Datasets:

jhu-clsp

/

core17-instructions

like 0

1692320_1

'04 Report Faulted Application of Shuttle Foam

engineering at the Johnson Space Center here, said it was obvious that Lockheed's external tank engineers ''did not do a thorough job'' of identifying the quirks and variations that can occur when foam is applied by hand. And despite the space agency's insistence that it would not allow scheduling pressures to dictate a return to flight before it was safe, Mr. Perry wrote, its reluctance to re-evaluate the quality-control problems ''stems from the 'schedule-first' attitude'' of Lockheed Martin management. According to the report, even after two years of effort to correct the foam debris problem, ''there will continue to be a threat of critical debris generation.'' ''This variable could reasonably be eliminated,'' the report went on, ''and yet it continues.'' The 23-page document was initially sent to safety managers by e-mail and came to be distributed more broadly. The person who provided it to The Times did so on condition of anonymity, saying he had not been authorized to read it. Mr. Perry declined to discuss the document when reached by telephone. The report was also reviewed by the independent group that monitored the space agency's progress in improving safety. A spokesman for that group referred questions to NASA. David Mould, the agency's assistant administrator for public affairs, said a point-by-point response to the report was prepared but could not be released at this time because the information fell under confidentiality rules of the export controls that govern space technology. But Mr. Mould added: ''NASA and its contractors have made a number of process and quality improvements in the manual application of foam on the external fuel tank which have resulted in substantially less debris coming off the tank at launch. But as we saw, we still have work to do with the foam.'' He continued, ''There are still issues that we need to address and we will do that.'' Marion LaNasa Jr., a Lockheed Martin spokesman, said, ''We will defer to NASA regarding specifics of the memo, but would strongly emphasize that safety and quality are the guiding forces behind our workmanship on the external tank.'' A former director of the Johnson Space Center, George Abbey, said that he had seen the paper and that its conclusions were cause for concern. ''You would think that American industry could solve and fix this whole problem when you look at what they've done to develop the technology that's gone into the

1692238_2

Three Groups Join in Effort to Save Wright's Ennis House

was approved for a $3.1 million FEMA grant in May 1999, provided that it fulfilled the criteria. But it was able to raise only a portion of the matching money, and only $1 million of the FEMA grant was released, an agency spokeswoman said. The remaining $2.1 million is to expire on Sept. 10 unless the matching funds can be raised. Through intensive efforts over the past few weeks, this financing -- in the form of donations, bank loans and pledges -- has now been ''virtually secured,'' Mr. Leary said. Even if the initial stabilization work can begin as planned, however, the house faces significant financial challenges. According to several people involved in the project, the overall work needed could total $12 million to $15 million. The fund-raising effort began in earnest in early June, when the National Trust placed the Ennis House on its list of 11 most endangered historic places. (The building was also on the World Monuments Fund's recently released biennial list of 100 most endangered monuments in the world; it had been on the previous list as well.) In June, the National Trust joined with the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy to start a rapid overhaul of the building's administration. The result was the dissolution of the old trust late last month and the creation of the Ennis House Foundation, run by an 11-member board including two trustees from each of the three groups involved. Several people involved with the house cited the financial ineffectiveness of the previous trust, which was established in 1980 by the last private owner, Augustus O. Brown, as a factor in the building's continued decay. Although it allowed the public to visit the house on guided tours, that trust did not have much of a public profile and lost what few assets it had in the 2000 stock market crash. In 2002, the trust received a $100,000 grant from the Getty Foundation for emergency work, including the installation of two large steel supports, which now hold up what remains of the building's retaining wall, but money for a large-scale effort remained elusive. ''It became a house museum in the hands of a nonprofit organization without an adequate endowment,'' said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust. ''And this is unfortunately too common a practice. These houses really need endowments, because visitation alone will never support them.''

1692362_0

World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Unionists Reject Talks

After the Irish Republican Army's decision last week to end its guerrilla war against Britain, Northern Ireland's political parties began a series of meetings with the British authorities who manage the province in the hope of resuscitating its local government. But the hard-line Democratic Unionists, Ulster's largest party, threatened to boycott the negotiations in response to such moves as the reduction in the number of British soldiers in the province. ''The majority of people in Northern Ireland are very angry,'' said the Rev. Ian Paisley, the party's leader. Brian Lavery (NYT)

1698605_2

Navy Ships and Maritime Rescue Teams Are Sent to Region

10 teams of search-and-rescue crews and other personnel, but in some cases they were delayed in getting to the most devastated zones, because of the flooding and impassable roads. ''It is not as simple as driving right up into the city of New Orleans and starting a rescue as we might be able to do in other disasters, such as an earthquake,'' said Natalie Rule, a spokeswoman for the agency. In addition to the search and rescue teams, the emergency management agency had sent 23 disaster medical assistance teams. The federal Department of Transportation, meanwhile, had sent 390 trucks carrying millions of liters of water, tarps, millions of pounds of ice, mobile homes, generators, containers of disaster supplies, and forklifts to flood damaged areas. The Department of Health and Human Services dispatched dozens of public health officers and loads of medical supplies. The governors of Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi have called up about 10,000 members of their National Guards and are expected to mobilize more, the Pentagon said. Several neighboring states, including Arkansas and Texas, were also calling up Guard soldiers. Pentagon officials asserted that deployment of thousands of National Guard members from the gulf states to Iraq and Afghanistan had not affected relief efforts. But on Tuesday the two hardest-hit states, Louisiana and Mississippi, which each have more than 3,000 National Guard troops in Iraq, requested military specialists and equipment from other states, ranging from military police and engineers to helicopters and five-ton, high-wheeled trucks that can traverse the flood waters. President Bush announced Tuesday that he would cut short his extended summer vacation and fly to Washington to begin work on Wednesday with a task force that will coordinate the work of 14 federal agencies involved in the relief effort. The effort to move massive quantities of relief supplies and rescue gear was slowed by the closing of several Gulf Coast airports, the Federal Aviation Administration said. Officials managed at midday Tuesday to open a runway at Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport for relief flights, said Laura J. Brown, an aviation agency spokeswoman. Other Gulf Coast airports were operating on emergency power and were open only to aircraft involved in the disaster response, Ms. Brown said. Because so many towers were down, the F.A.A. dispatched a van from airport to airport dropping off satellite telephones and radios for use by tower personnel, she said. The situation

1691984_3

The Grades That Vanished, And Some Other Threats To Students' Data

combined Ms. Johnson's bill with another by State Senator Kate Brown, another Democrat, to cover compromising pictures taken with cellphone cameras. Public scrutiny of such incidents contributed to support for a federal measure, the Video Voyeurism Prevention Act, which became a law in December 2004. The act prohibits knowingly photographing, videotaping or electronically recording images of certain body parts (in the nude or in undergarments) without a person's consent. At times, even school administrators find themselves on the defensive for policy actions perceived to threaten student privacy, as when schools have issued radio-frequency identification tags to curb truancy and automate attendance tracking, to the concern of some parents and civil liberties groups. Although the Department of Education has not set rules governing how schools handle such privacy issues, it encourages school districts to set their own acceptable-use policies when incorporating computers and other technologies into classrooms. ''It's an issue to balance the tools with keeping kids' privacy safe,'' said Will Richardson, who supervises technology for Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J. Many acceptable-use policies, like that at Hunterdon, require parents to sign permission slips allowing their children to use school computers to go online, have their pictures posted on school Web sites or be listed on honor rolls. Beyond that, it is left to each teacher to set rules. Mr. Richardson, who also runs Weblogg-ed.com, a Web log promoting technology in the classroom, encourages teachers to adopt blogs, wikis and other publishing tools as part of their curriculum, while acknowledging the risks inherent in posting information on the Internet. ''We tell kids to use their first names only, or use a pseudonym, and obviously in the blogs, they can't divulge personal information,'' he said. Even with acceptable-use policies, voyeur laws and secured networks, some personal student information continues to leak from schools through legal loopholes. Allowances in student privacy laws have enabled military recruiters, state agencies and commercial marketers to gain access to student data, including names, phone numbers, grade point averages and courses of study. In particular, student information became more accessible after the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2001. The act required all schools that receive federal financing to release student records to groups like the military, book clubs and student recognition services unless parents signed waivers prohibiting the record sharing. Schools that fail to comply with such groups' requests for information can

1692007_3

You Think You've Got Tomatoes

I finally caught up with him by telephone, Mr. Yasuda said he had two workers in his office who needed his attention and he really had to go. Pressed to comment on what makes his store unique, he said: ''I don't know. All the markets are pretty good. We do the same thing.'' Reminded that his customers seem to think the Bowl is rather special, Mr. Yasuda made an effort. ''I think it's everything,'' he said. ''Not just produce. Our grocery section, we have a lot of variety, we do a good job.'' And off he went to check the contents of the latest load. Mr. Yasuda can let his tomatoes speak for themselves. After buying nine pounds of tomatoes for $21.81, I sat down in a friend's kitchen to discover the textures and flavors of each (or as many as I could manage). The Pink Zebra looked like a cross between a Fuji apple and a peach; it was sweet, not acidic, with deep pink flesh inside. The Cherokee Purple was deep vermilion with dark green streaks on the outside. Cut open, it looked like a hunk of raw meat, with firm flesh and little juice. The Lemon Boy was pale on the inside, tart and less intense than the others. The Beefmaster looked like a gnarly pincushion on the outside; inside it had deep red flesh and burst with flavor. I also tried the Wilgenberg hothouse, the Miyashita Nursery, the Momotaro, Big Beef, Dr. Wych's Yellow, Zebras (striped bright lime on the outside, kiwi-colored on the inside), Pineapple Stripe (squat and small), Mountain Delight (orange shaped and deep yellow in color) and the plum-colored Black Prince. Whew. My favorite turned out to be the Red Brandywine, a huge, pumpkin-shaped tomato that was soft and red on the inside. It had a velvety feel and flavor, and was enough to quell the most serious tomato lust. At least until next summer. The Berkeley Bowl Marketplace, located at 2020 Oregon Street, in Berkeley, Calif., is open Monday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information: (510)843-6929 or www.berkeleybowl.com. Correction: August 10, 2005, Wednesday An article last Wednesday about tomatoes sold at the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace in California misspelled the surname of a customer who commented on how to shop calmly in the store. She is Barbara Manierre, not Manierra.

1691996_2

It's Not Just for Cold Nights Anymore

days. ''Something chocolate is standard on every American dessert list, and port is one of the few wines that go with chocolate,'' he said. OTHER changes are coming from Portugal. ''This region has turned upside down in the last 15 years,'' said David Guimaraens, the winemaker for Fonseca Guimaraens and the other brands in the Taylor Fladgate partnership, who was guiding this visitor around some of the company's estates last fall. He pointed out new, unconventional methods for planting grapes, in vertical rows up and down the gentler hillsides so that tractors can till the soil. Machines are rarely used with traditional horizontal rows. He showed his latest piston-driven mechanical alternative to the quaint but effective and costly practice of having workers crush the grapes with their bare feet in big granite vats called lagares, a vestige of the past that still lingers in the Douro. Some producers use only treaded grapes for their finest vintage ports. But most are using various mechanical systems that are still being perfected. There are more than 30,000 growers of grapes for port in Portugal, most of whom cultivate just a few acres. For centuries, only major shipping companies with venerable names in the port business like Taylor, Dow and Warre could export the wines. But in 1986, when Portugal joined the European Union, individual growers and winemakers in the steep, remote inland region along the Douro River were allowed to ship their wines themselves. So some entrepreneurial farmers started making and selling port, usually under the single-quinta labels, instead of sending their grapes for blending to the big companies that dominate the port trade. All ports are deliciously, delightfully mellow, because after the grapes are crushed, the fermentation is arrested before all the sugar has been converted to alcohol by the addition of clear, unaged brandy, which also increases the wine's alcoholic content to about 20 percent. How the wine is aged determines its style, and there is something for everyone. Just as first growths establish renown in Bordeaux, the prestige of a port company depends on its classic vintage ports, ports that are bottled within about two years after they are made, and that often cost $100 or more. They are capable of aging for decades. But despite their overpowering presence in wine shops, classic vintage ports account for only about 2 percent of all port made in Portugal. Like vintage ports,

1698050_0

Seeking Nobility Through Architecture

To the Editor: I applaud the efforts to save the Glenwood power station in Yonkers (''Supporters Rise to Defend a Cherished Power Station,'' Aug. 7). Any society that believes in the idea of disposable buildings can never be expected to build with timeless nobility in mind. Those in opposition to saving the building should visit Italy for about five minutes. Lorenzo Porcelli Ossining The writer is an industrial designer.

1697654_0

Starting With Orpheus

THE FIRST POETS Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets. By Michael Schmidt. 410 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice. Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, the founder and director of Carcanet Press and the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. His widely praised book ''Lives of the Poets'' (1998) was a 900-page meditation on English poetry in which his forceful, witty, sometimes partisan sketches revealed a mind deeply in love with literature. In ''The First Poets,'' however, Schmidt seems less confident of his opinions. He is excessively deferential to authorities, even when gently rejecting their views. It is always a pleasure to encounter the lucid, astute prose of the late Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (Schmidt's don at Oxford), but this book is clogged with too many pedestrian quotations from academics past and present. Whenever he is front and center, Schmidt himself is a fascinating guide who wins the reader's trust. ''The First Poets'' covers about a half-millennium of writing up to the third century B.C. Its chronological organization is ideally suited for those seeking an introduction to Greek poetry, although the book needs better maps of the Mediterranean world. Drawing on translators from John Dryden to Guy Davenport, Schmidt deftly explains the problems in translating ''vowel-rich'' ancient Greek into English, which cannot capture Greek's falling rhythms and vocal pitch. A constant theme is the tragically fragmentary nature of the Greek poetry that we have. Only a fraction has survived, much of it by chance -- perhaps because it was quoted in an ancient letter or essay. Because of the fragility of papyrus and parchment, Greek literature was decaying by the Roman era. Schmidt stresses what we owe to the Egyptian desert, where papyrus discoveries are still being made in mummy wrappings and trash heaps. Ancient Greek poems today are often merely tentative scholarly reconstructions. Schmidt has a sharp eye for material culture: he notes, for example, how the fine grain of papyrus (made from

1697689_5

The Cult Of the Cycads

shifts, volcanic eruptions and various mass extinctions, many species of cycads are either endangered or extinct. What nature failed to achieve in millenniums, humans have accomplished in barely 100 years. In the 20th century, destruction of habitat and what euphemistically might be called ''overcollection'' have decimated the world's cycad population. They can be found in many tropical and subtropical locales, from rain forest to grassland to desert. But many of the remaining species are found in remote areas in South Africa, Central and South America and Australia, where they are particularly vulnerable to theft. Since 1975, an international treaty known as Cites (pronounced site-EEZ), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, has tried to protect cycads. A few species are so widely cultivated that they aren't protected -- the sago palm, for example, can be found in garden shops in cycad-friendly growing areas like Florida and Southern California. But the rare varieties need all the help they can get. Cycads listed in Cites Appendix I, the rarest and most endangered, are essentially banned from international trade. These are generally species just a few dozen plants away from extinction. It is against international law to remove them or their seeds from the wild and against international law to sell them. Plants on Cites Appendix II can be traded, but with important provisos. Each plant must be accompanied by a legal export permit, a document granted only if the plant is ''artificially propagated'' -- that is, not taken from the wild but grown from seed in a nursery. But that doesn't stop smugglers who sneak cycads out of Africa and into the United States by lying on the export permits. They claim that a plant was artificially propagated when it was actually ripped from the wild. They knowingly mislabel plants, identifying a cycad on Cites Appendix I -- a plant that is illegal to sell -- as an Appendix II plant. They obtain permits for plants that are legal to export and use the documents to accompany illegal plants. Cycads are often stripped of all their foliage to make them easy to ship, so that one cycad's bare squat trunk (called a ''caudex'' in the trade) looks a lot like another cycad's bare squat trunk. In this altered state, it would take an expert to distinguish between a relatively common and an impossibly rare plant. A

1697947_3

Call of the Wild, Or, Rather, The Grim Reaper?

15 years, mostly of farmers and villagers, including many children. In North America, however, the problem looms more in the imagination. There have only been a handful of deaths from attacks by cougars in the past two decades. And a study of bear attacks in Alaska from 1900 to 2002 showed that there were an average of only five attacks a year, with one fatality every two years. ''In truth, the number of people killed by domestic dogs around the world is much greater,'' Mr. Kruuk said. In this context, the deaths of Mr. Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, were something of an anomaly -- but a tragically understandable one, experts say, given that Mr. Treadwell violated just about every principle of human-grizzly interaction. Mr. Treadwell would follow bears around at close range, address them by nicknames and serenade them with song. Grizzlies don't like having their space invaded, experts say, so the only wonder is that the bears gave Mr. Treadwell such a long leash. His actions, the experts argue, are just what the animals did not need. Rather, research on aversion, like that outlined by Mr. Quigley, may help humans and large carnivores coexist. For though the number of attacks might be relatively small, wildlife experts say there are bound to be more of them as carnivore populations expand due to conservation efforts, human communities grow and displace animal habitats, and ecotourism increases in popularity. Craig Packer, a University of Minnesota biologist who conducted the Tanzanian research, said attacks in North America are rare now, but that wasn't always the case. ''Our ancestors dealt with this problem in the 1800's,'' killing off large carnivores en masse, he said. Today, ''we just aren't used to it,'' he added. In Tanzania, by contrast, because of all the attacks on people, lions outside of the national parks are barely tolerated any more. ''A lot of people, especially the more dewy-eyed conservationists, think predators are cute and cuddly,'' Mr. Packer said. ''They're not.'' ''They're territorial animals, and can breed rather quickly,'' he added. The ultimate goal of his study is to reduce lion attacks on people, which would have the benefit of reducing the number of retaliatory killings of the animals. In North America, with mountain lions roaming subdivisions all over the West, and black bears scaring suburbanites in New Jersey, Mr. Packer said, ''You're going to see a lot more

1697848_6

Attack on the Commuter Tomatoes

a share, with leftovers sold at a Friday market, according to Jack Algiere, the farm manager. The most local of produce, of course, is one's very own. But there is the wildlife problem to consider. ''We have a very limited garden because the deer come and eat everything,'' said Evelyn Miller, a lawyer in Briarcliff Manor who grows small amounts of basil, mint, thyme, rosemary and tomatoes. She says she would rather not worry about the garden's drying out, or being devoured, while she is on vacation, so she prefers to buy large quantities of organic basil for pesto at the market in Ossining, in addition to the small amount she grows at home. ''I go to the farmers' market for volume and quality,'' said Ms. Miller, noting that so far this year she has harvested just two tomatoes. WITH such a glorious abundance of local produce, would it be possible to change the views of a Mr. Richman, the local vegetable killjoy, about the quality of Westchester's produce? As a test, Mr. Richman was invited to visit the Rye Farmers' Market on a Sunday in mid-August, and was asked to sample some. He did so quite cheerfully, confessing that despite his reputation as a connoisseur of food quality, he doesn't usually prepare the dishes himself. In fact, he said that just knowing such markets existed had given him hope of forgetting his 12,000 prior supermarket purchases of peaches, nectarines and apricots that just never ripened. First stop: a free ear of roasted corn, butter and salt included, provided by Community Markets. With some surprise, he pronounced it very good. Then he ate another ear of corn raw -- after being persuaded that this would not be fatal. ''I'm shocked,'' he said. ''It's even sweeter this way.'' He picked out a tomato, noting that while it looked merely good, it tasted downright great. ''Decades of performing evil genetic operations has resulted in this tomato,'' was his assessment. Unable to resist a trip to the A&P adjacent to the market, he then conducted a similar taste test, on an ear of corn and a tomato, neither grown locally. The corn was sprouting a healthy half-inch-long shoot at the tip -- corn growing its own corn. All he could say of the flavor was, ''Not so terrible.'' The tomato was pronounced pretty though scarred. ''It looks like it had a knife fight

1697857_4

How Green Will the Garden Be?

In April, department officials said they were not satisfied with Hovnanian's water testing. The builder sued, accusing the Commissioner Bradley M. Campbell of the Department of Environmental Protection of a ''penchant for political pandering'' that was causing unjustified delay. (The exemption available to the project under the Highlands Act may expire in October.) Under court order Mr. Campbell has until Sept. 6 to act on the application. Mr. Campbell has been on vacation and was unavailable for comment, his office said. While Hovnanian's testing found an ample water supply for its 280 town houses, a local environmental group, Skylands Clean, commissioned a study that found the builder's estimates to be much too high. Residents say wells are running dry all over West Milford. ''Almost everyone in the area has groundwater and no access to the reservoirs,'' said Ross Kushner, the director of the Pequannock River Coalition. ''We get water from cracks in solid rock. This is a microcosm of the whole Highlands.'' The Highlands Council, while it has no authority over the permits, agreed -- at least to the extent of urging Mr. Campbell not to approve Eagle Ridge until the council finishes its master plan. Adam Zellner, the council director, said: ''There are 20 Eagle Ridges out there, and there are 1,000 projects out there a little smaller than that. So you've got to be sure. You've got to be right or you're going down a slippery slope.'' Grandfathered projects will probably bring several thousand more houses and condominiums, Wanaque Reserve among them, to the preservation area. Waiting for the Other Shoe But the much bigger unknown is what will surface in the ''planning area,'' the half of the Highlands that is not subject to the preservation law. The local authorities have approved big subdivisions that will mean an addition of some 5,000 houses and condominiums. Developers will also, presumably, be able to take advantage the state's new ''fast track'' law, which allows expedited permits from the state, although its effective date was postponed by Mr. McGreevey and then by Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey. If the Highlands Act was a triumph for environmentalists, the fast-track law was its price, a political tradeoff that its architects acknowledge. The boundaries of the preservation area were negotiated by legislators, local officials and building industry leaders. The resulting map carved out some tracts that developers were eyeing or that local officials wanted

1697916_1

King Kong vs. the Pirates of the Multiplex

films. If that happens, they will stop being made,'' said Mr. Jackson in an e-mail message from New Zealand, where he is putting the final touches on his version of ''King Kong.'' ''No studio is going to finance a film if the point is reached where their possible profit margin goes straight into criminals' pockets.'' Film piracy is taking place against a larger backdrop of technological and demographic shifts that are also shaking Hollywood. Elaborate home theater components -- like DVD players, advanced sound systems and flat-screen TV's -- are helping to shrink theatrical attendance, as more and more film fans choose to watch while stretched out on their couches. And with the advent of high-speed Internet connections that can deliver large film files to personal computers, the movie business is confronted with the same thorny challenges that the music industry encountered several years ago with the emergence of file-sharing programs like Napster. Hollywood reported global revenue of $84 billion in 2004, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accounting firm. With most theatrical releases amounting to little more than an unprofitable, expensive form of marketing, DVD's have become Hollywood's lifeblood: together with videos, they kick in $55.6 billion, or about two-thirds of the industry's annual haul, with box-office receipts making up most of the rest. The Motion Picture Association of America estimates that piracy involving bootleg DVD's deprived the film industry of more than $3 billion in sales last year. That figure does not include lost sales from pirated works peddled online, for which industry insiders say they have no reliable estimate but which they assume to be substantial. ''It's hard to say exactly what amount of money is involved, but it's huge,'' said Bob Wright, chairman and chief executive of NBC Universal, the parent company of Universal Pictures and a division of General Electric. ''There is a very dark, black cloud in this game. It's not in the hands of kids who live next door to you; it's organized groups and organized crime.'' Online, piracy essentially has no boundaries. But the packaging and distribution of bootleg DVD's take place in a number of far-flung locales; among the hot spots are the United States, China, Russia, Britain, Indonesia, Malaysia, India and the Philippines. At the heart of this network, according to federal investigators and analysts, are cybergeeks who fashion themselves as digital Robin Hoods, stealing from rich studios and giving film fans

1697690_0

Killer Tomatoes

Douglas Heath, Ph.D., says he is on the verge of perfecting what he hopes will be the defining fruit of his career, one with a trifecta of rare and attractive qualities. It is a seedless tomato; it delivers the robust, sweet-and-tart flavor most supermarket tomatoes lack; and it has all the disease resistance the commercial industry demands. He has, in fact, created it -- the patent on the technique has been filed and approved -- but just a few minor kinks remain. Although seedless grapes have been around for more than 100 years, seedless tomatoes aren't yet commercially available. At 7:20 one recent morning, Heath, 46, was tasting some cherry tomatoes and slicing into several other varieties, including a few that were full of seeds. At his five-acre trial field in the bottom lands in Woodland, Calif., Heath devotes most of his energies to his seedless project. He is also working on several aesthetic ''concepts,'' like exotic colors, patterns, shapes and flavors. As a tomato breeder for Seminis, a multinational corporation that sells vegetable seeds to commercial growers, Heath has already developed several new hybrids that are now sold worldwide. Because fresh tomatoes are one of the fastest-growing segments in the global food market, surveying Heath's garden is a bit like looking into the future of the produce aisle. In the shade between two tall rows, Heath cut into a tomato with tiger stripes, exposing standard-issue red tomato flesh that almost exploded with juice. The flavor was O.K. in the original heirloom tomato that he used to create this variety, but Heath likened its texture to that of a water balloon -- too soft on the inside. Now he had solved that problem. ''The main hook for this tomato is that wild color,'' he said. ''Through the years I've improved the firmness while maintaining the flavor.'' He walked on, stopping at a tangerine-colored tomato the size of a grape that goes by No. 3,756. He popped it in his mouth like a piece of popcorn. We tasted it, too. The tomato had an almost peachy flavor; other 3,756's that had sat on the vine a little longer tasted like apricots. Blindfolded, you might never guess they were tomatoes. ''My kids snarf these like candy,'' he said. Heath views his life's work as putting back into market tomatoes what intensive breeding for commercial scale took out. Since the first hybrid tomatoes

1693772_2

A Ruling of Import to Hunters, and Bears

public comment next month. ''We will only proceed with a hunt after the public process is complete,'' Mr. Campbell said. From Jan. 1 to July 8 this year there were 677 damage and nuisance complaints involving black bears in 17 of the state's 21 counties. During the same period last year there were 424 complaints, according to the state. ''The bear population has clearly escalated,'' said Ernest Hahn, the chairman of the Fish and Game Council. ''Bears, quite frankly, are causing a number of interactions that are not desirable.'' Last month, a female black bear wandered into a campsite in High Point State Park and tugged at a sleeping bag with a camper inside. It was later captured and killed. Of the two bears killed by state fish and game employees last weekend, one, a sow without cubs, broke through a window of an enclosed porch in Hardyston Township twice in one night. Another sow, also without cubs, broke into a shed at a camp in Frankford, N.J. No injuries were reported, but officials concluded the bears were hazards. The bears were trapped and then euthanized. So far this year nine bears have been euthanized. Eleven were euthanized in 2004, according to the state. Mr. Campbell said the department was still pursuing other bear management strategies like contraception. A separate plan calls for trapping and removing bears found in '' a nonsuitable habitat, not appropriate for any wild animal population.'' Hunting groups applauded the move by the council, but there were also critics. ''I think there is too much knee-jerk reaction and not enough real work on what has to get done,'' said Jeff Tittle, the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club, which opposes the hunt. ''The state is just not doing enough. There needs to be better plans in place.'' In 2003, 328 bears were killed during the hunt. In 2004, when Mr. Campbell called a second hunt unnecessary, he contended the bear population was about 1,600, though several independent studies estimated that the number was closer to 3,200. This year state biologists say that of the estimated 3,400 bears in the state, roughly 1,600 are within the proposed hunt area, a 580-square-mile area in the northwest part of the state, north of Route 78 and west of Route 287. If approved by Mr. Campbell, the hunt would be Dec. 5 through Dec. 11.

1694499_0

Under Pressure

A few weeks ago at Per Se, Thomas Keller's four-star restaurant in New York City, a waiter set a salad of diced watermelon and hearts of peach palm in front of me. ''This is watermelon that has been Cryovacked,'' he explained. ''It's something new we're doing. I think you will like it.'' This was a watershed moment on two accounts. First, because Keller had indeed managed to make something as mundane as watermelon taste different -- it had the crisp density of a McIntosh apple. But also because American dining has reached the level of sophistication at which a waiter will assume that a diner knows what ''Cryovacked'' is, and that this knowledge will enhance the experience of tasting diced watermelon. That won't be assumed here. ''Cryovacking'' is an industry term for putting food in a plastic bag and vacuum-packing it. Sometimes the food is then cooked in the bag. Other times, the pressure of the packing process is used to infuse flavors into ingredients. The watermelon, for instance, was vacuum-packed with 20 pounds of pressure per square centimeter, to compact the fruit's cells and concentrate its flavor. It had the texture of meat. Just the thing for backyard picnics. Cryovacking, which is more often called sous vide (French for ''under vacuum''), is poised to change the way restaurant chefs cook -- and like the Wolf stove and the immersion blender, it will probably trickle down to the home kitchen someday. Cryovacking has also given great momentum to the scientific cooking revolution of the last five years. Chefs have begun using techniques developed for industrial food production and advances in science to manipulate the chemical make-up of proteins, starches and fats to create new textures and flavors -- everything from fried mayonnaise to hot gelatins. Ferran Adrià is often seen as the hero of this movement. From his tiny restaurant, El Bulli, in Rosas, Spain, Adrià has sought to reform diners' expectations of ingredients like caviar (his might look just like osetra but is made of squid ink and calcium chloride) and to invent new flavors and textures (carrot juice frothed to a texture he calls ''air''). But the man who helped Keller master the technique that would compress watermelon and poach lobster with exquisite results, who taught Wylie Dufresne how to ''flash pickle'' water chestnuts with honey and sherry vinegar and who is having a greater impact on how

1694789_14

Awash in Information, Patients Face a Lonely, Uncertain Road

said Mr. Rich, a high school guidance counselor. ''They do one thing, and then you call them and they're doing something else.'' Finally, Mrs. Rich narrowed her list to six. Then, the very process that had helped her feel in control now made her feel more helpless than ever. She had come to the end of her research, with absolutely no idea how to decide. At last she turned to the first place she could have gone and saved herself so much trouble, Mr. Rich's longtime internist. The Riches were lucky to have a doctor willing to be their guide. He did not bother with a menu of options. Without polite shilly-shallying, he gave them just one name. ''It was such a relief,'' Mrs. Rich said. He sent the Riches to a specialist who was not even on her list. ''Cleveland?'' Mrs. Rich gasped, ''I thought Cleveland comes to New York!'' In retrospect, said Mrs. Rich, who was thrilled with the specialist, ''You start this process, and you hope you get all the information you need to make a valid and intelligent decision. But you really don't. And that's where your doctor comes in handy.'' So Little Time With patients having so much medical information, being a primary care doctor these days means donning armor daily. Here comes the public, bearing pharmaceutical brochures, sheaves of Internet printouts, pages of time-consuming questions: Vioxx? Total body scans? Why didn't you recommend a carotid artery Doppler? Uh-oh, the 11 o'clock news had a three-minute special on pain management. Or the estrogen update du jour. Ask your doctor! The phones will start at 6 a.m., the call-back list will balloon. Inquiring patients will be angry that their calls were not returned. But besieged doctors first call those with emergencies, then consulting doctors, laboratories, pharmacies, insurance companies and, oh, yes, they also start seeing patients who have scheduled visits. Doctors feel the benefits and burdens of medical information being so accessible to patients. Yes, studies show that the more informed patients are about their care, the more likely their health will improve. But the information that patients bring to the office visit is often half-baked. Doctors must spend precious moments in an already constrained time slot re-educating them. Dr. Russo, the West Orange, N.J., internist who sees 5,000 patients a year, applauds patients who do their homework. But, he noted, especially when patients are researching

1694597_5

Fixer-Uppers That Need Love And Concrete

for the dining room -- let alone millions of dollars for further repairs and conservation work. ''We still don't even have a phone,'' she said. Still, Barnsdall's condition is far less dire than that the later Ennis and Freeman Houses. These houses were built using the experimental textile-block method of concrete construction that Wright devised in the early 1920s. Partly made from decomposed granite and tied together with steel reinforcing bars, the blocks did not hold up well to water penetration, and many of them crumbled or disintegrated in the 1994 earthquake. The palatial Ennis House occupies a steep hillside in the Los Feliz neighborhood. Neglected by the trust that was responsible for maintaining it -- scandalously, in the view of several people familiar with that now-defunct organization -- the house continued to disintegrate years after receiving approval for a $3.1 million FEMA grant. It may be only a few heavy rains away from total collapse. The newly created Ennis House Foundation hopes to begin a rescue effort this fall -- if it can raise the money. Freeman House, which was donated by the original owners to the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1986, faced a similar situation for many years. ''People did not want to give money when they thought the thing was going to slip down the hill,'' said Robert Timmie, dean of the architecture school. Now, with the help of a $901,000 FEMA grant and additional funds from its own resources, the school has completeda $1.5 million stabilization project. But a more comprehensive student-driven restoration effort could take up to a decade. And to justify the expensive work, the school must integrate the restoration into the student curriculum. The project must be seen as an asset to the school, Mr. Timmie said, ''or else there are huge liabilities.'' By contrast, the two Wright concrete-block houses that remain in private hands are in relatively good condition. After his elaborate restoration, Mr. Silver sold the Storer House to another private owner, and it is widely considered the best-preserved Wright building in Los Angeles. The small 1923 Millard House in Pasadena was the first of Wright's concrete houses (unlike the other three, it was not built with steel rebar). It is now owned by David Zander, also a film producer, who is restoring it with the help of Marmol Radziner & Associates, a high-profile Los Angeles firm.

1694717_3

The Past, in Pixels

that her innocence should be thoroughly established by a strict search of the room, where, as she well knew, none of the valuables would be found. Recollections of a New York Chief of Police By George W. Walling. 1890. In order that the reader may understand just what confinement in Ludlow Street Jail means, let us suppose the case of a man who has been arrested for attempting to defraud, or something similar, and after having been brought before the court is remanded without bail to the jail. As he enters the iron gate at the main entrance the deputy sheriff who has brought him hands him over to the warden's care, who makes a record of his coming, and speedily finds out whether the prisoner wants to become a ''boarder,'' or to remain a common felon. For there are two distinct castes in Ludlow Street Jail, of which the public general hears of but one -- and that the higher one. These two castes may be named the ''paying'' boarders, and the ''non-paying boarders.'' The former class are the aristocrats of the jail. They pay the warden fifteen dollars a week for the privilege of sitting at his table and eating the luxuries of the market. This sum includes also a respectable room, not cell, and fair attendance. Except for the restraint of confinement the paying boarders' life in Ludlow Street Jail is not such an unhappy one as most persons think. There are sometimes prisoners who are even more aristocratic than the paying boarder they get a nicely furnished room with all the luxuries, have their meals served in their rooms and live in royal style. For this privilege, however, they have to pay from $50 to $100 a week. Of course the warden is glad to see such prisoners, and you may be sure he tries to keep them as long as possible. Tweed belonged to the paying class of boarders. Guarding a Great City A memoir by William McAdoo, a former New York police commissioner. 1906. The jostle and struggle between the driver and pedestrian in the streets had been for many, many years a fixed condition, quietly accepted by the multitudes. The driver, on his part, believed that the street belonged exclusively to him, and, whip in hand, he sat on his throne as one beyond the law. To place men at the more congested

1694782_1

Patients Turn To Advocates, Support Groups And E-Mail, Too

graduate program at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. Insurance companies also want to help patients manage their health care more efficiently, in order to keep costs down. Many companies use ''disease management teams'' who contact patients directly, largely bypassing the physician, a gesture that some patients view with skepticism. Typically, nurses from the team periodically call patients with chronic conditions like asthma, diabetes and back pain, and send reports to the doctor. The nurses can answer questions and monitor adherence to a treatment plan, tasks that most physicians do not have the time to do themselves. Reviews of disease management teams are mixed. Jean Faber, a patient in Verndale, Minn., with back problems, credits her insurer's team, American Healthways, with her turnaround. Ms. Faber said her internist told her that gastric bypass surgery was needed to alleviate her back pain, but she refused the surgery. A disease management nurse helped her figure out a diet and exercise plan instead. ''The nurse called once a month,'' Ms. Faber said. ''I felt like I had a partner.'' She lost 178 pounds in two years and is now pain free. But Richard Roberts, a family physician in Belleville, Wis., has misgivings. Insurance company teams can leave a doctor out of the loop, he said, and the quality of their reports is uneven. He referred one patient with multiple health problems to her insurer for help. A year later, she called him, complaining because she had to deal with a different team for each of her problems: ''It's like having four full-time jobs. And I already have a job. I felt better when it was just you and me.'' Doctors are keenly aware of the rift between themselves and their patients. A series of critical reports from the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, urged doctors to embrace ''patient-centered care,'' an approach that respects the patient's background and preferences. As of last year, all graduating medical students must pass an extensive exam in patient communication to complete their licensing requirements. Doctors who do not have the time to talk to patients are increasingly turning to e-mail. But patients need to be aware that the confidentiality of e-mail messages is not assured, and, given the hectic nature of people's lives, a timely response may not be, either. More profoundly, many doctors have been trying to reconnect with patients through

1694702_0

East Village West

CONTRARY to popular belief, Las Vegas is not, in fact, a city where you can find everything. True, you can gorge on prime rib for breakfast or play blackjack at 3 a.m. And not far from the city limits you can engage in the kind of adult activities that have been made illegal in 49 other states. However, according to Mark Advent, a casino developer and Las Vegas resident, something is missing from civic life. ''There's no place where I can stroll around,'' Mr. Advent said the other day on the phone from Los Angeles International Airport, where he was catching a flight to London. Las Vegas is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, but, he said, there are no neighborhoods, no pockets, no gathering places. ''There's no sense of community, like you have in New York,'' he said. And so, in true Las Vegas fashion, Mr. Advent has decided to remedy what he sees as the city's lack of a neighborhood fabric by building one of his own. On the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Paradise Road, on a vacant patch of desert near the airport, will rise East Village, a retail-office-entertainment complex inspired by Manhattan's strollable streets. The $250 million project is tentatively scheduled to open in 2007. Playing fast and loose with geographical borders, the development will contain a scale model of the Washington Square arch, a meatpacking district and a diamond district, which, as New Yorkers know, is a good 30 blocks north of the East Village. ''It's not an exact replica,'' Mr. Advent explained, adding that the complex was more an homage to great neighborhoods (which explains the part of the development based on Pike Place Market in Seattle). The name, he said, stems from the location, which is one mile east of the Las Vegas strip, and from the fact that ''it really is like a little village.'' ''It has texture,'' he added. ''A tattoo shop, cobblestone streets, a bakery.'' As it turns out, Mr. Advent has a bit of a history exporting the streets of Manhattan to the scorched Las Vegas earth. He was the mastermind behind New York-New York, the mammoth casino and hotel that opened on the strip in 1997 and has, among other things, copies of the Chrysler Building and the Statue of Liberty and a SoHo village shopping district. (It does not contain a Ray's Pizza, an

1697414_3

Energy Prices Vex Americans On All Fronts

twice that. Ms. Andersen, 57, a senior administrative assistant for a health care provider, said she and her husband had cut back on television channels and now subscribe only to basic cable service. They have not taken out their 18-foot fishing boat this summer because of the higher fuel costs. She does not know yet what other expenses may have to be eliminated or reduced. ''We don't know how bad it's going to be this winter,'' Ms. Andersen said. The most visible signs of higher energy costs have been gasoline prices, which have touched $3 a gallon in some parts of the country -- and have led to a spate of fuel thefts at service stations. On Wednesday, Hawaii, with the highest prices in the nation, said it would limit wholesale prices of gasoline in an effort to restrict further increases. Critics say the measure may backfire because it fails to address a cause of higher prices: higher demand. Crude oil prices, lifted by strong growth in the United States and in China, have risen 54 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange over the last year. Yesterday, the next-month futures contract settled at $67.49 a barrel, up 17 cents, after touching $67.70 midway in the trading session. These highs are causing concern around the world. The International Monetary Fund said that Asia's rapid economic growth was at risk from the energy prices. Still, according to the I.M.F.'s managing director, Rodrigo Rato: ''There is very strong demand, and we don't see that demand receding. Prices are not going back to the levels seen at the beginning of 2004.'' This may be little comfort for people like Stan Sawyer, a school district superintendent in Westbrook, Me. Mr. Sawyer said that the district had rerouted its buses over the last months, condensed runs, and is now considering curbing field trips for the year and extending the walking distance to and from school. In addition to trying to curb gasoline consumption, Mr. Sawyer faces another problem: His district budgeted heating oil purchases at only $1.60 a gallon -- well below even the current commodity market price for delivery next month, which is above $1.80 and climbing. ''There isn't any wiggle room,'' Mr. Sawyer said. ''Something like this, we're going to try to do cost estimates about how much it will cost and make it up somewhere else in the budget. It's not only

1697297_2

Avast! Pirates Steal Hearts

and moves, quite rapidly, to the Barbary pirates of North Africa, whose raids in the Mediterranean did not end until the 1830's. Each era had its own brand of pirate and its own definition of piracy. The English pirates of the 16th century seized enemy ships with royal permission. They were, Mr. Earle writes, ''the illegal but often much admired fighting extension of militant Protestant English expansion and not yet 'real' pirates.'' Like their Spanish and Dutch counterparts, they carried out foreign policy, amassing great fortunes when they succeeded. In time, and especially after peace treaties threw many a crew out of work, privateers turned into pirates, attacking any ship that sailed. Often, their activities were supported by powerful nobles in coastal towns. These shady grandees helped bankroll pirate voyages and reaped a healthy percentage of the profit when the booty was unloaded and sold. Early on, in the Jacobean period, pirate society was rigidly hierarchical and class-ridden, with poorly rewarded common seamen laboring under well-born officers who took home most of the prizes. Gradually, however, piracy became egalitarian. Captains ruled only so long as they enjoyed the support of their men, and prizes were shared equally. Here lies another clue to the popularity of pirates: the seductive picture of a band of outlaws, free as the wind and governed by their own democratic rules in a world of kings and princes. Mr. Earle points out, however, that the ''Treasure Island'' brand of pirate existed in a specific time (the 1650's to the 1720's) and a specific place, in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. These pirates, he writes, ''were indeed virtually the only pirates in history to exhibit those characteristics which we expect 'real' pirates to have.'' ''The Pirate Wars'' sheds light on many of those characteristics. The black flag, we learn, was first observed flying over the ship of Emanuel Wynn in 1700, but not all pirate ships adopted the color, although many did decorate their flags with skulls, crossbones, hourglasses, bleeding hearts and other symbols of impending death. Walking the plank, far from being standard practice, did not make an appearance until the 1820's, an invention of Cuban pirates. Mr. Earle makes no mention of parrots, peg legs or hooks. Legendary pirates like Blackbeard, Henry Morgan and Jean Lafitte were pests, but the nameless Barbary pirates constituted a real threat to the United States in the

1693057_1

The Bicycle Thief

eco-friendly bar and restaurant opened this spring on Fulton Street, at South Portland Avenue, décor included not only an awning made of solar panels, cups made of a biodegradable corn-based plastic, plates made of sugar cane fiber and tables made from recycled soda bottles, but also a bicycle-powered blender that sat on a steel stand on the patio and allowed patrons to pedal in place while mixing their own drinks. But one evening last month, the contraption disappeared. ''Apparently, someone rode off on it,'' said Atom Cianfarani, the bar's environmental consultant. ''I mean, no one saw it. But that's what we think must have happened.'' The last time anyone at Habana Outpost saw the bike blender was three weeks ago when an employee took the pitcher-and-base unit inside after closing. The next morning, Ms. Cianfarani noticed that the bike's stand was empty. ''We thought someone must have moved it to the basement,'' she said. ''But when I checked a few days later, it wasn't there.'' The blender, called the B3 and invented by a company called Byerley Bicycle Blenders, consists of an extension that shifts a regular bike's rear wheel back 15 inches to accommodate a platform where a spinning base unit can be attached. Habana Outpost set the B3 up on a used racing bike wrapped in orange electrical tape. The bike itself was inexpensive, but the parts for the B3 cost about $600. ''I don't know if whoever took it even knows what they have,'' Ms. Cianfarani said. ''But if they do, there's a lot they could do with it.'' The extension can also be use to carry baby seats, and, she pointed out, ''it works with any Oster blender, and Oster also makes food processors.'' Habana Outpost's owner, Sean Meenan, chose not to report the theft to the police -- ''It just seemed too silly,'' he said -- but instead put the word out among friends in the neighborhood to be on the lookout for a bright orange 10-speed with a huge, funny-looking extension on the back. After two weeks with no leads, he and Ms. Cianfarani have decided to build a replacement, and this time they will attach the B3 to a stationary bike. ''If someone really wants to steal the new one,'' Mr. Meenan said, ''they're going to have to be pretty strong to drag it out of here.'' SARAH SCHMIDT NEIGHBORHOOD REPORT: FORT GREENE

1692801_3

NONFICTION CHRONICLE

hearing on the scientist quickly became a kangaroo court. With Oppenheimer safely out of the way, the real arms race could begin, following Teller's dubious strategy of ever-bigger weapons. (Teller covered up the fact that his own big bomb never worked; it was the brilliant Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam who provided the breakthrough that made the H-bomb possible.) The larger casualty was ''the unique partnership between scientists and the government'' -- a rupture that, tragically, continues to distort policy making today. FREUD'S REQUIEM: Mourning, Memory, and the Invisible History of a Summer Walk. By Matthew von Unwerth. (Riverhead, $23.95.) In 1915, Sigmund Freud jotted down some thoughts ''On Transience'' that had supposedly struck him during a walk with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke and Rilke's former lover, the writer and Freud disciple Lou Andreas-Salomé. For von Unwerth, this obscure musing becomes the occasion for an elegantly meandering essay about Freud's life and the intellectual world he moved in. Although psychoanalytic ideas provide a backdrop, von Unwerth is equally interested in the characters and experiences -- contemporary and historical -- that informed Freud's thought. Along with sketches of the tortured Rilke and the subversive Andreas-Salomé, there are cameos ranging from Nietzsche, ''prostrate with insomnia, pain, opium . . . and overwhelmed by the revelation of eternal recurrence,'' to the merely ''normal'' Friedrich Schiller. Small matter that there isn't much of a central thread in all this: von Unwerth's unconventional approach is refreshing, and his literary fluency brings vitality to a well-worn subject. SONGS ON BRONZE: The Greek Myths Made Real. By Nigel Spivey. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24.) These are not the Greek myths you remember from school. To clean out the Augean stables, Herakles invents ''the world's first sewage drain.'' Trapped in the Labyrinth with the man-eating Minotaur, Theseus feels ''a flicker of affinity'' with the beast. At Troy, an exasperated Achilles pummels his ''loudmouth'' comrade Thersites until his brains are ''oozing out of his skull.'' And poor Medea, that ''amazing, resourceful girl'' who rescues Jason and the fleece and even forgoes a career to raise his children: she is dumped for a dumb little princess ''still in her teens.'' Spivey does not quite match the gifts of translators like Robert Fagels, whose mellifluous Homer manages to feel up to date without such obvious effort. But his racy retelling -- in an artfully compressed single narrative -- is a heroic

1693093_0

Where First A-Bomb Fell, Prayers Ask 'Never Again'

At 8:15 a.m. Saturday, as tens of thousands of Japanese bowed their heads here to mark the instant when an atomic bomb fell 60 years ago, only the loud, telltale buzz of the summer cicadas broke the respectful silence. In an hourlong ceremony at the Peace Memorial Park, participants, as in previous years, laid wreaths, burned incense, prayed for the souls of the dead, and gave impassioned pleas for world peace and the abolition of nuclear arms. Few in Hiroshima can remember an Aug. 6 that was not oppressively hot, and Saturday morning's blazing sun matched expectation and memory. Still, on the 60th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attack, some members of the aging and dwindling population of survivors expressed worries that Japan was shedding its postwar pacifism. The survivors, whose suffering had long made them Japan's most eloquent advocates for pacifism, said recent policy changes inside Japan had made them deeply pessimistic. ''The dispatch of our Self-Defense Forces to Iraq is completely out of line with pacifism,'' said Akihiro Takahashi, an A-bomb survivor and former director of the Peace Memorial Museum here. ''In the future, the peace Constitution will no doubt be revised, and that will lead to conscription and, eventually, the possession of nuclear arms.'' Since early 2004 Japan has had about 500 troops in southern Iraq, deployed on a humanitarian aid, noncombat mission. A decade ago, on the last major anniversary of the dropping of the bomb, the possibility of Japan acquiring nuclear arms or revising its official renunciation of war was unthinkable. Today, North Korea's possible possession of nuclear weapons has led many here to worry about an arms race, and Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party has begun the process of revising the American-imposed postwar Constitution. ''Things have changed,'' said Dr. Hiroshi Maruya, 80, a physician and survivor of the nuclear blast. ''Ten years ago, few could question Article 9 of the Constitution,'' he said of the war-renouncing clause. ''But people talk about it openly now.'' With government thinking no longer matching the survivors' message of pacifism, the general attitude toward them has changed, survivors and experts say. Osamu Fujiwara, associate professor of peace studies at Tokyo Keizai University, said Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi did not follow his predecessors' practice of speaking to A-bomb survivors after the annual Aug. 6 ceremony. ''There is no political debate over this cancellation,'' Professor Fujiwara said. ''The ceremony

1692802_13

The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home

in the notion that Western civilization is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said brusquely. ''A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The ''philosophical diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ''philosophical shriek'' of those who intend to destroy it. Naipaul formulated those terms in a lecture he delivered in 1992 at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank in New York. (Called ''Our Universal Civilization,'' it appears in his 2002 essay collection, ''The Writer and the World.'') In it, he cites a remarkable passage from Conrad: ''A half-naked, betel-chewing pessimist stood upon the bank of the tropical river, on the edge of the still and immense forests; a man angry, powerless, empty-handed, with a cry of bitter discontent ready on his lips; a cry that, had it come out, would have rung through the virgin solitudes of the woods as true, as great, as profound, as any philosophical shriek that ever came from the depths of an easy chair to disturb the impure wilderness of chimneys and roofs.'' As for evidence of the diffidence: ''I think it actually is all around us. It's all around us,'' Naipaul said. But where, exactly? ''There are millions and millions of people all around us,'' was all he would say. In ''India: A Million Mutinies Now'' (1990), his third nonfiction book about India, Naipaul celebrated the million manifestations of daily life, of lives undefeated by the chaos, disarray and poverty of the larger society. A Hindu by birth, though not observant, Naipaul finds India a place of great hope. It is, he says, the country where belief and unbelief coexist most peaceably. The economic development of India -- and China -- he said, will ''completely alter the world,'' and ''nothing that's happening in the Arab world has that capacity.'' Yet Naipaul called it ''a calamity'' that, even with its billion people, ''there are no thinkers in India'' today. India is also where he turns for a theory of history. ''The only theory is that everything is in a state of flux,'' he said. This is his own ''personal idea,'' he said, but one linked to a philosophical concept in Indian religion. ''I find it impossible to contain

1693079_0

The Old Man and the Boat

I WENT to Havana earlier this summer partly for the reason that I suspect almost any American without a loved one there would wish to go: to drink in the lost world -- so close, so forbidden to our eyes (at least, mostly forbidden) for nearly half a century. So, yes, I wanted to smoke a Cohiba cigar, an authentic one -- and did. So, yes, I wanted to flag down one of those chromeless Studebakers (or Edsels or Chevy Bel Airs, it didn't matter) that roll down the Prado at their comic off-kilter angles, amid plumes of choking smoke. I got in and told the cabbie, ''Nacional, por favor.'' That's the faded and altogether wonderful Italianate monstrosity of a hotel where you're certain Nat King Cole and Durante are in the bar at the far end of the lobby (having just come in on Pan Am from Idlewild), and Meyer Lansky is plotting something malevolent in a poolside cabana while the bottle blonde beside him rubies her nails. So, yes, I wanted to stand at dusk at the giant sea wall called the Malecón that rings much of the city so that I could watch the surf beat against it in phosphorescent hues while the sun went down like some enormous burning wafer. So, yes, I wanted to walk those sewer-fetid and narrow cobbled streets in Habana Vieja and gaze up at those stunning 16th-century mansions, properties of the state, carved up now into apartments, with their cracked marble entryways and falling ceiling plaster and filigree balconies flying laundry on crisscrossses of clothesline. I went to Cuba for all of this, but primarily I went to behold -- in the flesh, so to speak -- Hemingway's boat. You see, for three years I have been obsessing on this wooden possession, which was so much more than a wooden possession, which lasted the most imitated writer of the 20th century through three wives, the Nobel Prize, all his ruin. Her name is Pilar and she'd been intimately his, and he hers, for 27 years, which were the last 27 years. She was sitting up on concrete blocks, like some old and gasping browned-out whale, about 200 yards from the main house, under a baking corrugated-metal awning, on what was once Papa's tennis court, just down from the drained swimming pool where Ava Gardner reputedly swam nude. Even in her diminished,

1696393_4

South Korea, in Turnabout, Now Calls for More Babies

late 1990's, but we had been focused on decreasing the birthrate for 40 years and it was hard to change directions,'' he said. But some of the measures aimed at reversing the trend have done little more than suggest the government is still out of step with the times. A campaign earlier this year urged women to have at least two children by joining the ''1-2-3'' movement: have one child in the first year of marriage and a second before turning 30. It ended after many young women and men, who have been delaying marriage until their late 20's or later, said the campaign's expectations were unrealistic in this age. Mr. Park said the government was considering new measures to tackle some of the biggest reasons cited by couples for not having children, including the high costs of after-school education and the lack of day care. The government also wants to give tax breaks to couples with several children and encourage paid maternity leaves. Local governments are not waiting, though. In April, Seocheon, a west coast county whose population has declined from 150,000 in the 1960's to 65,000, began giving out bonuses for babies: $300 for the first or second child, $800 for the third. ''Some villages haven't heard babies crying in 18 years,'' said Lee Kwon Hee, the county deputy chief. At the Masan Elementary School, the population of 56 students is less than a tenth of what it was in the 1970's. Back then, pupils were packed together so that schools had what were called ''bean sprout classrooms,'' said Kim Deok Sang, the principal. Nowadays, Masan's students have to join those at the two nearest schools for sporting and other events. There was some good news, though, in at least one corner of Seocheon County. Last winter, the village of Seokdong celebrated its first newborn in four years -- twins, in fact, born to Lee Ji Yun, 28, and her husband, Park Dae Soo, 32. Their 4-year-old daughter had been the last child born there. The young couple own 10 cows and farm potatoes, rice, garlic and chilies. Although the county gave them a total of $1,100 for the twins, they emphasized that the cash incentive played no role in their decision. Mr. Park said he doubted that the bonus would bolster the birthrate. His wife, a nurse who stopped working when the twins were born, nodded. ''If

1696445_1

In Catskills, Learning to Live Near Bears

recent years, more and more residents have complained about encounters with bears in their yards. The only recorded fatality from a bear in the wild in state history occurred in Sullivan County three summers ago, when a 5-month-old died after a bear snatched her from a stroller in a bungalow community. After the death, state environmental officials started an outreach program focusing primarily on Sullivan County, where the summer population quadruples, but also on Ulster County, where Woodstock is. Earlier this year, Ms. Gore, who is working on a doctorate, approached the state about starting more intensive awareness initiatives in two pilot communities: Warwick, in Orange County, and Woodstock. ''We embraced the concept,'' said Bill Rudge, the natural resources supervisor for the state Department of Environmental Conservation's Region 3, which includes much of the Catskills. ''We wanted to do more.'' The reasoning behind the education awareness campaign holds that changes in human behavior can reduce unpleasant encounters between bears and humans. Complaints about bears in the Catskill Mountains have fallen by half this summer over last year, officials say, although it is too early to tell whether that is a result of the education efforts. ''I'd like to think it's because of the outreach program, and I think people are starting to change their behavior,'' Mr. Rudge said. ''But it's also a very good year for bears' natural foraging for berries and nuts.'' State officials are keeping a close eye on the bear population. There are 1,200 to 1,500 bears in the Catskills, one of three black bear ranges in New York. The others are the Allegany range in the Southern Tier, with 500 bears, and the Adirondacks, with 5,000 bears. In the Catskills, the number of bears has risen steadily from about 600 in the 1970's, when hunting was briefly suspended to encourage the population. Biologists attribute the increase to the reforestation of large swaths of former farmland, as well as a growing number of second homes in mountainous communities like Woodstock. Unlike New Jersey, where debates have raged over whether to reintroduce bear hunting, New York has long embraced hunting as a way to manage the population. This year, state officials decided to lengthen the bear hunting season, which in the Catskills will run from Nov. 21 to Dec. 11. Last year, 257 bears were killed in the Catskills. For some residents of Woodstock, a longstanding arts colony

1696402_4

U.S. Trade Pact Divides the Central Americans, With Farmers and Others Fearful

experiment in free trade with the United States has depopulated much of the countryside and sent waves of migration north of the border. With that in mind, perhaps no Costa Rican region has more at stake than Guanacaste, where tens of thousands of small farmers like Mr. Elizondo raise beef, pigs, rice and sugar cane. Rice farmers here see the agreement as an unmitigated disaster. Even though they have 10 years before the 35 percent duty on imported rice begins to disappear, most say they will never be able compete with rice farmers in the United States, who have better technology and receive huge subsidies. It costs about $250 to produce a ton of rice in both countries, but the Americans sell it on the world market for much less, farmers here said. ''It's impossible for is to be competitive with all the subsidies that the North Americans have,'' said Emilio Rodríguez Pacheco, 48, who farms about 25 acres of rice here. ''For the rice sector it's a tragedy.'' At the same time, critics point out that vulnerable parts of the United States economy remain protected, even in areas where Central American negotiators managed small inroads, like sugar and textiles. The agreement, for instance, leaves in place the price supports for American sugar, while opening the door only a crack, letting in imports equal to 1 percent of United States production. The part on textiles was also written to protect United States fabric and yarn factories, this time from Chinese competition. It requires that 90 percent of apparel turned out by Central America makers use American fabrics, which they can buy duty free. ''If we are in Cafta, we can survive,'' said María A. Quirce, the executive director of the Chamber of Textile Exporters. ''If we are out of Cafta, we are out of business.'' Defenders of the pact say most of the complaints are baseless and born of fear of change. Freer access to the North American market is the only way, they maintain, for Central American economies to grow. Meanwhile, if the structure of the Costa Rican economy changes, then so be it. Ruined farmers will shift to export crops or find other kinds of work. Foreign investment will bring more jobs. ''We are condemned to be traders,'' said former President Óscar Arias, who is running for president again this year and supports the treaty. ''We produce what

1696108_1

Black Flag

speak of, and a Constitution that was skeptical about, if not antagonistic to, the maintenance of permanent armed forces. The two human symbols of this vulnerability were the American sailor seized from his ship and ''impressed'' into the British or French Navy, and the sailor or passenger taken at sea by marauding Muslim pirates and delivered into slavery. Each of three new books treats a different aspect of that vertiginous period. The word ''corsair,'' which can mean either pirate ship or pirate, became inextricably and incorrectly linked with the Romantic as a result of Byron's 1814 poem of that name. But corsairs ruthlessly kidnapped and plundered, whether in Africa (the Barbary Coast) or the Gulf of Mexico. We may still harbor a slight sympathy for the smuggler and the bootlegger, but there was little romance in living at a time when such people had state power. Finally resolving the question of how the Laffite/Lafitte/Laffitte family actually spelled its name (it evidently never quite made up its mind and wasn't much of a nursery of literacy), William C. Davis in ''The Pirates Laffite'' takes us to New Orleans in the period immediately following Thomas Jefferson's acquisition of the Louisiana territories. Nobody quite knew where the new frontiers were; it was not clear whether Spain had accepted Napoleon's right to dispose of such a vast area; the status of Florida was undecided by the sale; and in the meantime the city was ruled by a few American officials and judges presiding over rather than governing a mass of slaves, free blacks, Creoles, Spaniards and Frenchmen. On islands in the neighboring bay of Barataria (quixotically named after the ''isle'' acquired by Sancho Panza in ''Don Quixote'') a more or less self-governing pirate republic had established itself. Here the Laffite half brothers, Pierre and Jean, who had standardized the signatures they used, disposed of substantial numbers of slaves and vast quantities of contraband, confident that many respectable citizens of New Orleans would not scruple to avoid the 1808 prohibition on importing the first, and the tiresome duties payable on the second. Rebecca West once described a Serbian peasant who was stopped by the king and asked how he was doing. The honest fellow's response -- that the pigs thrived and the smuggling trade flourished also, thank you -- would summarize the relationship between authority and organized crime in Lousiana then. The piratical idyll was,

1696439_7

For Merck, the Vioxx Paper Trail Won't Go Away

their way through the trove of 7 million papers that Merck has already produced, said Richard T. Evans, a drug industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. Meanwhile, federal prosecutors are conducting their own criminal investigation of Merck, and withtheir broad subpoena power they may find documents that plaintiffs' lawyers have not yet uncovered. To be sure, some one-time factors did cause the Angleton case to be particularly disastrous for Merck. In the future, its lawyers will presumably avoid cross-examining 60-year-old widows for 90 minutes, as Gerry Lowry -- one of Merck's lead lawyers in this case -- did to Mrs. Ernst. Ms. Lowry, for example, repeatedly questioned her about Mr. Ernst's relationship with his adult children from a previous marriage, whom Mrs. Ernst does not know and who were not a part of the lawsuit. Mr. Bicks, the outside lawyer, said Ms. Lowry's approach was fraught with unnecessary risks. ''Conventional trial wisdom is that there is no reason to personally attack a person who has lost a loved one.'' Merck's witnesses may also be better prepared so they are not embarrassed by being unable to answer basic questions about the clinical trials that they say convinced them of Vioxx's safety, as happened to Dr. Alan S. Nies in the Angleton case. In addition, Texas has relatively liberal rules of evidence, so Merck may be able to keep juries from seeing some of the documents Mr. Lanier used in this trial. In its statement after the case, Merck said it believed that Judge Ben Hardin, who oversaw the Angleton case, had wrongly allowed irrelevant and scientifically flawed testimony. And many judges may not allow juries to see some of Merck's more inflammatory marketing materials. But many provocative documents, such as the e-mail messages in which Merck scientists discussed their early concerns about Vioxx, are clearly relevant to the litigation and will be allowed everywhere. And unless Merck can quickly figure out how to explain those documents to juries, it will soon face an enormous problem. Even Merck, with $22 billion in sales and $6 billion in profits last year, can withstand only so many $250 million verdicts before it is forced to rethink its plan to fight every Vioxx lawsuit. ''There are 4,000 of these cases out there,'' said David Berg, a Houston trial lawyer. ''The black hole gets bigger the more and more they get hit.'' News Analysis

1694340_1

Lutherans Reject Plan To Allow Gay Clerics

resolution to remain unified despite deep differences over homosexuality was approved by a vote of 851 to 127. ''We said that we are going to have a communal spirituality, not an issue-driven one,'' said Bishop Stephen P. Bouman of the metropolitan New York synod. ''They allowed us to continue to have pastoral space in local situations for people to offer sensitive and graceful ministry to gay and lesbian people and their relations.'' Bishop Bouman said that Lutheran churches ''in most regions of the country'' already performed same-sex blessings and that the vote in Orlando on that issue ''creates a little more public room'' for such ceremonies. But a Lutheran group called Goodsoil that advocates gay equality accused the church of ''sacrificing'' gay men and women ''on the altar of a false and ephemeral sense of unity.'' The Lutherans are only one of many mainline Protestant denominations to struggle with seemingly irreconcilable views on homosexuality within their ranks. The United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church have upheld bans on ordaining noncelibate gay men and lesbians. The Episcopal Church U.S.A. approved the ordination of an openly noncelibate gay bishop in 2003. In the fallout, some congregations have left, and the Episcopal Church has been condemned by many of its affiliates in the worldwide Anglican communion. During the Lutherans' debate in Orlando, the Rev. Robert Driesen, a voting member from the Upper Susquehanna synod in Pennsylvania warned that if Lutherans moved in the same direction as the Episcopalians, the repercussions would be felt worldwide. The Lutheran World Federation includes 138 member churches in 77 countries. ''We would separate ourselves not only from these communions but from much of historic Christianity,'' Mr. Driesen said. ''Should we take the same action, we can expect fractures.'' The meeting was interrupted when nearly 100 supporters of gay inclusion filed to the front of the assembly and stood in silent protest. The resolutions on homosexuality had been proposed by a church committee that met for three years. The church currently allows the ordination of gay men and women as long as they are celibate and chaste. The defeated resolution would have permitted noncelibate gay men and lesbians to be ordained if they met several criteria, including being in committed relationships. Many delegates in favor of full inclusion of gay men and women shared personal stories of anger and alienation from the church because of its stance. The

1694363_0

The Growth in Jobs

To the Editor: Re ''Some Caveats on Job Growth'' (editorial, Aug. 6): Three cheers for rejecting the triumphal tone of business and government analysts who are content with a 5 percent unemployment rate because it is perceived as good for stock- and bondholders. Not only would further strong job growth be good for middle-class wage earners, it is also crucial for the continued success of the welfare-to-work policies and for integrating ''at risk'' groups like ex-offenders into society's mainstream. These important social benefits from a high-employment economy are well worth a small increase in inflation rates. Robert Cherry Brooklyn, Aug. 7, 2005 The writer is a professor of economics at Brooklyn College and the author of two books about jobs, race, gender and the economy.

1694345_2

June Trade Deficit Surged As Oil Price Resumed Climb

played significant roles in the surge, which produced a $17.6 billion trade deficit with China -- eclipsing the $12.8 billion June deficit with Europe, in second place. China's lopsided imbalance captures headlines, overshadowing the role of United States exports, which almost always rise. Indeed, they were a record $106.8 billion in June. But they have been stuck at nearly that level since April, despite a 15 percent decline in the value of the dollar over the last three years vis-à-vis the currencies of America's most important trading partners. A cheaper dollar should stimulate exports by making them less expensive in foreign currencies, and stimulate production at home by making imports more expensive. Mr. Behravesh counts on this to happen, but first ''the dollar must fall a minimum of at least an additional 20 percent, including at least that much against the Chinese yuan.'' The yuan so far is down 2.1 percent, a result of the Chinese government's announcement last month that it would allow the yuan to appreciate gradually. Some economists argue that faith in exchange rates is misplaced. They say that consumption and economic growth are much stronger in the United States than in other countries and that Americans, as a result, suck in imports at a greater pace than people abroad. ''The trade deficit is much more responsive to the growth and consumption differential than to exchange rates,'' said David Malpass, chief economist at Bear, Stearns & Company, representing this view. Other economists are concerned, however, that some of the products once exported from the United States are no longer made here. They note that while the trade surplus in services -- particularly financial services -- is rising, the amounts involved are too small to offset the swelling imbalance in goods. Television sets and VCR's, for example, are either no longer made in the United States or are made in small numbers. But demand is strong and imports of these items totaled $8.7 billion in June, overwhelming exports of $1.9 billion. Vehicles hew to a similar pattern -- $16.4 billion in imports versus $6.2 billion in exports -- and so does machinery, at a moment when investment by business is rising. ''There is a question now whether we can go back to making the stuff in the United States that Americans want,'' said Catherine L. Mann, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics. ''I don't know.''

1694400_0

Changes Considered For Flight Screening

A staff group at the Transportation Security Administration has put together a list of possible changes in airline screening that include allowing small knives and scissors and skipping screening all together for members of Congress, governors and airline pilots. The new head of the agency, Edmund S. Hawley, promised in his confirmation hearing last month that he would re-evaluate current procedures, most of them established immediately after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. A spokesman for the agency, Mark O. Hatfield, confirmed that a ''summit group'' had been considering changes, but he said, ''I don't really think they constitute recommendations at this point.'' The specifics of the changes under consideration were first reported in The Washington Post.

1696721_3

OBSERVATORY

from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. Using genetic analysis, researchers affiliated with New York University, the American Museum of Natural History and the Wildlife Conservation Society discovered that a male humpback sampled in 2002 off Gabon in West Africa was the same whale that had been sampled in 2000 off Madagascar. The finding, by Cristina Pomilla and Howard C. Rosenbaum and reported in Biology Letters, should add to understanding of the migratory patterns of these animals. Man vs. Beast in Tanzania To a tourist in one of Tanzania's national parks, a lion is a majestic beast, and seeing one is often the highlight of a safari. But to many Tanzanian villagers outside the parks, a lion is a terrifying pest, said Craig Packer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has studied the animals in Tanzania over three decades. Dr. Packer said that because of lion attacks on people and livestock, there has been a ''huge change in attitude'' in Tanzania, home to one-quarter to one-half of the lions remaining in Africa. Half of the animals are outside the parks. ''People don't tolerate problems with lions any more,'' Dr. Packer said. Villagers are quite willing to kill the animals, often by poisoning them, and that spells trouble for conservationists trying to protect the species. Dr. Packer and his colleagues set out to quantify the situation, assembling 15 years of data on lion attacks on people. Their report, published in the journal Nature, details the circumstances of 871 attacks from 1990 to 2004, most in the southern part of the country. More than 560 of the victims died. ''We were really horrified when we saw the scale of the whole problem,'' he said. Attacks have increased in recent years, he said, to well over 100 a year. Lions can work their way through the walls of thatch huts to drag people away, and attack farmers as they sleep in makeshift huts in their fields, trying to protect crops from bush pigs. A major reason for the increase, Dr. Packer said, is that there are more people. Tanzania's population increased to 35 million in 2002 from 23 million in 1988. ''There are people living where they never have before,'' he said. Those people, among the poorest in Africa, increasingly rely on bush meat -- large animals like antelope and smaller ones like rats -- to survive. That takes food away

1698263_0

Left Behind, Way Behind

First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school. Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college. Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty. Of all the factors combining to shape the future of the U.S., this is one of the most important. Millions of American kids are not even making it through high school in an era in which a four-year college degree is becoming a prerequisite for achieving (or maintaining) a middle-class lifestyle. The Program for International Assessment, which compiles reports on the reading and math skills of 15-year-olds, found that the U.S. ranked 24th out of 29 nations surveyed in math literacy. The same result for the U.S. -- 24th out of 29 -- was found when the problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds were tested. If academic performance were an international athletic event, spectators would be watching American kids falling embarrassingly behind in a number of crucial categories. A new report from a pair of Washington think tanks -- the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America's Future -- says an urgent new commitment to public education, much stronger than the No Child Left Behind law, must be made if that slide is to be reversed. This would not be a minor task. In much of the nation the public education system is in shambles. And the kids who need the most help -- poor children from inner cities and rural areas -- often attend the worst schools. An education task force established by the center and the institute noted the following: ''Young low-income and minority children are more likely to start school without having gained important school readiness skills, such as recognizing letters and counting. By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind nonpoor students. Across the nation, only 15 percent of low-income fourth graders achieved proficiency in reading in 2003, compared to 41 percent of nonpoor students.'' How's that for a disturbing passage? Not only is the picture horribly bleak for low-income and minority kids, but we find that only 41 percent of nonpoor fourth graders can read proficiently. I respectfully suggest

1698234_2

Arbas Journal; As France Shops for Bears, Shepherds Feel Threatened

a diplomatic gesture, from state to state. Mr. Reynes points to a regional survey earlier this year in which 68 percent replied that they favored more bears as an economic asset. The resistance, he says, is a ''psychological problem, a cultural problem.'' The movement to bring back the bears gained momentum last November, when a hunter shot and killed one of the few remaining native bears, a female named Cannelle, or Cinnamon. Cannelle's death shook not only the pro-bear faction in the mountains, but the entire nation. President Jacques Chirac, in a statement, called it a ''great loss for biodiversity in France and in Europe.'' The imported bears do not necessarily have to be from Slovenia, though that tiny Balkan country has, for Europe, become to bears what Japan once was to transistor radios. Countries that have taken in Slovenian bears in recent years include Italy, Switzerland and Austria, in addition to France. The pro-bear momentum, however, was of short duration. The attack on Mr. Mirouz's sheep, which were grazing on high mountain slopes, came in June. Details are disputed, but Mr. Mirouz said his father and brother had earlier spotted the bear in a pasture. The bear attacked while his father looked on helplessly through binoculars, killing some of the sheep and stampeding the others. In the end, Mr. Mirouz counted 180 or so dead sheep. The government was quick to pay an indemnity for the dead sheep, amounting to more than the income he could have expected by selling them. Still, soon after the attack, 150 farmers -- most of them sheep herders like Mr. Mirouz -- demonstrated along the route of the Tour de France bicycle race, holding banners aloft with the words, ''The endangered species is us.'' The government, made uncertain, postponed the release of the other bears while it studied the attack and its implications. With 580,000 sheep in the Pyrenees, almost as many as there are people, the government is treading lightly. Mr. Reynes, surrounded in his office by a life-size stuffed bear and brochures promoting the merits of a healthy bear population, contends that accidents like the death of Mr. Mirouz's sheep could be avoided if the farmers made better use of government subsidies to pay for shepherds and sheep dogs. Bears, he says, are timid by nature, and dogs or shepherds usually suffice to keep the bears at bay. ''The heart of

1693880_0

The Movies Are Rated R, But Not On the Billboards

The billboards promoting the latest installment in the Columbia Pictures ''man-whore'' franchise, ''Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo,'' are about as subtle as the nine-story-tall leaning tower of Pisa rendered to look as if it were poking out of Rob Schneider's pants. For anyone still in danger of missing the point, one version of the sign on Sunset Boulevard has the crooked tower swinging up and down in the wind, presumably from flaccid to erect. Like the first ''Deuce Bigalow'' comedy, the sequel, which opens Friday, is rated R, for ''pervasive strong crude and sexual humor, language, nudity and drug content.'' But the billboards, which Columbia said were in place about a week before the movie received its rating, on July 7, say the film ''is not yet rated.'' The same fine-print footnote could be seen in lieu of an R rating in the early posters for ''Wedding Crashers,'' which New Line Cinema released July 15. Ditto for billboards everywhere now advertising ''The 40-Year-Old Virgin,'' from Universal Pictures, which opens Aug. 19. In a season when these raunchy sex comedies were supposed to defy conventional Hollywood marketing wisdom by wearing their R-ratings proudly -- ''Wedding Crashers'' has been a hit of the summer, earning more than $140 million in its first 24 days -- the ratings-free outdoor advertisements would appear counterintuitive, at least. But they could also point, a few film executives speculated and a few industry critics warned, to a loophole in the movie industry's self-regulating ratings system, which is intended to give parents the information they need to make decisions about what their children see. (The ratings system has been refined in recent years amid pressure from Congress and parents' groups, but they were focused on violence, not sex.) Marketing executives for New Line, Columbia and Universal all said the explanation for the rating-less advertisements was simple, and entirely innocent. ''What it boils down to is deadlines,'' said Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Pictures Entertainment and president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group. He and other executives said that it can take a month or so to prepare and place outdoor advertising, and that those ads -- billboards, bus and train signs, in-theater posters and the like -- are typically plastered across the marketplace six or eight weeks before a film's release. That adds up to a lead time of 10 to 12 weeks,

1693977_6

Alchemy for the Dinner Table; Science's Quest for Tasty, Fat-Free, Life-Preserving Additives

added to foods without an unappealing taste or smell. A specially modified cornstarch and a vegetable protein, usually soy, are mixed with water and fish oil and then cycled through machines that evaporate the water. In the process, the starch and protein molecules attach themselves to the droplets of fish oil, forming a shield. The concoction emerges from the machines as a beige powder. Jim Zallie, a food scientist and National Starch group vice president, says that a company in Seattle is testing the product for its bread. The label on the bread, he says, is unlikely to advertise the fish oil content, but simply cite the presence of omega-3's. Kellogg has signed a 15-year licensing deal with Martek Biosciences, a company that sells omega-3 fatty acids derived from algae, which have a milder smell and do not necessarily need to be encapsulated. Kellogg declined to comment on the deal or when the algae-based omega-3's might appear in its products. Kerry Ingredients, a Wisconsin-based subsidiary of the Kerry Group, a European food giant, is doing similar encapsulation with fiber, also to avoid the unseemly taste and texture issues. Without encapsulation, the ground-up soybean hulls the company is using as fiber make food taste a bit like sawdust. But guar gum, which comes from the seeds of the guar plant and is used widely in food as an inexpensive thickener and stabilizer, is even more problematic. Kerry Ingredients is using guar, which has a neutral flavor, as a fiber source, ''but it's the consistency of mucus,'' said Jack Maegli, a food scientist who heads research and development for new products at Kerry Ingredients. ''If you eat too much of it, it invokes the gag reflex. I know it sounds unpleasant, and it is unpleasant. That's why we encapsulate it.'' The problem, Professor Nestle said, is that ingredients that are extracted from their natural sources are never as good as the real thing. She cited plant sterols, another seemingly healthy ingredient popping up in various foods. Extracted from soybeans using a chemical solvent, plant sterols are promoted for their cholesterol-reducing benefits and have been added to yogurt, orange juice and cereal. But, Professor Nestle said: ''No way do plant sterols replace whole fruits or vegetables, or even beans for that matter. The evidence is pretty clear that foods work, but single nutrients don't.'' Food companies insist that, unlike their critics, they are

1698479_0

Corrections

An article in Business Day on Friday and an entry in the Five Days feature in Business Day on Saturday about Alan Greenspan's tenure as chairman of the Federal Reserve misstated his age. He is 79, not 78.

1698330_0

MEMO PAD

HURRICANE RIPPLES With Hurricane Katrina pounding the New Orleans area yesterday, shutting airports from the western Florida Panhandle to Baton Rouge and creating mounting delays at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, a central connecting point for the South, here are some ways to plan ahead if you're traveling this week. A new Web service, www.flightstats.com, calculates status and delays for every domestic flight. (Click the link ''Sample Aps'' and then ''Airport Status.) ''You just drill in and see how your flight may be affected,'' said Meara McLaughlin, the head of business development and marketing for Flightstats. All major airline Web sites have a tool, usually called a flight tracker, that gives the real-time status of any flight, including anticipated delays. And the Federal Aviation Administration maintains a map showing real-time airport operating status at its Web site, www.faa.gov, under the Airport Status link. Individual airlines are also posting information about changing itineraries and canceling tickets on their own Web sites. AMERICANS ABROAD -- Americans made a record 27.4 million trips overseas in 2004, an increase of almost 12 percent over 2003, according to the United States Department of Commerce. Kennedy International Airport in New York was the most popular departure point, with 4.7 million outbound international passengers. FREE-STAY DAY -- Don't ignore those people handing out luggage tags today in business districts in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles. As big hotel chains battle to promote their various guest-loyalty programs, hundreds of representatives of InterContinental Hotels will be distributing numerically coded luggage tags, and one in six of them will have a prize of $250 toward a stay at any hotel that accepts American Express cards. In all, there will be 1,000 winners. There are more than 3,500 InterContinental Hotels Group hotels with 535,000 rooms in 100 countries. But the promotion, on behalf of Intecontinental's Priority Club Rewards loyalty program, allows winners to use the awards even at rival hotels. The idea, InterContinental said, is to illustrate that its own loyalty program makes getting free stays easier than other programs. Winners can redeem hotel-stay vouchers at www.priorityclub.com/freestay. PREMIUM LOUNGING -- Airlines with the top-rated premier services keep raising standards with their airport lounges. The latest example is Virgin Atlantic, which has opened Phase 1 of its new Upper Class Lounge at Heathrow Airport in London. It's next to the original Upper Class Lounge and has a spa pool, steam room

1698302_0

OBSERVATORY

Putting a Lid on It As society pumps more and more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, scientists are trying to determine what can be done to reduce the effect on global temperatures. One area of research is in developing ways to store much of the gas, perhaps underground or in the sea. But nature already has several storage systems for carbon dioxide, including plants and trees, which use the gas in photosynthesis. Scientists have wondered if trees will soak up some of the additional carbon dioxide, by growing faster. The effects of CO2 enrichment have been tested on shrubs, grasses and small trees, but it is more difficult to conduct such experiments on large trees in a natural forest. An international team led by researchers at the University of Basel in Switzerland has done just that, however, with a novel approach that involved setting up a 140-foot-tall construction crane in the middle of a hardwood forest of oaks, lindens, maples and other species. They used the crane to run a network of porous plastic tubes through the forest canopy and pumped carbon dioxide through it over four years. Over that time they measured various aspects of tree growth to see the effect the elevated CO2. Their conclusion: although the response differed among the tree species, over all there was no increase in leaf or stem growth over the four years. The trees grew vigorously, the researchers reported in the journal Science, but they did not add biomass. So perhaps trees will not be of much help in storing excess carbon dioxide. Farmers' Almanac An El Niño event can bring heavy rains to certain areas and drought to others. Either way, the weather can wreak havoc on agriculture. Forecasters have gotten better about predicting such seasonal events, however, so farmers can plan accordingly. If drought is expected, for example, they can plant drought-resistant seeds, or alter planting times to make better use of what little rainfall there is. That all works well if the farmers hear of the forecast. In much of the developing world, however, there is no reliable way for subsistence farmers to hear of potential droughts before they happen. In Zimbabwe and a few other countries, efforts have been made to get such forecasts to farmers, usually by radio. The question then is, Do they do any good? Do farmers change their planting plans

1698344_1

A Quest to Save a Tree, and Make the World Smell Sweet

500 miles northeast of here. But when the exploitation there grew so intense that the tree was virtually wiped out, they turned next to the Brazilian Amazon. But by the late 1980's, the rosewood population in Brazil's eastern Amazon had also been eradicated. Alarmed, Brazil's environmental protection agency responded by putting rosewood on its list of endangered species. The measure was meant to stop the plunder. But with the agency unable to enforce its prohibition, much of the rosewood trade went underground, pushing prices up and forcing companies like Phebo, Brazil's oldest soap manufacturer, to look for lower-cost synthetic substitutes, which are imported from places like China. ''Rosewood soap continues to account for half our sales, but we had to stop using the real thing around 1990,'' said Roberto Lima, manager of the company's plant in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon. ''We sell nearly four times as much soap as we did back then, but the scarcity of the natural extract has pushed the price to a level that only the big companies overseas can afford.'' What happens after drums of the fragrant oil leave mills in the Amazon for export is not always clear. Environmental groups say much of the oil is routed through a handful of brokers, many based in the New York area. But those intermediaries are reluctant to talk about how they obtain the product and how they manage to comply with the Brazilian government's strict regulations. According to academic and industry studies, legal rosewood oil production in Brazil today is barely one-tenth of its peak in the late 1960's, when annual output was 300 tons. The number of registered mills, which turn rosewood tree trunks into oil through an inefficient process that seems to devour trees, has also fallen drastically, from more than 50 in the 1940's to fewer than 8 now. About six years ago, though, a community group in this small island town in the middle of the Amazon River began an effort to try to revive the industry, this time on a sustainable basis. Rather than simply cut down trees and haul away their trunks, the group, Avive, decided to prune branches and leaves every five years or so, thereby extending the usefulness of individual rosewood trees for decades. Today the project's members, most of them peasant women, have planted and are tending more than 3,000 rosewood saplings in the

1698331_1

Don't Let That Ticket Out of the Screener's Sight

boss at the Transportation Security Administration, drafted a list of possible rule changes that could, if put in place, do a lot to reduce the hassle factor. One would allow passengers to pack pocket knives and scissors in their carry-on bags. Another would let most keep their shoes on. Another would let laptops stay in their cases. That's the new management's thinking. But what did old management think of this initiative? I put the question to Tom Ridge, who was the head of Homeland Security for just over three years, starting in October 2001. Most of the current checkpoint procedures were put in place during his tenure; did he agree that some of them ought to be jettisoned? He did. In focusing so intently on things people might be carrying, ''I think we probably overreacted,'' Mr. Ridge told me at this month's annual convention of the National Business Travel Association in San Diego. ''Does anybody truly think you could take over an airplane with fingernail clippers, nail files, cuticle scissors? The answer is absolutely not. We need to move from looking for weapons to paying attention to people who are or could be terrorists.'' He didn't mean eliminating magnetometer scans for weapons or explosives. New checkpoint technologies, in fact, would enhance the ability to do that, he said. But there are better ways to look at people and send them to their gates more efficiently while maintaining tight security, he suggested. I asked him about the changes being discussed for expediting the movement of passengers, especially frequent fliers, through the checkpoints. He expressed strong support for the proposed registered-traveler program, which would streamline the process for travelers who undergo background checks and provide personal information, including biometric data like iris scans. The program is being tested by the T.S.A. at a half-dozen airports. If it is adopted, frequent fliers will be able to register and, if cleared, routinely pass through checkpoints without being hauled aside for a secondary screening -- unless something unusual sets off the alarm. To register, these travelers -- and it is presumed that millions of the most frequent business travelers would be among them -- would pay an annual fee, which has not yet been set. They would carry electronic cards encoded with personal data, including iris scans and fingerprints. The cards would be tied electronically to a vast federal database of personal information, including financial

1693345_1

Some Fear Iraq's Charter Will Erode Women's Rights

with authority that would effectively supersede that of civil courts like this one and produce an Iranian-style theocracy. Each individual court, some women fear, would make rulings according to its whim, replacing the set judgments of the existing law -- even though those judgments are rooted in Shariah. ''It's really a huge setback,'' said Shirouk al-Abayachi, project manager of the Iraqi Women's Network, an umbrella organization of more than 80 women's groups that was founded in 2003. ''In a state of going forward,'' she said, referring to Iraq's budding democracy, ''we are going backward.'' The issue has prompted a series of recent protests and news conferences by the women's groups, including a meeting last Tuesday attended by the American ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. Generally loath to interfere openly with the Iraqi political process, American officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Mr. Khalilzad, have insisted that the new constitution protect women's rights. But the ramifications of the ambiguously worded provisions are not yet certain. Current Iraqi law coexists with Shariah and Christian church rulings in a thick undergrowth of judicial institutions and precedents that some legal specialists here say is unlikely to be changed much. ''I don't see any significant difference with the new constitution,'' said Jaafar Nasser Hussain, a Shiite member of the Supreme Court who received his first appointment as a judge in 1976 and served for a time in a family court in Diyala Province, east of Baghdad. Basic differences among Shiite, Sunni and Christian religious doctrine are reflected in the law, Mr. Hussain said. For example, Isma, the bride -- the judge would not let her and the groom give their last names for publication -- is entitled to half her wedding gift before the marriage ceremony and half afterward, whenever she asks for it, because she is a Shiite. A Sunni bride could request the second payment, in this case five million dinars, or about $3,400, only on the death of her husband or after a divorce. ''Yes, I got the sum,'' Isma told the judge when he asked if the first payment had been made. ''I pronounce you husband and wife according to the agreement between you,'' the judge said. The women in the group behind them broke into the jarringly high-pitched ''La la la la la la la!'' of Muslim celebrations and threw candy that landed with a thunk on the

1691809_0

Itineraries; Air Boors

New technology and recent economic realities translate into novel etiquette challenges on plane flights nowadays. Like trying to avoid the pornographic film playing on the DVD of the passenger next to you. Or trying to breathe through your mouth for six hours because your seatmate decided that the perfect in-flight lunch was a tuna fish sandwich -- a smell that doesn't mix so well with the Big Mac being consumed by the guy in front of you. These are some of the problems passengers a few years ago never had to face, before DVD's were prevalent and before most airlines stopped serving meals. ''You wouldn't believe what people watch,'' said Mimi Rodriguez, a flight attendant with America West. She says it is not uncommon for people to watch pornography on board; if a passenger complains, she asks the offending party to step into the galley and tells him that his film choice is making some fellow travelers uncomfortable. ''But it's not a violation of regulations,'' she says. ''We usually ask them to turn it off or turn the screen so it can't be seen.'' Most comply, she adds. If assaults on fliers' eyes and ears are increasing, so are attacks on their noses. Strongly aromatic foods like the Korean dish kimchi can really stink up a cabin, she says. So can less exotic fare, like hard-boiled eggs. Some etiquette problems are virtually as old as flying, but people have come up with new methods to deal with them. Consider the reclining seat. Every frequent flier has a story about an insensitive slob who shoved his seat back, causing a computer to fly off the tray table. Or alternatively, the idiot sitting behind who kept jamming her knees into the seat in front. Ira Goldman, president of Right Brain Ltd., took matters into his own hands in 2003 and invented the Knee Defender (www.kneedefender.com). These are small pieces of plastic that slip onto the legs of the tray table to prevent it from closing, and therefore, stop the seat in front from reclining. ''Computer users put it on as a safety catch,'' Mr. Goldman said. His product, which he says he has sold by the thousands online, comes with a courtesy card that you can give the passenger in front to let him know you are using the Knee Defender. Bill Taylor, a media consultant who flies almost every week, bought

1691864_2

Saudis' Leader Is Dead, Ending 23-Year Reign

efficiency -- an assurance that there would not be any major changes in international or domestic policies. Saudi officials said they expected that, if anything, relations with the United States might grow closer, because the new king has a warm relationship with President Bush. For Abdullah, who has fashioned himself as a reformer in a land where conforming to tradition is a virtue, the challenge now is to make good on longstanding promises for change. In his nine years as the de facto ruler of the country, he pushed for changes that included the nation's first popular elections, which were held this year to elect local councils. He also moved the education of girls from the control of the religious authorities to the Ministry of Education. And he has worked to balance close relations with the United States, which is perceived by many in the royal family as essential for national and regional security, against rising anti-Americanism among many of his nation's citizens. But it remains to be seen whether King Abdullah has the fundamental power to challenge Saudi Arabia's imbedded powers, including the infamous vice police, the religious clergy and more than a thousand royals all vying for position and a hand at the country's purse strings. He may push for greater citizen participation in government, more rights for women and amnesty for some political prisoners, political analysts said. ''We're pinning an awful lot on this one personality,'' said Toby Jones, the Persian Gulf analyst for the International Crisis Group, who sees the king and his crown prince as the collective flag-bearers for change. ''But they're basically not democratic reformers. They're interested in adjusting the political system but not interested in fundamentally changing it.'' Stability is a bedrock principle in the Middle East, and in particular in Saudi Arabia, whose dynasty was forged in the 18th century through an alliance between a tribal leader, Muhammad bin Saud, and a religious leader, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, who preached a puritanical form of Islam that sought to restore Islam from what they saw as heresies, superstition and deviance. Even as the royal family pulled together quickly to head off any vacuum in power, the new king is already well along in years, and his crown prince was born in 1928. The royal family is thousands strong, including older brothers and relatives, who feel that by tradition it is their right to

1691787_0

Rescued From Dustbin, Paper Medical Record Tells Its Tale

''I wonder if patient could tolerate such a procedure emotionally,'' wrote a doctor about Mrs. E., a 44-year-old breast cancer patient being considered for a last-ditch brain operation called a hypophysectomy. ''I believe she stands a very real chance of another remission by hypophysectomy,'' wrote one of his colleagues. This debate about Mrs. E.'s treatment, which occurred in 1960, comes from her paper medical chart, an aging document full of descriptive longhand notes by doctors, nurses and social workers. It was rescued from a New York medical center that was disposing of its old records because of space limitations. With the push toward electronic medical records, physicians' notes are becoming less discursive and more standardized. As a result, stories like Mrs. E.'s may disappear. But they can teach us a great deal about the ordinary, and sometimes unexpected, events encountered by patients in the past. Mrs. E. had watched the lump in her left breast grow for almost two years before seeing a doctor in 1954. A black domestic worker originally from the Caribbean, she was raising three children by herself and feared losing her job. ''I hope it is not too late,'' she told a social worker. But it was. When the doctors operated, they removed not only her breast, but also the chest wall muscles and the rib cage on the side of the cancer. At that time, such radical operations were in vogue. So was concealing information from patients. Mrs. E.'s chart reveals what one would expect from this era. She was told a white lie -- that she had a ''tumor.'' The word ''cancer,'' with its ominous implications, was avoided. But the chart was also full of surprises. The hospital's social workers routinely visited Mrs. E. at her ''poor tenement house'' because she could not afford taxi fare. ''She seems a person accustomed to facing difficulties with fortitude,'' one social worker wrote admiringly of Mrs. E. The hospital also gave her holiday gifts and money to purchase a breast form. In 1957, for reasons that are unknown, Mrs. E.'s doctor decided to tell her that she had breast cancer and would die from the disease. That the doctor decided to tell this to a poor black woman, who was less educated than most private patients, was especially surprising. Mrs. E., another doctor noted in the chart, ''is an example of a pt. who has been 'told

1691925_0

Corrections 1/3

A chart on Friday listing violent incidents attributed to the Irish Republican Army, which announced that it was giving up violence, omitted some that took place in Northern Ireland itself before 1998. With attacks in the province itself considered, the peak of the violence was in the 1970's, not at the end of the 1980's. 1/3 1/3

1692499_1

The I.R.A.'s Gift of Gab

Indeed, Mr. Adams would not have been allowed into political talks in 1998 about Northern Ireland's future unless he had subscribed to principles embodying such a commitment. In spite of that pledge, I.R.A. activity, albeit at a much lower level, persisted and pitched the Irish peace process into one crisis after another. A real sign of change would have been an announcement that the I.R.A. was disbanding, but that was absent from the statement, as was any pledge to end recruitment. The events that provoked last week's statement -- the robbery of more than $50 million from a Belfast bank last December and the subsequent killing of a Belfast Catholic, Robert McCartney, by what are generally believed to be I.R.A. members -- showed that the conventional test of I.R.A. sincerity, its willingness to disarm transparently, was made largely irrelevant. The I.R.A. didn't need tons of Semtex explosives or heavy machine guns to commit those crimes. All it needed was a few motivated members. The problem was not I.R.A. weapons but the I.R.A. itself. The experience of the last 11 years of the Irish peace process is that continued I.R.A. activity has sapped the trust of the majority Protestant community and made its political leaders reluctant to enter into a power-sharing government with Sinn Fein in 1998. But Sinn Fein has turned that to its electoral advantage, charging Protestants with bigotry, and seeking sympathy and solidarity from Catholics in both Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. The result is that Sinn Fein is now the largest Catholic party in Northern Ireland and has seats in the London, Dublin, Belfast and European Parliaments. Final peace has been delayed for narrow political gain. The I.R.A.'s refusal to begin disbanding is one big reason instability still exists. The Belfast bank robbery illustrated the way such instability can be fostered. While the I.R.A.'s war against Britain has diminished during the last eight years, the organization's drift into racketeering has accelerated. Ian Pearson, a former security minister in Northern Ireland, recently called the I.R.A. ''perhaps the most sophisticated organized criminal grouping'' anywhere in Europe. Few experts expect such activity will cease because of last week's statement. The criminality linked to groups like the I.R.A. is staggering. One recent British government report estimated that there were 140 paramiltary-associated criminal gangs, many with international connections, operating in an area that in terms of population is about the size

1692497_2

Too Much Pork and Too Little Sugar

need to reconfigure our cars and mass transit; we need a broader definition of what we think of as fuel. And we need a tax policy that both entices, and compels, U.S. firms to be innovative with green energy solutions. This is going to be a huge global industry -- as China and India become high-impact consumers -- and we should lead it. Many technologies that could make a difference are already here -- from hybrid engines to ethanol. All that is needed is a gasoline tax of $2 a gallon to get consumers and Detroit to change their behavior and adopt them. As Representative Edward Markey noted, auto fuel economy peaked at 26.5 miles per gallon in 1986, and ''we've been going backward every since'' -- even though we have the technology to change that right now. ''This is not rocket science,'' he rightly noted. ''It's auto mechanics.'' It's also imagination. ''During the 1973 Arab oil embargo Brazil was importing almost 80 percent of its fuel supply,'' notes Mr. Luft, director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. ''Within three decades it cut its dependence by more than half. During that period the Brazilians invested massively in a sugar-based ethanol industry to the degree that about a third of the fuel they use in their vehicles is domestically grown. They also created a fleet that can accommodate this fuel.'' Half the new cars sold this year in Brazil will run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol. ''Bringing hydrocarbons and carbohydrates to live happily together in the same fuel tank,'' he added, ''has not only made Brazil close to energy independence, but has also insulated the Brazilian economy from the harming impact of the current spike in oil prices.'' The new energy bill includes support for corn-based ethanol, but, bowing to the dictates of the U.S. corn and sugar lobbies (which oppose sugar imports), it ignores Brazilian-style sugar-based ethanol, even though it takes much less energy to make and produces more energy than corn-based ethanol. We are ready to import oil from Saudi Arabia but not sugar from Brazil. The sum of all lobbies. It seems as though only a big crisis will force our country to override all the cynical lobbies and change our energy usage. I thought 9/11 was that crisis. It sure was for me, but not, it seems, for this White House, Congress

1692610_0

World Briefing | Europe: Northern Ireland: Blair Resumes Diplomacy

Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain held separate talks in London with the leaders of Northern Ireland's main Catholic and Protestant political parties. But there seemed to be no narrowing of the deep gulf between the sides and no indication that the Irish Republican Army's announcement last week that it had ended its armed campaign had lessened its opponents' mistrust. Alan Cowell (NYT)

1695241_5

Fields of Bio-Engineered Dreams; Can Gene-Altered Rice Help Rescue the Farm Belt?

thought gene-altered rice could end up in their bottles of Bud. For Missouri's farm economy, the risk of growing pharmaceutical rice is high. More than half of Missouri's rice is sent abroad, to the European Union and Caribbean countries that are especially sensitive about genetically modified products. ''We are still having to make statements to our customers that the rice we export is not genetically modified,'' said Carl Brothers, the vice president for marketing at Riceland Foods, which markets more than half of Missouri's rice. ''We are concerned longer term that if Ventria and others get involved that will get harder to say.'' The two companies reached a truce in April: Ventria agreed not to grow genetically modified rice within 120 miles of commercial rice crops. ''We can continue to purchase rice grown and processed in Missouri as long as Ventria's growing areas remain sufficiently far from commercial rice production,'' said Francine Katz, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch. That deal suddenly made four test plots in the northern part of the state, including Mr. Garst's, all the more important, since Ventria's agreement with Northwest Missouri State calls for the company to grow 70 percent of its rice in the state. To prove to its customers that it would have a diverse supply base, Ventria must grow in at least one other location in North America, and is also searching for a growing area in the Southern Hemisphere to be able to produce year-round. In June, Ventria planted 70 acres of genetically modified rice in North Carolina. There, environmentalists continue to attack the company, saying the rice poses a threat to other crops and the human food chain. Ventria's rice fields are just a few miles from a rice-seed-screening research center and are also close to two wildlife refuges with large populations of migrant birds and swans that environmentalists contend could transport Ventria's rice seeds into wild areas. Storms and floods, environmentalists say, could also lead to rice contamination. ''Just washing away in a big rain- storm is enough,'' said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. Scientists at Ventria, which is yet to make any money from its bio-rice, say rice is among the safest crops for genetic engineering. Rice stalks pollinate themselves, so the altered genes, which are synthetic versions of human genes, cannot be easily transferred to plants in

1695119_1

Dubya-Dubya-Dubya.Follies.com

2001 just a few months after its central bête noire, President Bush, has been a minor triumph of counterprogramming. The administration has not taken the bait (apart from a threatening letter from Vice President Dick Cheney, later gleefully posted and pilloried on the site). But on the evidence of ''Dear Dubya: Patriotic Love Letters to Whitehouse.org,'' now in an extended run at the Brick Theater, some of the administration's more credulous supporters -- along with the usual mixed nuts -- have been taken in by the ruse. ''SUBJECT: War in Iraq -- an idea that may work!'' begins a typical e-mail message to the site, dozens of which form the text of ''Dear Dubya.'' They were culled by the site's creator, John A. Wooden, and performed by six actors at music stands, reader's-theater style. Another e-mail writer politely notes a discrepancy in a fictional executive order signing ''female circumcision back into law.'' Many others are strictly from the crackpot camp, like the touching, ''Could we make Julia Child a national treasure?'' The ease and anonymity of e-mail can make it an especially unvarnished and revealing medium, but to act it out in all its multiple-exclamation-point excess is to flirt with caricature. For the most part, the performers, under the direction of R.J. Tolan, avoid this trap, giving these sketches of touchy Republicans, cheery dimwits and taunting rednecks recognizable human shape and voice. There are a few condescending regional accents, and the occasional superfluous wink at the more chilling or absurd material. But the best moments of ''Dear Dubya'' outweigh the cheap ones. Given some of the show's most thanklessly intolerant rants, Elaine Anderson stands out for refusing to comment on her characters. She gives one of them -- a soon-to-be grandmother who sees the face of Jesus in her daughter's ultrasound -- a beatific desperation. Robert Larkin and Dale Carman also modulate expertly, letting our shocked laughter bubble up with minimum pressure. A stunningly double-edged chortle is provided by a red-stater (read by Ms. Anderson) who has proudly purchased a ''Jesus Votes Republican'' bumper sticker from the Web site, and who smilingly proclaims, ''Your parody doesn't work on me. The laugh is on you.'' Whitehouse.org may have done its job too well. ''Dear Dubya: Patriotic Love Letters to Whitehouse.org'' runs through Aug. 27 at the Brick Theater, 575 Metropolitan Avenue (Lorimer Street and Union Avenue), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, (718)907-6189. THEATER REVIEW

1695179_0

Fighting The Last Hijackers

Here's a question you should definitely not consider out loud the next time you're at the airport waiting in line at the security checkpoint. Suppose you were a terrorist who wanted to kill as many airline passengers as possible. Which of these plans sounds more feasible? 1.Smuggle a pocketknife or scissors on board. Then force your way into the cockpit and crash the plane. 2.Walk into the airport with a bomb and detonate it in the most crowded spot: in the middle of the passengers waiting to have their bags inspected for pocketknives and scissors. Most terrorists probably gave up on the first idea after Sept. 11, 2001, when airlines started locking cockpit doors and telling pilots not to open them, no matter what anyone was threatening to do to flight attendants or passengers. Even if there were still terrorists planning to take over planes, they wouldn't need to bother smuggling weapons on board because they could kill people by stabbing them with pens or strangling them with belts. I mention these ideas not to give terrorists any help -- they are obvious ones that have concerned security experts since Sept. 11. The experts have told the Transportation Security Administration that its airport screeners are wasting time looking for the wrong things, but the T.S.A. has gone on fighting the last war. Under its new leader, Kip Hawley, the T.S.A. is finally considering proposals to speed up the screening process by ignoring scissors, small knives and other items now on its verboten list. That would be a favor to airplane passengers, but it would take a lot more to undo one of the costliest mistakes Congress made after Sept. 11: the creation of the T.S.A. Congress ignored the lessons from Israel and European countries, which have learned the hard way not to rely on government workers to screen airline passengers. The overseas airports switched to private companies and let the national government concentrate on being a watchdog -- a job it could do much better when it wasn't overseeing its own workers. But Congress insisted on creating a new federal airport security agency in charge of everything: making the rules, enforcing them and running the system. It was supposed to be a new kind of streamlined agency, exempt from some federal work rules. But a former T.S.A. official told me he was amazed at how quickly it had turned into

1695185_1

MEMO PAD

in Latin America. That's according to a new survey by World Travel BTI, the big corporate travel management company. PLAYING CATCH-UP -- Long-haul fliers know that domestic airlines with international routes have lagged behind premier international carriers in the quality of their business-class cabins. Now, American Airlines, the operating unit of the AMR Corporation, intends to do something about the gap. American said yesterday that it would renovate business-class cabins on its Boeing 767-300's starting next year and on its Boeing 777's in 2007. The improvements, which include new lie-flat seats, new menus and improved in-flight entertainment systems, will make the airline ''highly competitive'' with foreign carriers offering luxury business cabins, the airline said. By the end of this year, American said, international flying will represent about 30 percent of its total seat capacity. SAN FRANCISCO-SYDNEY NONSTOP -- Qantas says it will add three weekly San Francisco-to-Sydney flights to its international nonstop network in March. The service will be on Boeing-777-400ER aircraft with 14 seats in first class, 64 in business and 265 in coach. Flying time will be 14 hours and 35 minutes from San Francisco. Qantas made San Francisco one of its destinations when it first began flying to North America in 1954, then dropped it in 1994 and shifted its emphasis to Los Angeles, where it continues to have substantial operations. Meanwhile, Emirates said demand for service to Dubai is so strong that it will start a second daily nonstop from Kennedy International Airport on Nov. 7, flying A340-500 planes whose top-line feature is 12 fully enclosed first-class suites with sliding doors that can be closed for privacy. DITCH THE BAGS -- For the next three months, you can ship your bags ahead free on Singapore Airlines on all outbound flights from Los Angeles International Airport. Passengers can opt to have their bags picked up at home and sent to their destination airport under an arrangement between Singapore and BaggageDirect, a luggage-shipping service. There is a two-bag, 70-pound limit, and a fee for pickup beyond 30 miles from Los Angeles International. Singapore says it will continue the service but charge a fee for it after the three-month introductory period. JOE SHARKEY Memo Pad Correction: August 29, 2005, Monday A report in the Memo Pad column in the Itineraries pages of Business Day on Aug. 16 about new flights from San Francisco to Sydney planned by Qantas misidentified

1696930_3

Tracing a Mutiny by Slaves Off South Africa in 1766

perhaps dozens of slaves were killed. The surviving crew went down in ignominy for losing their ship; the Malagasy slaves met bondage and servitude. The Dutch East India Company dispatched the three-masted Meermin from Cape Town in December 1765 to buy slaves on the west coast of Madagascar, nearly 1,700 miles away. The growing Dutch settlement at Cape Town relied on slave labor, and the warring tribes on Madagascar were known to trade their captives to European merchants for guns and goods. In late January, the Meermin left Madagascar with 147 slaves, including some women and children. Fearful the slaves would die in the airless cargo hold, the ship's captain ordered at least some of them unchained and allowed on deck. Another senior officer decided to employ five slaves to clean spears and other weapons that the crew had picked up in Madagascar as souvenirs. It was a stunningly stupid move. Armed, the slaves killed about half the crew, stabbing them to death or tossing them overboard. Surviving sailors barricaded themselves in the ship's lower quarters, surviving on raw bacon, potatoes and brandy. Once they realized they could not sail the ship on their own, the Malagasy allowed several crew members on deck to guide them back to Madagascar. By day, the Dutch headed in the general direction of the island. But at night they steered full sail for Cape Town. By the end of February, they had made it to 90 miles east of Cape Town. Spotting shore, the slaves decided they had reached their homeland and dropped anchor in the bay. Seventy slaves piled into two small boats and headed ashore, promising to light three fires on the beach to signal the others if the land was Madagascar. They did not get far. Dutch farmers, suspicious of the stationary ship without a flag, had alerted the local magistrate and organized a force of local men to patrol the beach. When the slaves hit shore, they were killed or captured. For the next week, the Meermin remained at sea while the Malagasy aboard tried to figure out what had happened and the Dutch on shore tried to figure out what to do. At some point, records indicate, more slaves came ashore in a raft, spotted a black shepherd running away and decided they had reached Madagascar. Their fate is unclear. Dutch authorities in Cape Town dispatched two rescue ships,

1695554_1

Q & A

programmed time for a radio and tape player that you have tuned and cued up in advance. Although it records the audio digitally to a memory card instead of a cassette tape, the Radio YourWay LX AM/FM radio recorder from Pogo Products has a timer that can be set to capture radio broadcasts when you're not around to push the record button. A model that records eight and a half hours of programming is $200 at pogoproducts.com/radio--yourway.html. And because the recordings are digital, you can copy them to a computer by connecting the recorder with a U.S.B. cable. The Radio Shark from Griffin Technology ($70 at griffintechnology.com/products/radioshark) is an AM/FM radio that connects to the U.S.B. port of a Mac or PC and comes with its own software for recording audio programs. If you're on the go, you can transfer files recorded with the Radio Shark to portable music players that are compatible with the AIFF audio format. Keep in mind that you should record shows only for your personal use and be aware of copyright laws concerning the material. Dial Locally, Talk Globally Q. Are there any American companies that have a worldwide phone plan? I spend three months of every year in Norway and want to buy a phone in the United States that I can use internationally. A. With the right type of wireless phone and a service provider that has roaming agreements in place with service providers in other countries, you can use your cellphone both here and there, but the call charges might be a bit higher when you use the phone overseas. When shopping, look for a phone that supports the G.S.M. wireless standard, which is widely used outside North America, and a provider that offers global roaming. Cingular is one company that offers both. Information on using its phones and service around the world is at cingular.com/customer--service/cingular--world. Verizon Wireless is also among the companies offering phones and plans that will work internationally; you can find information on its global phone service at verizonwireless.com, in the Business Users section. If you're considering T-Mobile as a service provider, you can find information on the company's WorldClass international service at tmobile.com. Shoveling Out The Hard Drive Q. What's the best way to clean up the C: drive on my PC? A. One way to start clearing space is to uninstall programs you no longer use with

1694160_0

Sugar in the Energy Bill

To the Editor: Thomas L. Friedman (''Too Much Pork and Too Little Sugar,'' column, Aug. 5) is right about the potential of sugar-based ethanol to reduce our dependence on oil. But contrary to his suggestion that the recently passed energy bill does nothing to encourage domestic production of ethanol from sugar cane, the bill, at our urging, included two sugar-to-ethanol provisions. The first is a $36 million grant program to finance demonstration projects that produce ethanol from cane sugar, sugar cane and sugar cane byproducts; and the second, loan guarantees (up to 80 percent of a $50 million loan) for projects that produce ethanol from sugar cane, bagasse and other sugar cane byproducts (molasses). Mr. Friedman rightly notes Brazil's large commitment to sugar-based ethanol. Our provisions are extremely modest when compared with the Brazilian program, but we believe that they will demonstrate feasibility in tapping into one of the country's most abundant crops to lessen our dependence on oil. Daniel K. Akaka Neil Abercrombie Washington, Aug. 9, 2005 The writers are Democrats who represent Hawaii in the Senate and the House.

1694106_4

Exploring One Man's Fate In the Alaskan Wilderness

room, a scene that illustrates Mr. Herzog's sense of drama beautifully. Sporting a blue smock and a fixed gaze, Dr. Fallico recounts his version of the attack, a description based on his examination of the bodies and the six-minute audio record found on one of Treadwell's video cameras. (The lens cap was on the camera.) The account is graphic, gruesome and thoroughly riveting, partly because morbid tales always tug at the imagination, but also because Dr. Fallico turns out to be an incredible storyteller. For Mr. Herzog, it's clear that the truth of this story isn't located just in the facts that the doctor strings together with florid gestures and pregnant pauses, but in a performance that is as artful as it is true. Treadwell's adventures among his beloved grizzlies were also a kind of performance, built on lies and truth and played out on the stage of celebrity. Even though his choices were dangerous and finally fatal, he traveled a familiar American path shaped by boundless optimism and an almost religious belief in the self. He lived among grizzlies because he believed that he could. Given this, the cheap shots that followed his death, including the appalling snarkiness that crept into newspaper headlines (''Grizzly bear that killed pair attacked at lunchtime''), are revelatory. For some, Treadwell's death confirmed that animal activists and environmentalists are dangerous wackos; for others, though, his unhappy end may have suggested something equally disturbing: sometimes a smile and American goodwill aren't enough. Throughout ''Grizzly Man,'' men and women pay testament to Treadwell's niceness and naïveté. Some are kind; others less so. Each testifier seems to capture some authentic quality of Treadwell, who from the evidence of his videos and Mr. Herzog's sympathetic inquiry, seemed equally nice and naïve, brave and foolish. At some point that foolishness mushroomed into a welter of delusions about his power to survive the wilderness in which he so recklessly tried to find himself. His death, as inevitable as it was preventable, could mean that he may have been more lost than found. Mr. Herzog remains generous to a fault on this particular point, perhaps because he recognizes that for someone like Treadwell, there is nothing more terrifying than being ordinary, even the claws of a grizzly. ''Grizzly Man'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has some adult language and vivid descriptions of a bear

1691727_2

After Saints Preserve Us, She Returns The Favor

with the biggest ad -- Chiarelli's Religious Goods, a religious supply company that goes back three generations. Uncertain of her technical proficiency, Ms. Ferrandi called the owner, John Chiarelli, and offered to repair any broken statues. ''I figured if they were broken and he couldn't sell them, I could use them for practice,'' she said. It was a modest start to what has become a steady stream of work. Last year she repaired 43 statues for churches in the New York metropolitan area. She does most of the work herself, but occasionally hires other artists she knows in Williamsburg to help her with airbrushing or to fill in any gaps in her expertise. One of Ms. Ferrandi's projects last year was repairing five statues of the Madonna that were damaged in a fire in the Buoncammino Park chapel in North Bergen, N.J. She was able to finish the work in time for one of the statues to be used in a festival run by the Society of Maria Santissima Del Buoncammino Di Altamuro. ''It looks brand-new,'' said the president of the society, John Mustaro, 58. ''Some people, especially the women, were in tears when they saw it. She does fantastic work because she cares, that's why. To me she gave me the impression that she was operating on a human being.'' Ms. Ferrandi says by the time she gets her hands on a statue, there are often obvious signs of wear and tear. ''I see a lot of Band-Aids and surgical tape, which is always very touching, but not very effective,'' she said. Replacing worn fingers and cleaning lipstick from a statue's feet are also not uncommon. One pastor, in an effort to deter his congregation from kissing a statue's feet, asked her to mix an abrasive substance with the paint so that it would be rough to the touch. Did it work? ''Of course not,'' she said. The price for Ms. Ferrandi's work varies widely. Finger repairs can cost $50, while a complete restoration can be $9,000. Reattaching the head of the statue of St. Anne will be her most complicated and extensive repair project so far. It will also be the most expensive, though she declined to provide a price tag. The 100-year-old statue, which depicts St. Anne standing with Mary as a child, first needs to be cleaned. The head will have to be replaced or fixed

1691678_0

The Mexican Evolution

WITH nearly six million Mexicans living illegally in the United States, some Americans, particularly those in border states, are greatly worried about the costs of illegal immigration and have demanded that more be done to stem it. Modern-day ''minutemen'' patrol the border. Voters pass measures limiting the rights of illegal immigrants, and senators debate legislation to establish guest-worker programs. Certain elected officials and pundits focus on the perils of illegal immigration to score political points. But chances are that there will be a substantial decrease in illegal immigration from Mexico in the next 20 years, and it won't be because of civilian border patrols, laws being passed, pronouncements by politicians, or as some would like, ''building a wall on the border.'' Instead, the cause will be demographic trends within Mexico itself, trends that have been largely ignored in the debate over immigration. Mexico's population growth rate has dropped by more than 50 percent during the last five decades, according to the United Nations. The annual growth rate has declined from approximately 3 percent in 1960 to 1.3 percent today. And it is expected to continue to fall in the first decades of the 21st century; by 2050, the United Nations predicts, the rate will be negative. The fertility rate in Mexico has had a corresponding significant drop, from 6.9 children per woman in 1955 to 2.5 today. The population growth rate of Mexico is now only slightly higher than that of Canada, where recent data shows it to be 1 percent. Twenty-five years ago, Mexico had a growth rate more than twice that of Canada. So what is the significance of all this? The aging of the population in Mexico coupled with Mexico's economic expansion mean that jobs in Mexico will be more plentiful, thereby prompting fewer young people to come to the United States in search of work. Studies have shown that as the population growth rate in countries worldwide slows, migration drops. This is especially true for an expanding economy like Mexico -- in one telling statistic, youth unemployment there dropped to 4.1 percent in 2001 from 9.6 percent in 1995. A recent Pew Hispanic Center study highlights some of the change in immigration to the United States from the south. Pew predicts that the share of first-generation immigrants in the total Hispanic population in the United States will drop from about 40 percent in 2000 to closer

1692728_1

The Good News Bears

The message I took home was: ''You mess with my habitat, and I'll mess with you.'' Besides their natural charisma, the bears have another crucial asset for a poster animal: location. Because the Arctic is projected to feel the effects of global warming sooner and more severely than temperate regions, the recent shrinking of sea ice in the Arctic has been promoted as a grim harbinger for the planet. The polar bear has become, in the words of the WWF conservation group, ''an ambassador for Arctic nature and a symbol of the impacts that global warming is increasingly having around the world.'' Conservation groups and scientists have been making headlines in the past year, warning that shrinking sea ice could make wild bears extinct by the end of the century, possibly within just 20 years. Right now, though, Inuits like Nathaniel Kalluk here in Resolute Bay aren't exactly worried. ''There are a lot more bears now than before,'' said Mr. Kalluk, who is 51 and has been hunting since childhood. ''We'll spot 20 to 30 bears on a hunting trip. Twenty years ago, sometimes we didn't see any at all.'' This is not an isolated trend. Although the bears seem to be hurting in some places, like the Hudson Bay region south of here, their numbers have increased worldwide. In Canada, home to most of the world's polar bears, the population has risen by more than 20 percent in the past decade. The chief reason for the rise is probably restrictions on hunting (for which conservationists deserve credit). In this village of fewer than 200 residents, Mr. Kalluk and the other hunters are limited each year to three dozen bears, which they allocate by drawing names out of a hat. But the increase might also be related to the recent warming, which could be helping bears in some places. After all, the bears have thrived in warmer climates than today's. In the 1930's, the Arctic was as warm as it is now, and in the distant past it was even warmer. The doomsday reports of the melting Arctic have focused on the rise in temperatures compared with the late 1970's, but that was a particularly cold period. So the bears can cope with some global warming, which would increase the diversity of species in the Arctic -- and maybe the number of humans, too. Today only 30,000 people live in

1692743_0

The Misery in Niger: We Must Act

To the Editor: Niger is only one of many countries that are propelled toward catastrophe by uncontrolled population growth. In our own backyard, Haiti is on the same course. It is not the apathy of rich countries that causes the crisis. It is elementary that nations must be able to sustain their own populations through good times and bad. In the short run, rich countries can and should send food. In the long run, family planning (which is not supported by the Bush administration) is the only measure that will stand between many poor, crowded countries and disaster. Michael Jorrin Ridgefield, Conn., Aug. 5, 2005

1694966_0

Spyware Heats Up the Debate Over Cookies

INTERNET users are taking back control of their computers, and online marketers and publishers are not pleased with the results. But they don't quite know what to do about their conundrum -- if it is a conundrum, since they can't even agree on that. Until recently, Internet businesses could track their users freely, using what are known as cookies, tiny text files they embed on the user's hard drive. Now, with the proliferation of antispyware programs that can delete unwanted cookies, they often cannot tell who has been to their Web site before or what they have seen. And this erosion of control over a tool for gaining insight into consumer behavior has many of them fretting. ''Cookies are critical from a business perspective,'' said Lorraine Ross, vice president for sales at USAToday.com. ''They help us do things like track our profitability per unique visitor, for instance. But if you don't know how many people are coming in, you don't really have a handle on whether your profitability is improving or not.'' It isn't necessarily just corporate America that is threatened by the anticookie fervor, Ms. Ross said -- the deleters stand to suffer, too. For example, cookies help a computer limit how many times a user sees annoying ads like a floating, animated message. Such ''frequency caps,'' to use industry parlance, are common among publishers. ''So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience,'' she said. Last year, though, Ms. Ross said executives at the company debated how effective their frequency limits were, since a growing number of Internet users were deleting cookies and possibly seeing lots of animated ads. Ms. Ross said that like most established companies, USAToday.com did not use its cookies to identify its users. ''But the user's paranoia is understandable, given the history,'' she said. Cookies first got a bad name in 1999, when DoubleClick announced that it would use them to identify Internet users and analyze both their offline purchasing patterns and online surfing habits for the purpose of showing them more relevant online ads. That plan died a loud, painful death after privacy advocates objected strenuously, and marketers and publishers have since taken a much more cautious approach. Even so, privacy advocates deplore cookies and, as software programs like Webroot Spy Sweeper and McAfee AntiSpyware have come on the market, surfers by the millions are apparently knocking the cookies out

1695013_0

Crowds Thin At Heathrow In Recovery From Strikes

British Airways said Sunday that it had almost cleared up the backlog left by strikes last week that forced it to cancel hundreds of flights. Some 95 percent of flights are operating as normal, a spokeswoman said, and the 600 passengers still stranded at hotels near Heathrow Airport have been rebooked on new flights and should leave ''within a few days' time.'' Not that the passengers, some of whom have been waiting since Thursday, will necessarily get anything to eat when they board their planes. With catering services still disrupted after the unofficial strikes that began when Gate Gourmet, the caterer that serves British Airways, fired some 670 of its workers on Wednesday, the airline said it would offer a bare minimum -- coffee, tea or water -- on even its long flights. ''We're advising people to eat before they get to the airport,'' the British Airways spokeswoman said, asking that her name not be used in accordance with company policy. Passengers checking in were being given vouchers to buy food to take on board, worth £40, or about $73, for first-class passengers; £30 for business class; £20 for premium economy class, known as ''world traveler plus''; and £10 for economy, or ''world traveler'' class. In addition, some passengers still did not know where their luggage was. The airline said it had cleared a backlog of about 5,000 missing bags, but that 10,000 were still ''displaced'' -- lost in the system -- with a majority at Heathrow. The British Airways spokeswoman said that all affected passengers had been offered refunds or the chance to reschedule their flights. Concerning additional compensation, she said, disgruntled passengers should write to the company's customer relations department to lay out their cases. Passengers whose flights were canceled at the end of last week said they were furious that they had not been given priority over new passengers scheduled to fly out of Heathrow. But the airline said that bumping the new passengers to make way for the old would prove too complicated. The unofficial strike of about 1,000 ground workers like baggage handlers, check-in staff and drivers, which threw the operations of British Airways and several other airlines into chaos late last week, is over. But the threat of further labor action remains. Gate Gourmet, the catering firm whose firing of its workers set in motion the larger sympathy strike, is currently negotiating with the

1697556_0

World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Amazon Deforestation Slows

1677493_1

Pomp and Circumspect

adding figures, searching data. So accountants lose work to TurboTax. And lawyers lose work to legal Web sites that offer uncontested divorces for $249 and articles of incorporation for the price of a pizza. To cope, we'll have to rely on what's harder to replicate in the 1's and 0's of computer code -- inventiveness, empathy and seeing the big picture -- which also happen to be the components of satisfying work. The second force involves jobs going overseas. As certain types of work (answering phone calls, writing basic computer code, analyzing financial statements) migrate to places like India, graduates will have to draw on abilities that are less routine. These abilities (creating new products, crafting narratives, caring for others) are more difficult to outsource. But once mastered, they're typically more engaging than simply following the steps on a spec sheet or plugging numbers into a spreadsheet. Finally, there's prosperity. This year's graduates have always lived in a country whose standard of living -- deep into the middle class -- is breathtaking. While the United States still has a disgraceful level of poverty, most Americans, in material terms, are doing pretty well. For instance, the United States has more cars and trucks than licensed drivers. American families own such a surfeit of consumer goods that they've turned self-storage into a $17 billion-a-year industry. In an overstocked marketplace, businesses can no longer crank out pallets of identical widgets. They must create customized, intriguing, even beautiful products, services and experiences. How do you do this? You need employees who possess not only technical ability but also a sense of curiosity, aesthetics and, yes, joyfulness. In other words, to make it in the emerging economy, we will have to do things that software can't do faster and that overseas knowledge workers can't do more cheaply. In addition, what we produce must also satisfy the growing consumer demand for products and services infused with emotion, spirituality and artistry. As the information age matures, eat-your-spinach skills are still necessary, but they are no longer sufficient. The abilities that matter more are turning out to be the abilities that are also fundamental sources of human gratification. And that's good news for many intrinsically motivated (but sometimes parentally discouraged) professions. Indeed, more Americans already work in art, entertainment and design than work as lawyers, accountants and auditors. To be sure, this new labor market is not a

1677503_0

The gender gap beneath the steeple: One writer is on to something, even if not everything.

''Why Men Hate Going to Church.'' You can't get a much more straightforward title than that for a book on religion. David Murrow, a television writer and producer, decided to write ''Why Men Hate Going to Church,'' just published by Nelson Books, after years of worshiping in Roman Catholic, Orthodox, mainline Protestant, evangelical and Pentecostal churches and discovering that ''no matter the name on the outside, there are always more women on the inside.'' That gender gap, he concluded, was the elephant in Christianity's living room that almost no one wanted to acknowledge or discuss. In fact, recent thinking and writing about gender and religion have usually viewed church leadership and language as patriarchal and sexist; it is women who have been alienated and excluded. Yes, Mr. Murrow concedes, at the top level of the professional clergy, churches are ''led by males''; but otherwise, he argues, they are ''dominated by women and their values.'' He cites survey after survey showing that in virtually every form of church-related activity, women constitute a great majority, generally from 60 to 80 percent, of participants. If only half those findings are scientifically reliable, the point is well made. And the pattern is not limited to the contemporary United States. With a few possible exceptions in Eastern Europe and Asia, the gender gap holds for Catholics and Protestants worldwide, even for the rapidly growing Pentecostal churches in Africa and Latin America. It has long been the norm in Catholic Europe, perhaps since the Middle Ages. Certainly the rolls of New England churches in Puritan times recorded a majority of female members, and 19th-century church leaders reported a similar preponderance of women at services. By contrast, Mr. Murrow claims, no such gender gap exists in Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam -- an interesting point, although one he doesn't at all document. ''Only Christianity,'' he writes, ''has a consistent, nagging shortage of male practitioners.'' So why do men hate going to church? Hormones, says Mr. Murrow. Brain structure. Prehistoric imprinting. Men can't sit still, want to be outdoors, aren't very verbal and can't read and sing at the same time. Men crave adventure, risk, danger and heroic sacrifice. Men value boldness. They love action, tools, technology and competition. Men are hunters and warriors. Women are gatherers and child-tenders. Is all this true? Mr. Murrow clearly thinks so, even if he apologizes now and then for being politically

1680802_0

U.S. Balks at German Chancellor's Call for Global Regulations to Curb Hedge Funds

Germany and the United States are parting company again, this time over Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's call for international regulations to govern hedge funds. Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, speaking here Thursday at the end of a five-country European tour, said the United States opposed ''heavy-handed'' curbs on markets. He said that he was not familiar with the German proposals, but left little doubt about how Washington would react. ''I think we ought to be very careful about heavy-handed regulation of markets because it stymies financial innovation,'' Mr. Snow said after a news conference here to sum up his visit. Noting that the Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed that hedge funds be required to register themselves, he said he preferred the ''light touch rather than the heavy regulatory burden.'' Mr. Schröder said this week that he would raise the issue of imposing uniform global regulations at a meeting of the Group of 8 industrial countries next month in Gleneagles, Scotland. A spokesman said the chancellor had discussed his proposals with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain. How to deal with hedge funds also came up at a meeting in Frankfurt between Mr. Snow and the German finance minister, Hans Eichel. ''We both agree we need more transparency,'' Mr. Eichel said afterward. ''Whether we need more regulations, we could look at later on.'' Among the measures being considered by Berlin are stricter rules requiring funds to disclose how many shares they own in companies, as well as shares they borrow and sell to try to profit from shifts in prices. The explosive growth of hedge funds and their potentially disruptive effect on markets have become issues on both sides of the Atlantic. But in Germany, which faces a federal election this fall with a stagnant economy and high unemployment, it has taken on a sharp political edge. Mr. Schröder's Social Democratic Party has criticized hedge funds for their lack of transparency -- a variation on its theme that foreign investors and even some big German companies are acting dubiously. Party leaders have tarred foreigners as ''locusts'' who plunder German companies and throw out their workers. In one well-publicized case, the German workers who were thrown out had been sitting in the executive suite. American and British hedge fund managers orchestrated a noisy public campaign against the management of Deutsche Börse, which operates the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, because they opposed the company's

1682151_0

3-Year Federal Study of 9/11 Urges Rules for Safer Towers

After an exhaustive, three-year study of the collapse of the World Trade Center, a federal panel will call for major changes in the planning, construction and operation of skyscrapers to help people survive not only terrorist attacks but also accidental or natural calamities, according to officials and draft documents. The recommendations, to be made public tomorrow, include a call for a fundamental change in evacuation strategies for tall buildings: that everyone should have a way out in an emergency, replacing the current standard of providing evacuation capacity for a few floors near a fire or emergency. The panel also called for sturdier elevators and stairways, and found that current standards for testing fireproofing of steel for tall buildings are flawed. Taken together, the recommendations, by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, are likely to open an intense national debate over the costs of such changes and whether lessons for other skyscrapers can reasonably be drawn from the extraordinary events of Sept. 11. The agency's proposals are not binding, but are meant to influence the policies of cities and states across the country. Many of them have become public in draft form during the three-year inquiry and have prompted fierce lobbying or objections from prominent engineers, building industry professionals, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which built the trade center. While the agency has revised certain aspects of its findings on what precisely happened at the trade center, the package of recommendations makes it clear that the agency has essentially held firm on its emphatic and demanding safety agenda for the next generation of tall buildings in America. S. Shyam Sunder, the engineer who oversaw the inquiry for the agency, said the investigators worked to identify issues of ''safety for the vast majority of buildings'' in fires, earthquakes, power losses and sudden hurricanes. The costs of the changes are unknown, but structural engineers suggested they would add 2 to 5 percent to development costs of ordinary buildings. The study disclosed that critical design benchmarks and code standards used in the construction of the trade center -- the time it takes to walk down stairs, the distance separating stairways, and the fire-resistance tests -- turned out to have little relationship to the experiences or needs of people inside the towers. These findings, Dr. Sunder said, have broad application to buildings everywhere. The investigation also found that most

1682107_3

Six Months After

great damage to rainforests and setting the stage for more natural disasters. Timber needs to be obtained legally, and conservation measures, like replanting mangrove trees rather than developing the land from which they were uprooted, should be part of the reconstruction. The housing problem is further complicated because many ownership records were swept away by the waves. And in many small villages, such documents never existed. In some of the affected countries, up to 90 percent of displaced people have lost their identity documents. The World Bank is financing a ''titling'' project in Aceh to help Indonesians develop an effective property-rights system -- it is an initiative that should be replicated across the region. (Sri Lanka must also resolve conflicts arising out of the government's policy largely prohibiting reconstruction within a ''buffer zone'' near the water. Many survivors who want to return to their old land oppose the restrictions and their concerns should be taken into account as they are in Indonesia.) Finally, we must do all we can to assure that the voices of the most vulnerable are heard. Will women survivors be involved in the design and execution of the recovery process? Will their property rights be protected? Will the Dalits (also known as the ''untouchables'') of India be discriminated against? Will poor families get documentation for their assets and have access to lines of credit? Will national governments give localities greater flexibility to meet their particular needs? Will children who survived be able to get back to school? Will the disaster usher in a new chapter in the peace processes in Sri Lanka and Aceh, thereby making it easier for aid to be distributed and reconstruction to take place wherever it's needed? Thanks to the generosity of millions of people, we will have the resources to meet these daunting challenges. The World Food Program of the United Nations is feeding more than 700,000 people daily. Unicef is making substantial commitments to meeting the area's large needs for water and sanitation. Other United Nations agencies are doing their part. But most of the financing for reconstruction and recovery is in the hands of donor governments and charitable groups like the Red Cross, Catholic Relief Services, and hundreds of other nongovernmental organizations. In order for the recovery effort to succeed, these groups have to be treated as equal partners in the planning process. Of course, the reconstruction process will

1683615_2

No Pot of Gold In Court Ruling For the Studios

service. With the ruling, movie executives hope they will be able to further develop their online businesses from a position of strength, unlike the music business, which made little effort to create licensed services until piracy was already widespread. Entertainment executives said they believed that the sheer publicity about the hotly anticipated court decision might dissuade young music fans from continuing to trade copyrighted material freely. ''Tonight parents all across the country will go home to have conversations with their kids and say there is a right way and a wrong way to enjoy music,'' said Mitch Bainwol, chairman of the Recording Industry Association of America, the lobbying group for the major music labels. But others said the ruling was not likely to translate to any real change in consumer behavior. An estimated six million Americans are using file-sharing networks at any one time, according to estimates from BigChampagne, which studies online activity. The overall number of people using the networks, meanwhile, is estimated to be in the tens of millions. Young music fans have had five years or more to become accustomed to the easy acquisition of free music files that can be easily burned to CD's, transferred to portable music players like Apple's iPod, and shared without restriction. For executives expecting families to take account of their online activity, ''I think that's very wishful thinking, because I think most parents don't know what Grokster is,'' said Andy Gershon, president of the independent music label V2, which releases music by artists like The White Stripes and Stereophonics. ''Are morals and ethics passed down at a dinner table based on what the Supreme Court says?'' The music companies have been trying desperately to regain their footing in the marketplace since 1999, when the pioneering file-swapping service Napster, created by a college dropout named Shawn Fanning, vastly accelerated the flow of free, unprotected music files online. After years of infighting over how to proceed in the digital realm, the music companies licensed an array of services to sell downloads and subscriptions, including iTunes, which charges 99 cents a song. The labels, meanwhile, have also tried to retain fans of the old-fashioned compact disc, enticing them with price cuts, contests and extra content like music-video excerpts. In their most controversial step, the entertainment companies have filed lawsuits against individual computer users. The major labels, for instance, have sued some 11,700 people since

1679083_3

Few Visas, Fewer Resort Workers

rely on a glut of college students and high school teenagers to fill in as store clerks, cashiers and other low-paid workers. During the last 15 years, however, fewer American students have been venturing into the summer workforce. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that 67 percent of American 16- to 24-year-olds had summer jobs last year, compared with a high of 78 percent in 1989. Last year's figure was the lowest percentage since 1966. And those venturing into the workplace are looking for résumé-building positions. About 82 percent of college seniors now list internships at law firms, Wall Street corporations and nonprofits on their résumés, compared with just 3 percent in 1980, according to Vault, a career research firm in New York. ''They don't want to sling pizzas or make cheese steaks,'' said John Mosca, the nightclub manager at Jenkinson's Boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. Of the 100 workers he hired this summer, 20 are from the Czech Republic, and only a dozen are American collegians. ''Unless they're on scholarship, they want everything handed to them on a silver platter.'' Another factor keeping American students out of the seasonal workforce is the expanding academic calendar. Many college students now return to classes in August. Resorts, meanwhile, have lengthened their season. ''We begin in May and end in October,'' said Patti Ann Moskwa, a bar owner on Mackinac Island. ''We can't fill those positions with students.'' H-2B workers, on the other hand, can stay up to 12 months and sometimes longer. ''I'm here from April to December,'' said Carol Morris, a 39-year-old Jamaican who left behind two children to spend her ninth season on Nantucket. She makes about $400 a week cooking and bagging groceries. But opponents of the H-2B program say workers like Ms. Morris illustrate the real reason why college students have vanished: employers want cheaper labor. Many jobs pay $8 to $12 an hour, with few benefits besides dorm-style housing and a uniform. EMPLOYERS, however, counter that Americans don't want these jobs, especially since they are temporary. Moreover, they note, the law requires that they advertise the jobs locally and pay competitive wages. And they point to the visa figures as proof of the enormous demand. The number of H-2B visas went from less than 13,000 in 1996 to more than 66,000 in 2004, prompting the Citizenship and Immigration Services, an arm of the Department of

1679087_1

U.N. Reports Say Poverty Causes Deeper Worry South of Sahara

reduce the mortality rates of children under age 5 by two-thirds by 2015. Experts at the United Nations Development Program said their projections ''reflect current trends, not destiny.'' Secretary General Kofi Annan praised the European Union yesterday for its recent commitment to almost double aid in five years and pointedly added at a news conference, ''I look to all donors to follow their example.'' The United States has declined to make a similar commitment. Administration officials say they have already tripled aid to Africa since President Bush took office and contend that a more gradual buildup of assistance will give African countries time to develop the capacity to spend the money well. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who is advocating a doubling of aid by 2010, has put Africa's plight at the top of the agenda for the Group of 8 major industrial nations, whose leaders are to meet July 6-8 in Gleneagles, Scotland. While agreeing with American officials that Africa must confront corruption, Mr. Blair, the European Union, the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, contend that more African nations are ready to spend much more money productively. Each report assesses the human costs of failing to achieve goals that the world's heads of state unanimously endorsed five years ago to reduce poverty, hunger, child mortality and illiteracy. ''The Gleneagles G-8 Summit in July 2005 provides a critical opportunity to prevent the potential human development costs identified in this report from becoming actual costs,'' says the United Nations Development Program's report, from the agency's Human Development Report Office. It forecasts that 5.1 million African children will die in 2015. That is more than the 4.8 million who now die each year and 3 million more than if the goal were met. The report on the Millennium Development Goals says almost half of all deaths among children under 5 occur in sub-Saharan Africa, while globally half the 11 million annual child deaths are the result of five diseases: pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria, measles and AIDS. ''Most of these lives could be saved by expanding low-cost prevention and treatment measures,'' the report says. Even as poverty deepens in Africa, with stagnating agriculture and the staggering toll of AIDS, the world as a whole is likely to meet the goal of halving extreme poverty, largely because of progress in India, China and other Asian nations, the report says.

1677368_0

World Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Arrests On Illegal Logging

Barely a month after incurring international criticism as a result of a large increase in deforestation in the Amazon, the government has announced the dismantling of what was described as the largest illegal logging ring operating in the world's biggest tropical rain forest. Among the 89 people arrested were 49 employees of the federal environmental protection agency, who were accused of accepting bribes to issue timber felling and transportation permits. The authorities said the gang had been functioning since 1990 and had illegally cut nearly $400 million worth of timber. Larry Rohter (NYT)

1677288_3

Gains Made to Contain AIDS, but Its Global Spread Goes On, U.N. Says

greatest risk of infection. A 2004 survey of national AIDS spending in 26 countries found that some countries had used limited prevention resources for less effective initiatives aimed at the general population, including people at low risk. ''This approach misses the critical opportunity to prevent an epidemic that is concentrated in the most vulnerable populations from spreading to the population at large,'' Dr. Piot said. Worldwide, services to prevent transmission of H.I.V. from mother to child reach only 8 percent of pregnant women, including just 5 percent of pregnant women in Africa. Prevention, Dr. Piot said, must be an integral part of programs to treat infected people. Meeting the goals set in 2001 will require greater success in reaching young people with essential information, education and services, the report said. Although many young people are learning about AIDS, more than half of those surveyed in nine sub-Saharan countries lacked comprehensive information about H.I.V. prevention. AIDS accounts for 3 percent of deaths in children under 5 years old, but in hard-hit countries, the figure reaches 50 percent. Also, AIDS has orphaned 12 million children in Africa and an additional 3 million elsewhere. National efforts and financing are insufficient to address the problem of orphans, which is expected to grow in coming years, but, Dr. Piot said, political commitments to combat the spread of AIDS, sorely lacking in the early stages of the epidemic, have increased significantly since 2001 at the national, regional and global levels. The response to AIDS in the Caribbean is being transformed by the leadership and collaboration of the region's political leaders, under the umbrella of the Pan Caribbean Partnership Against H.I.V./AIDS. Still, political commitment remains inadequate in many countries where the epidemic is emerging as a major problem. The United Nations cited disturbing signs of growth of the epidemic in Asia, home to half of the world's population. ''Strong and energetic leadership is especially vital in all countries in Asia and Eastern Europe, where the opportunity to prevent the epidemic from becoming generalized is quickly vanishing,'' the report said. At the same time, an acute shortage of workers who possess the skills and expertise needed to combat AIDS has become a major barrier to starting and expanding essential prevention and treatment programs. ''Stopping the epidemic will require development of microbicides to protect women and a vaccine,'' and that will take years, Dr. Piot said. Delegates ended the

1677346_6

A Portal to AOL's Future?; New Free Site May Affect Time Warner Decision on Troubled Unit

of AOL say. AOL.com will draw much of its content and its tone from the AOL service, with its flashy headlines, big photographs and instant polls. But AOL will not give away those aspects of its paid service that its research shows are most appealing: special features for children with access controls for their parents, Spanish- language pages, protection against viruses and spam, and e-mail addresses at AOL.com. (The free service will offer e-mail at AIM.com.) Of course, AOL's Internet service, which costs $23.90 a month, is facing ever more competition from low-price dial-up providers and even some broadband providers. This week, SBC Communications started offering high-speed Internet service to new customers at $14.95 a month. AOL hopes to leapfrog its rivals by using the latest technology in its new portal, particularly with video. The site will begin public tests this month and should be generally available by the end of the summer. AOL will try to draw traffic to the portal from its assorted free properties, including Netscape, Mapquest, Moviefone and most important, the AOL Instant Messenger chat system. Collectively, those services are used by more than 50 million people a month who are not AOL members. AOL also hopes that by moving its content outside its members-only service, its pages on many subjects, as diverse as musicians and diets, will be indexed by Google and other search engines. ''My biggest problem is the walled garden,'' said Mr. Kelly, who runs all of AOL's Web properties in addition to ad sales. ''The world can't see the good stuff we do every day.'' By sometime next year, if ad dollars are flowing in and investors start to bid up Time Warner shares, the bet will have paid off. If AOL.com is doing well but Time Warner shares are still flat, Mr. Parsons may be interested in selling a partial stake in America Online to the public. This sort of spinout in theory would let investors put an independent value on AOL and allow the online unit to make acquisitions with its own stock. The questions will be tougher if Mr. Miller's portal flounders as badly as AOL for Broadband has. If Mr. Parsons is then inclined to sell, not many media or technology companies would have the combination of resources and need to spend $8 billion or more for a shrinking Internet service business. Microsoft is the most logical buyer

1678327_2

With Carryout, Bears Find a Life-Changing Experience

referring to the 46 mountains south of Lake Placid and Saranac Lake that are more than 4,000 feet high. In part, he said, the increase is attributable to more building in areas open to development there. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has proposed changing rules in wilderness areas of the Adirondack Park to require visitors to keep food, garbage and toiletries in containers ''manufactured for the specific purpose of resisting entry by bears.'' To be bearproof, Dr. Beckmann said, a container must be made of thick, nonpliable metal, and have latches in recessed compartments bear paws cannot reach. In New Jersey and Connecticut, where the black bears were almost wiped out by 1900, populations are also on the rise. So far, urbanized bears are not a big problem in those states, but wildlife agencies nevertheless advise rural residents to invest in bearproof garbage containers; to store garbage in garages, sheds or basements; to make sure the grill is cleaned after every barbecue; and to otherwise avoid tempting bears with food. Requiring bearproof containers is one of the few effective measures for getting rid of nuisance bears, Dr. Beckmann said, noting that when he and others captured Nevada bears and moved them far out of town, even hundreds of miles away, 92 percent returned, 70 percent in less than 40 days. At Yellowstone, where he is working now, nuisance bears dispersed into the woods after the widespread adoption of bearproof trash bins. But naturalists are beginning to wonder whether urban living has changed bear habits so much they will have a hard time readjusting to the wild. Dr. Beckmann, who used radio collars and other means to identify and track bears, said bears in the wild were typically active 13 hours a day, in daytime, hunting for food. The urban bears were on the move only about 8 1/2 hours and at night, ''cruising through the garbage under cover of darkness.'' Abundant food and relative lack of exercise may explain why urban bears are so much larger than their rural cousins. In the wild, males rarely weigh more than 250 pounds, but garbage-fed males routinely reach 400 pounds or more. And while the rural bears retire to their dens for winter on Dec. 4, on average, the urban bears put it off until New Year's. ''We had several male bears giving up on hibernation entirely,'' Dr. Beckmann said.

1678310_1

Don't Let Your Baby Blues Go Code Red

through it. And remember: postpartum depression is beyond your control. Having it does not mean you are not a good mother or that you are crazy. The most important thing is that you don't wait for it to pass.'' This is a very important message, because the consequences of not treating postpartum depression can be quite devastating for the mother, for her spouse or companion and especially for her baby. Symptoms and Risks The so-called baby blues experienced in the days after childbirth are very common. About 70 percent of women are likely to experience mood swings or feel weepy and emotional about the slightest untoward event or remark. These feelings, which mimic the symptoms many women experience just before their menstrual periods, are most likely brought on by the abrupt decline that occurs at childbirth in the hormones estrogen and progesterone. These baby blues pass on their own, usually within two weeks and do not require treatment. But for some 400,000 American women each year (representing about 10 percent of births), a more severe mood disorder results. They may feel sad, hopeless, overwhelmed, unable to cope, irritable and afraid of harming themselves, their partners or their babies. Crying, uncontrollable mood swings, a fear of being alone, a lack of interest in the baby, loss of energy and motivation, withdrawal or isolation from friends and family, and an inability to make decisions or think clearly are also common symptoms. Physical symptoms may occur as well, including extreme fatigue, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, headaches, chest pains, palpitations and rapid breathing. Ms. Shields experienced most of these, yet resisted for too long the urging of friends and family to seek the help she clearly needed. All the while, she felt unattached to her daughter and feared harming herself as well as her marriage and the emotional development of her baby. The most severe form of the disorder, postpartum psychosis, occurs after 1 or 2 of every 1,000 births, usually within six weeks of delivery. Symptoms may include delusions, hallucinations, sleep disturbances and obsessive thoughts about the baby. Untreated, the result can sometimes be suicide or murder of the baby, the spouse or other children in the family. Some women are more likely than others to be afflicted with postpartum depression, and researchers are now trying to better identify them and devise therapies to use before childbirth or immediately after it. Known

1678319_2

Sage Advice in Archaeology: Think Like a Neanderthal

marks could only have come from other cave bears -- a sign of cannibalism or savaging. This is important work. We need to know about how extinct animals lived because we cannot observe them. The same is true for prehistoric humans. Q. Were your cave bears studies connected to your interest in prehistoric humans? A. Absolutely. It is thought that one reason we find huge cave bear bone accumulations in European caves is that Neanderthals probably hunted them. My current research area is the extinction of Neanderthals in Europe and the spread of modern humans thought to have left Africa some 40,000 years ago. It is believed that when modern humans arrived in Europe, the Neanderthals disappeared. With this subject, you often work in caves. All prehistoric Europeans liked living in caves. The caves had to be oriented to the southwest for sun and warmth. They needed a cave high up over a river. Why? Because the animals they hunted would come to the river to drink and from above, they could make hunting plans. Plus they needed to be near a water source for themselves. Over the years, I found a few caves that met this requirement, but none were continuously inhabited. Sopeña was rich with 16 layers of sediment, all with signs of the earliest humans. The cave's habitation spans Neanderthal times and the beginnings of modern humans in Europe. Because of this, Sopeña is like a book that has all the pages. There are no pages missing. Q. Are there clues at Sopeña to why the Neanderthals disappeared? A. One of prehistory's big questions is, Why did the Neanderthals become extinct at roughly the same moment that Homo sapiens arrived from Africa? At Sopeña we may learn if there were significant differences in behaviors that gave an edge to modern humans. Could it have been diet or the way they processed food? Q. So you're studying prehistoric diets? A. Yes. We look for remains like bones, charcoals from their fires and tools. From this we can learn how their diet changed over time. It's like we're digging through prehistoric domestic waste. One thing we're learning through isotopic analysis of Neanderthal bones shows that they were almost entirely carnivores. Q. Are you saying Neanderthal man was on a variant of the Atkins diet? A. They mostly ate meat. And you need carbohydrates. We're finding that modern humans, coming

1678482_10

Many Demands On New Tower At Ground Zero; Seeking Better Security At a Symbol of Resolve

a big S.U.V. can carry is the equivalent of the charge used in the Oklahoma City bombing. To make underground parking safe, all vehicles entering the subterranean roadways would be subject to inspection at the entrances off Liberty and Vesey Streets, said Stefan Pryor, president of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Security experts underscore that terrorists' intentions cannot be predicted, and they recommend the installation of specially designed air intakes and ventilation systems in buildings at the site to counter radiological, chemical and biological threats. Also undergoing scrutiny is the $2 billion PATH station and transportation hub by the architect Santiago Calatrava, which poses many engineering challenges, including the routing of the PATH tracks directly under the Freedom Tower site, meaning that the tower's supporting columns must be threaded among the rails. Mr. Calatrava said in an interview that he could deliver ''a beautiful building that accomplishes all the needs of security,'' adding that ''95 percent of people in the station will be in lower levels,'' and therefore more shielded from the possibility of explosion. The distance from Church Street to the above-ground part of the terminal has not yet been determined by the Port Authority, which runs PATH, but engineers have set 50 feet as a goal. To support the bulk of the museum building, transfer girders will be used to redistribute its weight out to the sides of the PATH station mezzanine directly below. Generally speaking, the use of transfer girders is ''strongly discouraged'' in the emergency management agency's primer. ''If you lose the transfer girder, a lot more of the building is going to come down,'' Dr. Hinman said in an interview. The failure of structural transfer systems contributed to the collapse of the original 7 World Trade Center and of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. But the transfer girders above the PATH station have been designed ''in a way that the global collapse of the building would be almost impossible,'' Mr. Calatrava said. The museum is to have a ''crystalline facade'' of glass prisms set into walls of wood or terra-cotta designed to capture light, said Craig Dykers of the Norwegian architectural firm Snohetta. ''We have been apprised of the security requirements,'' he added, ''and we plan to meet and exceed them.'' But relatives of those who died in the trade center have expressed concern about all of the glass facades planned

1678398_0

Real Dangers of Deforestation

To the Editor: Re ''To Save Its Canal, Panama Fights for Its Forests'' (May 24): I recently returned from a trip to Easter Island, where the Rapanui people are noted for cutting down their trees to build their famous monoliths. Today, the island is an ecological disaster. Two weeks ago, The Times clearly noted how the Panamanians had deforested the area around Lake Gatún, and were forced to stop the operation of the locks because of lack of rainwater runoff. Please tell me why people do not realize that our whole existence on this planet is in danger from this deforesting. Robert S. Salzman Millington, N.J.

1680193_0

Illegal Rice Found Again in China's Food Supply

Genetically altered rice, which is not approved for human consumption anywhere in the world, has been found again in China's food supply, this time in one of the country's biggest cities, the environmental group Greenpeace said on Monday. Researchers for Greenpeace say bags of rice purchased in the southern city of Guangzhou were tested by an independent laboratory and found to contain genetically altered rice, which is illegal to sell on the open market in China. The findings suggest that China may have inadvertently become the first country where people are consuming genetically modified rice, even though safety testing has not yet been completed. Scientists around the world continue to debate the use of genetically altered crops, but there has been little or no evidence that genetically altered crops are harmful to human health. Two months ago, China's Ministry of Agriculture said it would investigate claims by Greenpeace that genetically altered rice was being illegally planted and sold in Hubei Province in central China. The findings have not yet been released. Now, Greenpeace asserts that rice that has been genetically altered to resist pests has spread from experimental plots in Hubei to wholesale rice markets in Guangzhou, which is about 90 miles north of Hong Kong. ''This illegal and unapproved rice has spread out of Hubei Province and it is reaching other parts of the country,'' said Sze Pang Cheung, a Greenpeace researcher in Beijing. Mr. Sze said Greenpeace bought the rice from a Guangzhou wholesaler, who buys from Hubei and then resells about 60 tons of rice a day, much of it to Guangzhou restaurants. Last April, Greenpeace said a group of ''rogue scientists'' in Hubei had allowed altered rice to illegally seep into a corner of the market by selling it to regular farmers.In the United States, the planting of genetically altered corn and soybeans is widespread. But since the late 1990's, European and American regulators have slowed the approval process over health and safety concerns, as well as consumer fears.

1682940_2

While Supplies Last: Three Natural Wonders That Are Feeling the Heat

climate. ''There are areas where we used to have rivers flowing in the park, and we don't have them anymore,'' said Gerald Bigurube, director of Tanzania National Parks. Steps are being taken, Mr. Bigurube said, to curb deforestation of the area, which is said to play a part in the loss of cloud cover that has exposed the mountain to the sun's ultraviolet rays. Some estimates say the ice cap could be gone by 2020, but Mr. Bigurube predicts little impact on tourism. ''The presence of ice and snow was like the icing on the cake,'' he said. ''Now when the icing is not there, the cake is still great to enjoy.'' SEEING IT -- Climbing Kilimanjaro, the tallest free-standing mountain in the world, is usually done in six to eight days and is considered a tough hike rather than an actual climb. Good Earth Tours and Safaris, (877) 265-9003, www.goodearthtours.com, based in Arusha, Tanzania, with an office in Tampa, Fla., offers trips on routes of varying difficulty starting at $720 a person. GETTING THERE -- Kilimanjaro International Airport, near Moshi, Tanzania, is served by KLM and Ethiopian Airlines, among other lines. THE GREAT BARRIER REEF A chain of coral reefs off the northeastern coast of Australia that is more than 1,400 miles long, this is said to be the largest natural feature on earth, visible even from space. Formed by groups of tiny coral polyps encased in shells of calcium carbonate, the reef system supports rare wildlife and 1,500 species of fish. But as the ocean warms, the algae that support the polyps are expelled, causing the coral to bleach white and possibly die. The summers of 1998 and 2002 caused major bleaching episodes across large portions of the reef, and while much of it rebounded from the bleaching, up to 5 percent was permanently damaged. ''Good management can't stop bleaching occurring, but it can maintain the conditions that enable it to bounce back,'' said Dr. Paul Marshall, manager of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park's climate change response program. The park, which sees about 1.8 million visitors a year, is fighting the reef bleaching by trying to improve the area's water quality and stop overfishing, said to hinder the ability of the coral to rehabilitate itself. Unlike glaciers, coral can evolve and adapt to climate change, but humans, as Dr. Marshall points out, are affecting the ecosystem in ways

1683191_0

Why Now?

To the Sports Editor: Seven Formula One racing teams using Michelins were told the tires might shred because the cars exerted intense downforce at full speed on the banked corner leading to Indianapolis Motor Speedway's straightaway. As an alternative, Michelin and the seven teams proposed installing a series of turns, a chicane, just before the banked turn as a way to slow the cars. But the offer was refused by racing authorities and a competitor, so the seven teams using Michelins pulled their cars out of last Sunday's United States Grand Prix. Are Michelin and the protesting teams, having been at Indy for five previous Grand Prix races, asking us to believe they did not know about the problems of the banked turn until last weekend? Robert CONLEY Chancellorsville, Va.

1683216_0

Used S.U.V.'s Come Loaded, With Safety Concerns

A COUPLE of years ago, federal regulators invited reporters to an Ohio test track to see how old and more recent model Toyota 4Runners fared on a new federal rollover test. The outcome was sort of like those before-and-after pictures on miracle weight loss commercials. The rollover test is a series of sharp swerving maneuvers done at escalating speeds. The 2000 model 4Runner tilted up on two wheels at the lowest speed, 35 miles per hour, halting further tests. A 2003 model 4Runner did considerably better, staying grounded even at 50 miles an hour because it had been redesigned to be more stable and came equipped with electronic stability control, a technology that applies brake pressure to individual wheels to prevent rollovers. Many other sport utility vehicles have undergone similar transformations, with recent studies showing that automakers have made progress in re-engineering some new S.U.V.'s to be less deadly both for people who ride in them and those in vehicles that get hit by them. That's promising news for people buying new S.U.V.'s, but what about people stuck with the older, less stable models? The average vehicle stays on the road for 15 years, or 170,000 miles, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, the industry's main lobbying group. That means older model S.U.V.'s are often being handed down to teenagers or, through the used car lot, to other drivers, often with high risk profiles. ''It's a huge concern, because the secondhand and thirdhand vehicles are often driven by people who are lower-income, less-skilled drivers, younger drivers, people who are more likely to get involved in crashes,'' said Joan Claybrook, the president of Public Citizen and a former top auto safety regulator. ''They will do a lot of damage to other people as well. These drivers are more likely to be higher risk takers, more likely to speed, to drink and drive, to not fully inflate their tires and more likely to get involved in crashes.'' Ms. Claybrook and other safety experts say they hope parents will be careful about what cars they hand down to their teenagers. Brian O'Neill, the president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research group financed by car insurers, suggested that parents avoid older S.U.V.'s and instead buy sedans, like a used Taurus, Camry or Accord. ''When you're 16 or 17, there's no such thing as a good driver,'' Mr. O'Neill said. ''They're

1682919_2

Message in a Bottle

it, it's not the kind of drink that I could make in my kitchen and pound the pavement with,'' Marlin said. ''It would go bad.'' A nutritionist friend referred her to Abe Bakal, a New Jersey-based consultant with 30 years' experience developing foods for clients like Nabisco and Heinz. Marlin told Bakal about her project, and soon he sent her a proposal: he would develop four flavors of Fizzy Lizzy for a cool $50,000. Although Marlin planned to devote her entire checking account to startup costs, that amount was nowhere near what Bakal was asking for R & D alone. She told Bakal she couldn't afford him, but he was so impressed by her enthusiasm that he offered to consult in return for a 20-percent stake in the business. ''Liz was oozing enthusiasm about the project, and she was committed,'' Bakal recalled recently, ''and one of the things I've learned in product development is that sometimes -- not always, but sometimes -- you can compensate with enthusiasm and commitment for money.'' The two developed their first four flavors -- cranberry, grapefruit, orange and pineapple -- in Bakal's lab, using a purist's approach: just juice, carbonated water and only the smallest amount of natural flavorings and ''filler'' juices, like white grape juice. Once the flavors were developed, Marlin had to find a bottler. Carbonated drinks made with real juice must be bottled in a machine called a tunnel pasteurizer, a contraption Marlin describes as ''sort of like a car wash for bottles that kills the bacteria.'' She wanted to bottle just 50 cases of each flavor, but no bottlers with the machine were willing to do a production run smaller than 2,000 cases. It took a year of phone calls before she persuaded one to run 500 cases of each flavor. Four years would elapse between Marlin's fateful bike ride and her first carbonated juices rolling off the assembly line, but a taste of success was immediate. In the spring of 2000, she hit the streets of Manhattan with a red Rubbermaid cooler full of her drinks. At her first stop, the Garden of Eden, a high-end food market, the manager took a swig of a cranberry Fizzy Lizzy and said, ''O.K.'' That summer, she took her cooler campaign to the Hamptons, adding popular upscale markets like Southampton's Village Cheese Shop and Barefoot Contessa in East Hampton to her account list.

1682957_0

E-Mailapropism

Soon after the world began, the ancients undertook the construction of an ill-fated ziggurat in the land of Shinar. An edifice of ambitious vertical proportion, it began to encroach upon heaven itself until the deity, concerned for the neighborhood, confounded our forebears' language so they could not communicate and scattered them abroad. In recent years, mankind has devised means of information transmission so vast and so rapid and so efficient that they would seem to challenge the natural order. But our capacity to communicate nonetheless seems, for some mysterious reason, to have diminished radically. If not the Tower of Babel, perhaps the Slough of Babble. (I do not here propose to address the nattering of chat rooms or the bombast of the blogosphere, both beyond hope, but rather commercial communication, wherein cogency not only is important in its own right but also serves to convey professional substance.) A scant generation ago, in the world of business, stenographers -- who have since gone the way of the great auk -- struggled to transcribe dictation both tedious and tendentious. (''In preparation for the plenary meeting of the board next Tuesday, we need to prepare to carefully and with statistics present the color of a dog food can that. . . . '') Clearly what was then required of business folk was that they learn to strop and vigorously employ Occam's razor (after William of Occam, English scholastic philosopher, d. 1349?), which requires the elimination of all elements unnecessary for proof or explanation. Instead, afforded a simple and enticing method of transmission, they have opted to use Redmond's wordchipper (after William of Redmond, the American developer of Word and enabler of e-mail, b. 1955) -- which reduces context to mulch. (''on the woof chow i think yellow probalby -- thats what the stats say . . does the board care? ur call'') In fairness to Bill Gates, you can hardly blame the medium. The medium, after all, is not the message. But the very facility and rapidity of e-mail are seductive, and the tendency arises to blurt, rather than to compose -- to confuse the instantaneous with the efficient. (''yup -- yellow -- go for it . . ill clue the board Not too orangy tho'') Nor should that which is merely brief be construed as that which is truly terse. It is one thing to eliminate elements unnecessary for proof or explanation;

1682008_2

School Playground Clear? A Bear Must Be Near

arose when an unexpected visitor attempted to pick up a child from the school. Teachers and the school nurse have walkie-talkies and wear identifying tags on lanyards. ''This is the only childhood they get,'' said Joyce DeFrancesco, 53, the assistant principal. It was Ms. DeFrancesco who came up with Brown Alert, based on ''teddy bear brown'' and ''woodsy things,'' she said, when they decided to add the warning to the flip book last year. Bears seem to prefer Thompson Brook School to the four other schools in Avon, school officials said. Three were spotted here during the school year, which ends today. The biscuit-colored brick building seems to attract wildlife; a swarm of bees took up residence in the playground equipment and there have also been woodchucks, wild turkeys, foxes and coyotes. An adult male black bear can stand six feet tall and weigh as much as 400 pounds. Environmentalists say they are unlikely to attack people. But they certainly can alarm people: statewide, there have been more than 1,600 reported sightings of bears in the past year. Environmentalists believe there are about 300 to 500 black bears in Connecticut. Paul Rego, a state biologist and a bear specialist, who sounded only a ''hmmmm'' when the books ''Goldilocks and the Three Bears'' and ''Blueberries for Sal'' were cited as research sources, succinctly described bear pursuits. ''They're after food and sex,'' he said, adding that bears will wander as far as 20 miles from their home for both. A century ago, people hunted bears here but it is no longer legal, Mr. Rego noted. Bear hunting is permissible in several other New England and mid-Atlantic states, including Maine and New York. New Jersey environmentalists have said they are rethinking a plan to block a bear hunt. Douglas Thompson, 66, scoffed. He owns the colonial-era Sunrise Farm in Avon, where there are gray-sided barns near the school and fields rippled with shiny stalks of cattle corn. ''Of course when you mention hunting here, people go all Disney and picture Bambi,'' he said. Claire Pikor, 10, a fifth grader, spotted a bear cub outside her Thompson Brook classroom, picking its way across the wood-chip landing in a parking lot. She was delighted. But some other students screamed. ''Well, they were the girlie girls,'' she said of the incident last fall. ''But my teacher did tell us to get away from the windows.'' INK

1682004_2

2 Columbus Circle Makes Group's List of Threatened Sites

of experts who evaluate the sites' significance, the urgency of their condition and the viability of the nominator's proposal to protect them. Several sites are relisted. Among those that were on the 2004 watch list are Little Hagia Sophia, the oldest preserved Byzantine church in Istanbul, which was converted to a mosque in 1504 but is closed because of structural damage; Frank Lloyd Wright's 1924 Ennis-Brown House in Los Angeles, one of four textile-block houses that the architect built from local materials; and the Panama Canal area, which the fund says is threatened by development pressures and a lack of regulation. ''Some of these sites are so much on the tourist circuit that people don't really think about the conservation issues,'' Ms. Burnham said, citing, for example, the formerly listed Taj Mahal and Pompeii. Sites can also be unglamorous, like a fish processing site in British Columbia that once made the list, or hazy in origin, like the Pulemelei Mound in Samoa, a mysterious earth and stone monument built between 1100 and 1500 that made this year's list. On watch in the United States are the bluegrass cultural landscape of Kentucky, whose horse farms and training stables are threatened by urban sprawl; Hanging Flume in Montrose Country, Colo., a 13-mile-long track that was used for hydraulic gold mining in the late 19th century; and the Ellis Island baggage and dormitory building in New York, where immigrants waited to be processed for arrival or deported. This year's list has sites from 55 countries on all 7 continents, including Antarctica, the fund said. There is Tell Balatah from the Palestinian territories, thought by some scholars to be the biblical city of Shechem; the Roman aqueduct in Segovia, Spain, whose rough-hewn granite blocks are being eroded by pollutants; the International Fairground, built between 1963 and 1975 in Tripoli, Lebanon, which faces possible conversion into an amusement park; and the Teatro Capitolio in Lisbon, a 1930's theater that has been closed since the 1980's and is slated for demolition. There are six sites in China, two of which -- the Cockcrow Post Town in Huailai and the Tianshui Traditional Houses in Gansu Province -- have been relisted. As development gains speed there, Ms. Burnham said, ''towns are rapidly disappearing.'' Among the other sites included for the first time this year are Afghanistan's oldest mosque, the Haji Piyada in the northern province of Balkh, whose

1681995_1

Taking a Cruise? Great, But Don't Read This Book

story of ''what happens when little guys become big guys.'' How big? Put it in perspective. Even though it leaves the colossal new Queen Mary II out of this study, the book's statistics are staggering. The immense Voyager of the Seas, owned by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines (the cruise world's other giant, which, together with Carnival, controls 90 percent of the industry), carries 300 tons' worth of passengers -- and they will gain an additional 15 tons or so during their cruise. It can disgorge 8,000 people, replace them with 8,000 others and head back out to sea, all in the course of eight hours. Such vessels have turned a formerly exotic type of travel into one that ''now feels as safe and comprehensible -- and nearly as accessible -- as the nearest strip mall.'' Mr. Garin compiles a detailed, generally lively account of how it got that way. He also treats the cruise business as a microcosm of what happens when an industry is essentially free of government regulations and tariffs. If Wal-Mart were making money at Carnival's profit margins, he argues, it would have earned $65 billion in 2003. In fact, playing by its own comparatively modest rules, Wal-Mart earned only $8 billion during that period -- and, unlike the cruise companies for all practical purposes, paid taxes on it too. Mr. Garin presents a timeline to explain how the cruise business reached such a profitable juncture. He goes back to the days when wooden ships carried immigrants from Europe to America and the trip was not generally regarded as a pleasant experience. Then, in the latter half of the 19th century, iron steamships greatly enhanced the speed and profitability of such shipping. But it took two forms of Congressional regulation -- the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, limiting immigration, and the arrival of Prohibition when offshore drinking remained legal -- to create the notion of recreational sea travel on a large scale. Two technological changes -- the advent of air travel and the birth of air-conditioning -- completed the change of focus: what had once been a North Atlantic transportation business could now purvey leisure-time trips in the tropics. And those third world tropics were promoted for their fairy-tale innocence by cruise innovators. ''The natives sing while they work or play a happy lot, carefree and gay,'' as one early cruise brochure put it. This book gives

1681184_0

Paperback Row

THE OUTLAW SEA: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime, by William Langewiesche. (North Point Press, $13.) Langewiesche turns an astute eye to the empty three-fourths of the globe, where 40,000 merchant ships operate with virtually no oversight. The book's centerpiece is the Estonia, a giant ferry that sank in the Baltic in 1994, and the anarchy that prevailed during the disaster. The author, a national correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly, looks at pollution, piracy and the threat of terrorism. Our reviewer, Nathaniel Philbrick, called this a ''brave, often electrifying book.'' THE STRENGTH OF THE SUN, by Catherine Chidgey. (Picador, $14.) Chidgey's second novel is an intricate connect-the-dots tale in which widely separated simultaneous events -- a girl's disappearance in New Zealand, a British curator's leaving his wife -- develop serpentine connections. THE POLITICS OF TRUTH: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife's CIA Identity -- A Diplomat's Memoir, by Joseph Wilson. (Carroll & Graf, $16.95.) Wilson, the top American diplomat in Baghdad before the first gulf war, tells captivating stories from his life as a foreign service officer in Africa while condemning the latest war with Iraq and the ''campaign of fear, lies and character assassination'' inside the Beltway. SWEET LAND STORIES, by E. L. Doctorow. (Random House, $12.95.) These stories plumb the failures of modern American life. ''A House on the Plains'' is narrated by the grifter son of a master con woman; ''Jolene: A Life'' tells the story of a woman who becomes a victim in one brutal relationship after another. In the Book Review Lee Siegel called Doctorow's stories ''beautifully written, meticulously plotted, scrupulously imagined.'' Joyce Carol Oates's I AM NO ONE YOU KNOW: Stories (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $13.95) features the author's trademark use of onrushing language and unsettling subject matter, from crazy parents to murder by claw hammer. A VENETIAN AFFAIR, by Andrea di Robilant. (Vintage, $14.) This engrossing story, drawn from family documents, involves a star-crossed couple in 18th-century Venice: Giustiniana Wynne, the illegitimate daughter of an English baronet, and Andrea Memmo, a Venetian aristocrat of ancient lineage. Di Robilant, whose father was a descendant of Memmo and discovered a moldering packet of letters between the two lovers, recreates the affair and renders a rich picture of the times. LETTERS TO A YOUNG CONTRARIAN, by Christopher Hitchens. (Basic Books, $12.95.) In a series of characteristically acerbic essays, Hitchens

1681217_0

Using Your Cellphone Anywhere in the World

AMERICAN cellphones work fairly well across most of the United States, but what about when you travel to, say, Paris? With newer phones that support international standards, reducing roaming rates and allowing you to take advantage of local rates, it's now easier and cheaper to stay in touch with cellphones when traveling overseas. The place to start is with a GSM phone. Just as radios operate on different standards (AM vs. FM) and frequencies, so do cellphones. Two of the most popular cellular standards are GSM (global system for mobile communications) and CDMA (code division multiple access), each of which uses different frequencies (think radio stations). For travelers, GSM is the driving force behind easier roaming, since it's the standard used in most countries (though some like Japan and South Korea use others). GSM is also the main network for American carriers like Cingular and T-Mobile, while others, including Verizon Wireless and Sprint, have recently released hybrid phones that include GSM for roaming. Without a newer hybrid phone, a traveler on a non-GSM network will have limited international roaming options. In recent years, Cingular, T-Mobile and other companies have begun selling phones and service plans that can be used in both the United States and other GSM-based countries. Susan Simmons, vice president of strategy at the Management Network Group, a communications industry consulting company, said that the move is aimed at ''the average consumer, student or business person traveling abroad who doesn't want to worry about the hassle or expense of renting an international world phone.'' For example, Cingular's World Basics Plus Western Europe Plan ($5.99 a month) has a flat 99-cents-a-minute roaming rate in 23 countries. Users need a GSM phone with the frequency for the country they're visiting. Sites like www.gsmworld.com (click on Roaming, then Coverage Maps) list GSM bands for each country. With the purchase of a global phone, Verizon Wireless customers can obtain GSM roaming rates of $1.29 a minute plus long distance charges for many countries. In some that use CDMA, like Canada, Bermuda, Israel, Mexico, South Korea, the rate is just 69 cents a minute. ''Verizon has done a good job of creating solutions where customers can use their phones overseas,'' said Delly Tamer, founder and C.E.O. of LetsTalk.com, a San Francisco-based online wireless retailer who notes that Verizon Wireless has two new phones -- the Samsung SCH-A790 and Motorola A840 -- that are

1684003_0

Online Dating? Thin and Rich Works Here, Too

ONLINE dating is one of the most popular paid services on the Internet. A 2003 report by comScore Networks stated that 40 million Americans had visited an online dating site, and JupiterResearch reported early this year that industry revenue will reach $516 million in 2005. Recently, three economists -- Günter J. Hitsch, Ali Hortaçsu (both from the University of Chicago) and Dan Ariely (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) -- examined the experiences of a sample of users of a major online dating service and subjected it to empirical scrutiny. Their paper, ''What Makes You Click,'' is available on Mr. Hortaçsu's Web page. Users who sign up for a dating service typically post a profile describing their age, income and other characteristics along with an optional photo. The researchers asked University of Chicago undergraduates to rate the users' physical attractiveness based on the photos, adding another variable to the mix. The online service provided the researchers with information about which sites a user browsed, whether the user sent e-mail to other users or replied to them and whether the user exchanged phone numbers. What happened after that particular milestone was not recorded. Start with the self-reported characteristics. There was a strong Lake Wobegon effect in the data, with only 1 percent of the population admitting to having ''less than average'' looks. Even so, only a third actually posted a photo. The reported weights of the women were substantially less than national averages and about 30 percent were blonde. The reported weights of the men were consistent with national averages and only about 12 percent were blond. What are people looking for? The most important variable, for both men and women, is looks. Furthermore, posting a photo is a big help: women who post photos receive about twice as many e-mail messages as those who do not, even when they report that they have ''average looks.'' Having a lot of money is good for attracting e-mail messages, at least for men. Those men reporting incomes in excess of $250,000 received 156 percent more e-mail messages than those with incomes below $50,000. Women like men with a higher income than they have but men do not want to date women who earn more than they do. The stated goals for using the service make a big difference in how many e-mail messages are received. Men who are ''hoping to start a long-term

1677121_3

Fewer Friends In High Places For This Lobby

generally easier -- though not always -- to defend in trade negotiations. Phillip W. Hayes, spokesman for the American Sugar Alliance, rejects the charge that his industry opposes free trade. Rather than the slow dismantling of the American program through bilateral negotiations, domestic sugar producers say they want all countries to end their sugar subsidies at once in a global trade agreement. ''If everyone laid down their subsidies,'' Mr. Hayes said, ''then we would give up our sugar program.'' The sugar industry in the United States is blessed by geography and a single-minded focus on defending the quota program. Much of the American sugar program resides in Florida, home of cane growers that produce about a quarter of the nation's sugar. Cane sugar is also an important part of Louisiana's economy. Sugar beets are grown in North Dakota, Minnesota and other northern states that have consistently lobbied their lawmakers to oppose any threats to the program. Despite its small size, accounting for just 1 percent of American farm receipts and 61,000 direct jobs, sugar is the single largest agricultural donor to political campaigns. The Fanjul family, descendants of a Cuban sugar baron who was forced out after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, operates the nation's largest cane-growing and refining operation through the Flo-Sun Company, based in Palm Beach, Fla. While Alfonso Fanjul Jr. donates to the Democrats, his brother, Jose Fanjul, contributed more than $200,000 for George W. Bush's re-election effort. Cafta, an economic pact with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, would eliminate most tariffs for American goods into those countries and enshrine the duty-free status of most goods coming from those countries. Sugar makes up only a fraction of the deal and would lead to opening up the American market to 1 percent more sugar from Central America, or, in the words of administration officials, only one teaspoonful a week per person. Ambassador Allen F. Johnson, America's chief international agricultural negotiator, said that the changes would be so small that there was nothing in Cafta that was a threat to the sugar industry. He suggested that the sugar lobby was short-sighted, risking its relationship with the administration ahead of legislation that would determine the billions of dollars in federal money to be divided among farmers into the next decade for crop subsidies, conservation and other agricultural programs. ''It is not in sugar's