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243819_1 | Ex-Burpee Chief Named To Du Pont Joint Venture | company, has been named the president of a new venture called Freshworld that hopes to market better-tasting varieties of fresh produce. ''What we're looking for is genetic exclusivity,'' said Mr. MacDowell, 57. In essence, he wants to put the taste of backyard garden vegetables into commercial crops, he said. At Burpee, he said, ''we were really designing for the backyard and for taste,'' adding, ''Much of that has rubbed off on to what we are doing now.'' Freshworld is a venture of the DNA Plant Technology Corporation and the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company. Its first product is Vegisnax, a vegetable snack that Freshworld contends has superior taste and texture. It has been test-marketed and is expected to be available this fall. The other branded produce Freshworld is developing should begin to come on the market in 1990. DNA Plant Technology is headed by Richard Laster, who is also Freshworld's chairman. William F. Kirk, the director of agricultural products for Du Pont, is Freshworld's vice chairman. ''This is Du Pont's first major step into the food industry,'' Mr. Kirk said. ''We see enormous opportunity to use the tools of biotechnology to develop and commercialize branded produce that is fresher when it reaches the consumer, better tasting and more nutritious.'' Mr. MacDowell comes from a gardening family. ''My mother made me weed,'' he said. She grew flowers and vegetables; his father was a beekeeper and orchardist. In his garden at home in Solebury, Pa., he said, he has 20 varieties of lettuce alone. He also keeps bees and tends an apple orchard. Mr. MacDowell is a graduate of Oberlin College and has an M.B.A. degree from Harvard. He went to work for the Procter & Gamble Company after graduation and in 1963 joined the General Foods Corporation, where he became the manager of its Birds Eye frozen vegetable products. At General Foods, he did the study to acquire the W. Atlee Burpee Company, and General Foods named him to head Burpee after it was acquired. He held the post from 1970 to 1980, leaving after Burpee was bought by the ITT Corporation. Mr. MacDowell then became a consultant and was the president of Summersweet Inc., a company developing sweet corn, and chairman of American Treescapes, a company, started by his son, that plants and moves large trees. He and his wife, Jane, have two other children. BUSINESS PEOPLE |
243783_4 | Gan Attack: Unusual for Its Viciousness | seem to personify a level of unattainable affluence is a common pattern among particpants in wolf-pack attacks. ''From what I have been able to gether about the Central Park case, there seem to be some socioeconomic factors involved,'' said Dr. Leah Blumberg Lapidus, a specialist in adolescent behavior in Columbia University's department of clinical psychology. ''The media, especially television, is constantly advertising these various things that are necessary to define yourself, and the joggers may represent a level of socioeconomic attainment that the media has convinced everybody is necessary to have in order to be an acceptable person,'' she said. ''So, to that extent, such people become a target.'' On the other hand, Dr. Lapidus said, that did not explain why some of the victims were black or Hispanic. Law-enforcement officials said the the scale of the Central Park episode was reminiscent of an incident in July 1983, when gangs of youths ran amok at a Diana Ross concert in Central Park, beating and robbing scores of people. Two years later, in April 1985, a March of Dimes walkathon in which 26,000 people marched through Manhattan broke up in turmoil after packs of youths attacked and harassed dozens of people in and around Central Park, snatching chains, purses and other property. Police officials, who said Friday that none of the suspects in the park case had a criminal record, said yesterday that they had discovered that that one, 17-year-old Michael Brisco, had been on three years' probation since December after a wolf-pack-style robbery last year. Officials said he and two others, 12 and 15 years old, had assaulted and robbed a 14-year-old on Nov. 10 on East 90th Street near Second Avenue. Authorities reported over the weekend that they were investigating the possibility that some of the participants in the park attacks had been involved in three separate robbery sprees four days earlier in East Harlem, one of which involved a stabbing. Unusual in Intensity Professor Lapidus and another psychologist, Dr. Ann M. Jernberg, who is director of the Theraplay Institute of Chicago and Wilmette, Ill., both said that what they found set the park rampage apart from others were the intensity of the violence and the apparent failure of almost all of the nine accused youths to show any remorse. Police and prosecutors said they laughed and joked while in police custody,and that only one expressed any sorrow. ''This |
243638_1 | Warming of Oceans Spurs Concern Over Shift in Climate | were skewed because a Mexican volcano, El Chichon, erupted in 1982. But climatologists said that while the findings did not prove global warming, they were consistent with it. ''It's too soon to tell'' whether the new readings say anything about climatic trends, said A. E. Strong of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who reported them in the current issue of the British journal Nature. ''If this trend continues at the same rate for another six or eight years, we're going to be concerned that a significant portion of this is a result of global warming,'' he said. ''But it could easily cool off, and we could see just a short-term cycle.'' Dust from a Volcano The measurements were made by infrared sensors aboard NOAA satellites that take readings at 2.5 million to 3 million points in the ocean. This compares with some 50,000 conventional thermometer readings taken aboard ships and buoys. In this respect, he said, the satellite coverage is superior. But the eruption of El Chichon in 1982 sent so much dust into the air that it would have distorted the satellite readings and produced lower temperatures, said Dick Reynolds, who analyzes satellite and ship readings for the National Weather Service's Climate Analysis Center. This, climatologists say, would have guaranteed a rise after 1982, as the dust cleared. Mr. Reynolds said that data from ships and buoys showed almost no trend during the period. Dr. Strong said that from 1984 on, dust from El Chichon was not a factor, and that the trend after that, as measured by satellite, was essentially the same as for the entire 6.5 years. Over the whole period, he said, the average temperature of the ocean outside the polar regions rose to 36.8 degrees, from 35.5 degrees. Insofar as the satellite readings are accurate, a six-year trend ''is really very short compared with the ups and downs we've seen'' over the long term, said Kirk Bryan, a climatologist at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University. He noted in particular a dramatic warming trend in the 1930's in the Northern Hemisphere and a cooling trend in the 1960's. ''We still haven't explained why those events occurred,'' he said. In the Northern Hemisphere, the 1930's were about 1 degree warmer than the 1960's. Dr. Strong holds that ocean measurements are a more accurate gauge of temperature change on a global scale because cities |
242328_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | LEAD: International A2-11 International A2-11 A rise in West German interest rates was announced. It upset stock and bond markets in West Germany, the United States and other countries and fueled fears that other nations will follow suit. Page A1 Unrest among Soviet troops that once would have been invisible is breaking out as troop are cutback, the budget shrinks and the scars of Afghanistan linger. A1 Washington may tell Soviets: let's share some secrets A10 News analysis: Protests in Beijing this week were surprising because the Government permitted them. The nation's leaders have allowed demonstrations to interrupt their sleep for the last two nights. A8 Japan's crisis deepens A9 The United States accused Panama of taking steps to rig an election scheduled for May 7 in favor of General Noriega A3 El Salvador's army fills ranks by force A3 A decade of civil war in Aghanistan has brought shortages of food and medical care to the poor in Kabul. But for rich, the city is a world of choice, free-market style. A8 The strife that has gripped Jordan since Tuesday is similar in tactics to the Palestinian uprising but has been bred by economic neglect, not occupation, residents say. A6 Hussein gives partial support to Shamir's election proposal A6 Money for a new short-range missile for Western Europe is likely to be appropriated by Congress, despite West Germany's uncertain commitment, Secretary Cheney said. A11 Mitterrand ends a Bonn visit tainted by Kohl's woes A11 Walesa visits Pope at Vatican A9 National A12-18 A new test detecting viral hepatitis, which afflicts 3 to 7 percent of the population, is effective and could eliminate the last major threat to blood supplies, researchers said. A1 The battleship Iowa steamed north from Puerto Rico with her foredeck blackened, the guns of a turret askew, and the bodies of 47 crewmembers being flown to a mortuary. A1 A grim military ceremony A18 High-definition television's first broadcast system that is compatible with existing television sets was demonstrated by researchers. A1 The E.P.A. urged all schools to test their buildings for radon. It cited evidence of high levels of the cancer-causing gas in some classrooms. A1 Nuclear fusion experiments in Utah and the prospect of a discovery that might mean wealth and glory have jolted the state's political and business leaders into overdrive. A1 Leading physicist is named Bush's science adviser A18 Betty Wright came out |
242372_0 | Sensible Ways to Save Young Lives | LEAD: America may be the richest country in the world but its infant mortality rate still lags shamefully. The National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, headed by former Senator Lawton Chiles, offers a sensible program for improvement. America may be the richest country in the world but its infant mortality rate still lags shamefully. The National Commission to Prevent Infant Mortality, headed by former Senator Lawton Chiles, offers a sensible program for improvement. Medical care, the commission says, isn't all that's needed by poor pregnant women to produce healthy children. They need social support too, during and after pregnancy, from health care professionals or trained workers from their community. The commission points to a special program involving 350 pregnant women in Elmira, N.Y. All the women received prenatal care, and half also received twice-monthly home visits from nurses. The group receiving the visits had healthier pregnancies with fewer complications and premature deliveries. The babies of the youngest mothers weighed more than those in the comparison group. The commission also would provide all pregnant women and new mothers with a handbook offering basic health information and a place to enter a comprehensive health record. The mother will know, for instance, when to get a child vaccinated; a new pediatrician will know the basic health history. Another sensible idea: situating together all the health services poor women and children are apt to need in order to make possible ''one-stop shopping'' for health care. And the group would set up a nationwide toll-free telephone number that pregnant women can call for health care referrals. The commission's proposals are contained in the Healthy Birth Act of 1989, now before Congress and estimated to cost about $100 million in its first year. It may be cheap at twice the price. |
242287_2 | KEY LENDING RATES INCREASED BY BONN TO CURB INFLATION | currencies. The rate increase by West Germany highlights the extreme importance that nation places on keeping inflation tightly checked. The West German inflation rate, while much below other countries, is currently at an unusually high 2.7 percent a year. The Bundesbank said the move ''reflected the fact that monetary growth currently remains stronger than can be tolerated from the point of view of monetary stability.'' West Germany's money supply has been growing well above the Bundesbank's target for 1989. Nevertheless, as recently as last week West German officials appeared to be satisfied that prices have not been rising strongly. But since then oil prices have jumped to their highest levels in 21 months, and analysts said concerns about new inflation from imports have increased. The rate increasewill help strengthen the mark, economists said, and thus mitigate inflation generated by oil and other imports. The two rates being raised by the Bundesbank are the nation's benchmark discount rate and the Lombard rate. Both will go up by a half a percentage point, effective Friday, lifting the discount rate to 4.5 percent and the short-term Lombard rate to 6.5 percent. The discount rate is the rate paid by commercial banks for borrowing from the central bank using bills as collateral, and the Lombard rate is that paid by the banks for short-term borrowing using securities as collateral. Economists and market experts in West Germany and other major financial centers were stunned by the Bundesbank's decision, which was made by its policy-setting central bank council at a regularly scheduled meeting. ''It was a complete surprise,'' said Guenter W. Teich, treasurer of the Bank of Boston in Frankfurt. ''No one expected this.'' Peter Pietsch, an economist with Commerzbank A.G. in Frankfurt, said the action ''contradicts all the recent claims by the Bundesbank's directors that they were satisfied with current interest rate levels.'' ''These increases,'' he said, ''are bound to have a dampening effect on economic growth.They will weaken domestic demand.'' The council meeting lasted six hours, which was considered unusually long. ''They may have had a difficult time reaching a conclusion,'' a person close to the central bank said. ''Such a move clearly has a worldwide effect. If they are not acting in concert with other major industrial nations, then they had to consider the consequences of such an action.'' But Bundesbank officials said no one factor caused the current rate increase and they |
242296_0 | A Worried Liquor Industry Readies for Birth-Defect Suit | LEAD: Already faced with declining sales and increasingly hostile public attitudes, the alcoholic beverage industry is bracing for the first in a series of trials in which they are blamed for causing birth defects. Already faced with declining sales and increasingly hostile public attitudes, the alcoholic beverage industry is bracing for the first in a series of trials in which they are blamed for causing birth defects. The nation's first lawsuit on behalf of children suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome, a birth defect that is the leading known cause of mental retardation, is scheduled to go to trial Monday in Federal District Court here. In the suit, two parents who admit they are alcoholics say a distiller's failure to warn of the link between moderate or heavy whisky consumption and birth defects was the cause of their child's deformities and impairments. The suit alleges that liquor manufacturers have a duty to warn consumers that drinking during pregnancy can lead to birth defects. Lawyers for the distiller, argue that because most people already know of the dangers of drinking, the company had no duty to warn of specific health hazards. The Company's Dilemma The distiller, James Beam, faces a legal dilemma similar to that of tobacco companies in past lawsuits. In court documents and depositions, it has refused to admit that drinking during pregnancy can cause birth defects, while at the same time arguing that there is enough general knowledge of those very health hazards to warrant caution. Public health officials and legal experts say the Seattle case, and two similar suits awaiting trial here, could be as harmful to the alcoholic beverage industry as recent suits have had to cigarette makers. A Federal law passed last year requires beer, wine and liquor labels to include a warning of the connection between alcohol and birth defects, beginning in November. More than 5,000 babies a year are born with fetal alcohol syndrome in this country, according to Government figures, and perhaps 10 times as many show some signs of deformities or impairments that studies have been linked to drinking during pregnancy. Some states, including New York and California, require liquor stores or bars to post warnings. $2 Billion a Year in Ads An effort in Congress to require the health cautions in advertisements as well as on labels was defeated, but legal experts say that if any of the current suits are |
242272_0 | Mitterrand Ends a Visit to Bonn Tainted by Kohl's Domestic Woes | LEAD: President Francois Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl today ended a two-day meeting that was colored by the West German leader's sharpening domestic difficulties, which are causing deep concern in Paris. President Francois Mitterrand and Chancellor Helmut Kohl today ended a two-day meeting that was colored by the West German leader's sharpening domestic difficulties, which are causing deep concern in Paris. Senior French officials say they fear that Mr. Kohl, with his popularity at its lowest point, could be ousted with his center-right coalition after next year's parliamentary elections by a coalition between the opposition Social Democrats and the anti-NATO Greens. A so-called red-green government in Bonn would be a geopolitical nightmare in Paris, quickening the deepest fears that many French officials and intellectuals harbor about a neutralist-minded Federal Republic drifting east and loosening its security ties to Western Europe. At a joint news conference in the ornate Salle des Fetes of Elysee Palace, Mr. Mitterrand and Mr. Kohl avoided discussing the West German Chancellor's difficulties, but they hovered behind the two men's remarks. Kohl's Domestic Imperatives Asked about his wavering commitment to NAT0's plans to replace its aging short-range nuclear missiles and about his Government's plans to postpone planned extensions of the length of military service, Mr. Kohl became extremely testy. ''No one has done as much as we have about defense preparedness as we have in NATO,'' said the Chancellor. ''If all NATO members had done as much as we have, we could have avoided a lot of problems.'' ''How we do it is entirely our national matter,'' said the Chancellor of his Cabinet's decision to put off a highly unpopular extension of military service from 15 to 18 months. The extension was initially adopted because West Germany's declining birth rate is making it difficult to keep the armed forces up to strength. Mr. Mitterrand has gone to great lengths to accommodate French strategic doctrine and military policies to Mr. Kohl's domestic imperatives and to a widespread West German aversion to nuclear weapons stationed on German soil. The French President has concluded that it is pointless to press Mr. Kohl to accept a replacement for the aging Lance short-range missile until after next year's election. Split in Kohl Government ''Nothing should be done that will compromise the movement toward disarmament,'' Mr. Mitterrand said, when asked about the short-range missile, suggesting that NATO did not have to resolve the |
239688_2 | Moscow Rations Sugar, a First Since '45 | ''It's the right decision,'' said Irina V. Solenova, a cash- register clerk, who complained that the quest for sugar, currently selling at about 75 cents a pound, has been getting out of control. ''People have been coming from everywhere to Moscow to buy sugar, and there's not enough for Muscovites.'' Around the corner at a busy bakery on Tsvetnoy Boulevard, the manager, Sergei Ignatov, said the demand was so great that the store receives five tons of sugar twice a month and typically sells out in two or three days. ''People are constantly complaining,'' he said, noting that last fall, the Government issued informal limitations of two kilograms of sugar per customer - equivalent to 4.4 pounds - in any one transaction. Customers routinely move from store to store in the attempt to circumvent that. Sad but Necessary ''No matter how sad it is, we are forced to introduce coupons,'' said Valery A. Zharov, deputy chairman of the Moscow city council in issuing the order, which will be in effect at least until the end of the year. The rationing will allow each Muscovite 4.4 pounds a month, except in June and July when home jam makers are busy and the limit will be 6.6 pounds. Even before the recent boom in moonshining, the Soviet Union was a nation of sugar cravers - whether as the basis for alcohol or cake topping. Individual sugar consumption is about 60 percent higher than in the United States. The Soviets' close ties to Cuba have provided no special advantage in combating the scarcity. And because Government planners find scarce foreign currency more toothsome than sugar, they are reluctant to part with hard currency to import extra supplies. Moscow officials gave no indication whether the ration coupons might be extended to other consumer goods in short supply. Meat, butter, soap and laundry powder lead the list. The shortage of soap particularly riles Muscovites. A common joke lately is the exclamation: ''Thank glasnost for the shortage of soap: the Communists are finally cleansing themselves.'' Moscow is a city of almost nine million people, with three million commuters and visitors a day, most of them armed with shopping bags and increased wages, but not a whole lot to purchase. Mr. Zharov said that the current run on sugar had seen the normal daily consumption of about 700 tons leap to 2,000 tons a day in March. |
241410_0 | A Forest Near Times Sq. Faces Danger | LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: You report that Brazilians are smarting from the outcry among ''rich nations'' that object to destruction of the Amazon rain forests (news story, March 23). No wonder. How can we complain when our own Government provides huge subsidies for the clear cutting, at an economic loss, of rain forests in the Pacific Northwest and in the Alaskan Tongass? If this is the way we treat our forest assets, how can we persuade the Brazilians to preserve theirs? Closer to home, the magnificent 30-square-mile Sterling Forest - only one hour from Times Square - is threatened with development. This wildlife-rich remnant of the vast eastern woodlands is not, for the most part, ideal development land. Much of the surrounding terrain is both flatter and easier to build. But the primary owner of Sterling Forest, the Home Insurance interests, wants to reap the profits that development would bring, a legal right that our law guarantees. New York State could acquire and preserve Sterling Forest, but the state is apparently not willing to act before piecemeal sales and development break up the forest irrevocably. Unlike Brazil, New York does not need to destroy its remnant forests to provide farms for millions of hungry citizens. It is simply a question of land use priorities: private profits versus preservation. In the last 20 years, the New York City metropolitan area's population has grown only 5 percent, but developed land has grown by 30 percent. If our leaders have the foresight to preserve Sterling Forest now, they will be repaid with the gratitude of generations of future New Yorkers. If, however, we in New York are not willing to preserve our own share of humanity's natural legacy, our exhortations to the poorer nations will surely fall on deaf ears. JOHN A. HUMBACH Chairman, Sterling Forest Coalition White Plains, March 28, 1989 |
241434_2 | Book Notes | publisher plans to auction the book for paperback reprint, and it has already accepted a six-figure minimum guarantee (''floor'') from Warner Books. An Unlikely Best Seller Stephen W. Hawking's ''Brief History of Time'' (Bantam Books) has now been on the best-seller list for 52 weeks. Since the book is by a scientist who reviews efforts to create a unified theory of quantum mechanics and general relativity, it is clearly not the kind of light fare that usually manages to stay on the list for that long a time. Yet Bantam published 40,000 copies initially and it became the No. 1 nonfiction hard-cover book of 1988. Now, after 22 printings, there are 870,000 copies in print. Vintage and the Greeks Vintage Books made headlines last week when it acquired reprint rights to ''The Joy Luck Club,'' a first novel by Amy Tan, for more than $1.2 million. Shortly before that, Vintage had also acquired the reprint rights to Robert Fitzgerald's translation of Homer's ''Odyssey.'' Since its publication by Doubleday in 1961, the Fitzgerald ''Odyssey'' translation has sold almost 1.5 million copies. Doubleday still owns the rights to the Fitzgerald ''Iliad'' translation, while Vintage holds the rights to the Fitzgerald ''Aenead.'' So when the Fitzgerald estate invited bids on the ''Odyssey'' translation, there was no lack of interested publishers. Vintage's winning bid is said to have been for ''a substantial six figures.'' Architectural Reference ''AIA Guide to New York City'' has been the standard architectural reference work to the five boroughs since its publication in 1968. It was revised in 1978, and still another revision will be published next month. It will include 250 additional pages of text and photos, for a total of 999 pages, and will also include a section titled ''Necrology'' - a list of important buildings, parks and monuments that have disappeared since the first edition of the book. The authors of the 999-page guide are Elliot Willensky and Norval White, both of whom have since written other books about New York architecture. They got the idea for the book while working at a New York architectural firm, and it was privately published in 1967 for distribution among delegates to that year's conference of the American Institute of Architects. Macmillan published the guide the following year in hard cover. Now Harcourt Brace Jovanovich owns the rights, and it is publishing the guide in simultaneous hard-cover and paperback editions. |
241504_2 | Panel Finds U.S. Lags on Schools and Health Care | shortfall of savings relative to investment in the American economy.'' It added, ''The nation simply consumes so much of its output that there is not enough left over, or saved, to meet its investment needs. The nation has met this savings shortfall by borrowing overseas to finance its investment.'' The nation's second greatest weakness, the report said, is the vulnerability of many financial institutions, especially the savings and loans and the commercial banks that hold billions of dollars in loans to developing countries. The committee said it is also concerned about signs that the decline in the trade deficit may have stopped, that the pace of productivity growth has fallen behind that of many other countries and about the debts the Government, consumers and corporations have amassed in the 1980's. 'Shortcomings' in Education The committee singled out education as ''perhaps the most prominent area where our nation's shortcomings threaten to impose enormous long-term costs.'' ''The United States spends more per student than other industrialized nations,'' the committee said, ''but it is still falling behind the rest of the industrialized world in promoting literacy, job skills and educational achievement at every level.'' It said the dropout rate for blacks is 40 percent and more than 50 percent for Hispanic students. ''Higher education,'' the report said, ''has become increasingly important to our economic performance. It is estimated that a majority of all jobs created between now and the year 2000 will require postsecondary education, but there are serious problems of access and equity.'' The committee found that while family incomes rose 6.4 percent in the 1980's, the cost of public colleges rose 32 percent and private colleges, 51 percent. At the same time, Government grants to students declined. As a result, loans accounted for half of all student aid last year, an increase from 17 percent in the mid-1970's, the report said. These factors may be contributing to a decline in college enrollment, especially among minority groups, the report suggested. Black enrollment in college slipped from 33.5 percent of high school graduates in 1976 to 28.5 percent in 1986. A 'Vital Investment' ''Increased public outlays for education should be viewed as a necessary and vital investment,'' the report said. The committee also spoke of a decline of poverty among the elderly and a sharp increase among the young and the general population in the past decade. ''The puzzle is that poverty is |
238067_2 | Brazil Announces Plan to Protect the Amazon | 49 environmental decrees. Some of the decrees created new parks. Others provided investments totaling $76 million in new environmental programs. Stand Is Criticized The highly nationalistic tone of the speech followed a week of incidents that reinforced the belief held by many Brazilian officials that they are under attack from all sides on the issue. Last Friday, as Mr. Sarney presided over a meeting of Latin American environment ministers in Brasilia, a Soviet diplomat representing the United Nations Environment Program chided him for opposing debt-for-nature swaps. ''I make this suggestion with full knowledge of the strong opposition personally expressed by the President of the republic,'' read the text prepared by Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the program. On Monday, 28 Latin American intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru and Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia, called for an international tribunal to judge ''ecocide and ethnocide'' in Brazil's Amazon region. The declaration, drafted by the Mexican poet Homero Aridjis and Mr. Garcia Marquez, said, ''To invoke national security to justify crimes against nature seems to us to be puerile and dishonest.'' On Tuesday, Brazil's Foreign Ministry protested to France the publication in Paris newspapers of a state-sponsored advertisement that implied that Brazil was one of 24 countries ''ready to delegate part of their national sovereignty'' to create ''a world authority, with real powers of decision and execution to save the atmosphere.'' The Brazilian Government, the protest said, is firmly opposed ''to the meaning of the text.'' 'Fantastic' Ideas in Italy On Wednesday, Fernando Cesar Mesquita, president of the new National Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources, said on his return home from a visit to Rome that Italian television had been showing ''fantastic'' programs charging devastation of the Amazon. ''It is part of an orchestrated campaign for the internationalization of the Amazon,'' he said. Today, two Brazilian environmentalists said they found shortcomings in the new program. Fabio Feldmann, a Sao Paulo legislator elected on an environmental platform, said the program failed to take several steps that would further limit damage in the Amazon: end tax credits for farming projects and end charcoal-fired steel plants. And Alfredo Sirkis, a Rio de Janeiro City Council member from the Green Party, said, ''It's too little, too late for this Government.'' Noting that Brazilians elect a new President in November, he said the new government would set the course for the Amazon in the 1990's. |
240129_3 | Foreign Repairs on Jets Prompt Concern in U.S. | trade surplus in airliner maintenance, according to a study conducted by Gellman Research Associates Inc, of Jenkintown, Pa., for the Air Transport Association, the airline trade group. In 1987, the 14 largest United States airlines earned $104 million from maintenance done for foreign airlines while they spent only $89.8 million on overseas repairs, the study said. A similar survey of 11 European airlines found that the American carriers had a trade surplus of more than 2 to 1. The Gellman report warned that other countries might retaliate if the United States continued to restrict the work that foreign shops could perform. Besides concern about jobs, opposition has focused on the F.A.A.'s ability to supervise the foreign maintenance. Mr. Mineta said the aviation agency lacked the necessary inspectors. The aviation agency maintains that the foreign repair shops undergo the same scrutiny as domestic ones and pose no safety threat. ''There are absolutely no changes in the safety standards that we're applying,'' said Anthony J. Broderick, the agency's Associate Administrator for Regulation and Certification. ''In fact, they're arguably stricter overseas.'' The new regulation became effective Dec. 22. Previously, foreign shops could perform maintenance on American airplanes only if they were operated ''wholly or in part'' overseas. Even then, the shops were limited to emergency or minor repairs. What critics have particularly singled out is that the new rule permits airlines that fly exclusively within the United States to have all repairs performed overseas if they choose. But an airline must ''demonstrate a need'' before sending its maintenance overseas, an F.A.A. spokesman said. And the repair shops must be certified by the aviation agency. The agency now has 933 maintenance inspectors who monitor 4,400 repair stations in this country. Seventeen inspectors oversee about 200 foreign maintenance stations. The agency has received budget approval to hire 104 more inspectors this year, an F.A.A. spokesman said, and will request approval to hire 232 other inspectors in the next two years. The foreign repair stations contend that the quality of their work is equal to that in the United States and that labor rates are comparable. ''It's a complete smokescreen to suggest that all the problems are overseas,'' said Graham Howat, managing director of the Hong Kong Aircraft Engineering Company Ltd., which has done work for United Airlines, Pan American World Airways and Trans World Airlines. Correction: May 10, 1989, Wednesday, Late City Final Edition Because |
244078_1 | The Jogger and the Wolf Pack | leaving her for dead in the April mud. New Yorkers respond with unanimous fury: Those guilty of the atrocity deserve swift, stern punishment. The news inspires horror and outrage: A pack of teen-agers rampages through Central Park, harassing and assaulting several people, ultimately brutalizing and raping an innocent young woman who had been jogging on a lonely path, leaving her for dead in the April mud. New Yorkers respond with unanimous fury: Those guilty of the atrocity deserve swift, stern punishment. But the deeper question remains. What caused such savagery? How could so many teen-agers lose all sense of morality, even of compassion? The public lunges for explanations. Drugs: Was this unusually vicious attack yet another ugly manifestation of crack? Apparently not. Police have ruled out drugs as a factor. Greed: The police rule that out, too. The wolf pack stole nothing more than a sandwich. Race: Investigators are pursuing reports that a few of the black or Hispanic youths referred to white victims in racial terms. But three of the victims were also black or Hispanic. True, the Central Park group showed the same sickening lack of compassion as did the gang of white teen-agers who beat blacks and chased one to his death in the Howard Beach case. But the park group did not display the crude racial animus of the Howard Beach group, who attacked blacks simply because they had wandered into the neighborhood. Poverty: Cardinal O'Connor asserts that the city must share the blame for conditions that breed crime. Others, similarly, worry about an alienated underclass. But it now appears that this explanation also fails. Reporters find that some of the suspects come from stable, financially secure families. Teachers, neighbors and friends expressed shock and surprise at the arrests. Only one suspect has a criminal record. Then what is the explanation for this explosion of savagery? Are teen-agers more prone to violence today than in the past because of abundant television and movie violence? Are even stable families failing to instill compassionate values? Or could this be just an extreme, isolated case of contagious adolescent barbarity? The question demands more than the quick reassurance of a label. Glib answers bear a price. For one thing, without fuller understanding, the incident could inflame racial tension. For another, labels distract from real answers. How could apparently well-adjusted youngsters turn into so savage a wolf pack? The question reverberates. |
243961_2 | Bonn's Dovish Nuclear Stand Winning Support in NATO | on different issues, the West German coalition within NATO typically includes Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Italy, Spain, Greece and Luxembourg. Yet a decisive turn in Bonn's favor occurred after President Francois Mitterrand of France was re-elected to a second seven-year term last May. In his first term, Mr. Mitterrand observed a stern vigilance toward the Soviet Union, pleading in the West German parliament in 1983 for the deployment of American medium-range missiles. But in his second term the French President has accommodated French strategic doctrine to the spreading antinuclear sentiment in West Germany, which has weakened and, lately, panicked Mr. Kohl. A 'Futile' Tactic Well before Washington or London came to the same conclusion, Mr. Mitterrand argued that it was futile to press the beleaguered Mr. Kohl to endorse the replacement of the aging Lance short-range nuclear missiles before next year's parliamentary elections in the Federal Republic. And though France is hostile to the new West German demand for superpower negotiations on short-range missiles and nuclear artillery, a senior adviser to Mr. Mitterrand said it was unwise for NATO to stake out a public position against such talks. ''One has to understand the Germans' reaction,'' the Mitterrand adviser said. ''If France's defense were assured by short-range American missiles on French soil, the reaction of the French would be the same as the Germans' today.'' Rather than veto the Germans' demand for short-range negotiations -as the Bush Administration did Monday - the French official suggested that NATO should seize the initiative and propose to the Soviet Union that it reduce its short-range arsenal, now overwhelmingly superior, to roughly the same level as the alliance's 88 Lance launchers, most of which are stationed in West Germany. To satisfy West German opinion, NATO might lower the ceiling to 66 launchers or so, he added. The conversion of France to the role of an explainer, if not always a defender, of German positions within the alliance means that Mr. Kohl and his influential Foreign Minister have one of the Continent's two nuclear powers halfway in their camp. Britain, the other nuclear power in Western Europe, has few unwavering allies on the Continent, with the curious exception of Portugal. A Threat to NATO Talks By pushing for ''speedy'' negotiations on short-range nuclear systems, the Kohl Government has implicitly threatened to disrupt the NATO summit gathering in Brussels on May 28-29. Yet despite their Continental |
243874_1 | Lessons | the same thing at Queens?'' The new research is from Michael Useem, director of the Center for Applied Social Science at Boston University, who conducted surveys of 535 corporations and 505 middle and senior managers. The results are discussed in ''Liberal Education and the Corporation,'' published by Aldine de Gruyter. Mr. Useem confirmed the ''seeming policy inconsistency in which top executives sometimes extol the virtues of the liberal arts while their own college recruiters are primarily looking for graduates with practical skills.'' This is true, he said, because ''senior managers travel in circles where that kind of cultural capital is important.'' Once past the recruiter, though, liberal arts graduates apparently do well. ''Over all,'' Mr. Useem said, ''liberal arts, business and engineering graduates are about equally likely to reach middle and top management in America's top corporations.'' The prospects for advancement vary considerably by type of company. Service companies are better bets than manufacturing ones, pharmaceutical concerns better than electronics, and diversified financial companies better than savings banks. Prospects also vary within companies. Liberal arts graduates are more likely to reach high rungs of the corporate ladder working in marketing, sales and personnel than in manufacturing. Other researchers argue that social factors like the pace of change and the global economy will make liberal arts graduates relatively more valuable. Interest in the liberal arts seems to be growing among students. Between 1970 and 1985, said Alexander Astin of the University of California at Los Angeles, the proportion of freshman professing interest in the liberal arts declined, from 40 to 21 percent. By 1987, it was up to 25 percent. Educators suggested strategies for liberal arts students seeking business careers. Mr. Scheetz urged students to consider internships to strengthen ''their presentation to the employer'' and careful selection of summer jobs. ''Don't just take any one,'' he said. ''Make it career-related.'' Colleges and universities are starting programs for such students. Queens assembled a group of corporate leaders to advise on the skills that graduates should have and started a Business and Liberal Arts program last year. It offers 24 hours of courses on topics including accounting and the corporate culture and culminating in a senior seminar on problem solving. Participants take internships and executives volunteer to be their mentors. One participant is Richard Evans, 19 years old, a sophomore from Douglaston, Queens, who is majoring in psychology and feels he is receiving |
243925_0 | Maxwell Smart's Phone Is Moving Onto the Market | LEAD: In the 1960's television series ''Get Smart,'' the secret agent Maxwell Smart had a radio telephone so small that it fit inside his shoe. Now Motorola Inc. appears to be ahead in the race for such a phone with a cellular model small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. In the 1960's television series ''Get Smart,'' the secret agent Maxwell Smart had a radio telephone so small that it fit inside his shoe. Now Motorola Inc. appears to be ahead in the race for such a phone with a cellular model small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. The hand-held phone is the size of a wallet or checkbook and offers the same performance of larger mobile phones, Motorola said. Weighing in at 12.3 ounces and measuring 13.5 cubic inches, the Motorola phone is the smallest and lightest cellular phone on the market. Ed Staiano, Motorola's executive vice president, said researchers spent five years reducing the size and weight of the phone's components - in particular, the oscillator and duplexer, which allow a caller to talk and listen at the same time. Mr. Staiano said the new mobile phone has one-tenth the number of parts (only 220 pieces) of the original cellular phone introduced 10 years ago. It permits up to 75 minutes of use with a standard battery. Current portable models provide up to two and a half hours of talk time. Motorola engineers designed the phone so that it would survive the company's standard ''drop test,'' in which an electronic device is dropped from a height of four feet. It also passed a water immersion test. Industry analysts said the Motorola phone was a significant advance over current portable models, but they predicted that it would have only moderate acceptance initially because of its high price. The price? Would you believe -$2,995? BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY |
243881_0 | Economic Scene; Burger Flippers Take the Heat | LEAD: AS America's white-collar elite grows rich, must the poor and near-poor be left behind? AS America's white-collar elite grows rich, must the poor and near-poor be left behind? The widening income gap, especially disheartening for its disproportionate impact on the young and non-white, has been casually linked to everything from the rusting of Big Steel to the Reagan Administration's ''let them eat ketchup'' poverty policy. The loss of high-wage jobs in manufacturing and reductions in government subsidies for the working poor have certainly not helped. Nor has the explosion in urban housing costs since the mid-1970's, which left renters out in the cold. But as Robert Reich of Harvard's Kennedy School perceptively argued in the May 1 issue of The New Republic, the critical change has been the integration of the world economy. Free trade and capital flows have pushed American workers into a global competition that few are equipped to win. Unfortunately, Mr. Reich does a better job of describing their predicament than finding a way out. He brushes aside organized labor's protectionist impulse as largely irrelevant to an era in which ''technologies, savings and investments move effortlessly across borders.'' But his (and almost everyone else's) preferred fix, giving every American worker the skills to beat the competition, probably isn't practical. According to Stephen Rose and David Fasenfest of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, average incomes, adjusted for family size and inflation, rose by 7.3 percent between 1979 and 1987. During the same period, however, the incomes of families in the top fifth rose by 13.8 percent, while those in the bottom fifth fell by 10.9 percent. Frank Levy, an economist at the Urban Institute, has pinpointed the proximate cause: the decline in wages for younger workers without college degrees. Mr. Reich takes the case one step further. The growing gap, he argues, is the inevitable result of international economic integration. The creation of a global labor market has increased the demand for workers with ''symbolic-analytic'' skills - i.e. the skills they teach in college and graduate school. But it has also forced blue-collar Americans into a depressing competition with their lower-paid counterparts in places like South Korea and Brazil. Where unions have succeeded in holding the line on wages, production has migrated, leaving younger workers to punch cash registers at K Mart or deliver pizzas. How to repair the damage? Tighter trade barriers would force industries |
228601_1 | From Bumpers to Hoods, Detroit Opens the Door for Plastics | to change. Taking cues from the Japanese, American auto makers have shifted from mass producing single models in runs of 300,000 or more to building several distinct models on top of the same platform, but in smaller quantities. Plastics are cost competitive with steel for these lower production runs of 100,000 cars or less. Because steel is much costlier to cast than plastic is to mold, its cost advantage over plastics declines as batches shrink. ''It all comes down to the numbers,'' said Joseph Coote, a consultant at Chem Systems Inc., a market research firm in Tarrytown, N.Y. ''The cost of using steel is exorbitant for short runs.'' With the Big Three auto makers using lower production runs, plastics indeed seem poised for a bigger push into Detroit. In fact, their use in exterior body panels is expected to climb to 220 million pounds in 1993, up from 125 million pounds today, according to Frost & Sullivan Inc., the market research firm. Auto makers have long appreciated the benefits of plastics. Composites - plastic resins reinforced by such materials as glass or steel - are not only lighter, but are more rust and dent resistant than steel. And because they can be molded in large and intricate shapes, one plastic piece can replace several steel parts. ''A steel frame requires a bunch of separate pieces to be welded together,'' said David Arndt, a plastics engineer at the Ford Motor Company. ''Much of it could be done in one plastic part. And if there are no welds, it won't break.'' Auto makers finally seem willing to give plastics a bigger role in cars. Last October, Chrysler, Ford and General Motors formed a consortium to jointly develop composites technologies for auto production with plastics suppliers. The consortium plans to meet with suppliers for the first time later this month. Plastic producers are more ready than ever. To increase their chances of infiltrating Detroit, they are forming alliances with traditional auto suppliers. G.E. Plastics formed one of the first joint ventures last year, pairing up with Masco Industries, an auto engineering and design firm, to supply such things as an all-plastic bumper system for the 1989 Hyundai Sonata. ''To serve Detroit, the polymer people have to join with the auto people,'' said John Slaton, senior vice president at Ferro, a resins compounder, which is negotiating partnerships with plastic fabricators. WHAT'S NEW IN PLASTICS |
228914_4 | Solo or Package? The Choice Is Yours | visits seven countries. Travelers are accompanied by ''a professional multilingual American Express tour manager.'' After two days in London, the group flies to Amsterdam, then goes by tour bus to West Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France. City-to-city bus journeys, each lasting several hours, are made on nine of the days. Twenty nights are spent in first-class hotels, with private bath. Breakfast, tax and service is included. In addition to the 20 breakfasts, 10 other meals are provided. Sightseeing tours with local guides are given in six cities, along with a number of excursions. In this comparison a rental car has been substituted for the tour bus. Twenty-five departures of the tour are scheduled from April 27 through Oct. 12. Groups are 45 to 50 people. The price per person in double occupancy is $2,219, excluding trans-Atlantic air fare. (There is a $100 reduction for the spring and fall departures.) THE PACKAGE . . . ON YOUR OWN Hotels Rembrandt Hotel, London, two nights. . . . $381 Amsterdam Hilton, two nights. . . . $248 (weekend) Maritim, Darmstadt, one night. . . . $111 Arabella Westpark, Munich, one night. . . . $111 Ramada, Vienna, two nights. . . . $273 Le Boulevard, Venice, two nights. . . . $370 Cicerone, Rome, three nights. . . . $555 Roma, Florence, one night. . . . $181 Pullman, Nice, two nights. . . . $209 Alpha-Palmiers, Lausanne, two nights. . . . $240 Sofitel Paris, Paris, two nights. . . . $246 Flight to Amsterdam One-way in tourist class on British Mid land (booked no more than two days before flight). . . . $73.50 a person Bus Transportation From Amsterdam to Paris. . . . $1,156 for the car. Meals Five hotel dinners in London, Darmstadt, Lausanne and Venice. . . . $236 for two Lunch, I Falciani, Florence. . . . $75 for two Dinners at the Indonesia, Amsterdam; the Platzl, Munich; Il Faggiano, Florence, and Peristilio, Rome. . . . $225 for two City Sightseeing Half-day tours in London, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Florence and Paris, including guide and admissions. . . . $254 for two Other Excursions Amsterdam canal cruise, Cologne Cathedral, Rhine cruise, the Romantic Road, Munich sighteeing, Tuscan and Umbrian drive, night tour of Rome, Lean ing Tower of Pisa, Monte Carlo, Seine cruise. . . . $45 for two Services of Tour Manager . |
228595_1 | Producers Share Research To Whip the Competition | university research on projects with commercial appeal. For instance, since 1985, 41 companies, the Government and trade groups have given a total of $4.5 million to the Center for Plastics Recycling Research at Rutgers State University in New Jersey to develop products from recycled plastics, some of which are now being tested. And in the largest joint effort to date, 76 companies are funding new product development at the University of Akron and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. ''Japan is awfully good at sharing research and working cooperatively toward national goals, and Europe is getting better at it,'' explained Roy Harrington, a vice president at the Ferro Corporation, a resin compounder in Independence, Ohio. ''In order to compete, we have to, too.'' Ferro is one of the 12 founding members of the Edison Polymer Innovation Corporation, the consortium working with the Ohio universities. Formed in 1985, EPIC has grown to 76 member companies, all of which have made three-year commitments that range from $1,875 to $55,625 a year, depending on their size. For its part, Ohio has contributed $9.5 million to the partnership with the hope that resulting new products will keep jobs in the state. ''It's a different approach,'' said Dr. Alan Altenau, director of research at the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, a founding member of EPIC. ''We're trying to corral the talent in the state and focus it.'' The partnerships are just beginning to bear fruit. The B. F. Goodrich Company recently licensed from EPIC a synthetic healing agent - one of eight products that showed commercial merit out of 18 research projects originally pursued. While new products are the partnership's main goal, access to a pool of prospective research employees is a fringe benefit. ''Whatever you can do as a company to target these people is helpful,'' said David Bonner, vice president of research and development at Goodrich. Graduates of the three dozen universities in the nation with bachelor's programs in polymer studies are highly prized. Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich., boasts a 100 percent placement rate in both its two-year and four-year programs in plastics engineering technology. And industry is footing the $1.7 million bill to expand the program and double enrollment to 200 in 1990. The expansion comes none too soon. The 100 places in the polymer program for the freshman class in 1990 are already filled. WHAT'S NEW IN PLASTICS |
228596_1 | Polishing Thier Image with Consumers, Even First Graders | Corporation to make products like insulation materials from fast-food containers collected from the restaurant chain. Manufacturers have also created advertising campaigns to promote recycling over more severe measures to reduce waste. In response to a law passed last year by the legislature in Suffolk County, N.Y., that bans nonbiodegradable food packaging, like plastic grocery bags and fast-food cartons, the Mobil Corporation, the maker of Hefty garbage bags and other plastics products, created ads that promote recycling and thinner plastics as more effective over the long term than bans. Other manufacturers have taken decidedly lower-key strategies to help polish the industry's image. This spring, a local chapter of the Society of Plastics Engineers will open the nation's first plastics museum. In Leominster, Mass., the new National Plastic Center and Museum is supported by Tupperware International and the E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company, among others. ''In general, the public image of the plastic industry leaves something to be desired,'' said Jack Keville, vice president of the center. The museum will house a research library and the 17-year-old Plastics Hall of Fame, and will sponsor exhibitions that demonstrate the wonders of plastics. One of the first will expose plastics to freezing and superhot temperatures. The museum also is developing educational videos for secondary school students stressing the wide uses of plastics and career opportunities in the industry. The city of Akron, Ohio, the nation's tire-making capital, is another believer in the benefits of fostering an appreciation for plastics among youngsters. With the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company as its consultant, the city schools in 1986 developed a curriculum on polymers to educate children in kindergarten through the third grade about the complex structures and everyday uses of polymers. Last year, the program was expanded through grade six. ''We realized we needed to start early to keep students here in Akron and to expose them to the industry,'' explained Jeanne Bodine, director of elementary education at the Akron Public Schools. ''I always think of ivory and wood when I think of materials, but these kids have grown up with polymers.'' WHAT'S NEW IN PLASTICS Correction: May 14, 1989, Sunday, Late City Final Edition An article on March 5 incorrectly described the founding of the National Plastics Center and Museum in Leominster, Mass. The museum, which opens later this year, was founded by an unaffiliated group of individuals in the plastics industry. |
228755_2 | Dependency Leads to Abuse | his family or has been friendlier. The agents, understandably, are insecure about client relationships based only on good will. The agent is reluctant to refer his client to someone else for fear of losing the client. Some agents try to handle all aspects of the athlete's life themselves. This renaissance-man approach has led to huge monetary losses by many athletes because the agent was not competent to handle that aspect of the athlete's life. Other negotiating agents align themselves with particular financial planners or securities brokers where they can safely refer a client. The operative concern is maintaining control of the client, not providing the athlete with the best advice. This control leads to abuse. Much of the abuse is subtle: charging a fee that is 4 to 10 times the fee a sophisticated businessman would pay for similar services; purporting to represent the interests of multiple clients equally who are competing with each other for a single endorsement opportunity or playing contract; or charging the clients for the costs of a Super Bowl party that serves only to enhance the status of the agent, not the client. These kinds of abuses are not often reported in the media but they are prevalent. More dramatic are the investment losses. In one case a professional baseball player was left virtually penniless after earning $6 million over eight years. Some agents use a power of attorney to obtain loans that are neither useful nor necessary to the athletes. Sometimes agents take kickbacks (politely referred to as commissions) for selling unnecessary and expensive insurance to the athlete. Other agents have their clients investing with the agent himself, thereby assuring the agent of solvent co-investors to support his investment. In each of these examples, the agent's interest in securing more clients, getting paid excessively or insuring the success of his real estate is paramount to the client's interest. In each case, the abuse arises from the athlete's trust in the agent, and the agent's unfettered ability to take advantage of that trust. Given the amount of publicity agent scandals have received in recent times, one would think some agency would act to control the agent problem. None has stepped forward. No agency representing Government, players' association, league or the N.C.A.A. or individual college has acted in a meaningful way to solve these problems. One of the most famous football agents in California has not |
234301_1 | Forests Are Still Vanishing | the Pacific Slope are ancient or ''old-growth'' forests in sizable tracts still to be found in this country. Even they may be gone within 20 or 30 years. Thus has the United States done throughout its history what a righteous world denounces Brazil for doing today; no wonder Brazilian leaders point to the United States as their role model in deforestation. And even without Brazil's development needs, the U.S. continues to clear away its most valuable forests. The United States Forest Service regulates most of the nation's remaining old-growth timber, almost all of it in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, including the important temperate rain forests of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. But that doesn't mean these forests are protected from cutting. The Forest Service is charged not with preserving forests but with their utilization - timber productivity as well as recreation and the protection of wildlife habitat and ecosystems. So it regularly permits private lumber companies, as they deplete their own forests, to cut Forest Service timber. Old-growth trees, 300 or more years old, make particularly valuable timber for their huge size and tight grain. Critics charge that the Forest Service does not sufficiently protect these irreplaceable trees or the remarkable ecosystems that surround them, and that it contends twice as much old-growth remains on its lands as is actually the case. Wilderness Society officials believe, for example, that within two or three years no ''ecologically significant'' old-growth will remain in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest in Washington. West Coast conifer forests unique to the United States are being cut, too; sometimes mixed stands of spruce, hemlock and cedar are inadequately replaced with Douglas fir alone, making for a very different forest. In old-growth areas, of course, saplings planted today hardly replace trees that took hundreds of years to grow. For the loggers to get at the trees, roads must be cut, increasing forest destruction and preventing affected areas from ever being declared protected ''wilderness.'' In six Southern Appalachian national forests encompassing 3.5 million acres, the Forest Service plans to open more than two million acres to logging in the next decade, doubling the timber harvest. The plans call for more than 3,000 miles of new roads in the six areas. An active Federal tree-planting program was established in the 1985 farm bill, but the need is enormous and growing with every slash of the saw. The Wilderness Society |
234423_1 | Children: Patients, Pupils, People | and Henry Waxman have just proposed to help poor children the right way: comprehensively. Legislation they introduced this week seeks to insure physical and educational development of all children. The details remain to be evaluated, but the approach is surely welcome. Representatives George Miller and Henry Waxman have just proposed to help poor children the right way: comprehensively. Legislation they introduced this week seeks to insure physical and educational development of all children. The details remain to be evaluated, but the approach is surely welcome. There's considerable evidence to show that spending dollars early to insure a healthy start for poor children saves millions later. Mr. Miller's House Committee on Children, Youth and Families calculates that every dollar spent, for example, on prenatal care can save $3.38 in the cost of care to low-birthweight infants. A dollar spent to immunize a child can save $10 in later medical costs. The wisdom of promoting healthy development is increasingly being recognized. Many state governors have begun special programs aimed at disadvantaged children. For the most part, however, the approach has been piecemeal. Poor children do not simply lack food, or shots, or diagnosis of impaired hearing or vision. By the time many poor children get to school, health disorders have already affected their ability to learn. Sometimes they are patients, sometimes pupils, at all times whole people. Congress reflected its understanding of the need for a broader approach last year when it appropriated $20 million to establish two dozen comprehensive child development centers. Mr. Miller, Mr. Waxman and 16 other sponsors now want to expand on that principle. Their Child Investment and Security Act is a comprehensive plan to expand a number of existing prevention programs so all eligible women and children would be covered by 1993. States would be required to phase in Medicaid coverage for eligible pregnant women and infants. Medicaid coverage would also be extended to all young children, up to age 6, in low-income families. And the bill would expand childhood immunization, the special supplemental food program for women, infants and children (WIC), Head Start and preschool education for the handicapped. These gradual extensions will likely cost an additional $1.5 billion in the first year, rising to an extra $6 billion in the final year. Finding the money in deficit-ridden Washington won't be easy. But finding the money to treat disease, ignorance, crime and dependence will be harder. |
231998_2 | TRADE GAP SHRINKS AS U.S. EXPORTS DIP LESS THAN IMPORTS | than it appeared since he could find no particular reason for the deterioration with Canada. Exports in January fell $1.3 billion, or 4.3 percent, to $27.8 billion, after reaching a record high in December, the Commerce Department said. Exports of capital equipment fell $1.2 billion while industrial supplies and materials and automotive goods each fell $600 million. Imports dropped $2.8 billion, or 6.9 percent, to $37.3 billion. Consumer goods were down by $1.4 billion, automotive products by $1.3 billion and capital goods by $700 million. Imports of oil accounted for 37 percent of the trade deficit by rising $200 million, to $3.5 billion. A 9-million-barrel reduction in volume was more than offset by a price increase of $1.36 a barrel, to an average $14.46. And the recent rise in oil prices is likely to have an adverse effect on the trade situation in coming months, analysts say. Beginning with today's report, the Government returned to the pre-1979 practice of reporting the trade figures on a customs basis, which excludes from imports the cost of freight, insurance and duties. This cuts about $1.5 billion a month from the deficit as previously reported by most news organizations. Further Changes Introduced The reports now also incorporate two new commodity classification systems, which make comparisons with trade partners somewhat easier and which are more closely integrated with the nation's gross national product accounts. Although the fact that exports sagged in January prompted some analysts to note that growth has slowed markedly since last summer, a recent Federal Reserve survey found evidence to the contrary. ''Economic activity for most of the country is reported to be expanding at a moderately strong pace,'' the Federal Reserve said in a survey of its 12 district banks for use at a meeting of its policy-making panel on March 28. ''Consumer spending, except for autos, has apparently gained momentum while manufacturing, especially for export, continues to show strength almost everywhere.'' Most economists regard increased exports as the key to further narrowing of the trade deficit, which eased last year to $119.8 billion from a record $152.1 billion in 1987, but analysts say several factors may prevent growth in exports. They point out that the dollar's slide has ended, that the Federal Reserve is seeking to restrain the economy to arrest inflation and that there are constraints on industrial capacity. Exports Called 'Worrisome' On a three-month moving average, exports are |
232060_1 | Chile Halts Exports of Fruit But Assails U.S. Warnings | Drug Administration said Monday that traces of cyanide had been found in two seedless red grapes from Chile that were in a batch at the port in Philadelphia. The discovery came during spot checks by Federal officials after the United States and Japanese embassies in Santiago received anonymous telephone calls earlier this month saying fruit exports would be poisoned. Health officials in the United States, Canada and Japan warned consumers not to eat Chilean fruit, and stores began removing from shelves fruit imported from Chile. The 12-nation European Community said today that it had received no reports of contamination of Chilean fruit. But Dansk Supermarked, Denmark's second-largest supermarket chain, removed Chilean fruit from its shelves as a precaution. Officials Sent to Washington President Augusto Pinochet sent his Foreign Affairs Minister, Hernan Errazuriz, and Agriculture Minister, Jaime de la Sota, to Washington to discuss the crisis with United States officials. In Hong Kong, health inspectors on Tuesday seized 6.7 tons of Chilean seedless red grapes from importers and wholesalers for testing. The Government said health inspectors had contacted local importers to stop sales of the Chilean grapes. Chileans reacted strongly to what they saw as a major blow to their booming fruit export industry, which was expected to earn about $850 million this year, up from $581 million in 1988. Nearly 65 percent of Chile's fruit exports - grapes, melons, apples and peaches - go to the United States. The industry employs about 500,000 people, and union leaders reported scattered layoffs on Tuesday. The Government said the poisoning of the grapes was a work of ''terrorism backed by the Communist Party.'' Controls Called Faulty Jose Sanfuentes, a spokesman for the Communists, denied that his party was in any way involved. Speaking at a news conference, he criticized the Government for faulty controls of exported fruits. Chile is at the height of its harvesting season, and Mr. de la Sota said it expected to export about 103 million crates of fruit. He said about 47 million crates had been shipped and 17 million more were in warehouses awaiting shipment or en route to various countries. Adm. Jose Merino, navy commander and a member of the ruling military junta, blamed both the Communists and the United States. ''This is yet another roguish act of the United States,'' he told reporters. ''Americans think we are all banana republics. Chile is not a banana republic.'' |
230596_3 | WITH TIRES | will provide more even wear. Because of new technology and the accuracy used in manufacturing, it is less important than it used to be to follow a certain pattern in rotating radial or bias-ply tires. But many of the makers recommend what is called the ''Forward-X'' pattern, particularly for front-wheel-drive cars. With front-wheel drive, the front tires wear two and a half times faster than the rear, which just go along for the ride, without any of the driving or steering forces and with only a fraction of the braking forces. The Forward-X pattern takes those rear wheels and moves them straight forward. The front tires are moved to the diagonally opposite corners. In any case, it is a good idea to have a tire dealer determine the rotation after your tires' wear pattern has been established. Bald or badly worn tires are not only hazardous but generally against the law. Tires with less than one-sixteenth of an inch of tread should be replaced. Manufacturers build ''wear bars'' into the design of the tread to warn the consumer that it's time for new tires. The bars begin to show up as narrow bands of smooth rubber across the tread at intervals around the tire. When they do, it is time to head for the dealer, and to puzzle over the alphabet soup that spells out today's sizes. A typical designation might be P195/60R15, with the ''P'' standing for passenger car and the ''195'' representing the width of the tire in millimeters. The ''60'' is the ratio of height to width; ''R'' means the tire is a radial, and ''15'' is the diameter of the rim in inches. A tire's sidewall also carries a lot of other information, such as maximum load and inflation pressure, and the pertinent data for your car can be found in the owner's manual or on a placard on the driver's door jamb, on the edge of the door or in the glove compartment. If you are not replacing all four tires, remember that tires of different sizes or construction (radial, bias, bias ply) should not be placed on the same axle. And never use a tire smaller than that specified by the manufacturer. At best, a car has only about 80 square inches of rubber on the road - as much contact as you have with the driver's seat. You don't want any less. COPING |
230665_1 | U.N. Rights Panel Avoids Cuba Issue | Human Rights Commission ended its annual session today without making provisions to review human rights abuses by Cuba again next year, as the Bush Administration wanted. The commission warned several other countries for the first time about their human rights record and adopted a number of international agreements designed to strengthen respect for human rights around the world. It called for an investigation by an independent expert into abuses by the Rumanian Government of President Nicolae Ceausescu, the first such investigation by an outside expert it has ordered in five years. Albania and Burma were told that their human rights records were considered unsatisfactory and were urged to improve. And, for the first time, the 43-member commission publicly debated Iraq's rights record, even though third-world nations, which make up a majority, blocked the full investigation that Western countries favored. In addition, the commission approved a new international convention guaranteeing children's rights, and a document that governments without a death penalty can sign to make it harder for their successors to reintroduce capital punishment. Today the commission unanimously adopted a provisional agenda for next year's meeting that makes no reference to Cuba. The Bush Administration wanted the commission to make a second inspection visit to the country and hold another debate on Cuba's human rights performance in 1990, calling this demand ''a crucial test'' of the commission's effectiveness as a human rights watchdog. Ambiguous Resolution Instead, the commission adopted an ambiguous resolution that officials warn may make it difficult for the United States to secure substantial discussion of Cuba's human rights record next year, despite the fact that the six commission members who visited the country this year found clear evidence of violations. Under the compromise resolution, Cuba has agreed to discuss these violations with the United Nations Secretary General, Javier Perez de Cuellar, who is expected to ask Jan Martinson, head of the United Nations Human Rights Center here, to act as his representative. But it is unclear whether the Secretary General is expected to report on the outcome of these talks to next year's commission. The resolution instructs him to deal with the results ''in the appropriate manner,'' but next year's agenda does not provide for any report on Cuba. American diplomats said they would have preferred a different resolution but expressed optimism that the United States will be able to get Cuba on the panel's agenda next year. |
235652_1 | Next Hurdle for Cleaner Cars: Find a Fuel Besides Gasoline | and eventually become a minor component of air pollution, the scientists say, vehicles will have to switch to energy sources like natural gas, electricity and fuels containing methanol. Progress Seen by 2000 In the meantime, they predict that by 2000 the total number of cars employing the latest technology will have increased enough so that automobile air pollution levels will be 20 percent of what they are today, provided that the number of cars does not increase significantly and Americans do not drive more miles. The total amount of automobile pollution released into the atmosphere has been declining since early in this decade, according to studies by the Environmental Protection Agency. But the level of overall automobile pollutants has not declined as rapidly as the emission reductions in the newest cars. This is because the total number of cars has been growing in recent years, Americans are driving slightly more than they used to and emission-control systems become less efficient with age. This has led experts to warn that the Federal Government and the states must focus added attention on keeping older cars properly tuned and their emission-control systems functioning properly. As cars age, emission controls function less effectively, and some drivers fail to maintain the systems or disable them deliberately. Air pollution from cars has taken on new importance in the wake of the adoption of a preliminary plan in Southern California earlier this month that would dictate a switch to alternative fuels for 40 percent of cars within the next decade and would end the use of gasoline in all cars by 2007, technology permitting. Officials of the E.P.A., which since 1972 has applied continuous pressure on auto makers to reduce emissions, stated in recent testimony that use of alternative fuels had more promise of reducing emissions than further modification of gasoline engines and catalytic converters that treat the exhaust after it leaves the engine. If emission levels cannot be cut further, that will have important implications for Los Angeles and other cities with serious air quality problems. Those areas may have no choice but to consider eventually switching to alternative fuels, power sources like batteries or huge public transportation systems. Methanol and Methane Many environmental scientists find promise for clean air in fuels like methanol and methane, because they are chemically much simpler than gasoline and can be burned with fewer and more easily disposable byproducts. Natural |
235736_0 | Topics of The Times; Fido Calling, and Calling | LEAD: Imagine the house dog or cat marooned on a doorstep, its plaintive bark, meow or scratch drowned out by passing traffic or its owner's TV set. Imagine rain making the scene all the more pathetic. Or imagine the same dog or cat desperate to get out and thus avoid a spanking for sullying the rug yet again. Imagine the house dog or cat marooned on a doorstep, its plaintive bark, meow or scratch drowned out by passing traffic or its owner's TV set. Imagine rain making the scene all the more pathetic. Or imagine the same dog or cat desperate to get out and thus avoid a spanking for sullying the rug yet again. Now imagine that said pet has but to ring a bell to get in and out. Imagine, in short, the Pet Chime. It is battery-operated, can be installed on either side of a door and takes only the press of a paw to operate, thus ending frustration for pets - and for owners who value their rugs. There's just one problem. Dogs and cats, as their owners know, can be shrewd beyond expectations. Sure, it's all well and good for them to be able to call their owners to the door. But just suppose they teach every cat and dog in the neighborhood how to ring the bell? There would be frustration. |
235640_3 | 20 Retarded Children Shunted To Squalid Foster-Care Home | neglected or abused by their parents, but the majority were placed voluntarily, in effect abandoned by parents who were overwhelmed by trying to care for them and unable to get them in state institutions on their own. Action After Lawsuit Yet the foster-care system was ill-prepared for them. Foster families would not take them, and the city had no special places for them. The children spent months or years moving from place to place, or living in group homes for emotionally or behaviorally disturbed teen-agers. There, the mentally retarded youngsters were easy targets for bullies. The city took steps to change this last summer after being sued by the Legal Aid Society for the practice of constantly moving children from one placement to another. In September the city announced it would create special homes to address the needs of children on the ''overnight circuit.'' By October, they began sending mentally retarded children to Ashford, a three-story building that had been a foster home for troubled teen-age girls. The home was in a dilapidated state, but little was done to repair it or begin programs to address the needs of the disabled children. Surrounded by garbage-filled vacant lots, the brick building had broken windows. Most of the furniture was in pieces, and the paint was peeling off the walls. Only Beds and Chairs ''They did not provide furniture, training, toys, qualified people, you name it,'' said Linda Schleicker, a spokeswoman for Local 371 of the Social Services Workers union. ''Nothing was in place. They just threw the kids in there.'' On a recent visit, the house was virtually empty but for beds in the children's rooms and ripped chairs in the reception area. ''These kids like bright decorations, rugs, curtains just like other kids,'' said Kay McNally, another lawyer with Legal Aid. ''This is not a home setting.'' The children have a range of disabilities. Several are autistic as well as mentally retarded. And some also have serious medical problems like diabetes and chronic liver disorders. In many cases, they need constant supervision. They are incapable of dressing or eating alone and are likely to put almost anything in their mouths. Untrained Staff Interviews with legal aid lawyers and union officials and records of city officials give an account of life at the home. Though many of the children need virtually one-on-one care, at times there were as few as three |
233970_0 | Sugar Prices Fall Sharply After Report of Soviet Intent | LEAD: Sugar futures prices plummeted to a two-week low yesterday, and the market braced for further declines amid reports that the Soviet Union had said for the second time in as many weeks that it had finished its sugar buying for this year. Sugar futures prices plummeted to a two-week low yesterday, and the market braced for further declines amid reports that the Soviet Union had said for the second time in as many weeks that it had finished its sugar buying for this year. Sugar futures settled 0.34 cent to 0.63 cent lower, with the contract for delivery in May at 11.63 cents a pound. The May contract's value fell about 5.1 percent during the session, to about $13,025 from about $13,730. Heavy selling hit the sugar market at midday on rumors, which were later confirmed, that Soviet officials had said they had completed their 1989 sugar-buying program. Buying by China, the world's other major sugar importer, does not appear likely in the near term, analysts said. Further Declines Expected Market analysts said the selloff had left the futures market technically weak and prone to further declines. ''The consensus now seems to be 10.50 to 11 cents,'' said Kim Badenhop, an analyst in New York with Merrill Lynch Capital Markets Inc. ''There may be a little buying interest tomorrow, but I think we're headed down in the short term.'' Wheat futures prices fell sharply on the Chicago Board of Trade amid improving prospects for rain in the Great Plains. Dry weather during the winter is believed to have caused some irreversible damage to the winter wheat crop in Kansas and other central Plains states, but many forecasters are predicting a good soaking for the region early next week. ''Wheat's a tough crop,'' said Victor Lespinasse, a grain trader with Dean Witter Reynolds Inc. in Chicago. ''You can kill a crop two or three times and still come back and have a record harvest.'' Strong Gain for Soybeans Corn and oat futures prices fell in line with wheat but soybean futures gained strongly in a rally tied to bullish chart signals, analysts said. Crude-oil futures recovered from sharp opening losses to finish nearly unchanged, while refined products settled mostly higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange. West Texas Intermediate crude oil settled 1 cent to 3 cents lower, with the May contract at $20.04 a barrel, Cattle futures declined amid |
234043_0 | Brazil, Smarting From the Outcry Over the Amazon, Charges Foreign Plot | LEAD: Embarrassed by the international outcry against the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the Brazilian Government has begun a nationalist campaign that includes denunciations of foreign meddling and charges that the rich nations themselves covet the region's immense spaces and mineral wealth. Embarrassed by the international outcry against the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the Brazilian Government has begun a nationalist campaign that includes denunciations of foreign meddling and charges that the rich nations themselves covet the region's immense spaces and mineral wealth. From the President down, officials in recent weeks have used every public occasion to denounce dark foreign designs to occupy the Amazon and complained of hypocrisy among the industrialized nations, asserting that they commit far greater ecological sins. Yet recognizing that the environment has suddenly become a major international political issue, Brazil has also begun preparing its own public relations campaign aimed at demonstrating that it, too, is concerned with preserving the Amazon, its Indian population and the richest ecosystem on earth. New Laws Are Planned The announcement of a new environmental program, planned for April 6, is being billed as a major event and the President's office is mustering prestigious foreign guests to come to give weight to the ceremony. President Jose Sarney will propose far-reaching new laws affecting the Amazon, said Fernando Cesar Mesquita, the head of the Government's newly formed environmental agency. The measures will include a drastic change in the tax system, a ban on deforestation for agriculture and cattle and controls on the sale of mercury, with which hundreds of thousands of gold prospectors have been polluting the rivers. There are also plans to enlist the help of the army and the air force in the coming dry season to diminish the huge forest fires that farmers set to clear the land. Mr. Sarney's program is expected to be an expanded version of steps he announced last October after a rush of international protests against devastation in the Amazon. At the time, he called for a new Amazon policy to be formulated by mid-February. That deadline passed and the new policy is now due in April. Subsidies Spur Deforestation Although environmentalists contend that the poorly staffed and equipped Government agencies will have great difficulty in putting new rules into effect in a region larger than Europe, proposed changes in the laws and tax breaks could make a significant difference. According |
234043_6 | Brazil, Smarting From the Outcry Over the Amazon, Charges Foreign Plot | not to finance a road that environmentalists said could speed destruction of the jungle. Japan then strongly denied any involvement in the project. Indignant to see the United States and Japan discussing Brazil's future, Mr. Sarney declared the road to be a national priority and said it would be built with or without foreign financing. The large public relations event planned for the announcement of the new Amazon policy has drawn bitter criticism from Brazilian scientists. It has been disclosed that the President's office has appropriated $2 million for the event, much of it to be spent on air fares and Amazon visits for guests. This has rankled scientists because across-the-board budget cuts have badly hurt all research related to the Amazon. At the National Institute for Space Research, which processes satellite images that register Amazon fires and deforestation, for example, researchers said they had not been able to finish analyzing last year's data because there was no money to repair a broken computer or even to develop the film. Forest wardens in Rondonia state complained last month that there was no money for fuel or spare parts for their vehicles. During severe forest fires in Bahia state this month, the Forestry Institute said it had only 50 men to combat a blaze covering thousands of acres. ''Who does Sarney think he is kidding with all this public relations stuff?'' one frustrated scientist said. But opponents contend that until the elections in November the Sarney Government is likely to use the ''foreign threat'' to the Amazon as a rallying point. The President has now closely involved the military chiefs of staff in all deliberations on Amazon issues. The military has opposed any proposals that foreigners pay for or create nature reserves in the Amazon. Double Standard Charged The Government has also ordered its diplomats to go on a counteroffensive. At a meeting in Ecuador this month, Brazil succeeded in enlisting other Amazon Basin countries - Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela - to repudiate outside interference in the Amazon. ''What infuriates us is the double standard,'' said a senior Foreign Ministry official who still felt rankled by recent sharp criticism of Brazil by France, a country that he said had ''no enchanting environmental record.'' Also, he said, Brazil was rebuffed when at the conference on chemical weapons in Paris late last year it tried to introduce a clause in |
234115_0 | NEWS SUMMARY | LEAD: International A3-14 A treaty to restrict waste shipments across borders was unanimously adopted by more than 100 countries. The treaty aims to prevent the exportation of hazardous waste to unsafe, inadequate sites. Page A1 International A3-14 A treaty to restrict waste shipments across borders was unanimously adopted by more than 100 countries. The treaty aims to prevent the exportation of hazardous waste to unsafe, inadequate sites. Page A1 The P.L.O. won't halt the uprising in the Israeli-occupied territories, its leaders told the Bush Administration. But a P.L.O. official raised the possibility that his organization might talk with Israeli officials. A1 In Honduras, human rights abuses were committed by some of the Nicaraguan guerrillas in their camps, Bush Administration officals said they had tentatively concluded. A8 Honduras appears to have accepted the American request that the guerrillas be allowed to remain for the foreseeable future, five weeks after signing an accord calling for dismantling contra bases in Honduras. A1 A program to obtain intelligence on the flow of illegal immigrants through Mexico into the United States has been suspended by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service. A3 In San Salvador, negotiations with rebels were called for by President-elect Alfredo Cristiani who asked the United States not to prejudge him or his party and proposed an ''indefinite cease-fire.'' A9 In response to the rain forest outcry, the Brazilian Government has begun a nationalist campaign that includes denunciations of foreign meddling and charges that the rich nations covet Amazonia's space and wealth. A14 The Dutch police seized a shipment of an American-made chemical used in rocket fuel that was bound for Iran last year, according to court documents and American officials. A13 News analysis: In China, strains between Prime Minister Li Peng and Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party General Secretary, are shrouded in rumors and the veil of secrecy that protects all of China's leaders. A12 Opening the U.S. embassy in Kabul and 11 other embassies that were closed two months ago was requested by the Afghan Government, saying that a diplomatic presence will be required to end the Afghan war. A10 NATIONAL A16-27, B8-11 The gap between the rich and poor is widening, Congressional data indicates. Changes in personal income were greater than the changes in family income. A1 A survey of toxic chemicals released into the air by industry shows they are being emitted at rates that threaten public |
227798_2 | Last Civilian Photography Satellites to Shut Down | No money for operations was set aside by the Reagan Administration in its fiscal 1989 budget, but Congress provided six months of operating funds. That money will run out on March 31, forcing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the system, to order yesterday that it be readied for shutdown. ''It's one of the most shortsighted moves in space history,'' said Peter D. Zimmerman, an expert on such satellites and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. ''For lack of an infinitesimal sum, we're discarding a system that founded the whole field of remote sensing.'' Bud Littin, a spokesman for N.O.A.A., said the prospects for a rescue ''don't look good,'' adding, ''We're out of money, that's all. The situation's pretty bleak.'' Hearing Scheduled in the House A subcommittee of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee has scheduled a hearing for March 7 on the proposed shutdown. The satellites are run under contract to the Government by the Earth Observation Satellite Company of Lanham, Md., which sells the space photos for between $50 and $1,000. Yesterday Peter M. P. Norris, the company's executive vice president, called the Government action ''beyond belief'' and vowed to work feverishly to reverse it. A company statement issued yesterday said that by March 15 all services to customers would cease, including access to over two million Landsat photographs in archives. Every month, 38,800 new images are relayed to earth by the two satellites in space. Fourteen countries receive pictures from the satellites, while Pakistan and Ecuador are building ground stations to pick up the data as well. The satellites were originally put into orbit by the Government for scientific use and are not commercially self-supporting, although some experts say they could soon be so. The Landsat series of satellites was developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, with the first one being launched in 1972. Over the years, they have been used not only by agriculturists, geologists, oceanographers, ecologists and others concerned with land management but also by African relief agencies to identify little used roads in remote regions. Despite the current budget difficulties, funding is continuing for the construction of Landsat 6, which is scheduled for launching in June 1991. Some scientists have expressed concern that shutting down the two satellites will leave gaps in the historical record of Earth's changing environment as seen from space. |
227807_1 | Tokyo Orders a Cut in Buying of Iranian Oil | edict against Mr. Rushdie last month, West Germany, France, Spain, the Netherlands and Japan, among others, have acted to stop further economic negotiations with Teheran, depriving Iran of $3 billion to $4 billion in credit lines it had hoped to secure from those countries over the next few months. Last Thursday, West Germany, Iran's largest trading partner in Western Europe, said it was suspending talks on the financing of Iran's war-shattered economy until Ayatollah Khomeini lifted the threat against Mr. Rushdie. Dieter Vogel, a spokesman for the Economics Ministry in Bonn, said the measures meant that possible state-guaranteed export credits to German exporters of goods to Iran would not be available. Iran was seeking as much as $2 billion in credits from West Germany. On Saturday, a British trade fair planned in Teheran was canceled by both sides. Over the last two weeks, New Zealand, which exports lamb to Iran, issued a formal protest over the Rushdie affair. Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden all canceled planned visits by business delegations to Teheran. Last month a handful of foreign reporters were taken on an extensive tour of Iran's war-damaged refineries, oilfields, offshore platforms and refineries. During the tour, Iranian oil executives laid out detailed plans - dependent on a certain amount of foreign help - to rebuild refineries, construct pipelines, install new offshore oil platforms in the Persian Gulf and build new petrochemical plants. An 'Absolute Priority' They said Iran hoped to complete these programs within five years to generate about $6 billion in revenues - a goal that the Rushdie dispute may already have put out of reach. Speaking in a Teheran interview three weeks ago, Iran's oil minister, Gholam Reza Aghazadeh, said these projects were an ''absolute priority.'' He said they would revive the exports of refined products and save hard currency now being spent to import petrochemicals and oil products like kerosene and gasoil, which Iran's badly damaged refineries cannot produce in quantities adequate to satisfy domestic needs. The visit to Teheran earlier this week by the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, set off speculation that Moscow might come to Iran's rescue by replacing much of the anticipated Western help. But oil industry officials in Europe say that even if the Soviet Union does offer technical and economic assistance, it is difficult to see how it will be able to fully satisfy the country's enormous needs and |
227870_3 | For the Undecided, Tower Vote Poses Hard Choice | one group says that.'' Battle Over Bork Recalled In terms of pressure from back home, the politics of the decision leave much to the discretion of the senator. In contrast to the furor over Judge Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court, comparatively little mail has been received on the Tower nomination, several senators said. ''I think it's a lot easier'' than the Bork nomination, Senator Heflin said. ''There's no real organized effort out there, as there was with Judge Bork. You got thousands and thousands of letters and phone calls with Bork.'' But there has been Presidential pressure. Senator John B. Breaux, a Louisiana Democrat who describes himself as leaning against the Tower nomination, was among those summoned to the Oval Office on Tuesday. ''He campaigned against me four times,'' Senator Breaux of Mr. Bush. ''But I really admire and respect the guy. I think he's great.'' More Than 'Minimum' Standard After an amiable visit, Mr. Breaux, though, emerged still leaning against the nomination. ''Because of the enormity of the problems - the procurement scandals, the need for reduced spending, the need for a Secretary who has to have good relations with Congress - this isn't a minimum requirement test. It's far more than that.'' Mr. Bentsen, who gained national visibility as Michael S. Dukakis's running mate in last year's Presidential campaign, is in a particularly difficult position. Voting against the vast majority of his fellow Democrats would not help his new image as national party leader, one Democratic strategist said. But a Bentsen aide asserted that his colleagues would understand. ''He could be the only Democrat voting for Tower and his colleagues would understand perfectly,'' the aide said, ''simply because he's the only Democrat who served 14 years with him from the same state.'' Senator Dodd has perhaps the most difficult dilemma in what has become a very personal decision. Mr. Tower was one of a handful of senators who voted against the censure of Mr. Dodd's father on charges of financial misconduct. ''The relationship between my father and John Tower, while it's personally important, is not going to be the deciding factor in how I, as a U.S. Senator, cast my vote,'' Mr. Dodd said at a news conference in Connecticut Monday. But he added, ''Of course I haven't forgotten how John Tower voted - what kind of a son would I be if I did? |
229612_1 | Trace That Call No More! | their wits. And you'd be wrong. Because, look what happens: Phone rings, you look at your new phone attachment with its digital display showing the number the call is coming from, and you say, ''Do I know anybody at that number?'' You can't remember, can you? If you're like me, you can't remember your own home number half the time. Once at an airport I wanted to call home but couldn't remember my number. Information wouldn't tell me because it was unlisted. Fortunately my employer's number was listed, so I called a friend in the office, and he looked up my home number in the company records and told me. After that I made strenuous efforts to commit my home number eternally to memory. I was so successful that when I picked up a telephone to make a call I had to make an intense effort of concentration to avoid automatically punching my own home number, even when I was at home. I got many a busy signal in those days before it dawned on me that the phone that was busy was the phone I was holding at my ear. I am describing a brain so packed with numbers that for years there hasn't been room in the attic to put a new one. First came the flood of ZIP codes and area codes. Then the phone company killed all the old exchange names and substituted three more digits for each. Finally the custodian of my mental attic sent down the word: ''You want to put one more number up here, pal, I'm going to have to throw out some of the old ones.'' So we abandoned the brain and went to little books. Now when I need the number of say, my friend Nolan, I open a little book to the N's, and there it is. But, suppose Nolan is phoning me, and I have bought this new telephone detector: Phone rings. I look at the box. There's a number there. I'm baffled. Could be my automobile license plate number, which I can't remember either. Could be my World War II military service number, which must have accidentally got tossed out of the brain several years ago, probably to make room for the new TV channel numbers I had to remember to get results from the cable system. I miss that old number. Call it sentiment, but I |
229661_1 | About New York; In Williamsburg, Hasidim Find A Door of Hope | seen walking with retarded children late at night to avoid detection. The most obvious reason is the deliberate distance separating the Hasidim from the modern world. No television, movies or theater - and traditionally no contamination by such modern concepts as psychotherapy. Moreover, mental impairments are linked to sin. There is also the high regard that Hasidim hold for biblical study and the finely tuned mind. And one other thing. ''Marriages are arranged,'' said Rabbi Stauber, arranger of many himself. ''It isn't boy meets girl and they fall in love.'' The result, the rabbi says, is that parents keep the developmentally disabled in the closet so as not to send out a negative advertisement about their other children. The average number of children per family, he says, is 7.5. ''The problems people might have sought solutions for in other communities are often just disregarded,'' said Harriet Stein, a social worker at Pesach Tikvah, at 18 Middleton Street. ''Coming out in the community is very hard,'' agreed the mother of two developmentally disabled children. ''There is a long period of denial.'' But ever so slowly, that appears to be changing. For five years, Pesach Tikvah has tried to address needs ranging from retardation to psychoses. Yiddish is spoken, food is kosher, sexes are separate. But modern pyschology is used in treating 38 people living in two residences, as well as 40 participants in a workshop who do such rudimentary things as assemble pencils. Some 400 outpatients are counseled monthly. Although some of the client families pay, most money comes from city and state programs now threatened by budget shortfalls. Pesach Tikvah is clearly playing a catch-up game. ''We seem to be re-inventing the wheel at a time everybody else is in modern automobiles,'' Rabbi Stauber said. No one suggests that Hasidim are sicker than other Americans. In fact, the Pesach Tikvah staff believe the community's incidence of mental problems is likely lower than the general society's 1-in-5 rate. And the majority of the problems are the same as everybody else's. With some differences. Holocaust survivors and their children suffer particular traumas. And there is the practice of arranging marriages between those suffering similar afflictions, say schizophrenia. For psychiatrists, this can create both a fascinating laboratory and a stiff challenge. Other differences arise from the gulf separating Hasidim from the rest of society -men's broad-brimmed hats, women's wigs, huge families, the fact |
235758_1 | A Yachting Pox on Both Spinnakers | court appeal, New Zealand now owns the old silver mug it has yet to earn. Finally, it has come to this: that a judge can decide who won and who lost. In this litigious society, where people yell ''whiplash'' at the sound of screeching brakes, it had to happen sooner or later. Ideally, sports trophies and titles should be won in competition, not in courtrooms. But don't blame the judge. Her decision merely interpreted the amended 1887 Deed of Gift from the four surviving members of the America syndicate. Instead, blame both Dennis Conner, the Stars & Stripes skipper, and Michael Fay, the New Zealand syndicate millionaire. Conner and Fay each deserve a yachting pox on both their spinnakers for scheming to win at any cost. And the cost, it turns out, is the dignity of the America's Cup itself. After decades of being not much more than what would be called a boat race at Aqueduct, the America's Cup transfixed much of the nation in 1983 when Australia II's legal winged keel sailed past Liberty in a decisive seventh race off Newport, R.I., ending the New York Yacht Club's 132-year hold on the silver mug. And when Conner recaptured the cup in 1987 off Fremantle, Australia, with Stars & Stripes in a four-race sweep of Kookaburra III, he was Patrick Henry in Docksiders. Now, however, the America's Cup has been melted into another of sport's disenchanting legal cases. Pro football antitrust. Baseball collusion. Mike Tyson's managerial conflicts. Ad nauseam. In other sports, the commissioner would have averted a court case. If the Los Angeles Dodgers announced they would open the season with a 12-man batting order that included six outfielders instead of three, Bart Giamatti would hold up his hand. End of idea. If there were an America's Cup commissioner, Fay would have been told to enter a 12-meter yacht like every other syndicate has for more than 30 years. Instead, both Fay and Conner schemed. Fay squeezed through a loophole in the deed with his giant monohull. Then the arrogance of Conner and the San Diego Yacht Club defied the deed by using a catamaran, which has two hulls and no keel. ''We had a job to do,'' Conner said after his September sweep. ''And we went out and did it.'' Conner and his San Diego colleagues did it knowing they risked a reversal in court. The previous |
235895_1 | Depressed Parents Put Children At a Greater Risk of Depression | ''A seriously depressed mother or father is not able to have an emotionally attuned, reciprocal engagement with anyone. That can have devastating effects on their children.'' Ways to Cushion Children By identifying difficulties in the way depressed parents treat their children, researchers hope to design ways to intervene that could cushion children from the impact of a parent's depression. Typically, there are several specific problems with the interactions between depressed parents and children, said Marian Radke-Yarrow, chief of the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has conducted much of the research on depressed parents and their children. For the research, depressed parents and children are invited in pairs to a comfortable apartment designed so they can be observed unobtrusively. The parents and children spend half a day there, going through such normal activities as playing, making and eating lunch, and napping. At the Society for Research in Child and Adolescent Psychopathology last month, Dr. Radke-Yarrow reported on one such study, which involved depressed mothers and their small children. She identified the main differences between life for a child in families where a parent is seriously depressed and those where there are no such problems. Among the differences were these: * Depressed mothers are more likely to back off when they meet resistance from children while trying to control them. The mothers seem uncertain and helpless, typical signs of depression. * Depressed mothers were less able to compromise in disagreements with their children, and they often confused their children's normal attempts at independence as breaking rules. * While making and eating lunch, the depressed mothers spoke to their children far less than did other mothers. The children of the depressed mothers also spoke infrequently. * When the depressed mothers did speak to their children, they made more negative comments than did other mothers. Applicable to Fathers, Too While the research involved mothers and their children, the findings are thought to apply as well to depressed fathers. Each of the patterns can have harmful effects on a child's emotional development. Among the children who become depressed, those with depressed parents become so at an earlier age, on average, than the children whose parents are not depressed, according to a study by Dr. Weissman. They also have more frequent recurrence of episodes of depression, and are more impaired by their depression in school and in their social |
235921_0 | Sand in His Shoes | LEAD: The ''swarming horde'' is about to hit Cuba. Yanqui media moguls, ever eager for excuses to drop network anchors in exotic waters, will provide more air coverage in their invasion than J.F.K. ever assigned to his fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. The ''swarming horde'' is about to hit Cuba. Yanqui media moguls, ever eager for excuses to drop network anchors in exotic waters, will provide more air coverage in their invasion than J.F.K. ever assigned to his fiasco at the Bay of Pigs. The occasion is the visit of Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev to Fidel Castro. Let us examine a few of the obvious stories on the assignment sheets, along with the harder-to-get follow-ups. 1. Cuba has been crippled by Communist economics and a generation of U.S. embargo, and is propped up by $5 billion a year in Moscow subsidies. True enough; the Soviets provide economic aid, largely in oil, equal to 25 percent of the Cuban gross national product. (Contrast: combined military and economic aid to Israel from the U.S. is under 7 percent of our ally's G.N.P.) But why is it that sugar, Cuba's primary export, has been rationed for the past three years in the Soviet Union? Answer: After the Gorbachev crackdown on official vodka production, a home brew known as samogon was fermented everywhere. The moonshiners need sugar to make their alcoholic beverages, causing the sugar shortage and even snatching candy from Russian children. As a result of this underground demand, and in tandem with the price support of cane in Europe and corn fructose in the U.S., the world price of sugar has been rising, strengthening Mr. Castro's hand in his dealings with his Soviet patron. 2. Behind the smiles and back-patting is growing Soviet-Cuban tension: while Gorby is talking glasnost, Fidel, at age 62 and after three decades in power, is among the last of the Stalinists - enforcing ''rectification,'' a Maoism now being used by Li Peng in Peking to slow down the long march to capitalism. Behind-the-scenes conflict makes good copy, especially in voice-over commentary accompanying shots of two crowd-users working the fence. Such easy thumbsucking can be supported: Mr. Castro profited from renting his army to Angola and resented the loss-cutting deal the Soviets made to send them home; Cuba's controlled press has pointedly ignored the Yeltsin election victory; Mr. Castro recently took a U.S. diplomat aside to grumble |
229261_2 | NEWS SUMMARY | computers sometimes do a better job. A1 John Tower has talked about things he never thought he would have to talk about, from rumors that he chased women to what kind of pomade he puts on his hair, as he wages an 11th hour counteroffensive A1 Many Texans cooling toward Tower B11 A Time-Warner merger would create an entertainment behemoth of singers, journalists, studios, books, movies, magazines and cable TV. That raises troubling questions for would-be competitors. A1 Time Warner would be a strong competitor for authors D8 Problems beset two years of talks D9 A network to import AIDS drugs that are not available in the United States has been set up by a New York group boldly attempting to press the limits of the F.D.A.'s rules. A1 Circumcision helps stop infections of the kidneys and urinary system, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in its first claim that a common operation ''has potential medical benefits and advantages.'' A14 Rain fell on the ''Aryan Woodstock'' over the weekend. What was planned to be week-long concert and recruitment rally for neo-Nazi skinheads turned out to be a soggy meeting of fewer than 100 youths. A12 Jesses Jackson's support in Chicago is going to a black third-party candidate for Mayor, not the Democratic nominee. That is triggering questions about Mr. Jackson's loyalty to the Democrats. B10 Mayor Barry's support is weakening as the Washington coalition that helped elect him to office comes apart amid the concern over his personal and political problems. B10 A plan to dig a ditch on the border between the United States and Mexico near Otay Mesa, Calif., is stirring passions on both sides of the border. A12 WASHINGTON TALK B6 At banks, Federal initials count. Savings and loan associations want to display F.D.I.C on their windows instead of F.S.L.I.C., which appears to have become as reassuring as S.O.S. REGIONAL B1-5 A restructuring of the school system in New York City is being urged by lawmakers, parents and educators 20 years after a bitter and racially divisive teachers' strike led to decentralization. A1 Making drug addicts help addicts who have contracted AIDS is the aim of a training program that Beth Israel Medical Center began early last month. B1 Large war chests of House members from the New York metropolitan region have made them more immune to challenges than many other lawmakers. B1 The suburbs are being |
229149_0 | Tax Code Will Send Research Overseas | LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: A key point missed in ''U.S. Com-panies Lift R.& D. Abroad'' (Economic Scene column, Feb. 22): the tax code in effect for 1989 may encourage United States companies to move research and development out of this country. Here is just one of the ways the Internal Revenue Service sends research centers - and their rich spillover benefits - overseas: In 1977, the I.R.S. issued tax code regulations (Section 861) restricting the deduction of research and development expenses from United States income. The rules seriously disadvantage such companies as computer and business equipment manufacturers, which do most of their research and development in this country, but sell products worldwide. Allowing companies to deduct domestic research and development expenses from income would be an incentive for them to keep research and development at home. But the I.R.S. rules force companies to allocate a certain amount of the domestic research and development expenses to income earned in other countries. The effect is that by financially penalizing companies that do research and development in the United States and export overseas, Section 861 encourages them to move research and development sites and the associated jobs to other countries, where such expenses can be deducted. While there may be many business reasons for selecting a research and development site, our tax code should not encourage American companies to do research and development in other countries. Will Congress help? In the past, Congress has taken short-term measures to stop the I.R.S. from enforcing the rules, but has done nothing permanent to encourage companies to keep research and development at home. Now, with the growth of the deficit, legislative proposals suggesting revenue losers, such as tax rules more favorable to industry-financed research and development, have been dismissed by those with short-term vision. They do not realize they are indirectly exporting American jobs and high-technology research and development. Let's ask again: Will Congress help? JOHN L. PICKITT President, Computer and Business Equipment Manufacturers Assn. Washington, Feb. 22, 1989 |
235142_2 | Recycling Law's Mechanics: Symphony of Sorting, Maybe | the Mayor, it could take effect on about July 1. The Sanitation Commissioner is developing regulations and intends to have a six-month education period before imposing fines. Q. How will it be enforced? A. Sanitation police would inspect buildings and issue summonses similar to traffic tickets. Violators would be fined $25 for the first infraction, $50 for the second and $100 for the third. A person or building deemed a persistent violator could be fined from $500 for a single household to $10,000 for a large building. Persistent violation is defined as four infractions in a six-month period. Fines would be mailed to the Environmental Control Board and summonses challenged there. Q. Where would it start? A. Recycling would begin in neighborhoods already in the department's voluntary pilot program, including: Clinton, Chelsea, Greenwhich Village and the West Village in Manhattan; Throgs Neck in the Bronx; the Brooklyn Heights, Dyker Heights and Fort Greene sections of Brooklyn; Forest Hills, Rego Park and Bayside in Queens, and the southern end of Staten Island. The program would be expanded to new areas over five years. Q. How much waste is collected by New York City a year? A. More than five million tons of solid watse is collected from households by the Sanitation Department. Private carters dump almost three million tons that they collect from buinesses. Q. Why do we need to recycle? A. The city's principal dumping site, the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, is filling up rapidly and expected to be full by the turn of the century. A smaller landfill, Edgemere in Rockaway, Queens, is expected to close in 1991. Q. Does the city have other plans for the garbage crisis? A. The city, which already has three incinerators, hopes to build one at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But incinerators cannot handle the vast amounts of garbage collected, and environmentalists object to them as sources of pollution. Q. Will other materials be collected under the recycling plan? A. The Sanitation Department is developing programs to collect leaves and cut grass for composting. The department also hopes to begin collecting Christmas trees each January for chipping into mulch for gardens and parks, and to develop separate locations for disposing old tires and batteries. Q. What about private businesses and institutions? A. The Sanitation Commissioner is businesses and offices, under which private carters would collect the material, most of it paper. |
235181_3 | Food Industry Now Testing Crops For Pesticides to Calm Consumers | markert have been testing produce for residues of pesticides in a program developed by NutriClean, a laboratory certification company in Oakland. Earlier this month, the Stop & Shop Supermarket Company of Braintree, Mass., owner of 116 stores in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island signed a contract to join the program. Growers of tomatoes, celery and citrus in California's Central Valley last year began filling out detailed records of the pesticides used on each orchard or field. The records are being analyzed by Technical Assessment Systems, a risk assessment company based in Washington, D.C., to develop a computer model that would make precise estimates of pesticide residues in crops and would virtually eliminate the need for expensive routine testing. Fueled by Health Concerns Such measures are a result of growing scientific evidence about the hazards of pesticides. A pivotal moment came in May 1987 when the National Academy of Sciences published a report that said 28 widely used pesticides, particularly those appled to fruits and vegetables to battle fungus, could cause thousands of additional cancer cases in the United States. Lawrie Mott, a senior scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, said the number of cancer cases caused by the 28 pesticides in this country could be 1.46 million over the 70-year lifetime exposure. ''We saw food safety was an issue that was coming down the road and we had to do something to get ready,'' said Lawrence A. Thibodeau, 73, the founder and president of the Maine Farmers Exchange, which markets a quarter of Maine's $115 million crop from the old Presque Isle National Bank Building on Main Street. ''The time has passed when we could just say our product is safe, it has no residues. We need scientific proof.'' Such tests might have served to calm potato buyers last week, they said, after the disclosure of a memorandum from the Federal Environmental Protection Agency recommending a ban on the use of the insecticide aldicarb on potatoes. The memorandum said the chemical was acutely toxic and threatened the health of infants and children. None of the farmers selling potatoes to Maine Farmers Exchange used aldicarb, company records showed. ''We know our crop is safe,'' said Jeff Smith, a 38-year-old potato farmer from Mapleton, eight miles west of here. ''Tests are not going to find anything. They are just going to verify what we've been saying all along.'' |
235119_3 | A Bumper Crop Of Grapes And Uncertainty | The brunt of the economic loss could fall on the dozens of export companies that take fruit on consignment from hundreds of growers, large and small, and ship it to 40 countries for sale. Working Capital Exporters usually take bank loans, fruit industry officials say, and use them to advance capital to growers, who repay them when accounts are settled at the end of a season. Enrique Bruzzone, president of the exporters association, said that the exporters had debts of $400 million for this season and that most of them were now ''technically bankrupt.'' The Chilean Government, its finances in better shape than those of most Latin American countries, has promised to invest $44 million in emergency measures to soften the blow. These include a program to buy fruit now in cold storage and distribute it to social welfare organizations, jobs programs in the most affected regions and an advertising campaign in the United States and elsewhere. Perhaps the most important and costly measure is one to allow exporters to use the hard currency received for fruit sales since Feb. 20 to buy Chilean foreign debt paper on the secondary market abroad, where it sells at about 60 percent of face value. They can then collect the face value, in pesos, from Chile's Central Bank. But the Finance Minister, Hernan Buchi, said the Government would not take any measures aimed at saving specific companies from bankruptcy. Even with strong Government backing, though, Chilean growers and exporters fear they will not be able to overcome what they think is now a psychological aversion to all Chilean fruit by consumers in the United States and elsewhere. 'Doubt Will Still Exist' Angel Arancibia, another grower in the Colina area, said that ''after the avalanche of publicity against Chilean fruit on television and in newspapers in the United States, the doubt will still exist in the minds of buyers.'' He predicted that Americans would skip Chilean fruit and wait for United States fruit to come into season. Mr. Arancibia said he was finishing his grape harvest and had no idea whether any of it would be sold. He said about a third of his total harvest had been on ships bound for Philadelphia when the ban was imposed and most of the rest was in cold storage. Coming at the height of the harvest season for grapes and other summer fruit, the interruption in |
231846_4 | Putting Space-Age Materials to Use | matrix. This imparts some of the properties of the reinforcement to the material. But in applications requiring more strength and stiffness, the fibers are continuous and often loosely woven into tapes or cloth for ease of handling. By orienting the direction and quantity of the fibers, product designers can build in strength where it is needed and save money by eliminating the reinforcing where it is not. ''We are in the age of designer materials,'' Mr. Bowman said. ''You put properties where you want them and don't waste properties you do not need. There are a lot of things you can do with them that you can't with monolithic materials.'' The fibers can even be woven into three-dimensional shapes, and gaps between the fibers are filled in by gaseous deposition of the matrix material. This is how the carbon-carbon brake disks coming into use in commercial aviation are fabricated. Mr. Bowman said composites can provide for ''specific solutions'' to design problems rather than the ''general solutions'' offered by older types of materials, like nylon or Teflon. Composite materials are tailored to each application, rather than leaving it to manufacturers to figure out how to apply a homogeneous materal. But the materials have drawbacks. They are expensive and require long curing times. In addition, the hand labor involved in their fabrication can be substantial. Curing times measured in hours might be acceptable in a low-volume industry like aircraft, but would be prohibitive in auto manufacturing. Composite producers also acknowledge that most product designers are more comfortable working with metal, and the large investment that companies have in metal-working equipment tends to inhibit a switch to new materials. New applications are most likely, they say, in problem areas where conventional materials are inadequate. Most composites in use consist of plastics as the matrix. But plastics are limited by the amount of heat they can withstand and are of little use above 500 degrees Fahrenheit. That rules them and most metals out for high-temperature uses in advanced engines and ultra-high-speed aircraft. To push the boundaries of materials technology, the Federal Government is backing efforts to develop rapidly cooled metal alloys, carbon-carbon, metal-ceramic and ceramic-ceramic materials that hold their strength at temperatures up to 3,000 degrees. Textron has developed a process to produce continuous silicon carbide fibers by depositing the ceramic on a carbon filament core. The resulting fibers are loosely woven into a |
230695_4 | Paying for Employee Education Benefits | new trade or profession or a substantially different job classification.) Some of those affected will notice the change in their W-2 forms, which will include the educational benefits as additional income. But because the change came late in the year, additional withholding may not have been made. Indeed, some employers may not even have listed the benefits as extra income on the W-2's. Instead, they may have sent notices to the employees instructing them to report the benefits when they file their 1988 returns. In any event, those affected may have a bigger tax bill or get a smaller refund. Any new extension of Section 127 is likely to treat graduate study the same way, Ms. Pecarich said, because Congress is concerned that the tax benefits were going disproportionately to better-paid or more professional employees. Meanwhile, other changes in the tax law last year have addressed, if not resolved, a longstanding problem for graduate students who teach or do research. That is, how much of the student aid they receive is a tax-free scholarship and how much is taxable salary? Many graduate students receive scholarships to cover the cost of tuition and books or fellowships as an incentive to pursue particular projects. They may also receive stipends, which are payments in return for services like research and teaching. But student aid is not always so clearly labeled. For example, non-cash awards, like tuition waivers, are often given to students as part of a package of assistance that also involves teaching duties. Now, the universities must identify all aid given to graduate students as being either tax-exempt scholarship assistance or taxable income tied to services. What remains murky is just how to make that allocation. Treasury regulations are vague about putting a dollar value on a student's worth as a teacher and thus determining what part, if any, of a tuition waiver should be considered income. At the same time, universities are subject to a hefty tax penalty for failing to withhold enough income tax for a student's compensation. As a result, the natural tendency of the schools will be to put a very high value on the student's services, some tax experts say. Some graduate students will see extra income reflected in their 1988 W-2's because of this. Those who believe that a university treated too large a portion of their student aid as income may question how the allocation |
230993_0 | CAMPUS LIFE: Barnard; Tradition Revived As Greek Games Stage a Return | LEAD: Read into it, whatever significance you will, but the Greek Games, a once-hardy perennial of Barnard College life, are returning to campus after a 22-year absence. Read into it, whatever significance you will, but the Greek Games, a once-hardy perennial of Barnard College life, are returning to campus after a 22-year absence. The games, an evocation of the classic traditions that distinguished academic life and architecture in the early years of this cebtyrtm were a feature of campus life from 1903 to 1967. That year, they vanished, apparently the victim of an upheaval in life styles that paid little homage to yesterdays. In the old games, the young women made their own flowing Greek robes, recited Greek poetry and completed in chariot races, hurdling and hoop-rolling. Many ofthe events had musical accompaniment. The pretext for the Greek revival is Barnard's centennial celebration. The games will be held on Saturday, April 15, at 1:30 P.M. Thirty students and alumnae will participate in 10 events in the school gymnasium, which has a stage with appropriate Greek colums. The poetry, which used to be in Greek, will probably include some English this year, but the chariot races will be in honored tradition, whith four women dancers in the roles of horses, pulling a chariot and driver. Not everyone at the school is ecstatic about the idea. Elizabeth Schack, a sophomore, said: ''I think the new style of the Greek Games would exclude a lot of people. Many people are involved in sports instead of the performing arts.'' And Katie Lipsitt, a senior , said: ''There's something a little backward about it. It is special, but women now are very capable. We can do a lot more than choreographed dances.'' Although Barnard students still stage a play in Greek once a year, the Greek Games have been gone for so long, that they seem innovative to today's students. Collegians reared in an age when differences between men's and women's campus activities have been more often deplored than lauded had mixed reactions to the new games. Christine Giordano, a senior who is president of the Student Government Association, said: ''I think it's great because it has been a tradition of Barnard. It's very symbolic of the Barnard spirit.'' But Ms. Giordano, noting that Barnard students today may be more athletically competitive than previous classes, said, ''I think that if the Greek Games were reinstituted |
230698_3 | E-Mail Searches for a Missing Link | wastebaskets, no more misunderstandings on the phone. E-mail is faster and cheaper than overnight services, and for personal messages it is more convenient and secure than fax. If it were easier to use and reached a broader audience, the potential for e-mail would seem unlimited. Besides communicating with one another, the 49 members of the aerospace association need to exchange information with customers including the Federal Government, and with thousands of smaller supplier companies. And the aerospace industry's needs are not unique. Steven York of Northrop said other industry associations have been clamoring for news of the project. ''I predict there will be an explosion of traffic if this thing is reliable and if it is priced at a reasonable rate,'' he said. The one protocol that everyone would adhere to - both for communications within a company and transmissions to other companies - is an international standard called X.400. X.400 is a set of rules that will eventually allow worldwide exchange of electronic information. The technology needed to connect the various E-mail carriers using X.400 is essentially in place, said Steve Farowich of Boeing, the project manager for the aerospace industry pilot program. Yet hurdles remain. The E-mail companies, like separate islands in an archipelago, have their own cultures and practices. Each has invested a lot of money to build large populations of users. Building a bridge to another island might bring in new customers, but bridges work both ways, and some customers might emigrate. When everybody talks the same language, the carriers will be judged on price and service. Still, some E-mail systems are experimenting with interconnection, on a very limited basis. For example, subscribers to A.T.&T. Mail and Dialcom can exchange messages. MCI Mail and Compuserve have a proprietary link for their subscribers. Beyond message service, A.T.&T. and other companies are working to develop broader business applications for e-mail. George Cunningham, A.T.&T.'s division manager for E-mail, cited order entry as an example. When a salesman visits a customer, for example, and takes an order for 400 widgets, he must forward that information to the company. Typically, that is done by mail or telephone. But the E-mail carriers hope to demonstrate how much quicker and more accurate their services could be. The aerospace agreement could also lead to a more rapid implementation of a standard for electronic document interchange, or EDI, which has been hampered by a lack |
230947_0 | U.N. Population Plan for China a Test for U.S. | LEAD: A new United Nations plan to help China control its population growth will provide an early test of the Bush Administration's attitude toward Beijing's forced abortion and sterilization policies, officials and diplomats say. A new United Nations plan to help China control its population growth will provide an early test of the Bush Administration's attitude toward Beijing's forced abortion and sterilization policies, officials and diplomats say. The United Nations Fund for Population Activities, the world family planning agency, will ask its governing council in early June to approve the $57 million five-year plan under which it will help China promote family planning and develop a modern contraceptive industry. This will be the first time the United States, which is a member of the council, has been asked to approve a new plan for China since 1985, when Congress cut off all American contributions to the agency, claiming it was helping China run a population control program that employed compulsory abortion and sterilization. ''There is a new President and a new program so I hope we will also have a new policy and the United States will resume its support for us,'' said Dr. Nafis Sadik, the agency head. Dr. Sadik said that when she visited Beijing in January, Chinese leaders admitted that ''overzealous'' family planning officials had forced women to have abortions against their wishes. But they insist that this is against official policy requiring voluntary abortions. Dr. Sadik, who is from Pakistan and the only woman to head a United Nations agency, said the Chinese told her they are now trying to improve the image of their population policy abroad, cracking down on officials involved in family planning abuses, including coerced abortions. She said the Chinese leaders also told her that they are anxious for the United States to support the United Nations agency's new population control program. She said they regard the disagreement over the agency as an ''irritant in their relationship with Washington.'' The Reagan Administration and Congress cut off funding for the agency, which relies on voluntary governmental contributions, in 1985 after American anti-abortion groups accused the agency of helping China implement a population control program that provided for compulsory abortion and sterilization. The money Congress would have given was allocated instead to voluntary population control programs in other developing countries not run by the United Nations agency. The withdrawal of American funding has not |
230833_0 | THE WORLD: The Amazon Forest; Brazil Wants Its Dams, but At What Cost? | LEAD: THE rising waters are already lapping at the treetops and soon a new expanse of rain forest will completely disappear in Brazil's rush for energy. In a few months' time, Samuel, a new hydroelectric dam near this town in the Amazon Basin, will be ready to operate. THE rising waters are already lapping at the treetops and soon a new expanse of rain forest will completely disappear in Brazil's rush for energy. In a few months' time, Samuel, a new hydroelectric dam near this town in the Amazon Basin, will be ready to operate. Brazil is increasingly looking to the Amazon Basin to provide much of its energy. With little fanfare and great determination, the country has begun a huge undertaking: tapping the hydroelectric potential of a region that holds the largest network of rivers on earth. At least 15 of the Amazon's many tributaries are each more than 1,000 miles long. Of all the momentous changes unfolding in this great expanse of nature, the quest for its energy may have the most far-reaching consequences. Lacking significant reserves of oil or coal and dismayed by constant difficulties with its one nuclear plant, the Government sees no alternative but to harness the power of Brazil's main rivers if the country's industrial south is not to be held back by serious shortages of electricity. Already three new dams are in place in the Amazon Basin. Plans call for the region to fulfill close to 37 percent of Brazil's energy needs within two decades. The quest for energy helps to clarify the growing international debate about the future of the Amazon. Worried that destruction of the rain forest could wipe out thousands of species and affect the global climate, much of the developed world is pushing for its conservation. Determined to become a developed country itself, Brazil sees the exploitation of the Amazon as essential to its growth. Only last month, President Bush urged the Japanese not to finance a highway through the jungle to Peru that would link the region to the Pacific Coast - and, critics feared, create a shortcut opening the jungle to indiscriminate destruction. Similarly, opponents of the dams at home and abroad hope that they can slow them down by pressuring international creditors to cut off funds. Officials in Brasilia talk bitterly of ''double standards'' applied by countries - the United States among them - that never |
230833_1 | THE WORLD: The Amazon Forest; Brazil Wants Its Dams, but At What Cost? | harness the power of Brazil's main rivers if the country's industrial south is not to be held back by serious shortages of electricity. Already three new dams are in place in the Amazon Basin. Plans call for the region to fulfill close to 37 percent of Brazil's energy needs within two decades. The quest for energy helps to clarify the growing international debate about the future of the Amazon. Worried that destruction of the rain forest could wipe out thousands of species and affect the global climate, much of the developed world is pushing for its conservation. Determined to become a developed country itself, Brazil sees the exploitation of the Amazon as essential to its growth. Only last month, President Bush urged the Japanese not to finance a highway through the jungle to Peru that would link the region to the Pacific Coast - and, critics feared, create a shortcut opening the jungle to indiscriminate destruction. Similarly, opponents of the dams at home and abroad hope that they can slow them down by pressuring international creditors to cut off funds. Officials in Brasilia talk bitterly of ''double standards'' applied by countries - the United States among them - that never allowed environmental concerns to hinder their own expansion. Last week, Brazil was joined by the seven other nations of the Amazon Pact in denouncing outside interference in the country's environmental affairs. Brazilians have always looked at their jungle hinterlands as a place to be conquered, exploited and peopled in the way Americans looked at the old West. The Bandeirantes, the trailblazers of the 17th century, are national heroes. The country's powerful armed forces still consider the occupation of the jungle, above all the border regions, vital for national security. The rush to the north and west already has turned into the largest migration of this century, involving hundreds of thousands of settlers and gold prospectors, as well as logging and mining companies, all carving away at the jungle. Today 15 million people live in the region, twice as many as in 1970, and an enormous demand for goods and services of every kind has followed. Among the beneficiaries are the huge construction companies, which are rapidly joining the military in opposing Brazil's budding environmental movement. Now on the drawing board is an ambitious program that calls not only for the Amazon Basin to produce enough electricity to cover its own |
231109_7 | 'Students Are a Lot More Self-Concerned' | applicants is better. And, of course, people in health-care jobs are in great demand. Q. Can you quote some starting salaries? A. Engineers are getting in the range of $29,000 to $30,000 or a little more with a bachelor's degree. Accountants average around $26,000 to $28,000. With some of the enrichment money going to teachers in Connecticut, salaries are going up. Probably a brand-new, inexperienced teacher can expect $20,000 or maybe $22,000, depending on the geographic area. There's not a lot of money in the social science field. Somebody who has a bachelor's in psychology or sociology and gets a job with some agency in an urban area would probably be lucky to get $17,000. And ironically, a lot of these low salaries are in the urban areas where it's not cheap to live. Q. What are some job-hunting tips? A. I'm kind of appalled at the number of people - experienced or brand-new grads - who will look for a job without really knowing what it is they have to offer or even being able to identify what's the right kind of job for them. That's the worst part; not knowing enough about yourself so you can convince the employer that he should hire you. The other part is there are an awful lot of people who contact an employer without knowing anything about that employer. Both of these things are relatively easy to do. I mean, it isn't like you can't find the information and so forth. The information is there both about the employer and yourself. Q. Is it worthwhile to invest in things like video resumes? A. I suppose video resumes are good for somebody who's in the north end of Maine and can't travel a distance. But gimmicks don't typically do a lot for anybody. A gimmick may get you some attention, but I doubt that it's really going to get you the job. Q. What do you see in the future in the job market? A. I don't see any end to the high-tech field. That's going to keep growing. Everybody in our field talks about the big growth in the service industry but somehow we've got to be producing more things. I'd like to hope we'll see more of a shift back toward producing types of careers, just for the sake of the country and our economy. CONNECTICUT Q & A: DOUGLAS DARING |
231020_1 | A Puritan At the Helm | than the coast of Maine in a dour mood. In spite of this risk, there are those of us who are drawn irresistibly to sail there. It is not that we forget the awful days; it is partly because of them that we go. The brilliant days owe some of their gleam to the very existence of the awful ones. Those of us who have inherited the happy legacy of the Puritans take an obscure satisfaction in adversity, and we believe that we deserve the brilliant days only if we have suffered the dreadful ones. Duty, rigor and merit play a great part in this latter-day Puritan ethic. For us, a vacation is not meant merely to be fun. It is, like the rest of life, a struggle, a test of the soul, in which the only true pleasures are earned. This viewpoint is definitely elitist and presumes a snobbish, Spartan meritocracy. Rigor is deemed a proper state, and all efforts to make things easier are seen, by these rules, as lower-class. Although sailboats in the Caribbean, for example, are usually chartered with crews, very few in Maine are: this would be cheating. Using mechanical aids is cheating as well. It is only relatively recently that the idea of a motor placed on a sailboat was grudgingly accepted, and motorboats themselves have always been beneath contempt. Thirty years ago, Samuel Eliot Morison, the historian of Mount Desert Island, wrote with asperity: ''Nowadays, any fool with a radar and a fathometer-equipped power boat can roar through the thoroughfares as easily as he can drive a car.'' And of course things have only gotten worse: today there is not only radar but loran, a system of radio signals that enables you to place your vessel precisely on a global map. Both radar and loran are cheating, by the old standards. There is an island, east of Mount Desert, owned by a Boston family. They Page 76 62 Maine Jump use it only in the summer, but there is a caretaker year-round. Since the coast is frequently fogbound, the suggestion was made to install radar in the launch that plies between island and mainland. The older members of the family oppose this, not because they actually want anyone to perish in the sea, but because of the principle of the thing. THE DESPISED TECH-nology, however, is not always foolproof. Several years ago our |
231024_1 | A Diver's Map of Bermuda: Here There Be Treasures | shifting sand until, back in 1983, a sharp-eyed Bermudian spotted an anomaly on the bottom and decided to investigate. What is she now? A ship? No longer. No more than a skeleton is a man. For what used to be 30 or 40 feet high, deck upon deck of bilge space and cargo space and living space; what used to carry stout masts and square sails; what was home to bold and questing men (or were they fearful, unwilling voyagers impressed from squalid dockside taverns?) has been squashed into a lumpy paste six or eight feet thick. She lived in the mid-1700's, that much I know, for the one hard, incontrovertible piece of evidence we have found is a single badly oxidized silver coin, a Spanish piece of eight, dated 1752. Surely she had been returning home from the New World, for her cargo - picked apart bit by bit, like plucking raisins from a giant rice pudding - bears evidence of trade along the coasts of Central and South America: barrels of indigo, to be blended into rich dyes for Continental finery; mahogany, already sawed into furniture lengths; lignum vitae, the impossibly dense forest wood so hard that it was used for, among other things, clock bearings. Probably she was French, but after nearly five years of meticulous excavation, after analysis and study of artifacts by archeologists, historians, numismatists and experts in everything from weapons to crockery, no one knows for sure. Yes, a couple of pewter spoons carried a crest that included a fleur-de-lis, but study of a seven-volume compendium of 18th-century French heraldry failed to turn up the crest. Yes, a few wooden plates were marked ''L.F.D.G.,'' which may have stood for ''Louis de France Dei Gratia.'' Then again, it may not have. Yes, some barrel tops were marked in French, but in the 17th and 18th centuries ships were often equipped adventitiously: English guns, Spanish coins, French wines, Chinese porcelain, Dutch stoneware. It is unlikely that she will ever yield answers to her mysteries, for there is nothing special enough about her to warrant expensive, exhaustive academic exploration. She was of ordinary design - the Chevy truck of her day - carrying ordinary cargo on ordinary routes. But to me she is wonderful, for she lets me touch the past. To feel a strand of rope that no man has touched in more than 200 years, |
230689_1 | Goodrich Finally Gets It Right | also history. In their place are a healthy plastics business and a fast-moving bunch of specialty chemical and aerospace businesses run by managers who were handpicked for their entrepreneurial styles, and who have been given the authority to run with their instincts. Today almost all of Goodrich's revenues come from product areas that accounted for only 37 percent of sales in 1980. Many of the new products offer very high margins, which means that Goodrich's profits have leaped forward, even as its sales have been cut back. Profits doubled last year to $209.9 million on sales of $2.42 billion. As recently as 1985, Goodrich lost $26 million on sales of $3.2 billion. ''You know how they say that in every fat man, there's a thin man dying to get out?'' asked John D. Ong, the 55-year-old lawyer-turned-businessman who has been Goodrich's chief executive since 1979. ''Well, I always knew that inside this bad, fat company was a great, thin company dying to get out.'' The diet has not been painless. It meant firing many veteran executives who were unable to adapt to the quickened entrepreneurial style Goodrich has adopted. It meant paring businesses and taking write-offs that decimated Goodrich's balance sheet. And it meant fighting off numerous takeover attempts from astute raiders who could smell the company's vulnerability a mile away. But apparently, the pain was worth it. For the first time in years, Goodrich is in a position to help its businesses grow. It ended 1988 with more than $300 million in hand - and a willingness to spend it. ''This is a huge company with a lot of momentum,'' said Theodore S. Semegran, an analyst at Shearson Lehman Hutton Inc. who has been suggesting that people purchase the stock. ''It no longer has to worry about rebuilding. Now it can concentrate on optimizing what it has.'' Not bad for a company that, for much of the 1970's and early 1980's, looked like it might not even survive. Until about 1977, Goodrich was primarily a manufacturer of tires and industrial rubber products. Both were low-margin commodity businesses that rely on selling huge volumes and that compete almost entirely on price and delivery. And both businesses were in trouble. A slowdown in Detroit caused problems for the original-equipment-tire business, while a growing consumer preference for radial tires, which last longer than conventional tires, meant a slowdown in replacement tire sales |
230909_0 | Aloof Giant, Brazil Warms To Neighbors | LEAD: Displaying the daring shapes of the country's most famous architect and the idealistic vision of a well-known anthropologist, a $50 million monument has been built to a subject that interests few Brazilians: Latin America. Displaying the daring shapes of the country's most famous architect and the idealistic vision of a well-known anthropologist, a $50 million monument has been built to a subject that interests few Brazilians: Latin America. But the purpose of Sao Paulo's new Latin American Center, with its library, museum, auditorium, conference rooms and restaurant, is to change just that - to make Brazilians turn their eyes away from the United States and Europe and take notice of their immediate neighbors. ''Over the years, we have been very separate,'' said Orestes Quercia, the governor of Sao Paulo State who ordered construction of the project. ''Above all, we Brazilians have been separate from the others. I think the center can awaken curiosity and help us understand the benefits of closer ties.'' Center Faces Big Challenge The cultural complex, which will be inaugurated March 18, nonetheless faces a heady challenge. For the best part of five centuries, after a brief period of competing for territory, the relationship between Brazil and the rest of Latin America has been marked largely by indifference, as if their common Iberian heritage were purely accidental. For example, to this day, no educated Brazilian would dream of learning Spanish before English and French or visiting Buenos Aires before New York or Paris. Music, art and movies from Spanish America are rarely available here. Even news from the continent is given minimal display by local newspapers. The reverse is less true. While the Portuguese language and the vast Amazon rain forest are barriers to closer ties, the 10 nations bordering on Brazil have a greater need to know what the largest, most populous and economically most powerful nation in the region is up to. But they too view this country as strangely isolated. 'A Cruel Mistake' ''Latin America is the most homogeneous area on earth, the only truly homogeneous bloc,'' noted Darcy Ribeiro, the anthropologist who developed the concept of the Latin American Center. ''Yet Brazil and Spanish America have finished up divided into two worlds, back to back to each other. This is the story of a cruel mistake.'' In reality, thanks to their common difficulties in consolidating democracy and servicing huge foreign debts, Brazil |
232652_6 | Drastic Steps Are Voted to Reduce Southern California Air Pollution | products. The first phase of the new plan, the first five years, would place sharp new controls on the content of paints, solvents, deodorant sprays and the like, which emit hydrocarbons, or reactive organic gases, that create ozone when exposed to sunlight in the air. This is expected to have a drastic effect on industries like furniture making and refinishing, automobile painting, as well as smaller effects like forcing people to start barbecue fires with sticks and paper. This phase would also require costly control devices on boilers, trash-burning plants, industrial heaters and the like. Also, the sale of bias-ply tires, which spew particles on the road more than radial tires, would be banned, parking fees raised for cars carrying only one person, and methanol fuel would be required for buses by 1991 and for rental cars by 1993. The second phase, from 1993 to 1998, envisions converting 40 percent of all cars and 70 percent of trucks and other freight vehicles and all buses to methanol and other clean fuels. The final phase is admittedly speculative and assumes breakthroughs in technology. This would ban all gasoline vehicles by the year 2007. STAGE 1 Time: 1989 to 1993 Cost: $2.8 billion per year. Actions: Dozens of measures to tighten restrictions on the use of automobiles, encourage public transportation and limit household and industrial activities that produces chemical emissions. STAGE 2 Time: 1993 to 1998 Cost: Unknown Actions: Conversion of 40 percent of cars, 70 percent of freight vehicles and diesel buses to cleaner fuels. Remaining emissions from consumer products and industrial sources would be cut by half. STAGE 3 Time: Beyond 1998 Cost: Unknown Actions: Technologies not yet available would cut emissions further, including an end to the use of gasoline in automobiles by 2007. CHANGING HABITS TO REDUCE SMOG Examples of changes that would be required under the new Southern California plan to reduce smog. Planned for the next five years * Reformulate paints and solvents to reduce emissions * Ban gasoline-powered lawn mowers * Ban on sales of barbecue fuels that require starter fluid * Lower emission limits for diesel vehicles * Limit the number of cars each family can have * Increase registration fees for motorists with more than one car * Raise parking fees for cars that carry only one person * Restrict all new tires purchases to radials, which throw less rubber into the air |
232588_0 | 2 Are Killed as Medieval Tower Collapses in Italy | LEAD: A 900-year-old medieval tower collapsed in a downtown square of this northern Italian city today, killing two people, injuring 15 and burying parked cars and a newspaper stand, officials said. A 900-year-old medieval tower collapsed in a downtown square of this northern Italian city today, killing two people, injuring 15 and burying parked cars and a newspaper stand, officials said. More than 100 firefighters who dug for hours through the rubble of the 255-foot tower rescued two men and a woman, a Civil Defense official said. Doctors at the San Matteo hospital reported that none of the injured was in serious condition. The Civil Defense said that no one was reported missing, but added that rescue operations were to continue through Saturday. The tower collapsed at 9 A.M., scattering its red bricks throughout the square. The 501-year-old cathedral next to the collapsed tower suffered substantial damage, and some shops in the square were struck and damaged, according to the local archbishop's office. ''The baptistery and an arch were cracked following the collapse of the nearby tower,'' a local church official said. ''Experts are checking the extent of the damage.'' About 50 People in Cathedral About 50 people were attending a Mass in the cathedral when the tower collapsed, he said, but none was injured. The cathedral was fenced off and nearby streets were closed to traffic as the authorities inspected the cathedral, including the dome, which was designed by Donato Bramante. A spokeswoman for the mayor's office said there had been no indications that the tower was in danger of collapsing. ''It all happened abruptly and unexpectedly,'' she said. Experts had recently checked to determine whether the medieval tower might need restoration work. Maria Antonietta Abrate, who works at the local historical preservation office, said deterioration of mortar probably caused the collapse. ''It's something due to age, which cannot be predicted,'' she said. ''It's typical of ancient towers.'' Pavia, a former capital of the Longobards - the German tribe that founded the city in 568 - is about 20 miles south of Milan. |
232525_0 | Japan Denies Backing Amazon Road Project | LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: You report that the governor of a state in Western Brazil is negotiating the financing of a 500-mile highway link to Peru with the Government of Japan (front page, Feb. 19), but disregard the simple fact that Japan is not extending any financial cooperation to the project. The Government of Japan is not involved in this project. It is the basic policy and principle of our Government to consider the possibility of granting aid only after a request is made by the national-federal government of the recipient country. The Brazilian Government has never made a request for Japan's financial cooperation in this road construction project in the Amazon. You are simply wrong in your reference to ''the Japanese Government's Overseas Economic Development Corporation.'' There is a public agency named the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund, but it is not involved in financing this project, as the Japanese Government is not extending or considering extension of cooperation to this project. Also, contrary to your implications, statistics show that Japan imports less than 2 percent of Brazilian forest product exports (1986 Food and Agriculture Organization statistics). Finally, Japan is a major contributor to the activities of the International Tropical Timber Organization, which is implementing environmental projects in Latin America, such as the so-called Acre Project, undertaken with the participation of an environmental group, the World Wide Fund for Nature. The Acre project is considered to be a model project from the standpoint of environmental protection. TOSHIYUKI TAKANO Counselor for Public Affairs, Embassy of Japan Washington, March 6, 1989 |
232606_3 | Suitcase Shards May Offer Clues To Identities of Pan Am Bombers | bomb was loaded aboard a Pan Am flight there, and later transferred to the jumbo jet at Heathrow Airport near London. The warnings about a bomb in a radio-cassette player followed a raid on suspected cells of a terrorist group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, on Oct. 26. In that raid, the police confiscated a Toshiba radio-cassette player containing a plastic explosive and a fuse triggered by changes in altitude. British and American officials said today that they warned major airlines and airports of suspected terrorist plans, in writing, in the month before the Pan Am jet was struck. None of the warnings were made public. Unaware of Security Failures Mr. Skinner said he was unaware of security failures by British or American officials. In interviews today, those officials termed their precautions as proper. They noted that even with increased vigilance, it is difficult to detect a bomb in checked luggage, particularly when hard-to-detect plastic explosives are involved. The task was made doubly difficult, they said, in the crush of passengers at Christmas time. The question of negligence could later be important. Civil aviation treaties largely shield airlines from huge liability claims in international aviation disasters like the Pan Am explosion. But if an airline ignores or flouts standard safety rules, that shield may not apply. On Nov. 6, the West German police gave the ministry in charge of the Frankfurt airport a detailed description of the bomb, said Manfred Langendorf, a ministry official. Two days later it gave the description to Interpol, the international police data exchange. Airlines Told of Threat On Nov. 10, Mr. Langendorf said, the ministry told airlines and airport authorities in Frankfurt of the threat, ''including and especially the American carriers.'' Each airline, including Pan Am, initialed a letter with the information to confirm that they were advised, he said. The Pan Am spokeswoman, Ms. Hanlon, confirmed that account and said the airline ''put increased security measures into place in Frankfurt.'' She could not say if Pan Am relayed the warning to London or elsewhere. Ms. Hanlon said the notice called for no response and that Pan Am passed it to security officials in Frankfurt. She said she did not know what steps, if any, were taken there. By Nov. 15, Mr. Langendorf said ''we received more information with pictures'' of the bomb and organized a seminar on the bomb |
233285_1 | NEW AIRPORT RULES ISSUED IN BRITAIN | Flight 103 in December. New security orders have been issued to all of Britain's major airports, according to an airport spokesman. The orders came as a furor continued over warnings received before the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in December. British news reports said the new directive is believed to require passengers to remove all electric and electronic equipment from luggage before check-in and to pack such items in hand luggage to be examined at boarding gates. Investigators have said the bomb that blew up Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on Dec. 21 was concealed in a radio-cassette player. All 259 people aboard the plane and 11 on the ground were killed. A Manchester airport spokesman, speaking on condition that he not be identified, said that the orders were received Friday night but that he could not give details because it was a security matter. Message Is Reaffirmed The Department of Transport would not say if a new directive had been sent. But it reaffirmed a Feb. 18 message that advised all airlines using British airports to begin asking travelers if their baggage contained radios, computers or other such equipment and then to examine the items for possible explosives. The Conservative Government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher came under renewed attack today for its handling of a bomb warning before Flight 103 blew up. Opposition politicians again called for a full statement on the matter by Transport Secretary Paul Channon or for an independent inquiry. Mistakes Reportedly Admitted The British Department of Transport, in an internal memorandum, has conceded that serious security mistakes were made in baggage handling at Heathrow Airport last Dec. 21, shortly before the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland, ABC News reported from London last night. The memo was reportedly issued Dec. 29, but there was no immediate confirmation from the British Government. A spokeswoman for Pan Am in New York, Pamela Hanlon, said the airline could not comment on a British Government internal document or on matters that might be under inquiry. ABC News quoted the memo as saying that baggage from Frankfurt was transferred directly to the Pan Am jet heading for New York without being screened, as required by security rules. It also said baggage was taken out of one container and put in another, raising the possibility that other luggage was put on the plane by an airport employee. |
233259_0 | With Fate of the Forests at Stake, Power Saws and Arguments Echo | LEAD: In the American rain forests, a misted expanse of coastal evergreens running from Northern California through Southeast Alaska, more of the tallest and oldest trees in the world are being cut from public land than ever before. In the American rain forests, a misted expanse of coastal evergreens running from Northern California through Southeast Alaska, more of the tallest and oldest trees in the world are being cut from public land than ever before. The cutting, spurred by profound changes in the timber industry, threatens the last stands of ancient trees in the United States, as well as the throngs of animals and birds that have dwelled in the forests for eons. The virgin timberlands that once covered much of the country have shrunk to a prized strip in the Far West, most of it owned by the Federal Government. These last ancient forests are being logged at the rate of 60,000 acres a year - three times the annual harvest at the height of the post-war building boom. Some tree experts think only 2 million acres, about 10 percent, are left of the forest that was here before Colonial times. Other estimates are as high as 6 million acres, or 30 percent. Some scientists and conservationists think the old forests will be gone in three decades if logging continues at the present rate. Others say it could be 15 years. An Industry in Change The cutting stems from industry changes as predictable as automation and as hard to control as foreign prosperity. Foreign timber companies are able to outbid American companies for logs from state and private lands. That has put more pressure on American companies to log the last remaining large source of raw wood for domestic use: the national forests. The companies plant new trees to replace the ones they cut, but seeds planted today will not become full-grown trees for decades. For generations, the Forest Service was seen as the protector of the national forests, and the agency insists it still is. But some conservationists think the agency has become too cozy in recent years with the timber industry. ''Smokey the Bear has become Mr. Lumberjack,'' is how one conservationist group put it. Still, all this cutting has not brought prosperity to everyone. Although the huge timber companies that export heavily and rely on automation are doing well, there is double-digit unemployment in many small |
227532_3 | Fiery 'Mountains of Tires' Defy Firefighters at Dump | hundred feet away, he was watching a soap opera on television today. ''I'm not going to tell you a thing,'' he said, briefly opening the door to a visitor. Richard Evans, the owner of the company, would not say how much he paid for the use of Mr. Valentine's land, but he said he was angered by the local officials' complaints about his business. ''Where are the tires going to go?'' he asked. ''Everybody wants to use tires, but nobody knows how to get rid of them. Do you have a car? You use tires. This is a dirty business, but it must be done by somebody.'' Mr. Evans said that over the years he had sold some of the used tires to companies in Ireland, Norway, El Salvador, Mexico and elsewhere that have turned them into door mats, dock bumpers and other products. He also said he planned to buy a shredder to gnash them into a fluffy material that some companies could use as stuffing for furniture. Complaints by Some Residents Mr. Beck, the Supervisor, showed a lengthy file of letters to state officials and to Mr. Valentine asking that collection of the tires be stopped. Several citizens have complained about the dump for years, and a letter from one local group dated over a year ago raised concerns that ''the tires seem to be multiplying'' and represented a severe fire hazard. But there was wide agreement in Catskill, whose best-known homeowner is Mike Tyson, the heavyweight boxing champion, that despite all the talk and all the complaints, nothing much was ever done about the tires, at least until they went up in smoke. The tire fire may spur calls from lawmakers for more immediate regulation of the tire dumps across the state. That was the case with a fire burned for three weeks in Milton, Saratoga County, last November at an illegal landfill that had collected tons of construction and demolition material. The state developed regulations that would allow it to close such dumps. Here in Catskill, firefighters are pumping in water from Catskill Creek, a mile away, and trucking in dirt and cement dust from the surrounding countryside. They are also using bulldozers to push some tire piles away in a bid to prevent them from catching fire. Mr. Tompkins, the president of the local fire company, said that even with those efforts, the fire would |
227562_0 | U.S. Ponders Trade Aid for Caribbean | LEAD: The Bush Administration is weighing a plan to increase economic benefits for countries in the Caribbean region by raising their entitlements to ship textiles to the United States at the expense of richer Asian countries. The Bush Administration is weighing a plan to increase economic benefits for countries in the Caribbean region by raising their entitlements to ship textiles to the United States at the expense of richer Asian countries. ''We are looking at that,'' the United States trade representative, Carla A. Hills, said in her first appearance before the House Ways and Means subcommittee on trade. ''We are very favorably disposed toward strengthening our Caribbean Basin Initiative.'' The panel's chairman, Representative Sam Gibbons, Democrat of Florida, said it would soon draft legislation to widen the benefits under the Reagan Administration's 1983 program of preferential trade and tax benefits for 22 Caribbean countries. The effort is being undertaken because of disappointment in the original program, into which Congress had written a series of restrictions. Reinforcing the effort is a widely held perception that the region's economic and political stability is vital to this country's national security. The present law exempts from duty-free tariff treatment certain goods classified as ''import sensitive,'' including textiles and apparel, footwear, handbags, work gloves, watches, petroleum and tuna. The new proposal would expand the duty-free preferences to include apparel made from fabric ''cut and formed'' in the United States. It also would set a minimum level for the region's United States sugar quotas and would increase the duty-free allowance for American tourists in the Caribbean to $600 from $400. In addition, it would repeal the Sept. 30, 1995, expiration date. To encourage long-term investment, it would require Congress to give 12 years' notice before the program is ended. The issue of permitting additional textile imports has been hotly debated because of the domestic textile industry's political strength. |
230072_1 | Amgen Beats Japanese on Protein Patent | States patent covering the biological materials and the genetic engineering process used to produce a naturally occurring protein in the human body that stimulates production of white blood cells. Amgen Inc., a small biotechnology company, said today that it had been awarded the first United States patent covering the biological materials and the genetic engineering process used to produce a naturally occurring protein in the human body that stimulates production of white blood cells. Analysts said it was not a surprise that Amgen received the first patent on the protein, known as recombinant granulocyte colony-stimulating factor, or G-CSF, although the company has been running neck and neck with Chugai Pharmaceuticals Ltd. of Japan in development of the drug. Chugai could still be the first to receive a product patent for G-CSF, but the process patent that Amgen received from the United States Patent and Trademark Office puts it in a strong position, particularly for sales in the United States, the analysts said. In a statement, Gordon M. Binder, Amgen's chief executive, said, ''This patent confirms the strength and breadth of our proprietary position on recombinant G-CSF.'' Marketing Plans Amgen, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., said it expected to file a Product License Application for recombinant G-CSF with the Food and Drug Administration later this year. Upon approval, Amgen will market the product in the United States under the name Neupogen; in Europe Amgen will jointly market G-CSF with F. Hoffmann-LaRoche. Amgen shares closed today at $40.75, up $1.75, over the counter. The first major application of G-CSF is likely to be as an adjunct to chemotherapy. Cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy or radiation often have extremely low white blood cell counts as a result of the treatments, which puts them at an increased risk of infection. Low white blood cell count, or neutropenia, is also a problem for patients with AIDS. G-CSF is being evaluated in clinical trials with more than 400 patients around the world. Neupogen will be the second major product for Amgen after EPO, or Epogen, which is used to raise the red blood cell count in patients with anemia, and is expected to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration soon. Many analysts believe that G-CSF, and a similar protein, granulocyte macrophage colony stimulating factor, or GM-CSF, being developed by other companies, could be a larger product than EPO, both for Amgen and the overall market. |
230098_0 | Board to Study Disputed Tower Plan | LEAD: Having been debated and reshaped and debated again, a proposal to build a luxury apartment tower over the West Side Y.M.C.A. will come to the New York City Board of Estimate today carrying a narrow rejection from the local community board. Having been debated and reshaped and debated again, a proposal to build a luxury apartment tower over the West Side Y.M.C.A. will come to the New York City Board of Estimate today carrying a narrow rejection from the local community board. The 40-story tower, whose entrance would be on West 63d Street, between Central Park West and Broadway, would include 100 to 120 upper-income apartments, 59 lower-income rooms and an expansion of the 60-year-old Y.M.C.A. Put forth in 1987, the proposal has been reduced and changed in response to criticism and concerns from neighbors and the City Planning Commission. The revised version of the tower was approved last month by two committees within Community Board 7. Vindication in the Approval But it was rejected Tuesday night by the full board. The vote was 19 against the plan and 16 in favor. ''The major concern was the density and the fact that there weren't sufficient low-income units,'' said Doris Rosenblum, district manager of the community board. Nonetheless, the Young Men's Christian Association discerned vindication in the approval by the community board's housing committee and its zoning and planning committee. ''Their support of the project was a major shift that, we think, reflects very favorably on the changes we've made that have been responsive to community concerns,'' said Paul L. Kendall, senior vice president of the Y.M.C.A. of Greater New York. But there is still considerable opposition. Critics say that the project will result in a net loss of the low-income housing that the Y.M.C.A. already provides and that a tower of that size is much too big for a mid-block site. Several Opponents Other opponents include the Parks Council, the Federation of West Side Block Associations, a neighborhood group called Who Owns the Sunshine? and Councilwoman Ruth W. Messinger. Originally, the tower was to have 41 stories and rise 487 feet to the top of its pyramidal peak. To build at that size, the Y.M.C.A. would have earned a zoning bonus by rehabilitating 25 units in two tenements at 14 and 16 West 64th Street and reserving them for lower-income tenants. It would have built 40 sleeping rooms in |
230057_0 | 8 Amazon Nations Denounce Pressure to Save Rain Forest | LEAD: Seven Amazon countries have united behind Brazil to denounce foreign pressure to save rain forests, saying they would not take orders from abroad on their environmental policies. Seven Amazon countries have united behind Brazil to denounce foreign pressure to save rain forests, saying they would not take orders from abroad on their environmental policies. Officials from the eight nations of the Amazon Pact - Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela - said any pressure on Brazil to protect the Amazon would be answered by all of them. The Peruvian Foreign Minister, Guillermo Larco Cox, said Amazon countries would respect the vast region's environment but not accept ''impositions from people who try to boss us around.'' Brazil has come under criticism from around the world because of the destruction of its share of the Amazon rain forest, the world's largest, by settlers and loggers. Scientists say the loss of foliage is speeding a process of global warming. |
236030_0 | Tax Code Also Reduces U.S. Scientist Pool | LEAD: To the Editor: To the Editor: John Pickett (letter, March 6) points out that the tax code encourages United States companies to move research and development centers out of the country. The new tax code also penalizes students who enter graduate study in science, mathematics and engineering, as well as postdoctoral study and research at United States universities. This has happened because Congress made graduate and postdoctoral stipends fully taxable. The new tax on graduate stipends greatly increases the cost of graduate education and puts the full tax burden on students. Even worse, our doctoral students must pay their tuition out of pretax income. The new tax on graduate stipends brings the Treasury about $1,500 per doctoral student a year. For example, for doctoral students in mathematics, a number estimated at 1,600 in the United States, this brings the Treasury less than $3 million in revenue. There are probably better ways to raise this money. The new tax code was enacted at a time when it was difficult to attract sufficient numbers of qualified United States doctoral students to science, mathematics and engineering doctoral programs. As an educator active in both undergraduate and graduate programs, I find it increasingly difficult to motivate my students to pursue a career in research. I think that financial factors are important in their decisions. On the national level, the number of mathematics doctorates awarded to United States citizens has declined from 750 a year in 1975 to fewer than 400 a year. The same trend is visible in other science-related areas. If Congress wishes that the nation have sufficient numbers of graduate scientists, mathematicians and engineers, it might help by eliminating this unfortunate provision of the new tax code. MANFRED PHILIPP Bronx, March 13, 1989 The writer is a Lehman College professor of chemistry and biochemistry. |
236170_0 | Brazil Wants Foreign Aid to Fight Pollution, but No Strings | LEAD: Addressing Brazil's growing environmental problem, President Jose Sarney appealed today for foreign aid, but rejected foreign supervision. Addressing Brazil's growing environmental problem, President Jose Sarney appealed today for foreign aid, but rejected foreign supervision. Speaking in Brasilia, Mr. Sarney warned his audience, a gathering of Latin American environment ministers, that international concern over the Amazon could lead to ''a return of the time of interventions, to a new colonial system.'' ''Persuasion is giving way to at= ''Persuasion is giving way to attempts at intimidation, to explicit and veiled threats that even question the veiled threats that even question the principle of sovereignty of states,'' he 'Poverty of Pollution' At the same time, the President denounced ''the poverty of pollution'' and asked international organizations for new credits for environmental programs in Brazil. Brazil's two-track approach was evident today in this Amazonian frontier city during a visit by four American senators concerned about increasing deforestation rates in the Amazon. ''True inquisitors'' was how Jeronimo Santana, Governor of Rondonia, described to local reporters the senators' fact-finding visit. ''Daily we are receiving caravans of reporters, photographers, scientists and researchers attracted by the sensationalism of the news of the devastation,'' the Governor complained. Satellite surveys show that about 22 percent of Rondonia has been deforested in the last five years. On Wednesday, Ernandes Amorim, the Mayor of an agricultural boomtown carved out of the Amazonian forest in the 1980's, suggested in published interviews here that the visiting Americans could more profitably spend their time reforesting Vietnam. Asserting that Americans ''burned Vietnam's forests with napalm and other bombs,'' the Mayor of Ariquemes said: ''Now they want to wash their consciences by blocking the development of Brazil, and principally of Rondonia.'' 'Men or Monkeys' Today, in a front-page editorial in Estadao, a local newspaper, Mouricio Calixto urged the senators: ''Please state your choice: men or monkeys. Both find the Amazon their natural habitat.'' Despite the verbal fireworks, Rondonia's Vice Governor, Orestes Muniz, greeted the Americans courteously. When Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, asked if Brazilian sensitivities over sovereignty rule out international environmental aid, Mr. Muniz responded, ''We need foreign aid.'' American aid would be welcome in the Amazon for soil surveys, for reforestry projects and for researching medicinal plants, he said. Later, Senator John H. Chafee of Rhode Island, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, said that the visiting group, which also |
236049_1 | Reviews/Film; A Greek Exile Returns Amid Existential Anguish | years. Spyros, the white-bearded, craggy-faced returned exile, says very little. He gazes at the world with penetrating, stoical, weary hostility. When he first arrives at the port of Piraeus, he asks almost plaintively for his children to kiss him. Thereafter, he evinces no interest in them at all. He rebuffs the questions and salutations of the friends and relatives ready to celebrate his return, going instead to a dreary hotel to spend his first night back home by himself. The message here is that the exile can never really return; the past is unrecapturable. Spyros is a victim of history living with memories, and yet he is also compelled to upset the arrangements of the present. In the end, he is sent back into exile when he incurs the anger of local people, some of whom - those who are old enough - remember his penchant for stirring up trouble long ago. There are extraordinary scenes in this film, which opens today at the Public Theater, starting with the mystical shots of twisting galaxies that accompany the opening credits. Village life in Greece comes across visually in all of its harsh, threadbare stubbornness. The movie has a slow, ponderous, emotionally troubled quality; the characters, particularly Alexandros and Voula, the two adult children, are deeply perplexed, full of existential anguish. All of this seems to promise that some serious disclosures are coming, some insight into the human condition. But when the end comes, the viewer is left instead with the vague unsettled feeling that, aside from gaining the knowledge that exile is emptiness, two and a half hours in the presence of much onscreen joylessness has produced little satisfaction. As for the mystery of the nonexistent voyage, Cythera, it should be noted, is the island where, in Greek legend, Aphrodite, the goddess of sensual love, rose full grown from the sea. And indeed, this is a film not only about the emptiness of a ruined life, but about love as well, as embodied in Spyros's wife's choice to follow him into exile when he is driven from his home yet again. Drifting toward Cythera, where Aphrodite is particularly revered, is what the film might be called. Even so, the metaphor remains elusive and vague; it's like a slightly too long allegory whose moral you just don't get. Toward Aphrodite VOYAGE TO CYTHERA, directed by Theo Angelopoulos; screenplay (Greek with English subtitles) |
233798_1 | Bolivia Shifts Tactics in Drug Fight | ''but there would be a high cost in social and economic terms. If we cut off the peasants' income they will react, and we want to avoid violence.'' Bolivia, the poorest nation in South America, is the second-largest grower of coca, after Peru. Most of the Bolivian coca is processed at clandestine laboratories into coca paste or cocaine base, preliminary forms of the drug, then flown to Colombia for final processing and distribution to the United States and other consumer nations. The Drug Enforcement Administration and other United States agencies have been helping Bolivia in anti-drug efforts for more than a decade, but most have been aimed at stopping traffickers or raiding laboratories. In mid-1986, the United States sent 170 soldiers and 6 Black Hawk helicopters to help the Bolivian drug police raid laboratories. The operation almost halted cocaine exports from Bolivia for a few months and left growers with no market for their leaves. But when the troops left, exports resumed and prices for the leaf climbed. A Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman said farmers were now getting $70 to $100 for 100 pounds of leaves. While that is a fraction of what they were receiving five years ago, it is well above the production cost, which he estimated at $30. The price is said to have fallen to about $20 per 100 pounds during the 1986 raids. During Attorney General Dick Thornburgh's one-day visit here on May 7, Bolivian officials reportedly expressed their concern that the United States might want to send in troops again, as it did in mid-1986. In answer to reporters' questions, Mr. Thornburgh said the United States would only send troops to a drug-producing country if the Government of that country requested such help. Bolivia already receives more United States aid, for both economic support and anti-drug programs, than any other South American nation. The total in fiscal 1988 was $59.3 million, and Mr. Aguilar said it was being increased this year. But there is growing insistence here that not enough is earmarked for developing alternative crops and jobs in the Chapare, the tropical rain forest northeast of Cochabamba where most of Bolivia's coca fields are. An example of the Bolivian view was expressed recently by Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a candidate for President in the May 7 elections. While saying Bolivia should ''get out of the cocaine business,'' he called the United States' approach |
233872_1 | Navy Trident 2 Missile Explodes In Its First Underwater Test Firing | 11 submarines planned for the Trident fleet. The United States also intends to sell the new missile to Britain. The Navy, Congressional staff aides, industry executives and nuclear specialists said the failure today would set the program back several weeks during an investigation into the cause of the explosion. Not until after that, they said, would it be possible to know how much further the program might be delayed. It was the missile's third failure since January 1988 after a string of successful tests. An Equal to the MX The Trident 2 missile, which can carry up to 15 warheads, depending on weight, is intended to be the equal of the Air Force's MX missile, able to strike within about 100 yards of a target at a range of about 7,500 miles and with enough explosive power to destroy heavily protected targets. The Trident missile program has won praise from usually critical observers like Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Many in Congress supported the Trident while opposing the MX missile because the submarine-launched missile would be out of sight at sea. The land-based missile program has drawn protests not only from people opposed to nuclear weapons and from environmentalists but from citizens who did not want the weapon based near their homes. Until a year ago, the Trident program had been on schedule and on budget, in contrast to many other weapons programs. But last year, after eight test launchings from a pad at Cape Canaveral the missile program suffered several setbacks. In January a missile performed erratically when it was nearly three minutes into flight and had to be destroyed over the Atlantic. Later another missile was destroyed in flight. In September a Trident 2 was blown up by mistake by a range safety officer who was not informed that an off-course maneuver had been programmed into the flight. The Navy did not that lauching as a test. Fleet of 20 Planned In the end, 16 of 18 actual tests were successful and the final, or 20th test, from a launching pad, was cancelled as unnecessary and to save money. In comparison, the Air Force said Sunday that its 18th consecutive successful test of the MX missile had been launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to the Kwajalein atoll 4,100 miles away in the Pacific. The Navy so |
233829_2 | U.S. Trying to Halt Abuses Of Incompetent Pensioners | the poor aged, blind and disabled. The agency says its policy is to not give benefit checks directly to people it considers incompetent to conduct their affairs unless they fail to find a representative within 90 days. But legal experts assert that in some cases the agency has withheld payments for as long as a year. These people, in desperation, sometimes turn to strangers and can fall prey to the unscrupulous. ''I get a sense that we could probably tighten the security clearances of representative payees,'' said Representative Andy Jacobs, Indiana Democrat and chairman of the Social Security subcommittee. Profiteers Round Up Victims Jose Sanchez, a claims representative with the Social Security Administration in Porterfield, Calif., said in an affidavit last month: ''It is common practice for these persons to be told to find anyone they can to act as their payee or otherwise they may not receive their benefits.'' ''I have learned of a literal 'slave trade' of S.S.A./S.S.I. recipients who are sold frequently from payee to payee,'' Mr. Sanchez continued. He told of an ''industry'' in which ''profiteers drive through towns and cities and whisk away elderly homeless and alcholics from the streets'' and take them to unlicensed group homes where the operators are designated to receive their benefits. ''Immediately thereafter the beneficiaries conveniently disappear,'' he added. ''I know of another young person whose relatives exchange him every three months so each relative can share in the extra income,'' he said. Mr. Sanchez's affidavit, on which he elaborated in a telephone interview, was made in support of a lawsuit, Briggs et al. v. Bowen, in Federal Court in California. The plaintiffs are Social Security beneficiaries to whom the agency has refused to pay benefits because they do not have a representative. 'Vulnerable to Exploitation' Their suit, on behalf of all people like them as a class, says the policy ''leaves these eligible individuals homeless, hungry, without clothing, and vulnerable to exploitation'' and asks the court to order that they be paid directly. Mr. Enoff said he would not comment on a pending lawsuit. But he said that ''when we cannot find a payee, we pay the person directly to meet current needs, except in the cases of addicts and alcoholics.'' As for allegations of abuse of beneficiaries, Mr. Enoff said the agency routinely asks representatives how they know the beneficiaries, whether they have been convicted of a felony |
235350_1 | Talking Business with Shea of Worldwatch Institute; Cleaning Up On Cleaning Up | pollution. In all of these areas, there's a need for innovative devices and approaches. Recycling is particularly rich. Q. Why? A: Waste is the new mother lode. We're producing ever greater volumes of waste - over 150 million tons in the United States over the course of a year. And there are no longer inexpensive, accessible places to put that waste. Landfills are filling up. Q. Can you give an example of a company that's followed this approach successfully? A: There's a company called St. Jude Polymer, in Frackville, Pa., that's named after the patron saint of hopeless causes. They had an idea to recycle PET plastic, the type from which soda bottles are made. They had a very difficult time getting bank loans, because the bank thought it was not an economical venture. But the company has expanded tenfold in the last five years. They're unable to keep up with orders for their plastic pellets, from which you can make the insulation that's used in sleeping bags, paint brush bristles, plastic box strapping and many other items. Q. Are there other waste materials awaiting the invention of innovative reprocessing techniques? A: Many. If you can invent a way to reprocess magazines, for instance, you've got a market just waiting for you. The number and different types of magazines are increasing, but magazines are currently not recycled because of the clay used to make glossy paper, as well as the glue binding. Q. Isn't it unrealistic, though, to say that an entrepreneur can tackle a problem of global scale - like global warming or the hole in the ozone layer - and hope to make either a difference or a profit? A: It's increasingly realistic. Environmental problems have become so severe that they threaten the viability of the planet. And thresholds of public perception are starting to be crossed, since the problems are hitting close to home. Q. So how do you make a profit from addressing such problems? A: In such an environment, if you can invent devices that help solve these problems, they will sell. You could develop something like a film for automobile windows that would mean the car would heat up less. Therefore you would use the air-conditioner less, thereby saving you energy and helping to save the ozone layer, because the refrigerant used in air-conditioning units is CFC's, or chlorofluorocarbons, which also contribute to global |
235362_0 | Merger in Plant Research | LEAD: Calgene Inc., a leading company in agricultural biotechnology, said today that it planned to acquire its rival, Plant Genetics Inc., in a stock transaction. Calgene Inc., a leading company in agricultural biotechnology, said today that it planned to acquire its rival, Plant Genetics Inc., in a stock transaction. The merger of the companies, which are next door to each other in Davis, Calif., is part of a consolidation in the biotechnology industry that is occurring as start-up companies run short of cash to finance research and development. Under the proposed agreement, 2.1 million shares of Calgene common stock will be issued in exchange for all the outstanding common shares of Plant Genetics. Based on the closing price of Calgene's stock today, $5.875, up 25 cents, the deal would have a total value of about $12.3 million. Plant Genetics shareholders will get 42-hundredths of a share of Calgene stock, valued about $2.47 each, for each of their shares. Plant Genetics stock closed today at $2.50, down 37.5 cents. Both stocks are traded over-the-counter. Roger H. Salquist, Calgene's president and chief executive, said the companies complemented each other in products and would achieve economies of scale by combining operations. Calgene has been specializing in planting new genes into crops, particularly cotton and tomatoes, by using genetic engineering. Plant Genetics, which needed more money to continue operating, has been working on improving crops, particularly potatoes and alfalfa, by using cell biology and plant-breeding technologies that are closer at hand than by gene splicing. |
234544_2 | Satellite Is Lofted for Anti-Missile Test | of an electrically neutral beam of subatomic particles The launching yesterday was preceded by two similar experiments that operated for hours rather than months. In September 1986, a Delta rocket carried a sensor-laden satellite that worked for a few hours. And in February 1988, another Delta carried a satellite that observed mock enemy targets for 12 hours. John E. Pike, director of space policy at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based private group that is critical of the anti-missile effort, said the need for a third space-based sensor experiment suggested that the anti-missile program still had ''a long way to go.'' He said the test ''will probably generate more data than everything else they've done to date'' because of its long duration. The new satellite is designated Delta 183, or Delta Star. The Pentagon tried to send it into orbit on March 16 but halted the countdown minutes before liftoff because of technical problems. Observing Rocket Plumes According to military officials, Delta Star has seven sensors that are to gather data on rocket plumes and such background clutter as the aurora borealis, or northern lights, which could confuse a system on anti-missile sensors and weapons. The sensors operate in the visible, infrared and ultraviolet wavelengths. ''These instruments are expected to provide greater understanding of the problems associated with plume emissions, including the environmental backgrounds against which they may be observed,'' said a statement from the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, which designed the sensor module. The entire spacecraft, powered by solar-electric panels, is 18 feet long and 16 feet wide. Yesterday the satellite's first observations were to be of the second stage of the Delta rocket as it separated from the Delta Star satellite and fired its jet thrusters to send it back toward Earth. Delta Star was to track the rocket stage through its fiery re-entry and atmospheric breakup. Experts hoped to learn by today whether those observations were successful. In months ahead, Delta Star is to observe several planned rocket firings, including the launching of other Star Wars experiments and small rockets from such places as Wallops Island, off the Virginia coast. 'Targets of Opportunity' It is also to observe ''targets of opportunity,'' like military and civilian space launchings and firings of the space shuttles. Delta Star has small jets that allow it to make slight changes in its orbital position so it can move |
234550_0 | Crumbling English Cathedrals Go Abroad for Aid | LEAD: The medieval cathedrals of England are crumbling, and their custodians are looking with increasing desperation to wealthy private donors in Britain, the United States and elsewhere to save them. The medieval cathedrals of England are crumbling, and their custodians are looking with increasing desperation to wealthy private donors in Britain, the United States and elsewhere to save them. The bishops of the Church of England, with the Queen at their head, have received no direct Government money for the upkeep or repair of their cathedrals for more than a century. Salisbury Cathedral's 404-foot spire, its limestone blocks cracked and worn by wind, rain, frost and poisons in the atmosphere to a thickness of only three inches in places, threatened to fall apart after more than 600 years, and is now swathed in 280 tons of steel scaffolding. At the dizzying height of the spindly structure, the once spiky Gothic spines and decorations look worn to nubs, like the battlements of sand castles on the beach after a high wave. Choir Tour to Raise Funds ''I don't think it would have collapsed altogether, like the medieval tower in Pavia the other day,'' said Roy Spring, the Clerk of the Works, referring to a structure in Italy that crumbled last week. ''But I thought there might be a cracking, a shifting of weight, and a fall of masonry onto the tower.'' Mr. Spring, who is in charge of the repairs, said $:6.5 million, about $11 million, is needed to save the spire, the tower and the west front.''Since 1984,'' he said, ''we've raised three million.'' Looking for some of the rest of the money, the Very Rev. Hugh Dickinson, the dean of Salisbury Cathedral, will leave next week for a trip to Atlanta, Columbia, S.C., New York, Orlando, Fla., Rochester, N.Y., St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco and Beverly Hills, Calif., with the cathedral's choir. It is to be his second visit to the United States this year to scout prospective donors for an American appeal this fall for $3 million. ''We don't have wealth on anything like the scale you've got,'' he said. ''I think the time will come when the state will have to make a contribution, though. If the Salisbury appeal fails, the Government would have to do something.'' #1840 Act Took Cathedral Money Salisbury is not alone in the scramble for restoration funds. Ely Cathedral recently raised $:4 |
234548_3 | E.P.A. WILL REVIEW DAM IN COLORADO | the announcement ''has a chilling effect on the economic development prospects of the entire Denver metropolitan area. Financed by Local Water Districts ''When we hit the turn of the century, we will have to have a major water project on line to support growth, or we'll be severely constrained,'' Mr. Christopher said. The Two Forks project has been described as the last of the great dam-building projects in the western United States. Large water storage and diversion projects had been financed for decades by the Federal Government but were curtailed after the Reagan Administration ordered sharp cuts in Federal support. The Two Forks project, which had been talked about since the 1920's, was to be financed by the Denver Water Board and a consortium of the water districts in 41 suburban communities and would have involved no Federal money. The project has been under way for the last 10 years and has been estimated to cost from $500 million to $1 billion. The dam would flood the scenic Cheesman Canyon and could disrupt migration patterns for whooping cranes downstream in central Nebraska. The project would also destroy what is described by Federal officials as one of the finest trout streams in the United States. Decision Reflects Commitment In a four-page statement announcing the decision, Mr. Reilly described the Cheesman Canyon as ''an outstanding natural resource'' and said that evidence developed by the Corps of Engineers ''does not resolve the critical environmental issues raised by this project.'' ''This decision reflects a commitment to protect and preserve the environment and to test environmentally questionable projects against the standards established by the Clean Water Act and this nation's other environmental laws,'' he said. Warren Oatman, whose property at Deckers would be flooded by the Two Forks Dam, called today ''a day of celebration.'' For us it's great,'' said Mr. Oatman, who has lived in the area for 58 years. ''To save this canyon is the main thing we've been fighting for.'' The Corps of Engineers issued its construction permit earlier this month after years of debate over the potential environmental harm of the project. Under Federal law, the E.P.A. has the right to review and veto the permit on environmental grounds. Mr. Reilly today ordered the review that could lead to a veto. Before his selection as E.P.A. Administrator, Mr. Reilly had been president of the World Wildlife Fund, a leading environmental group. |
232381_1 | Koop Says Abortion Report Couldn't Survive Challenge | Committee subpoenaed it and supporting documents. The subcommittee, which oversees some Federal health budgets, has had periodic hearings on abortion policy. Few Surprises There had been speculation that the report was not released previously because it contained information that favored one side of the abortion issue or the other. But the draft report listed all arguments and contained few surprises. Going further than the letter, the draft report called for comprehensive programs to prevent abortion, including more contraceptive research, sex education programs for children and a recommendation for society to subsidize the costs of childbearing and care for women who decide to bear unplanned children. ''We must support those parents who bear their children and either keep them or place them for adoption,'' said the report, ''just as our laws support those who resort to abortion as the only feasible personal alternative.'' The draft, written in plain language and not as a scientific document, also called for wider contraceptive use, more sex education and family life programs, and developing ways to modify the behavior of sexually active people who do not regularly use contraception and do not use it effectively. Background of Draft Mr. Reagan had asked the Surgeon General, who also opposes abortion, for the report after meeting with abortion opponents. The request was for a comprehensive report that focused on the emotional as well as the physical ramifications of terminating pregnancy. Abortion opponents contend there is a heretofore unrecognized post-abortion stress syndrome, similar to that suffered by some Vietnam veterans after the war. They say the condition can cause major emotional problems for women 5 or 10 years after their abortions, and should be recognized as a significant problem. Dr. Koop said some of the President's advisers believed it would be easy to do a report critical of abortion. ''In the minds of some of them, it was a foregone conclusion that the negative health effects of abortion on women were so overwhelming that the evidence would force the reversal of Roe vs. Wade,'' he wrote Mr. Reagan, referring to the United States Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. To the surprise of many, Dr. Koop said it was not possible to complete the task because existing scientific data was not good enough to assess psychological consequences. He noted that doctors had long ago concluded that the physical results of abortion are not major health factors and required |
232367_0 | U.S. Halts Plan to Turn Off the Landsat Satellites | LEAD: Two Landsat Earth-sensing satellites that were to be turned off at the end of the month for lack of money have been given a reprieve by the Bush Administration. Two Landsat Earth-sensing satellites that were to be turned off at the end of the month for lack of money have been given a reprieve by the Bush Administration. The Department of Commerce said Wednesday that it had rescinded the order to shut down. Earth Observation Satellite Company, or Eosat, the private operator of Landsat for the Government, said yesterday it had resumed taking orders for the data and images that are widely used by Government agencies and commercial customers for producing maps, searching for minerals and studying crop conditions and patterns of land use. If the satellites, Landsat 4 and 5, had been switched off, it would have put the United States out of the business of supplying data on Earth resources gathered from space until at least 1991, when the Landsat 6 satellite is scheduled to be launched. France is promoting international sales of data from its SPOT-Image satellite system, and the Soviet Union is now offering similar information from its remote sensing satellites. Quayle Promises Money Vice President Dan Quayle, heading the newly created National Space Council, made the arrangements to block the termination of Landsat operations. He said the Administration would find the money to keep the satellites in service at least until the completion of a study to determine the need for them. According to Government estimates, it will cost about $9.4 million to keep the system running through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year. In Congressional testimony last week, Thomas N. Pyke Jr., assistant administrater of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees the program, said Federal agencies that use Landsat data would probably be asked to contribute financing until the policy review could be completed. These include the departments of Defense, Agriculture and Interior and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Details Known in a Week Congressional aides who attended a meeting with Mr. Quayle last week said he assured them the money would be available but did not discuss how it would be raised or how long the policy review would take. Debbie Williams, a spokeswoman for Eosat, said details of the financing arrangement should be known in about a week. The transfer of the Landsats from the Government |
232355_0 | China Purchase Rumors Send Sugar Prices Soaring | LEAD: Sugar futures prices surged to their highest levels in nine months yesterday amid rumors that China had purchased as much as 500,000 tons of sugar. Sugar futures prices surged to their highest levels in nine months yesterday amid rumors that China had purchased as much as 500,000 tons of sugar. ''What you saw was a market catching fire,'' said Arthur Stevenson, analyst for Prudential-Bache Securities Inc., New York. ''And the real excitement is the possible growing participation in the markets of China, the world's most populous nation.'' Sugar settled 10 cents to 51 cents higher on the New York Coffee, Sugar and Cocoa Exchange, with the contract for delivery in May at 12.59 cents a pound. Buying began with a rumor that the Chinese had bought 150,000 to 500,000 tons of raw sugar from Thailand, though many traders said they doubted that the shipment exceeded 350,000 tons. Many other traders said they believed the Chinese actually bought the sugar last fall from Cuba and that, after learning the Soviets had made a similar-sized purchase from Thailand, they simply swapped shipments to take advantage of economies in delivery of the sugar. The market was also bolstered by talk that the Brazilians had sold 100,000 tons and that Argentina was in the market for a large shipment. Energy futures, which hit a 16-month high Monday and soared again in successive sessions, were mixed. Crude oil highlighted the complex, losing 5 cents at the opening on profit taking, and recovering gradually in light trading. Crude oil settled 2 cents lower to 9 cents higher on the New York Mercantile Exchange, with April at $19.84 a barrel. Gold and silver continued sliding in the face of a firm dollar and uncertainty about whether higher inflation is in the offing. Platinum was apparently bolstered by trade-house buying prompted either by ideas that the market was oversold or by recent sales by the Japanese. Gold settled $2.30 to $2.90 lower at the New York Commodity Exchange, with March at $389.80 an ounce; silver slipped 3.2 cents to 4.7 cents, with March at $6.059 an ounce. Platinum was $7.20 to $7.70 higher, with April at $545.50 an ounce. FUTURES/OPTIONS |
228333_0 | Japan Declines to Pay For Highway in Brazil | LEAD: Japan has decided not to finance construction of a 500-mile highway through the Amazon rain forests in Brazil, a senior Republican Senator said today. Japan has decided not to finance construction of a 500-mile highway through the Amazon rain forests in Brazil, a senior Republican Senator said today. Senator Robert Kasten of Wisconsin said he had received assurances from Japan's Ambassador to the United States, Nobuo Matsunaga, that Japan would not finance the $300 million highway project, known as BR-364. Many environmentalists oppose the project because they fear it will hurt the rain forest. ''The ambassador assured me the Japanese are not considering any proposal to fund this highway,'' Mr. Kasten said in a statement Thursday. He is the senior Republican on the Foreign Operations subcommittee, which has jurisdiction over American funds to multilateral development banks. The planned road, which would link existing road systems in western Brazil and neighboring Peru, would open up large tracts of rain forest that are largely undisturbed. Brazilian officials have been trying to negotiate Japanese financing. |
232978_0 | Newark Will Hold Meeting on Auto Thefts | LEAD: MORE than 300 lawmakers, insurance experts and law-enforcement officals are expected to meet in Newark tomorrow to try to devise solutions to the problem of automobile thefts in New Jersey. MORE than 300 lawmakers, insurance experts and law-enforcement officals are expected to meet in Newark tomorrow to try to devise solutions to the problem of automobile thefts in New Jersey. Statistics released by the National Automobile Theft Bureau, an Illinois-based agency financed by 650 insurance companies, show that Newark led the nation in 1987 with 13,891 cars stolen, or a rate of 4,363 thefts per 100,000 residents. Second on the list was neighboring Irvington, with 2,118 auto thefts, a rate of 3,381 thefts per 100,000 residents. Of the 15 worst cities in the country in car thefts, 6 were in New Jersey. The state ranked third in the nation, with 59,096 auto thefts, behind Massachusetts and New York. James Donovan, a spokesman for the conference, said Mayor Sharpe James was considering a proposal to provide antitheft devices without charge to 10,000 Newark residents. He said an announcement of the plan awaited finding a means of paying for it. The proposal and the conference are part of a comprehensive program drafted by the Newark police to increase public awareness of antitheft measures, to frighten potential car thieves, to increase penalties for car theft and to foster cooperation among the state's police departments. Police Blame Youths Capt. George Dicksheid of the Newark Police Department, who is organizing the conference, said that juveniles, some as young as 10 years old, were responsible for most of the car thefts in the city. The police point out that 80 percent of stolen cars are recovered, suggesting that the thieves steal cars for fun and for the pocket money that can be raised by quick sales of the tires and radios, rather than for the larger profits to be made by dismantling the vehicles. ''The juveniles know they will never do time for car theft,'' Captain Dicksheid said. ''There just isn't enough jail space. That's why most of the city's 50 worst car thieves are under 18.'' After four fatalities resulting from high-speed chases this year, the Newark police were restricted in the actions they may take to apprehend the car thieves. Captain Dicksheid cited what he described as a ''classic case'' involving a 17-year-old who was fatally shot last month after, the police say, |
232820_4 | Sports of The Times; How About an Academic Media Guide? | a serious student of Picasso. Not that Harmon's academic schedule was confined to watercolor painting. As an Iowa freshman, he produced a 1.62 average (on a 4.0 scale), an overall D, in such physical-education courses as billiards, bowling, soccer, and coaching football. On the stand Harmon insisted that his curriculum was ''not a joke.'' The tragedy is, he was serious. But an even greater tragedy is that too many colleges create too many schemes that enable too many so-called student-athletes to perpetrate the same fraud. Too many so-called student-athletes who never graduate from college. With that in mind, Bill Bradley, the Senator from New Jersey who was a Rhodes scholar and an all-America basketball player at Princeton before joining the Knicks, has introduced Federal legislation that would force colleges and universities to disclose their graduation rate of student-athletes so that incoming student-athletes would have what Bradley described as an ''informed choice.'' For now, colleges may or may not disclose that graduation rate. But those that waffle tell a real student all that student needs to know. The fun of rooting for a college team is knowing that its athletes are serious students who take serious courses, who go to serious classes and complete serious assignments in earning a serious degree. Not long ago Duke suspended its 6-foot-10-inch center, Alaa Abdelnaby, for academic reasons. Not because he hadn't met the Atlantic Coast Conference's standards, but because he hadn't met Duke's standards. After missing two games, Abdelnaby was reinstated in time for the A.C.C. tournament. But at least Duke had not been willing to wink at, much less close its eyes to, an academic problem. Those who root for a college team that depends on tramp athletes taking tramp courses aren't really rooting for that college; they're just rooting for some semipros that the college has hired, the same way it hires security officers or kitchen cooks. Bill Bradley is calling his legislation the Student-Athletes Right to Know Act. But shouldn't a college rooter have a right to know what courses a student-athlete is taking in order to know if that athlete is worth rooting for? Is that athlete taking medieval history or watercolor painting? Shakespeare or basket-weaving? Sociology or negotiating with an agent? Chemistry or shopping for a Trans-Am that a booster has arranged? Let the colleges put that academic information in their media guides instead of all those puffy profiles. |
233045_0 | Elcetronic Gear Is Prized But Few Can Afford It | LEAD: Technology enables physically impaired people to hold jobs they otherwise could not. A computer equipped with an electronic voice will read back letters typed in by a visually impaired person for accuracy. Similarly, some computers will articulate words identified on the screen, enabling people with speech difficiencies to communicate. Technology enables physically impaired people to hold jobs they otherwise could not. A computer equipped with an electronic voice will read back letters typed in by a visually impaired person for accuracy. Similarly, some computers will articulate words identified on the screen, enabling people with speech difficiencies to communicate. Quadraplegics can type into a computer by pointing a beam of light from a special headband onto a light-sensitive keyboard. Because markets for these products are small and limited by the few disabled people who can afford such devices, entrepreneurs have driven this new industry. But that may change. Under a 1986 amendment to the Rehabilitation Act, all electronic office equipment purchased by the Government sincer last October must be adaptable to people with disabilities. ''Products marketed by entrepreneurs aren't necessarily widely available in the workplace,'' said Mr. Knorr of the Electronics Foundation. ''This is an attempt to make mass-marketed office equipment adaptable. Apples and I.B.M.'s must have ports for computer cards that do the speech conversion or for other peripherals that allow people with disabilities to operate them.'' Besides preventing disabled people from being locked out of Government jobs, the rule is expected to increase competition and thereby reduce prices of such technology. Price will nevertheless remain an issue. Insurers and state agencies have traditionally financed purchases of devices like wheelchairs and canes, but rarely have paid for these new high-tech machines. While not all adaptive equipment is expensive, much of it is. For instance, an optical character recognition machine, which scans and reads print in an electronic voice, costs $8,000, down from $35,000 two years ago. Although companies are often willing to buy equipment to accommodate people with disabilities, many advocacy groups prefer giving users the ability to purchase them. ''A person can market themselves better if they have the proper equipment,'' said Mr. Rochlin. ''It gives employers one less reason not to hire them.'' Recently the Government has set up programs to help individuals make such purchases. Maine, New York and California now grant low-interest loans on a limited basis for such purchases. And last August the Federal |
232766_0 | Pesticide Regulation, Slow and Unsteady | LEAD: WHAT is the public supposed to think? Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Alar, a chemical used to make apples redder and crisper, as a carcinogen and said that it should be banned - though not until 1990. The E.P.A.'s Acting Deputy Administrator, John Moore, told a Senate subcommittee that if the substance had just been invented, the agency would not allow it to be sold. WHAT is the public supposed to think? Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency identified Alar, a chemical used to make apples redder and crisper, as a carcinogen and said that it should be banned - though not until 1990. The E.P.A.'s Acting Deputy Administrator, John Moore, told a Senate subcommittee that if the substance had just been invented, the agency would not allow it to be sold. But last week, as more schools succumbed to fears of chemicals in food and banned apples from their cafeterias and some supermarket chains refused to accept fruit treated with Alar, the E.P.A. and two other Federal agencies announced that ''the Government believes it is safe for Americans to eat apples.'' The issue was only confused by last week's scare over at least two cyanide-tainted grapes imported from Chile in what was seen as an attempt to sabotage that country's economy. For decades regulating pesticides and other agricultural chemicals has been haphazard and fraught with guesswork. While it has become relatively easy to show in the laboratory that a chemical is potentially carcinogenic, it is far more difficult to determine whether enough of it finds its way into the food supply to pose a serious threat. When a chemical like Alar, said by the Government to be used on only 5 percent of the apples grown in the United States, is already on the market, the situation can degenerate into one that is more adversarial than scientific. Whether or not the alarm is way out of proportion to the danger, the debate over Alar is nearly identical to those that have occurred almost annually since DDT was outlawed in 1972. In case after case, the Government has been unable to unravel the tangle of economic and scientific factors and quickly make decisions about whether a pesticide should be banned. To help allay the uncertainty and to make more rational decisions, experts in and out of the Government are studying new procedures that they hope will modernize |
232776_3 | The Vatican and the American Ways | did not include, except in the most marginal way, any difficulties created by the Vatican officialdom itself. The problem was aptly illustrated during the meeting when Eduard Cardinal Gagnon, head of the Vatican's office on the family, got headlines in the United States with a scattershot attack on everything from Planned Parenthood (''encouraging promiscuity'') to television's ''Dallas'' (''subtle pornography''). If the American archbishops shared some sympathy for those opinions, they were put on the spot by Cardinal Gagnon's other dicta. Letting nuns serve on marriage tribunals, which grant annulments, was risky, he indicated. ''We have to be careful that their tender hearts do not play tricks on them,'' he said. At a news conference last Monday, Archbishop May tried to pick up the pieces. ''I would agree with women in the United States,'' he said, ''at their consternation and irritation at certain things that were said.'' A Lost Opportunity? Did the Americans lose a crucial opportunity, then, by simply explaining their own practices without directly criticizing any of the Vatican's? An American priest long resident in Rome defended their restraint. What passes for frankness in the United States might be bitterly resented by Vatican officials as brutal criticism, he said. But another consideration not raised in Rome was the conviction of many Catholics that some problems confronting church teachings are found not in American culture but in the teachings themselves. Fidelity to the Gospel, they believe, requires that some of those teachings, particularly on contraception, sexual morality and the role of women in the church, be modified. Unlike strands of Christianity that strive to re-create the church of apostolic times, Roman Catholicism does acknowledge a form of legitimate change in its doctrine, which it terms ''development.'' The one thing that Americans and Vatican officials alike praised about American culture - its deep commitment to religious liberty - was a case in point. A century and a half ago, Popes and papal aides were roundly condemning the principles of separating church and state. Catholic officials warn that development of doctrine does not mean that everything is up for grabs or that the faithful can choose their beliefs or morals to suit their preferences. But just how does legitimate modification of church teachings take place? As long as meetings like the one in Rome skirt that difficult question, the ensuing periods of good feeling are apt to be short-lived. IDEAS & TRENDS |
232926_8 | 'YOUR MOTHER IS IN YOUR BONES' | years, it can finally be let go.'' As Amy Tan tells us of her own homecoming on the jacket of ''The Joy Luck Club,'' it was just as her mother had told her it would be: ''As soon as my feet touched China, I became Chinese.'' Woven into the narrative of the lives of June and her mother are the stories of the three other Joy Luck aunties and their California-born daughters. Moving back and forth across the divide between the two generations, the two continents and the two cultures, we find ourselves transported across the Pacific Ocean from the upwardly mobile, design-conscious, divorce-prone and Americanized world of the daughters in San Francisco to the world of China in the 20's and 30's, which seems more fantastic and dreamlike than real. We come to see how the idea of China - nourished in America by nothing more than the memories of this vanished reality - has slowly metamorphosed in the minds of the aunties until their imaginations have so overtaken actual memory that revery is all that is left to keep them in contact with the past. When we are suddenly jerked by these sequences from the comforting familiarity of the United States into a scared child's memory of a dying grandmother in remote Ningbo, to remembrances of an arranged marriage with a murderous ending in Shansi or to recollections of a distraught woman abandoning her babies during wartime in Guizhou, we may readily feel bewildered and lost. Such abrupt transitions in time and space make it difficult to know who is who and what the complex web of generational Joy Luck Club relationships actually is. But these recherches to old China are so beautifully written that one should just allow oneself to be borne along as if in a dream. In fact, as the story progresses, the reader begins to appreciate just how these disjunctions work for, rather than against, the novel. While we as readers grope to know whose mother or grandmother is getting married in an unfamiliar ceremony, or why a concubine is committing suicide, we are ironically being reminded not just of the nightmarishness of being a woman in traditional China, but of the enormity of the confusing mental journey Chinese emigrants had to make. And, most ironic, we are also reminded by these literary disjunctions that it is precisely this mental chasm that members of |
232688_1 | Boone Country: Rugged Land For Recreation | border of Kentucky and the northern border of Tennessee. Largest of the three is the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, which opened last May. Adjoining it is the Rugby Historic District, Hughes's pleasant village, which is undergoing restoration. Visitors to the primitive Big South Fork Area may find bed and board there in a Victorian setting. Surrounding these two are historic and scenic sites linked by the Big South Fork Heritage Trail. Introduction to the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area begins with the Bandy Creek Visitor Information Center on Tennessee State Route 297. The information center has details on the conservation purposes and wide range of recreational possibilities within the 1,250,000 acres of Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area. Relief maps in National Park Service brochures guide the visitor through the diverse, sprawling landscape, and bulletins identify sites for hiking, rafting and camping and describe the geological history that created the area's dramatic features. A 250-seat amphitheater is the summer and autumn center for interpretive programs about the Cumberlands, especially the watershed of the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River. AT Bandy Creek visitors have access to campgrounds as well as all 267 miles of the area's trails for hiking, horseback riding or mountain trail biking. Winding roads and trails lead to the Big South Fork River gorge and its tumbling tributaries, steep bluffs and rock shelters, where only a small sampling of its trove of prehistoric artifacts has been unearthed. The landscape of the Big South Fork is the handiwork of ancient inland seas and mountains wrenched upward by the collision of continental plates, sculptured by the slow, incessant action of water carving stone arches, bridges, caves and the lips of waterfalls. Not far from serene, isolated coves are tumultuous rapids creating a watery juggernaut. (No one should attempt rafting in these waters without knowledge of the river's mood and dangers and a realistic assessment of one's own ability.) Once stripped of its stands of virgin timber and rich coal seams, the Big South Fork area is being rehabilitated and some of the surrounding industrial frontier, like the Blue Heron Mine, is being reconstructed. Referring to the rock shelters and their artifacts, the rangers have heard visitors speak of ''the Mesa Verde of the Appalachians.'' Others have called the gorge of the Big South Fork ''the little Grand Canyon of |
232975_1 | ; Tall Ships and Modern Times | fishing boat, yacht, ferryboat, trawler. The shore is lined with sailboats. I can see Shelter Island between their masts. An enormous shed takes up a lot of space. This is where the sailboats and yachts are wintered. Work, in winter, is mostly on fishing boats and other work boats, such as the Coast Guard cutter that was there almost a month for motor work, repairs and a new coat of paint. Stove-in boats are replanked and repaired. Did you know that ''stove'' is the past of ''stave''? I didn't. A trawler, old but classic, was brought up from the muddy bottom, where she had tried to bury her ancient bones, and completely restored. There is a lot of motorized equipment, such as cranes and derricks to move the boats from place to place. Sometimes it's noisy over there. Motors puff and chug. Electric sanders grind off old paint and make clouds of dust that drift far. The hardy family men and youths who work there seem to know what they are doing and why. They toil in all kinds of weather, every day but Sunday. Their faces, sun- and wind-chafed, are a color different from those of indoor people; more rosy. There is freedom and purpose in their stride, satisfaction in their bearing. There is a cat named Shipmate. His history is unusual. He always rode on the shoulder of a crew member of the Rattlesnake. He was at home on that boat, and was aboard, perched on his master's shoulder, when the Rattlesnake embarked for southern waters. But just as she sailed past the pilings of the yard, Shipmate jumped ship. Later came news that the Rattlesnake, upon reaching her destination, promptly sank. Shipmate now lives in the carpenter shop, where he is honored as a supernal creature who knew what was going to happen. Many fine boats have come out of this shipyard. There are plans for the Lady Sterling to be built and berthed here. She will be a working classroom to teach wooden boat construction, marine ecology and the geology of Long Island, and to provide day and weekend trips for students and the public, as well as for the promotion of Suffolk County and its sailing and marine heritage. The vessel will meet the highest standards of United States Coast Guard requirements, and Greenport will have her own tall ship right here in this shipyard. |
232886_0 | Radar and Health: Additional Views | LEAD: A journalist who calls attention to an environmental hazard educates the public. One who educates without evidence about such a hazard merely spreads rumors. A journalist who calls attention to an environmental hazard educates the public. One who educates without evidence about such a hazard merely spreads rumors. The Feb. 5 article ''Woman's Fight Against Navy Radar Raises Health Issue'' tells about the ''solitary crusade'' of Dorothy Powell of Maple Shade, who suffers from tension, ear pains, head noises, shortness of breath, palpitations and electric-like jolts in her body, and who attributes her symptoms to radar emanating from a Navy test site five miles away. If the reporter had discussed Mrs. Powell's complaints with a physician, not an unreasonable way of investigating an illness, she might have learned how commonplace such symptoms are. Far from being ''classic'' for microwave exposure, as suggested by Dr. Louis Slesin, the ''microwave industry expert,'' complaints like these are, singly and in varying combinations, caused by diverse physical and psychological disorders. When Mrs. Powell considers and then rejects the possibility that she is imagining things, she raises a question that needs a medical answer. Had the reporter obtained expert opinion, she might have given us more balanced and sophisticated reporting. JEFFREY FRANKEL, M.D. Short Hills |
231212_3 | Restorers Gather to Review Their Successes | preservation of art than Italy, and it is the paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque eras that have served as test subjects for some of the most important advances in the history of conservation. During previous centuries, restoration involved such dubious practices as dusting with abrasive brooms, washing with Greek wine and, quite often, extensive and deceptive repainting. During the past few decades, conservation has been revolutionized by advances in chemistry and the computer, as the symposium illustrated. But Italian restorers today face difficulties quite apart from those posed by the decaying objects themselves. Insufficient funds, environmental pollution, the dirt and humidity generated by millions of tourists, a famously cumbersome bureaucracy and the loss of a master-apprentice system are among the problems. The tradition of the master and apprentice, for instance, ''is dying because a law passed in 1955 requires the master to pay an apprentice not only wages but most of the costs of social security and health insurance as well,'' pointed out Eve Borsook, a research associate at Villa i Tatti, the Harvard Renaissance center in Florence, at Friday's session. ''No private restorer can afford this.'' Training in institutions may be strong, Miss Borsook added, ''but how much does it encourage initiative, intellectual curiosity and vigilant self-criticism?'' Throngs in the Sistine Pietro Marani, a curator at the Brera in Milan, noted on Saturday that the money has not yet been granted for installation of a humidity and air-conditioning system in the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie to protect ''The Last Supper.'' And Fabrizio Mancinelli, a curator at the Vatican museums, conceded that there is no reasonable means of limiting the number of visitors who crowd into the Sistine, raising the humidity and dust. Privately, several Italian conservators at the symposium also noted that corporate financing has been a great boon lately, but that it had gone principally to famous sites and not to projects that may be of equal art historical significance and are just as much in need of repair. The symposium was sponsored by Olivetti, one of Italy's more generous corporate sponsors when it comes to art history and conservation projects. Olivetti paid for the renovations at the Brancacci Chapel. About what these renovations in particular have revealed, William Hood, the chairman of the art department at Oberlin College, summed up the results revealed at the symposium as ''rewriting the history of 15th-century Florentine painting.'' |
233534_4 | Terrorism Alert: A System Shows Gaps | than normal. Additional batteries used to arm the explosive device would rattle around inside. ''Any item about which a searcher is unable to satisfy himself/herself must, if it is to be carried in the aircraft, be consigned to the aircraft hold,'' the bulletin said. That is where the bomb that destroyed Flight 103 was. But Mr. Channon has excused both the delay and the possible misinformation by saying that since it almost certainly was loaded in Frankfurt, not Heathrow, ''the sad fact is that nothing my department did or could have done would have made the slightest difference.'' Mr. Channon is not in charge of the painstaking investigation into the crash, which has pieced together thousands of fragments of wreckage and has now identified the piece of baggage in which the tape recorder was contained, but not whose baggage it was or who put the bomb into it. 'A Lot to Be Desired' But an American official close to the investigation said that the confusing statements from the Department of Transport had shaken confidence in Washington, where Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner dispatched aides to Britain and West Germany last week to review the state of international cooperation on terrorism. ''It's obvious that there is a lot of information out there, but a lot to be desired on the way it comes together so it can do some good,'' he said. There have also been indications of discontent from officials in other countries with an interest in the investigation. Alexander Prechtel, a spokesman for the West German federal prosecution authority, said, ''If the British authorities know more than we do, then they are not fulfilling their pledges of keeping us closely informed.'' The investigation is being run not by Scotland Yard, though its anti-terrorism branch is involved, but by a detective chief superintendent of the Strathclyde police force, the largest in Britain outside London, from the town of Lockerbie, a village of about 3,500 people near the English border. Over the weekend, the Transport Department advised airlines again to be on the alert for luggage and passengers carrying electronic devices aboard airplanes, citing a ''high and continuing risk'' that they could conceal explosives. The department said it had originally issued the warning on Feb. 18, two days after the investigators determined what had brought down Pan Am 103. Until the weekend, it apparently had not been enforced, even at Heathrow. |
233408_1 | Long-Term Forest Studies Offer Insight Into Effect of Pollutants | was a regionwide problem. They noted that high acidity levels had made streams uninhabitable for some kinds of aquatic life and made trees more vulnerable to disease. They predicted that if acidity levels remained high, the vegetation would deteriorate, as it has in polluted areas of Europe. ''We really don't know, nor does anybody know, what the effects of acid rain per se are on the forest, but it's really not the question,'' said Gene E. Likens, director of the Institute of Ecosystem Studies at the Mary Flagler Cary Arboretum in Millbrook, N.Y. ''It's not just acid rain. It's ozone and lead in rainfall, and droughts and defoliating insects like gypsy moths.'' Dr. Likens, a principal researcher at the forest, said: ''When all those things come together at the same time, they can cause a serious effect. When any one or even a few of them are there singly, then we don't see effects, but that doesn't mean there isn't stress.'' Guidelines for Forest Managers Researchers here have been looking at the way these stresses affect the forest, with its maple, yellow birch and beech trees, as well as the effects on Mirror Lake nearby. By showing the fragile condition of the lake and its shores, the researchers offered persuasive evidence that the lake should be preserved by the Forest Service instead of being developed commercially. Their experiments in tree harvesting have led to a set of widely followed guidelines for forest managers, recommending that forests not be cut more then every 70 years, not be cut in huge blocks or on steep, fragile slopes. This summer the researchers plan to study what stresses resulted from last summer's season of drought, heat and high air pollution. The backbone of the research done at Hubbard Brook has come from the constant measuring of water, sunlight and nutrients in nine of the forest's watersheds. In each of these microenvironments, bucket-like collecting devices measure the amount of precipitation coming in, while small dams at the bottom of the watersheds are used to measure the amount of water flowing out. Since the bedrock beneath the forest is watertight, these calibrations allow scientists to calculate exactly how much water is being used by the plants and animals in each watershed. The chemical content of the water and the soil is also examined so that the type and amount of nutrients used by the forest's various |