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but they are of limited effectiveness, some experts said. In the trial, which was conducted by the V.A. health system, with help from the National Institutes of Health and Merck, half of the 38,500 participants received a single injection of the vaccine and the other half a placebo. The volunteers, none of whom had previously had shingles, were then followed for an average of three years and some for as long as five years. The participants, like most adults in the United States, had most likely had chickenpox. There were 315 cases of shingles in those who got the vaccine compared with 642 among those who got the placebo, a reduction of 51 percent. Even among those who got shingles, its severity was reduced by the vaccine. The vaccine group as a whole had 61 percent lower burden of illness, a measure of the intensity and duration of pain. And the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia was reduced by two-thirds, with 27 cases among vaccine recipients compared with 80 in the control group. The authors said that side effects were mild and that they detected no cases in which shingles was caused by the vaccine itself, which contains a live but weakened virus. However, people with compromised immune systems, who might have been at greater risk of getting the disease from the vaccine, were excluded from the trial. Experts hailed the results. ''Grown-ups should welcome the zoster vaccine,'' Dr. Donald H. Gilden of the University of Colorado wrote in an editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine. ''We may need it more than children do.'' He predicted that the vaccine would be highly cost effective even if Merck were to charge $500 for it. Merck said it had not decided on the price. Merck, which has been hurt by the withdrawal from the market of its pain drug Vioxx, is counting heavily on vaccines for growth in the next few years. In addition to the shingles vaccine, it is hoping to bring to market a vaccine against human papilloma virus, which causes cervical cancer, and one against rotavirus, which causes potentially fatal diarrhea, mainly in developing countries. There are still unanswered questions, like how long the vaccine's effectiveness lasts and whether people younger than 60 might also benefit from vaccination. Another question is whether adults would bother to get the shot. Only about 60 to 65 percent of people over
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Vaccine Curbs Shingles Cases And Severity
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trunk. On a recent cold and drizzly Saturday morning, José Darío Cárcamo, 68, and his son and grandson were scavenging for the remnants of trunks in what had once been a grove of alerce trees here. Their plan was to recover as many stumps as they could with their axe and power saw and then sell the wood, either to neighbors for fuel or to local artisans who prize the alerce as the raw material for carved souvenirs or musical instruments. ''When I was a young man, it seemed that there were still alerce forests everywhere,'' said Mr. Cárcamo, a former woodsman. ''Now my grandson has only this, and God only knows what will be left for his grandson.'' Government officials maintain that environmental groups here and abroad are exaggerating the threat. They argue that alerce stocks remain plentiful and that the official policy is working better than the alternatives suggested by critics. ''The alerce is not going to be wiped out this year or next, or in the next thousand years,'' Carlos Weber, director of the National Forestry Corporation, the government agency that oversees all aspects of Chile's forest management, said in an interview in Santiago. ''We're not talking about 50 or 100 trees left, we're talking about hundreds of thousands of acres, far above what the market demands each year.'' In an effort to safeguard the alerce, Chile has set up a network of national parks and other protected areas. But the government has crippled the environmental crimes division of the national police, and environmental advocates say they are worried at other signs of a lack of resources and political will to guarantee that the law is obeyed. ''It's an absurd responsibility and raises the question of whether the government is serious about enforcing environmental laws in southern Chile,'' said Aaron Sanger, the representative in Chile of Forest Ethics, an American environmental group. ''The government has one ranger for every 900,000 acres in that region, so it is kind of hard for that ranger to do a good job of detecting illegal logging in these remote places.'' Environmental groups charge that the illegal traffic in alerce wood is controlled by a mafia that has connections to powerful politicians. Last year, a judge near here received death threats after she began an investigation into charges that a federal senator had improperly pressured Mr. Weber to issue logging certificates to
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From Thousand-Year-Old Sentinel to Traffickers' Booty
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WITH his thatch of gray hair, tweedy attire and half-glasses riding low on his nose, Ronald Ferket could pass for a tenured university professor. He is a teacher of sorts, except that his classroom is De Vagant, a pub-cafe steps from this city's soaring cathedral and 16th-century guildhalls, and his subject isn't literature or mathematics, but genever, the fiery liquid filling the hundreds of bottles that surround him. Beer may be Belgium's most famous alcoholic beverage, but genever, the country's other traditional tipple, has gained newfound respectability. Also known as jenever, genièvre, peket or Dutch gin, the juniper-flavored eau de vie was once derided as hooch for the working class and nearly legislated out of existence in Belgium. But Belgian distillers are now producing genevers of exceptional quality, some of a color, smoothness and flavor reminiscent of fine whiskey. And Mr. Ferket, author of a book on the subject and proprietor of De Vagant -- a true gin joint with more than 200 homegrown varieties -- is one of Belgian genever's most ardent promoters. Invented about 450 years ago in the Low Countries, genever is traditionally made by distilling the unfiltered and fermented mash of malted grains, principally barley, and flavoring this ''malt wine'' with aromatics like juniper berries, caraway seeds or fennel. The barley malt gives traditional genever more body and grain taste than English-style gin, which uses neutral spirits and was developed after 17th-century Flemish distillers set up shop in London. During the Industrial Revolution, when more efficient distillation columns supplanted the old pot stills, and cheaper raw materials like sugar beet molasses largely replaced barley, most genever lost its typical grain taste. Though a few small Belgian distillers continued to produce grain genever, industrial production of cheap, 100-proof genever soared along with public drunkenness -- Belgians annually soaked up a staggering two and a half gallons per capita by the late 1800's. A 1919 law finally banned the sale of distilled spirits in bars, but the law's 1984 repeal ushered in a new era of Belgian genever, this time with an emphasis on quality. ''When De Vagant opened in 1985, there were only a few genevers made in Belgium,'' Mr. Ferket said on a recent afternoon in the pub, a congenial space with piped-in classical music, an oak-beamed ceiling, and walls that have turned a warm honey color from years of tobacco smoke. ''We carried about 20
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A Belgian Bad Boy Has Gone Good
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consequences of climate change. ''Each administration has a policy position on climate change,'' Mr. Piltz wrote. ''But I have not seen a situation like the one that has developed under this administration during the past four years, in which politicization by the White House has fed back directly into the science program in such a way as to undermine the credibility and integrity of the program.'' A senior Environmental Protection Agency scientist who works on climate questions said the White House environmental council, where Mr. Cooney works, had offered valuable suggestions on reports from time to time. But the scientist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because all agency employees are forbidden to speak with reporters without clearance, said the kinds of changes made by Mr. Cooney had damaged morale. ''I have colleagues in other agencies who express the same view, that it has somewhat of a chilling effect and has created a sense of frustration,'' he said. Efforts by the Bush administration to highlight uncertainties in science pointing to human-caused warming have put the United States at odds with other nations and with scientific groups at home. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who met with President Bush at the White House yesterday, has been trying to persuade him to intensify United States efforts to curb greenhouse gases. Mr. Bush has called only for voluntary measures to slow growth in emissions through 2012. Yesterday, saying their goal was to influence that meeting, the scientific academies of 11 countries, including those of the United States and Britain, released a joint letter saying, ''The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.'' The American Petroleum Institute, where Mr. Cooney worked before going to the White House, has long taken a sharply different view. Starting with the negotiations leading to the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty in 1997, it has promoted the idea that lingering uncertainties in climate science justify delaying restrictions on emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases. On learning of the White House revisions, representatives of some environmental groups said the effort to amplify uncertainties in the science was clearly intended to delay consideration of curbs on the gases, which remain an unavoidable byproduct of burning oil and coal. ''They've got three more years, and the only way to control this issue and do nothing about it is
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BUSH AIDE EDITED CLIMATE REPORTS
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year as a result of HSST interruptions. ''It's not even close to fixed,'' he said. Department officials vehemently deny that the HSST program is experiencing unusual difficulty. ''All of what you're describing is incidental and anecdotal,'' Mr. Kroot said in an interview, and he likened those episodes to the periodic balkiness or inaccessibility of a workplace's e-mail system. Despite ''occasional instances of slow response time,'' he continued, ''over all, the system is working very well.'' Stephen Morello, communications director for the department, said that HSST ''has been unavailable to the field for a grand total of less than 40 weekday hours'' from March 1 to June 7. That means it was available 93 percent of the time, he said. To its credit, the Education Department has been running regular informational meetings for 80 programmers, and Mr. Kroot said there was a waiting list for participants. A pilot program is enabling about 20 programmers to access HSST from home so they can use it during nonpeak hours. Many of the shutdowns, Mr. Kroot said, were deliberately timed for evenings and weekends to minimize disruption, and those interruptions were necessary for making improvements to the system. SOME programmers, like Jordan Goldman of Brandeis High School, hailed the system. ''It's gotten better as the weeks go by -- faster and more efficient,'' he said. ''They've introduced new functionality to the system that makes our life even easier.'' It is worth noting that Mr. Goldman was speaking in a telephone interview monitored by an Education Department information officer, Marge Feinberg. Asked about e-mail messages from Mr. Mazzola to programmers, Mr. Kroot did admit there had been ''bugs'' in a product called D.T.C. -- Distributed Transaction Coordinator -- which helps HSST print documents. Microsoft, which makes D.T.C., has sent people to New York to try to solve the problem, Mr. Kroot said. ''At no point has that impacted for more than a couple of hours,'' he said. ''And the total number of times is fewer than half a dozen.'' Jean-Claude Brizard, the executive director of secondary schools, said he expected no significant problems in busy periods later this month. ''I don't see a big crunch coming in June,'' he said. ''I have several programmers who are very vocal, and I have not heard from them at all.'' Within a few weeks, it will be apparent whether things have stayed so serene. ON EDUCATION E-mail: sgfreedman@nytimes.com
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The System Is Down. Is That a Problem?
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routes as children move, and outreach workers track where the families are living. Most of the students get off the bus in the morning carrying nothing -- no backpack, no books. Teachers know that homework is hard to manage in the students' living situations. ''If a child falls asleep at a regular school, you wake him up and tell him to pay attention,'' said Dina Vance, the principal. ''But when I taught here, I'd pick up the child and carry him to a spot where he could sleep for a few hours. This is a place where these kids feel comfortable, where they're free to pop up and say, 'I need a shower.''' Pappas is not academically outstanding -- no surprise, since most of the 25 or so new students who arrive at the school each week are two or three years below grade level. Classes are large, and in one squirmy first grade, the teacher spent an interminable half-hour on a simple worksheet with pictures of things that started or ended with ''k'' -- an activity that engaged no more than a handful of the children. But last year, Pappas, previously an ''underperforming'' school on state report cards, met state and federal standards. Sandra E. Dowling, who founded the school 25 years ago with eight students and is now superintendent of the Maricopa County Schools, said that in principle, it would be better for homeless children to stay in their old neighborhood schools. ''I would love to see these kids in mainstream schools getting all the support and help they need,'' Dr. Dowling said. ''But as a practical matter, that's not what happens.'' In Phoenix, she said, about 95 percent of the homeless children attend the Pappas schools. And that, Ms. Duffield said, is part of the problem. Separate schools, she said, make it much easier for shelters and social workers to refer students there than to fight for the transportation and support they need to stay in a mainstream school. ''When I first started in the field, 20-some years ago, the fact that children were homeless seemed like a temporary crisis, a problem that could be eradicated,'' said Steve Banks, attorney in chief at New York's Legal Aid Society. ''What's so shameful now, whatever the programs to help them, is the national acceptance that there are homeless children.'' In the end, advocates say, no school can solve the
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Teaching the Homeless, and Fighting a Trend
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systems.'' Signs of the Internet's growing power in China came this spring during a wave of popular demonstrations against Japan in which organizers relied heavily on private Web pages, blogs and mass cellphone messages to mobilize protesters. In the space of a few weeks, as many as 40 million signatures were collected online to demand that Japan be barred from obtaining a seat on the United Nations Security Council. The Chinese authorities may have tacitly approved of the anti-Japanese demonstrations, but in a system built around tight state control over political expression and association, the idea of millions of citizens using the Internet to rally around political issues is anathema. Growing concern among China's leaders about the destabilizing potential of the Internet comes during a campaign of increasingly harsh measures against political dissent, arrests of journalists and other restrictions on expression. The tone has been set by President Hu Jintao himself, who, quoting Mao, has warned against insurrection, saying, ''A spark from heaven can light up an entire plain.'' Mr. Hu has also recently ordered stepped up efforts to enforce ''law and order,'' by which Chinese authorities often mean clamping down on opposition or criticism of Communist Party rule. The new measures against personal Internet activity come after months of increasingly restrictive controls of Internet usage at other levels, whether through heavy investment in technologies that allow the government to monitor and censor use or through tightened rules governing Internet cafes and Web servers. In March, for example, bulletin boards operated by the country's most prominent universities were blocked to off-campus Internet users as part of what was called a campaign to strengthen ideological education of college students. Users of Internet cafes must also now produce identification and are issued user numbers, which make it easy to follow the activities of individuals. Web administrators at popular online services have also been warned that they will be held responsible for politically offensive communications, thereby enlisting them in the policing efforts. It is now common for administrators to remove from their servers any messages they deem politically sensitive. In another step to control the Internet, a newspaper, Southern Weekend, recently reported, the government has begun employing online commentators whose job is to defend the government's point of view when negative comments appear on Internet chat rooms. The propaganda agents pose as ordinary users and try to steer discussion in the government's favor.
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China Tightens Restrictions On Bloggers and Web Sites
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President Bush ran into new problems with his trade agenda on Tuesday, as attempts to entice support from the sugar industry for a Central American agreement veered toward collapse. With public anxiety already high about imports and foreign competition undermining American jobs, Republican Congressional leaders are struggling to line up enough votes to pass the Central American Free Trade Agreement, which would cut trade barriers with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. The inability to placate sugar producers, who are angry that the agreement would allow slightly higher imports, raises doubts about Mr. Bush's ability to push the trade deal through Congress. The president's problems, some lawmakers said, say as much about the weak support for trade agreements as it does about the strength of the sugar lobby. Though sugar producers are heavy political contributors, their clout has been elevated because they have been able to turn Republican lawmakers against the party's leadership. ''It's not opposition of the sugar industry that's the main thorn in Cafta,'' said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Finance Committee. ''The main thorn is that this is the only opportunity for people to vent their frustration over trade policy.'' The Senate Finance Committee is expected to vote on the trade agreement on Wednesday, but the committee is so divided that Republicans may have to send the bill to the floor without actually approving it. In meetings on Capitol Hill last week and again on Tuesday night, White House officials repeatedly tried to soften the opposition of sugar producers with side deals that would temporarily reduce the sting of the trade agreement. Under the agreement, Central American countries would be allowed to export slightly more sugar. That could reduce American sugar prices, which are higher than world prices because of the United States' existing import quotas. Under one proposed side deal, the government would provide limited government subsidies for ethanol that is made from imported sugar. In previous meetings, Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns has suggested that the government could pay Central American sugar producers not to export to the United States and to pay with surplus American crops accumulated under other farm subsidy programs. But sugar industry executives and their supporters in Congress have repeatedly rejected those overtures as short-term measures. ''With the administration seemingly unwilling to talk about any long-term solutions, I hold out little
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Sugar Still A Barrier To Securing Trade Pact
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Victory at Sea, 200 Years Ago
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are now beginning to emulate. It has been able to afford this because Brazilian labs make copycat versions of expensive brand-name drugs. Brazil can freely copy any drug commercialized before 1997, when the country began to respect patents on medicines, a requirement for joining the World Trade Organization. But newer AIDS medicines are still imported and are expensive, and Brazil is spending two-thirds of its antiretroviral budget on just three of these drugs. The government is now contemplating measures that would allow Brazilian labs to copy these drugs. Brazil's health ministry has asked the manufacturers of the drugs to voluntarily license Brazil to make copies. They have refused, and Brazil is threatening to break the patents and pay the holders a reasonable royalty, as W.T.O. rules require. Right-wing groups in the United States and pharmaceutical manufacturers are calling this theft, and several members of Congress have asked the United States trade representative to apply trade sanctions. American trade officials have refrained, but they have criticized Brazil's threat to seize patents. While property rights deserve respect and should not be carelessly violated, what Brazil is doing is legal and deserves Washington's support. Brazil's opponents argue that the country has no real AIDS emergency. Drug companies note that they offer Brazil drugs at deep discounts and say that Brazil can afford them. But the World Trade Organization rules are clear: they encourage all members to use the flexibilities in the intellectual property rules to promote access to medicine for all. Countries need not wait for an emergency, and Brazil isn't even a tough call. Brazil's free universal treatment program, an indispensable weapon against the AIDS epidemic, locks Brazil's government into buying lifelong daily medicines for 170,000 people, and that number is rising. Brazil has the right to make sure it can continue to meet this burden by getting medicines at the cheapest possible price. Breaking patents should be reserved for when it is clearly necessary to protect public health. But these rights have been underused. Only a handful of countries have used W.T.O. rules to break patents on medicines. Countries are intimidated, mainly by the United States. Health ministers who propose making copycat drugs are usually silenced by influential local business sectors afraid of trade retaliation. The American trade representative should make a public statement that the United States will not retaliate against Brazil for exercising its right to save lives. Editorial
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Brazil's Right to Save Lives
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As the market for cellular phone service matures, the wireless industry is counting on creating and filling a new need: data services that allow phones to receive e-mail, navigate the Web and download games, music and video. But many wireless data plans are a smorgasbord of options that can leave customers bewildered. ''That is one of my biggest gripes with the wireless carriers,'' said Peter Rojas, editor in chief of Engadget, a Web log devoted to consumer electronics. ''They are doing a really terrible job of communicating wireless data to their subscribers.'' While several wireless companies have simplified their offerings, choosing the right plan means weighing several considerations: the amount of data you plan to download, the speed of the network, the type of phone you use, and the Web sites you plan to visit. Data Services Nearly all new cellphone models allow subscribers to connect to Web sites that have been customized for handsets. These sites include popular destinations like CNN.com, ESPN.com and Amazon.com. ''If you go to a site that is not specially designed and rendered for a mobile phone, you are not going to see it,'' said Sam Hall, Cingular Wireless's vice president for mobile browsing. ''The browsers on regular phones cannot handle full HTML Web sites, so you are limited as to the Web sites you can go to.'' Mobile browsing varies widely in price among the carriers, but nearly always requires piggybacking on a midlevel voice-plan subscription. Sprint offers a $15-a-month plan, PCS Premium Vision Pack, that includes unlimited e-mail, instant messaging, 100 text messages using Short Message Service (SMS) and unlimited access to the wireless Web. For an extra $5 a month, you can upgrade to a package that includes picture and video mail. A $25-a-month plan called PCS Vision Multimedia Pack includes all of the above and adds Sprint TV, a collection of entertainment, news and sports video channels. T-Mobile has a simple $30 plan that allows unlimited e-mail, Web browsing and text and instant messaging. Verizon Wireless offers a plan that lets its subscribers send an unlimited number of text messages to one another for $5 a month, and 50 messages to non-Verizon subscribers. The company's $10 and $15 monthly plans provide 250 and 500 messages, respectively, that can be sent to non-Verizon subscribers, and unlimited messages to those on the same network. But to connect to the mobile Web, add another
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Basics; Not Just for Talking Anymore
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extra scrutiny. Among the 50 or so passengers interviewed this month at airports in New York, Atlanta and Chicago, there was no consensus about whether any clothes attracted extra attention. But there was wide agreement that the simpler and more dressed-down, the more efficient the experience. On its Web site, the security administration advises against wearing metallic jewelry, belt buckles and hidden body piercings and says passengers who set off the metal detector will be subject to hand-wanding or a pat-down that includes the torso. ''Screeners do have some discretion and can refer a passenger to additional screening if they notice any irregularity to a passenger's contour, or if it appears there is an item protruding underneath their clothing,'' Ms. Davis said. At Kennedy Airport in New York last week , passengers who would normally consider themselves fashionable were willing to commit a faux pas to get through security. John Robshaw, a textiles executive, wore a denim shirt tucked into denim jeans, but no belt. Sarah Flood, an oncology nurse, was in white short shorts, a green T-shirt and blue hoodie that matched her carry-on bag. ''This is not my fashion day,'' she said, a newly purchased bohemian cotton skirt, the look of the season, packed in her checked luggage. As they have become conditioned to the intrusiveness of modern security measures, undressing and redressing in front of revolving casts of strangers, travelers have developed new routines of composure, evolving their wardrobes to speed them along. And clothing makers have come up with innovations to meet their needs. Shoe companies like Florsheim, Clarks and Rockport sell ''airport friendly'' shoes without steel shanks. Underwear makers promote support bras made without an underwire, as even a small bit of metal can trigger a sensitive alarm. ''Americans have simplified the way they dress for travel,'' said Valerie Steele, the chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. ''It's not a question of dressing better or worse. It's about dressing in a way that is more transparent.'' At the USAir terminal at LaGuardia Airport in New York, the sartorial adaptations to modern air travel played out with a sense of theater. After collecting their boarding passes, a handful of businessmen stepped over to a ficus tree and rested their briefcases on a concrete planter as they patted themselves down, checked their pants pockets for keys, coins, pagers and
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Flight Suits
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On a sunny afternoon last week, life overwhelmed art as tourists and students at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's roof sculpture garden gaped at the skyline beyond a sea of Central Park trees and (if they noticed) also admired Sol LeWitt's whimsically colorful installation ''Splotches, Whirls and Twirls,'' on view through Oct. 30. Visitors from places where cigarettes are still popular found ''Splotch No. 3'' particularly worthy of extended contemplation, perhaps because it was in the only section of the garden (and the museum) open to smokers. SETH KUGEL Correction: June 30, 2005, Thursday A picture caption last Thursday with the ''Fixed Position'' feature, about the rooftop sculpture garden at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, misspelled the given name of a woman who commented on the artwork. She is Cecilia Pimentel, not Cecila.
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Fixed Position; Castles in the Air
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the memorial will begin next spring and it should be completed in September 2009. The Freedom Tower -- which will reach 1,776 feet into the sky -- is being redesigned to make it the safest tower in the world. Yes, work has been delayed by security concerns, but we may make up for this with an expedited construction schedule and a simpler, more slender design. The new plans will be made public in a matter of weeks. Other aspects of the effort are proceeding apace. Groundbreaking for Santiago Calatrava's spectacular transportation center is set for late summer; work should be completed in 2009. The International Freedom Center and International Drawing Center will break ground on their shared cultural center in 2007; it too should open in 2009. And we will soon see Frank Gehry's design for the performing arts center, which should be completed in about three years. At the center of all this will be the Wedge of Light Plaza, a public space the size of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Its shape was inspired by the configuration of sunlight at the Trade Center at the times on that terrible morning when the first plane struck and when the second tower fell. The master plan is not a straitjacket. For example, if a decision were made to convert some towers to residential instead of commercial use, the plan could accommodate that decision without compromising integrity or sacrificing light and air. Some things, however, are inviolable. The Freedom Tower must remain the beacon around which the others cluster. It must stand 1,776 feet tall, and it should beckon toward the Hudson River. These are not simply hallmarks of a plastic keychain souvenir. Symbols matter -- whether the slurry wall, the Wedge of Light Plaza or the luminous Freedom Tower itself. The quality of what we achieve at ground zero will, after all, define the New York skyline and give shape to our aspirations and dreams. When I hear the naysayers carping about the supposed lack of progress, I like to think of a phrase written by George Washington in a letter during the bleak early days of the Revolutionary War: ''Perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages.'' The record of achievement in America then and now affirms my optimism and sustains my resolve. Op-Ed Contributor Daniel Libeskind is the master planner of the World Trade Center site.
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From the Ashes
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President Bush and South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, tried Friday to shore up an alliance that has shown strains as Washington and Seoul pursue different strategies to deal with North Korea's nuclear weapons program. Mr. Roh left saying they had brought ''closure'' to some of their differences, but Mr. Bush's public comments suggested that significant disagreements remained. Asked by reporters whether he was willing to offer the North ''inducements'' to return to talks about giving up its nuclear weapons program, Mr. Bush immediately responded, ''Yep.'' He then explained that he was still waiting for a response to an offer he made a year ago, offering fairly unspecific economic, energy and diplomatic benefits that would be delivered gradually as the North disgorged every element of its large nuclear complex. North Korea has never responded directly to that offer, and in the past Mr. Roh's aides have urged Mr. Bush to make the timing and terms of his offer clearer. But South Korean officials insisted today that during the Oval Office meeting and a more relaxed lunch in the White House, Mr. Roh did not seek an improved American offer to the North. The meeting took place at what could be a critical juncture. After boycotting all negotiations for a year, North Korea told American officials on Monday that it was committed to returning to multinational talks about its nuclear program, which were suspended a year ago. But no date has been set, and it is unclear whether the talks will indeed resume. In the days leading to the meeting on Friday, Mr. Bush's advisers made it clear that the president would offer nothing new to lure the North to the table. As Mr. Roh was arriving in Washington, one senior White House official involved in preparations said the North ''has gotten us to bid against ourselves two or three times.'' Now, he said, ''the question is how long do you let this go without there being a consequence?'' Talk of consequences and timetables for moving to sanctions against North Korea were briefly suggested by a Pentagon official traveling last week with Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, before others in the administration quashed public discussion of the idea. It is just that sort of talk that Mr. Roh came here to discourage, his aides have said. He came seeking assurances that Mr. Bush would not attack the North's nuclear facilities,
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U.S. and Seoul Try to Ease Rift on Talks With the North
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years. According to the institute, sweat and ultraviolet rays will not cause your helmet to degrade. ''Your helmet will get a terminal case of grunge before it dies of sweat,'' the group says on its Web site. ''It's marketing overselling,'' said Randy Swart, director of the institute in Arlington, Va. ''There have only been minor changes to helmets since 1999. As long as they meet safety standards, you're fine.'' Tod Marks, senior editor at Consumer Reports, says if you're a casual rider and haven't been in an accident involving your head, ''there's no reason you can't keep it for five to seven years.'' CAR TIRES -- Scientific tests show that even tires that aren't driven much start disintegrating after five years, said Don Jarvis, Ford's safety policy coordinator. The structure of the rubber begins to change as oxygen molecules begin to migrate out of the rubber, he said. In hotter climates, this occurs even faster. This doesn't really affect people who drive their vehicle regularly, since most replace their tires at about 45,000 miles, or every three years, according to the Rubber Manufacturers Association. But it does mean, Mr. Jarvis said, that you should be sure to rotate your spare tire in for regular use, rather than storing it in the back of the car for years. The Rubber Manufacturers Association, however, is not supporting Ford's decision. ''If Ford has data, it hasn't shared it with us,'' said Dan Zielinski, a spokesman for the association. ''There is no data that says tires will not be able to perform due to age alone.'' The federal Department of Transportation doesn't require expiration dates on tires, but is considering a petition urging such a move, according to a spokesman, Rae Tyson. ''We think it's good that Ford has stepped forward and has given some guidance,'' Mr. Tyson said. ''Old tires can potentially be a safety problem.'' BOTTLED WATER -- After considering tires, children's safety seats and bike helmets, worrying about the freshness of bottled water may seem a bit, well, frivolous. After all, most of us drink the water soon after we buy it. But why have the expiration date at all? Again there are no federal laws requiring expiration dates on bottled water. They exist, according to the International Bottled Water Association, because some states require them. To simplify things, manufacturers simply stamp a date on all containers. In addition, a date
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An Expiration Date on a Child Seat? Huh?
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The Department of Homeland Security is investigating whether the Transportation Security Administration again violated the privacy rights of airplane passengers as it experimented with a new antiterrorism screening system, federal officials said Wednesday. The internal inquiry comes only two months before the agency intends to start using the electronic identity-confirmation system, Secure Flight, intended to block terrorists from boarding commercial planes in the United States. The introduction of Secure Flight, which is replacing a system that relies primarily on the airlines to do electronic screening, has already been delayed. And Congress has demanded that Transportation Security, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, prove to federal authorities that the system will honor individual privacy rights. ''It is critical for public confidence in the program that the department demonstrate strict adherence to privacy laws and policies,'' said Nuala O'Connor Kelly, chief privacy officer at the Homeland Security Department, who announced the investigation on Wednesday at a gathering of department officials and privacy experts in Cambridge. As Secure Flight is now devised, the government will take information collected from airlines, like the names and birth dates of passengers, and compare that with a federally maintained list of suspected or known terrorists. The program is supposed to begin officially in August with two airlines and then expand to all 65 domestic airlines by the end of 2006. To reduce the likelihood of false matches and to confirm that the passenger is not traveling under a fabricated identity, the government is experimenting with accessing vast repositories of information from private companies like Acxiom and InsightAmerica that assemble biographical details about the public. Justin Oberman, the assistant administrator at Transportation Security who is in charge of Secure Flight, said tests had suggested that the agency should be able to cut in half the number of inaccurate matches, which now occur for about 1 percent of the 1.8 million domestic passengers who fly on an average day. ''We believe we can find the bad actors,'' Mr. Oberman said. An earlier effort to create a screening system, called Computer Assisted Passenger Profiling System II, was canceled after airlines, under what was later found to be lax supervision by Transportation Security, inappropriately turned over personal information on passengers to private companies. At least one person's information was made public. The new inquiry by the Homeland Security Privacy Office, which began last week, is examining how the Transportation
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More Privacy Questions for Air Safety Agency
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Last year, New Jersey's top environmental official blocked a planned bear hunt, saying he hoped that a bear contraception program and public safety education would reduce encounters. But that approach has not worked, and he says now that he is considering allowing a black bear hunt this fall. The announcement yesterday by Bradley M. Campbell, the commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, came as a surprise to hunting and environmental groups alike. It was Mr. Campbell's appeal to the state Supreme Court in December that canceled a bear hunt that had been approved by the state fish and wildlife council. The court sided with him, saying that before a new hunt could be held, the Department of Environmental Protection would have to come up with a comprehensive plan to manage the bear population. A plan has since been proposed, Mr. Campbell said in an interview, and he noted that there ''have been significant bear-human conflicts this year that suggests that the population is growing beyond a reasonable habitat.'' There were 398 damage and nuisance reports involving bears from Jan. 1 to May 27 this year, according to the D.E.P., compared with 234 reports during the same period last year. ''Public safety requires that we consider a bear hunt,'' Mr. Campbell said. A public hearing on the issue is planned for Tuesday. Three hundred twenty-eight bears were killed in the bear hunt in 2003, the state's first one in 33 years. In 2004, Mr. Campbell called a second hunt unnecessary; he said the bear population was about 1,600, though several independent studies estimated that the number was closer to 3,200. This year, Mr. Campbell said, the bear population was estimated at 2,000 to 3,000. He added that recent encounters between humans and bears had made a hunt necessary to ''manage the black bear population.'' Not everyone agrees, however. ''To open a sports hunt, or trophy hunts, will not result resolve the conflicts,'' said Nina Austenberg, the director of the mid-Atlantic office of the Humane Society of the United States. ''There are ways to manage the bears that are humane, and that's how it should be handled.'' Ms. Austenberg said the group would fight any hunt and said that it would appeal to Senator Jon S. Corzine and Douglas R. Forrester, who are running for governor, to oppose a hunt. Their campaigns said yesterday that they would rely on
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In Shift, New Jersey Official Says He May Support Bear Hunt
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THREE years ago, a woman visiting her doctor to discuss the onset of menopause would most likely leave with a prescription for hormone-replacement therapy and the instruction that she stay on it for the rest of her life. Now, unless her hot flashes or other menopausal problems are severe, the same woman could visit the same doctor and get little more than sympathy. What happened? In 2002, a major study by the Women's Health Initiative found that the hormones that had been routinely given to millions of women once they reached menopause did not reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke, as had been expected. Instead, the study found, some of the drugs actually increased the risk, as well as the incidence of breast cancer. Medical practice often shifts over the years. As conflicting research comes in, beliefs can swing one way or the other and back again. But the effect here was immediate. Still, while the controversy over hormone replacement is an extreme example, it is not the only time women have been advised to do one thing to protect their health only to be told, Wait, not so fast. Here is the medical consensus -- for now -- on some of these issues, with a caveat that every decision has to take into account a patient's medical history. Pap Smears Pap smears save lives. That is beyond dispute. As recently as the 1930's, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says, cervical cancer was the top cause of cancer death in American women. But since the early 70's, the number of cases of cervical cancer and the number of women who die from it have gone down almost by half. The reason is the Pap smear, a test in which a small sample of cells from a woman's cervix is examined for changes that can lead to cancer. For decades, women were urged to have a Pap smear annually, from age 18. But health organizations and the federal government now take a less aggressive approach. Women are now advised to have their first Pap test done about three years after they have first had sexual intercourse, or by age 21. Until age 30, they should have the tests every year. But after 30, if they have had three negative screenings in a row, they should be tested every two to three years. Women are still advised to
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What's a Woman to Believe? The Latest on Shifting Guidelines
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about some kind of participatory process, how do you have it in that kind of society?'' said Aviva Imhof, campaigns director for the International Rivers Network, an anti-dam group based in Berkeley, Calif. International Rivers Network has other problems with the project, and with most dams. In particular, said Patrick McCully, the group's executive director, the people most directly affected by a dam, those displaced by a reservoir and others who live downstream, are seldom consulted. Mr. McCully said that many dams have had disastrous consequences, and that less costly and smaller-scale alternatives -- like rainwater harvesting, in which rain is captured in tanks and used to recharge groundwater -- need to be explored. Even the World Commission on Dams, while not going as far as to condemn most dams, in its final report pointed out that ''an unacceptable and often unnecessary price has been paid'' in social and environmental terms. For Thayer Scudder, an emeritus professor at the California Institute of Technology and a former member of the commission, Nam Theun 2 is one dam that should be built. ''If Laos is going to alleviate the poverty of its country, what option was there to this project?'' said Dr. Scudder, an expert on resettlement issues who consulted on the project for the bank. ''I think there weren't many other major options.'' But even Dr. Scudder, with more than 50 years experience in dam projects all over the world, says that in most cases, a big dam is not the answer. ''The potential of large dams is not being realized,'' he said. And certain costs, like those sure to arise when reservoirs silt up and dams must be decommissioned, have never been factored into dam economics, he said. But major dam-building countries like China and India, which together have more than 50 percent of the roughly 45,000 dams over 50 feet high in the world, will continue to plug up their rivers. Despite international protests and pressure, China, for example, went ahead with its mammoth Three Gorges Dam, which will displace more than a million people, while India has faced violent protests against a multi-dam project on the Narmada, a river that is sacred to Hindus. But these are countries facing severe problems of supplying water to growing urban populations and industries, Dr. Scudder said, and dams are a short-term answer. ''And that is the tragedy,'' he said. THE WORLD
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Unloved, but Not Unbuilt
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England Journal of Medicine. It described 19 patients they had treated -- 18 of them women. Both articles suggested that the condition, although not nearly as common as a heart attack, might not be that rare. It might simply be going undetected, misdiagnosed as a heart attack or other problem. The Johns Hopkins team also created a Web site about the syndrome, www.brokenheartinfo.org. Cardiologists at other hospitals said in interviews that they had also seen cases like the ones the articles described. Dr. Valentin Fuster, director of the Zena and Michael A. Wiener Cardiovascular Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, said he had had three similar patients. One was a man whose son had died, and two were women who had learned their husbands were having affairs. All recovered. ''Our interpretation was adrenaline release due to emotion, which damages the heart,'' Dr. Fuster said, adding ruefully that he had been preparing an article about the condition himself, but the Hopkins team had beaten him to it. Dr. Maryjane Anna Farr, director of the Richard T. Perkin Heart Failure Program at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, said that doctors at her hospital had also seen similar cases, almost entirely in women. One or two were distraught over the death of a sibling, Dr. Farr said. Since the article was published, Dr. Wittstein said, his team has treated eight more patients who developed heart failure after emotional stress, for a total of 27, including only two men. Physical stress -- like strokes, drug withdrawal, head and spinal injuries and respiratory problems -- has played a role in 62 other cases, about three-quarters of them in women. No one knows why the syndrome seems to be much more common in women, especially postmenopausal women, than in men. Although people may be tempted to assume that women are more emotional and crank out more adrenaline when they are upset, Dr. Wittstein said, that is not necessarily the case. Men's baseline levels of adrenaline are actually higher than women's and shoot up more under stress. The cases involving physical stress are also primarily in women. Another intriguing question is whether any medicine could prevent the syndrome. Beta blockers, for instance, are a common class of drugs that counters the effects of adrenaline. They are widely used to treat heart problems and to help calm people who get the jitters about public speaking or musical
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Something to Consider Before You All Shout, 'Surprise, Grandma!'
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or other items are examined. By adding a single screener to the typical checkpoint, these machines could be used to check the boarding passes, hands and shoes of all passengers. The additional work could be accommodated in part because some manual tasks could be automated, like moving empty bins back to the front of the line via conveyor belt. As a result, a reconfigured checkpoint used in the study could handle 171 to 179 passengers an hour per lane, compared with the current 183, meaning a major improvement in security without a corresponding slowdown in passenger screening. Another option to screen better for explosives, Mr. Tighe said, is to install more expensive machines that can detect particles of explosives displaced by puffs of air as passengers walk through them. Recommendations related to checked baggage include allowing workers monitoring the scanning device to rely more on the computer screen to determine if a suspicious-looking item is an actual threat, instead of the more time-consuming process of opening up the bag. Air cargo on passenger planes is rarely physically inspected today. Several alternatives were proposed for systems that could handle such a complicated task, given the many different sizes and weights of packages. The House of Representatives has allocated $30 million to Homeland Security for testing such options in the coming year. Perhaps the most difficult challenge is enhancing security for passengers flying to the United States, the report says. Ideally, the report says, the system should be set up so that ''passengers departing overseas locations for the U.S. can expect the same level of security.'' But the report makes clear that this is not the case. Whatever the shortcomings of the United States system, more severe problems existed at most of the 16 airports in South America, Asia and Europe that were examined for the report. ''Urgent attention needs to be given to some security measures that can be taken very quickly at relatively low costs,'' the report says, recommending, for example, wider use of explosives trace detection machines. Christopher R. Bidwell, managing director for security at the Air Transport Association, who has seen a draft of the report, said many of the recommendations seemed obvious. But pulling together all of these possible short-term improvements in aviation security is still worthwhile, he said. ''They are not visionary by any means,'' Mr. Bidwell said. ''But they are things that need to happen.''
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REPORT PRESSES EASY WAYS TO FIX AIRLINE SECURITY
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and fitness evaluations. She was encouraged to browse an extensive collection of sex manuals. And she left with a prescription for a low-dosage testosterone cream, a treatment not approved by the Food and Drug Administration for loss of libido, or for any use by women. Not yet, anyway. (Sonja and two other women in this article asked that their last names be omitted because of the intimate nature of their problem.) Since the 1960's, testosterone, the so-called hormone of desire, has been on the market for men to treat hypogonadism -- low testosterone levels -- and used by bodybuilders. But it is fast becoming the most commonly prescribed drug treatment for women who complain of low or no libido -- in fact, prescriptions for testosterone creams, gels and other transdermal treatments rose eightfold between 1999 and 2004, according to a recent audit by Verispan, which conducts market research on pharmaceuticals. Testosterone is also the subject of intense interest by pharmaceutical companies, who are pursuing it with other treatments for female sexual dysfunction, or F.S.D., hoping to develop an equivalent to the blockbuster erectile dysfunction drugs. The quick-fix promises of new drug therapies are most likely to appeal to baby boomers. But some doctors and other experts are alarmed by the lack of knowledge about long-term effects, especially after the negative reassessment of hormone replacement therapy three years ago. In a widely cited study from 1992 written by Edward O. Laumann, a University of Chicago sociology professor, and others, 43 percent of women reported some sexual dysfunction, the most prevalent being loss of libido. For now, there is no F.D.A.-approved drug treatment for women with libido problems. The prescriptions are off-label -- not for F.D.A.-approved use -- and out-of-pocket. This medicalization of women's sexuality has some respected therapists up in arms. Leonore Tiefer, a psychologist specializing in sexuality and an associate professor of psychiatry at New York University, describes an ''F.S.D. zeitgeist that is dangerous and uninformed.'' The most closely watched trials for F.S.D. treatments are those involving testosterone. Procter & Gamble has a testosterone patch, Intrinsa, whose first application for approval was rejected by an F.D.A. advisory committee, but whose latest study results will be resubmitted, according to a company spokeswoman. A smaller company, BioSante, is conducting trials with a testosterone gel, LibiGel, which is rubbed into the skin daily. Vivus and Acrux, two pharmaceutical companies, have partnered to develop
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Not Tonight
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Adam Fisher remembers walking home from elementary school thinking not about Mister Softee or Ms. Pac Man but about Ms. Grace, his third-grade teacher. Why, he wondered, had she explained a new math concept in such a roundabout way? If only she had laid it out like this, he recalls thinking, reworking the lesson in his head, then we would have understood it immediately. This was not the first time Mr. Fisher had pondered the art of teaching and learning. In fact, he had been tutoring his classmates since the previous year, having discovered that he had a knack for explaining concepts so the other kids understood them. A slender fellow with a goatee and a mass of curly hair, Mr. Fisher, 34, still tutors students. Only today his students are seeking higher test scores -- and his tutorials cost $375 to $425 an hour. Mr. Fisher is among about 100 tutors working for Advantage Testing Inc., an Upper East Side test preparation firm. He joined nine years ago, with no formal teaching experience but a master's degree in music from Juilliard and a Harvard physics degree, and is now one of the firm's most senior tutors. He says he consistently raises SAT scores by more than 200 points and achieves similar results in graduate school exams. The faculty members, as Advantage calls its tutors, have made a profession of preparing students for tests like the SAT's and SAT II Subject Tests, the Graduate Record Exam, the Graduate Management Admission Test and the law school and medical college admissions tests. To apply for the job each had to meet the firm's prerequisite of scoring, cold, in the 99th percentile or above on any test in which they intended to tutor -- for Mr. Fisher, the law school and graduate management test and the SAT. Tutors are paid $165 to $685 for a 50-minute session, depending on seniority. (Lower rates are offered to needy students, and the firm does some pro bono work.) But while Mr. Fisher earns over $100,000 a year, he insists he is not in the job just for the money. And a visit to the sparsely furnished Upper West Side apartment he shares with his wife and infant daughter lends credence to his claim. Sitting in his home office at Broadway and 73rd Street, his prized cello balanced against the bare wall, he says he tutors for
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Tutors Hold Key to Higher Test Scores, for a High Fee
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a story as a means to get at her journal?) Similar heart-rending decisions have been pressed upon some Internet companies recently, including Yahoo, but with different results. When one of Yahoo's e-mail clients, Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth, was killed in Iraq, his parents obtained a court order requiring the company to release their son's e-mail. Yahoo did not appeal the order. Other e-mail providers, including America Online, make it a matter of policy to transfer e-mail accounts to the next of kin upon receiving proof of a client's death. But as an ethical matter, a diary is different. It is not merely property, like old letters stashed in a (virtual) shoe box; it is an intimate memoir its writer deliberately kept secret, a desire worthy of respect. You would, of course, have to obey a similar court order, something you should explain to your customer's family. And there are additional circumstances that would supercede the wishes of the dead. For instance, if your customer had been murdered and her journal might help solve that crime, says Mary Frances Love, an attorney specializing in intellectual property, ''then a court would open up the files because of 'compelling reasons to jeopardize the privacy of an individual.''' One of our neighbors, a 12-year-old boy, has a teacher who penalizes students if they turn in handwritten assignments. Our neighbors cannot afford a computer, but students are permitted to use the computer lab after school. However, when there is no teacher to supervise, the lab is not available. Is this teacher's policy ethical? Julie Beman Dixon, Hartford This teacher would be wrong to impose a demand that unduly burdens students with little money. By providing a computer lab, however, the school has reasonably accommodated kids who lack computers of their own. (Assuming, that is, that a teacher is generally on duty and the computer lab is widely available.) What's more, the typing requirement itself is not capricious. There is a legitimate interest in freeing teachers from hacking through the impenetrable thicket of junior-high handwriting and in teaching kids to type (or at least in requiring them to learn typing), a useful skill. It would also be good if the schools taught kids decent penmanship, but even in the utopian (or do I mean nostalgic?) Randyland School District, that ability would be cultivated in elementary, not middle, school. THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 6-12-05: THE ETHICIST
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Ethical Hacking?
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To the Editor: After reading ''Putting Their Antennas Up: The Search for Profits From WiFi'' (June 5), one can almost conclude WiFi is the best thing since the discovery of fire: you can surf the Internet almost anywhere! You're not tethered to a wall jack, so freedom of placement is nearly unlimited. There are hundreds of ''node hot spots,'' or reception points, in public places. They're almost everywhere, and that presents a growing potential public health danger. These wireless ''hot spots'' are small radio stations, which include transmitters and receivers. A person is exposed to radio frequency radiation whether or not they use the wireless network. This can include children, the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. An energy field (magnetic, radio frequency, nuclear, solar) is carcinogenic. Energy particles, even in weak fields, course through cells, hit DNA and can disrupt or damage it. Damaged DNA can lead to cancer. There is no safe level of exposure to a carcinogen. Yet there was no mention in the article of possible adverse health effects of WiFi. Have studies been done about possible dangers to the general population being exposed, 24/7, to this radio frequency radiation? Mark Serotoff Commack The writer is a retired high school science teacher.
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WiFi Is Everywhere, But Is It Safe?
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in America over recent decades reflects cultural and political shifts. ''People have not changed biologically in the past 100 years,'' Dr. Kirmayer said, ''but the culture, our understanding of mental illness'' has changed. That evolving understanding can have implications for diagnoses. For example, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association dropped homosexuality from its manual of mental disorders, amid a growing realization that no evidence linked homosexuality to any mental impairment. Overnight, an estimated four to five million ''sick'' people became well. More common, however, is for psychiatrists to add conditions and syndromes: The association's first diagnostic manual, published in 1952, included some 60 disorders, while the current edition now has about 300, including everything from sexual arousal disorders to kleptomania to hyposomnia (oversleeping) and several shades of bipolar disorder. ''The idea has been not to expand the number of people with mental conditions but to develop a more fine-grained understanding of those who do,'' said Dr. Ronald Kessler, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and lead author of the latest mental health survey. But if contemporary trends, whether scientific or commercial, can serve to expand the franchise of mental illness, the mores, biases and scientific ignorance of previous centuries did much to hide it. In the 18th and 19th centuries, doctors had far fewer words for mental impairment -- madness, hysteria, melancholia -- and estimated its incidence at somewhere around 5 percent to 10 percent, as far as historians can determine. In some communities, the mentally ill were tolerated as holy fools or village idiots. The city of Geel, in Belgium, was particularly enlightened. There, in the 18th and 19th centuries, lunatics ''could walk the streets, engage in commerce, they would deliver food, carry milk, they were incorporated into the society and respected,'' said Dr. Theodore Millon, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and Psychopathology in Coral Gables, Fla., and author of a recent history of psychiatry and psychology, ''Masters of the Mind.'' But Geel was exceptional. More typical, Dr. Millon said, was for people considered mad or uncontrollable to be confined, sometimes in homemade chambers called lock boxes. They were captive, uncounted, beyond any hope of treatment, their stories lost to history. The behavior of millions of others who were merely troubled, rebellious or moody was often understood -- and veiled -- in religious terms, said Dr. Nancy Tomes, a professor of
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Ideas & Trends; Who's Mentally Ill? Deciding Is Often All in the Mind
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Every year Kenya's corn farmers lose about 15 percent of their crop to the stem borer, an insect that drills into the corn stalk. Farmers who can afford it douse their corn repeatedly with pesticides, which poison the environment. The stem borer and its relatives steal the livelihood of millions of small corn farmers. Last year at least 125 Kenyans, most of them children, died from eating corn with toxins created by the stem borer. Help may be on the way from genetic manipulation. Kenya has just begun trials of a corn identical to the local variety but carrying genes that increase its resistance to the stem borer. The project, carried out by the Kenyan national agricultural research program and the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, is a careful endeavor to test genetically modified crops and make them work for the small farmer. A billion acres worldwide are planted with genetically modified crops. Yet virtually all the land belongs to agribusiness. That is because biotech companies create genetically modified seeds that can't be replanted; farmers who use them have to buy expensive patented seeds each year. Subsistence farmers need to be able to replant their own crop for seed, but companies like Monsanto and Syngenta find no profit in recyclable seeds. They also have no incentive to create hardier versions of subsistence crops, like cassava and sweet potatoes, that agribusiness doesn't grow. Kenya's corn project will move slowly. The research will take six more years and will cost $10 million, which will come from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, which is separate from the biotech company. Researchers must also persuade biotech companies, which hold the patents, to free up the technology. The Kenya project will likely get the needed financing and permissions. But similar studies will be needed elsewhere. Other farmers might, for example, want a drought-resistant corn. Since there is no market incentive, it won't happen without help from governments and foundations and cooperation from biotech concerns. The Kenya study is a model of how to do it and a warning about how difficult adapting this technology for poor farmers will be. Editorial
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Genes and a Hoe
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COONEY--John M. John Mason Cooney succumbed to cancer on June 13, 2005. He was 71 years old. This brought to a close a life devoted to education and community service, including 30 years of distinguished service at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Cooney was born in 1933 and raised in McDowell County, West Virginia, where his father and grandfather were involved in the coal industry. Graduating from Elkhorn High School as class president, he continued his education in 1952 at the McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, one of the nation's top college preparatory schools. Cooney obtained his bachelor's degree from Marshall University in 1956, studying philosophy and Greek. He then attended Princeton Theological Seminary from 1956-1958 and transferred to Harvard University, where he received his divinity degree (theology) in 1959. In 1962, he completed credits for his doctoral degree in political science at Rutgers University. Cooney's early professional years were spent in the church. He served as minister of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Califon, New Jersey, from 1959-1966. He was a member of Newton Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church (honorably retired). Cooney was the organizing chairman of the Northwest New Jersey Community Action Program, the antipoverty agency still serving Hunterdon, Warren, and Sussex counties. He then worked for New Jersey Governors Hughes and Cahill in the Department of Community Affairs, in the areas of education and youth. Among his many duties, he served Governor Cahill as staff director for the White House Conference on Children and Youth (1969-1972), assembling and directing the New Jersey committee that included, among others, future New Jersey Governor and 9/ 11 Commission Chair Thomas Kean. In 1972, Cooney began work representing Rutgers University in the local community and as a liaison to the state government, local government and community organizations, and coordinating visits of national and world dignitaries while serving Rutgers University President Edward J. Bloustein. He continued to serve in that role under Bloustein's successor, Francis L. Lawrence. Cooney retired from that position in 2002. At Rutgers, Cooney administered programs that brought distinguished visitors to the institution: the Victoria Program in Contemporary Issues, the Clifford P. Case Fellowship Program, Senator Bill Bradley student programs, and the Holland Program on Ethics in Government. Among the visitors were former Presidents Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton, former Speaker of the House Thomas Tip-O'Neill, and former Vice President Walter Mondale. He coordinated the royal visits
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Paid Notice: Deaths COONEY, JOHN M.
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And in 1968, an errant weather satellite crashed into the Pacific, but federal teams managed to recover its plutonium battery intact from the Santa Barbara Channel, off California. Such accidents cooled enthusiasm for the batteries. But federal agencies continued to use them for a more limited range of missions, including those involving deep-space probes and top-secret devices for tapping undersea cables. In 1997, when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration prepared to launch its Cassini probe of Saturn, hundreds of protesters converged on its Florida spaceport, arguing that an accident could rupture the craft's nuclear batteries and condemn thousands of people to death by cancer. Plutonium 238 is hundreds of times more radioactive than the kind of plutonium used in nuclear arms, plutonium 239. Medical experts agree that inhaling even a speck poses a serious risk of lung cancer. But federal experts say that the newest versions of the nuclear batteries are made to withstand rupture into tiny particles and that the risk of human exposure is extraordinarily low. Today, the United States makes no plutonium 238 and instead relies on aging stockpiles or imports from Russia. By agreement with the Russians, it cannot use the imported material -- some 35 pounds since the end of the cold war -- for military purposes. With its domestic stockpile running low, Washington now wants to resume production. Though it last made plutonium 238 in the 1980's at the government's Savannah River plant in South Carolina, it now wants to move such work to the Idaho National Laboratory and consolidate all the nation's plutonium 238 activities there, including efforts now at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. By centralizing everything in Idaho, the Energy Department hopes to increase security and reduce the risks involved in transporting the radioactive material over highways. Late Friday, the department posted a 500-page draft environmental impact statement on the plan at www.consolidationeis.doe.gov. The public has 60 days to respond. Mr. Frazier said the department planned to weigh public reaction and complete the regulatory process by late this year, and to finish the plan early in 2006. The president would then submit it to Congress for approval, he said. The work requires no international assent. The Idaho National Laboratory, founded in 1949 for atomic research, stretches across 890 square miles of southeastern Idaho. The Big Lost River wanders its length.
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U.S. Has Plans To Again Make Own Plutonium
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of symptoms. It is essential for the international community, led by the United States, to take decisive action to prevent a pandemic. So what should we do? Recently, the World Health Organization called for more money and attention to be devoted to effective preventive action, appealing for $100 million. Congress responded promptly. A bipartisan group of senators obtained $25 million for prevention efforts (a quarter of the request, the traditional contribution of the United States), allowing the C.D.C., the Agency for International Development, the Health and Human Services Department and other agencies to improve their ability to act. In addition, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously approved legislation directing President Bush to form a senior-level task force to put in place an international strategy to deal with the avian flu and coordinate policy among our government agencies. We urge the Bush administration to form this task force immediately without waiting for legislation to be passed. But these are only modest first steps. International health experts believe that Southeast Asia will be an epicenter of influenza for decades. We recommend that this administration work with Congress, public health officials, the pharmaceutical industry, foreign governments and international organizations to create a permanent framework for curtailing the spread of future infectious diseases. Among the parts of that framework could be these: Increasing international disease surveillance, response capacity and public education and coordination, especially in Southeast Asia. Stockpiling enough antiviral doses to cover high-risk populations and essential workers. Ensuring that, here at home, Health and Human Services and state governments put in place plans that address issues of surveillance, medical care, drug and vaccine distribution, communication, protection of the work force and maintenance of core public functions in case of a pandemic. Accelerating research into avian flu vaccines and antiviral drugs. Establishing incentives to encourage nations to report flu outbreaks quickly and fully. So far, A(H5N1) has not been found in the United States. But in an age when you can board planes in Bangkok or Hong Kong and arrive in Chicago, Indianapolis or New York in hours, we must face the reality that these exotic killer diseases are not isolated health problems half a world away, but direct and immediate threats to security and prosperity here at home. Op-Ed Contributors Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois, is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Richard Lugar, Republican of Indiana, is its chairman.
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Grounding a Pandemic
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as among the people they have been sent to protect. Mr. Foley said Haiti -- where most people live on $1 a day, more than 40 percent of children are malnourished, and childbirth is the second leading cause of death among women -- faced myriad challenges as it struggled for stability. But, he said, unless the government took control of the streets, it would make no real progress on any other front. He said that police reforms were crucial to fighting crime, and that the United States was considering a one-time waiver of its ban on the sale of weapons to Haiti in order to approve a request by the Haitian government to buy $1.7 million in equipment for law enforcement. ''Haiti is close to a failed state,'' Mr. Foley said. ''Many people have looked at the current mission as Haiti's last chance to have a huge international effort to help it become self-sustaining.'' When asked why the United States had not committed troops, he said that it had sent troops last year and would spend some $200 million helping Haiti this year alone. But he pointed out that the United States was also occupied with its international campaign against terrorism. The growing insecurity in the capital has raised new fears. Authorities warn they may not be able to protect their people from the coming hurricane season, much less organize them for national elections scheduled to begin in October. The main roads from the capital to the international airport and seaport are considered unsafe. The United States and several other countries, including Britain, Australia and Canada, have issued warnings in recent weeks about an increase in attacks against foreigners and cautioned their citizens not to travel here. Schools and businesses in the center of the city have closed. Well-to-do Haitians with relatives abroad have begun to leave the country. Those who stay say they are increasingly afraid to leave their homes. Jean-Gérard Gilbert, the director of a private high school in the city's center, was abducted at 6:30 a.m. Wednesday at the school's front gate. His wife, Maryse Gilbert, said he called her half an hour later. ''I've been kidnapped,'' he told her. ''They shot me two times in my feet.'' Then Mrs. Gilbert said the kidnappers snatched the phone and demanded $200,000. ''Where am I supposed to get that kind of money?'' she asked them. After hours of negotiations,
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A New Scourge Afflicts Haiti: Kidnappings
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because it's the cognitive distraction that can compromise driving,'' said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Mr. Tyson said research from within his agency and outside it, along with driving simulations, found that it was the talking on a cellphone while driving that was distracting, and that therefore cellphones should be used only in emergencies. Even AAA of America, the automobile organization that helped draft Washington's ordinance, believes the real issue is cellphones, in general, which cause distracted driving, said John B. Townsend II, manager of public and government relations for AAA Mid-Atlantic. Mr. Townsend cited a AAA analysis of 50 traffic deaths over a fixed period in the Washington area that found only 2 that possibly involved cellphone use. ''In the cosmic scheme of things, it's not just the cellphone,'' he said. ''We would not come right out and support a ban on hand-held cell phones. That's not the issue. The real issue is distracted drivers.'' But the laws could be in response to people's fears rather than hard evidence, Mr. Townsend said. A survey by AAA Mid-Atlantic showed that 63 percent of motorists favored a ban on driving with hand-held cellphones (76 percent in Washington), with those favoring bans directed at new teenage drivers rising to 79 percent. Results of the survey, culled from 1,300 interviews in the Mid-Atlantic area in December 2003, also showed that 71 percent of drivers felt distracted using a cellphone. But John Walls, the vice president of public affairs of CTIA, the Wireless Association, a trade organization representing wireless interests, said it was unfair and unnecessary to create hands-free laws. ''We question the need for a law singling out behavior that apparently is pretty far down the pecking order of accidents in the first place,'' Mr. Walls said. He cited statistics showing that before the New York law was enacted, fewer than one-hundredth of 1 percent of New York City accidents were related to cellphones. But a spokesman for the New York Department of Motor Vehicles, Joseph Picchi, said that he thought the law was having an impact but that the department was still compiling statistics. A report is due by the end of 2005. Mr. Picchi pointed out that the law requiring seat belts in automobiles had taken years to catch on but now had a compliance rate of 85 percent. ''Cellphones are one of the bigger
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Driver-Cellphone Laws Exist, but Their Value Is Disputed
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seem like an anachronism. But in fact, at least two countries -- India and Pakistan -- broke the ban, and two others -- Iran and North Korea -- have recently been identified as possibly preparing for nuclear tests. Many Western experts worry that the world is entering a second nuclear age centered on Asia. As the scientists from Djibouti suggested, the network is also a boon for nations seeking a better understanding of the planet's inner secrets: the whys of earthquakes and volcanoes, of how continents split and merge. Vibrations from natural seismic events travel vast distances and are picked up by the network's recording stations. A map of recent measurements shows the outline of the earth's main tectonic plates grinding past one another in endless waves of major and minor earthquakes, a discovery about the mobility of the earth's surface that originally took scientists decades to uncover. ''We did in a few months what it took earth science 50 years to accomplish,'' Fil J. Filipkowski, a network officer, boasted in early December while giving a tour of the Vienna complex. ''Just today, there's been 147 events,'' he said, peering intently at a computer monitor and pointing to a computerized map full of dots. ''Currently, there's a series of seismic events in Indonesia, natural seismicity. It's keeping our analysts busy.'' Twenty-four days later, the sea west of Indonesia erupted in the giant earthquake and towering tsunami whose waves smashed coasts from Asia to Africa. It turned out that in a chance demonstration of its sensitivity, the network had picked up the first rumbling of seismic activity leading up to that quake. The network has grown fast since its birth in the late 1990's. It first achieved global coverage last year, officials said. The regular addition of new sensors is increasing the depth, sensitivity and diversity of the measurements, raising the odds that analysts here will be able to detect a covert nuclear blast. The current complement of roughly 140 stations is to become 321 later this decade. (A station can have more than one sensor.) This year's budget is $105 million, Daniela Rozgonova, a spokeswoman for the organization, said. Despite its youth, the network has already had several grim achievements. It detected the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in early 2003, the collapse of the Russian submarine Kursk in 2000 and the shock waves from a series of Indian
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Listening for Atom Blasts, But Hearing Earthquakes
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primary education, promote sex equality and achieve sharp reductions in hunger, and in the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, by 2015. A main focus is also on slashing the millions of preventable deaths among mothers and children. Britain, in particular, has recently seized the leadership on these issues. In July, it will hold a summit meeting of industrial countries that will spotlight poverty, particularly in Africa. Prime Minister Tony Blair has appointed a commission on Africa that is to report this spring, and the chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, is campaigning for a ''Marshall Plan'' for Africa that includes debt relief and his own proposal to nearly double aid from rich nations. Levels of aid are likely to be high on the agenda this year. In 2002 many world leaders, including President Bush, supported a declaration promising to ''make concrete efforts'' toward a target of providing seven-tenths of 1 percent of their national incomes for aid. Five countries have achieved that goal: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Britain, France, Finland, Spain, Ireland and Belgium have committed to reach that level on specific timetables. The United States government, which allocates less than two-tenths of 1 percent for aid, has not made a comparable pledge; the Bush administration has increased American aid by a half, to 15 hundredths of 1 percent from one-tenth of 1 percent, but it is still the smallest percentage among major donor countries. In September, world leaders are to gather at the United Nations to take stock of progress toward their antipoverty goals. The new report, ''Investing in Development: A Practical Plan to Achieve the Millennium Development Goals,'' says poor countries should stop tailoring their plans to combat poverty to the limited resources available and instead draw up comprehensive approaches, then figure the costs. The project calls on poor countries to improve their own governance, uphold the rule of law and spend more of their own money to combat poverty. But economists on the team estimate that those resources will be inadequate and that donors will need to make up the difference. ''We are not telling countries what to do,'' said Professor Sachs said, who emphasized that many African leaders he had met with were pressing for the solutions proposed in the report. The report advocates that rich countries support a crash development program this year in at least
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U.N. Proposes Doubling of Aid To Cut Poverty
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forces,'' Mr. Dixon said, for example, if the containers are stacked up to eight high on deck and rolling through 40-foot seas. The group tried a number of approaches to sensing whether the container doors were open at sea, including a pressure sensor. But in one storm the container flexed so much that the pressure between the door and the door frame went to zero. ''So we decided pressure was not a good sensor,'' he said. ''The zero reading would give us a false alarm in heavy seas.'' Instead, the device senses magnetic flux density between the frame and the door of the container, said Russell Mortenson, chairman of All Set Marine Security. ''When the door moves, the magnetic field changes,'' he said, ''and we can determine the distance between the door and the door frame quite accurately.'' The device is built to last for the life of the container, typically 10 years, he said. To interrogate the sensor, the G.E. group built wireless readers with a 100-foot range at dockside and prototypes of hand-held readers with a 30-foot range. ''In the future,'' Mr. Petrizzi said, ''we'd like a hand-held device the size of a flashlight to allow people to arm and read the status of the device.'' Unisys paid for some of the tests for the new system. ''It was an opportunity to look at the competing types of technology,'' said Greg J. Baroni, who is president of the global public sector of Unisys. ''This one is relatively inexpensive compared to the alternatives,'' he said. One alternative is Global Positioning System-based systems with satellite communication to keep track of goods on route. David Schrier, lead author of a report on container security by ABI Research of Oyster Bay, N.Y., said there would eventually be government-mandated rules for smart containers. His company estimated that more than seven million containers enter the United States annually. ''Once that government mandate comes,'' he said, ''the market will lose its apprehension about the costs of smart containers'' and start providing minimum protection. ''That may well be simple devices to tell if the container has been opened or not.'' Dr. Flynn said money spent on ensuring the integrity of cargo shipments was justified. ''The costs to improve the odds of preventing an attack, and, in the worst case, to prevent shutting the whole system down, are a good payment to make.'' WHAT'S NEXT E-mail: Eisenberg@nytimes.com
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Cargo Containers' Electronic Sensor Says 'Do Not Disturb'
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To the Editor: Re ''College Degree Still Pays but It's Leveling Off'' (Business Day, Jan. 13): Your analysis of the ''value'' of college degrees once again proves that America has some true learning to do before it can catch up to the intellectual level of the rest of the industrialized world. I am tired of opening the newspaper at least once a year to find an article that basically reduces college education to a question of economics. Given the intellectual paucity of the American high school experience, all Americans should be going to college to finally learn something, regardless of whether that newfound knowledge increases their salaries. Prof. Harley Shaken, a labor economist at the University of California at Berkeley, argues in the article that the ''obsession with education'' overshadows attempts to equalize incomes by other means, and he is undoubtedly right. If Americans were to stop thinking of education as a means to an end, maybe it wouldn't be constantly cheapened in this way. Yes, please raise the minimum wage, enact something like the Equal Rights Amendment and strengthen unions. At the same time, strengthen education by reminding all Americans that a sound education is an end in itself. Jessamyn Blau Somerville, Mass., Jan. 13, 2005
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Learn for Learning's Sake
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A decision by the government to approve a proposal to allow same-sex couples to marry drew criticism from the conservative opposition and the Catholic Church. The proposal, which must be approved by Parliament, would also allow gay couples to adopt children. Representatives of the Catholic Church said the state lacked the power to sanction gay marriage, which they called an affront to the country's traditions. Opinion polls indicate that two-thirds of the public supports the government's proposal. Renwick McLean (NYT)
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World Briefing | Europe: Spain: Government Approves Gay Marriage Bill
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The Bush administration is proceeding briskly with its demolition job on the environmental regulations it inherited from previous administrations, especially the rules protecting the national forests against commercial exploitation. Over the last four years, the Forest Service has weakened agreements aimed at preserving old-growth trees and wildlife in the Pacific Northwest and in the Sierra Nevada. It persuaded Congress to adopt its misnamed ''Healthy Forests'' initiative that helps timber companies as much as it helps communities at risk from forest fire. It threatens to overturn President Bill Clinton's popular roadless rule protecting the most remote areas of the forests, and it has already removed those protections from the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Then last week, just before Christmas -- the administration's preferred time for unveiling bad news -- it announced a radical overhaul of the rules governing the management of the nation's 155 national forests. The ostensible purpose of the change is to streamline a cumbersome management process and give individual forest managers more flexibility to respond to threats like wildfires and the increasing use of the forests by off-road vehicles. But the new rules would also eliminate vital environmental reviews, as mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, jettison wildlife protections that date to President Ronald Reagan, restrict public input, and replace detailed regulations, like those limiting clearcuts and protecting streams, with vague ''results-based'' goals. These are unacceptably high costs to pay for regulatory efficiency. More broadly, the whole idea of giving local managers more flexibility defies history, however reasonable it appears on the surface. The main reason Congress enacted the National Forest Management Act in 1976 was that the public had lost confidence in the Forest Service, not only local foresters but also their bosses in Washington, who seemed mainly interested in harvesting timber no matter what the cost to the forest's ecological health. There are, of course, forest mangers who act responsibly. And the administration promises that forest plans will be regularly audited under an ''environmental management system'' it has borrowed from private industry. But it is not clear who will be conducting these audits (indeed, it's entirely possible the timber industry could end up monitoring itself). Nor, given the vagueness of the new guidelines, are there any longer clear standards against which foresters and their plans can be measured. This is a recipe for trouble. Forest supervisors have always been subject to fierce
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Trouble in the Forests
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Shares in Eli Lilly & Company fell yesterday after an article in a medical journal suggested that the drug company had long concealed evidence that its well-known antidepressant, Prozac, could cause violent and suicidal behavior. The accusations were made in the Jan. 1 issue of The British Medical Journal, which said it had turned over documents related to the allegations to the United States Food and Drug Administration. The F.D.A. was reviewing the papers, which had been missing for more than 10 years, according to the Journal article, which said they were originally gathered during a lawsuit against Lilly on behalf of victims of a gunman in Kentucky who had reportedly been taking Prozac for a month before going on a rampage. An F.D.A. spokeswoman, Kathleen Quinn, could not confirm yesterday whether or not the agency had received the documents mentioned in the medical journal. But at least one member of Congress said he had obtained copies of the documents reportedly given to the F.D.A. In a written response, Eli Lilly said: ''To our knowledge, there has never been any allegation of missing documents'' from lawsuits involving Lilly. The company also said it tried unsuccessfully to obtain copies of the documents from The Journal. ''Lilly has consistently provided regulatory agencies worldwide with results from both clinical trials and postmarketing surveillance,'' including data related to Prozac, the company's statement said. Eli Lilly's stock fell 75 cents, or 1.3 percent, to $56.75. It is unclear what, if any, action might result from the matter. In October, the F.D.A. ordered pharmaceutical companies to include ''black box'' warnings on the labels of their antidepressants, including Prozac. The warnings are the strongest restriction the government can impose on pharmaceutical companies, short of banning a drug. The warnings state that antidepressants increase the risk of ''suicidal thinking and behavior in children and adolescents.'' British medical regulators have recommended that many antidepressants not be prescribed for children and teenagers, but had not included Prozac in those advisories. Even if the documents do not prompt legal or regulatory action, they could sully Eli Lilly's image. The company's fortunes have been closely tied to Prozac. The company has long defended the drug in the face of legal and medical challenges and insisted that it has not suppressed relevant information about the drug. The report comes at a time of renewed scrutiny of the pharmaceutical industry and the government's process
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Lilly Shares Fall on Report About Prozac Documents
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Art and science don't often intersect, but Marion Mecklenburg, a Smithsonian Institution engineer who is also a painting conservator, is trying to merge them. His purpose: to find better ways to preserve priceless art works, including those like the ''Mona Lisa'' that are painted on thin wood panels. After two decades in painting conservation, Mr. Mecklenburg realized that many of the techniques he was using were not effective, so he returned to school to learn the science. With an engineering degree, he returned to the Smithsonian's Center for Materials Research and Education and began devising computer simulations to measure how paintings react under different environmental conditions. His conclusion: some preservation practices adopted in past centuries -- even the last century -- harmed, rather than helped, great works of art. One of the practices he examined was the standard that museums worldwide adhere to: maintaining strict temperatures and humidity to prevent paintings from buckling and flaking. Earlier this year, Mr. Mecklenburg, 62, began to focus on how varying temperatures and humidity affect wood panels. He began his project shortly after the Louvre disclosed in the spring that the ''Mona Lisa,'' Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century masterpiece, was noticeably warped, and that museum curators, along with the French Center for Research and Restoration of Museums, were assessing the damage. The ''Mona Lisa'' was painted on a panel of poplar, as were many works in Europe at the time. Serendipitously, poplar -- also known as cottonwood -- was also the wood Mr. Mecklenburg chose to study. Mr. Mecklenburg said his experiments showed that wood panel paintings are more resilient -- weathering changes in temperature and humidity as they did for centuries -- than experts in recent decades have believed. He examined how much wood changes, including how much it expands or contracts under different temperatures and humidity levels. Assisted by Evan Quasney, a 19-year-old mechanical-engineering student from the University of Michigan, he found that a two-foot-wide wood panel, for example, could bend as much as one and a half inches without breaking, cracking or warping. ''We knew that paintings bent with changes in humidity, but we were not sure how much,'' said Mr. Quasney, who was a Smithsonian intern last summer. ''What we found was that a painting is elastic, like a rubber band, and it can withstand a range of changes in humidity and temperature -- then snap back without cracking or
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Techniques That Might Smile Upon Mona Lisa
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live at the Cooke Health Center, on Fifth Avenue near 106th Street, when he was 2 months old. Officials at the center said that they provided care well beyond the state requirements and that a review by the Office of Mental Retardation last year found no deficiencies. Interviews with state officials, health center staff members and people who knew Frashawn paint a picture of a boy who was well tended but, in the end, could not overcome the odds against him. A nurse's aide accompanied Frashawn to school in Chelsea, spending the entire day with him. A staff of health care professionals made sure he did not wander off, taking head counts every 15 minutes. But in one brief flash, just 15 minutes, attention apparently lagged. Frashawn awoke and was dressed at 6:15 a.m. on Tuesday. At 6:30, he was discovered missing. He was not found for about two hours. Frashawn is among an increasingly small number of patients so severely developmentally disabled that they are institutionalized. A decade ago, there were 5,000 developmentally disabled adults and children in institutions in New York; now there are only about 600, according to state records. The Cooke Health Care Center is a 729-bed long-term care center that mainly treats the elderly. But after the mistreatment of retarded children at Willowbrook State School and its closing in 1987, the center opened a 50-bed ward to take in some of the patients from Willowbrook. From age 5, Frashawn attended Public School 138, a special education program, which has classrooms in several school buildings throughout Manhattan. The principal, Jackie D. Keane, said that although Frashawn could not speak, he was exceptionally social. ''He had a sparkle in his eye,'' Mrs. Keane said yesterday. ''He was very outgoing. He loved to reach out.'' Among Frashawn's favorite activities were storytelling, music classes and a pet therapy program. As principal of P.S. 138, Mrs. Keane oversees 337 severely disabled children, including about 60 in a program inside P.S. 33 in Chelsea, where Frashawn attended classes. Frashawn received occupational, physical and speech therapy, Mrs. Keane said. Because of respiratory problems, a nurse accompanied him at all times. He was taught in classes of no more than 12 children, led by a teacher and at least four paraprofessionals. ''They need constant supervision, absolutely,'' Mrs. Keane said. ''Sometimes it's difficult to watch somebody 24/7. It is difficult. You're afraid to blink.''
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Disabled Boy Who Fell Into Chute Suffocated
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Mobile phone carriers and entrepreneurs bid nearly $1 billion yesterday on the first day of a government auction of radio spectrum, the airwaves that carry wireless data and phone traffic. The auction, for 242 licenses in big and small markets across the country, is scheduled to continue this morning, with 31 of the 35 bidders that were initially eligible still participating, according to the Federal Communications Commission, the regulatory agency that is overseeing the auction. The F.C.C. regularly auctions radio spectrum, as it did six times last year, but industry analysts said the auction that began yesterday was particularly significant because it included a major chunk of spectrum, the last time such a big auction was likely to take place until at least halfway through 2006. The spectrum is an essential asset to mobile phone companies, which can face network congestion -- and thus dropped calls or poor reception -- if they do not have enough spectrum. Demand for spectrum has become more intense in light of increased use of mobile phones by consumers and of new phone-based services like e-mail messaging and games. ''This is the last major spectrum auction for the foreseeable future,'' said Chris King, an analyst with Legg Mason, an equity research firm, suggesting the auction was significant for the industry. There is no way to predict how long the auction will take and how high the bids may go. The last major auction for this particular type of radio spectrum, commonly known as P.C.S. for personal communications services, began on Dec. 12, 2000, and ended on Jan. 26, 2001, raising $16.8 billion. That auction was for 422 licenses, however, nearly double the number being offered this time, and much of that money was never paid to the government because parts of the auction were invalidated. Bidders for the latest 10-year licenses include the major national and regional mobile phone carriers, but because of a quirk in the way the F.C.C. handles its spectrum auctions, the companies typically do not act under their own names. In yesterday's auction, for instance, the bidder with the highest bid total was Royal Street Communications. The F.C.C. said that company was 85 percent owned by MetroPCS, a regional phone company with operations in California. In the last round, it bid $207 million, and it is in the lead for seven licenses. Industry analysts said the major carriers' use of smaller
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Spectrum Sale Draws $1 Billion in Bids
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tower that emerged from political compromise. Among the questions the planners are asking themselves are these: With the antennas off to one side, would the building itself create too large a shadow for the broadcast signal? Would the signal be compromised because of the distance the transmission cables have to travel from the central building core to the antennas at the tower's edge? How would an eccentrically located spire behave in high winds? How safe would it be to build such a spire, itself several hundred feet tall, when it cannot easily be secured to all four corners of the building below? How much extra structural reinforcement would be required in the main body of the tower to accommodate an outboard spire? Would it be possible to move the spire closer to the building core without exactly centering it, thereby preserving some of Mr. Libeskind's symbolic intent? Assuming that the spire would be nonmetallic to avoid interfering with the broadcast signal, what sort of precedent is there for construction with composite materials on that scale and at that elevation? All these questions can be answered. And if there are engineering problems, they can presumably be solved. But it will cost money to do so. Possibly a lot of money. No one at the negotiating table will publicly answer these questions, including Paul Bissonette, president of the Metropolitan Television Alliance. The group, which includes Channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13, signed a memorandum of understanding in 2003 with the developer, Larry A. Silverstein, to install antennas atop the Freedom Tower. Broadcasters have used the Empire State Building since the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001. The alliance had considered building a 2,000-foot freestanding broadcast mast in Bayonne, N.J. But Edward Grebow, who was then the alliance president, was persuaded that the construction of Freedom Tower would occur ''in a plausible time frame'' and accommodate the broadcasters' needs. Over the following months, the tower design changed considerably, after Mr. Silverstein, the commercial leaseholder at the site, made it clear that his architect was Mr. Childs, not Mr. Libeskind, the master planner for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. What emerged in December 2003 from a fractious relationship between the two architects was, simply put, Mr. Childs's tower with Mr. Libeskind's spire on top. Paul Goldberger said in ''Up From Zero''
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Will the Spire Survive At the Freedom Tower?
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An article yesterday about the policies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America toward gay men and lesbians referred imprecisely to its stance on ordaining them. The church indeed accepts gay clergy members, but they must remain celibate.
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Corrections
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a result, only two people perished. Local fishermen call that a blessing but also a curse, because with so few deaths, little international or national aid has arrived, they say. Already impoverished fishermen are despairing. Even before the tsunami, most of Sri Lanka's fishermen were nothing more than day laborers. The majority of fishing boats in the country are owned by businessmen who never go to sea, according to officials. Instead, they pay fishermen $3 to $5 a day on average to do the work for them. Many fishermen are also heavily in debt. Mr. Yusuf's previous boat was owned by Mr. Khan, his crewman. Mr. Khan still owes $1,500 on the boat, a hefty sum in an occupation where $150 a month is a good salary. Mr. Yusuf has a fourth-grade education. His two crewmen have eighth-grade educations. All chose fishing because it is the lifeblood of their community, an area famed for its rich fishing. On a normal day, as many as 100 boats would be plying the waters off Oluvil. On this day, nine boats were bobbing on the horizon. Before the tsunami, Mr. Yusuf routinely used his motor to cruise a dozen miles offshore to catch more lucrative deep-sea fish. Now, stuck with only paddles and muscle power, he planned a maritime baby step, a trip no more than a mile offshore. As his crewmen lowered the net into the water, Mr. Yusuf slowly paddled the boat out to sea. The men had spent days repairing the net and were unsure how well it would work. It was designed to sink to deep waters and catch large fish. About 15 minutes after they cast the net, they began retrieving it. ''We've got only small, small fish,'' Mr. Fasmeer lamented. Slowly, the mood on the boat lightened. The two younger men joked with one another as Mr. Yusuf silently paddled. The crew occasionally bailed, but the boat did not appear to be taking on much water. After they had retrieved several hundred yards of the net, a strong current caused their net to become entangled with one from the canoe that had departed seconds before they did. The tangle meant both nets would catch less fish. The two crewmen carefully retrieved the two nets, separating them slowly. As they pulled the final section from the water, they found large numbers of fish ensnared. Excited, they made their
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In a Small Fishing Boat, Looking to Make Peace With a Punishing Sea
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Sailors on the San Francisco, a nuclear-powered attack submarine, had just finished cleaning the vessel last Saturday as it sped along 500 feet beneath the surface of the South Pacific. Submarines run blind, just listening for sounds of danger. And to the captain and other officers relying on undersea navigation charts, everything seemed clear. Suddenly, there was a horrible screeching. And according to an e-mail message written by a crew member, the inside of the submarine quickly resembled a scene from the movie ''The Matrix.'' He wrote, ''Everything slowed down and levitated and then went flying forward faster than the brain can process.'' The submarine had crashed head-on into an undersea mountain that was not on the charts. One sailor was killed, and about 60 others were injured. Now, Defense Department officials say they have found a satellite image taken in 1999 that indicates an undersea mountain rising to perhaps within 100 feet below the surface there. But the older navigation charts provided to the Navy were never updated to show the obstruction, they acknowledge, in part because the agency that creates them has never had the resources to use the satellite data systematically. The officials said the main chart on the submarine, prepared in 1989 and never revised, did not show any potential obstacles within three miles of the crash. They said the incident happened in such a desolate area -- 360 miles southeast of Guam -- that updating their depiction of the undersea terrain was never considered a priority. The new information about the charting flaws also illustrates what many experts say is a broader danger not only to submarines but also to many surface ships. At the same time, it provides a glimpse into the arcane task of plotting an undersea world that in some areas is still more mysterious than the surfaces of Mars or Venus. A variety of satellite data is now showing that many sea charts, including some that still rely on notations from the days when sailors navigated by the stars, are inaccurate. And some scientists are calling for greater use of satellite data to fix more precisely the location of undersea ridges, islands and even continental boundaries and to chart large, less studied areas of the oceans. The latest disclosures support the account by the commanding officer of the San Francisco that the charts showed that his track was clear. But former
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Submarine Crash Shows Navy Had Gaps in Mapping System
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is no panacea. The prospective output by the Canadian companies would cover only about three to four years of oil production by Cuba, which now imports much of its oil from Venezuela on favorable terms. Yet the deposits showed how tantalizingly close Cuba has come to altering the dynamics of oil exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that also provides one of the largest sources of oil for the United States. The economic outlook for Cuba is not as dire as it was a decade ago, with growth reaching 5 percent in 2004, according to government estimates; at least a small part of that economic growth was spurred by investments by international energy companies searching for oil. Last month's discovery already has Cuba watchers here and officials there pondering potential changes in relations with the United States. American companies are currently prohibited from drilling in waters 100 miles or so from the coast of Florida. American energy companies quietly chafe at restrictions that make Cuban territory off limits to them while Canadians, Spaniards and Brazilians search Cuban waters for offshore wildcatting possibilities. A significant oil discovery, one that could turn Cuba into an oil exporter from an importer, might prompt calls for reviewing policies that exclude the great majority of American companies from trading with Cuba. ''The Canadians aren't there because they like Castro's aunt or a good Cuban coffee,'' remarked Jorge Piñón Cervera, a Miami-based consultant who closely follows Cuba's energy industry and a former high-ranking executive in Latin America for Amoco. ''They're in Cuba because it's almost a virgin exploration province right in the backyard of the U.S.'' The Cubans, since introducing policies in the early 1990's aimed at encouraging investment by foreign energy companies, have increased oil production to more than 75,000 barrels a day in 2004 from 18,000 barrels a day in 1992. The discovery last month by Pebercan of Montreal and Sherritt of Toronto illustrates how companies from other countries stand to benefit from the American embargo on most dealings with Cuba. Shares in Pebercan soared on the Toronto Stock Exchange after Mr. Castro's announcement, climbing nearly 50 percent in the two and a half weeks since; thanks in part to the Cuba find, the company's stock performance ranked second in 2004 among North American energy-exploration companies tracked by John S. Herold of Norwalk, Conn., an energy analysis company. Sherritt, a diversified minerals
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Oil Find Hints at a Less Dependent Cuba
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substance. Citing a conventionally bred potato that turned out to contain an unintended toxin, the report says the hazard lies with the toxin's presence, not the breeding method. Among the foods developed through induced mutations are lettuce, beans, grapefruit, rice, oats and wheat. None had to undergo stringent testing and federal approval before reaching the market. Only those foods produced by the specific introduction of one or more genes into the organism's DNA are subject to strict and prolonged premarketing regulations. But as the academy's report points out, gene splicing is only a process, not a product, a process on a continuum of genetic modification of foods that began more than 10,000 years ago when people first crossed two varieties of a crop to improve its characteristics. In fact, gene splicing is the most refined, precise and predictable method of genetic modification because the function of the transferred gene or genes is known. It is also important to realize that genes are rarely unique to a given organism. Regulate by Degree of Risk All new crop varieties, whether produced through gene splicing or conventional techniques like cross-breeding or induced mutations, go through a series of tests before commercial introduction. After greenhouse testing for the look and perhaps taste of the crop, it is grown in a small, sequestered field trial and, if it passes that test, in a larger trial to check its commercial viability. The potential risks associated with genetically modified foods result not so much from the method used to produce them but from the traits being introduced. With gene splicing, only one or two traits at a time are introduced, making it possible to assess beforehand how much testing is needed to assure safety. While such safety tests are important, it is possible to become fixated on hypothetical risks that can never be absolutely discounted. Indeed, Dr. Miller, once director of the Office of Biotechnology for the Food and Drug Administration, argues that overly stringent regulations can needlessly raise public fears. ''People naturally assume that something that is more highly regulated is more dangerous,'' he said, adding, ''Government officials should have done less regulating and more educating.'' A risk-based protocol for safety evaluation would greatly reduce the time and costs involved in developing most new gene-spliced crops, many of which could raise the standard of living worldwide and better protect the planet from chemical contamination. PERSONAL HEALTH
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Facing Biotech Foods Without the Fear Factor
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To the Editor: Re ''About That Old Computer'' (editorial, Jan. 9): A generation ago, throw-away bottles and cans were littering the roadsides. British Columbia became the first jurisdiction in North America to require beverage producers to provide cash refunds to consumers who turned in empty containers. The personal computer is the pop can of the cyber age. Let the computer makers come up with the recycling solutions. Everyone will benefit. Helen Spiegelman Vancouver, British Columbia
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Recycling Computers
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The travelers who went to La Guardia Airport yesterday afternoon could see the storm, but thought they could beat it. Their goal was to get out of New York City before the snow got really bad, even if it meant boarding flights that were scheduled to go to places that were not their final destinations. As the ''canceled'' notices flashed red on computer monitors at Delta Airlines and white at monitors at Northwest, there were still small teasing windows of escape. One flight to Minneapolis. One flight to Savannah, Ga. One to Atlanta. One to Columbus, Ohio. Richard Wilke, a 42-year-old consultant with Lippincott Mercer, was originally scheduled to fly to Seoul, South Korea, from Kennedy International Airport today. But with an eye on the approaching storm, he tried to fly from La Guardia to Atlanta yesterday and then on to Seoul. His Atlanta flight, scheduled to leave at 2 p.m., made it all the way to the runway. ''We thought we were going to be the last one out,'' he said. ''It was not to be.'' The flight was eventually canceled. Erum Siddiqi, 24, of Elmont, N.Y., had been scheduled to fly to Orlando, Fla., today but she rescheduled for a flight yesterday in an effort to beat the storm. That flight was canceled after she arrived at the airport and had passed through security. She then tried to get on a flight to Savannah, only to be told it was completely booked by people who had had the same idea. Matt and Jaime Borgman were trying to return home to Springfield, Mo. yesterday. Their 11:30 a.m. flight to Kansas City, Mo., on Midwest Airlines was canceled, even though there was not a snowflake in sight yet. So they went to the Delta counter in an attempt to get on a flight to Atlanta. There was room on a 3 p.m. flight, but then that, too, was canceled. ''We didn't make it,'' said Mrs. Borgman, a doctor, who said she had to be at work by 6 a.m. tomorrow. Still, to an undiscerning eye, the airport looked very much like it was operating. Planes pulled up to gates. Passengers got off with suitcases and duffel bags in tow. They retrieved their luggage at the baggage claim and lined up for taxis. But they were not coming off arriving flights; they were getting off departing flights that had made it
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A Little Late, Trying to Take Flight (Any Flight) From the Storm
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people, who are working less than ever, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The employment rate for those aged 16 to 24 was about 40 percent throughout the 1990's but has drifted down recently; it was 31 percent in October 2003. Some 26 percent of high school graduates not enrolled in college were unemployed in fall 2003, up from 17 percent a year earlier. SnagAJob.com, which describes itself as the nation's largest site for part-time and hourly jobs, said job postings increased fourfold from 2003 to 2004. Much of that increase is a result of rising difficulty in finding good hourly employees, said Shawn Boyer, the chief executive. Many companies have recently begun reaching out to prospective employees in a variety of ways -- direct-mail campaigns, fliers, in-store signs and Web-enabled kiosks. In October, the Container Store -- which tracks how frequently customers shop and what they buy -- sent out 100,000 invitations to those deemed enthusiastic about gift wrap to recruit them for its Gift Wrap Wonderland department. REI, a nationwide retail cooperative that sells recreational equipment, sent e-mail postcards to its members in seven market areas this year, inviting them to apply for employment in recently opened stores. ''There is more competition than there used to be for hourly employees,'' said Anna McGough, the company's retail hiring manager. ''We've really accelerated our customer recruiting efforts in tougher markets like those on the East Coast, where we are less well known.'' Several companies, like Kmart, Target, Circuit City and Albertsons, have begun using Web-enabled kiosks where customers can apply for a job on the spot. Target has kiosks in all 1,313 stores; six months ago Kmart installed them in 400 stores -- including both Manhattan locations -- and plans more in 2005. ''We have potential candidates coming in the stores every day, so it made sense to set up a system where it would be easy for customers to shop and then put in an application for employment,'' said David Whipple, senior vice president for associate relations for Kmart. Mr. Sullivan, the consultant, advises job seekers interested in working at a favorite business to read what has been written about that company's management practices, observe how employees behave and ask them if they like their jobs. ''If a hotel worker tells you, 'This is a great place to work,' it's probably a great place to work,'' he said.
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Stores Find Good Workers Among Devoted Customers
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slept with one another.'' The contemporary attitude toward homosexuality was, to put it mildly, schizoid. ''Love between men was intrinsic to the humanist educational program. Yet the medieval-Christian impulse to demonize homosexual acts persisted regardless. . . . The law too was equivocal on this issue.'' And what of atheism? In a paper, Richard Baines, a former roommate turned enemy of Marlowe's, summed up for the Privy Council an atheist lecture Marlowe may have presented to Sir Walter Raleigh's group of alleged atheists, who, among other naughty things, spelled the name of God backward. The poet asserted that Moses was a juggler who could easily fool the gullible Jews, that Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest. Also that he, Marlowe, could come up pronto with a much better religion than the filthily written New Testament. Further, that St. John the Evangelist was Christ's bedfellow, who used him as the sinners of Sodom, and that they who loved not tobacco and boys were fools. Moreover, that he had as good a right to coin money as the queen. These and similar charges leveled at Marlowe by several others are cited over and over again in Riggs's book, such repetitiousness being one of its few flaws. No doubt Marlowe's ideas about religion and hedonism were derived from the Cambridge curriculum. He had fallen for Ovid's sensual poetry (which he also translated) and the Epicurean philosophy of Lucretius, as well as for hard-nosed history from Polybius and Livy. Virgil was another influence, and it was in seeking an English measure to match the Latin hexameters that he adapted Sackville and Norton's iambic pentameter from their clumsy play ''Gorboduc'' and created the powerful yet flexible blank verse that Ben Jonson dubbed ''Marlowe's mighty line.'' When he left university and had to make a living, Marlowe gravitated toward espionage for the Privy Council and writing for the stage. The two were hardly antithetical. Many playwrights -- including George Gascoigne, Thomas Watson, Anthony Munday, Samuel Daniel and Ben Jonson -- espoused them both. As Riggs notes, ''The plots and counterplots of this era taught Marlowe that spies and scriptwriters had a lot in common.'' It was at the written request of the Privy Council that Marlowe got his M.A. -- by that time, he had often played hooky, mostly on the Council's behalf, employed as he was by them ''in matters touching the benefit
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A Brawler and a Spy
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in person, and half met via video link in order to test the efficiency of telemedicine -- that is, seeing a doctor, nurse or nutritionist remotely. (All participants came to the lab in person.) Starr County has 15 physicians; the ratio of residents to doctors is 3,412 to 1. (The statewide ratio is 661 to 1.) There are no behavioral therapists or pediatric dietitians in Starr County. The nearest pediatric endocrinologist lives about 70 miles from Rio Grande City. One of the first things Visio did when she started the Diabetes Risk Reduction via Community-Based Telemedicine program, or Dirrect, in Starr County was to analyze the food served in the Rio Grande City Consolidated Independent School District, where all children receive both free breakfast and free lunch; so many qualified that it was easier just to serve everybody. The food service is run by Edna Ramon, who is 80 years old and began her job nearly two generations ago when malnutrition, not obesity, was the district's main problem. Ramon still talks about her memories of the dry hair and bony hands she saw on the children in the district in those early days. Visio analyzed Ramon's menus and quickly established that with breakfasts containing as many as 600 calories and lunches with 800, every child was on track to gain at least nine pounds during the school year. In addition, children were drinking huge quantities of sugary drinks -- sodas, fruit drinks and sports drinks -- which they bought from vending machines and at convenience stores and also drank at home. In the two months between her first two visits -- between initially screening the children and starting the program itself -- the children gained an average of two pounds. Visio also found at the outset that 13 percent of the prekindergarten and 18 percent of the kindergarten students she screened had acanthosis nigricans, a disorder characterized by dark, thick patches on the skin. Acanthosis nigricans can signal insulin resistance, warning of diabetes, a disease in which the body does not produce or properly use insulin. Insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas, controls the level of sugar in the body and helps the body use glucose as fuel. Excess fat tissue and insufficient muscle, which come from a lack of exercise, predispose a person to diabetes. Left untreated, diabetes can lead to blindness and loss of limbs; many of
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Heavy Questions
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To the Editor: Cuba has the lowest infection rate for AIDS in the hemisphere (''Cuba Counters Prostitution With AIDS Programs,'' news article, Dec. 26) because of a sound public health policy developed over the last two decades of this global epidemic. Cuba's very low infection rate can be traced back to the 1980's, when Cuban soldiers returned from Angola with a sexually transmitted disease that was subsequently identified as AIDS. Cuba imposed routine H.I.V. testing for all of its citizens, the military and all social groups, including prostitutes. Cuba recognized early on that the most important factor in preventing H.I.V.-AIDS was to treat it like every other infectious disease by carrying out universal routine H.I.V. testing, confidential name reporting to public health officials and mandatory partner notification, with treatment for all those infected. Few things in Cuba are good these days, but the Cuban approach to controlling H.I.V.-AIDS is excellent. Sanford F. Kuvin, M.D. Palm Beach, Fla., Dec. 26, 2004 The writer is founder and chairman of the Sanford Kuvin Center for Infectious Diseases at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Cuba and AIDS
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top prize of more than $1.87 million, all while sailing to Puerto Vallarta and Mazatlán, Mexico, on the PartyPoker.com Million IV tournament cruise. The seven-day Holland America cruise sails from San Diego on March 19. Most spots are reserved for those who qualify online through www.partypoker.com, but a limited number are available for those who wish to buy into the tournament for a fee of $10,500 a person; an additional fee for a double cabin for two people, including accommodations, port charges and food, starts at $2,200. Information: (888) 999-4880; www.cardplayercruises.com. HISTORY AMERICA TOURS -- Since 1991, History America has been taking people ''where history happened,'' as its motto puts it, organizing small-size and informative cruises, often led by guest historian guides. This group doesn't charter entire ships, but signs on with smaller ships that agree to try to accommodate History America's itineraries on their cruises. Groups tend to be around 30 to 40 people. ''On average we take up about a quarter of the vessel's passengers,'' said the group's president, Julia Brown. ''Typically the way we work it, is that our historian -- the onboard lectures that he gives are open to everyone onboard. But then we have very specific shore tours just for our participants.'' Trips include ''War in the Pacific: Through the Solomons to Rabaul,'' March 28 to April 12, led by the historian Edwin C. Bearss. It departs from Sydney, Australia, at rates starting at $6,730 a person in double occupancy, not including onboard charges and tips; ''Journey to the Czars: A Cruise Into the Russian Past,'' June 12 to 25, departing from Moscow, $1,595 and up. Information: (800) 628-8542; www.historyamerica.com. BARE NECESSITIES TOUR AND TRAVEL -- The Web site of this group says it seeks to provide a safe, comfortable environment for people to hang out naked, and works to ''dispel the misconception that nudity, per se, is sexual or exploitive.'' Upon clicking ''enter,'' however, after reading the entire moral and legal disclaimer (of course), you had better make sure your boss isn't looking over your shoulder as you glance over the site's images -- full of exotic locales and plenty of bronzed bodies that haven't yet suffered gravity's effects too gravely. From Aug. 3 to 13, the group offers ''The Adriatic and the Royal Clipper,'' a cruise in a real clipper ship -- sails and all -- beginning in Venice, then proceeding to ports
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Poker Nuts and Nudists, Come Aboard
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with constantly evolving technological innovations, like ball bearings, lighter speed frames and tubing in the front forks. But because of its unwieldy size, it was prone to accidents that plagued even the hearty athletes who rode it (Herlihy notes Mark Twain's arduous, perilous and funny efforts to master the high wheel recounted in his essay ''Taming the Bicycle''). After the limited success of the high wheel in the 1870's came the ''safety'' era -- the development of the bicycle style that is the most direct ancestor of our present bicycle. Safety came in the size of the bike: two wheels of equal size powered by pedals connected to a chain that propelled the rear wheel. Unlike the perilous high-wheeler, the new style was close to the ground and easy to ride. Herlihy is at his best weaving together the technical improvements that made this machine so desirable (the pneumatic tire and the diamond frame, to name just two) and the social changes that resulted from its widespread acceptance (in 1895 alone, one million riders across American society became cyclists). I was particularly taken with the details of how the components that grace our contemporary machines -- including wire spokes, tire and rim refinements, the freewheel, coaster and hand brakes, planetary gears and derailleurs -- were developed. Herlihy's prodigious research is always entertaining, as are the period illustrations that copiously grace the volume. There are bicycle tales, like an account from Bicycling World in 1908 about Harvard's septuagenarian president, Charles W. Eliot, who cycled the several miles between his home and his office: ''Every clear morning'' Eliot ''jumps on his bicycle . . . like a boy in his teens.'' Theodore Roosevelt, New York's police commissioner, commented in 1896 on the ''extraordinary proficiency'' of the department's squad of cyclists. And we learn that the bicycle was instrumental in the early technologies of the automobile and the airplane: the pioneer automakers Henry Ford and Charles Duryea were bicycle mechanics, and the Wright brothers, who had a bicycle repair shop in Dayton, Ohio, used bicycle parts like chains and ball bearings in the Wright Flyer, which they built in their bike shop. While reading ''Bicycle,'' I was all too often overcome with the desire to jump on my own machine. I would relish having David V. Herlihy as my cycling companion any day. Edward Koren is a longtime artist for The New Yorker.
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It Is About the Bike
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is a nightmare scenario: defenders of population growth ''nonchalantly'' mention ''adding 'only' 2.5 billion more people . . . as if that were acceptable.'' Population growth has made Los Angeles ''less appealing,'' especially owing to traffic: ''I have never met an Angeleno (and very few people anywhere in the world) who personally expressed a desire for increased population.'' About the only nonaboriginal society Diamond has kind words for is pre-Meiji Japan, where population control was strictly enforced. But wait -- pre-Meiji Japan collapsed! If 2.5 billion more people are not ''acceptable,'' how, exactly, would Diamond prevent their births? He does not say. Nuclear war, plague, a comet strike or coerced mass sterilizations seem the only forces that might stop the human population from rising to its predicted peak. Everyone dislikes traffic jams and other aspects of population density, but people are here and cannot be wished away; the challenge is to manage social pressure and create enough jobs until the population peak arrives. And is it really an ''impossibility'' for developing-world living standards to reach the Western level? A century ago, rationalists would have called global consumption of 78 million barrels per day of petroleum an impossibility, and that's the latest figure. If trends remain unchanged, the global economy is unsustainable. But the Fallacy of Uninterrupted Trends tells us patterns won't remain unchanged. For instance, deforestation of the United States, rampant in the 19th century, has stopped: forested acreage of the country began rising during the 20th century, and is still rising. Why? Wood is no longer a primary fuel, while high-yield agriculture allowed millions of acres to be retired from farming and returned to trees. Today wood is a primary fuel in the developing world, so deforestation is acute; but if developing nations move on to other energy sources, forest cover will regrow. If the West changes from fossil fuel to green power, its worst resource trend will not continue uninterrupted. Though Diamond endorses ''cautious optimism,'' ''Collapse'' comes to a wary view of the human prospect. Diamond fears our fate was set in motion in antiquity -- we're living off the soil and petroleum bequeathed by the far past, and unless there are profound changes in behavior, all may crash when legacy commodities run out. Oddly, for someone with a background in evolutionary theory, he seems not to consider society's evolutionary arc. He thinks backward 13,000 years, forward only
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There Goes the Neighborhood
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A thaw in the frosty relations between Europe and Cuba gathered speed after Cuba reopened official contacts with the embassies of eight European nations on Monday, including France, Britain and Germany, Reuters reported. Relations have been tense since the European Union began pressing Cuba to free dissidents jailed in March 2003. Last year the European embassies began inviting opponents of the government of Fidel Castro to their diplomatic cocktail parties, and Cuba cut off relations with them. Spain, which has extensive investments in Cuba, worked to broker a truce between Mr. Castro and European leaders. President Castro released 14 of the 75 jailed dissidents, and a European Union panel recommended this month that the practice of inviting dissidents to parties be dropped in favor of more discreet contacts. James C. McKinley Jr. (NYT)
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World Briefing | Americas: Cuba: Diplomatic Deadlock With Europeans Over
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Marcos Velasco, a 32-year-old Brazilian software developer, enjoys movies with special effects, maintains a vast collection of antique computers in his home and is the proud father of two young children and one mobile phone virus, which he named after himself: Velasco. Computer security experts around the world have given his virus and its variants more toxic-sounding names like ''Lasco.A,'' ''Symbos--Vlasco.A'' or simply ''the Lasco virus.'' They are also calling it stupid. ''We think he's dangerous,'' said Mikko Hypponen, the director of antivirus research for a Finnish company, F-Secure, ''because he publicly posts working mobile malware that any clown anywhere can easily download and use.'' Mr. Velasco's creation is essentially a piece of computer code that takes advantage of the short-range radio frequency technology called Bluetooth, which is installed on many common handheld devices, especially cellphones. If a person carrying an infected phone passes someone carrying a Bluetooth phone on the street, Mr. Velasco's worm can jump the gap, infecting the second phone. He does not spread the virus -- technically a worm, according to some computer security experts, that has the ability to reproduce itself and does not need a host program -- but he is evidently happy to share his work. ''This worm for cellular phones is the first one with available source code in the world,'' his Web site declares. Whether anyone beyond antivirus researchers has downloaded Mr. Velasco's program is an unanswered question, and industry experts are careful to say that the age of the cellphone virus is not yet upon us. But Mr. Velasco's virus, which appears to do little harm, points not just to the inevitability of more virulent ones aimed at cellphones and other mobile devices, but also to a virus-writing subculture unfazed by multimillion-dollar bounties, international prosecution and an official inclination, after the attacks of September 2001, to characterize virus writers as terrorists. For Mr. Velasco -- as with many virus enthusiasts who operate in a murky area of the law -- the objective is not malice, but about testing theories, solving puzzles or just free expression. From his home in Volta Redonda, a steel-making city west of Rio de Janeiro, Mr. Velasco runs a small software development company, dotes on his collection of 104 aging computers (which he says he may open to the public one day), and dreams of writing a book on viruses. ''Security, hacking and viruses are all
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A Virus Writer Tests the Limits In Cellphones
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index is saying this is reality. The reality is that ours is an economy that will be very productive on the high end but not necessarily this big job generator.'' The main culprit, Mr. Hancock said, has not been that jobs have migrated to countries where labor is cheaper, as one might have expected, but that productivity gains have enabled companies to do more with less. ''Offshoring has always been part of the Silicon Valley story, back to the 70's,'' Mr. Hancock said. ''Today it's Taiwan and China and India, but back then it was the Japanese. What we do in Silicon Valley is innovate, things become a commodity, and so it's moved offshore while we continue to do the design and innovation.'' Increasingly, those high-end jobs can be found in the health and medical fields, the report found. ''The local economy is creating these dynamic new clusters in areas like biotech, the biomedical industry, bioinformatics, health care and at the intersection of bio with information technology,'' Mr. Hancock said. ''That seems to be where the job generation is.'' The report's authors cautioned against drawing conclusions that were too negative. If comparing present-day Silicon Valley to 2000, things look grim by nearly every measure, as the area has seen a steep decline in everything from jobs to venture capital to funding for the arts and municipal services. But if the comparison year is 1998, just before the dot-com phenomenon spun out of control, ''then we seem to have returned to similar levels of performance, and embarked on a new period of incremental growth,'' according to the report's authors. The study also found that 40 percent of the regional population is foreign-born, up from 32 percent in 2000. ''I'd say it's not bad news coming out of Silicon Valley, but we have our challenges,'' Mr. Hancock said. Primary among those concerns is what he called the ''Manhattan effect.'' ''Our worry is that Silicon Valley becomes this world center for people working on innovative enterprises who can afford to live here, but at the same time people who want and need to be here find that ours has turned into an economy that's not robust in terms of the middle,'' he said. That day hasn't arrived yet, Mr. Hancock said, but the study found that housing is so expensive that ''it's difficult to retain young talent, teachers and service professionals.'' New Economy
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Silicon Valley is flush with cash, so why are job and income numbers there still lagging?
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Countries from Northern and Central Europe and South America dominated the top spots in the 2005 index of environmental sustainability, which ranks nations on their success at such tasks as maintaining or improving air and water quality, maximizing biodiversity and cooperating with other countries on environmental problems. Finland, Norway and Uruguay held the top three spots in the ranking, prepared by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities. The United States ranked 45th of the 146 countries studied, behind such countries as Japan, Botswana and the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and most of Western Europe. The lowest-ranking country was North Korea. Among those near the bottom were Haiti, Taiwan, Iraq and Kuwait. The index is the second produced in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. The first complete index, in 2002, produced outrage and soul-searching in lower-ranking countries like Belgium and South Korea, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report. The report is based on 75 measures, including the rate at which children die from respiratory diseases, fertility rates, water quality, overfishing, emission of heat-trapping gases and the export of sodium dioxide, a crucial component of acid rain. In its opening chapter, the Environmental Sustainability Index report said: ''Although imperfect, the E.S.I. helps to fill a long-existing gap in environmental performance evaluation. It offers a small step toward a more vigorous and quantitative approach to environmental decision making.'' The report also cited a statistically significant correlation between high-ranking countries and countries with open political systems and effective governments. The report's flaws stem largely from inadequate data, Mr. Esty said, adding that the ranking system is at best approximate, because some individual scores had to be imputed in many cases. But he said that data might improve in coming years. He also said a system that rated Russia, whose populated western regions have undergone extraordinary environmental degradation, as having greater environmental sustainability than the United States had inherent weaknesses. At 33, Russia's ranking, Mr. Esty said, is in large part a consequence of the country's vast size. While it ''has terrible pollution problems'' in the western industrial heartland, he said, its millions of unsettled or sparsely settled acres of Asian taiga mean ''it has vast, untrammeled resources and more clean water than anywhere in the world.'' So, he added, ''on
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Nations Ranked as Protectors of the Environment
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To the Editor: Re ''Oil Find Hints at a Less Dependent Cuba'' (Business Day, Jan. 11): I have just returned from Cuba as a member of a delegation of religious leaders and university students through Make a Difference, a humanitarian service organization. Most of Cuba's citizens are poor. Cuba has the potential to improve its quality of life by exporting oil. The necessity for and the potential economic gain from Cuba's oil production will influence the United States to consider negotiating a new relationship with Cuba. We will need the support of Cuba and other countries with mutual interests in Cuba in this effort. We will also have to address healing old wounds and reconciling some of our political differences with Cuba. This will benefit the cause of peace, stability in the region and security among nations, particularly those of the Americas. Frederick J. Streets Chaplain, Yale University New Haven, Jan. 11, 2005
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A New Tone on Cuba?
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to promote a grandly imagined history for his city of Viterbo. ''His intertwining of archaeological artifacts, inscriptions, manuscripts, local topography and well-known ancient sources not only proved difficult to untangle,'' Rowland writes. ''It also set the standard for all subsequent antiquarian writing, sincere as well as counterfeit.'' Curzio, who may have begun his jape as a satire on Annius, became in time his imitator, doing for Volterra what Annius had done for Viterbo. As time went one, he had little choice in the matter. Relatives and friends took up his cause so fervently that he could not let them down by revealing the truth. Scholars who attacked the scarith were vilified. One (Vincenzo Noghera) was threatened with a lawsuit that would reveal his unsavory past as a Portuguese spy. Another (Paganino Gaudenzio) had his chair at a Tuscan university imperiled. A third (Leone Allacci) was mocked for his crude polemical style. But Tuscan loyalty did not have an endless reach. Curzio's defenders hoped for sympathy from a Florentine (Medici) pope, Urban VIII. Galileo had made the same miscalculation. In the Rome of long knives, a bright and bitter Jesuit, Melchior Inchofer, teamed up with other critics to make a savage attack under the pseudonym Durkhundurk (''Through-and-Through'') on every aspect of the scarith. The demolition was thorough. ''Prospero'' wrote on paper; the Etruscans wrote on linen. Prospero wrote from left to right; the Etruscans wrote in the other direction. Prospero wrote in the hand of Curzio himself. Finally (though this was not known till later), some of Prospero's papers had a ''modern'' watermark. Inchofer, who had examined and denounced Curzio's fellow Tuscan, Galileo, won as clear a victory against Curzio himself. The odd thing is that Inchofer had first made his name defending a fraudulent document, a letter of the Virgin Mary written to the city of Messina. This loose-cannon Jesuit went on, eventually, to attack his own order, for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment ''in a remote Jesuit house where, like many an inconvenient Jesuit in those troubled times, he was quietly assassinated in 1649.'' Curzio's fraud had only a brief time of fame; but the men who attacked it were almost as vulnerable, on several grounds, as the fake documents themselves. Rowland, in this dazzling piece of scholarship, gives Curzio the last laugh. His was a fertile fakery: ''The rapid increase in knowledge about the Etruscans during
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The Scarith Awakens
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and expect rewards for performance. The professional ethic gives employees more freedom, flexibility and respect, but it also gives them more responsibility for their destinies. ''Parachute'' is a job-hunting guide for believers in the professional ethic. It starts from an understanding that the employment relationship is an exchange, not an entitlement. A successful job applicant is not someone who simply needs a job, but someone who can solve an employer's problems. ''You want the employer to see you as a potential Resource Person for that organization, rather than as simply A Job Beggar,'' Bolles writes in the 2005 edition. Instead of telling readers to send out résumés and answer ads, ''Parachute'' advises them how to look for the hidden jobs, the ones employers may not even have created yet, the ones that truly match their talents and desires. Most jobs are never advertised, Bolles reminds us, and résumé screeners are usually trying to eliminate candidates. The book encourages informational interviews, which help job hunters learn about occupations and workplaces and provide employers a low-risk way of getting to know potential hires. Over the years, ''Parachute'' has grown like a ramshackle house, adding resources, fine points, numbered lists of tips, personality tests and advice for job-hunting on the Internet. The essential argument is clearest in the original edition, which sums up the job-hunting plan in three marching orders: ''You must decide just exactly what you want to do,'' ''You must decide just exactly where you want to do it, through your own research and personal survey'' and, the key through all editions, ''You must research the organizations that interest you at great length, and then approach the one individual in each organization who has the power to hire you for the job that you have decided you want to do.'' All this hard work, and the many written exercises that accompany the research, understandably turn off some readers. '' 'Parachute' convinced me that getting a decent job was such a fearsomely difficult task that only the extremely lucky or the extremely clever or the well-connected could get one,'' said one librarian who read the book as a teenager in 1987. ''If jobs were plentiful and easy to come by, one wouldn't have to go through all the incomprehensible rigmarole the book had one go through.'' Bolles repeatedly declares that job-hunting is hard work -- ''the most difficult task any of us
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The Book of Jobs
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A lot of weight rests on the shoulders of a boy who does not have the strength to stand on his own. Daniel J.S. Kim, 12, is the only son of Dong Kyu Kim, 53, and Chun Jan Kim, 47, who immigrated from South Korea 20 years ago to make their home in Flushing, Queens. ''Especially in our culture, it is quite a distinction. The oldest son should take care of the family, the parents, bring them into their home,'' explained the Rev. Danny Kim, no relation, pastor of the Full Gospel New York Church in Queens, who interpreted for Mr. and Mrs. Kim. But it is not solely his status as their oldest and only son that sets Daniel apart. ''He can't take even one step,'' Mrs. Kim said. Daniel must use a wheelchair. When he was a toddler, his difficulty standing led to a diagnosis of muscular dystrophy. ''He was able to walk when he was about 4 years old,'' Mr. Kim explained. ''As he got older, his body got heavier, but his muscle strength stayed the same.'' At home, even Daniel's wheeled mobility is limited. ''The house is not handicapped-accessible,'' Mr. Kim said. At school, Daniel uses an automated wheelchair to get around. But that chair stays at school, along with the relative freedom it affords him. The chair is simply too big and heavy to get it past the front door of the Kims' home. At home Daniel typically uses a manual wheelchair, though he does not have the strength to push himself. And even it can't go everywhere. ''Living here is difficult,'' said Mr. Kim. ''The bathroom is really small. We have to carry him.'' Daniel's body is weak, but his mind is not. He is a seventh grader at the Henry Viscardi School, a state-supported school in Nassau County for physically disabled students with high academic performance, and as a report card from last semester shows, he's a straight-A student. But as Daniel continued to excel in school, his parents felt a growing sense of worry. They feared that as he pushed forward academically, the limitations of their home might begin to hold him back. At home, Daniel did not have a usable computer. He wrote his homework by hand, no small feat because of his condition. ''It is difficult for him to write. It takes him a really long time to write just
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The Neediest Cases; For an Only Son, Burdens Beyond Family Expectation
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groundskeeper. Salaries are also no longer paltry, either: full professors earned, on average, $88,591 and associate professors $63,063 in the 2003-04 school year, according to the American Association of University Professors. Still, human resources departments view the tuition benefit, which is tax free, as an essential tool to recruit and retain employees and compete with private-sector salaries. In these days of sky-high tuition and competitive admissions requirements, the perks for faculty children have become even more coveted. Stanford University cut its tuition benefits by more than half in 1999 but rescinded the policy after deeming the benefit too valuable a recruitment tool. When the University of Pennsylvania tried to scale back its tuition benefit for employees by excluding graduate programs, the ensuing protests led the administration to cut the benefit only for recent hires. The dean of admissions, Lee Stetson, estimates that 60 freshmen out of a class of 2,400 receive a tuition waiver of 75 percent as dependents of faculty and staff. ''They're part of the university family,'' he says, ''so we try to do our best to maximize the number we can admit, assuming that they're qualified.'' Despite fiscal pressures stemming from state budget cuts, many public colleges and universities continue to offer employee dependents some kind of a break. The University of Pittsburgh pays full tuition. The California State University system waives about half its undergraduate tuition. In addition to breaks for faculty dependents at their own campuses, most private universities subsidize the education of faculty and staff children who attend other colleges. Brown University, for example, covers $10,000 of its own $29,200 tuition for children of employees and offers a matching cash credit for use at other colleges. And some universities belong to consortiums that arrange reciprocal tuition waivers. Stephen Loomis, a professor of biology at Connecticut College, in New London, has two children taking advantage of such an arrangement. His daughter attends Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., and his son is at Champlain College in Burlington, Vt. The tuition tab for both, which comes to more than $40,000 a year, is waived because Connecticut College is a member of a consortium allowing it to send children of its employees to member colleges in exchange for accepting other faculty and staff children to its own campus. For Professor Loomis, free tuition has been a major incentive to remain at Connecticut College. ''I was asked to apply
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The Other Legacies: Fac Brats
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even believe in this.' It took me a long time to come to peace with it.'' Today, every Tuesday and Thursday, he teaches 1,000 students. First he delivers one lecture to more than 500 students at 11 a.m., then he repeats the lecture at 12:30 p.m. word for word. What changed his mind was the realization that for students, being part of such an enormous gathering fosters ''a certain bonding experience.'' The reason is ''what economists call 'economies of scope': a shared experience that allows students to discuss topics at mealtime and in dorms with classmates who encountered the same ideas that same day.'' ''I'm not a Luddite,'' he adds. But with online communication or videotaped lectures, Mr. Elzinga feels the talks wouldn't have the same impact: ''What's lost is this camaraderie of the classroom that somehow seems to be a positive experience for a lot of students here.'' Ms. Oblinger offers another defense: ''Some faculty are wonderful performers.'' An example from the Program in Course Redesign itself reinforces this observation. The University of New Mexico's report on its experiences says that the decision of the school to eliminate two of three weekly lectures by a popular associate professor in psychology was met with ''considerable, sustained student protest.'' The university relented, reinstating one of the lectures. It's an example that speaks to a reason beyond the pedagogic or the economic -- beyond reason, even. The lecture format might lend itself to a flat classroom and a fleet of laptops. But what about the lecturer -- that eminent presence planted at the front of the room, dispensing depths of knowledge in the very voice of authority, commanding attention with a display of erudition that is nothing if not theater? It would be difficult to imagine a Vladimir Nabokov pacing among a bunch of seven-foot-diameter tables, occasionally consenting to interrupt his literary discourse long enough to lean forward and offer interactivity. As far as Mr. Elzinga and even Ms. Oblinger are concerned, we shouldn't have to. A Socrates practicing his method, however, might be a different story. In the idle moments between grant applications, this is what Ms. Twigg envisions: a contemporary version of the ancient Greek navigating a sea of laptops, soliciting questions, and perhaps, even from freshmen, eliciting wisdom. Oh, yes: and saving money. Richard Panek is author of ''The Invisible Century: Einstein, Freud and the Search for Hidden Universes.''
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101 Redefined
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are less adept than their American counterparts at selling themselves aggressively. Danielle Hopkins, assistant director of international graduate career development at the Fisher College of Business, said foreign students must work harder to achieve the same goals as domestic students. While internships are always important, she said, they are especially crucial for international graduates. An internship that allows an employer to appreciate a student's talent increases the chance that the organization will sponsor that student for a temporary work visa. She advises students to be flexible about returning home if finding work in the United States is not possible. Globalization is making that a more palatable option, said Allan E. Goodman, president and chief executive of the Institute of International Education. Mr. Goodman said that Chinese and Indian students were finding it easier and more desirable to return home after graduating from American universities. Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, has established a big presence in China and is seeking to recruit American-educated Chinese who speak Mandarin and are interested in returning home. The firm continues to interview international students but does not track how many it hires, said Dan Black, a recruiting leader for Ernst & Young's Americas practice. Mr. Black said the decline in work visas had made it crucial for his organization and foreign students to start the paperwork six months earlier than in the past. This year, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services filled the 65,000-worker visa quota on Oct. 1, the first day of the new fiscal year. Mr. Black said that Ernst & Young treated all job candidates with respect, but some international students have said they felt that other organizations did not always do the same. ''I don't know if they feel they're being treated outwardly hostile, but there's a subtext that those with Middle Eastern names aren't really being considered,'' Ms. Steinfeld of N.Y.U. said. ''It's a reality that like most of the population, recruiters are more suspicious of Middle Eastern-sounding names.'' Shafaq Khan, 20, a Columbia University sophomore, agrees with that assessment. Reared in Saudi Arabia but a graduate of an American high school, she is a naturalized citizen (her father is an American citizen) and thus does not have to be concerned with frustrating visa issues. She is planning to become an investment banker and is searching for an internship with a small venture capital firm. In the process,
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U.S. Jobs Becoming Scarcer For Students From Abroad
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has been a particularly troublesome division for P.A.G., as the luxury group is known. In a worldwide market glutted with millions more cars than there are buyers, financial analysts see Ford's projections as ambitious. At the same time, Ford will have to make more money in its automotive unit if it expects to reach its goals. Ford Credit, the company's financing division and a crucial profit engine, is expecting earnings to fall at least 25 percent this year as interest rates rise and the division scales back some businesses. For both Ford and General Motors, lending money to car buyers has been more lucrative than selling the cars. ''We believe this improvement in automotive earnings is crucial to the company's ongoing turnaround,'' said John Casesa, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, in a note to investors Tuesday. ''However, significant improvement from the P.A.G. will be difficult to achieve given that troubled Jaguar has been a persistent money loser.'' Ford was more optimistic than G.M. was in its 2005 forecast earlier this month -- G.M. is projecting a steeper decline in earnings this year and pushed back its mid-decade goals. Ford executives said Tuesday that they expect pretax operating profit of $5 billion to $5.7 billion this year, compared with $5.8 billion last year. That projection was in line with what analysts had been expecting. Ford shares rose 16 cents, or 1.22 percent, to $13.23. Ford and G.M., the last two predominantly American-owned automakers, have been struggling to compete against Asian and European rivals. Both have been losing market share despite heavy spending on rebates, and both are weighed down by soaring health care and pension costs. Standard & Poor's has the debt of Ford and G.M. rated one notch above junk bonds, a precarious position for two of the largest corporate borrowers. Last week, Ford said its net earnings for last year, after tax and special items, was $3.49 billion, up substantially from its performance in recent years but still modest by the standards of competitors like Toyota. Mr. Ford has sought to focus the company on trying to make compelling cars and trucks and selling or leaving ancillary businesses. In the United States, the company has been augmenting the offerings from its three longtime brands -- Ford, Mercury and Lincoln. This year, it will offer three Ford, Mercury and Lincoln midsize sedans, entering a market dominated by Honda and Toyota.
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Ford Says '05 Earnings Will Fall, but It Still Expects to Make Money Making Cars
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watered down too much during the building process. ''It's quite amazing that they chose it, because there are several risks, both from a building point of view and an image point of view,'' said Hanno Rauterberg, architecture critic of Die Zeit, the German weekly. ''The bank's image is one of stability and solidity, but Coop Himmelb(l)au likes to say that good architecture has to burn,'' he said. ''It shows how over time, the avant-garde has gone mainstream.'' Founded in 1968, Coop Himmelb(l)au -- the name translates roughly as Blue Sky Collaborative -- has designed museums in the Netherlands and in Akron, Ohio, and a customer delivery center for BMW in Munich. It is best known for an apartment tower in Vienna and an ultramodern cinema in Dresden. Despite the firm's self-consciously hip image, its managing partner, Wolf D. Prix, said he was confident that Coop Himmelb(l)au's design would prevail over the two rival, more conventional designs -- one by a German firm, the other a joint submission by German and Malaysian firms. ''Our design is not only functional, it is an emotional skyscraper,'' Mr. Prix said in a telephone interview from Vienna. ''It will be an icon for the European community in the new century.'' For all its success as an economic venture, the European Union has yet to produce much memorable architecture. Its administrative offices in Brussels are housed in drab blocks. The bank's headquarters are in a leased Frankfurt tower that is lost next to its more swaggering neighbor, the Commerzbank tower, designed by the British architect Norman Foster. Frankfurt's leaders lobbied vigorously for the new design. They worried that the European Central Bank was leaning toward the second of the three finalists, a Berlin-based firm, ASP Schweger Assoziierte, for cost reasons. The bank has suffered losses recently because of the decline of the dollar against the euro. In an interview last fall, Frankfurt's director of planning, Edwin Schwarz, said the Coop Himmelb(l)au design would be a ''landmark, an eye-catcher, that would give the E.C.B. a worldwide image.'' City officials were not available for comment on Thursday. Mr. Prix disputed reports that the Himmelb(l)au design was much more expensive that the other two finalists, saying that notion was planted by rivals during the competition for the commission. German newspapers have reported that the building could cost up to 700 million euros ($924 million). Frankfurt has taken a keen
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Europe's Ambitious Bank Picks a Bold Design
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hoodwink parishioners into believing that policies remained unchanging despite the fact that sanctions may not be enforced. Lutherans Concerned, a group that seeks greater acceptance of gays in the church, contended that the recommendations did not go far enough to dispel the punitive atmosphere around issues of homosexuality. ''We were dismayed and deeply saddened by the recommendations because we felt they perpetuate a system of selective discrimination of gays and lesbians in the Lutheran church,'' said Emily Eastwood, the group's executive director. The Lutheran Church's efforts to negotiate a compromise come at a time when other mainline Protestant denominations have been roiled by disputes over the acceptance of gay clergy members. Recently, the United Methodist Church defrocked a minister in Pennsylvania who had admitted to being in a long-term lesbian relationship. She is appealing the decision. The Episcopal Church USA is also wrestling with the issue of homosexuality. The Episcopal bishops met in Salt Lake City on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss how to respond to what is known as the Windsor Report. It was produced last fall by an international committee of church leaders trying to reconcile the conflict over homosexuality in the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which the Episcopal Church is the American affiliate. The rift deepened in 2003 when the Episcopal Church ordained an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire, and several church provinces in Africa, Asia and Latin America threatened to break ties with the Americans. The Windsor Report called on the Episcopal Church to declare a ''moratorium'' on ordaining bishops living in gay relationships and to halt public ''rites of blessing'' for same-sex unions. The American bishops said yesterday that they did not have enough time in Utah to reach agreement on those recommendations. However, as the Windsor Report called for, they issued a statement expressing their ''sincere regret for the pain, the hurt, and the damage caused to our Anglican bonds by certain actions of our church.'' The presiding bishop, Frank Griswold, said from Salt Lake City, ''We perhaps have not been the most sensitive partners in terms of taking with full seriousness the integrity of other provinces and their struggles.'' Correction: January 15, 2005, Saturday An article yesterday about the policies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America toward gay men and lesbians referred imprecisely to its stance on ordaining them. The church indeed accepts gay clergy members, but they must remain celibate.
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Lutherans Recommend Tolerance On Gay Policy
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yuan more expensive against the dollar would mean that American exporters to China, like Boeing, could sell more goods. Importers like Wal-Mart would have to pay more for the toys, clothes and other goods they buy. That would give Wal-Mart and others an incentive to import from other nations, or even use American suppliers. Yet executives in many industries say that China's competitive advantages are so great that even the largest increase in the yuan that Beijing might approve this year, perhaps 10 percent, would not significantly cut into the American trade deficit with China. Indeed, revaluation is likely to increase the deficit for months and perhaps years, by immediately driving up the already considerable cost of what the United States imports from China. A stronger yuan would give a boost to American companies exporting to China because their goods would become cheaper here. But the United States now buys nearly five times as much from China as China does from the United States. So the gains from a rise in the smaller amount of exports are likely to be overwhelmed by the much higher cost of the larger amount of imports. Alan G. Hassenfeld, the chairman of Hasbro, said that a revaluation of 3 percent to 5 percent this spring seems most likely. But that degree of change would not prompt toymakers to look seriously at moving production to lower-wage countries like Vietnam or India. Chinese toy factories, he said, had a big advantage over factories elsewhere in the quality and dedication of their workers and managers. Even a 25 percent increase in the value of the yuan, which few say they expect, would still allow many toymakers to export a wide range of products from China successfully. An increase that big would probably prompt manufacturers to move some of their bulkiest products, like car-racing sets, to countries closer to the United States to save on shipping costs, Mr. Hassenfeld said. ''You wouldn't run,'' he said, ''but you would take some items and move them back to a Mexico'' or some other nearby country. Companies, like toymakers, that use a lot of Chinese labor are the most likely to be affected by a stronger yuan. That is because the workers are paid in yuan, and wages are already rising in China -- even without an appreciating yuan. Daniel Chou, export manager at the Ningbo Keerdeng Toys Company near Shanghai,
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A Chinese Revaluation May Not Help U.S.
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up 135 percent. To some extent the technology decline reflects the bursting of the bubble, but imports of technology products are up 28 percent, indicating that it's not just the bubble at work. There are easy jokes to be made about trash and technology, but to make them is to risk overlooking the real importance of the deteriorating trade picture, which is that American competitiveness is waning rapidly, and the lower dollar has done nothing to correct that. ''Businesses and plants that might have weathered a few years of uncompetitive exchange rates are being permanently shut down,'' wrote Bob Prince of Bridgewater Associates, a money management and advisory firm, after the November trade numbers came out. ''If prices adjusted more fluidly, these businesses and plants would recover once the dollar fell,'' he wrote. Instead, China, which runs the biggest trade surplus with the United States, does not allow its yuan to rise against the dollar, and other Asian countries have similar policies. Mr. Prince calculates that the dollar is down only 5 percent against a basket of currencies weighted to reflect current American imports, although it is off 20 percent against a basket reflecting imports in 2000. The willingness of China to put its money into Treasury securities has served both to prevent changes in currency values and to hold down American interest rates, thus encouraging more American consumption and bigger trade deficits. In the words of Cathy E. Minehan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, ''Unavoidable economic logic suggests that eventually this situation will prove unsustainable.'' But eventually can be a long time, and in Washington no one seems eager to deal with the root problems. The administration blames Europe and Japan for not growing rapidly enough, and thus wanting more American exports, which conveniently ignores questions of American competitiveness. Some other politicians hope to use the dismal trade numbers to gain support for protectionist legislation to benefit one industry or another. It is not clear what will end this trend. For now, foreigners seem happy to lend Americans money -- largely through purchases of government and corporate bonds -- thus allowing Americans to buy things and keep the foreigners working. The Americans are happy to keep borrowing and buying. But eventually there may be limits both to how much money foreigners will lend and to how much trash the United States can export. Floyd Norris
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U.S. Tech Exports Slide, but Trash Sales Are Up
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The tsunami that ravaged countries all around the Indian Ocean also hit the eastern United States, though only the tide gauges noticed. A tide gauge at Atlantic City recorded the passage of a ''train'' of waves, just under nine inches from crest to trough, 32 hours after the earthquake struck off Sumatra's west coast on Dec. 26, said Dr. Alexander B. Rabinovich of the Canadian Institute of Ocean Sciences in Sidney, British Columbia. A gauge at Port Canaveral, Fla., recorded 13.4-inch waves 24 minutes later. Dr. Rabinovich has been spearheading an international effort to chart the course of the fading ripples from the devastating tsunami set off by the earthquake. The tsunami was so powerful that it swept around the world over the next 36 hours, with its last residual waves perceptibly jostling tide gauges from Russia's remote northeastern Pacific waters to the North Atlantic, scientists said yesterday. The tsunami ripples would have been imperceptible to Floridians, mingled among the other sloshing of waters there, but were clearly discernible in the data, Dr. Rabinovich said. Other Atlantic gauges detected the waves in Bermuda and the Virgin Islands, he said. The evidence of the tsunami's passage in the Atlantic is particularly significant, seismologists and oceanographers said, because data on how quake-generated waves move there are scant compared with information available for the Pacific. The newly discovered records of the Atlantic waves from the Sumatran earthquake should help improve computer simulations of tsunami behavior in the Atlantic, said Dr. Vasily V. Titov, a tsunami expert who works for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle. Such simulations can help scientists predict where tsunamis generated in the Atlantic might strike, he said. The signal of the tsunami's quiet journey once it left the Indian Ocean was detected almost immediately in the Pacific Ocean, where 90 percent of tsunamis occur and tide gauges are specifically designed to catch trains of waves generated by underwater earthquakes, scientists said. ASIA'S DEADLY WAVES: TIDE GAUGES
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Tsunami's Ripples, Unnoticed, Washed Along Atlantic Coast
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of organic molecules -- the stuff of life -- that must continually be drizzling down on the surface. This manna makes Titan a prime exploration target for astrobiology -- the study of life beyond Earth. If terrestrial life started from a primordial soup of complex organics floating in young seas, then the deeply frozen surface of Titan (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit) is a primordial snow cone loaded with the same promising molecules. Thus Titan seems like an analog of the environment of Earth on the eve of life, a place where we can study the type of complex organic chemistry that at least once somehow became alive. Could the moon be home to primitive organisms that emerged during its warmer period? Might some of these still be playing ''survivor'' in underground seas or near-surface lakes melted by volcanic heat or the occasional energetic comet collision? We just might find out. Last July 1, after an intrepid seven-year trek from Earth, NASA's Cassini spacecraft reached Saturn, swinging within 12,000 miles of the roiling cloud tops before hitting the brakes hard with a 97-minute blast of its main engine. This harrowing maneuver slowed the spacecraft so that Saturn's gravity could pull it into orbit like a horseshoe hitting the post. Cassini's close fly-by of Titan in October allowed the first decent surface images of the moon, made by using cloud-penetrating radar and infrared light. These show us that Titan is an active world with a youthful, still evolving surface. How can we tell? The key clue is a dearth of the circular impact craters that stipple the landscapes of all worlds with ancient surfaces. Most moons, including Earth's, have been geologically dead for eons, as they lack the internal energy to produce the upheavals that would erase the scars of long-ago comet or asteroid collisions. Titan, however, is sparsely cratered, which tells us the surface is young and, like Earth's, undergoing some kind of makeover. A variety of surface features are seen but none are obviously recognizable, giving us, for the moment, a planetary Rorschach test. Some scientists see hints of possible ice volcanoes. Others see streaks and curving boundaries suggesting blowing dust and flowing liquid, cracks from Titan-quakes and signs of large-scale erosion. Large dark areas first hinted at seas, but these sites seem to have the wrong reflective properties for bodies of open liquid. Nothing is universally accepted among the
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Under the Moon
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what nutritionists and doctors regard as undeniable proof of an alarming growth of obesity since the mid-1970's, when the survey was first done in its current form. As elsewhere around the world, the main culprits, they say, are an unbalanced diet and a sedentary lifestyle, with some variants that are particularly Brazilian. Brazilians have, for example, a pronounced sweet tooth, perhaps natural in a country that is the world's largest exporter of sugar. People routinely sprinkle sugar on naturally sweet fruits like pineapple or papaya, and it sometimes seems that half the mass of a cafezinho, the espresso coffee consumed everywhere in the country, is sugar, not liquid. ''Brazil and the United States are the countries that have the highest levels of consumption of sugar in the world, accounting for about 19 percent of calories,'' said Carlos Augusto Monteiro, a nutritionist at the University of São Paulo who was a consultant to the government study. ''Consumption of soft drinks, for example, has grown 400 percent in the last 30 years, and we think that could play an important role in Brazil's growing fatter.'' In addition to incorporating increasing amounts of fatty, processed foods in recent years, the Brazilian diet is also unusually heavy in starches and other carbohydrates. A typical luncheon plate, especially in the countryside or in poor neighborhoods, will contain not only a small piece of meat and beans for protein but also rice, potatoes, pasta, bread and cassava too. Like people in more economically developed countries, Brazilians also lead a more sedentary life these days. Between 1940 and 2000, Brazil's population, now 175 million, went from being 80 percent rural and 20 percent urban to 80 percent urban and 20 percent rural, which has resulted in a marked decrease in physical activity. Brazilian notions of what is considered beautiful or sexy may also be a factor in encouraging plumpness. Traditionally, the idealized feminine form here has been the ''guitar-shaped body,'' a woman with a slender bust and waist and an ample rear end. ''American men may focus on breasts, but the Brazilian man has always wanted something to grab on to,'' said Constanza Pascolatto, one of the country's leading commentators on issues of esthetics, fashion and beauty. ''Women were always being told, 'You have to eat or else you're going to look like a stick,' and were encouraged to be fleshy.'' While that preference may still be
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Beaches for the Svelte, Where the Calories Are Showing
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numerous high school graduates earn. The dynamics, however, do not work that way. For one thing, the wage spread between high school and college graduates is determined by what happens to each side of the equation. During the 1980's, high-school-educated blue-collar workers lost well-paying jobs by the hundreds of thousands as domestic manufacturers increasingly lost out to foreign competitors. As their incomes fell, the spread widened rapidly. The wages of the high school educated did not begin to increase again until the late 1990's, when tight labor markets increased the demand for their services. Now, the incomes of the high school educated are rising almost as quickly as the incomes of the college educated, according to an analysis of wage data by the Economic Policy Institute. That brings into question how much value a college education adds. ''The obsession with education has become a mantra to avoid tough political choices,'' said Harley Shaiken, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley. While education is essential, Mr. Shaiken and other economists argue, it is not enough. They would put more of the burden on government to close the wage gap, through such additional steps as raising the minimum wage and strengthening the laws governing collective bargaining. That argument may undervalue the advances that are being made in high school education, says Richard Murnane, a specialist in the economics of education at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard. He notes that many states now require high school seniors to pass ''exit exams'' to get their diplomas. Because these exams require considerable proficiency in reading and mathematics, ''employers are beginning to see that high school graduates have more skills than they used to have,'' Mr. Murnane said. If college graduates ask for too much money, he said, employers may hire these high school graduates instead. Another dynamic also undermines the value of a college degree, says David H. Autor, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While the college premium appears to be leveling off, the spread between the incomes of the highest-earning Americans and those in the middle expanded almost as fast in the 1990's as it did in the 1980's. ''If I may speak somewhat loosely, there continues to be rising demand for people who have very strong cognitive, managerial and communications skills,'' Mr. Autor said. ''The vast middle, whether they are college educated or not, are not
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College Degree Still Pays, but It's Leveling Off
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of magnitude 6 or over. A major challenge will be to build a system where different nations can get access to data in a rapid and uniform way, said Mark P. Lagon, United States deputy assistant secretary of state. ''NATO has existed for decades and there are interoperability problems, meshing is difficult,'' he said in an interview. The network would be designed to detect and warn against ''all hazards'' -- droughts, wildfires, floods, typhoons, hurricanes, landslides, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. ''The problem is reaching out to the people in the fishing villages, and the fishermen,'' Jan Egeland, United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, said. ''You need a system of sirens, SMS on mobile phones, and radio.'' If a regional warning system had been in place in the Indian Ocean on the morning after Christmas, many thousands of people could have avoided death or injury, specialists told delegates to the five-day conference here. The message resonated deeply in this port, where 6,433 died in a pre-dawn earthquake that destroyed much of the city 10 years ago last Monday. ''A minimum of 10 percent of the billions now spent on disaster relief of all nations should be earmarked for disaster risk reduction,'' Mr. Egeland proposed. ''I am acutely aware of how much money is being spent on being fire brigades, us putting plaster on the wound, and too little on preventing the devastation and suffering in the first place.'' Preparedness sea walls, flood control canals, tighter building and zoning codes can have a real impact, said Yoshitaka Murata, Japan's minister for disaster management. ''After World War II, every major typhoon cost us thousands of lives,'' Mr. Murata said. ''Today the number of victims from typhoons has been greatly reduced.'' Last fall, the 10 typhoons that pummeled Japan caused $10 billion in damage, but took only 212 lives, government figures show. But even in Japan, a nation acutely aware of tsunami dangers, one-third of 21 eastern Hokkaido localities warned about a tsunami threat on Sept. 26, 2003, did not follow instructions to tell residents of coastal areas to evacuate. In the 14 towns that did, only 20 percent of people evacuated. Many people went down to the shore to watch the wave come in. The meeting also sought to focus attention on the cumulative toll of natural disasters. From 1992 through 2001, natural disasters killed 622,000 people, and affected two billion.
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U.S. Vows to Attain Global Warning System
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Mexico's trade deficit grew to $8.1 billion last year, the Finance Ministry said, as economic growth of at least 4 percent drove demand for imports. The increase in imports was partly offset by higher prices for Mexico's oil exports and more exports of manufactured goods. An estimated 90 percent of Mexico's $189 billion in exports last year went to the United States. Elisabeth Malkin (NYT)
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World Business Briefing | Americas: Mexico: Trade Deficit Rises
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In at least a temporary diversification away from genetically modified crops, Monsanto, the agribusiness company, agreed yesterday to pay about $1 billion to acquire Seminis, the world's largest producer of fruit and vegetable seeds. Until now, Monsanto has focused on corn, soybeans and cotton seeds, and on using genetic engineering to produce crops that are resistant to herbicides and insects. But executives said yesterday that Monsanto would develop new vegetable varieties using conventional breeding. They said the fruit and vegetable seed business could grow without biotechnology, based on a consumer movement toward healthier diets. ''It's fine to dream, but you have to decide what you're going to do tomorrow morning,'' Monsanto's chief executive, Hugh Grant, said about biotech fruits and vegetables during a conference call with analysts. ''In the long term, there may be opportunities in biotech.'' Some genetically engineered papaya and squash are on the market. The first biotech crop to be commercialized was the Flavr Savr tomato, developed by a biotechnology start-up that Monsanto acquired. But that tomato did not catch on. Now industry executives say it is difficult to bring new biotech fruits and vegetables to market because of consumer resistance. Also, fruits and vegetables are small crops, making it difficult to recoup development and regulatory costs. A few years ago, Monsanto decided to focus its biotech efforts on major crops. The acquisition comes as Monsanto has been shifting its business from agricultural chemicals to seeds and biotechnology. Over the last decade, it has aggressively acquired seed companies, mainly in the corn and soy business, igniting some concerns that the markets were becoming too concentrated. The new acquisition not only makes Monsanto the largest supplier of vegetable seeds in the world, but also, according to the company's calculations, the largest seed and biotech company over all. It would surpass DuPont, which owns the corn seed giant Pioneer Hi-Bred, in terms of revenues derived from seeds and biotech traits. Seminis, based in Oxnard, Calif., had sales last year of $526 million, with its leading products being tomato, cucumber, beans and pepper seeds. Its main brands are Seminis, Asgrow, Petoseed and Royal Sluis and it sells mainly to farmers, not gardeners. But, with partners, it has recently started to develop some consumer items, like the Bambino miniature watermelon and Lettuce Jammers, lettuce in the shape of a taco shell. Its main rivals in fruit and vegetable seeds are Syngenta
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Monsanto Buying Leader In Fruit and Vegetable Seeds
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accelerating sea-level rise, said as the Chilean Navy plane flew over the sea ice here on an unusually clear day late in November. ''Around the Amundsen Sea, we have surveyed a half dozen glaciers. All are thinning, in some cases quite rapidly, and in each case, the ice shelf is also thinning.'' The relationship between glaciers (essentially frozen rivers) and ice shelves (thick plates of ice protruding from the land and floating on the ocean) is complicated and not fully understood. But scientists like to compare the spot where the ''tongue'' of a glacier flows to sea in the form of an ice shelf to a cork in a bottle. When the ice shelf breaks up, this can allow the inland ice to accelerate its march to the sea. ''By themselves, the tongue of the glacier or the cork in the bottle do not represent that much,'' said Dr. Claudio Teitelboim, the director of the Center for Scientific Studies, a private Chilean institution that is the partner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in surveying the ice fields of Antarctica and Patagonia. ''But once the cork is dislodged, the contents of the bottle flow out, and that can generate tremendous instability.'' Glaciologists also know that by itself, free-floating sea ice does not raise the level of the sea, just as an ice cube in a glass of water does not cause an overflow as it melts. But glaciers are different because they rest on land, and if that vast volume of ice slides into the sea at a high rate, this adds mass to the ocean, which in turn can raise the global sea level. Through their flights over this and other areas of Antarctica, NASA and the Chilean center hope to help glaciologists and other scientists interested in climate change understand what is taking place on the continent and why. To do that, they need to compile data not only on ice thicknesses but also the underlying geology of the region, information that is most easily obtained from the air. The flights are taking place aboard a Chilean Navy Orion P-3 plane that has been specially equipped with sophisticated instruments. The devices include a laser-imaging system that shoots 5,000 pulses of light per second at the ground to map the ice surface, as well as ice-penetrating radar to determine the depth of the ice sheets, a magnetometer and
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Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable
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Last year was an especially bad one for the pharmaceutical industry, which experienced controversies over how drug studies are disclosed and the implosion of the painkiller Vioxx. Now, as a result of the recent publication of an article about the antidepressant Prozac, it appears that the staid, usually methodical world of medical journals could suffer its own black eye. On New Year's Day, the British medical journal BMJ published a news article suggesting that ''missing'' documents from a decade-old lawsuit indicated that Eli Lilly & Company, the maker of Prozac, had minimized data about the drug's risks of causing suicidal or violent behavior. Within days, the article was cited in hundreds of television and newspaper reports. An outraged Washington lawmaker demanded to know if Lilly had hidden the information from the Food and Drug Administration. While company officials refuted the article's assertions, it was still repeatedly cited. And last Thursday, Lilly spent about $800,000 to run full-page advertisements in 15 major publications to dispute the article. The incident may prove to be a messy one for the BMJ, which is based in London and owned by the British Medical Association, a professional group. Much of the journal, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, is devoted to research reports about medical issues that are reviewed by experts. But the BMJ, like some other medical journals, also has a separate news section that prints articles like the recent one about Prozac. As it turns out, some of the Eli Lilly documents, which the BMJ said it received from an anonymous source, have been circulating for years. And, Lilly officials said, the BMJ and its reporter declined to provide the company with copies of the documents at issue prior to the article's publication. The American freelance reporter who wrote the article, Jeanne Lenzer, declined to be interviewed, referring all questions to the BMJ. Officials there did not respond to written questions, but a spokeswoman, Emma Dickinson, said in an e-mail message on Friday that the publication ''takes this issue very seriously'' and will address Lilly's concerns after reviewing them. The BMJ, which is considered a leading medical journal, may have little choice. While Lilly has not taken legal action, its lawyers have notified the publication that the company considers the article to be ''inaccurate and defamatory,'' asserting that the records were not missing and that all their relevant data had been previously
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Dispute Puts a Medical Journal Under Fire
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be the first to perform such a separation without causing brain damage to either patient. Their success, the doctors say, stems from dividing the operations into parts, rather than performing one marathon surgery. So far the boys' doctors say they have not detected any evidence of neurological damage. Still, the boys will have to overcome significant developmental delays: they cannot talk, walk or eat like normal toddlers and it will be at least several months before they can do so. Nevertheless, the boys are impressing their caregivers with the progress they are making at Blythedale Children's Hospital here, where they are undertaking their long therapeutic journey. ''They are just miracles, there is no other way to say it,'' said Meredith Gosin, the social worker who has worked with the Aguirre family since they arrived in New York in September 2003 to start their medical treatment. ''I know it every time I see them.'' Like other staff members at Blythedale, a rehabilitation hospital for children, Ms. Gosin seems equally awed by the boys and their mother. ''Every day you see changes in all of them,'' she said. ''The boys get more independent. They learn new things. Then Arlene changes, too. She comes into her own.'' Every morning the boys wake up at 9 a.m. and start a six-hour battery of therapies. Their progress, if tedious, is steady. They are learning to stand, to use a few words in sign language and, perhaps most important to Ms. Aguirre, to live with each other as separate beings. ''It's exhausting,'' Ms. Aguirre said one recent afternoon, as she settled Clarence down for his afternoon nap. ''They always want me and it's much harder now.'' There is a simple marker of time in Ms. Aguirre's mind: Before and now. Before the surgery, she could cradle the twins at the same time. Now, she has to decide whose cries seem more urgent. Before, she would feed them simply by placing their bottles in their mouths. Now, she shuttles back and forth, encouraging the boys to eat Goldfish and Cheez-Its, their favorite snacks. Before, they were joined as one body, and Ms. Aguirre agonized about whether they would survive. Now, they are two toddlers, and Ms. Aguirre frets over the mundane. She worries, for example, that they do not get enough sleep. On a typical night, the boys finally begin to quiet down about 11 p.m., too
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Double Duty, and Then Some; Mother of Separated Twins Copes With Medical Needs and New Identities
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with the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Sydney Opera House. Detractors liken the canopy to the Nike ''swoosh'' and warn that a humid greenhouse effect may develop underneath, and that overhead panels may blow away in typhoons and become scythes. Leslie E. Robertson, a prominent American structural engineer working on the project, said that experiments in wind tunnels had showed that such problems could be avoided. The government's plans have particularly divided artists here. Many question whether the project places too much emphasis on property development, and warn that Hong Kong has done little to assemble important museum collections or to invite internationally renowned performance troupes to appear at the site. ''It's good to have a couple nice buildings around, but how is the hardware going to help the life of the people, is it going to go beyond being a tourist spot?'' asked William Kong, a producer of the films ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,'' ''Hero'' and ''House of Flying Daggers.'' As the project has acquired critics in the cultural community, populist politicians in the legislature here have begun suggesting a different approach. They want to sell the land, worth as much as $6 billion, to developers. The legislature would then direct a small part of the proceeds to cultural programs and the rest to social spending, notably to cancel the government's recent move to cut welfare payments. The current cultural district plan ''is undemocratic and without proper consultation,'' said James To, a senior lawmaker from the opposition Democratic Party. In an unusual twist, the government's plan is also opposed by many property developers, the most politically influential segment of the city's business community, who usually are adversaries of the Democratic Party in the legislature. The developers usually back the Tung administration, whose members are selected by the Beijing officials who also control the fate of the developers' many projects in mainland China. But the government's decision to put the entire peninsula out for tender as a single project meant that only a handful of the wealthiest developers could submit bids last summer. The rest of the developers want the project withdrawn and broken into smaller pieces on which they might compete. Local politics also loom large. Mr. Tsang and Henry Tang, the financial secretary and third-ranking government official here, are the leading candidates to succeed Mr. Tung as chief executive when his term expires in 2007. Mr. Tsang
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Arts Project Provokes Hong Kong Uproar
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Brazil posted a record trade surplus in 2004 for the second consecutive year, benefiting from a boom in commodities exports to markets like China. The trade minister, Luiz Fernando Furlan, said the country finished the year with a trade surplus of $33.7 billion, up 36 percent from a surplus of $24.8 billion in 2003. Exports and imports both climbed to all-time highs last year, with foreign sales surging 32 percent, to $96.48 billion, far beyond forecasts. Imports rose 30 percent, to $62.78 billion, as Brazil's economy, which is South America's largest, grew at its fastest pace in a decade. Most economists expect Brazil's trade surplus to narrow in 2005 for the first time in four years as the global economy slows. Todd Benson (NYT)
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World Business Briefing | Americas: Brazil: Record Trade Surplus
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design the software and processes that streamline the operations of giant retail chains and global high-tech manufacturers. We engineer advanced engines and the guts of the world's computers. We devise brands, durable corporate identities and fashions. We conjure new ways to move money and put it to work. We turn the most basic tasks into knowledge work. Modern printers, to note one example, rely heavily on the most advanced automated presses, computerized design tools and management and shipping for delivering materials efficiently to consumers and are as dependent on the latest software and technological innovations as a biotech lab. And those 2.8 million American workers who in recent years have lost their factory jobs? They don't learn new ways to use power tools. They are retrained in front of a computer; they learn to run the robots that do the jobs they used to do. The trouble with this apparently successful state of affairs is that the stuff we do best exists nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Some of our most valuable things -- software codes, pharmaceutical processes, car designs, digital movie files -- weigh nothing and, as e-mail attachments, can move at the speed of light. To learn American ideas and procedures is all but the same as owning them. (Unless, of course, laws successfully prohibit their co-option.) In contrast, most of what China makes that finds its way into the world market is physical. The Chinese can borrow and steal the designs to our best products all they want. For instance, 90 percent of all software running on Chinese computers has been pirated and bought openly in stores for around $3 a copy. But if Americans wanted to borrow and steal what China makes, we would have to march in with an army and commandeer Chinese factories and workers. Western powers and the Japanese tried that in the mid-19th and -20th centuries, respectively, and will not repeat the experiment. China, however, can in a sense colonize the developed world simply through careful study and a willingness to go its own way on intellectual-property protection. If China's commitment to wipe out commercial piracy and counterfeiting were judged by the laws that the country has on its books, the Chinese government would seem to be as strict as any. China has made a great show of cracking down in the past few years. Newspapers and television news programs
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Manufaketure
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With the dollar plummeting against the euro, the pound and the yen, a budget-minded traveler might assume the only option for 2005 is to stay home. But there are still places where the dollar holds some clout, including Argentina, Brazil, China (where the exchange rate is soothingly predictable) and areas of Central and Eastern Europe that lie beyond the forbidding euro-zone -- and where Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, is already being called ''the new Prague.'' Speaking of which, Shanghai might indeed be ''the new Paris'' -- with ominous Paris-like prices -- but a two-and-a-half hour train ride away is Nanjing, a bustling riverside city that has maintained much of its historical fabric. An elaborate Ming tomb complex, a traditional Chinese park and smaller crowds are among the attractions. The comfortable Hilton, near a restored section of the city wall, costs about $80 a night. Pingyao, a Han merchant city in north-central Shanxi province, is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and, with its traditional architecture and crimson lanterns hanging everywhere, one of the few historically intact cities in China. A room with private bath in a centrally located two-star hotel will cost about $50, while accommodations in small, clean family-run inns cost as little as $15 a person. With its many parks and temples, Kunming, in southern Yunnan province, is one of the most pleasant big cities in China. Here you will find lodgings ranging from about $15 a person at a two-star hotel to $110 at the five-star Harbour Plaza. From Kunming, many travelers make side trips to Lijiang, another World Heritage Site, and the mountainous village homes of ethnic minorities like the Dai and the Naxi (expect to pay $20 to $50 for a room in a homey guesthouse in Lijiang). A proposal for a huge dam project near the region's two-mile-deep Tiger Leaping Gorge -- a project that would displace thousands of people -- provides further inspiration for a visit. For a completely different Chinese travel experience, join the Asian and Russian tourists who flock to Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Near Sanya, a city on the southern coast, the beaches are broad and white. A five-star hotel costs less than $150 a night, and a three-day package at a comfortable, Western-style hotel called Resort Intime goes for as little as $250, with air fare from Shanghai. A recent visitor to the area reports spending
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BUDGET -- Some Central European cities offer a refuge from the mighty euro; South America and China are dollar-friendly, too.
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worked to death, above all on the brutal sugar plantations of the Caribbean, that between 1660 and 1807, ships brought well over three times as many Africans across the ocean to British colonies as they did Europeans. And, of course, it was not just to British territories that slaves were sent. From Senegal to Virginia, Sierra Leone to Charleston, the Niger delta to Cuba, Angola to Brazil, and on dozens upon dozens of crisscrossing paths taken by thousands of vessels, the Atlantic was a vast conveyor belt to early death in the fields of an immense swath of plantations that stretched from Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro and beyond.'' The subject of this interesting and valuable book is the tiny cadre of reformers that undertook to arouse public feeling against this great abuse. Hochschild says: ''For 50 years, activists in England worked to end slavery in the British Empire. None of them gained a penny by doing so, and their eventual success meant a huge loss to the imperial economy.'' Vast, entrenched and profitable as the slave trade was, how did they manage to bring it to an end? That they did end it is assumed by Hochschild rather than proved by him. It seems a little odd in a historian to use the improbability of a movement's success as grounds for heightened admiration, rather than for heightened attention to other contributing factors. Given that the whole infernal enterprise was sustained by the immense wealth it generated, one might, without cynicism, look to the economic considerations in play. When the British outlawed the exportation of Africans to the colonies for sale in 1807, they had had almost 20 years' notice that the Americans intended to ban the importation of Africans in 1808. And it was just about this time that Napoleon, cut off by the British Navy from French colonies in the Caribbean, began looking into the domestic cultivation of the sugar beet. And there were the rebellions in the West Indies, particularly the Haitian rebellion. The sections of the book that deal with them bring to light an astounding, and forgotten, episode in Western history. Since Haiti alone produced as much foreign trade at that time as the whole of the 13 colonies of North America, it was potentially a great loss. It belonged to France, but Britain supplied it with slaves, a valuable trade since the slaves were
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Freed
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A major dam project suspended last year by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is now the focus of a bureaucratic fight between pro-development advocates pushing to restart the project and environmentalists who want public hearings and further research. The conflict highlights the growing tension between the need for environmental protection here in one of the world's most polluted countries and China's insatiable hunger for new energy sources to fuel its booming economy. The original project called for a 13-stage dam on the Nu River, which flows through a remote, pristine region in western China that is designated as a World Heritage Site by Unesco. Last spring, Mr. Wen unexpectedly halted the project for further study of possible environmental damage, a decision that led to speculation in the Chinese news media that the project was dead. But in recent months, new accounts in Chinese newspapers have suggested that the project may be restarted in some form. Witnesses have reported that some ancillary construction work is under way beside the Nu near the city of Liuku, a site planned for one of the dams. The ultimate fate of the project remains uncertain, but the debate within the government has trickled into the public domain. In November, Pan Yue, the deputy director of the State Environmental Protection Authority, announced that public hearings would be held early this year to discuss the impact of the dam proposal. The hearings, a very rare step in China's closed political system, come as environmental officials are trying to gain greater regulatory power after years of being steamrolled by more powerful ministries charged with economic development Zhu Xinxiang, director of the environmental agency's assessment division, said that an environmental feasibility study on the dam project was still under way and that no timetable had been set for deciding if the dams would be built. He said the construction currently under way was outside the scope of Mr. Wen's order and was not an indication that the dam project had restarted. But Mr. Zhu also added in an interview that the environmental agency did not have the power to stop such a project in China. Earlier this year, the dam project provoked international controversy. Environmentalists in China and elsewhere protested against building such a large dam project in an unspoiled canyon region considered important for its biodiversity, wildlife and wetlands. The project would also force the relocation of more than
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Chinese Project Pits Environmentalists Against Development Plans
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American voters. French foreign policy in the 1960's was not driven by a leader's personal antipathy for a brash Texan in the White House, and neither is today's. Regime change in the United States might have led John Kerry to slap Mr. Chirac on the back and say, ''Lafayette, we are here!'' -- but nothing would have altered the underlying fact that France has for decades viewed the United States as a unique threat. The root of the problem is Gaullism itself. More than just a form of nationalism, Gaullism insists that France must exert an outsized influence on the course of human events. During the cold war, de Gaulle spoke of his country leading Europe as ''one of three world powers and, if need be one day, the arbiter between the two camps, the Soviet and the Anglo-Saxon.'' Hence de Gaulle developed a nuclear arsenal, threatened to destabilize the dollar and criticized American military actions. Mr. Chirac and his neo-Gaullists recognize that France can no longer serve as a fulcrum between East and West, but they believe their country still has a vital role to play in containing the world's ''hyperpower,'' in their pejorative labeling of the United States. On the cultural front, this agenda can manifest itself in bizarre rear guard actions. Most ridiculously, a French court has declared that the film ''Un Long Dimanche de Fiançailles'' (''A Very Long Engagement'') is not eligible to compete in French film festivals, despite having being filmed in France, in the French language, with hundreds of French actors and technicians. Its offense: receiving financial backing from Warner Brothers. In world politics, the French are much more aggressive. Before the invasion of Iraq, Paris didn't just express reservations -- it tried to sabotage American goals in every feasible venue, from the chambers of the Security Council to the committee rooms of NATO. Since then, it has issued a raft of demands, including the hasty transfer of sovereignty to an ad hoc Iraqi government, as well as a date certain by which the United States will remove its troops, no matter the circumstances. Mr. Chirac's diplomats even spent October lobbying unsuccessfully for Iraqi insurgent groups -- the ones now killing American troops and Iraqi civilians -- to be represented at the international summit in Egypt in November. It is difficult to see how French interests are furthered in any way by this behavior,
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Liberté, Egalité, Absurdité
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very small market for Michelin, the world's leading tiremaker, but it is an apt demonstration vehicle for the Tweel. The first commercial use of the integrated tire and wheel assembly will be on the stair-climbing iBOT wheelchair, another product developed by Dean Kamen, the Segway's inventor; Michelin said it would announce another application at the Detroit auto show next week. The tiremaker has high expectations for the Tweel project. The concept of a single-piece tire and wheel assembly is one the company expects to spread to passenger cars and, eventually, to construction equipment and aircraft. The Tweel offers a number of benefits beyond the obvious attraction of being impervious to nails in the road. The tread will last two to three times as long as today's radial tires, Michelin says, and when it does wear thin it can be retreaded. For manufacturers, the Tweel offers an opportunity to reduce the number of parts, eliminating most of the 23 components of a typical new tire as well as the costly air-pressure monitors that will soon be required on new vehicles in the United States. In recent years, manufacturers have devoted an increasing amount of attention to tires that let motorists continue driving after a puncture, for 100 miles or more, at a reduced speed. Several such ''run flat'' designs are now available, providing convenience and peace of mind for travelers as well as freeing automakers to eliminate the weight and cost of spare tires. Michelin, which markets run-flat tires under the Pax name, took a different approach in developing the Tweel. Its goal: a replacement for traditional tires that is designed to function without air in the first place. Mounted on a car, the Tweel is a single unit, though it actually begins as an assembly of four pieces bonded together: the hub, a polyurethane spoke section, a ''shear band'' surrounding the spokes, and the tread band -- the rubber layer that wraps around the circumference and touches the pavement. While the Tweel's hub functions as it would in a normal wheel -- a rigid attachment point to the axle -- the polyurethane spokes are flexible to help absorb road impacts. The shear band surrounding the spokes effectively takes the place of the air pressure, distributing the load. The tread is similar in appearance to a conventional tire. One of the basic shortcomings of a tire filled with air is that
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AUTOS ON MONDAY/Technology; Reinventing the Wheel (and the Tire, Too)
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parents who wanted to guarantee a boy. Government officials are hardly backing away from population control. But the government is examining various possible changes. Last year, the State Council, China's cabinet, appointed a research group of 250 demographers and other experts to examine issues like imbalance between the sexes, dropping fertility rates and ways to prepare for China's rapidly aging population. It may also address whether and when China should move to a nationwide two-child policy to prevent a looming baby bust. ''In the future, I think we have to consider this issue,'' said Hao Linna, spokeswoman for the National Population and Family Planning Commission. ''As for what time, when and how we need to research these issues. We need to study how to shift, in what form and what method.'' Yet government officials agree that reversing the birth imbalance between boys and girls cannot be postponed. Experts debate to what extent China's population policy should be blamed for the problem, noting that the problem predates the one-child policy. Other Asian countries like India and South Korea without such policies also have lopsided birth rates. But statistics show that China's imbalance has widened since population controls began in the late 1970's. In early January, the government announced that the nationwide ratio had reached 119 boys for every 100 girls. Studies show that the average rate for the rest of the world is about 105 boys for every 100 girls. Demographers predict that in a few decades China could have up to 40 million bachelors unable to find mates. On a recent afternoon here in southeastern China, hundreds of students in the dirt courtyard of Lanxi Middle School held a parade rehearsal. The school goes through 12th grade, and about 60 percent of students in the higher grades are male. The marchers, mostly boys, waved flags and kicked dust in the air beside a billboard promoting the latest propaganda campaign: Respect Girls. Local officials brought a visiting reporter here because Lanxi Middle School is participating in a Care for Girls pilot program. Female students from poor families are getting free tuition, as are students from families with two girls. The principal, Hu Hongbin, happily shows off an exhibition room where posters show girls in the program. Mr. Hu said the exhibition room was supposed to build the self-esteem of girls, though it also seemed intended to impress visiting officials. Still, he
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Fearing Future, China Starts to Give Girls Their Due
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TWENTY-FIVE years of dictatorship and civil war, preceded by a century and a half of misrule, have made Liberia one of the world's poorest countries. But Liberia's development failures have paradoxically led to a success. Liberia has something that the world values now more than ever: a vast rain forest. Liberia's status as a republic with strong ties to the United States kept out European colonizers, so no Western power came in to slice rails and roads into the interior. Nature flourished in splendid isolation, and today more than a third of the country is virgin rain forest, one of the largest proportions of any nation. A Garden of Eden bloomed around the hamlets where I worked: colobus monkeys crashed through the jungle canopy, pygmy hippos tobogganed into rivers, and sometimes the only roads through the forest were those blazed by elephants. Conservation International says that Liberia is the linchpin of West Africa's Upper Guinean forest, which is believed to shelter the highest mammal species diversity of any region in the world. It's not just tree-huggers who want to save the Liberian rain forest; nearly all first-world governments have made conserving the last great rain forests on earth a priority. The Liberian forest serves us all: it mitigates global warming; it harbors vulnerable species like the Mount Nimba viviparous toad and zebra duiker; it could be the source of new medicines; and it provides aesthetic and spiritual well-being. Economics 101 is also at play here. As the supply of pristine rain forests declines (conservation groups estimate that the world loses an acre every two seconds) and the demand for what they provide increases, their value increases. Liberia should capitalize on its ecological wealth by exchanging something the world needs for something Liberians desperately want: stability. It would be a sort of Peace for Nature swap, based on the Debt for Nature model in which third world countries receive debt relief for conserving their natural heritage. Under Peace for Nature, Liberia would convert a significant part of itself into a United Nations biosphere reserve, zoned for both strict preservation and multiple use. In return, the world would commit to a sustainable, lasting Liberian peace instead of the usual Band-Aid approach. This means a full 20 years, long enough to establish a habit of peace and to educate a new Liberian generation. We would ensure security through the United Nations, meanwhile training
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Seeing the Forest for the Peace
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with credit card functions, although they could just as easily represent competition for the practice of paying by cellphone. The marriage of cellphone and charge card poses some significant challenges, including security problems. To reduce fraud from stolen phones, consumers may be required to punch an authorization code into their phone each time a charge is made. For more than a year, phone makers, software companies and computer chip manufacturers have been working to develop secure and reliable payment technology for cellphones. After the phone's chip is recognized by the electronic reader, the credit card account number will be verified, as it is now, and the price of the purchase will be added to the consumer's credit card bill. The new phones may also be capable of being programmed for a prepaid sum from which payments could be deducted. But there have been some glitches in the product trials, according to Jorge Fernandes, chief executive of Vivotech, a cellphone software company based in Santa Clara, Calif. In two trials, one at a corporation in the Midwest and the other at Santa Clara University, Vivotech used infrared technology for communications between the phone and the card reader. Participants had to aim the cellphone at the reader in a certain way for the infrared beam to be picked up. ''People got very upset,'' Mr. Fernandes said. ''Pointing your cellphone at a target is very difficult.'' Mr. Fernandes said the company believed it might have solved that problem by switching to a technology that uses low-level radio signals. Last month, Vivotech began testing the technology, which allows users to wave the phone within a couple of inches of a reader, at a sports arena in the Atlanta area. Cellphones are becoming mainstream payment devices in Korea and Japan. In Japan, NTT DoCoMo, the mobile phone operator, said that it had already sold more than a million phones equipped with chips that include the payment function. More than 13,000 Japanese shops have electronic readers capable of communicating with the phones. For now, the phones are used mostly to debit a prepaid amount, which is deposited by plugging the phone into a machine similar to an A.T.M. that takes cash and credits the handset. In South Korea, people are already using cellphones as credit cards, said Sue Gordon-Lathrop, vice president for the consumer products platform for Visa International. She said American consumers would eventually embrace
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Momentum Is Gaining for Cellphones as Credit Cards
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who of top Army officers overseeing Humvees and other transport vehicles were present. The contractors were mostly private companies, from family-run businesses like Mr. LeBlanc's General Purpose Vehicles to large companies like AM General, an Indiana company that makes the Humvee. For the contractors, the money at stake is significant, and there is no guarantee that AM General, a unit of Renco, or other contractors will make the replacement vehicles. ''Why would we buy the same old thing?'' asked Brig. Gen. William Lenaers, who was recently appointed head of the Army's Tank Automotive Command Center, the military's hub of automotive oversight in the Detroit suburbs. ''We're looking to get something that is markedly better, not a little better, but markedly better.'' One big presenter in Yuma, Stewart & Stevenson, a publicly traded Houston-based military contractor, makes thousands of armored transport vehicles that are larger than Humvees. Those vehicles account for nearly 40 percent of the company's revenue, or close to half a billion dollars annually. As for AM General, the Army said that in the last 12 months, it had spent $830 million on Humvees. In Yuma, two teams of about 10 civilian Army employees, a variety of Army officers and an observer from the Marines assessed the technologies as a handful of generals peered over their shoulders. There were Humvees with supercharged air-conditioners, demonstrations of dashboards with night vision, special long-lasting engine coolant and batteries that could take gunshots and still outlast today's batteries. Some demonstrations made clear that many military vehicles lacked technologies widely used in consumer cars and trucks, like antilock brakes, in part because redesigned models of military vehicles appear every few decades, not every few years. In one test, AM General showed how suspension technology available on a Hummer H1, the consumer version of the Humvee sold by General Motors, could help the vehicle work its way out of a ditch. This appealed to Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, an officer who plays a central role in procurement of such vehicles from the Army's operations near Detroit. He said antirollover technologies like electronic stability control, which is standard in many new sport utility vehicles, would save lives in military rollover accidents as well. ''We're putting that technology in our trucks now so if you have to make a sudden swerve to avoid a dangerous situation, the vehicle will adjust to it and the soldiers will be
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Kicking the Tires on the Next Humvees; Stung by Criticism, Army Takes a Long Look at Its Transport Vehicles
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have faced criminal charges; 20 percent have been homeless at some point. Their problems at home -- wherever it may be -- affect their performance in the program, Ms. Samms said. ''You can say you need to come to class, but if their grandmother is throwing them out, then they're going to focus on that,'' she said. But the students do come to class. In fact, Ms. Samms said, ''we have so many students that technically, if they all came, we'd have an issue.'' The program was founded in 1999 because the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene determined that the city did not have enough programs for the needs of mentally ill people 16 to 21 years old. Many are too old for pediatric psychiatric services offered by the city and too young to navigate the adult services system. Others are too old for foster care and the special education services offered by the public schools. Some do not even have a place to call home. Ricardo Pierre-Luis came to the program in 2002, looking for a way to earn his high school diploma. Struggling with learning disabilities as far back as elementary school, he was jostled around through the system, but never thought that anyone had given him a chance to learn at his own pace. At 16, he dropped out of school. He joined a gang, used drugs and started committing robberies. Later that year, he served time on Rikers Island for those robberies. When Mr. Pierre-Luis got out, he did not know what to do. ''I was really quiet, really shy,'' he said. ''I felt like I had issues to deal with, but I didn't know how to tell anybody.'' He was referred to the Adolescent Employment and Education Program, after being told that he suffered from depression and anger problems, and he immediately jumped into the G.E.D. program there. He passed all the classes, and now needs only to improve his performance on the final exam and pass to get his diploma. He hopes to be in college by the fall. ''I'm going to be a man pretty soon, and I need to figure out what I'm going to be,'' he said. ''We only have one life to live.'' He reads voraciously, and to help satisfy his appetite, the bureau gave him a $50 gift card to a bookstore, drawing money from The New
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The Neediest Cases; For Those Who Hit Bottom, a Step Up
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good will spread by the American relief efforts could be undermined by resentment and that there could be a violent backlash. A1 A Move to Stop Attacks in Gaza Palestinian security forces in modest numbers took up positions in northern Gaza with orders from their new president, Mahmoud Abbas, to prevent militant groups from firing mortars and Qassam rockets at Israeli settlements and towns. A3 Conviction Reversed in Ireland A Dublin appeals court overturned the conviction of Colm Murphy, the only person jailed in connection with a 1998 car bombing in Northern Ireland that killed 29 people, saying the trial court failed to fully address tainted evidence. The court ordered that he be retried later this year. A7 NATIONAL A8-13;16 Administration Releases Drug Benefit's Rules The Bush administration unveiled rules for the new Medicare drug benefit that guarantee patients access to a wide range of medicines while giving insurance companies potent tools to control costs. A11 Farmers Offered Amnesty The Environmental Protection Agency said it would shield operators of large livestock operations from prosecution for air pollution violations if they participated in a new program to collect emissions data. A8 A.C.L.U. Won't Pursue Action The executive committee of the American Civil Liberties Union decided against disciplinary action against two dissident board members. A8 Search for Oil Slick in Pacific An oil slick floating somewhere along a 90-mile stretch of Southern California coastline has killed more than 700 sea birds. A8 Complicity to Misconduct The United States attorney's office strongly disputed arguments of government misconduct and complicity in a human smuggling disaster that killed 19 in 2003, saying that the border agents who stopped a trailer in South Texas had no idea it held 74 illegal immigrants. A13 New Drilling Planned in Alaska Citing a need for energy, the government plans to open for exploratory oil and natural gas drilling thousands of acres on Alaska's North Slope that have been protected for decades because of migratory birds and caribou. A16 A Teddy Bear Uproar A teddy bear that has its paws restrained by a straitjacket has caused an uproar in Vermont, where the bear is made by a popular company. The state's governor, medical professionals, and mental health advocates say that the bear represents an extreme and painful image of mental illness. A8 Religion Journal A13 NEW YORK/REGION B1-5 Ground Zero Developers Contribute to Pataki Group Developers heavily involved in rebuilding
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NEWS SUMMARY
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Vince Canziani, the director of Wagon Road Camp in Chappaqua, N.Y., has an understanding with Jose Robles, a 17-year-old camper. ''I say hello, and he gets really happy,'' Mr. Canziani said. Set on 53 wooded acres 35 miles north of New York City, Wagon Road offers a retreat for developmentally and physically disabled children on weekends throughout the year. Like Jose, some of the campers are reliant on wheelchairs. Others are autistic or mentally retarded. But there is also another element in play here. The Respite Program, as the 33 days at camp each year are called, is as much for those who care for the children as it is for the children themselves. ''This camp is a blessing,'' said Margarita Robles, 57, Jose's grandmother. ''We can have a rest and do the things we can't do when he's here. And he loves it.'' Jose, who lives with cerebral palsy and mental retardation, seems to love a lot in life. He bounces wildly in his chair when he hears the name of his teacher at Public School 811K, a part of District 75, New York City's district for disabled students. He laughs and throws his head back when his grandmother talks about the Pentecostal church they attend weekly. He points enthusiastically at his suitcase when his grandmother tells him he is going to camp. And he makes cheerful noises as his grandfather rubs his head in the living room of the public housing complex where they live in Canarsie, Brooklyn. ''He mostly loves music,'' Mrs. Robles said as Christian salsa played quietly in the background. ''At night I give him a bath, feed him, and then he goes to his music. He's a very lovable child, and he's very happy all the time. The only problem we have is that he's getting too heavy for us.'' Mrs. Robles, a school aide in Brooklyn, and her husband, Raul Robles, 65, who is retired, have cared for Jose since he was 8, when his mother found she could not juggle Jose's needs with a job and three other children. Their son, Jose's father, lives in California with a second wife and three other children. As Jose has grown, the Robleses have aged, an important consideration because Jose needs to be lifted several times a day -- into the shower, his bed, the wheelchair, his car seat. At 150 pounds, this is difficult,
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The Neediest Cases; Where Children Get Recreation, and Guardians a Rest
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getting the resources we need.'' He described Africa's predicament as ''a forgotten and neglected quadruple tsunami of AIDS and preventable disease, of ongoing terrible conflicts, of lack of good governance or lack of governance at all in addition to chronic lack of food due to droughts.'' ''There are 40, 50 rich countries that can foot the bill of vaccinating children and feeding children, and Africa should have exactly the same worth as the tsunami-affected region,'' he said. He spoke at a Security Council briefing on Africa's humanitarian problems and to reporters afterward. He said African crises went unattended because protracted conflicts did not attract the attention that natural disasters like earthquakes or tsunamis did and because people did not think they lent themselves to demonstrable success. ''We have to do a better job in advocating on behalf of Africa, not only how bad it is but how it can be fixed if you invest,'' he said. ''There is no better investment and no more immediate return on an investment than changing humanitarian condition in Africa. It may be that we haven't been able to sell the idea that it is as important and as inexpensive to save lives and stabilize in Congo as it is in Aceh and in Sri Lanka.'' He told the Security Council that despite the best efforts of the international community, aid efforts were falling behind in many parts of Africa. He cited the Darfur region of Sudan, Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Central African Republic, Ivory Coast, Chad, Uganda, Guinea and Zimbabwe where contributions ranged from 10 to 40 percent of money pledged to highs of 75 percent. He also said that in countries where the United Nations had helped bring peace or monitor cease-fires, the lack of full financing of appeals had threatened a slide back into conflict. ''In Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire and Burundi where there were big expensive peacekeeping missions, we have less than half the funds that we need for minimum humanitarian program and less than half of what we need to reintegrate the ex-fighters,'' he said. ''What I hope to see is the kind of immediate decisive international reaction to the crisis in the Congo, which takes millions of lives, that we just saw in the Indian Ocean, where, thanks to an immediate outpouring of donors and an immediate response by an effective humanitarian community, we saved tens of thousands of lives.''
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African Crises Take Back Seat to Tsunami, U.N. Relief Chief Says
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