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1699627_0 | THE NATION: The Days After; The View From Abroad | THEY were perhaps a bit slow, but the expressions of sympathy and offers of aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina did materialize in Europe through the week. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany declared, '''Our American friends should know that we are standing by them.'' The French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, offered to send supplies, two airplanes, 35 members of civil security rescue teams, and other equipment and personnel. Still, Europe's response so far to the calamity of Katrina has been complicated, even ambivalent. There was plenty of sympathy and willingness to help, but there was also, as with Mr. de Villepin's offer, a rather formulaic quality and an absence of any powerful, spontaneous surge of empathy and affection for the afflicted nation. Why? It is hard to measure this, but judging from the commentary and the blogs, the collective European response to the victims of the tsunami or the famine in Niger, to the killings in Darfur or the deaths of Shiite pilgrims in Baghdad seems to have been more immediate and deeply felt than for the victims of Katrina. And one reason for this relative coolness may be that these other disasters took place in poor, troubled nations, not in the most powerful and richest country on earth. In fact, the spectacle of the hurricane causing a disaster of third-world proportions in the United States seems to have provoked a sort of dismay among Europeans, mingling with the sorrow. As a reporter on BBC Television argued on Friday, not able to keep the anger from his voice, the looting, the armed gangs, the gunplay and, especially, the arrogance, in his view, that the mostly white police displayed toward mostly black residents represented ''the dark underbelly of life in this country.'' There was something shameful, he said, about the way a natural disaster has produced behavior that, for example, the tsunami didn't produce in the third-world countries it hit. And it is painful to be a witness to somebody else's shame. ''Why should hundreds die, mostly African-Americans, in a predicted disaster in the richest nation on earth'' was one expression of a widespread feeling in Europe, this one appearing Friday in a letter in the British newspaper The Guardian. There were many comments to the effect that earlier predictions of the disaster did not lead public officials to make sure the levees would withstand any possible onslaught, and |
1699442_2 | Havana via Woodbridge: Legal Cuban Cigars | the trove of Cuban tobacco, Puros de Armando Ramos has chosen about 200 buyers at stores across the country, 6 in New Jersey. Despite his cigars' scarcity, Mr. Magier, 48, decided to sell them at relatively affordable prices, in the same range as other premium cigars. At the Tobacco Shop, they cost $12.35 to $16.75 each. His goal, he said, is not to make a lot of money at once, but to stay in the cigar business. ''We will be around longer than the tobacco,'' Mr. Magier said. ''The Pinars put us on the map, but it's a small part of who we are.'' Forty percent of his company revenue is from the Pinars, though they are more expensive than the Ecuadorean cigars he sells. Mr. Magier, a former marketing executive, and Armando Ramos, a cigar roller in Cuba before fleeing the revolution, started Puros de Armando Ramos in 1996. For three years, it sold cigars rolled in Ecuador -- which has a reputation for providing ideal wrappings -- until Mr. Magier found out about the stash in Tampa, after the seller got in touch with him. The cigar leaf was sent from Havana in 1956, 1958 and 1960 and had languished in a climate-controlled warehouse after Murray Grossman, the man who imported it, died and his estate was tied up in probate. In 1985, Jeff Grossman, his son, inherited the tobacco. In 1998, when President Clinton announced that he would ease some restrictions on aid and travel to Cuba, Jeff Grossman was concerned that Cuban cigars would be allowed onto the American market, and he decided to sell. Though the cache was in perfect condition and court documents and appraisers attested to its authenticity, Mr. Magier was still skeptical. ''You can't smoke paperwork,'' he said. The real test for him: an assessment by Mr. Ramos, now 84. Upon inspecting the leaf, he pronounced it authentic. With that, the company entered the Cuban cigar business, exporting the tobacco to its factory in Ecuador and shipping back hand-rolled cigars. At the Tobacco Shop in Ridgefield, Mr. Kolesaire found that convincing customers that the cigars were Cuban was not easy at first. ''I tell people to smoke an inch and smell the bouquet,'' he said. ''It won't lie.'' Customers seem to agree. Mike Santangelo, 43, a printing-company owner from Mahwah, said of the Pinars, ''They were everything we were hoping they'd be.'' |
1699504_1 | Why the Internet Isn't the Death of the Post Office | coming of the paperless office. But the consumption of paper keeps rising. (It has roughly doubled since 1980, with less use of newsprint and much more of ordinary office paper.) And so, with some nuances and internal changes, does the flow of material carried by mail. On average, an American household receives twice as many pieces of mail a day as it did in the 1970's. ''Is the Internet hurting the mails, or helping?'' asks Michael J. Critelli, a co-chairman of the public-private Mail Industry Task Force. ''It's doing both.'' Mr. Critelli's day job is chief executive of Pitney Bowes -- yes, that Pitney Bowes, once known for its postage meters and now a ''mail and document management'' company. In the last few years, it has also functioned as a research group for the mail industry, commissioning a series of studies, available free at PostInsight.PB.com, that contain startling findings about the economic, technological and cultural forces that affect use of mail. The harmful side of the Internet's impact is obvious but statistically less important than many would guess. People naturally write fewer letters when they can send e-mail messages. To leaf through a box of old paper correspondence is to know what has been lost in this shift: the pretty stamps, the varying look and feel of handwritten and typed correspondence, the tangible object that was once in the sender's hands. To stay in instant touch with parents, children and colleagues around the world is to know what's been gained. But even before e-mail, personal letters had shrunk to a tiny share of the flow. As a consultant, Fouad H. Nader, wrote in a Pitney Bowes study, personal mail had ''long ago been reduced to a minimum with the proliferation of telephone services in the last 50 years.'' Personal letters of all sorts, called ''household to household'' correspondence, account for less than 1 percent of the 100 billion pieces of first-class mail that the Postal Service handles each year. Most of that personal mail consists of greeting cards, invitations, announcements and other mail with ''emotional content,'' a category that is generally holding its own. The same higher-income households that rely the most on e-mail correspondence also send and receive the most letters. Whatever shrinkage e-mail has caused in personal correspondence, it is not likely to do much more. The Internet and allied technologies, meanwhile, are increasing the volume of old-fashioned |
1703914_3 | A Fright Over Fries; California Wants to Serve a Health Warning With That Order | McDonald's, Burger King and Frito-Lay, other companies named in the suit are KFC, a division of Yum Brands; Wendy's International; Lance, which makes Cape Cod potato chips; H.J. Heinz, which produces Ore-Ida frozen potato products; the potato chip company Kettle Foods; and Procter & Gamble, which sells Pringles. The regulation of chemicals in food has, for the last four decades, relied upon animal study extrapolation to determine risks to humans. For obvious ethical reasons, the testing of potential carcinogens is not done directly on humans; animals, particularly mice and rats, have served as proxies. The California attorney general and several activist groups say that consumers should be given information so they can make informed food choices. ''Proposition 65 requires companies to tell us when we're exposed to potentially dangerous toxins in our food; the law benefits us all,'' said Mr. Lockyer, in a statement. Edward G. Weil, California's deputy attorney general, said he was ''not trying to ban French fries,'' but that he needed to take action in the absence of regulatory decisions by either the F.D.A. or the California E.P.A. The attorney general's office cites a dozen acrylamide animal studies showing both cancer and birth defects, as well as the federal Environmental Protection Agency's regulation of the chemical as a carcinogen for 13 years. The food industry and the F.D.A., meanwhile, are calling for more studies. The agency says that it has been ''very active'' in acrylamide research and will do a thorough risk assessment once a large-scale experiment is completed in 2007. The controversy started when Swedish scientists accidentally discovered acrylamide in food in 2002. The chemical had long been used in the manufacture of things like grout and adhesives and to perform tasks like separating solid sewage from water. Its discovery in food sent the international scientific community into a tailspin and ignited a debate over how chemicals in food should be regulated. Under the Delaney Clause, which amended the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act in 1958, no substance that causes cancer in either humans or animals can be added to food. But that law is normally applied to substances introduced to food, like dyes and preservatives, not those, like acrylamide, created by cooking. Frying and baking potatoes at home create acrylamide as well. Thus, the food industry wants acrylamide treated differently from food chemicals. ''Acrylamide has been present in the food supply and safely consumed |
1703946_3 | Deep Flaws, and Little Justice, in China's Court System | and perfunctory court proceedings to resolve criminal cases instead of the Western tradition of analyzing forensic evidence and determining guilt through contentious court trials. China's criminal laws forbid torture and require judges to weigh evidence beyond a suspect's confession. But lawyers and legal scholars say forced confessions remain endemic in a judicial system that faces pressure to maintain ''social stability'' at all costs. The police and government officials in Anyang, the northern Henan county seat where Mr. Qin was interrogated, and authorities in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, declined repeated written requests to discuss his case. But Mr. Qin, his family members and several people involved in his defense said the case showed how political motives and collusion among police, prosecutors and the courts could make the law a source of terror for people who lack the power or money to defend themselves. A Suspect Investigation Just after noon on Aug. 3, 1998, Jia Hairong, a 30-year-old peasant woman, was found murdered on her family's farm in the village of Donggaoping, an hour's drive from Anyang, according to court documents. Her pants had been cut off with a razor blade. She was raped and strangled, her body stashed behind tall cornstalks. The police found a plastic alarm clock and the razor blade at the scene. They determined that both items were stolen from a nearby home just before the assault. Court documents do not make clear whether physical evidence -- fingerprints, blood, semen, traces of clothing -- could have identified the killer. If there were such forensic leads, they were not followed. Instead, the police relied on the accounts of three children who were playing outdoors in Qinxiaotun, a village about a mile east of Donggaoping, the records show. The children recalled seeing Mr. Qin, who lives in Qinxiaotun, walking from the direction of Donggaoping that afternoon. Around midnight on Aug. 4, four officers arrived at the steel plant where Mr. Qin worked nights and took him away for questioning. Mr. Qin is a tall, shy, doe-eyed man who rarely travels farther than a bicycle ride from his dirt-floored village home. When he speaks -- friends say he generally speaks only when spoken to -- he has a heavy local accent that even Anyang residents have trouble understanding. The police would not tell him why he was being detained. But through the early morning hours, he was told to detail how |
1703433_2 | Good Grief | last Thursday, the very same day that he delivered his speech in New Orleans, the World Bank released a report showing that the continued violence in Iraq had frightened away private investors, slowed reconstruction and disrupted oil production. The Times reported yesterday that even in Najaf, an Iraqi city often cited by the U.S. as a success story, American officials have acknowledged that reconstruction projects ''are hobbled by poor planning, corrupt contractors and a lack of continuity among the rotating coalition officers.'' Polls have shown that over the past two years Americans have lost a great deal of faith in Mr. Bush, who tends to talk a good game but doesn't seem to know how to deliver. Thursday night's speech was designed to halt that slide. But Mr. Bush's new post-Katrina persona defies belief. The same man who was unforgivably slow to respond to the gruesome and often fatal suffering of his fellow Americans now suddenly emerges from the larva of his ineptitude to present himself as -- well, nothing short of enlightened. Not only was he proposing a Gulf Coast Marshall Plan, but he was declaring, in words that made his conservative followers gasp, that poverty in the U.S. ''has roots in a history of racial discrimination which cut off generations from the opportunity of America.'' If you were listening to the radio, you might have thought you were hearing the ghost of Lyndon Johnson. ''We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action,'' said Mr. Bush. He was being Lucy again, enticing us with the football. But before we commence kicking the air, consider the facts. This president has had zero interest in attacking poverty, and the result has been an increase in poverty in the U.S., the richest country in the world, in each of the last four years. Instead of attacking poverty, the Bush administration has attacked the safety net and has stubbornly refused to stop the decline in the value of the minimum wage on his watch. You can believe that he's suddenly worried about poor people if you want to. What is more likely is that his reference to racism and poverty was just another opportunistic Karl Rove moment, never to be acted upon. Charlie Brown's sister, Sally, once asked how often someone could be fooled with the same trick. She answered her own question: ''Pretty often, huh?'' Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com |
1703418_0 | AUTOS ON MONDAY/Technology; Coming: 95% Recyclable Cars | HOUSEHOLDS across the United States are steadily coming to terms with local laws that require trash to be separated and sorted -- glass bottles divided from aluminum cans, plastic milk jugs isolated from newspapers -- before it is all hauled to the curb to await pickup. Most of Europe, though, already embraces (or enforces) recycling with true-believer fervor. So many subcategories have been created for the redirection of castoffs that just a relatively small volume of unusable material finds its way to that final resting place once known as the dump. No wonder, then, European lawmakers are setting limits on the wastefulness in scrapping automobiles, a process that has typically sent 25 percent of each vehicle, by weight, into an ever-shrinking amount of landfill space. On Jan. 1, the next phase of a vehicle recycling mandate set by the European Union, known as the End-of-Life Vehicles Directive, will take effect. The new regulations will require 85 percent of the car's materials, by weight, to be recovered and reused; the figure includes 5 percent through energy recovery, typically by burning materials that are not economically practical to recycle. In 2007, networks set up by carmakers in the European Union must be ready to accept all scrap vehicles, regardless of age, at no cost to the car's last owner. In 2015, the portion of each vehicle that should be recycled increases to 95 percent. Despite the complexity of construction and wide variety of materials in new vehicles, reducing potential waste to just 5 percent can be accomplished without the need for technological breakthroughs. For instance, the 2007 Mercedes-Benz S-Class sedan, which made its debut at the Frankfurt auto show last week, will comply with the 2015 regulation, the company said. The car was designed with recyclability as a goal, with materials selected for ease of processing from the beginning of its development. The new S-Class goes on sale in the United States early next year. Though more than 10 million vehicles are scrapped each year in this country, sending about four million tons of waste to landfills, laws based on the principle that producers should be responsible for products at the end of their useful lives are given little chance of winning approval here. The situation is different in Europe and Japan, both of which have limited landfill space and strong public support for environmental reforms. Chris Rogers, head of corporate affairs |
1701879_0 | A Healthier Amazon Jungle | Last month, Brazil's environmental officials announced that the burning of the Amazon has slowed. Deforestation this year is half of what it was the year before. This news shows that when Brazil's government musters the political will to protect the Amazon, it can do it. Large swaths of the jungle are still disappearing, mainly set on fire by soybean farmers and ranchers looking for land to raise cattle. Last year was the worst for Amazon deforestation in a decade. The health of the Amazon is a global concern because the forest soaks up greenhouse gases, which lessens global warming. Deforestation means the Amazon could eventually become too small to produce the rain that it needs to survive. Deforestation is also deadly for millions of Amazon peasants trying to eke out a living growing small plots or collecting forest products. Land grabbers snatch up valuable property near planned paved roads, burning the villages to drive the inhabitants away. Hundreds of leaders who have tried to speak up for peasants have been murdered, and virtually none of the killers ever face jail. Unfortunately, part of the reason farmers and ranchers cleared less jungle this year is because the price of soybeans and beef have dropped, and Brazil's currency is stronger. So exports are less profitable. But the government's commitment to protecting the Amazon has also been important. Led by Marina Silva, the environment minister and once a poor Amazon rubber tapper herself, Brazil is starting to impose its authority in parts of the forest that have always been lawless. In the state of Pará in February, gunmen killed Dorothy Stang, an American nun who had worked with the rural poor for 30 years. After the murder, the government sent 2,000 federal troops to the zone and announced a logging ban on millions of acres of Amazon land. The government has also begun to enforce its laws. It is beginning to require real documentation of claims for land title. In June, police arrested dozens of members of an illegal clear-cutting ring. Finally, through new satellite imaging, Brazilian authorities can spot burning while it is happening and theoretically make arrests. Rule of law is still foreign to the Amazon. But it is becoming a little less so. Editorial |
1701679_1 | A $79.95 Opportunity To Breeze Through Security | and don't charge a fee, are limited to 2,000 members at each participating airport. What they all have in common is the means to let travelers identify themselves with a thin card encoded with their biometric data -- iris and fingerprint scans -- that the T.S.A. has checked against what Mr. Brill's company describes as ''various terrorist-threat-related databases'' and concluded that you have passed muster. The reward for that is expedited passage through security in a designated lane, along with the assurance that you won't be randomly hauled aside for one of those secondary inspections and pat downs. Other future benefits, Mr. Brill said, might exempt travelers from much disliked rules like having to take off their shoes or remove laptops from their cases. Suppose your airline has marked your boarding pass with the dreaded SSSS symbol. That supposedly means you probably did something suspicious, like flying on a one-way ticket or abruptly changing a reservation, both, of course, common behavior for business travelers. Whip out your registered traveler card and, voilà, the S's disappear, Mr. Brill said. ''When you come to our kiosk and put in your card with your prints, our attendant puts a big T.S.A. stamp on your boarding pass that overrides the four S's,'' he said. A survey this year by the National Business Travel Association and the Travel Industry Association of America found that 53 percent of business travelers said they would pay an annual fee to participate in a registered-traveler program. Mr. Brill's initiative was timely. It was also carefully designed to allay concerns about the potential for invasion of privacy whenever the government gets a green light to conduct background checks. To obtain a Clear Registered Traveler card, an applicant provides the company with his or her name, address, birth date, Social Security number, and two forms of government-issued ID. Digital images of an applicant's fingerprints and irises are made. The biographical and digital information is then sent to the T.S.A., which checks it. Mr. Brill's company says it guarantees restitution of any financial loss that might arise from the ''highly unlikely event'' that its basic information on you is used for identity theft. The company does not get access to the T.S.A.'s evaluation, nor to any financial or other information on the applicant. Neither the company nor the applicant is told why an applicant is rejected. Still, privacy advocates are watching registered-travel |
1701733_2 | Meet The Fakers | of military expenditures. This U.N. summit is meant to review the millennium development goals, such as cutting child deaths around the world by two-thirds by 2015. All the goals, adopted with great fanfare five years ago, are feasible, and some countries -- from Bangladesh to Indonesia, Brazil to Mongolia -- are on track to meet them. Hats off to them. But most of the world appears likely to miss the goals. Two countries that should be the leaders of the developing world, China and India, are both off track and should be ashamed of their records. In India, among children 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys, meaning that each year 130,000 Indian girls are discriminated to death. Bangladesh has now overtaken India in improving child mortality, and Vietnam has overtaken China. If India had matched Bangladesh's rate of reduction in child mortality over the last decade, according to the U.N.D.P., it would have saved 732,000 children's lives this year. Likewise, China has largely ignored its poor interior, so it still loses 730,000 children each year. China has also taken diplomatic positions that hurt the world's most vulnerable populations, by supporting Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and by implicitly endorsing Sudan's genocide just as it once endorsed Pol Pot's. And African leaders? Perhaps this is naïve, but it strikes me as racist for them to have complained about brutal white rule in South Africa or Zimbabwe while excusing black rule that is even more brutal. Readers often ask if I find it depressing to visit African slums or mud-brick villages. On the contrary, it's exhilarating to see how little it takes to make a difference. Ancient scourges like river blindness and leprosy are being controlled, and a clever initiative by Bill Gates and others to promote vaccinations (the Global Alliance for Vaccinations and Immunization) saved more than one million lives just between 2001 and 2004. That makes it maddening to see leaders posturing for the cameras at the U.N. while, as the U.N.D.P. report notes, ''the promise to the world's poor is being broken.'' The report adds that the gap between the current trendline on child mortality and the one the leaders committed themselves to amounts to 41 million children dying before their fifth birthday over the next decade. Rather than toasting themselves, these leaders should apologize for this continuing holocaust. Op-Ed Columnist E-mail: nicholas@nytimes.com |
1701690_2 | China's State Secrets Agency Will Guard One Less: Death Tolls | to the release of data that is not currently available in some form. But the revised regulations may make it more difficult for local officials to cover up accidents on the grounds of protecting state secrets, as they have often done in the past. As recently as this summer, officials were accused of providing a false death toll for a flash flood that wiped out a school and killed scores of children in the northern province of Heilongjiang. In a commentary accompanying the announcement, the news agency said the veil of secrecy hindered the response to disasters. ''To continue to see natural disaster death tolls as state secrets makes it difficult to adapt to practical needs of disaster relief work and is not in accordance with general international practices,'' the commentary said. There was no immediate indication of whether the easing of restrictions on information about natural disasters signals a broader easing of China's draconian rules on other secrets. Chinese authorities often cite violations of state secrets, broadly defined as anything that affects the security of the state, to punish journalists, lawyers, doctors, government officials or others who challenge the Communist Party. Offenders have been sentenced to long jail terms for sharing political gossip, or distributing speeches by government officials or articles published in the state-controlled press. The secrets agency also did not define what kind of disaster was considered natural as opposed to human. It is unclear, for example, if a flood that followed a dam break, or the collapse of a mine, would be considered accidents in which the government retains the prerogative to suppress data. It is also unclear whether the rules will apply retroactively to major disasters and atrocities in China's past. The government has never provided a clear accounting of the deaths from the largely policy-driven famine that occurred during the disastrous Great Leap Forward, from 1958 to 1960, when Mao sold China's scarce grain reserves abroad and forced peasants to make steel in backyard furnaces. Although historians say that about 30 million people may have starved to death in what is still referred to as the ''three years of natural disaster,'' the number is a gross estimate and widely disputed. The official death toll in the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, one of the largest in history, is still recorded as 250,000, but Chinese experts acknowledge that the real toll was three times that amount. |
1701832_0 | World Briefing | Europe: France: Support For Indian Nuclear Plants | France has agreed to support India's plans to develop civilian atomic energy after winning two multibillion-dollar contracts for the sale of Airbus airliners and conventionally powered submarines to India. India, which tested nuclear weapons in 1998, has already won approval for its civilian atomic energy program from the United States and Britain. John Tagliabue (NYT) |
1701664_2 | OBSERVATORY | provided by the adult albatrosses and their offspring. Temperatures of occupied nests showed that the birds kept the nests at a temperature that is optimal for caterpillar feeding. Remnants of Salt Making In the development of ancient societies, salt was an important building block. It was a crucial trading commodity, and by allowing food to be preserved it enabled empires to expand. But salt itself is not preserved. Time and water wash it away, so solid archaeological evidence of salt production has rarely been discovered. Now, researchers have found strong signs that salt was produced in central China in the first two millenniums B.C., during the dynastic period. ''It's always been known that salt during the dynastic period was important in China,'' said Rowan K. Flad, an assistant professor at Harvard and the lead author of a paper on the work published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ''But all of the known discussions on the processes of salt production relied on the use of large iron pans, which weren't available until the last couple of centuries B.C.'' Several years ago, while a doctoral student at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. Flad and colleagues in China excavated a mound at Zhongba, a riverside site in the Sichuan Basin.. (The area is now under water, having been flooded as part of the Three Gorges Dam project.) The mound was essentially a heap of pottery fragments. Dr. Flad and his colleagues excavated tens of thousands of them, at various levels that corresponded to three time periods: about 2000 to 1750 B.C., 1630 to 1210 B.C., and 1100 to 200 B.C. Within each period, the type of pottery found was extremely uniform. Most fragments from the earliest period, for instance, were from large pointed-bottom vats, while in the latest period, pieces of rounded-bottom jar, generally 4 to 6 inches in diameter, were found. One clue that these vessels were used in salt making, Dr. Flad said, is that they resemble the types used by other cultures, like the Maya, to boil brine. ''We find very similar types of rounded-bottom jarlets in the Maya region,'' he said. Most archaeological work on salt production stops there. But Dr. Flad and his colleagues also used X-ray fluorescence and spectrometry to analyze the pottery and soil from the site. They found that the soil in areas where salt production was thought to |
1701732_2 | Necessary Measures | countries where obstetricians are scarce, home births are common and the dead are mourned privately simply do not have the data. That is why in 2000, their most recent assessment, scientists from the United Nations warned that ''it would be inappropriate to compare the 2000 estimates with those for 1990,'' or to ''draw conclusions about trends.'' Malaria is another example where United Nations goals hinge on something immeasurable. In 2000, the organization's scientists warned that ''it will not, in general, be possible to measure the overall incidence rate of malaria.'' Yet barely two months later, the United Nations placed bets on doing exactly that and persuaded the world's leaders to endorse a new Millennium Development Goal to start lowering the incidence of malaria by 2015. Having ignored the advice of its own scientists and fashioned its goal unwisely, the United Nations today studiously avoids having an opinion on whether the malaria crisis -- the disease is the No. 1 killer of children in sub-Saharan Africa -- is getting better or worse. And yet, nobody who studies malaria doubts that it is getting worse. Probably the most useful discussion the United Nations could plan for this week's meeting would be one that asked world leaders to endorse new goals against which they could truly measure progress. This is feasible: there are alternative ways to track malaria's toll or to assess the safety of pregnancies. For instance, dozens of demographic surveillance sites could be set up in the poorest countries to document births, deaths, illnesses and social services. This has already been done in countries like Tanzania and Ghana. How disappointing it is that the United Nations leadership went to great lengths to ensure that no such discussion could happen this week. Last September, Louise Fréchette, the United Nations deputy secretary general, instructed the organization's scientists that she didn't want the summit meeting being ''distracted by arguments over the measurement of the Millennium Development Goals,'' and ordered that they refrain from proposing any refinements to the goals. This is lamentable political censorship. By putting that discussion off limits, and pretending the Millennium Development Goals are meaningful as they now stand, the United Nations has lost five years on a short timeline and sabotaged its own vital mission to help the world's most unfortunate and needy people. Op-Ed Contributor Amir Attaran, a scientist and lawyer, is a professor at the University of Ottawa. |
1701691_1 | Mexico Builds Trade Ties With China | flooded with Chinese products, both legal and contraband, from chili peppers to blue jeans to electronics. Last year, Mexico imported $31 in goods from China for every dollar's worth it sent there, according to trade experts here, and that does not include the thriving market in smuggled Chinese goods. ''The real relationship between the People's Republic of China and Mexico is very tense,'' said Enrique Dussel Peters, an expert on Mexican-Chinese trade at the Autonomous University of Mexico. ''This ratio of 31 to 1, which is only going to grow in the short run, is not only a social problem but could become a political problem.'' In a speech after a signing ceremony, Mr. Fox made it clear he had spoken with Mr. Hu about both the yawning trade deficit and the dumping of contraband Chinese goods. ''Today we heard from President Hu his enthusiasm, his help, his support in closing the commercial gap,'' Mr. Fox said, looking over at Mr. Hu. ''We touched on the subject of contraband and President Hu offered to help with this area.'' For his part, Mr. Hu kept his remarks short and diplomatic, saying only that he looked forward to seeing more Mexican products in the Chinese market. Later in the day, he visited the Mexican Supreme Court and then the Senate, where he got stuck in a broken elevator for 15 minutes. Mr. Hu's visit seems part of a broader effort to secure future sources of oil, iron ore, aluminum, timber and other commodities throughout Latin America and Canada, despite the United States' longtime hegemony in the region. Under his watch, China has sewn up deals for Chinese companies to develop oil fields and mines and to purchase commodities in Brazil, Venezuela, Chile, Cuba, Bolivia and Argentina. Mexico is different. The Constitution bans foreign investment in Petróleos Mexicanos, the state-owned oil monopoly, and the country lacks large reserves of iron and bauxite, analysts say. Julian Ventura, the Mexican director general for Asian affairs, said oil exploration did not even come up Monday. And the mining agreement is only a framework for future deals, not a binding contract, he said. Still, Mr. Ventura said the agreements signed Monday were intended to begin diminishing the trade gap. One of the most important agreements, Mr. Ventura said, will establish direct flights and allow large group tours to begin coming to Mexico from China, a potentially rich |
1701890_0 | When Food From the Laboratory Leaves a Bitter Taste | The heroes and villains in ''The Future of Food,'' Deborah Koons Garcia's sober, far-reaching polemic against genetically modified foods, are clearly identified. The good guys, acknowledged in the film's cursory final segment, are organic farmers along with a growing network of farmers' markets around the United States that constitute a grass-roots resistance to the Goliath of agribusiness and the genetically engineered products it favors. The bad guys, to whom this quietly inflammatory film devotes the bulk of its attention, are large corporations, especially the Monsanto Company, a pioneer in the development of genetically engineered agricultural products. In recent years, Monsanto has patented seeds that yield crops whose chemical structures have been modified to ward off pests. The film poses many ticklish ethical and scientific questions: Since genetic material is life, should corporations have the right to patent genes? What are the long-term effects on humans of consuming genetically engineered food, which is still largely unlabeled in the United States? Can the crossbreeding of wild and genetically modified plants be controlled? Might genetically engineered food be the answer to world hunger? And finally, could the reduction of biodiversity, which has quickened since the introduction of genetically modified plants, lead to catastrophe? The film's answers to these five questions are: No. Possibly damaging. Probably not. Probably not. Possibly. In each case, the movie outlines the pluses, the minuses and the imponderables. But the overall attitude of Ms. Garcia, the widow of the Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, might be summed up with the scolding slogan ''It's not nice to fool Mother Nature.'' Much of the film is devoted to Monsanto's prosecution of Canadian farmers on whose property the company discovered traces of its patented Roundup Ready canola seed, which is genetically engineered to kill pests. Though the seed had drifted accidentally onto the farmers' land, courts ruled that they had violated Monsanto's patent and were liable for damages. The film begins with a capsule history of agriculture going back more than 12,000 years but concentrating on the 20th century. It traces the development of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the rise and fall of the green revolution, its morphing into the gene revolution, and the implanting of natural bacterial toxins into the cells of corn. Can wheat be far behind? In the mid-1990's, Monsanto, the DuPont Company and others bought the seed industry. Monsanto alone spent $8 billion investing in the notion that, |
1701986_0 | Decision Time on Iran | IN November 2003, Iran averted a crisis when it agreed to suspend activities that could one day give it the capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear material. The International Atomic Energy Agency had discovered an 18-year pattern of noncompliance by Iran with its obligations to report all its nuclear activities, during which time international inspectors could not verify that they were solely for peaceful purposes. Because Iran suspended its most sensitive activities, the agency's board agreed to hold off reporting Iran to the United Nations Security Council. This was understood, in effect, as a quid pro quo: suspension of uranium-enrichment-related and reprocessing activities in return for not being reported to the Security Council. Last November, Iran agreed with Britain, France and Germany to extend its suspension to include ''all tests or production at any uranium-conversion installation.'' Iran also agreed that ''sustaining the suspension, while negotiations on a long-term agreement are under way, will be essential for the continuation of the overall process.'' But last month, the day before Britain, France and Germany gave Iran a proposal for a long-term agreement that offered economic assistance in exchange for ending its nuclear fuel cycle activities (but not its electrical nuclear program), Tehran announced that it would resume uranium conversion activities in Isfahan, which it did. The agency's board of governors will meet in Vienna next Monday to decide how to respond. At the moment there is no consensus or even a majority that agrees with Washington, Berlin, London and Paris that Iran's noncompliance should be reported to the Security Council. Iran is vigorously lobbying its fellow developing countries on the board. While the agency's statute makes clear that it should report Iran's noncompliance to the Security Council, many board members are reluctant to do so, fearing a repeat of the dynamic that led to the war in Iraq. It is important to remember that under the agency's statute, there is no deadline or expiration date after which noncompliance becomes moot. Thus, Iran is still accountable for its past breaches. And Iran's resumption of work related to uranium conversion eliminates the only reason for the three European countries not to report Iran to the Security Council. A failure by the board to make such a report would considerably weaken the agency and the global nonproliferation regime. It would reveal that the world is unwilling to hold rule-breakers to account, inviting proliferation by other countries. |
1709234_0 | A Trio More Astringent Than the Sum of Its Parts | Collectivism can be a tricky aspiration for any jazz ensemble. Jazz is a soloist's art -- that's the prevailing presumption, anyway -- and it's not easy to subvert the heroic ideal. Not easy, but possible, especially in the avant-garde. And as Fieldwork proved at the Jazz Gallery on Tuesday, the results are often intriguing. Fieldwork, a trio, was formed in 2000 by the pianist Vijay Iyer, the saxophonist Aaron Stewart and the drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee. Over time the personnel have shifted: Mr. Stewart drifted out of the group more than a year ago, and Mr. Kavee recently followed suit. The ensemble currently consists of Mr. Iyer, Steve Lehman on alto and sopranino saxophones, and Tyshawn Sorey on drums. The sound of the group is darkly astringent, with an unsettled quality that hints at contemporary anxieties. Partly this is by thematic design; Mr. Iyer, in his other projects, has trafficked in sharp social commentary. More directly, the restlessness is a result of rhythmic strategies borrowed from South Indian music and other sources; Fieldwork's pulse is more cyclical than symmetrical, confounding Western notation. Mr. Iyer was the compass and center. The absence of a bassist emphasized the range of his piano playing, which tends toward a supple sort of percussiveness -- as if he were pressing, not striking, the keys. And his compositions were distinctive exercises. ''Accumulated Gestures,'' which came near the end of the set, featured abstruse scraps of pianism, a tangle of signature phrases. But Fieldwork doesn't sound like Mr. Iyer's other ensembles, and for good reason. Mr. Lehman and Mr. Sorey, superbly skilled musicians in their 20's, have each applied a personal stamp to the trio's sound, even as they are enveloped by it. Mr. Sorey, who can be a steamroller in other settings, managed an undulating deftness, most strikingly on ''Futile,'' his own composition. He fragmented the beat, but lightly, with controlled restraint. Throughout the set, his charm was in smoothing out rhythmic wrinkles and rounding sharp edges. Mr. Lehman maintained a modest stoicism as well, refraining from any interjection that might offset the equipoise of the ensemble. He often served not as a lead voice but as a textural or structural element. On the off-kilter ''Telematic,'' he coaxed a conch-shell tonality from his alto and then moved on to a sputtering riff that functioned as a bass line. The cryptic challenge of the set grew wearisome |
1709373_0 | World Briefing | Africa: Somalia: Pirates Seize Another Aid Ship | Days after the United Nations recovered a cargo ship carrying relief food that had been hijacked by gunmen and held for more than three months, another ship carrying food for suffering Somalis has been seized at gunpoint. ''It is scandalous that a small number of profiteers would once again hijack humanitarian food supplies destined for fellow Somalis,'' said Robert Hauser, the World Food Program director for Somalia. Marc Lacey (NYT) |
1709390_0 | World Business Briefing | Europe: Italy: Contract for Bridge to Sicily | The much-debated plan to build a bridge linking Messina on the island of Sicily with the toe of the Italian boot moved a step closer to realization yesterday after the company organizing the project awarded a 3.88 billion euro ($4.65 billion) construction contract. Impregilo, Italy's largest construction company, heads the group that won the contract for what would be the longest suspension bridge in the world at 3.7 kilometers, or 2.3 miles. The final bill is projected to be about 6 billion euros, according to government-owned Stretto di Messina, which is in charge of design and financing and will eventually operate and manage the bridge. Eric Sylvers (IHT) |
1712462_0 | Things to Think About If You're Thinking 'Used' | WHEN a car is totaled, that's the end, right? Well, no. Of the estimated 2.5 million cars written off each year as complete losses, nearly half are said to rise from the dead to make it back onto the market for resale. While there are certain risks in buying a used car, it is critical to find out the auto's whole story. ''There's really nothing wrong with buying a salvaged car if that's what you know you're buying,'' said Larry Gamache, a spokesman for Carfax, a company in Fairfax, Va., that sells background reports on used cars. ''The real problem is having someone tell you something is a one-owner, low-mileage cherry, and finding out later it's a rebuilt wreck.'' Selecting safe and reliable used cars will become more challenging as some of the estimated half-million cars damaged in Hurricane Katrina are repaired and resold. ''People are going to buy them up at below-market prices and move them to places like New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago -- places where people are used to paying more for used cars -- and sell them about $500 under Kelley Blue Book,'' Mr. Gamache said. ''They'll be making huge amounts and ripping you off.'' The good news is that there is a lot of information available for used-car buyers. For instance, consumers can obtain the results of crash tests done by the federal government and insurance companies; check dependability surveys compiled by groups like Consumer Reports; or buy a car's detailed history through businesses like Carfax or Experian Automotive. (With both, consumers can buy one report for about $20 or unlimited reports over a specified period for about $25.) Consumers should also have a car checked by a mechanic or certified inspector before buying it. Car experts say that buyers should look for models built since the late 1990's, when manufacturers started paying closer attention to how well cars held up in accidents and routinely included safety features like air bags. They say that buyers shopping for newer models should look for side-impact air bags with head protection, which have been shown to reduce the risk of death in an accident by 45 percent. Gabriel Shenhar, senior auto test engineer for Consumer Reports, recommends looking for cars that have stability systems like Electronic Stability Program or Electronic Stability Control, which help keep vehicles on course in emergency situations. Mr. Gamache suggests that it is |
1712459_4 | Why Look at the Road When There's So Much Going On Inside? | new technology come new problems. One complaint that Jerry Goedicke has about all the gear in his 2005 Acura RL, which offers Bluetooth, the OnStar communications service developed by General Motors and keyless ignition, among other things, is that he is never sure how to diagnose a problem in the systems. For instance, take the real-time traffic information. Data is provided by XM satellite radio and the in-car satellite communications system in 22 cities and is displayed on Mr. Goedicke's navigation screen. At times when he's driving near his San Francisco-area home, he said, the icons that tell him if there is traffic or an accident ahead disappear from his screen. ''I have no clue if the problem is with the car, with the XM radio, or with the information being provided from government sources,'' he said. ''There are so many pieces to the system that you have no idea where to point the finger.'' It may only get worse as manufacturers add more gizmos. Among the toys likely to be popular: a view of the dashboard projected on the window in front of the driver, and a hard disk that can store video games and television programs transferred from a home digital-video recorder, like TiVo. Dr. Strayer, the psychology professor, sees no end in sight to the popularity of gadgets in the car. Until recently, he said, airplane cockpits were becoming weighed down with controls, but the military urged manufacturers to simplify their designs because of concerns about pilot distraction. ''I'm not sure if anyone is going to pressure the auto industry,'' Dr. Strayer said. While he agrees with carmakers who say that drivers have always been distracted by tuning the radio or eating in the car, Dr. Strayer said the new tasks being demanded of drivers are different. ''They tend to require more cognitive skills and use more mental resources,'' he said. Even hands-free devices for cellphones or audio prompts on navigation systems, he said, tend not to help. At least nine studies have shown that holding the phone is not the source of the distraction for the driver. And audio prompts alert drivers to turns by distance; most people give directions by landmarks, which require less brain power. ''When you are paying attention to displays, audio prompts or cellphone conversations,'' Dr. Strayer said, ''you are not processing other information required to see what's coming at you.'' SAFETY |
1712551_2 | Living Hand to Mouth | is a limit to how long you can do that. China's leaders know this and have been taking steps to reverse deforestation and find alternatives to the coal-powered electricity plants that have turned cities like Shenzhen into just one big gray cloud. One thing the Chinese government is doing is changing how local, state and national officials are judged. G.D.P. growth is not the only metric anymore. ''During the transition period from planned economy to a market economy, there was a period when the economic indicators were the only criteria, because we had to develop the economy,'' Shanghai's deputy mayor, Feng Guoquin, told me. Today, however, more and more Chinese citizens demand that their local officials ''pay equal attention to economic development and ecological protection.'' But given that the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party rests largely on its ability to keep raising living standards, it can't afford a recession and mass unemployment -- in any crunch, officials will always choose raw growth. The party cannot afford a recession, and it also has to extend growth to the still impoverished rural areas. But many of those villages are already boiling because, while villagers crave jobs, they resent the deforestation, dams and polluted rivers that have already been dumped on them by the big cities. So I'm glad that Donald Rumsfeld finally came over to China to talk with China's military last week, but that is so 20th century. How China uses its growing military is purely hypothetical. What China's impact on the global environment will be if it continues to grow at this pace is a certain disaster -- for China and the world. Tighter regulation alone won't save China's environment, or the world's. Since logging in most natural forests was banned here in 1998, China's appetite for imported wood has led to stripped forests in Russia, Africa, Burma and Brazil. China outsourced its environmental degradation. That is why you need an integrated solution. And that is why the most important strategy the U.S. and China need to pursue, in concert, is one that brings business, government and N.G.O.'s together to produce a more sustainable form of development -- so China can create a model for itself and others on how to do more things with less stuff and fewer emissions. That is the economic, environmental and national security issue of our day. Nothing else is even close. Op-Ed Columnist |
1712460_2 | More Complex Cars And Stricter Rules Lead to More Recalls | automobile industry's most notorious recalls, faulty tires on Ford Explorers fell apart at high speeds, causing the sport-utility vehicles to flip in some instances. The new law, known as the Tread Act, requires automakers to provide the federal government with quarterly reports on potential safety issues in addition to reporting problems that arise between the quarterly filings. The law is intended to act as an early warning system, enabling automakers and the government to spot possible safety problems early on and issue recalls quicker. Joan Claybrook, the president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen and a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said the Tread Act was undoubtedly having an impact on the number of recalls. ''Under the law that existed before the Tread Act, what the law said was that when the manufacturer learned of a safety defect, they had to do a recall,'' Ms. Claybrook said. That delayed the recall process, she said, because automakers could issue a recall whenever it suited them. Automakers acknowledge that the Tread Act has had a considerable effect on how often they issue recalls. ''The Tread Act certainly has been an important part of this over the last four or five years,'' said Bob Ottolini, the executive director of product development quality at General Motors, the world's largest automaker. ''All of us, certainly General Motors has, put into place much more rigorous processes to understand our data.'' Among this year's largest recalls were those caused by safety problems that were caught by the early-detection system. The largest one, involving nearly four million Ford F-150's, Expeditions and Lincoln Navigators, was issued by the company after the safety agency noticed numerous fires in the vehicles and began an investigation. But certainly a more rigorous screening of vehicle data is not the only reason recalls are rising. In August, Jim Press, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales USA, said at a conference that adding more technology to cars had led to what he called an epidemic of recalls, because the more sophisticated a car, the more bugs it can develop. ''It caught up with all of us in 2004,'' Mr. Press said. Safety experts and manufacturers point to several other reasons, including the increasing complexity of automobile engineering and the sharing of parts across multiple vehicle lines; if one part is defective, it can affect many types of |
1712444_1 | Car Manual vs. Repairman: Who Knows Best? | the chart in the back. The subtleties lie within its pages.'' While oil-change shops argue otherwise, few vehicles fall into the ''severe service'' category, which means more frequent maintenance intervals, said Csaba Csere, the editor of Car and Driver magazine. ''It's nonsense to say that severe service is city driving, or driving on one dirt road every six months,'' Mr. Csere said. ''Everyone comes up with reasons for extra service, and most are totally unnecessary.'' But Darrell Amberson, president of the Lehman's Garage chain in the Minneapolis area, said that severe driving was the norm. ''A salesman with a lot of highway driving is doing ideal driving,'' he said. ''Just about everybody else is a severe driver.'' Mr. Csere said it was best to trust the manual. Unfortunately, even those who read the manual often run into contradictory or unclear advice. Some of the most perplexing maintenance practices include: WHEN TO CHANGE THE OIL -- Changing the oil every 3,000 miles, as many quick-lube chains recommend, is usually a waste of money and oil. And cars that use synthetic oils can go much farther without a change. While it is true that severe driving requires more frequent oil changes, there is no consensus on what constitutes severe driving. ''Extreme driving is starting the car, driving 10 miles at low speeds, and then shutting it off,'' said Don Sherman, technical editor for Automobile magazine. ''Then why do engines that only receive 15,000-mile oil changes all seize up?'' asked Rene Gauch, the owner of the German Independent garage in Los Angeles. Mr. Gauch recommends a 7,000-mile change interval with synthetic oil, and a 3,000- to 5,000-mile interval for those who use regular oil. Mr. Eisenstein of TheCarConnection.com added, ''Oil is the one place where you can err on the side of caution.'' PROPER TIRE INFLATION -- Few drivers keep their tires inflated to the right pressure, which manufacturers stress is the amount that they have determined based on the tire and the weight of the car. The ''maximum tire pressure'' embossed on the sidewalls can be more than 20 pounds higher than the pressure that should actually be used. Proper inflation pressures are listed in the manual as well as on a sticker usually located in one of the door sills. Beginning this model year, the manual is the only place to find the right tire pressure for driving in an empty |
1712438_2 | After the Loss of Some Shirts, Lenders Are Leasing Again | imposed. Most important, residuals were pumped up to reduce the amount of the lease principal. This was especially true in the case of S.U.V.'s, which were becoming wildly popular in the 90's. It was not a good idea. Inflating residual values might have seemed like a low-risk idea during the mid- to late 90's, when used-car sales were robust. By the early 2000's, however, formerly leased cars and S.U.V.'s began flooding the used-car market, just as sluggish new-car sales prompted carmakers to offer discounts. Soon, used-vehicle values were falling far below residuals, and lenders were losing their shirts. As a result, the leasing industry lost $10 billion in 2001, Mr. Spinella said. Not surprisingly, that caused many banks to swear off leasing. As interest rates declined, no-interest loans and hefty rebates enticed consumers to buy once again. Buy they did -- including consumers who had become disenchanted with leasing because of penalties incurred when they turned in cars. But leasing remained popular among some luxury-car customers, primarily for tax reasons. For example, 40 to 50 percent of Mercedes-Benz vehicles are leased, a figure that has not changed appreciably in the last decade, said Jürgen Rochert, vice president of the Mercedes-Benz Credit Corporation. The numbers are about the same for BMW, said Bob Devine, president of BMW Financial Services in the United States. Now, for several reasons, leasing has become popular again. Predictions of residual values have become more reliable, said Gary Tucker, senior vice president for financial services and insurance at J.D. Power & Associates. Over the last few years, used-car prices have stablilized, except for a recent drop resulting from the extension of employee discount programs on new cars to all customers. Interest rates, meanwhile, have been rising, meaning that loans cost more and average car loan terms are lengthening. ''More than 30 percent of car loans are now 72 months or longer,'' Mr. Tucker said. ''For many consumers, that makes leasing an attractive alternative way to a lower monthly payment.'' Auto manufacturers are also changing the way they price cars. ''Dealers used to have enough margin in a car and cash incentives to cover it,'' Mr. Tucker said, referring to the amounts needed for a down payment or to pay off a consumer's old car loan. ''But their ability to do this is now reduced.'' With lease financing, on the other hand, the automakers' finance units are often |
1712430_0 | ODDS AND ENDS: Picnicking, Defogging and Making Fuel Go Further; Leave the Scraper in the Trunk | WITH the leaves already changing, it won't be long before many people find themselves scraping snow and ice off the windshield on wintry mornings. With that in mind, no doubt, General Motors has introduced two car models for 2006 -- the Cadillac DTS and Buick Lucerne -- that will come equipped with heated windshield fluid that clears and de-ices the glass. The act of scraping his windshield, says Solomon Franco, caused him to ask why a civilization that can send men to the moon has not discovered how to automatically clear windshields of snow and ice. Mr. Franco, who was a law student in England at the time, founded Microheat Inc. in Farmington Hills, Mich., in the late 1990's to develop the technology, now patented, for heating the windshield fluid, called HotShot, and took it to market in late 2002. G.M. is the first automaker to use the product as standard equipment on its cars. MICHELLE KREBS |
1707844_2 | G.E. Commits to Dredging 43 Miles of Hudson River | yards of PCB-contaminated sediment. The remaining mud, in which the contamination is lighter but spread over a much larger area, would be dredged in the second phase, a project that would last five years and cost about $500 million. Federal officials said that if G.E. decided not to cooperate in the second phase, the government would use legal means to force the company to do the work, or would undertake the cleanup itself and bill G.E. ''We have made a commitment to all parties that this cleanup is going to get done, and we are unequivocal about this,'' said Alan J. Steinberg, regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, which filed the consent decree with G.E. in federal court in Albany. Community organizations like Scenic Hudson, which has been fighting for years to get G.E. to remove the PCB's, were disappointed with the consent decree. ''Unfortunately, this is exactly what we would expect from G.E.: a lack of commitment to cleaning up their mess,'' said Rich Schiafo, Scenic Hudson's environmental project manager. ''G.E. has fought a cleanup tooth and nail, and they're still not making a full commitment.'' Robert Goldstein, a lawyer with the environmental group Riverkeeper, said he was skeptical that the agreement would lead to the removal of all the PCB's. Because the company will be operating the dredges and monitoring the work, Mr. Goldstein said, it could make a case that dredging does not work, justifying a decision to drop Phase 2. George Pavlou, the environmental agency's Superfund director for the New York region, said dredging had been conceived as a two-phase process since at least 2002. Doing so, he said, allows the work in Phase 1 to be evaluated by an independent panel ''to determine whether engineering and quality of life standards will be achieved in such a way that they do not do more harm than good.'' G.E. will have until August 2008 to decide whether to go forward with Phase 2. Gary Sheffer, a spokesman, said the company had already shown its willingness to cooperate with the cleanup. G.E. has spent more than $100 million taking samples from the river bottom and designing a dredging plan. It has agreed to build a processing plant in Fort Edward, about 45 miles north of Troy, that will be large enough to handle all 2.65 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment over the life of the project. |
1707787_5 | Uninvited Guest Turns Up at Catholic Synod: Issue of Married Priests | it to everyone every Sunday,'' Bishop Theotonius Gomes of Bangladesh said in an interview between sessions. ''You try to get it to as many people as you can.'' In many places, lay people lead church services that are not actual Masses, and they cannot consecrate the bread and wine. Cardinal Angelo Scola of Venice, the church official leading the synod, has appeared to play down the problem of a priest shortage, though. He said the eucharist was a gift, not a right. ''The church is not a business that can determine in rigorous terms how many priests it needs,'' he said Monday. But even if the problems seem clear to many bishops, the solutions are not. The church has ruled out opening the priesthood to women. Some liberal groups, which have little voice in the church anyway, are pushing to do away with mandatory celibacy -- a position opposed by many others in the church as being contrary to longstanding Roman Catholic practice and theology. ''It's kind of a defining thing,'' Bishop Aloysius M. Sutrisnaatmaka of Indonesia said in an interview, adding that he would oppose any change in celibacy rules. ''It's a very spiritual thing.'' Still, there are already some exceptions: Eastern Rite priests, and married Anglican priests who convert. Synod working papers note that many bishops are calling for a serious discussion of ordaining married men who have proved themselves in service to the church. In the next two weeks, bishops will vote on the issues that most concern them and send their recommendations to Benedict. His own position is unclear, though he has said bluntly in the past that a shrinking church may be an irreversible trend. Still, many experts say the church will have to confront the question or face a church with substantial changes. ''It's a bit like the church has decided to play the game of baseball but it's lost all of its pitchers,'' said Mr. Young, the American sociologist. ''You can go out and try to do that, and give it great thought and great reflection. But if you don't have that pitcher, it's not the same game.'' Correction: October 13, 2005, Thursday An article on Friday about a new openness in discussion of church issues at a Roman Catholic synod in Rome referred incorrectly to the status of deacons. They are considered clergy members with restricted functions, not members of the laity. |
1706969_0 | The American Church and the Ban on Gay Priests | To the Editor: Re ''Americans Plan Rome Trip Over Ban on Gay Priests'' (news article, Sept. 30): It seems that many monks and priests want to remain gay. But if gays can be allowed as priests, why doesn't the church allow married people to become priests? It seems to me, a Catholic from India, that in the West the priesthood has become just another profession. In the East, we look at priests as men who have renounced all worldly pleasures for a spiritual and holy life. If someone is not capable of dedicating his life to God, let him not choose the priesthood. G. Joseph New City, N.Y., Sept. 30, 2005 |
1708349_0 | IN THE REGION/New Jersey; Building a Town's Future, Ready or Not | THERE is a huge hole in the ground in downtown Montclair, and on one recent Saturday, that seemed a great reason for developers to put on a music show. There was opera; there was jazz; there was dixieland and rock 'n' roll on a stage set up at the long-dormant corner of South Park and Church Streets, attracting throngs of shoppers and diners. The reason for joy about a supersize divot in the downtown? This hole was formerly the site of the Hahne's department store building, notorious in Montclair and beyond for squatting on a prime retail corner for 15 years without any tenants, while succeeding generations of town politicians, brokers and builders bickered over what should become of it -- and indeed, what should become of downtown Montclair. The Hahne's structure is finally gone. It was demolished last summer after a complicated redevelopment deal was struck, permitting one set of developers to build a seven-story 101-unit condominium project with street-level shops on the site, and a rival developer to build a condo-hotel project on a parking lot across Church Street. The foundation is now being poured for the Siena condo development, which will feature one-, two- and three-bedroom units priced at $300,000 to more than $1 million. The first list of interested buyers' names was taken on Sept. 24 at the street music festival sponsored by the developers, Pinnacle Downtown and Kohl Partners, to provide fanfare for the start of marketing. The project represents the first large-scale mixed-use development to occur in several decades in this town of slightly less than 40,000, situated 12 miles west of Manhattan. It comes only after years of wrangling -- and perhaps fittingly, amid ongoing debate concerning what the character and tone of downtown Montclair should be. Its developers bill the Siena as a luxury building, with a design inspired by the lovely city in Tuscany from which it takes its name. ''The lobby will be a gorgeous, sort-of-modern Italianate style with marble and granite finishes, and a mosaic water wall,'' said a Pinnacle vice president, Mary Boorman. ''The homes will be first-class, with hardwood floors, granite countertops, marble bathrooms and a prime location, right in the thick of everything in Montclair.'' Montclair's quirky appeal -- veggie delis, foreign film houses and art galleries are rife -- is being marketed as a major amenity, Ms. Boorman asserted. Meanwhile, debate rages around town about |
1708476_0 | Disabled in Turkey: Ankara Defends Its Record | To the Editor: ''Turkey's Disabled'' (editorial, Sept. 30) attributes Turkey's record in caring for the mentally disabled to its supposed lack of a ''culture of rights.'' To the contrary, Turkey's record over the last two decades has been marked by a steady and dramatic expansion in individual rights and personal freedoms. Such reforms have multiplied as Turkey has prepared for accession talks with the European Union. Addressing the needs of the mentally disabled is a challenge for many countries, as cited in numerous reports issued by the organization that recently studied some of Turkey's facilities. My government is looking into the serious issues raised in this report and is committed to addressing any deficiencies in the treatment of the mentally disabled that may exist in Turkey. No lack of rights is impeding our ability or desire to provide for the welfare of our citizens. Engin Soysal Deputy Chief of Mission Turkish Embassy Washington, Oct. 3, 2005 |
1708350_3 | Information, Please | first response, several programs to ensure a smooth flow of information have been successfully implemented. Still, communicating effectively with the public will put all this training to the test. And that, in the end, is often how residents judge a government's response. Did they tell me what to do, where to go, how to go? New Jersey has one of the highest per capita Internet-access rates in the nation. State leaders should take advantage of this when thinking about how to ensure proper communication with residents. If all other telecommunications systems have shut down, one that will continue to work is Wi-Fi. Yes, the same service provided by Starbucks and most libraries. It is inexpensive to build and maintain and runs on less wattage than one light bulb. This means that a household generator, car battery or even a single solar panel could provide enough power to maintain the system when all else has shut down. Since Wi-Fi can handle Internet telephone service, the 911 and 211 systems could both still be used to enable the government to communicate with the public in this Internet-savvy state. At the same time, since Wi-Fi can be localized, neighbors can talk with one another to make sure that no one is left behind. Indeed, combining Wi-Fi with the oldest form of communication -- mouth to mouth -- creates a safety net government officials must not overlook. New Jersey has spent almost half a billion dollars in federal Homeland Security funds in just the last two years. Working through county and municipal governments, Wi-Fi systems could be created for pennies compared with the money spent so far. In the end, much has been done to create a program that will protect New Jerseyans. But, if the system fails to properly communicate with the citizens, we can expect disastrous results. State officials should take advantage of a cheap, easy-to-use technology to make sure they are able to communicate effectively with all levels of government and the public. After all, New Jersey has consistently been a leader in telecommunications technology. To help make sure that what happened in the aftermath of Katrina never happens here, we must guarantee a sound investment in the right communications tools. SOAPBOX Bob Sommer is executive vice president of the public affairs firm MWW Group and lecturer at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. |
1708594_5 | In a Classical World, Nerds Walk With Gods | have to stay true to 'The Iliad' and traditional mythology,'' they wrote in one of the 16 community rules listed for the site. ''Cassandra can have a fling with Aeneas, but she can't go to Italy with him, because it didn't happen.'' But why would these stories, written more than 2,000 years ago, appeal to teenagers today? ''Are you kidding?'' asked Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr., 57, president of the American Classical League. ''Those are great stories!'' Mr. Kitchell, who helped start what he calls ''the great counteroffensive'' in the 1970's against the decline of Latin in the United States, seems to be onto something. Kelsey Turbeville, 18, a freshman at Wellesley College in Massachusetts said she had to hold back tears when she translated the part in 'The Iliad' where Hector dies. ''I was on the subway,'' she said, ''so I managed not to cry.'' At Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, students present a statue of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, with offerings like balloons and glow sticks. Ms. Burton of Exeter said, ''I never feel that sense of being casually close to other writers the way I do to Catullus or Cicero. I imagine the modern scenario of what Catullus would write if he had a blog, or what Cicero would say if he went on Fox News.'' FOR Zach Herz, 19, a sophomore at the University of Chicago, ancient literature has an appeal that goes beyond the words themselves. ''What the classics give you is an understanding of our culture as the last expression of forces that have been in play for thousands of years,'' he said. ''It makes you a little bit more modest, makes you understand that you're part of something big, of this great cultural thing that will go on after you're dead and that started before you ever were born.'' And as for his thoughts on ''Troy,'' he said it's a modern reflection of a different time. ''The Greeks were comfortable with gods ruling their lives in a way that we're not. Instead of being a movie about Zeus and Poseidon and all that, it's a story about Brad Pitt. Brad Pitt is apparently our new god.'' Correction: October 16, 2005, Sunday An article last Sunday about young Americans studying Latin and ancient Greek misstated the number of families, or declensions, in which nouns are grouped in Latin grammar. There are five, not four. |
1708178_0 | DEALS & DISCOUNTS | SHOPPING IN DENVER -- The Hotel Teatro, the boutique hotel across from the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, has a Fall Shopping Getaway package through Dec. 1. Guests pay $165 a night (normally $235) for a standard room with queen bed or $195 a night (normally $265) for a superior room with king bed. Also included is transportation to shopping, a discount card and an in-room aromatherapy bath (normally $15). Taxes of 13.85 percent are extra. Call (888) 727-1200 or see www.hotelteatro.com. FAMILY HOLIDAY IN BOSTON -- The Colonnade, a 285-room hotel in the Back Bay area of Boston, is offering families two connecting rooms for $349 a night (normally $518) plus 12.45 percent tax from Nov. 15 through March 31. Also included is free breakfast at Brasserie Jo in the hotel; call (800) 962-3030 or see www.colonnadehotel.com. CRUISES IN CHINA -- Victoria Cruises is again offering 40 percent discounts on cruises along the Yangtze River in China from December through mid-March. These trips are between the cities of Chongqing and Yichang and include a chance to tour the huge Three Gorges Dam project. Among them are a one-way, four-day, three-night cruise downstream from Chongqing to Yichang and a five day, four night cruise upstream from Yichang. Prices for either trip start at $450 a person, double occupancy. Off-ship excursions start at $60. Air fare is not included. Call (800) 348-8084 or see www.victoriacruises.com. PAMELA NOEL |
1708142_2 | Hey Hey, We're the Monkeys | to read the book to learn the details. There you'll also find details of chimpanzee violence. Infanticide, de Waal tells us, is a leading cause of death among chimps, both in zoos and in the wild. One reason bonobos engage in so much sex is to prevent rival males from killing their babies. If everybody has sex with everybody else, there's no saying who's the daddy. Like humans, chimps can be ruthless toward individuals who are not part of their troop. De Waal explains that large-brained animals capable of using empathy to do kind things for others are also capable of great cruelty, because they can imagine what their victims will feel. One of the most shocking incidents he describes occurred at Gombe National Park in Tanzania, where a group of chimps lived peacefully for years. As youngsters they played and groomed one another, but the group gradually drifted apart and formed two new groups. Chimps that had known one another for years were now in conflict. ''Shocked researchers watched as former friends now drank each other's blood. Not even the oldest community members were left alone. An extremely frail-looking male, Goliath, was pummeled for 20 minutes and dragged about.'' De Waal compares this horrible chimp behavior to genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia. With chimps, as with humans, fighting within one's own group is restrained compared with attacks on outsiders. De Waal does not discuss the possible genetic implications of many of his observations. Animals who have high-fear genetics are less inclined to be aggressive because they are afraid to fight, and stressful, scary situations can affect them more dramatically. When bombs fell on Munich during World War II, de Waal tells us, all the bonobos in the zoo died of heart failure, but all the chimps survived. Unfortunately, he does not discuss how these differences in fearfulness might affect social behavior. Fear and other traits, like aggression and sociability, have a strong genetic component. In my own work with antelopes, I have observed huge differences in the startle and fear response between individual animals. It is likely that there may be genetic differences between the most peaceful and most violent chimps. Also, since I am a person with autism, I do not agree with de Waal's view that emotions are required for making choices and storing memories. I use my visual thinking all the time to make logical choices. |
1708131_2 | Vanished Americans | the significance of everything from haplogroups to glottochronology to landraces. He offers amusing asides to some of his adventures across the hemisphere during the course of his research, but unlike so many contemporary journalists, he never lets his personal experiences overwhelm his subject. Instead, Mann builds his story around what we want to know -- the ''Frequently Asked Questions,'' as he heads one chapter. He moves nimbly back and forth from the earliest prehistoric humans in the Americas to the Pilgrims' first encounter with the Indian they (mistakenly) called ''Squanto''; from the villages of the Amazon rain forests to Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, the sole, long-vanished city of the North American Mound Builders; from the cultivation of maize to why it was that the Incas apparently developed the wheel but never used it as anything but a child's toy. Mann remains resolutely agnostic on some of the fiercest debates. What he is most interested in showing us is how American Indians -- like all other human beings -- were intensely involved in shaping the world they lived in. He is sure that ''many though not all Indians were superbly active land managers -- they did not live lightly on the land.'' Just how they did live, so long uninfluenced by the vast majority of the world's population in Africa and Eurasia, forms the bulk of his fascinating narrative. What emerges is an epic story, with a subtly altered tragedy at its heart. For all the European depredations in the Americas, the work of conquest was largely accomplished for them by their microbes, even before the white men arrived in any great numbers. The diseases brought along by the very first unwitting Spanish conquistadors, and probably by English fishermen working the New England coast, very likely triggered one of the greatest catastrophes in human history. Before the 16th century, there may have been as many as 90 million to 112 million people living in the Americas -- people who could be as different from each other ''as Turks and Swedes,'' but who had cumulatively developed an incredible range of natural environments, from seeding the Amazon Basin with fruit trees to terracing the mountains of Peru. (Even the term ''New World'' may be a misnomer; it is possible that the world's first city was in South America.) Then, disaster. According to some estimates, as much as 95 percent of the Indians |
1708440_0 | Baby Food, Out From the (Very) Cold | ''PALTRY'' may be too kind a word to describe the current sales of frozen baby food. Of the 296 categories of supermarket products tracked by Information Resources, a market research firm, it ranked 295th over the 52-week period that ended May 15. It was behind such supermarket esoterica as soap dishes (292nd), produce rinse (289th) and meat pies (277th). The baby food market is instead dominated by jarred purées, processed to ensure long shelf lives. They are also, according to Dominique Stevens, a former marketing manager at Sun Microsystems, pallid in color and wan in flavor. So when her daughter was born in 2002, Ms. Stevens took to cooking batches of pulped peas and carrots, then freezing them for future use. On infant play dates, other mothers complimented Ms. Stevens on her food's rich green and orange hues. ''You can really see the difference in the colors,'' she said. The praise gave her an idea, one that has surely occurred to countless other parents with heads for business: to sell baby food commercially. Ms. Stevens thus founded Golden Gate Brands, based in Mill Valley, Calif., whose sole product line is Loving Spoonfuls Organic Baby Food. The easy part was developing the recipes, which consist of nothing more than organic fruits and vegetables, and spring water. Once blended, the foods are placed into plastic cups and flash frozen. The more arduous task was jumping through several regulatory hoops. As Ms. Stevens quickly discovered, starting a baby food company is not as easy as, say, starting a company that makes clothes or toys. For safety reasons, state and federal governments frown on the commercial sale of home-cooked food. Ms. Stevens had to enroll in a local Better Process Control School, a cram course approved by the Food and Drug Administration. Only graduates of such a school can legally supervise a food processing and packaging plant. She had to ace 16 different exams before receiving her certification, answering questions regarding correct chlorination techniques and the four methods of crimping a tin lid. (Ms. Stevens sheepishly acknowledged that she had forgotten that last answer.) Using personal savings, Ms. Stevens bought the necessary manufacturing equipment -- including a machine she described as a giant Cuisinart -- and moved it into an industrial space. Detailed records are kept of every batch that moves out the door. ''The F.D.A. should be able to come at any time |
1713880_2 | Funds Fade, Deaths Rise and Iraq Rebuilding Is Spotty | the money woes have. ''What you have to keep in mind is the chilling effect of that many deaths and that many injuries,'' Mr. Barton said. ''I think the numbers are huge.'' The report also outlines what it calls ''steady progress'' in parts of the American-financed rebuilding program, despite what is described as ''the hazardous security environment, the fluid political situation, and the harsh realities of working in a war zone.'' Some 1,887 of 2,784 rebuilding projects have been completed, by the American government's own count, and progress has been made in coming up with estimates for how much it will cost to complete the remaining work. Those estimates are needed to determine how many of the projects will have to be cut. The projects include water treatment plants, oil pump stations, electricity generators and power lines, police stations, border posts, schools, clinics, roads and post offices. Aside from the security bills, rising materials costs, delays and repeated changes in the priorities in rebuilding have contributed to the financial challenges. ''I think that the report confirms what we have been saying for some time -- that we continue to make progress in rebuilding Iraq,'' said Lt. Col. Barry Venable, a Pentagon spokesman. Regarding the shortcomings detailed by the report on the ability of the United States government to gauge that progress, Colonel Venable said, ''There's a war going on, so not everything can be known, but there's certainly a desire to discover'' more complete information. A spokeswoman for the State Department, which now largely oversees the rebuilding effort, , ''We welcome and value the independent oversight.'' She spoke under department ground rules that require anonymity. ''Their objective findings have helped improve transparency, accountability and efficiency as we work with the Iraqi people to establish an independent, stable and prosperous Iraq,'' she said. The five electrical substations examined by the inspector general's office, which is led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., were built in southern Iraq at a cost of $28.8 million. ''The completed substations were found to be well planned, well designed and well constructed,'' the report says. Unfortunately, the system for distributing power from the completed substations was largely nonexistent. ''No date for installing the distribution system was given,'' the report says. Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who travels extensively in Iraq, said problems like that illustrated why the official American government statistics on |
1708693_2 | Trade Chief Makes Offer To Reduce Crop Subsidies | is scheduled to be reached by the end of 2006. But Mr. Bush also has received strong pressure from members of his own party and from many Democrats not to touch the politically popular subsidies. As a result, the United States has resisted going first, saying other nations must indicate how much they will cut tariffs that put American farm exports at a tremendous disadvantage. Mr. Portman, in his article in the Financial Times, urged ''ambitious tariff reduction'' with cuts of 55 percent to 90 percent over five years. Those would hurt many other nations more than they would hurt the United States, which generally has had somewhat lower tariffs than other rich nations, with some exceptions for products that have long had political protection. He also proposed a 60 percent cut by the United States in some kinds of farm subsidy programs. But it is unclear if that is enough for America's trading partners, especially Europe and Japan. ''All countries must also simultaneously deliver real market access,'' Mr. Portman wrote. European leaders have agreed to eliminate all export subsidies for farm products, but they still have high tariff barriers and pay tens of billions of dollars a year in farm subsidies. The United States has lower tariffs on most farm imports, but it retains high barriers for products like sugar and orange juice -- both of which have powerful lobbies in Washington -- and it pays out billions of dollars in subsidies to producers of cotton, corn, beef and other commodities. In a speech Thursday to the Commodity Club in Washington, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns said the United States needed to use the World Trade Organization ''to force open markets for U.S. products'' and called for the country to present bold proposals instead of clinging to a farm program ''that is wed to the past.'' ''We can sit back and watch as our farm policy is disassembled piece by piece,'' Mr. Johanns said, ''or we can begin a discussion about how to craft farm policy that provides a low-risk, meaningful safety net for our farmers and ranchers.'' The reluctance by the United States and the European Union to reduce tariffs on imported crops and subsidies for domestic farmers has been assailed by large developing countries, including Brazil and India, which are demanding more access for their own farm products in exchange for lowering barriers to manufactured goods and services. |
1708738_0 | Pakistani Immigrants Receive Scant Information But Mobilize to Assist Victims of Quake | For 18 hours after a powerful earthquake hit Pakistan early Saturday, Mohammad Javed Iqbal, a livery cabdriver in New York City, tried in vain to telephone his relatives. But phone lines into their town of about 30,000 in the North-West Frontier Province were jammed or not working for hours, he said. Finally, he reached his son Bahadur Khan, 25, who, weeping, told him how two cousins, Aurang Zad Khan, 70, and Aujaman Ara, 35, were unable to flee their crumbling home when the quake struck. ''The wall collapsed on them and they died,'' Mr. Iqbal, 66, said yesterday in the section of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn known as Little Pakistan. His eyes brimmed with sadness and fury above his flowing white beard as he described how their bodies were pulled from the rubble. ''Now the women and children are under the sky, they are living outside.'' Across the New York metropolitan region, where an estimated 120,000 people of Pakistani descent live, many echoed Mr. Iqbal's experience in struggling to learn the fate of family and friends caught in the earthquake. It has not been easy. Telephone service into the country has periodically failed since the quake, and even if a connection is made, there is no guarantee of reaching family or friends in the remote region. ''Not everyone has a phone in their house and that's the thing,'' said Mohammad Razvi, the executive director of the Council of Peoples Organization, a grass-roots network in Brooklyn that serves Pakistani, Indian and Afghan immigrants. Mr. Razvi said that families in the affected areas were trying to pass word of their conditions to neighbors who had telephones. For many relatives in New York City, with scant information available, there was a mounting sense of helplessness and frustration as images on several Pakistani satellite television channels showed the destruction and despair. Some Pakistanis have found an outlet planning charity drives. At the Makki mosque on Coney Island Avenue, where Ramadan prayer services were under way, a money collection for the victims was being organized. In Jackson Heights, Queens, the Ambassador Restaurant planned to hold a fund-raiser timed to end with the breaking of the daily fast observed during Ramadan. Unsolicited donations of clothing have already begun to be dropped off outside the council's office along the southern end of Coney Island Avenue, Mr. Razvi said. ''The people, I can tell you, they're more |
1708808_0 | Guatemalan Village Overwhelmed by Task of Digging Out Hundreds of Dead From Mud | Hundreds of men in the Guatemalan Indian village of Panabáj hacked with hoes and shovels on Saturday at the river of mud about a half mile wide and as deep as 20 feet that hit their town last week. As rescue workers and relatives of the dead arrived Saturday, villagers handed out native herbs and told the visitors to press the leaves into their noses to fend off the smell of decomposing bodies. At a jury-rigged mobile mortuary, 10 husky men in the back of a pickup truck, equipped with a few crude coffins, long nylon bags and a gallon of bleach stood ready to haul decaying remains away. ''There is no time for funerals,'' said Nicolás Pablo Tzina, the leader of the crew. ''But we want to find our beloved people and bury them with dignity.'' Mayor Diego Esquina of Santiago Atitlán, the nearby municipality that oversees the village, estimated that as many as 400 people lay dead beneath the mudslide, making this one of the areas hardest hit by the rainstorms spawned last week by Hurricane Stan. The rains, which started gently last weekend and then turned torrential, caused a trail of death and destruction from southern Mexico -- where an estimated 20 people were killed, 70 rivers overran their banks, 30 bridges fell and more than 150,000 people were left homeless -- to El Salvador, where an estimated 71 people died and about 65,000 were left homeless. Newspapers across Central America described the storm as the worst natural disaster to hit the region since Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm with winds of up to 180 miles per hour that killed about 9,000 people in 1998. In Guatemala, however, Stan, a much weaker Category 1 hurricane that swept across the region with 80 m.p.h. winds, hurt worse. Vice President Eduardo Stein described the damage as ''colossal'' in a television interview on Sunday. Guatemalan authorities reported that the death toll went up again on Sunday, to 652 people from the 508 that had been reported Saturday. About 130,000 had been left homeless in Guatemala, authorities said, and three million more had been left without electricity, water and other basic services. Landslides, Mr. Stein said, had been reported on hundreds of mountains and had damaged nearly 2,500 miles of highway, leaving most of the entire northern province of San Marcos cut off from aid. An American helicopter unit from |
1713051_1 | Green Dreams in Shangri-La | they are making the cities unlivable, but if it just pushes them into the countryside, they will destroy way too much of China's farmland, and the natural areas that are the home of things like Tibetan culture. The living Buddha, Ang Weng, is right in the middle of this drama, trying to promote a higher living standard for his people -- without destroying the ''sacred forests'' essential to Tibetan spirituality. The living Buddha wears a sunny smile and a cowboy hat. His wife, who makes a mean butter tea, a traditional Tibetan drink, translated from his Tibetan dialect into Chinese for my translator. He got right to the point: ''The human brain is moving much faster into the modern world than the environment, and this fast move is having an impact on the environment. Build this and build that, and you lose the environment.'' The good, and surprising, news I found in Shangri-La was how much the poor villagers here were coming up with their own green growth solutions. For instance, the 39 families in the village of Hamugu have bundled their savings to build a lodge for ecotourists drawn by the wetlands. ''We just need a Web site,'' the manager told me. A local botanist has built Shangri-La Alpine Botanic Garden, which employs two dozen people and shares profits with the local village. It also has the finest public toilet I've ever used, a solar-powered composting toilet with an automated plastic green seat cover -- in the middle of nowhere! It was labeled ''The Lavatory of Environmental Protection of the Travel.'' A U.S. multinational, 3M, is financing the restoration of the local forests to reduce climate change and protect the watersheds. And the old log-and-mud town of Zhongdian here is a Disneyland-like traditional Tibetan village, with hot-pot restaurants that attract droves of Chinese tourists. ''All the basic elements of a network solution to safeguard environment and culture are here,'' said Lu Zhi, Conservation International's director in China and my traveling companion. (My wife's a C.I. board member.) ''But the challenge is how do you organize this business-N.G.O.-government network more effectively so you can provide ecofriendly alternatives to industrial development that could be replicated in the rest of rural China.'' Not only would this be enormously important for China's environment, but it could also be a model for other developing countries. What we don't want is for China to protect |
1712992_0 | Will Revenue Sharing Survive Mara's Death? | One of the last times that Gene Upshaw, the executive director of the N.F.L. Players Association, spoke to Wellington Mara was at the Super Bowl in February. Mara, the Giants' co-owner who died at age 89 Tuesday, will be eulogized this morning at St. Patrick's Cathedral as one of the towering figures in National Football League history. His support of the decision in the early 1960's to share television revenue with all teams was the bedrock of the business model that helped to create parity in the N.F.L. and made it the most popular and lucrative sports league in the United States. In February, Mara and Upshaw spoke about revenue sharing. It has again become a central issue for owners, who are facing disagreement in their ranks over how much of locally generated revenue -- like that produced by luxury suites and stadium naming rights -- should be shared among the 32 teams. ''He said that I had to stay on this,'' Upshaw said of Mara in a telephone interview Wednesday night. ''He was very adamant about his position on it. We're all going to be at the services, but we cannot forget the principles and integrity and what he stood for. He did it and now it's what every other league is trying to do.'' And what would the N.F.L. be like if not for Mara's foresight? ''It would be just like baseball,'' Upshaw said. ''It would have been very easy for him to say, 'I have the largest market and I don't want to share.' Which is what we have going on right now. We do have a group who believes the reason they have success is they're so much smarter than everyone else. I'm not begrudging them for having that thought, but they have to understand where it all came from and why.'' A small group of owners that includes the Redskins' Daniel Snyder and the Cowboys' Jerry Jones want to keep a larger portion of local revenues, believing that they should not hand over the money their franchises make because of their entrepreneurial efforts. But there is concern among other owners that a plan that allows teams with an explosion of revenue -- almost always teams that play in new or refurbished stadiums with luxury suites -- could create competitive imbalance in a league that thrives on parity. But the high-revenue owners counter that they need |
1713104_3 | 100-M.P.H. Winds Crumple Sugar Cane, a Staple of Florida Economy | back to normal.'' In South Bay, population 4,500, and nearby Clewiston, population 15,000, some hardware and grocery stores opened Thursday and several filling stations were selling gas. During the night, the first government food supplies reached Clewiston. On Thursday morning, more than 100 cars lined up for water, ice and boxes of chicken stew and barbecued beef. Lolita Williams, 42, inched toward the food and water in a tan Pontiac with three other women and two small children. ''I'm hungry till my head hurts,'' Ms. Williams said. The area, heavily populated by migrant workers from Mexico, Jamaica and Haiti, is already one of the poorest in the state. Most fieldworkers have lost nearly a week's pay. Nestor Betancos, who drives sugar cane workers to their fields in a bus, said his bosses had told him, ''We ain't going to be able to work for two weeks to two months.'' ''The cane is all lying down,'' he said. ''And the mills have been damaged, too.'' In addition to sugar, oranges, ornamental plants and vegetables like lettuce, peppers and corn are grown in this area. Many of the vegetables are sold in New York. On Thursday afternoon, Bobby Tony Smith, the city manager of South Bay, paused in a sport utility vehicle west of town as a soldier with an M-16 rifle and three town employees distributed water and food to homes along a main road. Looking out at the damaged cane fields, Mr. Smith said he could not say how many millions of dollars the losses would be. But, he said, ''The windshield view suggests mass devastation to the crops.'' Rick Henderson, the president of Henderson's Sani Service Systems, which provides portable toilets for fieldworkers, said, ''The farmers lost probably 80 percent of their crop.'' ''I imagine this is going to kill our business,'' said Mr. Henderson, who has lived in the area all his life. ''When the farmers get hit, it has a domino effect on the whole area.'' Cuba Accepts U.S. Aid WASHINGTON, Oct. 27 (Reuters) -- Cuba, the longtime American foe whose own offer of help was snubbed by Washington after Hurricane Katrina, has for the first time ''in memory'' accepted American disaster aid, the State Department said Thursday. A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said a three-member American assessment team was on standby to go to Cuba to see what was needed after flooding from the storm. |
1712223_3 | Enduring Incontinence In Silence | is more common in younger women, abdominal pressure increases pressure on the bladder that leads to leaking. Coughing, heavy lifting, running or even a giggling fit can set it off. Urge incontinence, also known as an ''overactive bladder,'' is more common in postmenopausal women. Patients experience an increased urge to urinate along with an inability to delay voiding, so the release of a small amount of liquid on the way to the bathroom may occur. In mixed incontinence, patients have a combination of symptoms. The causes of incontinence vary. Weakness in the muscles or connective tissue in the pelvic floor can be caused by the loss of muscle mass from aging or from trauma in a vaginal delivery. Estrogen changes after menopause have been associated with urge incontinence. In some cases, anatomical abnormalities like a defect in a ligament that holds up the bladder or an instability at the junction where the bladder and the urethra meet may be the cause. Dr. Melville's study found that obese women had a 140 percent increased risk of incontinence, and researchers speculate that an increase in obesity may lead to even higher incidence. One surprising finding in Dr. Melville's study was that depressed women were 148 percent more likely to be affected than nondepressed women were. Neurotransmitters like serotonin that are altered in depression may also cause alterations in brain chemicals that affect the bladder, she said. But, she added, the relationship could also go the other way. ''Incontinence so severely affects some women's quality of life that they may become socially isolated and embarrassed,'' Dr. Melville said. ''And over time, that could lead to depression.'' Another study, presented in September at the annual meeting of the American Urogynecologic Society in Atlanta, found a link between incontinence and postpartum depression. The researchers, from the University of Virginia and the University of Michigan, found that women who suffered depression after giving birth had a higher incidence of urge incontinence than new mothers who were not depressed. While a gynecologist or general practitioner may be the first doctor women consult, patients with complicated cases may be referred to a urogynecologist who specializes in female pelvic floor dysfunction. First-line treatments, especially for stress incontinence, often involve changes in behavior like avoiding caffeine and chocolate, which cause the bladder to contract, and using Kegel exercises to strengthen the levator ani muscles that surround and support the pelvic |
1712246_7 | No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum | extend far beyond the sparsely populated north, contributing to climate and ocean shifts that could dry the American West and possibly slow north-flowing warm currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keep northern Europe milder than it would otherwise be. The effects could also include a sharp increase in the rate at which seas are swelled by melting glacial ice and far greater warming as even more greenhouse gases, locked in permafrost and the Arctic seabed, are liberated by warming. For example, American and Russian scientists studying lakes in northeastern Siberia recently reported that the melt of permafrost is generating methane, a potent greenhouse gas. In spots, so much methane is being released that roiling streams of bubbles prevent the surface from freezing even in the depths of the Siberian winter. The most that can be expected, some climate scientists say, is to limit the human contribution to warming enough to forestall the one truly calamitous, if slow motion, threat in the far north: the melting of Greenland's ice cap. Rising two miles high and spreading over an area twice the size of California, this vast reservoir -- essentially the Gulf of Mexico frozen and flipped onto land -- contains enough water to raise sea levels worldwide more than 20 feet. In recent years, the ice sheets of Greenland have been building in the middle through added snowfall but melting even more around the edges in summer. Many Greenland experts say the melting is already winning out. James E. Hansen, a scientist for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who has been designing simulations of earth's climate for nearly four decades, is among those who say that prompt cuts in emissions can avert a Greenland meltdown. Dr. Hansen said that while the Arctic's amplifying effects, like the transition from white ice to dark water, are substantial, they still occur only when the region is feeling some big external warming influence, like the transport of heat from the rest of a greenhouse-warmed planet. If prompt action is taken to slow growth in carbon dioxide releases, and other, easier efforts are begun to cut emissions of methane, soot and other sources of warming, he said, then it may be possible to retain some summer sea ice and prevent rapid deterioration of the Greenland ice sheet. ''It is physically and technologically possible, but there has to be a will to achieve it,'' Dr. Hansen |
1710370_0 | To Prove You're Serious, Burn Some Bridges | WITH good reason, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences spent a lot of time alluding to apocalyptic nuclear war when it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science last week and never got around to mentioning local movie theaters or phone plans. The prize winners -- Robert J. Aumann and Thomas C. Schelling -- are arguably the only Nobel laureates who can claim to have helped preserve the human race. Their work on game theory during the cold war showed that it was not enough for the Americans and Soviets to be able to destroy each other. To avoid war, each side had to understand the other's power and know that a preemptive attack could not prevent a counterattack. Weapons were actually more important to protect than citizens. Destruction had to be both mutual and assured. But the basic insight -- that lending credibility to a threat or promise often is not as easy as it seems -- has a lot to say about dozens of other matters more mundane than the cold war. If anything, the idea plays a larger role in today's economy, when many transactions are faceless, taking place online or on the phone, than when Professors Aumann and Schelling were making names for themselves in the 1950's. ''This permeates life,'' Mr. Schelling said by telephone from Maryland last week. ''I find it important in dealing with children, dealing with spouses, dealing with neighbors, dealing with customers.'' The biggest problem with making an effective threat is that backing out can be so easy. In fact, it can often be less painful than making good on the threat. Three-year-olds have a particularly keen understanding of this, which is why a piercing scream has defeated many an effort at vegetable feeding. Mr. Schelling, in writings famous for their charming examples, explained how people could make their word seem credible. Some ways are formal, like a cellphone contract. Others are less obvious. These subtler methods usually involve something that seems rather strange on its face: people taking steps to restrict their own options. In effect, they are removing choices that they fear they might later make -- and sending a message to their antagonists. The ancient Greek historian Xenophon, who earns a footnote from Mr. Schelling, argued that putting an army in a corner might improve its odds of victory. The enemy would then know that retreat was not |
1707062_0 | REALLY? | THE CLAIM -- If attacked by a bear, play dead. THE FACTS -- As bear populations from New Jersey to Yellowstone rebound, so do reports of tense human encounters with them. Common wisdom holds that the way to react, when all else fails, is simple: curl up in a ball and play dead. But that is not always the best idea. Attacks can generally be divided into two groups: predatory and defensive. Each calls for a different strategy. Black and grizzly bears are capable of both types of attack. Those involving grizzlies tend to be defensive, when the animal feels threatened, according to Stephen Herrero, a bear expert at the University of Calgary and the author of ''Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance.'' Playing dead then lets the bear know you're not a threat and can cause it to back off. Black bears usually flee from humans, but when they do attack the motive tends to be predatory, and playing dead doesn't work. Neither does running away, since bears are much faster than humans. If the bear is after food, it is best to drop it and back away, Mr. Herrero says. If the animal presses, he adds, be aggressive: shout, bang on objects or use pepper spray to scare it off. The National Parks Service and the National Wildlife Federation recommend similar measures. THE BOTTOM LINE -- Experts do not recommend playing dead if a bear attack appears to be predatory. ANAHAD O'CONNOR Really? |
1707135_0 | The I.R.A. Disarms | To the Editor: Re ''The I.R.A. Finally Risks Disarmament'' (editorial, Sept. 27): The leaders of the Irish Republican Army were not ''balking'' at delivering on disarmament. In return for the I.R.A.'s destruction of arms, the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 required the British to take reciprocal measures of demilitarization. It was the British who balked at instituting the reductions because the military and police sectors are a significant source of jobs for loyalists. Yes, the British did respond to civil rights marches with violence, but it was not isolated and did not end there. For decades after Bloody Sunday in 1972, they corrupted law and justice with internment, arrest without trial and without jury and with systematic anti-Catholic discrimination. You cite ''I.R.A. terror'' in London but not the day in May 1974 when the British Army-loyalist collaboration produced the largest atrocity of the conflict, the Dublin-Monaghan bombings. We fear that your call to the Rev. Ian Paisley to ''demand an end to the mayhem by his community's extremists'' will fall on deaf ears. He got his start by creating mayhem; his message has never changed. Michael J. Cummings Albany, Sept. 27, 2005 The writer is a member of the Irish American Unity Conference's national board. |
1707126_0 | Itineraries; MEMO PAD | REGISTERED TRAVELER TEST -- A 14-month government test of the registered traveler program at five airports ended last week, when the Transportation Security Administration sent e-mail messages to about 10,000 people enrolled in the pilot project, saying that the tryouts were successful and had ''proven the viability of the Registered Traveler Program under real-world conditions.'' With the end of the government-run program, a similar one managed by Verified Identity Pass at Orlando International Airport in Florida remains in operation and, according to its founder, Steven Brill, is poised to expand to other airports. In Mr. Brill's program, called Clear Registered Traveler, members pay $79.95 a year to register their biometric identification data. After a background check by the T.S.A. clears them, members are cleared for expedited treatment that allows them to use designated checkpoint lanes and bypass secondary airport security screening. Mr. Brill said the T.S.A. indicated that certain other checkpoint benefits, like not having to remove jackets and shoes or take laptops from cases, were likely to be added. FLIGHT DELAYS IN AUGUST -- Among the six network airlines, Northwest Airlines had the worst percentage of on-time arrivals in August, according to the monthly Air Travel Consumer Report of the United States Transportation Department. Northwest's domestic flights arrived on schedule only 67.2 percent of the time in August, compared with 80.9 percent for United, 78.3 percent for US Airways, 75.7 percent for Continental, 73.1 percent for American and 70.1 percent for Delta. STRETCHING THOSE MILES -- Not all customers are pleased with the new frequent-flier program announced by US Airways after its merger with America West. Yes, America West frequent fliers will have access to trip awards on US Air's wide range of domestic and international routes (including those on Star Alliance partners), while US Air's frequent fliers will have a lot more choices in domestic routes in the western United States. But many US Air frequent fliers are grumbling because the new rules, which take effect tomorrow, raise the minimum number of miles required for a domestic award ticket to 25,000 from 20,000. US Air has increased the number of annual trip segments required to achieve the top level, Chairman's Preferred, to 120 from 100. The other way to reach the top level, flying 100,000 miles a year, remains unchanged. UPPER OR LOWER BUNK? -- To rein in surging travel costs, corporations might try some unusual experiments -- |
1707215_0 | World Briefing | Africa: Somalia: Pirates Release 2 Ships | Gunmen who held a cargo ship carrying United Nations food aid hostage off the coast of Somalia since June fled the ship in recent days after it ran out of fuel, officials said. The 10-member crew, held for 98 days, has been released, but officials at the World Food Program said they could not yet account for the 850 tons of rice that had been aboard the vessel. The pirates had used the ship to hijack a second ship carrying cement. That ship was also reported to have been released. Marc Lacey (NYT) |
1707549_1 | Pillars of Cultural Capital | Americans who enter college has shot upward. The problem is that students who enter college often find that they are unable to thrive there. As enrollment rates have shot up, completion rates have actually drifted down. And it is students from less-educated families who are dropping out most. The new inequality is different from the old inequality. Today, the rich don't exploit the poor, they just outcompete them. Their crucial advantage is not that they possess financial capital, it's that they possess more cultural capital. Since I wrote that column, I've been inundated with letters and e-mails from people who are working to tackle this problem. The best of these efforts are directed at helping students from less-educated families accumulate what you might call the four pillars of cultural capital. Academic Competence. Students are not going to be able to thrive in college if they graduate from high school doing eighth-grade work. That's why colleges and universities nationwide have decided they can't just wait for students to come to them. They are adopting high schools and creating curriculums designed to prepare students for college work. Charter schools like KIPP Academies are springing up, specializing in tough, intensive college prep for poorer kids. Practical Competence. Surveys show that poorer students understand the importance of college and want to attend. But many adopt a magical worldview, imagining that success will somehow come to them out of the blue. An astonishing number of students register for the SAT tests, but don't bother to show up on exam day. Students do well in high school, but don't fill out college applications because they don't feel like writing the essays. Colleges are now sending out student ambassadors to coach and nag other students through the mundane, day-to-day steps that lead to college admissions and success. Economic confidence. Poorer students are risk-averse. Often overly intimidated by college costs, unwilling to take out student loans, too quick to leave school to get a job, they wind up underinvesting in their education. The great sociologist Daniel Bell suggests that the best response is to shift financial aid into federally financed savings accounts, delivered to students at birth and growing over time, to use to pay for school. Students with these nest eggs would have a greater sense of security and less of a feeling that they were sending their families over an economic precipice. Social Confidence. Elite schools |
1712880_3 | Mammograms Validated as Key In Cancer Fight | to have had mammograms in the prior two years. In 2000, the figure was 70 percent. At the same time, chemotherapy and hormonal therapy with tamoxifen, which blocks the effects of estrogen that can fuel breast cancer, had come on the scene, and their use had spread rapidly. To develop their estimates, the researchers built computer models of the disease, its detection and its treatment, asking whether they could explain the falling death rate from 1990 to 2000. The answer, they all agreed, was that they could explain it only if both mammograms and treatment were having an effect. The debate over mammograms began in the 80's, when the National Cancer Institute questioned their benefits for women in their 40's. In 2002, the British journal Lancet published a paper saying the benefits of mammograms for women of any age were unclear. One group, the P.D.Q., an independent group that analyzes data for the National Cancer Institute to present to the public, said it could no longer tell women that mammograms prevented breast cancer deaths. That group, of which Dr. Harris is a member, said the clinical trials of mammograms had not made a strong case that lives were saved. Just because a cancer is found early, the group added, does not mean that the patient is necessarily better off. Some cancers are curable, no matter when they are found. Others are incurable, no matter when they are found. To know that a screening test works, experts need strong evidence from clinical trials, and the evidence from the mammography trials was just not convincing to them. In response, health organizations, including the American Cancer Society, the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Academy of Family Physicians, took out advertisements saying that mammograms saved lives and that they were concerned that the debate was going to erode women's confidence in the test. In subsequent years, Dr. Harris said, he and others became convinced that mammography could work, in ideal clinical trial settings in studies in Sweden. But he wondered what its effects were in the United States today. ''The question was not whether you could make mammography work under ideal circumstances,'' Dr. Harris said, ''but does it work now, in the real world right now?'' It was a question of particular importance, he said, because treatment was much better than it had been even a decade before and improving day |
1709687_2 | City Slickers Get Advice On Survival Of Wettest | I would guarantee you'd see at least one rainbow a week.'' It might be harder to sustain such optimism in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, which the Guinness Book of World Records rates as the rainiest place in the world. Unsurprisingly, Meghalaya means Land of the Clouds. It receives a whopping average of 39 feet a year of rain. At the front desk of the Hotel Pinewood Ashok in Shillong, the capital city, a man who answered the telephone identified himself as Mr. S.C. Dui. Asked what suggestions he might have for the soggy citizens of New York, he gave this deadpan advice:''Here, we have to keep at home when it rains. We use the umbrella and the raincoat. It is like that.'' Mr. Dui went on to say that it rains in Shillong nearly every day from April to October. ''Generally, in what is called the low pressure time,'' he said, ''we work at home -- sometimes for a week.'' Pedro Novak is a tour operator in Rio de Janeiro, specializing in excursions to the rain forest. He has traveled up and down the Amazon and its tributaries for 15 years to places like the port city of Belem, Brazil. From December to March, he said, it rains in Belem at least three times a day, sometimes so heavily that motorists must pull off the road. He said the native tribesmen often used their canoes as large umbrellas, standing in the shelter of the down-turned hulls. He had no time for whiners in New York. ''Look here,'' he said, as if to them, ''your skin is waterproof. The Indians survive, so so can you.'' The place in the continental United States that gets the most precipitation is Mount Washington, N.H., which, according to the most recent information from the National Climatic Data Center of the Commerce Department, had 101.91 inches of it in 2000. At the top of Mount Washington sits the Mount Washington Observatory, where Neil Lareau, a weather observer, said that, yes, it often rains. To amuse themselves on rainy days, the scientists play something they call fog chicken, Mr. Lareau said: The staff members of the observatory spread out on the cloudbound deck, then rush blindly at one another in the fog. ''The other things we do are bit more standard,'' he said. ''When it's really raining, we just hang out and play some Scrabble.'' |
1709668_2 | Priests Urged To Recruit Young Men For the Pulpit | Vatican investigators have been instructed to visit each seminary in the United States to look for ''evidence of homosexuality'' and see whether seminarians are being properly prepared to live celibately. Father Burns said polls showed that 90 percent of priests were happy in the priesthood and had no regrets. But many priests believe that ''morale is low for everyone else,'' he said, so they hesitate to encourage others to join. He said another factor in the shortage was that contemporary culture discourages commitment of any kind and that many professions requiring service to others like nursing and teaching were also short of candidates. The shortage feeds on itself. More and more priests are in their 60's or older, few have time to work as youth pastors, and many divide their time among multiple parishes, affording little opportunity to mentor future priests, said Mary L. Gautier, senior research associate at the Georgetown center. ''When your pastor is 75 and he's there all by himself, it's hard to imagine that as a role model,'' Ms. Gautier said. The bishops call their new initiative ''Fishers of Men,'' a reference to the biblical account of Jesus' call to two brothers casting their nets at the Sea of Galilee, ''Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.'' The program has been tested in six dioceses, Father Burns said. The plan is for priests to meet in their dioceses, relate histories about how and why they became priests, and learn ways to invite others to join. The program includes a new video that features a young boy who is inspired to become a priest after watching a priest at the scene of a car accident administer last rites to a dying victim. Father Burns said the video was based on a true case. ''The program will make some difference, but I don't think it's going to make enough difference,'' said Sister Christine Schenck, who directs FutureChurch, a liberal Catholic group that advocates the ordination of women and married men as a solution to the priest shortage. The nun spoke in an interview from Rome, where she is monitoring the bishops' synod. ''With the numbers of priests we need, there are not that many that are called to celibacy,'' she said. ''Even if the bishops start an all-out campaign and it's wildly successful, there's just no way they can catch up.'' |
1710505_0 | Bad News for Players Hit in the Head Too Often | The severe blows to the head commonly experienced by professional football players may have long-lasting consequences, according to a new study. Retired National Football League players in the study who suffered three or more concussions in their playing days were five times as likely to suffer mild mental impairment as those who had no concussions. The study, published in the October issue of Neurology, also found that retired players developed Alzheimer's disease at a younger age than American men in the general population. The researchers sent health questionnaires to 3,683 retired players; 2,552 returned the form. Among 758 players over age 50, the researchers found 22 cases of diagnosed mild cognitive impairment and 77 cases of retirees with significant memory impairment as determined by spouses or close relatives. The more concussions the players had had, the more likely they were to suffer memory problems. More than 60 percent of the respondents sustained at least one concussion in their careers, and nearly a quarter had three or more. A concussion was defined as an injury to the head that resulted in altered mental status and at least one of 12 different physical symptoms. Stephen W. Marshall, a co-author of the study, said the sample was not large among all people who have had concussions, and that any study dependent on self-reports has limitations. He was particularly cautious about the findings concerning Alzheimer's disease. ''There are only 33 diagnosed Alzheimer's disease cases in our data,'' he said, ''so any conclusion must be very tentative at the moment.'' Dr. Marshall, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, added that he planned to pursue the research as the population of retired players aged. VITAL SIGNS: SPORTS MEDICINE |
1710506_1 | Can Brain Scans See Depression? | the technology has been oversold as a psychiatric tool. Other researchers remain optimistic, but they wonder what the data add up to, and whether it is time for the field to rethink its approach and its expectations. ''I have been waiting for my work in the lab to affect my job on the weekend, when I practice as a child psychiatrist,'' said Dr. Jay Giedd, chief of brain imaging in the child psychiatry branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, who has done M.R.I. scans in children Monday through Friday for 14 years. ''It hasn't happened. In this field, every year you hear, 'Oh, it's more complicated than we thought.' Well, you hear that for 10 years, and you start to see a pattern.'' Psychiatrists still consider imaging technologies like M.R.I., for magnetic resonance imaging, and PET, for positron emission topography, to be crucial research tools. And the scanning technologies are invaluable as a way to detect physical problems like head trauma, seizure activity or tumors. Moreover, the experts point out, progress in psychiatry is by its nature painstakingly slow, and decades of groundwork typically precede any real advances. But there is a growing sense that brain scan research is still years away from providing psychiatry with anything like the kind of clear tests for mental illness that were hoped for. ''I think that, with some notable exceptions, the community of scientists was excessively optimistic about how quickly imaging would have an impact on psychiatry,'' said Dr. Steven Hyman, a professor of neurobiology at Harvard and the former director of the National Institute of Mental Health. ''In their enthusiasm, people forgot that the human brain is the most complex object in the history of human inquiry, and it's not at all easy to see what's going wrong.'' For one thing, brains are as variable as personalities. In a range of studies, researchers have found that people with schizophrenia suffer a progressive loss of their brain cells: a 20-year-old who develops the disorder, for example, might lose 5 percent to 10 percent of overall brain volume over the next decade, studies suggest. Ten percent is a lot, and losses of volume in the frontal lobes are associated with measurable impairment in schizophrenia, psychiatrists have found. But brain volume varies by at least 10 percent from person to person, so volume scans of patients by themselves cannot tell who is sick, |
1710506_8 | Can Brain Scans See Depression? | treatment, with drugs or other therapies. ''They increase compliance with treatment and decrease the shame and guilt'' associated with the disorders, he said. At the Brainwaves Neuroimaging Clinic in Houston, doctors use the scans to diagnose and choose treatment for a range of psychiatric problems, according to a clinic spokeswoman. And a variety of doctors advertise the imaging services, particularly for attention-deficit disorder, on the Internet. But the experts who study imaging and psychiatry say there is no evidence that a brain scan, which can cost more than $1,000, adds significantly to standard individual psychiatric exams. ''The thing for people to understand is that right now, the only thing imaging can tell you is whether you have a brain tumor,'' or some other neurological damage, said Paul Root Wolpe, a professor of psychiatry and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. He added, ''This imaging technology is so far from prime time that to spend thousands of dollars on it doesn't make any sense.'' The big payoff from imaging technology, some experts say, may come as researchers combine the scans with other techniques, like genetic or biochemical tests. By radioactively marking specific receptors in the brain, for example, researchers are using brain scans to measure how brain chemicals known to affect mood, like dopamine, behave in people with schizophrenia, compared with mentally healthy peers. Imaging researchers are also studying depression-related circuits to see how they may arise from genetic variations known to put people at risk for depression. And as always, the technology itself is improving: a new generation of M.R.I. scanners, with double the resolution power of the current machines, is becoming more widely available, Dr. Lieberman said. ''With increased resolution, we'll be able to do more sensitive and more precise work, and I would not be surprised if anatomy alone based on volume will be a diagnostic feature,'' he said. ''We have gained an enormous amount knowledge from thousands of imaging studies, we are on the threshold of applying that knowledge, and now it's a matter of getting over the threshold.'' But for now, neither he nor anyone else can say when that will happen. Correction: October 20, 2005, Thursday A picture credit in Science Times on Tuesday with a series of brain images for an article about scans for mental illness misstated the given name of a researcher. He is Bennett A. Shaywitz, not Bernard. |
1710532_2 | How to End Airplane Boarding Bottlenecks | just makes sense. It's quicker and it's more efficient.'' Why is shaving a few minutes off the human cattle herd such a big deal? Any business traveler who has ever rushed seconds too late to a connecting flight will be happy to answer that question. And so will any airline that has found itself at either the top or the bottom of an on-time performance ranking. Four out of every five United flights arrived on schedule for the 12 months ending in August, according to the United States Department of Transportation. That is slightly better than average, but it isn't a figure I dwell on when I find myself stuck on a United flight behind somebody who is trying to stuff his luggage into a bin that is already full. I'm too busy biting my tongue. Reginald Lafontaine, a retired principal from Toronto, shares my frustration. As he boarded a flight from Helsinki, Finland, to New York recently, he said, the economy-class section descended into anarchy as passengers clamored about the cabin with bulky carry-ons too big for the overhead compartments. ''They spent an extra 15 minutes or more going up and down the aisles, trying to find a space for their luggage,'' he said. He dismisses Wilma as little more than a Band-Aid that won't begin to address the real problem. ''It's hype,'' Mr. Lafontaine said. What is the fastest way to board a plane? ''Back to front,'' said Robert W. Mann, an airline analyst in Port Washington, N.Y. That's because bottlenecks do not happen only in economy class. First-class passengers also can obstruct the boarding progress as they try reach into the overheads for their laptops or make their flight attendant run into the galley for a cocktail. Better yet, said Michael Miller, an aviation analyst with the Velocity Group in Washington, eliminate assigned seating. Southwest Airlines does it. ''And no one boards its planes faster than Southwest,'' he said. ''Bottom line: assigned seats delay flights.'' I agree. Wilma represents a good start at paring the amount of time it takes to get seated on a plane. But if United and all of the network carriers were serious about reducing boarding delays, they would jettison assigned seating or any kind of preferred seating, and pack people in front to back. And they wouldn't let us carry all of our earthly belongings with us. ITINERARIES: SOUNDING OFF E-mail: elliottc@nytimes.com |
1709158_3 | Tucked in Katrina Relief, A Boon for Online Colleges | Higher Education Act in 1992. DESPITE the added protection, news organizations like The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Chicago Tribune and ''60 Minutes'' have uncovered continuing misbehavior by proprietary schools -- admitting unqualified students, inflating graduation and job-placement rates, lying about accreditation, paying bonuses to employees for signing up new pupils. Students have found themselves without promised employment or academic credentials and owing tens of thousands of dollars in loans. Only last May, the federal Department of Education's inspector general, John P. Higgins Jr., testified before a House committee that ''while fraud and abuse does occur at nonprofit and public-sector institutions, historically, fraud and abuse predominantly involves proprietary schools.'' Over the past six years, he continued, nearly three-quarters of fraud cases arose from the profit-making field. Mr. Higgins singled out the industry's desire for ''rapid growth'' as the ''No. 1 risk factor for abuse.'' Indeed, stocks for proprietary schools have soared as they have shown increasing enrollment, a process all but certain to be aided by the end of the 50 percent rule. At least one Wall Street analyst of education companies, Kelly Lynch, an executive director of UBS Investment Research, has warned in writing of ''a 'pressure cooker' environment'' to enroll students. ''The drive for aggressive growth,'' she said in an interview on Monday, ''has led to some quality-control issues.'' Several news organizations' reports have focused on the Career Education Corporation, based in suburban Chicago, which has enrolled about 100,000 people in more than 20 colleges. Other large profit-making education companies include Corinthian Colleges, Education Management, and the Apollo Group, which includes the University of Phoenix. A federal ''demonstration program'' begun in 1998 has permitted about 15 proprietary schools, such as the University of Phoenix and Western Governors University, to be exempted from the 50 percent rule in return for accepting government oversight. Their successful compliance was one reason Senator Kennedy has now endorsed a further rollback of the regulation, members of his staff said. Some of the largest and most controversial proprietary companies -- Career Education Corporation and Corinthian Colleges among them -- are not in the demonstration program and would directly benefit from the end of the 50 percent rule. How many new schools subsequently would open up to reap federal loans and grants is anybody's guess. The prospect does not worry Bruce Leftwich, vice president of government relations for the Career College Association, which represents about |
1709016_6 | The Contemporary Dining Scene, Est. 1985 | had pasta and risotto. Union Square was a mirror for many new ways of thinking, and these were reflected as well in such restaurants as Jams, which brought the chef Jonathan Waxman from California to New York in 1984, and An American Place, where the chef Larry Forgione combined French technique with American ingredients and recipes. It opened in late 1983, after Mr. Forgione ceded the helm of the River Cafe to Charlie Palmer. In the mid-1980's, the combined influences of nouvelle cuisine and California cuisine translated into dishes with less sheer volume and slosh and more bright colors and seasonal produce. It translated into a heightened obsession with the freshness and sourcing of ingredients -- Union Square was beside a greenmarket that became an increasingly trafficked stop for the city's chefs -- and gave currency to the philosophy that sometimes the best way to treat a great ingredient is to leave it be. ''Everybody was turning away from what was known and traditional and accepted,'' said Mr. Palmer, who ran the kitchen at the River Cafe from 1983 to 1987, when he left to open Aureole. ''One of the major things we were doing was bringing in all kinds of products that didn't exist before, that you hadn't seen before, like wild boar from the West,'' he said, referring to his time at the River Cafe. ''I was using ramps,'' he added, noting that most diners had no idea what those were. Over at Montrachet, Mr. Bouley would put a pasta dish next to a French staple on a menu that pointed the way toward the polyglot approach prevalent today. Bryan Miller, then the restaurant critic for The New York Times, remembered that before 1985, when he organized his reviews into bound dining guides: ''It was very easy to index: French, Italian, Greek. Back then I had a little section called Eclectic, with like 12 places. ''Now, everything's eclectic.'' Just as the mid-1980's erased dividing lines between established cuisines, they admitted less established cuisines into the club of what was considered noteworthy, stylish, upscale. One of most significant openings of 1985 and one of the hottest restaurants for the next half decade was Arizona 206, which lent cachet to Southwestern cooking, putting it on the map. Arizona 206 also underscored the desire to define and showcase distinctly American food and a distinctly American sensibility, a desire evident as well |
1709087_1 | Study Says Software Makers Supply Tools to Censor Web | the regulations and customs are quite clear. The Digital Freedom Network, a human rights group based in New Jersey, notes that among things forbidden by Myanmar's Web regulations, introduced in January 2000, are the posting of ''any writings directly or indirectly detrimental to the current policies'' of the government. The rules also forbid ''any writings detrimental to the interests of the Union of Myanmar.'' As with their six previous reports, OpenNet researchers combined a variety of network interrogation tools and the cooperation of a volunteer in Myanmar ''who remains anonymous as a safety precaution,'' the report noted, to test the accessibility of various Web sites. Sites like Hotmail, which offer free e-mail services, were routinely blocked, forcing Myanmar citizens to use one of the two officially approved (and easily monitored) Internet service providers for their e-mail. And of 25 sites dealing with Burmese political information and content -- from freeburmacoalition.com to burmalibrary.org -- a full 84 percent were blocked. ''There's a cat-and-mouse game going on between states that seek to control the information environment and citizens who seek to speak freely online,'' said John Palfrey, the director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and a researcher with the OpenNet Initiative. ''Filtering technologies, and the way that they are implemented, are becoming more sophisticated.'' Not surprisingly, repressive governments have been eager buyers of those technologies. The OpenNet study suggests that Myanmar, which has long been under American sanctions, including the 2003 Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act, has recently migrated from an open-source filtering technology to a proprietary system called Fortiguard, developed by Fortinet, in Sunnyvale, Calif. That upgrade, which appears to have taken place as the OpenNet researchers were conducting their analysis, may have made censorship even more efficient and widespread than reflected in the new survey. For its part, Fortinet says that it uses ''a two-tier distribution model,'' according to a company spokeswoman, Michelle Spolver, meaning that the company sells all of its products to resellers, who sell to end-users. ''Our intent is to fully comply with the law, and Fortinet does not condone doing business with U.S.-embargoed or sanctioned countries,'' Ms. Spolver said. Yet the Fortinet system appears to be hard at work in Myanmar. ''The Myanmar state has put out a Web page talking about it, we've procured a block page that has hallmarks of Fortinet's system, and have heard from people on the |
1709114_0 | He Doesn't Make Coffee, but He Controls 'Starbucks' in Russia | Sergei A. Zuykov is a lawyer for Starbucks in Russia. Only the Starbucks he represents brews no coffee and owns no shops. Its business consists of trying to sell its name back to the other Starbucks -- the better-known company from Seattle. A tall, strapping 39-year-old former car alarm salesman turned trademark squatter, Mr. Zuykov has stalled Starbucks' entry into one of the fastest growing retail markets in Europe while competitors, both homegrown and international brands, have been springing up like mushrooms after the rain. ''It's not fair, but it's legal,'' Mr. Zuykov said of his grip on the Starbucks trademark here. ''I do not steal. You cannot steal what is already yours. When we applied, Starbucks was not so interested in coming to Russia.'' Starbucks sued and won a lower court ruling in Moscow on Aug. 30. But Mr. Zuykov asked for and received a temporary injunction. A showdown in the long-running case, seen as a test of intellectual property rights here, is coming at an appellate hearing on Oct. 17. Mr. Zuykov, who said he owned roughly 300 brands in addition to Starbucks, is merely the best known of what trademark lawyers say are a dozen or so individuals and companies active in hoarding brand names and patents in Russia. While authorities are clamping down on street vendors selling knockoff Nikes and bootleg DVD's, these legal pirates have thrived. Better enforcement of intellectual property rights is seen as a requirement for Russia's entry in the World Trade Organization later this year or early next year. Authorities are indeed trying to clamp down. Last winter police made a show of grinding millions of counterfeit cigarettes under bulldozer tracks into the black mud of a field outside Moscow. But that has not prevented intellectual piracy from rising to the higher levels of American-Russian relations. Rob Portman, the United States trade representative, bluntly told a Russian delegation in Washington on Sept. 27 that widespread piracy was a barrier to Russian membership in the W.T.O. Somehow, though, in the through-the-looking-glass world of Russian law, tougher enforcement has actually spawned a new breed of pirate. The improved enforcement over the last five years has also allowed brand squatters to use the courts to take aim at large Western companies that failed to register their trademarks quickly enough, according to Anna A. Baglay, a lawyer with Intels Agency, a Moscow firm specializing in intellectual |
1710981_0 | Rain Forest Jekyll And Hyde? | Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation. On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have ''helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness.'' Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest. According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers. Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped ''wasn't necessarily toxic.'' ''We've done inspections,'' the spokesman said. ''We've done a deep scientific analysis, and that analysis has shown no harmful impacts from the operations. There just aren't any.'' You would have a very difficult time selling that story to the people in the rain forest who have been drinking and bathing in water fouled with the byproducts of oil-drilling processes. Parents have watched their children play and their livestock feed in areas contaminated with oily substances. Pits that perpetually ooze gunk and oil are ubiquitous. Two years ago, a reporter from The Times interviewed a man named René Arévalo who lived near a separation plant that was once operated by a Texaco subsidiary. The house in which Mr. Arévalo and his five children lived had been built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater had been dumped. The family got its water from a well. ''If you dig here just a meter deep,'' said Mr. Arévalo, ''you hit oil. The water is contaminated, very |
1706311_1 | Note to Drivers: Lose the Phone (And Lipstick) | many of those states have gone beyond merely regulating cellphone use among drivers, cracking down on distractions inside cars. Tennessee and Virginia, going further than most, have passed laws prohibiting the display of pornographic videos in vehicles. In Nevada, lawmakers recently increased penalties for drivers who kill someone while eating, putting on makeup or using a cellphone. In Washington, district lawmakers have banned driving while ''reading, writing, performing personal grooming, interacting with pets or unsecured cargo'' or while playing video games. At least a half-dozen other states, including Alaska, Louisiana, Delaware and Wisconsin, are considering bans on activities that pull drivers' attention away from the road. ''This is a trend that we're seeing in a lot of places,'' said Matt Sundeen, a transportation specialist at the National Conference of State Legislatures. ''Since the introduction of the cellphone in cars, there has been enormous growing interest in distractions and now they are looking at all aspects of the issue.'' Studies have shown for years that holding a cellphone to your ear while maneuvering a vehicle can be dangerous. One 2002 Harvard study estimated that drivers using cellphones may cause about 2,600 deaths a year nationwide and 330,000 injuries. Hand-held cellphones are not the only problem either. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that distractions are a factor in up to 80 percent of all traffic accidents reported to the police. Even the use of a headset or other hands-free cellphone device can reduce a driver's concentration enough to pose a hazard, the agency found. ''It's the cognitive distraction of the conversation that causes problems,'' said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the traffic safety agency. Banning the use of hand-held cellphones will nonetheless make highways safer by reminding drivers to pay better attention, said Connecticut State Representative Richard Roy, Democrat of Milford, who had been pushing for a law against driving distractions since 1998. ''There's nothing worse than seeing someone driving down the road, on the phone or shaving or putting on make-up, and there's a child in the back seat,'' he said. ''They'll say over and over that they love that child but they're putting the child in danger.'' Mr. Roy said the law included a provision that allows the police to record which distractions are occurring most often. The Connecticut law includes a ban on cellphone use, even with a hands-free device, for drivers with a learning permit. Mr. |
1707285_1 | Helping Victims Of the Storm Stay Connected | he had hooked up the equipment, and evacuees were phoning loved ones. Within a day, 11 families had been reunited. ''There wasn't any better feeling in the world,'' said Mr. Dearman, who is 43. ''After food and shelter, their next need was to get ahold of their families.'' In one swoop, Mr. Dearman not only connected people in crisis, but he also illustrated the power of long-distance wireless networks, an emerging technology that uses unlicensed radio-wave bandwidth to send Internet signals into rural towns and cities, where the connections are locally accessible, much like Wi-Fi hot spots. The networks typically use microwave dishes and routers to beam and distribute the information many miles in the air from an original Internet connection. In Mr. Dearman's case, the connection was on his farm, which suffered no damage in the hurricane. The technology's attraction, for Mr. Dearman and the small bands of volunteer techies who cobbled similar systems together around the Gulf Coast, is that it sidesteps many of the pitfalls that plague conventional phone systems during disasters. Other than the original Internet connection, the technology does not rely on telephone wires run by BellSouth or other phone companies; no roads have to be dug up and switching stations are not needed. Mr. Dearman and his team also provided voice service to the evacuees by using Internet phone adapters and handsets that enabled calls to piggyback on the high-speed data connections. All the equipment was donated, but the microwave dishes normally cost a few thousand dollars and are hung from water and radio towers. The dishes are a bit larger than those used for home satellite TV. Antennas placed atop shelters and churches cost several hundred dollars and are the size of a shoe box. The equipment uses little power and can run from wall plugs, generators or batteries. Wireless Internet Service Providers, or WISP's, like the one Mr. Dearman has run for four years, are popping up in rural areas where there are not enough customers for cable or phone companies to justify offering broadband service. These wireless networks are being pushed by an informal group of unconventional technologists whom Mr. Dearman tapped into after the storm. After he got the church online, Mr. Dearman's mother-in-law told him about another shelter in Delhi nearby, so he hooked up two more Internet phones there. Before he left town, he heard of another 13 |
1707274_5 | The Time Is Now: Bust Up The Box! | emerging optical networks like the Global Lambda Integrated Facility, the National Lambda Rail and Teragrid. These networks not only make it possible to harness the power of multiple supercomputers, but they also allow scientists to create a new class of instruments, in which huge volumes of scientific data are easily available to researchers around the globe. For example, at the iGrid symposium scientists showed the first high-definition digital video broadcast from an undersea volcanic vent more than a mile beneath the ocean off the northwest coast of the United States. The video comes from a new undersea observatory being constructed by a United States-Canadian partnership. The system will consist of a web of computers interconnected by fiber-optic sensors on the sea floor intended to monitor everything from geological to climate changes. The distributed computing system will collect data from thousands of sensors of different types that allow the researchers to build a complete picture of the undersea world. ''This is the new computational science,'' said Edward Lazowska, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the project investigators. In the future, he said, science will be based on data flowing across computer networks that can then be visualized and mined. For Mr. Smarr, the power of visualization and the need for very high-speed networks was underscored when a team of researchers at the TelaScience Laboratory at San Diego State University worked to assist rescue teams responding to the Indian Ocean tsunami and to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. By quickly processing digital satellite image data, the researchers at the university were able to support rescuers with detailed visual maps. By processing satellite imagery of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Katrina, the researchers correlated satellite imagery with address information, permitting individuals and rescuers to see the impact of the flooding on homes. The researchers were slowed, Mr. Smarr said, when it took 10 days to transfer the digital data from a United States Geological Survey computer because of a slow computer network. In commercial data centers, thousands or tens of thousands of server computers can be more rationally used as workloads are moved around to mirror changing needs. While the United States has been relatively slow in deploying fiber optics directly to homes, that is not true of a growing number of countries in Asia and Europe. In Japan, for example, there are now three |
1712064_2 | Poor Nations Are Littered With Old PC's, Report Says | visited Lagos, where it found that despite growing technology industries, the country lacked an infrastructure for electronics recycling. This means that the imported equipment often ends up in landfills, where toxins in the equipment can pollute the groundwater and create unhealthy conditions. Mr. Puckett said the group had identified 30 recyclers in the United States who had agreed not to export electronic waste to developing countries. ''We are trying to get it to be common practice that you have to test what you send and label it,'' he said. Mr. Puckett also said his group was trying to enforce the Basel Convention, a United Nations treaty intended to limit the trade of hazardous waste. The United States is the only developed country that has not ratified the treaty. Much of the equipment being shipped to Africa and other developing areas is from recyclers in the United States, who typically get the used equipment free from businesses, government agencies and communities and ship it abroad for repair, sale or to be dismantled using low-cost labor. Scrap Computers, a recycler in Phoenix, has eight warehouses across the United States to store collected electronics before they are shipped to foreign destinations, and Graham Wollaston, the company's president, says he is opening new warehouses at the rate of one a month. Mr. Wollaston, who describes his company as a ''giant sorting operation,'' said there was a reuse for virtually every component of old electronic devices: old televisions are turned into fish tanks for Malaysia, and a silicon glass shortage has created huge demand for old monitors, which are turned into new ones. ''There's no such thing as a third-world landfill,'' Mr. Wollaston said. ''If you were to put an old computer on the street, it would be taken apart for the parts.'' Mr. Wollaston said the system was largely working, though he conceded that some recyclers dump useless equipment in various developing nations, most notably China. ''One of the problems the industry faces is a lack of certification as to where it's all going,'' he said. He says his company tests all equipment destined for developing nations. The Environmental Protection Agency concedes that ''inappropriate practices'' have occurred in the industry, but said it did not think the problem should be addressed by stopping all exports. ''E.P.A. has been working with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for the last several years on |
1712178_0 | Mayor Seeking Major Changes At Ground Zero | After months of delays and redesign, the intramural struggle over redevelopment at ground zero erupted in public during the weekend as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called for the removal from the project of the commercial leaseholder, Larry A. Silverstein, and an even broader rethinking of plans. ''It would be in the city's interest to get Silverstein out,'' Mr. Bloomberg was quoted as saying in an article in The Daily News yesterday. He said the plan to build as much as 10 million square feet of office space on the site might force ''a kind of construction which maybe the marketplace doesn't want.'' The mayor suggested adding housing to the mix. While he seemed to back away yesterday from a direct confrontation with Mr. Silverstein, Mr. Bloomberg is jumping in at a fractious moment at the World Trade Center site. The steel framework of the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower was supposed to be heading skyward by now, but the project was radically redesigned this summer. More recently, Gov. George E. Pataki removed the Drawing Center and the International Freedom Center from the cultural building on the memorial quadrant. By removing the Freedom Center while the matter was under consideration by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, Mr. Pataki provoked an extraordinarily open show of anger and frustration at the board's Oct. 6 meeting, followed last week by the resignation of Roland W. Betts, a close friend of President Bush and one of the most influential board members. He was appointed by Mr. Pataki in 2001. ''The L.M.D.C.'s ongoing role has been severely marginalized,'' Mr. Betts said in his letter of resignation. At the board meeting, he even questioned whether the corporation had a future. Such a public rebuke of the governor might not have occurred if he were not heading into the final year of his three terms after announcing that he would not run for another term. On the other side of the coin, Mayor Bloomberg's status as a power to be reckoned with is underscored by polls showing him in a comfortable lead in his re-election bid. Given the mayor's standing and the uncertain climate around ground zero, his opinions could reverberate deeply. As a practical matter, however, the mayor cannot evict Mr. Silverstein, who is counting on $4.65 billion in insurance payments to finance reconstruction. Nor can the mayor dictate that housing be included in the trade center project. The |
1709934_0 | Facebook.com Goes to High School | AS if they needed one, local high school students now have another reason to go online. Facebook.com, a social networking site for college students begun last year by a Dobbs Ferry native, has started a site geared toward secondary-school students. It has been out there only a month, but Westchester youths, like their counterparts across the country, are succumbing to the site's practicality and versatility. The site, which includes profiles and photos, is a fancy electronic version of the whiteboard that students often mount on their doors to leave and receive messages. And the college-level online community is restricted: only those with e-mail addresses ending in ''.edu'' can gain access to it. The site's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, 21, was a Harvard sophomore when he had the idea last year to transform those ubiquitous college directories of incoming freshmen into interactive sites. His site allowed any student with a university e-mail address to register, create an online profile and invite friends to communicate through the profile. The site was so popular, according to Mr. Zuckerberg, who has been adept at using computers for years, that he quickly duplicated it at colleges nationwide. Now, nearly five million of the eight or so million college students in the country are registered users. Moving to the high school market seemed a natural extension, but restricting the network to high school students, without unwanted adults -- including students' parents -- was a challenge. Because high school students have an array of e-mail addresses, most of which are unrelated to the schools they attend, facebook.com needed a way to ensure that only students signed on. The solution the company devised was simple. In September, Mr. Zuckerberg says, registered college students were asked to send invitations to high school students to join the new network, and the high school students in turn could invite fellow students. Because many high school students prefer instant messaging to e-mail, the company also permitted registration through America Online's instant messaging service (more commonly known by its initials, A.I.M.). The response, not surprisingly, was immediate. ''Hundreds of thousands'' of high school students have already registered, Mr. Zuckerberg said. There is no charge to register; the site makes its money from ads (but only the college version has them). One of the college students doing the inviting -- which the site calls ''friending'' -- was Caitlin McQueen, a 2005 graduate of Ursuline High |
1710047_1 | Waiting for the Petrodollars to Trickle Down | 2002. What ultimately happens to this windfall -- whether oil exporters decide to spend it or salt it away -- will help determine how the pain caused by expensive energy is distributed throughout the American economy and the rest of the world. At first glance, the implications are straightforward. If energy exporters spent the bulk of their newfound treasure on things like new oil exploration gear and fleets of limousines, for instance, much of the money would make a round trip, financing imports from the industrialized oil importing countries from which it came. If, on the other hand, oil exporters saved their stash by, say, building up reserves invested in United States Treasury bonds, they would be effectively draining the money away from investment and consumption in the industrial world, delivering a potentially big blow to demand and employment. But there's a twist to the story. Pumping tens of billions of dollars in savings by oil exporters into American government bonds and similar assets would help keep the lid on interest rates in the United States, adding support for the housing market and bolstering consumer spending by already over-stretched Americans. ''Oil exporters could spend the money directly or help others increase spending, for example, by giving loans,'' said Hossein Samiei, head of the commodities unit in the I.M.F.'s research department. So far, oil exporting countries have set much of the money aside. Russia's current account surplus -- the broadest measure of its balance of trade -- will swell to $102 billion from $60 billion last year, the monetary fund says. The surplus in Middle Eastern countries will rise to $218 billion this year from $57 billion in 2003, according to the I.M.F., almost double China's daunting surplus. Economists reckon that this pile of savings has softened the impact of higher oil prices in the industrialized world, helping keep interest rates low. According to the I.M.F., more expensive energy will have only a modest impact on global growth, which should slow slightly to 4.3 percent this year from 5.1 percent in 2004. Still, the situation is fluid. The monetary fund has said that Middle Eastern countries seem more cautious than in the 1970's, when they spent lavishly on public works and made many ultimately unproductive investments. But there are other profligate spenders among oil exporters, places like Venezuela and Nigeria. ''Oil exporters have a lot of useful ways to spend the |
1709952_0 | The North Wind Doth Blow | EVEN those terrified by the ferocity of a great storm may be able to enjoy it from an armchair -- in coffee-table format, of course. James Lincoln Turner of Spring Lake is the author of ''Seven Superstorms of the Northeast'' (Down the Shore Publishing, $32), and he serves up details of spectacular blizzards and hurricanes that date to the late 1800's. On Nov. 24, 1950, at age 14, Mr. Turner embarked on his lifetime of weather watching. Early that mild morning at his home in Sea Girt, he noticed clouds that had an orange tint. Sea gulls were flying inland and landing on lawns. A coincidence? The Great Appalachian Storm officially began on the New Jersey coast that night with sustained winds of 26 miles an hour in Long Branch, and gaining strength at the rate of 2 to 4 m.p.h. each hour at the storm's center. A storm surge along the New Jersey side of the Delaware Bay the next day is described as ''a solid wall of water more than a head high.'' With some storms, it is the lack of warning that is most striking. Capt. Morton Mortenson sailed out of Atlantic City on his fishing boat the morning of Nov. 23, but two days later was caught in waves so towering that he asked for help from the Westcott Tug Service to return to port. His last words by radio phone were to his brother Ole: ''I don't think we're going to make it.'' The Blizzard of 1888 began with the coldest day on record in New York City since records were first kept in 1869. Within four days, houses from North Jersey to western New York were buried in drifts as high as 40 feet. Passengers on a train from Albany were snowbound in their cars for 48 hours. Mr. Turner uses weather maps and isobars to explain the violent paths of the storms, and includes eyewitness accounts combed from newspapers of the time. The collection of nearly 200 photographs showing splintered boardwalks and houses moved from their footings by wind and water is well worth a look. Today, satellite technology and the Weather Channel seem to speak to what we need in terms of warnings. But in his introduction Mr. Turner reminds us that a greater potential for disaster exists now, when hundreds of thousands of people live in fragile coastal regions. Christine Contillo |
1710259_0 | Cândido and Ted's Excellent Adventure | THE RIVER OF DOUBT Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey. By Candice Millard. Illustrated. 416 pp. Doubleday. $26. Theodore Roosevelt was an enthusiastic advocate of the road trip as antidote to the blues. At 25, he lit out for the Dakota Badlands after his wife and his mother died of separate illnesses on the same day. After relinquishing the presidency to William Howard Taft in 1909, Roosevelt spent nearly a year on a high-style (260 porters!) African safari. Brooding wasn't his style. ''Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough,'' he once said. So after he ran on the Bull Moose ticket in 1912, losing his bid to take back the presidency, Roosevelt needed some serious adventure to shake off the funk of defeat. He found it in South America. As Candice Millard notes in ''The River of Doubt,'' her vibrant retelling of Roosevelt's post-election expedition, it was supposed to be another African-style safari: a well-provisioned paddle up two known tributaries of the Amazon River. This time, though, Roosevelt demanded a more challenging itinerary. He wanted to push the boundaries of scientific knowledge, not be carried like a valise. His guide, the legendary Brazilian explorer Col. Cândido Rondon, suggested a survey of the Rio da Dúvida, the River of Doubt, an uncharted capillary of the Amazon that ran through some of the most treacherous terrain the great rain forest could offer. Bully to that, Roosevelt responded, brushing aside the warnings of field naturalists with firsthand experience in the region. ''If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America,'' Roosevelt wrote, ''I am quite ready to do so.'' He very nearly did. The ex-president had survived Africa, the American frontier and the Spanish-American War, but the unexplored Amazon presented dangers of an entirely different magnitude. Out there every teeming inch of forest seemed to conspire against a man's survival. If the vipers, piranhas, jaguars, caimans or anacondas didn't get you, malaria or a poisoned arrow or a cut gone septic just might. Colonel Rondon's previous Amazonian adventures had produced great geographic discoveries, incredible stories of bravery and suffering, and a notoriously high casualty rate. ''In fact, so infamous were Rondon's expeditions into the interior that he had to pay his men seven times what they made anywhere else,'' Millard writes. ''When the Brazilian colonel invited him to join the descent of the River of Doubt, |
1710136_0 | News Summary | INTERNATIONAL 3-10 Iraqis Vote on Constitution Millions of Iraqis streamed to the polls to vote on a new constitution, joined by what appeared to be strong turnouts of Sunni voters in some parts of the country. But the Sunni turnout, high in some cities like Mosul, low in others like Ramadi, appeared to be insufficient to defeat the new charter. 1 Illegal Logging Rises in Amazon Timber harvesting is booming in the Brazilian Amazon despite new, more rigorous regulations and repeated pledges by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to crack down on those pillaging the world's largest tropical rain forest. 6 Russia Unmoved on Iran Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice failed to persuade Russia to drop its opposition to bringing the issue of Iran's nuclear program before the United Nations Security Council. 10 Restoring Icons in Russia Since the fall of atheistic Communism in 1991, the painting and restoring of religious icons has flourished again in Russia, and old icons that had been hidden or neglected are in need of restoration. Sometimes the restorers rediscover forgotten creations of great masters. 10 Quake Death Toll Rises The death toll from the earthquake in South Asia a week ago has risen to 38,000, with 62,000 people injured, as more bodies have been pulled from the rubble, the senior military spokesman for Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. President Pervez Musharraf warned that the toll was likely to increase even more as recovery teams reached remote towns and villages. 4 Constitutional Debate in Kenya The debate over how to revamp Kenya's colonial-era Constitution has ranged from lofty discussions of the merits of having a prime minister to rock throwing, chair hurling and fruit tossing. 3 NATIONAL 12-33 The Judith Miller Case Judith Miller, a reporter for The New York Times, was jailed for refusing to reveal a confidential source to a grand jury investigating whether administration officials had leaked the identity of a C.I.A. operative as part of an effort to blunt criticism of the its justification for the war in Iraq. On Sept. 30, having received a release from her source, she testified before the grand jury that the source was the vice president's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. An examination of Ms. Miller's decision not to testify, and then the circumstances that allowed her to do so, offers fresh information about her role in the investigation and how The |
1710100_1 | Loggers, Scorning the Law, Ravage the Amazon Jungle | occurring elsewhere in the Amazon. Despite regulations that are more rigorous, at least on paper, and repeated pledges by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to crack down on those pillaging the world's largest tropical rain forest, shipments of wood from the region are booming as never before. According to government figures, Brazilian timber exports from the Amazon increased in value nearly 50 percent in 2004 over the previous year, to just under $1 billion. In the first half of this year, when the rainy season traditionally slows down activities, exports rose an additional 20 percent in value. Over all, nearly 40 percent of the wood cut in the Amazon is now being shipped overseas, compared with only 14 percent in 1999. Brazil's main markets are the United States, which accounts for one-third of all timber shipments abroad, followed by China, at 14 percent and growing rapidly, and European countries, which collectively account for 40 percent. ''The problem, though, is that the government's own figures indicate that about 60 percent of those exports are illegal,'' said Paulo Adario, who directs the Amazon campaign of the environmental group Greenpeace. ''So you have to ask yourself: how is it possible that even with logging permits suspended since July 2004, wood exports are continuing to rise so frighteningly?'' Advocates for peasant settlers, including labor unions and Roman Catholic Church officials, answer by pointing to the traditional reluctance of the federal government's environmental and forestry agency, known as Ibama, to act against loggers and sawmill owners. The agency is chronically short of staff and money, its employees are often threatened, and neither the army nor the police are willing to provide protection to inspectors on official missions. ''You can have a thousand laws on paper, but they don't mean anything unless the authorities enforce them,'' said Erwin Krautler, the Roman Catholic bishop of the Xingu region. Ibama officials, however, argue that they are enforcing the law more aggressively now and have begun making progress. They note that seizures of illegally cut wood are up, that the volume of timber harvested has begun to drop sharply, and that for the first time ever, a timber merchant was recently jailed for logging on public land. ''As regards issues of monitoring and enforcement, you have to look at the Amazon in a broad context,'' João Paulo Capobianco, the agency's director of forests, said in a telephone interview |
1709821_5 | Meet the Life Hackers | which had until then been little more than glorified word-processors and calculators, began to experience a rapid increase in speed and power. ''Multitasking'' was born; instead of simply working on one program for hours at a time, a computer user could work on several different ones simultaneously. Corporations seized on this as a way to squeeze more productivity out of each worker, and technology companies like Microsoft obliged them by transforming the computer into a hub for every conceivable office task, and laying on the available information with a trowel. The Internet accelerated this trend even further, since it turned the computer from a sealed box into our primary tool for communication. As a result, office denizens now stare at computer screens of mind-boggling complexity, as they juggle messages, text documents, PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets and Web browsers all at once. In the modern office we are all fighter pilots. Information is no longer a scarce resource -- attention is. David Rose, a Cambridge, Mass.-based expert on computer interfaces, likes to point out that 20 years ago, an office worker had only two types of communication technology: a phone, which required an instant answer, and postal mail, which took days. ''Now we have dozens of possibilities between those poles,'' Rose says. How fast are you supposed to reply to an e-mail message? Or an instant message? Computer-based interruptions fall into a sort of Heisenbergian uncertainty trap: it is difficult to know whether an e-mail message is worth interrupting your work for unless you open and read it -- at which point you have, of course, interrupted yourself. Our software tools were essentially designed to compete with one another for our attention, like needy toddlers. The upshot is something that Linda Stone, a software executive who has worked for both Apple and Microsoft, calls ''continuous partial attention'': we are so busy keeping tabs on everything that we never focus on anything. This can actually be a positive feeling, inasmuch as the constant pinging makes us feel needed and desired. The reason many interruptions seem impossible to ignore is that they are about relationships -- someone, or something, is calling out to us. It is why we have such complex emotions about the chaos of the modern office, feeling alternately drained by its demands and exhilarated when we successfully surf the flood. ''It makes us feel alive,'' Stone says. ''It's what makes us |
1709937_1 | A Commitment on PCB's | divides the cleanup into two phases and binds the company to conduct only the first -- a yearlong project to remove the thickest PCB deposits, which make up only about 10 percent of the 2.65 million yards of tainted mud, at a cost of $100 million to $150 million. The other 90 percent of the mud is spread over a much larger, though less heavily contaminated area, and would be removed in a second phase lasting five years and costing about $500 million. What are the chances that the second phase will ever be completed? That's the worry. Because G.E. will operate the dredges and monitor its own progress, environmentalists fear that the company will now have both the means and motive to demonstrate that dredging does not work and should be abandoned. G.E. had long argued that the PCB's are best left where they are, and a complex dredging project that conveniently fails could help to revive that discredited argument. G.E.'s stubbornness on the PCB issue is legendary. But our choice is to set the dimmer switch on our expectations somewhere between the environmentalists' black gloom and a 100-watt optimism about G.E.'s good intentions. There can be little debate that a multinational corporation larger and more powerful than some preindustrial empires could have thrown its resources wholeheartedly at the problem long ago. Just the amount that G.E.'s earnings rise in a typical good-news quarter could pay for the cleanup. Nevertheless, we view this agreement as a laudable step forward and G.E.'s best opportunity yet to demonstrate the purity of its intentions. A cleaner Hudson River could be the prime example of the company's stated commitment to a cleaner world, and we have every hope that it will be. This partly reflects our confidence in the E.P.A., which ordered the cleanup in 2001 in one of the high points of Christie Whitman's tenure as administrator, and which has shown itself to be responsive on the PCB issue at a time when our faith in the federal government's commitment to its environmental responsibilities has been sorely tested. The agency asserts unequivocally that it will keep the closest watch on G.E. and use whatever means necessary to force the company to cooperate with the cleanup -- in all its phases, and without undue delay. We accept that assertion, reserving the right to remind the agency of its promise if it reneges. Westchester |
1709983_1 | Cell Rage Roils a Co-op On a Historic Block | them atop the co-op, an eight-story red-brick building on Carroll Street and Eighth Avenue, within the Park Slope Historic District. The equipment will weigh more than seven tons, and its 15-inch-tall antenna panels will be bolted to the parapet. In exchange, the co-op will receive $1,800 a month from T-Mobile USA. Carl Stoll, president of the co-op, said that the board regarded the 15-year contract as something that strengthened the building's finances and that a letter sent to shareholders last December had mentioned discussions with T-Mobile. He added that he had been stunned by the shareholder reaction. ''I've been threatened; I've been coerced,'' he said, noting that one of his fellow board members was ''full of angst because he says he wants to get along with his neighbors.'' The opposition group has expressed concern that the equipment could harm both residents' health and their property values. The opposition also fears that the new equipment will make the building more vulnerable to liability. ''We found so many obvious holes in the contract that it alarmed us that the board of directors was asleep at the wheel,'' Mr. Escobar said. In response to the outcry, T-Mobile has met three times with the board and the shareholders and commissioned an independent study of the antennas to be installed on the building. The report, noted Russ Stromberg, T-Mobile's senior development manager for the Northeast, found that the radio frequency emissions from the antenna operations complied with the strictest Federal Communications Commission regulations. ''The information is overwhelming that there's no negative health effects,'' he said. But mistrust within the building has grown so deep that Mr. Escobar dismissed the study as bogus, saying it focused on a different antenna from the type to be installed on the building. Mr. Stromberg in turn defended the study. He noted that T-Mobile was compelled to use a smaller antenna than the one in the study to comply with Landmarks Preservation Commission requirements and that the power and radio frequency of the two antenna models would be the same. ''These are the two factors that determine whether an antenna meets F.C.C. regulations,'' he added. What is clear is that the dispute goes well beyond equipment. ''I think this controversy could be more detrimental to property values than the antennas,'' Mr. Stoll said. ''I think they elect a board to run the building. Now, they can't have it both ways. |
1708988_0 | Corrections | An article in Business Day on Thursday about smaller video producers who use the Internet for distribution referred incorrectly to the television program ''Oceans of Mystery'' by Eco-Nova Productions, which has a new diving section on its Web site. Although the Discovery Channel occasionally reruns episodes, the program is no longer in production. |
1708928_2 | Europe Entertains an American Offer to Cut Farm Aid | groups like Oxfam International say. Oxfam called Mr. Portman's offer ''smoke and mirrors.'' The group said that under the proposal, the United States would have to shave agricultural spending by only 2 percent, to $73.1 billion, while wringing harsh concessions on market access from developing countries. ''This proposal doesn't ask much of the United States while asking a lot of other countries,'' said Gawain Kripke, a policy adviser with Oxfam. But Bob Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, disagreed, calling the Portman plan ''an aggressive proposal'' that would reduce the amount the United States government could spend under World Trade Organization agreements in one subsidy category to $14.4 billion from $19.1 billion. Mr. Stallman also praised the proposal's call to reduce European Union spending on agriculture from a maximum of four times what the United States spends to only twice as much. Mr. Portman's proposal also asks the European Union to lower that category of trade-distorting subsidies by 83 percent, from $80 billion to $15 billion. Europe has agreed to end export subsidies but the bloc's members still have high tariffs on farm imports and domestic subsidies worth about $60 billion each year. United States trade negotiators have been under pressure for months to detail President Bush's pledge to severely cut agricultural subsidies, which officially total $19 billion but are much higher when import restrictions for sugar producers and other indirect aid are counted. The Bush administration is rushing to avoid another failure in the deadlocked Doha trade talks, which are scheduled to conclude in a framework agreement at a December meeting of trade ministers in Hong Kong. A much-anticipated round of talks in Cancún, Mexico, in 2003 collapsed over disagreement on agricultural subsidies. ''Negotiators need to make a tremendous amount of progress in the next month or we are entering Hong Kong with the smell of failure all around -- again,'' said Ken Cook, president of Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit research policy group in Washington opposed to some farm subsidies. The agriculture programs of the United States have come under fire in recent years, notably its cotton program, parts of which were ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization after Brazil filed a complaint. Brazil has also been mulling a challenge on soybeans and Uruguay has discussed filing a complaint on rice. ''We must use the W.T.O. to force open markets for U.S. products,'' Agriculture Secretary |
1711863_0 | Brazil Makes Progress Against Illegal Logging | To the Editor: Re ''Loggers, Scorning the Law, Ravage the Amazon Jungle'' (news article, Oct. 16): Recent data from the real-time deforestation detection system indicate that a 40 percent drop in deforestation is expected this year from 2004, the greatest drop since deforestation monitoring began in 1988. By August, some 3.3 million cubic feet of wood had been seized, along with dozens of trucks, tractors and other equipment used to fell timber. Fines totaling $150 million were issued. From 2002 to 2004, the certified sustainable forest management area increased from 741,000 acres to 3.4 million acres, demonstrating that the number of those acting legally increased. Wood volume used by timber industries in the Amazon dropped from 990 million cubic feet to 848 million cubic feet in the same period. Over the last two years, 140 people have been arrested for environmental crimes, including illegal exploiters, businessmen and environmental agency employees. In August, Ibama, the federal government's environmental and forestry agency, charged and requested the arrest of José Dias Pereira, a farmer who destroyed roughly 20 million trees in Terra do Meio. Despite repeated habeas corpus requests, he remains incarcerated; this is unprecedented in Brazil. João Paulo Capobianco Secy. of Biodiversity and Forests Ministry of Environment Brasília, Oct. 18, 2005 |
1711574_4 | Publish and Perish | he's being jerked around. ''You ask yourself, 'Why am I getting up at 4 a.m. to go to Fort Lee, New Jersey, to be on a business program that no one will see when I wrote a sensitive literary book about relationships on the Internet?' '' said John Seabrook, the author of ''Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace'' and ''Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing -- The Marketing of Culture.'' ''What About Oprah?'': ''Every author eventually asks this question. I tell them, 'I'm sure someone has thought about it,' '' said Nicholas Latimer, the director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf. Reality Beckons: ''I'd put together three media events in this city and had been driving around all day. I was stuck in traffic, it was raining, I had no readings lined up and I was headed toward a store to sign between 6 and 10 books,'' Oppenheimer said. ''That's when I realized I'd pushed this thing too far.'' The Last Hurrah: ''It's a hideous thing,'' Carroll said. ''You get a good review.'' As Stendhal wrote of the last stages of love, this review is ''the final torment: utter despair poisoned still further by a shred of hope.'' Carroll likens the book's sudden resurgence to the Drunk Dial, when a lover asks, ''Can I come over one more time?'' ''So you make love, and then that's it,'' Carroll said. ''You never ever rise on Amazon again. The interview with Terry Gross falls through, and even the publicist's assistant won't return your call.'' Withering: Publicist attempts to wean author. The message is delivered subtly; most authors get it. ''I'm sorry,'' they might say in the tone of an emergency-room surgeon. ''We've done all we can.'' For some authors, though, ''all'' isn't enough. ''I have a saying,'' Oppenheimer said. ''You never know what's enough until you've done more than enough. My publicist, the second one I hired, finally told me, 'I think it's time for you to think about the paperback.' '' ''The beginning of acceptance,'' Seabrook said, ''is when you realize that the reason your book isn't in bookstores isn't because it's sold out. It's not there because the store never ordered it in the first place.'' ESSAY Elizabeth Royte is the author of ''Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash'' and ''The Tapir's Morning Bath: Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest and the Scientists Who Are Trying to Solve Them.'' |
1711902_3 | For Some College Graduates, a Fanciful Detour (or Two) Before Their Careers Begin | professional schools usually do not hold it against them. ''Most graduate and professional schools today would prefer that a student take the time to go away, have different experiences and then come back refocused,'' said Bill Wright-Swadel, director of career services at Harvard College. There are three primary reasons students seek out alternatives to traditional career-building after college, said Mark Smith, assistant vice chancellor and director of the career center at Washington University. One is simply fatigue. ''I see our students immensely involved as undergraduates,'' Mr. Smith said. ''They are taking overloads of classes, double majors, and then they are very involved in extracurricular life. A lot of them are coming out and they are just kind of worn out.'' Other students, he said, are motivated by idealism to seek out community service programs. Kathy L. Sims, director of U.C.L.A's career center, said that every year about 60 new graduates of the university go to Japan to teach English for a year. The third motivation is to test a possible career by working in a field for few years before committing to graduate or professional school. Someone contemplating law school might work for a while in a legal office or in government. ''These are not necessarily unfocused people who are putting off launching,'' Mr. Wright-Swadel of Harvard said. ''Often they have a plan and they have three or four things in mind that they want to experiment with.'' Cultural patterns have changed, too, with fewer people getting married immediately after college and fewer taking jobs with companies at which they expect to work for their entire careers, said Lisa Severy, director of career services at the University of Colorado. The mind-set for many students is ''you get your degree and then you think about what you might want to do,'' she said. Experience Inc., a Boston-based company that provides information about jobs and employers to students at 3,800 universities through an Internet service, recently prepared a questionnaire for subscribers on their choices after graduation. More than 2,000 seniors and recent graduates filled out the questionnaire online over four days in mid-September, and the results appeared to bolster what career counselors have been observing. Most of those who responded said they were considering taking a year off after graduating or were actually doing so. Only a small portion said they wanted to do community service, with most saying that they either |
1711569_5 | Where Hubris Came From | ''slugfest,'' ''without a clue,'' ''ethnic fault lines'' and the like. I do not believe the attempt to export Athens's institutions, or ''Athenianism,'' as he calls it, was ''the Western world's first example of globalization.'' Nor was Athens ''hyperdemocratic'': after all, it was a slave society. Nor, I suspect, was Athens's desire for the Greek world to embrace democracy -- if it had such a desire -- the key element in the conflict. It is worth remembering that the prime object of the Sicilian expedition, the pivotal event of the war, to which Thucydides devotes two out of the eight books of his history, and about which he writes with unforgettable passion and artistry, was to reduce to subjection the city of Syracuse. Syracuse was a democracy and, as a result of its victory over the Athenian invaders, its democracy flourished as never before. It is a mistake, I think, to give too much weight to Thucydides, simply because he is such a marvelous writer, and his voice so much more adult than the voices of others we hear from the period. After all, there was an earlier Peloponnesian war that lasted 15 years, 461-446 B.C., and Athens's collapse and surrender in 404 was not the end of the matter. By 403 B.C. she had regained her democracy and her freedom, and during the next decade she rebuilt her fleet and Long Walls and, with other cities, destroyed Spartan imperialism. Plato grew up during the great Peloponnesian War, but the second half of his life saw a magnificent Athenian revival in culture. In artistic terms, the first half of the fourth century B.C. was a continuation of the Golden Age. I do not think anyone can sensibly use the experience of Athens in the years 421-404 B.C. as an argument against encouraging the spread of democracy in the world. All the same, I would like as many Americans as possible to read this book. In the Middle Ages, wise men used to say ''History is the school of princes.'' Today it ought to be the school of democracy. Americans, fortunate in their power and prosperity,have many unavoidable responsibilities to the world, and in discharging them should study the past, even the remote past, to find any guidance it has to offer. .Paul Johnson is a historian and an essayist for The London Spectator. His latest book is ''Washington: The Founding Father.'' |
1711819_1 | Manny's Boys | Wandy Salazar, Kelvin Suarez and many other young ballplayers have also finished their mangu, and are approaching the park. The baseball field is jammed between the blaring traffic of Amsterdam Avenue and a bluff that drops down to a jumble of train tracks and highways. Nothing about the field, at 175th Street, seems idyllic. The pitcher's mound is dirt piled over an old automobile tire. Home plate is a chunk of cinder block. Boulders jut treacherously through the thin soil of left and center fields. And yet if there is anything magical about a baseball diamond, as much of that enchantment can be found here, amid the rows of tenement buildings that are home to struggling Dominican immigrants, as on any lush rural or suburban field. From these unpromising environs has come athletic royalty. There is strong evidence that Lou Gehrig, the legendary Yankee first baseman of the 20's and 30's, got his start at Highbridge. In the last 15 or 20 years, a dozen or so local players, all Dominican, have entered professional baseball's minor leagues. At least three have reached the majors, and one of them, Manny Ramirez of the Red Sox, has become one of the sport's brightest stars. Robelis, Santiago and their friends know that the odds against making it to the majors are great, yet they follow Manny's career and hope that they, too, will lift their families out of poverty through baseball. Manny, who used to wake up at 5:30 a.m. to run up the neighborhood's hills with an automobile tire roped around his waist, showed that talent could not be denied or overlooked, no matter how unlikely the surroundings in which it presented itself. ''Why not us?'' says Rafael, who hopes to play in the Dominican Republic this winter. ''We follow the things Manny did. In high school, I got up at 5:30 a.m. to train. I ran through the streets, like Manny did.'' Bruises and Bottled Dirt Highbridge Park may be the birthplace of baseball greatness, but it is also a neighborhood place, where adults get a few hours of escape from the demands of the difficult, low-paying jobs that are often the lot of new immigrants. Softball leagues play on the park's smaller ball field, at 171st Street. Fathers -- and, with fathers often in the Dominican Republic or otherwise absent, mothers, too -- toss balls to their sons on both |
1711592_3 | The Catch | fisheries managers in places like the Falklands are trying to wall in their piece of the ocean, building ramparts of regulations to keep enough fish in the water to maintain a sustainable harvest. On the other side, ''illegal, unreported and unregulated'' -- or ''I.U.U.'' -- fishing boats like the Elqui are laying siege to those same waters and stealing the fish out from under their protectors. In some fisheries, the pirate haul may be four times the legal catch. The Chilean sea bass is the unlikely Helen in this undersea Trojan War. What happens to it as the siege plays out will inform what can be done to manage marine life. Ultimately it may determine whether we can keep on eating ocean fish, the last truly wild food on earth. Those on the fisheries-management side of the war insist that things are starting to go their way. They claim that a combination of satellite monitoring of fishing boats, tighter import controls and high-profile arrests have greatly reduced the pirate catch in the last three years. Indeed, just as the Elqui was being brought to dock, a corporate-nonprofit partnership called the Marine Stewardship Council was completing a study of the same waters where the Elqui was caught poaching and was on the verge of declaring the Chilean-sea-bass fishery of South Georgia Island ''sustainable.'' But even after watching the impressive international marine-conservation machine in action and meeting with the scientists and regulators who had engineered the South Georgia success story, the question that had been bothering me all the way down the Chilean coast to the Falklands remained: Is this fish managed well enough to eat? The idea of managing the sea is a relatively new one, largely because for most of fishing history, the difference between what humans needed and what the ocean could provide was so great that the concept seemed absurd. For fishers of days past the closest thing to a management policy consisted of finding a fish, learning how to catch it and then catching all of it. Daniel Pauly, the director of the Fisheries Center at the University of British Columbia and a noted expert on global fishing trends, cites the example of the earliest anglers, Stone Age peoples in Africa who eradicated a six-foot-long catfish 90,000 years ago and then moved on to another animal. ''This pattern,'' Pauly says, of fishermen ''exterminating the population upon which |
1711869_3 | Web of the Free | allow a site onto the Net, or not, by virtue of its role of maintaining a master list of domain names. Imagine how much certain governments would covet such power. American values caused the Internet to emerge and evolve as a medium of freedom. While there is a standard of transcendent decency that can and should regulate Internet communication in such matters as child pornography, there are standards of national self-interest that vary from country to country. China sees the Internet as part of its internal infrastructure and seeks to govern it as such, monitoring and censoring communications that include words like ''liberty,'' ''Tiananmen Square'' or ''Falun Gong,'' and going after dissidents who use the Internet. Internationalizing control of a medium now regulated with a loose hand by a nation committed to maximizing freedom would inevitably create more of an opening for countries like China -- a strong proponent of imposing some international supervision of Icann -- to exert more pressure on internet service providers. More broadly, international regulation could enable like-minded governments to work in concert to deem certain thoughts impermissible online. It is all too possible that minority political or religious expressions would be widely repressed under a doctrine of the greater good imposed by a collective of governments claiming to know what's best, limiting what may be expressed online to whatever, say, the United Nations General Assembly, the European Union, or the Arab League, might deem reasonable. Any society may, of course, choose to create its own balkanized domestic version of the Internet, an Intranet within its borders that it regulates as it pleases. It could then still do within its borders many of the things done by the Internet, like Brazil's online tax collection system, but would not enjoy the online privilege of worldwide interaction. The Internet is an attractive commercial infrastructure for all societies, even oppressive ones. But the string attached to its creation by America is that it must be used within a context of freedom, both economic and political. That is a democratic value that we should not be shy about exporting. Accepting that commitment to online freedom should be the price that foreign governments must pay for the blessing of the Internet in their national economic lives. Op-Ed Contributors Mark A. Shiffrin, a lawyer, is a former Connecticut state consumer protection commissioner. Avi Silberschatz is a professor of computer science at Yale. |
1711854_0 | Health Concerns Over Cell Towers | To the Editor: I reside in the building you described in your Oct. 16 article ''Cell Rage Roils a Co-op on a Historic Block.'' The article focused on the conflict within the building, and made mention of members' health concerns, but, oddly, said nothing about the international, national and intra-state attention given to this issue. Both houses of the New York State Legislature are considering bills that propose a moratorium on the construction of cellular base stations. In August 2004, the International Association of Firefighters released a resolution opposing the installation of cell towers on fire station roofs until a joint Canadian and United States study is conducted. Their position paper points to several research studies demonstrating serious neurological damage to firefighters working and sleeping in stations with such towers on their roofs. These and other studies call for great caution in locating cell towers in highly populated areas. In New Zealand, as well in Los Angeles and Palm Beach, Fla., cell towers are not permitted near schools. Our building has obtained a temporary restraining order against T-Mobile's planned installation of a base station and six antennas on our roof. We join Astoria, Queens, and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, along with cities across the country, in calling judicial attention to the problem, and not just with T-Mobile. It should seem fairly obvious that this is not merely a petty intra-building controversy. Leonore Gordon Park Slope, Brookly |
1711913_0 | Catholic Bishops Again Reject Married Priests | The first Synod of Bishops under Pope Benedict XVI ended Saturday with an embrace of tradition, acknowledging the severity of the shortage of priests in the Roman Catholic Church but rejecting solutions like allowing married priests. ''There has been a massive restatement of the importance of the tradition in the Latin church of mandatory celibacy,'' Cardinal George Pell, archbishop of Sydney, Australia, said in a news conference here. After three weeks of meetings, more than 250 bishops from around the world approved 50 propositions that will be passed on to the pope. The synod began with unusually frank discussions of the shortage of priests, especially in developing nations. The discussions, rare under Pope John Paul II, raised hopes in some liberal Catholic groups that the bishops might recommend further study toward allowing married priests or relaxing celibacy rules. But the final propositions broke little new ground: the bishops, in a joint message, said they were ''worried because the absence of priests makes it impossible to celebrate Mass, the day of our Lord.'' They restated a long-held and more conservative goal of recruiting more priests, but strongly rejected any changes to priestly celibacy. ''They started the conversation and then said, 'Well, we're going to keep on doing what we've always been doing,''' said Sister Christine Shenk, who represents Future Church and Call to Action, two American Catholic groups. ''It's very frustrating.'' She said she was encouraged by how much the priest shortage was discussed, though she said the problem would require action to keep the church strong. ''No one is saying that celibacy isn't a jewel in the church,'' she said. ''We are saying married priests are jewels, too.'' The synod addressed two other issues: whether to continue denying communion to Catholics who have divorced and remarried without an annulment from the church; and whether Catholic politicians at odds with the church on issues like abortion should be denied communion. The bishops upheld the ban on communion for divorced Catholics, but said they should not be ''excluded from the life of the church.'' Without taking communion, they should still, the message said, ''participate in Sunday Mass and devote themselves assiduously to listening to the Word of God so it might nourish their life of faith, of love and of conversion. We wish to tell them how close we are to them in prayer and pastoral concern.'' On the question of Catholic |
1711929_0 | COLLEGES OPPOSE CALL TO UPGRADE ONLINE SYSTEMS | The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications. The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues. The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers. It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks. So far, however, universities have been most vocal in their opposition. The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access. Recognizing the growth of Internet-based telephone and other communications, the order requires that organizations like universities providing Internet access also comply with the law by spring 2007. The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new technologies like telephone service over the Internet were endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps ''in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies.'' Justice Department officials, who declined to comment for this article, said in their written comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission that the new requirements were necessary to keep the 1994 law ''viable in the face of the monumental shift of the telecommunications industry'' and to enable law enforcement to ''accomplish its mission in the face of rapidly advancing technology.'' The F.C.C. says it is considering whether to exempt educational institutions from some of the law's provisions, but it has not granted an extension for compliance. Lawyers for the American Council on Education, the nation's largest association of universities and colleges, are preparing to appeal the order before the United States Court of Appeals for the District |
1708064_3 | Holding Back the Flood; Looking for a Way to Preserve the Trade Center's Slurry Wall | Port of New York Authority, as it was then known. He was chosen because ''he spoke Italian (the technology was largely Italian, and many of Icanda's workers had come straight from Italy for the job), he had actually seen a completed slurry wall and he was a superb engineer,'' James Glanz and Eric Lipton wrote in ''City in the Sky'' (Times Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2003). Though the slurry wall survived 9/11, numerous steps had to be taken to reinforce it temporarily. New tendons, anchoring the wall to bedrock, were installed and capped by steel ''high hats'' arrayed in columns of alternating widths, the narrower columns disclosing where the joints are between the wall panels. And in 2003, workers sprayed on a liquid concrete known as shotcrete to protect the surface of the wall. As a result, what is visible today bears almost no superficial resemblance to the original slurry wall except at panels 37 and 38, which escaped the shotcrete treatment because an interim staircase was placed in front of them. There, near the joint between the panels, the nearly 40-year-old rebar cages are plainly visible, like skeletons in an X-ray. One day, this raw and ravaged part of the wall might be framed within a museum exhibition hall, with a skylight above. ''This could be the perfect area where you'd talk about the days after 9/11 when people were asking, 'Will the bathtub survive?' '' said Anne Papageorge, a senior vice president of the development corporation. Even the new shotcrete surface is important, said William J. Higgins of Higgins & Quasebarth, the preservation consultants to the project, because the period of historical significance at the site is regarded as running from Sept. 11, 2001, through the completion of recovery and stabilization. Though he is legendarily the father of the slurry wall, Mr. Tamaro, now a partner at Mueser Rutledge Consulting Engineers, is first and foremost an engineer. And he would frankly rather support the wall with floor slabs than see it broadly exposed to view. ''I'm not trying to kill the scheme,'' Mr. Tamaro said, ''but I do think one should be careful in what one does with the wall to make it an architectural statement.'' Unsentimentally, he explained: ''I have a problem with the reverence given to the wall because I don't think it relates to the collapse of the towers in any way. It did its |
1706436_1 | ARMCHAIR TRAVELER | DEEP BLUE SEA: THE DREAMS, SCHEMES, AND SHOWDOWNS THAT BUILT AMERICA'S CRUISE-SHIP EMPIRES By Kristoffer A. Garin Viking, 380 pp., $24.95 The world can be divided into those who regard a voyage on a cruise ship as the epitome of an idyllic holiday, and others for whom confinement on a swaying jail among the ''overfed and nearly dead'' is tantamount to a glimpse of hell. As a journalist, Kristoffer Garin tries not to take sides. He traces without regret the decline of the luxurious trans-Atlantic liners in the 1960's and the creation in the port of Miami of a distinctly American vacation for the middle class. He credits ''Love Boat,'' the 1970's television show, with enticing average consumers to hop aboard floating Disneylands. No one can deny the success of the formula. At any given moment some 200,000 people are booked on cruise ships, making cruising the fastest-growing sector in the tourist industry. But the harsh realities of the passenger trade, which for years has enjoyed booming profits by steering clear of many American tax, labor and environmental laws, keeps Mr. Garin from being too romantic about life aboard ship. His book is an entertaining if disorganized exposé of boardroom ruthlessness and below-deck exploitation. Many of his chapters are devoted to the deals and corner-cutting of Ted Arison, an Israeli-born entrepreneur, and his son Micky, who built tiny Carnival Cruise Lines into a devouring entity -- its nickname, says Mr. Garin, is Carnivore Cruise Lines -- that now controls 50 percent of the market. Mr. Garin offers ample evidence of their power-grabbing exploits and yet displays a degree of affection for these modern pirates in a cutthroat business. He is less kind about the brutal conditions endured by their crews. Mainly from poor countries, they are at the mercy of strict overseers who can fire or threaten them with impunity. After a voyage, deckhands often have only eight hours of turnaround time before they must return to sea. Passengers have sometimes fared no better. Deaths of the elderly were once so routine that a ship's agent on Curaçao would greet arrivals with a cheery ''Lose anyone?'' Mr. Garin is hazy about which of the worst problems have been fixed. He suggests that reform does not happen without intense media scrutiny. His book, as funny as it appalling, should by read by anyone before casting off. RICHARD B. WOODWARD Armchair Traveler |
1706753_2 | For Mormons in Harlem, Bigger Space Beckons | are bare. The only visual clue to the room's function is the list of hymn numbers posted at the front. But last Sunday, as usual, the 150 chairs were filled and people stood at the back. Also as usual, the room was one of the most racially integrated in Harlem, with about equal numbers of white and black worshipers. (The Mormons have separate congregations for Spanish speakers.) The members approved a formal upgrade of the congregation from a branch, the smallest worship unit, to a ward, which must have at least 300 members. Then, after sharing a sacrament of white bread and water, they took turns speaking. (The Mormon church does not have specialized clergy, and preaching duties rotate among its members. Most adult males are ordained priests, which entitles them to perform marriages and baptisms. While women cannot be priests, they do preach and teach.) ''Because we stood strong together, this is what happened,'' a founding member of the congregation, Polly Dickey, 59, testified through tears. ''This is what this church is about. As long as we stay together, we can accomplish anything.'' The Mormon Church, founded in 1830 by Joseph Smith Jr., is one of the fastest-growing religions in the world, with more than 12 million members; half are in the United States, mostly in Western states. It is based on what Smith said were transcriptions of gold tablets he had found hidden in a mountain in upstate New York, which told the story of a lost tribe of Israel that fled to the New World and was eventually wiped out. Many members of the Harlem church said they had tried several other religions before being converted by Mormon missionaries who came to their doors. ''It's the common sense of it,'' said Wilbertine Thomas, 53, a Baptist-turned-Catholic who was baptized in February. ''At Our Lady of Lourdes they don't tell you the details of how to live your life.'' The ''details'' part of the service came when partitions went up and the congregation broke into study groups. A dozen of the newest members, mostly black, gathered in a back room to learn Gospel essentials from three well-scrubbed young white teachers in short-sleeved white shirts and ties. One teacher, Blake Carter, a graduate student at Columbia University, narrated a lesson in obedience, using the other two as actors. The young man who did as his parents instructed was rewarded |
1706712_0 | Options Open, Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor | Lucas E. Nikkel, a Dartmouth graduate, wants to be a doctor, but for now he is teaching eighth-grade chemistry at a middle school in North Carolina, one of nearly 2,200 new members of Teach for America. ''I'm looking at medical school, and everybody says taking time off first is a good idea,'' he said. ''I think I'm like a lot of people who know they want to do something meaningful before they start their careers.'' For a surprisingly large number of bright young people, Teach for America -- which sends recent college graduates into poor rural and urban schools for two years for the same pay and benefits as other beginning teachers at those schools -- has become the next step after graduation. It is the postcollege do-good program with buzz, drawing those who want to contribute to improving society while keeping their options open, building an ever-more impressive résumé and delaying long-term career decisions. This year, Teach for America drew applications from 12 percent of Yale's graduates, 11 percent of Dartmouth's and 8 percent of Harvard's and Princeton's. The group also recruits for diversity, and this year got applications from 12 percent of the graduates of Spelman College, a historically black women's college in Atlanta. All told, a record 17,350 recent college graduates applied to Teach for America this year. After a drop last year, applications were up nearly 30 percent. Teach for America accepted about a third of this year's Ivy League applicants, and about a sixth of all applications. Teaching does not pay much. It is not glamorous. And the qualifications of most young people going into the field are less than impressive. A report by the National Council on Teacher Quality last year said that the profession attracts ''a disproportionately high number of candidates from the lower end of the distribution of academic ability.'' But then there is Teach for America, whose members typically have top academic credentials -- the average G.P.A. is 3.5 -- experience with children and determination to get results. Teach for America officials see their recruiting success as a sign of the post-9/11 generation's commitment to public service, and to improving the quality of education for low-income children. ''The application numbers we're seeing reflect college students' belief that education disparities are our generation's civil rights issue,'' said Elissa Clapp, Teach for America's vice president for recruitment and selection. Many corps members talk |
1706607_3 | College Still Counts, Though Not as Much | and word processors; and 37 percent of the flight attendants -- to cite just a few occupations that do not seem to require a college education, although at least 10 percent of the jobholders have one. Clearly there are more college graduates than unfilled jobs requiring their credentials. But demand is not the only issue. Other factors also play a role, says Daniel E. Hecker, an economist in the bureau's Office of Occupational Statistics. Some college graduates choose the lesser job because it fits their schedule or they prefer less challenging work or they think it is a step to something better. Others have been laid off and cannot get another college-level job. Then, too, some employers have upgraded their education requirements to take advantage of the ample supply of college graduates. ''It could be,'' said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard University labor economist, ''that being a flight attendant in business class or first class on an international flight requires a set of language and interpersonal skills that could be quite different than if you are just shoveling drinks in economy class.'' The downward pressure on the wage premium and the healthy supply of college graduates are also encouraging what labor economists describe as a sorting process, one in which employers increasingly rank college graduates. Or, as Mr. Hecker put it, ''Many people with bachelor's degrees did not develop the skills in college that employers are looking for in college graduates.'' More than in the past, these underperformers are being ranked with high school graduates, while others above them are sorted by school attended, field of study, postgraduate degrees and the like. ''What you are looking for are signals that tell you this person has the most potential,'' said Anthony Carnevale, a senior fellow at the National Center on Education and the Economy. ''So if they went to Harvard or Swarthmore, you use that as a marker of greater potential.'' For the chosen, particularly those with postgraduate degrees, the wage premium continues to rise, but for the huge mass of college graduates, the chipping away is likely to continue until a shortage finally develops. That is not happening yet. Twenty-nine percent of the population age 25 to 29 held bachelor's degrees in 2002, up from 23.2 percent in 1990. But the big jump in the 90's is not likely to repeat itself in this decade, said Susan M. Dynarski, a |
1706537_0 | Katrina Rachets Up Local Sugar Production | ANTHONY SINAPI didn't pay particular attention to a recent bill for sugar until asked to compare it with past ones. The price had jumped $7 per 100-pound bag, and his bakery in Hartsdale, Sinapi's, can go through two tons of it a month. ''Thank God you brought that to my attention,'' he said when asked about the invoice. ''I manufacture Italian ices, too. Thank God the season's over, or else I would have been hitting skyrocket prices here.'' Mr. Sinapi is feeling the pinch of a nationwide sugar shortage. Supplies were already scant over the summer because the federal government, which controls production levels across the country, underestimated demand for the year. Then prices took another hit when American Sugar Refining Inc., the Yonkers-based manufacturer of Domino Sugar, lost one of its largest processing plants in Hurricane Katrina. ''We're not going to be able to replace all that productive capacity,'' said Donald Brainard, the company's vice president for human resources. The damaged refinery, in Chalmette, La., can turn out 900,000 tons a year. It will be brought back to that level in phases, but it remains unclear how long the repairs will take. To make up for the shortfall in the meantime, production has been stepped up in Yonkers, in Baltimore, and at a plant in Crockett, Calif., that American Sugar Refining bought in August. The refining company is owned in turn by Florida Crystals Corporation, which has headquarters in West Palm Beach, and by a cooperative of Florida sugar-cane growers. ''We will be able to replace, by increasing operations at our other locations, a percentage of the Chalmette output,'' Mr. Brainard said. ''It's anybody's guess -- 20 percent, 25 percent, 30 percent -- it's certainly not going to be anywhere near the full productive output of Chalmette.'' Locally, work schedules have been increased, even though the plant was already in use around the clock. Mr. Brainard estimates that the Yonkers plant can bolster production levels by 10 to 15 percent. Paul Rusignulo, 44, a packaging specialist who until recently lived in Louisiana, is one of a few key employees who have been temporarily relocated to Westchester. ''I'm sure I'll be doing a lot of the same work, plus whatever else I can get my hands on,'' he said. ''I like to live and learn.'' All Chalmette employees, relocated or not, are being paid salary and benefits, and the company |
1706625_0 | This Flock Wants The Walls to Tumble Down | For more than a century, Bay Ridge United Methodist Church has stood elegant watch over an unhurried corner of southern Brooklyn, and neighbors find themselves marveling at the distinctive lime-green facade of the turn-of-the-century building. One ardent admirer is Chuck Otey, a columnist for a local newspaper and a lawyer who has lived down the block from the church for 40 years. ''A lot of people come out of the subway on Fourth Avenue every afternoon and see that big, beautiful green building,'' Mr. Otey said the other day. ''It has that 65-foot tower, one of the last four-sided clock towers in Brooklyn. And the inside is beautiful, too. It's a very comforting landmark.'' So comforting, in fact, that neighborhood preservationists want to make sure the building will stand for posterity, and have asked the city's Landmarks Preservation Commission to designate it as a landmark. But efforts to preserve the church have run into resistance from an unlikely quarter: the congregation. ''We've told the Landmarks Commission that we don't want to be landmarked,'' said the pastor, Robert Emerick. ''If the process goes forward, we would have to fight it.'' The church, which dates from 1899, is built of lime-green serpentine sandstone from Pennsylvania. But the same material that gives the building its unusual cast may doom it to ruin. To demonstrate, Mr. Emerick rubbed the facade gently. Large chunks of sandstone crumbled beneath his fingers. ''We're lucky it's lasted as long as it has,'' he said. ''If it's landmarked, we'll just have to put a fence around it and let it crumble.'' The decision, Mr. Emerick said, is between demolishing the failing structure, or continuing to pour the small congregation's limited resources into maintaining it. The sandstone on the building's tower began to chip off a decade ago. The congregation raised $50,000 for repairs, enough to wrap the tower in a protective net, but far from the $3 million that the pastor estimated it would cost to fix it. Such a bill would tax the resources of most congregations. It was overwhelming to United Methodist, which has shrunk by half over the past few decades, to 200 members. To make up some of the shortfall, the church rented out the sanctuary to both a Korean and a Romany congregation. But before too long, it became clear that there was no way the church could save its sanctuary, Mr. Emerick said. |
1697161_1 | Insurance Premiums Rise As Threats to Ships Grow | loss, they're building up a reserve to fund a loss, if and when it occurs,'' he said. Bombings in Indonesia over the last several years -- in Bali and at the Australian Embassy and a Marriott hotel in Jakarta -- have focused attention on the country's radical groups. The risk to insurers has been that terrorists might ally themselves with the many seasoned pirates in Indonesia who conduct attacks on commercial vessels for profit, robbing crew members and sometimes kidnapping them as well. But the increased premiums have drawn considerable criticism in the last week from shipowners, who say that vessels have been attacked only by people interested in profit, not politics. Terrorists might seek to blow up a ship, which would be costly for insurers. But pirates seldom inflict much damage on ships, shipowners and their associations said, and the ransoms occasionally paid for sailors kidnapped by pirates are not covered by insurance policies. ''Yes, there have been piracy attacks, but there is a big difference as far as we're concerned between a piracy attack and a terrorism attack,'' said John Fawcett-Ellis, the general counsel and regional manager in Singapore for the International Association of Independent Tanker Owners, which is based in Oslo. The extra premiums being assessed in recent days are small -- typically one-hundredth of a percent of a vessel's value for each one-way trip through the strait. The world's highest rates are for Umm Qasr, a deepwater port in Iraq; premiums for ships there can reach half a percent, 50 times the new premium for the Strait of Malacca. But the extra premiums for the strait set a precedent that could start to drive up the cost of transporting huge quantities of oil and other goods around the southernmost tip of continental Asia, the shipowners warn. Noel Choong, the director of the International Maritime Bureau's piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said that the number of pirate attacks in the strait was little changed in the first half of this year compared with the period last year. There were practically no attacks in the first two months of this year, probably because of a heavy Western military presence during tsunami relief operations. A surge of attacks in the spring followed the Western navies' departure, but the attacks have nearly stopped since the Indonesian navy stepped up patrols in July. Mr. Choong said that not one |
1697221_6 | Google Gets Better. What's Up With That? | on an open, published standard that the company is making available to all. Already, Google Talk communicates with popular chat programs like iChat, Trillian, Adium, Psi and GAIM, but that's just the beginning. Google is making overtures to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft about making their chat programs compatible; EarthLink has already agreed to join the federation; and Google is also inviting the makers of games, collaboration tools and even cellphones to join in what it hopes will one day be a grand, unified chat network. In the meantime, Google Talk is significant for another reason: it requires a Gmail account. (Gmail is Google's free, Web-based e-mail service, whose two most famous aspects are its vast capacity -- over two gigabytes of storage for each account -- and the ads that appear, in small type, off to the right side of each message you read. The ads are computer-matched to keywords in the body of the message, which disturbs some privacy advocates.) Until now, Gmail accounts were available by invitation only. Google let the service spread gradually and virally, giving each existing member a few additional invitations to extend. At one point, people were actually selling these invitations on eBay. As of yesterday, however, all that has changed. Now anyone can get a Gmail account -- and can therefore use Google Talk. But to prevent spammers and other abusers from snapping up Gmail accounts by the thousands, Google has designed a clever safeguard: when you apply for a Gmail account, you must provide a cellphone number. Google sends a code to your phone, which you use to complete the registration. (Actually, you don't have to own a cellphone; you just have to know somebody with a cellphone. They can get the code for you, because each cellphone number is good for a number of registrations -- just not hundreds of them.) In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use -- not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons. Wish they'd cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company's really up to is enough to drive you crazy. David Pogue E-mail: Pogue@nytimes.com |