Subject: Please help protect this board From: Bobby To: All Date Posted: Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:11:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please help protect this board from viruses and spam.

Subject: Please notice the viruses. From: Bobby To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 28, 2006 at 17:38:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, please help protect the board when your computer is working again.

Subject: Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 28, 2006 at 14:23:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/paul_krugman_gr.html February 27, 2006 Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs Edited by Mark Thoma Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. ... But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question ... about income inequality, he declared that 'the most important factor' in rising inequality 'is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education.' That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening.... What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite. I think of Mr. Bernanke's position ... as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group ... the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization... The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but ... real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year. So who are the winners from rising inequality? ... A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon ... gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only ... about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains. But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint. Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: ... the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The ... 99.99th percentile [is] probably well over $6 million a year. ... The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service. The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story. Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes ... Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff ... And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who ... has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to 'democratic society.' It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Feb 28, 2006 at 18:54:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint. Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: ... the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The ... 99.99th percentile [is] probably well over $6 million a year. ...' This is the core reason why we are at economic risk. It's why the housing boom lacks fundamental support and will suffer a hard landing. It has been the unsustainable housing boom which has temporarily held this economy together in the absence of growing wealth among the bottom 90 %. In fact the 90 % bottom level has accumulated a record level of debt in an attempt to keep up. The late 20's and early 30's of the last century were the last time this extreme imbalance of wealth distribution occured. Ben Bernanke has spent a lot of time thinking about the Great Depression and why it occured. His conclusion has centered around mistakes by governmental agencies and legislative miscues. Certainly these factors had a hand in making things worse. But what if the real reason had been centered around the loss of wealth among the masses, massive build-up of personal debt and resulting drop in consumption? Imagine what happens if we get a relatively steep fall in housing - wouldn't this also have a negative affect on the stock markets since it would put a severe crimp in the economy? With both housing and stocks declining what happens to consumption in the absence of a job market which owes, in many regions, so much to the residential housing boom? Is this not a negative feedback loop? IMO, we will get the answers to these questions in the next few years and beyond. We have competing economic theories - which will prove to be right or, perhaps, we need to rewrite and revamp prevailing economic precepts. The coming years will be amazing!

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 06:14:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Nonetheless the housing boom has run through developed countries, and housing prices continue to be stable. I am just not finding a collapse evident in the economy, for all the problems.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: Graduates Versus Oligarchs From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 09:02:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The bull market that began in October 2002 continues, and that is what we know as of this day. The Vanguard REIT index is up 9.9% so far this year. We can be cautious, but nonetheless we are in an international bull market for the present. The worry for me is long term interest rates, but so far they are benign. So, I am pleased as of this day :)

Subject: Cracks developing From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 09:25:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'The investment boom has also taken up the slack left by consumers wrestling with record debt levels and a flat housing market.' We are begining to see cracks in housing in Australia which are begining to slow their economy. Luckily for Australians, the commodity (especially in metals) boom has helped the segment of their economy, based on resources, pick up much of the slack. It's interesting to note that 60% of Australia's GDP (according to this article) is dependent on household consumption while, in the US, some 75% of GDP is dependent on household consumption. From The Financial Times: Australian economic growth slower than expected SYDNEY (Reuters) - March 1, 2006 01:55 GMT Australia’s economy grew a slower-than-expected 0.5 percent in the final quarter of 2005 as a surge in business investment was partially offset by a downturn in the housing sector and a dismal trade performance. Government data on Wednesday showed gross domestic product (GDP) grew 2.7 percent from a year earlier, up from 2.5 percent in the third quarter. Yet growth was still some way below best estimates of the economy’s speed limit, arguing against the need for a restraining rise in interest rates. “It’s confirmation the economy stepped down several gears in the second half of 2005,” said Michael Blythe, chief economist at Commonwealth Bank. “It is hard to be too pessimistic for the outlook for 2006, but it is one of those indicators that says there is no hurry to do anything on rates.” Financial markets had looked for a rise of around 0.7 percent in fourth-quarter GDP, so the soft result dented the Australian dollar while boosting bond futures. The total value of all goods and services produced in Australia in 2005 stood at A$870 billion ($644 billion) in inflation-adjusted dollars. A decade ago it was A$608 billion. Australian Treasurer Peter Costello accentuated the positive by pointing to the strength of business investment which he said would boost production and economic growth this year. HEAVY LIFTING Business all but carried the economy last quarter, contributing 0.7 percentage point to GDP growth. High commodity prices, healthy profits and strong global demand have driven a boom in mining, resource and transport investment, such that business spending has averaged annual growth of 14 percent over the past three years. The surge in business investment promises to ease capacity constraints in the economy, support exports and restrain inflation. Exports could do with the help as, despite huge price gains in some of Australia’s biggest commodities, export volumes have consistently disappointed. Meanwhile, imports have stayed strong, particularly of capital goods. As a result, international trade lopped 0.5 percentage point off GDP growth last quarter. The investment boom has also taken up the slack left by consumers wrestling with record debt levels and a flat housing market. Residential investment fell last quarter, taking 0.2 percentage point from GDP. Meanwhile, household consumption, which accounts for about 60 percent of total GDP, rose 0.7 percent in the quarter, adding 0.4 percentage point to growth. The government also took up some of the slack as a hefty 2.7 percent jump in spending added 0.5 percentage point to growth. Australia’s government still boasts a healthy budget surplus, giving it scope to cut taxes again this year to support the consumer. “The weakness in the household sector of the economy has helped to contain core inflation despite rising energy and upstream prices,” said Andrew Hanlan, senior economist at Westpac. “I think while that situation persists, interest rates will certainly be on hold.” “Going forward, we think the export recovery and business investment will still be supportive of growth running around 3 percent annualised rather than that pronounced softness we saw in the second half of last year,” he concluded.

Subject: Shifting economy From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 27, 2006 at 20:57:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Consolidation and lay-offs hit mortgage industry By Julie Haviv Fri Feb 24, 3:19 PM ET A major transition is underway in the U.S. mortgage lending industry, with consolidations and lay-offs at the forefront as companies try to deal with waning demand for home loans. This shift is expected to pick up steam in 2006 if the housing market, as widely expected, cools off from its record-breaking five-year run. 'There are some very important signals emerging in that we have seen some pretty good companies go on the block for sale or have been sold recently, which is a clear sign that consolidation is seriously underway,' said Douglas Duncan, chief economist at the Mortgage Bankers Association, an industry trade group. Duncan said developments at two mid-sized 'good performing' companies may hint to a wider trend. Waterfield Mortgage Co. recently announced that it will sell its mortgage banking business and Irwin Financial Corp. (NYSE:IFC - news) said last month it hired JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM - news) to look at selling its conventional first mortgage unit, Irwin Mortgage. 'They just couldn't get the revenue per loan that the big guys were getting,' he said. Even the larger firms are poised for a downturn. Countrywide Financial Corp. (NYSE:CFC - news), the largest U.S. mortgage lender, recently announced it plans lay-offs for sometime this year, partly in response to lower profits on sales of mortgages. On its fourth-quarter earnings conference call in late January, the company's chief executive, Angelo Mozilo, said intense competition should force some smaller lenders out of the market. Employment in the real estate and mortgage industry peaked at 504,000 in October of last year but fell to 501,000 in December, according the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is a noteworthy shift, given that the sector has been gaining jobs over the past five years. Employment stood at 283,000 in March of 2001. Mortgage rates are expected to continue ratcheting upward from their historic lows, and that will limit lending and refinancing activity, putting more pressure on firms to find new efficiencies, said Duncan. A week ago, the average 30-year fixed loan reached 6.22 percent. But Duncan expects it to climb to 6.40 percent by the end of 2006, significantly higher than its 2005 low of 5.47 percent. VOLUME IS EBBING The U.S. housing market surged for five years, shattering sales and construction records and sending home prices up more than 55 percent on average nationwide. But now the market has taken on a 'survival-of-the-fittest' atmosphere, said Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Moody's Economy.com, a consulting firm. 'Mortgage lending is an opportunistic business and when business declines, the instinct is to consolidate to become more efficient, and that is what we are seeing,' said Chen. The MBA's seasonally adjusted refinancing index, which hit a record level near 10,000 in May of 2003, stood at 1,571.4 for the week ended February 17. While refinancing has been trending lower over the past few years, the drop in volume for home purchase loans has gained substantial momentum in only the past year. The MBA's seasonally adjusted purchase mortgage index-- considered a timely gauge on U.S. home sales -- stood at 408.7 last week, its lowest level since the week ended January 7, 2005, when the index hit 393.1. According to Duncan, lenders have been holding 'slowdown' meetings with their employees, a move he said historically coincides with a turn in employment. LENDERS LAST HURRAH? Mortgage lenders, however, are not ready to throw in the towel just yet and are actively seeking new ways to increase business volume, whether through new loan products or reaching out to untapped markets. 'We have worked hard over the past three years in developing a wide array of products -- all credit types, all documentation types, all amortization types and all combinations of first and second mortgages,' said Bob Walters, chief economist at Quicken Loans, an online mortgage lender. By diversifying its product line, Quicken Loans is able to serve the entire spectrum of clients, said Walters. 'The firms that are focused on one type or another will struggle as the market narrows,' he said.

Subject: Re: Shifting economy From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Tues, Feb 28, 2006 at 12:36:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice though the REIT index is up 9.9% this year, and long term interest rates continue nicely low. The international bull market in stocks continues. I am still fairly content.

Subject: Re: Shifting economy From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Tues, Feb 28, 2006 at 12:33:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thanks, Pete :) Bobby has been having computer problems.

Subject: Strangers at the Door From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 23, 2006 at 05:40:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/23/opinion/23ervin.html?ex=1298350800&en=ef2eb3d5a1ebc9c8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 23, 2006 Strangers at the Door By CLARK KENT ERVIN Washington WHO could have imagined that, in the post-9/11 world, the United States government would approve a deal giving control over six major American ports to a country with ties to terrorism? But this is exactly what the secretive Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has done. Since 1999, the ports of New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other cities have been operated by a British concern, P & O Ports, which has now been bought by Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the government of the United Arab Emirates. Defenders of the deal are claiming that critics, including the Republican and Democratic leaderships in Congress, are acting reflexively out of some bias against Arabs. This is simply not true. While the United Arab Emirates is deemed by the Bush administration to be an ally in the war on terrorism, we should all have deep concerns about its links to terrorists. Two of the 9/11 hijackers were citizens of the emirates, and some of the money for the attacks came from there. It was one of only three countries in the world that recognized the Taliban regime. And Dubai was an important transshipment point for the smuggling network of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist who supplied Libya, Iran and North Korea with equipment for making nuclear weapons. Most terrorism experts agree that the likeliest way for a weapon of mass destruction to be smuggled into our country would be through a port. After all, some 95 percent of all goods from abroad arrive in the United States by sea, and yet only about 6 percent of incoming cargo containers are inspected for security threats. It is true that at the ports run by the Dubai company, Customs officers would continue to do any inspection of cargo containers and the Coast Guard would remain 'in charge' of port security. But, again, very few cargo inspections are conducted. And the Coast Guard merely sets standards that ports are to follow and reviews their security plans. Meeting those standards each day is the job of the port operators: they are responsible for hiring security officers, guarding the cargo and overseeing its unloading. Probably few Americans knew until this week that major ports were operated by a foreign company. Now several members of Congress are introducing bills that would prohibit such ownership. While President Bush has threatened a veto, certainly it is reasonable to reconsider whether such strategic assets should be controlled by any foreign entity. The debate over the sale should also shed light on the mysterious workings of the Committee on Foreign Investment, an interagency body led by the secretary of the Treasury. Under current rules, the committee can approve deals in which foreign companies take over American properties with national security importance after just a 30-day review, and without the approval of the president. If the committee does not approve a sale within this period it can — or if the acquirer is a foreign government it must — take an additional 45 days to conduct an 'investigation,' after which it has to make a recommendation to the president, who then has 15 days to approve or reject the deal. While the president must inform Congress of his decision, it has no review power. In this instance, even though the acquirer was a foreign government, no investigation was conducted and the president was not informed. Obviously, the committee has a worrisome amount of power and the process is too rapid. At a minimum, the law should be changed to take away its power to decide matters with such a major bearing on national security on its own. And where a foreign power would be in control, the committee should thoroughly investigate and make a recommendation to the White House. Then, if the president approves the deal, Congress should have the ability to review and reverse it. If our nation's treaties and trade agreements are important enough to require Congressional approval, then surely ceding control of our most important strategic assets to a foreign power should as well — especially in the new age of terrorism. Clark Kent Ervin was the inspector general of the Homeland Security Department from 2003 to 2004.

Subject: Bobby, please notice the virus From: Bobby To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 23, 2006 at 04:09:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, please notice the virus filled program below. This is very dangerous.

Subject: 'The Mensch Gap' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 16:26:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/krugmans_money__3.html February 21, 2006 Paul Krugman responds to comments on his latest column, 'The Mensch Gap': Krugman's Money Talks: No Menschen in Washington, Commentary, NY Times: ... Ken Shemberg, Bowling Green, Ohio: As usual, I think you have it right. This administration couldn't admit a fault if they were caught red-handed on videotape. But, to be fair, is that really different from other presidents? Your example of Ike's D-Day letter was written before he became a president. Maybe Lincoln admitted faults — he liked to poke fun at himself — and maybe Kennedy admitted fault on the Bay of Pigs. But in reading presidential biographies, it's hard for me to dredge up a time when a president said, yep, I was wrong — on a major issue, anyway. Can you think of one? Grover Cleveland did admit to having an illegitimate daughter. But that was a bit different, wasn't it? Paul Krugman: Fair enough; full-blown apologies from politicians are rare. But I think there are two distinguishing features of this administration. First, they don't even make tacit admissions that they made mistakes. Both Reagan and Clinton changed course and brought in better people when it became clear that their policies weren't working; these guys never do. In particular, it's obvious to everyone that Rumsfeld and Chertoff are incompetent. But they're loyal, and Bush chose them, so they stay. The other is that they don't even admit to themselves that they've made mistakes, and learn nothing from experience. I'll write soon about how looming problems with Medicare Part D were ignored in the months after Katrina, when any normal administration would have wondered what other things it was unready for. Max Wieselthier, New York.: A quite beautiful exposition with one minor defect. The plural for mensch is menschen. Paul Krugman: Yes, I know. What do you take me and my parents for, untermenschen? But it's become an English word for all practical purposes. And if The History Channel can pronounce Field Marshal Rommel's first name 'Irwin', I can anglicize the plural of mensch. ...

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 19:19:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/30/05 - 2/21/06 Australia 3.3 Canada 7.6 Denmark 3.0 France 6.9 Germany 9.2 Hong Kong 4.5 Japan -3.4 Netherlands 8.5 Norway 11.0 Sweden 5.8 Switzerland 5.8 UK 6.0

Subject: Viruses Above! From: Bobby To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 14:50:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please note set of viruses above. Please help

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 19:18:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/30/05 - 2/21/06 Australia 2.2 Canada 5.8 Denmark 1.7 France 5.5 Germany 7.8 Hong Kong 4.6 Japan -3.2 Netherlands 7.1 Norway 10.7 Sweden 4.1 Switzerland 4.8 UK 4.3

Subject: Investing From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 19:17:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice how remarkably well the real estate investment trust index is holding. Also, the dollar continues to be strong but Latin American currencies, especially Brazil's, and with the exception of Chile's, are gaining in strength against the dollar.

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 18:47:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/05 to 2/21/06 S&P Index is 3.0 Large Cap Growth Index is 1.9 Large Cap Value Index is 4.0 Mid Cap Index is 4.6 Small Cap Index is 7.3 Small Cap Value Index is 6.9 Europe Index is 6.8 Pacific Index is -0.4 Emerging Markets Index is 10.2 Energy is 9.1 Health Care is 1.7 Precious Metals is 14.7 REIT Index is 9.4 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 1.4 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is -0.4

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 18:44:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/05 - 2/21/06 Energy 7.2 Financials 2.7 Health Care 2.7 Info Tech 2.5 Materials 5.8 REITs 9.5 Telecoms 11.1 Utilities 3.2

Subject: Paul Krugman: The Mensch Gap From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 16:29:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/02/paul_krugman_th_2.html February 20, 2006 Everybody makes mistakes. But not everyone can admit them. By Mark Thoma The Mensch Gap, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: 'Be a mensch,' my parents told me. Literally, a mensch is a person. But by implication, a mensch is an upstanding person who takes responsibility for his actions. ... Dick Cheney isn't a mensch. There have been many attempts to turn the shooting of Harry Whittington into a political metaphor, but the most characteristic moment was the final act — the Moscow show-trial moment in which the victim of Mr. Cheney's recklessness apologized for getting shot. Remember, Mr. Cheney, more than anyone else, misled us into the Iraq war. Then, when neither links to Al Qaeda nor W.M.D. materialized, he shifted the blame to the very intelligence agencies he bullied into inflating the threat. Donald Rumsfeld isn't a mensch. Before the Iraq war Mr. Rumsfeld muzzled commanders who warned that we were going in with too few troops, and sidelined State Department experts who warned that we needed a plan for the invasion's aftermath. But when the war went wrong, he began talking about 'unknown unknowns' and going to war with 'the army you have,' ducking responsibility for the failures of leadership that have turned the war into a stunning victory — for Iran. Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, isn't a mensch. Remember his excuse ... 'I remember on Tuesday morning,' ... 'picking up newspapers and I saw headlines, 'New Orleans Dodged the Bullet.' ' There were no such headlines, at least in major newspapers, and we now know that he received — and ignored — many warnings about the unfolding disaster. Michael Leavitt, the secretary of health and human services, isn't a mensch. He insists that the prescription drug plan's catastrophic start doesn't reflect poorly on his department, that 'no logical person' would have expected 'a transition happening that is so large without some problems.' In fact, Medicare's 1966 startup went very smoothly. ... I could go on. Officials in this administration never take responsibility ... it's always someone else's fault. Was it always like this? I don't want to romanticize our political history, but I don't think so. ... Dwight Eisenhower ... wrote a letter before D-Day accepting the blame if the landings failed. His modern equivalent would probably insist that the landings were a 'catastrophic success,' then ... blame ... their failure on the editorial page of The New York Times. Where have all the mensches gone? The character of the administration reflects the character of the man at its head. President Bush is definitely not a mensch; his inability to admit mistakes or take responsibility ... approaches the pathological. ... And as long as his appointees remain personally loyal, he defends their performance, no matter how incompetent. After all, to do otherwise would be to admit that he made a mistake in choosing them. ... But how did such people attain power in the first place? ... Whatever the reason ... it has horrifying consequences. You can't learn from mistakes if you won't admit making any mistakes, an observation that explains a lot about the policy disasters of recent years ... Above all, the anti-mensches now ruling America are destroying our moral standing. A recent National Journal report finds that we're continuing to hold many prisoners at Guantánamo even though the supposed evidence against them has been discredited. We're even holding at least eight prisoners who are no longer designated enemy combatants. Why? Well, releasing people you've imprisoned by mistake means admitting that you made a mistake. And that's something the people now running America never do.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: The Mensch Gap From: Sid Baroni To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 07:10:12 (EST) Email Address: sidbaloney23@juno.com Message: Hey Paul: How about being a mensch and returning the Enron money?

Subject: Trolling From: Bobby To: Sid Baroni Date Posted: Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 09:59:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, we have a troll.

Subject: True Costs of the Iraq War (J. Stiglitz) From: Yann To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 21, 2006 at 03:16:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The True Costs of the Iraq War By Joseph E. Stiglitz (Feb.2006) (http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stiglitz67) The most important things in life ­ like life itself ­ are priceless. But that doesn’t mean that issues involving the preservation of life (or a way of life), like defense, should not be subjected to cool, hard economic analysis. Shortly before the current Iraq war, when Bush administration economist Larry Lindsey suggested that the costs might range between $100 and $200 billion, other officials quickly demurred. For example, Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels put the number at $60 billion. It now appears that Lindsey’s numbers were a gross underestimate. Concerned that the Bush administration might be misleading everyone about the Iraq war’s costs, just as it had about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and connection with Al Qaida, I teamed up with Linda Bilmes, a budget expert at Harvard, to examine the issue. Even we, as opponents of the war, were staggered by what we found, with conservative to moderate estimates ranging from slightly less than a trillion dollars to more than $2 trillion. Our analysis starts with the $500 billion that the Congressional Budget Office openly talks about, which is still ten times higher than what the administration said the war would cost. Its estimate falls so far short because the reported numbers do not even include the full budgetary costs to the government. And the budgetary costs are but a fraction of the costs to the economy as a whole. For example, the Bush administration has been doing everything it can to hide the huge number of returning veterans who are severely wounded – 16,000 so far, including roughly 20% with serious brain and head injuries. So it is no surprise that its figure of $500 billion ignores the lifetime disability and healthcare costs that the government will have to pay for years to come. Nor does the administration want to face up to the military’s recruiting and retention problems. The result is large re-enlistment bonuses, improved benefits, and higher recruiting costs – up 20% just from 2003 to 2005. Moreover, the war is extremely wearing on equipment, some of which will have to be replaced. These budgetary costs (exclusive of interest) amount to $652 billion in our conservative estimate and $799 billion in our moderate estimate. Arguably, since the government has not reined in other expenditures or increased taxes, the expenditures have been debt financed, and the interest costs on this debt add another $98 billion (conservative) to $385 billion (moderate) to the budgetary costs. Of course, the brunt of the costs of injury and death is borne by soldiers and their families. But the military pays disability benefits that are markedly lower than the value of lost earnings. Similarly, payments for those who are killed amount to only $500,000, which is far less than standard estimates of the lifetime economic cost of a death, sometimes referred to as the statistical value of a life ($6.1 to $6.5 million). But the costs don’t stop there. The Bush administration once claimed that the Iraq war would be good for the economy, with one spokesperson even suggesting that it was the best way to ensure low oil prices. As in so many other ways, things have turned out differently: the oil companies are the big winners, while the American and global economies are losers. Being extremely conservative, we estimate the overall effect on the economy if only $5 or $10 of the increase is attributed to the war. At the same time, money spent on the war could have been spent elsewhere. We estimate that if a proportion of that money had been allocated to domestic investment in roads, schools, and research, the American economy would have been stimulated more in the short run, and its growth would have been enhanced in the long run. There are a number of other costs, some potentially quite large, although quantifying them is problematic. For instance, Americans pay some $300 billion annually for the “option value” of military preparedness – being able to fight wherever needed. That Americans are willing to pay this suggests that the option value exceeds the costs. But there is little doubt that the option value has been greatly impaired and will likely remain so for several years. In short, even our “moderate” estimate may significantly underestimate the cost of America’s involvement in Iraq. And our estimate does not include any of the costs implied by the enormous loss of life and property in Iraq itself. We do not attempt to explain whether the American people were deliberately misled regarding the war’s costs, or whether the Bush administration’s gross underestimate should be attributed to incompetence, as it vehemently argues is true in the case of weapons of mass destruction. Nor do we attempt to assess whether there were more cost-effective ways of waging the war. Recent evidence that deaths and injuries would have been greatly reduced had better body armor been provided to troops suggests how short-run frugality can lead to long-run costs. Certainly, when a war’s timing is a matter of choice, as in this case, inadequate preparation is even less justifiable. But such considerations appear to be beyond the Bush administration’s reckoning. Elaborate cost-benefit analyses of major projects have been standard practice in the defense department and elsewhere in government for almost a half-century. The Iraq war was an immense “project,” yet it now appears that the analysis of its benefits was greatly flawed and that of its costs virtually absent. One cannot help but wonder: were there alternative ways of spending a fraction of the war’s $1-$2 trillion in costs that would have better strengthened security, boosted prosperity, and promoted democracy? Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at Columbia University and was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to President Clinton and Chief Economist and Senior Vice President at the World Bank. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2006. www.project-syndicate.org

Subject: Report on Impact of Federal Benefits From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 11:11:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/national/18poverty.html?ex=1297918800&en=8460128cd4972f05&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Report on Impact of Federal Benefits on Curbing Poverty Reignites a Debate By ERIK ECKHOLM A brief report this week from the Census Bureau, highlighting how welfare programs and tax credits affect incomes among the poor, has fanned the politically charged debate on poverty in the United States and how best to measure it, with conservatives offering praise and liberals saying it underplays the extent of deprivation. The report, 'The Effects of Government Taxes and Transfers on Income and Poverty: 2004,' found that when noncash benefits like food stamps and housing subsidies were considered, as well as tax credits given to low-income workers, the share of Americans living under the poverty line last year was 8.3 percent. This is well below the 12.7 percent of Americans that the government officially says lived below the poverty line in 2004, using the conventional methodology that only counts a family's cash income. Conservatives have long maintained that poverty levels are overstated, and the new report was hailed by Douglas Besharov, an expert on social policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research group in Washington, as a much needed corrective. Mr. Besharov issued a news release saying, 'The new data show that real progress against poverty has been made in the last 40 years.' But liberal scholars said the report presented a misleading and partial picture, highlighting uncounted resources available to many poor people but ignoring, on the other side, many new expenses and hardships they face in a changing economy. 'Yes, the E.I.T.C. means a family has more money, and that's good,' said Timothy Smeeding, an economist at the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, referring to the Earned-Income Tax Credit, which can pay thousands of dollars to a low-income worker. 'But going to work can also mean high new expenses for travel and child care, for example, and these aren't included.' 'They've added in the extra benefits people get, but not the extra costs,' Mr. Smeeding said of the Census Bureau, adding that the report gave an overly optimistic figure of living conditions on the bottom. All sides agree that the current official methods for calculating incomes, and the poverty line itself, are outdated. Over the last decade, a host of technical studies by the National Academy of Sciences, academic scholars and the Census Bureau have analyzed incomes and needs under varying assumptions. In a news release this week, the bureau called the report 'part of an ongoing Census Bureau effort to understand economic well-being and poverty in America,' adding that the bureau 'has been working to streamline and simplify the many ways to consider the poverty rate.' Bureau officials did not respond to requests yesterday by telephone and e-mail for further comment on the report and its critics. For Mr. Besharov, a merit of the report was that it 'streamlined' the complex data offered by previous studies. 'This makes it a lot easier for people to look at the numbers and draw their own conclusions,' he said in an interview. Mr. Besharov said that if additional factors were to be included in income calculations, like the imputed rental savings for people who live together, the value of home equity and unreported public benefits, the share of Americans living below the poverty line would fall below 6 percent. 'I think the real story is that 40 years of benefits haven't eradicated poverty, but we've made some real progress,' Mr. Besharov said. But other scholars counter that many studies, which tried to paint a picture of needs and of uncounted benefits, have often placed more people below the poverty line rather than fewer. That line, many also say, is unrealistically low. The official poverty line was developed in 1960 and based on the simplest of calculations: the cost of feeding a family, multiplied by three. Since then, the original income cutoff has been adjusted for inflation but not for the radical changes in society and household expenses. But even as scholars and officials experiment with new data and seek new insights, most agree that the official methods for calculating incomes and the poverty line are unlikely to be changed. This is because eligibility for many major public programs, like food stamps and Medicaid, is tied to the official poverty rate, and any change would have wide repercussions. The official poverty line, from almost any viewpoint, represents a meager life at best. Currently a family of four including two adults and two children is declared poor with an annual income of $19,157 or less, regardless of location. The new Census Bureau report is online at www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/effect2004/effect2004.html .

Subject: At a Scientific Gathering From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 11:00:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19science.html?ex=1298005200&en=e8808528f2df8156&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 At a Scientific Gathering, U.S. Policies Are Lamented By CORNELIA DEAN ST. LOUIS — David Baltimore, the Nobel Prize-winning biologist and president of the California Institute of Technology, is used to the Bush administration misrepresenting scientific findings to support its policy aims, he told an audience of fellow researchers Saturday. Each time it happens, he said, 'I shrug and say, 'What do you expect?' ' But then, Dr. Baltimore went on, he began to read about the administration's embrace of the theory of the unitary executive, the idea that the executive branch has the power or even the obligation to act without restraint from Congress. And he began to see in a new light widely reported episodes of government scientists being restricted in what they could say in public. 'It's no accident that we are seeing such an extensive suppression of scientific freedom,' he said. 'It's part of the theory of government now, and it's a theory we need to vociferously oppose.' Far from twisting science to suit its own goals, he said, the government should be 'the guardian of intellectual freedom.' Dr. Baltimore spoke at a session here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Though it was organized too late for inclusion in the overall meeting catalogue, the session drew hundreds of scientists who crowded a large meeting room and applauded enthusiastically as speakers denounced administration policies they said threatened not just sound science but also the nation's research pre-eminence. The session was organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit organization that has been highly critical of the Bush administration. Not all of the speakers had harsh words for the administration. Rita R. Colwell, who headed the National Science Foundation, the government's leading financing organization for the physical sciences, from 1998 to 2004, said she had never experienced political pressure in that job. But, Dr. Colwell said, the free flow of scientific information is crucial for maintaining the nation's leadership in research. Threats to that, she said, are second only to terrorism as threats to the nation's security. Another speaker, Susan F. Wood, former director of the office of women's health at the Food and Drug Administration, said administration interference with the agency's scientific and regulatory processes had left morale there at a 'nadir.' Dr. Wood, who received a standing ovation from many in the audience, resigned in August to protest agency officials' unusual decision to overrule an expert panel and withhold marketing approval for Plan B, the so-called morning after pill, a form of emergency contraception. She said she feared that competent scientists would leave rather than remain at an agency where their work was ignored because 'social conservatives have extreme undue influence.' Later, in response to a question, she said that she might have consulted the agency's inspector general over the Plan B decision, but that inspectors general often had to be prodded by Congress before taking action. Democrats have little power in this Congress, she said, and Republicans who care about science have been 'remarkably silent.' Others in the audience said efforts to stifle researchers were attacks on more than science. 'Administrative legitimacy has been violated as much as scientific legitimacy,' said Sheila Jasanoff, an expert on science policy who teaches at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. 'You can't get the most solid possible basis for making a decision unless you have not just the most credible and legitimate form of science but also the most credible and legitimate administrative process.' Leslie Sussan, a lawyer with the Department of Health and Human Services who emphasized that she was speaking only for herself, drew applause when she said she saw the administration's science policies as 'an attack on the rule of law as a basis for self-government and democracy.'

Subject: Superheroes Dive In From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:59:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/arts/design/20marv.html?ex=1298091600&en=f07499cc0d5c031b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 The Battle Outside Raging, Superheroes Dive In By GEORGE GENE GUSTINES Embedded reporters on the front lines of war. The search for weapons of mass destruction. An attack on civil liberties. Sounds like a job for ... Spider-Man? America's current real-world political issues will wind themselves into the lives of the heroes of Marvel Comics in 'Civil War,' a seven-issue limited monthly series set to begin in May. In the series, the beliefs of many well-known Marvel characters, including Captain America, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man and Spider-Man, will be challenged. Marvel will also publish a related series, beginning in June, that is to appear biweekly. Plans for that series, 'Civil War: Front Line,' are to be announced by the company on Saturday at the first New York Comic-Con, a consumer and business trade show. Joe Quesada, editor in chief of the Marvel Comics division of Marvel Entertainment, said the idea for 'Civil War' came out of one of the company's creative summits, which are used to assess the state of the heroes. 'Stagnation means death,' said Mr. Quesada, adding that Stan Lee, the creator of many of Marvel's characters, often advised piling problems onto heroes to keep them fresh. 'Civil War' provides problems in spades. The story opens with a reckless fight between a novice group of heroes (filming a reality television show) and a cadre of villains. The battle becomes quite literally explosive, killing some of the superheroes and many innocent bystanders. That crystallizes a government movement to register all super-powered beings as living weapons of mass destruction. The subsequent Registration Act will divide the heroes into two camps, one led by Captain America, the other by Iron Man. Along the way, Marvel will unveil its version of Guantánamo Bay, enemy combatants, embedded reporters and more. The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: 'Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?' Comic books have a long history of reacting to or depicting the news. In 1940's comics, Hitler and Nazi soldiers often battled Marvel's Captain America and DC's Superman and the Justice Society. More recently, superheroes have wrestled with poverty in Africa and reacted to losses on Sept. 11. A forthcoming graphic novel will pit Batman against an Al Qaeda threat. As deeply entangled in current United States politics as the new Marvel series seem, 'Civil War' and the accompanying 'Front Line' series won't be written by Americans. Mark Millar, a popular comics writer who is Scottish and lives in Glasgow is writing 'Civil War'; Paul Jenkins, a British writer who lives in Atlanta and had a lengthy run on 'Spider-Man,' is writing 'Front Line.' In a telephone interview, Mr. Millar said the nature of the story — a crossover event with plot strands weaving through multiple Marvel titles — meant a lot of coordination with other writers to make sure events and characters lined up properly. Mr. Millar said the story would cause a 'seismic shift' in the Marvel heroes: 'Before the civil war, the Marvel universe was a certain way. After the civil war, the heroes are employed by the government.' But don't think that gives away the ending. 'Some people refuse to do it,' he said, 'and those guys are performing an illegal act by doing so.' Mr. Jenkins's 'Civil War: Front Line' will explore the ramifications of the events in the main series and more. 'I have absolute carte blanche to take on the political landscape as it exists in America and all around the world,' he said in a telephone interview. Mr. Jenkins will be telling some of his stories through the viewpoint of two embedded reporters. One works for a left-leaning newspaper, The Alternative. The other works for The Daily Bugle, whose fictional publisher, J. Jonah Jameson, Mr. Jenkins likened to Rupert Murdoch. Jameson has an agenda and pushes his embedded reporter to meet it. Mr. Jenkins will be doing some embedding of his own, using, in part, actual war letters and diaries, including 'The Diary of Anne Frank' to tell the parallel story of a frightened young mutant girl in Manhattan, and the World War I poem, 'Futility,' by Wilfred Owen, to chronicle the last moments of a hero's life. Are these stories getting too heavy for comics readers looking to shut out real-world tensions? Not really, say the Marvel writers. 'Civil War,' Mr. Millar said, will work on two levels: 'At the core, it's one half of the Marvel heroes vs. the other half.' But, he added: 'The political allegory is only for those that are politically aware. Kids are going to read it and just see a big superhero fight.'

Subject: Recipe for a Family Brawl From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:47:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/business/yourmoney/19frenzy.html?ex=1298005200&en=b22b538623829e83&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Like Father, Like Son: Recipe for a Family Brawl By RICHARD SIKLOS THE word on Brent Redstone, who is suing his billionaire father, Sumner M. Redstone, in an attempt to dissolve the family business, is that he does not have the drive, the stuff, the mojo, that his dad does. Thus Brent's sister, Shari E. Redstone, has been given the nod as the future successor to their father, suzerain of the recently divided CBS Corporation and Viacom Inc. But in taking on his pugnacious pop — all three Redstones are lawyers by training, by the way — perhaps Brent is finally showing that he is a Redstone after all. The particulars of the younger Mr. Redstone's grievances, as outlined in a lawsuit filed last week, are at first blush more lurid than threatening to the family's sprawling media assets, which the Redstones control through their 11 percent equity stake and 71 percent voting interest in Viacom and CBS. Brent Redstone, who is 55, contends that he has been kicked off Viacom's board, shut out of decisions at National Amusements (the private family holding company that also runs a movie theater chain) and deprived of his fair share of the family's assets. He wants National Amusements dissolved so that he can take his one-sixth share of a fortune valued at $8 billion and go his way. His 82-year-old father, needless to say, is embarrassed by the public airing of laundry and allegations of self-dealing that his son has leveled. But, equally needless to say, he is not one to roll over easily. What makes Brent Redstone's lawsuit so fascinatingly meta — seeking the split of a company that has just split — is that he surely knows better than anyone with whom he is dealing. The Redstone follies and their Shakespearean subplots, of course, are nothing too unusual for media dynasties with graying patriarchs. The antics follow a series of similar intrigues that might lead you to believe that the era of the family media dynasty is under pressure, maybe even on the wane. A closer look at the field indicates that, actually, the opposite is true, especially if you look at both the privately held and publicly traded media groups. Hurt feelings and all-out feuding are a natural consequence of the generational transition of leadership occurring across the media industry, resulting from the proliferation and consolidation of media businesses in the latter part of the 20th century. Last year, Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert's elder son and potential successor (sort of), quit his executive role at the family-controlled News Corporation amid frustration that his father was undermining him. It turned out that Lachlan and his three siblings from Mr. Murdoch's first two marriages were also having a tense time with their dad over his desire to give an equal share of the family trust to his children from his third marriage. At Cablevision, which owns a lucrative cable television operation, some cable channels and New York City sports interests, tensions have emerged between the founder, Charles F. Dolan, and his son, James, whom he had made the company's chief executive. Investors and analysts have been scratching their heads over a series of strategy flip-flops: aborting a satellite venture, for instance, calling off plans to take the company's cable systems private and embracing a separate plan to pay out a special dividend. What these three examples have in common, of course, are various degrees of nepotism, dysfunction and a mandatory retirement age (for media moguls) of never. Then there is the whole father-son dynamic, but that's another story. (By the way, it's hard to talk about familial dysfunction gone wild without mentioning the collapse of the Adelphia Communications cable empire and the resulting prison terms for the founder, John Rigas, and his son Timothy — although what went on there was so scandalous that it belongs in a separate category, the one with WorldCom and Enron.) John L. Ward, professor of family enterprises at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, says that only about half of all family-led businesses make it to a next generation of ownership. But he added that he believed the rate of succession was higher among media companies, in part because the business is glamorous or is seen as performing a public service. 'In terms of family members, it's very easy for them to be attracted to the company,' he said. 'It's not like making widgets.' He also said that media dynasties, unlike other family businesses, tend to be more comfortable with sharing bad news and fielding criticism — because that, after all, is their business. In the case of businesses in which the family does not own clear control, the laws of entropy can come into play. That's what seems to be happening at Knight-Ridder, where the chief executive, Anthony P. Ridder, a great-grandson of one of the company's founders, is under pressure from outside shareholders to sell the company. Mr. Ridder controls only 1.9 percent of the company's votes, in contrast to top executives at the Washington Post Company, the McClatchy Company, The New York Times Company and the Belo Corporation, all of whom are descendants of founders whose position is secured against outside agitators via a controlling family trust. Clearly, though, there is no one-size-fits-all model for the multigenerational media dynasty. Some are publicly held, some private; some have professional managers, others chip-off-the-old-block leaders. A tipping point for the sale of several family-owned newspaper groups came in the 1980's, when some descendants who no longer had close ties to the business wanted to cash in their stock — perhaps most famously the Bingham family, which owned newspapers, TV and radio stations and much else in Louisville, Ky. Once you go beyond the biggest media groups based in the United States — Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company and NBC Universal (none of which have a family in control), as well as Mr. Redstone's and Mr. Murdoch's companies — there are actually plenty of examples of companies that have successfully made the generational transition so far. Perhaps the most notable example is Comcast, the nation's largest cable company, where the founder, Ralph J. Roberts, passed the baton to his son Brian L. Roberts. The Robertses and other media families have been criticized for using multiple-voting shares to keep a grip on companies while actually owning only a small part of the equity; Comcast says that stability of ownership has helped it outperform the market since it went public in 1972. At Cox Enterprises, the privately held media conglomerate based in Atlanta, the founder's grandson, James Cox Kennedy, holds the roles of chairman and chief executive. 'Knock on wood, we currently have no family squabbles,' Mr. Kennedy said in an interview last week. 'It may be simply the number of families we're dealing with,' he said, referring to the fact that the business is controlled by the two daughters of the company's founder. Advance Communications and the Hearst Corporation are also private, multi-generational media companies that appear relatively stable, Mr. Kennedy said. In Advance's case, various members of the Newhouse family have senior roles in the company, which counts cable, newspapers and Condé Nast among its interests. THE family setup at Hearst is almost the opposite, and it's worth remembering that the company is the creation of William Randolph Hearst, a mercurial mogul if ever there was one. He set up his trust in such a way that the company would be controlled by people outside the family, although his descendants would be involved. The trust expires with the death of the last relative who was alive when Mr. Hearst died, in 1951. That could take a while. Clearly, media moguls have their own views of what they want their legacy to be and the roles that they want their descendants to play. The only common thread is that, having worked so hard to gain power, they don't give up their companies any more easily. For instance, it is quite telling that control over Mr. Murdoch's empire currently resides in a Bermudan holding company overseen by eight trustees who are nominated by Mr. Murdoch and his four elder children. The names of companies that appoint these trustees on the various Murdochs' behalf? One is called Safeguard. The other, Secure.

Subject: Bush's Chat With Novelist Alarms From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:43:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/national/19warming.html?ex=1298005200&en=a7ab8a29e56cf4df&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Bush's Chat With Novelist Alarms Environmentalists By MICHAEL JANOFSKY WASHINGTON — One of the perquisites of being president is the ability to have the author of a book you enjoyed pop into the White House for a chat. Over the years, a number of writers have visited President Bush, including Natan Sharansky, Bernard Lewis and John Lewis Gaddis. And while the meetings are usually private, they rarely ruffle feathers. Now, one has. In his new book about Mr. Bush, 'Rebel in Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush,' Fred Barnes recalls a visit to the White House last year by Michael Crichton, whose 2004 best-selling novel, 'State of Fear,' suggests that global warming is an unproven theory and an overstated threat. Mr. Barnes, who describes Mr. Bush as 'a dissenter on the theory of global warming,' writes that the president 'avidly read' the novel and met the author after Karl Rove, his chief political adviser, arranged it. He says Mr. Bush and his guest 'talked for an hour and were in near-total agreement.' 'The visit was not made public for fear of outraging environmentalists all the more,' he adds. And so it has, fueling a common perception among environmental groups that Mr. Crichton's dismissal of global warming, coupled with his popularity as a novelist and screenwriter, has undermined efforts to pass legislation intended to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that leading scientists say causes climate change. Mr. Crichton, whose views in 'State of Fear' helped him win the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' annual journalism award this month, has been a leading doubter of global warming and last September appeared before a Senate committee to argue that the supporting science was mixed, at best. 'This shows the president is more interested in science fiction than science,' Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, said after learning of the White House meeting. Mr. O'Donnell's group monitors environmental policy. 'This administration has put no limit on global warming pollution and has consistently rebuffed any suggestion to do so,' he said. Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes's book left a false impression of Mr. Bush's views on global warming. Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to several speeches in which Mr. Bush had acknowledged the impact of global warming and the need to confront it, even if he questioned the degree to which humans contribute to it.

Subject: A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:35:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/business/20carr.html?ex=1298091600&en=6258e3032814eb4c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 A B-Movie Becomes a Blockbuster By David Carr HOLLYWOOD is filled with intrigue that has nothing to do with who will win the best-actor Oscar next month. The selection process that currently has the A-List lighting up BlackBerrys and cellphones is emanating from a grand jury in Los Angeles that is looking into secretive business conducted by Anthony Pellicano, a high-profile private investigator. The case, which could ultimately threaten the reputation and even the freedom of some of the entertainment industry's most prominent figures, also serves as a reminder that even though the studios are now just one more adjunct of large media companies, Hollywood has always been a wide-open town that lives by its own rules. If you put all the elements of the Pellicano story in a movie pitch, they would laugh you out of the bungalow. A Hollywood private detective with wise-guy connections, Mr. Pellicano cleans up messes for the powerful, engaging in pervasive surveillance along the way. A reporter, Anita M. Busch, who has written for both The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times, gets a little too close on a story about one of his clients, and he dispatches a small-time hood to blow up her car, according to a search warrant. The operative decides that the fireworks are too dicey and instead leaves behind a shattered windshield, a note that stays 'Stop' and a dead fish in a tin tray. (And a rose, don't forget about the rose.) It gets better. Federal authorities traced the attempt to terrorize the reporter back to Mr. Pellicano. On a November day in 2002, his office was raided, and in the safe investigators found $200,000, plastic explosives and two grenades. Eight days later, they go back and find the real dynamite: transcripts, tapes and computer files of phone conversations, many involving the most powerful people in the entertainment business. At this point, according to Marvin Rudnick, a former federal prosecutor and one of Ms. Busch's attorneys, 'the B-movie turns into a blockbuster.' ON Feb. 6, Mr. Pellicano and his cadre of alleged co-conspirators were indicted on 110 counts of racketeering and conspiracy. On Wednesday, Terry N. Christensen, a respected member of the Los Angeles bar, was indicted on wiretapping and conspiracy charges in connection with the divorce case of Kirk Kerkorian, the billionaire investor. At one time or another, Mr. Christensen has also represented Paramount Pictures, the Walt Disney Company, MGM/UA and Sony Pictures Entertainment. Many recognizable names have been questioned, among them Bert Fields, whose client list includes some of the city's better-known names, including Michael S. Ovitz, the once-powerful talent agent, and Brad Grey, now the chairman of Paramount. People who were in litigation against both men were subjected to background checks and wiretapping, according to the indictment, but neither has been implicated in any criminal activity. Still, with the indictment of Mr. Christensen, no one knows which way the marble will roll next. Mr. Rudnick said that far-reaching issues were being raised. 'When you look at these cases, you have to ask yourself, 'Is there a protection racket in Los Angeles?' ' he said. 'And I think you are seeing evidence that there is right now, that people are using extra-legal means to neutralize antagonists in legal proceedings. The integrity of the courts has been called into question.' There are legal implications beyond civil matters like divorce and business disputes. Mr. Pellicano has done work on behalf of law enforcement in the past, and those cases would be opened anew if it were found that he violated the law in the conduct of his business. And given that federal investigators are in receipt of an uncertain number of recorded conversations, all those being questioned have to answer knowing that they may face federal perjury charges if they are less than forthcoming. The last time there was even close to this kind of tension held in common in Los Angeles, Heidi Fleiss was under investigation for running a prostitution ring. Her black book contained many A-List names, but in the end none of the big boys ended up getting hurt. They may not be so lucky this time around. 'There is a great deal of schadenfreude going around among the lawyers who are not targets, I'm sure,' said Eric Weissmann, an entertainment lawyer, who has no knowledge of anyone's guilt or innocence. 'I think the problem is far more endemic than the lawyers or investigators. You have clients who want to win at all costs, and they are not necessarily interested in the Marquis of Queensbury rules of engagement. There is an enormous pressure to win.' If the case has legs, it could become a concern for the giant New York media companies that now own the movie business. While Time Warner, Viacom and Sony wrestle with balance sheets and the nuances of Sarbanes-Oxley, much of the old-school charm of Hollywood has stayed in place, with power brokers madly suing and swearing oaths against each other, all the while serially marrying and divorcing. Going back to the days of moguls like Mayer and Wasserman, Hollywood sprang up to escape the scrutiny of the government and corporate overseers. Now, what had been a sideshow threatens to pull back the blankets on an underbelly of the business that never went away, even after the studios became another item in corporate quarterly reports. A New York-based media executive who declined to comment on the record because his company had no involvement in the matter, said that the Christensen indictment 'makes you wonder about the scope of the investigation.' No one, not even a new generation of corporate overseers, has ever been able to teach Hollywood manners. As one of the executives in 'Indecent Exposure,' David McClintick's 1982 account of the Begelman scandal at Columbia, said, 'the new Hollywood is very much like the old Hollywood.'

Subject: Digital Moves to Top-Tier Cameras From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:35:06 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/technology/20camera.html?ex=1298091600&en=8ed81a12ac27c98e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 Digital Moves to Top-Tier Cameras By IAN AUSTEN Like many serious amateur photographers, Chad Marek has a sense of brand loyalty that rivals the attachment of many sports fans to their home teams. But the reasons for his commitment have as much to do with practical matters as emotional pull. The 10 Konica Minolta digital and film cameras owned by Mr. Marek, a 35-year-old quality-control engineer who is also the president of a Chicago camera club, work only with lenses designed for that brand. Similarly, Mr. Marek's collection of about 33 Minolta lenses — he's lost count — will not fit any other make of camera. So Mr. Marek was more than a little concerned when Konica Minolta said last month that it was abandoning the photo business — both digital and film — and selling some of its camera technology to Sony. 'Minolta had a great name in photography — they were No. 3 in the market when I bought my first camera,' Mr. Marek said. 'I can't imagine being without it now.' Not all of the traditional leading camera makers have taken Konica Minolta's drastic step. Faced with brutal competition in the consumer market for compact digital cameras, several have turned to high-margin, digital single-lens reflex, or S.L.R., cameras, which feature interchangeable lenses, to maintain their profits. Those high margins have not escaped the notice of relative newcomers like Sony, Panasonic and Samsung. At the annual Photo Marketing Association International show next week in Orlando, Fla., all three are expected to further outline their plans to move into photography's top tier. When that occurs, the challenge for some of photography's most venerable brands may be simply to survive. 'Life used to be stable in the camera business,' said Ned Bunnell, director of marketing at Pentax Imaging. 'But if you look at what happened to the personal computer industry, I think it's logical to think that the same sort of consolidation would take place in the camera industry.' Sony has already risen to the No. 3 spot in digital camera sales in the United States, with 15.8 percent of the market, just behind Canon, at 17.2 percent, and Kodak, at 16.9 percent, according to Current Analysis, a research firm in Sterling, Va. And as the competition gets keener, life becomes fundamentally different for camera companies, which used to operate at a stately pace with new product cycles measured in years. Nikon's top-of-the-line F-series of cameras, for example, has been revamped only six times over nearly five decades. 'In the past, as a camera maker we were able to take it easy, watch what was happening,' said Makoto Kimura, the president of Nikon Imaging and a senior managing director of Nikon, its parent. 'Now we've had to revitalize ourselves.' In 1988, Sony introduced what is generally regarded as the first successful digital camera for consumers, the Mavica, which stored its photos on a standard diskette. While not breathtaking technology, the disks meant that the Mavica was the first camera that offered an easy way to transfer photos to computers. 'That was when we started to think that other players were beginning to look at the possibilities of digital photography,' Mr. Kimura said. With digital photography, Sony and other electronics makers immediately boasted advantages that offset their lack of optical experience. From its video camera business, Sony knew how to design and manufacture charge-coupled devices, or C.C.D.'s, the light-sensing chips that became film's most common digital replacement. Making the chips is beyond the financial or technical reach of most camera makers, several of which rely on Sony and other electronics companies as suppliers. The electronics companies' main advantage, however, was far less technical. The shift to digital photography meant that even relatively expensive cameras were increasingly purchased at electronics chains rather than specialty shops. The traditional camera makers were, by and large, left learning how to elbow their way onto shelves at Best Buy, Staples and Circuit City as well as adjusting their systems to meet the inventory and logistics demands of the national chains. 'I was with Sony for a number of years,' said Jeff R. Clark, the senior digital photography analyst at Current Analysis. 'Supply chain management was probably more important to that company than the products it made.' Eastman Kodak and Fuji Photo Film also have a good understanding of mass merchandisers from their film businesses. That helped Kodak, at least in the United States, become a major vendor of digital cameras and sometimes the market leader. But its sales are weighted toward lower-priced cameras, a factor somewhat offset by the cameras' ability to connect easily to home snapshot printers that use only profitable Kodak supplies. Perhaps inevitably, the number of competitors offset the higher-than-anticipated demand for digital cameras, pushing down prices and margins. New models with additional features appeared every few months rather than years apart. Canon, which is unique among camera companies in that it has extensive in-house chip-making ability through its office machine division, found a route to salvation. In 2003, it introduced the Digital Rebel, the first digital S.L.R. priced under $1,000 with a lens. The move was well timed. Many early digital camera buyers were returning for their second camera, and digital S.L.R.'s offered higher image quality, partly because of larger imaging chips. Digital S.L.R.'s were equally appealing to their makers and retailers. The incompatibility of lenses between brands and a lack of similar products from electronics makers has, so far at least, minimized price-cutting. Further adding to profits are the sales of even higher-margin accessory lenses and other add-ons that digital S.L.R.'s generate. Although Pentax cut the price of one digital S.L.R. this month to $600, from $800, the category has generally avoided the price free-fall that has plagued the compact camera market. According to Current Analysis, the average price of a Canon PowerShot S410 compact camera fell to $244 last month, from $346 a year earlier. But the successor to the Digital Rebel S.L.R., the Digital Rebel XT, still retails for just under $1,000. Nikon has similarly been able to maintain prices on its two S.L.R. cameras aimed mainly at consumers. Nikon said this month that its success with high-margin digital S.L.R. cameras helped account for a 26 percent increase in third-quarter sales, tripling its profits. And Canon ended 2005 with sales up 8.3 percent and a net revenue increase of 11.9 percent, performance it attributed largely to its digital S.L.R. cameras and photo printers. But Steve Hoffenberg, the director of consumer imaging research at Lyra Research in Newton, Mass., said that it was not just the high margins of S.L.R.'s that had drawn manufacturers' interest in the segment. The compact camera market, he said, is likely to be squeezed further as high-quality cameras are introduced into mobile phones and hand-held devices. He also expects the electronics companies to match their earlier digital imaging successes in the S.L.R. market. 'A new wave of technology has given the newcomers the upper hand,' Mr. Hoffenberg said. 'For the consumer electronics companies, digital photography has been all upside, while the photo industry was stuck in a slow evolution stage.' Some smaller camera makers appear to be looking for a truce. While neither Pentax nor Olympus has followed Konica Minolta's lead and retrenched to more profitable lines of business like medical imaging, both have allied themselves with electronics companies. Pentax is producing a Samsung-branded digital S.L.R. and supplying the Korean maker with its lenses. Olympus and Panasonic's parent company, Matsushita Electric, have similarly joined forces, although they have yet to unveil specific products. Those alliances, like Sony's deal with Konica Minolta, give electronics companies access to a full range of established lens systems and other accessories. James Neal, director of digital imaging products at Sony Electronics, said his company expected interchangeable lens cameras to maintain a strong position in the market. 'It is key for Sony to be in this market at this time,' Mr. Neal said. 'Consumers are really interested in moving up the ladder in terms of quality and performance to digital S.L.R.'s. If we just stopped at point-and-shoots, we would not have met all the needs of consumers.' Mr. Neal said Sony was counting on sales to owners of Minolta lenses. (Konica, a maker of film, photocopiers and mini photo labs, merged with Minolta about two years ago.) For customers like Mr. Marek, it may be a tough sell. While Sony has been skilled at making its cameras easy to use, particularly for newcomers, it has sometimes omitted features like optical viewfinders and tripod sockets, which serious photographers often view as essential. Similarly, Sony cameras use proprietary memory cards that are generally more expensive than industry standards such as Compact Flash. Mr. Marek is eager to see what Sony offers, but he is also wary. 'They're going to get my first look next time I buy a camera because of my investment in my current equipment,' Mr. Marek said. 'But if they don't meet my needs, I'll go elsewhere.'

Subject: Quiet Bid to Reunite Haiti From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:33:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/international/americas/20haiti.html?ex=1298091600&en=d1fd492763e93792&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 Préval's Silence Obscures Quiet Bid to Reunite Haiti By GINGER THOMPSON PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — President-elect René Préval, who rose to power as a champion of this country's poor masses, attended his first victory party among its elite. It was a Friday-night, garden-side, happy-hour kind of affair in a mansion near Pétionville, a mecca for this country's glitterati, with lots to drink, lots of laughter, and performances by popular Haitian musicians. But when the hostess invited Mr. Préval, a reluctant politician, to address the group, he introduced several carefully chosen backers to speak for him. Two were leaders of Fanmi Lavalas, the principal political party of the poor. Then he called two men whose designer clothes and light complexions marked them as sons of the upper classes. Reaching for one another across the gaping divides between class and skin color that have crippled this former slave colony for most of its 202-year history, the young men and Mr. Préval hugged, bringing a roaring ovation from the crowd, and a glimpse of the how Mr. Préval envisioned his second presidency. 'You see, everyone,' Mr. Préval said, beaming, as if he might finally get used to the spotlight, 'I am going to reconcile Haiti.' It was as close to making an acceptance speech as he has come since Thursday, when he was declared the winner of an election for president that had threatened to plunge this country, the most volatile in the hemisphere, back into crisis. Mr. Préval, a 63-year-old Belgian-educated agronomist who was president from 1996 to 2001, has not yet officially addressed the nation, and he has not yet granted interviews. But parties like the one on Friday showed Mr. Préval quietly at work on the glaring challenge of ending the devastating hostilities between the rich and the poor — starting with repairing some of the damage he had just done to that cause. Last week, he charged the authorities with fraud in elections whose credibility was considered crucial to strengthening Haiti's stumbling democracy. Now he, too, faces questions about the legitimacy of the back-room deal brokered by foreign diplomats that ended the possibility of a runoff and made him the victor. He has held a battery of private meetings and conversations with the same opponents whom he called enemies on national television last week. The angry protests that paralyzed cities across the country, forcing a defiant Provisional Electoral Council to bow to his demands last week, have raised questions here and around the world about whether Mr. Préval will be his own president, or a low-key copy of his old ally, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Mr. Aristide, the fiery slum priest who could command this country's poor masses as firmly as Moses did the Red Sea, was forced from power and into exile in South Africa two years ago by a violent uprising supported by the elite. But some contend that he continues, either directly or through the masses who remain loyal to him, to have influence over Mr. Préval. Pressure for Mr. Aristide's return has clearly begun building from South Africa, where President Thabo Mbeki suggested Sunday on public radio that Mr. Aristide might soon consult with Mr. Préval. 'I would imagine from everything that I've seen and heard that President Préval himself wouldn't want to oppose President Aristide's return to Haiti,' Mr. Mbeki said on SABC radio, Reuters reported. 'But I think it will be determined largely by an assessment by René Préval, and by President Aristide as to the timing of it, so that it doesn't produce unnecessary problems.' Problems are about all that is left of Haiti, a sinking ship of a nation where a majority of the 8.1 million people suffer the hemisphere's worst levels of poverty and corruption, while a tiny minority of them profit from it. Almost every chance for progress has been ruined by fighting among populist leaders from Haiti's urban slums and movers among the bourgeoisie. Several foreign diplomats acknowledged that the events of last week had fueled concerns in their nations' capitals that Mr. Préval would use the same burning barricades and threats of chaos that characterized Mr. Aristide's rule. They wondered how Mr. Préval would respond if the mobs that helped him win power demanded, in return, that he bring Mr. Aristide home. 'We made very clear to Mr. Préval that we see Aristide as a figure of the past, with no place in Haiti's future,' said one Western ambassador, who asked not to be identified because diplomacy on the issue is continuing. 'He told me: 'Don't worry, Mr. Ambassador. The last time Mr. Aristide returned to Haiti, he came with 50,000 American troops. I don't think he'll have access to that kind of force anymore.' ' The American ambassador to Haiti, Timothy M. Carney, who is serving as chargé d'affaires until a new ambassador arrives, reiterated comments by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. 'We believe we can work with Préval,' Mr. Carney said. 'Haitians clearly believe he is his own man,' he said of Mr. Préval, who, according to the final election results, won 51.1 percent of the votes compared with the 12 percent won by the nearest rival. 'I think what he's doing now is proving he has the force of character, by reaching out to the opposition, by beginning to move forward with no Aristide in sight.' Mr. Préval, political analysts said, may be the first leader in decades who can build a bridge between the haves and have-nots. Unlike Mr. Aristide, born a destitute orphan, Mr. Préval is the son of a former agriculture minister and was reared among the middle classes until his family fled the country under the dictatorship of François Duvalier. After that, he led a largely blue-collar life that instilled in him empathy for the poor. He was a waiter, messenger and factory worker in New York, and then owned a bakery in a poor neighborhood in Haiti and ran programs to help the poor. 'I haven't felt this much hope about Haiti in many years,' said Dumarsais Simeus, a Haitian-American businessman, a former candidate for president, and one of the few people at the party who agreed to be interviewed for attribution. 'I believe' Mr. Préval 'is going to dedicate himself to uniting this country.' But hope may be trampled by Haitian realities. The volume of the scathing comments from fractious political leaders has dropped since Mr. Préval was declared president. But their suspicions continue. The protests have ended, but the tens of thousands of people who participated in them remain restless, without work, and living in hovels next to open sewers. Killings and kidnappings have dropped from as many as six a day to almost none. But the gang members suspected of being responsible still control the capital's most populous slum, Cité Soleil. Mr. Préval has disclosed very little about his plans for building Haiti back into a nation. He has talked vaguely about disarming the gangs and strengthening the police. He has said he will seek increased investment from the United States and urge Haitian professionals abroad to bring their expertise home. He made the same promises at the start of his first term as president, said Jocelyn McCalla, of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights. While Mr. Préval is the only Haitian president in recent history to finish a full five-year-term, then peacefully hand over power, Mr. McCalla said he accomplished little else. Some political analysts said most of Mr. Préval's efforts in his last term were undermined by Mr. Aristide. Mr. McCalla said that seemed too easy an excuse, and that he wondered what made anyone so sure that things would be different this time. Though Mr. Préval gave little away on Friday, the scene alone — bankers boogieing with advocates for the poor — spoke volumes. 'A lot of black Haitian leaders in this country are very angry, and rightfully so, about the way they have been treated by the wealthy of this country,' said a political analyst at the party. 'Mr. Preval does not harbor that kind of anger. He is not criminal. He is not corrupt. And he is not going to allow class warfare.'

Subject: It Rings, Sings, Downloads, Uploads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:33:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/technology/20cell.html?ex=1298091600&en=66209299b82326c1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 It Rings, Sings, Downloads, Uploads. But Can You Stand It? By KEN BELSON Greg Harper is your classic gadget freak, with the latest cellphones and strong opinions about each of them. You would think that he'd be wildly enthusiastic about the new third-generation, or 3G, cellphones that play video and music. But instead, he seems less than impressed — a reaction that could spell trouble for Sprint, Verizon Wireless and other providers that have spent billions of dollars upgrading their networks to lure customers to their high-speed 3G systems. 'I'm no longer worrying about hot spots or being out of touch,' said Mr. Harper, a business consultant who carries a Motorola phone from Verizon for talking, a Sprint Pocket PC smart phone for e-mail and an iPod for music. 'The big problem is how hard it is to navigate the stuff,' he said. 'And they hit you with these extra charges, so you don't want to use it.' Mr. Harper's advanced phones enable him to watch TV segments, send e-mail messages and photos, download music and games, and search the Web about five times faster than with a standard cellphone. But the 3G service for his phones and laptop PC adds as much as $60 a month to each of his cellular plans. Figuring out how to use all the features on the handsets is also a chore. If the nation's biggest cellular carriers are not impressing early adopters like Mr. Harper, it may be years before ordinary consumers start signing up in sizable numbers for the new services, which were introduced about a year ago. American carriers combined have spent about $10 billion in the last three years to upgrade their networks. Verizon Wireless now offers 3G services in 181 markets, while Sprint expects to match Verizon's coverage in the coming months. Cingular uses a different 3G technology that is available in 52 cities. (T-Mobile, the fourth-largest carrier, plans to introduce 3G services next year.) With individual subscribers spending less on standard voice-only plans, the carriers are banking on consumers to move rapidly to more expensive 3G services and do more than talk on their handsets. But the experience of carriers that introduced 3G services in Japan, Korea and elsewhere is sobering. In those countries, it took years before phones and plans were cheap enough to entice consumers to use the new data features, and even longer before carriers saw any return on their investment. American carriers have not released separate figures for 3G cell subscribers. But industry analysts say there may be fewer than five million 3G phones in use, or less than 3 percent of the market, and only two million of those are connected to a 3G data plan. 'The biggest impediment is not pricing or technology, but consumer behavior,' said Charles S. Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research. 'Most people still look at these things as phones.' To be sure, the amount that consumers spent on data services has nearly doubled in the past year, and revenue from those services now makes up nearly 10 percent of overall sales at the largest carriers. Last Wednesday, Sprint Nextel said that its customers had downloaded one million songs from its music site since it opened in October (some were promotional giveaways; others sold for $2.50 a song). Verizon said that in the fourth quarter, its customers sent 7.4 billion text messages and 135 million photos with their handsets. But thus far, the bulk of the data being swapped on phones — short messages, ring tones and photos — can be handled by the current generation of phones. Only about one-quarter of Verizon Wireless's handsets are even capable of providing 3G services, though the company is steadily adding more models to its lineup. The carriers are trying to keep prices for the new phones in line with other high-end handsets, lest they scare away customers. Verizon Wireless's LG 8100, which lets customers watch television clips, play games and listen to music, costs $150 after rebates. Verizon's 3G data service, called V Cast, which allows users to watch CNN, CBS News and MTV segments, among other programs, costs an additional $15 a month. Sprint has a $15-a-month plan that lets subscribers watch segments of ABC News and other programs, listen to a Sirius radio channel and roam the Web. For $20 or $25 a month on Sprint, users can watch extra programming from ESPN, Animal Planet and other channels that have been reformatted for the small screen. While watching video on cellphones may be novel, the experience is hardly overwhelming. As Mr. Harper and others have found out, downloading a video clip can often take as long as watching it. The program clips on V Cast are updated only a few times a day and often there are only a handful for each category, some of which are sports, news and entertainment. 'All the services are lacking,' Mr. Harper said. 'Verizon's V Cast is better than Sprint's, but it ain't there yet.' Cingular has introduced a more complete TV experience called MobiTV, which gives subscribers 25 channels of live television, including CNBC, Fox Sports and Discovery, on their phones for $9.99 a month in addition to their data and voice plans. Verizon also plans to introduce a similar type of video service created by Qualcomm called MediaFLO that will provide access to live television broadcasts. Still, for business users like Mr. Harper, few phones have all the functions he needs. Many business executives still buy devices like the Treo or the BlackBerry because their larger screens make it easier to read e-mail and open large attachments. Adding a 3G data plan makes sending and receiving those messages faster as well. One bright spot for the carriers is that many companies are starting to buy their broadband PC cards, which plug into laptops to enable them to connect wirelessly to a 3G network. Doris Mosblech, the network manager at Embarcadero Systems, which provides technology to shipping companies, is using PC cards from Sprint Nextel to let her company's workers access their e-mail with their laptops. The cards, priced at around $250 retail, can send data up to 10 times faster than older PC cards. With the new PC card, a user still needs to subscribe to a monthly 3G plan. 'As time has gone on, the applications we use require more broadband,' Ms. Mosblech said, referring to larger e-mail attachments, videoconferencing and Internet phones. 'The new cards felt almost like the speeds we get on our desktops.' In time, carriers may cut the prices for the cards and the PC data plans, which now cost between $40 and $80 a month. That was the pattern in other countries where 3G services were introduced. American carriers, while late to 3G, have also learned from what has succeeded and flopped overseas. Verizon and Sprint have relied heavily on Samsung and LG, two companies with experience making 3G handsets in South Korea. Other manufacturers have ironed out many of the kinks — like poor battery life and bulky size — that plagued the first 3G phones released in Japan in 2001. The carriers are also introducing flat-rate data plans; the Asian providers learned that consumers did not like having to pay by the piece for the data they sent. Still, though customers are upgrading their phones and plans in Japan, the amount that individual subscribers spend has declined, a trend that may make American carriers think twice about expecting any windfalls from their 3G networks.

Subject: A Fountain of Innovation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:10:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/technology/20MIT.html?ex=1298091600&en=ab1d21bea42d6436&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 A Fountain of Innovation Gets a New Leader By TANIA RALLI CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The workspaces of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are jammed with ideas and projects, many of which will not hit the market for years, or even decades. Groups work on projects like robots with hands that can sense what they are touching, computers that can respond to human emotion and communal cars that stack together like shopping carts to save urban space. As Frank Moss, who was named last week as the new director of the lab, said: 'My job is to live in the future 20 years from today.' It will also be his job to keep persuading major companies to look upon the Media Lab, which was co-founded by Nicholas Negroponte, as an incubator for their future products and innovations. The Media Lab relies heavily on sponsors from corporate America to keep it running. And it must compete for the money with other universities — like Stanford, Carnegie Mellon and the California Institute of Technology — which have started similar research centers. The Media Lab has been tackling technological challenges — large and small, vital and fanciful — since the 1980's. Some of its innovations include digital ink, wearable computers and advanced prostheses. Thirty faculty members and 250 students work in a series of labs littered with robot parts, flat-screen monitors and bright plastic furniture. Mr. Moss, who is 56, expects that technology will change society more profoundly in the next 20 years than it has in the past 20, by easing the burden of aging and improving communication, health care and education. He is enticed, for example, by the concept of cellphones that silence themselves upon entering a theater, or phones that convey the urgency of a call from an elderly parent at an unusual time of day. As Mr. Moss assumes the directorship of the Media Lab, its chairman, Mr. Negroponte, is stepping down to focus on One Laptop per Child, a nonprofit organization he started last year to create and provide $100 laptop computers to children, especially in developing countries. Walter Bender, who has served as interim director of the Media Lab for the last five years, will join Mr. Negroponte as president for software and content development of the organization. Mr. Moss has spent most of his career building computer and software companies, including Stellar Computer and Bowstreet. He led Tivoli Systems from its founding in 1991 until its merger with I.B.M. in 1996. Most recently, he founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a company that combines technology with the sciences to seek new cancer treatments. A childhood fascination with the space program led Mr. Moss, who is a native of Baltimore, to Princeton University, where he received an undergraduate degree in aerospace and mechanical sciences. He went on to complete a Ph.D. at M.I.T. in aeronautics and astronautics in 1977. He got into computers at M.I.T., largely because at that time the space program had peaked. When Mr. Moss turned 50, he said, he re-evaluated his life's work. His three children, now 30, 24 and 16, thought he should give something back to humanity, he said. 'They were not particularly impressed by selling systems and network software,' he said. Mr. Moss is impressed with the way that his children and other young people use technology, and it has altered his view of where cutting-edge ingenuity originates. As the young population adapts technology to suit their needs, Mr. Moss said, 'that's going to be the source and the force of innovation, and that's going to come from the bottom up.' Almost 100 companies, including Motorola, Samsung and Toyota, currently support the lab with about $32 million in annual funding. Three years is generally the minimum sponsorship time, with annual financial commitments of between $200,000 and $750,000. The remaining financing — about 30 percent — comes from government agencies and private foundations. Before the dot-com bubble burst in early 2000, the lab had more than 120 sponsors and $40 million in annual financing. 'You need very smart people like Nicholas and Frank to manage the expectations of companies,' said Saul Griffith, a founding partner of the engineering design firm Squid Labs in Emeryville, Calif., who completed his Ph.D. at the Media Lab in 2004. 'The research there relies on long-term time scales.' Mr. Moss said that coming from a commercial background helped him to see things from the perspective of a company that might help finance the lab. 'When investments are made, companies want to know if it's going to impact their products,' he said. His biggest role at the Media Lab is to make that connection for the sponsors, he said.

Subject: A Lesson From Hamas From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 10:09:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/weekinreview/19glanz.html?ex=1298005200&en=63e612363a1407e2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 A Lesson From Hamas: Read the Voting Law's Fine Print By JAMES GLANZ DEMOCRACY rests on the will of the majority. Or so the speeches say. But in reality, election systems are almost never designed to achieve majority rule alone. Like the famous checks and balances of the American system, they also try to give a wide range of groups a portion of power. But sometimes the framers of an election law can wildly miscalculate, allowing one faction to game the system and gain power far out of proportion to its share of the vote. That's what seems to have happened in Hamas's victory in the Palestinian territories, according to a new analysis by an American who advised the Palestinian Authority on the elections. It represents a cautionary tale for other new democracies, like Iraq's, whose systems are being designed with the help of outside experts. The reasons behind the overwhelming Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections go beyond a vote that was split among the numerous candidates backed by Fatah, the former ruling party, this new analysis shows. It strongly suggests that a quirk in the electoral law itself helped convert a slight margin in the popular vote into a landslide for the group. The analysis was performed by Jarrett Blanc, the American elections expert, who also has worked on elections in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo and Nepal. The lesson is that the way a new election law turns votes into representatives — the fine print of election laws — can have as much of an impact on who will be running a country as an occupying army. That observation has implications far beyond the Palestinian vote, particularly for countries like the United States and other Western nations that seek to promote new democracies. Iraq offers another example. There, a very complicated election law sought to concentrate the voting strength of Kurds who had become dispersed outside traditional Kurdish areas. But it didn't work. The effect, in fact, was to add about 10 seats to the total amassed by the victorious Shiite parties, Mr. Blanc said. Among the Palestinians, Mr. Blanc attributes Hamas's unanticipated landslide in part to an obscure balloting method called 'bloc voting,' which was used in local districts to promote candidates whose support was geographically concentrated. It was first used by the Palestinians in 1996, when Fatah was the pre-eminent political organization and bloc voting's skewing effect simply shut out much smaller parties. 'Election systems always seem arcane until the day after the election,' Mr. Blanc said in an interview. 'It's always difficult to get people interest in the details of the rules, but the rules matter tremendously.' 'In the case of Hamas,' he said, 'the consequences were revolutionary.' The perils of electoral law are well known to the small community that studies and monitors elections worldwide. A handbook published by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Stockholm notes that the systems chosen 'may have consequences that were unforeseen when they are introduced.' And in the country involved, the handbook says, such choices 'can have disastrous consequences for its democratic prospects.' The electoral system the Palestinians chose has seldom been used before on a national scale. In this election, half of the 132 members of Parliament were elected by a national vote on party lists, and half by direct voting for candidates in 16 districts. The number of seats available in each district varied according to population. Jerusalem had six, for example, and Jericho one. In multiseat districts, a voter could cast as many votes as there were seats at stake, in what is called a bloc vote. Bloc voting 'is not an especially fair system,' Mr. Blanc said. 'It has a kind of feeling of fairness because you're selecting your representatives in a very direct way.' Most commentary on the Hamas victory has emphasized that it played to the movement's strength because Hamas was the most disciplined party and offered fewer candidates than the previously dominant Fatah, which had internal rivalries and put forward long lists that split its voters. But Mr. Blanc's analysis found that vote-splitting was not the only way in which the system intensified the value of Hamas's organizational skills. Mr. Blanc, who works for an international democracy organization known simply as IFES (it used to be the International Foundation for Election Systems), illustrated what he meant by describing what could have happened if the system had been used in the 2004 Georgia Congressional elections. In those elections, with 13 seats up for grabs, 1.8 million votes were cast for Republicans, who won 7 seats, and 1.1 million for Democrats, who won 6. But if, instead of 13 one-seat races, the election had been decided by a statewide bloc vote, then even if both parties had offered lists of only 13 candidates apiece, Republicans could have swept all 13 races — assuming that enough supporters voted a straight ticket. Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas candidate who did not win, said in a telephone interview that his party won far more seats than it expected, but he attributed it mainly to voter dissatisfaction with Fatah. He did not give a direct answer to several questions on whether Hamas designed some electoral tactics to take advantage of the bloc vote. Khalil Shikaki, the respected Palestinian pollster, said that both Fatah and Hamas had an inkling of what the system would mean for their prospects. But when it came to playing the system, Mr. Shikaki said, 'Fatah, the leaderless, failed the test and Hamas did not.'

Subject: Planting Seeds of Private Health Care From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 09:29:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/20/international/americas/20canada.html?ex=1298091600&en=ca9e5e8f45cc8d4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 20, 2006 Ruling Has Canada Planting Seeds of Private Health Care By CLIFFORD KRAUSS TORONTO — The cracks are still small in Canada's vaunted public health insurance system, but several of its largest provinces are beginning to open the way for private health care eventually to take root around the country. Last week Quebec proposed to lift a ban on private health insurance for several elective surgical procedures, and announced that it would pay for such surgeries at private clinics when waiting times at public facilities were unreasonable. The proposal, by Premier Jean Charest, who called for 'a new era for health care in Quebec,' came in response to a Supreme Court decision last June that struck down a provincial law that banned private medical insurance and ordered the province to initiate a reform program within a year. The Supreme Court decision ruled that long waits for various medical procedures in the province had violated patients' 'life and personal security, inviolability and freedom,' and that prohibition of private health insurance was unconstitutional when the public health system did not deliver 'reasonable services.' The decision applied directly only to Quebec, but it has generated movement for private clinics and private insurance in several provinces where governments hope to forestall similar court decisions. Coincidentally, last week Premier Gordon Campbell of British Columbia asked in his Throne speech, the equivalent of a state of the province address, 'Does it really matter to patients where or how they obtain their surgical treatment if it is paid for with public funds?' It was a question that was almost unthinkable for a major politician to ask before last year's Supreme Court decision. Public health care insurance, where citizens go to their doctor or to the hospital for basic services paid for by taxpayers, has long been considered politically sacrosanct in Canada, and even central to the national identity. Mr. Campbell presented his vision for a new provincial health care system that would resemble those of most of Western Europe, where the government pays for essential treatment delivered in both public and private clinics and hospitals. Alberta's premier, Ralph Klein, recently expressed a similar goal, and his government is promising legislation to permit doctors to work simultaneously in private and public institutions and allow the building of private hospitals. Quebec, Canada's second most populous province, after Ontario, has not decided to go that far. Forced by the court to meet a one-year deadline for a plan to change the system, Mr. Charest proposed limited but important changes. He proposed that private insurance cover knee and hip replacements and cataract surgery. Publicly run hospitals would be allowed to subcontract to private clinics for such procedures when the hospitals were unable to deliver the services within six months. The plan is to be introduced in the provincial Legislature for passage before the summer. 'We're putting the private sector to work for the public,' Mr. Charest told reporters. 'We're taking a measured step in this direction.' Mr. Charest and the province's health minister, Philippe Couillard, called for an open debate, and they did not rule out more privatization in the future. Quebec already has about 50 private health clinics, far more than any other province, but doctors would remain forbidden to serve in both the private and public systems under the Charest plan. Antonia Maioni, a McGill University political scientist who specializes in health care, said Mr. Charest had to be careful about pushing too hard for privatization because he knew unions and other liberals would resist sweeping changes. 'They are trying to stay politically afloat,' Ms. Maioni said, noting Mr. Charest's low standing in opinion polls only a year or two before the next provincial elections. 'The winds of change are blowing, but they are not knocking everything over.' Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a Conservative elected last month, did not propose a sweeping overhaul of the system in the recent national campaign. But he did favor guaranteed waiting times for services. As a free-market Conservative, he is thought to favor the Supreme Court decision and will probably try to use it to encourage changes. The departing Liberal government opposed fundamental changes. But the new health minister, Tony Clement, is a proponent of experimentation and innovations to reduce waiting, modernize equipment and increase the supply of doctors.

Subject: Women's Health Studies Leave Questions From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 09:17:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/health/19health.html?ex=1298005200&en=a91e39f0cb8743b7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Women's Health Studies Leave Questions in Place of Certainty By DENISE GRADY So what do women do now? The results of two major studies over the past two weeks have questioned the value of two widely recommended measures: calcium pills and vitamin D to prevent broken bones, and low-fat diets to ward off heart disease and breast and colon cancer. Should women abandon hope, since it looks as if nothing works? Abandon guilt and assume diet makes no difference? Or muddle on with salad and supplements, just in case? The studies — part of the same government research project that in 2002 found hormone treatment for menopause did more harm than good — have confused women and prompted renewed examination of the regimens that many have been carefully following. Researchers find themselves parsing the results, and debating about how far the scientific rules can be stretched when it comes to measuring results and searching for evidence in smaller groups of patients within a large study. The researchers admit that the findings were an unexpected and puzzling challenge to firmly held, almost religious beliefs about nutrition and health. And though some experts said the results meant women should look for other ways to prevent heart disease, cancer and bone loss, the scientists who conducted the studies insisted that hints of benefit in parts of the data could not be ignored. 'We just didn't come out with as strong a finding as everyone expected,' said Dr. Marcia L. Stefanick, head of the study's steering committee. 'The results weren't clear enough, weren't black and white.' 'We're still debating amongst ourselves,' Dr. Stefanick said. The studies, which involved thousands of women and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, were the largest and most rigorous look ever at the effects of diets and supplements, and are unlikely to be repeated. News of the findings spread rapidly, and women interviewed in several cities were aware of them. Pouran Zamani-Hariri, 68, of Chicago, said she had been taking calcium and vitamin D every day for five years and planned to ask her doctor about the calcium study. But the results did not surprise her, Ms. Zamani-Hariri said, because despite taking the supplements, she has broken her shoulder and her leg within the last two years. 'Maybe it proves that it doesn't work,' she said. Kim Curtis, 39, a portfolio accountant from Winthrop, Mass., said she chose full-fat foods over reduced-fat products because she worried about sugars and preservatives being used to replace fat in processed food. 'The way things are, you're going to get cancer anyway,' Ms. Curtis said. But the researchers who conducted the study said their findings were not a signal to binge on bacon cheeseburgers. 'I was a little uncomfortable with some of the reactions,' said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, the program that has created the stir. It worries him, he said, that some people think the studies mean fat and calcium do not matter. 'It's not what we say, and I don't think it's what the papers say,' Dr. Rossouw said. 'For folks who are on a low-fat diet, by all means continue,' he added. 'If you're on a high-fat diet, certainly get it down. That's the message we would like to send.' As for calcium and vitamin D, he said, the recent study had 'enough hints' of benefit that women whose diets do not provide adequate amounts should take supplements. The studies were part of the health initiative, which started in the 1990's. The one on the low-fat diet, which included nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79, found that overall, after eight years, the diet had no effect on the rates of breast cancer, strokes, heart attacks or colon cancer. Similarly, the calcium study, which included more than 36,000 women, found that taking supplements for seven years did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer, but it did produce a 1 percent increase in bone density in the hip. Given the findings, then, how can researchers like Dr. Rossouw still recommend low-fat diets and supplements? The answer depends on how one interprets data. These studies included women who were treated and a control group that took placebos or, in the diet study, ate whatever they wanted. The researchers tracked their health, comparing the groups. According to standard rules based on probability, the difference in results between the groups has to be of a certain size to qualify as a genuine, or statistically significant, difference, and not something that could happen by chance. In the diet study, the difference in breast cancer rates was not statistically different. But Dr. Rossouw said it was so close — a 9 percent reduction in risk, whereas 10 percent would have been significant — that if the study had gone on longer, it might well have become significant. That was one of his main reasons for continuing to defend a low-fat diet. In addition, he said, the women who started out eating the most fat and then reduced their intake seemed to have the biggest reduction in risk. Dr. Larry Norton, a breast cancer expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, also said the reduction in breast cancer risk came too close to significance to ignore. 'Any minute now that study could turn positive,' Dr. Norton said. He added, 'It's a trend, a strong hint that something is happening and we need to follow these patients longer.' The patients are still being monitored. Dr. Norton is an author of a study in which a 50 percent reduction in dietary fat reduced the risk of cancer recurrence in women who had already had breast cancer. A participant in the government study, Connie Elsaesser, 76, of Cincinnati, said she had mostly given up butter and cut back on cheese and desserts. At times she had cravings, Ms. Elsaesser said, but she had no intention of resuming old eating habits. 'I've been brainwashed,' she said. The debate about the studies stems from findings in subgroups of patients, a kind of result considered questionable by many scientists. A basic rule in setting up experiments is that a study must be designed from the very beginning to look for certain effects in a certain type of patient. It is generally not considered legitimate for researchers to go back over the data afterward and slice it up into smaller groups — sometimes called data snooping — until they find a result they like. That result could be false because it arose from chance. In addition, if there is no statistically significant finding in the larger group, it is considered even worse to dig around in subgroups. 'Subgroup analyses can get you in trouble,' Dr. Norton said. 'They don't prove anything.' But, he added, effects found in subgroups can lead to further studies. In the calcium study, the researchers noticed intriguing differences in certain subgroups. The ones who took most of their calcium, 80 percent of the pills, had a 29 percent reduction in hip fractures. Women over 60 also had a reduction, 21 percent. Those findings persuaded Dr. Rossouw and Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, the director of the health initiative and of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, to recommend supplements for women whose diets did not include enough calcium. 'I think those are fair health messages,' Dr. Nabel said. 'I don't think it's overstating the data or cheating.' But statisticians say that subgroup analyses are seductive and perilous, and that the danger is in believing too much. The health initiative investigators are cautious and conservative in their analyses, Dr. Rossouw said. They decide ahead of time on subgroups they plan to examine — women of different ages, women who did and did not follow their assigned treatment, women of different races — and give greater weight to those analyses than to ones they decide to do after the study is completed. But what does it mean when, as happened in this study, the subgroup analysis found that women in their 50's had more hip fractures if they took calcium and vitamin D? What does it mean if the women who were deficient in calcium were not helped by the supplements? The temptation, statisticians say, is to pick the subgroup analyses that support a favored hypothesis and disregard the ones that do not. 'The probability that you will see a spuriously positive effect gets very big very quickly,' said Dr. Susan Ellenberg, a former Food and Drug Administration official who is now a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania. The health initiative investigators say they are aware of the pitfalls. One way to decide whether to use a subset, Dr. Rossouw said, is 'the reality check.' He explained: 'For a person knowledgeable in this field and knowing what is likely to be plausible, what do you believe?' That, for example, is why the health initiative investigators emphasized their analysis of women who complied with their assigned treatment, be it placebos or calcium and vitamin D supplements. Donald Berry, a statistician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he would not be so critical of the analysis of women who took most of their pills, although he was not overwhelmed by the effect. The annual rate of hip fractures in women who adhered to the regimen was 10 per 10,000, compared with 14 per 10,000 in women taking placebos. 'One thing that is absolutely clear,' Dr. Berry said. 'If there is a benefit, it's not great, no matter which subgroup we're talking about.' Dr. Ellenberg quoted another statistician, Richard Peto of Oxford University, who said of subgroups, 'You should always do them but you should never believe them.' Dr. Nabel acknowledged that statisticians often frowned on using subgroups, but, she said: 'Medicine is an art. You take the data you have in hand and do your best to interpret it for the individual sitting across the table from you.' These studies are not the last word from the health initiative. There will be more reports and analyses, many based on subgroups, Dr. Nabel said. Dr. Rossouw said, 'Probably 15 to 20 papers a year for the next 5 years would be a conservative estimate.'

Subject: Good News From New Guinea From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 07:09:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19sun4.html?ex=1298005200&en=6f070ffaad111c0f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Good News From New Guinea By VERLYN KLINKENBORG No one, to my knowledge, keeps an index that measures just how bad the news is from day to day. But most of us can gauge its badness by the way good news makes us feel. A case in point is the article in this paper recently about a scientific expedition to the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. During a monthlong field trip, biologists came upon new species of frogs, butterflies, birds, palms, and rhododendrons. That field trip, whose rigors few of us can imagine, was the subject of conversation in many places the evening the article appeared, including the restaurant in the West Village where I was having dinner with friends. There was an excitement, an exultation in the voices at the table as they talked about New Guinea. It sounded as though a new continent had been discovered, not a few species in remote forests halfway around the world. I noticed the same reaction during the rediscovery — contested, confirmed and now recontested — of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was long believed to be extinct. The very thought that the bird had been heard in the Big Woods of Arkansas filled many people with hope and joy. But it also felt like the temporary lifting of some chronic biological melancholy, an oppression that bears a strange resemblance to the persistent numbness I associate with the nuclear standoff of the cold war. Call it biophilia if you will — E. O. Wilson's term for the connections we 'subconsciously seek with the rest of life.' What Mr. Wilson means by the word is something like a strong but latent undertow in humans, a 'richly structured and quite irrational' predisposition. What I'm hearing is more overt than that. It is something like a sigh of relief, a sigh that measures the bleakness of living in the midst of a mass extinction that we ourselves are causing. Nearly the whole of the scientific history of the West has been spent in a perverse balance between identifying species and destroying them. The emotions we feel about ravaging the biological richness and complexity of Earth are made possible only by an awareness of how many life-forms science has discovered. To suspect how rich we might be is to know how poor we are busy making ourselves. Most of us will never come in contact with more than a tiny fraction of the species on this planet. Most of us, in fact, know so little about the life-forms around us that the distinction between known and unknown species is nearly meaningless. Practically speaking, nearly all the species in New Guinea are unknown to most of us. We may know none of the names of these newly found creatures or their distinctive traits or the habitats where they live. And yet the thought of them exalts us. Part of the pleasure of reading about this expedition to the Foja Mountains is the pleasure we always derive from the thought of an undiscovered country, from imagining, for instance, those long-ago days when the middle of America was still an Amazon of grasses. It's tempting to say that what really moves us in the news of this expedition is simple possibility, the feeling that discovery is still alive, that the Earth has not been entirely trampled or paved. But that makes the value of these newly identified species — and of all others — merely symbolic. They become important to us for the feelings, the possibilities, they arouse. The hard part is remembering that all these species, discovered and undiscovered alike, are important in themselves. Their existence has no reference whatsoever to humans or their minds. The tragedy is that their survival depends on the interest we take in them. We will be identifying new species for many decades to come, although most of them will not be nearly as photogenic as the new honeyeater recently found in New Guinea. The test for us is the same as it has always been. It is not how many species we discover. It is how to protect them once we have found them and how to keep from destroying the species we do not know before we have a chance to find them.

Subject: India, Oil and Nuclear Weapons From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 07:08:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19sun1.html?ex=1298005200&en=5ac389a3013a5615&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 India, Oil and Nuclear Weapons Exploding at the seams with building, investment and trade, India can hardly keep up with itself. Airplanes coming into Delhi and Mumbai routinely end up circling the airports for hours, wasting precious jet fuel, because there are not enough runways or airport gates. City streets originally built for two lanes of traffic are teeming with four and sometimes five lanes of cars, auto-rickshaws, mopeds, buses and trucks. This energy-guzzling congestion will only become worse as India continues producing fairly high-quality goods and services at lower and lower prices — from automobiles that cost only $2,500 to low-budget airline flights for $50. India's president, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, sounded exactly like President Bush when he told the Asiatic Society in Manila earlier this month that energy independence must be India's highest priority. 'We must be determined to achieve this within the next 25 years, that is, by the year 2030,' he said. Unfortunately, Mr. Kalam, like Mr. Bush, is far better at talking than at any real action to reduce energy consumption. In the new enclaves for India's emerging middle class and its rapidly rising nouveau riche, environmentally unsustainable, high-ceilinged houses feature air-conditioning systems that stay on year round. When President Bush makes his long-planned trip to India next month, he will be visiting a country that, like China, has begun to gear its international strategy to its energy needs. That is one of the biggest diplomatic challenges facing the United States, and right now the American strategy is askew. India desperately wants Mr. Bush to wring approval from Congress for a misbegotten pact in which America would help meet India's energy requirements through civilian nuclear cooperation. With its eye on the nuclear deal, India recently bowed to American pressure and cast its vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's suspected nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council. That was a victory for Mr. Bush, and India did the right thing in helping to hold Iran accountable, but the deal it wants to make with the United States is a bad one. It would allow India to make an end run around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's basic bargain, which rewards countries willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their energy needs. America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on India because India refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty and it has tested a nuclear device that uses materials and technology diverted from its civilian nuclear program. In trying to give India a special exemption, Mr. Bush is threatening the nonproliferation treaty's carrot-and-stick approach, which for more than 35 years has dissuaded countries that are capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. And if his hope is that the promise of nuclear technology from America will be enough to prod India to turn its back on Iran, that's a bad bet. Even as India was casting its vote on Iran's nuclear program, India's petroleum minister, Murli Deora, said his government would continue to pursue a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline deal with Tehran. There is no diplomatic quick fix in this energy-hungry world. Even if India shunned Iran, it would still have to turn to other petroleum suppliers that Washington wants to isolate, including Sudan and Venezuela. And the Iranian supplies would wind up going to other energy-hungry nations, tying them more closely to Tehran. If Mr. Bush wants to tackle this quandary seriously, he needs to begin by pushing for significant energy conservation steps in the United States, by far the world's largest energy consumer. That would do far more to weaken the stranglehold Iran and other energy-producing nations now exercise over world oil markets.

Subject: The God Genome From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 11:05:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/books/review/19wieseltier.html?ex=1298005200&en=9ecb4016f9ff8682&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 The God Genome By LEON WIESELTIER THE question of the place of science in human life is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. Scientism, the view that science can explain all human conditions and expressions, mental as well as physical, is a superstition, one of the dominant superstitions of our day; and it is not an insult to science to say so. For a sorry instance of present-day scientism, it would be hard to improve on Daniel C. Dennett's book. 'Breaking the Spell' is a work of considerable historical interest, because it is a merry anthology of contemporary superstitions. The orthodoxies of evolutionary psychology are all here, its tiresome way of roaming widely but never leaving its house, its legendary curiosity that somehow always discovers the same thing. The excited materialism of American society — I refer not to the American creed of shopping, according to which a person's qualities may be known by a person's brands, but more ominously to the adoption by American culture of biological, economic and technological ways of describing the purposes of human existence — abounds in Dennett's usefully uninhibited pages. And Dennett's book is also a document of the intellectual havoc of our infamous polarization, with its widespread and deeply damaging assumption that the most extreme statement of an idea is its most genuine statement. Dennett lives in a world in which you must believe in the grossest biologism or in the grossest theism, in a purely naturalistic understanding of religion or in intelligent design, in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in 19th-century England or in the omniscience of a white man with a long beard in the sky. In his own opinion, Dennett is a hero. He is in the business of emancipation, and he reveres himself for it. 'By asking for an accounting of the pros and cons of religion, I risk getting poked in the nose or worse,' he declares, 'and yet I persist.' Giordano Bruno, with tenure at Tufts! He wonders whether religious people 'will have the intellectual honesty and courage to read this book through.' If you disagree with what Dennett says, it is because you fear what he says. Any opposition to his scientistic deflation of religion he triumphantly dismisses as 'protectionism.' But people who share Dennett's view of the world he calls 'brights.' Brights are not only intellectually better, they are also ethically better. Did you know that 'brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States, and born-again Christians the highest'? Dennett's own 'sacred values' are 'democracy, justice, life, love and truth.' This rigs things nicely. If you refuse his 'impeccably hardheaded and rational ontology,' then your sacred values must be tyranny, injustice, death, hatred and falsehood. Dennett is the sort of rationalist who gives reason a bad name; and in a new era of American obscurantism, this is not helpful. Dennett flatters himself that he is Hume's heir. Hume began 'The Natural History of Religion,' a short incendiary work that was published in 1757, with this remark: 'As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.' These words serve as the epigraph to Dennett's introduction to his own conception of 'religion as a natural phenomenon.' 'Breaking the Spell' proposes to answer Hume's second question, not least as a way of circumventing Hume's first question. Unfortunately, Dennett gives a misleading impression of Hume's reflections on religion. He chooses not to reproduce the words that immediately follow those in which he has just basked: 'Happily, the first question, which is the most important, admits of the most obvious, at least, the clearest, solution. The whole frame of nature bespeaks an intelligent author; and no rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religion.' So was Hume not a bright? I do not mean to be pedantic. Hume deplored religion as a source of illusions and crimes, and renounced its consolations even as he was dying. His God was a very wan god. But his God was still a god; and so his theism is as true or false as any other theism. The truth of religion cannot be proved by showing that a skeptic was in his way a believer, or by any other appeal to authority. There is no intellectually honorable surrogate for rational argument. Dennett's misrepresentation of Hume (and his similar misrepresentation of William James and Thomas Nagel) is noteworthy, therefore, because it illustrates his complacent refusal to acknowledge the dense and vital relations between religion and reason, not only historically but also philosophically. For Dennett, thinking historically absolves one of thinking philosophically. Is the theistic account of the cosmos true or false? Dennett, amazingly, does not care. 'The goal of either proving or disproving God's existence,' he concludes, is 'not very important.' It is history, not philosophy, that will break religion's spell. The story of religion's development will extirpate it. 'In order to explain the hold that various religious ideas and practices have on people,' he writes, 'we need to understand the evolution of the human mind.' What follows is, in brief, Dennett's natural history of religion. It begins with the elementary assertion that 'everything that moves needs something like a mind, to keep it out of harm's way and help it find the good things.' To this end, there arose in very ancient times the evolutionary adaptation that one researcher has called a 'hyperactive agent detection device, or HADD.' This cognitive skill taught us, or a very early version of us, that we live in a world of other minds — and taught us too well, because it instilled 'the urge to treat things — especially frustrating things — as agents with beliefs and desires.' This urge is 'deeply rooted in human biology,' and it results in a 'fantasy-generation process' that left us 'finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us.' Eventually this animism issued in deities, who were simply the 'agents who had access to all the strategic information' that we desperately lacked. 'But what good to us is the gods' knowledge if we can't get it from them?' So eventually shamans arose who told us what we wanted to hear from the gods, and did so by means of hypnosis. (Our notion of God is the product of this 'hypnotizability-enabler' in our brains, and it may even be that theism is owed to a 'gene for heightened hypnotizability,' which would be an acceptable version of a 'God gene.') To secure these primitive constructs and comforts against oblivion, ritual was invented; and they were further secured by 'acts of deceit' that propounded their 'systematic invulnerability to disproof.' Folk religions became organized religions. The 'trade secrets' of the shamans were transmitted to 'every priest and minister, every imam and rabbi.' Slowly and steadily, these 'trade secrets' were given the more comprehensive protection of 'belief in belief,' the idea that certain convictions are so significant that they must be insulated from the pressures of reason. 'The belief that belief in God is so important that it must not be subjected to the risks of disconfirmation or serious criticism,' Dennett instructs, 'has led the devout to 'save' their beliefs by making them incomprehensible even to themselves.' In sum, we were HADD. Here endeth the lesson. There are a number of things that must be said about this story. The first is that it is only a story. It is not based, in any strict sense, on empirical research. Dennett is 'extrapolating back to human prehistory with the aid of biological thinking,' nothing more. 'Breaking the Spell' is a fairy tale told by evolutionary biology. There is no scientific foundation for its scientistic narrative. Even Dennett admits as much: 'I am not at all claiming that this is what science has established about religion. . . . We don't yet know.' So all of Dennett's splashy allegiance to evidence and experiment and 'generating further testable hypotheses' notwithstanding, what he has written is just an extravagant speculation based upon his hope for what is the case, a pious account of his own atheistic longing. And why is Dennett so certain that the origins of a thing are the most illuminating features of a thing, or that a thing is forever as primitive as its origins? Has Dennett never seen a flower grow from the dust? Or is it the dust that he sees in a flower? 'Breaking the Spell' is a long, hectoring exercise in unexamined originalism. In perhaps the most flattening passage in the book, Dennett surmises that 'all our 'intrinsic' values started out as instrumental values,' and that this conviction about the primacy of the instrumental is a solemn requirement of science. He remarks that the question cui bono? — who benefits? — 'is even more central in evolutionary biology than in the law,' and so we must seek the biological utilities of what might otherwise seem like 'a gratuitous outlay.' An anxiety about the reality of nonbiological meanings troubles Dennett's every page. But it is very hard to envisage the biological utilities of such gratuitous outlays as 'The Embarkation for Cythera' and Fermat's theorem and the 'Missa Solemnis.' It will be plain that Dennett's approach to religion is contrived to evade religion's substance. He thinks that an inquiry into belief is made superfluous by an inquiry into the belief in belief. This is a very revealing mistake. You cannot disprove a belief unless you disprove its content. If you believe that you can disprove it any other way, by describing its origins or by describing its consequences, then you do not believe in reason. In this profound sense, Dennett does not believe in reason. He will be outraged to hear this, since he regards himself as a giant of rationalism. But the reason he imputes to the human creatures depicted in his book is merely a creaturely reason. Dennett's natural history does not deny reason, it animalizes reason. It portrays reason in service to natural selection, and as a product of natural selection. But if reason is a product of natural selection, then how much confidence can we have in a rational argument for natural selection? The power of reason is owed to the independence of reason, and to nothing else. (In this respect, rationalism is closer to mysticism than it is to materialism.) Evolutionary biology cannot invoke the power of reason even as it destroys it. Like many biological reductionists, Dennett is sure that he is not a biological reductionist. But the charge is proved as early as the fourth page of his book. Watch closely. 'Like other animals,' the confused passage begins, 'we have built-in desires to reproduce and to do pretty much whatever it takes to achieve this goal.' No confusion there, and no offense. It is incontrovertible that we are animals. The sentence continues: 'But we also have creeds, and the ability to transcend our genetic imperatives.' A sterling observation, and the beginning of humanism. And then more, in the same fine antideterministic vein: 'This fact does make us different.' Then suddenly there is this: 'But it is itself a biological fact, visible to natural science, and something that requires an explanation from natural science.' As the ancient rabbis used to say, have your ears heard what your mouth has spoken? Dennett does not see that he has taken his humanism back. Why is our independence from biology a fact of biology? And if it is a fact of biology, then we are not independent of biology. If our creeds are an expression of our animality, if they require an explanation from natural science, then we have not transcended our genetic imperatives. The human difference, in Dennett's telling, is a difference in degree, not a difference in kind — a doctrine that may quite plausibly be called biological reductionism. Dennett is unable to imagine a fact about us that is not a biological fact. His book is riddled with translations of emotions and ideas into evo-psychobabble. 'It is in the genetic interests of parents . . . to inform — not misinform — their young, so it is efficient (and relatively safe) to trust one's parents.' Grief for the death of a loved one is 'a major task of cognitive updating: revising all our habits of thought to fit a world with one less familiar intentional system in it.' 'Marriage rituals and taboos against adultery, clothing and hairstyles, breath fresheners and pornography and condoms and H.I.V. and all the rest' have their 'ancient but ongoing source' in the organism's need to thwart parasites. 'The phenomenon of romantic love' may be adequately understood by reference to 'the unruly marketplace of human mate-finding.' And finally, the general rule: 'Everything we value — from sugar and sex and money to music and love and religion — we value for reasons. Lying behind, and distinct from, our reasons are evolutionary reasons, free-floating rationales that have been endorsed by natural selection.' Never mind the merits of materialism as an analysis of the world. As an attitude to life, it represents a collapse of wisdom. So steer clear of 'we materialists' in your dark hours. They cannot fortify you, say, after the funeral of a familiar intentional system. BEFORE there were naturalist superstitions, there were supernaturalist superstitions. The crudities of religious myth are plentiful, and a sickening amount of savagery has been perpetrated in their name. Yet the excesses of naturalism cannot hide behind the excesses of supernaturalism. Or more to the point, the excesses of naturalism cannot live without the excesses of supernaturalism. Dennett actually prefers folk religion to intellectual religion, because it is nearer to the instinctual mire that enchants him. The move 'away from concrete anthropomorphism to ever more abstract and depersonalized concepts,' or the increasing philosophical sophistication of religion over the centuries, he views only as 'strategic belief-maintenance.' He cannot conceive of a thoughtful believer. He writes often, and with great indignation, of religion's strictures against doubts and criticisms, when in fact the religious traditions are replete with doubts and criticisms. Dennett is unacquainted with the distinction between fideism and faith. Like many of the fundamentalists whom he despises, he is a literalist in matters of religion. But why must we read literally in the realm of religion, when in so many other realms of human expression we read metaphorically, allegorically, symbolically, figuratively, analogically? We see kernels and husks everywhere. There are concepts in many of the fables of faith, philosophical propositions about the nature of the universe. They may be right or they may be wrong, but they are there. Dennett recognizes the uses of faith, but not its reasons. In the end, his repudiation of religion is a repudiation of philosophy, which is also an affair of belief in belief. What this shallow and self-congratulatory book establishes most conclusively is that there are many spells that need to be broken.

Subject: Love and Rage of an Irish Childhood From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 11:01:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/books/review/18eder.html February 18, 2006 The Love and Rage of an Irish Childhood By RICHARD EDER John McGahern writes with pastoral passion and a painter's eye about the fields, flowers, hedges, waters and gentle sweep of hill in County Leitrim. He was born there, and 30 years later he came back to live. Leitrim is relatively poor, and its stony inch or two of soil lies on clay. The stony poorness, though, is the condition for its unassuming beauty; saving it from both factory farming and the locust swarm of tourists. Stoniness and beauty. For half a century Mr. McGahern has grappled his novels and short stories into an unflinching hold upon two traditionally rooted aspects of Irish life and character: the lilt and the grunt. What has made the writer a master of contemporary Irish fiction, second only to William Trevor, is that his lilt is free of indulgence, his grunt is free of despair and neither would accomplish what it does without the other. The stony gets the edge in 'All Will Be Well,' a memoir Mr. McGahern has written in his 70's. The assurance of the title barely masks its white-knuckled grip on itself. There was much darkness along with a measure of light in the upbringing of the author and his younger siblings; he might well have called his book 'What We Came Through.' The darkness emanates through the writer's father, a sergeant in the Garda, or national police; the light, through his mother, a rural schoolteacher. I say 'through' rather than 'from.' Sgt. Francis McGahern, portrayed in vivid and often horrifying complexity, evidently stands for all that is closed in his country's spirit; and Susan McGahern, deeply devout, signifies what is spontaneous and open. 'All Will Be Well' is their son's memoir of a nation and not just a family. Sergeant McGahern was the commander of a four-man police barracks in Cootehall, a rural town on the Shannon River. In the early 1940's there was little order to keep; a bicycle stopped for having no light, a stray cow on the road. The sergeant's subordinates spent much of their duty time working their own gardens, while submitting reports on what they called 'patrols of the imagination.' Young John, precocious, was sometimes called on to help with the drafting. 'Paper never refuses ink, Sean,' one of these easygoing national guardians would counsel him. It was an ironic motto for a future writer so painstaking that he tore up his first novel, after a prominent publisher asked to see it, because he deemed it unsatisfactory. Sergeant McGahern was the opposite of easygoing. A former Irish Republican Army fighter who was eased into the Garda after the Irish state was set up, he prized his position, stomping into Sunday Mass, boots and buttons agleam, and taking his seat in front. Within, though, he was a conflicted mess, with business deals on the side and not so much painstaking as painsgiving; above all to his family. Mostly he was absent. While he lived in the barracks, his wife and children lived outside a village 20 miles away where she worked as a teacher. Francis would appear every few weeks, alternating rugged charm, a little work around the house and bullying harassment of Susan and the children. Absence, charm and violence: this was the man, in his son's telling, and it was the first, in a way, who did the most damage. When the children were still little, Susan fell ill with cancer: through the weeks of her dying, with her relatives attending her, Francis stayed away. Much later he would stay away from all but one of his daughters' weddings. He was unable to tolerate any situation that infringed on his tiny kingdom of control, Mr. McGahern suggests; and he would turn violent when it was threatened. With their mother dead, he was obliged to take the children into his barracks quarters. Calling them his 'troops' he worked them, grudged them their food and, between spasms of affability, beat them, sometimes so badly that his men threatened to report him. But when, at 16 or 17, John fought back, the father retreated in self-pity; still later, with the son's early literary success, he turned creepily fawning. Utterly opposite was Susan, the little boy's companion, protector and refuge, and a high-spirited beacon against her husband's erratic darkness. Their errands, their night walks, were magical and are magically recalled. She was passionately religious, and while she was alive the child emulated her faith. Simply, religion meant mother, so he was outraged when she promised that when she died they would someday be together in Heaven. 'Our Heaven was here,' Mr. McGahern writes, 'With her our world was without end.' But it ended. Is the contrast of father and mother too open and shut for a memoir? Perhaps. The urge to do justice, even over petty instances of the sergeant's cruelties and foolishness, does partly constrain the novelist's gift for imaginative sympathy and imaginative bleakness. A reckoning is not quite the same as a recollection. Yet it must be said that what the author wields is anger, not bitterness. The anger is against the fetid shadow that the sergeant cast upon his wife and children's inclination and talent for taking pleasure in their lives. And, beyond this, upon the pleasure that the rural Irish world all around them had to offer. Between his anger, Mr. McGahern writes of works, days, pathways and pastimes, and the musical wit and hard-pressed generosity of country neighbors; along with grudges, foibles and here and there a flash of danger.

Subject: Women's Health Studies Leave Questions From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 10:59:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/health/19health.html?ex=1298005200&en=a91e39f0cb8743b7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Women's Health Studies Leave Questions in Place of Certainty By DENISE GRADY So what do women do now? The results of two major studies over the past two weeks have questioned the value of two widely recommended measures: calcium pills and vitamin D to prevent broken bones, and low-fat diets to ward off heart disease and breast and colon cancer. Should women abandon hope, since it looks as if nothing works? Abandon guilt and assume diet makes no difference? Or muddle on with salad and supplements, just in case? The studies — part of the same government research project that in 2002 found hormone treatment for menopause did more harm than good — have confused women and prompted renewed examination of the regimens that many have been carefully following. Researchers find themselves parsing the results, and debating about how far the scientific rules can be stretched when it comes to measuring results and searching for evidence in smaller groups of patients within a large study. The researchers admit that the findings were an unexpected and puzzling challenge to firmly held, almost religious beliefs about nutrition and health. And though some experts said the results meant women should look for other ways to prevent heart disease, cancer and bone loss, the scientists who conducted the studies insisted that hints of benefit in parts of the data could not be ignored. 'We just didn't come out with as strong a finding as everyone expected,' said Dr. Marcia L. Stefanick, head of the study's steering committee. 'The results weren't clear enough, weren't black and white.' 'We're still debating amongst ourselves,' Dr. Stefanick said. The studies, which involved thousands of women and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, were the largest and most rigorous look ever at the effects of diets and supplements, and are unlikely to be repeated. News of the findings spread rapidly, and women interviewed in several cities were aware of them. Pouran Zamani-Hariri, 68, of Chicago, said she had been taking calcium and vitamin D every day for five years and planned to ask her doctor about the calcium study. But the results did not surprise her, Ms. Zamani-Hariri said, because despite taking the supplements, she has broken her shoulder and her leg within the last two years. 'Maybe it proves that it doesn't work,' she said. Kim Curtis, 39, a portfolio accountant from Winthrop, Mass., said she chose full-fat foods over reduced-fat products because she worried about sugars and preservatives being used to replace fat in processed food. 'The way things are, you're going to get cancer anyway,' Ms. Curtis said. But the researchers who conducted the study said their findings were not a signal to binge on bacon cheeseburgers. 'I was a little uncomfortable with some of the reactions,' said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, the program that has created the stir. It worries him, he said, that some people think the studies mean fat and calcium do not matter. 'It's not what we say, and I don't think it's what the papers say,' Dr. Rossouw said. 'For folks who are on a low-fat diet, by all means continue,' he added. 'If you're on a high-fat diet, certainly get it down. That's the message we would like to send.' As for calcium and vitamin D, he said, the recent study had 'enough hints' of benefit that women whose diets do not provide adequate amounts should take supplements. The studies were part of the health initiative, which started in the 1990's. The one on the low-fat diet, which included nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79, found that overall, after eight years, the diet had no effect on the rates of breast cancer, strokes, heart attacks or colon cancer. Similarly, the calcium study, which included more than 36,000 women, found that taking supplements for seven years did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer, but it did produce a 1 percent increase in bone density in the hip. Given the findings, then, how can researchers like Dr. Rossouw still recommend low-fat diets and supplements? The answer depends on how one interprets data. These studies included women who were treated and a control group that took placebos or, in the diet study, ate whatever they wanted. The researchers tracked their health, comparing the groups. According to standard rules based on probability, the difference in results between the groups has to be of a certain size to qualify as a genuine, or statistically significant, difference, and not something that could happen by chance. In the diet study, the difference in breast cancer rates was not statistically different. But Dr. Rossouw said it was so close — a 9 percent reduction in risk, whereas 10 percent would have been significant — that if the study had gone on longer, it might well have become significant. That was one of his main reasons for continuing to defend a low-fat diet. In addition, he said, the women who started out eating the most fat and then reduced their intake seemed to have the biggest reduction in risk. Dr. Larry Norton, a breast cancer expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, also said the reduction in breast cancer risk came too close to significance to ignore. 'Any minute now that study could turn positive,' Dr. Norton said. He added, 'It's a trend, a strong hint that something is happening and we need to follow these patients longer.' The patients are still being monitored. Dr. Norton is an author of a study in which a 50 percent reduction in dietary fat reduced the risk of cancer recurrence in women who had already had breast cancer. A participant in the government study, Connie Elsaesser, 76, of Cincinnati, said she had mostly given up butter and cut back on cheese and desserts. At times she had cravings, Ms. Elsaesser said, but she had no intention of resuming old eating habits. 'I've been brainwashed,' she said. The debate about the studies stems from findings in subgroups of patients, a kind of result considered questionable by many scientists. A basic rule in setting up experiments is that a study must be designed from the very beginning to look for certain effects in a certain type of patient. It is generally not considered legitimate for researchers to go back over the data afterward and slice it up into smaller groups — sometimes called data snooping — until they find a result they like. That result could be false because it arose from chance. In addition, if there is no statistically significant finding in the larger group, it is considered even worse to dig around in subgroups. 'Subgroup analyses can get you in trouble,' Dr. Norton said. 'They don't prove anything.' But, he added, effects found in subgroups can lead to further studies. In the calcium study, the researchers noticed intriguing differences in certain subgroups. The ones who took most of their calcium, 80 percent of the pills, had a 29 percent reduction in hip fractures. Women over 60 also had a reduction, 21 percent. Those findings persuaded Dr. Rossouw and Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, the director of the health initiative and of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, to recommend supplements for women whose diets did not include enough calcium. 'I think those are fair health messages,' Dr. Nabel said. 'I don't think it's overstating the data or cheating.' But statisticians say that subgroup analyses are seductive and perilous, and that the danger is in believing too much. The health initiative investigators are cautious and conservative in their analyses, Dr. Rossouw said. They decide ahead of time on subgroups they plan to examine — women of different ages, women who did and did not follow their assigned treatment, women of different races — and give greater weight to those analyses than to ones they decide to do after the study is completed. But what does it mean when, as happened in this study, the subgroup analysis found that women in their 50's had more hip fractures if they took calcium and vitamin D? What does it mean if the women who were deficient in calcium were not helped by the supplements? The temptation, statisticians say, is to pick the subgroup analyses that support a favored hypothesis and disregard the ones that do not. 'The probability that you will see a spuriously positive effect gets very big very quickly,' said Dr. Susan Ellenberg, a former Food and Drug Administration official who is now a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania. The health initiative investigators say they are aware of the pitfalls. One way to decide whether to use a subset, Dr. Rossouw said, is 'the reality check.' He explained: 'For a person knowledgeable in this field and knowing what is likely to be plausible, what do you believe?' That, for example, is why the health initiative investigators emphasized their analysis of women who complied with their assigned treatment, be it placebos or calcium and vitamin D supplements. Donald Berry, a statistician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he would not be so critical of the analysis of women who took most of their pills, although he was not overwhelmed by the effect. The annual rate of hip fractures in women who adhered to the regimen was 10 per 10,000, compared with 14 per 10,000 in women taking placebos. 'One thing that is absolutely clear,' Dr. Berry said. 'If there is a benefit, it's not great, no matter which subgroup we're talking about.' Dr. Ellenberg quoted another statistician, Richard Peto of Oxford University, who said of subgroups, 'You should always do them but you should never believe them.' Dr. Nabel acknowledged that statisticians often frowned on using subgroups, but, she said: 'Medicine is an art. You take the data you have in hand and do your best to interpret it for the individual sitting across the table from you.' These studies are not the last word from the health initiative. There will be more reports and analyses, many based on subgroups, Dr. Nabel said. Dr. Rossouw said, 'Probably 15 to 20 papers a year for the next 5 years would be a conservative estimate.'

Subject: So Who Is King of the Jews? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 10:55:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27rosen.html?ex=1290747600&en=d4b9408c704f2597&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 27, 2005 So Who Is King of the Jews? By JONATHAN ROSEN When I was an undergraduate at Yale 20 years ago, Harold Bloom was the pre-eminent literary presence on campus, famous for 'The Anxiety of Influence' and 'A Map of Misreading,' but to me he was a Jewish hero, and not simply because he looked like Zero Mostel. Bloom had somehow dislodged T. S. Eliot from his dominant position in the syllabus and replaced him with Wallace Stevens, and though there was a fine literary argument for this that had to do with Milton and his Romantic heirs, as opposed to the metaphysical poets favored by Eliot, I always suspected it had to do with the fact that Eliot was an anti-Semite. Bloom taught a class called 'Counter-Normative Currents in Contemporary Jewish Literature,' which included moderns like Freud, Kafka and Babel but began with 'the Yahwist,' author of the oldest strand of the Hebrew Bible. Suddenly, being a Jewish writer wasn't just for post-Enlightenment Johnny-come-latelies, but an ancient birthright. This notion was given bolder expression in a lecture I heard Bloom deliver about how the New Testament was a 'weak misreading' of the Hebrew Bible. I never thought I would hear a professor publicly proclaim - at Yale, no less - the great, private Jewish gripe that in layman's terms might be expressed: Christianity stole our watch and has spent 2,000 years telling us what time it is. Bloom punningly referred to the New Testament in Hebrew as 'Brit haHalasha' ('weak covenant'), instead of 'Brit haHadasha' ('new covenant'). 'The Anxiety of Influence,' in tracing the way works of literature struggle with their predecessors, had already given criticism the thrill of a blood sport. Here were all the great Bloomian notions - 'misreading,' 'belatedness,' 'originality' - employed to unseat not merely T. S. Eliot but Christianity itself. Bloom's new book, 'Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine,' is a fearless, provocative meditation on the themes I found so exhilarating 20 years ago, although it turns out that Judaism is, for Bloom, as much a betrayal of Yahweh as Christianity is. Bloom is not a modest critic. If literary representations of God are all we have, then literary critics are the true prophets. Bloom, it turns out, is high priest of his own religion, a Yahwist sect of one. Bloom's Yahweh is the work of an author called the J writer by German 19th-century scholarship, but though Yahweh is a literary character, he is also, through a semi-mystical Bloomian maneuver, real. He is the 'man-God' who appears to Joshua with a drawn sword, the jealous, zealous, hungry, hands-on deity who makes Adam out of a mud pie, picnics with the elders on Mount Sinai, chooses Moses and then, with irrational outrage, tries to kill him as he travels back to Egypt. This God made the redactors of the Hebrew Bible so uncomfortable that he was gradually papered over, displaced by priestly sources and the Deuteronomist, and then finally done in by the rabbis of the Talmud, whom Bloom clearly admires, and in some ways even resembles, though he finds their recasting of God as the merciful, covenant-keeping Lord of monotheism a betrayal of the rough, irrefutable reality that Yahweh represents. None of this is to say that Bloom likes Yahweh, who he feels should be 'convicted for desertion.' But present or absent, Yahweh is for Bloom inescapable, like death. 'My Orthodox Judaic childhood,' Bloom writes, 'lingers in me as an awe of Yahweh.' (Bloom may be our most confessional critic. Could anyone imagine Lionel Trilling telling us, as Bloom does, that his mother trusted in the covenant with the Jewish God, though he cannot?) But before he gets to Yahweh, Bloom turns his attention to Jesus, to whom the first half of the book is devoted. The order is important. Bloom offers an excellent explanation of the radical difference between the Hebrew Bible and the Old Testament. A key difference, Bloom notes, is that the Hebrew Bible ends with II Chronicles and the 'heartening exhortation to 'go up' to Jerusalem to rebuild Yahweh's Temple.' The reconfigured 'Old Testament' ends with the minor prophet Malachi prophesying the return of Elijah, a lead-in to the Gospel of Matthew. In 'Jesus and Yahweh,' Bloom reverses this revision: Yahweh, though older, isn't superseded, but given the last word. For Bloom, Jesus and Jesus Christ are two entirely unrelated figures, and Bloom spends the first half of the book exploring their incompatibility. Jesus is the Jew Yeshua about whom no verifiable facts are knowable. What we do know, aside from a few scraps from Josephus ('wonderful writer and non-stop liar'), is contained in unreliable works written 'almost entirely by Jews in flight from themselves, and desperate to ingratiate themselves with their Roman overlords and exploiters.' By this Bloom means the New Testament, which he also refers to as 'the Belated Testament.' Jesus Christ, as opposed to Jesus, is a later theological construct that owes a great deal to Hellenic thought. Christ, for Bloom, is a betrayal of Jesus the man, Yeshua, who clearly lived inside a Jewish world, trusted in the covenant with Yahweh, did not think the Law was death, and would be appalled at, or at least entirely baffled by, the religion created in his name. Jesus belongs on one side of the Judeo-Christian divide, Christ on the other. Bloom is persuasively aware that the Judeo-Christian tradition is a convenient myth that joins two deeply incompatible religions. Bloom's insistence on the unrecoverable details of the life of Jesus doesn't stop him from using his ear to locate in the gospels the elements that seem to him truest to the real Yeshua, that 'greatest of Jewish geniuses.' These are found particularly in the gospel of Mark, where Jesus' dark parables, his ambivalence toward his own apostles and toward those he would save, make him a literary, if not a literal, son of the enigmatic, mercurial Yahweh of the Hebrew Bible. In Bloom's account, Jesus, with his deep connection to the uncanny Yahweh, can seem like the last real Jew, rather than the first Christian. 'Jesus and Yahweh' is not a big book, but it is bursting with ideas and contradictions, discussions (and dismissals) of New Testament scholarship, accounts of Lurianac kabbalah, gnomic Nietzschean utterances and brilliant asides about the essence of American religion. It also contains several outrageous statements - like the insistence that 'Torah is Yahweh.' Throughout, Bloom writes as if all Western literature were his private Talmud, turning it and turning it to reveal hidden meaning, and taking the whole of it personally: the author of the gospel of John 'hates me and I respond in kind.' Bloom tells us this book is the fruit of the work he began when he wrote 'The Anxiety of Influence' (1973). That work originally contained a chapter on the New Testament that he excised, and so it in fact seems Bloom's own struggle with the New Testament was always lurking behind the arguments in 'The Anxiety of Influence' and was perhaps the seed of that theory, not its fruit. This makes a great deal of sense. Who really cares, in the end, that Stevens 'misread' Shelley in order to produce his own strong poetry? But the battle between the New Testament and the Hebrew Bible is a struggle over religious truth that goes to a core crisis in Western civilization, and in Bloom himself. It helps explain why, in Bloom's agonistic literary universe, literature, despite his genius for explaining it, can seem oddly irrelevant. It is religious truth that matters. Bloom calls himself a cultural Jew who does not 'trust' in the covenant, trust being for him the hallmark of the normative Jew. And yet what dominates this book isn't the figure of Jesus or Yahweh. It is the image of Bloom, filled with post-Holocaust anguish and outrage, awakened at 2 a.m. by nightmares of Yahweh. What ultimately gives this book its power and poignancy is the image of a 74-year-old Jew, crying out to a silent God who nevertheless 'won't go away.' What could be more normative than that?

Subject: India, Oil and Nuclear Weapons From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 10:51:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19sun1.html?ex=1298005200&en=5ac389a3013a5615&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 India, Oil and Nuclear Weapons Exploding at the seams with building, investment and trade, India can hardly keep up with itself. Airplanes coming into Delhi and Mumbai routinely end up circling the airports for hours, wasting precious jet fuel, because there are not enough runways or airport gates. City streets originally built for two lanes of traffic are teeming with four and sometimes five lanes of cars, auto-rickshaws, mopeds, buses and trucks. This energy-guzzling congestion will only become worse as India continues producing fairly high-quality goods and services at lower and lower prices — from automobiles that cost only $2,500 to low-budget airline flights for $50. India's president, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, sounded exactly like President Bush when he told the Asiatic Society in Manila earlier this month that energy independence must be India's highest priority. 'We must be determined to achieve this within the next 25 years, that is, by the year 2030,' he said. Unfortunately, Mr. Kalam, like Mr. Bush, is far better at talking than at any real action to reduce energy consumption. In the new enclaves for India's emerging middle class and its rapidly rising nouveau riche, environmentally unsustainable, high-ceilinged houses feature air-conditioning systems that stay on year round. When President Bush makes his long-planned trip to India next month, he will be visiting a country that, like China, has begun to gear its international strategy to its energy needs. That is one of the biggest diplomatic challenges facing the United States, and right now the American strategy is askew. India desperately wants Mr. Bush to wring approval from Congress for a misbegotten pact in which America would help meet India's energy requirements through civilian nuclear cooperation. With its eye on the nuclear deal, India recently bowed to American pressure and cast its vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran's suspected nuclear program to the United Nations Security Council. That was a victory for Mr. Bush, and India did the right thing in helping to hold Iran accountable, but the deal it wants to make with the United States is a bad one. It would allow India to make an end run around the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty's basic bargain, which rewards countries willing to renounce nuclear weapons with the opportunity to import sensitive nuclear technology to help meet their energy needs. America has imposed nuclear export restrictions on India because India refuses to sign the nonproliferation treaty and it has tested a nuclear device that uses materials and technology diverted from its civilian nuclear program. In trying to give India a special exemption, Mr. Bush is threatening the nonproliferation treaty's carrot-and-stick approach, which for more than 35 years has dissuaded countries that are capable of building or buying nuclear arms from doing so, from South Korea to Turkey to Saudi Arabia. And if his hope is that the promise of nuclear technology from America will be enough to prod India to turn its back on Iran, that's a bad bet. Even as India was casting its vote on Iran's nuclear program, India's petroleum minister, Murli Deora, said his government would continue to pursue a multibillion-dollar gas pipeline deal with Tehran. There is no diplomatic quick fix in this energy-hungry world. Even if India shunned Iran, it would still have to turn to other petroleum suppliers that Washington wants to isolate, including Sudan and Venezuela. And the Iranian supplies would wind up going to other energy-hungry nations, tying them more closely to Tehran. If Mr. Bush wants to tackle this quandary seriously, he needs to begin by pushing for significant energy conservation steps in the United States, by far the world's largest energy consumer. That would do far more to weaken the stranglehold Iran and other energy-producing nations now exercise over world oil markets.

Subject: Mind Over Splatter From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 10:47:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19foster.html?ex=1298005200&en=21f0d73f56374f1a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Mind Over Splatter By DON FOSTER Poughkeepsie, N.Y. LAST year, 24 paintings were unveiled as previously unknown works by Jackson Pollock. Authenticated by one of the world's most respected authorities on Pollock's work, the paintings were to go on exhibition this year, the 50th anniversary of the artist's death. But Richard Taylor, a physics professor retained by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation to subject six of the paintings to computer-assisted analysis, discovered that the paintings may well be fakes — at least, the drips lack Pollock's characteristic geometric pattern. The collection's owner disputes that this finding is conclusive. At the heart of the controversy lie critical questions about artistic meaning and value that have vexed literary scholars no less than art historians. Would the exposure of a hitherto successful forgery diminish Jackson Pollock's reputation as a unique creative genius, by demonstrating that his work is replicable? If Shakespeare were credited with a mediocre poem hitherto presumed to be written by a lesser light, would that change our opinion of Shakespeare? 'What matter who's speaking?' asked Michel Foucault, quoting Samuel Beckett. What matter whose painting? The implied answer — no matter at all — takes for granted that cultural artifacts are symptomatic of the society that produced them. The critic's job, then, is to assess the product on its own merits, quite apart from the artist's name or reputation. If 'Hamlet' had been written by Christopher Marlowe or Edward de Vere, not by William Shakespeare, would the text therefore be less great? Perhaps not, but we would think of it in a different way. If a previously authenticated Pollock painting was actually done by a disciple, or by Norman Rockwell, or by a monkey with a paintball gun, yet looks to be authentic Pollock, so what? The look-alike might be worth less at Sotheby's, but would it be worth less as art? At stake in such attributional debates is a question of methodology: how can experts tell the difference between the real thing and an imitation? If the qualitative judgment of Pollock or Shakespeare scholars differs from quantitative analysis of a computer-assisted study, whose verdict will carry the day? That Richard Taylor's analysis can inform us of patterns generated by Pollock much of the time provides no guarantee that Pollock reproduced those patterns all of the time. But if the Pollock canon includes a forgery, it may be that Taylor's analysis provides a more objective mode of analysis than aesthetic appreciation. I am well acquainted with the risks of over-reliance on quantitative techniques. In 1989 I published a book proposing that the 1612 poem 'A Funeral Elegy,' by 'W. S.,' might be Shakespeare's. Seven years later, the elegy made front-page news when computer-assisted analysis, along with the opinion of other Shakespeare scholars, tended to confirm that 'W. S.' was indeed Shakespeare. But in 2001, a French Shakespearean, Gilles Monsarrat, proposed that W. S. was in fact Shakespeare's junior colleague, John Ford. Computer-assisted analysis confirmed that this was probably right, and the title-page initials, wrong. In the art world, the problem of attribution is complicated by market value. Nobody made more money by including 'A Funeral Elegy' in editions of Shakespeare printed from 1997 to 2001. But if you have paid, say, a half-million for a Pollock painting and some physicist and his computer say that you were hoodwinked, the question of the work's value is not wholly aesthetic. Literary and art attribution is not just a game of pin the name on the donkey. A community of interested scholars must consider all available evidence, and come to a consensus. In the case of the Pollock canon, the jury is still out. It would be a mistake, in my opinion, to sell the disputed Pollock canvases at a discount without more evidence than computer-assisted analysis of drip patterns. Meanwhile, Jackson Pollock may be chuckling in his grave: if the object of Abstract Expressionist work is to embody the rebellious, the anarchic, the highly idiosyncratic — if we embrace Pollock's work for its anti-figurative aesthetic — may faux-Pollock not be quintessential Pollock? May not a Pollock forgery that passes for authentic be the best Pollock of all? Don Foster is a professor of English at Vassar College.

Subject: A Modern, Multicultural Makeover From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:27:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/books/13kaku.html?ex=1284264000&en=0c12f7eb552cad0c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 13, 2005 A Modern, Multicultural Makeover for Forster's Bourgeois Edwardians By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The opening sentence of Zadie Smith's glorious new novel announces the book's provenance: 'One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father' - an echo, of course, of the opening sentence of E. M. Forster's 1910 novel, 'Howards End,' which began, 'One may as well begin with Helen's letters to her sister.' Although the plot of 'On Beauty' hews remarkably closely to 'Howards End,' Ms. Smith has managed the difficult feat of taking a famous and beloved classic and thoroughly reinventing it to make the story her own. She has taken a novel about Edwardian England - about class and the competing claims of idealism and money, about a country on the brink of the social upheavals of World War I - and used it as a launching pad for a thoroughly original tale about families and generational change, about race and multiculturalism in millennial America, about love and identity and the ways they are affected by the passage of time. After the weirdly sodden detour she took with her last novel, 'The Autograph Man' (2002), Ms. Smith has written a wonderfully engaging, wonderfully observed follow-up to her dazzling 2000 novel 'White Teeth' - a novel that put the then 24-year-old British writer on the international literary map and made her an instant star. A kind of bookend to that debut book, 'On Beauty' is also a big-city novel (set mainly in Boston instead of London), alive with the cacophony of urban life and animated by a vibrant sense of how people live and talk today - be they upper-middle-class academics, disenfranchised Haitian immigrants, aspirational hip-hop performers or preachy neoconservatives. Following the lead of both 'White Teeth' and 'Howards End,' this novel also pivots around the stories of two families with intertwined lives - families who represent very different ways of looking at the world. Not unlike the bohemian Schlegels in 'Howards End,' the English-born Howard Belsey and his African-American wife, Kiki, are multicultural liberals, whose view of the world is rooted in the political struggles of the 1960's and the academic zeitgeist of a would-be Ivy League college. Howard's rival - in the rarefied world of Rembrandt studies and in the larger world of cultural politics - is Monty Kipps, a right-wing Trinidadian professor and pundit whose old-fashioned materialism recalls that of Mr. Wilcox in 'Howards End.' Monty's enigmatic wife, Carlene, forms an unlikely spiritual bond with Kiki and upon her death leaves Kiki an expensive bequest that, like the bequest left by Mrs. Wilcox in 'Howards End,' will have all manner of unforeseen repercussions. In setting up these narrative echoes of 'Howards End,' Ms. Smith sometimes over-stage-manages her story, but these lapses are quickly steamrollered by her instinctive storytelling gifts, her uncanny ear for dialogue and her magical access to her characters' inner lives. As she demonstrated in 'White Teeth,' she possesses an ability to inhabit with equal ease the point of view of children, adolescents and the middle-aged, and in these pages she captures with pitch-perfect accuracy the street-smart banter of wanna-be rappers, the willfully pedantic language of academics and the marital shorthand of long-time couples. She gives the reader vivid portraits of the Belseys' three teenage children: the earnest, conscientious Jerome, who falls hopelessly in love with Monty's beautiful and promiscuous daughter; his awkward but headstrong sister, Zora, who befriends a talented rapper named Carl (who plays the 'Howards End' role of Leonard Bast in this novel); and their younger brother, Levi, who would like to disavow his middle-class roots and reinvent himself as an activist from the hood. Ms. Smith's portrayal of the Belsey children not only reveals the traits and mannerisms they share with their mother or father but also underscores the many ways in which they have rebelled against their parents, eluding familial history and forging identities of their own. She proves equally adept at delineating Howard and Kiki's three-decade marriage - a relationship founded on love and passion, but more recently foundering upon long-held resentments and frustrations and the simple fact that Howard and Kiki are no longer the people they were 30 years ago. Kiki, who has ballooned to 250 pounds, resents Howard for not accepting her as she is - 'I'm not going to be getting any thinner or any younger,' she angrily tells him - and for drawing her into an almost exclusively white world that often feels alien to her. 'I staked my whole life on you,' she says. 'And I have no idea any more why I did that.' Howard, on his part, has grown more and more dogmatic over the years. Intent on importing his strict academic aesthetics into his home, he has become judgmental about what sort of paintings can be hung on the walls, what sort of music can be played in his presence. Like so many Forster characters, he has always had difficulty connecting the poetry and the prose in his life, and these days he seems increasingly incapable of expressing his feelings - to Kiki, to his aged father or to his children. He has recently started a perilous relationship with Monty Kipps's teenage daughter, Victoria - the very girl who broke the heart of his son Jerome, and who is now pursuing Zora's handsome protégé, Carl. While such soap opera-ish developments may sound melodramatic and contrived in summary, Ms. Smith explicates the familial geometry of the Belsey clan with both sympathy and gently ironic humor. She shows us how this family has constructed its own mythology about itself, and how that mythology is shaken by the family's collision with the Kippses, sending each character into a re-examination of his or her life and the assumptions they have taken for granted for so long. 'On Beauty' opens out to provide the reader with a splashy, irreverent look at campus politics, political correctness and the ways different generations regard race and class, but its real focus is on personal relationships - what E. M. Forster regarded as 'the real life, forever and ever.' Like Forster, Ms. Smith possesses a captivating authorial voice - at once authoritative and nonchalant, and capacious enough to accommodate high moral seriousness, laid-back humor and virtually everything in between - and in these pages, she uses that voice to enormous effect, giving us that rare thing: a novel that is as affecting as it is entertaining, as provocative as it is humane.

Subject: Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:26:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18rich.html?ex=1284696000&en=36254e1e1bfd021c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 18, 2005 Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors By FRANK RICH SOME fearless outside referee had to barge in and try to adjudicate the culture wars, so let us rejoice that it's Zadie Smith. She brings almost everything you want to the task: humor, brains, objectivity, equanimity, empathy, a pitch-perfect ear for smugness and cant, and then still more humor. Born in 1975 - safely past the 1960's, the birth of our blues - she's not much burdened by heavy dogmatic baggage of her own. Being from England, she is one wry remove from the ground zero of these battles, America. She can't reconcile the warring camps - no one can - but 'On Beauty' is that rare comic novel about the divisive cultural politics of the new century likely to amuse readers on the right as much as those on the left. (Not that they'll necessarily be laughing in the same places.) Yet Smith is up to more as well: she wants to rise above the fray even as she wallows in it, to hit a high note of idealism rather than sink into the general despair. How radical can you be? Blame it on her youth. Those who were enraptured by Smith's startling 2000 debut, 'White Teeth,' will find that 'On Beauty' is almost literally a return to form. Here again, we have a baggy, garrulous account of two contrasting, haplessly interconnected families in an urban setting teeming with ethnic, racial and economic diversity. This time the city is not Smith's native London but Boston, or, more specifically, the mythical outlying town of Wellington, home of a college of the same name. We are pointedly told that Wellington is not in the Ivy League, but you can herewith banish all thoughts of Brandeis and Tufts. The school's exasperating culture of entitlement, arrogance and raw ambition, as well as a character or two, will be recognizable to anyone with a passing acquaintance with Harvard, where Smith did time as a Radcliffe fellow after 'White Teeth' put her on America's map. (She is kind enough to spare us a Larry Summers clone, however.) Clearly her stay in our Cambridge, like her years as a student in the other Cambridge back home, was fruitful, especially in this case outside the classroom. You'd never guess she wasn't to the Adams House manner born. 'One may as well begin with Jerome's e-mails to his father' is the first sentence of the book, a blunt declaration of Smith's intention to pay homage to 'Howards End.' In E. M. Forster's masterpiece of pre-World War I England, the collision of two antithetical families is set off by the infatuation of the young, art-worshiping Helen Schlegel with a scion of the profoundly prosaic businessman Henry Wilcox. Smith baits her own narrative mousetrap by propelling Jerome, an altruistic teenage son of Howard Belsey, a left-wing Rembrandt scholar at Wellington, into a live-in internship in London with his father's archnemesis, a reactionary and thoroughly Anglicized Trinidadian scholar of Rembrandt and much else named Monty Kipps. Much as Forster's turn-of-the-20th-century heroine finds to her astonishment that she likes it when the Wilcoxes dismiss socialism, women's suffrage, art and literature as sheer nonsense, so Jerome Belsey discovers in the Kippses' household that he 'liked to listen to the exotic (to a Belsey) chatter of business and money and practical politics; to hear that Equality was a myth, and Multiculturalism a fatuous dream' and 'thrilled at the suggestion that Art was a gift from God, blessing only a handful of masters, and most Literature merely a veil for poorly reasoned left-wing ideologies.' What's more, Monty Kipps has a very hot daughter who doesn't necessarily abide by her famous father's publicly disseminated moral code. The many delicious complications that ensue, not to be divulged here, compound by the page once Monty Kipps, along with his wife, Carlene, and that daughter, Victoria, move to Wellington for a visiting professorship, thus allowing Kipps and Howard Belsey to square off in ideological and personal combat against the backdrop of the continuing fratricides of a liberal university and its only slightly less liberal environs. What keeps the political conflicts from becoming didactic and predictable is, for starters, the principal characters, the Belseys and Kippses themselves. Only one of them, Howard, is white, and even he's not an American-born white man but a refugee from working-class London (humble roots he has tried to escape as surely as Monty Kipps has distanced himself from his own island origins). Howard's Florida-born wife of 30 years, Kiki Simmonds Belsey, is African-American, and thus the three more-or-less college-age Belsey children are black, though not in all cases as black as they'd like to be. Among the novel's several contrapuntal subplots is the continuing effort of the Belsey and Kipps offspring alike to gain the friendship (platonic and not) of Carl Thomas, a Roxbury hip-hop wiz whom they worship as a fount of the 'street' authenticity denied them in the hopelessly bourgeois hood of Wellington. (As a plaything for the higher classes, Carl is to Wellington's aesthetes what the lowly clerk Leonard Bast was to the Londoners of 'Howards End.') Because Smith's antagonists are in their different ways outsiders of a sort in white America, even at an institution as ostentatiously all-embracing as Wellington, they allow us to view the wildly overplowed comic terrain of the university from a slightly askew angle. The boilerplate political battles that buffet the campus, whether over affirmative action or the grievances of the local Haitian community, are not as one-dimensional when both sides of the argument are taken by those who have more than a theoretical stake in the outcome. Here, as in 'White Teeth,' Smith further lightens the load by exulting in the multicultural stew of her milieu without turning it into course work in Multiculturalism. In her Wellington and Boston, as in her London, the racial melting pot is an established fact, to be savored and explored rather than mined for sociological morals. In 'On Beauty,' anyone who is still arguing over it all at this late date is a bit of a dolt, oh so last-century and a ripe target for farce. That's the case with both Howard Belsey and Monty Kipps, both nearing 60, both handicapped by their own ideological blinders. In life, neither of them connects much to anything, including their infinitely wiser if long-suffering wives, their precocious nearly grown kids and the art that is the platform for their careers as scholars. Howard's yearly seminar is a tendentious running argument against 'the redemptive humanity of what is commonly called 'Art,' ' in which Rembrandt is seen as 'neither a rule breaker nor an original' but as 'a merely competent artisan who painted whatever his wealthy patrons requested.' Howard's own taste runs to conceptual pieces too transgressive to be displayed in his own home. Monty, who announces his arrival at Wellington by arguing in the local paper for 'taking the 'liberal' out of the Liberal Arts,' reserves his greatest passion for punditry, not art, which he mainly seems to care about as a commodity. He is fond of boasting that he owns 'the largest collection of Haitian art in private hands outside of that unfortunate island.' Eventually one valuable piece in that collection, a Hyppolite painting of the voodoo goddess Erzulie treasured mainly by his wife, will become as symbolic a pawn in the two families' lives as the charismatic young interloper from Roxbury. Smith is merciless about both Howard and Monty, the fatuous postmodernist and the self-satisfied capitalist alike, and it's hard to say which is more ridiculous or reprehensible. Howard has become the kind of academic who 'could identify 30 different ideological trends in the social sciences, but did not really know what a software engineer was.' For him a rose has long since stopped being a rose but is instead 'an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice.' That he has 'almost no personal experience of pornography' would never stop him from contributing to 'a book denouncing it, edited by Steinem.' So highly developed are his left-wing P.C. sensibilities that in his zeal to smite Monty's challenges to them he becomes the campus's foremost crusader against free speech. But Monty is no less a hypocrite, a rigidly conservative Christian who preaches against homosexuality in public even as his best friend is a gay Baptist minister who delivered the benediction at President Reagan's inauguration. His own brand of pomposity, like Howard's, knows no bounds; he is 'a man constantly on the lookout for the camera he knew must be filming him' and has 'this way of torturing metaphor that the self-consciously conservative occasionally have.' Kiki Belsey in particular has his number: 'Often enough she spotted Monty, leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd 19th-century three-piece suits, with his timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating.' Out of both curiosity and sympathy Kiki is soon driven to seek a friendship with Monty's elusive and mysterious wife, apotheosized by one and all from afar as 'the ideal 'stay-at-home' Christian Mom.' The warring academics can be insufferable, but the novel as a whole rarely sinks to their level, thanks to Smith's generous portrayal of the two families' often wounding private dramas. It's Kiki, a majestically overweight earth mother with a feminist's spine, who gives the book its biggest (but not sentimental) heart. A hospital administrator, not an academic, she is in Wellington but not of it, despite her long marriage to Howard. Along with the Belsey children - especially the ever-assertive daughter, Zora, a Wellington undergrad who emulates her father to a fault - she anchors the academic farce to a domestic reality beyond academe. As befits a farce, sex is no small part of that reality in 'On Beauty.' However funny some of the couplings, the human costs of the betrayals pump blood into what might otherwise be an etiolated campus satire. Even so, the satire is not to be sneezed at. Smith has her own droll takes on the familiar targets, whether she is dryly delineating the silken bureaucratic maneuvers of Howard's best friend, Dr. Erskine Jegede, Soyinka professor of African literature and assistant director of the black studies department, or describing faculty meetings at which the priority 'is to try to get a chair as near the exit as possible, so as to enable discreet departure halfway through.' Though Smith quite rightly puts greater faith in the students than the adults who have already mucked things up, she hardly gives them a free pass. These are kids all too visibly angling for the fast track to 'an internship at The New Yorker or in the Pentagon or in Clinton's Harlem offices or at French Vogue.' The vestigial preppies make a brief appearance too. In one set piece, Howard eviscerates the singers in a Wellington glee club (with their 'F. Scott Fitzgerald heritage haircuts' and voices redolent of 'Old Boston money') with such misanthropic precision that he almost (but not quite) makes you like him. Smith is after so much in 'On Beauty' that, as with 'White Teeth,' not quite all of it comes together at the end. And sometimes in the later pages the stage management is all too visible, as in a climactic scene in which a political demonstration in the Wellington streets brushes against a particularly tawdry extramarital assignation for diagrammatic effect. Nor does every character have the weight of the Belseys; they intermingle with some cartoons. In her failings as in her strengths, Smith often seems more reminiscent of the sprawling 19th-century comic novelists who preceded Forster than her idol himself. But that's not always the case. What finally makes 'On Beauty' affecting as well as comic is Smith's own earnest enactment of Forster's dictum to 'only connect' her passions with the prose of the world as she finds it. For all the petty politics, domestic battles and cheesy adulteries of 'On Beauty,' she never loses her own serious moral compass or forsakes her pursuit of the transcendent. By not taking sides in the Belsey-versus-Kipps debate, she wants to lift us to the higher view not dreamt of in their philosophies. It's too late for burnt-out cases like Howard and Monty, who are both far too jaded and cynical to see past the culture wars to the beauty of culture itself. But Smith and many of her other characters do, especially the young ones, even those who are for now held captive by their iPods. Not for nothing does 'On Beauty' progress from an enraptured account of an open-air performance of Mozart's Requiem early on to a radiant literary tour of the wonders of Hampstead Heath to the crowning image of a Rembrandt portrait being projected larger and larger in a lecture hall until the 'ever present human hint of yellow' becomes an enveloping balm, however temporary, for all wounds. Smith is roughly the same age as Forster at the time he published 'Howards End.' No one will confuse her voice with his, but her authorial presence is at the very least a channeling of the searching heroine of that novel. Margaret Schlegel, Forster wrote, was 'not beautiful, not supremely brilliant, but filled with something that took the place of both qualities - something best described as a profound vivacity, a continual and sincere response to all that she encountered in her path through life.' For all Zadie Smith's other talents, it is this quality that makes you want to follow her every step on that path.

Subject: Drug Plan's Start From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:25:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/politics/19older.html?ex=1298005200&en=2fbfba473151ca68&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Drug Plan's Start May Imperil G.O.P.'s Grip on Older Voters By ROBIN TONER WASHINGTON — Older voters, a critical component of Republican Congressional victories for more than a decade, could end up being a major vulnerability for the party in this year's midterm elections, according to strategists in both parties. Paradoxically, one reason is the new Medicare drug benefit, which was intended to cement their loyalty. During next week's Congressional recess, Democrats are set to begin a major new campaign to highlight what Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, describes as 'this disastrous Republican Medicare prescription drug plan.' Democratic incumbents and challengers plan nearly 100 public forums around the country, armed with briefing books and talking points on a law that, party leaders assert, 'was written by and for big drug companies and H.M.O.'s, not American families.' Recognizing the widespread criticism of the new drug program, Republican senators met in a closed session with administration officials this week to discuss the rocky rollout of the plan and prepare for questions back home. But pollsters say the Republicans' difficulties with the over-60 vote go beyond the complicated drug benefit, which began Jan. 1. President Bush's failed effort to create private accounts in Social Security last year was also unpopular with many older Americans. That, in addition to confusion over the drug benefit, has 'taken the key swing vote that's been trending the Republicans' way and put it at risk for the next election,' said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster. 'And what that means is Republicans are going to have to work extra hard.' Mr. Bolger added: 'It's no secret what the Democrats are going to do. It's what they always do — scare seniors.' Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, countered: 'We told them up front, the way you're designing this is going to be a disaster. If you go back to the debate, we said this is set up for failure.' Retirees loom large in midterm elections because they turn out in force at the polls, even in nonpresidential years; their numbers and influence are particularly strong in Congressional battlegrounds like Florida and Pennsylvania. For years, Democrats counted on the over-60 vote to regularly return their party to power on Capitol Hill — the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Social Security and Medicare, as Democrats were quick to remind retirees. But that changed in the 1990's, when that vote began tilting toward the Republicans. One reason for the change was demographics — the passing of the New Deal generation and its replacement with retirees whose political loyalties were formed in a more Republican era. But it also reflected Republican success in muting or neutralizing the longtime Democratic advantage as the more trustworthy party on Social Security and Medicare. The passage of the Medicare prescription drug law in 2003 was intended to be the crowning accomplishment of that strategy. Experts note that the retiree vote is hardly monolithic, nor is it motivated purely by what happens to programs for older Americans. 'It's not always economics that prevails,' said Susan A. MacManus, an expert on generational politics at the University of South Florida in Tampa. She noted that many retirees in her region are younger and more affluent, less dependent on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and more concerned about national security and moral issues. In fact, Democrats suffered one of their worst years among over-60 voters in the 1998 House vote, according to surveys of voters leaving the polls; some analysts attributed that to the Monica Lewinsky scandal that year, which they argued was particularly offensive to older voters. In more recent elections, older voters have been particularly responsive to Mr. Bush's national security and antiterrorism positions, said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster. But for now, the major battleground is the new Medicare benefit, a program potentially affecting 42 million older and disabled Americans that has been rolled out in a bitterly competitive political year. At stake is control of the House and Senate: Democrats could gain control of the House for the first time in 12 years if they make a net gain of 15 seats, a difficult challenge. They could regain control of the Senate by picking up six seats. Older voters will play a crucial role in some of the marquee races, including the Pennsylvania Senate race, between Republican Senator Rick Santorum and his Democratic challenger, State Treasurer Robert P. Casey Jr. Among the fewer than three dozen House districts considered competitive, the over-60 vote will be critical in states like Florida and New Mexico. New Mexico's attorney general, Patricia Madrid, who is challenging Republican Representative Heather A. Wilson, was chosen to deliver the Democratic radio address on Saturday, focused on the Medicare drug benefit. Many Republicans say they still believe that the drug program, by this fall, will be a net political advantage with millions of retired voters. But they acknowledge problems, including low-income people who fell between the cracks in the transition; the difficulties reported by many pharmacists in determining eligibility; and the general struggle of millions of retirees faced with a choice among 40 or more private drug plans, with different rules, lists of covered drugs and premiums. Republicans have reacted angrily in recent days to what they assert is a blatant effort by Democrats to capitalize on the confusion. Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, accused Democrats of trying 'to scare seniors away from signing up for this benefit.' Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Finance Committee, asserted that the Democrats' new public campaign was a strategy of 'inherent political hypocrisy and opportunism.' Democrats insist they are urging older voters to sign up for the program — the deadline for signing up without penalty is May 15 — even as they highlight its flaws. They are pushing legislation that would, among other things, extend the sign-up deadline, allow Medicare to negotiate prices directly with drug companies and impose new regulations on private drug plans. As the election approaches, increasingly anxious Congressional Republicans say the onus is on the Bush administration to make the program work. Representative Paul D. Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who played a crucial role in the drug law, said, 'By and large, people are satisfied, but there are a lot of people who are frustrated and confused, no two ways about that. The question is whether those people who are frustrated and confused are going to have their problems resolved in the next few months. The administration is really on the hook for smoothing out these problems.' Surveys show that older voters remain skeptical; a new nationwide poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, found that retirees were almost twice as likely to say they viewed the benefit unfavorably (45 percent) as favorably (23 percent). Last month's New York Times/CBS News Poll found that most did not expect the law to lower drug costs over the next few years. In the 22nd Congressional District, in Florida, where State Senator Ron Klein, a Democrat, is challenging Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr., a Republican, Mr. Klein said the prescription drug issue was part of a general economic squeeze, including higher homeowners' insurance and gas prices, that retirees were feeling. 'Things have gotten pretty rough in the last couple years, and these Medicare prescription drug costs, on top of the other issues, are weighing pretty heavily on people with fixed incomes,' Mr. Klein said. 'Let's start thinking about the consumer side, instead of figuring out how to prop up the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.' Mr. Shaw, who came to Congress in 1981 and has proved one of the more durable political survivors, said he expected an expensive race, but a successful one. He said he had been giving seminars to help older Americans maneuver through the new drug benefit. 'It's complicated and confusing, no question, because it's new,' Mr. Shaw said. 'But I can tell you by November, those who have it will be delighted, and those who don't will be wanting to get into the program.'

Subject: Morocco's Past, Morocco's Future From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:24:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/opinion/18sat3.html?ex=1297918800&en=fa305adc6f382b50&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Morocco's Past, Morocco's Future Moroccans will mark a half-century of independence next month, but they have spent those years under monarchs with unchecked power. The security forces of the former king, Hassan II, arrested, exiled, jailed, tortured or killed thousands of critics or perceived critics and sometimes their families as well. Repression softened in the 1990's. Hassan's son, Mohammed VI, who succeeded him in 1999, established a truth commission to investigate the crimes of his father and grandfather. It was the first such commission in the Arab world, but its achievements would be an impressive attempt to deal with the past anywhere. The commission's staff members inspected the former secret prisons and interviewed jailers to attempt to write the full story of what had happened. They took thousands of statements from victims in private, and a few told their stories in televised hearings. The commission also recommended major reforms to Morocco's Constitution to prevent future abuses, including an independent judiciary and oversight of the security apparatus. The commission's impact has been enormous. It has opened a debate throughout Morocco about the past and how to democratize the country, and people elsewhere who watched the hearings on Al Jazeera are now asking whether such things could happen in their nations. The king's support made the commission possible. He has provided an ample budget, allowing the commission to pay reparations and provide medical care for victims. He also made the crucial acknowledgment that the crimes uncovered were not aberrant acts of individuals, but state policy. He has endorsed the commission's recommendations. But the king's appetite for reforms may have limits. Significantly, the commission could never state the obvious: the monarchy was to blame for the abuses. With many perpetrators still active in the security services, the commission has also not recommended the prosecution of those responsible. Nor has the king issued a formal apology to victims, instead delegating that job to the prime minister. Indeed, human rights abuses continue in Morocco. The judiciary is still strictly controlled, the security forces still employ torture, and people still go to jail for writing and saying things deemed insulting to the monarchy. After terrorist bombs exploded in Casablanca in 2003, the government arrested thousands of people and passed new antiterror laws with alarmingly broad powers. A new bombing could provide the security service with an excuse to stop all reforms. Such abuses will continue until no one is above the law. As the country celebrates its half-century of independence, King Mohammed VI has the opportunity to make history by backing reforms that undermine his own power — but will bring Morocco into the modern world.

Subject: Spectator's Role for China's Muslims From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:23:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/weekinreview/19yardley.html?ex=1298005200&en=203962acae4e3ad9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 A Spectator's Role for China's Muslims By JIM YARDLEY LINXIA, China RELIGION is often hidden in China, so the unabashed public display of Islam here in the city known as Little Mecca is particularly striking. Men have beards and wear white caps. Women wear head scarves. Minarets poke up from large mosques. A bookstore sells Korans and religious study guides in Arabic. These are reminders that with almost 21 million followers of Islam, China has roughly as many Muslims as Europe or even Iraq. But the openness of religion in this isolated region along the ancient Silk Road does not mean that China's Muslims are active participants in the protests and seminal debates roiling the larger Islamic world. In that world, they are almost invisible. A case in point is the outrage and violence over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that last week continued to ripple through Islamic countries. Here in Linxia, which has more than 80 mosques, news of the cartoons spread quickly. The local religious affairs bureau also moved quickly. Local Muslims say officials visited imams and cautioned them against inciting followers. The same happened in 2003, when a few protests broke out over the American invasion of Iraq. The China Islamic Association, the quasi-governmental agency that regulates Islam, quickly intervened and shut down the protest. Not that most Chinese Muslims need any warning. With 1.3 billion people, China is so huge and Muslims constitute such a tiny minority that most Muslims intuitively learn to keep quiet. 'We can talk about these things among ourselves,' said a shopper at a Muslim bookstore. 'But China has a law. We are not allowed to speak out about these things that are upsetting the Muslim world.' The tight government regulation of religion, as well as restrictions on free speech, can even separate Muslims on the Chinese mainland from their peers in Hong Kong, where citizens enjoy far greater civil liberties. On Friday, Hong Kong Muslims held a protest against the cartoons. Human rights groups have long criticized the lack of religious freedom in China and highlighted the harsh treatment of underground Catholics, Tibetan Buddhists and Uighurs, the Muslim ethnic group in the western region of Xinjiang. Yet other Chinese Muslim groups that might be expected to support the Uighurs have rarely done so. Dru C. Gladney, a leading Western scholar on Chinese Muslims, said the country's 10 Muslim nationalities usually find common cause only when they feel an issue denigrates Islam, as was the case with the cartoons. Sometimes, disputes between different factions can end in violence. Mr. Gladney said the largest group, the Hui, regard some Uighurs as unpatriotic separatists who give other Chinese Muslims a bad name. The Hui, he said, have blended fairly well into society by placing pragmatism over religious zeal and adopting the low profile of an immigrant group living in a foreign land — despite their presence in China for more than 1,300 years. 'They don't tend to get too involved in international Islamic conflict,' said Mr. Gladney, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii. 'They don't want to be branded as radical Muslims.' Yet Chinese Muslims should not be considered completely housebroken by authoritarian rule. Since the seventh century, when Islam began arriving in China along trading routes, there have been periodic Muslim revolts. Under the Communist Party, Muslim rage, if mostly contained on international issues, has erupted over localized affronts. Large protests broke out in 1989. Muslims took to the streets to denounce a book that described minarets as phallic symbols and compared pilgrimages to Mecca with orgies. Government officials, who allowed the protests, quickly banned the book and even held a book burning. A few years ago, thousands of Muslims protested in various cities after a pig's head was nailed to the door of a mosque in Henan Province. And last year, riots erupted after Hui from all over central China rushed to the aid of a Muslim involved in a traffic dispute. At the Mayanzhuang Islamic school in Linxia, Ma Huiyun, 40, the director of studies, said the cartoons infuriated him and other local Muslims. 'But we have to cooperate with the government,' he said. 'They asked us to be calm. They said they would speak on our behalf and express our unhappiness.' Mr. Ma said Chinese Muslims want closer ties to the Islamic heartland in the Middle East. His school now has two computers to obtain news from the Middle East or about the Iraq war. This year, Mr. Ma made his first pilgrimage to Mecca, one of roughly 10,000 Chinese Muslims estimated to have taken part in the hajj. The government has begun hiring Chinese Muslims to work in Middle Eastern embassies and state-owned companies that do business in the region. But many Muslims here cite obstacles to developing relationships with Muslims in other countries, and as a result, the Chinese remain largely isolated. 'There is really not a lot of understanding about us in the outside world,' Mr. Ma said. Linxia, once known as Hezhou, has been a center of Islam for centuries and now has a climate of religious tolerance. But Muslims elsewhere in China face more restrictions. In Xinjiang, for example, Muslim schools are tightly monitored and are allowed only limited numbers of students. Many of the same societal problems that fueled protests by Islamic immigrants in Europe — discrimination, lower education levels, higher unemployment, a sense of cultural separation from the dominant majority — can be found in China, too. China's Muslim population is stable, but among upwardly mobile Chinese, Islam is not as popular as Buddhism or Christianity. The pressure to assimilate, too, has watered down Islam in many places; in cities, some people who call themselves Muslims abstain from eating pork but rarely attend mosque. Not so in Linxia. At the Muslim schools in the city, most of the students are young boys from poor families who may one day became imams. It will be their job to navigate the delicate task of being Muslim in China. 'Obviously, we're different from Muslims in other parts of the world,' said Ma Ruxiong, a teacher at the Nanguan Mosque, the city's oldest. 'We just can't go into the streets and protest. You have to have permission from the government. But there are other things we can do. We pray to Allah to protect all Muslims in the world.'

Subject: Determined Skater Makes History From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:22:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/sports/olympics/19speed.html?ex=1298005200&en=bc1eeccf3cf1d013&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Determined Skater Makes History With Fierce Charge to the Gold By LYNN ZINSER TURIN, Italy — As Shani Davis took a final lap around the speedskating oval Saturday to celebrate his victory in the 1,000 meters, the first individual Olympic gold medal won by a black athlete in a Winter Games, an overwhelmingly Dutch crowd set aside color and nationalism to celebrate a spectacular performance. In the moments after the race, the only color Davis cared about was gold. 'I just think that it's cool to have a gold medal because so many people train hard and work hard all their lives and they don't have a gold medal, regardless of their color,' Davis said. 'Here I am, 23 years old, been skating for 17 years, ever since I was 6. 'It feels good to have a medal,' added Davis, who later donned a Chicago White Sox cap and hugged some of his competitors. 'Especially a gold one.' For Davis, who has clashed with his own federation during the season and his teammates this week, the gold has been a singular pursuit. He began as a child charging around a roller-skating rink until someone recognized his talent and pointed him toward the ice. Davis stood out as a rare African-American in a mostly white sport, supported by a single mother who helped bulldoze any barriers she sensed were in front of him. Davis is only the third black athlete to win a medal in a Winter Olympics. The figure skater Debi Thomas won a bronze in 1988, and the bobsled brakeman Vonetta Flowers won a gold with the driver Jill Bakken in 2002. Davis's victory came in speedskating's premier event. The 1,000 meters consists of 21 races between pairs of skaters, and the medals belong to the three with the fastest times. Davis's teammate and rival, Chad Hedrick, the gold medalist in the 5,000 meters, skated in the fourth group and watched as his time of 1 minute 9.45 seconds held up for an hour and a half. Fourteen groups came and went, and Hedrick still had a No. 1 by his name. But Davis stepped onto the ice and changed everything. He skated smoothly, jumping to a good early pace and never breaking stride. He was still charging hard around the final turn, finishing in 1:08.89, a time that seemed untouchable. The American Joey Cheek, the gold medalist in the 500 meters, skated in the next pair and came closest, in 1:09.16, to win the silver. The Dutch skaters Erben Wennemars and Jan Bos went last, with thousands of flag-waving, horn-blowing fans howling with every stride. But the best Wennemars could do was third place. Davis skated his warm-down laps without even turning to watch Wennemars and Bos finish. Davis's journey to this victory was complicated by at least two factors, his love of both long-track and short-track speedskating and his determination to carve his own path no matter whom he offended. He made the 2002 Olympics as an alternate in short track, but never competed. He kept the spot only after an arbitrator found no proof that United States short-track skaters Apolo Anton Ohno and Rusty Smith had allowed Davis to win a race at the Olympic trials. Davis tried again to qualify in both sports this year, but he failed to make the short-track team by a single place. He is engaged in a battle with U.S. Speedskating over sponsorship, which grew so heated the organization ended the contract that financed his training. The dispute began when Davis refused to remove the logo of his main sponsor, the Netherlands-based bank DSB, from the most prominent spot on his uniform and replace it with the logo of the federation's chief sponsor, Qwest. Cherie Davis, who raised Shani by herself in their hometown, Chicago, has also been outspoken in what she calls the persecution of her son. She has demanded all information about Shani be removed from the federation's Web site. There also appears to be tension between Cherie Davis and her son. A Dutch television documentary on speedskating filmed Davis as he prepared for Turin. In one scene, Cherie Davis chastised Shani for failing to make the short-track team, telling him, 'Someone's going to see what a loser you are.' But the path has always been the clearest for Davis in long-track skating. He won a world all-around championship last year, holds the world record in the 1,000 and seemed poised for Olympic stardom. His singularity, though, was brought into sharp relief here when he refused to skate in the team-pursuit event Wednesday, drawing criticism from his teammates. Davis said he wanted to save his strength for the individual events. Without him, the American team, including Hedrick, failed to qualify for the final. 'I'm not a team player,' Davis said Saturday. 'People do what's best for them. I had the opportunity to win the 1,000 meters, and I was focused on that.' Hedrick had been most critical of Davis for skipping the team pursuit, and that helped give this race a soap-opera atmosphere. Davis said his decision had drawn hate e-mail messages sent to his Web site, with people saying they hoped he would fall, 'using the n-word,' he said. But Davis did not fall or even flinch, and the soap opera did not hold up. Hedrick was sixth, far eclipsed by Davis. They will meet again in the 1,500 on Tuesday and in the 10,000 on Friday. Hedrick holds the world record in both events. After Davis won yesterday, Hedrick did not directly criticize him, but he was less than effusive. 'He had a great skate today,' Hedrick said. 'That's all I have to say.' Cheek, who said he would again donate his medal bonus from the United States Olympic Committee to the organization Right to Play, found himself playing peacemaker. 'This is an individual sport,' said Cheek, who was quick to congratulate Davis when the results were finalized. 'It can get pretty tense out here.' On Saturday, Davis channeled all that emotion onto the track. 'I'm just happy that the things that I've trained for, I was right about,' said Davis, refusing to engage in much discussion about his historic first. He will receive his gold medal Sunday night in Turin's Piazza Castello. 'It hasn't sunk in yet because I don't have the gold medal yet. Maybe when I see it, it will be real.'

Subject: Good News From New Guinea From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 08:22:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/opinion/19sun4.html?ex=1298005200&en=6f070ffaad111c0f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 19, 2006 Good News From New Guinea By VERLYN KLINKENBORG No one, to my knowledge, keeps an index that measures just how bad the news is from day to day. But most of us can gauge its badness by the way good news makes us feel. A case in point is the article in this paper recently about a scientific expedition to the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. During a monthlong field trip, biologists came upon new species of frogs, butterflies, birds, palms, and rhododendrons. That field trip, whose rigors few of us can imagine, was the subject of conversation in many places the evening the article appeared, including the restaurant in the West Village where I was having dinner with friends. There was an excitement, an exultation in the voices at the table as they talked about New Guinea. It sounded as though a new continent had been discovered, not a few species in remote forests halfway around the world. I noticed the same reaction during the rediscovery — contested, confirmed and now recontested — of the ivory-billed woodpecker, which was long believed to be extinct. The very thought that the bird had been heard in the Big Woods of Arkansas filled many people with hope and joy. But it also felt like the temporary lifting of some chronic biological melancholy, an oppression that bears a strange resemblance to the persistent numbness I associate with the nuclear standoff of the cold war. Call it biophilia if you will — E. O. Wilson's term for the connections we 'subconsciously seek with the rest of life.' What Mr. Wilson means by the word is something like a strong but latent undertow in humans, a 'richly structured and quite irrational' predisposition. What I'm hearing is more overt than that. It is something like a sigh of relief, a sigh that measures the bleakness of living in the midst of a mass extinction that we ourselves are causing. Nearly the whole of the scientific history of the West has been spent in a perverse balance between identifying species and destroying them. The emotions we feel about ravaging the biological richness and complexity of Earth are made possible only by an awareness of how many life-forms science has discovered. To suspect how rich we might be is to know how poor we are busy making ourselves. Most of us will never come in contact with more than a tiny fraction of the species on this planet. Most of us, in fact, know so little about the life-forms around us that the distinction between known and unknown species is nearly meaningless. Practically speaking, nearly all the species in New Guinea are unknown to most of us. We may know none of the names of these newly found creatures or their distinctive traits or the habitats where they live. And yet the thought of them exalts us. Part of the pleasure of reading about this expedition to the Foja Mountains is the pleasure we always derive from the thought of an undiscovered country, from imagining, for instance, those long-ago days when the middle of America was still an Amazon of grasses. It's tempting to say that what really moves us in the news of this expedition is simple possibility, the feeling that discovery is still alive, that the Earth has not been entirely trampled or paved. But that makes the value of these newly identified species — and of all others — merely symbolic. They become important to us for the feelings, the possibilities, they arouse. The hard part is remembering that all these species, discovered and undiscovered alike, are important in themselves. Their existence has no reference whatsoever to humans or their minds. The tragedy is that their survival depends on the interest we take in them. We will be identifying new species for many decades to come, although most of them will not be nearly as photogenic as the new honeyeater recently found in New Guinea. The test for us is the same as it has always been. It is not how many species we discover. It is how to protect them once we have found them and how to keep from destroying the species we do not know before we have a chance to find them.

Subject: Actions in U.N. Council From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 09:46:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/18nations.html?ex=1297918800&en=36078248b0371f20&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 U.S. Criticized for Actions in U.N. Council By WARREN HOGE UNITED NATIONS — Developing nations expressed anger on Friday at what they said was a United States-led effort to wrest power from them and give authority for bringing major change at the United Nations to the 15-member Security Council. Conflict burst into the open after John R. Bolton, the American ambassador to the United Nations, scheduled Security Council briefings on two volatile issues that many on the 191-member General Assembly believe are their responsibility and two United States congressmen wrote an accusatory letter to Ambassador Dumisani S. Kumalo of South Africa, head of the Group of 77, which represents 132 developing nations. Mr. Bolton, president of the Security Council this month, set meetings next week on what the United Nations has been doing about charges of sexual exploitation by peacekeepers and an audit on waste approaching $300 million in the peacekeeping purchasing department. The letter — from Representative Henry J. Hyde of Illinois, the Republican chairman of the Committee on International Relations, and Representative Tom Lantos of California, the top Democrat on the committee — took issue with an earlier complaint from Mr. Kumalo to Secretary General Kofi Annan. Mr. Kumalo said in a Feb. 6 letter that the Secretariat had bypassed the General Assembly by commissioning audits, suspending people under investigation and briefing reporters about it. The congressmen wrote, 'We are writing with regard to the outrageous attack you have launched on behalf of the Group of 77 against the United Nations Secretariat for its aggressive effort to shine a light on the corruption that has infected the United Nations procurement office.' The dispute comes while intense negotiations are going on to reach consensus on proposals to tighten management of the United Nations, and to produce a new Human Rights Council to replace the discredited Human Rights Commission. Mr. Bolton said he had no quarrel with the General Assembly taking up reform issues, but said he would not relinquish the Security Council's right to do the same. 'The United States believes in taking action and being effective, and we don't apologize to anybody for that,' he said.

Subject: Chad's Oil Riches From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 09:29:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/africa/18chad.html?ex=1297918800&en=f4ac939c344fcf93&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Chad's Oil Riches, Meant for Poor, Are Diverted By LYDIA POLGREEN and CELIA W. DUGGER NDJAMENA, Chad — Students from the Institute of Mongo have everything they need to learn: desks, computers, professors, notebooks and inquisitive minds. The only thing missing is the school itself. Their country's newfound oil wealth is supposed to build it in their hometown, about 275 miles east of here, but after three years it is still not ready. So they study in borrowed classrooms here in the dusty capital. 'It's a long time we wait, but this is Chad,' said Abdelraman Choua, 22, a computer science major from Mongo. 'We are always waiting.' Such is reality under a World Bank-supported program that was supposed to harness this impoverished African nation's oil wealth for the benefit of its poorest citizens. A $4.2 billion oil pipeline has generated $399 million for Chad since mid-2004, but the spending of the money has been seriously marred by mismanagement, graft and, most recently, the government's decision that a hefty share can be used to fight a rebellion. And now the approach, once envisioned as a model for the development of other African countries, seems to be on the verge of collapse. In recent weeks, Chad seriously weakened a law that dedicated most of its oil revenue to reducing poverty and reneged on its deal with the World Bank. In response, the bank suspended all its loans to the country. What is happening in Chad, a Central African country twice the size of France, is an important test of the idea that international institutions like the World Bank can influence governments of poor countries to spend newly tapped riches on their people instead of using the money to further entrench themselves in power. The proposition is particularly challenging as oil prices surge, because now nations like Chad can attract investors who make few or no demands on how the profits are spent. High-level talks in Paris to resolve the crisis with Chad ended inconclusively this month, though World Bank officials still hope for a settlement that preserves the government's promise to use its oil money to build schools, clinics and roads rather than to support an army that has recently experienced a rash of defections among rebellious officers. As a rising tide of oil money flows to poor African countries in the coming years, the bank will have little choice but to grapple with its role. 'It's not clear at all how to get your hands around it,' said Paul D. Wolfowitz, who became president of the bank last summer. 'But I think to stand back and say the whole thing is a dirty business and we in the World Bank don't want to have anything to do with it is very shortsighted.' Africa is in the midst of an oil boom, with countries that have already struck oil aiming to double production by the end of the decade. Billions of dollars have been invested in new production capacity, much of it to feed a thirsty American market. The United States already gets about 18 percent of its oil from sub-Saharan Africa, a share that will rise in coming years and could outpace imports from the Persian Gulf, experts say. But the United States also faces fierce competition for Africa's oil from countries like China, Taiwan, India and Malaysia. From Angola to Nigeria, Gabon to Sudan, riches from oil have often ended up in the pockets of the ruling elite, inciting conflict over the spoils. In Congo, the off-again-on-again fight over a very similar issue, that vast country's mineral riches, has killed four million people, more than any conflict since World War II. Most died of disease and hunger as wars over diamond and copper mines raged. Chad has been ranked with Bangladesh at the world's two most corrupt countries by the corruption watchdog Transparency International. The hope that Chad would chart a more humane path fractured when its Parliament voted recently to soften the oil revenue law, allowing the money to be diverted. 'We have our backs against the wall,' said Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, Chad's minister of communications, explaining that the nation was out of money and facing a rebellion from former soldiers seeking to overthrow President Idriss Déby. 'We have lived without oil in the past, and we are prepared to do it again to preserve our dignity. And there are other partners we can pursue.' That Chad's government faces a crisis is beyond doubt. Civil servants went on strike for weeks when their salaries were not paid for several months, and retired people have not received their benefits since 2004. The ailing Mr. Déby, president since 1990, is facing an armed rebellion in the east of the country. Some experts say he may believe that he needs money now to buy weapons and the loyalty of restive military officers. The crisis in Darfur, the region of neighboring Sudan that borders Chad, has also put enormous pressure on Chad, which is now host to 200,000 Sudanese refugees. Complicating matters, Chad and Sudan have accused each other of supporting rebels on each other's soil. Chad has demanded that the consortium led by Exxon Mobil that built the pipeline begin depositing the oil royalties directly in the country's central bank rather than an account designated in its agreement with the World Bank. Chadian officials said they were prepared to 'close the faucets' of the oil pipeline if no settlement was reached. Exxon, responding to written questions, said only that it hoped that the bank and Chad could address Chad's financial distress while preserving the poverty-reduction framework. The Exxon-led consortium was willing to build the 665-mile pipeline from landlocked Chad to the sea only with the World Bank's backing, said Rashad Kaldany, director of oil, gas and mining for the bank and its private investment agency, the International Finance Corporation. With Chad's history of civil war, ethnic strife and corruption, its oil lay untapped for decades because no one was willing to put capital at risk here. In 2000, the bank approved the project and lent Chad $37 million for its stake in the pipeline, while its finance agency lent the companies building the pipeline $100 million. Their support was conditioned on Chad's commitment to adopting a law requiring that most of the oil revenue go to poverty alleviation. The royalties were to be deposited in an offshore account, and an independent oversight committee was to vet, approve and monitor all spending. But once the oil revenues began to flow into the government's coffers in 2004, the model program quickly ran into trouble. 'This project could not survive contact with the reality of Chad,' said Gilbert Maoundonodji, who runs a Chadian nonprofit group that investigates petroleum spending in the country. 'It is the most corrupt country in the world.' The oversight group officially charged with monitoring the oil spending laid out a damning catalog of malfeasance and bungling last May, from overspending on office equipment to bungling or abandoning entire public works projects. In the town of Moïssala, a water tower was approved, and an advance of $360,000 paid to the builder. But when monitors checked its progress, they found no water tower, and no one in the local government had ever heard of the project. Many of the wells that were supposed to be dug in rural areas were still unfinished, while others were dug, but not deeply enough. The builders filled them with water from a cistern to try to fool the inspectors, said Thérèse Mekombe, vice president of the oversight panel. The group found that the Ministry of Higher Education had bought a computer for $5,300, a secretary's chair for $3,600 and scooters that should have cost $1,000 for triple the price. Companies that won contracts to make desks for schools used scrap wood, producing desks with bucked legs and tops. The Ministry of Health commissioned a clinic in the town of Bierre, but the builder abandoned the site with no explanation. The largest amount of money — $51 million through last year — has been devoted to public works, mainly roads. Of that, $48 million has been assigned to a partnership formed between a foreign construction company and a company led by President Déby's brother, Daoussa Déby, according to the oversight committee. Government officials say Daoussa Déby's company won contracts though competitive bidding and got so much of the work because few companies have the capacity to complete big projects. Asked about the propriety of a member of the president's family receiving so much money, Mr. Doumgor, the government spokesman, shrugged. 'This is universal,' he said. 'The ones who have the big fortune, all the money, are those in power. I don't say it's right, but it is the same in every country.' The panel's findings toughened the World Bank's reaction to Chad's insistence that it needed to change the law regulating how it spent the oil money, said Ali Khadr, the bank's director for Chad. The bank told Chadian officials it was willing to consider amendments to the law, but first wanted Chad to explain its deepening fiscal woes. 'They kept saying to us: 'No, no, no, there's no time for that. You're either with us or against us,' ' Mr. Khadr said. Members of the oversight committee and outside watchdog groups say the bank did not do enough to ensure that the monitors had adequate resources. Mr. Khadr disagreed. For its first three years, the bank and its International Finance Corporation provided $1.3 million to support the oversight committee's operations. The publication of its critical report was itself 'pretty good evidence that its capacity, if not ideal, is at least adequate,' he said. But Ms. Mekombe of the oversight committee said that even when the monitors documented problems, their recommendations were often ignored, while officials and companies cited as corrupt were never investigated by the government. 'All the work we have done, all the sacrifices we have made, sometimes I think it is all for nothing,' she said. Critics say the bank moved too hastily to move the project to completion before this unstable, corrupt and autocratically-governed country was ready for it. Though aware of the risks, bank managers said they felt that other investors with no stake in poverty reduction would eventually build the pipeline anyway. Mr. Kaldany, the bank's International Finance Corporation official, pointed out that another oil project just over the border in Sudan had been undertaken by a consortium led by China with no controls on how the government spends the money. Indeed, as oil prices have soared, even difficult-to-reach fields with low-quality oil like Chad's have become attractive to investors. And as flawed as the reality of Chad's experiment has been, even some of its fiercest critics say they are glad the World Bank is here. 'Without the World Bank, we would be in an even bigger disaster,' said Boukinebe Garka, a labor union leader. 'Someone else would have built the pipeline, and then we would be in the same situation as Angola or Sudan. At least now we have some control, even if it is not perfect or even very good. It is a start.'

Subject: Call for Free Speech in Public Letter From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 09:27:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/asia/18china.html?ex=1297918800&en=23906fefc61b67bc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Fired Editors of Chinese Journal Call for Free Speech in Public Letter By JIM YARDLEY LANZHOU, China — The controversy over news media censorship in China continued Friday as two editors who had been removed from a feisty weekly journal, Freezing Point, issued a public letter lashing out at propaganda officials and calling for free speech. Meanwhile on Friday, a group of prominent scholars and lawyers who had contributed articles to the journal wrote an open letter to President Hu Jintao, denouncing the crackdown against Freezing Point as a violation of the Chinese Constitution and of the promise made by top leaders for a consistent rule of law. The two broadsides came as intellectuals and some former party officials have sharply criticized the recent increase in censorship of the news media. Propaganda officials, who shut down Freezing Point last month, announced this week that the publication would restart March 1, but without the top two editors. In their public letter, which was released in Beijing, the two editors, Li Datong and Lu Yuegang, defended their stewardship of Freezing Point and made an ardent plea for freedom of expression, saying it was the role of the news media to investigate 'unfairness in the world.' 'What do the people want?' they wrote. 'The freedom of publication and expression granted by the Constitution.' As for the plan to resume publication of Freezing Point, the editors added: 'The newspaper run by the taxpayers' money is forced to publish the trash of the propaganda officials. This is a crime and an abuse of power.' Freezing Point is a supplement of the official China Youth Daily newspaper. In closing the supplement, propaganda officials singled out an essay by a Chinese historian, Yuan Weishi, that had blamed Chinese textbooks for whitewashing the savagery of the Boxer Rebellion, the violent movement against foreigners in China at the beginning of the 20th century. Mr. Li, one of the editors being removed, had said that the March 1 edition of the new Freezing Point would include an article criticizing Mr. Yuan's article. In Beijing on Friday, an official with the State Council Information Office, the government's public affairs division, said the public outcry against Mr. Yuan's essay had justified the 'reorganization' of Freezing Point. The official told Reuters that the essay was historically inaccurate and 'severely hurt the national feelings of the Chinese people, creating malicious social consequences.' But the 13 scholars who wrote the open letter to President Hu argued that the Chinese Constitution protected free speech, even speech the government deemed incorrect. 'There are those among us who don't fully agree with the views expressed in Yuan Weishi's article, but we firmly believe in protecting his right to publish the article, because Yuan's piece didn't violate the Constitution or break the law,' the scholars wrote. 'A basic tenet of freedom of speech includes the right to express 'incorrect views.' ' Among the signers of the letter were He Weifang, a leading constitutional scholar; Qin Hui, a history professor at Qinghua University; and Zhang Yihe, an author whose father was an intellectual purged during China's antirightist campaign in 1957. The letter also directly addressed President Hu's call for a 'harmonious society.' 'Your concerns about opening up freedom of discussion aren't completely unfounded,' the scholars wrote. 'However, we need to understand, a truly harmonious society is actually a society that appears to be rife with various conflicts.'

Subject: German Muslim Leader Speaks Peace From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 09:03:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/europe/18kohler.html?ex=1297918800&en=71cef79d1b175f5c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 German Muslim Leader Speaks Peace to Provocation By MARK LANDLER COLOGNE, Germany AYYUB AXEL KÖHLER pads around his snug apartment here these days with three telephones that ring ceaselessly from sunrise until well after dark. What, the callers from the German news media want to know, does Mr. Köhler think of the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper lampooning the Prophet Muhammad? How should Germany's more than three million Muslims respond to this attempt at satire? 'One has to understand how much we love our prophet,' he said, sitting in a tidy living room furnished with Moorish antiques. 'Our prophet was a very mild man. He was not a terrorist.' Yet, Mr. Köhler says Muslims should not allow their anger to mutate into violence. 'I tell Muslims, 'Please don't be provoked,' ' he said. 'This is not a civilized way to protest blasphemy.' In case there is any misunderstanding, he added: 'I am in favor of press freedom. I know what it means to live in a society without it.' On that last point, certainly, there is no dispute. Mr. Köhler is not just the newly elected chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. He is also a German who grew up in Communist East Germany, before fleeing to the West in the 1950's and converting to Islam. A plump 67-year-old who wears a paisley bow tie and a pair of Birkenstocks, Mr. Köhler is a supremely improbable choice to be a leading voice for Germany's predominantly Turkish Muslim population. He shares a last name with the German president, Horst Köhler, while his adopted Muslim name is the Arabic form of Job, the long-suffering Old Testament figure. He was baptized a Protestant, though he says religion played at most an episodic role in his life until he went from Axel to Ayyub. Little in Mr. Köhler's life has followed a predictable path, including his ascension to his current post, which he says he took only reluctantly following the retirement of his predecessor, a Saudi doctor. Mr. Köhler took office on Feb. 5, just as the firestorm over the cartoons ignited. The Muslim council's first impulse, he said, was to avoid getting into the dispute, so as not to stir up its members. When European diplomatic outposts in the Middle East came under a hail of rocks, Mr. Köhler realized he could not stay above the fray. He embarked on a media tour of Berlin and Hamburg, facing television cameras to preach a message of moderation. 'I wasn't prepared for this at all,' he said, shaking his head. 'It wasn't my goal in life to be a public figure.' At first, his goal was simply to survive. He was born in 1938 in Stettin, in what is now the Polish city of Szczecin, and his earliest memories are of bombing raids. In 1943, his family fled to a remote village south of Berlin, thinking it would be safer. Mr. Köhler's parents rarely went to church. His father, an architect, struggled with Christian tenets like the Holy Trinity. Childhood innocence ended for Mr. Köhler in May 1945, when Red Army troops marched into his village on their way to Berlin. He recalls a night of paralyzing terror, when the Russian soldiers rampaged through town, raping women. He and his mother hid with 30 others in a potato cellar. As soldiers stomped on the floorboards above them, one of the women delivered a baby. The others knelt and prayed that the soldiers would not hear its cries. Their prayers were answered, but by the baby's death. 'That is the religion I grew up with,' Mr. Köhler said, his voice catching. AFTER the trauma of the war, his family had to learn to live under the spiritual emptiness of Communism. In high school, Mr. Köhler said, he was asked by party functionaries to inform on his teacher. He and other students tipped off the man, who fled to West Germany. At that moment, Mr. Köhler decided he, too, would leave. After getting out of East Germany, Mr. Köhler bounced between refugee camps, finally landing uncomfortably in Baden-Württemberg, in the south, a parochial place with a bewilderingly thick Schwabish German accent. Mr. Köhler's world opened up, though, after he went to study geology at the University of Freiburg. There he fell in with a circle of Muslim students from Egypt and Iran. While they were not fervent, Mr. Köhler said, they piqued his curiosity. He bought a book with the title 'Religions of the World.' 'It was the deep humanity of these people that attracted me,' he said. 'For me, it was a process of gliding into Islam. It wasn't as though a light bulb suddenly went on over my head.' Mr. Köhler also met and married an Iranian woman, even moving to Tehran to teach there (the marriage ended in divorce). He said he did not convert to Islam because of his wife, though she was a factor. Back in Germany in 1973, Mr. Köhler joined the Institute for German Economics in Cologne, where he worked for the next 26 years. Among other things, he published a survey of Islamic economies, which he now dismisses with a grimace as a minor work. It did, however, arouse the interest of a young Turkish-German teacher, who became his second wife. Mr. Köhler also plunged into municipal politics and Muslim causes. He joined the Free Democratic Party, as well as an association that sought to unify Germany's disparate Islamic organizations to lobby the government on issues like teaching Islamic studies in public schools. Germany's Muslims are a fractious crowd, however, and the efforts to forge a united front failed. Today, Mr. Köhler's central council is the smaller of two Islamic umbrella groups. It is less Turkish and more Arab than its rival, the Islamic Council for Germany, which includes the largest Turkish group, the Islamic Community of Milli Gorus. Mr. Köhler's group once claimed to represent 800,000 Muslims, though experts say the true number is much smaller. He speaks of having links to between 400 and 500 mosques in Germany. UNLIKE his rivals, who tend to keep close political and cultural ties to Turkey or other countries, Mr. Köhler said his council seeks to foster a European brand of Islam, unfettered by nationalism or sectarianism. Mr. Köhler is a Sunni, but he said there were Shiites on his board. The German police keep Muslim groups under surveillance, and have banned some, including one led by Metin Kaplan, a Turkish militant who calls himself the caliph of Cologne and who was jailed for four years for the murder of a rival Muslim cleric. He has since been deported to Turkey. From his balcony in a middle-class neighborhood, Mr. Köhler can peer down at Mr. Kaplan's former house. The two men knew each other, and even now, Mr. Köhler defends him. 'He was just a nice old man,' he said. 'If there was no Kaplan, they would have had to invent him.' Mr. Köhler believes Germany's Muslims showed their true colors in the peaceful way they reacted to those provocative cartoons. Yet German officials, he said, are quick to brand Muslims as dangerous extremists. It is a politically popular tactic, and goes hand in hand with legal campaigns, like forbidding Muslim teachers to wear headscarves in schools. 'It is an old story in Germany,' Mr. Köhler said, showing his visitor to the door. 'We've always had problems with foreigners.'

Subject: Iraq Power Shift Widens a Gulf From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 09:01:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/middleeast/18sectarian.html?ex=1297918800&en=8aa1a4208dbc64b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Iraq Power Shift Widens a Gulf Between Sects By SABRINA TAVERNISE BAGHDAD, Iraq — Not long after the Americans occupied Iraq, strange things began happening in the family of Fatin Abdel Sattar, a Sunni Arab. Her teenage son stopped giving his Sunni name in Shiite areas. Her sister's marriage fell apart as her Shiite husband turned his anger over old wounds on his Sunni spouse. 'We're concluding that it's better not to marry those from another sect,' Ms. Abdel Sattar said, 'to avoid problems in the future, to try to make our children's lives a little easier.' Of all of the changes that have swept Iraqi society since the American invasion almost three years ago, one of the quieter ones, yet also one of the most profound, has been the increased identification with one's own sect. In the poisonous new mix of violence, sectarian politics and lawlessness, families are turning inward to protect themselves. 'Since the state was dismantled in Iraq, institutions have disappeared and people have withdrawn into their clans and tribes,' Ayad Allawi, the former prime minister, said in a recent interview. The trend badly damaged the fortunes of Mr. Allawi's bloc of secular parties in the December elections for Parliament, as the vast majority of Iraq's 11.9 million voters cast ballots along sectarian and ethnic lines. As a result, tribal ties now bind more firmly. Social life has withdrawn from clubs to homes. Mixed marriages are more carefully considered. 'For a parent, the first question now is going to be: Sunni or Shiite?' said Shatha al-Quraishi, an Iraqi lawyer who specializes in family law. 'People are starting to talk about it. I can feel it. I can touch that something has changed.' At the same time, pent-up feelings that for years were kept hidden under Saddam Hussein's government are now bursting into full view, in some cases dividing families. Shiite husbands jailed under Mr. Hussein turn their anger on their Sunni wives. Children come home asking if they are Sunni or Shiite. Sectarian tensions in private lives are far from universal: Iraqis of different sects have mixed for decades and still do. But anecdotal evidence provided in interviews with lawyers, court clerks and social workers suggests that fault lines that have always existed are now becoming more distinct. An analysis provided by one family court in central Baghdad showed that mixed marriages were rare to begin with, making up 3 to 5 percent of all unions in late 2002. But by late 2005 they had virtually stopped: the court did not record any in December, and last month registered only 2 out of 742 marriages. 'For the coming 10 years you can record the biggest changes in the Iraqi community,' said Ansam Abayachi, a social researcher who works with Iraqi women and families. 'The Sunnis will be on one side, the Shia on the other, and there is no mixed family.' The changes have their roots in the recent upheaval in the order of Iraqi society. Shiites, long oppressed, swept national elections in January 2005 and are now in power for the first time since the formation of the state in the 1920's. Sunni Arabs, once the rulers, deeply resent that loss. Feelings have been further inflamed by the systematic killings of Shiites by suicide bombers and assassinations of Sunni Arabs by Shiites, some of them tied to the Shiiteled government. The violence has driven many families to seek safety by migrating to areas where their religious group predominates, reinforcing the sectarian tide. For hard-line Sunnis, Shiite power is a bitter pill. A recent conversation in a Baghdad gas station line illustrates the attitude. 'Those Shiites were servants,' one man told another, watching angrily as a third maneuvered in front, according to Ilham al-Jazaari, who was waiting nearby and overheard the exchange. 'They wiped our shoes. Now they are going in front of us.' There are the extreme cases. Reports have surfaced of hard-line tribes, particularly in the heavily Sunni areas of central and western Iraq, refusing to allow tribal members to marry Shiites. One mixed couple even had a series of threatening telephone calls demanding that they divorce or be killed. But most cases are subtler. Maisoon Muhammad, a counselor at the Center for Psychological Health in Iraq, said one of her patients, a Sunni woman, recently received a marriage proposal from a Shiite. One of the woman's aunts urged her to accept, but another forbade the union, saying she would refuse to greet a man she knew to be Shiite. 'We used to dismiss such stances,' Ms. Abayachi said. 'They were old-fashioned. They were not civilized. They were just holding to a tradition that was meaningless.' But attitudes are changing. Ms. Quraishi said a Shiite friend's family had recently rejected her fiancé, a Sunni. 'Before we would have said, 'Why?' ' she said. 'But now we accept these things.' The changes wrought by the invasion have helped to harden attitudes. Anmar Abed Khalaf, 24, a Shiite university student, was rejected several times by his girlfriend's Sunni father because of his sect. The man would perhaps not have taken such a hard line — he himself is married to a Shiite — if he had not been fired from his job of many years as a post office manager because of his membership in Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. American soldiers arrested a relative, prompting further anger against the new order. Mr. Abed Khalaf said he felt more resignation than anger over the rejection. 'I do not blame her father or her mother,' said Mr. Abed Khalaf, who lives in Dora, a violent mixed neighborhood in southern Baghdad that has been tormented by sectarian assassinations for more than a year. 'It is because of the situation.' It was Sunni bitterness that eroded the marriage of Khaloud Muhammad, 25, a Shiite whose father-in-law was from the Douri tribe of hard-line Sunni Arabs. 'I wasn't the one he wanted for his son,' said Ms. Muhammad, who was waiting with her mother to file divorce papers in a family court in central Baghdad last month. 'He threw words at me: 'I don't like Shia. We are unlucky that our son married you.' ' While some Iraqis pulled back, others became more self-assured in their own ethnic identities, no longer feeling the need to apologize for their Shiite last names, for example. Shortly after the American invasion, one of Ms. Abdel Sattar's brothers-in-law began expressing his identity as a Shiite. He joined a political party and struck up a friendship with another Shiite in-law. He had been imprisoned under Mr. Hussein for belonging to a political party, and he now began speaking about the scars on his face after living for years with his wife without mentioning them. But his newfound identity soured his marriage. When Sunni insurgents rebelled in Falluja in 2004, he began saying 'you Sunnis' when referring to his Sunni Arab family. Disagreements would erupt in front of the television at night over everything from promotions for the military to news about insurgent attacks. Still angry about the past, he began to blame all Sunnis, including his wife, for his suffering. 'It was like an eruption of a volcano, hidden inside for all those years,' Ms. Abdel Sattar said. 'Those who were oppressed before, they have a weakness inside themselves. They live with this history. They can't get rid of this feeling.' Ms. Abayachi, the social researcher, said she hoped that the violence could also unite Iraqis. At a conference for victims of violence, at which about 40 Iraqis of different sects spoke of injuries received before and after the invasion, she had a glimpse of that. 'I noticed that when all of those people released their suffering there was a little bit of cooperation,' she said. 'They were coming together with the common points.' Mr. Abed Khalaf, the student, says he finds fewer and fewer of those connections. Shiites are also becoming too sectarian, he said. New groups of guards with strong Shiite Islamist leanings now patrol his university campus. Last year they asked to see his identification when he was sitting with his girlfriend — an effort, he said, to humiliate him. 'It is their time,' he said, walking to the parking lot of the university. 'I don't know when it will be mine.'

Subject: France warned about this From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 19:43:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The French have a long history of colonisation. Although the US Administration says, this is not colonisation, much of the principles of interfering in the politics brings in many new problems that take a long way to work themsleves out. As you got involved, you are suppose to swtick it through. This is exactly why France wanted nothing to do with this crap, whether direct or indirect. But the French were right.

Subject: Migrations From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:48:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/books/review/08CAMEROT.html?ex=1140325200&en=a487710db642f169&ei=5070 June 8, 2003 Migrations By PETER CAMERON MY INVENTED COUNTRY A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile. By Isabel Allende. ISABEL ALLENDE was born not in Chile but in Lima, Peru, where she lived until she was 4. When her father, a secretary at the embassy, deserted the family -- he ''went out to buy cigarettes and never came back'' -- Allende's mother was forced to return to her native Santiago. Allende spent the next five years living in Chile, until she moved to Bolivia, where her stepfather, another diplomat, had been posted. After two years in Bolivia, the family moved to Lebanon. She spent three years in Beirut before the civil war of 1958 caused the family to scatter: Allende and her brothers returned to Chile, and her mother moved to Spain before joining her husband in Turkey. On her return to her grandfather's house in Santiago, Allende was ''the most miserable adolescent in the history of humankind,'' no doubt due to her peculiar ''childhood and adolescence . . . marked with journeys and farewells.'' For the most part, she would remain in Santiago for nearly another two decades, marrying, working as a journalist and having a family before circumstances forced her to leave once again. In 1975, two years after the brutal military coup that toppled the socialist government led by her father's cousin, Salvador Allende, she fled, sleepless and trembling with fear, to Venezuela, ''carrying a handful of Chilean soil from my garden.'' For more than a decade, Allende lived in Caracas, until the publication of her first novel, ''The House of the Spirits,'' and the dissolution of her first marriage freed her to begin a new life in California, where she remarried and has remained ever since. It isn't easy to piece together this timeline after reading ''My Invented Country: A Nostalgic Journey Through Chile,'' Allende's new memoir about her life within and without her native land. To make a coherent story of her experiences, a reader must sift and reorder fragments of information that are offered throughout the book, rather like shards of pottery murkily glimpsed at the bottom of a river, where a swift current constantly rearranges them. In many ways, given the tremendous amount of geographical, personal and political upset in her life, this disorder makes perfect sense. It is in Allende's novels -- many of them based upon her family's life and her own -- that coherence is achieved, for often it is only in novels, in art, where what has been irreparably sundered can be made whole. And so while this slim book may afford readers a truer and more intimate picture of Allende's life, it is a picture that seems both unnecessary and underrealized. Time and again, we learn that because an event, detail or story has already been told by her elsewhere, she will not tell it again. (''I won't expand on that here since I have already recounted it in the final chapters of my first novel and in my memoir 'Paula' ''; ''I won't repeat here the details of those years . . . because I have already told about them elsewhere''; ''I recounted her drama in the 'Stories of Eva Luna,' and I don't want to repeat it here.'') ''My Imaginary Country'' is full of holes that can be filled only by consulting the pertinent passages from Allende's earlier novels and memoirs. This can make frustrating reading for those who don't have her entire oeuvre in their heads or at their fingertips. Allende has no illusions about her haphazard scheme and its effect. ''This book is not intended to be a political or historical chronicle,'' she confesses, ''only a series of recollections.'' Elsewhere she reveals that ''I am writing this . . . without a plan.'' The book's random nature is reinforced by her casual, chatty tone, which is always charming and entertaining (although some of her humor can seem forced in translation; Allende writes in Spanish and is translated here by Margaret Sayers Peden). Her observations about how her initial estrangement and later exile from Chile have come to form her and influence her writing are interesting and sensitively expressed. ''Several times I have found it necessary to pull up stakes, sever all ties and leave everything behind.'' The first time she left Chile, as a child, she felt ''something tear inside me . . . an insurmountable sadness was crystallizing deep within me.'' ''The House of the Spirits,'' she tells us, ''was an attempt to recapture my lost country, to reunite my scattered family, to revive the dead and preserve their memories.'' These observations about the effects of history and memory on her writing are surrounded by more generic observations about Chile and Chileans. As a reporter, Allende is prone to generalizations (''Chileans are bad-humored''; ''Cubans are enchanting'') and exaggerations (Chile ''is the most Catholic country in the world -- more Catholic than Ireland, and certainly much more so than the Vatican''; ''We drank more tea than the entire population of Asia put together''). These remarks may be characteristically Chilean -- we make statements without any basis, but in a tone of such certainty that no one doubts us'' -- yet they don't help conjure a particularly vivid portrait of the country. The freshest and most specific images in this book all come directly from Allende's life. Some of the loveliest writing is about her maternal grandfather, a ''formidable man'' who ''gave me the gift of discipline and love for language.'' Clearly this autocratic and idiosyncratic man had a large and lasting influence on Allende, and the picture of him that she creates in these pages is full-bodied and affecting. He was a man who ''never believed in germs, for the same reason he didn't believe in ghosts: he'd never seen one,'' and who admired the young Isabel's desire to be strong and independent but was unable to foster or even condone such unfeminine characteristics. One of the most keenly felt holes in the book is made when she must leave him, when she flees Chile after Pinochet takes power. Reading along, I kept wondering: don't fiction writers trust themselves? Or why don't they? It seems to me that everything Allende attempts to relate in this memoir she has already eloquently expressed in her previous books. But, of course, what is expressed in fiction is often elliptical and nuanced, and therefore not to be trusted. So here are parts of her story on the nonfiction record, in an enticing yet frustrating book that will send many readers back to the source (or the sources) -- her novels.

Subject: Farewell, Condo Cash-Outs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:43:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/business/17investors.html?ex=1297832400&en=e9888f1ada8cc72f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 Farewell, Condo Cash-Outs By MOTOKO RICH When developers in Arlington, Va., threw a party 18 months ago to showcase plans for Clarendon 1021, a condominium development that had not yet been built, 3,600 prospective buyers stood in line just for the chance to book reservations to bid on the apartments. Now, less than a year after the building opened, speculators in this and other buildings are putting dozens of units on the market at the same time, causing asking prices and profits to slip. Of 23 investors who sold since Clarendon 1021 opened last summer, the three most recent sellers actually lost money, after paying all fees, and average profits in the building have declined since August, said Frank Borges LLosa,) owner of FranklyRealty.com. The Great Condo Gold Rush is fading from memory and the Great Sell-Off has begun. 'Money Down! Motivated Seller, Want More? Just Ask!' screamed an investor's online advertisement last week for a one-bedroom apartment in Clarendon 1021 that had never been lived in. 'I hate it when people say prices can never go down,' said Mr. LLosa, a resident of the building. 'The speculators make the profits more volatile.' Over the last few years, real estate speculators looking to make a quick gain also snapped up preconstruction condos in Chicago, Miami and San Diego. With prices rising by more than 20 percent a year, short-term buyers figured that by the time the condos were ready to occupy, they could sell them without ever moving in, clearing thousands of dollars in profits. But as more speculators look to cash out in recently hot condo markets around the country, some economists say they could put even more downward pressure on prices in those buildings where for-sale listings are swelling. In Miami, at the Jade Residences at Brickell Bay, more than 20 percent of the building's 352 units are on the market. In San Diego, about a third of the 96 units in the Alicante, a condominium that opened last fall, are listed for sale and sellers are already starting to cut asking prices. In Donald Trump's luxury condos at 120 Riverside Boulevard in Manhattan, owners of more than one-fifth of the building's 250 units are currently marketing their apartments. With so much inventory, said Ilan Bracha, a broker with Prudential Douglas Elliman in New York, 'the buyers are coming in, checking the best views and then they negotiate. This is the reality.' While investors made up only 9.5 percent of residential mortgages nationally in the 10 months through October, according to First American Corporation's LoanPerformance, a San Francisco mortgage data firm, the numbers are much higher in places like San Diego, where investors represented 13.5 percent of residential mortgages, and Miami, where they were 16 percent. Hans Nordby, research strategist at Property and Portfolio Research in Boston, said those numbers underreport the real level of speculation in those markets because many buyers disguise their intentions when they get their mortgages. As those speculators flood the market, he said, they will put pressure on other sellers to cut prices, too. 'A rising or sinking tide affects all boats,' Mr. Nordby said. Still, a sell-off in speculative condos is unlikely to start a widespread housing crash, because condos were more overbuilt than single-family homes during the recent boom, said Joseph Gyourko, professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. But weakness in the condo market, he said, 'is a consistent indicator that the great boom has really ended.' For those buyers who had dreamed of quick riches, the change in the market has come as a sobering lesson. A little over a year ago, Shabana Qureshi, a 26-year-old engineer, put deposits down on two condos in Arlington. 'My friends were making hundreds of thousands of dollars off of properties,' Ms. Qureshi said. 'I just thought I'll take this risk now and not think about it too much, and once the time comes I can either sell it or use it depending on my needs.' She moved into a one-bedroom condo at Clarendon 1021 with hardwood floors, granite kitchen countertops and a heated pool on the roof. But having taken a pay cut with a new job, she can no longer afford the mortgage and maintenance fees, which are almost $3,000 a month. Last week, she put the condo, for which she paid $438,000, on the market for $470,000 and plans to move into the other condo she bought in Arlington. She is selling the Clarendon condo herself to save on the real estate commission. But even if she gets her asking price, she figures she will break even after closing costs. Having scrimped to buy at what she said she believed was the peak of the market, Ms. Qureshi said she regretted her investments. If she had to do it all over again, she said she would have spent more money on travel and a new car. 'I would have been more carefree and invested once I had a family,' she said. In the last few years, speculators were drawn to real estate because of double-digit appreciation. Nationally, median condo prices increased by nearly 13 percent, to $218,200, in 2005, according to the National Association of Realtors. But earlier this month, the group, which is based in Washington, forecast a slowdown in the rate of appreciation, saying that median home prices for all housing types — single family, townhouses, condominiums and co-ops — would rise by only 5 percent this year. Already, the rate of appreciation in some of the hottest markets for speculators has slowed. In San Diego, the median home price (the exact middle of all prices) rose at an annual rate of just 2.5 percent in January, compared with 20 percent a year earlier, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a research firm. Last week, in a sign of a broader slowdown in the housing market, Toll Brothers, the luxury home builder, said orders for new homes fell by nearly 30 percent in the three months ended Jan. 31. On Monday, KB Homes also said that orders were down significantly and that more buyers were canceling contracts. At the same time, developers are still building condos in Miami, New York and Chicago, so speculators trying to sell will also have to compete with new units coming on the market. The slowdown will affect all sellers, of course, but speculators may be more acutely affected if they were expecting speedy profits or are paying mortgage and maintenance costs on empty apartments. In some cases, even if they rent them out, the rents will not cover their costs. This is not the first time that condo markets have been influenced by investors. In the late 1980's, developers converted thousands of condo units in the Northeast and many of them were bought by speculators, said Karl E. Case, an economist at Wellesley College. Many of those investors, he said, ended up losing money when they sold in the early 1990's. 'It was ugly,' he said. More experienced investors take a philosophical view of what they see as inevitable setbacks. R. Dawn Stahl, a lawyer in San Diego who bought two apartments in the Alicante, is now trying to sell both of them. But in a city where there are about 6,200 condos for sale, up from about 3,100 this time last year, according to the San Diego Association of Realtors, it has been difficult to lure buyers. Ms. Stahl has yet to receive any offers, so she has already lowered her asking price on one of the listings from $650,000 to $599,000. She paid $499,000 for that two-bedroom apartment and said she believed she would make a small profit after paying commissions and capital gains taxes. But if she cannot sell within a few months, she will rent the apartments out instead. 'I knew that was a risk that I took,' Ms. Stahl said. But a reason that a speculative sell-off is not likely to lead to a bursting bubble is that unlike stocks, where investors can panic and sell large volumes in a matter of hours, owners of real estate will only slash prices so far. 'People resist and don't sell,' said Mr. Case. 'It tends to stabilize prices.' A year and a half ago, Erez Abkzer, who owns a window treatment business in New York, signed a contract for a one-bedroom condo facing the river in 120 Riverside for $850,000. 'The market was booming and I decided to jump on that wagon,' he said. He closed on the apartment last month and immediately listed it for $1.1 million. He said he would rent the apartment rather than lower his price. 'Otherwise it would all be in vain,' Mr. Abkzer said. 'I won't make money on it.' Some brokers say that speculators have unrealistic profit expectations. 'I think a lot of sellers are saying I should make X percent,' said Eve Thompson, an agent with Long & Foster in Fairfax, Va. 'But your chances of being able to do that are as good as going to Oracle and telling them you want more for your stock.' In Miami, where there appears to be a large overhang of investor properties, sellers are still making profits, said Ron Shuffield, president of Esslinger-Wooten-Maxwell Realtors. But with the inventory of available condos having jumped from about 5,400 listings at the end of December 2004 to about 12,750 now, he said, asking prices have come down in the last three or four months. Mr. Shuffield said he was confident that there would eventually be takers for most of those condos because of the influx of buyers from Latin America and Europe as well as baby boomers from the Northeast. But some real estate watchers say there is evidence that demand is starting to slacken in Miami. According to Michael Y. Cannon, managing director of Integra Realty Resources-South Florida, a market analyst, the volume of sales of existing condos declined by 9.6 percent in South Florida between 2004 and 2005. For now, the bumper crop of properties is a boon to buyers. In San Diego, Tom Hinks, a 21-year-old who is looking to buy a condo downtown, has realized he can take his time. His approach might scare some sellers. Since Mr. Hinks started looking four months ago, he has viewed 30 condos. 'I've actually liked quite a few of them,' he said. 'But every day it seems like the prices are starting to trim down so I don't want to pay too much.'

Subject: The New England From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:30:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9901E4DF1E31F933A05757C0A9669C8B63&n=Top/Features/Books/Book Reviews April 30, 2000 The New England By ANTHONY QUINN WHITE TEETH By Zadie Smith Zadie Smith's debut novel is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones and textures. Hopscotching through several continents and 150 years of history, ''White Teeth'' encompasses a teeming family saga, a sly inquiry into race and identity and a tender-hearted satire on religious antagonism and cultural bemusement. One might be inclined to assume that Smith, who began writing the book when still a Cambridge undergraduate, has bitten off more than she can chew; one might even feel a little huffy that one so young (she is 24) has aimed so high. Is it open season on Henry James's baggy monster? Yet aside from a rather wobbly final quarter, Smith holds it all together with a raucous energy and confidence that couldn't be a fluke. ''White Teeth'' begins as the story of an Englishman, Archie Jones, and his accidental friendship with Samad Iqbal, a Bengali Muslim from Bangladesh. The two men met in 1945 when they were part of a tank crew inching through Europe in the final days of World War II. They missed out on the action, and over the next three decades have continued to do much the same. Archie is something of a sad sack, a dull but decent fellow who tied for 13th in a bicycle race in the 1948 Olympic Games; he has failed at many things, including marriage (he got the Hoover in the divorce settlement) and a suicide attempt that begins the novel. Samad, in spite of looking like Omar Sharif, is now a downtrodden waiter in a West End curry house, and is obsessed by the history of his great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, who allegedly fired the first shot of the Indian Mutiny in 1857 (and missed). By the mid-1970's Archie has married again, this time to a six-foot Jamaican teenager named Clara, a beauty in spite of lacking her top row of teeth; they have a daughter, Irie, who will become the steady center of the narrative. Samad has opted for an arranged marriage with a Bengali, the fiery Alsana, though whatever grief he's endured from his helpmeet is nothing compared with the trials of raising his two sons, Magid and Millat. Both families, the Joneses and the Iqbals, make their home in the tatty but vibrant suburb of Willesden in northwest London, a melting pot of race and color that is maintained by and large at an amiable simmer. Archie's prosaic bloke-in-the-pub outlook could be seen as representative: ''He kind of felt people should just live together, you know, in peace and harmony or something.'' Samad, on the other hand, values difference and craves debate. At a school governors' meeting, for example, he questions the Christian relevance of the Harvest Festival: ''Where in the Bible does it say, 'For thou must steal foodstuffs from thy parents' cupboards and bring them into school assembly, and thou shalt force thy mother to bake a loaf of bread in the shape of a fish?' These are pagan ideals! Tell me where does it say, 'Thou shalt take a box of frozen fish fingers to an aged crone who lives in Wembley?' '' This conflation of the high and the low -- biblical morality juxtaposed with the mundane details of domesticity -- is key to Smith's frisky and irreverent comic attack. At one point Samad is doubtful about disclosing a secret to his friend Zinat, who protests her trustworthiness: ''Samad! My mouth is like the grave! Whatever is told to me dies with me.'' But the passage goes on to point out: ''Whatever was told to Zinat invariably lit up the telephone network, rebounded off aerials, radio waves and satellites along the way, picked up finally by advanced alien civilizations as it bounced through the atmosphere of planets far removed from this one.'' Here it's the ancient solemnity of an oath bumping up against modern technology that strikes off comic sparks. This juxtaposition is related to the larger way in which the novel plays with the gap between expectation and reality, most vigorously dramatized in Samad's offspring, the ''first descendants of the great ocean-crossing experiment.'' Samad demands too much of his twin sons, Magid and Millat, and pays a calamitous price. He packs Magid back home to be educated, but the son returns eight years later with a pukka English accent and a serene atheism. As for Millat, he begins as a superstud and troublemaker, graduates to mobster machismo -- his touchstones are ''The Godfather'' and ''Goodfellas'' -- before pledging himself to the militant fundamentalist Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation, or KEVIN (they're aware they have ''an acronym problem''), and demonstrating against Salman Rushdie in 1989. The last reference is partly ironic. The dust jacket of ''White Teeth'' boasts a blurb (an ''astonishingly assured debut'') from none other than Rushdie himself, and reviews in the British press were quick to identify Smith's rollicking verbal pyrotechnics as a not too distant relative of Rushdie's own. One of the book's historical set pieces, recounting the simultaneous occurrence of Clara's grandmother giving birth and the Jamaican earthquake of 1907, has a whiff of Rushdiesque playfulness about it. But the younger writer has no reason to linger in her elder's shadow. While there are consonances between the two, Smith's style is lighter and less fantastical; what's more, there is a quality, a spirit, in her novel that is not to be found in Rushdie's work, and it might be called humility. There is something provisional and undogmatic about the way ''White Teeth'' confronts large themes -- migration, cultural identity -- and knows to stop short of haranguing the reader. Smith thickens the cross-cultural stew by introducing a third family into the narrative. Irie and Millat are befriended by the white, middle-class Chalfens, who typify a distinctive strain of North London liberal trendiness. Marcus Chalfen is a university lecturer and scientist who's developing a controversial experiment in rodent genetics called FutureMouse. Joyce, his wife, is an earnest horticulturalist who tells Irie and Millat that they look ''very exotic'' and asks them where they come from ''originally.'' '' 'Oh,' said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. 'You are meaning where from am I originally.' ''Joyce looked confused. 'Yes, originally.' '' 'Whitechapel,' said Millat, pulling out a fag. 'Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.' '' Joyce proceeds to adopt the wayward Millat as her pet cause, inviting him to live chez Chalfen and paying for his analysis; she's too complacent to notice that her eldest son, Joshua, is an animal-rights renegade who's plotting violent retribution on his pioneering father. This underscores one of the book's most salient conflicts -- the need to belong versus the renouncing of patrimony -- which Smith attempts to spell out in a grand finale, a fortuitous meeting of parents and children at Marcus's FutureMouse exhibition on New Year's Eve 1992. By this point the novel has squandered a little of the good will it has been so stylishly accumulating, and one wishes that a firmer editorial hand had steered it away from its overeager braiding of plot lines. (A flashback to the mystery of Archie's wartime test of character is at once pat and faintly ridiculous.) The focus becomes fuzzy, and the writing, hitherto so confident, suddenly feels labored and scrappy. But perhaps this overreaching is a natural consequence of Smith's ambition. ''White Teeth'' is so unlike the kind of comic novel currently in vogue among young British women -- the girl-about-town Bridget Jones wannabe -- that its very willingness to look beyond the stock in trade of boyfriends and weight problems is a mark of distinction. Smith's real talent emerges not just in her voice but in her ear, which enables her to inhabit characters of different generations, races and mind-sets. Whether it's her notation of Archie's blokish colloquialisms (''Blimey!'' ''I should cocoa''), Clara's Anglo-Jamaican patois ('''Sno prob-lem. If you wan' help: jus' arks farrit''), the banter of two ancient Jamaican grouches or of second-generation Bengali teenagers, the mongrel texture of metropolitan life rises vividly from the page. There is more than virtuosity at work here. Smith likes her characters, and while she is alert to their shortcomings and blind spots, her generosity toward them never flags. That is why ''White Teeth,'' for all its tensions, is a peculiarly sunny novel. Its crowdedness, its tangle of competing voices and viewpoints, betoken a society struggling toward accommodation, tolerance, perhaps even fellowship, and a time in which miscegenation is no longer the exception but the norm: ''It is only this late in the day that you can walk into a playground and find Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O'Rourke bouncing a basketball and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with first and last names on a direct collision course.'' There are reasons, so late in the day, to be cheerful, and this eloquent, wit-struck book is not least among them.

Subject: Courtly Lust From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:28:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9903E5D7153AF931A35751C1A9679C8B63 December 2, 2001 Courtly Lust By JANICE P. NIMURA THE TALE OF GENJI By Murasaki Shikibu. Translated by Royall Tyler. A THOUSAND years ago, during Japan's Heian period, a lady of the imperial court wrote a prose narrative that was nothing like the Chinese-influenced histories and poetry her contemporaries read. It was something new: an imaginative re-creation of human entanglements meant to feel more real than reality itself -- a novel, as we define it today. But it is impossible to contain ''The Tale of Genji'' in the word ''novel.'' The princes and consorts and monks and maids that Murasaki Shikibu described may have been imaginary, but their preoccupations and the trappings of their privileged lives were taken directly from her daily life. ''Genji,'' for centuries of Japanese readers as well as decades of Western ones, is Heian Japan, a lost world as strange to the citizens of modern Japan as modern Japan is to most Westerners. The novel centers on the (largely amatory) exploits of Genji, the ''Shining Prince,'' an illegitimate son of the emperor whose staggering physical beauty and artistic prowess are such that even his enemies are moved by them. Despite his aesthetic perfections, Genji is no paragon -- he is by turns a rake, a sulk, a sentimentalist, a cad -- but he never forgets a single one of the women (or men) he romances, and he savors their various virtues with almost religious devotion. Between his affairs, the narrative contains a wealth of Heian detail: the court's elaborate hierarchy, its calendar of rituals and festivals, its cultivation of painting and music and poetry. Courtiers in 11th-century Japan referred to their world as ''above the clouds,'' and indeed those closer to the earth -- whether peasants or provincial governors -- were invisible to them. Relieved of concern for material well-being, these aristocrats created a society in which beauty was the only currency. Since men and women rarely glimpsed one another's faces, aesthetic value depended on nuance alone: the tints of layered sleeves peeking from beneath a screen, the spray of seasonal blossoms attached to an intricately folded letter, the elegant allusions to nature and love in a poem. Action was far less important than mood, and the most important mood was summed up in the Japanese word aware: a heightened poignancy, an exalted yet melancholy sense of the transience of beauty. ''Genji'' requires the reader to enter that mood. It is not easy to convey to a modern audience. Anyone who dares attempt a translation of ''Genji'' must be as much a cultural interpreter as a linguist. Until recently, English-speaking readers had a choice of two guides: Arthur Waley, who published the first translation of ''Genji'' in the 1920's and 30's, and Edward Seidensticker, who delivered the second in 1976. ''Since there is probably no such thing as a perfect translation of a complex literary work,'' Seidensticker wrote, ''the more translations, one would think, the better.'' If there was any doubt in the truth of that statement, Royall Tyler has now dispelled it. As the third of our guides, he has produced a translation that is the perfect complement to the other two, and the most painstakingly detailed of the three. Waley and Seidensticker chose very different approaches to the herculean task of translating ''Genji.'' Waley was a brilliant Renaissance man and Bloomsbury contemporary who taught himself Chinese and Japanese but never actually visited Asia. He was among the first to translate its literature for general readers, and was more concerned with conveying the spirit than the letter of the original. ''So much is inevitably lost in translating Oriental literature,'' he is reported to have said, ''that one must give a great deal in return.'' Much of what he gave, though delightful to read, is more ornate than what Murasaki Shikibu actually wrote. ''When translating prose dialogue one ought to make the characters say things that people talking English could conceivably say,'' Waley insisted, and though this is a commendable argument for translation as literature in its own right, it ignores the fact that people who speak in English today have almost nothing in common with the people speaking in ''The Tale of Genji.'' Seidensticker, emeritus professor of Japanese at Columbia University and a noted translator of modern Japanese fiction, returned to the original and found a drier, more ironic narrative voice, and a vision of Genji's world that felt less like a fairyland than Waley's. He stuck closer to the text, conveying its sparseness as well as its stateliness and flashes of wry humor. Compare the first line of ''Genji'' in the translations of Waley and then Seidensticker: ''At the Court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewomen of the Wardrobe and Chamber one, who though she was not of very high rank was favored far beyond all the rest.'' ''In a certain reign there was a lady not of the first rank whom the emperor loved more than any of the others.'' Tyler, an American recently retired from the Australian National University, navigates a course between his predecessors. His translation is less baroque than Waley's, less brisk than Seidensticker's, and often better than either: ''In a certain reign (whose can it have been?) someone of no very great rank, among all His Majesty's Consorts and Intimates, enjoyed exceptional favor.'' At its best, Tyler's ''Genji'' manages to combine crispness of language with a rigorous faithfulness to the classical Japanese. But this rigor can sometimes stand in the way of clarity. Heian courtiers did not address one another by name -- that would have been insultingly direct. In the text, characters are identified by titles (which change over time), elaborate honorifics or even the verb forms they use. This is a nightmare for translators, and Tyler takes the purist approach. Though the helpful character lists he includes at the beginning of each chapter mention the traditional sobriquets by which characters have become known to readers (and which Waley and Seidensticker used throughout), these names never appear in Tyler's translation. The result is an obliqueness that, while wonderfully evocative of the original, can be difficult to follow. There are nearly 800 31-syllable waka poems in ''Genji,'' another impossible challenge. Heian poetry is so rich in allusive wordplay that much of it is simply untranslatable. Waley ran the poems right into the text, and Seidensticker set them off as couplets; neither strategy was entirely faithful to the original, though Seidensticker's was perhaps more effective. Tyler's solution is to present each as a single sentence broken into two lines, and he makes his task even more difficult by preserving the 5-7-5-7-7 syllabic pattern of waka. His choice places technical accuracy above lyrical impact -- the poems end up wordier than the originals, which were more telegraphic in the sentiments they conveyed. Here, for example, is Tyler's version of Genji's poem to a lady who has eluded him, leaving her robe behind: ''Underneath this tree, where the molting cicada shed her empty shell, / my longing still goes to her, for all I knew her to be.'' And here is Seidensticker's: ''Beneath a tree, a locust's empty shell. / Sadly I muse upon the shell of a lady.'' Though the success of Tyler's strategy here is debatable, his interpretation of the poems (as well as the many obscurities in the text) is by far the most thorough and complete. This new edition is copiously footnoted, allowing us to appreciate puns and images Murasaki's readers would have recognized immediately. BECAUSE of its layers of cultural, political and literary complexity (not to mention its length), the decision to read ''The Tale of Genji'' requires a subsequent decision about which guide to choose. To encounter Waley's lush prose is to forget you are reading a translation -- or even a non-Western text. He conveyed the essence of aware perhaps more vividly than his successors, but detached the tale from its setting, letting it float somewhere in a misty world of long ago and far away. Seidensticker allowed his readers a clearer, more laconic view of Murasaki's world; you still forget you are reading a translation, but not that you are in Heian Japan. Both Waley and Seidensticker had a vision of the work as a whole that informed every sentence, and in some cases fidelity to the text was sacrificed to the translator's own style. Tyler never lets his style get in the way of his service to the original -- more than the others, you can feel the translator at work on every page. As guides, Waley is the most entertaining, Seidensticker the most unobtrusive, and Tyler the most instructive. His ''Genji'' is an enormous achievement.

Subject: Where Life Can Seem to Imitate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:26:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/arts/design/17sugi.html?ex=1297832400&en=98d8cd4e77497447&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 A World Where Life Can Seem to Imitate an Imitation By HOLLAND COTTER Washington — Hiroshi Sugimoto, the celebrated Japanese-born photographer, designed the installation for his own retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden here, and it is inspired. The first half of the show is light, cool and stylishly sparse. The second half seems dusky and cushioned, as if it were set in a temple or a spacecraft, with pictures shining like windows in the dark. After seeing the show, I dug up some old snapshots and spread them out on my desk at home. They are pictures I took some years ago of the imperial Shinto shrine at Ise in Japan. Architecturally, the main shrine is all exterior; everyday visitors can't go inside. And that exterior is plain, almost blank. It didn't feel to me like a setting for ardent religious emotion. It felt like a swept-clean place to think about the world as it is, with its storms, and pets, and lunatic history. Yet a potent object is hidden inside: a mirror. It is the emblem of the sun goddess, whose shrine this is: a polished surface reflecting light. You cannot see it, but the idea of it is enough. It fires your imagination; it makes Ise a power-place in your mind. The Hirshhorn show reminded me of all of this. After I saw it, light, time, paradox and Japan were on my mind. Mr. Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948, but he has spent most of his life in the United States. He came to America in the early 1970's, right out of college, studied art for a while in California, then settled in New York City, where he lives. In the United States, he supported himself as a dealer in ancient and medieval Japanese art, and he developed an abiding interest in Zen Buddhism. He looked at the new art around him, particularly at Minimalism and Conceptualism, and began making art of his own. The Washington exhibition, organized by Kerry Brougher, director of art at the Hirshhorn, and David Elliott, director of the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, begins with early photographs, from 1976. They're startling. In one, a polar bear stands on a snow field, eyeing a dead seal. In another, hyenas and vultures on an African plain tear into the carcass of an antelope, very 'Wild Kingdom.' But, in fact, these pictures aren't shot from nature. They are of dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, but with all traces of their museum setting left out. Right away we learn something about Mr. Sugimoto's art. It is often witty, and it is always theatrical. And, like most theater, it is highly stylized. Artificiality is its reality. Paradox and indirection are its forms of truth-telling. The diorama photos fit that description, as do the pictures in the 'Portraits' series (1999). All the sitters in the series are celebrities, but most are dead celebrities — Napoleon, Lenin, Henry VIII — so these can't be called portraits from life. Or can they? They may not be accurate depictions of the people themselves, but they are accurate depictions of depictions of those people, namely the sculptural portraits found in Madame Tussaud's wax museums. Part of the fun of these pictures is seeing artificialities pile up: Mr. Sugimoto's portrait of Henry VIII is a portrait of a Tussaud wax portrait, which is based on a painted portrait by Holbein. Also fun is the way the photographer treats historical pooh-bahs as found objects, Duchampian ready-mades. Reproductions of them are as good as the originals — better even, because they exist, while the pooh-bahs have turned to dust. He also uses photography to give new readings of icons. His 'Architecture' pictures (1997-2002) are portraits of Modernist monuments, from Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut to the Chrysler Building. The aggressive tradition they belong to is identified with clarity and permanence, but Mr. Sugimoto presents the buildings in a muzzy soft-focus. They look at once evanescent and veiled, as if they had secrets to hide. It is this kind of conceptual play that gives the first half of the show its air of wry, deadpan wit. But that mood changes. In 1975, the artist started photographing the interiors of old American movie theaters, picture palaces. The results are engaging as documents of vanishing artifacts. But they also ask questions about the relationship of photography and time. For each picture, Mr. Sumitomo pointed his camera at the screen and left the shutter open for the length of whatever movie was playing. The camera recorded the film not in readable images, but as soft white glow that seems to emanate from the screen. Time's passage is distilled to a radiant abstraction. It is possible to see the influence of Minimalism — Donald Judd boxes filled with light — or of Conceptualism's interest in immateriality and change. But at least as important is the influence of Buddhism, which in Japan has close links to Shinto. For the series titled 'Sea of Buddha' (1995), Mr. Sugimoto photographed the hundreds of near-identical Buddhist sculptures of Kannon, the goddess of mercy, which fill the temple named Sanjusangen-do in Kyoto. He shot the sculptures as they appear in the temple, arranged in massed rows, like a choir. At the Hirshhorn he displays the pictures as a long horizontal scroll of edge-to-edge prints stretching down a dark, tunnel-like space. The visual effect, of perfection in sameness, is both calming and stimulating, like a chant. This installation leads to the show's largest gallery, also dark, devoted to Mr. Sugimoto's 'Seascapes' (1980-92). A dozen of these reductive pictures of water and sky, shot at different places around the world, from the South Pacific to the Baltic Sea, line a single curving wall. Composed of paired horizontal bands of equal width, they look from a distance like abstract paintings, or windows onto lunar landscapes, but up close reveal the amazingly varied textures of the oceans' surfaces. What's most striking, though, is the symphonic whole Mr. Sugimoto has created from these pictures. On the far right he has hung one in which the bands of sea and sky are emphatically contrasted. Then, in each succeeding picture moving leftward, the contrasts decrease; the horizon line blurs until land and sea dissolve into an explosion of light, like the sun flashing off a mirror. Apparently, the Mori Art Museum version of the show pushed the contemplative aspects of Mr. Sugimoto's art even further by including documentary pictures of a Shinto shrine that he designed and built, on commission, in Japan in 2002. His shrine replaced one that had fallen into disrepair. Its design acknowledges the Ise model but is even more abstract. It adds something entirely original: a staircase made of melted optical glass, a material used to make camera lenses.

Subject: Munch Was More Than a Scream From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:25:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/arts/design/17munc.html?ex=1297832400&en=239ef1c0350b872e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 Munch Was More Than a Scream By GRACE GLUECK EDVARD MUNCH'S vision of modern angst, 'The Scream,' has been much in the news lately. The trial of six suspects in the theft of one version from an Oslo museum began this week; the painting has not been recovered. The image of 'The Scream' has been so widely embraced and reproduced that if you hear the name Munch 'The Scream' comes instantly to mind, and vice versa. Yet Munch (1863-1944) regarded 'The Scream' as an aberration, one that cast the shadow of insanity on a body of art that he intended to address more universal aspects of human experience. 'Edvard Munch: The Modern Life of the Soul,' an affecting full-scale retrospective that opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, presents this broader view. The first survey of the Norwegian painter in an American museum in almost 30 years, it was organized by Kynaston McShine, chief curator at large of the Modern. Its more than 130 oils and works on paper cover Munch's entire career, from 1880 to 1944. It also includes a large selection of the prints — many of them ingeniously adapted from his oils — that played an important role in his art. 'Mermaid,' not seen publicly until 2003, is among the paintings. Munch's first decorative work, this sexy 3-by-11-foot canvas was commissioned in 1896 by the Norwegian industrialist and collector Axel Heiberg for his home. Taking a Symbolist approach to a traditional Nordic theme, Munch depicted a voluptuous mermaid emerging from a moonlit sea, her fin wrapped around the moon's reflection. Not real but somehow not quite a figment, she almost certainly relates to the moonlight strolls Munch took on the beach with his first lover. 'The Scream,' although not the focus of the show, is not neglected. Two 1895 lithographs of the image, one with watercolor, are on view. An ectoplasmic being stands on a bridge against a lurid setting sun, hands to ears, mouth open to emit a horrendous howl. Its genesis, Munch wrote, was during a walk across a bridge in Kristiania (now Oslo) with two friends. He felt a 'tinge of melancholy' as the sun set. He stopped, leaned against the railing while his friends walked on, and saw 'the flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword' over the water and the city. Shivering with fright, he 'felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.' It took several false starts before this became the trenchant visual expression of Munch's feeling, the product of his own anxiety and depression at the time. When he finally made the image we know today, he noted faintly on the probable first version (1893) that 'it could only have been painted by a madman.' But it strikes such a universal chord that it has become something of a conduit between the artist's soul-searching work and pop culture, evolving over the years into a symbol that these days appears even on refrigerator magnets and inflatable dolls. And yet, for all its roots in Symbolism, the turn-of-the-century European movement that sought to replace naturalism with the imagery of fantasy, dream and psychic experience, 'The Scream' apparently had little to do with what Munch saw as the real thrust of his art. That took in such existential matters as birth, love, loss, emotional turmoil, the search for one's identity and the inevitable decline into death. In these paintings Munch struggled to render his own emotional and psychological traumas, including the deaths of his mother and older sister, as well as his doomed first real love affair, into universal images that resonated with the outside world. By so doing, he said, he hoped to 'understand the meaning of life' and to help others gain similar insights. More in line with his main themes are paintings like 'Madonna' (1894-95), a powerfully erotic image of a nude seductress that conveys the artist's conflation of love and death, and a lithograph of the same subject whose lurid border depicts spermatozoa and a distorted fetus. 'Madonna' is part of the cycle of paintings that Munch eventually named the 'Frieze of Life,' first exhibited under that rubric at the Berlin Secession of 1902. It encompassed what he saw as 'the modern life of the soul.' A vital part of the exhibition is the extraordinary range of self-portraits Munch made, from youth to near death. He variously depicts himself as a searching, skeptical young man; a dandy and cosmopolitan; a dejected lover; a denizen of hell; Jesus on the Cross above a leering crowd; and a restless night wanderer in his own home. Finally, in the touching 'Between the Clock and the Bed' (1940-2), he is a brave figure who stands in his bedroom, his studio behind him, a symbolic clock without hands to the left, as he resolutely confronts the certainty of his end. Although his native Kristiania was a distance from the aesthetic ferment of the great European cities, Munch didn't remain a provincial for long. His local training inclined him toward Norwegian naturalism, but around 1884 he connected with Kristiania's bohemian set and began to form new attitudes. The next year, an affair with Milly Thaulow, the wife of a cousin of one of his art teachers, inflamed his love life but ended badly, an event that burned deeply into Munch's turbulent psyche. As with every other emotional event in his life, his troubles with women became a rich source of material. 'It would kill me were my loneliness taken away from me,' he wrote later to another lover, who sought more togetherness. Her spirit, he went on to tell her, was 'totally undeveloped.' Finding naturalism too limited an artistic approach, Munch shared this observation in an 1885 letter to a writer friend: 'Perhaps some other painter can depict chamber pots under a bed better than I can. But put a sensitive, suffering young girl into the bed, a girl consumptively beautiful with a blue-white skin turning yellow in the blue shadows — and her hands! Can you imagine them? Yes that would be a real accomplishment.' He produced a number of variations — in oils and graphic art — on this theme, haunting evocations of the dying days of his older sister, Sophie, felled at age 15 by tuberculosis, which had earlier killed their mother. In one of six versions on canvas, 'The Sick Child' (1896), Sophie is depicted propped against a pillow, her head turned toward a female figure who sits beside her, head bowed, holding her hand. Sophie's thin yellow face has a feverish radiance; her expression already seems otherworldly. An accompanying lithograph, made the same year in fervid tones of red and yellow, shows only Sophie's head and shoulders and is even more shattering. Here death has taken a firm grip on her features; her sunken eye, grimly set mouth and neglected hair against a background of disorderly cross-hatching show that the battle is all but lost. The work gives ample evidence of Munch's mastery of printmaking, which he probably learned during time spent in Paris and Berlin in the 1890's and early 1900's. Fortunately, there are many more examples on view. A whole gallery in the Modern's exhibition is devoted to Munch's prints, important among them fresh interpretations of his 'Frieze' themes. And 25 more prints, lent by the Modern, are on display at Scandinavia House in an exhibition organized by Deborah Wye, chief curator of prints and illustrated books at the Modern. Among the masterpieces at Scandinavia House is 'Ashes II' (1899), a lithograph with watercolor additions adapted from a painting of 1894 that may be seen at the Modern. It depicts the end of a love affair, with the man in despair and the woman indifferent. The title 'Ashes' refers to the burned-out log that runs along the picture's edge, signifying the death of love. Also at Scandinavia House are two marvelous woodcuts, their themes now appearing only in print form. (The painting from which they were taken was lost in a shipwreck in 1901.) Each is titled 'Two People: The Lonely Ones' (1899-1917). In the subtle coloration for which Munch was noted, they depict a man and a woman on the beach, standing near each other but with just enough separation to indicate their essential alienation. To make his woodcuts, Munch invented a simplified process of jigsawing each compositional element of the printing block, inking each in the desired color, then fitting them back together and running the reconfigured puzzle through the press just once. This cut out the cumbersome process of using separate woodblocks for each color, which had necessitated putting the print through the press several times. By the early 1900's, Munch was on his way to international success. He was finished with his 'Frieze of Life' cycle, which now included the important (to him) 'Metabolism' (1899), an earthy Adam and Eve-like depiction that shows a nude couple divided by a barren tree whose roots feed off a corpse. Its theme, he said, was the powerful constructive forces of life, but its murkiness is un-Munchian. His work at this point began to take a more traditional turn, including portraits of friends and patrons and landscapes, whose naturalism was inflected by symbolic elements. But it is those haunting, penetrating 'Frieze of Life' works that, by reaching deep into normally buried feelings, give Munch his greatness.

Subject: In the Victorian Raj From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:23:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/books/17book.html?ex=1297832400&en=999fc475b0d5b78c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 In the Victorian Raj, Some Took Their Gin With Integrity By WILLIAM GRIMES In the palmy days when the sun never set on the British Empire, India was, in Disraeli's famous phrase, the jewel in the crown. Its vast territory, encompassing modern India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Bangladesh, was home to more than 300 million people, speaking hundreds of languages and dialects, divided by caste and religion and separated into a profusion of princely states. What they all had in common, in the Victorian era, was Britain, their imperial ruler. And Britain, in practice, meant the Indian Civil Service, the 800 or so government employees who kept the jewel polished. In 'The Ruling Caste,' David Gilmour takes a close look at this band of emissaries and the administrative machinery that made it possible for so few to rule so many. It is, in a way, a spinoff, or a series of outtakes, from 'Curzon,' his biography of India's most famous viceroy. It is also his opportunity to challenge the picture of the British administrators in India as the boorish, gin-swilling clubmen described by E. M. Forster in 'A Passage to India.' Mr. Gilmour concedes that the British ruled by force, not consent. At the same time, the civilians, as members of the Indian Civil Service were known, took a high-minded view of their mission. The duty of the British was, they believed, to rule firmly but fairly, to improve living conditions wherever they were posted and to maintain high standards of integrity. It is a measure of their success that both India and Pakistan adopted the British model for their own civil services after independence. The fact of British rule was an abomination, in other words, but the organizational structure was beyond criticism. Service in India, despite hardships, offered young men the prospect of adventure, a generous salary and pension and the chance, while still in their 20's, to govern large chunks of territory and change the lives of untold thousands of Indians. Indian service was part job, part calling, and it seemed to act as a magnet for certain families. Some sent their sons in generational waves. The Stracheys, for example, sent 13 family members from four generations. Until the mid-19th century, civil servants were trained, if that's the word, at Haileybury College, which was created in the early 1800's to ensure that recruits, selected by the directors of the East India Company, knew at least something about the country they were preparing to rule. A nepotistic old-boy's network quickly developed. Some graduates were outstanding, but others resembled the indolent, curry-loving Jos Sedley in 'Vanity Fair.' In 1853, open examinations produced a new breed, the 'competition wallahs.' Mostly middle class, and often the sons of clergymen, they resembled the Peace Corps volunteers of the 1960's, afire with a sense of imperial mission, further heated, toward the end of the century, by the works of Rudyard Kipling. 'They liked the thought of riding around the countryside dispensing justice under a banyan tree,' Mr. Gilmour writes. But where? The top-scoring candidates opted for Bengal, the Punjab or the Northwestern Provinces, the fast track for ambitious civil servants. Low scorers wound up in backwaters like Madras or Bombay. Wherever the competition wallahs went, they encountered the contempt of the old Haileybury crowd. Even one of their own, Lepel Griffin, complained, 'They neither ride, nor shoot, nor dance nor play cricket, and prefer the companionship of their books to the attraction of Indian society.' Freshmen civilians, known as griffins, usually aspired to be one of the 240 district officers, the princelings of the Indian Civil Service. Justice under the banyan tree was just part of the job description. In his districts, with an average area of 4,430 square miles and a population of perhaps a million, a district officer combined the functions of judge, tax assessor, census taker, police chief, game warden, public-works czar, diplomat and social director. He was expected to be incorruptible, impartial and incapable of accepting an 'illegal gratification.' The challenges facing the district officers provide some of Mr. Gilmour's most entertaining pages. The government took a tolerant view of local customs. One raja, for example, was allowed to take a new wife each year at an annual festival, but another, who wanted to carry on the family tradition of human sacrifice for his coronation, required discreet intervention. The district officer persuaded him to pretend to kill the victim, who then pretended to die. The niceties of social protocol in Victorian India could be alarmingly complex, for both ruler and ruled. Indian maharajas jealously guarded their privileges. One of the most effective methods of bringing a troublesome ally into line was to reduce the number of guns firing a salute. The British, for their part, lived according to 'The Warrant of Precedence,' a government publication that assigned rank with extraordinary precision. A civilian in India for 18 years had equal status with a lieutenant colonel, for example, but was 18 places above a major or a civilian who had been in the country for only 12 years. Mr. Gilmour is a stylish and engaging writer, but about half of 'The Ruling Caste' delves into matters of interest only to a specialist, like the difference between privilege leave, special leave, leave on medical certificate and furlough. Entire chapters, for the general reader, descend into a bureaucratic morass, enlivened here and there by a bright anecdote. The intricate machinery of government has its fascinations, but the pace picks up when Mr. Gilmour turns to the Kiplingesque tales of shrewd civilians waging diplomatic war with profligate, sometimes insane, Indian potentates or roaming the wild frontier in the name of British civilization. Some left behind canals and railroads. Others wrote treatises on Indian poetry or religion. Mr. Gilmour does make the case that the civilians, however tarnished their cause in modern eyes, deserve better than they get in 'A Passage to India.'

Subject: The Rabbi vs. the Archbishop From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:21:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/18/international/europe/18rabbi.html?ex=1297918800&en=1c445b2ac4b0bcaf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 18, 2006 Mideast Dispute: The Rabbi vs. the Archbishop By ALAN COWELL LONDON — At a time of heightened religious tensions across Europe, Britain's chief rabbi, Sir Jonathan Sacks, assailed the Church of England on Friday for supporting divestiture from companies whose products support Israeli policies in Gaza and the West Bank. Sir Jonathan said the move 'will have the most adverse repercussions on a situation over which it has enormous influence, namely Jewish-Christian relations in Britain.' The unusually sharp protest by Sir Jonathan, in an article in the weekly Jewish Chronicle, followed a vote this month by the Church of England's synod to 'disinvest from companies profiting from the illegal occupation, such as Caterpillar Inc., until they change their policies.' Caterpillar bulldozers have been shown on British television demolishing Palestinian homes. The Church of England has a reported $4.25 million stake in the company. The synod resolution was not binding, but the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury and spiritual leader of the world's 77 million Anglicans, was one of those who supported it. Since then, the archbishop has sought to avert confrontation with leaders of Britain's 300,000 Jews, saying in a letter to Sir Jonathan, published on the church's Web site (www.cofe.anglican.org) that 'much distress has been caused, especially to our Jewish friends and neighbors here and elsewhere. This distress is a cause of deep regret.' He insisted the significance of the synod vote was 'emphatically not to commend a boycott, or to question the legitimacy of the State of Israel and its rights to self-defense; least of all is it to endorse any kind of violence or terror against Israel and its people, or to compromise our commitment to oppose any form of anti-Semitism at home or abroad.' In response, the rabbi noted events in the Middle East and Britain that Jews found troubling. 'The Jewish community in Britain has contributed immensely to national life, yet after 350 years we still feel at risk,' he wrote in The Jewish Chronicle. 'The vote of the synod of the Church of England to 'heed' a call to disinvestment from certain companies associated with Israel was ill judged, even on its own terms. The immediate result will be to reduce the church's ability to act as a force for peace between Israel and the Palestinians for as long as the decision remains in force.' The issue is likely to be discussed again in May by the church's Ethical Investment Advisory Group, which has opposed divestiture in the past.

Subject: Quiet Resolve of a German Anti-Nazi From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:14:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/movies/17soph.html?ex=1297832400&en=d98005396e863865&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 The Quiet Resolve of a German Anti-Nazi Martyr By STEPHEN HOLDEN 'Sophie Scholl: The Final Days' conveys what it must have been like to be a young, smart, idealistic dissenter in Nazi Germany, where no dissent was tolerated. This gripping true story, directed in a cool, semi-documentary style by the German filmmaker Marc Rothemund from a screenplay by Fred Breinersdorfer, challenges you to gauge your own courage and strength of character should you find yourself in similar circumstances. Would you risk your life the way Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and a tiny group of fellow students at Munich University did to spread antigovernment leaflets? How would you behave during the kind of relentless interrogations that Sophie endures? If sentenced to death for your activities, would you still consider your resistance to have been worth it? In a climate of national debate in the United States about the overriding of certain civil liberties to fight terrorism, the movie looks back on a worst possible scenario in which such liberties were taken away. It raises an unspoken question: could it happen here? Scholl, whose story has been told in at least two earlier German films (Michael Verhoeven's 'White Rose' and Percy Adlon's 'Five Last Days'), is regarded today in Germany as a national heroine. Much of the movie, an Oscar nominee this year for best foreign-language film, is based on documents and court transcripts hidden in East German archives until 1990. The movie follows the last six days of Sophie's life, after she and her brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) are arrested at Munich University in February 1943 for printing and distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. Their arrest takes place in a political climate of panic and denial after Germany's defeat at Stalingrad. News of the rout has begun to circulate, but the powers-that-be dig in their heels. The Scholl siblings belong to the White Rose, a tiny resistance movement at Munich University. The pamphlet they distribute in the university's empty halls, while classes are in session, declares that the war cannot be won and urges Germany to sue for peace. They naïvely hope to ignite a spontaneous student rebellion. But the Nazi attitude toward the reversal of Germany's fortunes on the battlefield is one of enraged denial. The shrill accusations leveled against Sophie and two of the other accused in the interrogation room and in court by the fulminating judge, Dr. Roland Freisler (André Hennicke), have a tone of desperate, hysterical fury. 'Sophie Scholl: The Final Days' pointedly steers away from unnecessary melodrama and sentimentality to deliver a crisp chronology of events told entirely from Sophie's perspective, with minimal back story. As the brother and sister race to distribute the leaflets, the movie refuses to underline the built-in suspense. Apprehended by an alert janitor just as they are blending into a milling crowd of students, they are hustled to Gestapo headquarters and interrogated separately. As Sophie undergoes the first grueling hours of minute cross-examination by Robert Mohr (Alexander Held), an icy, contemptuous criminologist with a mind Columbo might envy, she maintains a remarkable composure, insisting that she is apolitical and relating an elaborate cover story involving the transportation of laundry in the suitcase that carried the leaflets. Sophie wins the first round of this cat-and-mouse game and is about to be released when investigators searching her apartment turn up more incriminating evidence. Even after her story crumbles, Mohr, who has a son roughly Sophie's age, is not entirely unmoved by her arguments, and near the end of her confinement, he offers her an unacceptable deal to save her own life. At each turning point, Sophie, who is deeply religious, prays to God for help. On learning that Hans has confessed, she finally admits her complicity but continues trying to protect other members of the group, especially Christoph Probst (Florian Stetter), who is married with children. But eventually he is brought into custody. We meet Sophie's sympathetic cellmate, Else Gebel (Johanna Gastdorf), an avowed Communist, and Sophie's supportive parents, who cheer her on in a subdued, wrenching farewell. Ms. Jentsch's portrayal of Sophie is the more impressive for its complete lack of histrionics. Yes, Sophie is a heroine, but not one given to Joan of Arc-style theatrics. An optimistic, life-loving student with a boyfriend and a rich future ahead of her, she is the kind of decent, principled person we would all like to be.

Subject: Fuel Rule Change for Big S.U.V.'s From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 04:11:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/business/16fuel.html?ex=1281844800&en=2d06f1360e161046&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 16, 2005 Fuel Rule Change for Big S.U.V.'s Seen as Unlikely By DANNY HAKIM DETROIT - The Bush administration is expected to abandon a proposal to extend fuel economy regulations to include Hummer H2's and other huge sport utility vehicles, auto industry and other officials say. The proposal was among a number of potential strategies outlined by the administration in 2003 to overhaul mileage requirements for light trucks - sport utility vehicles, pickup trucks and minivans. It had been seen by industry officials as likely to be adopted. But the impact of the tougher requirements would have been borne almost solely by the increasingly troubled domestic auto industry, a concern for the administration. Its broad plan to overhaul the light-truck mileage rules would change the regulatory system from one using averaged mileage for an automaker's entire annual light-truck output to one that sets up five or six classes, determined by a vehicle's size. The rules, the first major rewriting of fuel economy standards since they were created in the 1970's, will be released late this month. They are sure to renew vigorous debate about the nation's dependence on foreign oil, a matter underlined by rapidly rising oil and gas prices. The administration plan is still being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, which has had a role in drafting the plan. Further revisions could be made, including on the question of extending the regulatory system to cover larger vehicles. Until the details are published, its potential effect on the nation's oil consumption will not be fully clear. And the volatility of oil prices could push consumers toward buying more efficient vehicles, a trend that may outstrip regulations in determining fuel consumption in years ahead. 'We have no comment on it until we're ready to release it,' said Rae Tyson, a spokesman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a branch of the Transportation Department. 'It's still a fluid process at this point. We look forward to significant fuel savings without sacrificing safety or doing harm to the American economy.' Because cars, S.U.V.'s and other light-duty vehicles account for 40 percent of the nation's oil use, changes in the regulatory system are always watched closely, more so in an era of increased concern over foreign oil imports, rising fuel prices and debate on the effects of global warming. The broad outline of the Bush plan is almost certain to meet objections from environmentalists and those hoping for an aggressive approach to curbing dependence on foreign oil. But domestic automakers are likely to see it as a victory, since the new plan will decrease advantages that some foreign automakers, like Honda, have in the current system because they do not make the heaviest trucks and S.U.V.'s. Roughly speaking, corporate average fuel economy regulations - known as C.A.F.E. standards in the industry - divide each automaker's annual new vehicle production into two categories: passenger cars and light-duty trucks. New cars must average 27.5 miles a gallon and light trucks 21.2 miles a gallon in 2005 models and 22.2 miles by 2007. The figures represent lab-generated mileage and overstate the numbers that can be achieved on the road. Rules for cars are not being changed. When the current two-category system was created in the 1970's, cars ruled the American road. Since then, automakers have developed new classes of vehicles that qualify as trucks, including S.U.V.'s, minivans and family-oriented pickup trucks with two rows of seats. As a result, not only is the number of vehicles on the road increasing, but the average new vehicle is getting lower mileage than it did two decades ago because so many more new vehicles are trucks. An increasing emphasis on horsepower is also a major factor. Larger sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks weighing more than 8,500 pounds when loaded, like many Hummers and Ford Excursions, have been exempt from the regulations. When the system was created, vehicles of that weight were generally used for commercial purposes, but now hundreds of thousands sold each year are intended for family use. Automakers have had powerful incentives to produce such vehicles because they are exempt from fuel regulations, have had rich profit margins, and many consumers can claim tax breaks for them. The administration had suggested including larger S.U.V.'s in fuel economy regulations in a first wave of proposals in December 2003, but domestic automakers objected that such a move would harm their fragile bottom lines. The decision not to include larger S.U.V.'s was a recent development, said people briefed on the deliberations, who declined to be identified before the plan is made public. There could still be revisions, and the plan's release will be followed by a public comment period and then a revised final rule, which must be published by next April to have an effect on 2008 models. Gasoline prices have become a powerful counterweight to regulatory benefits given the biggest gas guzzlers. Many automakers, seeing the weakness in sales of large S.U.V.'s this year - they have recovered only after heavy discounting - are re-emphasizing plans for smaller, lighter S.U.V.'s in the future. Under the Bush administration plan, about half a dozen size classes will be determined by the vehicle's length and width. Instead of an overall mileage requirement for the total fleet of light trucks a manufacturer sells in a model year, makers will have to meet some kind of target or average within each size class. As a result of the proliferating categories, it will probably become more difficult to predict fuel economy trends. 'It's an invitation to game the system and increase our oil dependence and the pollution that results,' said Dan Becker, a global warming strategist at the Sierra Club. 'The Bush administration is failing to use the most powerful weapon in its arsenal to save people money at the pump.' Gloria Bergquist, a spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, a lobbying group for General Motors, Toyota and several other producers, said: 'The one thing we haven't heard is what the values will be for the different categories, and that will really tell us what the system means. 'Once the proposal comes out, we will have to take a hard look at it and see what the benefits may be to improving fuel economy.' The administration has taken some steps to increase fuel regulations for light trucks, raising the mileage standard for trucks to 22.2 miles a gallon for 2007 models, from 20.7 miles a gallon in 2004 models. Environmentalists have argued that gains from that move were offset by credits given to automakers for making vehicles that can use ethanol, even though there are few gas stations that carry the required blend. Under the administration's plan, for 2008 to 2010 models automakers will have a choice of complying with the new size-based system or the current system, though a further increase beyond 22.2 miles a gallon is expected in the current system. After 2010, the current system will be eliminated.

Subject: On the Menu for Breakfast: $1 Trillion From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 07:07:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/business/16wall.html?ex=1297746000&en=5f9bc82ceb0fde74&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 16, 2006 On the Menu for Breakfast: $1 Trillion By LANDON THOMAS Jr. On an early morning in late January, Merrill Lynch's chief executive, E. Stanley O'Neal, met for a quiet breakfast with Laurence D. Fink, his counterpart at BlackRock, at the Three Guys diner, blocks away from Mr. O'Neal's Upper East Side home. On the menu was a potential sale of Merrill's fund assets for a large stake in Mr. Fink's firm, a fast-growing asset management company. As in all initial deal discussions, the two men took pains to be discreet, hence the uptown diner as opposed to a more expensive locale in Midtown Manhattan. But in this case the two executives had extra incentive to keep their talks under wraps. John J. Mack, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley was pursuing a similar transaction with Mr. Fink at the same time. It seemed a long shot at first. Mr. O'Neal, a cool, dispassionate man who does not frequently socialize with his Wall Street peers, did not have the personal bond with the more outgoing Mr. Fink that Mr. Mack enjoyed. But the logic of the transaction led to an immediate meeting of the minds. After leaving the diner that morning, Mr. O'Neal called Gregory J. Fleming, his top investment banking deputy, and told him, in effect, to get the deal done. Within days, the broad principles of an agreement had been hashed out: Merrill would get a nonmajority stake, 49.8 percent, in BlackRock; Mr. Fink would retain control over his company, and Merrill would secure two seats on BlackRock's board. Soon afterward, Morgan Stanley, which wanted a majority stake, walked away from the deal. Yesterday, Merrill and BlackRock made it official, unveiling a transaction that gives BlackRock a total of $1 trillion in assets under management, including the $539 billion that Merrill is bringing, and gives Merrill immediate access to a diverse and growing pool of assets to sell through its retail network of more than 15,000 brokers. The deal and the high-stakes competitive maneuverings behind it shed new light on the rapidly changing financial landscape on Wall Street. Bigger and broader are no longer better. Wall Street's success stories in recent years have been more focused on firms like Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and BlackRock — whose stock has doubled in the last year, rising 3.6 percent yesterday. The game has changed in ways that famed conglomerate builders like Sanford I. Weill of Citigroup and his former protégé, James Dimon at J. P. Morgan, might find unfamiliar. Expensive, bulky banking mergers are out; in vogue are creative transactions like Merrill's deal with BlackRock. Indeed, Merrill, a firm once known for its lumbering size and breadth, is transforming itself by shedding assets, not acquiring them. 'The benefits of being a global supermarket have not been realized,' said Richard Barrett, a former top financial institutions banker at Credit Suisse First Boston. 'And everyone in the corporate world has been sensitized to potential conflicts. Now people are seeking value in other ways.' The deal also underscores the extent to which well-run money managers like BlackRock have become the belles of today's deal-making ball. They are now wooed by large institutions that five years ago, when BlackRock went public, paid the company little mind. BlackRock now has a price-to-earnings ratio of 35, a multiple that Merrill and the larger banks can only dream about. It was this valuation that ultimately dissuaded Morgan Stanley from pursuing a deal. But in the wake of this deal — as well as a similar transaction between Citigroup and Legg Mason last year — there will be fewer partners in asset management for Morgan Stanley to pursue. To be sure, Merrill Lynch has been a buyer of smaller niche companies, and Mr. O'Neal said yesterday that the investment bank would look to acquisitions to bulk up its trading business. But none have compared to the BlackRock deal in size and aspiration. As both Mr. Fink and Mr. O'Neal took pains to say yesterday, this deal was just too good to pass up. BlackRock combines its institutional focus with Merrill's retail heft; the equity-based bent of Merrill's asset management division fits well with BlackRock's fixed-income orientation, and finally, Merrill's international exposure allows BlackRock to become more of the global firm it has long aspired to be. 'We both had a common vision,' said Mr. O'Neal, speaking from BlackRock's headquarters. 'We have wanted a publicly traded stock as an acquisition currency in the money management space. And I have talked about accelerating growth. This allows us to do both things.' For Mr. Fink, the deal gives him the ideal partner to pursue his larger ambitions. 'We look at this as a partnership,' said Mr. Fink. 'It's not as if Stan is selling and I am buying. We are going to start working on integration today.' With its 49.8 percent stake, Merrill moves ahead of PNC Financial Services, the Pittsburgh-based regional bank, as BlackRock's main institutional shareholder. PNC's $240 million investment in BlackRock has ballooned to $7.1 billion; it now owns 34 percent and keeps two seats on the board. James E. Rohr, chief executive of PNC, was understandably pleased with the deal. 'It was a win-win-win,' he said. 'You don't see that all the time.' Shares of PNC surged 3 percent yesterday, to $68.99. Merrill's shares rose 4 cents, to $75.20. Citigroup advised BlackRock on the transaction; Credit Suisse counseled PNC and Merrill relied on its in-house bankers. While Mr. O'Neal and Mr. Fleming will join the BlackRock board, Mr. O'Neal made it clear that Mr. Fink would be the captain of the ship. But Merrill Lynch will be more than just a large shareholder. Through its vast retail system it will have effective control of a large chunk of BlackRock's expanded asset base. Given its complexity, the transaction was put together quickly, helped by the close friendship that Mr. Fleming, who took BlackRock public at a price of $14, and Mr. Fink enjoy Mr. O'Neal, Mr. Fleming and Mr. Fink raised glasses of red wine in celebration on Monday at Sistina, the Midtown Italian restaurant that is a favorite of Mr. Fink's. Perhaps the happiest man of all was David H. Komansky, the former chief executive of Merrill and a BlackRock board member, who masterminded Merrill's $5.3 billion purchase of the London-based Mercury Asset Management in 1997. While Mr. Komansky was later criticized for paying too much, the international flavor that the deal brought to Merrill's fund unit was crucial in making the division attractive to Mr. Fink. 'We never would have had this opportunity if Dave had not done the deal with Mercury in 1997,' Mr. O'Neal said yesterday. And any hard feelings that may have lingered in the wake of the cost- cutting campaign that Mr. O'Neal applied to the firm soon after succeeding Mr. Komansky seemed to have disappeared in the glow of yesterday's deal. 'It's the old story,' Mr. Komansky said with a laugh. 'What goes around comes around. You can't afford to leave many enemies around. Stan is a smart guy. It will be fun working together again.'

Subject: Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 07:04:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/business/16outsource.html?ex=1297746000&en=fa39a3608333d562&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 16, 2006 Outsourcing Is Climbing Skills Ladder By STEVE LOHR The globalization of work tends to start from the bottom up. The first jobs to be moved abroad are typically simple assembly tasks, followed by manufacturing, and later, skilled work like computer programming. At the end of this progression is the work done by scientists and engineers in research and development laboratories. A new study that will be presented today to the National Academies, the nation's leading advisory groups on science and technology, suggests that more and more research work at corporations will be sent to fast-growing economies with strong education systems, like China and India. In a survey of more than 200 multinational corporations on their research center decisions, 38 percent said they planned to 'change substantially' the worldwide distribution of their research and development work over the next three years — with the booming markets of China and India, and their world-class scientists, attracting the greatest increase in projects. Whether placing research centers in their home countries or overseas, the study said, companies often use similar criteria. The quality of scientists and engineers and their proximity to research centers are crucial. The study contended that lower labor costs in emerging markets are not the major reason for hiring researchers overseas, though they are a consideration. Tax incentives do not matter much, it said. Instead, the report found that multinational corporations were global shoppers for talent. The companies want to nurture close links with leading universities in emerging markets to work with professors and to hire promising graduates. 'The story comes through loud and clear in the data,' said Marie Thursby, an author of the study and a professor at Georgia Tech's college of management. 'You have to have an environment that fosters the development of a high-quality work force and productive collaboration between corporations and universities if America wants to maintain a competitive advantage in research and development.' The multinationals, representing 15 industries, were from the United States and Western Europe. The authors said there was no statistically significant difference between the American and European companies. Dow Chemical is one company that plans to invest heavily in new research and development centers in China and India. It is building a research center in Shanghai, which will employ 600 technical workers when it is completed next year. Dow is also finishing plans for a large installation in India, said William F. Banholzer, Dow's chief technology officer. Today, the company employs 5,700 scientists worldwide, about 4,000 of them in the United States and Canada, and most of the rest in Europe. But the moves overseas will alter that. 'There will be a major shift for us,' Mr. Banholzer said. The swift economic growth in China and India, he said, is part of the appeal because products and processes often have to be tailored for local conditions. The rising skill of the scientists abroad is another reason. 'There are so many smart people over there,' Mr. Banholzer said. 'There is no monopoly on brains, and none on education either.' Such views were echoed by other senior technology executives, whose companies are increasing their research employment abroad. 'We go with the flow, to find the best minds we can anywhere in the world,' said Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice president for technology and innovation at I.B.M., which first set up research labs in India and China in the 1990's. The company is announcing today that it is opening a software and services lab in Bangalore, India. At Hewlett-Packard, which opened an Indian lab in 2002 and is starting one in China, Richard H. Lampman, senior vice president for research, points to the spread of innovation around the world. 'If your company is going to be a global leader, you have to understand what's going on in the rest of the world,' he said. The globalization of research investment, industry executives and academics argued, need not harm the United States. In research, as in economics, they said, growth abroad does not mean stagnation at home — and typically the benefits outweigh the costs. Still, more companies in the survey said they planned to decrease research and development employment in the United States and Europe than planned to increase employment. In numerical terms, scientists and engineers in research labs represent a relatively small part of the national work force. Like the debate about offshore outsourcing in general, the trend, which may point to a loss of competitiveness, is more significant than the quantity of jobs involved. The American executives who are planning to send work abroad express concern about what they regard as an incipient erosion of scientific prowess in this country, pointing to the lagging math and science proficiency of American high school students and the reluctance of some college graduates to pursue careers in science and engineering. 'For a company, the reality is that we have a lot of options,' Mr. Banholzer of Dow Chemical said. 'But my personal worry is that an educated, innovative science and engineering work force is vital to the economy. If that slips, it is going to hurt the United States in the long run.' Some university administrators see the same trend. 'This is part of an incredible tectonic shift that is occurring,' said A. Richard Newton, dean of the college of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, 'and we've got to think about this more profoundly than we have in the past. Berkeley and other leading American universities, he said, are now competing in a global market for talent. His strategy is to become an aggressive acquirer. He is trying to get Tsinghua University in Beijing and some leading technical universities in India to set up satellite schools linked to Berkeley. The university has 90 acres in Richmond, Calif., that he thinks would be an ideal site. 'I want to get them here, make Berkeley the intellectual hub of the planet, and they won't leave,' said Mr. Newton, who emigrated from Australia 25 years ago. The corporate research survey was financed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, which supports studies on innovation. It was designed and written by Ms. Thursby, who is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and her husband, Jerry Thursby, who is chairman of the economics department at Emory University in Atlanta.

Subject: Price Gouging on Cancer Drugs? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 06:59:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/opinion/17fri3.html?ex=1297832400&en=b332a93782ffab90&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 Price Gouging on Cancer Drugs? The high price charged for Avastin, a drug that has proved moderately effective against colon cancer and is about to be used against breast and lung cancer, seems hard to justify on any ground other than maximum profit for its maker. The pricing scheme planned by Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, is a sign of how the rising cost of new life-extending drugs may affect American health care unless ways are found to mitigate the trend. As The Times reported on Wednesday, Genentech's pricing for Avastin will drive its cost to $8,800 a month for lung cancer and $7,700 a month for breast cancer, up from the $4,400 cost for colon cancer patients. The manufacturers go beyond the standard argument that high prices are needed to recoup research costs and add a new twist: the price reflects the value of this medicine to society. That is surely debatable. Avastin, while prized by oncologists as a genuine advance, extends the life of a typical patient with late-stage colon cancer by only five months. The drug will add several months to the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer, though individual patients may do better or worse. Those gains seem modest. This is not a miracle drug, bringing huge benefits to society. The high price seems to have been imposed mostly because the companies figured the market would bear it. Some patients are declining very high-priced drugs rather than making co-payments that can reach $1,000 or more a month. It is a judgment that each patient must make, based on how beneficial the drug is likely to be and how burdensome the cost is. A year of added life of reasonably good quality might be worth a lot to some patients. The main cost of such drugs, of course, is typically borne by insurance — Medicare for most of the elderly and private insurance for most others. Drug costs are still a relatively small part of the nation's health bill, but if extra-high prices become common, Congress may need to grant Medicare more power to push them down, and private plans will need to find ways to rein in the spending.

Subject: China Seeking Auto Industry From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 06:53:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/business/17auto.html?ex=1297832400&en=6a36d9f67c055851&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 China Seeking Auto Industry, Piece by Piece By KEITH BRADSHER CHONGQING, China — China is pursuing a novel way to catapult its automaking into a global force: buy one of the world's most sophisticated engine plants, take it apart, piece by piece, transport it halfway around the globe and put it back together again at home. In the latest sign of this country's manufacturing ambitions, a major Chinese company, hand-in-hand with the Communist Party, is bidding to buy from DaimlerChrysler and BMW a car engine plant in Brazil. Because the plant is so sophisticated, it is far more feasible for the Chinese carmaker, the Lifan Group, to go through such an effort to move it 8,300 miles, rather than to develop its own technology in this industrial hub in western China, the company's president said Thursday. If the purchase succeeds — and it is early in the process — China could leapfrog competitors like South Korea to catch up with Japan, Germany and the United States in selling some of the most fuel-efficient yet comfortable cars on the market, like the Honda Civic or the Toyota Corolla. The failure of China to develop its own version of sophisticated, reliable engines has been the biggest technical obstacle facing Chinese automakers as they modernize and prepare to export to the United States and Europe, Western auto executives and analysts said. Buying that technology from overseas would not only remove this obstacle but would also plant China's auto industry solidly in a position to produce roomy cars that can also get more than 30 miles to the gallon. The engine plant is one of the most famous and unusual in the auto industry. Built in southern Brazil in the late 1990's at a cost of $500 million by a 50-50 joint venture of Chrysler and BMW, the Campo Largo factory combines the latest American and German technology to produce the 1.6-liter, 16-valve Tritec engine. Lifan says it is the sole bidder for the factory and wants to bring it here to start producing engines in 2008. Though China's Communist Party is actively behind the effort, the bold moves are being driven by one of China's remarkable entrepreneurs: Yin Mingshan has become one of China's most successful and most politically connected corporate executives, with a hardscrabble upbringing that included spending 22 years of his earlier life in Communist labor camps and prison as punishment for his political dissent. Now the enormously wealthy and prominent president and principal owner of Lifan, Mr. Yin has his sights on exporting to Europe in 2008 and the American market in 2009. Trevor Hale, a DaimlerChrysler spokesman, and Marc Hassinger, a Bayerische Motoren Werke spokesman, each said separately that their companies were assessing their options for when their joint venture legal agreement expires at the end of next year, but that it was premature to provide details. The Tritec engine is one of the most technologically sophisticated and fuel-efficient car engines in the world, said Yale Zhang, an analyst in the Shanghai office of CSM Worldwide, a big auto consulting company based in the Detroit suburbs. Mr. Yin said he wanted to rebuild the factory on vacant land next door to his car assembly plant here. His goal is to understand the technology thoroughly so that he can supply engines not only for Lifan but also for other Chinese automakers. In an interview on Thursday in a glass-walled conference room overlooking his recently completed car assembly plant, Mr. Yin, 67, said that while Lifan would pay for the factory, the Chinese negotiating team is being led not by a Lifan official but by a senior Chinese Communist party official, Huang Zhendong. Mr. Huang, 65, is a member of the party's powerful Central Committee and led the party's Chongqing branch until December, when he became a senior member of the influential legal committee of the National People's Congress in Beijing. Mr. Yin's deputy, Yang Jong, Lifan's chief executive, has accompanied Mr. Huang on a visit to Brazil. 'Everyone knows you need government support — the government may provide land,' Mr. Yin said. Any attempt to buy a comparable factory in the United States might be blocked. But Mr. Yin said that Brazil did not have comparable restrictions on the export of high technology. Lifan, already one of the world's largest motorcycle manufacturers with sales in 112 countries, is about to start exporting its remarkably well-built, $9,700 midsize sedans to developing countries in Asia, the Mideast and the Caribbean. But several more years of work is needed before the company is ready to compete in industrialized countries, Mr. Yin said. 'Chairman Mao taught us: if you can win then fight the war, if you cannot win, then run away,' he said. 'I want to train my army in these smaller markets, and when we are ready, we will move on to bigger markets.' Accustomed to producing lightweight, fuel-sipping cars for cost-conscious Chinese families, Chinese automakers want to use that expertise as a competitive advantage around the world while oil prices stay high. Geely, a separate Chinese carmaker that surprised American and European manufacturers by announcing plans at Detroit's auto show last month to enter the American market in 2007, was emphasizing gas mileage even before oil prices surged in the last two years. When crude oil prices were much lower than they are today, Geely switched from an inexpensive electronic engine control and fuel injections system made by Denso of Japan to a more expensive but more fuel-efficient model made by Bosch of Germany, said Lawrence Ang, an executive director of Geely. Multinational automakers have struggled in China to keep up with the public's growing appetite for fuel-efficient models. Chinese carmakers like Chery and Geely captured a quarter of the Chinese market last year, up from less than 10 percent just two years earlier, said Michael Dunne, the president of Automotive Resources Asia, a consulting firm. 'Why the spurt? Small cars powered by gas-sipping engines that start at $4,000,' Mr. Dunne said. Raymond Bierzynski, the president of the Pan Asia Technical Automotive Center of General Motors in Shanghai, said that gasoline costs were more important to consumers in China than elsewhere because these costs represent a higher share of the low household incomes in China. G.M. sells its Buick Excelle compact sedan with special, low-rolling-resistance tires in China, which it does not do in any other market and which increases gas mileage by up to 2 percent, he said. Chrysler and BMW began construction of the Campo Largo factory in April 1998, a month before Daimler-Benz began a takeover of Chrysler that it completed in November of that year. Heralded in the automotive press at the time as arguably the most advanced engine factory ever built, the factory had already become a corporate orphan by the time production began in September, 1999. The Brazilian auto market had entered a slump by then and Daimler already had ample engine manufacturing capacity of its own and was uncomfortable collaborating with its longtime German rival, BMW. BMW installs its half of the engines from the factory in its award-winning Mini Coopers. But it has already announced that future engines for these cars will come from a factory in France that is owned and operated by PSA Peugeot Citroën. Chrysler used to put the Brazilian-made engines in its Neon compact cars and the PT Cruiser. But it is now selling its half of the engines to Lifan and to Chery Automotive and a Chinese joint venture by Mazda. Mr. Yin and spokesmen from DaimlerChrysler and BMW declined to comment on the price under negotiation for the factory. Lifan made its debut into the car market just last month with the introduction of the Lifan 520 sedan, assembled in the company's sprawling new assembly plant here, where the conveyor belt is bright red and the giant clamps holding unfinished cars are bright yellow — the colors of China's flag. Lifan models itself on Honda, another motorcycle manufacturer that entered the car market, and shares Honda's emphasis on efficient, energy-saving designs. Lifan has also copied Honda's focus on quality. Huge characters of Mr. Yin's sayings adorn a Lifan motorcycle engine factory inside and out; an illuminated board over the assembly line reads: 'Whoever wrecks Lifan's brand, Lifan will wreck that person's rice bowl.' A test drive here of the Lifan 520 sedan showed it to have an impressively sturdy body with no rattles or wiggles even when traveling over very rough pavement — although this is no guarantee of long-term reliability. There is ample headroom in the front seats and even the rear seats for a 6-foot-4 occupant. The $9,700 price tag includes leather seats, dual air bags, a huge trunk and a DVD system with a video screen facing the front passenger — a combination that could cost twice as much in a comparably equipped midsize sedan in the United States. Wages of less than $100 a month have helped control the cost. The assembly plant is better organized than many Chinese factories, although it still maintains large inventories of parts and materials awaiting assembly, incurring interest charges to finance these supplies. Mr. Yin has no doubts that China can also compete with the United States. 'Americans work 5 days a week, we in China work 7 days,' he said. 'Americans work 8 hours a day, and we work 16 hours.'

Subject: Wal-Mart Chief Talks Tough From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 06:00:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/business/17walmart.html?ex=1297832400&en=dc278902067fb074&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 On Private Web Site, Wal-Mart Chief Talks Tough By STEVEN GREENHOUSE and MICHAEL BARBARO In a confidential, internal Web site for Wal-Mart's managers, the company's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., seemed to have a rare, unscripted moment when one manager asked him why 'the largest company on the planet cannot offer some type of medical retirement benefits?' Mr. Scott first argues that the cost of such benefits would leave Wal-Mart at a competitive disadvantage but then, clearly annoyed, he suggests that the store manager is disloyal and should consider quitting. The Web site, which Mr. Scott uses to communicate his tough standards to thousands of far-flung managers, gives a rare glimpse into the concerns that are roiling Wal-Mart's retailing empire, from the company's sagging stock price to how it treats its workers. Judging by the managers' questions, Mr. Scott has an internal public relations challenge that in some ways mirrors the challenge he faces from outside critics. And while Mr. Scott's postings are usually written in a careful, even guarded manner, they can often be revealing — for example, showing a defensiveness and testiness with critics — that Mr. Scott normally keeps under wraps. Copies of Mr. Scott's postings covering two years were made available to The New York Times by Wal-Mart Watch, a group backed by unions and foundations that is pressing Wal-Mart to improve its wages and benefits. Wal-Mart Watch said it received the postings from a disgruntled manager. While the existence of the Web site and Mr. Scott's participation in it have been known, transcripts have never been made public before. The Web site has a folksy name — Lee's Garage, because Mr. Scott pumped gas at his father's Kansas service station while growing up. But its tone is at times biting. In his response to the store manager who asked about retiree health benefits, Mr. Scott wrote: 'Quite honestly, this environment isn't for everyone. There are people who would say, 'I'm sorry, but you should take the risk and take billions of dollars out of earnings and put this in retiree health benefits and let's see what happens to the company.' If you feel that way, then you as a manager should look for a company where you can do those kinds of things.' Mona Williams, a Wal-Mart spokeswoman, said Mr. Scott responded so sharply because of the manager's sarcastic tone. The question, she said, indicated the manager failed to understand how competitive retailing is and would not be able to convey that to his subordinates. 'At Wal-Mart, we communicate very candidly with one another,' she said. She added that Mr. Scott's tone did not deter employees from asking questions, noting that 2,147 questions have been asked since last April. Commenting on a labor union that is fighting Wal-Mart's expansion plans in New York City and elsewhere, Mr. Scott wrote in the Web site, 'that way its members' employers' — meaning many Wal-Mart competitors — 'can continue to charge extremely high prices for food and tolerate poor service.' Stung by the many news media reports about allegations of sex discrimination, off-the-clock work and child labor violations at Wal-Mart, Mr. Scott wrote, 'The press lives on things that are negative.' The Web site shows many sides of one of the nation's most powerful executives. He denounces managers who complain about the company or their subordinates. He frets about the success of his discount rival Target. He exhorts employees to act with integrity. He mocks General Motors for problems caused by its generous benefits. He rejects a manager's suggestion that Wal-Mart has created 'a culture of fear,' and he hails Wal-Mart's performance in responding to Hurricane Katrina. Mr. Scott has made some of these points before in public speeches, but in these confidential e-mail messages to managers, he delivers far blunter insights in much greater detail. In one posting, he urges managers to set an example by doing more to comply with the company's 10-foot rule, requiring employees to smile and ask 'Can I help you' when a shopper is less than 10 feet away. In his postings, Mr. Scott tries to strike a chummy, 'in the trenches' tone, reminding managers how frequently he visits stores — at least once a week — and pops into meetings unannounced 'to make sure there's not a filter keeping me from hearing what's really important.' But his responses often serve to remind managers of the gap between them and their chief executive, who earned more than $17 million last year, including stock options, who hops around the globe on Wal-Mart's fleet of jets and who lives in a gated community called Pinnacle. 'I recently had dinner with the prime minister of the U.K., Tony Blair, and his wife; my wife and I had a meeting with Prince Charles to talk about sustainability; and I met with Steve Case, the founder of AOL, and talked about health care,' Mr. Scott wrote in a two-week-old entry describing how he represents Wal-Mart around the world. Mr. Scott, 56, joined Wal-Mart in 1979 as its assistant trucking manager. Helped by his affable manner and his command of the company's vast distribution system, he was named chief executive in 2000. Throughout the dozens of postings, Mr. Scott shows deep concern about the many attacks and allegations that Wal-Mart skirts environmental and labor laws. He acknowledges that Wal-Mart used to have a greater tolerance for managers who cut corners, but his postings insist that Wal-Mart's new focus is on total compliance with the law. In a posting last June, he quoted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., saying, 'The time is always right to do what is right.' Responding to a manager's question about attacks on Wal-Mart's image, Mr. Scott wrote in an April 2004 posting: 'Your value to Wal-Mart is outweighed by the damage you could do to our company when you do the wrong thing.' 'If you choose to do the wrong thing: if you choose to dispose of oil the wrong way, if you choose to take a shortcut on payroll, if you choose to take a shortcut on a raise for someone — you hurt this company,' he added. 'And it's not unlikely in today's environment that your shortcut is going to end up on the front page of the newspaper. It's not fair to the rest of us when you do that.' Lee's Garage was set up in January 2004, at Mr. Scott's suggestion, to improve communications with managers after a wave of particularly bad publicity, including a federal raid that rounded up 250 illegal immigrants who cleaned Wal-Mart stores and a class-action lawsuit charging sex discrimination, filed on behalf of 1.6 million current and former female employees. Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart said a public relations assistant screened the questions and Mr. Scott dictated responses to an aide. At first the site was accessible only to salaried managers. Last October, it became available to all 1.3 million employees in the United States. The questions posted on the Web site range from the self-interested (when will managers receive a raise?) to the competitive (will the merger of Sears and Kmart hurt Wal-Mart?) to the academic (is Wal-Mart technically a monopoly that could be broken up?). A recurring theme is the attacks on Wal-Mart's image and managers' worries that these attacks are undermining employee morale and the company's ability to grow. Asked if the negative publicity has slowed Wal-Mart's expansion, Mr. Scott responded: 'I think it probably has. You can't get letters that say, 'I read where you're doing this and therefore I'll never shop with you again,' and assume everyone who writes that is just some nut. Some of those are real people who don't know us and believe what they've read.' A manager of a Wal-Mart's store in Medford, N.Y., asked about Wal-Mart's repeated failure to gain zoning variances and other government permits to open its first store in New York City. 'We're going to have to be a lot more sophisticated about it than we have been,' he said, saying that Wal-Mart brings good jobs and great prices. 'But I think you'll see us get the stores.' Though Wal-Mart is three times larger than its next biggest retail rival, Mr. Scott appears to be preoccupied with competitors whose individual store sales are growing faster than Wal-Mart's — namely Target and Walgreens. Asked about Wal-Mart's stock price, which has fallen 11 percent in the last five years. Mr. Scott said: 'You cannot have Target or Walgreens beating you day after day after day.' Mr. Scott wrote that one reason Wal-Mart's same-store sales were growing more slowly than Target's was that Wal-Mart's customers earn less and have been squeezed worse by soaring fuel prices. 'Wal-Mart's focus has been on lower income and lower-middle income consumers,' he wrote. 'In the last four years or so, with the price of fuel being what it is, that customer has had the most difficult time. The upper-end customer got a tremendous number of tax breaks about four years ago. They have been doing very well in this economy.' He said having to pay $50 to gas up a car did not change anything for rich customers, but did for those who didn't earn a lot. 'It changes whether or not you go to the movie, whether or not you buy new sheets, whether or not you go out to eat.' At several points, Mr. Scott addressed criticisms that Wal-Mart health plan was too stingy toward its employees. He said that Wal-Mart's health plan 'stacks up very, very competitively' with other retailers. In a knock at companies that provide more generous benefits, Mr. Scott wrote: 'One of the things said about General Motors now is that General Motors is no longer an automotive company. General Motors is a benefit company that sells cars to fund those benefits.' In one posting, Mr. Scott talked about how proud he was about Wal-Mart's response to Hurricane Katrina, when it rushed urgent supplies to the Gulf Coast. 'The media coverage has been extremely positive and speaks to who we really are as individuals, and as a company.' When one manager asked how an associate — Wal-Mart's term for an employee — could become chief executive of the world's largest retailer, Mr. Scott wrote, 'The first thing you can do is make sure you treat your people well, and understand that your associates are what will make you a success.'

Subject: Walmart vs Costco From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Feb 18, 2006 at 00:59:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The Costco Challenge: An Alternative to Wal-Martization? (July 5, 2005) by Moira Herbst Critics believe that Wal-Mart should play the role General Motors played after World War II… [and] establish the post-world-war middle class that the country is so proud of. The facts are that retailing doesn’t perform that role in the economy. Retailing doesn’t perform that role in any country. —Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott, April 2005 To workers and union leaders, it is a familiar refrain. These days, the story goes, consumers demand low prices, meaning goods must be produced and sold cheaply — and retail wages must be kept as low as possible. Companies like Wal-Mart insist they’re feeling the squeeze and must pay workers poverty wages — even while netting $10.5 billion in annual profits and awarding millions to top executives. But there’s another company that is breaking the Wal-Mart mold: Costco Wholesale Corp., now the fifth-largest retailer in the U.S. While Wal-Mart pays an average of $9.68 an hour, the average hourly wage of employees of the Issaquah, Wash.-based warehouse club operator is $16. After three years a typical full-time Costco worker makes about $42,000, and the company foots 92% of its workers’ health insurance tab. How does Costco pull it off? How can a discount retail chain pay middle-class wages and still bring in over $880 million in net revenues? And, a cynic may ask, with Wal-Mart wages becoming the norm, why does it bother? A number of factors explain Costco’s success at building a retail chain both profitable and fair to its workers. But the basic formula is one the labor movement has been advocating for decades: a loyal, well-compensated workforce means a more efficient and productive one. The Union Difference Though only about 18% of Costco’s total workforce is unionized, union representation creates a ripple effect and helps determine labor standards in all stores. The Teamsters represent about 15,000 workers at 56 Costco stores in California, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Virginia. Workers are covered by West coast and East coast contracts, negotiated in February and April of last year. “The agreements lock in wage and benefits packages that are the highest in the grocery and [discount] retail industries,” said Rome Aloise, chief IBT negotiator for Costco and Secretary-Treasurer of Local 853 in San Leandro, Calif. Costco passes on similar compensation packages to its non-union workers; the contracts act as templates for other stores’ employee handbooks. “The union contracts raise the bar and set the standard for all employees,” explained Aloise. “Still, while the company extends wage and pay raises to non-union employees, only union members enjoy benefits like seniority-based promotions, a grievance procedure and minimum hours for part-time workers,” he added. The Payoff of Better Pay Strong union representation isn’t the only reason Costco jobs are so well compensated; the company itself has an unusually forward-looking corporate philosophy. Costco CEO Jim Senegal has said: “We pay much better than Wal-Mart. That’s not altruism. It’s good business.” Chief Financial Officer Richard Galanti explained: “From day one, we’ve run the company with the philosophy that if we pay better than average, provide a salary people can live on, have a positive environment and good benefits, we’ll be able to hire better people, they’ll stay longer and be more efficient.” A 2004 Business Week study ran the numbers to test Costco’s business model against that of Wal-Mart. The study confirmed that Costco’s well-compensated employees are more productive. The study shows that Costco’s employees sell more: $795 of sales per square foot, versus only $516 at Sam’s Club, a division of Wal-Mart (which, like Costco, operates as a members-only warehouse club). Consequently Costco pulls in more revenue per employee; U.S. operating profit per hourly employee was $13,647 at Costco versus $11,039 at Sam’s Club. The study also revealed that Costco’s labor costs are actually lower than Wal-Mart’s as a percentage of sales. Its labor and overhead costs (classed as SG&A, or selling, general and administrative expenses) are 9.8% of revenues, compared to Wal-Mart’s 17%. By compensating its workers well, Costco also enjoys rates of turnover far below industry norms. Costco’s rate of turnover is one-third the industry average of 65% as estimated by the National Retail Foundation. Wal-Mart reports a turnover rate of about 50%. With such rates of employee retention, Costco’s savings are significant. “It costs $2,500 to $3,000 per worker to recruit, interview, test and train a new hire, even in retail,” said Eileen Appelbaum, Professor at Rutgers University’s School of Management and Labor Relations. “With Wal-Mart’s turnover rate that comes to an extra $1.5 to $2 million in costs each year.” Other analysts of the retail industry agree that happier, well-compensated workers help generate bigger profits. George Whalin, president of Retail Management Consultants in San Marcos, Calif., disagrees with many of Wal-Mart’s critics, but said: “There’s no doubt Wal-Mart and many other retailers could do a better job taking care of their employees. The best retailers do take care of their employees — Nordstrom’s, Costco, The Container store — with fair pay, good benefits and managers who care about people. You have fewer employee issues, less turnover and more productivity. It lessens costs to the company.” Still, Wall Street analysts intent on cutting up-front labor costs tend to frown upon Costco’s model. “Costco’s corporate philosophy is to put its customers first, then its employees, then its vendors and finally its shareholders. Shareholders get the short end of stick,” said Deutsche Bank analyst Bill Dreher. But Costco’s stock has quadrupled in the past ten years, and has in the past year inched closer to Wal-Mart’s per-share-price. In fiscal year 2004, Costco recorded record sales and earnings. While Wal-Mart continues to profit and expand, its stock has lost value — in recent months it is 16% off its 52-week high — as sales have been more sluggish as gas prices cause customers to cut back on driving to and from the store. The negative publicity around the company has also caused some damage. Of course, other factors besides low turnover and employee productivity are responsible for Costco’s efficiency. The company has a wealthier customer base than Wal-Mart’s; these customers buy higher-margin goods, purchase in bulk and have steadier spending habits. Costco also saves millions because it does not advertise. More Than Hot Air Besides the efficiency of its workforce, another reason Costco can afford to pay more is that it cuts the fat from executive paychecks. The overall corporate philosophy is that workers deserve a fair share of the profits they help generate — not just a pat on the back or a new job title like “associate.” For example, while CEOs at other major corporations average 531 times the pay of their lowest-paid employees, Sinegal takes only 10 times the pay of his typical employee. His annual salary is $350,000, compared to about $5.3 million awarded to Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott. After California Costco workers ratified their Teamster contract last March, CEO Jim Sinegal said Costco workers are “entitled to buy homes and live in reasonably nice neighborhoods and send their children to school.” That the company’s stated ideals match up with workers’ paychecks helps explain employee loyalty at Costco. Originally from El Salvador, 28-year-old Cesar Martinez has worked at a Redwood City, Calif. Costco for 10 years, serving as a Teamster shop steward for seven years. His pay is now up to $19.42 an hour, which he estimates brings him $43,000 per year. “There’s a feeling here that the company takes care of its employees and wants to share the profits. We feel compensated fairly,” Martinez said. “I’ve stuck with it so long because I like the job. And the salary is solid and we have a pension that gives me security into the future. That’s important to me,” he added. By contrast, some Wal-Mart employees experience the supposed care for “associates” as empty rhetoric. Forty-two-year-old Rosetta Brown, a Sam’s Club employee in Chicago, Ill., for example, stands back each morning when managers and associates gather for the Sam’s Club cheer. “I refuse to do it,” she said. “I don’t believe the company lives up to what they’re cheering for,” she said. Rosetta, mother to five children ranging in age from three to 25, does not feel well compensated at $11.34 per hour after five years. She is also suing Wal-Mart, parent company to Sam’s Club, for costs associated with a herniated disc she suffered when she said she was locked in while working the night shift. Twenty-seven-year-old Jason Mrkwa, who works as a frozen foods stocker in Independence, Kansas, also stands back when it’s cheer time at his store. But he insists he doesn’t hate Wal-Mart: “I’m not another disgruntled employee. I like my job. I just feel cheated with the pay I get.” He started at $7 per hour five years ago, and now makes just $8.53 per hour. Julie Molina, 38, has worked at Costco’s South San Francisco store for 19 years. “People stick around — most people in my store have been there ten years more. No one in retail makes as much as we do. Plus it’s a good working environment.” Molina attributes the positive working environment in large part to the Teamsters’ presence. “It works really well now. When problems arise management comes to the union for advice. But without the union I’m not sure what would take place. Would they treat us like Wal-Mart treats its workers? You hear horror stories,” she said. Of course Costco is not paradise — “On a local level, some managers don’t play fair — they might harass workers, fire them unreasonably or pattern bonuses unfairly. That’s where union representation is the real advantage,” explained Rome Aloise. Into the future, the question will be which model of employee compensation predominates in retail — the high road of Costco or the low road of Wal-Mart. “When companies like Wal-Mart are setting the standard, we have to ask: Do we want to live in a country where the largest employer pays below poverty-level wages, whose workers cannot afford health care?” says Paul Blank, chief spokesperson of Wake Up Wal-Mart, the United Food and Commercial Workers’ new campaign to change the company’s practices. “Or do we want Americans to enjoy a decent income and a sense of security in return for their work?” Costco v. Wal-Mart: How They Stack Up Global Workforce Wal-Mart: 1.6 million associates Costco: 113,000 employees U.S. Workforce Wal-Mart: 1.2 million Costco: 83,600 U.S. Union Members Wal-Mart: 0 Costco: 15,000 U.S. Stores Wal-Mart: 3,600 Costco: 336 Net Profits (2004) Wal-Mart: $10.5 billion Costco: $882 million CEO Salary Bonus (2004) Wal-Mart: $5.3 million Costco: $350,000 Average Pay Wal-Mart: $9.68/hour Costco: $16/hour Health Plan Costs Wal-Mart: Associates pay 34% of premiums deductible ($350-$1,000) Costco: Comprehensive; employees pay 5-8% of premiums Employees Covered By Company Health Insurance Wal-Mart: 48% Costco: 82% Employee Turnover (estimate) Wal-Mart: 50% Costco: 24% Sources: Wal-Mart, Costco, Business Week, Forbes.com

Subject: Kurosawa's Magical Tales of Art From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:58:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=&title2=AKIRA KUROSAWA'S DREAMS (MOVIE)&reviewer=VINCENT CANBY&pdate=19900824&v_id=1320&reviewer=VINCENT CANBY August 24, 1990 Kurosawa's Magical Tales of Art, Time and Death By VINCENT CANBY A solemn little boy comes out of his house one rainy morning to find the sun shining. His mother, practical and no-nonsense, looks up at the sky and says that foxes hold their wedding processions in such weather. ''They don't like to be seen by people,'' she says, and goes about her business. A solemn little boy comes out of his house one rainy morning to find the sun shining. His mother, practical and no-nonsense, looks up at the sky and says that foxes hold their wedding processions in such weather. ''They don't like to be seen by people,'' she says, and goes about her business. The casual remark is enough to send the boy into the forest, where the trees are as large and imposing as California redwoods. Even the ferns are taller than he is. The rain glistens within the shafts of sunlight. The boy moves with a certain amount of dread. This is forbidden territory. In a moment of pure screen enchantment, a strange wedding procession slowly comes into view, the priests in front, followed by the bridal pair, their attendants, their families, their friends and their retainers. They walk on two feet, like people, but that they are foxes is clear from the orangey whiskers on their otherwise rice-powder-white, masklike faces. The procession appears to be choreographed. The foxes march in unison to the hollow clicking sounds of ancient musical instruments. Every few steps their haughty manner becomes furtive when, as if on cue, they abruptly pause, cock their heads to the side, listen, and then move on. This is the sublime beginning of ''Sunshine Through the Rain,'' the first segment of the eight that compose ''Akira Kurosawa's Dreams,'' the grand new film by the 80-year-old Japanese master who, over a 40-year period, has given us ''Rashomon,'' ''Throne of Blood'' and ''Ran,'' among other classics. The film opens today at the 57th Street Playhouse. One might have expected ''Dreams'' to be a summing up, a coda. It isn't. It's something altogether new for Kurosawa, a collection of short, sometimes fragmentary films that are less like dreams than fairy tales of past, present and future. The magical and mysterious are mixed with the practical, funny and polemical. The movie is about many things, including the terrors of childhood, parents who are as olympian as gods, the seductive nature of death, nuclear annihilation, environmental pollution and, in a segment titled simply ''Crows,'' art. In this, the movie's least characteristic segment, Martin Scorsese, sporting a red beard and an unmistakable New York accent, appears as Vincent van Gogh, beady-eyed and intense, his head newly bandaged. Van Gogh explains the bandage to the young Japanese artist who has somehow managed to invade the world of van Gogh's paintings, entering just down-river from the bridge at Arles: ''Yesterday I was trying to do a self-portrait, but the ear kept getting in the way.'' ''Dreams'' is a willful work, being exactly the kind of film that Kurosawa wanted to make, with no apologies to anyone. Two of the segments may drive some people up the wall. ''Mount Fuji in Red'' is a kind a meta-science fiction visualization of the end of the world or, at least, of Japan. As the citizens of Tokyo panic, Mount Fuji is seen in the distance, silhouetted by the flames from the explosions of nuclear plants in the final stages of melt-down. ''But they told us nuclear plants were safe,'' someone wails. In ''Mount Fuji in Red,'' the nightmare of nuclear holocaust, expressed in psychological terms in Kurosawa's ''I Live in Fear'' (1955), is made manifest in images of cartoonlike bluntness. It may be no coincidence that Ishiro Honda, who has worked off and on as Kurosawa's assistant director since 1949, and is his assistant again on this film, is one of those responsible for such Japanese pop artifacts as ''Godzilla,'' ''Rodan'' and ''The Mysterians.'' ''The Weeping Demon'' segment is Kurosawa's picture of a Beckett-like world, one ravaged by environmental pollution. ''Flowers are crippled,'' someone says, looking at a dandelion six feet tall. Horned mutants roam the earth. In this last pecking order before the end, demons with two horns eat those with only one. ''Dreams'' is moving both for what is on the screen, and for the set of the mind that made it. Among other things, ''Dreams'' suggests in oblique fashion that the past does not exist. What we think of as the past is, rather, a romantic concept held by those too young to have any grasp on the meaning of age. In this astonishingly beautiful, often somber work, emotions experienced long ago do not reappear coated with the softening cobwebs of time. They may have been filed away but, once they are recalled, they are as vivid, sharp and terrifying as they were initially. Time neither eases the pain of old wounds nor hides the scars. For Kurosawa, the present is not haunted by the past. Instead, it's crowded by an accumulation of other present times that include the future. The job is keeping them in order, like unruly foxes. The foxes in ''Sunshine Through the Rain'' are not especially unruly, but their power is real and implacable. When the little boy returns home from the forest, he is met by his mother, who has run out of patience with him. She hands the boy a dagger, neatly sheathed within a bamboo scabbard, and tells him the foxes have left it for him. Since the boy has broken the law protecting the privacy of foxes, they expect him, as a boy of honor, to kill himself. The boy is bewildered. His mother sighs and says that if he can find the foxes again, he might persuade them to forgive him. In that case, he can come home. In the meantime, the door will be locked. The boy looks hopeful. ''But,'' his mother points out, ''they don't often forgive.'' A little boy is also the ''I'' figure, the dreamer, in another magical segment, ''The Peach Orchard,'' about the fury of some imperial spirits when a peach orchard is chopped down while in bloom. The boy explains that he tried to stop the destruction. Because they believe him, the spirits allow him to see the orchard as it once was. As these spirits, life-size dolls representing ancient emperors and the members of their courts, begin to sing, the air becomes thick with orangey-pink blossoms and the doll-figures turn into trees. The effect is exhilarating. In ''The Blizzard,'' a mountain climber is tempted to give in to his frozen exhaustion by a beautiful demon. ''Snow is warm,'' she tells him soothingly. ''Ice is hot.'' ''The Tunnel'' is about a guilt-ridden army officer who must persuade his troops, killed in battle, that they are indeed dead, and that nothing is to be gained by trying to hang onto life. The film's final episode, ''Village of the Watermills,'' features Chishu Ryu as a philosophical old fellow, the elder of an idyllic village where the air and water are clean, where villagers take no more from nature than they need, and where people live on so long that funerals are times of joy and celebration. The style is lyrical, the mood intended to be healing. ''Dreams'' is absolutely stunning to look at and listen to. It is, in fact, almost as much of a trip as people once thought ''Fantasia'' to be. More important, though, is that it's a work by a director who has continued to be vigorous and productive into an age at which most film makers are supposed to go silent. Movies are a young man's game. ''Dreams'' is a report from one of the last true frontiers of cinema.

Subject: In Deep Drought, at 104° From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:56:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/international/africa/17drought.html February 17, 2006 In Deep Drought, at 104°, Dozens of Africans Are Dying By MARC LACEY WAJIR, Kenya — Halima Muhammad is living through the worst drought to hit eastern Africa in decades. Yet when a large pool of fresh water appeared before her the other day in the middle of the scorching earth, this thirsty woman with eight thirsty children did something remarkable: She stayed put. The water, delivered twice a week in a tanker truck to remote settlements in the northeast, is not enough for her community of 6,000 people. Elders divvy it up, requiring suffering souls like her to wait in line for their names to be called before they can approach the pool and scoop out enough to fill a 20-liter jug. It looked like a mirage, so much water in the middle of the hot sand. And soon enough, it was gone, dried up, like all the land around. A sustained period with little or no rain and a lack of government planning for it are widely blamed for this humanitarian crisis, which is affecting a vast swath from Kenya across Ethiopia and Somalia to Djibouti. Dozens of people have died in the merciless heat since December, aid workers and hospital officials say, although the full death toll remains unclear. Already, animals are dying in huge numbers, their rotting carcasses littering the landscape and devastating the local economy. Aid workers estimate that 70 percent of the 260,000 cows in the Wajir district, near the border with Somalia, have died. Even camels drop in the sand. The relatively few wells are nowhere near the tiny patches of vegetation remaining for animals to feed on. So families are faced with the awful choice of allowing their animals, which are their life savings, to either starve to death or die of thirst. Aid organizations are working to prevent the nomadic people from suffering similar fates. Oxfam, which took reporters on a tour of the region this week, is making water deliveries to two dozen remote sites, providing at least some relief. But two 20-liter containers a week is nowhere enough for a family; the usual allotment in refugee camps is 15 liters daily per person. (A liter is slightly more than a quart.) Oxfam's initial deliveries were chaotic affairs, as residents rushed toward the water with their jugs in hand, desperate to get their share. But most people now are going along with the more organized approach. 'I don't know if I'll get any,' said Ms. Muhammad, looking frail as she stood toward the end of a long line. If no water remained when it was her turn, she said, she would ask her friends for some. They would share, she said, because next time they might be the ones who came up empty. Waiting idly for water to come is not the custom here. Women, whose job is collecting it, typically trek to faraway boreholes, where they load up their animals with plastic jugs and then head back home. But the animals are too weak for that now, the women say. The women are also too weak to make the journey, which is about 40 miles round trip, they say. 'Imagine that you are thirsty and you don't get water and you've left your children at home and they are starving,' said Ubai Made, who jumped the line in order to get just enough water for her infant daughter, who hung like a rag doll in her arms. Muhammad Daher, an Oxfam worker reading off the names, said it was difficult to get upset at the line-jumpers. Just then, another one appeared, an old woman who was walking slowly toward the pool. 'Hey!' he yelled, signaling for a community leader to intervene. 'Sometimes they sneak in if they are thirsty,' he said. 'But most of them wait under the trees.' Across the border in Somalia, the situation is equally dire. Families there are also surviving on two 20-liter jugs a week, which amounts to about three glasses of water daily per person, for drinking, cooking and washing. It is so clearly insufficient, especially given temperatures of up to 104 degrees, that some people have begun drinking their own urine to stay alive, aid workers say. 'People are not meeting their basic food and water needs,' said Aydrus S. Daar, a Kenyan who recently took part in an Oxfam-sponsored assessment of southern Somalia. 'The situation is bad.' Buying water from private vendors is not realistic, he said, because the price has soared from about 3 cents for a 20-liter jug in normal times to about $1, more than most people earn in a day. Desperate to relieve their thirst, those with the energy now walk the equivalent of two marathons to collect water, aid workers said, because nearby water sources are nothing more than cracked earth.

Subject: In Turin, Chocolate's the Champion From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:54:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/dining/15turin.html?ex=1297659600&en=473d9f0a7aeb5c25&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 In Turin, Chocolate's the Champion By CORBY KUMMER TURIN, Italy THE streets of Turin may be overflowing with Olympics visitors for a few weeks, but they always overflow with chocolate. Perhaps in no other place in the world, and certainly no other city in Europe, do so many pastry shops and chocolate-makers roast and blend their own cacao beans. The cafes of Turin, still the world's most sumptuous and beautiful, are famous for serving the city's own hot-chocolate-and-espresso drink called bicerin, a fabulous layered concoction served in glass cups. It's easy to stroll down the arcaded shopping streets and sample bars and fancifully shaped pralines wrapped in foil and colored papers with appealing Art Nouveau designs. But the chocolate par excellence — the one that says Turin to the rest of Italy — is the foil-wrapped mini-ingot called giandujotto. Biting into one isn't like eating any other kind of chocolate. The flavor of roasted hazelnuts comes through every bite, with the fruity high notes of fine Central American chocolate in the city's best. The depth of the hazelnuts balances the fruit of the chocolate, and anchors an experience that with the vinification of chocolate has become all too ethereal. The mysterious potency and semi-addictiveness of the combination is familiar to anyone who has smeared Nutella on bread or simply dipped a spoon into a jar of it. Gigi Padovani, a journalist for La Stampa of Turin and author of a brisk history, 'Nutella, un Mito Italiano' ('Nutella, an Italian Myth,' Rizzoli, 2004), calls the spread the 'good blob.' Nutella conquered the world soon after it was invented in Piedmont, the northwestern Italian region of which Turin is the capital, and went onto the market in 1964. But the combination of hazelnut and chocolate predated Nutella by a couple of centuries, and, like much brilliant inspiration, was born of necessity. By the late 18th century (about 150 years after Cortes had introduced chocolate to Spain in 1528) Turin was an international chocolate capital, thanks to trade relations between the ruling House of Savoy and the Spanish court. Turin's chocolate producers exported 750 pounds a day to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France, according to Sandro Doglio's 'Il Dizionario di Gastronomia del Piemonte' ('The Dictionary of Piedmont Gastronomy,' Daumerie, 1995). Swiss chocolate-makers came to Turin to learn their trade. But supplies of chocolate from the New World became irregular during a naval blockade imposed by Napoleon in 1806 (the French then ruled Piedmont), and the city's chocolate-makers had to look to local products as surrogates. The world's sweetest, most prized hazelnuts grow in the misty hills of the Alta Langa, the southern region of Piedmont around Alba. Roasted and ground with chocolate, the nuts helped the chocolate-makers stretch a scarce import. Chocolate plus hazelnuts conquered the city, and the combination soon took definitive shape in the form we know it today, an ingot with a rounded belly, wrapped in foil. Chocolate-hazelnut paste is tricky to mold, so it was shaped by hand, and named for the hat worn by the puppet Gianduja, a gluttonous, bibulous character who was Turin's contribution to commedia dell'arte. The chocolate-maker Caffarel introduced the candy at the carnival of 1865, and gave it its name in 1867. Powdered milk became a part of the standard formula after Daniel Peter discovered the technique for milk chocolate in 1875 and made Nestlé's fortune. The creation and its creator are still in place — Caffarel bought the rights to use the Olympic symbol during the Winter Games here — and chocolate remains important both as a regional symbol and an employer. In recent history the carriage-trade chocolatier has been Peyrano, founded in 1915 Four years ago, the Peyrano family scandalized Turin's bon ton by merging with a Neapolitan family named Maione. (Turin and Naples, both historically subject to strong French culinary influence, in fact share Italy's most refined pastry and chocolate-making traditions, but the exuberant character of Naples could hardly be further removed from the restraint of Turin.) The box may have lost some of its cachet, but the giandujotti are still excellent, as a trip to the unchanged, and somewhat dusty, store proved during a visit in early February as the city was anticipating the start of the Olympics. Peyrano recently opened a tiny tasting room and shop in an arcade somewhat hidden in the city's historic center; during the Olympics it offers special tastings and rich hot chocolate, which the main store has never sold. Peyrano's 'giandujotto antica formula,' with bombé base and crinkly foil, has a higher proportion of hazelnuts than its 'giandujotto nuova formula,' which has cocoa butter added for easy machine molding and smooth wrapping. The old formula has a slight smokiness that Dr. Mariella Maione, in charge of marketing, says comes from the olive wood the company still uses to roast chocolate. The 'antica' provides a definitive taste, with a satisfying amount of grit and a lingering aftertaste of fruit and roasted nut. It also has no milk — the dividing point in the modern giandujotto competition. 'When people ask me the secret of our giandujotto,' said Dr. Maione, who moved from Naples to Turin when her father became part of the business, 'I tell them there's only one: Torino.' CURRENTLY, the local chocolate king is Guido Gobino, a relative upstart and the son of a chocolate-maker. Mr. Gobino keeps up with the times as both the city's and the country's chocolate-makers mostly have not. (In Piedmont only Domori, under the young and innovative Gianluca Franzoni, known as Mack, has entered the single-origin, sexily packaged international chocolate sweepstakes.) His shop, with a magical factory in the basement, is a city showplace. Mr. Gobino travels the world to sell his products: just before the Olympics, he was promoting his chocolate in Japan. He pays attention to the international single-origin chocolate craze, though he thinks the future will return to blends of beans as supplies of fine cacao grow short. Unlike the city's other chocolate-makers, he makes his own couverture for filled chocolates and high-quality bars, which requires the addition of cocoa butter and refining, in expensive machines, as chocolate for giandujotti does not. Besides giandujotti, his signature products include 'amarissimi,' disks of bitter chocolate mixed with ground cocoa nibs, and nubs of chocolate-coated ginger. In giandujotti, Mr. Gobino made his name with the milkless, mini-sized 'Tourinot,' which has probably the fruitiest flavors and the darkest-toasted nuts of any of the city's elite competitors. Gobino uses only Piedmont hazelnuts, the world's most expensive (almost all other industrial makers use Turkish hazelnuts); one of the five growers Mr. Gobino buys from is his father-in-law. Peyrano and Gobino chocolates are available online (at peyrano.com and Gobino from the New York-based www.gustiamo.com), but some giandujotti still require a trip to the city. Going to find one renowned version at Stratta, in Piazza San Carlo, the city's salon (and NBC headquarters for the Olympics), is practically like going into a museum. Stratta is an 'elegant wonderland' of sweets, as Fred Plotkin says in his book 'Italy for the Gourmet Traveler' (an updated version will be published in May by Kyle Cathie). Adriana Monzeglio, a member of the family that has owned Stratta since 1959, recently explained that the shop has had success with newfangled chocolates with flavors like truffle, pepper and ginger. But giandujotti still account for half of its sales. Its sugar-free giandujotti, lower in milk as well, are surprisingly focused and good. Gertosio, a pastry shop on Via Lagrange, Turin's gourmet row, makes what could be the city's best beginning taster's giandujotto. Gianni Gertosio, scion of a pastry-making family in Cuneo, near the heart of the hazelnut-growing area of Piedmont, decided in 1975 to make giandujotti almost on a dare, according to his son Massimo, who makes them now. Gertosio's giandujotti are decidedly sweet, with an indeterminate but agreeable blend of cacao beans and a strong and welcome flavor of medium-dark roasted hazelnuts. They're mouth-filling, fresh, and unchallenging but very satisfying. For anyone who grew up on Nutella, Gertosio giandujotti are the first stop on a glorious path to chocolate-hazelnut adulthood.

Subject: Westminster Result From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:51:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/sports/othersports/15dogs.html?ex=1297659600&en=901722b917857ad2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Westminster Result Feels Like an Upset, but Isn't By JOHN BRANCH An athletic yellow Labrador retriever named Buzz was freed from its pen yesterday afternoon, and smiling people quickly gathered around, as they do when Labs are loose. Buzz had been named the best Labrador at the 130th Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show. If the best-in-show award was opened to a public vote, as if this were the television show 'American Idol,' Buzz and other Labradors might routinely win the big prize. Labradors are the most popular breed in the country, according to the American Kennel Club. But Westminster, while an immensely popular event, is not a populist one. Before last night's competition at Madison Square Garden, a Labrador had never won best in show. Neither had the friendly golden retriever, the low-centered dachshund, the beagle of Snoopy fame or most of the other top 10 breeds. Westminster bills itself as America's Dog Show. But America's favorite dogs rarely, if ever, win. More than other breeds, terriers win. And last night, the champion was again a terrier, with a twist. A sturdy dog named Rufus (Ch. Rocky Top's Sundance Kid) — tan with a strong wedge-shaped white snout — became the first colored bull terrier to win Westminster. His cousins in the terrier group, including a white bull terrier in 1918, have taken top honors 43 other times. 'He's the cutest dog around,' the handler Kathryn Kirk said as dozens of photographers and glad-handers surrounded Rufus, a 5-year-old from Holmdel, N.J. For a time, this year's best-in-show event looked different, if not entirely like a popularity contest. Of the seven finalists, five breeds — the fan-favorite golden retriever, the firehouse mascot Dalmatian, the intimidating Rottweiler, the wiry Scottish deerhound and the stout colored bull terrier — had never won the biggest prize at Westminster. They joined the pug, a winner in 1981, and the well-fluffed Old English sheepdog, a champion twice before. James Reynolds, the best-in-show judge, playfully put the dogs through the paces, at one point approaching them and looking them each in the eyes. He crouched to greet the pug. The crowd, perhaps viewing familiarity in the breed as the most important trait, had pulled mostly for the golden retriever and was increasingly smitten with the Dalmatian and the sheepdog. When the crowd hushed and Reynolds made his pronouncement, it seemed almost like an upset, although it might have been the furthest thing from it. Selecting a terrier — even a variation that had never won — from the more than 2,500 dogs in 165 breeds that had entered the competition restored some semblance of tradition. 'The crowd never sways it,' said Barbara Bishop, one of Rufus's co-owners. 'A judge does what a judge wants to do. You could stand on your head and scream, and it wouldn't matter.' Kirk said she was most worried about the Dalmatian, Boomer (Ch. Merry Go Round Mach Ten), owned by Dick and Linda Stark. They also own Carlee, the German shorthaired pointer who won last year's best in show. The Starks became the first owners to win back-to-back best in shows with different dogs. Rufus, shorthaired with a strong, bullish build and a stoic presence, is the type of dog that the country will come to know, if not recognize and adore. But why a victory for the dog-next-door type is so rare at Westminster is a matter of debate in dog circles. There is a sense that in a show designed to find an extraordinary and memorable dog as best in show, most of the top breeds are just too, well, ordinary. Popular dogs tend to plod, not prance. They are more wash-and-wear than primp-and-preen. They catch Frisbees, take up too much room in bed, scratch their itches on the corners of walls and knock vases off end tables with their uncontrollable tail wagging. 'Look at the Labrador,' said Buzz's owner, Kathy Sneider, of Plymouth, Mass. 'It looks like the type of dog that would be in a children's book with the word 'dog' under it. It's your basic dog. And I think that hurts its chances.' She made that comment before watching the group victory by the golden retriever, the second most-popular breed among Americans but only a second-time selection in the sporting group. Of the top 10 breeds in popularity, only 2 — the seventh-ranked boxer and eighth-ranked poodle — have won more than once. Six of the top 10 breeds have never won. The reception for Andy (Ch. Chuckanut Party Favour O' Novel), the golden retriever, was telling. He is from Bellingham, Wash., and owned by Ken Matthews and Wayne Miller. Time and again, Andy elicited the evening's most raucous response. Matthews, showing the dog, was jolted by the reception. 'They are popular, but that was like thunder,' he said. 'It was like, 'Holy, moly.' ' Westminster officials are not overly concerned that their show is out of touch with the sensibilities of the millions said to be watching the event from home. More unsung dogs are winning. The past four winning breeds had arrived with just two previous best in shows at Westminster. But eight varieties of terriers have multiple Westminster victories — nine, if you combine the bull terrier's colored and white versions. 'Terriers handle this kind of environment very well,' said the show's chairman, Tom Bradley, who breeds Labrador retrievers. 'This is their ballpark, so to speak.' That leaves the most popular breeds fighting against that home-field advantage — an unusual spot to be in, considering they are the ones with the true advantage back home.

Subject: Celebrity Freebies From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:50:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/movies/redcarpet/15bags.html?ex=1297659600&en=11f06c4fc9670b2a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Celebrity Freebies: A Force Irresistible? By SHARON WAXMAN LOS ANGELES — Lash Fary, one of Hollywood's sultans of swag, remembers the first time he called a company and suggested that it pay him for the privilege of providing its products to celebrities, free. Executives were confused. 'The hard part was convincing companies, six and seven years ago, that they should give their products away to rich people and pay us for the privilege of doing so,' Mr. Fary said. He was speaking in the gifting lounge for the Grammy Awards, just one red-carpeted stretch beyond the stage at the Staples Center, where performers rehearsed, before being lavished with skin creams, fruit-infused vodka, a Gibson guitar and a $3,500 coupon for party planning. Today it's all different, Mr. Fary, 34, explained. Now companies vie for the opportunity to be included in what he calls his 'interactive gifting suite,' where they have a face-to-face opportunity to press their wares on the rich and famous, in the hope that the celebrity will be seen with their items and set a trend. Mr. Fary's fee for providing that opportunity: $20,000. For a more modest $6,000, he was willing to include a company's product in the gift baskets that went to presenters and performers in this year's Grammys (estimated value: $54,000). In this Hollywood awards season, the piles of free stuff being handed to celebrities — nominees, award presenters, performers and members of their entourages — is escalating, and the number of Mr. Fary's competitors is growing, too. Originally conceived at the Academy Awards in 1989 as a way to thank actors for presenting awards at the Oscars, the gift basket has in recent years outgrown its origins to become a marketing juggernaut in its own right, in some cases all but overtaking the events themselves. Even celebrities seem somewhat mystified by the trend. Gwyneth Paltrow, for instance, expressed surprise on the red carpet of the Golden Globes at having received a cruise to Antarctica and Tasmania in her gift basket. (Estimated value: $22,000.) The gift phenomenon may create some unexpected problems for the organizations that sponsor them. At a recent board meeting of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which presents the Golden Globes, members fretted about what to do with their extra gift bags, valued at $62,000 each. On the advice of its tax lawyer, the association decided that 'none of the leftover bags may be given to any member, board or otherwise, or his family,' according to the meeting notes. Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor to the tax journal Tax Notes, said that celebrities would do well to pay attention to the tax implications. 'Queen Latifah is not getting a gift; Queen Latifah is getting income,' Ms. Sheppard said, speaking hypothetically of the star. 'And the company is having a deduction for a form of advertising. Tax law does not recognize this as a gift.' Michael Harris, president of Paragon Business Management, who manages entertainment clients like the reality show star Jesse James, said, 'If it's a fee for service, if you get this when you show up to do something, there would be taxable exposure.' But the issue is complicated, he added, because of the varying values that might be placed on a gift. 'The I.R.S.'s appetite to enforce this type of transaction would depend on the perceived value,' Mr. Harris said. Mindful of the risks of losing the public focus on movies, the Oscars have so far been careful to resist adding a 'giveaway lounge' to the bonus of the basket at the awards. 'That's a rather unusual setup, and that's not the way we do it,' said Leslie Unger, spokeswoman for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which presents the awards. But the academy cannot stop Mr. Fary from delivering his own fabulous consolation prize to the Oscar losers in the main acting categories. Scheduled for delivery a day after the March 5 telecast, it will include a three-night stay at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, a coupon for Lasik eye surgery and a set of high-thread-count bed linens. (The academy does not permit companies to reveal their participation in the official gift basket until the end of the month, but it is similarly extravagant.) At other events the 'gifting experience,' as it is now called, becomes more lavish every year. At the Screen Actors Guild awards last month, winners and presenters went directly from their televised moment behind the podium to a retreat behind the stage. Don Cheadle, nominated as best supporting actor for 'Crash,' came backstage during the telecast to collect a pearl, multistrand bracelet from an exclusive Los Angeles boutique and a trip for five nights to a Bora Bora resort. While those companies may not have gotten any marketing bang from those gifts, a presenter, Terrence Howard, did allow his picture to be taken with a LeVian watch he had just received. 'For that company, that's a homerun,' said Karen Wood, the president of 'Backstage Creations,' who organized the SAG lounge and has helped fuel the phenomenon in the past five years. 'Celebrities are very discerning. If they like a product, it translates to the public as trendsetting. Buzz starts building around that type of interaction.' Maybe, or maybe not. For every success story of an actor posing with a watch, a dozen other companies see their products disappear into limousines, never to be glimpsed in public again. And in the case of the highest-priced items — the trip to Antarctica, the party planning offer — only 5 percent to 10 percent are ever redeemed by the celebrity, Ms. Wood and others in her line of work say. But whether or not the gifts actually generate buzz, nearly every award show now includes them as part of the event, making the first two months of the year a freebie bonanza for the anointed few. In addition to SAG, the Directors Guild of America, the Grammys, the Independent Spirit Awards and the Golden Globes all have their own luxury baskets worth tens of thousands of dollars. Companies at the Grammy gifting lounge said the steep fee for participation was worthwhile. 'We're a small company, so this is a significant investment for us,' Marla Allen, the wholesale distributor of Forticelle skin care, said, standing beside her display in the lounge. 'But this gives us exposure to cross into the retail market.' Across the tent, a marketing consultant was handing out guitars by Gibson, the well-known American company, at $3,000 an instrument. 'This is the first time they're giving guitars,' Mr. Fary said. 'Usually it's a duffel bag.' But Gibson didn't really have a choice, he explained; another company had contacted Mr. Fary offering to give guitars, and Gibson — which had priority as a partner in the Grammys' charity, MusiCares — matched the offer. Strumming a model designed by U2's guitarist, The Edge, the Gibson consultant Ron Maldonado reeled off his list of eligible giftees: Mariah Carey, Carlos Santana, Kelly Clarkson, Jamie Foxx. Also Teri Hatcher, Ellen DeGeneres and Leslie Moonves, co-president of Viacom. Teri Hatcher? 'If she sits on my lap she gets two,' he grinned.

Subject: A Deadly Vacuum From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:48:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/opinion/16thu1.html?ex=1297746000&en=3f52223e10c90bc4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 16, 2006 A Deadly Vacuum In the Bush administration, there is no such thing as failure at the top. When something goes wrong because of bad leadership, punishment is meted out to the foot soldiers and middle management, while the people in charge remain unscathed. Now we'll see whether the rule holds true in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Yesterday an 11-member, all-Republican Congressional panel released a scathing report on the leadership failures before, during and after Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. This report, 520 pages in all, needs to be examined carefully for as many specific disaster-response lessons as possible. For example, more than four years after Sept. 11, many of the same communications issues that hampered operations at the World Trade Center — impeding the emergency responders' ability to talk to one another — still plagued Katrina rescue and relief missions. But right now one thing is clear. While there is no shortage of incompetent public officials involved in this tragedy, one stands out above the rest. That person is Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. According to the panel's report, Mr. Chertoff has 'primary responsibility for managing the national response to a catastrophic disaster,' yet he handled his decision-making responsibilities 'late, ineffectively, or not at all.' A FEMA official named Marty Bahamonde sent word back to Washington on the same day Katrina struck, saying the 17th Street Canal levee in New Orleans had been breached. This was not based on a rumor; he had seen it with his own eyes from a Coast Guard helicopter. FEMA public affairs officials sent Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff an e-mail note that night. The former FEMA director, Michael Brown, says he notified the White House at the same time. Yet the next day, President Bush said New Orleans had 'dodged the bullet,' while Mr. Chertoff flew to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. These are the people charged with protecting us and, failing that, rescuing us. This department was put together based on the belief that everyone would be safer with every facet of preparedness, protection and response under one umbrella. The first time this new system was tested, it failed. And it failed on Mr. Chertoff's watch. Now Mr. Chertoff and his opposite number inside the White House are proposing changes to FEMA, including a new professional response force. While this is a good idea in and of itself, big organizational solutions will not help if there is a leadership vacuum. It would be nice for the administration to finally send a message that if important people do a bad job, they go away. But the best tribute possible to the roughly 1,400 people who died along the Gulf Coast would be to help those still suffering in Mississippi and Louisiana, and those evacuees stranded hundreds of miles from home. Right now, almost six months after Katrina hit, families are being forced to leave hotels and are moving into shelters in Louisiana. If that is not a disaster, we do not know what is. This crisis isn't over, but officials aren't behaving as if they are on a crisis footing. There is no sense of urgency in the White House or in Congress to ensure that people get the help they need. Many people died. Many more can yet be saved.

Subject: Journal Shut by Beijing Censors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:44:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/international/asia/17china.html?ex=1297832400&en=abf76529fd147560&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 Journal Shut by Beijing Censors Will Return By JIM YARDLEY LINXIA, China — A provocative news and opinion journal that was closed last month by Chinese censors will resume publication in March but without the editor and top investigative reporter who earned it a reputation for aggressive reporting, the editor confirmed Thursday. The decision to restart the journal, Freezing Point, a weekly supplement of the official China Youth Daily, was made as the secretive Propaganda Department faced increased criticism for its aggressive censorship of newspapers and the Internet. On Tuesday in Beijing, a dozen former high-level party officials and senior scholars released a letter that denounced the closing of Freezing Point and called for a 'free flow of ideas.' But if the rebirth of Freezing Point suggests that party censors have bowed to pressure, the sidelining of its top two journalists suggests that the publication will not be allowed to continue its combative style of journalism. Li Datong, the editor of Freezing Point, said that he and Lu Yuegang, the deputy editor and a well-known investigative reporter, had been told that the magazine would restart March 1 without them. The two were transferred to a research branch of the newspaper, Mr. Li said. He also predicted that a new, more compliant tone would be evident in the March 1 issue. He said that it would include criticism of Yuan Weishi, a professor at Zhongshan University who had written an article in Freezing Point that said Chinese textbooks soft-pedaled the mistakes of Qing Dynasty leaders in the late 19th century. Propaganda officials cited Mr. Yuan's article in their Jan. 24 order to close the journal, which had also published exposés of official corruption. At a regular Thursday briefing with foreign news organizations in Beijing, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, said that Mr. Yuan's article was the reason Freezing Point was being 'reorganized.' Mr. Li and other editors at Freezing Point plan to release a rebuttal on Friday, possibly in a letter to President Hu Jintao. 'Broadly speaking, this is an approach they've used before,' said Kenneth G. Lieberthal, who was a China specialist in the Clinton administration. 'You shut down a publication and move out of key positions the people that cause you the most concern. In the process, you send a shot across the bow to the remaining editorial staff. And then you reopen.' In recent years, the amount of information available in Chinese newspapers and on Web sites has soared, often leaving party censors scrambling to keep up. With most newspapers now required to meet their budgets with little or no government money, editors push for the sort of aggressive or titillating reporting that attracts readers. But in recent months, officials have sought to tighten censorship. In addition to the changes at Freezing Point, editors have been fired at three other publications known for muckraking. Microsoft and Google have been criticized for helping China to censor online content, while Yahoo has been accused of providing information that helped the government jail dissident writers. In Congressional hearings in Washington this week, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and Cisco Systems were rebuked for trampling on civil liberties in China. Mr. Lieberthal said the censorship by Chinese officials was a serious matter but did not necessarily mean that news organizations were facing a lasting chill. He said the Chinese media network was now so vast that censors could only 'massage' the system by choosing as their targets certain journalists and publications. In some cases, he said fired journalists turned up at other publications months later.

Subject: China Shuts Down Influential Weekly From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:42:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/25/international/asia/25china.html?ex=1295845200&en=b05ce7a15a1526e6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 25, 2006 China Shuts Down Influential Weekly Newspaper in Crackdown on Media By JOSEPH KAHN BEIJING - China's Propaganda Department on Tuesday ordered the closing of Bing Dian, an influential weekly newspaper that often tackled touchy political and social subjects, as the authorities stepped up efforts to curb the spread of information and views the Communist Party considers unfavorable. The shutdown came the same day that Google announced that it would begin steering its Chinese users to www.google.cn, which will restrict access to content that China's media monitors consider problematic. President Hu Jintao has been tightening controls on expression as his leadership grapples with mounting internal challenges, including social unrest over corruption, pollution, unpaid wages and land seizures. Though the Chinese news media have never been permitted to criticize top leaders, television, newspapers and Web-based news sites, now mostly commercially driven, have often competed to break explosive news stories and discuss sensitive topics. But authorities under Mr. Hu have slowly but systematically purged editors who defy propaganda controls and have closed or reorganized publications that they believe have become too bold, making the news media more timid today than they were regarded as being in recent years. Bing Dian, or Freezing Point, published as a supplement to the influential newspaper China Youth Daily, was one of the few major news outlets that routinely printed in-depth investigative stories and broached delicate topics. The order to cease publication is effective immediately, the paper's longtime editor, Li Datong, said in a telephone interview. 'This is an intolerable step that has absolutely no basis in law and is in fact completely illegal,' he said. It cannot be appealed, he said. The authorities cited the publication of a lengthy study of Chinese middle-school textbooks as a reason for the order, Mr. Li said. The Jan. 11 article discussed what the author, Yuan Weishi, a Zhongshan University professor, referred to as official distortions of history to emphasize the humiliations China suffered at the hands of imperial powers. He criticized the textbooks' treatment of events like the Boxer Rebellion and the burning of the Summer Palace by British and French troops in 1860, which he said were partly the result of mistakes by then-flailing Qing Dynasty leaders. 'We are at a critical moment in our modernization and the key to the success of our development is understanding our system and mental model,' he wrote. 'I was shocked to see that few things had changed since the Cultural Revolution.' Mr. Li said the article, though provocative, was just an excuse for closing the paper. In August, a letter by Mr. Li led to a revolt at the China Youth Daily group after the paper's new party-appointed editor, Li Erliang, sought to impose a review system that graded the staff on factors including the reaction their work elicited from party leaders. The letter, which was posted on the Web, and the backlash resulted in the modification of the review system.

Subject: Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 17, 2006 at 05:33:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/science/17climate.html?ex=1297832400&en=dfaa1274873ace01&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 17, 2006 Glaciers Flow to Sea at a Faster Pace, Study Says By ANDREW C. REVKIN The amount of ice flowing into the sea from large glaciers in southern Greenland has almost doubled in the last 10 years, possibly requiring scientists to increase estimates of how much the world's oceans could rise under the influence of global warming, according to a study being published today in the journal Science. The study said there was evidence that the rise in flows would soon spread to glaciers farther north in Greenland, which is covered with an ancient ice sheet nearly two miles thick in places, and which holds enough water to raise global sea levels 20 feet or more should it all flow into the ocean. The study compared various satellite measurements of the creeping ice in 1996, 2000 and 2005, and was done by researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the University of Kansas. Glaciers are creeping rivers of ice that accelerate or slow and grow thicker or shrink depending on the interplay of a variety of conditions including rates of snowfall and temperature and whether water lubricates the interface between ice and the rock below. Sometimes the rate of movement in a particular glacier can change abruptly, but the speedup in Greenland has been detected simultaneously in many glaciers, said Eric J. Rignot, the study's author, who has extensively studied glacier flows at both ends of the earth. 'When you have this widespread behavior of the glaciers, where they all speed up, it's clearly a climate signal,' he said in an interview. 'The fact that this has been going on now over 10 years in southern Greenland suggests this is not a short-lived phenomenon.' Richard B. Alley, an expert on Greenland's ice at Pennsylvania State University who did not participate in the study, agreed that the speedup of glaciers in various places supported the idea that this was an important new trend and not some fluke. 'There's no way that the Jakobshavn Glacier on the west side can call up the Helheim on the other side of the ice sheet and say, 'Let's get going,' ' he said. A separate commentary published in Science by Julian A. Dowdeswell of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Britain noted that the rising flows could be a result of both the rapid deterioration of the miles of floating 'tongues' of ice where the glaciers enter the sea and an increase in water melting on the ice surface and percolating down through crevasses, where it can reduce friction with the underlying rock.

Subject: Beijing Censors Taken to Task From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:16:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/international/asia/15china.html?ex=1297659600&en=8faa0e59baded7b8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Beijing Censors Taken to Task in Party Circles By JOSEPH KAHN BEIJING — A dozen former Communist Party officials and senior scholars, including a onetime secretary to Mao, a party propaganda chief and the retired bosses of some of the country's most powerful newspapers, have denounced the recent closing of a prominent news journal, helping to fuel a growing backlash against censorship. A public letter issued by the prominent figures, dated Feb. 2 but circulated to journalists in Beijing on Tuesday, appeared to add momentum to a campaign by a few outspoken editors against micromanagement, personnel shuffles and an ever-expanding blacklist of banned topics imposed on China's newspapers, magazines, television stations and Web sites by the party's secretive Propaganda Department. The letter criticized the department's order on Jan. 24 to shut down Freezing Point, a popular journal of news and opinion, as an example of 'malignant management' and an 'abuse of power' that violates China's constitutional guarantee of free speech. The letter did not address Beijing's pressure on Web portals and search engines. That issue gained attention abroad after Microsoft and Google acknowledged helping the government filter information and Yahoo was accused of providing information from its e-mail accounts that was used to jail dissident writers. The issue will be the subject of Congressional hearings in Washington on Wednesday. In addition to shutting down Freezing Point, a weekly supplement to China Youth Daily, since late last year, officials responsible for managing the news media have replaced editors of three other publications that developed reputations for breaking news or exploring sensitive political and social issues. The interventions amounted to the most extensive exertion of press control since President Hu Jintao assumed power three years ago. But propaganda officials are also facing rare public challenges to their legal authority to take such actions, including a short strike and string of resignations at one newspaper and defiant open letters from two editors elsewhere who had been singled out for censure. Those protests have suggested that some people in China's increasingly market-driven media industry no longer fear the consequences of violating the party line. The authors of the letter predicted that the country would have difficulty countering the recent surge of social unrest in the countryside unless it allowed the news media more leeway to expose problems that lead to violent protests. 'At the turning point in our history from a totalitarian to a constitutional system, depriving the public of freedom of speech will bring disaster for our social and political transition and give rise to group confrontation and social unrest,' the letter said. 'Experience has proved that allowing a free flow of ideas can improve stability and alleviate social problems.' Some of the signers held high official posts during the 1980's, when the political environment in China was becoming more open. Although they have long since retired or been eased from power, a collective letter from respected elder statesmen can often help mobilize opinion within the ruling party. One of those people who signed the petition is Li Rui, Mao's secretary and biographer. Others include Hu Jiwei, a former editor of People's Daily, the party's leading official newspaper; Zhu Houze, who once ran the party's propaganda office; and Li Pu, a former deputy head of the New China News Agency, the main official press agency. Party officials and political experts say President Hu, who was groomed to take over China's top posts for more than a decade, has often attended closely to the opinions of the party's elder statesmen. Mr. Hu is widely thought to favor tighter media controls. Party officials said he referred approvingly to media management in Cuba and North Korea in a speech in late 2004. But he has also solicited support from more liberal elements. Last year Mr. Hu organized high-profile official ceremonies to mark the 90th anniversary of the birth of Hu Yaobang, the reform-oriented party leader who lost his posts in a power struggle and whose death in 1989 was the initial cause of the student-led democracy demonstrations that year. Some of the officials who signed the petition were close associates of Hu Yaobang. The reaction against the shutdown of Freezing Point was organized by its longtime editor, Li Datong, 53, a party member and senior official of the party-run China Youth Daily. Mr. Li broadcast news of the secret order on his personal blog moments after he received it and has since mobilized supporters to put pressure on the Propaganda Department to retract the decision. Under his stewardship, Freezing Point became one of the most consistently provocative journals of news and public opinion. It published investigative articles on sensitive topics like the party's version of historical events, nationalism and the party-run education system. Freezing Point ran opinion articles on politics in Taiwan and rural unrest in mainland China that caused a stir in media circles in recent months. The cause cited for closing Freezing Point was an opinion piece by a historian named Yuan Weishi. He argued that Chinese history textbooks tended to ignore mistakes and provocations by leaders of the Qing Dynasty that may have incited attacks by foreign powers in the late 19th century. Mr. Li often tussled with his bosses at China Youth Daily and officials at the Propaganda Department. But he has also cultivated support among the party elite. He often speaks supportively of President Hu and quotes extensively from the writings of Marx, who he says favored a robust free press. He has maintained that the Propaganda Department had overstepped its authority by ordering Freezing Point closed, and he filed a formal complaint to the party's disciplinary arm. 'The propaganda office is an illegal organization that has no power to shut down a publication,' Mr. Li said in an interview. 'Its power is informal, and it can only exercise it if people are afraid.' He added, 'I am not afraid.' Mr. Li scored an initial victory last week, when propaganda officials told China Youth Daily to draft a plan to revive Freezing Point, which had been formally closed for 'rectification,' Mr. Li and another editor at the newspaper said. Some media experts had predicted that the authorities would not allow Freezing Point to reopen, and the new order was treated as a signal that officials had misjudged the reaction to its closing. Shortly after the contretemps at China Youth Daily broke out, the former editor of another national publication attacked the bosses who had replaced him, saying they had exercised self-censorship in the face of pressure from propaganda officials. Chen Jieren, who lost his position last week as the editor of Public Interest Times, posted a letter online entitled 'Ridiculous Game, Despicable Intrigue.' The letter disputed his bosses' statement that he had been dismissed for 'bad management skills' and said he had a struggled constantly against senior officials for the right 'to report the truth with a conscience.' One recent issue of Public Interest Times mocked the poor quality of English translations on official government Web sites. In a separate incident earlier this year, a group of editors and reporters at the party-run Beijing News declined to report for work after the editor of the paper, known for breaking news stories on subjects the Propaganda Department has ruled off limits, was replaced. Many of the protesters have since resigned, reporters at the newspaper said. The resistance against censorship could signal a decisive shift in China's news media controls, already under assault from the proliferation of e-mail, text messaging, Web sites, blogs and other new forums for news and opinion that the authorities have struggled to bring under their supervision. Even most of the major party-run national publications in China, including China Youth Daily, no longer receive government subsidies and must depend mainly on income from circulation and advertising to survive. That means providing more news or features that people want to pay for, including exclusive stories and provocative views that go well beyond the propaganda fare carried by the New China News Agency or People's Daily. Few serious publications survive for long without subsidies if they do not have popular content, editors say. 'Every serious publication in China faces tough choices,' said Mr. Li of Freezing Point. 'You can publish stories people want to read and risk offending the censors. Or you can publish only stories that the party wants published and risk going out of business.'

Subject: France Télécom Plans to Cut 17,000 Jobs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:14:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/business/worldbusiness/15telecom.web.html?ex=1297659600&en=1b0cf5d3abaa0b68&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 France Télécom Plans to Cut 17,000 Jobs By JAMES KANTER PARIS - France Télécom, the struggling telecommunications giant, said Tuesday it would cut 17,000 jobs, or about 8 percent of its work force, as it predicted a revolutionary shift to Internet telephony by the end of this year. 'What has changed is the pace of evolution,' said Didier Lombard, the chief executive of France Télécom, in a Webcast conference with analysts. He forecast that 40 percent of French fixed-line retail service would move to VoIP, or voice over Internet protocol, in 2006. Saying the company was 'in crisis mode,' Mr. Lombard said he would cut 23,000 positions and create 6,000 new ones. 'We have to hire young people to renew the work force,' he said, hoping to shift the former state monopoly to a technology-oriented culture. Some 10,000 other jobs within the company would be reshuffled, he added. Mr. Lombard said he would streamline management and give workers incentives to leave voluntarily in order to avoid forced layoffs. Analysts said Mr. Lombard's predictions on the explosion of Web-based telephony reflected an industry coming to grips with the Internet's power in telecommunications. The popularity of services like Free and Skype, Internet-based phone services, will shrink profit margins and require phone companies to become ever more nimble. 'We seem to have reached a tipping point in terms of perception,' said James Golob, co-head of telecommunications research at Goldman Sachs in London. VoIP appears to be growing 'a lot faster, radically faster, than one would have expected six months ago,' he said. Others said Mr. Lombard's bold predictions on Web-based calling looked overblown, and might be aimed at convincing anxious workers and politicians that layoffs are crucial. Lars Godell, an analyst at Forrester Research, said only about 7 percent of French households with high-speed Internet connections were using Web-based calling services as of May 2005. According to Forrester Research, only 33 percent of French households have high-speed service, a far smaller number of homes than Mr. Lombard was referring to. Mr. Godell predicted fewer than 30 percent of those high-speed users would be making VoIP calls this year. Mr. Godell said he was puzzled by Mr. Lombard's predictions. 'It would be a revolution it were to be true,' he said. Mr. Lombard, who was named chief executive a year ago after Thierry Breton left to become finance minister, faces tough competition in the mobile market, particularly in Britain, and declining revenues in France and Poland from other services. To face the challenge, Mr. Lombard said, he would focus on high-speed Internet services for homes and cellphones, systems linking devices within customers' homes, and providing customers with more entertainment and information. Amid the anxiety, the company announced an 89 percent rise in net income to 5.71 million euros, but the figure was skewed by the acquisition of the rest of Equant, a data network company, and the sale of 45 percent of the Pages Jaunes Group, a telephone directory company, in 2004 and 2005. Sales rose 6.2 percent to 49.04 billion euros, while core earnings, or the gross operating margin, rose 2.8 percent to 18.42 billion euros. Shares of France Télécom closed up 3 percent at 19.16 euros. France Télécom is the second-largest telecommunications company in Europe after Deutsche Telekom, and the world's second-largest provider of high-speed DSL Internet services after China Telecom.

Subject: Attention Avid Shoppers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:13:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/travel/15tokyo.html?ex=1297659600&en=e5a5946894ca9bfe&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Attention Avid Shoppers: A High-End Complex Opens Its Doors By MATTHEW RUSLING It is 10:30 a.m. on Feb. 11, the much anticipated opening day of Omotesando Hills, a sprawling, upscale Tokyo shopping development spanning the Harajuku and Aoyama neighborhoods and running along the historic tree-lined Omotesando Avenue, the Japanese equivalent of the Champs-Élysées. The event has drawn everyone from tourists to the fashion-obsessed, and on this crisp, sunny Saturday morning, the line outside stretches down the long block. Many shoppers have been here for three or more hours to get a look at the object of so much recent media attention. 'We saw this place on the news and are really looking forward to going in,' says Nozomi Onodera, 20, in a long, fur-lined white coat with a Louis Vuitton bag at her side. Rikiya Tsukada, 20, adds, 'We have been planning to come here for a week.' At 10:45 a.m. the doors open, and about 100 shoppers are let in. Directed by an event staff in hooded blue jackets shouting through red megaphones, the line starts moving, excitement building fast. Soon the entrance is throbbing with visitors, their knee-length boots and high heels clacking on granite floors amid a chorus of excited voices. Young women in black blazers and skirts greet visitors at the door with 'irashaimasei' ('welcome'). Immediately visible to the right is the French chocolatier shop Jean-Paul Hévin, to the left Dolce & Gabbana and straight ahead, Yves Saint Laurent. The place is teaming with visitors snapping photos with cellphones and digital cameras, and with shoppers flocking to the first few stores within reach. Once the crowd flows out into the corridors, there is finally room to walk. The place is designed in an upward slope. The halls, if stretched out of their zigzag shape, are the same length as the avenue outside. New Age music and sounds of waterfalls and birds are piped in, and what seems to be the shadows of trees graze the walls. The complex has six floors above ground and six below, with the shops located from the third underground floor to the third floor above ground; there are 38 apartments spread out over five floors on the east and west wings, and the three lowest levels are for parking). A look down over the railing reveals a widening staircase that runs through the center of the sublevels. Omotesando Hills is a world away from urban Japan's bargain-hunting culture, where hundred-yen stores (the Japanese equivalent of the dollar store) seem to occupy every corner of the world's most expensive city. Most of the 93 shops, cafes and restaurants here reflect Japan's re-emerging interest in the high end as it perhaps starts to pull out of a decade-long economic slump. The construction of Omotesando Hills, designed by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando and built at a cost of $330 million, has been marked by controversy. It sits on the site of the former Dojunkai Apartments, which were built in 1927 as part of the city's reconstruction after the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923. They later became home to several small galleries and boutiques; the buildings' Bauhaus-influenced facades were a scarce constant in Tokyo's ever-changing landscape. Some longtime residents have expressed disappointment with the imposing structure. But to an observer with no attachment to the neighborhood and unacquainted with the finer points of architecture that the facade is said to have transgressed, the interior is a welcome departure from the overt showiness of the shopping districts in Shibuya or Roppongi. Thoughts of controversy quickly melt away as even this somewhat jaded patron gets caught up in a whirlwind of brand names. Shoppers can find everything from Jimmy Choo, based in London, to Lupo, from Barcelona. There is even a Mercedes showroom, as well as a wine-tasting restaurant. At the Italian boutique Patrizia Pepe, saleswomen are wearing sandals and sporting the store's spring line. At Dan Genten, a Japanese leather goods store, a man's leather backpack goes for around $900. Contrary to Western stereotypes of incessantly bowing, starch-shirted Japanese businessmen, most shoppers and store employees here are cool and chic, urbane and brand-savvy. Catering to women in their late 20's to early 30's range, the dimly lighted Self Frame feels like a trendy New York night club. 'We are casual with a twist of attitude,' says the store director, Yasuko Osyuya, herself in her early 30's with hair colored a light brown and dressed in one of the store's signature looks: jeans hanging from the hips and a sharp white jacket over a black tank top. Today was also the first day for Beyes, a shop aimed at men in the 30 to 40 range, which started as a Web site. 'Our target is fashionable men who like fashionable things,' says the owner, Yoshihiro Hidaka, 31. Indeed, one can find everything from $100 neckties to the latest Sony laptops. Imaii Colore is a spa that specializes in hair coloring, and offers everything from massages to facials. The store is owned by Hideo Imai, founder of the Japan Hair Color Association, who says he regularly sends his stylists to the United States and Europe to learn the latest in coloring technology. For most here today, the reaction is positive. 'This place is much better to walk around than Roppongi Hills,' says Nami Saito, 28, with a cheerful smile, who adds that she would like to come again. But some are less than enthralled by the new development. 'My first impression was that it was just like Europe — meaning it has very few bathrooms,' says Kayoko Sato, 60, with a laugh. 'And there are a lot of expensive things that only hillzoku can afford,' referring to people who live in Roppongi Hills, an apartment complex for the wealthy. Still, most are welcoming Omotesando Hills as the newest addition to Tokyo's long list of hot spots. And while the main draw this opening day seems not so much the shopping as the overall spectacle, Omotesando Hills is certainly poised to top the list of Tokyo's most avid — and well-heeled — shoppers.

Subject: Maybe You're Not What You Eat From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:09:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/health/14fat.html?ex=1297573200&en=52a3d312902ba78c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 Maybe You're Not What You Eat By GINA KOLATA In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet. The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has exerted a strong pull throughout history. And its appeal continues to this day, medical historians and researchers say. 'It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health,' says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University. 'It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself,' he said. 'Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. If not, you get healthy.' That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all. The report, from a huge federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health. The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of the two cancers or heart disease. But there were limitations to the findings: the women assigned to the low-fat diet, despite extensive and expensive counseling, never reached their goal of eating 20 percent fat in the first year —only 31 percent of them got their dietary fat that low. And the study did not examine the effects of different types of fat — a fact that critics say is a weakness at a time when doctors are advising heart patients to reduce saturated fat in the diet, not overall fats. The researchers also found a slight suggestion that low fat might make a difference in breast cancer but the results were not statistically significant, meaning they may have occurred by chance. Still the study's results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts. For example, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French 19th-century food writer, insisted that the secret to good health was to avoid carbohydrates. Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer, also knew the response his advice would provoke. ' 'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'oh Heavens above!' he wrote in his 1825 book, 'The Physiology of Taste.' 'But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes and those cookies, and a hundred things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs!' Brillat-Savarin continued, 'He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant? ' 'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease.' The Frenchman's recipe for good health was only one of many to come. A decade later, the Rev. Sylvester Graham exhorted Americans to eat simple foods like grains and vegetables and to drink water. Beef and pork, salt and pepper, spices, tea and coffee, alcohol, he advised, all lead to gluttony. Bread should be unleavened, and made with bran to avoid the problem of yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol, he continued. It is also important, he said, to seek out fresh organic fruits and vegetables, grown in soil without fertilizers. The reward for living right, Graham promised, would be perfect health. A few decades later came Horace Fletcher, a wealthy American businessman who invented his diet in 1889. He was 40 and in despair: he was fat, his health was failing, he was always tired and he had indigestion. He felt, he said, like 'a thing fit but to be thrown on the scrap-heap.' But Fletcher found a method that, he wrote, saved his life: eat only when you are hungry; eat only those foods that your appetite is craving; stop when you are no longer hungry and, the dictum for which he was most famous, chew every morsel of food until there is no more taste to be extracted from it. Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator, and his followers recited and followed his instructions to chew their food 100 times a minute. Liquids, too, had to be chewed, he insisted. He promised that 'Fletcherizing,' as it became known, would turn 'a pitiable glutton into an intelligent epicurean.' Along with the endless chewing, Fletcher and his supporters also advocated a low-protein diet as a means to health and well-being. But by 1919, when Fletcher, 68, died of a heart attack, his diet plan was on its way out, supplanted by the next new thing: counting calories. Its champions were two Yale professors, Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, who wrote the best-selling book 'How to Live.' 'Constant vigilance is necessary, yet it is worthwhile when one considers the inconvenience as well as the menace of obesity,' Fisher and Fisk advised their readers. More recently, of course, the preferred diet, at least for cancer prevention, has been to eat foods low in fat. And that was what led to the Women's Health Initiative, a study financed by the National Institutes of Health comparing low fat to regular diets. Eight years later, the women who reduced dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease as those whose diets were unchanged. They also weighed about the same and had no difference in diabetes rates, or in levels of insulin or blood sugar. It made sense to try the low-fat diet for cancer prevention, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, the director of the Women's Health Initiative. 'In the mid- to late 1980's, there was a body of literature that was suggestive that diet might impact the incidence of breast cancer and colorectal cancer,' Dr. Nabel said. For example, studies found that women acquired a higher risk of those cancers if they moved to the United States from countries where incidence of the cancers was low and where diets were low in fat. And there were animal studies indicating that a high-fat diet could lead to more mammary cancer. But intriguing as those observations were, there was no direct, rigorous evidence that a low-fat diet was protective. The Women's Health Initiative study would be the first rigorous test to see if it was. The study investigators decided to follow heart disease rates, as well. 'Think of it,' said Dr. Joan McGowan, an osteoporosis expert who is also a project officer for the Women's Health Initiative. 'Here was a hypothesis that just a better diet could prevent breast cancer. How attractive was that?' In the meantime, the notion that fat was bad and that low-fat diets could protect against disease took hold, with scientists promoting it and much of the public believing it. And a low-fat food industry grew apace. In 2005, according to the NPD Group, which tracks food trends, 75 percent of Americans said they substituted a low-fat or no-fat food for a higher-fat one once a week or more. So last week, when the study's results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that the low-fat diets had no effect, the study investigators braced themselves for attacks. Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, said the researchers knew that some critics would say the women did not reduce the fat in their diets nearly enough. Perhaps a lower-fat diet would have offered some protection against cancer, Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, 'what we achieved is probably what was achievable.' Other critics said that the study made a mistake in even aiming for 20 percent of calories as fat. Dietary fat should be even lower, they said, as low as 10 percent. But Dr. Rossouw said this was unrealistic, because try as they might, people are not able to change their eating habits that much. 'You can't do that,' he said. 'Forget it. It's impossible.' Critics now are telling the investigators that the study was useless because it focused on total fat in the diet, rather than on saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels. If the women had focused instead on getting rid of fats like butter, had substituted fats like olive oil and had eaten more fruits and grains, then the study might have shown that the proper diet reduces heart disease risk, they claim. 'Lifestyle goes beyond a modest difference in saturated fat,' said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, president of the American Heart Association. Dr. Rossouw responded, 'They're telling us that we chose the wrong kind of fat and that we just didn't know.' But, he said: 'We're not stupid. We knew all that stuff.' The investigators, he said, had long debates about whether to ask the women to reduce total fat or just saturated fat. In the end, they decided to go with total fat because the study was primarily a cancer study and the cancer data were for total fat. If the women had reduced just their saturated fat, their dietary fat content would probably have been even higher, fueling the critics. And, he said, some animal data indicate that polyunsaturated fat may even increase cancer risk. 'We looked at all possible scenarios,' Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, given the study's disappointing findings, he was not surprised by the critics' responses. Not everyone is attacking the study. Many scientists applaud its findings and say it is about time that some cherished dietary notions are put to a rigorous test. And some nonscientists are shocked by the reactions of the study's critics. 'Whatever is happening to evidence-based treatment?' Dr. Arthur Yeager, a retired dentist in Edison, N.J., wrote in an e-mail message. 'When the facts contravene conventional wisdom, go with the anecdotes?' The problem, some medical scientists said, is that many people — researchers included — get so wedded to their beliefs about diet and disease that they will not accept rigorous evidence that contradicts it. 'Now it's almost a political sort of thing,' said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University. 'We're all supposed to be lean and eat certain things.' And so the notion of a healthful diet, he said, has become more than just a question for scientific inquiry. 'It is woven into cultural notions of ourselves and our behavior,' he said. 'This is the burden you get going into a discussion, and this is why we get so shocked by this evidence.' The truth, said Dr. David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that while the Western diet and lifestyle are clearly important risk factors for chronic disease, tweaking diet in one way or another — a bit less fat or a few more vegetables — may not, based on studies like the Women's Health Initiative, have major effects on health. 'We should limit strong advice to where randomized trials have proven a benefit of lifestyle modification,' Dr. Altshuler wrote in an e-mail message. Still, he said, he understands the appeal of dietary prescriptions. The promise of achieving better health through diet can be so alluring that even scientists and statisticians who know all about clinical trial data say they sometimes find themselves suspending disbelief when it comes to diet and disease. 'I fall for it, too,' says Brad Efron, a Stanford statistician. 'I really don't believe in the low-fat thing, but I find myself doing it anyway.'

Subject: 'Grease' Ignites a Culture War From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:07:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/national/11fulton.html?ex=1297314000&en=69f393f73f12ba55&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 11, 2006 In Small Town, 'Grease' Ignites a Culture War By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO FULTON, Mo. — When Wendy DeVore, the drama teacher at Fulton High here, staged the musical 'Grease,' about high school students in the 1950's, she carefully changed the script to avoid causing offense in this small town. She softened the language, substituting slang for profanity in places. Instead of smoking 'weed,' the teenagers duck out for a cigarette. She rated the production PG-13, advising parents it was not suitable for small children. But a month after the performances in November, three letters arrived on the desk of Mark Enderle, Fulton's superintendent of schools. Although the letters did not say so, the three writers were members of a small group linked by e-mail, all members of the same congregation, Callaway Christian Church. Each criticized the show, complaining that scenes of drinking, smoking and a couple kissing went too far, and glorified conduct that the community tries to discourage. One letter, from someone who had not seen the show but only heard about it, criticized 'immoral behavior veiled behind the excuse of acting out a play.' Dr. Enderle watched a video of the play, ultimately agreeing that 'Grease' was unsuitable for the high school, despite his having approved it beforehand, without looking at the script. Hoping to avoid similar complaints in the future, he decided to ban the scheduled spring play, 'The Crucible' by Arthur Miller. 'That was me in my worst Joe McCarthy moment, to some,' Dr. Enderle said. He called 'The Crucible' 'a fine play,' but said he dropped it to keep the school from being 'mired in controversy' all spring. To many, the term 'culture war' evokes national battles over new frontiers in taste and decency, over violence in video games, or profanity in music or on television. But such battles are also fought in small corners of the country like Fulton, a conservative town of about 10,000, where it can take only a few objections about library books or high school plays to shift quietly the cultural borderlines of an entire community. The complaints here, which were never debated in a public forum, have spread a sense of uncertainty about the shifting terrain as parents, teachers and students have struggled to understand what happened. Among teenagers who were once thrilled to have worked on the production, 'Grease' became 'the play they'd rather not talk about,' said Teri Arms, their principal, who had also approved the play before it was presented. 'Grease' and 'The Crucible' are hardly unfamiliar; they are standard fare on the high school drama circuit, the second-most-frequently-performed musical and drama on school stages, according to the Educational Theater Association, a nonprofit group. The most performed now are 'Seussical' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' But challenges to longstanding literary or artistic works are not unusual, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the American Library Association's office of intellectual freedom. Complaints generally are growing; in 2004, the last year for which figures are available, 547 books came under fire, an increase of nearly 20 percent over 2003, when 458 books were challenged. 'That a literary work is a classic does not protect it from being challenged, or even removed from a particular community,' Ms. Caldwell-Stone said. Fulton, about 90 miles west of St. Louis, is best known as the home of Westminster College, where Winston Churchill gave his Iron Curtain speech in 1946. Presidents since Harry S. Truman have spoken in Fulton, lending the town a more cosmopolitan image. Joseph Potter, an assistant professor of performing arts at William Woods University here, has staged dozens of shows for the community, including 'Grease,' and said he had never received a complaint. But politically and socially, Mr. Potter said, the town's core is conservative. The three complaints about 'Grease' reached Dr. Enderle within the same week. Mark Miller, a 26-year-old graduate student, said he was moved to complain after getting an e-mail message about the show from Terra Guittar, a member of his church. Her description of the pajama party scene offended him, he wrote, adding that one character should have worn a more modest nightgown. Mr. Miller did not see the play. 'It makes sense that you're not going to offend anyone by being on the conservative side, especially when you're dealing with students, who don't have the same power as a principal or a theater director,' he said. A tape of the dress rehearsal showed that while most of the girls in the scene wore pajamas or a granny gown, Rizzo, the play's bad girl, wore just a pajama top. After the other girls fell asleep, Rizzo slipped her jeans on to sneak out for a date. Ms. Guittar was so outraged by the drinking and kissing onstage that she walked out on the performance. She said she was not trying to inhibit artistic creativity. 'It was strictly a moral issue,' she said. 'They're under 18. They're not in Hollywood.' But other parents were happy with the play. Mimi Curtis, whose son John played the lead, said the principal and drama teacher went out of their way to respect parents' wishes, changing the script in response to her own objections to profanity. Ms. Curtis, who ran a concession stand during the play, saw all four performances. 'I didn't view it as raunchy,' she said, adding that children who watch television are 'hearing worse.' Dr. Enderle said he did not base his decision to cancel 'The Crucible,' which was first reported by The Fulton Sun, a daily, just on the three complaints and the video. He also asked 10 people he knew whether the play crossed a line. All but one, he recalled, said yes. 'To me, it's entirely a preventative maintenance issue,' Dr. Enderle explained. 'I can't do anything about what's already happened, but do I want to spend the spring saying, 'Yeah, we crossed the line again'?' Nevertheless, the superintendent said he was 'not 100 percent comfortable' with having canceled 'The Crucible.' The absence of public debate meant that students heard of the cancellation as a fait accompli from their principal, Ms. Arms, and Ms. DeVore, the drama teacher. Others learned 'The Crucible' was off limits through an internal school district newsletter. In it, Dr. Enderle said he dropped the play after seeing this summary on the Web: '17th century Salem woman accuses an ex-lover's wife of witchery in an adaptation of the Arthur Miller play.' Mr. Miller wrote 'The Crucible' in the 1950's, in response to the witch hunt of his own day, when Congress held hearings to purge Hollywood of suspected Communists, pressuring witnesses to expose others to prove their innocence. The affair is not acted out in the play, which focuses on how hysteria and fear devoured Salem, despite the lack of evidence. Dr. Enderle said Fulton High's students had largely accepted his decision and moved on. They are now rehearsing 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' as their spring drama. But in interviews here, students, who had already begun practicing for auditions of 'The Crucible,' expressed frustration and resignation, along with an overriding sense that there was no use fighting City Hall. 'It's over,' said Emily Swenson, 15, after auditioning for 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.' 'We can't do anything about it. We just have to obey.' Both the students and Ms. DeVore seemed unsure of why 'The Crucible,' which students study in 11th grade, was unacceptable. Jarryd Lapp, a junior who was a light technician on 'Grease,' said he was disappointed that 'The Crucible' was canceled. But he had a theory. 'The show itself is graphic,' he said. 'People get hung; there's death in it. It's not appropriate.' Ms. DeVore believes it was canceled because it portrays the Salem witch trials, 'a time in history that makes Christians look bad.' 'In a Bible Belt community,' she added, 'it makes people nervous.' The teacher and her students are now ruling out future productions they once considered for their entertainment value alone, like 'Little Shop of Horrors,' a musical that features a cannibalistic plant, which they had discussed doing next fall. Torii Davis, a junior, said that in her psychology class earlier that day, most students predicted that 'Little Shop of Horrors' would never pass the test. 'Audrey works in a flower shop,' Ms. Davis said. 'She has a boyfriend who beats her. That could be controversial.' Ms. DeVore went down a list of the most commonly performed musicals and dramas on high school stages, and ticked off the potentially offensive aspects. ' 'Bye Bye Birdie' has smoking and drinking. 'Oklahoma,' there's a scene where she's almost raped. 'Diary of Anne Frank,' would you take a 6-year-old?' the drama teacher asked. 'How am I supposed to know what's appropriate when I don't have any written guidelines, and it seems that what was appropriate yesterday isn't appropriate today?' Ms. DeVore asked. The teacher said she had been warned that because of the controversy, the school board might not renew her contract for next year. For the moment, Dr. Enderle acknowledged, the controversy has shrunk the boundaries of what is acceptable for the community. He added that 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' was 'not a totally vanilla play.' But asked if the high school might put on another Shakespeare classic about young people in love, 'Romeo and Juliet,' he hesitated. 'Given the historical context of the play,' the superintendent said, 'it would be difficult to say that's something we would not perform.'

Subject: School, Sleepovers, Red Carpet Dreams From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:02:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/fashion/sundaystyles/12ADDISON.html?ex=1297400400&en=0bd87ba26c663d75&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 School, Sleepovers, Red Carpet Dreams By JESSICA PRESSLER WHEN Addison Timlin was 8 years old, she persuaded her parents to take her to Manhattan from their home in Quakertown, Pa., for an audition for 'Annie.' Her parents did their best to make it a low-pressure event. 'They were like, 'Oh, we'll go to New York, we'll go shopping, we'll go see the Rockettes, and also you can do your audition,' ' said Addison, now 14, on a recent afternoon. 'But I was very serious about it. I was three feet tall, and I was, like, focused.' She got the part, and after a couple of years when she was in 'like literally every professional production of 'Annie' on the planet,' got an agent and a role in the Broadway production of 'Gypsy,' her mother decided to move with her four children to Manhattan so her youngest daughter could pursue her career. 'At that point, it was, like, O.K., this actually might work out,' said Jayne Timlin, who was by then divorced from Addison's father. The family lived off Addison's $70,000 Broadway salary until Jayne Timlin found a job as an assistant at a mortgage firm. Ms. Timlin is not, Addison said, 'a classic stage mom.' In fact she still seems slightly befuddled by the experience. 'There was no stopping her,' Ms. Timlin said, looking at Addison. Addison, whose small size (five feet) belies her large ambition, smiled at that. But the road has been bumpy. Her brother and sisters had a difficult time adjusting to the move. 'They would get, like, 'It's all your fault we're here and away from our friends and our dad,' ' she said. 'But now they love New York.' As Addison's 19-year-old sister, Breana, put it, 'We all know 'Tomorrow' by heart.' Shuttling among the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan, acting classes, auditions and Lamaze classes, which she attends with her pregnant 21-year-old sister, Keely, Addison teeters between the relatively normal life of a teenager in New York City and the obligations and preoccupations of the almost famous. Her first feature film, 'Derailed,' in which she played Clive Owen's diabetic daughter, opened nationwide in December. Though in the movie she wore pigtails and pancake makeup to look younger, at the premiere she wore a strapless dress on loan from Betsey Johnson and had her hair and makeup professionally styled. At one point, she said, Jennifer Aniston, the film's star, wrapped an arm around her and, like a celebrity fairy godmother, told Addison she thought she would go very far, and to 'stay grounded.' 'She was sooo nice,' Addison said. 'The next day in the paper there was a gossip item that said, 'Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen were out partying together' or something, and it had a picture of them holding hands. But it was a still from the movie. I was, like: 'Hello! They're acting!' ' As it is for most teenagers, fame is a fantasy. But for Addison it's also a possibility, and the current crop of celebrities are like the wise elders of the tribe. Even celebrity's casualties provide lessons. 'I read with her for 'Gypsy,' ' she said, watching Melanie Griffith onstage during the Golden Globes awards show. 'She was so weird.' On weekends Addison, who has highlights in her long brown hair and wears an armload of bangles, often has sleepovers with her friends Stephanie Branco, 15 (known as Feeni), and Julianna Rose Mauriello, 14. 'Every time Feeni sleeps over my house,' Addison said, 'we make this instant Thai food, and we eat that with chocolate milk. And then we make the comfiest bed, and then we just talk, like, about our future. And it's like, 'Oh, my God, our future.' ' 'That's, like, every weekend,' confirmed Stephanie one afternoon as she and Addison drank lattes at Starbucks. Stephanie is also a student at the Professional Performing Arts School but doesn't plan to work until she gets older. Addison calls her the 'Colombian Salma Hayek.' 'When I sleep at your house, we do the same thing,' Julianna said to Addison, sipping her eggnog latte. 'But we eat waffles.' Addison's world is peopled with working actors who, like her, straddle the line between tween and teenager, who aren't quite stars but aspire to a place in the firmament. Fifteen-year-old Andrea Bowen, who plays Teri Hatcher's daughter on 'Desperate Housewives,' is a good friend. Aleisha Allen, 14, who had a small part in 'School of Rock' and starred with Ice Cube in 'Are We There Yet?' is a classmate. Like Addison, they are in a sort of incubation period, waiting for the break that may or may not come, waiting to get older so that they can audition for bigger, juicier roles. A benefit Addison attended at the DKNY store on Madison Avenue in December was a who's who of the almost famous. 'There's the girl who played the mini Jennifer Lopez in 'Jersey Girl,' she is sooo cute,' Addison said. Bubbly and friendly, Addison is kind of a socialite, although in this world there is less air-kissing and more jumping up and down. 'Wouldn't it be so cool if Dakota Fanning walked in right now?' she whispered, before making a beeline for Liam Aiken, the broody 16-year-old star of the Lemony Snicket movie and the most famous person in the room. (Their relationship would later be documented on the Almost Famous version of the tabloids: the Internet Movie Database message boards. 'I hear Liam has a crush on Addison,' read a post). Hallie Kate Eisenberg, the ringleted pipsqueak of the Pepsi commercials and the sister of Jesse Eisenberg, who starred in 'The Squid and the Whale,' was among the semi-familiar faces. She will appear in 'How to Eat Fried Worms' in the spring, though she has other plans for her future. 'I really enjoy performing,' she said, 'but I want to be a doctor.' 'I've met so many kids like that,' Addison said after the event, and after the DKNY representative pressed a card into her hand telling her to call if she ever needed an outfit for an appearance. 'I feel like a lot of my friends who work now don't want to do it when they're older. Some of them are, like, 'This is fun now, but when I grow up I want to be a mom in New Jersey.' And I'm, like, 'That's weird.' For me, I know this is what I want to do. I've always felt like this is what I've wanted to do. Forever.' But it is a heady time for teenage actresses. On the one hand there are more working actors between 13 and 19 than ever before, and the most prominent — those like Lindsay Lohan, Hilary Duff and the Olsen twins — are bankable enough to open their own films. On the other hand being under-age has done nothing to shelter them from the public's often critical gaze. Julianna, who plays a 9-year-old girl in 'LazyTown,' a children's show on Nick Jr., has already seen her level of 'hotness' debated on the Internet Movie Database message boards. 'She's NOT HOT,' read one post. AT 4-foot-9 and less than 100 pounds, Julianna said the attention had freaked her out at first, but she had come to realize it was 'just the trade-off.' With sweet but steely resolve, she said, 'If you can't take it, then you aren't fit for being in show business.' Addison's parents have their own concerns. 'Addison looked about 20 last night,' her father, R. J. Timlin, a real estate agent in Bucks County, Pa., said over the phone the day after the premiere of 'Derailed.' Ms. Timlin said, 'I'm a little worried she'll grow up too fast.' Addison agrees. 'You do grow up fast in the business,' she said. 'When I left school to do 'Annie,' I was 9, and I came back like, 35. You spend a lot of time with adults.' She confided that a former boyfriend, Connor Paolo, had become disturbingly grown-up after playing the young Colin Farrell in 'Alexander.' 'He got sort of strangely serious and like, old,' she said. 'He would be, like, 'We should go out to dinner and talk about this.' I was, like: 'We're 14. Who our age goes out to dinner?' ' Young actors are famously, and necessarily, precocious. 'They talk like adults; it's a little alarming,' said Shirley Halperin, the entertainment editor of Teen People. 'I couldn't even sit down to dinner when I was that age.' But it is, after all, their preternatural maturity that makes them able to, well, focus. 'I have it all mapped out,' Addison said. 'I don't want to be a teeny-bopper type of actress. I don't want to do kids' movies, like 'Spy Kids' and 'Sleepover' and 'Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen.' I would kill myself.' Addison does not yet have a publicist to shush her when she starts acting like a real teenager, but if the tabloid generation has taught her and her peers anything, it's how to position themselves in the market. They've seen that the right — or wrong — choices, in work and in life, can define a career. 'We talk about it a lot,' Ms. Timlin said. 'I say, like, 'Who do you want to be?' And she says, 'I want to be like Scarlett Johansson, because she's not out doing coke in the tabloids.' ' Addison said: 'I really believe that Lindsay Lohan, who I think is a really good actress, is in the position she is in because she is an idol to teenage girls. It's just too much pressure.' But the reality is, Addison would not choose death before Disney. During 'pilot season,' which lasts until the end of April, she will audition for a number of shows that cater to that audience. She would ('Of course!') take a role on a teen TV show or movie. She recently auditioned for the remake of 'Bridge to Terabithia,' and for 'My Friend Flicka.' Though Addison estimates she has been on hundreds of auditions and at this point feels like a hardened soul, that particular experience 'was sooo hard,' she said. 'I was so excited, and I went in and it went really well and then they ended up casting Alison Lohman, who is, like, 25. I was so disappointed. But when you lose it to a 25-year-old you can understand. They don't have to give you the tutor and the chaperone.' So for now she's planning on biding her time, taking acting classes, waiting for her sister's baby, and updating her MySpace.com profile to include pictures of people like 'my best friend' Jon Gordon, the president for production of Universal. In other words, staying grounded. 'I don't want to blow up just yet,' she said, 'although I sort of do.' Because fame, with all of its drawbacks, is still the holy grail. Back at Starbucks, as the caffeine starts to kick in, Addison and Stephanie acted out their red carpet dreams. 'O.K., I'm getting out of my limo,' Stephanie said. 'And I see Addison over on the red carpet being interviewed. And we look at each other and make eye contact, and because we've been away working on movies, on location, we haven't seen each other in such a long time. And so we run.' They shuffled toward each other. 'We're wearing really tight, tight dresses,' Addison explained. 'Oh, my god! I love you in your movie!' 'Oh, my god! I love you in your movie!' On the real-life red carpet, back at the premiere for 'Derailed,' one of the hordes of reporters waiting for Ms. Aniston to arrive asked Addison how she would handle being chased, the way her famous forebears are pursued through the streets by paparazzi. The younger actress smiled. 'Run, I guess.'

Subject: Tax Cheating Has Gone Up From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:01:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15tax.html?ex=1297659600&en=2fc2c05f8aace5f8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Tax Cheating Has Gone Up, Two Federal Studies Find By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON Historically, when income tax rates fall, so does tax cheating. But that is not what happened after President Bush started cutting taxes five years ago. A new report by the Commerce Department found that Americans failed to report more than a trillion dollars in income on their 2003 tax returns. That was a 37 percent increase in unreported income from 2000. In a separate report, the Internal Revenue Service looked at both unreported income and improper deductions and concluded that Americans shortchanged the government by $345 billion in 2001 — an amount almost equal to the projected federal budget deficit for 2007. The report, released yesterday by the I.R.S. commissioner, Mark W. Everson, was the agency's first estimate in 15 years of the gap between what Americans owed in taxes and what they paid. The I.R.S. report concluded that proprietors of small businesses, investors and farmers cheated the most. Workers who had 99 percent of their wages reported to the government and taxes withheld from their paychecks were the least likely to cheat. Mr. Everson acknowledged that the estimate is probably low because the I.R.S. looked only at individuals and small unincorporated businesses. It has not revised its estimates of tax cheating by corporations, large estates and by firms that do not hire their workers directly but instead contract with an employee leasing firm. The ability of the I.R.S. to enforce the tax laws has steadily eroded in the last 17 years as its ranks of auditors have been trimmed by about a third, the tax code has become more complex and new laws have been enacted to protect taxpayer rights. In his proposed budget for 2007, Mr. Bush laid out a five-point plan to reduce the underpayment of taxes by $350 million a year, an amount equal to a tenth of a penny per dollar of the unpaid taxes. A more serious effort to reduce the tax gap appears unlikely, two senators said yesterday. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee — which has held hearings on the issues of unpaid taxes, abusive tax shelters and criminal tax evasion — said it would take more than what Mr. Bush had proposed to make a meaningful dent. 'It's easy for politicians to stand on the soap box and criticize the tax gap,' Senator Grassley said, 'but I find it's pretty lonely when I need people to join me and get their hands dirty and try to solve these problems.' Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, the committee's ranking minority member, dismissed the Bush proposal as weak. 'The administration's budget plans won't take any real bite out of this unacceptable tax gap — it just nibbles at this crisis while the deficit grows,' Senator Baucus said. 'It's time for a comprehensive plan to go after scofflaws and tax cheats big and small, who are contributing to the deficit by not contributing their fair share,' he said. The Senate Budget Committee will hold a hearing today on reducing the gap between taxes owed and taxes paid. The I.R.S. estimate was based on a detailed study of 46,000 individual income tax returns. Mr. Everson said that about 10 million people did not file returns, costing the government about $27 billion in revenue. Another 10 million had incomes so modest that they were not required to file. About 130 million returns were filed. Cheating on business income was 'a problem 50 times larger' than cheating by wage earners, Mr. Everson said. The biggest single revenue loss came from proprietors of unincorporated businesses, who typically file a Schedule C with their tax return, who shorted the government an estimated $68 billion in 2001. Cheating by partnerships, most of whose members are wealthy professionals or investors, was put at $22 billion, while cheating by landlords and those collecting royalties was estimated at $13 billion. In percentage terms, farmers cheated the most, the I.R.S. said, failing to pay the government $6 billion, or 72 percent of the taxes they should have.

Subject: Livedoor Founder Is Charged From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:57:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/business/worldbusiness/14livedoor.html?ex=1297573200&en=8ca94e18c2371e9c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 Livedoor Founder Is Charged With Securities Violations By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO — Takafumi Horie, the founder of an Internet company whose brash tactics challenged Japan's business establishment, was charged Monday with violating securities law by spreading false information to inflate a subsidiary's stock price. The formal filing of charges by Tokyo prosecutors marked the latest chapter in the downfall of Mr. Horie, 33, who seemed to personify the bare-knuckles, individualistic brand of capitalism that many here say Japan needs. In a statement on Monday, Tokyo prosecutors said they had charged Mr. Horie and three other former executives of his company, Livedoor, with inflating the sales and profit figures of a subsidiary, Livedoor Marketing, to push up its stock price. Prosecutors also said that Mr. Horie and the others had issued press releases containing false information about the subsidiary, which was called ValueClick Japan until Livedoor took it over two years ago. If found guilty, Mr. Horie faces up to five years in prison or a fine of five million yen ($42,300). 'The key to Livedoor's rapid growth was actually criminal activities that damaged the fairness of securities trading,' the statement said. 'This case is just the tip of the iceberg,' it continued. 'We will continue a thorough investigation to bring everything to light.' Though prosecutors did not elaborate Monday, the major Japanese news media, who are routinely briefed by prosecutors, said the authorities were preparing new charges against Mr. Horie for reportedly inflating the profits of the parent company, Livedoor, as well. Mr. Horie resigned as chief executive of Livedoor after his arrest on Jan. 23. Since then he has been in jail, insisting, during interrogations running as long as eight hours a day, that he was unaware of any wrongdoing and vowing to have his say in court, according to Japanese news media reports. He reportedly spends his free time in a tiny cell reading an encyclopedia. Since Tokyo prosecutors raided Livedoor's luxurious central Tokyo offices last month, Mr. Horie's business empire has started coming apart at the seams. Livedoor's share price has plunged 90 percent, to 61 yen (52 cents), since then, wiping out more than $5 billion in market value. Business partners have canceled alliances, employees have begun jumping ship and, according to media reports, Mr. Horie's girlfriend, a television star, has canceled plans to become engaged. The T-shirt-clad entrepreneur built the company over the last decade, turning a college project into one of Japan's most popular Internet portals and acquiring dozens of smaller Internet companies. Along the way, though, he stepped on many influential toes, especially last year, when he tried a hostile takeover of a powerful media company, Fuji Television. After the raid, some outraged followers posted messages on Mr. Horie's blog saying he was singled out for political reasons. Others expressed bitter disappointment for believing in a man now accused of criminal misdeeds.

Subject: The Kiss of Life From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:56:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/opinion/14foer.html?ex=1297573200&en=44bad46ce1783713&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 The Kiss of Life By JOSHUA FOER Washington SINCE it's Valentine's Day, let's dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire? When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover. The mob kingpin gives the kiss of death, Catholics give the 'kiss of peace,' Jews kiss the Torah, nervous flyers kiss the ground, and the enraged sometimes demand that a kiss be applied to their hindquarters. Judas kissed Jesus, Madonna kissed Britney, a gambler kisses the dice for luck. Someone once even kissed a car for 54 hours straight. Taxonomists of the kiss have long labored to make sense of its many meanings. The Romans distinguished among the friendly oscula, the loving basia and the passionate suavia. The 17th-century polymath Martin von Kempe wrote a thousand-page encyclopedia of kissing that recognized 20 different varieties, including 'the kiss bestowed by superiors on inferiors' and 'the hypocritical kiss.' The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss 'making up for kisses that have been omitted.' (The Germans are also said to have coined the inexplicable phrase 'A kiss without a beard is like an egg without salt.') How did a single act become a medium for so many messages? There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe. Scientists have found evidence for both hypotheses. Other species engage in behavior that looks an awful lot like the smooch (though without its erotic overtones), which implies that kissing might be just as animalistic an impulse as it sometimes feels. Snails caress each other with their antennae, birds touch beaks, and many mammals lick each other's snouts. Chimpanzees even give platonic pecks on the lips. But only humans and our lascivious primate cousins the bonobos engage in full-fledged tongue-on-tongue tonsil-hockey. Even though all of this might suggest that kissing is in our genes, not all human cultures do it. Charles Darwin was one of the first to point this out. In his book 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,' he noted that kissing 'is replaced in various parts of the world by the rubbing of noses.' Early explorers of the Arctic dubbed this the Eskimo kiss. (Actually, it turns out the Inuit were not merely rubbing noses, they were smelling each other's cheeks). All across Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, we find cultures that didn't know about mouth kissing until their first contact with European explorers. And the attraction was not always immediately apparent. Most considered the act of exchanging saliva revolting. Among the Lapps of northern Finland, both sexes would bathe together in a state of complete nudity, but kissing was regarded as beyond the pale. To this day, public kissing is still seen as indecent in many parts of the world. In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers' Daily advised its readers that 'the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism.' If kissing is not universal, then someone must have invented it. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist at Texas A&M, has traced the first recorded kiss back to India, somewhere around 1500 B.C., when early Vedic scriptures start to mention people 'sniffing' with their mouths, and later texts describe lovers 'setting mouth to mouth.' From there, he hypothesizes, the kiss spread westward when Alexander the Great conquered the Punjab in 326 B.C. The Romans were inveterate kissers, and along with Latin, the kiss became one of their chief exports. Not long after, early Christians invented the notion of the ritualistic 'holy kiss' and incorporated it into the Eucharist ceremony. According to some cultural historians, it is only within the last 800 years, with the advent of effective dentistry and the triumph over halitosis, that the lips were freed to become an erogenous zone. For Freud, kissing was a subconscious return to suckling at the mother's breast. Other commentators have noted that the lips bear a striking resemblance to the labia, and that women across the world go to great lengths to make their lips look bigger and redder than they really are to simulate the appearance of sexual arousal, like animals in heat. A few anthropologists have suggested that mouth kissing is a 'relic gesture,' with evolutionary origins in the mouth-to-mouth feeding that occurred between mother and baby in an age before Gerber and still takes place in a few parts of the world today. It can hardly be a coincidence, they note, that in several languages the word for kissing is synonymous with pre-mastication, or that 'sweet' is the epithet most commonly applied to kisses. But kissing may be more closely linked to our sense of smell than taste. Almost everyone has a distinct scent that is all one's own. Some people can even recognize their relatives in a dark room simply by their body odor (some relatives more than others). Kissing could have begun as a way of sniffing out who's who. From a whiff to a kiss was just a short trip across the face. Whatever its origins, kissing seems to be advantageous. A study conducted during the 1980's found that men who kiss their wives before leaving for work live longer, get into fewer car accidents, and have a higher income than married men who don't. So put down this newspaper and pucker up. It does a body good.

Subject: Sympathetic Primate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:55:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/science/14obox.html February 14, 2006 There's Nothing Like a Sympathetic Primate By HENRY FOUNTAIN During a pregnancy, it's not unusual for the spouse to share some of the symptoms. Men have been known to experience nausea, headache, backache and, perhaps most common, weight gain. But humans aren't the only primates that can pack on the pounds when their mates are pregnant. A study of marmosets and cotton-top tamarins shows that males of these two squirrel-size monkey species gain weight, too. Male marmosets and tamarins are known for being good parents, said the study's lead author, Toni E. Ziegler of the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin. They are among about 10 percent of primate species considered biparental, with both sexes sharing the work. Earlier studies had shown that males of both species underwent hormonal changes when their mates were pregnant. The hormones involved were associated with paternal infant care, and Dr. Ziegler and colleagues at the center wondered whether they might affect the animals' bodies. 'That's why I went looking for a weight change,' Dr. Ziegler said. The study, published in Biology Letters, showed that male marmosets weighed up to 20 percent more at the end of their mates' five-month pregnancy; marmosets without pregnant partners gained no weight. Male tamarins were up to 8 percent heavier at the end of their mates' six-month pregnancy. In humans, sympathetic pregnancy symptoms are generally thought to be psychosomatic: emotions make a man raid the refrigerator. In the monkeys, however, Dr. Ziegler said, hormones are probably at work. 'If it is this hormone prolactin, which we suspect, it can actually change the metabolism of the monkey,' she said. In the study, the animals didn't eat more than they normally did. The hormonal changes are most likely set off when the male detects some chemical produced by the pregnant female, Dr. Ziegler said. 'We looked at their behavior very carefully,' she added. 'We didn't really see that they started spending more time together or any other activity that would perk the male's hormones.' Other studies will look at what the chemical cues might be. Among their other parenting chores, the males of both species spend much time carrying their offspring around. The young monkeys (there are usually two in a litter) hang on to their father's hair, usually around the neck. It's hard work, Dr. Ziegler said, 'so they may be beefing up because they are going to be expending so much energy.'

Subject: Help Eagle Leave Endangered List From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:53:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/politics/14eagle.html?ex=1297573200&en=9fb2d7672d3cb0a3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 Steps Taken to Help Eagle Leave Endangered List By FELICITY BARRINGER The bald eagle, a national symbol of majesty from the country's earliest days, moved several steps closer on Monday to leaving the list of threatened or endangered species. The federal Fish and Wildlife Service announced a series of decisions toward declaring the bird's population safely restored, effectively jump-starting a process that stalled several years ago. An effort begun in 1999 to remove the eagle from the federal lists became bogged down in debates over whether two other laws protecting the bird would actually prove more onerous for developers and landowners than the Endangered Species Act, once that law was no longer applicable. The Fish and Wildlife Service on Monday issued new voluntary guidelines for ways to protect eagles' nests and feeding grounds, and it defined some regulatory terms that determine the protection of the eagles under existing laws, like the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act. In doing so, the service signaled its willingness to finish the task of delisting the eagles. Environmental groups and agency officials held an unusual joint news conference by telephone to announce their progress. The chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service, H. Dale Hall, was joined by representatives of the National Wildlife Federation and Environmental Defense. All hailed the return of the eagle in the continental United States, where there were a total of 413 breeding pairs in 1963, according to Mr. Hall, and where there are 7,066 pairs today. Timothy Male, a senior ecologist with Environmental Defense, said his organization's poll of state wildlife agencies put the number of breeding pairs higher, at 9,100. 'There is no clearer victory in the history of the Endangered Species Act,' Mr. Male said. And Mr. Hall said the service was restarting the delisting process 'in light of the steadily increasing population that has exceeded recovery goals nationwide.' In recent years, Mr. Hall said, 'the service has been working to come up with a framework that will guide legal protections' for the birds. The chief environmental threat to the eagles, the pesticide DDT, which made the eagle's eggshells brittle and doomed generations of young birds before birth, was banned by the Environmental Protection Agency when it was new in 1972. Listed as endangered in most of the country in 1967 under a law that preceded the 1973 Endangered Species Act, the eagle has been afforded some kind of federal protection since 1918. What had been the concern of developers, which the new guidelines are designed to help address, was described by Christopher Galik, environmental policy analyst of the National Association of Homebuilders. 'The main idea for us was: when we're delisting something, it shouldn't result in a higher regulatory burden than before,' Mr. Galik said. The Endangered Species Act prohibits killing the birds, either directly or by interfering with their habitat: areas where they nested, bred and fed. It takes precedence over the older laws, like the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act, which prohibits activities that would 'disturb' the birds but does not specifically protect habitat. Once the bird is no longer protected by the Endangered Species Act, these other protections will come to the fore, along with the new voluntary guidelines and whatever protections are imposed by states or local communities. The Fish and Wildlife Service proposed that 'disturb' would be defined as activities that would disrupt the eagles' feeding and breeding or that would directly kill or injure the birds or cause them to abandon their nests. The bird's populations have recovered unevenly across the country, with the slowest recovery coming in the Southwest, which was the least hospitable area for the birds originally. Recovery has also been slow in Vermont despite aggressive recent efforts. But in the upper Northwest and the Southeast, the bird has thrived. Alaska and Canada, the fish and wildlife service estimates, have about 50,000 birds. The environmental representatives said that some of the protections afforded by the Endangered Species Act were crucial to restoring the bird's populations and warned that they would be blunted or eliminated in legislation under consideration in the House of Representatives. That legislation revises and narrows the current law's requirements for habitat protections. David P. Smith, the Interior Department's deputy assistant secretary for Fish, Wildlife and Parks, said yesterday that the fish and wildlife service 'is confident that existing protections both at the federal level and the state and local levels for habitat are sufficient.' Jamie Rappaport Clark, the executive vice president of the environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, who headed the Fish and Wildlife Service when delisting was first proposed in the Clinton administration, said Monday that she was 'pleased to see this process back on track.'

Subject: Investors Are Tilting Toward Windmills From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:51:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15electric.html?ex=1297659600&en=793a83bb64e899cb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 Investors Are Tilting Toward Windmills By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH It's hard to be in a business where you literally — as well as figuratively — are tilting at windmills. But that business may have just gotten its biggest tail wind yet. When President Bush called last month for more effort in alternative energies, a business that last year attracted only about $7 billion in investment nationwide, the 300 engineers and financiers at GE Energy Financial Services were already in the game. But that does not mean they were not happy that the White House acknowledged the sector. 'The president's speech changed zero for us; it was simply a recognition of what we already knew,' said David L. Calhoun, vice chairman of GE Infrastructure, the group that includes both turbine manufacture and energy financing. For now, wind energy is the only profit star in G.E.'s alternative energy galaxy, and both the finance and equipment sides of the company know they are gambling when it comes to solar and other fledgling technologies. Still, analysts applaud their decision to move on them. 'When you get the president talking about renewable energy, it has to be turning up the dial at G.E.,' said Deane M. Dray, an analyst at Goldman Sachs who has an outperform rating on General Electric shares. Certainly, it is getting attention from Energy Financial Services. The unit recently bought a wind farm in Germany and is installing new turbines there at a rapid pace. It has invested in solar energy farms in California and is in the end stage of negotiations for a large solar project in Europe. Indeed, renewable energy projects already account for $1 billion of the unit's $11 billion portfolio and are its fastest-growing niche. 'The renewables space has really heated up, and I hope it will account for 20 or 30 percent of our investments in five years,' J. Alex Urquhart, the unit's president, said. Today, alternative energy financing is barely a footnote in G.E.'s revenue stream. But the G.E. machine is gearing up for change. On Jan. 30 — a day before the president bemoaned the nation's 'addiction to oil' — Mr. Urquhart carved out a separate group to focus solely on renewable energy projects. Lorraine Bolsinger, who runs G.E.'s Ecomagination program, says she has begun to 'run the financial projects through our scorecard process' to see which ones she should include in her group of G.E.'s 'green' products. The pace is quickening in G.E.'s industrial camp, too. Energy equipment and related services, which accounted for about $42 billion of G.E.'s $149.7 billion in revenue last year, is G.E.'s largest industrial business. Alternative energy products like wind generators accounted for less than $6.3 billion of last year's sales. Four years ago, G.E. bought Enron's wind-turbine unit, and it is now a $2 billion business, heading rapidly toward $4 billion. In five years, G.E. expects that alternative energy products will account for more than a quarter of energy equipment revenue. If that happens, it will probably be a boon for Energy Financial Services, too. Last year, energy financing got plucked out of G.E.'s financial stable and placed under Mr. Calhoun's umbrella, along with the equipment makers. The financial team members say that working side by side with the technical equipment gurus is helping them pick and choose among potential investments. They get early alerts, they say, on which blade designs and composites make for the most efficient wind turbines, on whether solar energy is gaining momentum, or whether the technologies will have any resale or reuse value if a project does not work out or a borrower defaults. 'Only 60 percent of our projects involve G.E. technologies, but the global research center helps us decide which technologies to invest in,' said Kevin Walsh, managing director of Energy Financial's new renewable energy group. The potent mix of expertise is already paying off. Energy Financial, for instance, invested in a solar farm in California after G.E.'s industrial experts gave the project — which does not use G.E. equipment — a thumbs-up. The energy finance specialists are helping Mr. Calhoun evaluate the economic potential of a coal gasification project; if it proves viable, they will help promote and finance similar projects elsewhere. G.E. is not alone in backing renewables, of course. In November, Goldman Sachs committed to investing $1 billion in renewable energy, and it is already 'well on its way' to achieving that, according to Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman. J. P. Morgan Chase, too, has said it will invest more than $250 million in wind-energy projects. And venture capitalists have for some time been investing in smaller renewable energy projects and technologies. Over all, says Michael T. Eckhart, president of the nonprofit American Council on Renewable Energy, the $7 billion invested in renewable energy projects last year should increase by 25 percent a year over the next few years. He and many others say they believe that, if the president's imprimatur results in new regulations or tax incentives, even more Wall Street money will be attracted to such projects. Wind power has been the leading alternative energy source in recent years. The costs of turbines have come down even as their reliability and efficiency have increased; G.E., Goldman, J. P. Morgan Chase and others are snapping up wind farms across the world. By contrast, persistent shortages of silica, needed to make solar panels, have kept the solar energy sector from taking off on a similar trajectory. And few Wall Street dollars are going to projects that involve wresting megawatts from agricultural waste, be it crops like corn or the switchgrass Mr. Bush mentioned. And there has been almost no interest, at least so far, in methane generated from manure. Industry supporters see President Bush's speech as sending a new signal that might favor some of the more exotic energy sources, though. 'Now that the president has put the power of the bully pulpit behind ethanol,' Mr. Eckhart said, 'a lot of conservative people who thought biofuels were silly will view them as a mainstream investment.' For now, investors say that the logistics of selecting sites for factories and transporting biofuels keep them from being economically competitive. 'George Bush said interesting things about potential opportunities in biomass, but we need a better understanding of any legislative or regulatory changes his comments might spur,' Mr. Van Praag of Goldman said. GE Energy Financial Services has taken a few tentative steps toward biomass. It has a longtime, if small, investment in plants that burn woodchips for fuel. It is seeking advice about potential biofuel investments from colleagues at Jenbacher, an Austrian company G.E. bought in 2003 that makes generators that run on the gases emitted from landfills. And Mr. Urquhart said he is 'going to keep calling our people in Washington, and see what kind of rule-making is evolving around the biofuel idea.' In the meantime, he is keeping his eye out for projects that might merit investment even without additional government incentives. Mr. Calhoun has his eyes on Mr. Urquhart's quest, in case it turns up something G.E. should buy or make. 'Alex helps us decide where to put our development dollars, and we help him evaluate where to invest,' Mr. Calhoun said. 'And if he finds a great biomass plant, we'd be delighted.'

Subject: Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:49:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/business/15drug.html?ex=1297659600&en=62aabaec5acffa8c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can't Pay By ALEX BERENSON Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year. That price, about double the current level as a colon cancer treatment, would raise Avastin to an annual cost typically found only for medicines used to treat rare diseases that affect small numbers of patients. But Avastin, already a billion-dollar drug, has a potential patient pool of hundreds of thousands of people — which is why analysts predict its United States sales could grow nearly sevenfold to $7 billion by 2009. Doctors, though, warn that some cancer patients are already being priced out of the Avastin market. Even some patients with insurance are thinking hard before agreeing to treatment, doctors say, because out-of-pocket co-payments for the drug could easily run $10,000 to $20,000 a year. Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument — citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies. If society wants the benefits, they say, it must be ready to spend more for treatments like Avastin and another of the company's cancer drugs, Herceptin, which sells for $40,000 a year. 'As we look at Avastin and Herceptin pricing, right now the health economics hold up, and therefore I don't see any reason to be touching them,' said William M. Burns, the chief executive of Roche's pharmaceutical division and a member of Genentech's board. 'The pressure on society to use strong and good products is there.' Studies show that Avastin can prolong the lives of patients with late-stage breast and lung cancer by several months when the drug is combined with existing therapies. Genentech expects to seek federal approval later this year to sell it specifically for those diseases. But even now, doctors, who are free to prescribe the drug as they see fit, are using Avastin for some breast and lung cancer cases — and finding its cost beyond the means of some patients. 'Avastin is a superb drug, but its cost is already discouraging patients and doctors from using it,' said Dr. David Johnson, who heads the cancer unit at Vanderbilt University and is a former president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 'I wish it were one-tenth the cost, and if it were I would be giving it to almost everybody.' With colon cancer, a year of Avastin treatment costs about $50,000. But the drug will be used at higher doses for lung and breast cancer, and Genentech does not plan to reduce the unit price, even though the additional cost of producing a higher dose is minimal. Roche executives described the pricing plans were described in a recent interview. Because Genentech is a leading developer of cancer therapies, some doctors also fear that the company's pricing plans for Avastin — around $8,800 a month — may encourage other companies to charge more for their own oncology drugs. That could potentially drive up the overall cost of cancer treatment to unsustainable levels, they say. Right now, one of the few cancer drugs with a higher monthly price than the level planned for Avastin is Erbitux. The drug, used for colon cancer, sells for $9,600 monthly, but is not as widely prescribed as Avastin and is typically used only as a last-resort treatment for a few months. Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, the president of product development of Genentech, which is based in South San Francisco, Calif., said that Genentech had set Avastin's price based on 'the value of innovation, and the value of new therapies.' Genentech, which had more than $6 billion in sales last year, has many programs to help patients afford its medicines, and last year contributed $21 million to charities that help patients with their insurance co-payments, she said. Genentech intends to file an application later this year with the Food and Drug Administration to expand the drug's label to include treatment for breast and lung cancer. While nothing stops doctors now from prescribing Avastin for those diseases, F.D.A. approval would let the company promote and advertise it for such treatments and make insurers more likely to pay for the treatments. For now, insurers are deciding case by case whether to cover Avastin for breast and lung cancer, and in many instances they are rejecting coverage or at least delaying decisions. 'Insurers may say, 'It's not approved for that indication, so we're not paying for it,' ' said Dr. Paul A. Bunn Jr., the director of the University of Colorado cancer center. In those cases, patients must sign a waiver agreeing to reimburse the hospital for the price of treatment if the insurer will not agree to do so. And some patients are afraid to sign the waivers, Dr. Bunn said. 'A couple of patients have refused to sign or take treatment.' So far, insurers are generally covering Avastin's use in colon cancer, and they say they will probably cover its F.D.A.-approved use with other cancers. Other medicines as expensive as Avastin are typically prescribed only for rare conditions affecting small numbers of patients, and their makers justify the costs as necessary for getting a return on their up-front investments in the drugs. A few medicines, like Ceredase, a treatment for Gaucher disease (pronounced go-SHAY) from the biotechnology company Genzyme, can cost as much as $500,000 a year for some patients. Gaucher disease is a rare metabolic disorder whose symptoms include anemia. Avastin is currently used mainly in cases of late-stage colon cancer, a disease that affects about 50,000 Americans annually. On average, those patients take the drug for 11 months and it extends their lives an average of 5 months, compared with other treatments. Genentech and Roche are also testing Avastin for use in earlier stages of colon cancer, lung and breast and cancer, which collectively are diagnosed in almost 500,000 Americans a year. Genentech and doctors hope that if the drug is used earlier in treatment it can extend lives much longer — although that would require patients' finding the means to pay for it longer, too. Earlier this week Roche stopped recruiting patients for one clinical trial that included Avastin, while researchers try to explain the deaths of several patients. But doctors generally view Avastin as one of the safest cancer treatments. About 200 clinical trials including Avastin are taking place worldwide. With Avastin's expanded use, analysts expect the drug's sales to soar to $7 billion in the United States alone by 2009, compared with $1.1 billion last year. Over the same period, Genentech's overall profits are forecast to triple, to $4 billion in 2009, as sales — $6.6 billion last year — climb to $18 billion. 'They are certainly blazing new ground with the price of the drug,' said Geoffrey C. Porges, an industry analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. 'They're saying, we think this is fair value, at least on a relative basis.' Genentech has always been aggressive in pricing its therapies, Mr. Porges said. But insurers and government agencies have eventually accepted Genentech's terms, because its treatments, which include Herceptin, its current breast cancer treatment, have been shown to prolong life. When they were originally discovered, drugs like Avastin, which aim at the blood vessels that tumors use to grow, were expected to replace traditional chemotherapy, which directly fight tumor cells. Instead, the drugs have been found to work best when used in conjunction with chemotherapy. That has caused the overall cost of cancer treatment to soar, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. 'The financial resources are not limitless,' he said. 'There are tremendous pressures on the cost of cancer therapies today.' The high prices are especially discouraging for patients who have been told that the new drugs may have only marginal benefits for them. Ellis Minrath, who has pancreatic cancer, said he had chosen not to take Tarceva, a drug from Genentech that is approved for lung cancer and has shown promise in pancreatic cancer. He did so after learning that it would cost him about $1,000 a month in co-payments, even though he is covered by Medicare. 'If anybody came out and said, 'By God, this is the stuff. You want to get well, find a way to buy it,' that would be one thing,' said Mr. Minrath, who is 87. 'But that isn't the case. The forecast of how much it's going to do is not that wonderful.' But Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, the Genentech product development chief, said she would recommend that Mr. Minrath be treated with Tarceva. 'I don't think any patient should go without a Genentech drug for an inability to pay,' she said. 'If this is about money, that would disturb me.' The higher cost of using Avastin in breast and lung cancer, compared with colon cancer, is a result of cancer drugs' being priced on the basis of weight. In colon cancer, Genentech tested Avastin at a dose of 5 milligrams of the drug per kilogram — or 2.2 pounds — of the patient's body weight. But in lung and breast cancer, the company tested the drug at a dose of 10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Because the actual cost of producing Avastin is a fraction of what Genentech charges for it, some analysts and doctors had expected the company to lower Avastin's price per milligram for use in lung and breast cancer. Dr. Leonard Saltz, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, noted that Genentech had not tested the Avastin at the dose level for colon cancer in large-scale trials of lung and breast cancer. As a result, no one really knows whether the lower dose might turn out to be equally effective in lung and breast cancer, he said. Besides costing less, he said, a lower dose might have fewer side effects. 'There are no meaningful data to allow us to address that question,' he said. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann said that Genentech was assuming that some cancer doctors might, in fact, use Avastin at the lower dosage to treat breast and lung cancer. That is a reason the company does not want to lower Avastin's per-milligram price, she said, because doing so would cut too deeply into revenues if doctors do not prescribe the higher doses that were used in the breast and lung cancer trials. 'We don't actually know whether physicians will actually use Avastin as was used in the clinical trials,' she said. But Dr. Saltz and other doctors said that they would almost certainly stick to the higher Avastin dose that was tested in the clinical trials, for fear that a lower dose might not be as effective.

Subject: Psychotherapy Lets Bygones Be Bygones From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:48:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/health/psychology/14psyc.html?ex=1297573200&en=fbbdc8e354fbc8cd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 More and More, Favored Psychotherapy Lets Bygones Be Bygones By ALIX SPIEGEL For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present. Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief. But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing. Despite this profound change, the cliché of patients' exhaustively revisiting childhood horror stories remains. 'Average consumers who walk into psychotherapy expect to be discussing their childhood and blaming their parents for contemporary problems, but that's just not true any more,' said John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania. Professor Norcross has surveyed American psychologists in an effort to figure out what is going on behind their closed doors. Over the last 20 years, he has documented a radical shift. Psychotherapeutic techniques like psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, which deal with emotional conflict and are based on the idea that the exploration of past trauma is critical to healing, have been totally eclipsed by cognitive behavioral approaches. That relatively new school holds that reviewing the past is not only unnecessary to healing, but can be counterproductive. Professor Norcross says he believes that cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely practiced approach in America. The method, known as C.B.T., was introduced in the late 1960's by Dr. Aaron T. Beck. The underlying theory says it is not important for patients to return to the origins of their problems, but instead to correct their current 'cognitive distortions,' errors in perception that lead them to the conclusion that life is hopeless or that everyday activity is unmanageable. For example, when confronted with severely depressed patients, cognitive behavioral therapists will not ask about childhoods, but will work with them to identify the corrosive underlying assumptions that frame their psychic reality and lead them to feel bad about themselves. Then, systematically, patients learn to retrain their thinking. The therapy dwells exclusively in the present. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, it does not typically require a long course of treatment, usually 10 to 15 sessions. When cognitive therapy was introduced, it met significant resistance to the notion that people could be cured without understanding the sources of the problems. Many therapists said that without working through the underlying problems change would be superficial and that the basic problems would simply express themselves in other ways. Cognitive advocates convinced colleagues by using a tool that had not been systematically used in mental health, randomized controlled clinical trials. Although randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific research, for most of the 20th century such research was not used to test the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic methods, in part because psychoanalysis, at the time the most popular form of talk therapy, was actively hostile to empirical validation. When research was conducted, it was generally as surveys rather than as randomized studies. Cognitive behavioral researchers carried out hundreds of studies, and that research eventually convinced the two most important mental health gatekeepers — universities and insurance companies. Now the transformation is more or less complete. 'There's been a total changing of the guard in psychology and psychiatry departments,' said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychodynamically oriented therapist who teaches at Emory University. 'Virtually no psychodynamic faculty are ever hired anymore. I can name maybe two in the last 10 years.' Insurance companies likewise often prefer consumers to select cognitive behavioral therapists, rather than psychodynamically oriented practitioners. In the companies' view, scientific studies have shown that cognitive therapy can produce results in less than half the time of traditional therapies. But is it really the case that understanding the past is not necessary to healing? Could thousands of people have saved time and money by skipping over conversations about parents and cutting straight to retraining their thoughts and behaviors? Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said reviewing the past could be therapeutically important because it could help patients construct narratives of cause and effect. He pointed to cases of panic disorder. Many people have panic attacks, but a small percentage develop full-blown panic disorder, he said. Those who do not can usually find a rational explanation for their disturbing experience. 'They say, 'That's because I am about to take a midterm exam or I had too much coffee this morning,' explanations that de-catastrophize the bodily symptoms,' Professor McNally said. The rationalizations are effective, he said, even when the explanation is not correct. Merely asserting a logical sequence of cause and effect lets people feel that they have some control, that they are not victims of unexplained forces. In the same way, people who experience depression can benefit from an explanation for their feelings, an interpretation that allows them to feel that they are able, based on their understanding of the cause, to predict and control their emotions. This is a function of therapies that focus on the past, Professor McNally said. 'Detailed narratives about the past can be assumed under a larger rubric of trying to find meaning or trying to impose order, and thereby controlling one's world and experience,' he said. 'People say, 'At least I know why I'm unhappy in life.' ' New research suggests that psychodynamic therapy exploring the past can be as effective as cognitive work. In the last three years, psychodynamic therapists have started to subject their approach to same vigorous research as that used for cognitive therapy. The studies show similarly good results. The basic assertion that it is not absolutely necessary to review the past is now generally accepted. Even Professor Norcross, who says he regularly guides patients to the past when it is warranted, acknowledges that the data are not entirely solid. 'At the moment,' he said, 'there is no evidence that understanding the origins of your problems is necessary for effective psychotherapy. And there is some evidence that a preoccupation with the past can actually interfere with making changes in the present. 'Obsessive rumination about past events can trap patients in a self-defeating cycle from which they cannot extricate themselves. It can actually retard healing.'

Subject: New York in White From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 05:47:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/15/opinion/15wed4.html?ex=1297659600&en=3f9d1a8df3b38075&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 15, 2006 New York in White and, Briefly, in Repose By CAROLYN CURIEL A heavy snowfall visits the city in several stages. First it makes its entrance, grand and commanding, forcing every activity to pivot around its fall. The beauty of the falling snow last weekend was hypnotic. But it was outdone by the next stage, snowfall's end. Like a sumptuous feast finally put on a table, Phase 2 drew everyone to partake. On Sunday afternoon, legions of snow angels worked the plains of parks and yards, while future Olympians took to slopes that even bunnies might ordinarily have thought were too shallow. The snow's Phase 2 made even the most insular people more outgoing, as if in surveying the phenomenon, their happy gazes met those of others doing the same. Strangers freely helped the less limber or poorly shod over snowbanks and along icy walks. One woman patted my arm as I navigated a crosswalk. In her hand was my hat, which I had carelessly dropped in the street. 'You'll need this,' she said, smiling, before disappearing. The snow would not have been so delightful if it hadn't been so quickly cleaned. With almost preternatural efficiency, the city plowed and salted roads, and carted away the largest mounds of snow. It seemed that most walks in front of residences and businesses were actually shoveled clean as the city requires — within four hours after the end of a snowfall. There were some prominent exceptions, though, including the police station in Times Square, which was still snowbound during Monday morning's rush hour. Maybe the chore went unassigned in the rush to attend to other needs in a storm, or maybe the white pile was preserved for prolonged gaping from tourists. Now, alas, the city has entered the dreaded Phase 3, when the remaining snow looks like an uninvited guest. Its shrinking remains grow grayer and mushier as the temperature rises and our fascination evaporates. It is already taking its long, final leave, draining loudly at strained sewer grates — such an undignified ending for something that so recently fed a city's euphoria.

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 20:22:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/30/05 - 2/15/06 Australia 3.0 Canada 4.4 Denmark 1.5 France 5.7 Germany 8.1 Hong Kong 3.5 Japan -0.4 Netherlands 6.9 Norway 6.0 Sweden 4.6 Switzerland 3.6 UK 4.8

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 20:21:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/30/05 - 2/15/06 Australia 1.8 Canada 3.1 Denmark 0.7 France 4.7 Germany 7.2 Hong Kong 3.6 Japan -0.8 Netherlands 6.0 Norway 7.0 Sweden 3.0 Switzerland 2.9 UK 3.1

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 18:56:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/05 to 2/15/06 S&P Index is 2.8 Large Cap Growth Index is 1.9 Large Cap Value Index is 3.3 Mid Cap Index is 3.6 Small Cap Index is 6.8 Small Cap Value Index is 6.4 Europe Index is 5.6 Pacific Index is 0.9 Emerging Markets Index is 7.9 Energy is 3.8 Health Care is 2.2 Precious Metals is 8.8 REIT Index is 7.5 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 1.1 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is -1.2

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 18:51:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/05 - 2/15/06 Energy 2.3 Financials 2.7 Health Care 2.9 Info Tech 3.4 Materials 4.6 REITs 7.6 Telecoms 9.9 Utilities 1.1

Subject: Another then vs now From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 09:05:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I personally experienced the housing boom/bust cycle of the 80's thru early 90's. Some of the readers of this board may have also. There are differences now - the late 80's and early 90's were still experiencing the job and wage boom of hightech, interest rates were still coming down off of record highs and energy was also dropping off of record highs. All of these factors helped to lessen the blow of the housing bust. Unfortunately, we are now seeing these factors headed in the opposite direction on top of a level of personal debt which is much greater than it was back in the 80's. So it's not hard to see why economists like Paul Krugman, Robert Shiller, Stephen Roach, and Nouriel Roubini are predicting real trouble ahead of us. The following is from a blog site which provides a list of NYT's articles from the 80's-90's which documented the last big housing bust: Home Prices Do Fall A Look At The Collapse Of The 1980's Real Estate Bubble Through The Eyes Of The New York Times by James Bednar Northern New Jersey Real Estate Bubble Blog http://nnjbubble.blogspot.com Introduction 'Home prices never go down' is a quote often heard spoken by real estate agents. It isn't true. Real estate bubbles do exist and they do burst. The after effects of a real estate bubble burst are felt for years afterwards. Thanks to the online search capability of the New York Times, I was able to compile a list of articles that appeared in the New York Times during the real estate bubble from 1981 to 1988 and then from the resultant crash, from 1989 onwards. All the readers that have seen the preliminary compilation gave the same remark, 'It's like deja-vu.' Indeed, it is. We've quickly forgotten the 80's bubble that swept over the Northeast, in particular the New York Metropolitan area. We've convinced ourselves that 'this time is different.' Unfortunately, all we've proven is that we lack the ability to learn from history and our mistakes. New Jersey Median Home Price I've included a graph of the median home price in Northern New Jersey over that covers the period immediately preceding the 80's bubble, the crash, and the 2000's real estate bubble. Refer back to this graph as you read through the articles below. I've cut select pieces from each article that illustrate the period and well as public sentiment during that time. I've included the author as well as link so you can read the entire article. 1981 - Slow After 70's Slump Your Money; Buying Houses As Investments May 23, 1981, Saturday By ALAN S. OSER (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 2, Page 30, Column 1, 947 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30717F73F5C0C708EDDAC0894D9484D81 ''DO you think we did the right thing?'' the nervous woman asked the supposed authority. She and her husband, already owners of a summer home in Southampton, L.I., had just contracted to buy a condominium there, purely as an investment. They had seen home prices in the Hamptons rise... New Jersey Housing; HOW 'CREATIVE FINANCING' WORKS August 2, 1981, Sunday By ELLEN RAND (NYT); New Jersey Weekly Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 11, Page 16, Column 3, 1717 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60B14F83C5F0C718CDDA10894D9484D81 PERHAPS ''creative financing'' has always been a euphemism for techniques that, under ideal circumstances, might not have been necessary to put together a real-estate deal. Surely, most of the soc alled ''creative financing'' methods used in the residential market today have long been used in the more-sophisticated commercial realestate field.... CONDOMANIA: GOOD OR BAD? By REBECCA SCHLAM LUTTO Published: August 9, 1981 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9401E1DA143BF93AA3575BC0A967948260 ''CONDOMANIA!'' is the anguished cry of apartment renters in New Jersey and across the nation. They are referring to the increasingly accelerated pace of converting existing rental apartments to condominium or cooperative ownership. New Jersey Housing; SELLING YOUR HOME? TRY A RAFFLE By ELLEN RAND Published: October 11, 1981 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEFDD1339F932A25753C1A967948260 WE ALL know that these are tough times for many Americans, but the good old ''can do'' spirit has not vanished from the housing scene, as some recent news stories attest. As everyone must have heard by now, an enterprising Virginia couple, eager to sell their home, recently took matters into their own hands and raffled it off. RAFFLES A CHANCY THING FOR HOMEOWNERS By CHRISTOPHER WELLISZ Published: November 15, 1981 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01EFDD1F39F936A25752C1A967948260 As the popularity of house raffles has increased, so has the vigilance of law enforcement agencies in states where they are prohibited. A woman in Alabama pleaded guilty last month to a charge of unlawful promotion of gambling after she had tried to raffle her $60,000 home. In Tenafly, N.J., a real estate broker threatened with prosecution under the state's gambling laws is seeking a court order that would allow her to give away her home in a contest. 1982 - Real Estate Buzz Begins EXPANDED REAL ESTATE SECTION IS PLANNED FOR SUNDAY TIMES March 17, 1982, Wednesday(NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 22, Column 1, 328 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0813F8385F0C748DDDAA0894DA484D81 The New York Times will introduce an expanded and redesigned Real Estate section on Sunday, March 28. It will include added news and features for consumers along with continued coverage of commercial real estate. A.M. Rosenthal, executive editor of The Times, announced the change. He said new weekly columns... Talking Partnerships; SHARING A MORTGAGE ON A HOME By DIANE HENRY Published: May 16, 1982 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E3D81538F935A25756C0A964948260 YOU'VE found the house you want, but you cannot afford it. The down payment may be prohibitive, or perhaps the monthly payments are too high. Bankers, brokers, Congress and home builders are all working on new financing techiques to help you, and one idea gaining some interest around the country is shared ownership of a property: You find the house you want to live in and an investor helps you with the down payment, the monthly payments or both. In return, the investor gets tax benefits and a share of the appreciated value of the home at resale. HOBOKEN By ALFONSO A. NARVAEZ Published: August 1, 1982 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9504E2DD1339F932A3575BC0A964948260 HOBOKEN has for some time enjoyed a reputation - especially among those wishing to escape New York - as being a close-in, comparatively inexpensive alternative. But time and the unremitting pressures of the Manhattan real estate market have caused this city of 42,000 to take on some of the characteristics of its neighbor a cross the Hudson. Three- and four-room apartments, when available, rent for $500 and $600 a month with recently renovated units bringing up to $700 a month. A one-family brownstone that 10 years ago would have sold for $20,000 to $25,000 is now on the market for $120,000, down from last year's asking price of $135,000 - the drop a concession to the persistence of high interest rates. Condominiums, some of which have been carved out of old tenement buildings, have sold for from $35,000 to $100,000. Economic Scene; Slump's Effect On the Banks October 22, 1982, Friday By ROBERT A. BENNETT (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 2, Column 1, 900 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0D1EF93E5F0C718EDDA90994DA484D81 WHETHER one blames so-called Reaganomics, supply-side economics or monetarism, the country is feeling the effects of a classic recession, following an inflationary boom. As in past recessions, banks have not been spared the agonies, as was evident at this week's annual convention of the American Bankers Association in Atlanta.... Real Estate; Planned Units Arise In Jersey By ALAN S. OSER Published: December 10, 1982 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DF1F39F933A25751C1A964948260 Prices have been level for six to eight months, he said. But as soon as buyer demand picks up again, he predicted, they will rise rapidly. The reason is that suppliers have a limited inventory of housing products because of low demand over an extended period. Supply shortages will create sharp price increases, he said. TAXES ON PROPERTY ARE HEADING UP By DAVID W. DUNLAP Published: December 19, 1982 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E1DD1738F93AA25751C1A964948260 ''A lot of new houses have gone up and they're selling rapidly,'' he said. ''You can't touch anything new for less than $250,000.'' Although properties are supposed to be assessed at full value, as a practical matter they are not. If there is a flagrant difference between assessed and market values, a county tax board can order a municipality to revalue all property. Currently, several communities are going through such revaluations, which will be reflected in 1983 tax rates. In theory, if a property's value has doubled, and the town's budget remains constant, then the tax rate should be halved. North Caldwell is one community that is going through such a revaluation. The last time it did so was in 1971, and as Charles Schmitz, the tax assessor, said, ''I would hope that all properties have doubled since then. If a house was worth $100,000 then, I would assume that it would be at a minimum of $250,000 today. The average lot here, which is a half-acre, sells in excess of $80,000.'' 1983 - Real Estate Gains Limelight WHO GAINS WHEN HOUSING PROSPERS April 17, 1983, Sunday By N.R. KLEINFIELD (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 3, Page 1, Column 2, 3803 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0813F83D5C0C748DDDAD0894DB484D81 TALKING HOME VALUES; HOW TO GET A PROPER APPRAISAL By ANDREE BROOKS Published: May 8, 1983 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01EED71238F93BA35756C0A965948260 ''They always think their home is special because they live there,'' said Normam Kailo, past president of the New Jersey Association of Realtors and owner of the Soldoveri Agency in Wayne, N.J. ''It's such a danger that even after 22 years in real estate I would not try to set a price on my own house. I would make sure someone else made the decision for me.'' HIGH COURT SETS FORCED-SALE RULES By GEORGE W. GOODMAN Published: July 3, 1983 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07E3D81639F930A35754C0A965948260 THE EMPIRE AND EGO OF DONALD TRUMP By MARYLIN BENDER; MARILYN BENDER, A JOUNALIST AND AUTHOR, WRITES ON BUSINESS FROM NEW YORK. Published: August 7, 1983 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05E7D91E39F934A3575BC0A965948260 He made his presence known on the island of Manhattan in the mid 70's, a brash Adonis from the outer boroughs bent on placing his imprint on the golden rock. Donald John Trump exhibited a flair for self-promotion, grandiose schemes - and, perhaps not surprisingly, for provoking fury along the way. Senior realty titans scoffed, believing that braggadocio was the sum and substance of the blond, blue-eyed, six-footer who wore maroon suits and matching loafers, frequented Elaine's and Regine's in the company of fashion models, and was not abashed to take his armed bodyguard-chauffeur into a meeting with an investment banker. STATE'S HOUSING GROWTH CITED By DONOVAN WILSON Published: October 23, 1983 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04E4DC123BF930A15753C1A965948260 SPURRED largely by money from financial institutions in the state, New Jersey's residential real-estate activity has experienced a healthy growth in the last several years with the construction of condominiums and single-family homes. According to 1980 census figures, there were more than 50,000 condominium units in the state and more than 1.4 million single-family homes. Industry officials say those figures are rising. ABOUT REAL ESTATE; NEW COMPETING SKYLINE IS RISING AT MEADOWLANDS By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: December 28, 1983 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE1D71538F93BA15751C1A965948260 From the crest of the Route 3 bridge over the Hackensack River in New Jersey, it is possible to see across the low-lying salt marshes of the Meadowlands to the steel skeletons of three office buildings, totaling 820,000 square feet of space, taking shape to form a new skyline. The three buildings, along with a fourth of similar size under construction a few miles east, provide striking evidence of the Meadowlands' rapid transformation into a major metropolitan office center that competes with Manhattan for major users of commercial space. 1984 - Prices Begin To Skyrocket NEW YORK AREA ECONOMY ON THE MEND AS '83 ENDS January 1, 1984, Sunday By DAMON STETSON (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 1, Page 19, Column 1, 668 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0810F9395C0C728CDDA80894DC484D81 The economy of the New York metropolitan area, after a ''shaky start'' in 1983, moved toward recovery from the recession at the end of the year, according to the the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employment rose over the year, price increases were moderate, the purchasing power of worker earnings... THE ART OF NEGOTIATING WITHOUT TRAUMA By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: January 15, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B01E2DB1138F936A25752C0A962948260 JUST about everybody feels out of control when they try to negotiate the price of a home. Brokers say that even financial wizards at Fortune 500 companies tug their hair, grit their teeth and show other signs of emotional stress when they get down to hard bargaining over the purchase or sale of their homes. RESALE-HOME PRICES: UP AND RISING By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: January 22, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E7DF1F38F931A15752C0A962948260 A survey of the conventional homeowner housing market in New York City, Westchester County, Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey indicates that 1983 was a strong sales year, with prices generally increasing. It also shows that expected stability in mortage-interest rates, coupled with a strong demand and a diminishing supply of listings, should cause prices to continue to increase this year. APARTMENTS: WHY PRICES ARE SO HIGH By MATTHEW L. WALD Published: January 29, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B00EEDA163BF93AA15752C0A962948260 Why are the prices of new apartments so high in Manhattan? What could justify such figures for sales and rentals? ''It's land, land, land,'' said Lewis Winnick, an analyst at the Ford Foundation. He explained that Manhattan property on which apartments can be developed is made scarce first by high demand and second by restrictive zoning, land use, rent regulation and other policies of the city. THE HOUSE THAT'S NOT YOUR HOME By ANDREE BROOKS Published: February 5, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02E0DE143BF936A35751C0A962948260 Area suburbs report that many homeowners are buying second and third houses as investments and tax shelters. Among the factors encouraging this practice, they say, are lower interest rates, a rise in house prices, lenders' greater willingness to provide mortgages on houses not occupied by owners and a growing awareness of the tax benefits of such investments. CHOOSING THE RIGHT ADJUSTABLE MORTGAGE By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: March 18, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E0D81339F93BA25750C0A962948260 BUYING A HOME WITH A FRIEND By ANDREE BROOKS Published: May 6, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDD1038F935A35756C0A962948260 OVER the last two or three years a growing number of young, single people have chosen to buy a home in partnership with a friend. There is not necessarily a romantic involvement. The two simply decide to pool their resources to amass the necessary down payment or to qualify for financing at a time when property prices are so high. BROKERS PROCESSING MORTGAGES By ANDREE BROOKS Published: June 17, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9806EFD81639F934A25755C0A962948260 ''We are worried that the buyer is being steered into a mortgage program that is not necessarily the best for him,'' said E. Robert Levy, executive director and general counsel to the association. Borrowers are also in danger, he said, of being persuaded to finance more of the purchase amount than they might wish when the broker's mortgage-writing commission is based upon the size of the loan delivered. THE $100,000 HOUSE: GETTING SMALLER EVERY YEAR August 1, 1984, Wednesday By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM (NYT); National Desk Late City Final Edition, Section A, Page 8, Column 2, 1290 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F4081FFC3D5C0C728CDDA10894DC484D81 ..family house has been bobbing around the $100,000 mark or above for the first time. Which raises the question: What can you get in a house, new or old, for $100,000? Very little in New York or San Francisco until you get an hour or more from the city,... ABOUT REAL ESTATE; JERSEY PROJECT SELLS OUT IN A WEEKEND August 31, 1984, Friday By KIRK JOHNSON (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section B, Page 7, Column 1, 821 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40915FA3B5C0C728FDDA10894DC484D81 Selling homes from a trailer, with no models to show would-be buyers and only empty ground for a view, is not the easiest of propositions. But in this area of central New Jersey, which has experienced a rapid influx of companies, the demand for new housing is strong enough ABOUT REAL ESTATE; INNOVATIVE MORTGAGES AT JERSEY PROJECT By KIRK JOHNSON Published: October 19, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03EFDF1439F93AA25753C1A962948260 Creative financing has become so pervasive since the era of high interest rates began in the 1970's that innovative packages are now being used to originate even conventional fixed- rated mortgages. NEARBY URBAN AREAS DRAW HOME BUYERS By KIRK JOHNSON Published: December 16, 1984 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E01E6DA1338F935A25751C1A962948260 ''IN the 1960's, everything was suburbs - picket fences and two-car garages,'' said Carlos Alvarado, a slow smile crossing his face. ''Then everybody wanted Manhattan. Now it seems to be spreading into the areas adjacent to Manhattan. People want an urban life style again. It's almost like a fad.'' 1985 - Prices Rise, Affordability Questioned ADAPTING TO THE HIGH COST OF HOUSING By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: February 3, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9406E2DB1739F930A35751C0A963948260 Affordable apartments in Manhattan are as rare as crocuses in winter and market rates, by definition, are beyond the means of nearly everybody. A recent Chemical Bank study estimates that only 12 percent of all households can afford a new average-priced ($200,000) one-bedroom condominium or co-op apartment - and only if they are willing to spend 45 percent of their $58,000 annual income on housing expenses. THE NATION; Boom in House Foreclosures February 24, 1985, Sunday By KATHERINE ROBERTS, CAROLINE RAND HERRON AND MICHAEL WRIGHT (NYT); Week in Review Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 4, Page 4, Column 2, 288 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0E16FE385D0C778EDDAB0894DD484D81 The only sure thing in the housing market is that sure things can lead to disaster. A few years back, many families stretched their budgets to buy houses at high interest rates, figuring that if times got tough, they could always sell and make a profit. But today, tens... MAKING IT BIG IN THE HIGH-STAKES WORLD OF MANHATTAN REAL-ESTATE BROKERS By MICHAEL BLUMSTEIN Published: May 2, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04EFD6163BF931A35756C0A963948260 If neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night can stop mail carriers, then it would probably take nuclear war to keep Manhattan's real-estate brokers from completing their appointed rounds. There are certainly plenty of them. Manhattan now has 16,852 licensed real-estate brokers, salesmen and saleswomen, up from 13,138 in 1981, according to the New York Department of State, and they account for 42 percent of all the licensed real-estate brokers and sales personnel in New York City. In recent years, as prices and therefore commissions have soared, the payoffs have become impressive. Jersey Thrift Units 'Sound' May 17, 1985, Friday (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 5, Column 4, 210 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10D11FB395F0C748DDDAC0894DD484D81 In New Jersey, where 24 small savings and loan associations have no insurance, state banking officials said yesterday that the institutions were ''extremely sound'' and in no danger of failing. The average ''ratio of net worth to deposits is 24 percent,'' said William Sievewright, chief examiner in the savings... NEW YORK HOME PRICES SURGE By PETER T. KILBORN, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: May 24, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E0DD1639F937A15756C0A963948260 Home prices in New York City and its suburbs are rising faster than anywhere else in the nation, to the point where they now exceed those in many parts of the nation's customary pacesetter, California. And Allen J. Proctor, a regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said, ''I don't believe it's a bubble, a speculative bubble, like California was.'' MAKING THE MOST OF FAST-FALLING MORTGAGE RATES By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: June 30, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E5D71E39F933A05755C0A963948260 THE bad news about the slowdown in the nation's economy has been good news for people shopping for home mortgages. Interest rates, responding to a reduced demand for credit and stable inflation, have fallen to levels not seen since the summer of 1980. Rates, however, have already started to edge upward because of some preliminary reports on the economy's improving outlook. In any event, lower monthly interest costs are making houses more affordable and allowing some people to buy larger ones than they had anticipated. Other borrowers are seeing payments for their adjustable-rate mortgages decline or they are taking advantage of the opportunity to refinance high-cost loans at today's lower rates. STUDY PREDICTS SUSTAINED GROWTH FOR NEW YORK REGION'S ECONOMY By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: August 12, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E5D61339F931A2575BC0A963948260 The economy of New York City and its suburbs, buoyed by a swift, five-year recovery, has entered a period of sustained growth that will be halted only if the region fails to provide enough new housing, according to an economic analysis released yesterday. The study concludes that the nation's largest urban area has fully recovered from its severe economic problems of the 1970's, when New York City came close to bankruptcy, hundreds of businesses closed and thousands of jobs were lost. WILL A SHORTAGE OF HOUSING CRIMP ECONOMIC GAINS? August 18, 1985, Sunday By ANTHONY DEPALMA (NYT); Week in Review Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 4, Page 20, Column 1, 940 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C10F6345C0C7B8DDDA10894DD484D81 DURING rush hour, most highways in the metropolitan area are jammed with cars and buses headed in both directions, vivid if frustrating proof of the local economy's recovery from the malaise of the 1970's and the continued dispersion of jobs from New York City. An analysis released last week... BUYER'S MARKET FORESEEN FOR CITY CONDOS AND CO-OPS By RICHARD D. LYONS Published: August 25, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9507E1DC173BF936A1575BC0A963948260 REAL-ESTATE experts are predicting a buyer's market for cooperative and condominium apartments in New York City over the next year, shaped by burgeoning new construction, worry over proposed changes in Federal tax law and jitters among owners that prices may already have risen so high that it is time to sell. ''Simply put, there are going to be a lot of new apartments coming on the market in the next year, and sellers are going to have to offer the sort of incentives that haven't been generally available in recent years,'' said Yale Robbins, the realty consultant and compiler of New York housing data who is president of the company bearing his name. TAX PLAN SLOWS SALES OF RESORT PROPERTY September 2, 1985, Monday By ROBERT LINDSEY, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); National Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 1, Page 9, Column 1, 1596 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20B1EFF3E5F0C718CDDA00894DD484D81 Uncertainties over President Reagan's proposed overhaul of the tax code are depressing prices and causing a slump in the sale of resort property over much of the nation this summer. From Kaanapali Beach here on the coast of Maui to ski resorts in northern Maine, developers and real estate... TALKING TWO FAMILIES; The Merits Of Condo Conversion By ANDREE BROOKS Published: September 29, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E4DF1239F93AA1575AC0A963948260 AROUND THE MARKET; High and Low Ends Firm In Vacation Condo Sales By GENE RONDINARO Published: October 6, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900EFD71339F935A35753C1A963948260 Brokers at resort centers around the country report a slowing of sales this year from 1984, which they attribute in part to public uncertainty over the tax proposals. But this has has been somewhat offset by lower mortgage-interest rates and, in some cases, declining prices for resale and new recreational units at many resort areas. ''Sales are not at a standstill - I would say they are at a pony trot,'' said Ray Ellis, director of operational services and research for the condominium committee of the American and Hotel Association. NEW JERSEY OPINION; PLAYING THE GAME CALLED REAL ESTATE October 20, 1985, Sunday By REBECCA SCHLAM LUTTO; REBECCA SCHLAM LUTTO'S PLAYING PIECE IS OVER IN THE TEANECK PART OF THE BOARD. (NYT); New Jersey Weekly Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 11NJ, Page 22, Column 1, 700 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0D14FD355D0C738EDDA90994DD484D81 THE Real Estate Game has reached our town. Any number can play, but the minimum bid is $100,000. The playing pieces are suburban houses, and the owners need not move on the game board to enjoy playing. The game was all the rage in Washington and Los Angeles in... PUTTING THE HOMESTEAD DEEPER INTO HOCK November 24, 1985, Sunday By ROBERT A. BENNETT (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 3, Page 1, Column 2, 2759 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30E12F83A5C0C778EDDA80994DD484D81 TURN on the television. Open the junk mail. Sift through the brochures that come with the monthly bank statement. It's no secret: Home-equity loans are being promoted these days as the hottest product in consumer lending. The home-equity loan, of course, is the glossy name that the nation's marketers... HOUSE VALUES SURGE IN THE OLDER AREAS OF NORTHERN QUEENS By GENE RONDINARO Published: December 1, 1985 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9400EEDC1F38F932A35751C1A963948260 ''There has been a strong housing market here for some time but within the few years prices have gone through the roof,'' said Ted Metalios of Century 21/Metalios Real Estate in Jackson Heights. The agency, according to the Queens Board of Realtors, handles the majority of residential real-estate transactions in Jackson Heights and also brokers many of the sales in the nearby neighborhoods of Astoria, Woodside, Sunnyside, Long Island City, Corona and Elmhurst. 1986 - Manic Pace U.S. INQUIRY FINDS PATTERN OF FRAUD IN HOUSING LOANS By PHILIP SHENON, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: January 21, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE6D81130F932A15752C0A960948260 Federal investigators say they have uncovered a pattern of frauds against the Department of Housing and Urban Development involving falsified documents used to obtain tens of millions of dollars in Government-backed mortgages. More than a dozen real estate agents and mortgage industry officials have been indicted or convicted because of their involvement in such schemes in southern New Jersey. In the last year, similar swindles have been reported in Houston, Seattle and Milwaukee. HOME PRICES SOARING IN NEW YORK'S SUBURBS By THOMAS J. LUECK, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: January 27, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE5D6143DF934A15752C0A960948260 At a time when the nationwide boom in real estate is fading, economists say the suburbs of New York City may be emerging as the region with the strongest demand - and most rapidly rising prices - for housing in the country. Home prices in southern Connecticut, Westchester County and New Jersey and on Long Island are soaring. In many suburban communities, homes ranging from small two-bedroom bungalows to large, colonial estates have doubled in value over the last five years. ''As an investment, homes here are golden,'' said Joseph J. Bell, the Clerk of Morris County, N.J., where homes sold for an average price of $115,000 two years ago. As of last week, he calculated, the average was $172,515, about 50 percent higher. The economists say no one should expect home prices in the New York suburbs or elsewhere to continue rising at their current rates. With prices already beyond the reach of many potential buyers, and with the general rate of inflation below 5 percent, they say real-estate values have accelerated at a pace that cannot be sustained. OUT TOWNS; CASHING IN ON 'THE REAL ESTATE SCENARIO' IN JERSEY By MICHAEL WINERIP, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: February 23, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DEEDE1539F930A15751C0A960948260 Murphy Realty is one of many area concerns offering free seminars. Companies can't get new salesmen fast enough: Murphy had 12 offices last year, has 22 now and projects 100 in five years. ''We have corporate executives coming in every minute,'' Mr. Abrams said. At the free seminar, hopefuls hear about a woman who sold $1 million worth of real estate during the weeks she was at M.I.T. - the Murphy Institute Training program. Frank Kovats, head of another real estate school, told them, ''For a relatively small investment in time and money, you can enter a career that will change your life.'' He said that he had seen many people pass up the opportunity and that they were kicking themselves in the pants right now SURGE IN BUILDING DRAINING LABOR POOL By RICHARD D. LYONS Published: March 30, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4D7173CF933A05750C0A960948260 THE surge in building sweeping New York is triggering the greatest demand for construction workers in almost two decades, straining the supply of the most highly skilled tradesmen and increasing the labor costs of some new homes, apartments and offices. IN WESTCHESTER AND CONNECTICUT; Old Barns Turned Into Luxury Homes By BETSY BROWN Published: April 27, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE5DB103DF934A15757C0A960948260 OLD Westchester County barns have been going quickly in recent years as farmland becomes housing developments, but recently three old barns have appeared on the hillsides in North Salem and Lewisboro, looking as if they had always been there. IN NEW JERSEY; Slaughterhouse Blossoming Into Co-ops By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: May 11, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE4DB1639F932A25756C0A960948260 LOCATION, it is said with numbing regularity, is real estate's most important factor. Yet location can be what you make of it, and developers around New Jersey have shown they are willing to take a chance on what might appear to be an unpromising site in hopes of creating a successful project. THE FEW-FRILLS CONDOMINIUM June 23, 1986, Monday By THOMAS J. LUECK, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 1, Column 3, 1336 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50715F7345D0C708EDDAF0894DE484D81 The largest builder of condominiums in the New York suburbs, Kevork Hovnanian, says his biggest sales problem is crowd control. ''We want to maintain public safety,'' he said the other day. Again and again, the Hovnanian condominiums have sold out within hours of being offered for sale. Hundreds of... ABOUT REAL ESTATE; HOUSING SET FOR NEWARK NEWS BUILDING By PHILIP S. GUTIS, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: July 4, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE7D81731F937A35754C0A960948260 ''Renaissance Towers is aptly named because it is further testimony to the rebirth, progress and accelerated development that is taking place in our city,'' said Mayor Sharpe James, who took office on Tuesday. ''But the towers are just the tip of the iceberg. I believe this renaissance will spread to our residential areas and neighborhood commercial strips.'' Even though the building is far from complete - indeed its offering plan has not yet been accepted by the New Jersey Attorney General - the 131 units in the condominium are sold out. Buyers have signed agreements and placed $2,500 deposits on the apartments, which range from a $59,000 studio to a $390,000 penthouse. PERSONAL FINANCE; A Summer House Without Uncle Sam By CAROLE GOULD; CAROLE GOULD WRITES ON BUSINESS AND FINANCE FROM NEW YORK. Published: August 3, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE2DE1238F930A3575BC0A960948260 VACATIONERS in the market for a second home, as well as people who already own them, may want to rethink their plans for that seashore or mountainside cottage as a result of the tax revision proposals before Congress. Many rules concerning vacation homes are likely to be tightened, to the extent that, in the view of some tax advisers, it could make economic sense to act now to get under the current, more generous measures. If owners are contemplating selling, experts say, they should sell now to benefit from more generous capital gains treatment. Alternatively, would-be home-buyers might consider buying sooner than planned, to lock in more liberal tax breaks. REAL ESTATE, THE MAJOR OUTLAY; Refinancing Makes Sense For Many September 14, 1986, Sunday By H. J. MAIDENBERG (NYT); Personal Investing Supplement Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 12, Page 25, Column 1, 1508 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F5071EFB3C5D0C778DDDA00894DE484D81 NOT since the frenzied home-building years following World War II has there been so huge a volume of mortgage activity as in the past year. Forty years ago the source of the mortgage madness was the vast army of veterans taking advantage of low-cost Government financing; much of the... STATE TO ACT TO EASE MORTGAGE DELAYS By LEO H. CARNEY Published: October 5, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE0D6163EF936A35753C1A960948260 Reacting to the heavy volume of complaints about long delays in processing mortgage applications, the state's Department of Banking will soon propose regulations to alleviate the problem. Soon after interest rates began to drop significantly six to eight months ago, mortgage lenders were beseiged with applications to refinance existing residential and commercial mortgages at lower rates and by applications for new loans. SUBURBIA PRICING OUT THE YOUNG By THOMAS J. KNUDSON, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: October 6, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE7D61F3FF935A35753C1A960948260 The economic forces that have brought prosperity and change to the suburbs around New York are also pushing out of the region a precious resource: its young people. In increasing numbers, people in their 20's and 30's, married and earning $30,000 or more a year, are leaving the area they grew up in because they cannot afford the housing. FOCUS: Investment; Japanese Plunge Into U.S. Realty By TIMOTHY EGAN Published: November 23, 1986 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0DE1DB1130F930A15752C1A960948260 ONE of Japan's biggest exports these days is investment capital. In record numbers, Japanese banks and financial concerns are investing in the commercial real-estate market throughout the United States, focusing most recently on the West Coast. Mr. Shima of Coldwell Banker said the influx of capital should continue beyond the rise in exchange rates. ''Regardless of the yen-to-dollar ratio,'' he said, ''Japanese firms will continue to buy in this country for the simple reason that there is such an absolute scarcity of available property in Japan.'' NEWARK IS EVER RICHER IN REAL ESTATE, BUT STILL CASH POOR December 28, 1986, Sunday By ALFONSO A. NARVAEZ (NYT); Week in Review Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 4, Page 6, Column 1, 839 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F5071EFF3F5B0C7B8EDDAB0994DE484D81 WHEN he upset Kenneth A. Gibson last spring to become the chief elected official of New Jersey's largest city, Sharpe James recalled recently, ''I knew it would be the worst and the best of times to become Mayor.'' On one hand, there has been a resurgence of development interest... 1987 - Cracks Appear At The Top ECONOMIC GAINS FOUND SOFTER IN NEW YORK AREA January 11, 1987, Sunday By PHILIP S. GUTIS (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 1, Page 29, Column 1, 691 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F4071FFF3F540C728DDDA80894DF484D81 Although the economy of the New York-New Jersey region continued to grow last year - adding 135,000 jobs -a report released last week said that several suburban counties were beginning to show some signs of decreased economic strength. Although the economy of the New York-New Jersey region continued... ABOUT REAL ESTATE; BUILDER SAYS THE ACTION IS NOW IN JERSEY SUBURBS By RICHARD D. LYONS Published: February 6, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1DF123FF935A35751C0A961948260 For years conventional wisdom had it that the hub of the action was Manhattan if you wanted to be successful in metropolitan area real estate. Commercial properties in center city for sure, and residential as close as possible. But to hear Ara K. Hovnanian tell it, the far suburbs are the focus of today's action, including some in New Jersey. What Price Progress on the Hudson? By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: February 22, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE3DB1E3AF931A15751C0A961948260 DRIVING within sight of the river's edge from the George Washington Bridge south to the marsh grass and reeds of Caven Point in Jersey City, it is possible, in less than an hour, to get a good measure of the rapid development under way along the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. IN JERSEY, A STRESS ON URBAN HOUSING By JOSEPH L. SULLIVAN Published: March 1, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE6DD1E3CF932A35750C0A961948260 BUILDING or rehabilitating housing in New Jersey's decaying urban neighborhoods is on everyone's mind as Governor Kean and the State Legislature try to design a housing program for the current legislative session. RETRAINING AND HOUSING CALLED KEYS TO GROWTH By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: March 5, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDC123EF936A35750C0A961948260 The strongest expansion of the New York metropolitan region's economy since World War II will stop without significant improvements in job training and housing, according to two government reports released this week. ''After a decade of consistently good economic news, we are bumping up against the limits of our own growth,'' said Rosemary Scanlon, chief economist for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which yesterday released its annual analysis of the economy in New York City, its northern suburbs, Long Island, and eight counties in northern New Jersey. COST WOES IN HOUSING By ALAN FINDER Published: March 5, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2D61E3EF936A35750C0A961948260 The question, raised initially by Mayor Koch in December 1985, has acquired a sense of urgency in recent months at City Hall: Can new, unsubsidized housing be built by private developers for middle-income New Yorkers? The Battle to Preserve a Jersey Utopia By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: March 22, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE1D71F38F931A15750C0A961948260 IN their quest to preserve the remnants of Gustav Stickley's utopian community, the out-of-state developer and the home-grown preservationist are of a mind. They differ only in how to reach their goal, but that is a big difference. The developer, a red-haired firebrand named Jack C. Heller who travels in a limousine and breaks $100 bills in fast-food restaurants, intends to save the log house that served as home and refuge for Stickley, the designer and architect who is sometimes credited with founding the arts and crafts movement in America. MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION: A HOUSE IN THE COUNTRY By ERICA ABEEL; ERICA ABEEL IS A WRITER AND A PROFESSOR AT JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. Published: April 19, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEFDA1F30F93AA25757C0A961948260 Gulkin is among the growing number of middle- and upper-middle class Americans whose pursuit of happiness has led them to the purchase of a weekend retreat. For the obsession with having a country house is upon us. If every age has fads, foibles and conventions which reveal its collective psyche, one of ours is to acquire a second home in the mountains, in the woods or at the beach - in any rustic area, in fact, within three hours of the city. FLORIDA MARKET: BALLYHOO AND BARGAINS By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: April 26, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE4D7173CF935A15757C0A961948260 COMMERCIALS for ''Mediterranean villas'' fill Florida's airwaves and the state's roadways are littered with billboards announcing such events as the grand opening of the 19th phase of the 34th suburban-style project on the left Marketing offensives aside, it is a buyer's market for the sprawling communities of second and retirement homes in South Florida. High-rise apartment buyers also have their pick, but there are fewer choices for those who want a single-family house that looks original, is apart from the crowd and is set in a natural landscape. Prices have been flat for several years and the market is awash with real estate. As a result, many sellers are willing to accept considerably less than their asking prices, according to market analysts. The best deals are on about 5,000 high-rise condominium units - primarily in Miami, but scattered around the beaches of both coasts - that have been sitting vacant for several years. And since there are so many expanding projects, developers are quite competitive and more than willing to negotiate; many will immediately offer to pay closing costs and travel expenses. CAMPERS WAIT DAYS ON A CONDO TRAIL SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: April 26, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEED9143FF935A15757C0A961948260 They began arriving 10 days ago, dozens of people on the condominium trail. In warm sun and then cold rain, they lived in a community of cars, campers and trucks, assuring themselves a chance to pay $175,000 and up for one of the 100 town houses that will become Society Hill. Huge Jersey Project Planned on Hudson June 4, 1987, Thursday By THOMAS J. LUECK (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section B, Page 1, Column 4, 804 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40710F93C5E0C778CDDAF0894DF484D81 In a project that reflects the growing importance of New Jersey's riverfront real estate, developers said yesterday that they planned to build a $900 million complex of offices, condominiums, stores and a marina along the Hudson River in Jersey City. In a project that reflects the growing importance... Home Buying Drops Sharply In the Suburbs By THOMAS J. LUECK, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: July 27, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DA1731F934A15754C0A961948260 The surging market for homes in the suburbs of New York City has abruptly shifted gears. In many suburban communities, where real-estate prices have more than doubled since 1980, industry experts say there is a huge inventory of unsold homes, and a sudden paucity of buyers. In May, June and early July - normally the peak of the home-buying season - anxious sellers in much of the suburban region have been lowering their prices, sometimes repeatedly. ''The number of properties on the market is unbelievable,'' said Richard Palmer, regional vice president of the National Board of Realtors for New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. ''For the moment, the unsatiable demand for homes seems to be satisfied.'' About Real Estate; Hoboken By FLETCHER ROBERTS Published: August 14, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DEEDE153FF937A2575BC0A961948260 To witness the revitalization taking place in Hoboken, N.J., a visitor need not venture much beyond the PATH station at the southern end of the city. An area once noted for its unsavoriness because of the bars that catered to dockworkers in the waterfront's heyday has in recent years taken on a more genteel air, with sidewalk cafes, health clubs and even a takeout shop featuring food delicacies. Now this area is expecting a major lift from a $57 million mixed-use complex planned for the 1.3-acre site of a Shop-Rite supermarket, just a few steps from the PATH station. The complex will include 288 condominium units, underground parking and a ground-level shopping mall. The Windfall Profits in Insider Flips By MICHAEL DECOURCY HINDS Published: August 30, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE0DB153BF933A0575BC0A961948260 JAMES AND JOAN DRUKER purchased their Upper West Side apartment last April for $178,000. In June, they signed a sales contract to sell it at a $222,000 profit. Another couple, Eric and Carol Michaels, bought their Greenwich Village apartment in the early spring and sold it three months later, making $80,000. They are among the tenants in New York City who have purchased their apartments at discounted insider prices during a cooperative or condominium conversion and quickly resold, or flipped them. Beneficiaries of the conversion windfall include many tenants who did not buy apartments, but sold their options to purchase them at discount or took a generous buyout from the landlord. THE REGION: HOW SOME EXPERTS SEE THE LOCAL ECONOMY; Beyond the Boom: Where Do We Go From Here? October 4, 1987, Sunday By THOMAS J. LUECK (NYT); Week in Review Desk Late City Final Edition, Section 4, Page 24, Column 1, 2565 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40717FA345D0C778CDDA90994DF484D81 A REPORT by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey last week reaffirmed that the 10-year expansion of the metropolitan area's economy has continued this year, fueled by a sustained boom in construction and resulting in the lowest unemployment rate in nearly two decades. But the... The Aftermath for Housing and Offices By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: October 25, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2DA1431F936A15753C1A961948260 EVEN before stock prices tumbled on Wall Street last week, developers, investors and house buyers tried to assess just how closely the real estate market and the stock market were linked. Now they want to know if one can prosper without the other. The losses on Wall Street, and a possible continued loss of financial services jobs, left some commercial developers and investors scrambling to figure whether vacancy rates would rise and how that would affect plans for new office buildings. There also are worries that the cash-rich traders and others who have been able to pay extraordinary prices for new condominiums and gracious older houses in the suburbs might drop out of the market. If so, what happens to prices and how will that bear on new projects such as Battery Park City, which derives much of its style and reason for being from Wall Street? MARKET TURMOIL; Real Estate Market Remains Rattled October 30, 1987, Friday By LISA BELKIN (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 8, Column 1, 1195 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40712F9385C0C738FDDA90994DF484D81 The stock market plunge is taking a toll on the real estate industry, many buyers, sellers and agents agree. But there is little agreement as to whether the disruption is temporary or likely to be long-lasting. The stock market plunge is taking a toll on the real estate... Talking: Closings; Surviving Market's Turmoil By ANDREE BROOKS Published: November 1, 1987 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE2D81530F932A35752C1A961948260 THE recent turbulence in the stock market is causing many concerns for buyers who are poised to close on a home or an investment property. THE recent turbulence in the stock market is causing many concerns for buyers who are poised to close on a home or an investment property. What if the down payment, or part of it, was to have been raised through the sale of securities that are too diminished in value to cover the obligation? What if there is enough value left in the holdings, but, at current prices, no longer a desire to sell? 1988 - The Crash Begins Business Growth Is Slowing in New York January 6, 1988, Wednesday By THOMAS J. LUECK (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section B, Page 3, Column 1, 1055 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0715FB3A5D0C758CDDA80894D0484D81 Business expansion in the New York metropolitan region slowed last year, with its economy showing strain even before the stock market collapse on Oct. 19, according to a Government report released yesterday. Business expansion in the New York metropolitan region slowed last year, with its economy showing strain... New York Suburbs Spilling Westward By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: February 14, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE4DB153FF937A25751C0A96E948260 Lured by out-of-date house prices and a twin set of superhighways, growing numbers of New York and New Jersey residents are settling into dozens of small northeastern Pennsylvania communities stretching from the old mill town of Easton to the heart of honeymoon land in the Pocono mountains. Sweetening the Deals in a Soft Market By MARK MCCAIN Published: February 21, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDF143AF932A15751C0A96E948260 Taking a cue from anxious developers, Leonard D'Andrea stirred some flash into the strategy for selling his home in Stamford, Conn. Besides posting a competitive price on the two-bedroom condominium, he is offering to pay the buyer's $160-a-month maintenance fee for six months. ''The market is very, very soft right now,'' said Mr. D'Andrea, who began advertising his apartment without success last month. ''I saw the incentives that developers were offering and figured I needed to do something similar to compete against all their new product.'' A Dream Falls Flat: Fleeing Hoboken for the Suburbs March 7, 1988, Monday By DENA KLEIMAN, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late City Final Edition, Section B, Page 1, Column 2, 1325 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0716FC3A5F0C748CDDAA0894D0484D81 Seton and Brian Beckwith bought a brownstone here seven years ago amid hopes that this old waterfront city, minutes from Wall Street and with spectacular views of New York, would be transformed into a new middle-class community. Seton and Brian Beckwith bought a brownstone here seven years ago... Construction Of Apartments In Manhattan Falls Sharply By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: April 3, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5D6143FF930A35757C0A96E948260 NO one expected them to last forever, those buoyant days when it seemed there was a construction crane on every corner of Manhattan and apartment buildings were rising as fast as land could be cleared. The slide is startling, with apartment starts going from as many as 20,000 in 1985 to only 1,400 last year, according to a survey by the Zeckendorf Company. The meager number of building permits filed with the city last year - 1,200 units, compared to 4,000 in 1986 and 9,900 in 1985 - shows that production will remain at low levels for several years. A Helping Hand in Buying a First Home By IVER PETERSON Published: April 24, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE3D9133AF937A15757C0A96E948260 AS home ownership continues to decline among young adults, a growing number of states, municipalities and private employers are developing programs intended to help first-time home buyers over a relatively new hurdle: the difficulty of accumulating down payment and closing costs and meeting tightened mortgage-qualifying rules. IN THE NEW YORK REGION; With Vacancies Rising, Watchword Is Caution By MARK MCCAIN Published: May 15, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFDA133AF936A25756C0A96E948260 A HAZE of caution has been hanging over the Manhattan office market ever since last October's stock market crash. And the forecast for the rest of the year looks - at best - partly sunny. It is hardly like the mid-70's, when desperate owners would grab any offer dangled in front of them. But the inventory of vacant floors continues to grow. Investment banks are trimming their space requirements, owners are trimming their profit projections and builders are trimming their visions of skyscrapers. Reassessments Hit Homeowners Hard By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: May 15, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE6DA1631F936A25756C0A96E948260 NOT even in gentrifying Hoboken can Henry Wurtz imagine that his quirky little rowhouse - only 10 feet wide - is worth $212,200, the value recently put on it by a firm doing the city's new tax assessments. ''It's only a bowling lane, three stories high,'' said Mr. Wurtz, a 59-year-old nurse anesthetist who bought his house in the New Jersey community in 1980 for $47,000. He has gotten so worked up about the new assessment that he hung a sign outside his second-story window. It reads: $212,200 Narrowest House in Town Laughable!!! Buyers Call the Tune in Home Market By MARK MCCAIN Published: July 3, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE5D8173AF930A35754C0A96E948260 A YEAR ago Joseph Sorbera had big plans for a little piece of Staten Island. He would sell off seven new houses as fast as his construction crews could erect them. But today only one $665,000 house stands in his Hylan Avenue subdivision. And there are no takers. ''I'm sure we'll ultimately wind up with buyers, but right now the market is soft,'' said Mr. Sorbera, a builder based in Manhattan. ''We've become very cautious. We will only put up houses as they're sold, rather than building them on speculation, which was our initial strategy.'' New York Area Remains Costly Published: August 16, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEED7173AF935A2575BC0A96E948260 Prices of single-family homes in New York and the surrounding area are among the highest in the country but are increasing at slower rates than those in Southern California. According to the National Association of Realtors, the median home price in the New York City area, including Long Island, southwestern Connecticut and northeastern New Jersey, rose 4.9 percent for the year ended June 30, to $191,900. Nationally, the median price rose 3.4 percent, to $88,900. In Bergen County, N.J., the average list price of a single-family home was $409,865 at the end of July, compared with $372,107 last year. Although prices remain high compared with those in other areas of the nation, there are more homes being offered on the market. Properties available through the Multiple Listing Service of Nassau County, for example, climbed to 8,844 last May from 4,537 a year earlier. IN THE NATION; Scarcity and High Cost Of Land Slow Housing By ALAN S. OSER Published: September 11, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE7DE153AF932A2575AC0A96E948260 BUILDERS across the country contend that the scarcity and high cost of land approved by local governments for new residential construction is the chief obstacle to producing the elusive new single-family house affordable to the younger American household. The problem is most acute on the East and West Coasts, where tougher and tougher zoning rules, anti-growth policies, slow building-approval processes and other obstructions impede the land development process. Environmental concerns also rule out development on land that might formerly have been used, lifting prices for the fewer remaining buildable lots. Battle Over Condo Conversions Heats Up By JEFFREY HOFF Published: September 18, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2DD1E3FF93BA2575AC0A96E948260 WHILE New Jersey suffers from a severe shortage of low-cost housing, tens of thousands of tenants across the state face eviction because their apartments are being converted to condominiums or cooperatives. Mounting opposition to the evictions has generated fierce legislative and legal debates. A Year After the Crash, Climbing Back; Resilient Economy Puts Home Buyers Back into Market By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: October 16, 1988 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE2DB113DF935A25753C1A96E948260 A YEAR after Wall Street quaked last Oct. 19, tumbling much of the real estate market with it, most residential properties have sprung back smartly. But those closest to the epicenter - houses and apartments destined for buyers with incomes earned from the financial markets - are still slithering around in a slough of weakness. When Wall Street trembled and the co-op market was stunned to a halt, Mr. Friend tried hard to salvage his deal. He lowered the price on his apartment by $35,000, listed it with 50 brokers and even offered a week's vacation in one of his hotels to the broker who sold it. He postponed the closing on the 79th Street apartment several times and, under the terms of the contract, paid the owner's $2,200 monthly mortgage and maintenance charges. Banks' Net At Record $5.9 Billion December 13, 1988, Tuesday By NATHANIEL C. NASH, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 1, Column 6, 904 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0711FC345E0C708DDDAB0994D0484D81 The nation's commercial banking industry reported a record $5.9 billion in third-quarter profits, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said today. But the agency's chairman warned that the volume of bad loans had increased and that bank involvement in leveraged buyouts should be carefully monitored. The nation's commercial banking... 1989 - The Market Turns Home Prices Increase 3.4% February 15, 1989, Wednesday REUTERS (NYT); Financial Desk Late City Final Edition, Section D, Page 20, Column 4, 229 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0713FE3B590C768DDDAB0894D1484D81 Prices of existing homes rose 3.4 percent last year, but despite the moderate increase, many first-time buyers are being priced out of the market in some areas, a national real estate group said today. Prices of existing homes rose 3.4 percent last year, but despite the moderate increase,... Spring Sprouting Buds of Uncertainty By IVER PETERSON Published: March 19, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DF133FF93AA25750C0A96F948260 THIS spring, while some people let their fancy turn to thoughts of love, others will be worrying about the New York area housing market. The reason is simple: The tumultuous boom in house values of this decade's middle years has been followed by 18 months of slack prices and declining sales in the area, and the seasonal outlook speaks of opportunities for buyers, belt-tightening for sellers and uncertainties for all. Housing prices ran so far ahead of rises in income during the boom that some experts predict the slow market will persist for several years until wages catch up with wishes. Carefree Days of Turning Garbage Into Real Estate Are Over June 7, 1989, Wednesday (NYT); Editorial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 26, Column 4, 413 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0711F73F5D0C748CDDAF0894D1484D81 Bidding for Buyers in a Slow Market By IVER PETERSON Published: June 18, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7DE113FF93BA25755C0A96F948260 STEVE JANOWIAK cut the price of his penthouse condominium in suburban Chicago twice over the two years he listed it with a broker but it still did not sell. Fred Uehlein's condominium development outside Worcester, Mass., had sold well until the New England market slumped following the stock market crash in October 1987, and he was left with a third of the units unsold. Market for Top Apartments Is Cooling By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: July 9, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEFDC1F31F93AA35754C0A96F948260 TO many New York City renters, particularly those who endured the search for an apartment during the city's economic boom earlier in the 80's, it may seem as if Richard E. Hubner and Janet Aquino are talking about somewhere else. Both are moving to Manhattan - he from Boston and she from Philadelphia. Both braced themselves for a tortuous transition into the nation's most expensive rental market, expecting to settle for something smaller, dirtier, darker and far more costly than the homes they were leaving. And both have been pleasantly surprised. About Real Estate; Co-op Converters Start To Rent in Slowdown By ANDREE BROOKS Published: July 14, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE0DC1F3DF937A25754C0A96F948260 A growing number of cooperative and condominium converters in New Jersey have begun to rent rather than sell their swelling inventory of vacant units, reflecting the continued slowdown in residential sales that has especially affected that state's conversion market. The New York Area's Flat 'Move-Up' Market By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: August 6, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEFD81039F935A3575BC0A96F948260 THE weak market for homes in New York City's suburbs, where demand and prices have soured, is creating headaches for everyone trying to sell their houses - and migraines for sellers at the middle and high ends of the spectrum - according to economists and real estate brokers. The shift conforms to a pattern that has emerged in the past after periods of surging prices: With many homes languishing on the market, buyers are reluctant to stretch their budgets and people who already own homes postpone moves to larger, newer or more fashionable residences. New York City's Housing Pace Slows By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: August 20, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE0D6153FF933A1575BC0A96F948260 The slowdown is most pronounced in construction of expensive condominiums. In 1985, work began on over 21,000 new homes, more than half of them in fashionable Manhattan condominium towers. Now, analysts say, construction rates have dropped to where work is beginning on fewer than 12,000 new homes a year, less than a third of them in Manhattan condominiums. After a Decade of Expansion, L.I. Economic Bubble Bursts August 24, 1989, Thursday By PHILIP S. GUTIS (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 2, 1420 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0714FF395D0C778EDDA10894D1484D81 As the economy slows across the New York metropolitan region and much of the Northeast, economists say Long Island is on the leading edge of the downturn. After a decade of explosive growth, the Island's bubble has burst. As the economy slows across the New York metropolitan region... IN THE NATION; Demographics Hold Key To Home Appreciation By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: September 10, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE7DD123AF933A2575AC0A96F948260 ''There are never any guarantees that a housing investment will pay off,'' he said. ''Things go sideways, and even downwards for a while, and sometimes people get hurt.'' Like Mr. Pfister, experts across the nation now are reassessing the prospects for home value appreciation with a newfound sense of caution. Most continue to believe that home prices will continue to rise over the long term. But they point to factors already responsible for downturns in some markets, and that could spread to others. IN THE NEW YORK REGION; A Soft Market Is Chilling Apartment Construction By MARK MCCAIN Published: September 10, 1989 ''People haven't been shy about negotiating over the phone - to see how far they can whittle down the price before they even look at my apartment,'' said Mr. Ginsberg, who is asking $167,000 for a studio apartment on East 56th Street that he believes was worth more than $200,000 before the stock market crash of 1987. ''Nonserious shoppers are looking for the steal of century,'' he said. ''And unfortunately, some owners are panicking and selling their apartments for less than they're worth - which hurts all the rest of us.'' Whether the motivation is panic or simply realism, successful sellers today are often resigning themselves to break-even deals. And sellers who bought nondescript apartments at the peak of the bidding frenzy four years ago are looking at losses that sometimes exceed $50,000. Buyers have become choosy and cautious, amid fears that prices have not bottomed out yet. Deals are still being struck, but hot spots in the market are few. Working to Bolster Residential Sales By PENNY SINGER Published: September 10, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE0D81330F933A2575AC0A96F948260 ''The home-buying market needs new blood to remain healthy,'' she said. ''Sales have been flat across the tristate area.'' Doldrums Troubling Housing Developers By MARK MCCAIN Published: September 24, 1989 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DE1DB163EF937A1575AC0A96F948260 WITH birch trees and rhododendrons spread across their lush lawns, seven new town houses at the Racquet Club on Long Island Sound look like the pride of loving homeowners. But a wasteland of mud ponds and hardpan that surrounds this manicured oasis in Centerville, L.I., offers evidence of big plans gone awry. Bulldozers gouged 20 acres out of an oak forest there, 75 miles east of Manhattan, to make way for more than 200 homes. But after spending more than $12 million on land, site work, roads, construction and advertising, the developers found no buyers. The seven model homes now sit locked and empty. In a Cooling Housing Market, Real Estate Auctions Are Hot December 3, 1989, Sunday By CHARLOTTE LIBOV (NYT); Connecticut Weekly Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 12CN, Page 1, Column 5, 1450 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0715FD355F0C708CDDAB0994D1484D81 AUCTIONING off property, a sales method common in foreclosures, is being used more and more to market houses and condominiums in Connecticut as the demand for real estate continues to slacken. U.S. Seizes New Jersey Savings Bank December 9, 1989, Saturday AP (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 33, Column 6, 778 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0713FC3D580C7A8CDDAB0994D1484D81 Federal regulators seized New Jersey's largest savings association today after the institution recorded large losses from real estate ventures in New Jersey, Florida and Texas. Federal regulators seized New Jersey's largest savings association today after the institution recorded large losses from real estate ventures in New Jersey, Florida... NORTHEAST BANKS FACE HEAVY LOSSES ON PROBLEM LOANS December 15, 1989, Friday By MICHAEL QUINT (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 6, 1812 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0715FB3F5D0C768DDDAB0994D1484D81 Troubled real estate loans are causing heavy losses for bankers in the Northeast. Troubled real estate loans are causing heavy losses for bankers in the Northeast. With office vacancy rates reaching 25 to 30 percent in places like central New Jersey and Stamford, Conn., and with many condominium... Banks' Bad Real Estate Loans Spur Rising Worry of Failures December 29, 1989, Friday By NATHANIEL C. NASH, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 1, 1582 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA071EFC3C5B0C7A8EDDAB0994D1484D81 Federal regulators and banking experts say they are increasingly concerned that mounting losses from troubled real estate loans could lead to a series of bank failures, straining the Federal insurance program that protects depositors' funds. Federal regulators and banking experts say they are increasingly concerned that mounting losses... 1990 - Bank Failures And Foreclosure Savings Agency Ordered to Sell Real Estate Fast January 4, 1990, Thursday By NATHANIEL C. NASH, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 2, 1779 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30614FB385D0C778CDDA80894D8494D81 The new agency created to manage the huge savings and loan bailout was instructed today to sell the real estate it inherited from hundreds of insolvent institutions as quickly as possible. The directive from the Bush Administration raised concerns among bankers that the properties could be ''dumped'' in... Edgewater Sugar Factory Is Now a Rental Complex By ANDREE BROOKS Published: January 5, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE1DB1F38F936A35752C0A966958260 ''We felt that real estate values alongside the Hudson could only go up,'' Robert Gershon said. And since the buildings were occupied with industrial tenants whose rents supported the $850,000 purchase price, it seemed a good property to hold until a more profitable use might be found. It was still uncertain whether there would be a viable market for luxury housing in a community that formerly had such a strong industral image. ''So it became a wait-and-see purchase,'' Mr. Gershon said. By 1986 those doubts were gone. The development frenzy that hit the Northeast included the emerging neighborhoods of Edgewater. So the Gershons worked out an agreement with the town that allowed them to carve 40 residential units out of the complex's two main buildings (the second and smaller one to be dubbed Sweet'n Low). The apartment buildings were originally planned as a condominium. But even before construction began, Robert Gershon said, he and his brother were considering keeping some units as rentals in the hope of profiting from an increase in values. But in 1988, when demand for condominiums weakened, the brothers opted for a total rental complex. Mortgage Delinquencies Increasing By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: January 14, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5DA163BF937A25752C0A966958260 THE slump in the New York region's real estate market, now in its third year, is increasing the financial strain on homeowners, would-be sellers and lenders alike as delinquent mortgage loans and foreclosures spread across New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. More than 4 percent of the mortgage loans to individuals and families in New York City and its suburbs are now past due by at least two months, according to several studies. At those rates of delinquency, analysts say the region does not face anything close to the deep economic woes of Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado and other states around the Southwest, where more than 20 percent of the mortgage loans are delinquent and over 20,000 foreclosed homes are being sold off by the Federal Government. Buyers Hang Back in Muddled Market By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: January 28, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D81430F93BA15752C0A966958260 A TWO-YEAR slump in property values has pushed down home prices in the New York region and mortgage interest rates also have fallen, but the reductions show little sign of attracting the huge numbers of buyers who were locked out of the region's giddy real estate market in the mid-80's. CONSUMER'S WORLD; In Today's Housing Market, Is It Better to Buy or Rent? February 10, 1990, Saturday By LEONARD SLOANE (NYT); Style Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 50, Column 4, 923 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3061EF7345C0C738DDDAB0894D8494D81 The decision to own or to rent a home has traditionally been based on three elements: cost, personal preference and investment. But the recent decline in house and apartment prices has made a such an investment less of a sure thing and has helped to convert many potential... Job Hoppers Take Losses On Housing By ANTHONY DEPALMA, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: March 28, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DB153BF93BA15750C0A966958260 But now that fewer jobs are being created, demand has slackened throughout the region and brokers say prices have flattened or, in some instances, dropped as much as 30 percent. While that may be good news for potential buyers, a lack of optimism that values will rise soon prompts them to keep their price ranges conservative. Houses stay on the market months longer than before, and inventories of unsold homes have swelled. TALKING: Default Sales; Foreclosed Property Bargains By ANDREE BROOKS Published: April 15, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6DE173CF936A25757C0A966958260 A GROWING number of residential properties are being offered at below-market prices by lenders who have foreclosed on defaulting homeowners and troubled developers. The Dime Savings Bank of New York, for example, has 600 foreclosed homes available, and other banks also have large stocks of seized houses that they want to sell quickly. Most of these foreclosed properties can be obtained for 60 percent to 90 percent of what similar houses and apartments would bring in today's market. Developers Offer a Garden to Sell the Kitchen Sink By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: May 4, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE4DE1031F937A35756C0A966958260 With huge inventories of unsold homes in the New York region and New England, home hunters this spring are being offered an array of offbeat incentives and promotions. Select the right house and the sellers will throw in the cost of commuting to Manhattan for a year, or a fully landscaped English garden, or a 1984 Mercedes-Benz or an all-expenses-paid vacation to Disney World. ''Price cutting is too commonplace,'' said one developer, Steve Maun. ''We are trying to be creative.'' With Condos on Their Hands, Builders Turn to Auctioneers By IVER PETERSON Published: May 17, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE6D6153BF934A25756C0A966958260 The bidding had reached $247,000, and Steven Good - natty as a banker, with a red rosebud boutonniere -raised his gavel and put a little more pitch into his patter. ''Do I hear forty-seven five, forty-seven five?'' he implored the crowd assembled last Saturday at the Meadowlands Hilton Ballroom in Secaucus, N.J. ''C'mon ladies and gentlemen, don't let your dream house get away from you, gimme-gimme-gimme forty-seven five.'' A few rows back, Meryl Stevens sat with her fiance, Richard Berk, crunching numbers. The three-story town house on the New Jersey bank of the Hudson had been listed at $565,000 last year, and here it was being auctioned off for less than half price. MARKET WATCH; Where's The Cash, Mr. Trump? June 17, 1990, Sunday By FLOYD NORRIS (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 3, Page 1, Column 1, 495 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30611FD3B550C748DDDAF0894D8494D81 Is Donald a deadbeat? Is Donald a deadbeat? Donald J. Trump's failure to come up with a measly $30 million to pay bondholders at Trump's Castle, which he bought five years ago on amazingly generous, less-than-no-money-down, credit terms, is far from the final chapter of the Trump saga.... Construction Fades as Boom Loses Its Vigor July 2, 1990, Monday By RICHARD LEVINE (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late Edition - Final, Section B, Page 1, Column 5, 1465 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30612FE3F5B0C718CDDAE0894D8494D81 So many new towers are rising on the West Side of Manhattan that it is hard to believe the boom is over. But the construction workers who form lunchtime knots on the sidewalks and gather beneath the scaffolding know better. So many new towers are rising on the... Home Builders See Recession And Blame the Savings Crisis July 19, 1990, Thursday By IVER PETERSON (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 1, 1903 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3061FFE3B580C7A8DDDAE0894D8494D81 For the first time since the recession of the early 1980's, the rate of new housing construction has dropped for five consecutive months, providing further proof, home builders say, that the economic and regulatory fallout from the savings and loan crisis has pulled one of the country's biggest... A Market Slumps and Real-Estate Lawyers Scramble By ANTHONY DEPALMA Published: August 27, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2D71430F934A1575BC0A966958260 When houses and apartments were selling in days or weeks during the mid-1980's, real-estate closings were the bread and butter of many law practices in the New York metropolitan region. Some lawyers conducted hundreds of closings a year, collecting from $750 to $1,000 for each one. But since the real-estate market was laid low and houses began to remain unsold for a year or more, that steady source of income has dried up, and many of those lawyers have had to reorganize the way they practice law. ECONOMISTS FAULT POPULATION FIGURE FOR NEW YORK CITY September 1, 1990, Saturday By RICHARD LEVINE (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 1, Column 1, 1096 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F3061FFB3B5D0C728CDDA00894D8494D81 Could a city that enjoyed its greatest economic boom since World War II, experienced a dizzying rise in housing prices, attracted the largest wave of immigration since the days of Ellis Island and seemed to grow more crowded in every conceivable way actually be smaller now than it... Profits Off By 15.9% At Banks September 7, 1990, Friday By ROBERT D. HERSHEY JR., SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section D, Page 1, Column 3, 665 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30617FF3C590C748CDDA00894D8494D81 Mounting problems with real estate loans along much of the East Coast cut profits of the nation's commercial banks to $5.3 billion in the second quarter, 15.9 percent below those of the first three months of the year, the Government reported today. ''The quality of the banking industry's... Buyers Now Looking Just for a Home By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: September 9, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFDC153DF93AA3575AC0A966958260&sec=&pagewanted=1 Across the region, where a three-year slump has left thousands of houses and cooperative and condominium apartments languishing on the market, experts say the approach of buyers has changed radically from the go-go years of the 80's. Instead of expecting to sell at a profit after two or three years - as many homeowners did - buyers now expect to remain in their homes for five to 10 years or more. Residential Auctions More Popular By JAY ROMANO Published: October 7, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2DB1F3CF934A35753C1A966958260 RESIDENTIAL real-estate auctions, traditionally perceived as the last resort of desperate developers, are fast becoming an acceptable, sometimes preferable sales strategy, real-estate experts say. In the midst of a real-estate slump that has left the state blanketed with for-sale signs, anxious sellers are more quickly turning to the auction block to lure cautious buyers to their properties. And according to auctioneers, real-estate agents, developers and the buyers themselves, the strategy is working better than anyone expected. Chemical Bank Cuts Its Dividend As Bad Real Estate Loans Sour October 12, 1990, Friday By MICHAEL QUINT (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section A, Page 1, Column 1, 1030 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30612F93E550C718DDDA90994D8494D81 The Chemical Banking Corporation announced a sharp cut in its stock dividend yesterday and a loss for the third quarter, joining a growing list of large banking companies whose problems with real estate loans have led to reduced payments to shareholders. The Chemical Banking Corporation announced a sharp... Rentals Flourish as Home Sales Slow By SHAWN G. KENNEDY Published: November 11, 1990 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE2D71338F932A25752C1A966958260 IN the New York region's troubled home market, the rental alternative is becoming an increasingly attractive temporary haven for many would-be sellers and buyers. Among them are Samuel and Giedra Trocone, who see the should-we-sell-should-we-buy dilemma from both sides. Owners in New Jersey, the Troncones found, were lowering their prices every few weeks. But rather than viewing these reductions as a golden opportunity, the Troncones took them as a warning sign. Northeast Housing Slowdown Spreads Into Industry Recession December 16, 1990, Sunday By THOMAS J. LUECK (NYT); National Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 1, Column 4, 1607 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30616F63D590C758DDDAB0994D8494D81 A prolonged slump in home sales that began in the New York and Boston areas soon after the stock market collapse of 1987 has expanded into a housing recession that engulfs much of the nation, according to economists and real estate executives. As always, the strength of home sales... 1991 - A False Glimmer Of Hope Morris County Sees Taxes Rise As Values Fall By ROBERT HANLEY, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: January 7, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE0D61E3EF934A35752C0A967958260 After a 10-year boom in construction and property values, the taxable worth of real estate is dropping in Morris County, all but guaranteeing higher property taxes for homeowners. After soaring alongside the economy in the 1980's, Morris County's ratables -- the taxable value of its land and buildings and the foundation of its local budgets -- have declined by $2 billion to about $42 billion for the 1991 tax year, officials said. 'The 80's had them escalating so high that reality has set in,' Robert Natoli, the county treasurer, said of property values. Bud Struble, head of the County Board of Taxation, said, 'For the first time in memory, we're going the other way -- real value is coming down.' Real, or market, value is a critical part of assessed value. Redefining 'Affordability' for the 90's By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: January 20, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE1DE1131F933A15752C0A967958260 And for many homeowners, the gains in affordability are at best a mixed blessing. Millions who bought in the late 80's, believing their homes would prove to be lucrative investments, went further into debt for mortgage loans than has traditionally been considered prudent. Now, caught in a nationwide real estate slump and facing the propspect of selling for little more -- or even less -- than they paid, many are staying put, cutting back on other expenses and paying housing costs that are a heavy load. Personal Bankruptcies Mounting With the Trepidation Lessening January 21, 1991, Monday By NICK RAVO, SPECIAL TO THE NEW YORK TIMES (NYT); Metropolitan Desk Late Edition - Final, Section B, Page 1, Column 2, 1474 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20610FB3C5D0C728EDDA80894D9494D81 Throughout most of the 1980's, Paul Bernier, like many people here, prospered. He owned a 20-year-old contracting business. He also owned a fairly modest $300,000 home in this wealthy Fairfield County town. In the last 18 months, though, Mr. Bernier's company has collapsed under the Northeast's falling real-estate market.... Bottom of the Housing Slump Is Seen in the New York Area By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: March 1, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE1DD103BF932A35750C0A967958260 The New York area's housing slump may have finally hit bottom, or come close to it. Jersey's 'Gold Coast' Losing Its Glitter By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: March 24, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE3D61438F937A15750C0A967958260 THE New Jersey shore of the Hudson River, which emerged in the mid-80's as a powerful new magnet for high-rise office development, is struggling with high vacancy rates, canceled projects and nagging doubts about the capacity of its roads, parking and public transportation. No area better symbolized the 80's real estate boom in the New York region. An 18-mile corridor of gritty piers, derelict warehouses and abandoned railroad yards, the New Jersey riverfront became a patchwork of huge development sites. It also became the focus of a feisty battle for New York City tenants and the centerpiece of an urban renaissance so sweeping that some began calling the area the 'Gold Coast' of New Jersey. After a Long Slump, Home Sales Rise By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: August 25, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE7D7103AF936A1575BC0A967958260 SALES of houses, co-ops and condominiums in the New York metropolitan area, still near the bottom of a slump that has been longer and deeper than any since before World War II, have improved steadily since the spring in what analysts say is the beginning of a slow recovery. For sellers, the long slump has given rise to a new calculus in housing finance. They may accept less than their house was worth in the recent past, but they pay less for whatever they are buying in replacement. Recovery In Housing Is Erratic September 2, 1991, Monday By THOMAS J. LUECK (NYT); Financial Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 1, Page 25, Column 6, 1414 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20616FC34540C718CDDA00894D9494D81 After five months of robust sales gains during the spring and early summer, the nation's housing markets have lapsed into a sluggish, uneven recovery. Still, prices are increasing gradually in most areas, while new construction is rising steadily. 'This is a very weak and spotty recovery,' said David Shulman,... Are Auctions Driving Housing Prices Down? By IVER PETERSON Published: October 6, 1991 LAST spring, as many housing developers despaired of hitting their price goals in an open market and began to auction off their apartments and town houses, some holdouts protested that the auctions would push the market lower and drag down prices on all properties. Auctioneers, eager to break into the New York area's rich market of overbuilt and undersold housing, insisted that a quick sale of most units in a troubled development, even if at a discount, would shore up the prices of the remaining apartments and houses and secure higher prices for them. Home Buyers Holding Off Despite Low Interest Rates By THOMAS J. LUECK Published: October 27, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE1D7153BF934A15753C1A967958260 DESPITE a steep decline in interest rates that has brought fixed 30-year mortgage loans to below 9 percent for the first time since 1977, home buyers are holding back across most of the nation in what experts say are stubborn fears that job cuts and other recessionary pressures will persist. Elsewhere in the nation, home sales have declined steadily at the very time that interest rates have dropped most sharply. In This Buyers' Market The Buyers Are Edgy By NICK RAVO Published: December 15, 1991 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE1DC103DF936A25751C1A967958260 Indeed, these are tense times for home buyers, brokers, builders and sellers. Sale prices in the Northeast, in defiance of the old 'it-can-only-go-up' axiom, have been falling for two years, making many shoppers and new home owners wonder about the real worth of real estate. 1992 - Reality Sets Back In The Shattered Vision of the Booming 90's By DAVID W. DUNLAP Published: March 8, 1992 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEED9163CF93BA35750C0A964958260 As New York City's real-estate market enters its fourth year of distress, the absence of the Ninth Avenue projects, as well as dozens of others proposed in the last decade, is keenly felt. The virtual freeze in construction has cost millions of dollars in tax revenues and thousands of jobs, underscoring the city's dependence on development not only as a prime stimulator of its economy but also as a prop for its civic identity, as a place that ceaselessly, impatiently renews itself. An Uptick for Home Sales in the Region By NICK RAVO Published: June 7, 1992 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE0D6153BF934A35755C0A964958260 SPURRED by low interest rates and lower prices, the residential real estate market in the New York metropolitan region, which has been dramatically deflated by a three-year recession and rapidly changing demographics, appears, for the most part, to be taking a slight upward turn. Few real estate analysts, however, expect a sharp rise in sales volume for one-family homes, co-op apartments or condominiums anytime soon. Nor do they expect sale prices in the foreseeable future to return to the heights of the middle to late 80's. New Housing At Lowest Since '85 By NICK RAVO Published: August 30, 1992 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CEEDF1F3AF933A0575BC0A964958260 THE once frenetic pace of housing construction in New York City has slowed to a virtual halt over the last three years, impeded by the lingering recession, a dearth of Federal funds and a bureaucratic bog of rent and land-use regulations. Housing experts are unsure exactly how many new units are needed today. They contend, though, that despite attempts by the administrations of Mayors Edward I. Koch and David N. Dinkins to stimulate both construction and rehabilitation, vast numbers of affordable homes for low- and middle-income residents need to be built, particularly in the outer boroughs. Surge in Home Foreclosures and Evictions Shattering Families By NICK RAVO Published: November 15, 1992 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE1D81E3DF936A25752C1A964958260 The number of homes in foreclosure in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut has almost doubled since the middle of last year, rising to levels not seen in decades. The sudden surge in foreclosures, after a steady climb since the late 1980's, reflects the region's job losses, falling real-estate values and a growing backlog of cases that have clogged the courts, delaying some foreclosures for months and even years, lenders and lawyers say. Foreclosures on Rise While Prices Still Falter November 29, 1992, Sunday By ROBERT A. HAMILTON (NYT); Connecticut Weekly Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 13CN, Page 1, Column 5, 1556 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F1061FFD3C5C0C7A8EDDA80994DA494D81 WHILE most of the Connecticut economy languishes, one sector is thriving. Lawyers, auctioneers, real estate agents and others involved in foreclosures are doing a booming business. Four years ago, when real estate prices in Connecticut were at an all-time high, about 20 mortgages of every 1,000 were in foreclosure.... Foreclosures May Have Hit the Bottom By PENNY SINGER Published: December 13, 1992 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE5D9123BF930A25751C1A964958260 A critical factor in foreclosures, he said, is the large number of borrowers who bought high-priced houses in the 80's. 'The foreclosures reflect the mortgage policy of the mid-80's. They were allowed to liberally get large mortgages, but now the economic pressures for many, brought on by the recession -- such as loss of jobs, loss of income -- make it impossible for a lot of them to come up with their mortgage payments. That's the bad news. The good news is that the high level of foreclosures that we began seeing back in the first half of 1989 is finally leveling off.' 1993 - Hope For A Bottom Have Suburban Prices Hit the Bottom? By NICK RAVO Published: February 28, 1993 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F0CE7D9153CF93BA15751C0A965958260 THE market for one-family homes in the suburban New York metropolitan region, much of which has been in decline for the last five years, appears to have bottomed out in most areas, and, in some places, such as Northern New Jersey, a modest recovery seems to be under way. Real estate brokers attribute the trend to low mortgage interest rates, realistic prices set by sellers, the dearth of new construction and a small surge of first-time buyers who were priced out of the market in the mid-80's and frightened out in the late 80's and early 90's. 1994 - Disappointing Bounce Residential Real Estate Market Rebounds in New York Region By NICK RAVO Published: January 23, 1994 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801E6DF1030F930A15752C0A962958260 After five years of slumping sales and plummeting prices, the residential real estate market in the New York region is starting to rebound, according to housing analysts. Though the recovery is not as robust as in other parts of the country, like the Southeast and the Rocky Mountain states, the precipitous slide that saw home values in the region plunge by double-digit rates in the late 1980's and early 1990's appears to be ending. 1995 - Uncertainty As The Bottom Is Hit For Suburban Homes, Modest Recovery By NICK RAVO Published: February 19, 1995 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1DD1631F93AA25751C0A963958260 RECOVERY that was reserved in most areas and robust in some reigned over the residential real estate market in the New York suburbs last year. Home sales surged in much of Connecticut and Long Island and in Westchester and Rockland Counties and parts of Northern New Jersey -- but fell short of their mid-1980's peaks. Sale prices, in most places, were flat or rose only slightly, barely bouncing off the bottoms hit during the recession in the early 90's. New York Housing: Sellers Finally Sell By NICK RAVO Published: February 26, 1995 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE6DC153BF935A15751C0A963958260 OWNERS of residential real estate in New York City, particularly those with co-ops, may look back on 1994 as the year when it once again became possible to sell their homes -- even studios and one-bedroom apartments. It still wasn't easy, and the big profits of the 1980's remained only a memory, but the increased demand and stable prices were a substantial improvement over the early 1990's, when market activity slowed drastically and prices fell. In the Region/Connecticut; 'If You're Breathing' You Can Get a Home Mortgage By ELEANOR CHARLES Published: April 2, 1995 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1DB123AF931A35757C0A963958260 For Home Buyers, Patience Has Paid Off By NICK RAVO Published: May 21, 1995 INTEREST rates are falling. Interest rates are falling. It's a mantra being intoned by almost every real estate broker, mortgage banker and potential home buyer these days. And unlike other industry slogans -- like 'now is a good time to buy' or 'prices are rising' -- this one is unarguable, at least for now. Spring Housing-Sales Climate Is Chilly By NICK RAVO Published: June 18, 1995 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE5D7153FF93BA25755C0A963958260 SPRING is the time of year when residential real estate markets often blossom. This spring, though, the market's climate in most of the New York metropolitan region has been cool. House closing figures -- which typically reflect contracts signed one to three months earlier -- have been below those of a year ago in most areas and sale prices have been somewhat lower for many types of houses. About Real Estate; Agents Say Home Sales Remain in the Doldrums By TRACIE ROZHON Published: July 28, 1995 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEEDF1131F93BA15754C0A963958260 As the summer doldrums settle in, real estate agents across the metropolitan New York region are hoping for cooler weather -- and more sales. Among the reasons for the decline, she said, were that ' Wall Street bonuses were significantly lower and there were a lot of layoffs in industry here.' New listings of properties for sale are 'twice what's going off,' she said. COPING;Selling My Place. Naked Before the World. November 5, 1995, Sunday By ROBERT LIPSYTE (NYT); The City Weekly Desk Late Edition - Final, Section 13, Page 1, Column 3, 891 words http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30716F83C5D0C768CDDA80994DD494D81 THE real estate lady drove in from New Jersey with a box of cookies, a nice touch. She planned to put them near the front door so people would feel welcome to walk through my apartment as if they'd been invited to a party instead of an advertised Sunday... Today - Will this bubble end differently? Comments? Please join the discussion at http://nnjbubble.blogspot.com.

Subject: Re: Another then vs now From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 13:23:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The guess is that we are a lot more flexible an economy than in 1981, and more than in 1991. So far, I find warnings all over but no sign that the economy is threatened in the near term by a real estate slowing or by debt, nor have I found such a problem abroad in most recent years.

Subject: Re: Another then vs now From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 13:18:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excellent file of articles. Thanks!

Subject: Re: Another then vs now From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 18:57:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice the astonishing strength and stability of the Vanguard realestate investment trust index.

Subject: Re: Another then vs now From: Terri To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 10:48:06 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The sense is that the real estate market will have a soft soft soft landing provided long term interest rates stay low as they have been and are likely to remain. I am quite optimistic the Federal Reserve has already set the stage for our protection.

Subject: Re: Another then vs now From: Emma To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 13:56:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice, long term interest rates are fine, the dollar is stable, though I do not care about the value of the dollar all that much, the Vanguard REIT index is strong. Again, I too am reasonably bullish.

Subject: Tilt From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 19:14:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/books/review/02FUENTET.html?ex=1383109200&en=afc4868fc40f2f80&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND November 2, 2003 Tilt By Carlos Fuentes DON QUIXOTE By Miguel de Cervantes. Translation by Edith Grossman. Introduction by Harold Bloom. In 2005, Don Quixote will be 400 years old. Most epic heroes are young, from Achilles to El Cid. It was part of the genius of Cervantes to put an old man in the saddle and send him off to relive the heroic tales of the past. But Don Quixote is not alone in his mad quest for chivalry. He is accompanied by his opposite in figure, speech and temperament: the round, earthy, plainspoken Sancho Panza. I stop right here, as the curtain goes up -- or the pages open -- to celebrate the great new translation of ''Don Quixote'' by Edith Grossman. Nothing harder for the traduttore, if he or she is not to be seen as the traditore, than to render a classic in contemporary idiom yet retain its sense of time and space. Up to now, my favorite ''Quixote'' translation has been that of Tobias Smollett, the 18th-century picaresque novelist, who rendered Cervantes in the style proper to Smollett and his own age. His ''Quixote'' reads much like ''Humphry Clinker,'' and this seems appropriate and, even, delightful. The family relationship is there. Edith Grossman delivers her ''Quixote'' in plain but plentiful contemporary English. The quality of her translation is evident in the opening line: ''Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.'' This ''Don Quixote'' can be read with the same ease as the latest Philip Roth and with much greater facility than any Hawthorne. Yet there is not a single moment in which, in forthright English, we are not reading a 17th-century novel. This is truly masterly: the contemporaneous and the original co-exist. Not, mind you, the ''old'' and the ''new.'' Grossman sees to it that these facile categories do not creep into her work. To make the classic contemporary: this is the achievement. And through it, Grossman can highlight Don Quixote's flight into heroic rhetoric with great comic effect and meaningful emphasis. If for many reasons ''Don Quixote'' is the first modern novel, it is pre-eminently because of the different languages spoken in it. Characters in classical literature all spoke the same language. Achilles understands Hector; Ulysses can even speak to Polyphemus. But Quixote and Sancho speak two different idioms. Why? Because the characters are engaged in what the Spanish critic Claudio Guillén calls ''a dialogue of genres.'' There has been some dispute about whether ''Quixote'' is indeed the first modern novel. Ian Watt gives primacy to the 18th-century English novel, which was responding to the rise of a middle-class, book-buying public. André Malraux thought of Madame de Lafayette's ''Princesse de Clèves'' as the first because it initiated inner exploration of character. But I believe that ''Don Quixote'' really inaugurates what we understand modern fiction to be -- a reflection of our presence in the world as problematic beings in an unending history, whose continuity depends on subjecting reality to the imagination. Cervantes does it, as all writers do, in a precise time and space. This is Spain in the decadent reign of Philip III, a country that has conquered and plundered and built a New World in the Americas and returns, exhausted, to its native village in La Mancha with nothing but the memory of past deeds. It is also the Spain of the Counter-Reformation, where the Renaissance enlightenment brought to the court of Charles V by the Erasmist scholars had long been buried under the severe vigilance of the Inquisition and the edicts of the Council of Trent. Cervantes knew his times. One of his novellas, ''El Celoso Extremeño'' (''The Jealous Old Man From Extremadura''), came under the censorship of the archbishop of Seville because two lovers ended up together in bed. Heeding the church warnings, Cervantes changed the finale. The couple, as in movies from the Hays Office era, sleep in separate beds. Cervantes was a disciple of a daring Spanish Erasmist, Juan López de Hoyos. If ''The Praise of Folly'' and its author are never mentioned in the vast libraries of ''Don Quixote,'' it is for good reason: it was too dangerous. Yet could not ''Don Quixote'' accept as its perfect subtitle ''The Praise of Folly''? ''Don Quixote'' has so many levels of significance that I can set foot on only a couple of them. The first is the dialogue of genres. Cervantes inaugurates the modern novel through the impurity, the mestizaje of all known genres. Often criticized for ignoring the requirements of the well-made novel (recognizable characters, expert plotting, linear narrative), Cervantes audaciously brings into his book, first and foremost, the dialogue between the epic (Don Quixote) and the picaresque (Sancho Panza). But then he introduces the tale within the tale, the Moorish, the pastoral, the Byzantine modes and, of course, the love story. The modern novel is born as both an encounter of genres and a refusal of purity. Out of this meeting, Cervantes proposes a new way of writing and reading whose starting point is uncertainty. In a world of dogmatic certitude, he introduces a universe where nothing is certain. The place is uncertain: ''Somewhere in La Mancha. . . .'' The authorship is uncertain. Who wrote ''Don Quixote''? One Cervantes, ''more versed in pain than in verse''? A gentleman called de Saavedra, mentioned in the novel with admiration for his love of freedom? (Cervantes's full name was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.) Is the author the Moorish scribe Cide Hamete Benengeli, who discovers, by chance, an anonymous manuscript? Or is it the despicable Avellaneda, who writes an unauthorized sequel to ''Don Quixote'' (in real life, and in the novel)? Or could it be, if we follow this rich, fantastical path opened by Cervantes, that the author of ''Don Quixote'' is really Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote a tale called ''Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote''? If authorship is uncertain, so are names. ''Don Quixote'' is a veritable onomastic carnival. For beginners, Don Quixote is the heroic name that a minor hidalgo named Alonso Quixano gives himself in order to ride out as a knight errant. But is the name Quixano or Quixada or Quesada? And Quixote himself is dubbed, as he moves through the novel, the Knight of the Sad Face, or the Knight of the Lions, but when he goes into the pastoral mode, he becomes Quixotiz. And when he finally makes it to the castle of the cruel dukes, he is promptly dubbed Don Azote (Mr. Scourge), whereas the disguised Countess Trifaldi calls him Don Jigote, or Mr. Mincemeat Stew. Whoever enters Don Quixote's sphere changes names, furthering the uncertainty that brands this novel. The nameless horse becomes Rocinante; the magicians who haunt the Don are tongue-twisted beyond recognition by Sancho, whose wife can be Teresa, Juana or Mari Gutiérrez; Don Quixote's adversaries have to assume heroic names in order to be credible. And above all, Dulcinea, the knight's damsel, the epitome of gentility, is in all truth none other than the sweaty peasant girl Aldonza. Don Quixote wants to live the books he has read, Michel Foucault pointedly observed. This leads the book to an extraordinary inaugural event and to a heartbreaking conclusion. The event is that Don Quixote, in pursuit of the malevolent plagiarist Avellaneda, rides into Barcelona and there visits . . . a printing shop. And what is being printed there? The book that we are reading. ''Don Quixote de la Mancha.'' They know all about us! exclaims Sancho, even the most private conversations. Cervantes and his ingenious squire have just inaugurated, de facto, the era of Gutenberg, the democratic society of readers and writers. But then, the terrifyingly destructive, not evil but just plain and cruelly destructive, dukes invite the knight and his squire to their castle. And here the sadness of the book is brought to our hearts. For in the castle, Quixote's dreams are offered to him in reality. Where his wonderful imagination could turn an inn into a palace, here the palace is real. Where he could imagine scullery maids as highborn princesses, here the aristocratic women are real. Both real and cruel. Don Quixote is subjected to incessant mockery. Even Sancho, the levelheaded peasant, is lured into the political comedy of becoming governor of a nonexistent island. The illusion comes crashing down. Books are no longer the grand, imaginative truth that moved Don Quixote through perils without end. So the windmills were not giants. So the armies were only flocks of sheep. So reality is shabby, gray, unarmed. . . . What can Don Quixote do but return home, get into bed, recover his reason and peacefully die? The ''impossible dream'' is over. No wonder that Dostoyevsky, in his diary, calls ''Don Quixote'' ''the saddest book ever written.'' For it is, he adds, ''the story of disillusionment.'' That Edith Grossman has brought all these levels -- and many more -- to contemporary life is a major literary achievement. For to read ''Don Quixote,'' in an increasingly Manichaean world of simplistic Good versus Evil and inquisitorial dogmas, becomes one of the healthiest experiences a modern, democratic citizen can undertake.

Subject: Regarding Cervantes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 19:13:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/13/arts/13conn.html?ex=1276315200&en=39ab05ae1b5ea112&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 13, 2005 Regarding Cervantes, Multicultural Dreamer By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Why was 'Don Quixote' originally written in Arabic? Or rather, why does Cervantes, who wrote the book in Spanish, claim that it was translated from the Arabic? Much is being said this year about 'Don Quixote,' in celebration of the 400th anniversary of its publication. And indeed, much has always been said about this extraordinary epic, narrating the misadventures of a half-mad hidalgo who seeks to re-establish the traditions of knight errantry. Faulkner reread it annually; Lionel Trilling said all prose fiction was a variation on its themes. But aside from its literary achievements, 'Don Quixote' sheds oblique light on an era when Spain's Islamic culture forcibly came to an end. Just consider Cervantes's playful account of the book's origins. One day in the Toledo marketplace, he writes, a young boy was trying to sell old notebooks and worn scraps of paper covered with Arabic script. Cervantes recounts how he acquired a book and then looked around for a Moor to translate it. 'It was not very difficult' to find such a Moor, he writes. In fact, he says, he could have even found a translator of Hebrew. The Arabic manuscript, the Moor tells him, is the 'History of Don Quixote de la Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian.' Cervantes brings the Moor to the cloister of a church and commissions a translation. We know this is all a jest, as is the very name of the historian: 'Cide' is an honorific, 'Hamete' is a version of the Arab name Hamid, and 'Benengeli' means eggplant. But this eggplantish historian is no more a jest than anything else in the novel, whether it is Don Quixote tilting at windmills or Sancho Panza governing an island not surrounded by water. Benengeli is, apparently, just as earnest as Don Quixote, just as peculiar and just as important to understanding what this novel is about. At the time when Cervantes was writing this novel, nothing about this jest was possible. Neither an Arabic-speaking Moor nor a Hebrew-speaking Jew would have been readily found in the Toledo marketplace. And no Moor would have translated Arabic in the cloister of a church. The Jews had been expelled from Spain in 1492; only converts remained. Books in Arabic had been burned with all the ferocity that the priest applies to Don Quixote's library of chivalric narratives. And while the Muslims hadn't yet been expelled from Spain (that would happen in the years just after the first part of 'Don Quixote' was published), they too had to convert. So Spain was full of New Christians: converts from Islam (called moriscos) and Judaism (called conversos), some continuing to secretly practice their religion (like the Jewish marranos). One reason that pork became such a popular Spanish dish was that eating it was a way to publicly prove one was not following the dietary rules of Islam or Judaism. Eggplant, however, was associated with Muslim and Jewish tastes back when Toledo was home to a flourishing Jewish community. So Cervantes is up to a bit of mischief with these allusions. And they could not have been missed. L. P. Harvey's important new book, 'Muslims in Spain: 1500 to 1614' (University of Chicago Press), soberly recounts the ways in which Muslim culture and religion, which had been part of Spanish life for eight centuries, was forcibly suppressed, until Muslims were completely expelled from Spain, between 1609 and 1614. There was much trauma and bloodshed, much secrecy and much dissimulation. Don Quixote could hardly have wandered around La Mancha without coming upon traces of this trauma; Moors and moriscos were part of the landscape. 'A Moor she is in costume and in body,' is how one character is described, 'but in her soul she is thoroughly Christian.' And the Moors of Spain are almost catalogued: 'Tagarinos is the name given in Barbary to the Moors of Aragón, while those of Granada are called Mudéjares; but in the kingdom of Fez the Mudéjares are termed Elches.' In the novel's second part (published in 1615, after the Muslim expulsion), Sancho sees a Moorish shopkeeper from his hometown, in disguise. 'Who the devil would ever have known you, Ricote, in that clown suit you are wearing?' Sancho asks. 'Tell me, who has made a Frenchman out of you?' Ricote mentions Spain's forced exile of Muslims and its unavoidable sorrows: 'Wherever we may be it is for Spain that we weep; for, when all is said, we were born here and it is our native land.' Cervantes also had firsthand experience with such confrontations. In 1571, he fought at Lepanto, an epochal battle against the Turks and a major victory for the Christian West against Islam; he lost the use of his left arm. A few years later, returning to Spain, he was captured by Barbary pirates - Muslims who were themselves engaged in a kind of guerilla war against the Christian West - and was imprisoned for five years, surviving four escape attempts until finally, his freedom was ransomed. When Cervantes wrote 'Don Quixote' a quarter century later, this experience led to an extensive story about Moors and Christians involving kidnapping, conversion and betrayal. He wrote, though, not as warrior but as a philosopher. His empathy for the Moors is cautious but unmistakable. Recent scholarship suggests that Cervantes himself might have from a family of conversos; that could help explain why he was regularly denied the official appointments he sought. Other scholars have suggested that the novel itself is full of coded allusions to Judaism. There is no need, though, to accept that hypothesis to sense how, by the end, Spain's triumph turns ambiguous. All pieties inspire melancholy. Even Sancho is not to be fully trusted. He, too, easily dons the mantle of an Old Christian, at one point declaring that since he believes firmly in 'all that the holy Roman Catholic Church holds and believes,' and since he 'a mortal enemy of the Jews,' historians should treat him well. But Quixote rejects the notions of caste and of blood purity that characterized 16th-century Spain. Benengeli's manuscript is partly a ghost story about a lost world. Quixote is born of ideas latent in extinct, condemned texts, whether Arabic or chivalric. He has unswerving principles, but even they are inadequate to a world of disguise, enchantment, illusion and delusion. In her book 'The Ornament of the World,' the scholar María Rosa Menocal compares Quixote's mental universe with the world of the Toledo marketplace, with its conversos, marranos and moriscos: 'Who in this world ever says that he is what he seems to be? And who seems to be what he no doubt really is?' So Don Quixote's Spain, instead of displaying triumphant absolutism, is a world of shifting appearances. 'Don Quixote' is a resigned acknowledgment of a new kind of terrain that defined modernity: in it, very little is certain and much is lost. The book's power, though, also comes from Quixote's stubborn quest: he won't entirely let us accept that something else isn't possible.

Subject: Tax Cuts, Foreign Debt and 'Dark Matter' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 18:54:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: February 14, 2006 In response to comments on his latest column, Paul Krugman discusses tax cuts, Greenspan's ethical problems, trade deficits, and has some interesting comments on dark matter. He also gives Brad Setser a much deserved plug as the go to guy on the dark matter controversy. By Mark Thoma Krugman's Money Talks: Tax Cuts, Foreign Debt and 'Dark Matter', Commentary, NY Times: Readers respond to ... 'Debt and Denial' Andrew Levin, Hilo, Hawaii: The president's top economic advisor was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer about a week ago, and said that the middle class now pays a lower proportion of our income taxes than do people in the upper income brackets. .... Is this true, and if so, is this an appropriate way to judge the impact of the Bush tax cuts? Paul Krugman: The Bush administration has tried a lot of number games in an effort to pretend that its tax cuts favor the middle class. Rather than deal with all the hocus-pocus, keep your eye on the ball: The question is whether the Bush tax cuts make the after-tax distribution of income more or less equal. And the answer, without question, is that they increase inequality... The latest estimates from the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center say that making the tax cuts permanent will increase the after-tax income of the top 0.1 percent of the population by 7.5 percent, which is more than three times the tax cut for families in the middle quintile... Jeffrey T. Atwood, Larchmont, N.Y.: Your column today ... managed to lay some responsibility on Alan Greenspan... It is probably not surprising that the Republicans, like many people in power, flaunt their rhetoric about accountability, taking ownership and responsibility, yet cannot apply these concepts to their own actions when it requires their accepting consequences or stopping the buck. Paul Krugman: Greenspan has two ethical problems here. One is small in the scale of things; it's very improper for him to be out there commenting on monetary policy for personal gain, when his successor is new to the office and needs to establish his own credibility. The larger point is that Greenspan cheered on the tax cuts and pooh-poohed talk of a housing bubble until he was on his way out, at which point he started lecturing us on the evils of deficits and warning of 'froth' in housing. ... Martin Berger, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.: ...[M]y question ... has to do with balance of payments... You seem to equate purchases of foreign goods with debt. What's the connection? I would agree that accumulation of foreign debt is certainly problematic, especially when added to our growing domestic debt. But I don't see the connection between foreign purchases and debt. Are all foreign purchases financed by foreign banks? Could you explain this clearly?... Paul Krugman: The balance of payments always balances. If we don't sell enough goods and services to pay for our imports, we have to sell I.O.U.’s. Now, these don't have to be bonds. We could be attracting foreign companies that want to establish U.S. subsidiaries, or we could be selling stocks. In fact, however, we're paying for the trade deficit by selling bonds. Paul Krugman: Finally, I thought I should let readers know about a genuinely interesting dispute regarding the U.S. debt position and the balance of payments: the 'dark matter' controversy. The starting point for this discussion is a curious fact. According to official measures, the United States is a big net debtor. That is, foreign assets in the U.S. are much bigger than U.S. assets abroad. But if you look at U.S. earnings on its overseas assets, they're still roughly as big as foreign earnings in the U.S. This has led some economists to argue that official debt statistics are wrong — that U.S. corporations have much bigger overseas assets than the numbers say. The proponents of this view say that these hidden assets are the 'dark matter' of international economics, and that the U.S. debt and balance of payments position is much better than the usual numbers suggest. Dark matter, along with some other ideas that might make the U.S. picture brighter, was the basis of a recent Business Week cover story asserting that the U.S. economy is much stronger than people think. Interesting stuff. But there's a problem. When you look closely at the earnings numbers, U.S. corporations overseas aren't earning especially high profits. The funny number, instead, is the profits of foreign companies operating in the United States, which seem very low. So as the people doing this now say, there seems to be 'dark antimatter,' not dark matter. (Note to physicists: yes, I know that's wrong — antimatter still has positive gravity. Whatever.) What's going on? Brad Setser is the go-to guy on this. He thinks that what we may be seeing is the effect of tax avoidance strategies that understate foreign profits in the U.S. and make them pop up somewhere else. If you're into these things, read his blog for the implications. The overall deficit numbers, he suggests, are correct, but the division between trade and investment account may be distorted. Interesting stuff. But the bottom line — that we're spending way beyond our means as the day of reckoning approaches — probably doesn't change.

Subject: Another Obstacle to the Asbestos Bill From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 05:53:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/opinion/14tues3.html?ex=1297573200&en=0c61cab9305e9f9c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 Another Obstacle to the Asbestos Bill The Democratic and Republican opponents of a plan to compensate the victims of asbestos-related diseases plan a procedural vote today to derail the bill. Senators who care about the plight of ill asbestos victims and their families will not lend their votes to this sham. For the moment, the only certain winner in this struggle to offer justice to asbestos victims is Washington's lobbying industry. It has raked in millions of dollars to deploy high-priced hired guns on both sides of the debate, including an unseemly array of ex-members of Congress and former Congressional staff members. The main impact of the lobbying frenzy has been to obscure the asbestos bill's merits, which are substantial. Co-sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Patrick Leahy, the panel's ranking Democrat, the thoughtful compromise would create a $140 billion trust fund to pay awards to those sickened by asbestos-related diseases. That would remove the issue from a court system clogged with an overwhelming number of legal claims. Free medical screening would be available for workers exposed to asbestos but not yet sick. An unusual alliance of trial lawyers, manufacturers and insurance companies is trying to defeat the change, and the promise it holds for the hardest-hit victims of asbestos diseases. The alliance's vehicle at the moment is a technical maneuver requiring 60 votes to defeat. Its Senate backers — led by the Nevada duo of John Ensign, a Republican, and Harry Reid, the Democratic minority leader — contend that the fund would violate a budget spending cap approved by Congress. But they know full well that the asbestos trust fund would be financed by companies facing claims and by insurers. No federal spending would be involved. Should the fund run dry, claimants would have to return to court to seek compensation. The Senate should reject the maneuver by the bill's opponents and pass much-needed, long-delayed relief for asbestos victims.

Subject: Windfall to Oil Companies From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 05:47:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/14/business/14oil.html?ex=1297573200&en=97dc4137a6add7c2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 14, 2006 U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON — The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years. New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government. Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period. Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by laws and regulations that date back to 1996, when energy prices were relatively low and Congress wanted to encourage more exploration and drilling in the high-cost, high-risk deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico. 'We need to remember the primary reason that incentives are given,' said Johnnie M. Burton, director of the federal Minerals Management Service. 'It's not to make more money, necessarily. It's to make more oil, more gas, because production of fuel for our nation is essential to our economy and essential to our people.' But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court. Short of imposing new taxes on the industry, there may be little Congress can do to reverse its earlier giveaways. The new projections come at a moment when President Bush and Republican leaders are on the defensive about record-high energy prices, soaring profits at major oil companies and big cuts in domestic spending. Indeed, Mr. Bush and House Republicans are trying to kill a one-year, $5 billion windfall profits tax for oil companies that the Senate passed last fall. Moreover, the projected largess could be just the start. Last week, Kerr-McGee Exploration and Development, a major industry player, began a brash but utterly serious court challenge that could, if it succeeds, cost the government another $28 billion in royalties over the next five years. In what administration officials and industry executives alike view as a major test case, Kerr-McGee told the Interior Department last week that it planned to challenge one of the government's biggest limitations on royalty relief if it could not work out an acceptable deal in its favor. If Kerr-McGee is successful, administration projections indicate that about 80 percent of all oil and gas from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico would be royalty-free. 'It's one of the greatest train robberies in the history of the world,' said Representative George Miller, a California Democrat who has fought royalty concessions on oil and gas for more than a decade. 'It's the gift that keeps on giving.' Republican lawmakers are also concerned about how the royalty relief program is working out. 'I don't think there is a single member of Congress who thinks you should get royalty relief at $70 a barrel' for oil, said Representative Richard W. Pombo, Republican of California and chairman of the House Resources Committee. 'It was Congress's intent,' Mr. Pombo said in an interview on Friday, 'that if oil was at $10 a barrel, there should be royalty relief so companies could have some kind of incentive to invest capital. But at $70 a barrel, don't expect royalty relief.' Tina Kreisher, a spokeswoman for the Interior Department, said Monday that the giveaways might turn out to be less than the basic forecasts indicate because of 'certain variables.' The government does not disclose how much individual companies benefit from the incentives, and most companies refuse to disclose either how much they pay in royalties or how much they are allowed to avoid. But the benefits are almost entirely for gas and oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest producers include Shell, BP, Chevron and Exxon Mobil as well as smaller independent companies like Anadarko and Devon Energy. Executives at some companies, including Exxon Mobil, said they had already stopped claiming royalty relief because they knew market prices had exceeded the government's price triggers. About one-quarter of all oil and gas produced in the United States comes from federal lands and federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico. As it happens, oil and gas royalties to the government have climbed much more slowly than market prices over the last five years. The New York Times reported last month that one major reason for the lag appeared to be a widening gap between the average sales prices that companies are reporting to the government when paying royalties and average spot market prices on the open market. Industry executives and administration officials contend that the disparity mainly reflects different rules for defining sales prices. Administration officials also contend that the disparity is illusory, because the government's annual statistics are muddled up with big corrections from previous years. Both House and Senate lawmakers are now investigating the issue, as is the Government Accountability Office, Congress's watchdog arm. But the much bigger issue for the years ahead is royalty relief for deepwater drilling. The original law, known as the Deep Water Royalty Relief Act, had bipartisan support and was intended to promote exploration and production in deep waters of the outer continental shelf. At the time, oil and gas prices were comparatively low and few companies were interested in the high costs and high risks of drilling in water thousands of feet deep. The law authorized the Interior Department, which leases out tens of millions of acres in the Gulf of Mexico, to forgo its normal 12 percent royalty for much of the oil and gas produced in very deep waters. Because it take years to explore and then build the huge offshore platforms, most of the oil and gas from the new leases is just beginning to flow. The Minerals Management Service of the Interior Department, which oversees the leases and collects the royalties, estimates that the amount of royalty-free oil will quadruple by 2011, to 112 million barrels. The volume of royalty-free natural gas is expected to climb by almost half, to about 1.2 trillion cubic feet. Based on the government's assumptions about future prices — that oil will hover at about $50 a barrel and natural gas will average about $7 per thousand cubic feet — the total value of the free oil and gas over the next five years would be about $65 billion and the forgone royalties would total more than $7 billion. Administration officials say the issue is out of their hands, adding that they opposed provisions in last year's energy bill that added new royalty relief for deep drilling in shallow waters. 'We did not think we needed any more legislation, because we already have incentives, but we obviously did not prevail,' said Ms. Burton, director of the Minerals Management Service. But the Bush administration did not put up a big fight. It strongly supported the overall energy bill, and merely noted its opposition to additional royalty relief in its official statement on the bill. By contrast, the White House bluntly promised to veto the Senate's $60 billion tax cut bill because it contained a one-year tax of $5 billion on profits of major oil companies. The House and Senate have yet to agree on a final tax bill. The big issue going forward is whether companies should be exempted from paying royalties even when energy prices are at historic highs. In general, the Interior Department has always insisted that companies would not be entitled to royalty relief if market prices for oil and gas climbed above certain trigger points. Those trigger points — currently about $35 a barrel for oil and $4 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas — have been exceeded for the last several years and are likely to stay that way for the rest of the decade. So why is the amount of royalty-free gas and oil expected to double over the next five years? The biggest reason is that the Clinton administration, apparently worried about the continued lack of interest in new drilling, waived the price triggers for all leases awarded in 1998 and 1999. At the same time, many oil and gas companies contend that Congress never authorized the Interior Department to set price thresholds for any deepwater leases awarded between 1996 and 2000. The dispute has been simmering for months, with some industry executives warning the Bush administration that they would sue the government if it tried to demand royalties. Last week, the fight broke out into the open. The Interior Department announced that 41 oil companies had improperly claimed more than $500 million in royalty relief for 2004. Most of the companies agreed to pay up in January, but Kerr-McGee said it would fight the issue in court. The fight is not simply about one company. Interior officials said last week that Kerr-McGee presented itself in December as a 'test case' for the entire industry. It also offered a 'compromise,' but Interior officials rejected it and issued a formal order in January demanding that Kerr-McGee pay its back royalties. On Feb. 6, according to administration officials, Kerr-McGee formally notified the Minerals Management Service that it would challenge its order in court. Industry lawyers contend they have a strong case, because Congress never mentioned price thresholds when it authorized royalty relief for all deepwater leases awarded from 1996 through 2000. 'Congress offered those deepwater leases with royalty relief as an incentive,' said Jonathan Hunter, a lawyer in New Orleans who represented oil companies in a similar lawsuit two years ago that knocked out another major federal restriction on royalty relief. 'The M.M.S. only has the authority that Congress gives it,' Mr. Hunter said. 'The legislation said that royalty relief for these leases is automatic.' If that view prevails, the government said it would lose a total of nearly $35 billion in royalties to taxpayers by 2011 — about the same amount that Mr. Bush is proposing to cut from Medicare, Medicaid and child support enforcement programs over the same period.

Subject: PK on Al Franken From: Tony To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 18:51:40 (EST) Email Address: tonyressa@hotmail.com Message: Does anyone know what happened to the PK segments on the Al Franken show? Why did they end? PK on Al Franken

Subject: Inverted yield curve consequence From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 10:38:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The inverted yield curve is hurting profits for lenders since many lenders borrow short to lend long. This makes it more likely that lenders will tighten lending practices to reduce losses.

Subject: Re: Inverted yield curve consequence From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 11:03:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hurting profits is not the same as taking losses, and financial service companies are highly profitable. There is not the slightest reason to expect a limit in loans to any other than the poorest credit risks, and here tightness is always needed. Stock prices are telling me there is no worry about financial service companies, the problem is excessive fees for lenders and especially savers and investors.

Subject: Re: Inverted yield curve consequence From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 18:16:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma. The following Forbes article from March of 2005 anticipated the possibility of an inverted yield curve (which has occured and has been in place for some time now) and talks about the profits gained by borrowing short by both investors and lenders with regard to the gap between higher long term rates and lower short term rates. When these rates invert the profits go away and so do the loans which depend on a positive yield curve. That Tricky Yield Curve James Grant, 03.14.05, 12:00 AM ET Will it continue to flatten? The Federal Reserve keeps pushing up short rates; bond bulls keep pushing down long yields. Trouble ahead. Borrowing short and lending long must be the second most lucrative industry in America, right behind printing dollar bills. A banker borrows short when he issues a 30-day certificate of deposit. He lends long when he writes a multiyear auto loan. Thrifts, mortgage REITs, hedge funds, finance companies and the federally sponsored mortgage behemoths all engage in this ancient gambit. Why wouldn't they? Short-term interest rates remain well below long-term rates. But the gulf between the two is closing--and therein lies the trouble. A year ago the short-term borrowing rate was 1%; today it's 2.5%. A year ago the five-year Treasury yield was 3.12%; today it's 3.78%. A year ago, in other words, there were 2.12 percentage points of daylight between the cost of an overnight loan and the yield on a five-year investment; today there's only 1.28 percentage points. The less daylight, the less profitable are the banking business and allied financial trades. Following is a speculation on who is at risk, and why. 'Yield curve' is the term to describe the alignment of interest rates over time. The most crowd-pleasing alignment is that of short rates set comfortably below long rates (the curve is 'positively sloped'). The least favorite is that of short rates higher than long rates (the curve is 'inverted'). Also undesirable: short rates approximating long rates (the curve is 'flat'). A flat or inverted curve stymies the business of lending and borrowing. It's ice on the wings of the U.S. financial economy. Just to look at the curve today, you wouldn't suppose there's anything wrong. What's wrong is the direction of change. The Federal Reserve is pushing up the funds rate while the market is pushing down rates on longer-dated fixed-income investments--Treasurys, corporates and mortgages. Mortgages present a particular problem. When interest rates get low enough, homeowners refinance: They pay down their loans at 100 cents on the dollar. The lender who paid, say, 105 cents on the dollar to buy his mortgages is immediately out of pocket one nickel per dollar of cost. Just as bad, he must redeploy his capital at the new, lower yields. Will the yield curve continue to flatten? The Fed has given no sign it intends to pull back from its campaign to restore the funds rate to something like 3.5% or 4%. And the yield pigs have given no sign that they intend to refrain from gulping down any and every piece of paper on offer. If I am right about the bond market, long-dated yields will sooner or later rise. Inflation or credit difficulties--or both--will push them up. And if they take off sooner rather than later, the curve may regain its former positive slope. 'If' is the operative word. We are dealing with probabilities and risks. In an economy as leveraged as this one, the risk of a flat or inverted curve commands our respect. A flat curve would likely flatten--among others--mortgage investors. Their funding costs would rise. And if at the same time mortgage rates fell, touching off another wave of refinancings, the investors' interest income would fall. I am a long-term bull on Annaly Mortgage Management

Subject: Re: Inverted yield curve consequence From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 19:40:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: James Grant is my favorite bear, and I always pay attention to him since he is always looking for deep discount investments and acting rather than forever waiting and not investing. So far I do not find the inverted yield curve a problem for financial company shares, however. I would be more troubled by rising long term interest rates, but not so far.

Subject: Re: Inverted yield curve consequence From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Feb 14, 2006 at 11:44:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The point is we are in an international bull market since October 2002, and we should be pleased and take advantage of it through the end which will eventually come. I am defensively positioned having had several excellent years of investing, and hopeful and not worried personally in the least though I think we have terrible fiscal policy with this Administration.

Subject: Bird Flu Spreads to European Union From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 10:01:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/international/12cnd-flu.html?ex=1297400400&en=04a66db3b88f85ab&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 Bird Flu Spreads to European Union for First Time By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL The H5N1 bird flu virus has been detected in wild birds in Italy and Greece, the first time its presence has been detected in the European Union, European officials have announced. It was also detected in Bulgaria. 'The bird flu virus has arrived in Italy,' the Italian health minister, Francesco Storace, said Saturday at a news conference, announcing that 17 swans had been found dead in three southern regions: Calabria, Sicily and Puglia. The National Avian Influenza Lab in Padua confirmed H5N1 in five of the dead swans, and tests on others were continuing, Mr. Storace said. The arrival of bird flu in Western Europe has been predicted for months, since the virus has moved steadily from China to Russia to the Balkans and, in the last week, to West Africa. It is being carried by migrating birds, so all countries on their flight paths are vulnerable. 'In some ways we would have expected it earlier in Italy,' said Juan Lubroth, a senior veterinarian at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome. The discovery of the Italian outbreak seemed to be a model of early detection, underlining how bird flu can be controlled in countries that have the money and the scientific resources to do it. Outbreaks in poor countries like Nigeria, Turkey and Iraq percolated for months before they were discovered, allowing the virus to spread widely to commercial chicken flocks and even to humans. While the H5N1 virus does not readily spread from human to human, scientists worry that it will mutate into a form that can, setting off a worldwide human pandemic. Only about 160 people have become infected with the disease, mostly through close contact with sick birds, and about half of them have died. Police officers near Messina, Sicily, found two dead swans on Thursday and performed rapid screening tests on them in the wild, with the results suggesting that the swans had a flu virus, according to ANSA, the official Italian news agency. Such simple tests are not specific enough to indicate a particular virus or strain, like H5N1. The carcasses were immediately sent to a veterinary institute in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, which sent samples to the laboratory in Padua, where the positive test results were returned Saturday. Following the tests, Mr. Storace prohibited all movement of live animals in the affected regions. There are no signs of infection in commercial poultry yet, he said. 'There is no immediate danger for our country,' Mauro Delogu, an Italian virologist at the University of Bolgona, told ANSA, 'because our system of surveillance is efficient and has not contaminated bird farms.' In Greece, health officials announced that three swans in the northern part of the country had tested positive for the virus. Hours later, European Union officials said that some swans in Bulgaria, near the Danube Delta, had also test positive. Dead swans have become an important sentinel because they are very susceptible to the flu virus and are so large that people notice when they die, Mr. Lubroth said. Swans in southern Italy do not normally migrate, he added, but their wetlands are along many bird migration routes. Last autumn, several European countries, including Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, mandated that all commercial poultry be kept indoors, to prevent any contact with migrating birds. Greece also now requires that poultry be kept indoors and has banned the sale of live birds at street markets. Trying to calm public fears, the European Union's health commissioner, Markos Kyprianou, said: 'We should not be unduly surprised or alarmed if such cases are found in the European Union. 'What is important,' Mr. Kyprianou added, 'is that we have the framework in place to take the appropriate measures as soon as possible to contain it and prevent its spread to poultry, and that is what we are doing.' The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, Julie Gerberding, said she was not surprised that infected birds had been found in southern Europe. 'I view that as an expression of how birds fly,' she said. 'It's just like West Nile marching across the U.S.,' she added, referring to the disease transmitted by mosquitoes that feed on infected birds. 'You follow the flight patterns.' The variant strain of H5N1 found in Turkey and confirmed in Africa last week is identical to one found last year in dead migratory birds in a nature reserve in northern China, and later in Siberia. It is different from strains circulating among poultry in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Two species of ducks, the northern pintail and the garganey, migrate in a southwesterly direction each fall from Siberia to Turkey and the Black Sea coast, and in some cases to central Africa, according to a recent article in New Scientist. Other species that share the same African wetlands migrate north in the spring, which raises the threat that the disease will be spread more widely around Western Europe later this year.

Subject: A Back-Fence Dispute From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 10:00:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/international/americas/13argentina.html February 13, 2006 A Back-Fence Dispute Crosses an International Border By LARRY ROHTER GUALEGUAYCHÚ, Argentina — For Argentines, few traditions are more treasured at this time of year than a relaxed beach vacation, preferably in neighboring Uruguay. But the residents of this border town are risking their countrymen's wrath by blocking highways to Uruguay to protest the construction of a pair of paper mills there that they say will pollute the river that forms the frontier between the countries. Just east of here, several dozen demonstrators, some playing cards, others sipping bitter maté tea from gourds or roasting sausages on grills, sat in the shade of a red cargo truck and a tractor that serve as a roadblock. 'No to the paper mills, yes to life,' proclaimed their bumper stickers and the banners they had hung from the truck. 'The Uruguayans have no right to poison a river that belongs to all of us on both sides,' said José Pouler, the owner of a pizzeria here. 'These projects are going to damage agriculture and kill off tourism, all for the benefit of a couple of foreign companies that don't care about the people of this region.' The paper mills — one owned by a Finnish-Swedish consortium, the other by a Spanish company — are being built on the riverbank in the Uruguayan town of Fray Bentos. They represent an investment of more than $1.9 billion, the largest in Uruguay's history, and are expected to produce more than 1.5 million tons of cellulose for export each year. The road blockages here began just before the new year, after the residents of this town of 80,000 expressed frustration that their complaints were being ignored in both capitals. They accuse Uruguay of violating a treaty that governs use of the river, and are irritated that their own president, Néstor Kirchner, has not been more energetic in opposing the projects. Initially, the protesters announced in advance where and when they would block highways and for how long, allowing vacationers to adjust their schedules. But the picketers have raised the ante, now acting without warning and not telling motorists how long the blockade will last. The environmental group Greenpeace has also led protests aboard boats in the middle of the river. But spokesmen for the paper companies say that the factories will meet the demanding environmental standards of the European Union and will employ technology that reduces pollution to a minimum. Some of the vacationers who have come long distances from the interior of Argentina, only to be turned back here or at two other border crossings north of here, have cursed the protesters and refused to take the pamphlets they are handing out. But the opponents of the paper mills show little sympathy for them. 'Our health and well-being are more important than their being able to spend their summer vacation on a beach in Uruguay,' said Daniel Frutos, a physician here. Luis Molivuevo, one of the boycott organizers, added, 'We've asked other Argentines not to spend their summer in Uruguay, but if they don't want to help, then we have to make our boycott obligatory.' Commerce among the four countries that make up South America's Mercosur customs union is also suffering, and that has led Uruguayan authorities to charge that the promise of free movement in the group's founding charter is being violated. Trucks from Chile carrying mill equipment were forced to turn back, and on both sides of the border, drivers of other vehicles laden with cargoes of perishable food and machinery have been camped out, sometimes for days and with little money for food, waiting for the roadblock to be lifted. Across the river, in sleepy Fray Bentos, sentiment is just as strong in favor of the projects. The town has been 'economically dead' since a meat processing plant closed more than 20 years ago, said Dani Bazán, a commercial photographer there who welcomes the 2,000 new jobs and the revival of business activity the mills will bring. 'It's not that we like the idea of the mills so much as that we welcome the jobs, and well-paying ones, at that,' said Sandra Caballero, a 35-year-old cook who is taking a course to become a solderer in hopes of getting a job at the plant owned by the Finnish-Swedish consortium. 'There will undoubtedly be some pollution, but we have faith that our government will be able to control emissions and punish the companies if they do something wrong.' For Uruguayans, the dispute has also become a matter of sovereignty and national pride. Their country was created 180 years ago as a buffer between Brazil and Argentina, and throughout their history they have often complained of being bullied and scorned by their much larger neighbors across the River Plate estuary, with whom they share a similar accent and culture. Uruguay has recently expressed dissatisfaction with its secondary role in the Mercosur trade group and with the conduct of its neighbors. The left-leaning government of Tabaré Vázquez, which took office in March 2005, as a result has recently expressed interest in negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States; if reached, it would surely be a death blow to Mercosur. Mr. Kirchner initially declared that stopping construction of the paper mills was 'a national cause.' But faced with the prospect of Uruguay's defection from Mercosur, he has toned down his language and sought to discourage the roadblocks, although the police have not intervened to halt them. Though the two presidents have recently talked by phone about the standoff, they seem reluctant to make concessions that may offend their supporters. A Uruguayan congressman has suggested Vatican mediation, an idea that the papal nuncio quickly quashed. Argentina is talking about taking the case to the World Court in The Hague, where a decision would come only after the plants were operating. In his most recent public declaration, Mr. Vázquez vowed that 'construction of the plants will not be halted.' As a way of criticizing the Argentines, he recalled the lyrics of an old tango, comparing their behavior to that of 'the man who beats his wife because he fears she may cheat on him four or five years from now.' 'That is exactly what is happening to us right now,' he said. 'They are inflicting real damage on us out of fear of some hypothetical damage we might cause them in the future.'

Subject: Nowhere to Call Home From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:38:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/opinion/13mon2.html?ex=1297486800&en=7b02804f535ec86d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 13, 2006 Nowhere to Call Home The worst natural disaster in modern United States history has turned into our collective national shame. When the most powerful nation on earth cannot find long-term housing for its own hurricane victims in almost six months, there is no other word to describe it. Last Tuesday the government stopped paying for about 4,500 hotel rooms for storm evacuees. By March 1, all but a few people with extenuating circumstances will have to leave their hotels. So will those staying aboard cruise ships, many of whom are the police officers, firefighters and other government employees keeping the city from dying once and for all. Phasing out these stopgap accommodations is not, in itself, a problem. The problem is that many of the families being ejected have no homes to which they can return. The Federal Emergency Management Agency's answer was to provide trailers. It was a poor solution given that the emergency trailer parks tend to concentrate misery, but still better than nothing. Yet, as Jennifer Steinhauer and Eric Lipton reported in The Times last week, of the 21,000 trailers requested for New Orleans, only about 3,000 have been placed, set up and occupied. And the problem is larger than just New Orleans. Several other parishes are waiting for more than half of their trailers. FEMA says that it has the trailers ready to go, but that local governments won't approve sites and utility companies won't provide services. Struck once by an unforgiving hurricane, the victims now face a perfect storm of poor response: a federal government of terrible administrators and a locality that is legendary for political dysfunction. The federal government's inept handling of the aftermath mirrors its inept handling of the rescue and relief operations. And watching the outbreaks of pettiness among lawmakers in the Louisiana Legislature is enough to turn one's stomach. What is needed is work that solves the immediate problem and also contributes to the long-term solution. That means rehabilitating existing housing. FEMA is working on a pilot program to refurbish a 325-unit apartment complex. The agency says that the mayor's office has identified 20,000 apartments that could potentially be rehabilitated. Federal, state and local resources should be brought to bear in getting those homes fixed and reoccupied. Not next year, but right now. The same goes for the trailers.

Subject: Delay to Get Trailers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 09:35:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/nationalspecial/09trailers.html?ex=1297141200&en=abfd5be4ec682212&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Storm Victims Face Big Delay to Get Trailers By JENNIFER STEINHAUER and ERIC LIPTON SLIDELL, La. — Nearly six months after two hurricanes ripped apart communities across the Gulf Coast, tens of thousands of residents remain without trailers promised by the federal government for use as temporary shelter while they rebuild. Of the 135,000 requests for trailers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has received from families, slightly more than half have been filled. The delays have left families holed up with relatives or stranded out of state, stalled local economies and infuriated state and local officials, who criticize how the program has been managed. Further, officials and residents complain about problems with quality, like poor plumbing and electrical shorts, with the trailers they have received. 'The trailer problem is an individual human tragedy,' said Reinhard J. Dearing, the chief administrative officer of Slidell, across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. Several city officials, including police officers, are still without trailers or just received them this week, and have been sleeping with friends or neighbors, and in one case, under a desk in a government office. On Monday, frustrated by the delays, four members of the St. Bernard Parish Council performed what they called a symbolic act, taking three trailers from a local stockpile of about 275 and delivering them to residents. 'If this happened with any other business, you would find another purveyor,' said Councilman Mark Madary, who represents a parish where 6,000 families are waiting for trailers and about 2,000 have received them. The problems in administering the $4 billion trailer program mirror those of other major recovery efforts undertaken since the hurricanes crippled the region, and appear to be a result of failures at all levels of government. Local officials, contractors and residents say that some of the delays seem to stem from the federal government's poor planning and its frustrating layers of subcontractors and bureaucracy. For example, trailers are often sent to two different holding areas before they are distributed, and sit collecting dust while families wait. 'It is so disheartening to see people living in houses with water pouring through the roof,' said James M. McGehee, the mayor of Bogalusa, a small Louisiana city near the Mississippi border. Across the state line, Mr. McGehee said, are 'acres and acres' of trailers in holding areas. For its part, FEMA criticized local governments for rejecting trailer sites in neighborhoods and engaging in protracted negotiations about where the trailers should go. Agency officials also said that private companies, including electric utilities, had contributed to the problem by being slow to provide services. 'Everything from parishes not willing to accept trailers at all, to local rules and ordinances that we don't have authority to override, or the delay in getting power hook-ups, all impact the pace of getting trailers on the ground and occupied,' said Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman in Washington. 'The supply of trailers is not the issue; we have plenty of trailers.' FEMA, Ms. Andrews said, has about 19,000 trailers and mobile homes in staging areas, ready to go, but is waiting for Louisiana officials to decide where to put them. Federal and local officials say the vast scope of this disaster has rendered all tasks Herculean. 'I'm not going to make excuses, but this has been an unprecedented event, and we have never, never in the history of FEMA ever had to house this many people,' R. David Paulison, the acting FEMA director, said in Washington last week. 'So there are glitches along the way.' The trailer problem is most acute in Louisiana, where 60 percent of the 90,000 requests for manufactured housing have not been met. Of the 21,000 requests in Orleans Parish alone, only about 3,000 have been filled. By comparison, in Mississippi, federal officials say that of about 40,000 such requests, 34,560 have been met. FEMA officials in Louisiana say that at the rate they are going — installing about 500 units a day — it will most likely be an additional 100 days before they are close to reaching their goal. Residents who long to rebuild are impatient. Here in Slidell, where more than half the 10,000 homes are uninhabitable, Daryl Cleworth stood in his gutted house Monday afternoon, fiddling with some tools that seemed almost toylike compared with their task, and wondered when his several dozen calls to FEMA would result in a trailer. 'We'll take anything,' said Mr. Cleworth, who is living with his wife and baby in New Orleans while his three older children stay with his mother in Colorado. 'Just something to sleep in.' In the weeks after Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf Coast, FEMA signed contracts to buy about $2.5 billion in travel trailers and mobile homes from manufacturers and dealers across the country, in what was the single largest order in the history of the industry. With all of these pieces in place, FEMA officials predicted in September that they would soon be able to install perhaps as many as 30,000 housing units every two weeks, a goal the agency has never even approached. Already, the work completed so far is greater than any previous similar effort by FEMA. But the reality of the task along the Gulf Coast has proved far more complicated than FEMA officials expected. The goal from the start, particularly in Louisiana, was to find wide-open swaths of land where group sites, which have become known as FEMAvilles, could be set up. That was crucial because a large share of the homeless in Louisiana were renters who did not have their own property where FEMA could place a trailer. Even if they did, whole sections of New Orleans were still considered uninhabitable. The contractors sent teams of surveyors to identify possible sites for these new trailer communities. But as they began to negotiate the permits required, local authorities and landowners, one after another, started to turn them down. 'There is a very strong message: not in my backyard,' said Mark Misczak, who oversees the temporary housing effort for FEMA in Louisiana. Ronnie Hughes, the president of Ascension Parish south of Baton Rouge, where officials had considered a group site, said the parish instead decided to ban them. 'We are the fastest-growing parish in Louisiana prior to the hurricanes,' Mr. Hughes said. 'We don't have the infrastructure in place to support these cities.' To date, fewer than 5,000 of the 36,675 units of manufactured housing occupied in Louisiana are in group sites. Carl Goss, a subcontractor hired to install FEMA trailers, said he could install six a day but often installed only two, because the paperwork was wrong 65 percent of the time. The documents sometimes call for a unit that does not fit on the lot, Mr. Goss said. 'I'm real upset because I can't help people,' he said. Elected officials said they understood the complications. But FEMA, they added, has too many excuses. 'If you needed a classic example of how to make every mistake humanly possible and then throw more mistakes on top of that, that is what you have with this trailer program,' said Representative Gene Taylor, Democrat of Mississippi, a vocal critic of the program who lost his home in Bay St. Louis to Hurricane Katrina. With the cumulative costs of buying, installing and maintaining these units reaching $70,000 or more, and the months it is taking to finish the effort, Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, among others, says she wonders why FEMA put so much emphasis on manufactured housing in the first place. 'It's faster to fix apartment units that have gone down,' Ms. Blanco told a Senate committee last week. In fact, FEMA is now renovating an apartment complex in New Orleans, which Ms. Andrews, the agency spokeswoman, said was an acknowledgment of the inability to get enough trailers into the city. Shirley Harris, a 73-year-old Slidell resident, continues to live in a ramshackle house that was severely damaged by the storm. Ms. Harris said that FEMA had told her it could not install a trailer because she had electrical wires still hanging in front of her house. But looking across the street at a house with identical hanging wires and two FEMA trailers in the yard, she feels at a loss. 'I'd like to give up,' she said, beginning to cry. 'I just want to get away. But there is nowhere to go.'

Subject: Japan's Offensive Foreign Minister From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 07:14:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/opinion/13mon3.html?ex=1297486800&en=e70214f6699633cb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 13, 2006 Japan's Offensive Foreign Minister People everywhere wish they could be proud of every bit of their countries' histories. But honest people understand that's impossible, and wise people appreciate the positive value of acknowledging and learning from painful truths about past misdeeds. Then there is Japan's new foreign minister, Taro Aso, who has been neither honest nor wise in the inflammatory statements he has been making about Japan's disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War. Besides offending neighboring countries that Japan needs as allies and trading partners, he is disserving the people he has been pandering to. World War II ended before most of today's Japanese were born. Yet public discourse in Japan and modern history lessons in its schools have never properly come to terms with the country's responsibility for such terrible events as the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of Korean young women, the biological warfare experiments carried out on Chinese cities and helpless prisoners of war, and the sadistic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing. That is why so many Asians have been angered by a string of appalling remarks Mr. Aso has made since being named foreign minister last fall. Two of the most recent were his suggestion that Japan's emperor ought to visit the militaristic Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Japanese war criminals are among those honored, and his claim that Taiwan owes its high educational standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the 50-year occupation that began when Tokyo grabbed the island as war booty from China in 1895. Mr. Aso's later lame efforts to clarify his words left their effect unchanged. Mr. Aso has also been going out of his way to inflame Japan's already difficult relations with Beijing by characterizing China's long-term military buildup as a 'considerable threat' to Japan. China has no recent record of threatening Japan. As the rest of the world knows, it was the other way around. Mr. Aso's sense of diplomacy is as odd as his sense of history.

Subject: Suggests Paintings Are Not Pollocks From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 06:15:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/arts/design/09poll.html?ex=1297141200&en=c825ffd2608c77be&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Computer Analysis Suggests Paintings Are Not Pollocks By RANDY KENNEDY A physicist who is broadly experienced in using computers to identify consistent patterns in the drip paintings of Jackson Pollock has determined that half a dozen small paintings recently discovered and claimed by their owner to be original Pollocks do not exhibit the same patterns. The finding, by Richard P. Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, does not prove that Pollock did not paint the works, among a cache of 24 paintings found in 2003 in Wainscott, N.Y., by Alex Matter, whose father, Herbert, and mother, Mercedes, were friends of Pollock. But it casts serious doubt on their authenticity, even as Alex Matter is planning for a major exhibition of the paintings this year. And the finding could deepen a dispute among a once-unified group of Pollock scholars who have disagreed publicly over the works' origins. In previous years Dr. Taylor examined 14 indisputably authentic Pollock paintings by using what is known as fractal geometry, or looking for patterns that recur on finer and finer magnifications, like those in snowflakes. He found that despite the seemingly chaotic nature of the drip paintings, they exhibited remarkably consistent fractal patterns, both in the fluidity of the paint and in the way Pollock applied it as he stalked around a canvas on the ground. But in a news article being published today in the British scientific journal Nature, he says that his examination last year of transparencies of 6 of the 24 paintings discovered by Mr. Matter showed 'significant differences' between their patterns and those of known Pollock works. Further, the analysis, commissioned by the New York foundation that represents Pollock's estate, showed that there were notable variations in the patterns among the six paintings. 'That's either due to one person who is extremely varied,' Dr. Taylor said in a telephone interview, 'or it's due to a number of different artists.' Dr. Taylor — who said he was not paid for his research, though the foundation did reimburse the university for its equipment and time — offered no final conclusions about the works' authenticity. But he said his finding put the onus on Mr. Matter to provide a plausible explanation for 'why the patterns are different and why they're varying.' 'Certainly my pattern analysis shouldn't be taken in isolation but should be integrated with all the known facts — including provenance, visual inspection and materials analysis,' he said. Yesterday, scholars associated with the effort to organize an exhibition of the newly found paintings said they did not feel Dr. Taylor's work yielded enough evidence to decide whether the paintings were real or not. Claude Cernuschi, a Pollock scholar and art historian at Boston College who is writing a chapter for a catalog to accompany the exhibition, said that more than 6 of the 24 paintings should have been examined. He added that simply because the six did not exhibit Pollock's signature patterns did not necessarily mean they were painted by someone else. 'Pollock's techniques was very experimental, and it could be that he started to test how the paint would behave rather than trying to make a bona-fide finished painting,' he said. Mr. Matter discovered the 24 paintings, along with 8 other drawings and pieces of ephemera thought to be by Pollock, among possessions that the elder Mr. Matter had left when he died in 1984. They were wrapped in brown paper inscribed in his father's handwriting, labeling the works as Pollocks painted in the late 1940's. After the paintings were discovered, Mr. Matter, with a Manhattan art dealer, Mark Borghi, sought the advice of Ellen G. Landau, the author of a well-regarded 1989 Pollock monograph and one of the world's most respected authorities on the artist's work. Dr. Landau, a professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, came to the conclusion that the works were authentic and agreed to help with scholarship for an exhibition this year, the 50th anniversary of Pollock's death. But after Dr. Landau's role in supporting the works was announced last spring, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which had declined to enter into authentication disputes for almost a decade, became involved. It enlisted Eugene V. Thaw, a veteran art dealer, and Francis V. O'Connor, an art historian, who wrote the four-volume catalogue raisonné, or complete listing, of Pollock's work. Both Mr. Thaw and Dr. O'Connor said their initial opinion was that the paintings were not by Pollock and could in fact have been painted by more than one artist; one of Mr. Thaw's theories is that they were the creations of Mercedes Matter and her art students, trying to imitate Pollock's technique. Dr. O'Connor, Mr. Thaw and Dr. Landau had once worked as a team on the Pollock foundation's authentication board, examining and often discrediting paintings claimed to be originals. But the board disbanded in 1996 for reasons that remain unclear. And in the case of the newly discovered paintings, the sharp disagreement between Dr. Landau and her former colleagues has sometimes taken on personal overtones. 'I've spent nearly half my life working on Pollocks,' Mr. Thaw said last year, 'and if Ellen Landau's opinion prevails, people will happily buy them and they'll go into museums and books, but not the ones that I have anything to do with.' Dr. Landau, in a statement issued yesterday with Mr. Matter and Mr. Borghi, said: 'Authentication in art is never a single test. A range of eminent scholars have spent the last year actively engaged in examining these works from historical, stylistic, archival and other analytical vectors. This is a full, rich picture of these works, which will be presented in a full-scale catalog as soon as it is completed.' The statement also called fractal analysis a 'very new and contested field in art authentication' and criticized the foundation for not providing Dr. Taylor's analysis — which has been completed for several months — to Mr. Matter, saying that secrecy 'impeded a scholarly debate and consensus.' In a later e-mail message, Dr. Landau added that she did not feel comfortable commenting directly on Dr. Taylor's report because the Pollock foundation had not provided it to her. She said she was continuing her research into the paintings and into the artistic relationship between Pollock and Herbert Matter, which she said she had found to be 'nothing less than astonishing.' Dr. O'Connor said that he had chosen the six paintings to be examined by Dr. Taylor. Three were selected because they were paintings that Mr. Matter had widely publicized and shown at a Web site, www.pollockexhibit.com. The other three, Dr. O'Connor said, were chosen as representative of the various styles among the 24 paintings. Dr. O'Connor said in an interview that he did not exclude the possibility that some additional evidence — a letter from Pollock or a picture of him painting the works — could emerge to change his mind. But he said that Dr. Taylor's research had reinforced his initial doubts after examining the paintings. 'What I saw was that these works had very little connection if any with Pollock's oeuvre as we know it, and further, that they appeared to me to be painted by more than one artist,' he said. The foundation said it was withholding final opinions on the attribution of the newly discovered paintings until further research was done and scholars reached a consensus.

Subject: A Drip by Any Other Name From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 06:14:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/weekinreview/12kimmel.html?ex=1297400400&en=f7633b4372be63fb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 A Drip by Any Other Name By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN HE died half a century ago, his earliest drip paintings closer to President Grover Cleveland's day than our own. But for die-hard skeptics, Jackson Pollock is still Jack the Dripper, American art's first media celebrity painting glorified doodles that anybody's kid could do. Last week, in Nature, the British science journal, a physicist reported he had tested fractal patterns in six paintings from 24 supposed Pollocks discovered in 2003 by Alex Matter, son of the artists Herbert and Mercedes Matter, who were Pollock's friends. The physicist found 'significant differences' with known Pollocks. It turns out anybody could have painted these six pictures — except maybe Pollock. Pollock historians, a contentious crew, are still hashing out whether the works look right: whether their materials, palette and touch make sense to the expert eye. Meanwhile, with prices for Pollock in the stratosphere, Sunday garage-sale shoppers finding dripped paint on an old canvas can't help dreaming they've won the Powerball lottery. Such would-be Pollocks aren't necessarily fakes. Many artists in the 1940's and 50's experimented with drips as private exercises. With the passage of time, some of the pictures may be innocently mistaken for originals. Few artists did more than experiment. Contrary to cliché, Pollock's technique remained so identifiably his own that any dripper automatically seemed to be faking a Pollock. Willem de Kooning inspired countless disciples — from Joan Mitchell and Robert Rauschenberg on — who found easy ways to tweak his freewheeling, slash-and-dash brushwork for their own purposes. But Pollock, the bald James Dean of art, became more influential. Artists of many stripes learned about using industrial materials, about chance, about performance (thanks to films and photographs that Hans Namuth shot of Pollock at work), and in general artists were inspired by his risk-taking. As the sculptor Richard Serra put it, Pollock was 'not playing the same game as Vermeer.' 'We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention, to change history,' he said. 'Well, I don't know of anyone since Pollock who has altered the form or the language of painting as much as he did.' That doesn't matter to grumpy naysayers, for whom 1950's abstraction remains acceptable only in the form of those asteroid shapes and squiggly blobs on Formica kitchen countertops. But the curious truth is that while a few drips and splashes can imitate Pollock's touch (spawning the familiar cracks about toddlers' smears and housepainters' drop cloths and fueling authenticity disputes like the one over the smallish Matter pictures), it is nearly impossible to replicate the overall effect of the great big classic work: the full-scale complex rhythms and overlapping patterns, the all-over, depthless, balletic and irregular space he created. The more you attempt a full-blown Pollock, the less it will end up looking like one. Now fractal science helps prove the point. Ultimately, it turns out, Pollock may be actually harder to fake than Vermeer.

Subject: 'Eco-Modern' Homes in Country Setting From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 06:11:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/realestate/12wczo.html February 12, 2006 'Eco-Modern' Homes in Country Setting By LISA PREVOST BERLIN, Connecticut DAVID REVENAUGH is playing the role of developer, but he is really more of a philosopher at heart. Mr. Revenaugh, 55, who has worked as a carpenter, boat builder and yacht captain, has long been fascinated with the challenge of living well with less. As a boy, he was drawn to clubhouses. As an adult, he learned to appreciate the efficiency of ships' cabins. Settling into his first house, he was struck by the illogic in suburban living styles: the wasted space, the impractical building materials, the overwhelmed landscape. Now he is doing something about it. Mooreland Glen is Mr. Revenaugh's attempt to sell his passion for simplicity and practicality to a suburban population generally more stimulated by three-car garages and luxury bath suites. Billed as a 'green community' in this town's Kensington neighborhood, Mooreland Glen will meld modern design and environmentally sound technologies in 35 'high-performance, low-maintenance homes' on High Road amid natural plantings and walking paths. The green designation refers to both energy-efficiency and overall impact on the environment. The houses will be more airtight than traditional wood-frame homes because they use structural insulated panels, which block air leakage with rigid foam insulation. The housing design minimizes the need for fossil fuels by positioning each structure for maximal southern sun exposure, and installing highly efficient geothermal heat pumps, which essentially draw up the earth's natural thermal energy during cold weather, and pump hot air into the ground during the summer. 'I don't know of anything exactly like this anywhere: a modernist, green housing community set within the landscape,' said Bill Chaleff, of Chaleff & Rogers Architects, a Long-Island-based green building specialist who worked on the project. Fourteen so-called 'eco-modern' houses (what Mr. Revenaugh calls 'logical architecture') will be set on more than 10 acres of rolling pasture land bordered by the Mattabesset River. With an acknowledged nod to Marcel Breuer, the modernist architect, the flat-roofed homes will feature large expanses of glass, 10-foot ceilings and open living areas. At least 30 percent of the land will be designated as open space. In a second phase, 21 more homes will be spaced across a hill overlooking what is now a horse farm, just up the road. A six-acre portion of the 23-acre property will continue to be leased to the therapeutic riding school that now operates the farm. Both parcels were previously held in trust by descendants of the Moore family, whose prominence in Berlin dates to the 19th century. Nelson Augustus Moore, known professionally as N. A. Moore, was a landscape painter of the Hudson River School, as well as the inventor of the first daguerreotype photography studio. His more business-minded son, Ethelbert Allen Moore, rose to the chairmanship of Stanley Works, the tool and hardware maker in New Britain. Mr. Revenaugh's interest in the land arose from his marriage. HIs wife, Carlie Pease Revenaugh, a primatologist, is a Moore on her mother's side. In 2000, the couple purchased the 1820 Federal home where N. A. Moore grew up, just across the street from the pasture; by then the structure was being used as a two-family house and it was dilapidated. They planned to renovate the house and to move in with their son, Nathaniel, now 8. Next door is the stone house that N. A. Moore later designed and lived in. As the Revenaughs were re-establishing family ties to the land, however, the family trust was preparing to sell off the pasture as 10 building lots with curb cuts on High Road. 'This street is kind of a country oasis in the suburbs,' Mr. Revenaugh said. 'But the curb cuts would have forced the town to widen the road, and then bring in sidewalks and street lights, and that's the end of the country road.' He added, 'I saw it as an opportunity to do something really creative with the property.' If the pasture must be developed, Mr. Revenaugh decided, the housing ought to complement, not overtake, the landscape. He found the design expertise he needed in nearby New Haven, in the person of Dean Sakomoto, an architect and design instructor at Yale University. Using the profit from the sale of a beachfront family cottage in the town of Fairfield, Mr. Revenaugh hired both Mr. Sakomoto and another high-profile Yale instructor, Diane Balmori, a landscape designer, to draw up plans for a project that he could present as an alternative to the family trustees. The gamble paid off. After many heated discussions, Mr. Revenaugh sealed a deal on the land. Though the first phase of the project was announced in 2001, Mr. Revenaugh subsequently decided to hold off until he had secured the horse farm property as well. The negotiations dragged on until last year. Mr. Revenaugh used the time to test various 'green' building materials and technologies. His own home was a perfect laboratory. He pulled out walls and ceilings to open up the downstairs living spaces and reused the old timbers for kitchen cabinets. Then he replaced floors and counters with maintenance-free, long-lasting materials like Vermont slate, architectural concrete and bamboo. The exterior makeover included cement fiberboard clapboards and a wood trim look-alike made of PVC. What appears to be a slate roof is actually a composite engineered to last 100 years. 'The idea is to put something on once and not have to replace it,' Mr. Revenaugh said. 'Where I'm putting the money in the house is in the things that matter. It's not going bananas on bathroom suites that are 1,500 square feet.' Finally, he hired Mr. Chaleff, the green building specialist, to tweak Mr. Sakomoto's plans. The adjusted designs call for some houses with downstairs bedrooms and upstairs living areas totaling more than 3,000 square feet, and some slightly smaller, single-level homes. In addition to the structural insulated panels and geothermal heat pump systems, the houses will have roofs made of long-lasting copper or coated metal. The price point, starting in the upper $600,000's, is at the high end of the Berlin-area housing market. Scott Broder, owner of ERA Broder Group, the West Hartford agency representing the project, said the per-square-foot construction cost (roughly $210) is in line with traditional new construction. The target market, he said, is primarily couples who are 40 to 60 years old, with annual incomes of at least $150,000 and a like-mindedness about the benefits of low-impact building. 'Yes, the market for this style will be somewhat limited,' said Mr. Broder, who lives in a modern design home himself, 'but we believe it's out there.' The long delay in getting the project off the ground may have even helped in that regard. In the last year, Mr. Chaleff said, as prices for home heating fuels have soared, he has received a steady stream of calls from New York-area architects eager to learn how to integrate green technologies into their designs.

Subject: New Medicaid Rules on Home Ownership From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 06:09:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/realestate/12home.html February 12, 2006 New Medicaid Rules on Home Ownership By JAY ROMANO THE Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, signed by President Bush last Wednesday, makes significant changes in the rules regarding home ownership and its effect on eligibility for Medicaid, which is often used to pay for nursing-home care. Ronald Fatoullah, a lawyer in Great Neck, on Long Island, said that in determining an applicant's assets, the value of an individual's home was usually exempt. But under the new law, he said, a person with more than $500,000 in home equity is ineligible for nursing-home care under Medicaid. (Homes occupied by a spouse or a disabled or minor child are exempt. And the law allows states to increase the threshold to $750,000.) Mr. Fatoullah said that while the $500,000 limit on equity might seem reasonable for some parts of the country, it is not realistic for homeowners in the New York area. Indeed, he said, many of his clients are elderly individuals who bought their houses or apartments years ago and who now have equity far exceeding $500,000. And unless they do something to change their situation, he said, they could find themselves ineligible for Medicaid when they need it. Two other provisions of the new law, Mr. Fatoullah said, make Medicaid planning even more difficult. Previously, he said, a three-year look-back period was used to determine eligibility. Basically, this meant that while any asset transferred more than three years before applying for benefits would be ignored, assets transferred during that three-year period would result in a penalty. For example, Mr. Fatoullah said, in New York City, every $9,132 in assets transferred during the look-back period renders an individual ineligible for benefits for one month. So if a person transferred, say, $27,396 in assets one year before applying for Medicaid, that person would be ineligible for three months. But under the old law, such a transfer would have had no practical impact, since the ineligibility period would have begun on the first day of the month after the transfer and ended months before benefits were sought. Under the new law, Mr. Fatoullah said, the look-back period is increased to five years, and the ineligibility period starts when the person is in a nursing home and applies for benefits rather than shortly after the transfer was made. So, with that same $27,396 transfer in assets one year before applying for benefits, the three-month ineligibility begins with the application and can have the practical effect of losing three months of benefits. As a result, estate planners say, individuals — especially homeowners — need to plan carefully and early. Linnea Levine, a lawyer in Harrison, N.Y., said that homeowners, including those with more than $500,000 in equity, can use a life estate to protect the home while remaining eligible for Medicaid. With a life estate, Ms. Levine said, a person deeds a property to someone else while retaining the right to live in the home until death. With such a transfer, she said, Medicaid uses tables to determine the value of the asset being transferred. If a 75-year-old transfers title to a $600,000 home and retains a life estate, for example, Medicaid would value the transfer at $287,106. And though that amount would still be subject to the five-year look-back period, the $500,000 threshold would not apply. 'So early planning is essential,' Ms. Levine said. Ralph M. Engel, a Manhattan lawyer, said that another option for a homeowner with more than $500,000 in equity would be to take out a mortgage to reduce that equity. And what should one do with the proceeds of that mortgage? 'You could give it to your kids and hope you won't need Medicaid in the next five years,' he said. 'Or you could take a trip around the world.'

Subject: Paul Krugman: Debt and Denial From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 05:52:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ February 13, 2006 Paul Krugman is worried that Ben Bernanke has inherited a difficult set of economic conditions due to ballooning trade and budget deficits, housing bubble zones, and denial among economic agents creating these conditions. Because of this, Krugman is worried about a hard-landing outcome for the U.S. economy. I have more faith in the soft landing scenario than he does, but perhaps that's wishful thinking or denial on my part. In any case, this time I hope Krugman is wrong. By Mark Thoma Debt and Denial, Commentary, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: Last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets. That is, our imports were 57 percent larger than our exports. How did we manage to live so far beyond our means? By running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers. ... Sometimes large-scale foreign borrowing makes sense. ... But this time our overseas borrowing isn't financing an investment boom: ... business investment is actually low by historical standards. Instead, we're using borrowed money to build houses, buy consumer goods and, of course, finance the federal budget deficit. In 2005 spending on home construction as a percentage of G.D.P. reached its highest level in more than 50 years. People who already own houses are treating them like A.T.M.'s, converting home equity into spending money: last year the personal savings rate fell below zero for the first time since 1933. And it's a sign of our degraded fiscal state that the Bush administration actually boasted about a 2005 budget deficit of more than $300 billion, because it was a bit lower than the 2004 deficit. It all sounds unsustainable. And it is. Some people insist that the U.S. economy has hidden savings that official statistics fail to capture. I won't go into the technical debate about these claims ... except to say that the more closely one looks at the facts, the less plausible the 'don't worry, be happy' hypothesis looks. Denial takes a more systematic form within the federal government... Last week Mr. Cheney announced that a newly created division within the Treasury Department would show that tax cuts increase, not reduce, federal revenue. That's the Bush-Cheney way: decide on your conclusions first, then demand that analysts produce evidence supporting those conclusions. But serious analysts know that America's borrowing binge is unsustainable. ... So how bad will it be? It depends on how the binge ends. If it tapers off gradually, the U.S. economy will be able to shift workers out of sectors that have benefited from the housing boom and ... into sectors that produce exports or replace imports. Given time, we could bring the trade deficit down and bring housing back to earth without a net loss in jobs. In practice, however, a 'soft landing' looks unlikely, because too many economic players have unrealistic expectations. This is true of international investors, who are still snapping up U.S. bonds ... seemingly oblivious both to the budget deficit and to the consensus view ... that the dollar will eventually have to fall 30 percent or more to eliminate the trade deficit. It's equally true of American home buyers. Most Americans live in regions where housing remains affordable. But ... most of the rise in housing values has taken place in a 'bubble zone' along the coasts, where housing prices have risen far more than the economic fundamentals warrant. ... houses in the bubble zone are overvalued by between 35 and 40 percent, creating trillions of dollars of illusory wealth. So it seems all too likely that America's borrowing binge will end with a bang, not a whimper, that spending will suddenly drop off as both the bond market and the housing market experience rude awakenings. If that happens, the economic consequences will be ugly. All in all, Alan Greenspan, who helped create this situation, can consider himself lucky that he's safely out of office, giving briefings to hedge fund managers at $250,000 a pop. And his successor may be in for a rough ride. Best wishes and good luck, Ben; you may need it.

Subject: Treasury, today's column From: BB To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 03:13:43 (EST) Email Address: wbikales@adb.org Message: Today's column refers to a new unit in Treasury that VP has announced will demonstrate that tax cuts lead to higher revenues. Anyone know the details -- what unit, what exactly did Cheney say? thanks, all BB

Subject: Re: Treasury, today's column From: David E.. To: BB Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 18:46:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This might be Paul's source. It's interesting, the journalist couldn't find folks that were as sure as Cheney about revenue increases. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/10/AR2006021001855.html

Subject: Re: Treasury, today's column From: BBw To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 19:39:40 (EST) Email Address: wbikales@adb.org Message: Thanks very much. Yes, interesting, but not surprising, given the evidence of the last five years! The article also points out quite rightly that the CBO, among others, already uses dynamic analysis in its budget projections. Seems as though the purpose of the new unit is just as Paul says; produce propaganda for Bush's proposals.

Subject: More info: From: David E.. To: BBw Date Posted: Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 16:55:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Jack Kemp's column this week has some more info. http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/jackkemp/2006/02/13/186330.html The supply sider's are pretty excited about this, but I am guessing that after 5 years tax cuts should be proving their worth. This is a good time to see exactly where we are on the Laffer curve. The CBO did a good job of analyzing Social security reform. Made it obvious that besides cutting benefits, that the reform would cause the defiticit to rise. This happened because the diversion to savings accounts dries up the funds needed to provide current SS benefits. It is a good exercise to go through, I am all for lowering taxes and getting increased revenues at the same time. The only catch is, are we at a sweet spot on the Laffer curve?

Subject: Re: More info: From: Emma To: David E.. Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 16, 2006 at 06:11:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thanks, but the only thing about the Laffer curve and Jack Kemp for that matter is that they have always been wrong.

Subject: Sculpture From the Earth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 10:32:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/arts/design/24kimm.html?ex=1277265600&en=459c9977474bca45&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 24, 2005 Sculpture From the Earth, But Never Limited by It By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN WHEN Robert Smithson died at 35, in a plane crash in 1973, overseeing one of his earthworks, he gave the art world its own Buddy Holly. Who knows whether he now is, as the excellent touring retrospective freshly arrived at the Whitney advertises, the most influential postwar American artist. But he certainly fascinates a slew of young art worldlings. It would be heartening if this were attributable to some longing for a less money-besotted day, one that pressed art to go beyond the upholstered confines of institutions and commerce. The New York art scene of Smithson's time was grittier, angrier and more open to all sorts of splendid, hare-brained, homegrown schemes, of which Smithson had plenty. They helped to shove Minimalism, Conceptualism and Pop in various messy new directions. In an era of crabbed imagination and short-term profiteering, the sheer chutzpah of artists like Smithson is instructive. He was shrewd, caustic, competitive and ingenious. During a career that effectively lasted not even a decade, he anointed himself the spokesman -- and in the process made himself an inevitable target -- for a generation of fellow chest-thumping innovators and troublemakers who were about as amenable to herding as alley cats. Smithson's goal both for radical art and for himself depended on the dissemination of ideas via the printed page, through writings, photographs and film. Native touch, as this show demonstrates without actually diminishing him, was never his forte. The turning point came in the mid-60's when he proposed making art for an airport in Texas, involving mirrors, cameras and other things he imagined putting out in fields, to be seen from airplanes, opening up sculpture to vast scale, the outdoors and aerial views. A few years later came ''Spiral Jetty,'' 6,650 tons of black basalt and earth in the shape of a 1,500-foot-long coil or fiddlehead, projecting into the remote shallows of Rozel Point on the northeast shore of the Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the water is rose red from the brine shrimp and algae. There is a photograph of him in the show's catalog, young, pockmarked, bespectacled and shaggy, with sketchpad on lap, gazing raptly toward ''Jetty,'' as if into the great beyond, like one of Caspar David Friedrich's romantic loners on a misty mountaintop. For Smithson, the allusions in his work (he completed ''Jetty'' in 1970) were to lost worlds and imaginary cosmologies. He was as enamored of Borges and Blake as he was of horror movies and the dinosaur displays at the American Museum of Natural History. He read the science fiction of J.G. Ballard (he likened the red Salt Lake to a Martian sea), and he was inspired by geological formations and religious rituals (brought up Roman Catholic, he went through a phase of making religious art), of which pilgrimage was an aspect. The popular allure of ''Jetty'' was enhanced by Smithson's writings about it, part poetry, part hokum, and by the 16-millimeter color movie he shot of its construction: trucks and loaders lumbering like barosaurs across a prehistoric panorama to his narrative. Cunning and prescient, he grasped that in the modern age a sculpture in the middle of nowhere could have a life separate from itself, through reproductions and other simulacra, which is how most people would see the work. This gap between the real world and its translation into a gallery via photographs, maps or whatever became an abiding theme. The film of ''Spiral Jetty'' occupies a room in the exhibition. I stopped by to remind myself of the end of it, an aerial view when the sun, reflected in the lens of the movie camera, makes ''Jetty'' evaporate in an epiphany of light. It's treacly and compelling. To watch the film is also to be reminded how heavy machinery and raw materials made Smithson's hamfistedness more or less irrelevant, distancing him from the physical task of making sculpture, but paradoxically making that art more distinctly his own. ''Jetty'' (it's actually smaller than you might think from looking at pictures) acts as a kind of sign outdoors, pointing visitors to the surroundings -- moving attention from center to periphery, where there is not just nature to look at but also rusting cars and a decrepit pier. An ancient sea and industrial ruin, ''the site,'' as Smithson wrote, was ''evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes.'' His fascination was with the grandeur of such industrial decay, from which he came. He was born in New Jersey in 1938 and commuted as a teenager to classes at the Art Students League. (He never went to college.) New Jersey became the periphery of his universe, New York the center. One day in 1967, he hopped a bus from the big city to stroll around his hometown, Passaic, sporting a Kodak Instamatic and snapping highway abutments and drainage pipes. He published his deadpan travelog in Artforum as ''The Monuments of Passaic,'' opening up a world of artistic inquiry -- and introducing, with comedic élan, a fresh mythology -- to the dystopian sprawl across the Hudson River from Manhattan. ''I am convinced,'' he wrote, ''that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the nonhistorical past; it is in yesterday's newspapers, in the jejune advertisements of science fiction movies, in the false mirror of our rejected dreams. Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs.'' This was his rejoinder to the formal insularity of Minimalism, but it was also a way of reclaiming, as if through a back door, the quasi-spiritual ambitions of Abstract Expressionism. And it was more than that. Smithson carted slag and dirt from quarries and dumps back to New York to stack them in steel bins, which he called Non-sites, sculptural evidence of his eccentric archaeology, Minimalist in design, accompanied by maps and photographs -- the periphery literally brought to the center as visionary evidence of a kind of new Whitmanesque poetry. These clunky sculptures were both dumbly matter of fact and abstract. Their subject was vernacular America, but not transcribed from comic books into zippy Pop paintings. They were a different sort of Pop art. After the Non-sites came the ''Mirror Displacements,'' sometimes placed outside: more assemblages of dirt, sand, shells and salt, now piled to support mirrors (prop art) in geometric arrangements that multiplied and refracted the piles, dematerializing the materials. Like much of Smithson's work, the displacements were a good idea that did not automatically look great. That said, they have never looked better than they do at the Whitney, where they almost make Smithson into an elegant formalist and subtle colorist. The retrospective, organized by Eugenie Tsai, a Smithson expert, and in New York after much ballyhooed stops in Los Angeles and Dallas, consists mostly of drawings, photographs and films. Smithson didn't really make that many sculptures, not ones that could fit into a museum, anyway. This is the first full-scale overview of him in the country. His legacy endures in prospective plans and endless, indulgent prose. There is, consequently, a documentary aspect to much of the show. But it is compelling testimony to an exuberance cut drastically short. Some years ago, Ms. Tsai put together an eye-opening display of early work by Smithson at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. Early work -- what Smithson did from his teenage days at the Art Students League, starting in 1955, until he had his breakthrough in 1964 -- is what's especially fascinating here, too. You see in a teenage woodcut the early mixing of text and image; in collages from the early 60's, the arrangement of shapes with a distinct center and periphery. Throughout these years are all manner of roiling obsessions, conveyed via homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines, expressionistic religious paintings, and oddball sculptural contraptions that are attempts at Duchampian Pop. I was struck by an early collage of ''St. John in the Desert,'' a reproduction of a painting cut out of a book in which the Holy Spirit is transferred as if by magnetic attraction to the saint's upraised finger; the reproduction is surrounded by further clippings of diagrams from electrical manuals. ''I'm trying to achieve a sublime nausea by using the debris of science and making it superstitious,'' Smithson wrote. ''Religion is getting so rational that I moved into science because it seems to be the only thing left that's religious.'' There are also drawings of quarries whose scars can bring to mind stigmata (entropic landscapes as apocalypse), and cartoonish sketches of figures turned into trees, like the mythic Daphne, connecting the body to nature. All of these themes seem to be funneled into the first mature sculptures: mirrored steel boxes and gaudily painted metal wall reliefs: dizzy abstractions, like psychedelic Minimalism, sometimes with zigzag flashing lights (like the electric charge in the St. John). The mirrors call into play the rooms and the people in the rooms, who can disappear if they look for themselves in the mirrored boxes. Angled, these mirrors deflect direct sight, creating a visual sleight of hand, a kaleidoscopic universe of refracted space. Refraction, or maybe it is repression. If you look for it, you may detect a campy undercurrent to some of Smithson's work. It's hard not to read into his mature art a simmering stew of sexual and spiritual infatuations, boiled down to blunt, geometric forms. Call it ecstasy, or anger, in a box. Smithson's sculptures are allusive fragments of something larger, whether what's larger is a site in New Jersey or an emotion. One of the more eloquent rooms in the show contains black and white sculptures that he devised in the mid-60's, about the time of the airport project. These are crystalline shapes, repeated forms in series, from large to small, or vice versa, and they also include a kind of stepped sculpture, like an elongated staircase in sharply receding perspective, titled ''Pointless Vanishing Point.'' The work invites your movement across and around it, to see how space shifts. Like all of Smithson's sculpture, it orchestrates sight. And as I said, it is a fragment. That perspective goes on forever -- from site to mind, from something we can see to something we imagine.

Subject: 'New Boy,' by Julian Houston From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 09:26:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/review/12marler.html?ex=1297400400&en=f3dc92e70085fc18&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 'New Boy,' by Julian Houston By REGINA MARLER THE REV. JESSE JACKSON said of Joe Louis, 'He was our Samson; he was our David.' He was also, for African-Americans in the 1950's, their Icarus. Son of a sharecropper, Louis defended his heavyweight championship title for 12 years, but lost or gave away the millions he had earned, and ended up addicted to drugs and working as a greeter at Caesars Palace. As Rob Garrett, the hero of 'New Boy' sees it, Louis, through his 'ignorance and carelessness,' had been 'returned to slavery by the government.' 'Don't end up like Joe Louis,' Rob is told when he leaves Virginia to become the first black student at Draper, a Connecticut prep school. The specter of Louis's fate hangs over this debut novel, based on the author's own experience in the late 1950's, when he attended the Hotchkiss School, in Lakeville, Conn. Louis is the starkest of several cautionary figures Rob contemplates as he threads his way among hazards at Draper. The child of a dentist and a schoolteacher, Rob could have taken his place among the black bourgeoisie in his hometown, but wanted something less sure, something he couldn't yet envision: 'I was shedding like an overcoat the image of myself with which I had been raised, of the good colored boy brought up in a proper colored home to serve the needs of the race during its sojourn in captivity.' One hint that Julian Houston, who is now an associate justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts, was an eyewitness to this period is his comfort with bygone terms — relics like 'colored' and 'Negro.' His dignified prose, like Rob's cautious formality, is a good match for a tie-wearing era. At Draper, Rob keeps to himself, studying hard. His boldest gesture is refusing to stereotype himself by joining the football team. While he encounters little racial opposition from his classmates, Rob is stunned to discover that the first friend he makes, an acne-stricken New Yorker named Vinnie Mazzerelli, is the target of a sustained ethnic attack, with insults escalating to ostracism. The school administration regards these incidents as character-building, and refuses to censure the well-connected student ringleaders. Rob's shrewd cousin, Gwen, a retired Harlem schoolteacher whose hobby is scanning television shows for Negroes (about one appearance a month), supports his staying at Draper, and argues that for Rob to get ahead, he will have to move 'beyond what's familiar': 'These youngsters in Harlem spending all of their time with each other. . . . They don't have any idea what it's like to talk to a white person as an equal, much less a white person sitting next to you at the dining room table.' But Harlem, too, is 'beyond what's familiar' to Rob. At Thanksgiving break, walking down 125th Street for the first time — exhilarated to float through a sea of dark faces — he meets a black Muslim and carries away a copy of Muhammad Speaks, with its photo of another charismatic stranger, Malcolm X. Here were colored men who had 'no interest in the integration of the races, which I had been brought up to believe was the ideal for every Negro.' By the Christmas break, when he takes the train home to Virginia, he is itching to join a new group forming among his childhood friends that promises direct political action: a sit-in at the segregated Woolworth lunch counter. As the author pointed out in a recent interview, time has blunted our memories of segregation. Teenage readers of 'New Boy' may have seen pictures of events like the Birmingham riots, but know little of the everyday experience of racial segregation: the paranoid attempt to keep color inside the lines. Rob has been raised 'to give whites a wide berth,' aware that even brushing against a white person on the sidewalk could bring violence. The most disturbing — and beautifully written — scene in this novel is not the sit-in that Rob's friends stage, but the potent vision of white reprisal that follows Rob's innocent dream of rebellion as his southbound train approaches Washington. Here, he will be expected to move to the colored car at the back of the train. He yearns to disobey, to keep his seat beside a sour white woman, but can picture too well the 'dark retribution' of the South: the body search and interrogation by some sweaty local sheriff and his men, his suitcase emptied into the train aisle. Crosscurrents in the civil rights movement are well represented in 'New Boy,' and Rob's quick transition between 'good colored boy' and fledgling activist makes sense (and, judging from the author's biography on the book jacket, are also part of Julian Houston's own story). This is history without sensationalism, in which small acts of resistance eventually change the rules.

Subject: An Interview With Julian Houston From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 09:26:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/books/12houston-interview.html February 12, 2006 An Interview With Julian Houston By JULIE JUST A judge with a long background in the civil rights movement, Julian Houston says he decided years ago that he would like to try writing fiction. But it wasn't until he began working with a teacher in the late 1990's that he started seriously writing. The result is 'New Boy,' a graceful and moving debut novel that the author hopes will help young readers understand what America was like in the days of segregation. It is based on his experiences in 1959 as one of the first black students to attend the Hotchkiss prep school in Connecticut — called Draper in the novel — and also contains vivid scenes of Harlem night clubs and street life. An edited version of an interview with Houston follows. Q. Many kids reading 'New Boy' may be surprised by what turns out to be the most brutal incident in the novel, after the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter — namely, the merciless hazing of the Italian-American boy in the prep school dorm. How much of that story was based on real life? A. Much of it was based on real life, although all of the scenes are fictional. The hazing (it was called 'baiting' in those days, as in bear-baiting) began soon after the school year opened and continued, without interruption, until the boy whom I call 'Vinnie' withdrew from school. As far as I could tell, there was no effort by the faculty or the administration to come to his aid. It was as though they felt the hazing was a character-building experience for him. I have no idea what happened to him, although I have tried to find him. He just disappeared. Q. Various figures have vivid cameos in the novel, particularly Joe Louis and two Nation of Islam followers, whom the narrator, Rob Garrett, encounters in Harlem. Were they also drawn from life to some extent? When you eventually met Malcolm X, what were your impressions of him? A. I never met Joe Louis, however, I have met several members of the Nation of Islam, both in Boston and New York, over the years, including Malcolm X. The descriptions of Malcolm's bodyguards are drawn from those encounters. I was 19 years old when I met Malcolm. We met in New York City at the television studio for WNET Channel 13 in the spring of 1964. Malcolm had recently broken away from Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, and soon thereafter, he made a pilgrimage to Mecca and toured Africa. The trip led him to moderate some of his views about Islam and racial matters in this country. When we met, he had just returned to the United States and was waiting to be interviewed for a news program. I was in the studio waiting to be interviewed by the writer Fanny Hurst. I was dressed like a civil rights worker in the South, in a blue jean jacket and trousers, a blue workshirt and work boots. I went over to shake his hand and speak with him. He was gracious and warm, with a relaxed, boyish smile. He asked what I was doing in New York and I told him I was organizing rent strikes and working on school issues. He encouraged me and cautioned me to be careful. I felt very much in the presence of a great man. Q. Do you find that young readers are familiar with the history of segregation and the civil rights movement? Are they interested in hearing about it, or does it seem like ancient history to them? A. Most young people today, even those in the South, have only a superficial knowledge of the civil rights movement and segregation. I think those of us who were involved in the movement must bear the major responsibility for this. The Jewish community has done a very effective job of teaching young people about the Holocaust. On the other hand, we have been preoccupied with ideological disputes, vocabulary disputes, turf battles and celebrity worship, at the price of, among other things, laying the foundation for the younger generation to understand the significance of what we did. Beyond recalling the names of Dr. King and Mrs. Parks, most young people, black or white, can't tell you much about the civil rights movement and what it accomplished, which is not to say they are not interested in learning about it. One of the reasons I wrote 'New Boy' was to give young people a detailed picture of what it was like to live in a segregated community in the late 1950s. Q. Your description of the vitality of 125th Street in 1959 is particularly striking to read now, since Harlem in some ways seems to be in a historic resurgence. But of course, integration is a double-edged thing for black residents; did you foresee that early on? A. Black people have always had a certain ambivalence about whites, so it doesn't surprise me that they question the motives of whites who are moving into Harlem or investing there. I did not foresee, however, the rise of black nationalism that occurred at the end of the 1960's and continued for more than a decade, or the vehemence with which it took hold. Black nationalist and racially separatist ideas have always been articulated in the black community. In the early 20th century, Marcus Garvey and Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute, were prominent advocates of racial separatism, but the dominant philosophy of black leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries, from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. DuBois to Martin Luther King, has been to support racial integration. I saw the black community's embrace of black nationalism in the late 1960's as an expression of its rage at the assassination of Martin Luther King and its frustration with the slow pace of racial progress. I also saw it as self-defeating. Q. From the biography that appears on your book, fiction-writing appears to be something that came to you after many other vocations and accomplishments — how did it occur to you write about some of your experiences as fiction? A. My interest in writing fiction began more than twenty years ago, when I was first appointed as a judge in the Roxbury district of Boston. As I heard the daily list of cases assigned to me, I often felt that many held a story beyond those that were being presented in the courtroom and I wanted to try describe some of them in fiction. I studied fiction writing off and on, but it was not until I began to study privately with a teacher that I made an unqualified commitment to become a fiction writer. Like many writers of fiction, I often use my experiences in my work. As for 'New Boy,' my memories of what happened to Vinnie stayed with me like an aching tooth for more than forty years, until one day, seven years ago, my teacher said, 'Write me a story,' and I wrote the short story that became the basis for the novel. Q. Do you think the decision top black students have to make today, whether or not to attend private school, especially boarding school, still poses some of the same issues that Rob faces — survival in an alien environment? Or is it a completely different world for kids now, with different problems and different hierarchies? A. It's difficult for me to say. There have been improvements. Many boarding schools now have black faculty members and administrators. When I attended Hotchkiss, all of the teachers and administrators were white. And there is the obligatory observance of Martin Luther King Day and Black History Month. My sense is that those black students who are able to carve out an identity for themselves - as athletes or outstanding scholars, for example - fare better than those who don't. And the sense of alienation, of struggling to find a place for one's self 'on the slippery walls of the world,' as Rob Garrett puts it, is endemic to adolescence. But major issues of race and class remain unresolved in our society, so we should not be surprised that they continue to vex black youngsters., who often find themselves for the first time living next door to white children from families of extraordinary wealth and privilege.

Subject: The Starling Chronicles From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:57:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/nyregion/thecity/12bird.html February 12, 2006 The Starling Chronicles By LAURA SHAINE CUNNINGHAM Why is there a wild bird in my apartment? She fell, as a nestling, from the rain gutter on the roof of my country house. Since then, she has been dividing her time, as I do, between city and country — taking taxis while in town, going to meetings, theater. She has spent quality time in my apartment on East 80th Street, gazing at the street scene and listening to WQXR. She responds to both classical and jazz, is attentive to Jonathan Schwartz. At the start, there were two baby birds — the one we took to calling Raven Starling and her sibling, a creature that was smaller and weaker from the get-go. The ousted nestlings lay stranded on the grass, looking less like birds than glands, fleshy globs with a suggestion of gray lint over raw red flesh. The ugly little hatchlings had survived a three-story fall from a roof, and they had luck from the start; they fell at the feet of my 12-year-old daughter, Jasmine. 'Oh, look!' she cried. 'Baby birds!' Ugh, I thought. But I dutifully went online to figure out what to do with these creatures, then called a wildlife rehabilitation phone number that I found under 'Wild Baby Birds.' After listening to my description, the fatigued woman on the other end snapped: 'Sturnus vulgaris, a starling. Dog food on a chopstick, every hour.' I set the unappealing twosome on a warm hand towel in a basket in the bathroom. 'They'll be dead in the morning,' I thought, with some ambivalence. In the morning, one was dead, but Raven Starling was very much alive. 'One didn't make it,' Jasmine said, her voice reedy with grief. 'Let's hope for Ravvie.' Thus began the grueling all-day feedings. In the wild, starlings are insectivores, but they can live as omnivores if someone is willing to shop and mash commercial food for them. Ravvie demanded more and more of the recommended meal, which we adapted to cat food, Nine Lives mixed with Mott's natural apple sauce (no sugar for starlings, only corn syrup or fruit sweeteners), ground Tums (for calcium) and mashed hard-boiled egg yolk to meet her 'intense protein needs.' Why we were meeting this creature's intense protein needs was another matter. I did not give Raven Starling great odds. I believed that her daily meals were only staving off the inevitable. Every morning, I expected to find her dead in her basket, beak sealed forever. But when I walked into the bathroom on the fourth day, she stood up and spread her featherless wings, looking like a mini oviraptor escaped from Jurassic Park, demanding to be fed. I did not find the sight appealing, but I was impressed. 'She wants to live,' I realized. From that moment forth, I found the image of the bird, alone, opening her mouth without anyone to hear, unbearable. Which explains why I nearly died later that day, feeding her from her chopstick while navigating a turn off the West Side Highway into Greenwich Village, where a play of mine was in rehearsal. She later made it to several performances. With a drape over her head, Raven Starling knew to be still during performances, at least off Broadway. Raven Starling adapted to apartment life; she would even tolerate a car-sit for alternate-side-of-the street parking, or a quick run into the hot bagel place. Even an insectivore, I noted, was not immune to the charms of a warm sesame bagel. Our doorman, Manuel Gonzalez, welcomed Raven Starling. With doormanly discretion, he ignored her unattractive appearance and gave her courteous rides, often on his uniformed arm. In my apartment, two blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she perched on a houseplant and looked out the window, studying the city pigeons and sparrows and the renovation of the Junior League building across the street. She splattered away, in a box in the powder room. What have I done? I wondered. I've brought the worst of the country; a fecal spray, a wild thing, into what was an oasis of urban civilization. But I did notice she seemed attentive when I turned on WQXR, the classical station, and she clutched a program from the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center. I tried to ignore her odor, her cat-food-encrusted beak, and forced myself to share my daughter's deepening love. 'Oh, she's so cute.' But she wasn't cute. Her face was foreshortened, and with her tiny beady eyes, bright with ruthless appetite, and a jaw that compressed when her beak closed, which was rare, she looked like Andy Gump. I WENT to the Web site Starling Talk to check out the origins of starlings and discovered some surprising facts. The starling is a New York immigrant and, if not for Shakespeare, would never have entered our lives. In March 1890, a New York drug manufacturer named Eugene Schieffelin acted on his love for the playwright by vowing to release into Central Park all the songbirds mentioned in Shakespeare. Mr. Schieffelin loosed several species: thrushes, skylarks and starlings. Only the starlings survived. From the initial 100 birds released, flocks reproduced to the current hundreds of millions, making them among the nation's most abundant and ultimately most controversial birds. They are infamous as pests, accused of corroding buildings with their acid droppings, which is why the joy over their first observed roost, in the eaves of the American Museum of Natural History, quickly hardened into disgust. What did Shakespeare say regarding starlings that so inspired the 19th-century drug maker? It's a line in 'Henry IV, Part 1,' in which Hotspur threatens: 'The king forbade my tongue to speak of Mortimer. But I will find him when he is asleep. I'll have a starling shall be taught to speak nothing but Mortimer, and give it to him to keep his anger still in motion.' The birds, I learn, are mimics, known in Elizabethan times as 'the poor man's mynah.' Oddly, they are unlikely to repeat a single word; they require a rhythmic phrase. So Shakespeare is now regarded as having made a mistake. But one billion birds later, with Raven Starling as my constant companion, I live with the result of one man's infatuation with Shakespeare's silver-tongued reference to songbirds. 'She's making a mess,' I kept saying, but I also kept feeding her, and she grew, not gradually but suddenly, into a midsize blackish bird. 'Take a bath!' I ordered her, and she did, in a soup bowl filled with water in my formerly spotless city kitchen. By this point, the history of the starling had me in its talons. Starlings may be the champion bird 'talkers'; they can chorus in the wild by the thousands. Some experts have observed 'a murmuration,' as a flock of starlings is called, numbering a million or more. Yet starlings are as despised as they are loved. In September, it was reported that the federal government had killed 2.3 million starlings in 2004 as part of a campaign to get rid of what it described as 'nuisance animals.' Starling eliminators insist that the birds damage crops, soil buildings, even cause planes to crash, and have resorted to Roman candles, hot wires and a poison called Starlicide to discourage or destroy the birds. Is the killing justified? Starling supporters insist that it isn't, that the starling kills so many destructive insects; a murmuration should elicit a chorus of praise. Rachel Carson, the author of 'Silent Spring,' championed the starling: 'In spite of his remarkable success as a pioneer, the starling probably has fewer friends than almost any other creature that wears feathers. That fact, however, seems to be of very little importance to this cheerful bird with glossy plumage and stumpy tail.' The starling, she continued, 'hurries with jerky steps about the farms and gardens in the summer time, carrying more than 100 loads of destructive insects per day to his screaming offspring.' Another admirer was Mozart, who paid dearly for his pet starling, loved it and staged a funeral when it passed away, of unknown causes, at age 3. Some authorities think the starling's song became incorporated into Mozart's composition 'A Musical Joke.' RAVEN STARLING also began to sing, but would she really be independent someday? Could I release her, perhaps back into Central Park? No, I could not, I was told by Jackie Collins, who runs Starling Talk. An 'imprint' bird like mine, raised from infancy, can never join a starling murmuration. Starling Talk is filled with descriptions of confused imprint birds that have been found injured and emaciated and are unable to join in a flock. Although Raven Starling would one day speak better than a parrot, live to be 20 and play with a whiffle ball, she would have to stay forever among her adopted species — humans. By then I had ascended into the skies of a cyberculture of starling-keepers, and joined the Chirp Room, where visitors signed off with phrases like 'the whisper of wings' and quoted the famous line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, 'You are responsible forever for what you have tamed.' I learned that there are thousands of starling-keepers, the beneficiaries of a legal loophole: Although keeping a native wild bird in your home is illegal, starlings are exempt because of their foreign origin. Meanwhile, Raven Starling grew prettier. As she matured, she displayed a certain etiquette, wiping her beak after each gooey bite. We shared toast. I played her Mozart's starling song. Now when I heard the deep chords of Mozart's 'Requiem,' and Raven Starling sang along, in full throat, I pondered why I had tried so hard to keep this bird alive. Was it simply to keep a promise to a child? Perhaps there was another reason. In my home, we are all foundlings. I was an orphaned child, and my little girl was left on a street in China. Was this why the fallen starling had to be rescued? Because in our family, abandonment is unthinkable? Whatever my motivation, I was not alone in my demented devotions. At 3 one morning I tried to predict what would become of the three of us by checking on the bird's Web site, Starling Talk. There, I learned about other baby starling 'parents' who were struggling with similar issues but also celebrating events such as 'Stormy's Fifth Birthday.' Tamed starlings were on display, rainbow-hued when loved and cleaned, aglow as they were videotaped: 'Plant a kiss on me, liverlips,' said a saveling named Techno. I admit, I had become attached to Ravvie. She flew to me at a whistle, and she groomed my tousled hair. She sat on my head when I played piano. I never thought that I could love an insectivore. Maybe it's possible that someone can love anything. How far would I go in catering to my insectivore? Could I be like those other starling people on the Web site, who order bags of dried bugs? There was a human murmuration on the Web, especially in the dead of night, composed of bird people like a man living in a city apartment with an adult male starling named Smarty who has learned to take sharp right turns. But winter would change everything. Winter was when the true trial of caring indoors for a wild bird would begin. Raven Starling would be forced for long periods into apartment life in the city. I have learned that if she walked for much longer on even carpeted city floors, she would develop a deformity, 'spraggle feet.' ONE dawn, I began to communicate with a woman upstate, who has four starlings and offered to adopt mine. And I begin to wonder, what is best, to maintain Raven Starling as a lone creature, becoming spraggle-footed, commuting to New York and riding elevators, or surrender her to another 'mother' who maintains three rooms in her home just for her birds? So it came to pass that one September Sunday, I found myself driving with my daughter and the bird, in her cage, strapped to the back car seat, to a town five hours north of New York that even on the warm golden day appeared flattened by the memory of blizzards. Fort Plain, just outside Canajoharie. The town is blanched and beaten, an entire town with freezer burn. Nearly all the factories that once sustained the area closed long ago. Yet it is here I was assured that a warm and loving home with other starlings awaited Raven Starling. Mary Ann, the 'adoptive mother' who is known on the Web as Little Feathers, was sitting on the stoop of a house with a peaked roof when we arrived. At 52, in T-shirt and jeans, with long, flowing hair, she had a fatigued, youthful quality. Inside her neat but crammed living room, there was a smell, not unpleasant but avian. I think it was the smell of warm feathers. Mary Ann has three children: an 11-year-old daughter and a boy and girl who are 12. The older girl was robust; her handsome twin brother, who has cerebral palsy, looked five years younger, thin and frail. Mary Ann also had a dozen avian 'babies.' Her voice quickened as she described the antics of George. 'He's just a baby. And Chirp, she was given to me. And Littlefeathers, he was the first. And Trouble, well, his name fits.' In addition to the starlings, there were three pigeons, four society finches, and, the pièce de résistance, a paralyzed sparrow presented in the palm of her hand. I could not help connecting the flightless bird to the child who sits so still on the couch. How could Mary Ann care for all these needful beings? I was on the brink of saying, 'We thank you, but I'll take the bird home.' Instead, we recited the chorus of open adoption: I asked and she agreed, 'You shall have visitation.' 'We can see her again,' I said, my voice climbing too high, as Jasmine and I drove back to the city. I knew we were thinking the same thought. Someone left my daughter somewhere almost 13 years ago. 'On Quon Dong Road,' her papers report. I recited the rationale that Raven Starling was better off with other birds, with an at-home mother who knew avian medicine and had an avian vet. I had no doubt that was all true, but my hands tightened on the steering wheel. 'We're never coming back,' my child said. We drove along, and then somewhere along the Thruway, above a vast pasture, we saw them, a murmuration of starlings, thousands of birds. Through the open car window, I heard, or more accurately felt, a familiar sound, more vibration or audible breeze than a true noise; the flutter of thousands of wings in unison, combined with a muted mass voice. Later at twilight in the city, walking through Central Park, my daughter and I caught sight of another flock, or was it the same one? This was the true murmuration, an entity unto itself, to which Raven Starling, had her fate not crossed with ours, would have belonged. I watched the birds dip, then rise and reverse again, an animate banner, starring the skies above the city. My daughter and I stared upward. We would never see a flock of birds again without noticing and remembering: We knew one in a billion.

Subject: Tutor Program Offered by Law From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:55:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/education/12tutor.html?ex=1297400400&en=6537558d6112b754&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 Tutor Program Offered by Law Is Going Unused By SUSAN SAULNY Four years after President Bush signed the landmark No Child Left Behind education law, vast numbers of students are not getting the tutoring that the law offers as one of its hallmarks. In the nation's largest school district, New York City, fewer than half of the 215,000 eligible students sought the free tutoring, according to figures from the city's Department of Education for the school year that ended in June 2005. In one area of the city, District 19 in eastern Brooklyn, about 3,700 students completed a tutoring program last year, even though more than 13,000 students qualified. Yet New York's participation rate is better than the national average: across the country, roughly two million public school students were eligible for free tutoring in the school year that ended in 2004, according to the most recent data from the Department of Education, yet only 226,000 — or nearly 12 percent — received help. In California in the last school year, 95,500 of 800,000 eligible students were tutored. In Maryland, just over a quarter of those who were eligible — 5,580 of 19,520 students — actually enrolled in the last school year. And in Louisiana, despite aggressive marketing by the state, only about 5,000 of 50,000 eligible students took part in the program last year. The No Child Left Behind law requires consistently failing schools that serve mostly poor children to offer their students a choice if they want it: a new school or tutoring from private companies or other groups, paid for with federal money — typically more than $1,800 a child in big cities. In the past the schools would have been under no obligation to use that Title I federal poverty grant to pay for outside tutoring. City and state education officials and tutoring company executives disagree on the reasons for the low participation and cast blame on each other. But they agree that the numbers show that states and school districts have not smoothed out the difficulties that have plagued the tutoring — known as the supplemental educational services program — from its start as a novel experiment in educational entrepreneurship: largely private tutoring paid for with federal money. Officials give multiple reasons for the problems: that the program is allotted too little federal money, is poorly advertised to parents, has too much complicated paperwork for signing up, and that it has not fully penetrated the most difficult neighborhoods, where there are high concentrations of poor, failing students. 'I think there's a real learning curve on this because it's so different from what has come before,' said Jane Hannaway, the director of the Education Policy Center at the Urban Institute, which is in the early stage of conducting studies on the tutoring program for the United States Department of Education. 'At this point, policy analysts are trying to figure out what's working well and what may not be working well and what needs to be changed,' Ms. Hannaway added. Because the initiative is but a few years old, and many districts are only now starting tutoring programs, experts say their effort to pinpoint the hurdles to the initiative's success is also suffering from a lack of data. Even for those students who are getting tutored, there has yet to be a scientific national study judging whether students in failing schools are receiving any academic benefit. And there is no consensus on how that progress should be judged. In addition, it is not entirely clear why so many students do not complete tutoring programs once they have enrolled. In New York City, 34,055 schoolchildren did not successfully complete the terms of their tutoring contracts last year after signing up. Most seemed to attend a few sessions and then never returned. Federal education officials point to the fact that the initiative is still relatively new in explaining the low enrollment numbers, and say that participation is growing every year. 'To some extent, when you offer something new to low-income parents or to any parent group, initially you're not going to have a surge signing up because they don't know what it is and the procedure to sign kids up is somewhat complicated,' said Nina Rees, an assistant deputy secretary at the Department of Education. To that end, the department has been advising states and school districts to use everything they can to reach parents, including letters, fliers and the Internet, and to make the description of programs as simple as possible. Still, Ms. Rees noted that 'this can be time consuming, and a lot of districts don't have the capacity to administer a program like this while administering all of the other grants they are charged with administering.' While tutoring is only one of the choices given to students under the law, switching to new schools is more difficult, so school districts have put the emphasis on tutoring. In failing districts, the law required the tutoring to come from outside groups on the theory that they could do a better job than the schools that were failing in the first place. But to address the tens of thousands of students who are not getting tutors, federal education officials are now allowing some failing districts to tutor their own students. New York was the third city to receive such a waiver in November, after Chicago and Boston. City education officials say they hope running their own program will open access to more students because districts tend to tutor students at a much lower cost per child, and the tutoring groups tend to be larger. The federal government calls the three city efforts pilot programs and says that based on their success they could be replicated in other cities. Students are not required to sign up for tutoring. The option is offered, but students' ability to participate depends on how well the services are advertised, how cooperative districts are in letting tutors into schools, whether the tutors can serve all those in need and whether districts have enough money to cover services for those who want them. The money comes from a percentage of federal Title I money that the districts must set aside for tutoring or the school transfers. But some districts say the money has been insufficient to keep up with demand. After No Child Left Behind became law, companies and other tutoring groups rushed to be part of the new industry. Eduventures, a market research firm for the education industry, estimated that the amount of money spent on supplemental educational services last year was $879 million and that the figure would grow to $1.3 billion by 2009. The providers range from large companies like Catapult Learning, Kaplan Inc. and the Princeton Review to smaller community and religions groups and nonprofit organizations. To participate and be reimbursed per child tutored, providers must first win the state's approval. Some tutoring companies blame the school districts and the federal government for the bulk of the problems. 'If this was Year 1 or 2, I'd cut the districts more slack in somehow explaining the lack of aggressive outreach,' said Steven Pines, executive director of the Education Industry Association, a trade group that represents businesses like textbook, testing and tutoring companies. Jeffrey Cohen, the president of Catapult Learning, one of the largest tutoring companies, said participation rates were low because many districts were just now embracing the program, and some still had complicated sign-up procedures. 'From a macro level, there needs to be more enforcement,' Mr. Cohen said. 'If I can identify for you a school district that has 40,000 eligible children and 245 approved, I draw the conclusion that there is something wrong with the implementation there. In states and districts that have opened their arms to the value of tutoring, you see strong programs and strong participation.' Many state and district officials complain that federal financing is insufficient to meet demand and say that federal officials were also slow in offering advice, contributing to the bumpy start. In Washington, D.C., for instance, about 24,563 students are eligible this year for tutoring. But only 3,025 students are being tutored, because that is all the district says it can afford. There is only one official to handle everything related to the tutoring for the entire district. 'We don't have enough money to accommodate the desire,' said Tamika N. Maultsby, a program coordinator for Washington schools. 'We are working tirelessly. But we definitely need staff. The kids are signing up. The desire is there. We just don't have the money.' Some educational groups believe that some tutoring companies shun students with learning and language difficulties because the companies are judged based in part on the progress their students make. Some of the latest available data gives a clear picture that some of the country's vulnerable students are among those not being served: in New York City, for instance, about 9,000 of approximately 22,000 children with disabilities who were eligible for tutoring enrolled for help last year. Among students with limited English, about half the 40,000 eligible were being tutored. Beth Swanson, the director of after-school and community school programs for the Chicago public schools, said of tutoring companies, 'Typically, we do see that providers opt not to serve those populations, and likely because they don't have the materials, expertise or resources to do so.' Many in the tutoring industry deny such charges and say that schools do not notify them in advance about which students might require special services, citing privacy concerns. In May, in another relaxation of the law that recognized that some disabled children might be contributing to a district's failure rate, the Education Department announced that states could apply for flexibility to allow greater numbers of students to take alternate tests to assess whether they were comprehending material at their own grade level. Despite the efforts to draw students to tutoring, some students and parents say they are not even aware that they may qualify and express confusion about the free program. 'I need help in a couple of subjects, and I'm interested in anything that would help me,' said Ninoska Valverde, a student at Junior High School 291 in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. 'It would be a great idea, but I didn't even know about it.'

Subject: Bolivia's Knot From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:45:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/international/americas/12bolivia.html?ex=1297400400&en=77ab92929ee6a341&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 Bolivia's Knot: No to Cocaine, but Yes to Coca By JUAN FORERO VILLA TUNARI, Bolivia — Just weeks ago, Bolivian Army troops swooped down on Seberino Marquina's farm and, one by one, ripped his coca bushes from the ground. 'The commander said, 'Cut this,' and they did,' Mr. Marquina, 54, said, waving his machete on his small piece of the Chapare, a coca-growing region the size of New Jersey in central Bolivia. But after President Evo Morales's inauguration on Jan. 22, the army conscripts assigned to eradicate coca leaves here as part of the United States-financed war on drugs instead spend their days lolling at isolated roadside bases, trying to keep cool under the blazing sun. 'We're waiting for orders from the president,' said Capt. César Cautín, the commander of a group of 60 soldiers. Mr. Marquina is also waiting, and hoping that the new president will let him add to the flourishing crop of coca plants on the other side of the creek that runs through his 24-acre farm. Just how likely that is remains surprisingly unclear. Mr. Morales, 46, an Aymara Indian who grew up in poverty in the highlands and became a coca grower in this verdant jungle region, has not yet provided many details on his coca policy, except to say that his government will 'depenalize' coca cultivation and show zero tolerance toward trafficking: in other words, 'yes to coca, no to cocaine.' He has long opposed American eradication efforts and championed the coca leaf, which without significant processing has no mind-altering effects and is chewed here to mitigate hunger and increase stamina. He has pledged to push the foreign governments to open their markets to the many legal products that can be made from coca, like soap, shampoo, toothpaste and flour. He also wants to open markets to coca tea, which is legal and popular in the Andes. All forms of coca, which has a mild stimulating effect, have been blacklisted by the United Nations since 1961. Mr. Morales has also said that 23,000 farmers in the Chapare could continue to plant coca on a third of an acre of their land, as permitted under a 2004 agreement with Carlos Mesa, then the president, that was never endorsed by Washington. He is waiting for the results of a study financed by the European Union to determine just how much coca Bolivians need for traditional, legal uses, before deciding whether coca cultivation could increase. However, to be able to maintain good international relations and attract investors, Mr. Morales must also find a way to reassure foreign governments and investors that Bolivia will control trafficking — particularly by neighbors like Brazil, which is, after the United States, the world's second-largest consumer of cocaine, and the United States, which spends up to $1 billion a year to battle cocaine in the Andes. As a start, Mr. Morales appointed Felipe Cáceres, a former mayor in the Chapare and a small-time coca farmer, to the new post of vice minister of coca, to, in essence, oversee the fight against trafficking, an appointment that Washington supported. The American government, which for several administrations has contended that only aggressive eradication and interdiction will control trafficking, scoffs at Mr. Morales's 'yes to coca, no to cocaine' stance. 'This idea that he's going to go after traffickers but letting the coca bloom is tough seeing as workable,' says a high-ranking Congressional aide in Washington who helps shape anti-drug policy, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to give statements. 'It's a naïve, pie-in-the-sky approach to let the flower bloom but interdict the bouquet.' American policy makers fear that the progress made against coca in Colombia — where cultivation has been significantly reduced — could be offset by a burst of cultivation in Bolivia, and an accompanying surge in smuggling. There are now an estimated 65,400 acres of coca being cultivated in Bolivia, nearly half of it grown legally for traditional uses. 'The $64,000 question with Morales is, Will all the problems drift south to Bolivia and will we have to start all over again?' the aide said. And American officials are deeply concerned that a central part of their expensive Andean campaign — eradication — has been suspended in Bolivia. The American ambassador, David N. Greenlee, is carrying out an understated policy of not publicly challenging the government, but he lamented the situation. 'There is no eradication, and at this moment, that's my concern,' he said recently before meeting with the new foreign minister, David Choquehuanca, who has called coca 'a sacred leaf.' Bolivia, which many in Washington see as a symbol of success in the war on drugs, was a pariah nation just 15 years ago, with 123,000 acres of coca under cultivation. In 1988, the country criminalized coca, and American-sponsored eradication began. Production fell to a low of 48,000 acres in 2000. Bolivia went from being the No. 2 producer of coca, shipping much of its cocaine to the United States, to a distant third after Colombia and Peru, with most of the drug headed to Brazil. The eradication of so lucrative a crop, however, had serious social and political repercussions for a desperately poor country where coca and cocaine had become a leading industry. With their losses rising into the hundreds of millions of dollars, Chapare's coca farmers, often led by Mr. Morales, protested, blocked roads and battled security forces, sometimes with fatal consequences. The unrest so weakened the central state that two presidents were forced to resign in the 20 months ending in June 2005. The Americans responded to Mr. Morales's increasing popularity by trying to marginalize him from politics and labeling him an ally of traffickers, though they offered little evidence. The efforts only raised his stock among Bolivians, and he won the election with more than 52 percent of the vote, the biggest victory since Bolivia emerged from dictatorship in 1982. Now, in deference to Mr. Morales, a president who has a 74 percent approval rating, some hardened Bolivian drug warriors are conceding that he must be given a chance. 'In his speeches, Evo Morales handles some variables that are very interesting,' said Gen. Luis Caballero, who until last month led a 1,500-man special Bolivian police antinarcotics team. 'I think it can work, if there is a coherent strategy.' And some drug policy specialists are calling for foreign governments and investors to consider Mr. Morales's plan, even if it is an uphill battle that goes against anti-drug sentiments ingrained in the West. 'If there's one thing the international community should do, if only out of deference because he won the election, is to take seriously his arguments that coca products have a place in the international commodities market,' said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, an independent policy group that says the war on drugs has been counterproductive. At a recent coca fair in La Paz, two dozen small Bolivian and Peruvian companies displayed coca-based products they said they hopeed would one day be accepted worldwide. Besides the soap, shampoo and toothpaste, there were digestive potions pitched as calcium and iron supplements, or, alternatively, a cure for balding or as a diet aid. And there was a light green flour, for making bread. 'One of our most important products is granola, fortified with coca,' said Marco Alarcón, in a dapper vest and tie, said of his four-year-old company, Caranavi. 'Right now, we are selling everything in Bolivia, but the hope is to sell in China.' A couple of booths over, Angélica Quisberth, 25, sold cookies and bread made with coca. 'What we want to show is that the coca leaf is not just for cocaine,' she said, 'but that you can do many things with it, and generate work.' In contrast to the Chapare, the epicenter of eradication efforts in Bolivia, coca grows legally in the vast Yungas region, where farmers plant on centuries-old terraces in the foothills of the Andes and sell their crop at the government-supervised market in La Paz, just to the south. On a recent trip through Yungas, where three-quarters of Bolivia's coca is raised, it was common to see farmers harvesting in droves, wearing long-sleeved shirts to protect them from the sun. Stripping the small, shiny leaves from a branch, Pasquale Quispe, 53, owner of a 7.4-acre farm, explained that she and other peasants saw coca in almost spiritual terms. 'Coca is our daily bread, what gives us work, what gives us our livelihood,' she said. 'In other countries, they say coca is drugs, but we don't use drugs. It's the gringos who use drugs.' But with so much coca being produced in Yungas, the authorities say they believe that much of it winds up as cocaine. On a narrow mountain pass shadowed by craggy peaks, Lt. Col. Julio Cruz and his police unit stop vehicles leaving Yungas, checking the 50-pound sacks of coca leaves and making sure they are headed to the legal market. On some days, 500 vehicles carrying more than 150,000 pounds of coca pass through the checkpoint, Colonel Cruz said. But after this checkpoint, the police say, they have no way to know how much is diverted for illegal purposes. 'The leaf comes out legally,' Colonel Cruz said. 'But once out, it goes to labs for cocaine. We cannot escort every truck to market.' Pacífico Olivares, 49, a regional leader of coca farmers, said farmers knew that coca was made into cocaine, but he added that they should not be to held responsible. 'What blame do we have when we don't make cocaine?' he said. 'They should chase down the people who make cocaine.'

Subject: The Trust Gap From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:43:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12sun1.html?ex=1297400400&en=7557897fdc67af47&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 The Trust Gap We can't think of a president who has gone to the American people more often than George W. Bush has to ask them to forget about things like democracy, judicial process and the balance of powers — and just trust him. We also can't think of a president who has deserved that trust less. This has been a central flaw of Mr. Bush's presidency for a long time. But last week produced a flood of evidence that vividly drove home the point. DOMESTIC SPYING After 9/11, Mr. Bush authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the conversations and e-mail of Americans and others in the United States without obtaining a warrant or allowing Congress or the courts to review the operation. Lawmakers from both parties have raised considerable doubt about the legality of this program, but Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made it clear last Monday at a Senate hearing that Mr. Bush hasn't the slightest intention of changing it. According to Mr. Gonzales, the administration can be relied upon to police itself and hold the line between national security and civil liberties on its own. Set aside the rather huge problem that our democracy doesn't work that way. It's not clear that this administration knows where the line is, much less that it is capable of defending it. Mr. Gonzales's own dedication to the truth is in considerable doubt. In sworn testimony at his confirmation hearing last year, he dismissed as 'hypothetical' a question about whether he believed the president had the authority to conduct warrantless surveillance. In fact, Mr. Gonzales knew Mr. Bush was doing just that, and had signed off on it as White House counsel. THE PRISON CAMPS It has been nearly two years since the Abu Ghraib scandal illuminated the violence, illegal detentions and other abuses at United States military prison camps. There have been Congressional hearings, court rulings imposing normal judicial procedures on the camps, and a law requiring prisoners to be treated humanely. Yet nothing has changed. Mr. Bush also made it clear that he intends to follow the new law on the treatment of prisoners when his internal moral compass tells him it is the right thing to do. On Thursday, Tim Golden of The Times reported that United States military authorities had taken to tying up and force-feeding the prisoners who had gone on hunger strikes by the dozens at Guantánamo Bay to protest being held without any semblance of justice. The article said administration officials were concerned that if a prisoner died, it could renew international criticism of Gitmo. They should be concerned. This is not some minor embarrassment. It is a lingering outrage that has undermined American credibility around the world. According to numerous news reports, the majority of the Gitmo detainees are neither members of Al Qaeda nor fighters captured on the battlefield in Afghanistan. The National Journal reported last week that many were handed over to the American forces for bounties by Pakistani and Afghan warlords. Others were just swept up. The military has charged only 10 prisoners with terrorism. Hearings for the rest were not held for three years and then were mostly sham proceedings. And yet the administration continues to claim that it can be trusted to run these prisons fairly, to decide in secret and on the president's whim who is to be jailed without charges, and to insist that Gitmo is filled with dangerous terrorists. THE WAR IN IRAQ One of Mr. Bush's biggest 'trust me' moments was when he told Americans that the United States had to invade Iraq because it possessed dangerous weapons and posed an immediate threat to America. The White House has blocked a Congressional investigation into whether it exaggerated the intelligence on Iraq, and continues to insist that the decision to invade was based on the consensus of American intelligence agencies. But the next edition of the journal Foreign Affairs includes an article by the man in charge of intelligence on Iraq until last year, Paul Pillar, who said the administration cherry-picked intelligence to support a decision to invade that had already been made. He said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney made it clear what results they wanted and heeded only the analysts who produced them. Incredibly, Mr. Pillar said, the president never asked for an assessment on the consequences of invading Iraq until a year after the invasion. He said the intelligence community did that analysis on its own and forecast a deeply divided society ripe for civil war. When the administration did finally ask for an intelligence assessment, Mr. Pillar led the effort, which concluded in August 2004 that Iraq was on the brink of disaster. Officials then leaked his authorship to the columnist Robert Novak and to The Washington Times. The idea was that Mr. Pillar was not to be trusted because he dissented from the party line. Somehow, this sounds like a story we have heard before. • Like many other administrations before it, this one sometimes dissembles clumsily to avoid embarrassment. (We now know, for example, that the White House did not tell the truth about when it learned the levees in New Orleans had failed.) Spin-as-usual is one thing. Striking at the civil liberties, due process and balance of powers that are the heart of American democracy is another.

Subject: Outside Agitator From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:34:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06E0D8133DF93AA35756C0A96F958260&fta=y May 9, 1999 Outside Agitator By JUDITH SHULEVITZ Betty Friedan Her Life. By Judith Hennessee. Betty Friedan And the Making of ''The Feminine Mystique'': The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism. By Daniel Horowitz. Biographers rarely come across a subject as acutely in need of their skills as Betty Friedan. Here's a woman whose first book (''The Feminine Mystique,'' 1963) and the political organization she co-founded in 1966 (the National Organization for Women) changed the world so comprehensively that it's hard to remember how much change was called for. Then she was eclipsed by the younger, sexier radicals who took over the women's movement. These days she's mostly written off as obsolete -- too bourgeois for left-wing feminists, too feminist for the family-values right and too kooky for everyone else. In her last big book, ''The Fountain of Age,'' she took the revolutionary ideas about human potential she once used to refute conventional notions about women and repackaged them for the elderly with all the finesse of a diet doctor coming out with a follow-up exercise program. But Friedan's feminism is not irrelevant. We just can't see it anymore. Women no longer suffer ''the problem that has no name,'' the house- and child-bound version of femininity promulgated by experts and internalized by women that Friedan called the feminine mystique. These days it is fully accepted that women will work, and somewhat accepted that their children, if women should choose to have them, will receive part-time mothering. Liberal feminism, with its goal of securing women's legal and political rights, will probably be the only global revolution of this century to make it to the next unreversed. When future generations go looking for its heroine, they'll surely choose Friedan. Thirty-six years after she skewered the wrongheadedness of psychologists and educators with thrilling intellectual derring-do, arguing not just for the greater happiness of women but for that of their husbands and children, there has yet to be published a feminist manifesto that's even in range of ''The Feminine Mystique'' -- that's half as smart or broadly humane. So why doesn't Friedan get more respect? Here is where biography comes in handy. Like many provocative thinkers, only more so, Friedan undercut the reception of her ideas by being impossibly abrasive. In ''Betty Friedan: Her Life,'' Judith Hennessee tells the story of a meeting held in Friedan's Washington hotel room to determine whether another organization for women was necessary (NOW had not yet been formed). One woman in attendance asked so many annoying questions and declared so many times that there were too many women's groups already that Friedan yelled at her, ''Who invited you?'' and then, ''This is my room and my liquor!'' and then, ''Get out! Get out!'' The woman refused to budge, and Friedan stormed into the bathroom to sulk. Once the women's movement had been launched, Friedan went into permanent diva mode, openly discriminating against NOW's lesbian members and treating the women who worked most closely with her as if they were her maids. That she would be drummed out of NOW's leadership four years after the organization was founded may have been inevitable. That the next wave of feminists would dismiss her ideas as insufficiently revolutionary and Friedan herself as little better than a neoconservative -- as Susan Faludi did in ''Backlash,'' for instance -- is just short of tragic. Neither Hennessee nor Daniel Horowitz is quite up to the challenge Friedan poses as a subject. ''Betty Friedan: Her Life'' is good on her personal life but too shallow and gossipy to convey the subtleties of her thinking. Horowitz's ''Betty Friedan: And the Making of 'The Feminine Mystique' ''is more intellectually ambitious, but so tendentious you want to throw it across the room. He wrote it, he says, because he discovered while going through Friedan's papers at Radcliffe that she was not just a suburban housewife who happened upon feminism out of frustration, as she has often implied. Before Friedan moved out of New York City with her husband in 1956, she was a labor journalist and community organizer. Horowitz argues that Friedan played up her unhappiness as a stay-at-home mother and played down her radical past because she felt threatened by McCarthyism -- a plausible if not damning thesis. Horowitz's account of Friedan's early years establishes several links between the Old Left of the 1940's and 1950's and the second-wave feminism of the 1960's. For example, some female members of the Popular Front, a loose coalition of left-wing groups with which Friedan was even more loosely associated, demanded as early as the 1940's that men share housework and the Government sponsor child care. But Horowitz's main objective appears to be to wag his finger at Friedan for the sin of not writing ''The Feminine Mystique'' as a member of the American left -- for hedging ''her discussion of a capitalist conspiracy,'' for failing to explain the feminine mystique ''as an example of false consciousness,'' for offering ''psychological insights'' rather than ''institutional solutions.'' This is simply obtuse. It is precisely because Friedan abandoned the vocabulary of Marxism for that of bourgeois psychology that she was able to dismantle the reigning discourse about women, a middlebrow blend of bowdlerized Freudianism and behaviorism, and sell her audience on a more expansive vision of female possibility. If she'd merely rehashed the theories of Friedrich Engels, no one would have paid the slightest attention. Perhaps the most interesting thing one learns from these books is that Friedan's exhortation to women to free themselves of their own crippling ideas of themselves emerged out of battles she fought, and only partly won, with herself. Born in 1921 in Peoria, Ill., Bettye Goldstein was a brainy girl in a Midwestern town, a Jew with a stereotypically big nose and bossy manner. She was the darling of her father, who grilled her at the dinner table about her political opinions, and the embarrassment of her beautiful, fashion-conscious mother. Betty blossomed at Smith, dropping the final ''e'' from her name and becoming the star of the psychology department and the editor in chief of the college newspaper. An assiduous student -- her senior thesis was published in an academic journal -- she was also an unusually aggressive editorial writer, taking on everything from Smith's secret societies to American intervention in World War II. Pacifism, in fact, was her first public exercise in principled unreasonableness: Friedan clung to it long after most other leftists had given theirs up, and didn't change her mind until the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Graduating in 1942 with highest honors, Betty enrolled in a Ph.D. program in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, did as well as expected, and by March of her first year had won the most coveted fellowship in the field. What happened next is painful to read about: she declined the scholarship, dropped out of school and moved to New York City. In ''The Feminine Mystique,'' Friedan portrays this as the defining moment of her life, the identity crisis that led her indirectly to feminism. She was, she explains, dating a physicist who felt threatened by her success, and this made her fear that she might end up as the stereotypical female academic who turns into a shriveled old maid. Horowitz, of course, contends that Friedan's version of events soft-pedals the centrality of radicalism in her life. In his version, she left school and moved to New York because she wanted to fight for social justice. Horowitz also makes much of the decade that followed, during which Friedan worked first for Federated Press, a left-wing news service, and then for a union newspaper. Yet according to his own book, in a passage in an early draft of ''The Feminine Mystique'' that was later excised, Friedan was quite sour about the time she spent in the union movement. Comparing herself implicitly to the routinized employee in William H. Whyte's famous work, ''The Organization Man,'' she declared that throughout that period she had allowed ''the large organization'' to tell her what to write and think. Her disgust is understandable, considering she lost both of her jobs to men in circumstances that would probably be actionable under today's sex discrimination laws. Socialism may have let her down, but she had already opted for marriage and children anyway. Carl Friedan was a lively young theatrical director just back from the war when they met, handsome and funny if not her intellectual equal, and Betty Goldstein was determined not to miss out on having a family. It was a disastrous match. Hennessee gives the details: a letter from Carl to his parents making fun of his future bride's looks, a dinner party at which Carl flung a plate of fish against the wall and Betty calmly peeled it off and served it, physical fights in which Betty was punched or pushed down and Carl bashed in the head with a curtain rod. Perhaps the most liberating effect ''The Feminine Mystique'' had on Friedan personally is that it gave her, four years after it was published and she had become an international celebrity, the courage to end her marriage. One can see Friedan as the victim of lots of things: sexism, anti-Semitism, a general preference for the tall and willowy over the short and plump (the way the media anointed Gloria Steinem the heroine of the women's movement, literally shoving Friedan out of the picture, gives substance to this last theory). Certainly as the years progressed she began to regard herself through the lens of self-pity. Hennessee paints a grim portrait of the aging Friedan, a lonely, troubled woman who never mustered the focus to write another book as good as ''The Feminine Mystique,'' dissipating her energies instead by jetting around the world and generally playing the media goddess, insofar as the media would have her. She also seems to have descended into paranoia, consumed by strange theories about the Central Intelligence Agency and her rivalry with Steinem. But what was and remains refreshing about the author of ''The Feminine Mystique'' is that she doesn't blame others for women's plight. It is surprising to reread the book and realize that she almost never addresses the question of sexism. Friedan wants women to lead the lives they're capable of. She thinks they're entitled to jobs that fulfill them and marriages and families that give them love. She suspects that eliminating the sources of female frustration would make everyone's life more pleasant. Granted, she is talking about middle-class life, where pleasantness is a leading desideratum and women can get jobs worth leaving home for, not working-class life, where eliminating brutality may be the goal and women may have only the choice between holding a terrible job and raising children on a husband's meager wages. Friedan also decidedly underestimates the ferocity of the forces that would emerge to push women back into the home -- religious fundamentalism, in particular. But her faith that the will to better one's life can surmount many obstacles is not, I think, misplaced. For all her personal failings, Friedan's life and accomplishments are a testament to that optimism, a hopefulness that swept through society like a giant wind, rearranging as it went. She awaits a biographer who will do it, and her, justice.

Subject: The Prophet in the Tree From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:26:41 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03EEDD1731F93AA25754C0A96E958260&fta=y July 19, 1998 The Prophet in the Tree By ZIA JAFFREY HULLABALOO IN THE GUAVA ORCHARD By Kiran Desai. A voice, and a huge imagination, leap from the pages of ''Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard,'' a dizzying Hindi film of a novel by the 27-year-old Kiran Desai, daughter of the fiction writer Anita Desai. Like mother, like daughter -- which is not to say that Kiran Desai hasn't charted a territory of her own, as indebted to Shakespeare or Virginia Woolf as to Salman Rushdie or her mother. The novel is slow to get into but soon catapults us into a world in which a young Indian man, Sanpath, has lost his mind, climbs a guava tree to escape from the world of men, and then finds himself worshiped by the people of his village, and even by the local monkeys, as a prophet. Indeed, his oracular pronouncements -- ''Is your jewelry still safely buried beneath the tulsi plant?'' -- owe their seeming brilliance to his having been a low-level civil servant. In his boredom at his job as a postal clerk, he has opened a letter or two and learned some of the secrets of the townspeople. But after a while, these insights cease to matter: muttering ambiguous phrases, Sanpath is indeed an idiot savant, descended from a long line of eccentrics, not the least of whom is a mother obsessed with food and intent on fanciful new dishes that no one has ever imagined: '' 'Cumin, quail, mustard seeds, pomelo rind,' she muttered as she cooked. 'Fennel, coriander, sour mango. . . . Colocasia leaves, custard apple, winter melon, bitter gourd.' '' Into this concoction, Desai drops her characters like juicy morsels: a father who makes an industry out of his son's lunacy -- setting up a tea stall for tourists and churning out posters, fliers and newspaper articles; a sister, who bites off the ear of an ice-cream boy to declare her passion for him; the boy himself, who plans to elope with his impassioned suitor, but almost gives in to a girl, as plump as a birthday cake, whom his family has arranged for him to marry. There is Sanpath's grandmother, whose dentures -- ''better that they are a little loose than a little tight'' -- end up glaring at her from a chocolate ice-cream cone. And some of India's police and military officers are intent on ridding the town of Sanpath's monkey bodyguards, who have taken to robbing shops and people of their liquor in drunken orgies much like those of their evolutionary betters. It's a parable, an allegory, a bitter-sweet reminder of the chaos of India -- its layers of history, religion, superstition, colonialism and fanaticism that have led to the death of three Gandhis. In the end, though, the author doesn't quite know what to do with her heady epic, which keeps unfolding with new levels of intensity and ineluctability. So she puts Sanpath to sleep as a guava, held in the palm of the leader of the monkeys, who lands not so quietly in a vat of broth, trapped and stewed by Sanpath's mother. There's a lot of excellent writing in these pages; Desai has a lovely ear for dialogue; the monkeys are beautifully evoked; all the female characters are against stereotype -- active in their desires -- but the ending is a disappointment. Desai manages to suspend disbelief for a while, but one comes to expect -- and her own clues suggest -- a widening sphere of lawlessness and violence, not a funneling toward more lunacy. She seems tied to a linear notion of plot -- to episodes. Had she broken free of this structure, she might have been able to evoke a more nuanced world, both comic and tragic. Still, Desai creates a whole tableau -- like a medieval tapestry in which all the people and animals start moving and speaking -- affectionately describing a village atmosphere and the familial relationships within it. Finally one remembers neither the plot nor the hand that created it, but the characters who might one day appear at your dinner table, halfway between life and fiction, with many more stories to tell.

Subject: Drug, Danger Signals And the F.D.A. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:22:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/10/business/10drug.html?ex=1276056000&en=fdd014d6d1938784&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 10, 2005 Lucrative Drug, Danger Signals And the F.D.A. By GARDINER HARRIS AND ERIC KOLI Dozens had died and more than 100 patients had suffered serious heart problems by March 1998 after taking Propulsid, a popular medicine for heartburn. Infants, given the drug to treat acid reflux, seemed particularly at risk. Federal officials told Propulsid's manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, that the drug might have to be banned for children, or even withdrawn altogether. Instead, the government and the company negotiated new warnings for the drug's label -- though not nearly as tough as regulators had wanted. Propulsid had a good year anyway. Sales continued to surpass $1 billion. Johnson & Johnson continued to underwrite efforts that promoted Propulsid's use in children. A survey that year found that about 20 percent of babies in neonatal intensive care units were being given the drug. Two years later, as reports of heart injuries and deaths mounted, Johnson & Johnson continued defending the safety of Propulsid, but then pulled it from the market before a government hearing threatened to draw attention to the drug's long, largely hidden, record of trouble. That record, pieced together from newly obtained corporate and government documents, provides an in-depth view of a pharmaceutical company trying to save a lucrative drug in the face of growing evidence of harmful side effects. It is a story that has particular resonance now, as troubled arthritis painkillers -- Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra -- have again focused attention on what critics say is the federal Food and Drug Administration's inability to monitor and regulate pharmaceuticals effectively once they are on the market. Documents from lawsuits against Johnson & Johnson show that the company did not conduct safety studies urged by federal regulators and their own consultants that could have revealed Propulsid's danger early on. The F.D.A., moreover, did not disclose company research that cast doubt on Propulsid's effectiveness against digestive disorders it was being used to treat, since the studies are considered trade secrets. Propulsid's history has striking parallels with the painkillers now at the center of controversy. Dozens of studies sponsored by Johnson & Johnson that might have warned doctors away were never published, just as the pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer failed to publish an early study of Celebrex that indicated a heart risk. And Johnson & Johnson was able to delay and soften some proposed label changes, just as Merck later did with Vioxx. An F.D.A. advisory panel concluded in February that the three painkillers increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes. In April, Pfizer, under pressure from the F.D.A., withdrew Bextra and placed severe warnings about heart risks on the label for Celebrex, a sister pill. That followed a decision in September by Merck to withdraw Vioxx after years of insisting that it was safe. Members of a federal advisory committee on those painkillers cited Propulsid as an example of how even the strongest warnings -- known as black box warnings -- do not stop physicians from prescribing a drug inappropriately. Dr. Alastair Wood, the chairman of the panel, said in an interview that label warnings of a drug's potentially lethal effects do not protect all patients. Eventually, Johnson & Johnson made five significant changes to Propulsid's warning label and sent five letters to doctors across the country. But Dr. Wood, an associate dean at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said, ''The case of Propulsid proves this: When people are falling off a cliff, you don't put up more signs; you put up a fence.'' Despite these public warnings about Propulsid, much of the conversation between the company and regulators remained private as the drug thrived. With evidence mounting that Propulsid could interfere with the heart's electrical system, government regulators became increasingly confrontational with Johnson & Johnson executives. But physicians were never made aware of the full depth of the agency's concerns. And even though Propulsid was never proved effective in children, the company helped finance programs that encouraged the drug's pediatric use, according to internal company documents. Johnson & Johnson agreed last year to pay up to $90 million to settle lawsuits that eventually involved claims that 300 people died and as many as 16,000 were injured from taking Propulsid. Many of the documents relating to Propulsid obtained by The New York Times were filed under seal in the lawsuits. The company declined repeated requests to make executives available to be interviewed for this article. In written responses, Johnson & Johnson defended the safety of Propulsid and said that the marketing of the pill was appropriate. The company said it removed the drug from the market because physicians continued to prescribe it inappropriately despite repeated attempts by the company to warn them against that. Jason Brodsky, an F.D.A. spokesman, said that the Propulsid case had been unique because doctors insisted on having access to the drug, despite its side effects, and because its label was unusually confusing. Although the F.D.A. has the power to declare a drug mislabeled and order it off the market, it has done so only once in the last 30 years. Short of that, any label change sought by the agency has to be negotiated with manufacturers, a process that sometimes takes more than a year. Testifying before Congress in March, Dr. Sandra Kweder, the F.D.A.'s deputy director of the office of new drugs, bemoaned such delays and said having the power to mandate label changes ''would be very helpful.'' Even without that power from Congress, the F.D.A. has recently made moves to disclose concerns about drugs' adverse effects before label negotiations with drug makers are complete. The government and Johnson & Johnson negotiated for five years before the company pulled Propulsid. By then, the federal government had reports of 80 heart-related deaths and 341 injuries among patients taking Propulsid. First Signs of Trouble The first signs of trouble emerged soon after Propulsid was approved in 1993 for the treatment of nighttime heartburn in adults. By January 1995, the F.D.A. received reports of 18 Propulsid patients who had developed serious heart arrhythmias; one patient, an infant, had died. At a private meeting that month, agency officials told Johnson & Johnson executives that the drug was causing life-threatening arrhythmias, according to F.D.A. minutes of the meeting. Company executives insisted that such problems occurred only in patients who took Propulsid with other drugs or who had heart problems. The company sent two letters to doctors and added warnings to the drug's label listing drugs that should not be used with Propulsid. But by July 1996, regulators had reports of 57 Propulsid patients, including seven children, who had developed serious arrhythmias or other heart problems. In August 1997, after the company told the F.D.A. that two more children taking the drug had died, a top agency official wrote to the company that Propulsid's growing number of cardiac problems among infants and children ''suggests that pediatric patients may be at greater risk for them.'' Johnson & Johnson had previously conducted pediatric studies of Propulsid that failed to demonstrate that the drug was effective. In January 1995, the F.D.A. told the company that without studies showing that the drug worked in children it would not receive approval for pediatric sales. Johnson & Johnson never applied for such approval and the label did not recommend it for use in children. But doctors are free to prescribe medicines beyond the confines of labels, and Propulsid became popular among pediatricians. By 1998, doctors were writing more than half a million prescriptions a year for children and infants, according to internal company estimates. The company has said that its cherry-flavored liquid Propulsid was developed for geriatric patients, but company documents show that as much as 90 percent of it went to children. Without approval for pediatric use, Johnson & Johnson could not directly promote Propulsid for children. But F.D.A. rules did allow the company to support educational efforts among doctors. A crucial player in that effort was Dr. Paul Hyman, a pediatric gastroenterologist who is now at the University of Kansas. Dr. Hyman said in an interview that he was the first doctor in the United States, in 1984, to treat a child experimentally with Propulsid. Dr. Hyman became a Propulsid proponent. Johnson & Johnson financed some of his work and put him on its Propulsid advisory board. When he edited a textbook about childhood digestive problems that recommended Propulsid, the company paid for the press run of 10,000 copies and distributed them to doctors. In December 1997, he also made a 15-minute presentation at a Johnson & Johnson seminar where 240 doctors were trained to speak to health care professionals about the drug. While Dr. Hyman acknowledged that Propulsid had some potentially dangerous side effects, he said they were rare. The drug was so safe, he said, that it could be used to treat ''happy spitters'' -- infants who frequently spit up but are not ill. ''I was fairly vocal about how silly the whole death thing was, and how it was one in a million,'' he said. Although the company said educational efforts were legal, Dr. Stephen B. Fredd, who oversaw Propulsid for the F.D.A., said that he had been unaware that Johnson & Johnson was supporting programs advocating the drug's use in infants. ''I had no idea they were doing anything in any way to support off-label use in pediatrics,'' said Dr. Fredd, former director of the F.D.A.'s gastrointestinal and coagulation drugs unit. Instead, he said, ''I wanted them to warn doctors that there were dangers in using the drug.'' Growing Concerns Reports of patients who died while taking Propulsid were recorded in stark language on federal forms. ''Pathologist reports that a three-month-old female died while on Propulsid therapy,'' reads a July 3, 1998, report on F.D.A. MedWatch, the agency's Web site for posting potential safety problems. Her parents reported that the child, who had undergone cardiac surgery, was sitting in her swing chair and was ''fussy'' at 7:50 a.m., the F.D.A. form says. ''When the parents rechecked her at 8 a.m., the infant was unresponsive,'' it reads. ''Attempts to revitalize her were futile.'' Three weeks later, the mother of an 11-week-old premature boy who had had stomach surgery and was taking Propulsid ''noticed her son not breathing,'' another report said. Attempts were made to revive him. He was declared dead at the hospital. Johnson & Johnson later concluded in both those cases that the patients had no risk factors that would have indicated not to use Propulsid. In a statement yesterday, Johnson & Johnson said analysis of the cases ''strongly suggests'' other factors may have contributed to the infants' deaths. As injuries mounted, concern inside Johnson & Johnson about side effects among the youngest patients was growing. Johnson & Johnson researchers and executives made plans to ban sales for premature infants in the United States, an action it had taken in some European countries, according to documents obtained by The Times. But there was internal debate. On March 16, 1998, a Johnson & Johnson regulatory affairs director, Gaetan Rouleau, sent an e-mail message to other executives saying that Propulsid could be used for premature babies and that further discussion of its use in them be delayed until after an F.D.A. meeting that month on the drug's safety. Dirk Reyn, a Johnson & Johnson executive, wrote back to support the decision to ban Propulsid for premature babies, saying, ''We do have cases and there is a scientific rationale for this.'' Mr. Rouleau, however, responded that if the company agreed to ban Propulsid in premature children, it might be forced to stop selling its cherry-flavored liquid form of the drug. Unless Johnson & Johnson could justify the use of Propulsid in premature babies, he wrote, ''We have very little to support the use of the suspension in children at this time.'' Ultimately, the drug was not banned for premature babies. In the March 1998 meeting between the F.D.A. and company representatives, regulators expressed increasing concern about Propulsid's risks. During a presentation, an F.D.A. official projected a slide that asked, ''Is it acceptable for your nighttime heartburn medicine (i.e., something for which you could take Tums) to have the potential to kill you?'' Johnson & Johnson's minutes of the meeting stated: ''In F.D.A.'s opinion, cisapride is only minimally efficacious therefore no safety risk is acceptable.'' In May 1998, the F.D.A. proposed major changes to the label, including adding a paragraph stating, ''Despite more than 20 clinical trials in pediatric patients, safety and effectiveness of cisapride (Propulsid) have not been demonstrated in pediatric patients for any indication.'' An internal company memo examined 15 of the proposed label changes and estimated that they would cost over $250 million a year in lost sales. Since federal regulators cannot order changes to labels, the F.D.A. and the company negotiated. In the end, 13 of the 15 major proposed changes were either scrapped or softened. Instead of mentioning the results of the 20 clinical trials, the F.D.A. agreed to simply state that ''safety and effectiveness in pediatric patients have not been established.'' The label said some pediatric patients had been injured and others had died while taking Propulsid, ''although causality has not been established.'' Financing Questions Throughout the negotiations and label changes, the company kept up its support of doctors and patient groups that were promoting the drug as safe for use in children. During the late 1980's and the 1990's, for example, Johnson & Johnson said it gave $1 million to the American Pseudo-Obstruction and Hirschsprung's Disease Society. The society began as a support group for parents of children with rare digestive diseases for which Propulsid was a treatment. By 1996, with financing from Johnson & Johnson, the group's focus had shifted to common childhood acid reflux. Dr. Hyman was the chief medical adviser to the group, which helped to train speakers who, over three years, made presentations to 6,000 to 8,000 pediatric doctors and nurses about the treatment of reflux, recommending Propulsid, said the group's founder, Andrea Anastas. Ms. Anastas said the company had no influence over the group's activities. (Some details of the company's financial support of groups promoting Propulsid were reported in a 2003 documentary ''MAMA/M.A.M.A.,'' by Nonny de la Pe�a.) After the June 1998 label changes, the North American Society for Pediatric Gastroenterology Hepatology and Nutrition, a medical group for pediatric gastroenterologists, announced that it was going to study whether pediatricians should continue using Propulsid. Johnson & Johnson sent the group a confidential report conceding that placebo-controlled studies, many of them never published by the company, failed to show it was effective in treating children for reflux disease. The company, which had begun financing the group before the study was announced, eventually donated $450,000 to the society. The group report, released in May 1999, concluded that Propulsid ''has a place in pediatric therapeutics.'' Dr. Robert Shulman, a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and the lead author of the report, said Johnson & Johnson's money had no influence on the group's conclusions, although he said that he regretted that its financial support was not disclosed in the paper. Asked how his group's recommendation squared with the company's admission that the drug had not been proved effective in infants and children, Dr. Shulman said his group understood acid reflux in children better. ''We treat these kids every day,'' he said. By January 2000, the F.D.A. had reports of 80 deaths and 341 serious heart problems in patients taking Propulsid. The agency scheduled a meeting to discuss its concerns with a panel of outside experts. This meeting, unlike the others at which Propulsid's safety record was discussed, would be public. Preparing for the hearing, Janice Bush, a Johnson & Johnson executive, wrote a note during what a company spokesman said was a ''brainstorming'' session: ''Do we want to stand in front of world and admit that we were never able to prove efficacy!'' The words ''never able'' were underlined. Three weeks before the scheduled hearing, Johnson & Johnson announced it would stop selling Propulsid in the United States. The hearing was canceled.

Subject: A Surprising Warning on Stimulants From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:16:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12sun2.html?ex=1297400400&en=ab0d0568be163768&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 A Surprising Warning on Stimulants Last week's recommendation by a federal advisory panel that stimulants like Ritalin should carry a strong warning about their dangers was a brave effort to slow the drug promotion juggernaut that frequently drives use beyond reasonable bounds. The panel had simply been asked by the Food and Drug Administration to recommend research into possible cardiovascular risks from the drugs. But the panelists went further and urged regulators to require the strongest possible warning labels. To be sure, the decision was made by a narrow 8-to-7 majority of the panel, which heard only fragmentary data on known adverse effects. Actual proof of harm is uncertain. F.D.A. officials said that there were reports of strokes and heart problems among people taking the stimulants in recent years, and 25 sudden deaths. That is not a very high number, but such reports are notoriously incomplete and the stimulants have long been known to increase blood pressure and heart rates, posing potential risks to some patients. A biostatistician on the panel suggested that the stimulants might be more dangerous to the heart than the painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market because of its cardiovascular risk. The panel's action is best understood as a response to an alarming upsurge in use of stimulants that many have deemed unwarranted. Some 2.5 million children and 1.5 million adults take the stimulants, mostly to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Adult use has jumped sharply in recent years, and panelists were particularly disturbed to learn that some 10 percent of all 10-year-old boys in this country are on attention deficit drugs, a number they deemed far beyond need. Top F.D.A. officials expressed reluctance to issue too strong a warning based on uncertain evidence, lest they scare people away from potentially beneficial therapy. Some leading psychiatrists voiced the same worry. But the prime function of a strong warning label is to force doctors to think twice before prescribing. That is presumably salutary even if it does depress drug sales a bit. Many experts believe that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is overdiagnosed and that the stimulants to treat it are overprescribed, thanks mostly to the marketing muscle of the drug industry and prescribing fads in the medical profession. The renegade advisory panel was right to throw its weight against this trend.

Subject: Capture the Flag From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:15:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12burcharth.html?ex=1297400400&en=dd88af50e2d245d7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 Capture the Flag By MARTIN BURCHARTH THERE seems to be some surprise that the Danish people and their government are standing behind the Jyllands-Posten newspaper and its decision to publish drawings of the Prophet Muhammad last fall. Aren't Danes supposed to be unusually tolerant and respectful of others? Not entirely. Denmark's reputation as a nation with a long tradition of tolerance toward others — one solidified by its rescue of Danish Jews from deportation to Nazi concentration camps in 1943 and by the high levels of humanitarian aid it provides today — is something of a myth. What foreigners have failed to recognize is that we Danes have grown increasingly xenophobic over the years. To my mind, the publication of the cartoons had little to do with generating a debate about self-censorship and freedom of expression. It can be seen only in the context of a climate of pervasive hostility toward anything Muslim in Denmark. There are more than 200,000 Muslims in Denmark, a country with a population of 5.4 million. A few decades ago, Denmark had no Muslims at all. Not surprisingly, Islam has come to be viewed by many as a threat to the survival of Danish culture. For 20 years, Muslims in Denmark have been denied a permit to build mosques in Copenhagen. What's more, there are no Muslim cemeteries in Denmark, which means that the bodies of Muslims who die here have to be flown back to their home countries for proper burial. Recently the minister for cultural affairs, Brian Mikkelsen of the Conservative People's Party, asked scholars, artists and writers to create a canon of Danish art, music, literature and film. The ostensible purpose was to preserve our homegrown classics. But before the release of the canon last month, Mr. Mikkelsen revealed what may have been the real purpose of the exercise: To create a last line of defense against the influence of Islam in Denmark. 'In Denmark we have seen the appearance of a parallel society in which minorities practice their own medieval values and undemocratic views,' he told fellow conservatives at a party conference last summer. 'This is the new front in our cultural war.' Were it not that a majority of Danes actually believe in this Islamic threat it would seem to be an outlandish pretext. But they do. When the Danish flag was burned on the streets in Arab countries, the reaction here was outrage and calls for standing even more firmly behind Jyllands-Posten. The center-right government gained support in polls, as did the anti-immigrant Danish People's Party, without which the government would not have a majority in Parliament. Now, the general view, expressed in the press and among a majority of Danes, is that the Muslim leaders who led the protests in Denmark should have their status as citizens examined because they betrayed their fellow Danes by failing to keep the controversy within the country. But the real story is that they and their followers ran out of options. They tried to get Jyllands-Posten to recognize its offense. They tried to enlist the support of the government and the opposition. They asked a local prosecutor to file suit under the country's blasphemy law. And they asked ambassadors in Denmark from Muslim countries to meet with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. They were rebuffed on all counts, though a state prosecutor is currently reviewing the case. But, really, what choice did they have? This is not the only example of Denmark's new magical thinking. After the flag burnings, the Danish news media began to refer to the white cross on the flag's red background as a Christian symbol. There was something discordant about this, for we've come to connect the flag less and less to religion. Denmark, after all, is one of the most secular countries in Europe. Only 3 percent of Danes attend church once a week. Still, the news media were right. Up to a point. Legend has it that the flag fell from heaven during a battle between the Danes and the Estonians nearly 800 years ago. It was a sign from God, and it led the Danes to victory. Now that flag has become a symbol around the world of Denmark's contempt for another world religion.

Subject: According to Webster From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 07:09:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/12/opinion/12sun3.html?ex=1297400400&en=48fd62e8bf2712ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 12, 2006 According to Webster: One Man's Attempt to Define 'America' By ADAM COHEN When Noah Webster published 'A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language,' purists were horrified. Webster Americanized the British spellings in Samuel Johnson's famous dictionary, turning 'defence' and 'honour' into 'defense' and 'honor,' and dropping the 'k' from 'musick.' Webster included new American words like 'subsidize' and 'caucus,' and left out hoary Britishisms like 'fishefy.' John Quincy Adams, the future president, was shocked by the 'local vulgarisms,' and doubted that Harvard, of which he was a trustee, would ever endorse such a radical 'departure from the English language.' Webster's 'Compendious Dictionary,' which was published 200 years ago this month, defied the skeptics to become a success, and it was the forerunner to his much larger, and classic, 1828 'American Dictionary of the English Language.' Webster is remembered today almost exclusively as America's great lexicographer, but he was also a founding father of the first rank. The dictionaries he wrote were actually an attempt to help shape the kind of nation America would become. Webster was a brilliant polymath, in the style of Ben Franklin. He is called 'the father of American copyright law' for his successful campaign to win protection for his writings; 'the first historian of epidemic disease' for his pioneering research on yellow fever; and 'schoolmaster to America' — the title of a 1936 biography — for his enormously influential spelling and reading books. His great passion, though, was politics, and he held many views that now seem surprisingly modern. He kept religion and God out of his spelling books. He argued that the Constitution should include universal compulsory education and abolish slavery. And he helped create, in Connecticut, one of the earliest worker's compensation systems. When the new nation formed, British culture was still dominant, and it was not yet clear what it meant to be American. Webster thought it was vital to shake off 'foreign manners' and build an independent national culture. 'Nothing can be more ridiculous,' he wrote, 'than a servile imitation of the manners, the language and the vices of foreigners.' He believed that his dictionaries could contribute to this homegrown culture by reflecting the language that Americans were actually speaking. It was especially important, he thought, for America to define its own institutions. 'No person in this country will be satisfied with the English definitions of the words congress, senate and assembly, court, &c,' he wrote in the preface to the 1828 dictionary. Webster's other political purpose in writing his dictionaries was promoting national unity. He was disturbed to find, in his travels, that Southern whites, blacks, old-line Yankees and newly arrived immigrants were in many cases literally unable to talk to each other. He believed a 'federal language' could be a 'band of national union.' But he also knew that linguistic efforts would not be enough. He was troubled by the sharp political divisions he saw: North vs. South, rural areas vs. cities and, above all, his Federalist Party vs. Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans. During the bitter battles over the Embargo Act of 1807, Webster called on the parties to 'renounce their present warfare, and unite on some general points of policy.' The United States has more than achieved the cultural independence Webster dreamed of. He would be amazed to see that it now not only controls its own culture, but also exports it to the world — including Britain. His hopes for national unity have proven more elusive, even though America now has the 'federal language' that his dictionaries played such a large role in creating. Today's red-state-blue-state divide, and Washington's vicious partisan battles, are an uncanny parallel of the war over the 1807 embargo. If Webster were here, he would be clamoring, as many Americans now are, for leaders willing to look beyond party affiliation. The great wordsmith was never more eloquent than in his screeds against excessive partisanship. 'The party which, while in a minority, will lick the dust to gain the ascendancy,' he warned, 'becomes, in power, insolvent, vindictive and tyrannical.'

Subject: Current Economic Outlook From: Patricia Chang To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 02:25:14 (EST) Email Address: tpc1133@aol.com Message: Investors, CEOs,Oil Companies, and Real Estate Developers, among other wealthy people and enterprises seem to be feeding at the trough. The Budget Deficit grows ever larger, as does the Trade Deficit. Credit Card debt is at an all-time high. What I want to know is this: How long can this house of cards, otherwise known as our economy, continue to stand? Are there any reliable indicators of am impending collapse? Russia's economy went south over Afghanistan, but there were surely longtime deep cracks in the foundation. Bush insists on keeping tax cuts and lifting the Inheritance Tax. He insists on continuing the money pit in Iraq. What is keeping this ship afloat? Until a majority of people are adversely affected, personally affected, by the economy, they will continue to support Dubya. I want to know when this is going to happen.

Subject: Re: Current Economic Outlook From: Pete Weis To: Patricia Chang Date Posted: Sun, Feb 12, 2006 at 17:06:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What causes the 'house of cards' to collapse could be a number of things, but a 'hard landing' for the housing market would most likely be the trigger. Of course, not many think it's a 'house of cards'. But when you are completely dependent on central banks from just two nations (China & Japan) to continue purchasing US treasuries or its over for low, long term interest rates and the US consumer's ability to deal with his record debt, then you can be certain that we have anything but a strong and fundamentally sound economy. Still, the illusion continues for many.

Subject: Iraq Data From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 09:22:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/international/middleeast/11intel.html?ex=1297314000&en=babfdb0d2c3bb78d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 11, 2006 Ex-C.I.A. Official Says Iraq Data Was Distorted By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — A C.I.A. veteran who oversaw intelligence assessments about the Middle East from 2000 to 2005 on Friday accused the Bush administration of ignoring or distorting the prewar evidence on a broad range of issues related to Iraq in its effort to justify the American invasion of 2003. The views of Paul R. Pillar, who retired in October as national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed previous criticism from Democrats and from some administration officials, including Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism adviser, and Paul H. O'Neill, the former treasury secretary. But Mr. Pillar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of prewar intelligence. His article for the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, which charges the administration with the selective use of intelligence about Iraq's unconventional weapons and the chances of postwar chaos in Iraq, was posted Friday on the journal's Web site after it was reported in The Washington Post. 'If the entire body of official intelligence on Iraq had a policy implication, it was to avoid war — or, if war was going to be launched, to prepare for a messy aftermath,' Mr. Pillar wrote. 'What is most remarkable about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq is not that it got things wrong and thereby misled policymakers; it is that it played so small a role in one of the most important U.S. policy decisions in decades.' In an interview on Friday, Mr. Pillar said he recognized that his views would become part of the highly partisan, three-year-old battle over the administration's reasons for going to war. But he said his goal in speaking publicly was to help repair what he called a 'broken' relationship between the intelligence produced by the nation's spies and the way it is used by its leaders. 'There is ground to be replowed on Iraq,' said Mr. Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University. 'But what is more important is to look at the whole intelligence-policy relationship and get a discussion and debate going to make sure what happened on Iraq doesn't happen again.' President Bush and his aides have denied that the Iraq intelligence was politicized. Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said in November, 'Our statements about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein were based on the aggregation of intelligence from a number of sources, and represented the collective view of the intelligence community. Those judgments were shared by Republicans and Democrats alike.' Reports by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the presidential commission on weapons intelligence headed by Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal judge, and Charles S. Robb, the former Virginia governor and senator, found that C.I.A. analysts had not been pressed to change their views. A second phase of the Senate committee review, on how administration officials used intelligence, has not been completed. Mr. Pillar alleged that the earlier studies had considered only 'the crudest attempts at politicization' and that the real pressures were far more subtle. 'Intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions that had already been made,' chiefly to topple Mr. Hussein in order to 'shake up the sclerotic power structures of the Middle East,' he wrote. According to Mr. Pillar's account, the administration shaped the answers it got in part by repeatedly asking the same questions, about the threat posed by Iraqi weapons and about ties between Mr. Hussein and Al Qaeda. When intelligence analysts resisted, he wrote, some of the administration's allies accused Mr. Pillar and others of 'trying to sabotage the president's policies.' In light of such accusations, he wrote, analysts began to 'sugarcoat' their conclusions. Mr. Pillar called for a formal declaration by Congress and the White House that intelligence should be clearly separated from policy. He proposed the creation of an independent office, modeled on the Government Accountability Office and the Congressional Budget Office, to assess the use of intelligence at the request of members of Congress. Mr. Pillar suggested that the root of the problem might be that top intelligence officials serve at the pleasure of the president. A C.I.A. spokeswoman, Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, said the agency had no comment. Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said that the C.I.A. had long resisted intervention in Iraq, and that internal pressure on analysts to resist war was greater than any external pressure. 'If the C.I.A. had spent less time leaking its opinions, throughout the 1990's, opposed to any conflict with Iraq, and more time developing assets inside Iraq, the agency would have more credibility and better intelligence,' said Ms. Pletka, who served for a decade, until 2002, as a Republican staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Subject: Work vs. Family, Complicated by Race From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 08:15:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/fashion/thursdaystyles/09MOMS.html?ex=1297141200&en=7f020290abee24a9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Work vs. Family, Complicated by Race By LYNETTE CLEMETSON Mitchellville, Md. THE subject, yet again, was motherhood and work. Over tea and hors d'oeuvres in this affluent Washington suburb, a cluster of well-educated women gathered to discuss the work-life debate. Most in the roomful of lawyers, technology experts, corporate managers and entrepreneurs had read dispatches from the so-called 'mommy wars,' the books and articles grounded in the gulch between working and stay-at-home mothers. But for the women in attendance — all of them black — those discussions inevitably fell short. 'They don't speak to my reality,' said Robin Rucker Gaillard, 41, a lawyer and mother of two. 'We don't generally have the time or luxury for the guilt and competition that some white mothers engage in.' Around the country black women are opting out of the 'opt-out' debate, the often-heated exchange about the compatibility of motherhood and work. Steeped in issues like working versus staying at home, nannies versus day care, and the benefits or garish excess of $800 strollers, the discussion has become a hot topic online, in newspapers and in book publishing. It is not that black mothers do not wrestle with some of the same considerations as white mothers. But interviews with more than two dozen women suggest that the discussions as portrayed in books and the news media often lack the nuances and complexities particular to their experience. For professional black women, debates about self-fulfillment can seem incomprehensibly narrow against the need to build sustainable wealth and security for their families. The discussions also pale in comparison to worries about shielding sons and daughters from the perils that black children face growing up, and overlook the practical pull of extended families in need of financial support. Ms. Gaillard and others had gathered to broaden the working-mother debate by discussing a new book, 'I'm Every Woman: Remixed Stories of Marriage, Motherhood and Work.' Equal parts memoir, history lesson and cultural critique, the book, by Lonnae O'Neal Parker, a reporter for The Washington Post and a mother of three, celebrates the balancing act practiced by black women. Published in November by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, it takes a sometimes wrenching, sometimes joyful look at black motherhood from slavery and the great migration to suburbia, the corporate workplace and the ascendancy of hip-hop. And since it came out, Ms. O'Neal Parker has been invited to gatherings around the country by black women eager to talk about motherhood on their own terms. 'It was a breath of fresh air to have a conversation that resonated with me,' said Pamela Walker, 41, a professor at Northwestern Business College in Chicago. A married mother of six, she attended a reading of 'I'm Every Woman' at Sensual Steps, a shoe boutique in the predominantly black Bronzeville section on the South Side of Chicago. 'My family can afford expensive things, but why would I think about spending hundreds on a stroller when I could help a cousin buy textbooks for college? That is not my world.' Black mothers have traditionally worked in higher percentages than white women. And educated black mothers are still more likely to work than their white counterparts. According to census data from March 2005, 83.7 percent of college-educated black women with children under 18 are in the labor force, compared to 74 percent of college-educated white mothers. Census figures from 2005 also show that college-educated black women earn slightly more than their white counterparts, largely because they are more likely to stay in the work force and work longer hours than white women after having children. The commitment of black women to work is in large part economically driven. They have lower marriage rates than white women, meaning they are more likely to be single parents. Those who are married are more likely than their white counterparts to earn more than their husbands, census figures show. But for black middle-class women from Mary Church Terrell, a charter member of the N.A.A.C.P., to Coretta Scott King, working has also been a matter of choice. For generations black women have viewed work as a means for elevating not only their own status as women, but also as a crucial force in elevating their family, extended family and their entire race. Black women are not the only women feeling airbrushed out of today's images of motherhood as represented in the literature of the opt-out debate, which includes articles like one in The New York Times last year reporting that many women at Ivy League colleges plan to drop their careers, at least temporarily, once they start having children. Another article, by Linda R. Hirshman in the December issue of The American Prospect, a magazine devoted to liberal ideas, provoked sharp debate by arguing that women who stay home with children are in for a letdown, and that the workplace is the only realm where women find true fulfillment. This is, Ms. Hirshman acknowledged, not a new idea. It was the theme of 'The Feminist Mystique' written more than 40 years ago by Betty Friedan. Some white working-class and middle- class women have complained that both sides of the opt-out debate have an elitist tone. Recently members of a group called Latina Mami in Austin, Tex., vented about the lack of perspective in many of the motherhood books in bookstores. Some insiders in the battles have acknowledged the narrowness of public discourse. 'The conflict seems to be pretty much driven by white upper-middle-class angst, and the debate has been taken over by that,' said Leslie Morgan Steiner, a white mother of three and the editor of 'Mommy Wars,' an anthology of essays to be published by Random House next month. Ms. Steiner's book includes essays from Ms. O'Neal Parker and two other black writers, as well as a Pakistani mother who writes of her struggles with child care, and a Latina who was introduced to stay-at-home mothering through a bout with cancer. Tension between working and stay-at-home black mothers — friction that seems less prevalent and intense than among their white peers, many women said — is often driven by a pressure for persistent racial striving. Smiling at the circle of friends gathered in her Mitchellville living room, Frances Luckett, the principal at a private, predominantly black elementary school, welcomed her guests with an exhortation. 'Your journey is not just about you,' Ms. Luckett said to the two dozen women, aged 19 to 85. 'It's about adding to the journey of those who came before you and paving a way for the journeys after yours.' There were knowing groans as Ms. O'Neal Parker read aloud from 'I'm Every Woman' about 'bone memory' and the specter of a weary but resolute slave woman, who 'sticks a knee in my back and squares up my shoulders' when life feels unfair. There was empathetic laughter when she lovingly discussed the 'kink coefficient,' a term she coined to describe the extra hours black mothers build into their packed schedules to groom daughters whose kinky hair 'grows out instead of down.' The personal motherhood struggles that black women face are often complicated variations on more broadly voiced themes. Some professional women have mixed emotions about hiring nannies when they can recall women in their own families who cared for other women's children and cleaned their homes. Some of those who consider leaving jobs to raise children worry that it will be more difficult for them to resume their careers than for white peers. 'As black women who still have a hard time moving up, there is a fear that opting out will be one more strike against you,' said Linda Burke, the owner of an executive search firm and a founder of a Washington group called Sistermoms that invited Ms. O'Neal Parker for a book reading last month. Linda McGhee, a lawyer and member of Sistermoms, got her son into a private elementary school in Northwest Washington but decided against sending him, in part because she wanted to help her parents, who raised 12 children on meager resources, with health care. Her neighborhood public school did not meet her standards, so Ms. McGhee and her husband, a computer specialist for the federal government, pushed to get him into a high-performing public school in the same neighborhood as the private school they turned down. 'I grew up in a housing project, and without my parents always pushing I wouldn't have three degrees,' said Ms. McGhee, 44, who just completed a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. 'We just decided that, in the scheme of things, we didn't want to spend $20,000 on kindergarten.' Some concerns are more social than personal. Cheryl Roberts, a college administrator in Seattle, was the host at a private reading featuring Ms. O'Neal Parker on Martin Luther King Day. The guests at the catered affair included several federal judges and banking and aerospace executives whose successes eased worries about outcomes for their children. But as the discussion opened up, the women engaged in a passionate exchange on the lingering effects of a ballot initiative that ended the state's affirmative action programs. 'Our discussions have to move to a socially conscious place,' said Ms. Roberts, 48. 'It is part of the ethos of being an African-American woman. We understand there but for the grace of God go I.' Like their white counterparts, black mothers who leave careers to raise their children do sometimes face disapproval from working mothers. But even that judgment is driven less by gender politics than racial sensibilities, some women say. Tracie Miller-Mitchell, the daughter of Frances Luckett, was the only stay-at-home mother at her mother's afternoon function. Ms. Miller-Mitchell, who belongs to Mocha Moms, a national support group for black at-home mothers, said her mother was the person who most disapproved of her choice. 'A lot of financial sacrifice went into helping her get two degrees,' said Ms. Luckett, recalling her struggles as a divorced single parent. 'There are no guarantees in life, and I worry that if she just gives up her career, is just a wife and a mother, she will have nothing to fall back on.' Ms. Miller-Mitchell, 39, replied: 'I have my degrees to fall back on. Isn't what all that sacrifice was for? So I could have a choice?' Differences aside, the women gathered at Ms. Luckett's home said they felt refreshed by the discussion. 'I understand and respect the issues of white mothers, I truly do,' Ms. Gaillard said. 'But I also need for them to understand and respect mine.'

Subject: For Arab-American Playwrights From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 08:09:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/theater/newsandfeatures/11thro.html?ex=1297314000&en=730038deb5ed6a47&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 11, 2006 For Arab-American Playwrights, a Sense of Purpose By DINITIA SMITH The title of Yussef El Guindi's new play, 'Back of the Throat,' refers to an attempt by the lead character, an Arab-American writer named Khaled, to tell the government agents who show up at his door how to pronounce the first syllable of his name. This task, the need to identify and explain oneself, has become a familiar one since 9/11 to Arab-Americans, who often find themselves the subject of both curiosity and fear. For playwrights, though, this twin desire, has turned out to be an opportunity. 'For the longest time Arab issues or Muslim issues just had not been on the radar,' said Mr. El Guindi, whose play has its New York premiere today at the Flea Theater. 'They were regarded as too complex.' The subject was just 'too edgy,' he said. Then came 9/11. 'Suddenly there were calls for plays,' he added. Mr. El Guindi is one of a small group of Arab-American playwrights who have gained a higher profile since the terrorist attacks. Their work, they say, is partly designed to counter stereotypes about Arabs and Muslims. That effort has also helped unite a scattered and diverse group of immigrants and second- and third-generation Arabs, Muslims and Christians alike. 'Prior to Sept. 11, I felt the Arab community was a lot like the Mideast itself, made up of insular communities,' said Heather Raffo, a half Iraqi and half American playwright who was raised as a Catholic. She wrote and acted in 'Nine Parts of Desire' about contemporary Iraqi women. 'But since that time it's become an immediate, all-inclusive, wanting to create together.' In Chicago, the playwright Jamil Khoury (his father is Syrian, his mother is Polish and Slovak) and his partner Malik Gillani, founded the Silk Road Theater Project after 9/11 to showcase plays about the countries along that historical route, from China to Europe and including the Middle East. After 9/11, Nibras, an Arab-American theater collective based in New York, performed 'Sajjil,' Arabic for 'Record.' It was an ensemble piece based on interviews with Arabs and non-Arabs about what they think when they hear the word 'Arab.' The collective includes Nathalie Handal and Najla Said, the daughter of the scholar Edward Said. The production won a Fringe Festival Award in 2002. And in San Francisco, Golden Thread Productions was founded in 1996 to present theater about Middle Eastern culture. It co-produced the first performance of 'Back of the Throat' in 2005. 'Throat,' which runs through March 8, is about an Arab-American writer who after the Sept. 11 attacks is suddenly caught up in a Kafkaesque encounter with federal agents. To Mr. El Guindi the terrorist attacks were 'hideous.' But in the days after, he said, he and his Arab-American friends began to feel increasingly paranoid. Seattle, where Mr. El Guindi lives, is a liberal city, he said. 'Friends were questioned, friends of friends,' he said. 'The Patriot Act came in, and suddenly you didn't know what your rights were. You started hearing these stories of people getting stopped for what they were reading at airports, of the F.B.I. going to galleries and questioning the artist if the exhibit was politically charged.' 'I began to look at my apartment,' he continued. 'What do I have in my apartment if an F.B.I. agent came in? I have books on assassins, guns, Islam, research materials, the Koran, that would identify me as interested in the Middle East. In my paranoia, I started to imagine what could happen.' In the play, the agents who arrive at Khaled's rather messy apartment couldn't be more polite at first. 'We appreciate this,' says one, Bartlett, (Jason Guy). But slowly, things turn ominous. As the skein of insinuation unfolds, a chance encounter by Khaled (Adeel Akhtar) with a terrorist (Bandar Albuliwi) is distorted by the agents into a conspiracy. For all its atmosphere of menace, though, the play has humor. At one point, Bartlett gives Khaled an evaluation form. 'We're trying to get direct feedback from the public,' he says. 'Especially from our target audience.' Mr. Guindi said he doesn't feel obligated to write about politics. 'I wish there were more political plays,' he said. 'The problem with the American theater is it's not addressing what's going on.' At one point a look of anxiety crossed his face and he clutched his cheeks when talking about politics. 'Am I being too political?' he asked. Politics is almost always a subtext in Arab-American plays. Prominent among them is Ms. Handal, who wrote 'Between Our Lips,' about a Palestinian woman about to be executed for her husband's murder. Betty Shamieh's play 'Roar' is about Palestinian-Americans in Detroit during the Gulf War. But certain issues can be trigger points within the Arab-American community. In 2002, the Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles commissioned Mr. El Guindi to write a play as part of a cycle about different religious communities. The result was 'Ten Acrobats in an Amazing Leap of Faith,' about an Arab-American family in which the younger generation questions its parent's traditions. At a staged reading, 'conservative elements in the Muslim community objected because of the gay character,' Mr. El Guindi said, adding, 'There's also a son who begins to question his religion.' Mr. El Guindi, 45, is of Muslim heritage, but he said 'I'm not very religious.' He has lived in the United States since 1983 and has been a citizen since 1996. His voice is lightly inflected with a British accent from his childhood in England after his family fled Egypt in 1963 when Gamal Abdel Nasser began nationalizing their businesses. His Arabic, he said, is rudimentary. He graduated from American University in Cairo in 1982. 'My father said I should get to know my own country,' he said. He then came to the United States and got a Master of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. One reason Mr. El Guindi is an important playwright, said Dina Amin, a director and professor at the University of Delaware who studies Arab-American theater, is that 'although he is of the first generation, he tries to see the Arab-American predicament from within the second.' Mr. Khoury of Silk Road said that conservatism within Muslim culture may be one reason for the scarcity of Arab-American playwrights. Representations of the human form are frowned on, he said: women dancing, or performing in front of men is considered reprehensible. And until now, at least, Mr. Khoury said, 'there was a sense among Arab-American writers who may be interested in theater that there was not going to be an outlet for being produced.' Ms. Amin said that 'publishers are not interested in the plays unless they are stereotypical, unless they deal with topics like veils or female circumcision.' But many of the playwrights insist their stories are universal. Ms. Handal said a non-Arab woman in the audience can identify with 'Between Our Lips,' 'not because they're Arab but because they're a woman, a daughter.' To Ms. Said, 'Arabs are just like any ethnic group.' She has written a performance piece based on her first visit to Palestine with her father. She said that growing up in New York, with many Jewish friends, 'I might as well have been Jewish.'

Subject: Ex-Gay Cowboys From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:55:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/10savage.html?ex=1297227600&en=761a631539bdacdf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Ex-Gay Cowboys By DAN SAVAGE Seattle FIRST, a little of that full disclosure stuff: I have not actually seen 'Brokeback Mountain' or 'End of the Spear,' both of which I'm going to discuss here. But since when did not seeing a film prevent anyone from sharing his or her strong opinions about it? Before the posters for 'Brokeback Mountain' were even printed, everyone from the blogger Mickey Kaus to the Concerned Women for America to gay men all over the country had already said a lot about the film. (Their opinions were, respectively, con, con and pro.) So, let's get to it: Remember when straight actors who played gay were the ones taking a professional risk? Those days are over. Shortly after Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, both straight, received Oscar nominations for playing gay cowboys in 'Brokeback Mountain,' conservative Christians were upset when they learned that a gay actor, Chad Allen, was playing a straight missionary in 'End of the Spear.' 'End of the Spear' tells what happened after five American missionaries were murdered in 1956 by a tribe in Ecuador. Instead of seeking retribution, the missionaries' families reached out to the tribe, forgave the killers and eventually converted them to Christianity. An evangelical film company, Every Tribe Entertainment, brought the story to the screen. In a glowing review, Marcus Yoars, a film critic for Focus on the Family, noted that the 'martyrdom' of the slain missionaries has 'inspired thousands if not millions of Christians.' But after conservatives took a closer look at the cast list, the protests began. Many felt Chad Allen's presence in the film negated any positive message. The pastors claim they're worried about what will happen when their children rush home from the movies, Google Chad Allen's name, and discover that he's a 'gay activist.' ('Gay activist' is a term evangelicals apply to any homosexual who isn't a gay doormat.) They needn't be too concerned. Straight boys who have unsupervised access to the Internet aren't Googling the names of middle-aged male actors gay or straight — not when Paris Hilton's sex tapes are still out there. Frankly, I can't help but be perplexed by the criticisms of Mr. Allen from the Christian right. After all, isn't playing straight what evangelicals have been urging gay men to do? That's precisely what Jack and Ennis attempt to do in 'Brokeback Mountain' — at least, according to people I know who have actually seen the film. These gay cowboys try, as best they can, to quit one another. They marry women, start families. But their wives are crushed when they realize their husbands don't, and can't, ever really love them. 'Brokeback Mountain' makes clear that it would have been better for all concerned if Jack and Ennis had lived in a world where they could simply be together. That world didn't exist when Jack and Ennis were pitching tents together, but it does now — even in the American West. Today, the tiny and stable percentage of men who are gay are free to live openly, and those who want to settle down and start families can do so without having to deceive some poor, unsuspecting woman. Straight audiences are watching and loving 'Brokeback Mountain' — that's troubling to evangelical Christians who have invested a decade and millions of dollars promoting the notion that gay men can be converted to heterosexuality, or become 'ex-gay.' It is, they insist, an ex-gay movement, although I've never met a gay man who was moved to join it. This 'movement' demands more from gay men than simply playing straight. Once a man can really pass as ex-gay — once he's got some Dockers, an expired gym membership and a bad haircut — he's supposed to become, in effect, an ex-gay missionary, reaching out to the hostile gay tribes in such inhospitable places as Chelsea and West Hollywood. What should really trouble evangelicals, however, is this: even if every gay man became ex-gay tomorrow, there still wouldn't be an ex-lesbian tomboy out there for every ex-gay cowboy. Instead, millions of straight women would wake up one morning to discover that they had married a Jack or an Ennis. Restaurant hostesses and receptionists at hair salons would be especially vulnerable. Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one? Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce. If anything, supporters of traditional marriage should want gay men out of the heterosexual marriage market entirely. And the best way to do that is to see that we're safely married off — to each other, not to your daughters. Let gay actors like Chad Allen only play it straight in the movies.

Subject: From God's Mouth to English From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:54:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/books/review/17SHULEVI.html?ex=1255752000&en=6f64cf9f8047937d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland October 17, 2004 From God's Mouth to English By Judith Shulevitz THE FIVE BOOKS OF MOSES A Translation With Commentary. By Robert Alter. DON'T be deterred by the unfamiliar name. If you've never heard of the Five Books of Moses (not actually composed by Moses; people who believe in divine revelation see him as more secretary than author), you've heard of the Torah and the Pentateuch, the Hebrew and Greek names, respectively, for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. The story starts with the creation of the world, and ends with Moses dying on the wrong side of the Jordan and being buried in an unmarked grave. In between these extremes of possible experience, between the magnificent birth of the universe and the anonymous death of the human being, lies a tale that still has the power to astonish: ''The encounter between a group of people and the Lord of the world in the course of history,'' in Martin Buber's phrase. But this encounter has such enormous implications, and the story in which we read of it is so frank about what it means to enter into a relationship with the Lord, that for two millenniums readers have preferred to veil its details in allegory. Who wouldn't rather construe Abraham's knife as a metaphor for all the things that test our faith or a foreshadowing of the Cross than as a big sharp blade held by a father over his son's throat? Raw images like these must be what made theology necessary. Only by universalizing or typologizing the life stories of the biblical protagonists could most people stand to think about them. Robert Alter, who has come up with this remarkable translation of the Five Books after decades of writing some of the most convincing analyses ever produced of the Hebrew Bible, is a critic with the strength of mind to resist the urge to uplift. Luckily for us, he is equally skeptical of what usually replaces homily in modern commentary, namely history. Scholars who study the Bible, of course, don't try to determine what ''really'' happened, as passionate amateurs do. Instead they attempt to reconstruct how the books must have been assembled. But Alter, along with critics like Frank Kermode, Harold Bloom, David Damrosch and Gabriel Josipovici, has spent the past quarter-century rejecting both the preacherly and the historicist approaches to the Bible and devising one that would allow us to grapple with it as literature. Not that Alter overlooks the Bible's moral and spiritual dimensions; he could hardly do so, given that roughly half the Five Books is made up of laws, and the other half -- the narrative half -- is concerned with working out the covenants made by God with his chosen people. Nor does he ignore the work of scholars who valiantly attempt to isolate historical voices in this blended text. As a matter of principle, though, he declines to chop stories into pieces, reassigning parts to ''J'' or parts to ''P'' for the purpose of resolving apparent contradictions. What Alter does with the Bible instead is read it, with erudition and rigor and respect for the intelligence of the editor or editors who stitched it together, and -- most thrillingly -- with the keenest receptivity to its darker undertones. In the case of the binding of Isaac, for instance, Alter not only accepts a previous translator's substitution of ''cleaver'' for the ''knife'' of the King James version but also changes ''slay'' (as in, ''Abraham took the knife to slay his son'') to ''slaughter.'' Moreover, in his notes, he points out that although this particular Hebrew verb for ''bound'' (as in, ''Abraham bound Isaac his son'') occurs only this once in biblical Hebrew, making its meaning uncertain, we can nonetheless take a hint from the fact that when the word reappears in rabbinic Hebrew it refers specifically to the trussing up of animals. Alter's translation thus suggests a dimension of this eerie tale we would probably have overlooked: that of editorial comment. The biblical author, by using words more suited to butchery than ritual sacrifice, lets us know that he is as horrified as we are at the brutality of the act that God has asked Abraham to commit. Translators often win praise for their attention to nuance, but in the case of the Hebrew Bible subtlety has hurt more than it has helped. Biblical Hebrew has an unusually small vocabulary clustered around an even smaller number of three-letter roots, most of them denoting concrete actions or things, and the Bible achieves its mimetic effects partly through the skillful repetition of these few vivid words. The translators who gave us the King James version appear more or less to have understood this, but many 20th-century English-language translators have not. In their desire to convey shades of meaning brought out by different contexts or, perhaps, to compensate for what they perceived as the primitiveness of the ancient language, they replaced biblical Hebrew's restricted, earthy lexicon with a broad and varied set of often abstract terms. Not Alter. As he explains in his introduction -- an essay that would be worth reading even if it didn't accompany this book -- the Hebrew of the Bible is, in his view, a closed system with a coherent literary logic, ''a conventionally delimited language, roughly analogous in this respect to the French of the neoclassical theater,'' though plain-spoken where neoclassical French is lofty. Alter's translation puts into practice his belief that the rules of biblical style require it to reiterate, artfully, within scenes and from scene to scene, a set of ''key words,'' a term Alter derives from Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, who in an epic labor that took nearly 40 years to complete, rendered the Hebrew Bible into a beautifully Hebraicized German. Key words, as Alter has explained elsewhere, clue the reader in to what's at stake in a particular story, serving either as ''the chief means of thematic exposition'' within episodes or as connective tissue between them. All this repetition would be merely repetitive if Alter didn't tie it to a precise notion of what's going on in nearly every passage. The art of the translator, like the art of the narrator, lies in knowing when to paraphrase and when not to. What makes Alter's ''Five Books'' more engrossing than most other modern translations is that he bases this decision on more than instinct. Like Rashi and Abraham Ibn Ezra and the other great commentators whose insights fill his superb commentary, Alter has thought these stories through to their shocking ends. Often enough his choice to be literal stems from the rare resolve not to look away from the text, even when it dismays us, or ought to. Take Alter's treatment of the cycle of stories in which the first two matriarchs, Sarah and Rebekah, conspire against elder sons for the benefit of younger ones. Sarah insists that Abraham drive Ishmael, his firstborn, and Ishmael's mother, Hagar, into the desert to die, to protect the inheritance of Sarah's son, Isaac. Rebekah tells her son Jacob to trick his father, the now elderly Isaac, into giving him a blessing rightfully owed to Esau, Jacob's ever-so-slightly older twin brother. The matriarchs' behavior is indefensible, yet God defends it. He instructs Abraham to do as Sarah says, and after Jacob takes flight from an enraged Esau God comes to Jacob in a dream, blesses him, and tells him that he, too, like Abraham and Isaac before him, will father a great nation. Alter doesn't try to explain away the paradox of a moral God sanctioning immoral acts. Instead he lets the Bible convey the seriousness of the problem. When Abraham balks at abandoning Ishmael and Hagar, God commands, ''Whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice.'' Rebekah, while instructing Jacob on how to dress like Esau so as to steal his blessing, echoes God's phrase -- listen to my voice'' -- not once but twice in an effort to reassure him. As we read on in Alter's translation, we realize that the word ''voice'' (''kol'' in Hebrew) is one of his ''key words,'' that if we could only manage to keep track of all the ways it is used it would unlock new worlds of meaning. In the story of Hagar and Ishmael, God's messenger will tell Hagar that God will save them because he has heard the voice of the crying boy. And the all but blind Isaac will recognize the sound of Jacob's voice, so that although his younger son stands before him with his arms covered in goatskin (to make them as hairy as Esau's), and has even put on his brother's clothes (to smell more like a hunter), Isaac nearly grasps the deceit being perpetrated against him. If voices help those who know how to listen to them penetrate illusion, if voices express or summon up the will of God, what are we to think when God says to listen to the voices of the matriarchs as they advance their nefarious schemes? That their truth is God's truth? Does the biblical author mean to imply that the ethical strictures governing family and tribal life fade before the importance of choosing a person capable of carrying the blessing unto the next generation? What kind of family-unfriendly message is that? Alter doesn't answer such questions; he doesn't even raise them. But by allowing us to see for ourselves how the Bible embeds its most acute ironies in wordplay and repetition, he affords us a fuller glimpse than we are usually given of the dark and often surprisingly unpious sensibility that essentially invented Western religious life. The great philologist E. A. Speiser, by contrast, whose 1962 translation of Genesis offered the best textual analysis of the time, failed either to see or to communicate this alarming vision of the deity when he had God telling Abraham ''Do whatever Sarah tells you.'' The translators of the New Jewish Publication Society edition of Genesis missed it when they translated Rebekah's echo of God's phrase as, first, ''listen carefully as I instruct you,'' then, ''do as I say.'' (The King James Version astutely preserves ''voice'' throughout, though it doesn't catch Rebekah's echo; it has God telling Abraham to ''hearken'' to Sarah's voice but Rebekah telling Jacob to ''obey'' hers.) Alter, on the other hand, knew exactly what was going on in these passages. He saw that they brought the reader straight to the chilling mystery at the heart of the Hebrew Bible. As he wrote in 1992, ''Divine election is an exacting and perhaps cruel destiny that often involves doing violence to the most intimate biological bonds.'' Alter, it should be said, is not the only recent translator of the Hebrew Bible attuned to its uncanny power. Another recent English translation of the Five Books of Moses, published in 1995 by the Jewish studies scholar Everett Fox, also preserves its key words and archaic texture. Fox pays explicit tribute to Buber and Rosenzweig in his introduction, and his ''Five Books'' are in some ways truer to the Hebrew -- to the full measure of its foreignness -- than Alter's. But Alter's translation is better. His brilliant commentary, in footnotes on the bottom half of each page, draws on insights from the rabbis as well as modern scholars, adding depth to his own readings. And his biblical prose is fresher and more immediate. Fox, who wished to capture the intense aurality of biblical Hebrew (originally meant, after all, to be read aloud), as well as the dense cluster of meaning carried by individual words, wound up inventing a long-winded, much-hyphenated and gerund-filled English that can cast a weird antique spell over the reader but does not have the gorgeous terseness, what Alter calls the ''poise and power,'' of the original. By contrast, Alter's largely Anglo-Saxon English -- neither overly colloquial nor ornate, musical yet direct -- sounds as if it could be spoken today. Alter does stumble on occasion, most often when he tries to reproduce some Hebrew pun in English. For instance, to parallel the pun in the creation story that plays off ''adam'' and ''adamah,'' human and soil, an echo that conveys the humbleness of humanity's origins, Alter gives us ''humus'' and ''human,'' which is instructive but not felicitous. Fumbles like these, though, are minor when measured against his usual sureness of touch. Alter's magisterial translation deserves to become the version in which many future generations encounter this strange and inexhaustible book.

Subject: He's Taking Aeschylus Hip-Hop From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:52:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/arts/10powe.html?ex=1297227600&en=a24229b185656467&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 He's Taking Aeschylus Hip-Hop By JENNIFER DUNNING THAT lanky young man sitting on a sunny park bench and muttering into a portable cassette as he scribbles in a notebook may not be the amiable neighborhood madman. He could very well be Will Power, the rap actor and playwright whose 'Flow' was a hit of the 2003 New York City Hip-Hop Festival. Now Mr. Power, who likes to write outdoors, has returned with 'The Seven,' a hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus' 'Seven Against Thebes,' which opens on Sunday at the New York Theater Workshop. That ancient Greek tragedian might not recognize in 'The Seven' his comparatively barebones choral tragedy about two brothers who, in vying for control of the city of Thebes, fulfill the curse of family killing family that has been handed down by their father, Oedipus. Mr. Power has updated it and added characters, giving them songs, verse and humor that come from urban streets of the 21st century. A D.J. functions as the traditional chorus, overseeing and commenting on the action, which surges across a tiny, multilevel stage made spacious by looming black-and-white projections that partly set the production in the context of the original. For Mr. Power, 35, there are strong connections between 'Flow' and 'The Seven.' 'I saw these storytellers, I guess in Africa, in a vision I had, and then I wrote a whole bunch of other stories,' he said of 'Flow,' a monologue in which he also played storytelling characters that included a homeless man, a health-food-store clerk and a dancer. Both 'Flow' and 'The Seven,' which was written at the invitation of the Thick Description Theater in San Francisco and developed at the New York Theater Workshop's Jonathan Larson Lab, explore man's relationship to the past. New York Theater Workshop was where Mr. Larson's musical, 'Rent,' was developed; 'The Seven,' with choreography by Bill T. Jones, has a similar scrappy vitality. ' 'Flow' was about ancient stories and how to modernize them and use them as a guide,' Mr. Power said in a telephone interview on Wednesday. 'I was looking at the ancestors, at all the beauty in the past. Tragedy is almost the other side of the coin in terms of the baggage of the past, the pain of the past, the fear and the hatred of the past. I think of the past as things our ancestors accomplished and that we're trying to escape.' Mr. Power, born William Wylie in Manhattan, grew up in the working-class Fillmore district of San Francisco, where he acquired the neighborhood nickname Will Power. He spent summers in New York City with his grandparents, who taught him to love the Broadway theater. 'We'd wait on line at the ticket booth on 47th Street,' he recalled. 'That was the weekend family tradition.' 'The Wiz,' he said, was a revelation. In San Francisco, he studied theater with a teacher who had performed with Sun Ra. 'She started doing this Afrocentric, science-fiction, way-out children's theater,' he said. 'I think that's still in me.' Mr. Power began performing at 14 as an M.C. in theater that developed from competitions between neighborhood hip-hop crews, eventually writing plays and training at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Gradually, he came to know and perform with other hip-hop theater artists, among them Danny Hoch, the monologuist who suggested that Mr. Power turn his stories into a theatrical production, which Mr. Hoch directed, and who founded the hip-hop festival in 2000. 'The Seven,' directed by Jo Bonney, with music by Will Hammond and Justin Ellington, has taken Mr. Power a step further into the theater of hip-hop, a relatively new theatrical form. 'I am fascinated by the idea of using rhymes, hip-hop verse and music,' he said, 'of exploring hip-hop as a vehicle to tell a story theatrically.'

Subject: The Grass Station From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:47:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/11/opinion/11casey.html?ex=1297314000&en=77be332918518f59&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 11, 2006 The Grass Station By CONSTANCE CASEY THOSE of us who labor in the garden got an unexpected thrill listening to the State of the Union last week when President Bush touted a plant, switch grass to be exact, as a way to 'make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.' How pleasing to see official presidential recognition of the usefulness and worthiness of this common member (panicum virgatum) of the millet family. Previously insufficiently appreciated in our capital, switch grass is inexpensive food for cattle, horses, sheep and goats. This deep-rooted perennial controls erosion by slowing down water run off and keeping beneficial sediments in the field, and it is habitat for songbirds, game birds and waterfowl. And yes, ethanol can be made from switch grass, which grows in abundance on the prairies of the Great Plains. If grass had ambition (besides wanting to propagate), the panicum virgatum might see itself as a cure for global warming and a savior of the family farm. If burning compressed switch grass really does work to reduce the use of fossil fuels, it would reduce the carbon we release into the air. Then farmers could find new profits in growing the stuff. And the more, the better. Switch grass, like every other plant, takes carbon dioxide out of the air and uses it to build plant tissue. Fold that, Republicans, into your Clear Skies legislation. Switch grass cleans water as well as air; its wide-spreading roots filter out pesticides, herbicides and excess fertilizer before they reach the waterways. Up in Manitoba, Canada, where they care deeply about staying warm, they're experimenting with stoves that burn pellets of switch grass. Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, recently recommended switch grass as a balm for international tension. It's likely we'll find ourselves competing with China for oil, he told the Council on Foreign Relations, so we'll need to look at other fuels. He suggested that tons of agricultural materials, like corn, sugar cane and switch grass, could be used 'to create billions of barrels of new fuels.' At this point I wouldn't be surprised to hear someone say that switch grass is a cure for lower-back pain and nearsightedness. Family farmers know that switch grass is easy to grow. It doesn't complain about growing in sand; it doesn't mind clay either. It's tolerant of floods as well as of droughts. It would work as part of the effort to restore the Louisiana wetlands that can help protect New Orleans from hurricanes. Switch grass is native to most of North America, from Canada to Texas. The day after the State of the Union, the president joked that he might bring in a few extra dollars at his Crawford ranch by growing switch grass for fuel. Whoa, Mr. President, take a look next time you're trimming the brush: odds are you have plenty. Let's not forget that switch grass is beautiful and looks great in floral arrangements. On the very same day the president spoke, I got the latest Brooklyn Botanic Garden handbook, 'Designing Borders for Sun and Shade,' in the mail. The handbook strongly recommended switch grass as part of a perennial border. There's 'Dallas Blues,' 'Alamo,' and the prettiest, wine-red 'Shenandoah.' The handbook suggests combining switch grass with asters, sunflowers and black-eyed Susans for an all-native garden with a nice prairie feel. To me, though this may seem at first unrelated, this is just one more reason that 'America the Beautiful' should be our national anthem instead of that song with the bombs bursting in air. The clue to achieving clean fuel, clean air, clean water, world peace has been right there all the time in those 'amber waves of grain.'

Subject: No Aspirations to Cultural Commentary From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 07:04:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/movies/10curi.html?ex=1297227600&en=931bca57c25914e6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 A Cartoon Monkey With No Aspirations to Cultural Commentary By DANA STEVENS In a refreshing departure from the animal heroes of most recent children's movies, Curious George — or 'the monkey,' as he's called for the first two-thirds of this new animated film — doesn't rap, punch out bad guys or emit rapid-fire commentary on pop culture. In fact, Curious George doesn't even talk. Instead, he makes cute chittering noises, eats bananas and peeks playfully from beneath the yellow hat belonging to his human companion, the Man in the Yellow Hat (here given a name, Ted, and voiced by Will Ferrell). In this film version of 'Curious George,' directed by Matthew O'Callaghan, George is all monkey — a quality that will not only appeal to children, but will also come as a great relief to parents who grew up with the classic stories by Margret and H. A. Rey and are not eager to see them turned into the slangy, ironic metacartoons now in fashion. Ted, an earnest guide at the Bloomsberry Museum, heads to Africa in search of the long-lost idol of Zagawa. To his chagrin, the statue turns out to be tiny, and his hopes of saving the failing museum with a grand new acquisition are dashed. But unbeknownst to Ted, the baby monkey he befriended has followed him as a stowaway on the ship home. George's mischievous antics soon get Ted fired from his job, much to the delight of his nemesis, Bloomsberry Jr. (David Cross), who dreams of seeing the museum turned into a parking lot. But after getting into and out of a few more scrapes, Ted and George manage both to salvage the museum and impress Maggie (Drew Barrymore), the elementary school teacher of Ted's dreams. With top-drawer voice talent including Joan Plowright and Dick Van Dyke, original songs by Jack Johnson, and old-fashioned two-dimensional animation that echoes the simple colors and shapes of the books, 'Curious George' is an unexpected delight.

Subject: Manet and the Impressionists From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:32:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/books/10book.html?ex=1297227600&en=717931f1266c7056&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 In Salon Revolution, Manet and the Impressionists Rule By WILLIAM GRIMES Right next to the great Manet room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art hangs an overblown, fussily executed battle scene. Titled 'Friedland,' it depicts one of Napoleon's greatest victories. In 1875 the New York department store magnate Alexander T. Stewart paid a staggering 380,000 francs for it, acquiring a work that Henry James ranked among 'the highest prizes in the game of civilization.' The painting is by Ernest Meissonier. Ernest who? In his time, Meissonier was the most celebrated painter in France, weighed down with medals, honors and riches. Manet was a laughingstock, scorned by the critics, the public and most of all by establishment artists like Meissonier. Again and again, their paths would cross, with Manet always in the role of supplicant or outsider, until the gods of art history, with an almost playful cruelty, reversed the equation in one fell swoop. The rise of Manet and the fall of Meissonier provide the narrative spine for 'The Judgment of Paris,' Ross King's spirited account of the decade-long battle between France's officially sanctioned history painters and the wild tribe of upstarts contemptuously dismissed as 'impressionists.' It is, in its broad outlines, a familiar story, but Mr. King, the author of 'Brunelleschi's Dome,' tells it with tremendous energy and skill. It is hard to imagine a more inviting account of the artistic civil war that raged around the Paris Salons of the 1860's and 70's, or of the outsize personalities who transformed the way the world looked at painting. For French artists, everything hinged on the Salon, the annual juried exhibition sponsored by the government. Inclusion gave the official stamp of approval and smoothed the way for sales and commissions. Exclusion spelled professional death, underscored by the red 'R' ('rejected') stamped on the back of canvases that did not make the cut. In 1866 Jules Holtzapffel, who had shown in every Salon for the previous decade, failed to place a painting and committed suicide. 'The members of the jury have rejected me, therefore I have no talent,' he wrote in a suicide note. 'I must die.' Mr. Ross explains the bureaucratic machinery of the Salons in fascinating detail: how juries were selected, and how both artistic and national politics entered into the picture. He also vividly conveys the humiliation for spurned artists, who received no explanation for the decision of the jury, simply an order to pick up their work, stamped with the scarlet letter, and cart it away immediately. At issue, for renegades like Courbet and Manet, was a profound dissatisfaction with the entire notion of art as understood by the academy, which valued grand historical themes, or lofty classical subjects, executed in a highly finished style. The restless younger generation insisted on depicting, with a seemingly slapdash technique, scenes of contemporary life. It was a battle, as one French critic put it, between 'the sketchers' and 'the finishers,' waged with extraordinary ferocity on both sides. Meissonier was a finisher. He was also known for his 'incredible hauteur and colossal self-regard.' Mr. Ross nevertheless invests his artistic career with an unmistakable pathos. A finicky perfectionist, Meissonier specialized in small canvases that depicted roistering musketeers from the era of Louis XV. His dream, however, was to create a grand history painting that would forever silence the critics who scoffed at him as 'the painter of Lilliput.' Like Monet, Renoir and Cézanne, he, too, craved respect. In his quest for authenticity, Meissonier accumulated a museum's worth of uniforms and weapons. He plowed up the grounds of his palatial chateau in Poissy and dusted them with flour to imitate snow for a painting of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. To master the anatomy of the horse, he took courses at veterinary school. Rolling in a cart at top speed on his own railroad track, he sketched furiously as hired cavalrymen rode by. Small wonder that he looked on Manet and his ilk as vulgar dabblers. If Meissonier and his academic colleagues had the power and the money, the Impressionists and their cheerleaders, notably Charles Baudelaire and Émile Zola, had genius and energy. They also had all the good lines. 'I am swimming in dishonor like a fish in water,' Baudelaire wrote triumphantly to friends back in Paris after shocking the placid Belgians by spreading the rumor that he had killed and eaten his father. Cézanne said, 'I dare, sir, I dare,' responding to an inquiring journalist as he hauled his paintings to be spurned yet again by the Salon jury. 'I have the courage of my opinions — and he who laughs last laughs best.' Meissonier, to his credit, did manage at least one stinging one-liner. Infuriated by Courbet's role in toppling the Vendôme column, crowned by a statue of Napoleon, during the violent days of the Paris Commune, he fantasized about the appropriate punishment. Courbet, a heavy drinker and smoker, should be chained to the base of the column, he decided, and forced to copy the bas-reliefs that covered it, 'while having always in front of him, but beyond his reach, beer mugs and pipes.' Feelings tended to run high. It was that sort of decade. The suave Manet, stung by a newspaper critic's remarks, took part in one of the most ridiculous duels in French history. The two opponents, with no fencing ability, managed only to bend their swords. Mr. Ross has a taste for events like this, and for the social swirl and political turmoil of the decade he describes so vividly. Fashion, scientific advances and revolutionary politics all find their way into a narrative that in its way achieves the kind of history painting that Meissonier could only dream of.

Subject: Survey of Spain, Architects' Playground From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:31:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/arts/design/10ouro.html?ex=1297227600&en=7520f634f68deddf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 A Survey of Spain, Architects' Playground By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF IS there any show more overdue than a major one about contemporary Spanish architecture? For years now, architects and planners have been jetting to places like Barcelona, Bilbao and Mérida in an attempt to decipher one of the great architectural success stories in modern history. The endurance of Spain's grand experiment is remarkable. It started, you could argue, during the final years of Franco's rule in the early 1970's, as Spain began to awaken from the isolation of a four-decade dictatorship. It began to flower in earnest after 1986, when the country joined the European Union, and money began flowing into large-scale public works projects. Since then, Spanish architects have produced architecture of unusual depth, often with a firm connection to the land, a sense of humility and a way of conveying continuity with the past while embracing the present. As the building boom unfolds, international talents pour into the country to share in the creative foment. 'On Site: New Architecture in Spain,' which opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, skates rather lightly over this back story. Packed with pretty images and elegant models, the exhibition lacks the scholarly depth you might have hoped for on a subject that has mesmerized architects and planners since the 1980's. Also missing is the kind of basic information — historical background, a clear sense of a building's context, the architects' ages and nationalities — that would make the show accessible to a broad audience. What's more, the show's nationalist subject is a tricky one. A more tightly focused exhibition on, say, Catalonian architecture might have made a more compelling story, given the region's longstanding and determined struggle to assert its cultural independence from Madrid. And the starting date for the work on view — 1998 — has no particular resonance in Spain's recent architectural history. But if the show feels undercooked, there is much to see. The final exhibition organized by Terence Riley, who steps down next month as the Modern's chief curator of architecture and design, it includes the work of 47 architectural firms, many still largely unknown outside Spain. It's heartening to encounter so many young talents, some still in their 30's. They breathe life into the show just as you begin to despair of finding something to sink your teeth into. 'On Site' opens with two striking images: an enormous photograph of the facade of José Rafael Moneo's town hall extension in the southern city of Murcia, completed in 1998, and a similarly large image of the Santa Caterina Market in Barcelona by Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue. Mr. Moneo, 68, and Mr. Miralles can be read as two halves of a split personality. Based in Madrid, Mr. Moneo is an heir to classical Modernism whose sharp, angular works reflect the surgical precision of his thinking. Mr. Miralles, who died from a brain tumor six years ago at 45, was a sensualist whose curvaceous forms imbued architecture with a lost sense of pleasure. What unites the two is their easy relationship with history, the elegance with which they balance contemporary values with the past. For some, Mr. Moneo's City Hall may bring to mind the rigid geometry of Giuseppe Terragni's 1936 Casa del Fascio in Como, Italy. Both buildings overlook old cathedrals — Terragni's medieval, Mr. Moneo's Baroque. Yet in their irregular rhythms, the stone piers of Mr. Moneo's version are musical, gently liberating us from the gloomy legacy of the Dark Ages without sacrificing any of its warmth. Mr. Miralles's design, the renovation of an existing food market in the city's decrepit Gothic quarter, is equally refined but more fluid. Its wavy tile roof, decorated in pink, green and blue splotches, is draped over the market's old neo-Classical sheds like a delicate handkerchief. It's a joyful, almost childishly simple gesture that brings a historic site to life without mimicking its forms. Across the gallery, in a model for an expansion of the Institute of Modern Art in Valencia by the Japanese firm Sanaa, the past is literally boxed in. A milky white translucent shell encloses a replica of the museum's existing 1980's-era building. The older museum will house art, and the spaces between the two will become a vast public forum packed with a lobby, a restaurant and offices. Too old to be fashionable and too young to be considered a landmark, the original building is treated like a curiosity, a relic of the 80's preserved in a glass jar for the inspection of later generations. All three projects hint at the sophistication many Spanish cities have shown in dealing with their cultural heritage. Confronting that history has sparked the kind of lively creative dialogue that is rare in cities like ours, so often fixated on black-and-white preservation squabbles. Sanaa's design, for example, could be read as a retort to Mr. Moneo's 1985 Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, site of some of the best-preserved ruins in Europe. Mr. Moneo's building, a brick and concrete shell resting on heavy pillars over existing ruins, conveys both the weight of history and the violent clash of past and present. Sanaa's diaphanous glass shell in Valencia suggests a world in which both our present and our understanding of the past are fleeting and ethereal. (Unfortunately, the exhibits in the show never give you a visceral sense of the architects' exquisite use of materials, from Mr. Moneo's luxurious sandstone to Mr. Miralles's tile and Sanaa's creamy glass.) From there, the show drifts off into too many directions. One of its barely explored themes is the innovative public housing that continues to rise in Spain, most of it commissioned by local governments. In a sensitive project by Abalos & Herreros of Madrid, four elegant glass residential towers are arranged in a gentle arc to take advantage of views of nearby wetlands. But nothing in the show betrays that the design was chosen through a government-sponsored competition — the kind of contest that might surprise New Yorkers who expect public housing to be dreary, and dehumanizing. Other threads are picked up and dropped. A photograph of the interior of Richard Rogers's wonderful Barajas Airport terminals in Madrid, scheduled to open later this year, gives us an inkling of the project's structural potency. Its undulating roof, supported on big, V-shaped braces and pierced by giant oculi, evokes the lightness of Henri Labrouste's 19th-century National Library in Paris. The project was financed partly by the European Union, which has pumped more than $110 billion into Spain's infrastructure since 1986. The money has gone toward roads, bridges, train stations and airport terminals, many designed by first-rate talents. Yet little here hints at the vast scale of the undertaking. Instead, there is the usual array of high-profile designs by star architects. There is a zippy office block in Durango by Zaha Hadid that looks as if it were scooped out of the earth, where it connects to underground train tracks, and a less promising congress center by Rem Koolhaas in the shape of a long, narrow steel bar. Perhaps the most recognizable building is Jean Nouvel's Agbar Tower in Barcelona, whose phallic form, in an uneven pattern of colored glass, suggests comical urban swordplay. But it's the younger, lesser-known talents who regularly hold your attention. One of the most captivating projects is a 135-room hotel by the 37-year-old architect Enric Ruiz-Geli. The core of the building, set at the edge of a long urban park on Barcelona's outskirts, is a tinted glass-and-steel box — the very picture of Bauhaus-inspired functionalism. A steel web embedded with 6,000 or so photovoltaic cells is draped over the box, as if it were trapped in a fishnet. The cells, which Mr. Ruiz-Geli compares to computerized leaves, will provide shade during the day. At night, they glow in varying shades of green, yellow, blue or red, depending on how much sunlight they absorbed during the day — a natural Arcadia reimagined by Microsoft. Other young architects in the show seem equally absorbed by the collision of man and nature. In a small house by the 41-year-old Eduardo Arroyo set into a steep hillside outside Madrid, some of the forms cantilever like heavy branches and split apart to fit between existing trees. A museum in Santander by Emilio Tuñón and Luis M. Mansilla, a more established firm, is composed of repetitive cell-like forms. Its jagged roof echoes the silhouette of surrounding mountains and funnels light down into the galleries. One of the loveliest surprises in 'On Site' is a design for a spa and hotel complex in Gijón, a small former mining town in the north. The architects, Francisco Leiva Ivorra, 33, and Marta García, 31, are the youngest in the show, and the influence of older architects like Alvaro Siza and Ms. Hadid is obvious. Yet the project has an intuitive feel for both its physical surroundings and the scale of the human body. Mr. Ivorra has compared the complex, at one end of a public beach, to a salamander curled up in the sun. Its smooth form also evokes a stone that has been polished by the movements of the sea. Pedestrians will be able to proceed from the city's boardwalk to a walkway along the building's roof that ends with a stunning view of the historic city center. Below, water flows through a narrow channel from the sea to a central pool. The roof is pierced by a series of slots, allowing light to reflect off secondary pools and onto the building's underbelly. You sense a balance of conflicting urges toward solitude and engagement with the outside world, the longing for public interaction and for sensual intimacy. There are no wasted gestures, none of the clamoring for visual attention that infects so much contemporary architecture. Mr. Ivorra and Ms. García are too young to remember the era of Franco, who died in 1975; their design has a lightness of touch free of dark memories. It makes clear that the political boundaries that long separated Spain from the rest of the world have utterly melted away. The question, of course, is how long this creative bloom will endure. Such explosions of creativity, no matter how intense, naturally fade after time. And there are already signs that Spain is becoming more like everyplace else, collecting international talents the way Roman popes once collected artists. What's fascinating about Spanish cities is how fertile they have proven as training ground for brilliant architectural talents of their own. MoMA's exhibition demonstrates that such nurturing continues. This — and only this — makes the show feel fresh and worthwhile.

Subject: Vivid Back Story for a Stella Legend From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:27:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/arts/design/10stel.html?ex=1297227600&en=70d98a9c4b630597&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 A Vivid Back Story for a Stella Legend By ROBERTA SMITH Cambridge, Mass. EVERY art form cultivates its creation myths. Rock 'n' roll has Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. The modern novel has 'Ulysses' and its 18th-century precedent, 'Tristram Shandy.' Late-night television has Jack Parr and Ernie Kovacs. Underground comics have R. Crumb. Postwar American painting has Jackson Pollock's drips, Jasper Johns's flags, Andy Warhol's Elvises and Frank Stella's Black Paintings, all of which emerged in New York in stunning succession from the late 1940's to the early 60's. At the moment, the brooding, darkly titled Black Paintings that Mr. Stella made mostly in 1959, when he was only 23, may ring the least bells. They have probably never been less a force in contemporary painting or public consciousness than now. The status of the Black Paintings could improve with 'Frank Stella 1958,' a small, fast-moving (if bumpy) and rather obsessive exhibition organized by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and Megan R. Luke, a doctoral candidate in art history at Harvard. The exhibition at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery focuses on 21 of the 34 surviving paintings, drawings and reliefs that Mr. Stella made in 1958. These works lead directly to the imposing Black Paintings, in which slightly carpetlike designs result from radiating patterns of nesting black bands on white canvas. When the year began, he was starting his last semester as an undergraduate at Princeton. After graduating, he embarked on what could be called his first semester in New York, living in cheap storefronts and lofts on the Lower East Side and in the neighborhood now called SoHo and supporting himself as a house painter. Accompanied by an ostentatiously detailed catalog, these works have been glimpsed in previous Stella shows and books, but never examined as a group. Despite an insensitive hanging in an ugly gallery that is too small for them, they make a strong, even stirring impression. Their brushy fields of unruled stripes and blocks show a young artist cognizant of but hardly paralyzed by the innovations of the Abstract Expressionists and scrambling to assimilate the influence of Mr. Johns. Mr. Stella saw Mr. Johns's flag paintings for the first time in the older artist's debut, at the Leo Castelli Gallery in January 1958, and quickly made them the foundation of a stripe-based vocabulary. The show itself is built on the premise that behind every creation myth lies a messier, more colorful story of trial, error and triumph. In this case the back story may actually be more emblematic of the artist than the presumed masterpieces that followed. In other words, the show could actually leave the relatively low profile of the Black Paintings intact, suggesting the superfluity of art history and its designated landmarks to both the public and practicing artists. (It should be said that Mr. Cooper's and especially Ms. Luke's highly specialized essays don't help matters.) For a while, those masterpieces, the Black Paintings, put Mr. Stella squarely on the art-historical map. In December 1959, four of them were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, which promptly bought the largest, 'The Marriage of Reason and Squalor.' By September, Mr. Stella was showing his next series — the aluminum-striped shaped paintings — at the Leo Castelli Gallery. For the next decade and a half he reigned supreme as America's leading Abstract painter. The Black Paintings may also lag in prominence because Mr. Stella failed to fulfill some of the basic requirements of icon status. Unlike Mr. Johns's and Warhol's best-known efforts, the Black Paintings did not help ignite Pop Art and a new form of representation that artists continue to expand upon. Their resolutely abstract demeanor, based on a narrowly defined notion of formalist painting, is more an end than a beginning. And unlike Pollock, who died in a car crash at the age of 44, Mr. Stella has stayed alive and productive. He'll be 70 in May, and for the last quarter century has been churning out bulky colorful reliefs and even bulkier aluminum sculptures that have been increasingly viewed by many as inherently corporate. 'Frank Stella 1958' suggests, completely inadvertently, that the obscurity of the Black Paintings may be partly their own fault. They and Mr. Stella's subsequent striped shaped paintings are the most implacable and withholding of his production and, in many ways, the least characteristic of his sensibility. They are handsome works of great historical weight, but they don't seem to have held the artist's interest for very long, so why should they hold ours? All the more reason to examine what came before the Black Paintings, to better fathom what followed them. The show is an engaging combination of student work, precocious failures and robustly promising efforts. There are even two small wood assemblages, reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg, that hint at Mr. Stella's later reliefs. On hand are the first three of the Black Paintings, probably made toward the end of 1958. The most successful of these, 'Morro Castle,' exemplifies most closely the series as a whole, with its dark field flattened and radiating patterns. The worst, 'Criss-Cross,' is a murky swatch of perpendicular black stripes that some artists might have destroyed as a first, clumsy try. There are well-known works, like 'Astoria,' whose uninterrupted field of heavily reworked horizontal bands in ochre, with hints of green showing through, presage the Black Paintings' regimented patterns, but with more feeling. And there are works that seem barely started, like the intimations of vertical stripes, a brushy grid and a thick horizontal band in black on blue, with lots of bare canvas showing through, in an unfamiliar untitled work. Also unfamiliar, if more together, is 'Tundra,' whose broad bands of grays and blues have the softness of a stained painting by Helen Frankenthaler, and whose central windowlike motif of vertical lines evokes assorted American painters, including Georgia O'Keeffe, Adolph Gottlieb and Robert Motherwell. But the most engaging works are several in which the bands are defined in sourly contrasting hues of house paint (left over from the day job) and interrupted or countered by squares or doorlike rectangles. A strong example is the narrow red rectangle, carefully off-center, of 'Red River Valley,' which lords it over a pale green ground and a stack of green and black stripes like a giant beam of light or a bloody plinth. These works are muscularly painted and reworked in a way that is searching and sometimes tentative, but also outgoing and apparent to the eye. (The process was partly inspired by the complex collage-encaustic surfaces of the Johns flags.) In 'West Broadway,' for example, the edges of the alternating red and black bands are continually shifting creating a marked optical buzz. In 'Coney Island' there is more of a standoff, with little hints of white showing between yellow and red stripes, while a central, blue-violet square jazzes up their contrast. And in 'Grape Island,' the most economical work, a solid umber ground burns through all other additions, both the cryptic bands of bright yellow and a cursory central square of green. It is worth noting that while making these paintings, Mr. Stella was very interested in the formalist thinking of the art critic Clement Greenberg, whose theory of modernism had it that art mediums were being reduced to their essences. According to this suicidal program, painting's future lay in flat, rectangular, monochromatic canvases devoid of images and spatial illusion. Mr. Stella came closest to that future in the Black Paintings, but Greenberg did not endorse them. By the mid-1960's, his stripe vocabulary exhausted, he moved on to more complex, colorful, robustly worked and increasingly three-dimensional works. You could say that he accepted flatness as a given and built out from there. But in many ways he was returning to the colors and textures of the best paintings from 1958, and perhaps to a larger, truer part of himself.

Subject: Entry in the Big-Pickup Wars From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 06:25:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/automobiles/10tundra.html?ex=1297227600&en=07dcca0da0a2e067&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 Toyota Introduces Its Entry in the Big-Pickup Wars By MICHELINE MAYNARD CHICAGO — Toyota has been building pickup trucks in Japan for 70 years and has sold them in the United States since 1964. But none have been more important than the one it introduced here Thursday, either to Toyota or to Detroit. The new Tundra pickup, introduced at the Chicago Auto Show, is the first Toyota offering of a truck as large and powerful as vehicles from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. This Tundra, the successor to the smaller model in Toyota's lineup since 1999, does not go on sale until a year from now. But its introduction threatens the beginning of the end of Detroit's unquestioned dominance of the pickup truck market. 'It's the last bastion of American vehicles,' said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata, an industry statistics firm in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. And this Tundra fills a big hole in Toyota's lineup. Its success is considered critical if Toyota, which held 13.2 percent of the United States market last year and fourth place, is to pass Chrysler for the No. 3 spot behind Ford and ultimately unseat G.M. as the world's biggest carmaker. James Press, chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales USA, said, 'This is the most important product introduction we've ever had.' He was almost trampled by journalists surging toward the bright blue Tundra when the news conference was over. Mr. Press asserted that the new Tundra is as vital to Toyota as Camry, which has been the best-selling family car in the United States for the last five years; Lexus, the country's top-selling luxury line; and Scion, a three-year-old brand of cars popular with hip young consumers. Or, as Mr. Press put it, 'It's a new world of full-sized pickup trucks.' But Detroit is not about to be trampled by Toyota. The pickup truck market has some of the most fiercely loyal buyers in the industry, who tend to pick a brand and stick with it for life. And the Detroit companies, who sell four of every five pickups in the United States, are determined to hang on to those customers. On the floor of the Chicago Auto Show this week, Ford lined up seven F-series pickup trucks — in red, white and blue — with their formidable front ends pointed directly at Toyota's display. General Motors, meanwhile, is to introduce a barrage of pickups later this year that are expected to be crucial in stemming the company's billion-dollar losses and beginning its turnaround effort. On Thursday, Chrysler's chief executive, Thomas W. LaSorda, whose company sold 400,000 Dodge Ram pickups last year, paid tribute to Toyota, calling it 'a force to be reckoned with.' Given Toyota's position as the world's richest auto company, Tundra's arrival strikes fear in Detroit's heart, he said. But Mr. LaSorda went on: 'Just because we're fearful doesn't mean we're scared. We have a great brand in Dodge and a great brand in Hemi,' the company's powerful V-8 engine. Indeed, Detroit's dominance in the pickup truck market, which reached nearly three million vehicles last year, is a reason Toyota is emphasizing the American origins of its truck. Tundra, which will be built at a new $800 million plant in San Antonio, was designed in California, with much of the engineering work performed at the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor, Mich. It is the biggest project that its American staff has tackled. Mr. Pinelli predicts that Toyota will easily achieve its goal of selling 200,000 Tundras a year — and probably more. Given how well Camry, Lexus and Scion have performed, 'Toyota has the recipe for success,' Mr. Pinelli said. But this has taken a long time to prepare, even for a company known for being deliberate. Although it has sold small trucks here for more than four decades, it took until the early 1990's for Toyota to get serious about a big pickup truck. A major reason was that Congress, in a burst of 1980's protectionism, imposed tariffs on imported trucks, making Japanese models more expensive in relation to Detroit products. Another was that Americans were moving away from the cars on which Toyota cut its teeth, and the company was determined to follow its customers. Toyota's fledgling big-truck effort was the Japanese-built T-100, which now seems almost petite next to its latest truck, and it embarrassingly lagged behind Detroit pickups in engine power and hauling ability. By 1999, though, Toyota had introduced the original Tundra at its first American truck plant in Princeton, Ind. With this truck, Toyota has started over. Beginning in 2002, its engineers began interviewing every manner of truck owner — ranchers in Montana, construction company owners in Atlanta and business proprietors in Houston, among others — to be sure it understood their needs in a big pickup truck. A basic requirement was performance. While some people buy pickups as car substitutes, the most serious customers use them for work. So Tundra will be capable of towing more than 10,000 pounds, and will come equipped with a 5.7-liter V-8 engine, which Toyota will build at its engine plant in Huntsville, Ala. It will also have a new six-speed automatic transmission and be available in three body styles. These are all features that allow the Tundra to go toe-to-toe with Detroit's big pickups. Toyota engineers also learned that pickup trucks can be the equivalent of mobile offices. So this Tundra is compatible with Bluetooth technology, a feature found on Lexus models. Inside, there are connection ports for electronic devices as well as a big storage console between the front seats that can hold hanging files and a laptop. Toyota's initial sales goal is 200,000 a year, up from about 140,000 now. That is just one-fourth the number of F-series trucks sold by Ford. But Toyota is known for its stealth expansions: this week, it added 50,000 small sport utility vehicles to the 100,000 a year it originally planned to produce at a factory still under construction in Ontario. And some Toyota officials have said that to seriously challenge G.M. and Ford, the company has to sell at least half a million pickups a year — something Mr. Press said is well beyond its ability, at least for now. Beyond sales potential, Toyota has to hit other marks with this truck, said Yuichiro Obu, the chief engineer who led development in Ann Arbor. Along with meeting truck owners' needs, the truck must satisfy even more finicky Toyota owners, who will initially be the target customers for the Tundra, Mr. Obu said in an interview at the technical center this week. It has to meet their expectations for quality, reliability and comfort, attributes that equal 'Toyota-ness,' he said. The company may also face factors beyond its control, like competitors who will not hesitate to use rebates to take sales away. G.M. and Ford are giving an average $4,000 a vehicle in rebates on their trucks, while Toyota is offering about half that on the current Tundra, according to statistics from Autodata. High gasoline prices could also be a problem. Sales of big S.U.V.'s fell 25 percent in 2005, as buyers chose more efficient vehicles. But Mr. Pinelli and Toyota executives said they were not as concerned about the effect of fuel prices on sales of pickups because so many were purchased for business purposes. There is always the risk that Americans will resist a big Japanese pickup truck, an issue faced by Nissan, which introduced the Titan in 2003. It hoped to sell 100,000 a year, but sold only 86,000 last year. Toyota's dealers are eager for Tundra. 'This is a franchise within a franchise,' said Patrick Donohue, a dealer in West Allis, Wis. Mr. Donohue said he would use the year before the truck's arrival to expand his service department — the new Tundra will require repair bays 14.5 feet long instead of the usual 12 feet. Even so, he said, 'We'd like to sell them today.'

Subject: Tax Cuts Without Representation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 05:37:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ February 10, 2006 Paul Krugman has questions for the editors of the Wall Street Journal. By Mark Thoma Krugman's Money Talks: Tax Cuts Without Representation, Commentary, NY Times: Readers respond to Paul Krugman's Feb. 10 column, 'The Vanishing Future' ... B. Moss, New York: Here are two excerpts from recent Wall Street Journal edit pages that go to the heart of Bush supporters' thinking: “The latest chapter of this story the Reagan Revolution is the 2003 income and investment tax cuts enacted by the current President Bush. As in 1981, opponents insisted those tax cuts would harm the economy by increasing the deficit and driving up interest rates. But in the two and a half years since those tax cuts passed, the economy and tax revenues have both surged.” [In a separate editorial] “… since the investment tax cuts of 2003 were one of the triggers for the surge in asset values, business investment, and job growth, extending the 15 capital gains and dividend tax rates should be Congress's first order of business. Opponents of those lower rates will moan about the deficit, but the truth is that those tax rates corresponded with a record $284 billion increase in tax revenues in Fiscal Year 2005 and a $100 billion decline in the budget deficit.” What is your answer to this line of reasoning? Paul Krugman: I thought it might be worth saying something about the Wall Street Journal-type argument that, since the economy grew after the 2003 tax cut, tax cuts are vindicated, and should be made permanent. First point: if we give tax cuts credit for whatever happens to the economy in the next two years, what can we say about the 2001 tax cut? Employment actually dropped over the two years following that cut. So I guess we should say that the 2001 cut was bad for the economy, and should be allowed to expire — maybe even cancelled ahead of time. Right? Hello, WSJ, where are you? Bear in mind that the 2001 cut was the big one; most of the extra cost from extending the cuts comes from the 2001 legislation, not the 2003 legislation. So using growth after 2003 to argue for making the tax cuts permanent, when most of the cost of doing that comes from a tax cut that clearly did little for the economy, is a form of bait-and-switch. But seriously: yes, the economy grew after 2003. The overwhelming source of that growth was the housing boom — which had nothing to do with either the 2001 tax cut or the 2003 tax cut. More generally, sometimes it may make sense to cut taxes to boost the economy when it's depressed. But you have to pay for that by raising taxes or cutting spending when the economy is doing well. Otherwise, you're perpetually running up government debt, and eventually there will be a fiscal crisis. And the Bushies have apparently calculated that as long as that crisis is on someone else's watch, they don't care.

Subject: Sendak and Kushner From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 10:13:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/28/books/28SEND.html?ex=1382677200&en=90f986fe96a71783&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND October 28, 2003 Sendak and Kushner Let Humor Get Through By MEL GUSSOW Maurice Sendak and Tony Kushner are friends and collaborators. Together they created 'Brundibar,' a picture book based on the opera performed in the 1940's by children in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, and they have designed and translated a new version of the opera. And both have cameo roles in Mike Nichols's mini-series of Mr. Kushner's play 'Angels in America.' During an interview in his home in Ridgefield, Conn., Mr. Sendak held up a photograph from that mini-series, which is to be shown on HBO in December. Three bearded rabbis are standing in a cemetery. Peering closely, one can pierce the disguise and identify Mr. Kushner and Mr. Sendak as two of them. But who is the third? Between repeated takes of one scene, the third rabbi relentlessly ridiculed Mr. Sendak, calling him Mr. Kiddie Book King and spritzing him in the face with water from a plastic bottle. As Mr. Sendak recalled, he rose in anger saying: 'What is eating you? Leave me alone!' But the harassment continued. Finally the scene was completed. Mr. Sendak then reminded Mr. Kushner of his promise that he could talk to Meryl Streep, one of the movie's stars. 'You've just been talking to her for an hour and a half,' Mr. Kushner said, pointing to the third rabbi. If Ms. Streep could pass the Sendak test — and she did — she could play the rabbi in addition to her other roles. Such merriment is endemic to the Sendak-Kushner connection. Friends for a decade, they share an ironic sense of humor and a fierce imagination. 'Tony is an uncanny man,' Mr. Sendak said, 'and he knows what a collaboration is.' Mr. Kushner returns the compliment. In his new book, 'The Art of Maurice Sendak: 1980 to Present,' a lavish, perceptive celebration of the artist's work that is being published in December by Harry N. Abrams, he says that he has been a devoted Sendak fan since he was 4. Mr. Kushner is 47, Mr. Sendak 75. On Nov. 2 they are to appear at the 92nd Street Y to discuss 'Brundibar,' with a chorus singing excerpts from the opera. Their version was staged at the Chicago Opera this year, but has not been to New York. For Mr. Sendak the book 'Brundibar' may be, he said, his magnum opus, honoring an act of great moral courage and also a compendium of symbols and sensibilities that have defined the artist's life and work. The opera was written in 1938 and had 55 performances at the Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. Most of the children in its casts died in Auschwitz, as did the composer, Hans Krasa. The story is about good triumphing over evil, represented by Brundibar, a fearsome organ grinder. In an early version of the book, Brundibar looked like Hitler. Now he is less specific, but in spirit, 'he has to be Hitler,' Mr. Sendak said, adding: 'One of the most astonishing things is that the Nazis let that opera go on. I think that even they felt that a dramatic work had to have a villain.' In the book two small children in Prague try to get milk for their sick mother, traveling streets full of Sendak figures: a baker who is a double for Oliver Hardy, a goat that looks like Zlateh (in the I. B. Singer story). Eventually the children find the money to buy milk and rescue their mother, and Brundibar is driven from the city because 'the wicked never win.' Mr. Kushner said recently, 'It's the story of a bully defeated by collective action.' But the villain has the last word: 'Though I go, I won't go far . . . I'll be back.' Mr. Kushner said of his friend: 'He's always wrestling with questions of how to present the world to children as it is without violating the prescriptions that need to be left inviolate. He's always pushing right up to the edge, which I think is where most great children's literature and art for children come from. These children who were murdered by the Nazis have haunted him. Because it's Sendak, there's a potency to those images that will sink deep into the souls and minds of the kids who look at those pictures. It preserves the safety of childhood at the same time it begins to introduce the fact of evil.' Mr. Sendak said of 'Brundibar': 'It sort of rounds out my life. It started with those dark stories of children, and here I am. A big big circle was made here, because I was so bitter and unforgiving.' He was speaking of Nazism. 'Everything is from childhood,' he said. 'I think Freud said that there is a shut-off point that allows us to forget infancy. That would be such a frightening memory. We have amnesia. I feel mine didn't work.' His favorite show on cable television is a reality series in which babies are born on camera, and he said he was looking forward to a new cable show about autopsies. 'It's all I want to see, either the birth or the death,' he said. As Mr. Kushner said, 'He has a fantastic ability to be astonished,' although at the same time, 'the worst is always anticipated.' Or as Mr. Sendak put it, 'I am plankton.' He explained, 'We're all so busy rushing to do our thing, and Moby-Dick is just waiting to swallow us.' He has long been afflicted by depression, and eventually he began therapy. Speaking of himself, he said: 'You didn't go to college. You didn't go to art school. But you had to go to therapy. I chose the easiest one. And I couldn't be graded.' His doctor recommended a book about an autistic child named Kenneth, and in 1956, shortly thereafter, Mr. Sendak wrote 'Kenny's Window,' the first book in which he did both the text and the illustrations. Since then there has been an outpouring of books, often fantastical tales in which children live their dreams and nightmares. When I told Mr. Sendak that my son grew up on his work, he responded: 'Is he all right? Is he in therapy?' Mr. Sendak offered a rare observation about the themes in his books. 'They're all pointing titles,' he said, and offered three: 'Outside Over There,' 'In the Night Kitchen' and 'Where the Wild Things Are.' 'It's like looking for a place to go or finding a place to be.' Images and motifs recur in his books: windows, the moon, food, especially milk. 'Eggs, butter and milk — that's my dream combination, all of which I shouldn't eat,' he said. 'Milk is the essence. It has been an obsession all my life. The very word, milk. In Czech when they're singing on stage in `Brundibar' they sing `mleko, mleko.' It's perfect.' For the last two years, while working on 'Brundibar,' he has also been writing a book inspired by Shakespeare's 'Winter's Tale,' a fairy tale of redemption and return to life, which is, he said, 'the best children's story every told.' An insomniac, he often works until 2 or 3 a.m. while listening to music, then reads 'The Iliad,' usually four pages, before he tries to sleep. But his favorite reading is Melville, an enthusiasm shared with Mr. Kushner. He has a complete collection of signed first editions of Melville, and he has tried every way 'to sham myself into Herman's life.' Among his other treasures are Beatrix Potter's walking stick, the last photograph that Lewis Carroll took of Alice Liddell and two letters from Mozart, one in which Mozart admonishes his father for always treating him like a child. The artist has an affinity for dogs and for children. 'Having a child is almost as serious as having a German shepherd. A German shepherd will listen to Mahler with you all evening whether he likes Mahler or not, and then he goes for a walk with you and he gives you a lick before he goes to bed. Children are too hard, and you have to be gifted in rearing them in such a way that you are worthy of the charge.' Once he visited a 10-year-old girl who was dying of cancer. 'Where the Wild Things Are' was on her hospital bed. He asked if she wanted him to sign it for her. In classic Sendakese, she said, 'I don't care.' The girl's mother was embarrassed by her daughter's rudeness, but Mr. Sendak began to draw a picture in the book. The girl watched in fascination. 'We're having such a good time,' he said. 'How could she be dying? As we amused each other, I saw that the mother was crying, and the little girl reached around me and held her mother's hand, tight. She was taking care of her mother. And so she knew everything.' He paused and said, 'And that's what I think the Brundibar children knew. As human creatures, we're never as alert and as sensitive as we are when we are children. We can't allow ourselves to be.'

Subject: Child's Opera According to Sendak From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 10:07:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/arts/music/10send.html?ex=1297227600&en=cd4c828b947b3d83&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 Child's Opera According to Sendak: Send In the Bullies and Milk By CHARLES McGRATH If the life of Maurice Sendak were a Maurice Sendak picture book, it would open with a busy two-page spread, done in the dark, crosshatched style he has sometimes used, of a sickly, unhappy Brooklyn childhood: brooding parents, a World War II recruiting poster, a scary image of Hitler and, over in the corner, a pair of burglars scuttling away with the Lindbergh baby — an image that haunted Mr. Sendak in his early years. In Disney style, which the very young Sendak used to imitate, the kidnappers wear great big shoes with little white squares to indicate a shine. Next, there's a scene celebrating Mr. Sendak's meeting with Ursula Nordstrom, the legendary children's book editor, shown here lighting a fuse on a black-barreled circus cannon that launches a surprised-looking Sendak figure right across the page and over onto the next spread, where he turns into an acclaimed author and illustrator of children's books. A full page portrays a smiling, wolf-suited Max, from 'Where the Wild Things Are,' holding a bulging green sack emblazoned with a dollar sign. ('Max is like my demented son,' Mr. Sendak has said, 'and he's taking care of his father for life.') Flipping faster now, past pages showing a busy Sendak figure building opera sets, holding imaginary conversations with his heroes Melville and Mozart, we come to a quiet, leafy spread depicting the artist, now white-haired and carrying a cane, walking in the country with an enormous German shepherd while, off in the distance, some hairy monsters or wild things scurry down the road, past a sign pointing to New York in one direction, Connecticut in the other. For more than 30 years, Mr. Sendak, 77, has lived on the Connecticut side of that divide, in a putty-colored, black-shuttered house on a back road that is only half-paved. He moved there for his health, to get away from the stress of New York, he said recently, while sitting in a red barn on his property that he sometimes uses as a studio. 'In the movies, everyone used to move to Connecticut,' he said. 'That's where you went when you made it. Connecticut is where Katharine Hepburn lives in 'Bringing Up Baby,' ' and, he added, it's also where Franchot Tone takes Bette Davis to cure her of alcoholism in 'Dangerous.' Mr. Sendak still keeps an apartment in New York, but he visits the city less and less, and no longer goes to the opera, which used to be one of his passions. 'The worst thing is that I even missed the van Gogh show,' he said. 'That was a sin. But I have to say I just don't miss the city. Maybe that's a sign of the family illness — I don't know.' At the end of their lives, he explained, both his brother and sister displayed hermitlike tendencies. These days, Mr. Sendak works, reads, listens to music and takes long walks with Herman (named after Melville), the large and handsome German shepherd. Perhaps the most autobiographical of children's book authors, although he has no children of his own — the one who has kept in closest touch not only with his inner child but also with that child's deepest fears and anxieties — he has reached at last what appears to be a point of acceptance and equilibrium. This is occasioned partly by his current project: a restaging of the Czech children's opera 'Brundibar,' with an English libretto by Tony Kushner, which begins performances tonight as part of a double bill, with a Sendak-Kushner version of Bohuslav Martinu's 1937 antiwar opera, 'Comedy on the Bridge,' at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven. After closing in early March it will come to the New Victory Theater in New York, where it begins performances on April 28 and runs through May 21. This production is based on Mr. Sendak's 2003 picture book of the same name, written with Mr. Kushner, which in turn was inspired by the original opera, by Hans Krasa, with a libretto by Adolf Hoffmeister, which was first performed in 1942 at a Jewish orphanage in Prague. The score, jazzy, haunting and a little advanced for its time, combines elements of Debussy, Ravel, Berg and Gershwin, and the story is simple and affirmative: two children, Aninku and Pepicek, caring for their ailing mother, are told by the doctor that she must have milk if she is to recover. They go into town and while trying to raise some money by singing together, are chased away by a nasty hurdy-gurdy grinder named Brundibar (which means 'bumblebee' in Czech). After being joined by other children and some talking animals, though, Aninku and Pepicek prevail in true operatic fashion: they raise a bucketful of cash, drive Brundibar out of town and return home with the precious, life-sustaining milk. What gives the opera additional poignancy is that shortly before the first performance, Krasa, a Jew, was arrested and sent in an early transport to Theresienstadt, the 'model camp' that was in fact a way station for Auschwitz. Under Krasa's direction, 'Brundibar' was subsequently performed 55 times at Theresienstadt, with a cast of imprisoned children, for an audience that sometimes consisted of visitors sent by the Nazis, trying to demonstrate how humane they were. 'Think of it,' Mr. Sendak said. 'There was this bunch of children, and after every performance a part of the cast was sent off to Auschwitz, and then the next group of kids took over.' When he first heard about 'Brundibar,' he added, he felt the dead crowding around him — especially the Sendaks who didn't make it to this country, as his parents had, and instead disappeared in Poland. At the same time, he knew the story was the perfect subject for him: 'This is an opera about children and how the hell do they survive.' 'The Holocaust has run like a river of blood through all my books,' Mr. Sendak said. 'Anything I did had to deal with that — with my family, the ruination of my childhood, the humiliation of being a victim.' He explained that even his family's survival was a source of guilt, because his father had come to this country in pursuit of a woman and had met his mother only after learning that the other woman was already married. During the war, he recalled, when his brother was missing in action for a while, and worse and worse news trickled in from Eastern Europe, 'my house was a cemetery, with my mother pulling her hair, and my father staring at the floor.' And to this day, he added with a smile, he feels deprived whenever he watches 'Antiques Roadshow.' 'There's always a family, and they find all this stuff in the attic: 'Oh, I never knew Winslow Homer was so important!' I have nothing of my family's. When a friend of mine went to visit my father's town, he was told: 'The Jews never lived here.' ' ' 'Brundibar' became for me the epitome of all this loss,' Mr. Sendak went on. 'I wanted to stop dwelling on it, the way I used to dwell on the Lindbergh case. I felt that if I could just do 'Brundibar' right, then maybe this would be the end of the fever.' In Mr. Sendak's case, getting 'Brundibar' right has meant adding some refining touches. On the penultimate page of the book, for example, when the children return home to their mother, attentive readers will notice a crucifix on the wall — meant to indicate that Aninku and Pepicek aren't necessarily Jewish, and that the menace represented by Brundibar applies to everyone. 'My whole thought was they're two kids in the wrong place at the wrong time,' Mr. Sendak said. 'My point was to come to grips with the nature of that threat.' And in Mr. Sendak's version, unlike the original, which ends on a note of triumph and hopefulness, Brundibar literally gets the last word. On the book's last page, on top of an invitation to the Theresienstadt production, he has scribbled a handwritten note that says: 'They believe they've won the fight, they believe I'm gone — not quite! .... Though I go, I won't go far — I'll be back.' The Sendak-Kushner version of the opera has been staged twice before — in Chicago in 2003 and in Berkeley, Calif., last year — but Mr. Sendak believes that the Yale production, which is similar to the Berkeley version, is the best. The director of both, Tony Taccone, grasped the idea of the children's book right away, Mr. Sendak said, and the designer Kris Stone had been tremendously helpful in rejiggering the set to fit the peculiarities of the Yale theater. 'She's a gift from God,' he said, 'and I don't even believe in God.' This production is 'harder' and 'more real,' he added — partly because this time Brundibar makes an appearance at the very end and interrupts the final chorus to sing his ominous postscript: 'Nothing ever works out neatly — bullies don't disappear completely.' Hardly cheerful stuff, and yet Mr. Sendak suggested that he was content, at least for the time being. 'I'm less hysterical, less bullied by demons,' he said. 'I understand now that it isn't a question of whether I'm going to die, but when.' As the afternoon wore on, he reminisced about some good angels in his life: his brother and sister, who encouraged him to read, to draw, to listen to music; an art teacher named John Groth, who figured out that the way to reach the young Sendak was to give him assignments like painting the rape scene in 'Streetcar Named Desire' in the style of Goya; Ursula Nordstrom, his muse, as he called her; and Leonard Weisgard, a children's book writer of the 1940's and 50's, who gave him his first assignment; and Mr. Kushner. 'We talk to each other, we yell at each other, we love each other,' he said. 'It's what friendship is supposed to be.' Mr. Sendak has recently rediscovered Henry James, he said, and was eagerly studying his books about children, especially 'The Awkward Age' and 'What Maisie Knew.' 'There's so much going on there,' he explained. 'A sensuality, a richness, a deep undercurrent.' And after not working on children's books for a while, he is working on a new one, or rather an old one that he had abandoned in the mid-90's because back then it had seemed too 'light.' He has also just finished his first pop-up book, 'Mommy?,' with a text by Arthur Yorinks, for release this fall. In 1970 Mr. Sendak created a famous stir when he portrayed a completely naked boy in 'In the Night Kitchen,' and now he joked for a minute about how hard it was to do the separate little drawings for the pop-up parts. 'You know, the sleeve, the penis,' he said, smiling, and then he added, 'There really isn't a penis, but I'll do a pop-up penis someday. The penis has to have its time.'

Subject: Mecca Meeting From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 09:57:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/middleeast/09cartoon.html?ex=1297141200&en=ab6eaba3f6ffd40b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized By HASSAN M. FATTAH BEIRUT, Lebanon — As leaders of the world's 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad. The closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed 'concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries' as well as over 'using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions.' The meeting in Mecca, a Saudi city from which non-Muslims are barred, drew minimal international press coverage even though such leaders as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran were in attendance. But on the road from quiet outrage in a small Muslim community in northern Europe to a set of international brush fires, the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — and the role its member governments played in the outrage — was something of a turning point. After that meeting, anger at the Danish caricatures, especially at an official government level, became more public. In some countries, like Syria and Iran, that meant heavy press coverage in official news media and virtual government approval of demonstrations that ended with Danish embassies in flames. In recent days, some governments in Muslim countries have tried to calm the rage, worried by the increasing level of violence and deaths in some cases. But the pressure began building as early as October, when Danish Islamists were lobbying Arab ambassadors and Arab ambassadors lobbied Arab governments. 'It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it,' said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam. He said the demonstrations 'started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' ' The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam. At first, the agitation was limited to Denmark. Ahmed Akkari, 28, a Lebanese-born Dane, acts as spokesman for the European Committee for Honoring the Prophet, an umbrella group of 27 Danish Muslim organizations to press the Danish government into action over the cartoons. Mr. Akkari said the group had worked for more than two months in Denmark without eliciting any response. 'We collected 17,000 signatures and delivered them to the office of the prime minister, we saw the minister of culture, we talked to the editor of the Jyllands-Posten, we took many steps within Denmark, but could get no action,' Mr. Akkari said, referring to the newspaper that published the cartoons. He added that the prime minister's office had not even responded to the petition. Frustrated, he said, the group turned to the ambassadors of Muslim countries in Denmark and asked them to speak to the prime minister on their behalf. He refused them too. 'Then the case moved to a new stage,' Mr. Akkari recalled. 'We decided then that to be heard, it must come from influential people in the Muslim world.' The group put together a 43-page dossier, including the offending cartoons and three more shocking images that had been sent to Danish Muslims who had spoken out against the Jyllands-Posten cartoons. Mr. Akkari denied that the three other offending images had contributed to the violent reaction, saying the images, received in the mail by Muslims who had complained about the cartoons, were included to show the response that Muslims got when they spoke out in Denmark. In early December, the group's first delegation of Danish Muslims flew to Cairo, where they met with the grand mufti, Muhammad Sayid Tantawy, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League. 'After that, there was a certain response,' Mr. Akkari said, adding that the Cairo government and the Arab League both summoned the Danish ambassador to Egypt for talks. Mr. Akkari denies that the group had meant to misinform, but concedes that there were misunderstandings along the way. In Cairo, for example, the group also met with journalists from Egypt's media. During a news conference, they spoke about a proposal from the far-right Danish People's Party to ban the Koran in Denmark because of some 200 verses that are alleged to encourage violence. Several newspapers then ran articles claiming that Denmark planned to issue a censored version of the Koran. The delegation returned to Denmark, but the dossier continued to make waves in the Middle East. Egypt's foreign minister had taken the dossier with him to the Mecca meeting, where he showed it around. The Danish group also sent a second delegation to Lebanon to meet religious and political leaders there. Mr. Akkari went on that trip. The delegation met with the grand mufti in Lebanon, Muhammad Rashid Kabbani, and the spiritual head of Lebanon's Shiite Muslims, Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, as well as the patriarch of the Maronite Church, Nasrallah Sfeir. The group also appeared on Hezbollah's satellite station Al Manar TV, which is seen throughout the Arab world. Mr. Akkari also made a side trip to Damascus, Syria, to deliver a copy of the dossier to that country's grand mufti, Sheik Ahmed Badr-Eddine Hassoun. Lebanon's foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, says he agreed to meet in mid-December with Egypt's ambassador to Lebanon, who presented him with a letter from his foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, urging him to get involved in the issue. Attached to the letter were copies of some of the drawings. At the end of December, the pace picked up as talk of a boycott became more prominent. The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, comprising more than 50 states, published on its Web site a statement condemning 'the aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its Prophet' by Jyllands-Posten, and officials of the organization said member nations should impose a boycott on Denmark until an apology was offered for the drawings. 'We encourage the organization's members to boycott Denmark both economically and politically until Denmark presents an official apology for the drawings that have offended the world's Muslims,' said Abdulaziz Othman al-Twaijri, the organization's secretary general. In a few weeks, the Jordanian Parliament condemned the cartoons, as had several other Arab governments. On Jan. 10, as anti-Danish pressure built, a Norwegian newspaper republished the caricatures in an act of solidarity with the Danes, leading many Muslims to believe that a real campaign against them had begun. On Jan. 26, in a key move, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark, and Libya followed suit. Saudi clerics began sounding the call for a boycott, and within a day, most Danish products were pulled off supermarket shelves. 'The Saudis did this because they have to score against Islamic fundamentalists,' said Mr. Said, the Cairo political scientist. 'Syria made an even worse miscalculation,' he added, alluding to the sense that the protest had gotten out of hand. The issue of the cartoons came at a critical time in the Muslim world because of Muslim anger over the occupation of Iraq and a sense that Muslims were under siege. Strong showings by Islamists in elections in Egypt and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections had given new momentum to Islamic movements in the region, and many economies, especially those in the Persian Gulf, realized their economic power as it pertained to Denmark. 'The cartoons were a fuse that lit a bigger fire,' said Rami Khouri, editor at large at the English-language Daily Star of Beirut. 'It is this deepening sense of vulnerability combines with a sense that the Islamists were on a roll that made it happen.' The wave swept many in the region. Sheik Muhammad Abu Zaid, an imam from the Lebanese town of Saida, said he began hearing of the caricatures from several Palestinian friends visiting from Denmark in December but made little of it. 'For me, honestly, this didn't seem so important,' Sheik Abu Zaid said, comparing the drawings to those made of Jesus in Christian countries. 'I thought, I know that this is something typical in such countries.' Then, he started to hear that ambassadors of Arab countries had tried to meet with the prime minister of Denmark and had been snubbed, and he began to feel differently. 'It started to seem that this way of thinking was an insult to us,' he said. 'It is fine to say, 'This is our freedom, this is our way of thinking.' But we began to believe that their freedom was something that hurts us.' Last week, Sheik Abu Zaid heard about a march being planned on the Danish Consulate in Beirut, and he decided to join. He and 600 others boarded buses bound for Beirut. Within an hour of arriving, some of the demonstrators — none of his people, he insisted — became violent, and began attacking the building that housed the embassy. It was just two days after a similar attack against the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in Damascus. 'In the demonstration, I believe 99 percent of the people were good and peaceful, but I could hear people saying, 'We don't want to demonstrate peacefully; we want to burn,' ' the sheik said. He tried in vain to calm people down, he said. 'I was calling to the people, 'Please, please follow us and go back.' ' he said. 'We were hoping to calm people down, and we were hoping to help the peaceful people who were caught in the middle of the fight.'

Subject: Babar's Young Subjects Loyal From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 09:55:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/nyregion/09ink.html?ex=1297141200&en=286e0f8a79df5545&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 The Man Who Keeps Babar's Young Subjects Loyal By ROBIN FINN BABAR the elephant is 75 years old and, from the looks of him, immortal. Not a single wrinkle in that hardy gray skin. Maybe it's the yoga. 'Babar's Yoga for Elephants' hit the children's book list in 2002. 'Nobody ever changes in Babar books,' murmurs Laurent de Brunhoff, who has written and illustrated 34 of them since taking over the family franchise in 1946. Mr. de Brunhoff is not as ageless as his father's, and later his, famous creation, but at 80 he emanates a sweet-natured serenity not unlike Babar's. Maybe it's the yoga; he's been a practitioner for three decades. 'There is no hate in Babar,' he says. 'There is a kind of peace in him.' And longevity. Mr. de Brunhoff traces that straight to an audience he himself was a member of 75 years ago: then and now, 5-year-olds have a thing for benevolent elephant kings with stellar paternal instincts. Babar might have passed away prematurely when his original author and illustrator, Jean de Brunhoff, Laurent's father, died of tuberculosis in 1937, six years after bringing the popular character to life. For almost a decade, Babar was in literary limbo. But at age 21 Laurent, who studied art at the same Paris school his father had, decided to resuscitate Babar: that doing so meant ignoring his abstract painting style and copying his dad's mattered not. Why? 'Because I loved the elephant and wanted his story to go on.' So it has. One book became thirty. Mr. de Brunhoff, now a grandfather, has never outgrown Babar, and when he moved to New York from France in 1985, his elephant came with him. At his ornate studio on the Upper East Side, whimsical Babar watercolors decorate the walls, foreign editions of Babar books stock the bookcases (this elephant is fluent in close to 20 languages) and stuffed animal renditions of Babar and his entourage preside over the drawing table, eyeballing the artist as he sketches. Mr. de Brunhoff senses that he and the fictional elephant are soul mates of a sort. 'A lot of me is in Babar.' In conjunction with Babar's 75th anniversary and his latest adventure, 'Babar's World Tour,' Child magazine is honoring Mr. de Brunhoff with a Lifetime Achievement Award today at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. The author will attend, and an appearance by Babar is promised. But then, the two are rarely apart, except in Mr. de Brunhoff's dreams: 'I never dream of elephants.'

Subject: Cheney Aide Testified Leak Was Ordered From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 09:52:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10leak.html?ex=1297227600&en=fa5a437d48d75f0d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 Ex-Cheney Aide Testified Leak Was Ordered, Prosecutor Says By NEIL A. LEWIS WASHINGTON — I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, told a grand jury that he was authorized by his 'superiors' to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq's weapons capability in June and July 2003, according to a document filed by a federal prosecutor. The document shows that Mr. Libby, known as Scooter, was actively engaged in the Bush administration's public relations effort to rebut complaints that there was little evidence to support the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed or sought weapons of mass destruction, which was used to justify the invasion of Iraq. The document is part of the prosecutors' case against Mr. Libby, who has been indicted on charges that he lied about his role in exposing the identity of a C.I.A. operative to journalists. The prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, said in a letter to Mr. Libby's lawyers last month that Mr. Libby had testified before the grand jury that 'he had contacts with reporters in which he disclosed the content of the National Intelligence Estimate ('NIE'),' that discussed Iraq's nuclear weapons capability. 'We also note that it is our understanding that Mr. Libby testified that he was authorized to disclose information about the NIE to the press by his superiors.' Mr. Libby was indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice last October in what Mr. Fitzgerald has charged was a willful misleading of investigators about his role in exposing Valerie Wilson as an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Wilson is the wife of Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who had accused the administration of twisting intelligence about Iraq's efforts to buy uranium from the government of Niger. Ms. Wilson's identity was first disclosed in a column by Robert D. Novak in July 2003, just after Mr. Wilson wrote an Op-Ed column in The New York Times saying he had investigated the Niger claim and found little evidence to support it. Mr. Wilson charged that destroying his wife's undercover status was a way to discredit him and his assertions. The prosecutor's note of Jan. 23 does not, however, make any reference to Mr. Libby's involvement in the disclosure of Ms. Wilson's identity. It seems, rather, to be part of an effort by the prosecutor to demonstrate that Mr. Libby was engaged in using secret information to press the administration's case at the same time that Ms. Wilson's identity was leaked to reporters. The letter was first reported Thursday by the National Journal, which said its sources had identified that one of the superiors was Mr. Cheney. The National Intelligence Estimate, which was done in October 2002, said that Iraq 'will probably have a nuclear weapon during this decade,' but it included some dissenting views. The report was classified. But amid doubts about the rationale for the invasion of Iraq some of which were attributable to Mr. Wilson's Op-Ed article, the administration declassified the report on July 18. Mr. Fitzgerald said in his letter that Mr. Libby discussed the contents of the classified report in a July 8 meeting — 10 days before it was declassified — with Judith Miller, then a reporter at The Times. Ms. Miller, who spent 85 days in jail before agreeing to testify in the leak case, has told the grand jury that Mr. Libby told her about Ms. Wilson at the same meeting. Mr. Fitzgerald said that Mr. Libby's testimony showed how Ms. Wilson's status was disclosed. 'Our anticipated basis for offering such evidence is that such facts are inextricably intertwined with the narrative of the events of spring, 2003, as Libby's testimony itself makes plain,' he wrote. Mr. Libby's lawyers have already suggested they will mount a defense in which they will not challenge the charge that he made misstatements about how he learned of Ms. Wilson's identity and whether he shared that information with reporters. They have said that any statements he made to investigators that might have been untrue were the result of his preoccupation with many serious matters of national security at the time.

Subject: White House Knew of Levee's Failure From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 09:50:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10katrina.html?ex=1297227600&en=0120acb3ed9d0efe&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 10, 2006 White House Knew of Levee's Failure on Night of Storm By ERIC LIPTON WASHINGTON — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Bush administration officials said they had been caught by surprise when they were told on Tuesday, Aug. 30, that a levee had broken, allowing floodwaters to engulf New Orleans. But Congressional investigators have now learned that an eyewitness account of the flooding from a federal emergency official reached the Homeland Security Department's headquarters starting at 9:27 p.m. the day before, and the White House itself at midnight. The Federal Emergency Management Agency official, Marty Bahamonde, first heard of a major levee breach Monday morning. By late Monday afternoon, Mr. Bahamonde had hitched a ride on a Coast Guard helicopter over the breach at the 17th Street Canal to confirm the extensive flooding. He then telephoned his report to FEMA headquarters in Washington, which notified the Homeland Security Department. 'FYI from FEMA,' said an e-mail message from the agency's public affairs staff describing the helicopter flight, sent Monday night at 9:27 to the chief of staff of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and recently unearthed by investigators. Conditions, the message said, 'are far more serious than media reports are currently reflecting. Finding extensive flooding and more stranded people than they had thought — also a number of fires.' Michael D. Brown, who was the director of FEMA until he resigned under pressure on Sept. 12, said in a telephone interview Thursday that he personally notified the White House of this news that night, though he declined to identify the official he spoke to. White House officials have confirmed to Congressional investigators that the report of the levee break arrived there at midnight, and Trent Duffy, the White House spokesman, acknowledged as much in an interview this week, though he said it was surrounded with conflicting reports. But the alert did not seem to register. Even the next morning, President Bush, on vacation in Texas, was feeling relieved that New Orleans had 'dodged the bullet,' he later recalled. Mr. Chertoff, similarly confident, flew Tuesday to Atlanta for a briefing on avian flu. With power out from the high winds and movement limited, even news reporters in New Orleans remained unaware of the full extent of the levee breaches until Tuesday. The federal government let out a sigh of relief when in fact it should have been sounding an 'all hands on deck' alarm, the investigators have found. This chain of events, along with dozens of other critical flashpoints in the Hurricane Katrina saga, has for the first time been laid out in detail following five months of work by two Congressional committees that have assembled nearly 800,000 pages of documents, testimony and interviews from more than 250 witnesses. Investigators now have the documentation to pinpoint some of the fundamental errors and oversights that combined to produce what is universally agreed to be a flawed government response to the worst natural disaster in modern American history. On Friday, Mr. Brown, the former FEMA director, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. He is expected to confirm that he notified the White House on that Monday, the day the hurricane hit, that the levee had given way, the city was flooding and his crews were overwhelmed. 'There is no question in my mind that at the highest levels of the White House they understood how grave the situation was,' Mr. Brown said in the interview. The problem, he said, was the handicapping of FEMA when it was turned into a division of the Homeland Security Department in 2003. 'The real story is with this new structure,' he said. 'Why weren't more things done, or what prevented or delayed Mike Brown from being able to do what he would have done and did do in any other disaster?' Although Mr. Bahamonde said in October that he had notified Mr. Brown that Monday, it was not known until recently what Mr. Brown or the Homeland Security Department did with that information, or when the White House was told. Missteps at All Levels It has been known since the earliest days of the storm that all levels of government — from the White House to the Department of Homeland Security to the Louisiana Capitol to New Orleans City Hall — were unprepared, uncommunicative and phlegmatic in protecting Gulf Coast residents from the floodwaters and their aftermath. But an examination of the latest evidence by The New York Times shines a new light on the key players involved in the important turning points: what they said, what they did and what they did not do, all of which will soon be written up in the committees' investigative reports. Among the findings that emerge in the mass of documents and testimony were these: ¶Federal officials knew long before the storm showed up on the radar that 100,000 people in New Orleans had no way to escape a major hurricane on their own and that the city had finished only 10 percent of a plan for how to evacuate its largely poor, African-American population. ¶Mr. Chertoff failed to name a principal federal official to oversee the response before the hurricane arrived, an omission a top Pentagon official acknowledged to investigators complicated the coordination of the response. His department also did not plan enough to prevent a conflict over which agency should be in charge of law enforcement support. And Mr. Chertoff was either poorly informed about the levee break or did not recognize the significance of the initial report about it, investigators said. ¶The Louisiana transportation secretary, Johnny B. Bradberry, who had legal responsibility for the evacuation of thousands of people in nursing homes and hospitals, admitted bluntly to investigators, 'We put no plans in place to do any of this.' ¶Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans at first directed his staff to prepare a mandatory evacuation of his city on Saturday, two days before the storm hit, but he testified that he had not done so that day while he and other city officials struggled to decide if they should exempt hospitals and hotels from the order. The mandatory evacuation occurred on Sunday, and the delay exacerbated the difficulty in moving people away from the storm. ¶The New Orleans Police Department unit assigned to the rescue effort, despite many years' worth of flood warnings and requests for money, had just three small boats and no food, water or fuel to supply its emergency workers. ¶Investigators could find no evidence that food and water supplies were formally ordered for the Convention Center, where more than 10,000 evacuees had assembled, until days after the city had decided to open it as a backup emergency shelter. FEMA had planned to have 360,000 ready-to-eat meals delivered to the city and 15 trucks of water in advance of the storm. But only 40,000 meals and five trucks of water had arrived. Representative Thomas M. Davis III, Republican of Virginia, chairman of the special House committee investigating the hurricane response, said the only government agency that performed well was the National Weather Service, which correctly predicted the force of the storm. But no one heeded the message, he said. 'The president is still at his ranch, the vice president is still fly-fishing in Wyoming, the president's chief of staff is in Maine,' Mr. Davis said. 'In retrospect, don't you think it would have been better to pull together? They should have had better leadership. It is disengagement.' One of the greatest mysteries for both the House and Senate committees has been why it took so long, even after Mr. Bahamonde filed his urgent report on the Monday the storm hit, for federal officials to appreciate that the levee had broken and that New Orleans was flooding. Eyewitness to Devastation As his helicopter approached the site, Mr. Bahamonde testified in October, there was no mistaking what had happened: large sections of the levee had fallen over, leaving the section of the city on the collapsed side entirely submerged, but the neighborhood on the other side relatively dry. He snapped a picture of the scene with a small camera. 'The situation is only going to get worse,' he said he warned Mr. Brown, then the FEMA director, whom he called about 8 p.m. Monday Eastern time to report on his helicopter tour. 'Thank you,' he said Mr. Brown replied. 'I am now going to call the White House.' Citing restrictions placed on him by his lawyers, Mr. Brown declined to tell House investigators during testimony if he had actually made that call. White House aides have urged administration officials not to discuss any conversations with the president or his top advisors and declined to release e-mail messages sent among Mr. Bush's senior advisors. But investigators have found the e-mail message referring to Mr. Bahamonde's helicopter survey that was sent to John F. Wood, chief of staff to Secretary Chertoff at 9:27 p.m. They have also found a summary of Mr. Bahamonde's observations that was issued at 10:30 p.m. and an 11:05 p.m. e-mail message to Michael Jackson, the deputy secretary of homeland security. Each message describes in detail the extensive flooding that was taking place in New Orleans after the levee collapse. Given this chain of events, investigators have repeatedly questioned why Mr. Bush and Mr. Chertoff stated in the days after the storm that the levee break did not happen until Tuesday, as they made an effort to explain why they initially thought the storm had passed without the catastrophe that some had feared. 'The hurricane started to depart the area on Monday, and then Tuesday morning the levee broke and the water started to flood into New Orleans,' Mr. Chertoff said on CBS's 'Face the Nation' on Sunday, Sept. 4, the weekend after the hurricane hit. Mr. Chertoff and White House officials have said that they were referring to official confirmation that the levee had broken, which they say they received Tuesday morning from the Army Corps of Engineers. They also say there were conflicting reports all day Monday about whether a breach had occurred and noted that they were not alone in failing to recognize the growing catastrophe. Mr. Duffy, the White House spokesman, said it would not have made much difference even if the White House had realized the significance of the midnight report. 'Like it or not, you cannot fix a levee overnight, or in an hour, or even six hours,' he said. But Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine and chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said it was obvious to her in retrospect that Mr. Chertoff, perhaps in deference to Mr. Brown's authority, was not paying close enough attention to the events in New Orleans and that the federal response to the disaster may have been slowed as a result. 'Secretary Chertoff was too disengaged from the process,' Ms. Collins said in an interview. Compounding the problem, once Mr. Chertoff learned of the levee break on Tuesday, he could not reach Mr. Brown, his top emergency response official, for an entire day because Mr. Brown was on helicopter tours of the damage. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the homeland security committee, said the government confusion reminded him of the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. 'Information was in different places, in that case prior to the attack,' Mr. Lieberman said, 'and it wasn't reaching the key decision makers in a coordinated way for them to take action.' Russ Knocke, a homeland security spokesman, said that although Mr. Chertoff had been 'intensely involved in monitoring the storm' he had not actually been told about the report of the levee breach until Tuesday, after he arrived in Atlanta. 'No one is satisfied with the response in the early days,' Mr. Knocke said. But he rejected criticism by Senator Collins and others that Mr. Chertoff was disengaged. 'He was not informed of it,' Mr. Knocke said. 'It is certainly a breakdown. And through an after-action process, that is something we will address.' The day before the hurricane made landfall, the Homeland Security Department issued a report predicting that it could lead to a levee breach that could submerge New Orleans for months and leave 100,000 people stranded. Yet despite these warnings, state, federal and local officials acknowledged to investigators that there was no coordinated effort before the storm arrived to evacuate nursing homes and hospitals or others in the urban population without cars. Focus on Highway Plan Mr. Bradberry, the state transportation secretary, told an investigator that he had focused on improving the highway evacuation plan for the general public with cars and had not attended to his responsibility to remove people from hospitals and nursing homes. The state even turned down an offer for patient evacuation assistance from the federal government. In fact, the city was desperately in need of help. And this failure would have deadly consequences. Only 21 of the 60 or so nursing homes were cleared of residents before the storm struck. Dozens of lives were lost in hospitals and nursing homes. One reason the city was unable to help itself, investigators said, is that it never bought the basic equipment needed to respond to the long-predicted catastrophe. The Fire Department had asked for inflatable boats and generators, as well as an emergency food supply, but none were provided, a department official told investigators. Timothy P. Bayard, a police narcotics commander assigned to lead a water rescue effort, said that with just three boats, not counting the two it commandeered and almost no working radios, his small team spent much of its time initially just trying to rescue detectives who themselves were trapped by rising water. The investigators also determined that the federal Department of Transportation was not asked until Wednesday to provide buses to evacuate the Superdome and the convention center, meaning that evacuees sat there for perhaps two more days longer than necessary. Mr. Brown acknowledged to investigators that he wished, in retrospect, that he had moved much earlier to turn over major aspects of the response effort to the Department of Defense. It was not until the middle of the week, he said, that he asked the military to take over the delivery and distribution of water, food and ice. 'In hindsight I should have done it right then,' Mr. Brown told the House, referring to the Sunday before the storm hit.

Subject: Showing African Works From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:26:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/10/arts/design/10cott.html?ex=1260421200&en=2ab9b62ca7ca4780&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 10, 2004 Showing African Works as They Were Intended By HOLLAND COTTER PHILADELPHIA - Leontyne Price singing Bach is what I thought of when I saw the Yoruba carving of a seated woman, a child on her back and a big bowl in her hands, in 'African Art, African Voices' at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. With her tensed stance and closed eyes, she projects the throbbing gravity of that sound. Then I thought, Why, with all the election-year jabber about values, aren't Americans crowding into galleries of African art all over the country to see such truly adult models of goodness embodied, of moral poise in a slip-sliding world? One reason is that we don't know what we're looking at when we look at African art. We're still seeing what the Museum of Modern Art saw in its 1984 'Primitivism and Modern Art' exhibition: things 'monstrous and ominous, such as Conrad's Kurtz discovered in 'The Heart of Darkness' ' as one of the curators wrote. That was hogwash, of course, but tenacious hogwash. We're far from being clean of it. Aesthetic conventions are also a problem. Traditional African art and traditional Western art museums make a bad fit. Museums are cultural deep freezes. Their purpose is to stop objects from moving and changing, keep them stationary, retard their decay, arrest their history. In this sort of protective custody, art is a passive phenomenon. It is viewed; it is studied; it is enjoyed. A lot of modern Western art is conceived as passive, tailor-made for a museum life. But objects originally meant to be functionally active have to relinquish their function, and with it part of their meaning, to qualify as art in an institutional setting. Traditional African art - much of it, anyway - is functional almost by definition. Its value lies as much in what it does as in how it looks, and doing things requires mobility. Objects move from here to there, interact with other objects and with people. Art goes into the field to ensure that crops come up. It entertains through dances, gymnastics, storytelling. By reporting gossip and satirizing local politics, it keeps a community up on the news. It also serves as a social regulator and a moral agent, a cool instrument for handling hot situations like judging crime, settling disputes and confronting evil. It offers instructions in deportment and shapes self-definition. It promotes physical and psychological health. At once conservative and progressive, art's goal is to maintain social order in the face of chronically threatened disorder, even if doing so requires changing society itself. If, during an arduous, hands-on career, art suffers wear and tear, becomes a beat-up version of its original, spiffy self, that's all right. As long as it is in active use, it is alive and valuable. When it becomes permanently inactive, it becomes something else. And something else is what we see in art museums. Is it possible to restore this vivacity, or some sense of it, to African art in a mainstream museum setting? Many exhibitions have attempted to do so over the past two decades, and 'African Art, African Voices' is among the more recent. The show originated at the Seattle Art Museum with an effort by the resident curator of African art, Pamela McClusky, to rethink the permanent African display along the lines of a few basic propositions. One, African art is a dynamic, multimedia, multisensory experience; sight, sound, smell and touch all play a part. Two, Africans are the original and expert curators of their own art. Three, far from being an artifact of the past, African art is still vital and in every way - intellectually, aesthetically, politically - pertinent to the present. Applying these ideas to the Seattle collection, Ms. McClusky produced a solid, personable book, 'Art From Africa: Long Steps Never Broke a Back' (Princeton University Press), and the exhibition, coordinated at the Philadelphia Museum by John Zarobell, an assistant curator. It opens with a sculpture and a moving picture, a Benin bronze head set in front of a panoramic film of contemporary African cities. Benin bronzes can date back as early as the 12th century, yet in them past and present fuse. Their semirealist style makes them a comfortable entry point to African art for contemporary Western audiences. And although a Benin head would seem to have no connection to the jostling streets and noisy markets in the film, it may well have been produced in just such an urban culture. From this point on, the show divides into thematic sections shaped by several curatorial advisers, all but one of them African. Their contributions put Ms. McClusky's idea of filtering African art through African eyes into play, with particularly striking results in the selection of Maasia objects from Kenya. They were acquired for the collection by Kakuta Hamisi, a Maasai scholar and a former intern at the Seattle Art Museum. He arranged for the museum to send money to his home village to build a school. In return, villagers gave the museum personal objects of their own choice, from ordinary household items to handsome beadwork ornaments, for the collection, in the process shaping the picture that a Western audience would have of their culture. An absorbing documentary film of the villagers presenting their donations to Mr. Hamisi is on view in the gallery. In fact, in general film is given unusual prominence in this show as a means of establishing an atmospheric context for objects. And on the whole it does exactly what it's supposed to do, enhance and expand the art experience. It's thrilling to see Asante gold jewelry up close in a museum vitrine, where its symbolism can be scrutinized and its craftsmanship admired. But to see the same jewelry worn by a king and his entourage during open-air enthronement festivities, as we do in a film here, is instantly to comprehend art's role as a component of social theater, a tool of political persuasion. Films of masquerades in Nigeria and Sierra Leone give a comparable sense of immediacy to displays of Gelede and Sowei masks, objects that are now usually seen in isolation were once part of elaborate, kinetic ensembles. At the same time, however, many individual pieces in the show, even without audiovisual enhancement, generate tremendous energy. A standing male Kongo figure is certainly one, with his combative wrestler's stance, his torso bristling with nails and his eyes covered with mirrors. A type of Dan mask called Ga Wree Wree, snaggle-toothed and wearing an elegant hairpin-and-cowry-shell hat, is another. And then, looming over everything, there is the eight-foot-tall image of the spirit named Basinjom, from Cameroon, composed of a feather-crowned alligator mask and a midnight-blue caftan that trails on the ground. Monstrous and ominous? Well, awesome for sure and for a reason. The Kongo figure, once packed with potent medicines, was meant to face down evil and protect innocence. His mirrored eyes reflected the heaven. The Dan mask, at once sinister and soigné, was a supernatural judiciary agent who settled personal and communal arguments that might have lead to bloodshed and whose verdicts had the weight of law. As to the towering Basinjom - the name means 'god's medicine' - he was a combination of avenging angel and detective, a hunter of witches and other malign beings. He is said to have been particularly active during the colonial period, when African communities, and the moral paradigms they represented, were being shattered. The Basinjom costume was once actually worn in a religious initiation by one of the show's curatorial advisers, the art historian Robert Farris Thompson. This protean scholar has done more than any other to advance the concept of African art as interactive drama. He has also been assiduous in tracing that dynamic from the past into the present. And 'African Art, African Voices' follows his lead in a concluding selection of contemporary work. Several of the artists - Malike Sidibe, Zwelethu Mthethwa, William Kentridge, Yinka Shonibare - are well known internationally. Most work in media that are foreign to pre-modern Africa. Almost all make objects for museum display. Yet in every piece chosen, the traditional moral weight - the sense of art as a complex system of lived, in-the-now values - is sustained. That's why, when I saw Mr. Sidibe's 1986 photograph taken in Bamana, Mali, of two solemn women in vibrant striped dresses flanking a third woman with a baby on her lap, I thought of the Yoruba mother and child. And I heard the music again, but a little changed. Maybe Lutheran soul with an Afro-pop beat.

Subject: Crossing a Line Drawn From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:25:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/nyregion/09beach.html February 9, 2006 Crossing a Line Drawn in Greenwich's Fine Sand By ALISON LEIGH COWAN GREENWICH, Conn. — For Sheila Foster, Migdalia Bonilla and Claudette Rothman, it is what some of their fellow Greenwich residents have had to say in the morning paper that stings the most. They have been accused in letters to the local newspaper here, Greenwich Time, of making a big deal out of nothing. Of failing to follow 'a few simple rules.' Of being 'self-centered individuals of privilege' who played the 'race card.' Of needing 'thicker skin.' About a half-dozen letters have been published since June, when the women complained that they had been prevented from exercising together at the town's beach because they were black or Hispanic. An internal town inquiry found otherwise, but e-mail messages by the investigating official surfaced in December indicating that bias was a probable factor. Now the state's Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities has promised a full investigation if it cannot broker a settlement between the town and the women. Greenwich has a long history of limiting access to its beaches. But the dispute involving the three women, all prominent residents who are active in civic affairs, continues to cast a shadow as this community reconsiders its policies on beach access for the coming summer. In a lengthy interview, the three women said that they did not set out to be civil rights activists. But they said they had every intention of standing their ground because others with fewer resources might have trouble doing so. 'This is not about us,' said Mrs. Bonilla, whose husband, Bobby, played for the New York Mets, and whose daughter Danielle was Greenwich's first minority homecoming queen in decades. Town officials and their supporters say park employees were guilty of nothing more than enforcing the rules, which require a pass to get onto the beach. They defend the town's right to limit group access to the beach. And they say it is not the town's fault if one mostly black group was heavily questioned while other white groups used the beach without problems. 'We do not discriminate,' said James Lash, the town's Republican first selectman. He noted that Penny Monahan, a Democratic selectwoman, was herself once turned away at the beach for lacking a pass. Mrs. Bonilla arrived at the interview with a bag of paisley folders containing timelines, newspaper clippings, e-mail messages and other documents — in triplicate. 'If they don't take us that seriously, can you just imagine how they treat others?' she said. With Mrs. Bonilla handling organizational matters, Mrs. Foster, whose husband, George, also played for the Mets, has been the group's emotional center. With a father in the Air Force, she moved a lot as a child and recalls her 'first taste of prejudice' as a third grader in Greenville, S.C., in the 1960's. She was put in the only school around that was open to blacks, where beat-up textbooks were the norm, and discovered 'colored only' water fountains in stores. She initially thought the signs meant colored water ran from the tap. 'My mom had difficulty explaining that,' she said. Mrs. Foster said she was just as startled to find racism in Greenwich, the town where she and her husband have raised two children. As a veteran baseball wife, Mrs. Foster befriended Mrs. Bonilla at a children's soccer match shortly after Mr. Bonilla signed with the Mets in 1992. More recently, Mrs. Foster introduced Mrs. Bonilla to another friend, Mrs. Rothman, who moved to Greenwich from Westport. Last June, when Mrs. Rothman's personal trainer, Jason Hall, offered to conduct daily boot-camp style workouts at the beach, the three women figured the views of Long Island Sound would help them stick to the program and signed on. Six of the nine class members were black or Hispanic. All were Greenwich residents, making them eligible for cards that should have allowed them in the park all summer without fuss. Their first day at the beach drew little notice, even though some class members acknowledge that they had not yet arranged to get their season passes. The problems began the next day, on June 7, according to the women, their trainer and town officials. Three members of the group — Mrs. Foster and her daughter and Mrs. Bonilla — were turned away at the gate because they did not have passes. When they pulled over to call the others to tell them to carry on without them, the gatekeeper yelled at them for parking on the grass, according to Mrs. Bonilla, who was driving. Town officials say the employee was not being rude, just struggling to be heard. A white member of the class whose car had New Jersey plates was questioned at the gate, but allowed in without a pass. Mr. Lash, the first selectman, said the gatekeeper was exercising reasonable discretion when he let that person in. The four class members who made it past the gate were lining up to stretch when a park employee approached and asked if they were a group. When they said yes, the employee said that they could finish the workout, but that they would need a permit to keep meeting. Town officials allowed them to complete the week once they learned that they had already paid Mr. Hall. But after several trips and calls to Town Hall, in search of the proper form to apply for a permit, the group repeatedly met with objections and eventually disbanded. Mr. Hall said one parks department employee did not mince words: 'She said I would be arrested if I was caught back on the beach training.' Joseph A. Siciliano, the director of Greenwich's Parks and Recreation Department, did not respond to several requests for comment. While the women said they hated to think the worst, their suspicions hardened after they obtained copies of e-mail messages that Mr. Lash acknowledged had been deleted from the computers at Town Hall. The messages suggest that the town's affirmative action officer, Kelly J. Houston, was more sympathetic with the women's claim of bias than she indicated to Greenwich Time in June, when she said her own investigation found no evidence of discrimination. One day after the women were told to get a permit if they wanted to keep exercising, Ms. Houston, who is black, warned the women's trainer in an e-mail message, 'If you're doing a black group, you are going to need to cut your numbers down.' She also advised him to start his classes earlier, before the staff arrived. 'Kelly kept telling me on the phone that 'what had happened to you guys was definitely discrimination,' ' said Mrs. Rothman, who says she once considered Ms. Houston a friend. Now, not only are they no longer speaking, but Ms. Houston, whose husband presides over the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter, is being accused by the three women of having done a shoddy investigation. Ms. Houston did not return telephone calls seeking comment. The commission on human rights has spent recent weeks trying to mediate the dispute in the hope of pre-empting a full-blown investigation. In the meantime, the women wait. They returned to the beach last month for the first time since the encounter to retrace their steps for a reporter. 'Do you think we need a permit?' Mrs. Rothman joked somewhat nervously, as their heels sank in the wet sand. 'Are we a group?' They had the place practically to themselves.

Subject: Beginning of a Brazilian Friendship From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 07:09:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/movies/09vult.html?ex=1297141200&en=0cfe92d24b1af0ea&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 This Could Be the Beginning of a Brazilian Friendship By MANOHLA DARGIS The Brazilian film 'Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures' is, as might be expected from its quixotic title, a story of moving pictures, analgesics and scavengers. But this road movie about two men traveling the dusty byways of the largest country in Latin America is also about how a little imagination and a quality cinematographer can triumph over a poverty of means. Set in 1942 and principally inside the cab of a truck, it is the sort of human-scale production that holds your attention with good acting, nice lighting and a screenplay that favors thought over action, thoughtful incident over full-blown episode. Here, neither people nor vultures pick at bones. The film opens and closes with bookend images of a man driving a truck through the blindingly white light of a country that seems on full boil. The first man, Johann (Peter Ketnath), is an aspirin salesman who, having fled Germany before the war, now pitches his exotic product to peasants, using crudely effective advertising films as bait. At once guarded and easygoing, Johann enjoys keeping company with the occasional hitchhiker, which is how he meets the second driver and the man who brings the story to its close, Ranulpho (João Miguel). A refugee from Brazil's drought-plagued north and, like Johann, on the run from both his past and future, Ranulpho is looking for an exit strategy far more than he is a ride. He gets his wish, but before that happens the film's director, Marcelo Gomes, who wrote the screenplay with Karim Ainouz and Paulo Caldas, takes his travelers on a trip in which every quotidian moment seems to tremble with mystery and possibility. (Mr. Gomes helped write Mr. Ainouz's well-received directing debut, 'Madame Satã.') In between peasants stunned by heat and drought, plates of cooked goat, weeping women, beautifully parched vistas and the image of São Paulo glittering in Johann's black-and-white sales pitches, the two men peel away layers of national, social and class differences, tentatively breaching their divide. In time, these strangers become less strange to each other, if never friends, even while their prickles remain firmly in place. There are no last-minute revelations or grand epiphanies in 'Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures' — no murder, no drama, no blood on the carpet. This is, instead, a story about two ordinary people without personal agendas or political allegiances, men consumed not with history, but just making it through another day. Every so often, one of the men snaps on the radio, bringing the war a little closer, but mostly this is a film about the kinds of unremarkable individuals who survive extraordinary times rather than triumph over them. Early in their acquaintance, Ranulpho tells Johann, 'As my grandmother would say, 'Happy is the animal that eats the other.' ' For much of the film you wait for these men to turn on each other, to circle like vultures. Instead, they talk, they drive, they get along. What more could you want?

Subject: Thinking About the Way We Eat - c From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 06:04:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/l10diet.html Thinking About the Way We Eat - c To the Editor: The diet component of the Women's Health Initiative compared some 20,000 women advised to cut dietary fat and increase their intake of produce to a comparable group given the federal dietary guidelines. The difference in these interventions was modest; the advice to cut fat without attention to kinds of fat, questionable; and subject compliance, limited. Thus, there were only rather trivial differences in the diets between groups, and despite that, a trend toward reduced rates of both breast cancer and cardiovascular risk factors in the intervention group. That there were any discernible differences in outcomes at all is more surprising than how modest those differences were, particularly given that cancer and heart disease develop over decades and that this intervention occurred relatively late in life, in women well past menopause. My convictions in the fundamentals of a healthful diet are unshaken. David L. Katz, M.D. Dir., Prevention Research Center Yale School of Medicine Derby, Conn., Feb. 8, 2006

Subject: Thinking About the Way We Eat - b From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 06:03:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/l10diet.html Thinking About the Way We Eat - b To the Editor: The results of the Women's Health Initiative study cannot be regarded as proving that eating less fat does not reduce a woman's risk of getting breast cancer. The study reports that over a short average period of observation (about eight years) a small reduction in fat calories results in a 9 percent reduction in the risk of getting breast cancer, which is very close to 'statistical significance' (an arbitrary criterion). Women eating more fat before entering the trial and those adhering to the diet showed an even better reduction in breast cancer risk. It is too soon to dismiss these findings as negative, and further follow-up of women on this trial is needed. Larry Norton, M.D. Clifford Hudis, M.D. New York, Feb. 9, 2006 The writers are, respectively, deputy physician in chief for breast cancer programs; and chief, Breast Cancer Medicine Service, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Subject: Thinking About the Way We Eat - a From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 06:01:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/l10diet.html Thinking About the Way We Eat - a To the Editor: In the mid-1990's, when my mother first became a subject of the Women's Health Initiative study, of which the low-fat study was a part, she complained after her first orientation session, 'They make no distinction between lard and olive oil!' A slim, healthy senior citizen with no medical background, she was already aware, a decade ago, of mounting evidence that all fats are not equal. But the study's designers paid no attention to this, and we went ahead and paid $415 million to carry it out. It would be highly irresponsible of the American medical community if, as Dr. Michael Thun of the American Cancer Society suggests, this were to be the last word. The study was flawed and dated from the get-go. Gigi Edwards Saunderstown, R.I., Feb. 8, 2006

Subject: One of Detroit's Last Strongholds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:56:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/automobiles/09cnd-truck.html?ex=1297141200&en=a8ed9c0e1c4ffc96&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Toyota Vies for One of Detroit's Last Strongholds By MICHELINE MAYNARD CHICAGO — Toyota has been selling pickup trucks in the United States since 1964. But none have been more important than the one it unveiled here today — either to Toyota or to Detroit. Toyota introduced the new version of its Tundra pickup at the Chicago Auto Show, marking the first time it has offered a truck as big and as powerful as vehicles from General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. This Tundra, a successor to a smaller model in Toyota's lineup for the past decade, does not go on sale until a year from now. But its introduction spells the beginning of the end of Detroit's unquestioned dominance of the pickup truck market. 'It's the last bastion of American vehicles,' said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata, an industry statistics firm in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. The success of this truck is critical if Toyota, which held 13.2 percent of the United States market last year for fourth place, is to finally pass Chrysler for the No. 3 spot — and ultimately unseat G.M. as the world's biggest carmaker. James Press, the chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., said the new Tundra is as vital to Toyota as Camry, which has been the best-selling family car in the United States for the past five years; Lexus, the country's top-selling luxury division, and Scion, the three-year-old brand that has been a hit with young, hip consumers. 'It's one of the most important introductions we've ever had,' Mr. Press said in an interview here. But Detroit will not give any ground without a fight. The pickup truck market boasts some of the most fiercely loyal buyers in the industry, who tend to pick a brand and stick with it for their lifetimes, Mr. Pinelli said. And the traditional American companies are determined to hang onto those customers. On the floor of the Chicago Auto Show this week, Ford lined up seven of its F-series pickup trucks — in red, white and blue — with their formidable front ends aimed directly at Toyota's display. It was the automotive equivalent of 'talk to the hand' — or hood, in this case. General Motors, meanwhile, is launching a barrage of pickups later this year that will be a crucial element in stemming the company's billion-dollar losses and launching its turnaround effort. Mr. Pinelli, however, believes Toyota will easily achieve its goal of selling 200,000 Tundras a year — and probably more. Given how well Camry, Lexus and Scion have performed, 'Toyota has the recipe for success,' Mr. Pinelli said. But this dish has taken a long time to prepare, even for a company known for being deliberate. Although it has always sold small trucks here and has offered them in Japan since World War II, it took until the early 1990's for Toyota to get serious about a big pickup. One key reason was that Congress, in a burst of 1980's protectionism, imposed tariffs on imported trucks, making it costly to compete with Detroit's cheaper models. Another was that Americans were migrating away from the cars on which Toyota cut its teeth, and the company was determined to follow its customers. Toyota's fledgling big-truck effort was the Japanese-built T-100, which now seems almost petite next to its latest truck and severely lagged Detroit pickups in engine power and hauling ability. By 1996, Toyota had built a plant in Princeton, Ind., to produce the original Tundra. Though bigger than the T-100, and with more performance, purists still sniffed at it. 'The original ones were either too small, underpowered, or weren't seen as real pickup trucks,' Mr. Pinelli said. With this truck, Toyota has attempted to do its homework. Beginning in 2002, Toyota began interviewing every type of truck owner, from ranchers in Montana to construction crews in Atlanta and business owners in Houston, to be sure it understood their needs. One basic: performance. While some people buy pickups as car substitutes, the most serious customers use them for work. So the Tundra is capable of towing more than 10,000 pounds, and will come equipped with a new 5.7-liter V-8 engine and six-speed automatic transmission. To its surprise, Toyota engineers learned that they do not just use their pickups to lug things around: they are the equivalent of mobile offices. So this Tundra is compatible with Bluetooth technology, a feature found on its Lexus models, and has multiple connection ports for laptops, cellphones and other devices.

Subject: Army Focuses on Recruitment of Latinos From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:54:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/09recruit.html?ex=1297141200&en=36bc580980e71a86&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Army Focuses on Recruitment of Latinos By LIZETTE ALVAREZ DENVER — As Sgt. First Class Gavino Barron, dressed in a crisp Army uniform, trawls the Wal-Mart here for recruits, past stacks of pillows and towers of detergent, he is zeroing-in on one of the Army's 'special missions': to increase the number of Hispanic enlisted soldiers. He approaches a couple of sheepish looking teenage boys in the automotive aisle and seamlessly slides into Spanish, letting loose his pitch: 'Have you ever thought about joining the Army?' 'Did you know you can get up to $40,000 in bonuses?' 'I'm from Mexico, too. Michoacán.' In Denver and other cities where the Hispanic population is growing, recruiting Latinos has become one of the Army's top priorities. From 2001 to 2005, the number of Latino enlistments in the Army rose 26 percent, and in the military as a whole, the increase was 18 percent. The increase comes at a time when the Army is struggling to recruit new soldiers and when the enlistment of African-Americans, a group particularly disillusioned with the war in Iraq, has dropped off sharply, to 14.5 percent from 22.3 percent over the past four years. Not all Latinos, though, are in step with the military's recruitment goals. In some cities with large Hispanic populations, the focus on recruitment has polarized Latinos, prompting some to organize against recruiters and to help immigrants learn their rights. Critics say recruiters, who are under pressure to meet quotas, often use their charm and an arsenal of tactics, including repeated calls to a recruit, lunch at a favorite restaurant and trips to the gym. The Army also parades rigged-out, juiced-up Hummers wherever youths gather as promotional tools. 'We see a lot of confusion among immigrant parents, and recruiters are preying on that confusion,' said Jorge Mariscal, a Vietnam veteran who is director of the Chicano/Latino Arts and Humanities Program at the University of California, San Diego, and is active in the counterrecruitment movement. While the military emphasizes that it works to enlist all qualified people, not just Hispanics, military experts say that bringing in more Latinos is overdue. Hispanics have long been underrepresented in the Army and in the military as a whole. While Latinos make up 10.8 percent of the Army's active-duty force, a better rate than the Air Force or Navy, they account for 14 percent of the population as a whole. Hispanics also make up the fastest-growing pool of military age people in the United States, and they are more likely to complete boot camp and finish their military service, according to a 2004 study on Marine recruitment by CNA, a research group that operates the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research. Recruitment studies show that Hispanics' re-enlistment rates are also the highest among any group of soldiers. 'They are extremely patriotic,' said Lt. Col. Jeffrey Brodeur, commanding officer of the Recruitment Battalion covering Colorado, Wyoming, parts of Montana and Nebraska. That many Latinos in the military are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, typically engenders a sense of gratitude for the United States and its opportunities, something recruiters stress in their pitch. Poorer and less educated than the average American, some Hispanics view the military as a way to feel accepted. Others enlist for the same reasons that may attract any recruit: the money, the job training, the education benefits and the escape from poverty or small-town life. Edgar Santana, a skinny 17-year-old senior who recently hovered around the Army recruiting table at Harrison High School in Colorado Springs, said he was attracted by all those reasons, despite the war in Iraq. 'I get the freedoms, and I can enjoy them, so I believe I have to pay back that debt,' Mr. Santana said. Tony Mendoza Jr., 18, a senior at North High School in Denver, has already enlisted in the Army and will enter boot camp this summer. For him, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were what drove him into boots. 'My parents think I'm going to go in the Army and die, but I wanted to do it,' Mr. Mendoza said. Patriotism alone, though, does not account for the rise in Hispanic enlistment. The increase has gone hand in hand with a vast Army marketing campaign that includes Spanish-language advertisements on Univision and Telemundo, the country's two largest Spanish-language networks, and on the radio and in Hispanic publications. The budget for this campaign has increased by at least $55 million in four years. The Army has also expanded a small pilot project that allows 200 Latinos each year to undergo rigorous English language classes and then retake the Army qualifications tests. Ten cities now offer that option, up from five. Recruiters have noticeably stepped up their presence in schools and neighborhoods with Hispanic populations. 'You see them today where you would never see them three or four years ago,' said Rick Jahnkow, program coordinator for the Project on Youth and non-Military Opportunities in San Diego. In addition, the Army has made better use of bilingual recruiters to reach out to Latino communities. In the Colorado area, the number of bilingual recruiters has increased in the past 18 months to 13 from 4. Recognizing the importance of family and its weight in the process is crucial in Hispanic families, recruiters say. Since a mother's approval can make or break a deal, recruiters spend considerable time with Latino families. They have dinner, chat often on the telephone and remain patient. They even attend local Latino churches. Sgt. First Class Luis M. Galicia, a bilingual recruiter based in Colorado Springs, is always quick to say he was born in Mexico and raised, on little money, in California. He and his family picked grapes for extra cash. He says that his experience helps him connect.; 'there is a trust issue.' One incentive meant to appeal to this community, President Bush's 2002 executive order that permits legal residents in the military to apply for citizenship within one year, as opposed to three years, has actually done little to entice Latinos. In fact, the number of Army soldiers who are not citizens has declined since 2002 to 2,447 last year from 3,312. The same is true for enlistments. Simply speeding up the application process for people already in this country legally does not seem to provide enough incentive to counter the risks of joining up in a time of war. The recruitment campaign has in fact divided the Latino community. Some of the country's high-profile Latino organizations, like the League of United Latin American Citizens, support the military's efforts, viewing it as an important path to socioeconomic advancement. 'The fact that Latinos are underrepresented in the service causes us concern because the service is often a way to the middle class for many immigrants,' said Brent Wilkes, national director of the league. 'If you don't have a lot of options, would you rather go into the service and get a middle-class career, or stay in the fields all these years?' But community activists in places like California and Puerto Rico call that logic wrongheaded. 'This is not the time to sign up,' said Sonia Santiago, a psychologist and a counterrecruiter in Puerto Rico who founded Mothers Against the War after her son, a marine, was sent to Iraq in 2003. Dr. Santiago has routinely confronted recruiters outside schools. 'Those benefits don't mean anything, if they are buried or sick for the rest of their lives,' she said. Critics also say that Latinos often wind up as cannon fodder on the casualty-prone front lines. African-Americans saw the same thing happen during the 1970's and 1980's, an accusation that still reverberates. Hispanics make up only 4.7 percent of the military's officer corps. 'The fear is that the military is going to try to replace, consciously or unconsciously, African-Americans with Hispanics,' said David Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland. For bilingual recruiters, tapping into the Latino population has its own set of frustrations. Often, Latinos are willing to join the Army, but cannot. During his rounds at the Wal-Mart, Sergeant Barron encountered a number of illegal immigrants; they are immediately disqualified. Other Latinos lack adequate English skills or high school degrees, he said. In the past year, a Latino counterrecruitment movement has arisen in several major cities with the goal of blunting what organizers call overly aggressive and suggestive recruitment in Latino neighborhoods. Some critics say recruiters sometimes gloss over the risks and mislead potential recruits and their parents. Latino parents, especially those who speak little English and know little about the military, are especially susceptible to a recruiter's persistence and charm, critics say. Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son was a marine and died in Iraq in 2003, founded Aztec Warrior Project for Peace to help counsel Latinos on the military. He said he often encountered parents who did not understand the intricacies of the process. One set of parents in Southern California, he said, mistakenly signed papers allowing their 17-year-old to join the military on his 18th birthday, believing that the government required military service, something the recruiter did not clarify. Michael I. Marsh, a lawyer who represents migrant workers in Oxnard, Calif., said he wrote a letter to a local recruitment battalion last year after a 17-year-old's parents signed off on his Army Reserve enlistment at 18. The parents told him they were under the impression that they were signing to authorize a physical exam and blood work. When the youth later tried to nullify the contract, he was told it was too late and that if he tried to pull out, he would be ineligible for school money and federal employment. After Mr. Marsh sent the letter, the teenager was allowed to withdraw his enlistment, Mr. Marsh said. Military contracts are not binding until a person takes a second oath of enlistment. 'The recruiter does not lie, but he does not tell the whole truth,' Mr. Suarez said. 'If you don't know the question to ask, you don't get the information. With language and cultural differences, it's complicated.' S. Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army's recruiting command, said that the Army investigated allegations of misconduct and that, while recruiters were expected to encourage people to enlist, they must be honest about risks and benefits. 'Given the fact that we are a nation at war, recruiters have to be up front about the risks,' he said.

Subject: Falling Short of Prewar Performance From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:52:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/middleeast/09hearing.html?ex=1297141200&en=59ca112ddf7eaa4b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Iraq Utilities Are Falling Short of Prewar Performance By JAMES GLANZ WASHINGTON — Virtually every measure of the performance of Iraq's oil, electricity, water and sewerage sectors has fallen below preinvasion values even though $16 billion of American taxpayer money has already been disbursed in the Iraq reconstruction program, several government witnesses said at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Wednesday. Of seven measures of public services performance presented at the committee hearing by the inspector general's office, only one was above preinvasion values. Those that had slumped below those values were electrical generation capacity, hours of power available in a day in Baghdad, oil and heating oil production and the numbers of Iraqis with drinkable water and sewage service. Only the hours of power available to Iraqis outside Baghdad had increased over prewar values. In addition, two of the witnesses said they believed that an earlier estimate by the World Bank that $56 billion would be needed for rebuilding over the next several years was too low. At the same time, as Iraq's oil exports plummet and the country remains saddled with tens of billions of dollars of debt, it is unclear where that money will come from, said one of the witnesses, Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the Government Accountability Office. And those may not be the most serious problems facing Iraq's pipelines, storage tanks, power lines, electrical switching stations and other structures, said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, an independent office. In one sense, focusing on the plummeting performance numbers 'misses the point,' Mr. Bowen said. The real question, he said, is whether the Iraqi security forces will ever be able to protect the infrastructure from insurgent attack. 'What's happened is that an incessant, an insidious insurgency has repeatedly attacked the key infrastructure targets, reducing outputs,' Mr. Bowen said. He added that some of the performance numbers had fluctuated above prewar values in the past, only to fall again under the pressure of insurgent attacks and other factors. The chairman of the committee, Senator Richard G. Lugar, Republican of Indiana, began by billing the session as a way of deciphering how much of America's original ambitions in the rebuilding program are likely to be fulfilled with the amount of money that Iraq, the United States Congress and international donors are still prepared to spend on the task. This downsizing of expectations was striking given that $30 billion American taxpayer money has already been dedicated to the task, according to an analysis by Mr. Christoff of the accountability office. Of that money, $23 billion has already been obligated to specific rebuilding contracts, and $16 billion of that amount has been disbursed, Mr. Christoff said. Mr. Bowen's office has pointed out that another $40 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets of Saddam Hussein's regime was also made available for reconstruction and other tasks at one time or another. Last week, Robert J. Stein Jr., one of four former United States government officials in Iraq who have been arrested in a bribery and kickback scheme involving that money, pleaded guilty to federal charges. Mr. Bowen pointed out in his testimony that the news on reconstruction in Iraq is not all bad. Despite the recent financing and performance shortfalls, the rebuilding program now seems to be much less ridden by fraud, corruption and chaos than it was in the early days when people like Mr. Stein were in charge. James R. Kunder, assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East at the United States Agency for International Development, in the State Department, emphasized things like what he called a 30 percent 'potential increase' in electricity output because of new and reconditioned power generators in Iraq. 'We have done a lot of reconstruction work in Iraq over the last couple of years,' Mr. Kunder said. 'We did not meet all of the goals, the ambitious goals, we originally intended,' he conceded. Mr. Christoff of the accounting office said the latest numbers may actually overstate how well Iraqis have been served by the reconstruction program. Water numbers, for example, often focus on how much drinkable water is generated at central plants, he said. But he said 65 percent of that water was subject to leaking from porous distribution pipes, which often run next to sewage facilities. 'So we really don't know how many households get potable, drinkable water,' Mr. Christoff said. Mr. Christoff also brought another new figure to the hearing: he said that on a recent trip to Baghdad, the American forces there had told him that they would need another $3.9 billion to continue training and equipping Iraqi forces, in part so that they can better protect the infrastructure. The money would presumably be included in a 2006 supplemental funding request in which the Bush administration has said it would ask for more money to support the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, an official at the Office of Management and Budget said. The administration 'told us it would include this type of expenses,' the official said, adding that no total for Iraqi security forces has yet come directly from the White House. If the $3.9 billion that the American forces believe they need is actually appropriated, it would bring the total amount spent simply on training and equipping the Iraqi Army and the police to about $15 billion.

Subject: Paul Krugman: The Vanishing Future From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 05:24:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ February 10, 2006 No sense letting inconvenient facts get in the way of the administration's determination to make tax cuts permanent. By Mark Thoma The Vanishing Future, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: At this point we've had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget chicanery. ... What still amazes me, however, is the sheer childishness of the administration's denials and deceptions. Consider the case of the vanishing future. The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first tax cut through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted that its tax-cut plans wouldn't endanger the budget surplus ... But even some Republican senators were skeptical. So the Senate demanded a cap on the tax cut: it should not reduce revenue over the period from 2001 to 2011 by more than $1.35 trillion. The administration met this requirement ... by 'sunsetting' the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of 2010. This was obviously silly. For example, under the law as written there will be no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010. But the estate tax will return in 2011 with a maximum rate of 55 percent, creating some interesting incentives. I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw Momma From the Train Act. It ... quickly became clear that the budget forecasts the administration used to justify the 2001 tax cut were wildly overoptimistic. The federal government faced a future of deficits, not surpluses, as far as the eye could see. ... What were budget officials to do? You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future disappear. Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and revenues. But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years. This ... greatly aided the campaign to make the 2001 tax cut permanent because ... the ... budget analyses no longer covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the tax cut became invisible. But now it's 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period from 2007 to 2011 — which means including a year in which making the Bush tax cuts permanent will cost ... $119.7 billion... Has the administration finally run out of ways to avoid budget reality? Not quite. ... until this year budget documents contained a standard table titled 'Impact of Budget Policy,' ... But this year, that table is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what's really going on. Now, the administration has proposed ... cuts that are both cruel and implausible. For example, ... the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on veterans' health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five years. Yet even these cuts would fall far short of making up for ... making the tax cuts permanent. The administration's own estimate, which can be deduced from its budget tables, is that extending the tax cuts would cost an average of $235 billion in each year from 2012 through 2016. In other words, the administration has no idea how to make its tax cuts feasible in the long run. Yet it has never ... allowed unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those awkward facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is no coincidence.) ... The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that the tax cuts can't be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have decided to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration deal with the mess they have created.

Subject: Lending standards TOO LAX From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 04:00:22 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://thehousingbubbleblog.com/?p=50#comments The Washington Times continues its look into the mortgage business. “Home-financing offers come from an army of mortgage brokers estimated at 250,000 nationwide, many operating outside the reach of banking regulators. They have become the principal source of home financing in the US. In years past, banks and savings and loans provided most mortgages, but their share of the $2.8 trillion market dwindled to less than half in recent years, according to Harvard University.” “The number of unscrupulous brokers offering ‘junk mortgages’ has multiplied with the housing boom and advent of Internet financing in the past five years, said David Levine of a mortgage information service. Their advertisements ‘are designed to hit consumers where they are most susceptible, their wallet.’ They are often successful, because many consumers never see or understand the fine print, that explains what a bad deal the mortgages can be, he said.” “The brokers who offer such mortgages often have no licenses or formal training and may have just recently graduated from high school or college. They are essentially salespeople for whom there is no downside to the risky debt propositions they peddle.” “All this was made possible by an evolution of the mortgage market away from banks and thrifts, which in years past had to follow conservative credit guidelines laid down by regulators. The mortgage companies have been able to bypass the regulated banking industry by tapping into a plentiful source of funding for the loans, private and international investors. ‘The declining importance of bank deposits as a funding source for mortgages has largely driven the structural shift,’ William C. Apgar of the Harvard center said.” “It is now routine to approve loans that cover 100 percent or more of a home’s value and require up to 60 percent of a borrower’s income to make debt payments. Recently, several wholesale lenders announced that they would offer 100 percent loans to people who just emerged from bankruptcy.” “Brokers and real estate agents intent on clinching a home sale and mortgage financing have been known, among other things, to pressure home appraisers to ratify inflated prices on homes in overpriced markets, according to the Chicago-based Appraisal Institute. ‘Brokers are immune from the potential adverse consequences of both failing to match the borrower with the best available mortgage and failing to provide accurate data to underwrite the loan,’ Mr. Apgar said. ‘Both affect the odds that the loan will default, which can have devastating consequences for the borrower.’”

Subject: Lessons of Climatology Apply From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 18:24:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/science/earth/03conv.html?ex=1272772800&en=63899f3cf3ec756a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss May 3, 2005 Lessons of Climatology Apply as a Vicious Front Moves In By CLAUDIA DREIFUS WASHINGTON - When Dr. Stephen H. Schneider began his career as a climatologist in the 1970's, his goal was to save the planet. Four years ago, Dr. Schneider, a professor at Stanford, discovered he had an exceedingly lethal form of cancer, and quickly saving his own life became his goal. To increase the odds against the disease, mantle cell lymphoma, Dr. Schneider, 60, involved himself in every aspect of his treatment. How he pushed his doctors to experiment with new techniques to control the cancer is the subject of a book he has just completed, tentatively titled 'The Patient From Hell: Getting the Best That Modern Medicine Can Offer.' Da Capo Press/Perseus is to publish it in the fall. 'In my work on climate, I have one client, the earth,' Dr. Schneider, a winner of a 1992 MacArthur 'genius' grant, said in a recent interview during a scientific conference here. 'It was the same with the cancer. In both cases, there was no room to be wrong.' Q. In the debate on global warming, where do you place yourself? A. I'm often described as a skeptic because I tell environmentalists they don't need to cite the worst-case scenarios to describe the dangers of human-induced climate change. The mainstream evidence is bad enough. I started out in climatology in the early 1970's, looking at atmospheric warming and cooling. I didn't know which was going to win. By the late 1970's, the data suggested it's a bad idea to threaten the planet's life-support system without trying to slow the rate we were dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The models showed that if we continued as we were, we were likely to cause significant climate change. Q. What has climatology taught you about being a cancer patient? A. It helped my wife, my doctor and I redesign the protocol to save my life. With upcoming global warming, you can't have all the facts because the future hasn't happened yet. You feed the information you do have into a computer and make subjective judgments based on it. Four years ago, I found I had an enlarged lymph node. For a few months, I suspected cancer, but the early tests were negative. Months later, I was diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma, M.C.L. It's around 5 percent of lymphomas. Because it's relatively rare, there'd been very little observation of survival probabilities with a range of different treatments. My doctor, Sandra Horning, had helped to devise the protocols to treat it. Yet because M.C.L. is rare, she'd seen only about 20 patients. She'd managed to at least double their life span - way up from two years after diagnosis. But this wasn't a situation where researchers had followed 1,000 people for 15 years to learn what worked best. So I decided to use the techniques of climate prediction to increase my survival odds. Q. How does a person use a climate model to predict his own survival? A. To start with, my wife, Terry Root, a biologist, and I went to the Internet for information. There's a lot of nonsense there, but it gave us a starting point. We then had meetings with my doctor where we'd discuss various treatment options. We used math models to argue for unusual therapies. When you're looking at global warming, climatologists don't have all the facts because certain things haven't yet occurred. You feed information into a computer, you look to what you know and extrapolate: subjective probability analysis. For years, I have been advising governments to use it for climate change policy. That's safer than waiting for the climate system to perform the experiment on us. Similarly, I wasn't going to wait 15 years for researchers to gather the data. I'd be dead by then. Q. Can you give us an example of how your use of probability worked to your benefit? A. O.K. I received a chemotherapy cocktail called CHOP, and Dr. Horning added something relatively new, Rituxan, a monoclonal antibody treatment. With my cancer, the immune system's B cells are dividing out of control. Rituxan has these nanotechnology proteins that dock with the B cells. This then causes the immune system's T cells to kill them off. Till now, Rituxan has only been used on acutely sick people. But I had this idea to take it in maintenance doses whenever there were signs my cancer was coming back. I said to the doctors: 'If you never cure me, that's O.K. But maybe Rituxan can get the cancer down to a level where it doesn't kill me.' They answered, 'Sorry, there have been no clinical trials, and we don't have data to prove this works.' So I used probability models to argue there was little downside to trying it: 'Odds are the cancer is going to come back in three to five years, and once it does, it's hard to get rid of. Why don't we prevent that by doing routine maintenance with Rituxan?' I eventually won that round. Q. Did some of your doctors really consider you the patient from hell? How did this happen? A. Some felt that way. Sandra Horning was supportive, and whenever Terry and I convinced her of an idea, she tried to help. For instance, we argued very strenuously that they should use a modern microbiological technique, P.C.R., polymerase chain reaction, to keep track of the number of cancer cells in my blood. With P.C.R., diagnosticians can detect when cancer cells are increasing. What they normally use is CT scans, which detect problems much later on. P.C.R. is far more sensitive. My doctors initially disagreed. P.C.R. costs thousands for every test. We won that one, too. We now test my blood with P.C.R. every other month and go back to Rituxan, when it finds cancer cells are increasing. Q. Did you have radiation therapy? A. At first, I didn't want to. Who wants a Hiroshima dose of radiation? Sandra Horning countered, 'If a few cancer cells have survived everything else we've done, radiation will be an alternative kill mechanism.' So we did what scientists call decision analysis. You ask, What can happen and what are the survival odds? I'd ask her questions and she'd give me her best information. At the end of the calculations, we figured that radiation boosted my survival chances by about 20 percent versus the side effect of a 5 to 7 percent chance of leukemia, delayed 5 to 10 years. This was a no-brainer. Once I understood the odds, I was willing to stand in front of a cyclotron, smile and welcome every killing ray. Q. How's your health today? A. I'm four years out and still kicking. Not long ago, we celebrated my 60th birthday. At Stanford, they've modified some of the protocols that Sandra Horning, Terry and I designed for my case. What I've learned is that cancer shouldn't be treated with a one-size-fits-all protocol. You need to be able to negotiate and individualize. Now, I was lucky. I had good health insurance and access to Stanford University Hospital, the exact right place for this lymphoma. Also, I was a Stanford professor. I could approach the docs and say, 'Professor to professor, this is what I think we should consider.' I think my doctors gave me the best treatment they knew. It certainly got the cancer under control. Whether I would be in remission for as long without the modifications, I don't know. I believe that modifying the protocols, in negotiation with good doctors, increased my survival chances. But we need a bunch of other patients to prove that for a fact. I'm pleased it's going to happen.

Subject: Truth? Fiction? Journalism? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 14:25:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/09prize.html?ex=1297141200&en=0d93dce0782d23dd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Truth? Fiction? Journalism? Award Goes to . . . By CORNELIA DEAN Journalists like to think of themselves as presenting as accurate a picture as they can of the real world. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists takes a broader view. It is presenting its annual journalism award this year to Michael Crichton, the science fiction writer whose latest book, 'State of Fear,' dismisses global warming as a largely imaginary threat embraced by malignant scientists for their own ends. 'It is fiction,' conceded Larry Nation, communications director for the association. 'But it has the absolute ring of truth.' That is not the way leading climate scientists see it. When the book was published in 2004, climate experts condemned it as dangerously divorced from reality. Most of these scientists believe human activity, chiefly the burning of fossil fuels, is changing the atmosphere's chemistry in ways that threaten unpredictable, potentially damaging effects. The book is 'demonstrably garbage,' Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist, said in an interview yesterday. Petroleum geologists may like it, he said, but only because 'they are ideologically connected to their product, which fills up the gas tanks of Hummers.' Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment, called the award 'a total embarrassment' that he said 'reflects the politics of the oil industry and a lack of professionalism' on the association's part. As for the book, he added, 'I think it is unfortunate when somebody who has the audience that Crichton has shows such profound ignorance.' The book has high-profile admirers, though. One is Senator James M. Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, who calls global warming 'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.' Mr. Nation said there had been 'some pushback' on the award from association members who had written to association publications to protest it. 'Whenever you get to the global warming issue you have legitimate scientists on both sides of the issue, as we do in our own membership,' he said. But he praised Mr. Crichton as 'a high-profile writer' who had brought attention to the topic 'to really create some good.' He said readers would 'have a very good informational read' about science and sometimes the way science is made.'

Subject: Re: Truth? Fiction? Journalism? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 16:22:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Have you ever thought you were being conned? Have you ever stopped to think, 'Hhhhmm could there be some merit in the arguments against global warming?' Okay let me put it to you this way - not so long ago (about 8 years) there was this big movement against Ozone depletion and the specific gasses that cause Ozone depletion. The famous CFC gasses. It wasn't long before there was a world wide movement against these evil gasses and everyone was talking about skin cancer increases and how it's gotten worse. What if I were to tell you the whole CFC connection to ozone depletion to skin cancer was a farce. I don't think you would believe me. What if I had to tell you that in the 1960's there was great belief among the scientists of the day that the earth was getting colder and we were heading for another ice age. Yet in the article above we give full faith to Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford climatologist. He is not just any climatologist - he comes from one of the most recognised schools. Uhhhmm how many times have climatologists correctly predicted the weather 1 week in advance, let alone a couple hundred years in advance? He I'm not saying that pollution isn't bad. I'm not saying we have no problem and should continue buying these stupid gas guzzlers. I am saying that we continuously face an uphill battle against people like Senator James M. Inhofe who make statement like, 'global warming'the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.' Well I'm sorry to say this, but Senator James M. Inhofe can get away with his statement because there are indeed holes in the proof put forward on global warming. If we are to put forward an argument that can not be shaken, we better close up the holes in the argument. Science is not a subject of opinion. It is rock solid. But when statistics can be manipulated, it not only taints science but opens the door for opinions.

Subject: Re: Truth? Fiction? Journalism? From: Poyetas To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 11:17:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: That is why I recommended the book last time! Crichton is being used for political purposes but his central argument does make sense. I admit that I have not double checked his sources, nor am I a scientist but he does seem to raise doubt to the whole theory. The problem with science is not whether it is rock solid or not, but what your perception of rock solid is. Our entire scientific reality was partly based on Newtonian physics for years until Einstein came along. Does that suddenly make Newton's theories false?

Subject: Re: Truth? Fiction? Journalism? From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Sat, Feb 11, 2006 at 23:49:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Whoa... Newtonian mechanics are rock solid. When experimenting Newton's theories your odds of getting the same answer is 99.9%. The 0.1% error will actually be the experiment error itself and can be understood using the Taylor series. Einstein pushed the limits beyond Newton's realm. In other words, Newtonian mechanics cannot explain effects at or close to the speed of light. Newton's theories do not explain what happens at infinite levels, but it was never meant to. Science is rock solid when you can safely predict an outcome with 99.9% accuracy. Although Climatology is in deed an impressive discipline applying all well known science rules, it still is highly variable with a relatively low level of success. The success is so low that we still need people on the ground to spot Tornados. If I compare this field to say, Geotech or even geohydrology, the ability of a gehydrologist to predict the underground flow of water is truly accurate enough for us to make very good decisions. And we are able to build buildings and roads with very good confidence. Climatology with reference to pollution, on the other hand, suffers from a simple problem: Everytime it rains, pollution is brought down to earth and the air is relatively cleared. Pollution heats up the air and normally results in cloud build-up which cools down the air again and can lead towards rain again. From this simple point of view - how can pollution in, say, Los Angeles affect, say, New York? Pollution in Lod Angeles is outrageous, and I can understand the greenhouse effect heating up LA. But I have a hard time accepting how LA's greenhouse gasses and contribute to heat retention beyond the microclimate region of LA. I'm not a fan of the EPA - but the EPA advertises a truth on TV. The pollution per capita in the USA has come down since the 1970's. The problem is that the 'per capita' has come up. As much as the weather report tried to cleverly state how new records are being broken, listen carefully to what they say. In fact all climate records, (highest temperature, lowest temperature, highest rainfall, lowest rainfall, etc, etc) have all been set in the distant past. On the issue of global warming - we also have a natural cycle of global warming that is far greater than our records can show. But there are signs of the cycle. For example: Senator McCain was talking about how the ice shield in Alaska has retracted by 9miles (in a particular region). In the process Anthropologists were able to find ancient man-made tools. This shows that the ice-shield was once further back. The biggest factor that none of us are taking into account is that the sun appears to be going through its own cycles. And we may well be facing a 'hotter' cycle where the sun may well be heating the earth more than average. One way or the other - we should focus on cutting back on our pollution. It is highly arrogant of us to arrive at a place, make a mess of the place and then leave. You wouldn't do that at a guest's house, so why do we as a generation do it to earth? The only issue I put forward is that we do need to keep a campaigne going against pollution. However by touting half truths, we leave the argument open for the 'other side' and may well ruin it for everyone.

Subject: Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 11:01:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/national/08warm.html?ex=1297054800&en=c398855db07c1657&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 8, 2006 Evangelical Leaders Join Global Warming Initiative By LAURIE GOODSTEIN Despite opposition from some of their colleagues, 86 evangelical Christian leaders have decided to back a major initiative to fight global warming, saying 'millions of people could die in this century because of climate change, most of them our poorest global neighbors.' Among signers of the statement, which will be released in Washington on Wednesday, are the presidents of 39 evangelical colleges, leaders of aid groups and churches, like the Salvation Army, and pastors of megachurches, including Rick Warren, author of the best seller 'The Purpose-Driven Life.' 'For most of us, until recently this has not been treated as a pressing issue or major priority,' the statement said. 'Indeed, many of us have required considerable convincing before becoming persuaded that climate change is a real problem and that it ought to matter to us as Christians. But now we have seen and heard enough.' The statement calls for federal legislation that would require reductions in carbon dioxide emissions through 'cost-effective, market-based mechanisms' — a phrase lifted from a Senate resolution last year and one that could appeal to evangelicals, who tend to be pro-business. The statement, to be announced in Washington, is only the first stage of an 'Evangelical Climate Initiative' including television and radio spots in states with influential legislators, informational campaigns in churches, and educational events at Christian colleges. 'We have not paid as much attention to climate change as we should, and that's why I'm willing to step up,' said Duane Litfin, president of Wheaton College, an influential evangelical institution in Illinois. 'The evangelical community is quite capable of having some blind spots, and my take is this has fallen into that category.' Some of the nation's most high-profile evangelical leaders, however, have tried to derail such action. Twenty-two of them signed a letter in January declaring, 'Global warming is not a consensus issue.' Among the signers were Charles W. Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Their letter was addressed to the National Association of Evangelicals, an umbrella group of churches and ministries, which last year had started to move in the direction of taking a stand on global warming. The letter from the 22 leaders asked the National Association of Evangelicals not to issue any statement on global warming or to allow its officers or staff members to take a position. E. Calvin Beisner, associate professor of historical theology at Knox Theological Seminary in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., helped organize the opposition into a group called the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance. He said Tuesday that 'the science is not settled' on whether global warming was actually a problem or even that human beings were causing it. And he said that the solutions advocated by global warming opponents would only cause the cost of energy to rise, with the burden falling most heavily on the poor. In response to the critics, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, the Rev. Ted Haggard, did not join the 86 leaders in the statement on global warming, even though he had been in the forefront of the issue a year ago. Neither did the Rev. Richard Cizik, the National Association's Washington lobbyist, even though he helped persuade other leaders to sign the global warming initiative. On Tuesday, Mr. Haggard, the pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, said in a telephone interview that he did not sign because it would be interpreted as an endorsement by the entire National Association of Evangelicals. But he said that speaking just for himself, 'There is no doubt about it in my mind that climate change is happening, and there is no doubt about it that it would be wise for us to stop doing the foolish things we're doing that could potentially be causing this. In my mind there is no downside to being cautious.' Of those who did sign, said the Rev. Jim Ball, executive director of the Evangelical Environmental Network: 'It's a very centrist evangelical list, and that was intentional. When people look at the names, they're going to say, this is a real solid group here. These leaders are not flighty, going after the latest cause. And they know they're probably going to take a little flak.' The list includes prominent black leaders like Bishop Charles E. Blake Sr. of the West Angeles Church of God in Christ in Los Angeles, the Rev. Floyd Flake of the Greater Allen A.M.E. Cathedral in New York City, and Bishop Wellington Boone of the Father's House and Wellington Boone Ministries in Norcross, Ga.; as well as Hispanic leaders like the Rev. Jesse Miranda, president of AMEN in Costa Mesa, Calif. The evangelical leaders are meeting Wednesday with senators or their staff members concerned with legislation on energy and the environment. Their letter commends senators who last year passed a resolution by Senators Pete V. Domenici, a Republican, and Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, both of New Mexico, which called for regulatory measures like a cap and trade program, a system in which industries would buy or trade permits to emit greenhouse gases. In their statement, the evangelicals praised companies like BP, Shell, General Electric, Cinergy, Duke Energy and DuPont that it said 'have moved ahead of the pace of government action through innovative measures' to reduce emissions. The television spot links images of drought, starvation and Hurricane Katrina to global warming. In it, the Rev. Joel Hunter, pastor of a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., says: 'As Christians, our faith in Jesus Christ compels us to love our neighbors and to be stewards of God's creation. The good news is that with God's help, we can stop global warming, for our kids, our world and for the Lord.' The advertisements are to be shown in Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee and Virginia. The Evangelical Climate Initiative, at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, is being supported by individuals and foundations, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Hewlett Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation. The initiative is one indication of a growing urgency about climate change among religious groups, said Paul Gorman, executive director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, a clearinghouse in Amherst, Mass., for environmental initiatives by religious groups. Interfaith climate campaigns in 15 states are pressing for regional standards to reduce greenhouse gases, Mr. Gorman said. Jewish, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox leaders also have campaigns under way.

Subject: Kiribati From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 16:37:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Have you heard of the islands of Kiribati? Or how about one of the sub-islands called Kiritimati. Hhhmm okay. What if I were to tell you that in the tradiation of these islands the 'ti' is pronounced like letter 's'. So Kiribati is actually pronounce, 'Kiribas'. Okay now Kiritimati is pronounce, 'Kirismas'..... 'Christmas island'...? The old Nuclear test on Christmas and Easter island? But look up Christmas or Easter Island and you most likely won't find them because they are spelt different. Hhhmmm I wonder if that strange spelling is not on purpose.... you see the global warming issue is posing a serious problem to the people of Kiribati. They are about to lose their island. No seriously, these people are going to be without a land because the seas are in deed rising. They have the opportunity to move to another island that is part of their chain of islands and their is even an emergency project underway to build the necessary infrastructure on the new island to accommodate the mass migration of their people. Okay now for the real 'clinch' the people of Kiribati have already actioned a legal appeal (at the UN) against the government of the USA for the loss of their islands. As the USA is by far and away the biggest polluter of the world, it should face most of the brunt for global warming. And for this reason, it should face most of the blame for the loss of the Kiribati islands. Can you see how serious this could be? If the US government had to ever conceded that its pollution is the main contributor to global warming, the US would place itself in a position to lose the case against Kiribati. The only thing working against Kiribati?.... we do not have a rock solid case that pollution created by burning of fossil fuels is truly raising the global temperature on a macro scale.

Subject: Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 11:01:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/business/09scene.html?ex=1297141200&en=7e19fe9db622ef4f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 A Plug for the Unplugged $100 Laptop Computer for Developing Nations By HAL R. VARIAN ONE of the more interesting technology sessions at Davos, Switzerland, this year was Nicholas Negroponte's presentation of a $100 laptop computer intended for developing countries. Mr. Negroponte, the founder of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, announced that Quanta Computer would be manufacturing the device, based on a chip from Advanced Micro Devices and the Linux operating system. Quanta, a Taiwan company, makes about 30 percent of the world's laptops, so its involvement lends considerable credibility to the project. The mock-up that Mr. Negroponte demonstrated had a spill-resistant keyboard and a carrying handle. The final version will have a screen that can be read in direct sunlight, wireless networking capabilities and a hand crank to generate power. Despite the technological ingenuity of the device, it engendered considerable skepticism. One audience member asked what good a $100 laptop was when network connections cost at least $25 a month. Mr. Negroponte responded that the laptops would send and receive Internet data only when higher-paying commercial data was not being transmitted, leading to lower networking costs. Microsoft's vice president and chief technology officer, Craig J. Mundie, argued that a cellphonelike device would make more sense than a laptop computer in developing countries, because the demand for wireless communications services is strong and growing. As he suggested, there are proven uses for cellphones in developing countries: migrant workers use them to call relatives back home and farmers use them to check crop prices. There are also successful business models like the one pioneered by GrameenPhone of Bangladesh, which has fostered a network of entrepreneurial 'phone ladies' who provide communications services for entire villages. Often cellphone use among the poor in developing countries involves text messaging, which is much cheaper than voice. In the discussion after his presentation Mr. Negroponte emphasized the educational value of laptops, while Mr. Mundie and others focused on the business models enabled by cellphones. These views are not necessarily at odds: as with cellphones, there are many potential business models that can be built around cheap laptops. After all, the most important application for personal computers back in 1979 was VisiCalc, an early spreadsheet used by businesses. Going even further back in history, the must-have technology of 1853 was the sewing machine. Its success was largely because it offered purchasers a way to make money by taking in mending. Isaac Singer capitalized on this application by inventing a new way to sell products to consumers: the installment plan. What is the 21st-century equivalent of taking in mending? Let me suggest that using the $100 laptop as a cash register could be quite attractive. These days, a cash register is nothing but a personal computer with a different interface. A simple cash register program plus accounting software would be useful to merchants whether or not a network was available. If the computer was networked, there could be other valuable commercial applications. One could imagine using a networked laptop as a way to transfer funds, something like an A.T.M. with a human operator. Such an application is quite compatible with the Hawala system of monetary transfer that has been used in the Middle East, Africa and Asia for more than 1,200 years, providing a solid tradition on which entrepreneurs of the cyberage could build. Low-cost laptops could also serve as a way to record and preserve contracts and other legal documents. The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has argued that the lack of formal titles to land and other property has prevented the poor from posting collateral to secure loans. Perhaps cheap, networked laptops could serve as repositories for such documents. Replicating legal documents across a network using peer-to-peer technology would ensure that they would remain accessible even if an individual laptop were lost or stolen. Telephones are now viewed as an essential device for commerce, but it was not always so. The phone was not taken seriously by businessmen back in the 1870's, since there was no written record of transactions. The telegraph, which provided such a record, was viewed as far more trustworthy. Perhaps the virtue of having written (or at least electronic) records of transactions would be as useful in developing countries today as it was in 19th-century America. Of course, written communication requires a literate population. But that is a good thing. If reading, writing and typing are the key to employment, people will be highly motivated to acquire those skills. And, circling back to Mr. Negroponte's education vision, the $100 laptop can help people become literate. There are already computer programs to teach reading from scratch using simple pictures and animation. The great thing about computers is that they are what economists call general-purpose technologies. That is, they provide a platform on which other applications can be built, whether they are cash registers, A.T.M.'s, document repositories or instructional tools. Ultimately, both sides of the Davos debate are right: cellphones have proven uses and will continue to spread rapidly in developing countries. But cellphones have their limits. Offering general-purpose technologies like low-cost laptops is a riskier strategy, but it just might have a big payoff. Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Subject: The Ecological Indian From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 10:35:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/k/krech-indian.html October 17, 1999 The Ecological Indian Myth and History By SHEPARD KRECH 3d PLEISTOCENE EXTINCTIONS Beginning 11,000 years ago, at the end of the period known as the Pleistocene, many animal species that had flourished just a short time before vanished from North America. Men and women had been in the New World for only a relatively short time, and scholars have hotly debated the coincidence of their arrival and the extinctions. Paul Martin, a palynologist and geochronologist, spurred the debate more than any other person. When he proclaimed in the late 1960s that 'man, and man alone, was responsible' for the extinctions, he set off a firestorm that shows little sign of abating. Branding the ancient Indians—so-called Paleoindians—as superpredators, Martin likened their assault on Pleistocene animals to a blitzkrieg, evoking the aggressive, assaulting imagery of the Nazi war machine. Martin could not have made a more apt word choice for grabbing the public imagination. Over the last three decades 'American Blitzkrieg' and 'Slaughter of Mastodons Caused Their Extinction' have defined headlines, and writers in popular magazines like National Geographic concluded confidently that scientists suspect 'man the hunter' as the 'villain' in Pleistocene extinctions. There is no room for the Ecological Indian here. As Martin himself wrote in 1967, 'that business of the noble savage, a child of nature, living in an unspoiled Garden of Eden until the `discovery' of the New World by Europeans is apparently untrue, since the destruction of fauna, if not of habitat, was far greater before Columbus than at any time since.' For Martin, that realization is 'provocative,' 'deeply disturbing,' and 'even revolutionary.' To no surprise, Martin's findings fed the conservative press who argued that because of the (supposed) sins of their earliest ancestors, Native North Americans today lack authority to occupy the moral high ground on environmental issues. Martin's ideas have found support and reached a wide audience for over thirty years, but how well do they stand up today? For well over a century, the consensus in the scientific community has been that Paleoindians, the ancestors of today's American Indians, wandered eastward into North America from northeastern Asia. But among American Indians outside the scientific community, that idea has not met with universal acceptance. Some have taken issue with the idea that their ancestors came initially from Asia. Asked about the origin of the world and human beings, or about the migrations of their ancestors, Indians have sometimes responded that their communities were never anywhere other than where they were at the moment the question was posed. Their ancestors, they said, came into the present world from worlds preceding and beneath the current one, through mouths of caves or from holes in the ground. Other native people believed they had migrated from the east, west, or elsewhere. Some living in the interior of the continent thought that their ancestors once lived far away on the shores of salty seas. In days before they had incorporated European ideas of their origins into their own, American Indians answered questions about their origin and historical movements in as many different voices as there were nations with separate cultures. Even today native people do not speak with one voice on these or any other issues. Some adhere to contemporary versions of their traditional beliefs. But not all do. Many instead have long since converted to the position favored by archaeologists, paleontologists, and other scientists, that Indians came to the New World from Asia thousands of years ago. Like all scientific explanations, this one is changing based on the steady accumulation of data. Each year new sites or dates offer fresh insight on how and when people came into and spread throughout North and South America. The nature of science is to debate theories and to test and confirm or falsify hypotheses spawned by theories. As with evolution, a long period of shared understanding may be suddenly punctuated by 'fresh' insight fitting more seamlessly both new data and the broader historical context in which all scientific thought exists, and a new consensus begins to build. One recent example of this process is illustrated by debates concerning mass extinctions before the Pleistocene, for which there is growing widespread agreement that asteroids—a radical theory when initially proposed—and climate change spelled the end of major orders of living things. The scientific community's consensus is that when Paleoindians wandered eastward from northeastern Asia to North America, they came across a broad and vast land known as Beringia. At the heart of Beringia is a continental shelf that was exposed during lower sea levels of the Pleistocene and is today covered by the Bering and Chukchi seas. In short order, Paleoindians migrated south from Beringia along the west coast or through a corridor between two massive continental ice sheets and spread rapidly to the southern tip of South America. There was ample time and opportunity during the Pleistocene for Paleoindians to wander from Asia to America through Beringia. The Pleistocene era lasted for two million years, and was marked by periods when temperatures were cool and glaciers advanced and by periods when temperatures were warm and glaciers retreated. During the warmer eras marked by glacial retreats, the sea level was essentially today's, and Asia and North America were separated by a strait as they are today. But during the cooler periods when glaciers advanced, the sea level was lower, continental ice sheets were more expansive, and Beringia was exposed. A drop in the sea of 150 feet below today's level was all that was required to remove the obstacle of a strait and expose Beringia as a landmass. At these times, Asia and North America were joined, even if continental glaciers imposed to the east and south. The general scheme is not in dispute; the details, not surprisingly, are debated. For example, many discuss precisely when climatic and environmental conditions permitted Paleoindians to cross Beringia—how much earlier than the era of Paleoindian sites that have been securely dated (see below). Even though evidence for human occupation of Siberia during very early times is mounting, there is no evidence that human beings moved across Beringia prior to a cool era beginning some 80,000 years ago. Indeed from 115,000 to 80,000 years ago, the sea level was essentially today's and water blocked movement by land. But from 80,000 to 10,000 years ago there were long periods when temperatures were very cool and the sea level dropped more than 150 feet below its present level, removing the barrier of a strait; at other moments, temperatures were not as cold and a narrow strait remained as an impediment—not, however, if people possessed the technology to cross water or ice. There were two especially welcoming eras during this 70,000-year-long span. The first was from 65,000 to 23,000 years ago, when the strait—if there was one—was even narrower than today and continental ice sheets loomed but evidently were not joined to block passage toward the heart of the continent to the south (for those who headed in that direction). The second was from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago when the sea level was even lower, and a straitless Beringia grew into a broad plain measuring 1,000 miles from north to south. How inadequate the metaphor of bridge for the landmass that formed between Asia and North America! As a one-thousand-mile-wide plain, the 'Bering land bridge,' as it has been called, was surely attractive to generations of animals large and small, as well as to people following them. At different places and separate times, Beringia was probably a cold but productive steppe rich in fauna and a colder more barren tundra marked by much lower biological productivity. From 80,000 to 10,000 years ago, its vegetation changed from being adapted to wetter and milder conditions to being more suitable for colder and drier climate and longer ice cover. At the end of the Pleistocene, wetter and warmer conditions caused a rapid buildup of peat and an explosion in the numbers of birch trees in Beringia. At its greatest extent, this landmass was no doubt marked by different vegetation zones from north to south, and in the late Pleistocene by a mosaic of environments and species. For human predators, the most important characteristic may have been the abundant graze afforded by grassy vegetation for mammoths, bisons, and horses. For most of the time when Beringia was at its greatest expanse from 23,000 to 10,000 years ago, beyond it to the south and east coastal glaciers loomed and two massive ice sheets covered much of Canada. When they were at their maximum extent 18,000 years ago, the ice sheets encased Canada and the Great Lakes. But as temperatures warmed, they retreated, and waters released from them and from shrinking polar ice caps raised sea levels. After several thousand years, Beringia flooded, Bering Strait re-formed, and human migration between the Old and New World took place henceforth only across water or on ice. For the story of migration into the heart of North America, however, these changes mattered little. Men and women were already in the New World, and the major problem they faced was how to move south. One route was along the coast; some archaeologists argue that this route was the major and the earliest one. Another was through an inland gap or corridor from interior Alaska through the Yukon Territory, British Columbia, and Alberta—along the eastern flanks of the Rocky Mountains. The corridor formed some 13,000 to 11,000 years ago as the continental ice sheets pulled back from each other, allowing men and women, when conditions were optimal, to migrate into the heart of North America. Both routes marked the way into environments like today's but for their location farther south. Bordering the ice sheet was a narrow zone of periglacial tundra, south of which was boreal forest and mixed coniferous and deciduous forests in the East and plains in the West, and desert farther south. Each of these major environments contained grazers, browsers, and predators that would soon be extinct. The extinctions were remarkable by any measure. Animals familiar and unfamiliar, widespread and local, and large and small disappeared. Some were well-known creatures like lemmings, salamanders, and various birds. But many were not, and they constituted a fabulous bestiary. The mammals, especially the ones that were unfamiliar and large, have attracted great attention. How many mammalian species disappeared will probably always be unknown because of uncertainty over species boundaries, but at least thirty-five mammalian genera vanished. Mammals weighing more than one hundred pounds that became extinct have drawn intense interest partly because of their assumed attractiveness to human hunters. For one familiar only with today's North American fauna, these so-called megafauna (literally, large animals) were exceptional. They included exotic hulking tusked mammoths and mastodons that roamed prairies and boggy woodlands, respectively, towering elephant-like over almost all else. Several types of slow-moving, giant ground sloths ranging in size from several hundred pounds to twenty feet long in the same weight range as the mammoths also vanished. So did rhinocerous-sized pampatheres, a kind of giant armadillo, and armored two-thousand-pound, six-foot-long glyptodonts resembling nothing known today. Many herbivores disappeared, including single-hump camels, stocky six-foot-long capybaras, five-hundred-pound tapirs, three-hundred-pound giant beavers, four-horned antelopes, horses, bison-sized shrub oxen, and stag-moose with fantastic multiple-palmated and tined antlers. Carnivores also died out, including dire wolves whose large heads and powerful jaws made them resemble hyenas and huge fearsome fifteen-hundred-pound short-faced bears that were slim and possibly very quick and agile. Two large serrated-toothed cats vanished: scimitar-toothed cats that fed on mammoth young, and great saber-toothed cats that could gape, shark-like, opening their jaws to a one-hundred-degree angle before stabbing or ripping open prey with their enormous canines. All vanished. The end for many came between 11,000 and 10,000 years ago, a watershed millennium that opened with the disappearance of many members of the amazing bestiary and closed with the demise of the remaining camels, horses, mammoths, mastodons, and other megafauna. These species entered oblivion in a geological blink. The big question is why, which returns us to Martin's proclamation, 'Man, and man alone, was responsible.' Can we accept this? In his search for proof, Martin marshaled the power of simulation to his side. On the basis of assumptions about when Paleoindians arrived south of the continental ice sheets, population growth and movement, and kill rates, he and his co-workers simulated the rapid human movement and killings—the 'blitzkrieg.' In one scenario, one hundred Paleoindians arrived on the Alberta prairies some 12,000 years ago. Each year, they moved southward just twenty miles and killed only one dozen animals per person. They also reproduced, doubling their population every twenty years. Except for the reproduction rate, the assumptions underlying these figures seem fairly modest. Yet based on them, Paleoindians in only three hundred years numbered 100,000, spread two thousand miles south, and killed over ninety million one-thousand-pound animals. Using more conservative assumptions in other simulations, Martin and others argued that it still took relatively few years to reach first the Gulf of Mexico and then Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America, and to hunt megafauna to their doom. The thesis has proved seductive—and resilient. Granted, the overwhelming image one gets from Martin's blitzkrieg is of restless Paleoindians constantly on the move. Hunting people, they were always on the go along a 'front' (as in a military campaign). They expanded methodically, killing a mammoth here, a mastodon there, a glyptodont one day, a dim-witted giant ground sloth or cumbersome giant beaver the next. Martin argued that men (and women) arrived in the New World with knowledge of hunting large animals, but these same animals lacked experience with human predators and thus did not fear them, and so hunters left megafaunal extinctions in their wake. They ate little but megafaunal meat and wasted up to half of what they killed. Singularly focused on big game, they ignored fish, shellfish, plants, and other less dramatic sources of food. They moved fast, killed efficiently, and were fecund. Critics, scoffing at overly generous assumptions about kill rates, population growth, and population movement that depart from cautious, reasonable inferences from twentieth-century hunting-gathering peoples, complain that Paleoindians were too successful. Martin speculated that Paleoindians were successful in part because they were newly arrived in the New World, and animals lacked fear of them as predators and did not develop an awareness of how fatal their encounters with them would be until it was too late. When Martin first proposed his thesis some thirty years ago, archaeologists generally accepted that humans were in the New World 10,000 to 11,000 years ago but not much earlier. Today, as a result of a flurry of activity on early sites, it appears likely that Indians reached southern South America some 12,500 years ago, and a new consensus is emerging over an arrival date in the New World of 13,000 to 14,000 years ago. An arrival time of any earlier is sharply disputed. The lines are clearly drawn between most archaeologists, who are uncomfortable with dates earlier than roughly 14,000 years ago, and a vocal, persistent minority asserting that Paleoindians reached the New World 30,000 or 40,000 years ago. While linguistic, dental, and genetic theories lend support to the older dates, it is currently doubtful that a precise chronology can be derived from these theories. In the meantime, the earliest dated sites are plagued by various methodological problems. This debate will not be solved to everyone's satisfaction anytime soon, but at this stage it seems prudent to remain skeptical of dates earlier than 14,000 years ago. Animals like slow-moving, sluggish ground sloths must have been especially vulnerable to human predation, but animals with far more presumed agility than gigantic sloths disappeared too. Martin's argument that the superpredators killed them all easily and quickly because they lacked time to develop fear is weakened both by the likelihood that Paleoindians arrived 1,000 to 3,000 years before the watershed millennium when most megafaunal animals vanished and by the fact that prey do not always fear human hunters (animals like buffaloes or pronghorn antelopes survived into the modern era alongside humans, despite a reputation of being so bold or so intensely curious that hunters rather easily killed them). It is as reasonable to suggest that Paleoindians played a greater role in the extinctions the longer they were in North America. If only there were numerous archaeological sites with associated extinct megafauna to test Martin's thesis of overkill. But there are only fifty or so sites—a mere handful. At them, Paleoindians killed and butchered mastodons, mammoths, camels, horses, four-horned antelopes, tapirs, and a couple of other extinct species. Amazingly, Martin used the paucity of sites to help buttress his claim that a blitzkrieg marked the onslaught: 'Perhaps the only remarkable aspect of New World archaeology is that any kill sites have been found,' he once remarked, reasoning from the assumption that Paleoindians killed animals whenever they came across them and therefore the kill sites were scattered and ephemeral. For Martin, a negative (the absence of sites) proves a positive (man killed fearless animals in a blitzkrieg). Martin's unequivocal certainty that man alone was responsible seems remarkable in light of this alone. For Martin's image of restless, relentless Paleoindians to ring true and for the overkill thesis to work, Paleoindians had to be everywhere, required to focus energy and time on megafauna. Unfortunately for Martin, this simply does not fit our most sensible speculations today about Paleoindian adaptations. For too long, archaeologists interested in this period focused myopically, if understandably, on one type of technology referred to as Clovis, whose archetypal artifact is an impressive spear point from three to six inches long and supremely adapted to wounding or delivering the coup de grace to large animals. Archaeologists looking for Paleoindian remains have been attracted most often to bone sites where they have found these fluted points and concluded (not surprisingly) that Paleoindians were hunters, and perhaps hunters only. But we now know that Paleoindian technology cannot be reduced everywhere to spear points used by their makers in an exclusive search for megafauna. And it is inconceivable that in every climate and in every era, the makers of fluted points possessed precisely the same culture or practiced identical gathering and hunting strategies. For some years now the evidence has mounted for very different Paleoindian technologies and adaptive strategies in North America (indeed, throughout the New World). In the West, people used not only Clovis points but also a variety of large and small fluted and nonfluted projectile points. Undeniably, some Paleoindians may have been deliberate or opportunistic hunters of the megafauna that became extinct, but others were probably hunters of caribou, deer, beaver, and small animals. In the tundra, parkland, and mixed forest environments in the East, Indians killed many caribou and some mastodons. But in forested regions, they also exploited species like tortoises—which also disappeared—and other small animals. Many North American Indians were probably generalized foragers whose diet included seeds, roots, shellfish, and fish. In their adaptations they may well have been similar to their contemporaries in Chile, who gathered shellfish and plants and hunted small mammals—and lacked Clovis technology. Because of inadequate or expensive techniques of archaeological recovery, as well as poor preservation, much remains unknown about Paleoindian life, including how near the fit was to our contemporary understanding of hunter-gatherers as people with extensive and variable interest in seeds, fish, roots, shellfish, birds, and other such foods. In the twentieth century, people who gathered and hunted for their livelihood (who provide one way to think about Paleoindians at the end of the Pleistocene) have shown quite extraordinary variation in subsistence and social patterns, especially in environments as different as the various North American ones. Foraging people possess food preferences, but rather than restrict their hunting strategies to single classes of animals, many hunt animals that minimize the cost of their effort relative to their gain. For them, the consequences of hunting for the viability of a species are as likely to be accidental as deliberate. There is no reason to assume that Paleoindians in North America were any different. Of no help either to Martin's argument that only man the megafaunal hunter figured in the Pleistocene extinctions is that minifaunal as well as megafaunal animals vanished. Some were possibly relevant to Paleoindian diets or habits if people were generalized hunters and foragers, and some seem completely irrelevant. Relatively little is known about insects and plants, but at least ten genera (and many more species) of birds disappeared. They ranged widely in size and type from a jay to a flamingo. One was a shelduck, which like other waterfowl was probably easily killed while undergoing molt, when it could not readily fly. Another was a lapwing and no doubt tasty. Other birds included a condor, caracara, and vultures, all probable scavengers of grassland carcasses. There were other raptors, including eagles or hawk-eagles, and jays and cowbirds. Martin tried to explain all the extinct birds away by analogy with contemporary scavenging species in commensal or dependent relations with animals similar to Pleistocene ones that became extinct. But the behavior of the extinct Pleistocene genera was not necessarily identical to that of the living birds presumably related to them. Curiously, approximately the same percentage of birds disappeared as megafauna, even though in Martin's theory Paleoindians were interested only in megafauna. This coincidence alone suggests that we look elsewhere for causes before we conclude that humans alone were responsible for Pleistocene extinctions. The relevance of climate to these events has at times been too casually dismissed. Climate changes were pervasive at the end of the Pleistocene. Temperatures warmed by roughly thirteen degrees Fahrenheit, and the climate became drier overall. Affecting animals and plants more than higher temperatures and increased aridity, however, was probably the rise in seasonal temperature extremes. Winters became colder and summers hotter. In these new conditions, grasses and other plants, insects, and other organisms most directly dependent on temperature and precipitation either flourished or did not, as did invertebrate and vertebrate organisms in turn. Entire habitats changed rapidly at the end of the Pleistocene. In the Upper Midwest, spruce forest became pine forest almost overnight in geological time. For animals with firm boreal forest associations, such as mastodons, the consequences might have been dire. In some areas, grasses withered under drier conditions. With climatic and vegetational changes, small animals altered their distribution, retreating to areas where conditions remained tolerable. Through death or emigration, some animals abandoned the southern, desiccating parts of their ranges; herpetiles (snakes and tortoises) in particular changed theirs. At present, there is much we do not know about the consequences of these climatic and vegetational changes. For some species, there may have been less food. For some, grasses may have become more difficult to metabolize, or even toxic. Perhaps gestation changed. Although hypotheses such as a failure of enzyme systems abound, the causal chain between climate change and extinction remains unclear. The sequences are not clear today. Despite the focus on biotic properties and dynamics, we simply do not know enough about the specific properties of particular extinct forms. We may never know enough. Although much is conjectural, the emphasis on climate and attendant vegetational changes focuses discussion of the extinctions away from communities and on each specific species or genus that changed its range according to its tolerance to the changes. If extinctions are considered on a case-by-case basis, then factors like biomass, reproductive biology, overspecialization, feeding strategies, dependencies, and competition between species come to the fore as being in part responsible for a particular species's vulnerability. Some species have low rates of increase and others high rates. Some have long gestation periods, others short ones. Some have long lives, others brief lives. Some, because of their reproductive biology or social habits, are more vulnerable to extinction than others in a changing climate. The replacement of wet plant communities by dry plant communities in montane habitats will eliminate certain species. Climate changes might have destroyed a particular patchiness in habitat supposedly enjoyed by species like mammoths (on which human hunters also focused their energies). The timing of extinctions was surely important but has not been adequately worked out. Did large grazing animals, for example, become extinct before smaller ones in the same habitat? In large numbers, herbivores weighing over one ton can transform the environment. Once they are extinct, however, the floral composition of habitats can change to affect smaller grazing animals to the point of extinction. That the answers to these questions are currently ambiguous does not mean that they should not be pursued, on a species-by-species, genus-by-genus, habitat-by-habitat, or ecosystem-by-ecosystem basis. Climate presents a formidable obstacle to the exclusionary nature of Martin's thesis. Climate, after all, has been linked to the rapid evolution of mammalian forms. Moreover, in earlier extinction episodes that closely rivaled the late-Pleistocene one but took place long before man the superpredator arrived on the scene, climate overwhelmed plants and animals. Six other extinction events marked the last ten million years in North America. None was caused by Paleoindians, who did not yet exist. But it is a good bet that climate was involved, and there are marked similarities in climatic deterioration and extinctions of the late Pleistocene and the preceding era, the late Pliocene. Even though causation is far from clear, temperature and other climatic and sea-level fluctuations are correlated with these other extinctions, and they and other episodes make extinction seem normal, not abnormal, in the history of life. Indeed, most species that ever lived are extinct. The climatic changes at the end of the Pleistocene alone must have been sufficient to overwhelm certain animals and plants unable to adapt under altered conditions. Desiccation by itself imperiled animals forced to come to the remaining sources of water. Either animals moved to where conditions remained favorable, or they were left susceptible to a Paleoindian coup de grace, or they were weakened to the point of eventual disappearance without helping human hands. If climate fatally complicates the simplistic idea that humans alone were blamable for the extinctions, there is still too much we fail to understand about climate to ascribe responsibility to it alone. Perhaps we will be able to say one day with near 100 percent certainty that climate change triggered interactions that were ultimately destructive to the majority of extinct Pleistocene species. But that day has not yet arrived. In the meantime, because it is naive to think that any single factor was solely responsible for all Pleistocene extinctions, it is safest not to rule out a role for Native Americans altogether. To deny human agency would be as foolhardy as Martin's ruling out climate. Only strict adherence to the belief that modern industrial societies alone cause significant ecological change would lead us to that position. It makes as much sense to hypothesize that Paleoindians pushed certain species already heading toward their doom over the edge to extinction. After all, Paleoindians and a distinctive hunting technology were widespread, and the association of their artifacts with animal remains does show a taste for species now extinct. Another reason for the plausibility of a scenario in which Paleoindians played some role is that preindustrial humans have caused extinctions in other times and places. Throughout the Pacific, indigenous people had a severe impact on birds. They exterminated literally thousands of species well before the arrival of Europeans. The Hawaiian archipelago presents a classic case. There, native people altered the habitat so that it met their needs and conformed to their cultural expectations—so thoroughly that extinctions followed in their wake. Ancient Hawaiians cleared land with fire and diverted streams for irrigation, and crop plants and extensive grasslands took over what had been forested coastal areas. Fish ponds emerged where there had been mudflats. Hawaiians introduced dogs, pigs, chickens, and—inadvertently—rats and reptiles that had stowed away on their canoes. As a result of these introductions and radical changes in the habitat, over forty species of birds (well over half of all endemic bird species) became extinct. Some, especially those that could not fly, the ancient Hawaiians ate: petrels, flightless geese, ibises, rails, a hawk, and crow. Others like honeycreepers, other finches, and a thrush vanished as their habitats disappeared or as their feathers came into demand to ornament clothing. New Zealand presents a second compelling case. As in Hawaii, early Polynesian colonizers—the predecessors of today's Maori—deployed fire to transform New Zealand's environment. They also hunted at least thirteen species of moas—ostrich-like flightless birds, one of which towered over men and women—to extinction. They killed adult birds in large quantities and gourmandized their eggs. They left necks and skulls unused—wasted parts they discarded. In the end, no moas survived, and these ancient Polynesians turned their attention to what was left—shellfish, fish, seals, and small birds. The human hand is deeply implicated in the extinction of avifauna in Hawaii, New Zealand, and other Pacific islands. Of course, North America is not a small island. Nor were Paleoindian societies organized or structured in the same way as early Polynesian ones. Nor do we imagine that Paleoindians transformed or fragmented habitats, or introduced predators, as early Hawaiians did. Nevertheless, a human role should not be ruled out in any case, and there is no good reason to bar humans from at least a supporting part in North American Pleistocene extinctions. Perhaps the very large island of Madagascar provides a better model than smaller islands for what happened at the end of the North American Pleistocene. After the Indonesian—East African ancestors of the Malagasy settled Madagascar, large flightless birds, giant tortoises, hippopotami, more than fifteen species of lemurs (some of which were the size of gorillas), and other animals disappeared. Although some have blamed humans alone for this loss, it seems more likely that men and women arrived on this island at a moment of drought in a long-term climatic cycle oscillating from wet to dry, and that this in combination doomed more species than either humans, desiccation, or vegetation changes alone could have. In view of the evidence that recently came to light to support these island cases, Martin's theory that humans played a significant role in Pleistocene extinctions in North America may be more readily understood, but his continued assertiveness insisting that theirs was the only role that mattered is not. The evidence for the human role in the late-Pleistocene extinctions is circumstantial, and climatic change was fundamental and potentially far-reaching. There is still much we do not know about how and why animals responded to climate changes, but on Madagascar and Hawaii and other Pacific islands, both climate and human-induced changes played a role in the demise of animals. Multiple causes provide the best explanation. Vine Deloria, Jr., recently spoke contemptuously of 'mythical Pleistocene hit men' (and angrily vilified scientific methodology and authority), preferring in their place earthquakes, volcanoes, and floods of Indian legend. He theorized that such catastrophes not only occurred but somehow had continental reach to cause the extinctions. But the Pleistocene extinctions continue to defy soundbite simplification. Closer to the time when a fuller historical record can significantly inform interpretation, we turn to a case that also involves disappearance, not of animals but of people: the Hohokam, who lived in urban communities where Phoenix and Tucson sprawl today in the Arizonan Sonoran Desert.

Subject: Outskirts of the Welfare State From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 10:30:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05muslims.html?ex=1296795600&en=f22dbaf7a73cb0f9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Islam on the Outskirts of the Welfare State By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL In few places on earth is the air fresher than in a Swedish housing project. Take Bergsjon, which sits five miles from the center of Sweden's second-largest city, the stately Dutch-built port of Gothenburg. Home to a Volvo plant and some of the world's biggest shipyards, Gothenburg was long an industrial powerhouse. Bergsjon was built between 1967 and 1972 to reward the workers who made it that. Bergsjon resembles the places Swedes love to retreat to in midsummer — quiet, pristine, speckled with lakes and smelling of evergreen trees — but it is only a short tram ride away from the city's giant SKF ball-bearing plant. The center has no cars. Its 14,500 people live in apartments set within a lasso-shaped ring road, on grassy hills that climb toward the country's rustic uplands. As Asa Svensson, a municipal coordinator for the development, notes, 'It was planned for people who like to be in the country.' But now the shipyards are gone. The Swedish industrial workers Bergsjon was planned for no longer live there. Today it is inhabited mostly by immigrants, many of them refugees, of a hundred nationalities. Seventy percent of the residents were either born abroad or have parents who were. The same goes for 93 percent of the schoolchildren. You see Somali women walking the paths in hijabs and long wraps and graffiti reading 'Bosna i Hercegovina 4-Ever.' A few years ago, the mayor of Gothenburg declared, 'The prospects of turning Bergsjon into a normal Swedish neighborhood are almost nil.' Forty percent of the families are on outright welfare, and many of the rest are on various equivalents of welfare that bear different names. Far below half the population is employed. There are reports of a rise in recruitment to criminal gangs — and to radical Islamic groups, too, although none of the authorities can give a clear idea of how Islam is practiced and where. In October, Mirsad Bektasevic, a 19-year-old Swede from near Gothenburg, was arrested in Sarajevo in an apartment that contained suicide-bomb vests, explosives and a newly made video presumably intended for broadcast. Bektasevic, who was born to Muslim parents in prewar Yugoslavia and found refuge in Sweden as a 6-year-old, reportedly ran a Web site supporting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. In October 2004, Osama bin Laden disparaged George Bush's claim that Al Qaeda hated freedom by saying, 'Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden, for example.' Sweden may have kept its distance from the Iraq war, but it has been unable to shelter itself from world events. There are places like Bergsjon ringing the major cities across Sweden. They are all terra incognita to the vast majority of native Swedes. It would be wrong to overdraw the picture. Svensson, who has been working in Bergsjon for 25 years, says she has never been attacked or felt insecure there. The public spaces are clean, and the apartments are large. In the wake of last fall's riots in France, journalists from France and Germany visited Sweden's public housing, and some hailed it as a model to be imitated. But clearly, various experiments close to the heart of Swedish democracy and Swedish socialism have gone wrong. Swedes pride themselves on the success of the cradle-to-grave welfare state they developed over the last 70 years. For its foreign defenders throughout the cold war, it was an ingenious way of avoiding the pitfalls of both American-style capitalism and Soviet Communism, of achieving both equality and prosperity. But neighborhoods that were built to keep citizens close to nature now keep them far from the job market. Policies meant to protect people from persecution now expose them to neglect. Swedes have begun to use a word — 'segregation' — that they used to employ only when lecturing other countries. A sobering realization is beginning to spread that the Swedish system cannot be easily adapted to a society in which a seventh of the working-age population is foreign-born. The Garlic Express As Hemingway might have put it, Sweden has become a multiethnic, multicultural and racially divided country in two ways: first gradually, then suddenly. The gradual part started with World War II. Sweden was neutral, but it fell under Germany's sway. Indeed, the historian Byron Nordstrom has described this neutrality as 'a sham' and Sweden as a 'virtual ally' of the Germans. Sweden provided million of tons of iron ore to the Nazis and permitted the free movement of troops across its territory. This neutrality would have two important consequences in the half-century that followed. The first was spiritual. The ambitious Swedish welfare state, defended in the first decades of the century on grounds of ethnic, and even volkisch, solidarity, was maintained and expanded, but on different rationales — expiatory ones, you could say, like egalitarianism and humanitarianism. The second consequence was logistical. At a time when all of Europe's infrastructure needed to be rebuilt or replaced, Sweden had one of the few undemolished industrial bases on the continent. In retrospect, its astonishing postwar growth rates — 4 percent a year until the oil crisis of the 1970's and 7 percent for most of the 1960's — were almost inevitable. All Sweden lacked was sufficient people to man its factories. A result was a series of temporary labor agreements with foreign countries along the lines of Germany's Gastarbeiter program, starting with Italy and Hungary in 1947 and spreading to Yugoslavia and Turkey two decades later. (Finns, many of them Swedish-speaking, streamed in throughout the period.) As they did in Germany, the laborers proved considerably less temporary than anticipated. But in contrast to the German case, the immigration has been a success by any economic or cultural criterion you would care to use. When the boom stopped all over the West in the 1970's, labor unions sought — and got — restrictions on work-force migration. But one door was left open: political asylum. Polish Jews fleeing state anti-Semitism and Greeks fleeing the dictatorship of the 'colonels' began arriving in the late 1960's, and Swedish immigration since then forms — to use a metaphor of the economist Torsten Persson — 'a ringlike pattern of political crises,' from pro-Allende Chileans in the 1970's through Kurdish nationalists in the 1980's to Somalis and Bosnians in the 1990's. So began the 'sudden' phase of the emergence of multiethnic Sweden. Since 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, half of all residence permits granted — almost 400,000 — have gone to reunite families from various geopolitical disaster areas. A lot of these places were in the Islamic world. So Sweden now has a Muslim population of 200,000 to 400,000; the higher tally would place it among the most heavily Muslim countries in Western Europe. Goran Johansson, Gothenburg's Social Democratic mayor, was a labor boss at SKF in the late 1960's, back when the tram line used by foreign workers was known as the Garlic Express. When the Yugoslavs started coming, Johansson recalled on a dark afternoon at City Hall earlier this winter: 'I introduced these guys around. They directly found work and met Swedes every day. They had temporary housing, but they moved out quickly — often with Swedish women. Compare that to today!' Sweden suffered from bad decisions and bad timing. In 1985, it shifted responsibility for integrating immigrants from its employment bureaucracy to its welfare system. Then, between 1990 and 1994, squeezed between an expanding state sector and increasing global competition for its industries, Sweden underwent the worst economic collapse of any Western European economy in decades. G.N.P. contracted by 6 percent, and employment levels declined by 12 percent. This was the moment (1992) when asylum applications were reaching a peak of 84,000 a year — to a country of only 9 million. The vast majority were accepted. That is, before family reunification is even reckoned in, Sweden was adding almost 1 percent a year to its population by welcoming some of the most desperate and traumatized people on earth. Sweden had been trying to link immigrants with jobs and communities, along the lines Johansson still suggests. But such plans buckled under the size of the influx. The country now scrambled simply to house the newcomers. As it happened, empty housing was something Sweden had in abundance. Facing a housing shortage in the early 1960's, its government undertook an ambitious plan to build a million residences. It came to be known as the Million Program. The apartments that resulted compare well with other European subsidized housing, but Swedish culture is not built around apartment living, and native Swedes were unwilling to stay in them once they had enough money to afford their own houses. When the immigrants began arriving en masse, there was an obvious place to stick them. Assar Lindbeck, the dean of Sweden's welfare-state economists, points out that they were sent to areas where there were empty apartments — which are 'by definition in an area of high unemployment.' Cool Million By now, so fully has the immigrant population become associated with the Million Program that the immigrant magazine Gringo has coined the term miljonsvenskar, or 'million Swedes,' to describe the people who live in these apartments. The editor, Zanyar Adami, 24, a Kurd who arrived with his parents from Iran at age 6, brought out the first issue of Gringo in August 2004. He has since won the country's most prestigious journalism award. Adami wants to defend and even glorify the culture of the newest Swedes, but admits that he is confused about what that culture is. Growing up as he did in newish housing in Hasselby, west of Stockholm, brought feelings of alienation, loneliness and inferiority. His own journalistic career began when he went out to a disco with seven Swedish-looking friends and was singled out to be turned away at the door. He went home and wrote a white-hot article that was published to considerable fanfare in Dagens Nyheter, the most influential national newspaper. 'There was this feeling,' he recalls. ''A Swede is better than a foreigner.'' But alienation is by no means the whole of it. Adami is just as keen to show he does not have any chip on his shoulder. Sitting in the Cinnamon coffee shop in the upmarket bohemian neighborhood of Sodermalm, Adami says: 'My father is an economist and works as a taxi driver. He's always positive about Sweden, even if he's discriminated against. That's affected me a lot.' Gringo is a large-format, buzz-chasing magazine with a broad sense of humor and almost absurdly sophisticated graphics. Its articles depict life among the children of refugees as better than it is sometimes portrayed. The ghettoized svartkalle — or 'black head,' in the Swedish slang — comes off as positively cool. (Youth slang also has a term for ethnic Swedes: They are called Svennar, or 'Svens,' much as American ghetto slang used to refer to white people as 'Chuck.') Adami sometimes says that Gringo's project is to create a new Swedish national identity. A recent article on 'new Swedish words' included several Arabic ones, like habibi, haram and hayat. Every issue carries the motto 'Sveriges svenskaste tidning' ('Sweden's Most Swedish Magazine'). 'Mainstream Swedish media give an idea of the country that is 40 years out of date,' he says. 'Typically, their editorial staffs are middle-class, middle-aged, living here in Sodermalm.' On the other hand, Adami recently moved to Sodermalm himself. A generation ago, Nalin Pekgul looked at Sweden through Adami's eyes. When she arrived in the community of Tensta from Turkish Kurdistan with her parents in 1980, Tensta and the neighboring development in Rinkeby seemed to offer the best of both worlds — Swedish security and a cosmopolitan mix of cultures. Forty percent of Tensta was immigrant then, much of it Greek. Today immigrants and their children make up closer to 85 percent of the residents. As in Bergsjon, dependence is at astronomical levels. A fifth of the women in their late 40's, to take just one of many possible indices, are on disability benefits. Pekgul, who sat for eight years in the Riksdag, the national Parliament, now heads the National Federation of Social Democratic Women. Her decision to stay in Tensta, among people she grew up with, has been an important symbol. So it was national news when Pekgul let drop in a radio interview that she was looking to move elsewhere, citing rising insecurity and Islamic radicalization. 'People are using Islam to distance themselves from Swedish society,' she says, sitting over chocolate-covered oatcakes and tea in the building she grew up in. 'Ten years ago when I was a member of Parliament, people would see me on the tiniest cable stations. Now, when I'm on big national programs, only one or two people will ever say they've seen me. Everybody else is watching Al Jazeera.' Last January, Pekgul had a public discussion with the French feminist Fadela Amara about changes in France. 'Whenever she talked about France,' Pekgul recalls, 'it sounded like we were undergoing the same changes France did, only 10 years behind. It was the first time I had thought: I'm going to have to leave. It's not going to get better.' Burning Cars 'In segregated areas,' Mauricio Rojas says, 'schools are the key.' Rojas, 55, is a charismatic economic historian with a bewitching intellect who fled Chile in the early 1970's. 'Many Swedes think the areas are interesting to live in,' he says. 'And they're right. But they won't stay if they don't think their kids are getting a Swedish education.' Such blunt opinions have been Rojas's trademark since he began his career with the free-market Liberal Party. Immigrant politicians (although not voters) have gravitated to the Liberals, from Rojas to the Congo-born parliamentarian Nyamko Sabuni. This is perhaps not surprising in a country where the Social Democratic Party has been in power for all but a handful of years since 1932 and 'progressive' is a synonym for 'establishment.' Rojas estimates that the tipping point where white flight begins comes when immigrants reach 20 percent of the local population. The reason is that — given the tendency of immigrants to have more children — school systems then become half-immigrant. Kids come home speaking a 'Rinkeby Swedish,' with flat intonations and lots of slang derived from Turkish and Arabic, and the ethnic Swedes scatter. In Rinkeby and Tensta, that point was passed long ago. 'You have segregation,' says Bjorn Hjalmarsson, the principal of the Bredby School in Rinkeby. 'It's an enclave here.' Of the 400 students at Bredby, fewer than 10 speak Swedish in the home. Sweden introduced a wide-open school-choice program in the early 1990's, and that affects a district like this. Some ambitious parents send their kids to schools in the city center, the only way to make connections with ethnic Swedes and thus (parents feel) to rise in life. The most conservative Muslim parents, who see Sweden as immoral and atheistic and don't want their daughters going to school dances, use the area's 'intercultural' schools. The students in the English class for 15-year-olds come from Somalia, Syria, Turkey and Iraq. Many of the girls wear head scarves or hijabs. If Bredby is a representative school for the area (and it appears to be), then Sweden is getting educational outcomes far, far better than those of other European countries and the United States. The kids' English — a third language for all of them — is excellent, even if it takes them a while to get over their shyness in using it. They don't bring up politics, and they are unanimous in considering the United States 'cool.' They want to know how much American journalists earn and whether Tupac Shakur is really dead. 'You can get famous there,' say two of them. The only dissent on the question of America's coolness comes from the Swedish-born teacher, and this is not surprising. Particularly since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime, which numbered among its victims many relatives of the Kurds and Iraqis who sought asylum in Sweden, you find more unapologetic pro-Americanism among the children of Muslim immigrants than among those of Swedish stock. Ethnic Swedes seldom come to Rinkeby, and many of these students get nervous and feel they are being 'looked at' when they travel far from the neighborhood. What divides the students most sharply is the question of whether they are Swedish. When asked, half of them nod vigorously yes; the others nod vigorously no. 'I'm Swedish,' says one Somali girl. 'And I'm proud to be Swedish. I'm born here.' One of her friends snorts. Could something like the French riots, with burning cars and rampaging gangs, happen in Sweden? 'Absolutely,' says one lanky boy near the window. 'People burn cars here all the time. Not because they're angry — because they think it's fun.' And, in fact, the charred patch of ground visible next to the school entrance that day marks the spot where a car was driven up to the wall of the school the previous weekend and set alight. 'Sweden Will Never Accept You' Swedes aren't used to endemic crime, and they aren't used to associating certain neighborhoods with crime. Late last summer, there was a spectacular armed robbery by a gang from the town of Tumba. A month later, there was an attack on a police station in Ronna, a Million Program neighborhood in the city of Sodertalje, by Swedes of Assyrian Christian background. The incidence of violent crime is 37 percent higher in Sodertalje, at 13 incidents per thousand people, than in the rest of Sweden. While such figures would not cause an American's jaw to drop, they are part of a growing impression that society is losing its grip. Youths have discovered that if you hammer the panes at bus and tram shelters, the glass will rain into a pleasing arrangement of vitreous pebbles. Such piles are visible at several stops on the tram that connects Bergsjon to downtown Gothenburg. This hobby caused about 2.7 million Swedish kronor ($350,000) worth of damage last year, according to an official in the Gothenburg mayor's office. Among Somalis, the chewing of khat, an addictive low-intensity stimulant popular in East Africa, is widespread. Shipments of khat arrive daily (as they must, for the drug spoils quickly) from middlemen in England and Holland. On more than one occasion in the summer of 2004, transit authorities stopped bus traffic to Tensta because of attacks on passengers. Firemen and emergency medical technicians have been attacked in the suburbs of Malmo, Sweden's third-largest city. Just as Pekgul's young immigrant neighbors complain that crimes against Swedes are taken more seriously than crimes against immigrants, you frequently hear allegations from white people that the more violent among the miljonsvenskar pick out ethnic Swedish youngsters to rob. According to Johnny Lindh, the police commissioner in Rinkeby, this may be statistically true but does not mean that crime is motivated by race. It is more likely that white Swedes in the center of Stockholm are easier marks — identifiably middle class and unlikely to have developed the habit of defending themselves aggressively. According to the National Council for Crime Prevention, citizens of other countries make up 26 percent of Swedish prison inmates. Among those serving sentences longer than five years — which in Sweden are given out for only serious crimes like major drug dealing, murder and rape — about half are foreign citizens, and these figures exclude the foreign-born who have become Swedes. Again, to a non-Swede, the scale of this problem is small. In 2004, there were only 329 people serving sentences of more than five years in all of Sweden. Still, the association of crime and immigration is not a figment of the Swedish imagination. Last summer, the left-leaning tabloid Aftonbladet revealed that a number of Muslim extremist groups were recruiting in prisons. The largest is a group called Asir, perhaps named for the Saudi province from which four of the Sept. 11 hijackers came. It is where crime interacts with the world of Sweden's hundreds of thousands of Muslims that people get most passionate. There can be few countries in Europe where natives know less about the ways of the Muslims who live among them than Sweden. The isolation of the apartments where immigrants mostly live has a lot to do with this. But even those who live and work in those areas find it hard to be precise about Muslim ways, and particularly about Islamist radicalism — although all are fairly sure that it is increasing. 'We have some people here who can't leave Sweden,' says Commissioner Lindh in Rinkeby. 'If they went to the U.S., they would be imprisoned.' So the police have a pretty good idea of what's going on in the mosques? 'No,' Lindh replies. The Great Mosque of Stockholm dominates a busy square at Medborgartorg, three subway stops south of the city center. Reportedly financed by a sheik from the United Arab Emirates, it has a highly varied body of worshipers and leaders. Last summer, a window opened onto the mosque's internal politics. Swedish public radio broadcast the content of anti-Semitic cassette recordings being sold there. And various rival mosque leaders began to use the pages of the right-leaning tabloid Expressen to hash out their differences and expose each other's agendas. An Algerian-born, Saudi-educated conservative imam, Hassan Moussa, announced in the pages of Expressen that he was receiving death threats from within his own mosque. Moussa, who said he had been 'shocked' by the London bombings that summer, called on Sweden's integration minister, Jens Orback, to establish a council to combat extremism. In expressing his opposition to violence, Moussa recalls over coffee at the Culture House complex in central Stockholm, 'I decided that I would leave the word 'but' out of my sermons.' Moussa didn't gain much from going public. He lost influence within the mosque, according to someone knowledgeable about its inner workings. But his article brought many new Swedish Muslim voices out of the woodwork, the most forceful of whom was the Iraqi-born writer Salam Karam. Karam had long criticized Moussa himself for his 'double messages' and his intimacy with the hard-line Muslim Brotherhood, so he opposed Moussa's council on the grounds that Moussa would probably wind up serving on it. But Karam applauded Moussa's change of heart and added some horror stories of his own. One involved a prominent imam who had been ostracized and condemned as 'a Jew who converted to Islam' because he had opposed suicide bombing and suggested that Muslims vote for the Christian Democratic Party. (In general, the Social Democrats command a loyalty among Swedish Muslim voters approaching that of African-Americans to the Democratic Party.) Swedes increasingly get the sense that these are not just exotic or foreign stories. 'Radicals are abusing the situation in Sweden to recreate the old culture,' says Lebanese-born Kassem Hamadé, who reports on Islam and Islamic radicalism for Expressen. 'One of the most important appeals to potential members is: 'Sweden will never accept you.'' Irresistibly Seductive Sweden's immigrants are far from the poorest in Europe, but they are among the most excluded. Is outright prejudice to blame? A recent study by the economist Dan-Olof Rooth found that Swedish-raised children adopted from other lands, who often look different, did worse when looking for jobs than similarly situated ethnic Swedes. Channel 4's Kalla Fakta ('Cold Facts') and other national news shows routinely practice 'sting' journalism, showing, for example, that an apartment 'open' for a Swede is somehow 'taken' when a non-European shows up or calls. Real-estate companies have campaigned for the removal of satellite dishes — which tend to mark an apartment as home to unassimilated immigrants from developing countries — from apartment windows on the disingenuous reasoning that they could hurt someone if they fell. But when Swedes discuss immigrant issues, the background attitude is less often prejudice than political correctness. Problems are constantly fudged — and resolved in such a way as to establish no principles and offend no one. In one recent case, two girls were forbidden to wear full burkas to school in Gothenburg — but only because teachers supposedly could not tell them apart. There are shibboleths: education is hailed as a panacea for the ills of exclusion, even though the 'problem' immigrants who came from the developing world after 1980 have, on average, more academic qualifications than the successful ones who preceded them. And there are taboos: the practice of second-generation Swedes returning to their ancestral countries to find husbands and wives, for instance, is common, particularly among families from Turkey. Neighboring Denmark has passed laws limiting the practice. In Sweden, public discussion of this kind of endogamy is muted, although Swedes complain in private that it slows integration and unacceptably widens the number of potential new immigrants. 'It's nothing you can talk about,' says one educator at a Million Program school. 'In general, we despise the Danes for raising this.' The rise of a right-wing anti-immigrant party, along the lines of the Danish People's Party, appears unlikely in Sweden — in part because memory is still fresh of the New Democracy Party, which stormed into the Riksdag with more than 6 percent of the vote at the height of the economic downturn in 1991 but then performed erratically, embarrassing even its most ardent followers. Dilsa Demirbag-Sten, a Kurdish immigrant author and television personality, says the focus is too much on discrimination. 'Are immigrants discriminated against?' she asks over coffee in the Hotel Lydmar on a sunny Saturday morning. 'Definitely. But it is not the only reason they have problems. They are also discriminated against by the racist, anti-Semitic honor culture that many of them live under.' Demirbag-Sten, whose new book describes honor culture in Kurdish Sweden, says that the larger problem, in her community, at least, is a new kind of political Islam, one that knows how to probe liberal institutions and use them to advantage. She is particularly frustrated that recent government reports, thick with postcolonial theory and quotations from Edward Said, address neither immigrant anti-Semitism nor immigrant antifeminism. 'The focus on discrimination is a way of avoiding the real problem,' she says. 'Because if the problem is not discrimination, then the problem is the Swedish system itself.' This would indeed be troubling news for Sweden. Although its vaunted welfare state was called into question in the 1990's, it has since shown much more resilience than anticipated and retains its place as the foundation stone of the national self-image. No one expects the Social Democrats to be chased from power any time soon. And yet this system poses particular problems for welcoming newcomers that other systems do not. When the state winds up allocating goods and services, more things are 'decided' and fewer things 'happen.' Most Swedes are proud that 40 percent of apartments are public housing, distributed according to need. But that means that immigrants clustered together in apartment buildings far from the labor market can more plausibly blame the government for 'segregating' them, even if this segregation arose purely from Sweden's desire to help the world's most unfortunate, regardless of their race or country of origin. The welfare state's good deeds never go wholly unpunished. An argument now in vogue, particularly on the left and in academia, holds that Sweden suffers from 'structural discrimination.' Abdirisak Aden, a Somali-born Muslim who is also an active member of the Social Democratic Party, advances this view when he says, 'Whether you're Ahmed or Svensson, you should be equal in the labor market.' This takes the stress off of intentional discrimination, which is hard to document, and focuses on the ways ethnic Swedes and minorities would still be unequal in the labor market even if employers were not themselves biased. The 'structural racism' school emphasizes the inequalities that immigrants face because of their relative lack of access to capital and social networks. The problem is that the solutions it offers may involve dismantling more of Swedish society than anyone would be comfortable with. Consider a 2004 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development report, which saw a possible source of inequality in the fact that two-thirds of the jobs in Sweden are filled through 'informal methods.' Those 'informal methods' have never been a problem before. 'Informal methods' — whereby a man can, say, introduce his neighbor's nephew into the union local — may even be necessary in an egalitarian culture, where people have little chance to exercise what the social theorist Francis Fukuyama calls the 'thymotic' urge, the will to stand out. They may be the lubricant that keeps a free, socialist society from hardening into a system of bureaucratic authoritarianism. Zanyar Adami may be right when he says, 'I see no contradiction in having a bigger, more open Swedish society that keeps the old Swedish virtues.' But he may also be wrong. Mauricio Rojas, the free-market politician, once wrote that, in the 20th century, Sweden has 'improved living conditions for its citizens at the expense of limiting their vital alternative choices.' It unlocked the secret of one-size-fits-all well-being. Maybe Sweden is now simply too diverse to benefit from the mass-produced prosperity and security that suited it so well for almost a century. Critics of capitalism used to cite Joseph Schumpeter and Daniel Bell to show that the free market is ultimately undermined by its own successes: the wealth the work ethic creates makes people want to work less. The welfare state has its cultural contradictions, too. It rests on consensus, which is another way of saying a lack of cultural variety. The stronger the consensus, the more room a welfare state has to grow. But as consensus strengthens, so does a certain naïveté, a belief that your own idiosyncratic habits are something that no one else could fail to find irresistibly seductive. Sweden's biggest immigration problem may be a matter not of crime, unemployment and Islamic radicalism but of something else altogether: that its newcomers understand perfectly well what this system erected in the name of equality is and have decided it doesn't particularly suit them.

Subject: America's Jewish Founding Father From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:54:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/09/14/americas_jewish_founding_father?mode=PF September 14, 2004 America's Jewish Founding Father By James Carroll - Boston Globe THREE HUNDRED fifty years ago, Jews came to America. Beginning today, observances in New York mark the arrival in 'New Amsterdam' of 23 Iberian Jews in the year 1654. Noting the milestone in The New York Times last week, Jeremy Eichler celebrated 'a tale of the passage from the periphery to the center, from immigrant yearning to mainstream achievement.' The Jewish story in America is usually told that way. An alien people comes to an already established national culture, does very well by transforming and inventing aspects of it, from show business and movies to intellectual life and literature. Jews are honored by this story -- their creativity and diligence enable them to 'break in' -- and so is America -- the open society where outsiders are welcome. But the most basic assumption of that 'tale' is that, by the time Jews arrived, America was an already flowing 'mainstream,' marked by democracy, freedom, openness. The story as usually told does not credit Jews or the Jewish tradition, that is, with having centrally contributed to the invention of the national idea in the first place. I write from outside the Jewish experience, but what strikes me about that time when Jews first came to 'New Amsterdam' is how much the nascent American imagination was preparing to draw on the vital culture of the rabbis, going back centuries. The incubator for the new idea at that moment was, in fact, old Amsterdam, in Holland, where the great foreshadowing of what came to be called liberal democracy was embodied in a Jew. Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) was a bridge figure between the religious tradition of Rabbinic Judaism and the philosophy of the Enlightenment. In his political writings, one sees, for example, the clear influence of Lurianic Kabbalah, an established Jewish spirituality. It is a small step from the idea that 'emanations' of God inhabit the souls of all humans, to the idea that each person, taken individually, is as worthy as every other. That idea is the kernel of democracy. Political tolerance -- what we would call pluralism -- is rooted in this positive attribute. But Spinoza also saw up close the dark effects of the religious wars then wracking Europe, and so there was a negative source to his call for political tolerance as well. Spinoza was himself expelled from the Synagogue (1656), investigated by the Catholic Inquisition (1659), and banned by the Calvinist Synod (1670). This experience of omnidirectional religious intolerance underwrote his two-fold new idea -- that the state's first obligation is to protect the freedom of conscience of each citizen; to do so the state must not itself be religiously identified. The separation of church and state begins here. Spinoza is famous for proposing that all things be seen 'sub specie aeternitatis,' from the point of view of eternity. Nothing bound by time is absolute, which means no human institution is above criticism. Spinoza's political writing, especially his 'Theologico-Political Treatise,' imagines, therefore, social structures organized to support mutually critical give-and-take. Here is the seed of a constitutional polity, based on checks and balances. Spinoza did not exempt even the institutions of religion from this spirit of criticism -- which is why he was as suspect in his own Jewish community as he was denounced by Protestants and Catholics. To some, Spinoza was an irreverent atheist, to others, a mindless pantheist, seeing God everywhere. The point for us is that his fundamental (and, as this Christian sees it, fundamentally Jewish) idea that human beings participate in the divine, but are not themselves divine (Only God is God), spawns a political ideal of human rights, on one hand, and of limited government on the other. Amsterdam in Spinoza's day was alive with intellectual and political ferment: Dutch Calvinists struggling with republicanism, 'Puritan' nonconformists in flight from England, scarred veterans of religious wars, merchants and explorers looking west. John Locke, for one, would be immersed in these revolutionary currents, bringing their articulation to a next level, the place at which the American idea first becomes conscious of itself. But the author of what might be called the first draft of that idea, drawing on the positive riches of his own tradition, as well as reacting to the intolerance of which his people knew more than anyone, was Benedict Spinoza. When 23 Jews arrived in New Amsterdam in September of 1654, he was 22 years old. They and he together were just beginning, as was the great nation they then helped invent.

Subject: Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:51:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18schlesinger.html?ex=1284696000&en=c7225b818a2f5ced&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 18, 2005 Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER JR. THE recent outburst of popular religiosity in the United States is a most dramatic and unforeseen development in American life. As Europe grows more secular, America grows more devout. George W. Bush is the most aggressively religious president Americans have ever had. American conservatives applaud his 'faith-based' presidency, an office heretofore regarded as secular. The religious right has become a potent force in national politics. Evangelicals now outnumber mainline Protestants and crowd megachurches. Billy Graham attracts supplicants by the thousand in Sodom and Gomorrah, a k a New York City. The Supreme Court broods over the placement of the Ten Commandments. Evangelicals take over the Air Force Academy, a government institution maintained by taxpayers' dollars; the academy's former superintendent says it will be six years before religious tolerance is restored. Mel Gibson's movie 'Passion of the Christ' draws nearly $400 million at the domestic box office. In the midst of this religious commotion, the name of the most influential American theologian of the 20th century rarely appears - Reinhold Niebuhr. It may be that most 'people of faith' belong to the religious right, and Niebuhr was on secular issues a determined liberal. But left evangelicals as well as their conservative brethren hardly ever invoke his name. Jim Wallis's best-selling 'God's Politics,' for example, is a liberal tract, but the author mentions Niebuhr only twice, and only in passing. Niebuhr was born in Missouri in 1892, the son of a German-born minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. He was trained for the ministry at the Synod's Eden Theological Seminary and at the Yale Divinity School. In the 1920's he took a church in industrial Detroit, the scene of bitter labor-capital conflict. Niebuhr's sympathies lay with the unions, and he joined Norman Thomas's Socialist Party. Meanwhile, New York's Union Theological Seminary, impressed by the power of his preaching and his writing, recruited him in 1928 for its faculty. There he remained for the rest of his life. He died in 1971. Why, in an age of religiosity, has Niebuhr, the supreme American theologian of the 20th century, dropped out of 21st-century religious discourse? Maybe issues have taken more urgent forms since Niebuhr's death - terrorism, torture, abortion, same-sex marriage, Genesis versus Darwin, embryonic stem-cell research. But maybe Niebuhr has fallen out of fashion because 9/11 has revived the myth of our national innocence. Lamentations about 'the end of innocence' became favorite clichés at the time. Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. 'Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem,' Niebuhr wrote, 'are insufferable in their human contacts.' The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics). Niebuhr brilliantly applied the tragic insights of Augustine and Calvin to moral and political issues. He poured out his thoughts in a stream of powerful books, articles and sermons. His major theological work was his two-volume 'Nature and Destiny of Man' (1941, 1943). The evolution of his political thought can be traced in three influential books: 'Moral Man and Immoral Society' (1932); 'The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defense' (1944); 'The Irony of American History' (1952). In these and other works, Niebuhr emphasized the mixed and ambivalent character of human nature - creative impulses matched by destructive impulses, regard for others overruled by excessive self-regard, the will to power, the individual under constant temptation to play God to history. This is what was known in the ancient vocabulary of Christianity as the doctrine of original sin. Niebuhr summed up his political argument in a single powerful sentence: 'Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.' (Niebuhr, in the fashion of the day, used 'man' not to exculpate women but as shorthand for 'human being.') The notion of sinful man was uncomfortable for my generation. We had been brought up to believe in human innocence and even in human perfectibility. This was less a liberal delusion than an expression of an all-American DNA. Andrew Carnegie had articulated the national faith when, after acclaiming the rise of man from lower to higher forms, he declared: 'Nor is there any conceivable end to his march to perfection.' In 1939, Charles E. Merriam of the University of Chicago, the dean of American political scientists, wrote in 'The New Democracy and the New Despotism': 'There is a constant trend in human affairs toward the perfectibility of mankind. This was plainly stated at the time of the French Revolution and has been reasserted ever since that time, and with increasing plausibility.' Human ignorance and unjust institutions remained the only obstacles to a more perfect world. If proper education of individuals and proper reform of institutions did their job, such obstacles would be removed. For the heart of man was O.K. The idea of original sin was a historical, indeed a hysterical, curiosity that should have evaporated with Jonathan Edwards's Calvinism. Still, Niebuhr's concept of original sin solved certain problems for my generation. The 20th century was, as Isaiah Berlin said, 'the most terrible century in Western history.' The belief in human perfectibility had not prepared us for Hitler and Stalin. The death camps and the gulags proved that men were capable of infinite depravity. The heart of man is obviously not O.K. Niebuhr's analysis of human nature and history came as a vast illumination. His argument had the double merit of accounting for Hitler and Stalin and for the necessity of standing up to them. Niebuhr himself had been a pacifist, but he was a realist and resigned from the antiwar Socialist Party in 1940. Many of us understood original sin as a metaphor. Niebuhr's distinction between taking the Bible seriously and taking it literally invited symbolic interpretation and made it easy for seculars to join the club. Morton White, the philosopher, spoke satirically of Atheists for Niebuhr. (Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film director, was asked about his religious views. 'I'm an atheist,' he replied. 'Thank God.') 'About the concept of 'original sin,' ' Niebuhr wrote in 1960, 'I now realize that I made a mistake in emphasizing it so much, though I still believe that it might be rescued from its primitive corruptions. But it is a red rag to most moderns. I find that even my realistic friends are inclined to be offended by it, though our interpretations of the human situation are identical.' The Second World War left America the most powerful nation in the world, and the cold war created a new model of international tension. Niebuhr was never more involved in politics. He helped found Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization opposed to the two Joes, Stalin and McCarthy. He was tireless (until strokes slowed him up) in cautioning Americans not to succumb to the self-righteous delusions of innocence and infallibility. 'From the earliest days of its history to the present moment,' Niebuhr wrote in 1952, 'there is a deep layer of messianic consciousness in the mind of America. We never dreamed that we would have as much political power as we possess today; nor for that matter did we anticipate that the most powerful nation on earth would suffer such an ironic refutation of its dreams of mastering history.' For messianism - carrying on one man's theory of God's work - threatened to abolish the unfathomable distance between the Almighty and human sinners. Niebuhr would have rejoiced at Mr. Dooley's definition of a fanatic. According to the Irish bartender created by Finley Peter Dunne, a fanatic 'does what he thinks th' Lord wud do if He only knew th' facts iv th' case.' There is no greater human presumption than to read the mind of the Almighty, and no more dangerous individual than the one who has convinced himself that he is executing the Almighty's will. 'A democracy,' Niebuhr said, 'cannot of course engage in an explicit preventive war,' and he lamented the 'inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink, particularly when they try to play the role of God to history.' Original sin, by tainting all human perceptions, is the enemy of absolutes. Mortal man's apprehension of truth is fitful, shadowy and imperfect; he sees through the glass darkly. Against absolutism Niebuhr insisted on the 'relativity of all human perspectives,' as well as on the sinfulness of those who claimed divine sanction for their opinions. He declared himself 'in broad agreement with the relativist position in the matter of freedom, as upon every other social and political right or principle.' In pointing to the dangers of what Justice Robert H. Jackson called 'compulsory godliness,' Niebuhr argued that 'religion is so frequently a source of confusion in political life, and so frequently dangerous to democracy, precisely because it introduces absolutes into the realm of relative values.' Religion, he warned, could be a source of error as well as wisdom and light. Its role should be to inculcate, not a sense of infallibility, but a sense of humility. Indeed, 'the worst corruption is a corrupt religion.' One imagines a meeting between two men - say, for example, the president of the United States and the last pope - who have private lines to the Almighty but discover fundamental disagreements over the message each receives. Thus Bush is the fervent champion of the war against Iraq; John Paul II stoutly opposed the war. Bush is the fervent champion of capital punishment; John Paul II stoutly opposed capital punishment. How do these two absolutists reconcile contradictory and incompatible communications from the Almighty? The Civil War, that savage, fraternal conflict, was the great national trauma, and Lincoln was for Reinhold Niebuhr the model statesman. Of all American presidents, Lincoln had the most acute religious insight. Though not enrolled in any denomination, he brooded over the infinite mystery of the Almighty. To claim knowledge of the divine will and purpose was for Lincoln the unpardonable sin. He summed up his religious sense in his second inaugural, delivered in the fifth year of the Civil War. Both warring halves of the Union, he said, read the same Bible and prayed to the same God. Each invoked God's aid against the other. Let us judge not that we be not judged. Let us fight on with 'firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right.' But let us never forget, Lincoln reminded the nation in memorable words, 'The Almighty has His own purposes.' Thurlow Weed, the cynical and highly intelligent boss of New York, sent Lincoln congratulations on the inaugural address. 'I believe it is not immediately popular,' Lincoln replied. 'Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them. To deny it, however, in this case, is to deny that there is a God governing the world. It is a truth which I thought needed to be told and as whatever of humiliation there is in it, falls directly on myself, I thought others might afford for me to tell it.' 'The combination of moral resoluteness about the immediate issues,' Niebuhr commented on Lincoln's second inaugural, 'with a religious awareness of another dimension of meaning and judgment must be regarded as almost a perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free society on the one hand while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.' Like all God-fearing men, Americans are never safe 'against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire.' This is vanity. To be effective in the world, we need 'a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us' and 'a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy's demonry and our vanities.' None of the insights of religious faith contradict 'our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization. They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it.' The last lines of 'The Irony of American History,' written in 1952, resound more than a half-century later. 'If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.'

Subject: Guanlong Roamed China From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:35:41 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/science/09dino.html?ex=1297141200&en=1eb276997d197042&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Before the Tyrannosaurus, Guanlong Roamed China By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD Chinese and American scientists have discovered what appears to have been the granddaddy of all tyrannosaurs, a primitive crested dinosaur that lived 160 million years ago in northwestern China. The scientists announced yesterday that an analysis of two fossil specimens suggested that they were either remains of the most primitive tyrannosaur known or the first branch on the family tree leading to Tyrannosaurus rex, the symbol of tooth and claw predation in the age of reptiles. James M. Clark, a paleontologist at George Washington University, said the discovery 'shows us how ancestors of tyrannosaurus took the first step that led to the giant T. rex almost 100 million years later.' The research team, led by Dr. Clark and Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, named the new species Guanlong wucaii. The first, or generic, name is derived from the Mandarin word for 'crowned dragon,' a reference to its large, fragile crest. The second, or species, name refers to the rich colors of the Junggar Basin, the remote discovery site north of the Tian Shan range. The discovery, made in 2002, is described in detail in today's issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Clark and other team members discussed the ancestral tyrannosaur yesterday at a news conference in Washington. Two specimens of the new species were uncovered near one another. The most revealing one, the scientists said, was a nine-foot-long, 12year-old adult with the crested head believed to be typical of the species. The other was a smaller, 7-year-old juvenile. Almost immediately, Dr. Clark said, 'we knew we had something fairly rare.' The clearest evidence of an ancestral link to tyrannosaurs were the teeth and pelvic structure of the two skeletons. Closer examination, Dr. Clark said, dispelled any lingering skepticism and showed a definite relationship with later tyrannosaurs. Mark A. Norell, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a team member, said, 'The discovery of this basal tyrannosaur is giving us a much broader picture of the diversity of this group and its ancestors.' Dr. Norell noted several primitive traces in the skeletons, including the presence of long forearms and three-fingered hands. The well-known T. rex, which lived about 70 million years ago, toward the end of the Cretaceous period of geologic time, evolved short forearms that were virtually nonfunctional two-fingered hands, and a mammoth body two or three times the length of these early ancestors. The differences suggest that the newfound animals were an intermediate step in evolution between primitive coelurosaurs, a group of birdlike dinosaurs, and tyrannosaurs. The skeletons were found in sediments from the late Jurassic period, when the site in the desert basin was a warm land of lakes and marshes. The region of the discovery, near China's borders with Mongolia and Kazakhstan, was previously explored by a Chinese-Canadian fossil hunting expedition in the 1980's. Other paleontologists said they were not surprised that the region had yielded more discoveries from earlier epochs in the time of dinosaurs. Only a few scraps of dinosaur fossils were previously uncovered in the Jurassic deposits, but Dr. Clark said the age of the Guanlong specimen was 'about where we would expect the oldest tyrannosaurs to be.' The earliest previously known tyrannosaur was a 130-million-year-old feathered specimen, Dilong paradoxus, which American and Chinese scientists reported two years ago. No signs of feathers were found on the two Guanlong specimens. The presence of a crest on the Guanlong adult's head was a complete surprise, Dr. Clark said, showing that there was 'clearly still much more to be learned about early tyrannosaurs.' The research team said the crest was about as thin as a tortilla and only two and a half inches high. It appeared to be filled with air sacs and reminded the paleontologist of the ornamental features found on some living birds, like cassowaries and hornbills. Dr. Norell said the crest was too thin to have provided much protection, or to have been used in butting heads in combat. More likely, he said, the crest of these 'crowned dragons' had something to do with attracting mates or identifying fellow species members.

Subject: Prevailing Winds Are Free From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:34:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/asia/09letter.html?ex=1297141200&en=768ce85efbf52347&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Despite Web Crackdown, Prevailing Winds Are Free By HOWARD W. FRENCH SHANGHAI — For months now, the news about the news in China has been awful. Carrying out its vow to tighten controls over what it calls 'propaganda,' the government of President Hu Jintao has busied itself closing publications, firing editorial staffs and jailing reporters. More noticeably, the government has clamped down on the Internet, closing blogger sites, filtering Web sites and e-mail messages for banned words and tightening controls on text messages. Last year, Yahoo was criticized for revealing the identity of an Internet journalist, Shi Tao, who was subsequently jailed. [On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said court documents posted on a Chinese Web site showed that Yahoo had done the same in 2003, resulting in the jailing of another writer, Li Zhi.] Against this grim backdrop, the news that Google had agreed to apply censors' blacklists to its new Chinese search engine might have seemed like the ultimate nail in the coffin for freedom of information in this country. Chinese Internet mavens were outraged at Google for collaborating in the government's censorship effort. 'For most people, access to more diversified resources has been broken,' said Isaac Mao, a popular Chinese blogger, in a typical sentiment. 'The majority of users, the new users, will only see a compressed version of Google, and can't know what they don't know. This is like taking a 30-year-old's brain and setting him back to the mind of a 15-year-old.' Some threatened that Internet companies that toed the government line would regret it someday. 'Doing the bidding of the Chinese government like this is like doing the bidding of Stalin or Hitler,' said Yu Jie, a well-known dissident writer. 'The actions of companies that did the bidding of Stalin and Hitler have been remembered by history, and the Chinese people won't forget these kinds of actions, either.' Whether Chinese will hold a long-term grudge is arguable. But Web specialists are far more confident that the government will fail in its efforts to reverse a trend toward increasingly free expression that has been reshaping this society with ever more powerful effects for more than two decades. Last year, China ranked 159th out of 167 countries in a survey of press freedom, Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international rights group, said. But rankings like this do not reflect the rapid change afoot here, more and more of which is escaping the government's control. A case in point is the Chinese government's recent effort to rein in bloggers who tread too often into delicate territory, criticizing state policy or detailing official corruption. In December, the government ordered Microsoft and its MSN service to close the site of Michael Anti, one of China's most popular bloggers. Although Mr. Anti — who is also an employee of the Beijing bureau of The New York Times — had his site closed, any Chinese Web surfer can choose from scores of other online commentators who are equally provocative, and more are coming online all the time. Microsoft alone carries an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China. Add to that the estimated 10 million blogs on other Internet services, and it becomes clear what a censor's nightmare China has become. What is more, not a single blog existed in China a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day — some run by people whose previous blogs had been banned and merely change their name or switch Internet providers. New technologies, like podcasts, are making things even harder to control. 'The Internet is open technology, based on packet switching and open systems, and it is totally different from traditional media, like radio or TV or newspapers,' said Guo Liang, an Internet specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. 'At first, people might have thought it would be as easy to control as traditional media, but now they realize that's not the case.' If the Internet is at the center of today's struggle over press freedom, it is only the latest in a series of fights that the government has so far always lost. Under the veneer of resolute state control, one sector after another, including book publishing, newspapers and magazines, has undergone a similar process of de facto liberalization, often in the face of official hostility. The first wave came in book publishing, where beginning in the 1980's censors found themselves unable to suppress books that were critical of state policy or expressed divergent views on ideological matters. A big part of the reason for the weakening of the censors was the introduction of a market economy, where publishers had to seek profits to support their activities. Turgid, politically correct books that delighted the censors sold poorly, so profit-seeking publishers sought to get bolder, often provocative writing into print. Changes in the news media have also been driven by profit motives. With the state ending its subsidies for most publishing companies, publications have sought ways to build readership. Saucy entertainment and sports journalism have been big hits for many magazines and newspapers. Others, though, have hit on the idea of public affairs, uncovering corruption and writing about environmental problems and social inequality. As the readers' appetite for this kind of news has grown, the government has been hard pressed to force the genie back into the bottle. Newspapers have been closed, reporters and editors jailed — even killed, like Wu Xianghu, a newspaper editor who died last week after being beaten by the police, who reportedly were incensed by an article he published on abuses of power in their ranks. Still, the trend has not been reversed. Editors, like Li Datong of a recently closed Beijing newspaper supplement, Bing Dian, officially owned by the Communist Party Youth League, have begun to use the courts to challenge government efforts to silence them. But many frustrated reporters have simply moved to blogs, which give them an outlet to write about what they are not permitted to in their day jobs. 'Symbolically, the government may have scored a victory with Google, but Web users are becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated, and the censors' life is not getting easier,' said Xiao Qiang, leader of the Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. 'The flow of information is getting steadily freer, in fact. If I was in the State Councils information office, I certainly wouldn't think we had any reason to celebrate.'

Subject: Re: Prevailing Winds Are Free From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 16:01:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I don't get it. Am I the only one that sees this? Google is willing to collaborate with a Communist Regime in censoring freedom of speech but not willing to collaborate with the US government in providing details on what sites are searched by possible kiddy-porn criminals? Why can Google collaborate wiht one government and not the other? Also one more serious question: How come are the chinese so damn successful at filtering out Web sites and e-mail messages for banned words and tightening controls on text messages. Yet we can't get rid of stupid spammers. And worse, extremist terrorist groups can use the internet to broadcast their latest terror accomplishments and we can't stop it?

Subject: Benefits Go the Way of Pensions From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 09:25:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/business/09pension.html?ex=1297141200&en=f5aa3e1486810471&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Benefits Go the Way of Pensions By EDUARDO PORTER and MARY WILLIAMS WALSH For years, the benefit packages of General Motors were considered to be so good that the company was known among workers and retirees as Generous Motors. But now even G.M., struggling to maintain its grip in the global auto industry, is being forced to bow to a changing competitive landscape and join the ranks of hundreds of other companies that are moving to unburden themselves of as much of the cost of supporting their retired work force as they can. For those who were counting on G.M. to care for them for life, the company's recent moves to pare back, in different ways, the pension and health benefits of union and nonunion retirees amount to a breach of a promise that was at the core of the nation's labor relations for much of the post-World War II era: workers would give their productive years to the company; the company would care for workers when they got old. 'The thing that annoys me about G.M. is that when I retired I had a letter that said I would receive health care for life at no cost,' said Chester Clum, 79, a former sales and service manager at G.M. who retired in 1981 after 38 years of service. 'They never brought up that they could change that at will.' But, in fact, the change has been long in coming. While there are exceptions in industries less subject to intense competition, G.M. is like many other once impregnable American corporate titans in arguing that reducing the burden of caring for retirees has become essential to compete against foreign companies with lower benefit costs and domestic rivals with younger work forces and less generous benefit packages. With retirees living longer and accounting rules forcing companies to more honestly reflect their full costs on their books, the corporate-sponsored social contract is no longer sustainable. Something else, experts say, needs to replace it. 'It was easy to offer these things 40 years ago because they were cheap,' said Paul Fronstin, director of the Health Research and Education Program at the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a nonpartisan group in Washington. 'They're not cheap anymore.' Moreover, Mr. Fronstin said, 'employers have cut benefits not just because of the cost of these benefits, but because of the competition. How do you stay competitive when your competitors are not offering these benefits?' Companies have also noticed that, in many cases, offering a secure retirement package is no longer essential to attract formidable younger talent. I.B.M. found this out after closing its pension plan to new hires in December 2004. It hired about 7,500 employees last year, and observed that none of them seemed perturbed to be getting a rich 401(k) plan instead of the pension plan that was closed to them. Last month, I.B.M. froze the pension plan, saying that employees would only get the benefits they had earned up until the freeze. In the future, everybody will earn retirement benefits in the 401(k) plan. In many ways, G.M. is late to this transformation. G.M. said this week it would cap contributions to its health care plan for its nonunion retirees at this year's level and it would also pare their pension benefits. Nonunion employees hired after Jan. 1, 1993, are not eligible for any retirement health benefits at all. The automaker also closed its pension plan to new nonunion workers as of Jan. 1, 2001. The union, meanwhile, agreed for the first time last November that retirees would start paying for part of their health care coverage. Many of America's large companies took similar steps in recent years, closing their guaranteed pension plans and post-retirement health plans to new employees. Instead, they have offered fixed contributions to individual retirement accounts and health care packages limited to active workers. If a private company still offers old-style benefits to its retirees, chances are it has union contracts or other legal obligations that forbid a wholesale unwinding of established benefit packages. Unionized companies are about twice as likely to offer retiree health benefits as nonunion shops, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. By last year, the Kaiser survey found, only a third of companies with 200 workers or more offered any health care benefits to their retirees, down from 66 percent in 1988. Small companies, which employ about half of the work force, never offered very generous retirement benefits. The companies that still offer health insurance for their retirees have been trimming the plans in many ways. A survey of large companies by Kaiser and Hewitt Associates, a consulting firm, found that while only 12 percent of large employers ended all retiree health benefits last year, 71 percent required higher premium contributions from retirees, 34 percent increased co-payments or co-insurance and 24 percent increased deductibles. Companies have been moving away from traditional, defined-benefit pension plans since the late 1980's, when Congress imposed a steep excise tax on corporate withdrawals from pension funds. The new penalty prompted consulting firms to start promoting new plan designs that reduced pension obligations, often by eliminating the rich benefits that older workers could earn under the earlier designs. Companies that had never had pension plans in the first place, meanwhile, steered clear of them altogether, opting instead to create 401(k) plans, which are generally cheaper and easier to administer. The only employer of any appreciable size known to have created a traditional pension plan in the last few years is the United Methodist Church, which, as a church, is exempt from the pension funding rules. The exceptions to this steady erosion are in the public sector, where traditional retirement benefits abound, and in a few isolated industries that still have particular reasons for offering such benefits. Large pharmaceutical companies, for example, which still have greater control over their markets because of patent protection, say they continue to be committed to traditional benefits packages, while also providing 401(k) plans. 'The feeling here is the traditional pension offers certainty for our employees in their retirement,' said Patty Seif, a spokeswoman for GlaxoSmithKline. Ms. Seif said Glaxo also offers retirees the same health coverage that active workers get, as long as they have had at least 10 years with the company. Ms. Seif said Glaxo wanted to offer solid health benefits to retirees because it was in the health care business itself. Given all the flux in today's corporate environment, many workers — especially younger ones — are rolling with the punches. According to a survey in 2004 by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, only 5 percent of workers consider retiree health care to be their most important benefit, and only 4 percent put a defined-benefit pension at the top of the list. And 9 percent put either of these benefits in second place. And even those most immediately affected appear resigned to their fate. Gordon Goecke, 83, who worked at G.M. for 35 years before retiring, is currently undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, paying a $30 co-pay every time he sees a doctor, which he said is about once a month, and a $10 co-pay for each prescription. 'As we go on through the years ahead we're probably going to foot half or two-thirds of the bill,' Mr. Goecke said. 'Times change, and you've got to ride with them. G.M. is not the only company that's got financial problems.'

Subject: Diabetic Brothers Beat Odds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 07:25:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/nyregion/05diabetes.html?ex=1296795600&en=4a0f587370c79e8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Diabetic Brothers Beat Odds With Grit and Luck By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA When Robert Cleveland was a boy, in place of a birthday cake his mother wrapped an oatmeal box in colored paper and put candles on top. 'I never had any sweets as a child,' he said. 'Never.' Since he was 5, he has lived within the strict boundaries imposed by diabetes, knowing that if he loosened his grip on the disease it would ravage his body — the terrifying complications, the shortened life span. For years, the only diabetic he knew was the principal of his grammar school, who lost one leg to the disease, and then the other, 'and I remember wondering how long it would be before I lost mine.' Then his big brother, Gerald, got diabetes at age 16 and also adopted a set of meticulous lifelong habits. He scribbles sugar readings and insulin doses in a logbook, tests the level of sugar in his system seven or eight times a day, avoids desserts and simple starches, exercises and has always stayed reed-thin. 'Even so, I never expected to live to be 50,' he said. Both brothers have done a bit better than that: Gerald turned 90 this month, and Robert will be 86 in March, and they are in fairly good health for their ages. Experts say that they know of no other childhood diabetic who has lived to be as old as Gerald, and no one who has survived with the disease as long as Robert has — almost 81 years. 'My main reason to stay alive,' Gerald said, 'is to prove to young people there's a way to live with diabetes, to live well.' As diabetes poses a rapidly rising threat to Americans' health, the lives of these brothers from Syracuse offer the ultimate diabetic success story, with telling insights into what is possible, and at what cost. The Clevelands have lived long and healthy lives in part through extraordinary discipline in diet and exercise, but they have also suffered medical complications and harrowing close calls. Scientists who have tracked the brothers and other long-term diabetes survivors say that while they almost certainly have some genetic advantages, what sets them apart just as clearly are vigilance, hard work, self-sacrifice and determination. 'They're a little bit obsessive about their records and their diets,' said Dr. George L. King, research director of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School. He heads a study of people who have lived with diabetes for at least 50 years — more than 400 of them, so far. They arrive at the center, he said, carrying 'years and years of records, sometimes decades,' showing medical tests, blood sugar readings, insulin doses, exercise, even daily food consumption. 'Most of them do quite a bit of exercise, they are more careful about their health than even most diabetics, and they also have a very positive outlook.' Nearly all of these patients have Type 1 diabetes, also known as juvenile diabetes, which usually develops in childhood. But the lessons learned from them also apply to Type 2 diabetes, a much more common ailment that usually begins in adulthood and is closely associated with obesity, poor diet and lack of exercise. As Americans grow heavier and more sedentary, Type 2 has become the nation's fastest-growing major disease. Controlling diabetes still demands a rigorous set of daily tasks and choices, but they have become vastly easier in the last few decades, and millions of people manage them well. But millions of others do not, greatly increasing their risk of crippling complications and early death. Even when the Clevelands were small, doctors understood that a rigidly controlled diet and regular exercise could stabilize blood sugar and reduce the amount of insulin needed. Many people had neither the means nor the mind-set to follow such instructions, but the Clevelands' mother, Henrietta, did, and she taught her boys well. 'The doctor prescribed the diet I should be on, and my mother was most careful about sticking to it,' Robert Cleveland said. 'There were very few carbohydrates, a quart and a half of milk every day, and there were lots of vegetables and proteins. She weighed everything I ate on a scale. I could have 20 grams of bread at breakfast, which meant I couldn't have a complete slice.' Gerald calls himself a compulsive reader of food ingredient labels, appalled at both the contents of packaged foods and the ignorance of consumers. 'I get so frustrated with some people, even some people with diabetes,' he said. 'They don't look at the labels, they don't know what a carbohydrate is or even really what a sugar is, and they don't understand how the body uses food. You have to understand these things.' Gerald recalls that for his parents, his two brothers, his sister and him, 'life revolved around Bob and his diabetes, and all the work that was involved, and the fear and the need to watch out for him.' What makes the longevity of the Clevelands and some other diabetics all the more remarkable is that they lived most of their lives in the dark ages of diabetes care. When they were young, the disease was expected to lop 20 years off their lives. There was none of the modern gadgetry for measuring and controlling it, and the reasonable expectations for diabetics were amputations, blindness, kidney failure and heart disease. Yet against immense odds, the Clevelands endured, even thrived, living to have careers, long marriages, children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. 'To live as long as the Cleveland brothers, through those times when things were so much worse than they are now, is incredible,' said Aaron J. Kowalski, scientific program manager at the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. 'Yes, it's genetics, but it's discipline, too. It shows what you can do.' The Clevelands arrived at the right time in history, but barely. When they were born, Type 1 diabetes was still a death sentence — within weeks or months in most cases, or in a few years on what amounted to a starvation diet. Type 2 could often be controlled with diet and exercise, but otherwise, it usually led to years of debilitating illness and a shortened life. Then, in 1922, scientists at the University of Toronto isolated insulin in a form that was effective and safe enough for human use. Suddenly, thousands of people were delivered from the brink of death, but the lives ahead of them were hard. Controlling diabetes was hard and painful work in the early decades, and what would be considered good control today was simply out of reach. Disposable sterile syringes with fine-gauge needles did not exist; diabetics injected themselves with glass syringes and thick steel needles, reused again and again, and boiled each time to kill germs. Many people developed infections and abscesses from imperfectly sterilized syringes. 'I remember my mother sharpening the needle each time on a whetstone,' Robert Cleveland recalled. 'But sometimes it was like getting stuck with a knitting needle.' In the early years, the insulin, which was made from ground-up pancreases of pigs and cows, was so loaded with impurities that the doses needed were several times as large as those used today — and the bigger the dose, the more it hurt. The strength of the insulin was also inconsistent at first. Even after a few years, when the product became purer and more predictable, some people suffered serious adverse reactions to it. Diabetics suffered a roller-coaster effect of blood sugar highs and dangerous lows. Until the development years later of long-acting insulins that allowed more stability, doctors advised patients to interrupt their sleep to inject themselves, rather than let their sugar levels climb through the night. Though medical laboratories could test blood samples for sugar content, patients and most doctors' offices could not. Instead, they relied on urine tests, which were far less accurate. For decades, the Clevelands and millions of other diabetics heated urine on kitchen stoves, then added a chemical solution that turned various colors depending on the amount of sugar. Any diabetics who were aggressive about controlling the illness ran a serious risk of taking too much insulin, which can push blood sugar low enough to cause a coma or death. The alternative was to let sugar levels run abnormally high, which over years damages many parts of the body. Both brothers remain devout about diet and exercise, and have stayed remarkably active. Robert, a former accountant, is still an avid bicyclist. Gerald, who was the assistant schools superintendent in Syracuse, no longer plays tennis, but he regularly attends an exercise class for the elderly. Despite their caution, diabetes has given them frequent troubles and scares. When Gerald was in his 20's, a fever caused his blood sugar to soar, which, in turn, hindered his body's ability to heal and fight infection. He nearly died before doctors gave him a new drug, penicillin. Forty years ago, Robert went into a coma from low blood sugar and came near death after a hike in the Colorado Rockies. Just a few weeks ago, Gerald's blood sugar dipped low enough that he grew dizzy and fell in his apartment, and needed five stitches to close a gash on his head. The Clevelands have developed some of the circulatory and nerve problems in the feet that are so common to diabetics, and both have had some toes amputated. Gerald has undergone several operations for a rare condition, most prevalent in diabetics, that causes the hands to ball into fists. They also give much of the credit for their longevity to their wives, who helped them stick to the regimen and saved them from low-blood-sugar episodes. Robert's wife of 58 years, Ruth, is a nurse. 'She probably knows more about diabetes than anybody I know,' he said. Gerald's wife, Mildred, died in 2002, after 62 years of marriage, but even as she was dying, he said, she kept the habit of checking his skin during the night for the profuse sweat that might signal low blood sugar. 'One time when she had basically been bedridden for weeks, she found the strength to get up and go to the kitchen, and she poured orange juice and brought it back and made me drink it,' he said. Both brothers make a point of meeting with younger diabetics, giving them hope and encouragement. 'It hasn't been easy,' Gerald said, 'but I've had a wonderful life.'

Subject: Annie Hall From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 07:17:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=&title2=ANNIE HALL (MOVIE)&reviewer=Vincent Canby&pdate=&v_id=2547&reviewer=Vincent Canby April 21, 1977 Annie Hall By Vincent Canby Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) stands in front of an orangey sort of backdrop and tells us, the movie audience, the joke about two women at a Catskill resort. 'The food,' says the first woman, 'is terrible.' 'Yes,' the second woman agrees, 'and the portions are so small.' This, says Alvy Singer, is just about the way he feels about life. It's not great—in fact, it's pretty evenly divided between the horrible and the miserable—but as long as it's there, he wants more. In this fashion, Woody Allen introduces us to the particular concerns of his fine new film, Annie Hall, a comedy about urban love and incompatability that finally establishes Woody as one of our most audacious filmmakers, as well as the only American filmmaker who is able to work seriously in the comic mode without being the least bit ponderous. Because Mr. Allen has his roots as a writer of one-liners and was bred in television and nightclubs, standing up, it's taken us quite a while to recognize just how prodigiously talented he is, and how different he has always been from those colleagues who also make their livings as he once did, racing from Las Vegas to the Coast to Tahoe to San Juan, then back to Las Vegas. Among other things, he's the first major American filmmaker ever to come out of a saloon. For all of Mr. Allen's growth as a writer, director, and actor, Annie Hall is not terribly far removed from Take the Money and Run, his first work as a triple-threat man, which is not to put down the new movie but to upgrade the earlier one. Take the Money and Run was a visualized nightclub monologue, as freely associated as an analysand's introspections on the couch. This also is more or less the form of Annie Hall, Alvy Singer's freewheeling, self-deprecating, funny, and sorrowful search for the truth about his on-again, off-again affair with a beautiful young woman who is as emotionally bent as he is. The form of the two films is similar, but where the first was essentially a cartoon, Annie Hall has the humane sensibility of comedy. It is, essentially, Woody's Scenes from a Marriage, though there is no marriage, only an intense affair to which Alvy Singer never commits himself enough to allow Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) to give up her apartment and move in with him. Just why, we aren't told, though we can make guesses on the basis of the information furnished. Alvy, who grew up as a poor Jewish boy in Brooklyn in a house under a Coney Island roller coaster, is chronically suspicious and depressed. It may have started when he was nine and first read about the expanding universe. What kind of faith can you have if you know that in a couple of billion years everything's going to fly apart? With the firm conviction that the scheme is rotten, Alvy becomes a hugely successful television comedian somewhat on the scale of—you can guess Woody Allen. Annie Hall is no less ambitious and mixed up, but for other reasons that, we must assume, have to do with the kind of WASPy, Middle Western household where Mom and Dad tend guilts as if they were prize delphiniums. As Annie Hall, Miss Keaton emerges as Woody Allen's Liv Ullmann. His camera finds beauty and emotional resources that somehow escape the notice of other directors. Her Annie Hall is a marvelous nut, a talented singer (which Woody demonstrates in a nightclub sequence that has the effect of a love scene), generous, shy, insecure, and so uncertain about sex that she needs a stick of marijuana before going to bed. Alvy, on the other hand, embraces sex as if it were something that wouldn't keep, even when it means going to bed with a dopey reporter from Rolling Stone (Shelley Duvall in a tiny role). The most Alvy can do to meet Annie's fears is to buy a red lightbulb for the bedroom lamp. He thinks it's sexy. Annie Hall moves back and forth in time according to Alvy's recollections, from his meeting with Annie on a tennis court, to scenes of his childhood, to a disastrous visit with her family in Chippewa Falls, to trips to Hollywood and scenes of reconciliations and partings in New York. Throughout there are explosively comic set-pieces having to do with analysis, Hollywood, politics, you-name-it, but the mood, ultimately, is somber, thoughtful, reflective. One of Mr. Allen's talents as a director is his casting, and Annie Hall contains more fine supporting performances than any other American film this year, with the possible exception of The Late Show and Three Women. Most prominent are Paul Simon as a recording industry promoter, Carol Kane as Alvy's politically committed first wife, Tony Roberts as Alvy's actor-friend, Colleen Dewhurst as Annie Hall's mother, and Christopher Walken as Annie's quietly suicidal brother. That's to name only a few. There will be discussion about what points in the film coincide with the lives of its two stars, but this, I think, is to detract from and trivialize the achievement of the film, which, at last, puts Woody in the league with the best directors we have.

Subject: Sleeper From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 07:17:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=&title2=SLEEPER (MOVIE)&reviewer=Vincent Canby&pdate=&v_id=45148&reviewer=Vincent Canby December 18, 1973 Sleeper By Vincent Canby Miles Monroe (Woody Allen), the part-owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Restaurant in Greenwich Village, has a major problem. He had gone into St. Vincent's Hospital in 1973 for a minor ulcer operation, only to wake up 200 years later, defrosted, having been wrapped in aluminum foil and frozen as hard as a South African lobster tail when the minor ulcer operation went somehow wrong. Thus begins Sleeper, Woody's 2001 (actually, it's his 2173), which confidently advances the Allen art into slapstick territory that I associate with the best of Laurel and Hardy. It's the kind of film comedy that no one in Hollywood has done with style in many years, certainly not since Jerry Lewis began to take himself seriously. Sleeper is a comic epic that recalls the breathless pace and dizzy logic of the old two-reelers. The setting is an American police state, ruled by a terrible dictator who has the genial manners of your favorite TV anchorman, where Miles is enlisted to aid the forces of the antigovernment underground. Miles does his best to refuse. He is dirty-minded, mean-spirited, surreptitious, and incurably literate and cowardly. As he points out: 'I was once beaten up by Quakers.' The world in which Miles finds himself is truly alarming, a half-analyzed paranoiac's worst dream come true. Automobiles look like giant plastic turtles. Chickens are twelve feet tall and banana skins are as long as canoes. There are robot servants and robot dogs, and at the end of a dinner party a hostess comments: 'I think we should have had sex but there weren't enough people.' How did America get this way? Was there a ghastly war? Someone seems to remember that a man named Albert Shanker once got hold of a nuclear warhead. Sleeper is Mr. Allen's fourth film as star, director, and writer (this time with Marshall Brickman) and it is, I'm sure, not only his most ambitious but also his best. The fine madness of Take the Money and Run and Bananas, which were largely illustrated extensions of his nightclub routines, is now also apparent in the kind of slapstick comedy that can only be done in films. When Woody wrestles with a butterscotch pudding mix that won't stop rising, when he runs afoul of an ill-fitting flying belt, or when he attempts to clone the entire body of the dead dictator from all that remains of the dictator (a nose), you realize that the stand-up comedian has at last made an unequivocal transition to the screen. All of his original skills and humors remain intact. A fantasy in which Woody wins the Miss America contest, and another in which he plays Blanche Dubois to Diane Keaton's Stanley Kowalski, are vintage Allen. As Woody continues to grow as a filmmaker, so does Diane Keaton (his costar in Play It Again, Sam) continue to develop as an elegant comedienne along the lines of Paula Prentiss and the late Kay Kendall. In Sleeper, Miss Keaton plays Luna, a beautiful, right-wing, absolutely awful poet whose metaphors are muddled by her inability to remember that caterpillars turn into butterflies, not the other way around. Through the love, aid, comfort, and cowardice of a very small man, Luna is finally liberated. There are some comparatively calm spots in the film, here and there, but they don't count. If anything, they allow you to catch your breath. Sleeper is terrific.

Subject: The London of 'Match Point' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 06:11:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/travel/08weblondon.html?ex=1296968400&en=7837a31433fc3b88&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 The London of 'Match Point' By COLIN CAMERON Woody Allen has long served as an unofficial tourist guide to Manhattan, as fans of his movies have, over the years, sought out the sites where Annie Hall and Alvy Singer had one of their first dates (the Beekman Theater on Second Avenue, now closed), where, in 'Manhattan,' a young Mariel Hemingway told the character played by Woody Allen that she was leaving New York to study in London (John's pizzeria on Bleecker Street), and that incredible apartment in 'Hannah and Her Sisters,' where Hannah, played by Mia Farrow, gave her annual Thanksgiving dinner (the Langham, at 135 Central Park West). Now, with his most recent movie 'Match Point,' which has received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, Woody Allen has trained his lens on London. I live in London. Having your hometown portrayed on film can be a source of both pride and bewilderment. Take 'Notting Hill.' At the time of the film's release in 1999, my flat was near the plot's central location, a bookshop off Portobello Road. Yet, a muddling of street layouts and bus routes — one that bore little relation to the real city — ultimately left me despairing. In contrast, 'Match Point' is a relative pleasure. The film's London rhythms, tone and basic geography serve, in general, as a largely authentic portrait of neighborhoods. Only those living in the NW1 district have significant grievances. Scarlett Johansson's character, a struggling actress named Nola Rice, moves to a flat in this area, which she suggests is pretty run down. In fact, the glories of Regent's Park are nearby. For someone short of work, Nola enjoys privileged accommodations, first in Bayswater, off Hyde Park. She walks a long way for a drink — from Chelsea's Royal Court Theater after a failed audition to the Audley (41-43 Mount Street, W1), several miles away, near Grosvenor Square. (She should have taken the Underground.) Otherwise, 'Match Point' is consistently grounded in reality. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, who plays the ex-tennis pro, Chris Wilton, isn't overcharged at £225 a week for the modest west London flat rented at the film's beginning. Chris would also certainly need the well-bred in-laws — placed, plausibly, off affluent Eaton Square in Belgravia — he acquires by marrying Chloe Hewett, played by Emily Mortimer, to afford that move to a loft apartment on Albert Embankment, with Thames-side views of Parliament. If you could cover Mr. Allen's Manhattan in a day, you will need longer for the London of 'Match Point.' The ground featured ranges from Holland Park and Barons Court, in west London, to the City, the financial center, and Tate Modern, and to Ealing Studios, to the east. Running throughout the film is the Thames, which residents often overlook as a London destination. 'Match Point' is a reminder of attractions on the river's banks, beginning with the Saatchi Gallery (County Hall, Southbank, SE1) where Chris and Chloe tentatively begin dating. The film's culture is both classic and contemporary. The galleries at Tate Modern (Bankside, SE1) are featured (though mercifully not the gallery's restaurant, now one of the most overexposed locations in town). More intimate is Cork Street, on the fringes of Mayfair and home to many of London's art dealers. Scenes at a gallery that Chloe opens — a distraction from her main job of producing heirs — were filmed here, off Piccadilly. Meanwhile, London's edgy art scene, now well east of the Tate, or north, is beyond the film's frames. The performance art of 'Match Point' is high-end. The Curzon Mayfair, central London's plushest movie theater, along with the Chelsea Cinema, was used for interior shots. The Curzon delivers a mix of foreign language and quality productions (until last week, 'Match Point'). Some Curzon regulars would be patrons of Covent Garden's Royal Opera House. Scenes in 'Match Point' filmed at the Opera House would be familiar, though one was shot on a stage set built at Ealing Studios. The retail options of 'Match Point' run from high to low. My preference is for the boutiques of Westbourne Grove, such as Paul & Joe on Ledbury Road, where Nola works between auditions. This is my old neighborhood, properly celebrated. Shopping in 'Match Point' otherwise takes place on the branded boulevard of Old and New Bond Street, which Chris favors for gifts, visiting Asprey. If visiting, yourself, and exchange rates are favorable, shop down this stretch, or at Ralph Lauren in Chelsea, where Chris buys a cashmere sweater. Nearby, albeit out the picture, is Issey Miyake and other labels. Sight of the Ralph Lauren shop prompted a personal sadness. The Crescent, next door, is featured fleetingly. This would have been a more affordable lunch and supper option, compared with the choices of Tom (Chris's brother-in-law, played by Matthew Goode) and Chloe, like Locanda Locatelli (8 Seymour Street), off Marble Arch, and Julie's (Clarendon Cross, W11), near Holland Park. Sadly, since filming, the Crescent has closed. The Audley — Nola's watering hole — near Locanda, south of Oxford Street, on Mount Street, is a traditional pub that serves as a second living room for local office workers. Visitors are warmly received by Alex, the manager. St. George's Gardens, on Mount and South Audley Streets where Chris seeks refuge from family crisis, is also accessible. If traveling shortly, you should skip Queen's Club, home to the tennis tournament that precedes Wimbledon and the location for the opening scene. Now is not the weather for tennis in London. Also stay out of trouble. The grim inside of west London's old Glaxo Building — in 'Match Point,' Shepherd's Bush police station — is authentic. Preferable are open spaces in St James's Park. Here, Chris and Chloe take purposeful steps in their courtship, along tree and shrub-lined paths within the borders of Pall Mall, Horse Guards' Parade and Birdcage Walk. Their route, indeed the film's entire journey through London, is a worthwhile trail. This local approves.

Subject: Buy a Hybrid, and Save a Guzzler From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 06:09:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/business/08leonhardt.html?ex=1297054800&en=c1f887d437c77cda&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 8, 2006 Buy a Hybrid, and Save a Guzzler By DAVID LEONHARDT SOME of my favorite people drive a Prius. They bought the car, obviously, because they were worried about the planet. But the fringe benefits are pretty nice, too. Prius drivers can use a carpool lane in some places even when no one else is in the car. No matter where they're driving, they coast down the road in a whisper-quiet hum unlike anything else. Best of all, even if no one likes admitting it, they get to enjoy the cool-kid cachet that comes with being an early adopter of a fad. No other vehicle has had a recurring role on the TV show 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.' Now President Bush has taken the hybrid craze to a whole new level. To cure our addiction to oil, he said last week, we must invest in hybrid cars, hydrogen cars, even cars that run on wood chips and grass. Energy technology is having its big moment. Too bad the benefits of our new cult car have been so exaggerated. Let's start with the obvious advantage of hybrids. When you drive one, you burn less gas than you would in a regular car. A typical driver of a Prius will use about 250 fewer gallons of gasoline each year than somebody would in a Toyota Corolla, which gets 29 miles a gallon. That's doing everyone else a favor because gas use has other costs — like global warming and American troops stationed overseas — that nobody fully pays at the pump. But the favor is not nearly as big as hybrid owners imagine, for two reasons. First, hybrids have the most overblown mileage ratings in the auto industry. In the government's road tests, which are conducted in a world without much traffic or any air-conditioning, the Prius gets 55 miles to the gallon. Consumer Reports says the car really goes 44 miles on a gallon of gas. When I used one last week — and there is no denying that it's a great car to drive — I got 45 in Manhattan and on local highways. This is just the beginning of the story. The more time you spend looking at the economics of the hybrids, the less comfortable you get. The most important reason is a government policy that, amazingly enough, seems almost intended to undercut the benefits of efficient cars. In 1978, Congress set a minimum corporate average fuel economy, known as CAFE, for all carmakers. Today, the minimum average for cars is 27.5 miles a gallon. (For S.U.V.'s and other light trucks, it is 21.6.) YOU can guess what this means for hybrids. Each one becomes a free pass for its manufacturer to sell a few extra gas guzzlers. For now, this is less true for Toyota's cars, because they're above the mileage requirement. But Toyota's trucks and the American automakers are right near the limits. So every Toyota Highlander hybrid S.U.V. begets a hulking Lexus S.U.V., and every Ford Escape — the hybrid S.U.V. that Kermit the Frog hawked during the Super Bowl — makes room for a Lincoln Navigator, which gets all of 12 miles a gallon. Instead of simply saving gas when you buy a hybrid, you're giving somebody else the right to use it. The hybrid, then, is just about the perfect example of what's wrong with our energy policy. It's a Band-Aid that does a lot less to help the earth than we like to tell ourselves. When Vice President Dick Cheney dismissed conservation as 'a sign of personal virtue' a few years back, a lot of environmentalists were disgusted. But that, sadly, is what a lot of well-meaning hybrid owners are driving: an expensive symbol that they're worried about our planet, rather than a true solution. You can consider yourself a conservationist and still see the logic in this. As Jon Coifman, the media director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, says, 'We're not going to kick our oil addiction with good will and personal virtue. You do need market signals, and you do need rules. And you need virtue. You need it all.' The simplest idea in economics, I think, is that people respond to the incentives they are given. It's why market economies have done so well. So if we have decided that we need to use less oil for our own good — which seems to be the case — we need big incentives to change our behavior. A substantial gas tax would be the simplest, with other taxes being cut to keep down the overall burden. Car buyers could drive whatever they wanted, as long as they were paying the full cost of their gas, and automakers would respond with creative products. If we're not capable of having a serious discussion about new taxes, the second-best option would be lavish incentives for companies to sell a fuel-efficient fleet. Jonathan Skinner, an economist at Dartmouth, has a nice way of thinking about this. Forget about the 250 gallons of gas that a Prius saves relative to a Corolla. An S.U.V. that gets 16 miles a gallon, like the Cadillac SRX, uses almost 600 fewer gallons annually than an 11-mile-a-gallon Hummer H2, because small differences add up when gas is being burned so quickly. It's the person deciding between those two vehicles who needs some extra incentives. Instead, the government is giving $3,000 tax credits to hybrid buyers and opening carpool lanes to them. As a result, some people are buying cars they don't need. So get this: Americans are now replacing perfectly good cars, like the Corolla, in the name of conservation. There is one sign of improvement. The Environmental Protection Agency has announced that it is fixing its fuel-economy ratings. The stickers that appear on the windows of new cars will soon show more realistic mileage numbers. Unfortunately, the E.P.A. is in charge of only the stickers. The Department of Transportation makes the fuel-economy rules — the ones that actually matter — and it's not planning any changes. It will proceed with the fiction that the Prius gets 55 miles to the gallon. This is our energy policy.

Subject: Dip in Cancer Deaths Is Reported From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 05:58:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/national/09cancer.html?ex=1297141200&en=8717b53b2f2c12cb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Dip in Cancer Deaths Is Reported, First Decline in U.S. in 70 Years By DENISE GRADY The number of cancer deaths in the United States has dropped slightly, the first decline in more than 70 years, the American Cancer Society is reporting today. Much of the decrease is because of a decline in smoking and improved detection and treatment of breast, colorectal and prostate cancers, according to the society. The decline occurred in 2003, the latest year for which figures are available. There were 556,902 cancer deaths, 369 fewer than in 2002. Deaths fell in men by 778, but rose by 409 in women. 'Even though it's a small number, it's a notable milestone,' said Dr. Michael Thun, head of epidemiological research for the society. Dr. Thun (pronounced tune) said the death rate from cancer had been falling by slightly less than 1 percent a year since 1991, but even so, the actual number of deaths kept rising because the population was growing and aging. 'The decrease from 2002 to 2003 means that the decline in death rates had become sufficiently large that it was bigger than the aging and growth of the population,' Dr. Thun said. 'You would predict this is a trend that may have a few bumps but will continue,' he said. Dr. Robert A. Hiatt, deputy director of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the University of California, San Francisco, said, 'From the beginning of the century it's been going up and up and up, and this is the first time we've turned the corner.' Elizabeth Holly, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, said, 'It's quite good we've made some progress in our advance against cancer, but what it really is reflecting, fortunately, is a change in personal smoking habits and early detection and treatment in prostate, colorectal and breast cancer.' Tobacco still accounts for 30 percent of cancer deaths, she said, and death rates from smoking are not decreasing in women as they are in men, because women began to quit smoking later than did men. Dr. Holly added a note of caution. 'We still have some real tragedies and very substantial national failures,' she said, noting that the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer is less than 4 percent and that African-Americans with prostate cancer have twice the death rate of other groups. In addition, Dr. Holly said, increases in obesity could lead to increased cancer rates.

Subject: As Teflon Troubles Pile Up From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 05:50:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/dining/08teflon.html February 8, 2006 As Teflon Troubles Pile Up, DuPont Responds With Ads By MARIAN BURROS THE chemical used to make Teflon as well as grease-resistant packaging and stain-resistant textiles has been the subject of a lot of bad news recently. In December, the Environmental Protection Agency reached a $16.5 million settlement with DuPont over the company's failure to report health risks from the chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, also known as PFOA. Last month, the agency announced it had reached an agreement with eight companies, including DuPont and 3M, to eliminate PFOA and the chemicals that break down into PFOA from all consumer products by 2015. A few days later, the majority of the E.P.A.'s scientific review panel advised the agency that the chemical should be classified as a 'likely' carcinogen. This designation means that a chemical is known to cause cancer in animals, though the evidence that it causes cancer in humans is suggestive but not conclusive. The recent negative publicity prompted DuPont, which manufactures Teflon nonstick cookware, to run full-page advertisements last week in newspapers (including The New York Times), telling the public that cookware coated with Teflon 'is safe' and that 'there is no reason to stop' using it. The Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit environmental research and advocacy organization, agrees that Teflon-coated pans are not a major source of PFOA, but says they should be used with care. An overheated empty Teflon-coated pan poses some risk because it can release toxic gases, which are especially dangerous for birds. DuPont says this is only likely to happen at 660 degrees while other scientists say 325 degrees. Fluorotelomers, chemicals used in packaging, can also break down into PFOA, but there is currently no way for consumers to tell if a package contains the chemicals. The F.D.A. has found that PFOA migrates to the oil from the packaging for microwave popcorn bags during heating. The chemicals are also found in packaging for pizza, bakery items, drinks and candy. The safe level for PFOA, found in the blood of 95 percent of all Americans, is unknown. If the E.P.A. decides to classify a chemical as a 'likely' carcinogen, it would be required to conduct a full human health risk assessment for cancer. So until 2015, advice on how to reduce exposure has not changed: Use Teflon pans at lower temperatures and never put them over heat without food or liquid. Greasy food should not be heated in a microwave oven in a cardboard container: it should be transferred to glass or ceramic. For popcorn, advice from Alton Brown of the Food Network is worth repeating: Place one-quarter cup of good quality popcorn in a standard brown paper lunch bag; mix with oil and seasoning; seal the bag with a single staple and heat for two to three minutes in the microwave. Cast iron pans, seasoned and heated properly, require very little oil for browning. Professional chefs don't use nonstick pans because they do not brown as well as cast iron or stainless steel.

Subject: Censoring Truth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 05:42:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/opinion/09thu2.html?ex=1297141200&en=e5db1ec555b2f6e8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 9, 2006 Censoring Truth The Bush administration long ago secured a special place in history for the audacity with which it manipulates science to suit its political ends. But it set a new standard of cynicism when it allowed NASA's leading authority on global warming to be mugged by a 24-year-old presidential appointee who, quite apart from having no training on that issue, had inflated his résumé. In early December, James Hansen, the space agency's top climate specialist, called for accelerated efforts to reduce industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases linked to global warming. After his speech, he told Andrew C. Revkin of The Times, he was threatened with 'dire consequences' if he continued to call for aggressive action. This was not the first time Dr. Hansen had been rebuked by the Bush team, which has spent the better part of five years avoiding the issue of global warming. It was merely one piece of a larger pattern of deception and denial. The administration has sought to influence the policy debate by muzzling the people who disagree with it or — as was the case with two major reports from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and 2003 — editing out inconvenient truths or censoring them entirely. In this case, the censor was George Deutsch, a functionary in NASA's public affairs office whose chief credential appears to have been his service with President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee. On his résumé, Mr. Deutsch claimed a 2003 bachelor's degree in journalism from Texas A&M, but the university, alerted by a blogger, said that was not true. Mr. Deutsch has now resigned. The shocker was not NASA's failure to vet Mr. Deutsch's credentials, but that this young politico with no qualifications was able to impose his ideology on other agency employees. At one point, he told a Web designer to add the word 'theory' after every mention of the Big Bang. As Dr. Hansen observed, Mr. Deutsch was only a 'bit player' in the administration's dishonest game of politicizing science on issues like warming, birth control, forest policy and clean air. This from a president who promised in his State of the Union address to improve American competitiveness by spending more on science.

Subject: Chocolate That Flashes Its Passport From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 09, 2006 at 05:28:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/dining/08choc.html?ex=1297054800&en=536fbb314c8dceb8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 8, 2006 Chocolate That Flashes Its Passport By KIM SEVERSON HIS name was Conrad Miller, and he would be our chocolate sommelier for the afternoon. So it has come to this. Chocolate, a comfortable world that for many people exists between the downscale joy of a Kit Kat bar and the exhilaration of a well-made ganache, now requires a sommelier. It is no longer enough to understand the difference between milk and bittersweet. Even the know-it-all chocolate cowboys who brag about eating nothing less than 85 percent cocoa bars are out of their league. Now, the game is all about origin. As with olive oil or coffee, knowing where one's chocolate came from is starting to matter. Even the most casual wine drinker can name a preferred varietal, and the neophyte cheese fan understands that Brie is French and good Cheddar comes from England. Terroir, it turns out, matters in chocolate, too. That's where Mr. Miller comes in. He's a part-time musician with Midwest Mennonite roots, but he looks perfectly at home in the Flatiron district, where the French chocolate maker Michel Cluizel opened a shop in November at ABC Carpet and Home. It is Mr. Cluizel's only shop in America and much of the chocolate reflects the specific piece of land where the cacao beans were grown. Mr. Miller's job is to help the baffled but curious make sense of it all. His tools are a tray of foil-wrapped chocolate wafers from several countries, a glass of water and a little bowl of tortilla chips — he prefers unsalted — to provide a palate scrub. One day last week, he walked me through a $35 tasting. We pondered the snappy break and acidic finish of chocolate from the African island of São Tomé and discussed how growing cacao trees in the soil of a former mango grove might result in chocolate with a faint flash of the fruit. We contemplated the raisiny ways of a bar from Papua New Guinea, which Mr. Miller suggested would go well with port. Each chocolate wafer had its story, which Mr. Miller was happy to tell. 'It's like reading a novel and eating a novel all at the same time,' he said. But when it comes down to it, can he really discern Ghana from Grenada? Ecuador from Colombia? 'Regions I can tell. Continents, at least,' he said. 'I'm still working on the countries.' If our chocolate sommelier can't understand it all, is there hope for the rest of us? Even those who turn cacao pods into artisanal chocolate haven't quite settled on a lexicon for this new way of contemplating chocolate. Maricel E. Presilla, in her book 'The New Taste of Chocolate,' refers to it as one broad category — 'exclusive-derivation' chocolate. Some chocolatiers use simpler phrases like single origin, single bean or varietal. Others have gotten more extreme, naming bars after one of the three main varieties of cacao, like the rare criollo, and labeling chocolate made from beans grown on one farm 'plantation' or 'estate' chocolate. Harvests believed to be particularly special might even be deemed 'grand cru,' a term borrowed from winemakers. 'That doesn't mean much more than the chocolatier thought enough of his chocolate to give it a fancy name,' said Bill Yosses, the pastry chef at Josephs Citarella restaurant. He is among several pastry chefs and chocolate makers who have been cultivating a quiet, intense relationship with varietal chocolates since the late 1980's, when Valrhona, Lindt and others began producing chocolates identified by both the percentage of cocoa and the beans' origins. By 2000, chocolate makers like Mr. Cluizel and Gary Guittard in San Francisco were selling chocolate from small plantations, and the first bars marketed to consumers rather than pastry chefs began to show up regularly at specialty stores and upscale groceries. 'It sits right on the fence between hedonism and intellectual pursuit,' said the chef Mario Batali. He offers a tasting of three different origin chocolates that vary in intensity at his new Manhattan restaurant, Del Posto. For those more interested in politics than hedonism, eating chocolate according to country makes it a little easier to figure out the environmental and labor practices behind each bar. The use of child slave labor in cocoa production is of particular concern. In the late 1990's, reports of large numbers of child slaves being used in cocoa production in Ivory Coast began to surface. Since then, the world's major chocolate producers and the Chocolate Manufacturers Association have vowed to work to end child slavery in the cocoa business. So has TransFair USA, the fair trade certifying group, but less than 1 percent of chocolate sold in the United States meets the group's standards for safe labor practices, fair wages and social responsibility, said Ella Silverman, cocoa accounts manager. Some companies are producing bars that are designated both organic and single-origin chocolate. But cacao pods are highly susceptible to pests, especially when the dried beans are shipped. And the nature of cacao production doesn't lend itself easily to organic certification. As a result, the number of organic, single-origin chocolate bars is small and most are not well-regarded by the world's top chocolate experts. 'Every time I eat organic chocolate a little voice in my head says: Just let me give a cheque to the co-operative, but please don't make me eat this!' Chloé Doutre-Roussel, the chocolate buyer and consultant, wrote in her book 'The Chocolate Connoisseur.' (Tarcher, 2006) For someone who just wants a good piece of eating chocolate, trying to sort out the politics from the percentages is akin to trying to drink from a fire hose. At the Whole Foods in Union Square in Manhattan, the chocolate bar section holds more than 120 choices. The descriptions and naming conventions range from the simple — Newman's Own Organic Sweet Dark Chocolate, for example — to something so complex it is virtually meaningless to anyone but the most educated chocolate connoisseur. What is a Valrhona Grand Cru Caraïbe 66 percent dark chocolate supposed to taste like, anyway? To help consumers sort it out, or perhaps to jump on new marketing opportunities, chocolate makers and grocers have begun selling tasting kits with samples of single-origin varietals and encouraging home tasting parties. Guittard, the San Francisco specialty chocolate maker, sells a $15.95 pocket-size tasting kit for four, with slim bars of single-origin chocolates all made with same ratio of cocoa to sugar, 65 percent to 35 percent. A pamphlet provides a tidy tutorial on varieties, tasting protocols and growing regions. For $62, La Maison du Chocolat, which does not make its own chocolate but uses Valrhona as a base, provides a kit with five single-origin chocolates expressed in ganache, a mixture of chocolate and cream. At the shop, in Rockefeller Center, experts will walk customers through a tasting. Jacques Torres offers big bars of chocolate from Ghana, Peru and Costa Rica for $5. Pralus, the French chocolate maker known for its intensely aromatic chocolate, offers an ambitious tasting stack of 10 single-origin wafers, each a little smaller than a matchbook. Even Trader Joe's, the California-based grocer, is in the game, selling a $7.99 kit with chocolate from the Dominican Republic, Ecuador and Madagascar. Of course, not every chocolate maker is buying the hype. Deciding which chocolate to eat based on where it is from is essentially eating blind, says Robert Steinberg, a founder of Scharffen Berger chocolate in Berkeley, Calif. The company, respected by top chocolate makers for its consistent dark blends, was purchased by Hershey last year. 'To say, here we have single-origin Madagascar or Trinidad, and leave people with the impression that this is what beans from Madagascar or Trinidad taste like, is misleading,' Mr. Steinberg said. So many factors affect a piece of chocolate: not only where the beans were grown, but the skill of whoever dried, fermented and roasted them, the amount of cocoa butter that was mixed back into the crushed beans, the two- or three-day process of mixing, heating and cooling (called conching and tempering), and the touch of the chocolatier. 'What you find over time is that the name of the beans is not very representative of the flavor,' he said. 'The art of chocolate-making is in blending. People who think just about percentage or just about origin stop tasting and just focus on some kind of concept that is constantly changing.' Michael Recchiuti, the San Francisco chocolatier known for a line of dipped chocolate ganache infused with flavors like green apple, star anise and pink peppercorn, offers a small tasting package featuring four varietal chocolates. He has cartons of Guittard Madagascar criollo chocolate stacked along the walls of his small chocolate plant because he likes the delicate flavor. He even uses a little earthy El Rey, from the Venezuelan grower and chocolate maker who in the mid-1990's championed the concept of single-origin chocolate. But he's a blend man at heart. And he thinks the real beauty of chocolate lies beneath the label. 'So much of it is just marketing,' Mr. Recchiuti said. 'I have to literally not listen to all this chatter about percentage and where it comes from, and listen to my palate.'

Subject: Worm-eating Warbler Singing From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 19:24:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=5340&offset_finder=1&u=24039 Worm-eating Warbler Singing New York City--Central Park, North Woods.

Subject: Worm-eating Warbler From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 19:23:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=4450&offset_finder=1&u=900 Worm-eating Warbler New York City--Central Park, The Loch.

Subject: Incompetency & another crisis From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 14:35:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Although, one can make a case for influence peddling by big oil with the Bush/Cheney administration when it comes to energy policy, I prefer to call it horrific incompetency. I say this because if the incompetency relating to the Iraq debacle or the handling of the Katrina disaster or the corruption scandels regarding money for votes or leaking a CIA operative's name to the press, (etc,etc), don't bury the neoconservatives and the Republican party, then the coming energy crisis will absolutely!! Now, regardless how much money your oil friends make, who really wants to go down in history as the most hated and failed presidency in US history? I really believe that this administration is so incompetent, that it doesn't have a clue as to what is coming down the pike with regard to energy! The only way this presidency can get back any semblence of respect is to take on the growing energy problem with as much fervor as they got us into Iraq. Time is running out fast. It has got to be obvious that governmental action to promote conservation is of extreme urgency as well as spending far more money and effort to develop alternative sources! Would we be in Iraq in the first place if it wasn't for our dependency on oil?? Yet this administration does the opposite! This is a coming disaster for Republicans. From The Boston Globe: Energy gaps seen in Bush's budget Plan would cut funding aimed at conservation By Rick Klein, Globe Staff | February 8, 2006 WASHINGTON -- President Bush's latest spending plan is unlikely to substantially reduce US oil consumption in the short term because it slashes $100 million from federal programs promoting conservation and falls short of the commitment in last year's energy bill to make vast new investments in renewable and emerging technologies, like hydrogen fuel and solar power. Despite Bush's ambitious goal of cutting Middle East oil imports by 75 percent within 20 years -- outlined in his State of the Union address a week ago -- the president's budget calls for an 18 percent cut in programs aimed at reducing energy consumption, like financial aid to help needy families better insulate their homes and research to make cars use fuel more efficiently. Critics say the budget sends a mixed message on energy policy: The president wants to invest in renewable energy but would spend less on it than he promised in the energy bill he signed and would scale down efficiency programs that would more quickly reduce the nation's demand for oil. ''The reality in no way meets the rhetoric,' said Dan W. Reicher, president of New Energy Capital, a Vermont-based renewable energy company. Reicher, deputy energy secretary under President Clinton, said the White House budget cuts ''energy efficiency and other vital programs in order to pay for renewable-energy increases. It's hard to see that we reach the goals the president has set.' Democrats also allege that the president still refuses to abandon his administration's longstanding emphasis on oil drilling and exploration. He is giving the Interior Department's budget for drilling on public lands a 10 percent increase; is reviving a politically nettlesome proposal to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; and would provide $4.6 million to manage the Alaska Natural Gas Pipeline, a longtime oil industry priority. Though Bush's budget calls for a $381 million increase in spending on renewable energy technologies, some fear the money set aside for renewable energy isn't enough to make a real difference, while others say it depends too much on nuclear power. The extra money for renewable energy is still 22 percent less than the commitments laid out in the energy bill signed by Bush last year, according to an analysis conducted by Democratic staff members on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The $195.8 million the president wants for hydrogen research, for example, is barely a third of the total authorized by the energy bill. Craig Stevens, a Department of Energy spokesman, said the White House's emphasis on new energy sources over conservation reflects the department's current priorities. When federal resources are scarce, Stevens said, the president believes that supporting research into new clean-burning technologies will pay the largest long-term dividends. ''There are competing priorities right now,' he said. ''We can impact and help more people by introducing more renewable technologies to market.' Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, the ranking Democrat on the Senate energy committee, said Bush's desire to hold total Department of Energy spending flat next year could be the reason for the cuts. ''This budget is taking us backwards in important programs in energy efficiency, clean coal, oil and gas, electricity reliability, and distributed energy, just to name a few,' he said. But Frank Maisano, an energy industry lobbyist, said the energy priorities reflect the progress that's been made in promoting energy conservation. The best long-term solutions, he said, involve finding and developing new sources of energy. ''That doesn't mean you don't need energy-efficiency programs,' Maisano said, ''but the technologies are what's going to get us there, in terms of the long-term solutions. New technologies will further improve efficiencies.' With spiraling gas and home heating prices and continued instability in the Middle East, Bush made energy initiatives the centerpiece of his State of the Union speech last week. He said his new Advanced Energy Initiative would help bring cutting-edge technologies to market and wean the nation from imported oil. ''By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past,' Bush said last week Some of the budget's biggest energy investments are in nuclear power; the president wants a $115 million increase for research and development. He also proposes a $250 million Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, designed in part to encourage developing nations to build nuclear power plants. Representative Edward J. Markey, a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the focus on nuclear energy is particularly ill-timed, given global concerns about Iran's burgeoning nuclear program. ''It seems that when [Bush] is talking about renewable energy, he's talking almost exclusively about nuclear power,' said Markey, a Malden Democrat. ''I would just call it a business-as-usual budget with regard to energy, with no follow-up on the commitments in the energy bill.' Lowell Ungar, a senior policy analyst for the Alliance to Save Energy, said the president has largely concentrated on increasing the supply of energy, while ignoring the demand for it. Ungar said the president should make conservation a bigger priority and take bold steps, like raising fuel-economy standards in all new cars. ''If the goal is to reduce the American dependence on foreign oil, you can't do it just on the supply side,' he said. ''With these cuts to energy efficiency [programs], they're sabotaging their own goals.' In the process, Bush appears insensitive to low-income residents who are struggling to pay soaring heating costs, said John Drew, executive vice president of the Association for Boston Community Development. The 30 percent cut the president wants in an energy-efficiency program, he said, would force as many as 40,000 poor families in Massachusetts to find other ways to pay for home insulation and efficient heating and cooling systems. ''I find it incomprehensible that the national priorities are where they are,' he said. ''The oil companies are getting extremely rich. . . . The people who will get left out will be those of the lowest income.'

Subject: 'At Canaan's Edge' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 07:22:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/chapters/0205-1st-bran.html February 5, 2006 'At Canaan's Edge' By TAYLOR BRANCH February 28, 1965 Terror approached Lowndes County through the school system. J. T. Haynes, a high school teacher of practical agriculture, spread word from his white superiors that local Klansmen vowed to kill the traveling preacher if he set foot again in his local church. This to Haynes was basic education in a county of unspoiled beauty and feudal cruelty, where a nerve of violence ran beneath tranquil scenes of egret flocks resting among pastured Angus cattle. Across its vast seven hundred square miles, Lowndes County retained a filmy past of lynchings nearly unmatched, and Haynes tried to harmonize his scientific college methods with the survival lore of students three or four generations removed from Africa - that hens would not lay eggs properly if their feet were cold, that corn grew only in the silence of night, when trained country ears could hear it crackling up from the magic soil of Black Belt Alabama. Lessons about the Klan arrived appropriately through the plainspoken Hulda Coleman, who had run the county schools since 1939 from a courthouse office she inherited from her father, the school superintendent and former sheriff. After World War II, when Haynes had confided to Coleman that the U.S. Army mustered him out from Morocco with final instructions to go home and vote as a deserving veteran, she explained that such notions did not apply to any colored man who valued his safety or needed his job in her classrooms. Haynes stayed on to teach in distinguished penury with his wife, Uralee, daughter of an engineer from the Southern land-grant colleges, loyally fulfilling joint assignment to what their Tuskegee professors euphemistically called a 'problem county.' Not for twenty years, until Martin Luther King stirred up the Selma voting rights movement one county to the west, did Negroes even discuss the franchise. There had been furtive talk since January about whether Haynes's 1945 inquiry or a similarly deflected effort by an aged blind preacher qualified as the last attempt to register, but no one remembered a ballot actually cast by any of the local Negroes who comprised 80 percent of the 15,000 residents in Lowndes County. Despite ominous notices from Deacon Haynes, Rev. Lorenzo Harrison was keeping his fourth-Sunday commitment when the sound of truck engines roared to a stop outside Mt. Carmel Baptist on February 28, 1965. Panic swept through the congregation even before investigating deacons announced that familiar Klansmen were deployed outside with shotguns and rifles. Harrison gripped the pulpit and stayed there. He lived thirty miles away in Selma, where he knew people in the ongoing nonviolent campaign but was not yet involved himself, and now he switched his message from 'How can we let this hope bypass us here?' to a plea for calm now that 'they have brought the cup to the Lord's doorstep.' He said he figured word would get back to white people that he had mentioned the vote in a sermon. Haynes reported that some of the Klansmen were shouting they'd get the out-of-county nigger preacher before sundown, whether the congregation surrendered him or not. Harrison kept urging the choir to sing for comfort above the chaos of tears and moans, with worshippers cringing in the pews or hunched near windows to listen for noises outside, some praying for deliverance and some for strength not to forsake their pastor even if the Klan burned the whole congregation alive. There were cries about whether the raiding party would lay siege or actually invade the sanctuary, and Harrison, preaching in skitters to fathom what might happen, said he had been braced for phone threats, night riders - almost any persecution short of assault on a Sunday service - but now he understood the saying that bad surprises in Lowndes could outstrip your fears. Deacons said they recognized among the Klansmen a grocer who sometimes beat debtors in his store, a horseman who owned ten thousand acres and once shot a young sharecropper on the road because he seemed too happy to be drafted out of the fields into the Army, then with impunity had dumped the body of Bud Rudolph on his mother's porch. There was Tom Coleman, a highway employee and self-styled deputy who in 1959 killed Richard Lee Jones in the recreation area of a prison work camp. Such names rattled old bones. Sheriff Jesse Coleman, father of Klansman Tom and school superintendent Hulda, successfully defied the rare Alabama governor who called for state investigation in a notorious World War I lynching - of one Will Jones from a telegraph pole by an unmasked daytime crowd - by pronouncing the whole episode a matter of strictly local concern. Noises outside the church unexpectedly died down. Uncertain why or how far the Klan had withdrawn, deacons puzzled over escape plans for two hundred worshippers with a handful of cars and no way to call for help - barely a fifth of the county's households had telephone service, nearly all among the white minority. A test caravan that ferried home sick or infirm walkers ran upon no ambush nearby, and a scout reported that the only armed pickup sighted on nearby roads belonged to a known non-Klansman. The task of evacuating Harrison fell to deacon John Hulett, whose namesake slave ancestor was said to have founded Mt. Carmel Baptist in the year Alabama gained statehood, 1819. Hulett, a former agriculture student under deacon Haynes, was considered a man of substance because he farmed his own land instead of sharecropping and once had voted as a city dweller in Birmingham. He recruited a deacon to drive Harrison's car, put the targeted reverend down low in the back seat of his own, and by late afternoon led a close convoy of all ten Mt. Carmel automobiles some fifteen miles north on Route 17 to deliver him to an emergency way station at Mt. Gillard Missionary Baptist Church on U.S. Highway 80, where Harrison's father was pastor. Celebrations at the transfer were clandestine, urgent, and poignant, being still in Lowndes County. Until Hulett pulled away to attend the stranded congregation back at Mt. Carmel, Harrison kept muttering in terrified regret that one of them had to follow through on this voting idea no matter what. 'If I have to leave, you take it,' he told Hulett with a tinge of regret, as though cheating his own funeral. Just ahead lay fateful March, with a crucible of choice for Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson. The Ku Klux Klan would kill soon in Lowndes County, but its victims would be white people from Michigan and New Hampshire. Lowndes would inspire national symbols. It would change Negroes into black people, and deacon John Hulett would found a local political party renowned by its Black Panther emblem. Beyond wonders scarcely dreamed, Reverend Harrison would vote, campaign, and even hold elected office for years in Selma, but never again in the twentieth century would he venture within ten miles of Mt. Carmel Church. . . .

Subject: The Reality of the Fantasy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 07:21:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/30/books/potter-comment-bernstein.html?ex=1122004800&en=7ed5b71c29808663&ei=5070 November 30, 1999 The Reality of the Fantasy in the Harry Potter Stories By Richard Bernstein It was a quarter of a century ago that Bruno Bettelheim, the child psychologist, accounted for what may be the most impressive and otherwise mysterious publishing phenomenon of the season: the fact that the Harry Potter mysteries by the previously unknown J. K. Rowling are turning out to be among the best-selling books in history. In his classic study of children's literature, 'The Uses of Enchantment,' Bettelheim denigrated most children's books as mere entertainments, lacking in psychological meaning. The great exception to this rule was fairy tales, to which Bettelheim attributed something close to magical power. 'More can be learned from them about the inner problems of human beings,' he wrote, 'and of the right solutions to their predicaments in any society than from any other type of story within a child's comprehension.' That was quite a statement at the time, applied as it was to a form of literature that depicted fantastical worlds, seemed unnecessarily scary, depended on unrealistically happy endings and had very little claim on high literary culture. But Bettelheim's main idea was that children live with greater terrors than most adults can understand, and fairy tales both give uncanny expression to that terror and show a way to a better future. The same can be said of the Harry Potter books, and that could well be the reason why the three published so far occupy the first, second and third places on the New York Times hardcover fiction best-seller list, something that no other author in living memory has achieved before. Ms. Rowling's books are not fairy tales in the conventional Grimm Brothers sense, and they are not as good either. They lack the primal, brutal terror of the Grimm stories, and it was the expression given to that terror that was at the heart of their emotional usefulness for Bettelheim. The Harry Potter stories are light, modern tales, Indiana Jones-like fantasies for children. When I began to read them, having heard how great they were from my several addicted nephews, it was hard for me to understand what all the sensation was about. Conservative Christians have criticized the Harry Potter books, saying they lead their young readers in the direction of paganism. For me the problem was that Ms. Rowling's world of sorcerers, gravity-defying broomsticks, spells, potions, unicorns and centaurs, goblins, trolls, three-headed dogs and other monstrous and magical creations seemed so divorced from any reality as to kill off the narrative excitement. But whereas adults see in Harry Potter a fairly conventional supernatural adventure story -- one not nearly as brilliant or literary as, say, 'The Hobbit' or the 'Alice in Wonderland' books -- something more fundamental evidently reverberates in the minds of children, something as powerful as the witch of 'Hansel and Gretel.' And read from this point of view, the Harry Potter books do indeed contain many of the elements that Bettelheim identified in the Grimm tales. Ms. Rowling's success in this sense may show the continued power of the form and the archetypes that those long-ago Germans perfected. The key here is, not surprisingly, the hero, Harry himself, who is 10 years old in Ms. Rowling's first book. One of the first things we learn about him is that his parents died when he was an infant; he is being raised by an aunt and uncle who are dumb, stiff and uncomprehending and who treat him with stingy cruelty. Following Bettelheim's model, this would be very similar to the archetype of the evil stepmother as a representative of the 'bad' parent who frighteningly and uncontrollably replaces the 'good' parent. What children see at the outset in the Harry Potter books is a lonely boy being raised by evil people, and all parents seem evil to their children at least some of the time. Unknown to Harry is that his real mother and father, who died when he was a baby, were important sorcerers who were killed by a certain Voldemort, the evil genius of this story, who has been trying to seize power for eons. Here Ms. Rowling's adventure takes on a primal quality that links it with many classic tales, from 'Great Expectations' to 'Star Wars': there are a family secret and a family struggle passed down from one generation to another, and a lot of meaning comes when the true nature of that struggle is revealed. What is important in the fairy tale scheme is that Harry's situation contains many of the inchoate fears of childhood, not just the parental abandonment fear. Harry is skinny and weak and wears glasses patched together with tape, and in this sense he seems to stand in for the vulnerability, the powerlessness that children feel. He lives in a cupboard under the stairs, since his spoiled cousin has both of the children's bedrooms upstairs, so in a sense he is expelled, like Hansel and Gretel, even from the evil home he has. Most conspicuously, Harry is picked on by his cousin, Dudley, the son of Harry's guardians, who treat Dudley with blatant favoritism. There could hardly be a stronger echo of another common fairy tale theme, exemplified by Cinderella's evil stepsisters. To Bettelheim the conflict between Cinderella and her stepsisters represents the intense sibling rivalries that children feel and the fears that these rivalries give rise to. Fairy tales, with their eventual happy endings, point a way out for the child who otherwise, Bettelheim said, has no hope 'that he will be rescued, that those who he is convinced despise him and have power over him will come to recognize his superiority.' In the early stages of Harry's story the disadvantages he feels are partly recapitulated outside his home. After he learns that he is somebody, the son of famous sorcerers, Harry goes off to Hogwart's School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There he discovers that other students all seem to know more than he does, that they are insiders while he is the quintessential outsider. One boy in particular is the head of a small gang that picks on him. A teacher seems intensely and for no reason to dislike him. But gradually Harry emerges as an independent figure whose talents and skills are widely recognized. The rest of Ms. Rowling's first volume shows Harry assuming his true identity, gaining the courage to overcome obstacles and winning a battle against the adversaries of his ancestors. Harry's story, in other words, with its early images of alienation, rejection, loneliness and powerlessness leading to its classically fairy tale ending, contains the same basic message that Bettelheim described in 'The Uses of Enchantment.' It is 'that a struggle against severe difficulties in life is unavoidable, is an intrinsic part of human existence -- but that if one does not shy away, but steadfastly meets unexpected and often unjust hardships, one masters all obstacles and at the end emerges victorious.' 'Morality is not the issue in these tales,' Bettelheim said, 'but rather, assurance that one can succeed.' Such assurance comes in ways that adults often do not understand, but Ms. Rowling's Harry Potter seems to provide it.

Subject: A Lesson for the Birds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 06:59:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/science/07find.html February 7, 2006 A Lesson for the Birds: Those People Aren't So Bad After All By KENNETH CHANG For a Magellanic penguin, a species that lives along the coast of Argentina, the first time it sees a human is a scary experience. It turns its head back and forth, warily staring at the intruder with one eye, then the other. Stress hormones flood its bloodstream. Some biologists have worried that such encounters — increasingly frequent with a rise in ecotourism — may harm the penguins and other animals whose habitats are invaded by human visitors. But a new study has found that at least in the case of Magellanics the sight of a few more humans quickly subdues the panic. 'This head-spinning thing that they do slows down very quickly, within 10 days,' said Brian G. Walker, a professor of biology at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., and the lead author of a study that appears in the February issue of Conservation Biology. The level of stress hormones drops, too, Dr. Walker said, and the penguins take little further note of people. 'The take-home message, I think, would be right now it looks like it's O.K.,' he said, of the tourists' presence. Still, he added, that may not hold true for all penguins. More aggressive species like the Magellanic might be less disturbed by the visits than more timid species, Dr. Walker said. An earlier paper by Dr. Walker and two colleagues at the University of Washington, P. Dee Boersma and John C. Wingfield, did find that people were a source of stress for baby Magellanic penguins. At less than a week old, the chicks showed levels of stress hormones usually not seen until the age of 3 months. 'That's worrisome,' Dr. Walker said. 'Early exposure to these stress hormones can have negative effects much later in life.' In humans at least, people who grow up in stressful households suffer from greater heart disease as adults. Whether that is also true of penguins is not known.

Subject: Downy Woodpecker and House Sparrow From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:51:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=6052&u=4|5|... Downy Woodpecker and House Sparrow Converse New York City--Central Park, The Ramble.

Subject: The Parent Trap From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:50:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/opinion/08warner.html?ex=1297054800&en=bd6914c1346390d5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 8, 2006 The Parent Trap By JUDITH WARNER Washington I FIRST encountered 'The Feminine Mystique' in college, in 1986. We read it not in women's studies, but in a class on intellectual history; and indeed, from the vantage point of a young woman coming of age in the mid-1980's, the world that Betty Friedan depicted — a world in which a married woman couldn't get a job without her husband's permission, couldn't open a checking account and couldn't get credit in her own name — seemed like ancient history. And yet, five years ago, as I settled, for the first time, into a life where I worked minimal hours, spent maximal time with my children and was almost entirely dependent on my husband's salary and health benefits, ancient history became a current affair. I lived surrounded by women whose lives were much like mine, and the sentences that swirled around me on the playground stirred memories of thoughts and phrases I'd read long before. The voices coalesced into a chorus of discontent that haunted me until one evening, after my daughters had gone to sleep, I went through a pile of boxes and dug up my old copy of Ms. Friedan's book. This time, as it had for many of the homemakers who read it when it was published in 1963, 'The Feminine Mystique' felt horribly familiar. Looking back convinced me that we needed to start working toward a different future. You could say that the 'plight' of 21st century stay-at-home moms — or part-time working moms like me — is vastly different from 'the problem that has no name' experienced by the women of Ms. Friedan's generation, and in one key respect you'd be right: Girls and women today are no longer kept from pursuing their educational dreams and career aspirations. They're no longer expected to abandon their jobs when they marry and — in theory — are no longer considered 'unnatural' if they keep working when they have children. We women have, in many very real ways, at long last made good on Ms. Friedan's dream that we would reach 'our full human potential — by participating in the mainstream of society.' But, for mothers in particular, at what cost? With what degree of exhaustion? And with what soul-numbing sacrifices made along the way? The outside world has changed enormously for women in these past 40 years. But home life? Think about it. Who routinely unloads the dishwasher, puts away the laundry and picks up the socks in your house? Who earns the largest share of the money? Who calls the shots? The answer, for a great many families, is the same as it was 50 years ago. That's why when I read the obituaries of Ms. Friedan, who died on Saturday, I was sad, but also depressed: their recounting of her description of the lives of women in the 1950's sounded just too much like the lives of women today. Although it often seems anecdotally to be true that domestic tasks and power are pretty evenly divided in families where both parents are working full time, the statistics argue quite differently. The fact is, no matter how time- or sleep-deprived they are, working women today do upwards of 70 percent of household chores for their families. The gender caste system is still alive and well in most of our households. After all, no one really wants to do the scrubbing and folding and chauffeuring and mopping and shopping and dry-cleaner runs. (I'm leaving child-minding out of this; in a happily balanced life, it doesn't feel like a chore.) Once the money for outsourcing runs dry, it's the lower-status member of the household who does these things. It is the lower-status member of the household who is called a 'nag' when she repeatedly tries to get other members of the household to share in doing them. This is just one indication that the feminist 'revolution' that was supposed to profoundly reshape women's lives remains incomplete. Another is the fact that there are no meaningful national policies to make satisfying work and satisfying family life anything but mutually exclusive for most men and women. Ms. Friedan herself anticipated this issue, in the final pages of 'The Feminine Mystique,' when she called for changing 'the rules of the game' of society at large. In 1970, she came back to this thought, arguing that if we did 'not only end explicit discrimination but build new institutions,' then the women's movement would prove to be 'all talk.' Thirty-six years later, with women having flooded the professions and explicit gender discrimination outlawed, the institutions of our society simply have not changed to embrace and accommodate the new realities of women's lives. The problems of home life seem to me now to be an all but hopeless conundrum. Yet the enduring failure of our social institutions to realize the larger promises of the women's movement is something we can address, straightforwardly and comparatively easily. We owe to Betty Friedan, to our daughters and to ourselves. Ms. Friedan said last year, 'We are a backward nation when it comes to things like childcare and parental leave.' That's just the beginning. We need universal preschool, more and better afterschool programs, and policies to promote part-time work options that don't force parents to forgo benefits, fair pay and career prospects. We desperately need leadership on these issues. Without it, our national commitment to family values is truly 'all talk.'

Subject: Canada to Shield 5 Million Forest Acres From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:46:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/international/americas/07canada.html?ex=1296968400&en=d17beef4d0c2a5b6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Canada to Shield 5 Million Forest Acres By CLIFFORD KRAUSS HARTLEY BAY, British Columbia — In this sodden land of glacier-cut fjords and giant moss-draped cedars, a myth is told by the Gitga'at people to explain the presence of black bears with a rare recessive gene that makes them white as snow. The Raven deity swooped down on the land at the end of an ice age and decided that one out of every 10 black bears born from that moment on would be bleached as 'spirit bears.' It was to be a reminder to future generations that the world must be kept pristine. On Tuesday, an improbable assemblage of officials from the provincial government, coastal Native Canadian nations, logging companies and environmental groups will announce an agreement that they say will accomplish that mission in the home of the spirit bear, an area that is also the world's largest remaining intact temperate coastal rain forest. A wilderness of close to five million acres, almost the size of New Jersey, in what is commonly called the Great Bear Rain Forest or the Amazon of the North will be kept off limits to loggers in an agreement that the disparate parties describe as a crossroads in their relations. The agreement comes after more than a decade of talks, international boycott campaigns against Great Bear wood products and sit-ins in the forests by Native Canadians and environmentalists, who chained themselves to logging equipment. The process has already inspired similar efforts to save the Canadian boreal forest, to the north, and suggestions that the agreement could be a model for preservation in the Amazon and other threatened forests. Scientists say the agreement should preserve not only the few hundred spirit bears and other black bears, but also one of the highest concentrations of grizzly bears in North America as well as unique subspecies of goshawks, coastal wolves, Sitka blacktail deer and mountain goats. 'It's like a revolution,' said Merran Smith, director of the British Columbia Coastal Program of Forest Ethics, an environmental group. 'It's a new way of thinking about how you do forestry. It's about approaching business with a conservation motive up front, instead of an industrial approach to the forest.' Under the agreement, the loggers will be guaranteed a right to work in 10 million acres of the forest, which some environmentalists criticize. But they will be obliged to cut selectively: away from critical watersheds, bear dens and fish spawning grounds, negotiators said. 'There's a new era dawning in British Columbia,' said Gordon Campbell, the province's premier. 'You have to establish what you value, and work together. This collaboration is something we have to take into the future, and it is something the world can learn from.' As a sign of new Native power gained in recent court cases, many areas that will be preserved or selectively logged have been chosen based on the oral tradition of Native groups and the opinions of their elders. These include areas with cultural significance like ancient cemeteries, or those with medicinal herbs and cedars big enough to make totem poles, canoes and long houses. If the federal government agrees, more than $100 million will also be raised by governments and foundations to start ecotourism lodges, shellfish aquaculture and other environmentally sustainable economic activities for the 25,000 people who live in the region. 'Now we can manage our destiny,' said Ross Wilson, chairman of the tribal council of the Heiltsuk, one of the Native nations involved. 'Without this agreement, we would be going to court forever and we would have to put our children and old ladies dressed in button blankets in the way of the chainsaws,' he added, referring to the ceremonial dress worn in past protests. Among the supporters of the agreement are some of the biggest players in Canadian lumber and paper, including Western Forest Products, Interfor and Canfor. 'It's a cultural shift,' said Shawn Kenmuir, an area manager for Triumph Timber, which has already forsaken old clear-cut practices and begun consulting with the Gitga'at before cutting on their traditional lands. 'We've started the transition from entitlement to collaboration.' The forest represents a quarter of what remains of coastal temperate rain forests in the world. Because 15 feet of rain can fall in a year, the Great Bear has never suffered a major forest fire. That has allowed some of the tallest and oldest trees on earth to thrive, including cedars more than a thousand years old. An estimated 20 percent of the world's remaining wild salmon swim through the forest's fjords, including coho and sockeye, whose spawning grounds were threatened by erosion caused by past logging. Largely intact because of its remoteness, the forest contains an abundance of wolverines, bats, peregrine falcons, marbled murrelet sea birds and coastal tailed frogs. The ecological richness is immediately apparent to the few people who visit. Within minutes of a recent helicopter visit to Princess Royal Island, in the heart of the rain forest, a group of visitors saw a pack of six gray and black wolves, a seal and numerous bald eagles and swans. 'Look at the forest move,' said Marven Robinson, 36, a Gitga'at guide, as eagles glided through the moist air and the wolf pack played hide-and-seek with the visitors along a channel of diaphanous water. 'As long as there is a spirit bear, we're going the right way.' The efforts to save the rain forest began a decade ago, as lumber companies that had already cut most of the old-growth forest around British Columbia, by far Canada's richest forestry province, began moving into the Great Bear. A deluge of postcards and demonstrations by groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace at shareholders meetings and retail outlets pressed American, Japanese and European hardware chains to shun products from the area. By 1999, when the Home Depot announced it would phase out sales of wood from the Great Bear and other endangered old forests, some lumber companies were shifting their approach, agreeing to work with the environmentalists. MacMillan Bloedel, before it was acquired by Weyerhaeuser, broke ranks with the industry and promised in 1998 to phase out clear-cutting on the British Columbia coast. Other companies gradually fell into line. 'The customer doesn't want products with protesters chained to it,' said Patrick Armstrong, a consultant who served as a negotiator for the lumber companies. 'We're dealing with old-growth forests with charismatic wildlife.' Once Mr. Armstrong sat at the opposite side of the bargaining table from the environmentalists, but now he works closely with them. 'This needs to be celebrated — it's a big, big deal,' he said. 'Everyone had a greater interest in resolving the problems than continuing the conflict.'

Subject: Blend the Gmail and Chat Features From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:43:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/technology/07google.html?ex=1296968400&en=14d57a1dd5fdb102&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 New Google Service to Blend the Gmail and Chat Features By LAURIE J. FLYNN SAN FRANCISCO — Google, the search-engine giant, is expected on Tuesday to disclose that it will join its instant-messaging service with its popular Gmail program, the latest indication that the company has set its sights on the broader communications industry. The new program, called Gmail Chat, will let Gmail users exchange text messages with others without having to log onto a separate chat program, making instant messaging simpler and more integrated with the e-mail program. From anywhere in Gmail, the user can see who is available to chat. The program will also allow users to store instant-message conversations. But regardless of its features, Gmail Chat faces a considerable challenge if it hopes to lure users away from established instant-messaging programs like those of AOL, Yahoo and MSN, with tens of millions of users in total. Gmail Chat will be able to send and receive instant messages from a small set of competitive programs, including Jabber and EarthLink, but none of the larger ones like AOL, Yahoo or MSN. The more popular instant-messaging problems do not interact, and interoperability remains the holy grail of instant messaging. Google's vice president for product management, Salar Kamangar, declined to say how many people used Gmail, saying only that there were millions. AOL's instant messenger has 53 million users; MSN's 27 million and Yahoo's 22 million. Mr. Kamangar said Gmail Chat would be available Tuesday to an unspecified number of Gmail users, and to all users of the system by the end of February. Gmail Chat builds on the company's earlier instant-messaging technology, called GoogleTalk, which it announced in August. That program, which will still be available, allows GoogleTalk users to converse with others in remote locations, in addition to sending text messages. GoogleChat, on the other hand, will focus on simplifying the experience of sending and receiving text messages, Mr. Kamangar said.

Subject: Serving of Lean, Smoky Jazz From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:42:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/arts/07reev.html?ex=1296968400&en=a54e7904215f5ad8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 For a Period Film, a Serving of Lean, Smoky Jazz By NATE CHINEN It should come as news to no one that the front-runner for best jazz vocal album in this year's Grammy Awards is an intimate standards session that evokes the sound of the 1950's. Isn't that often the case? What's interesting about the current favorite is that it comes with a period picture attached, the George Clooney film 'Good Night, and Good Luck.' The soundtrack is the latest effort from Dianne Reeves, a singer who has been unbeatable in recent awards seasons. 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' about Edward R. Murrow's broadcast battle with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, takes place almost entirely at CBS television headquarters in 1953 and 1954. The powerful but mellow alto of Ms. Reeves wafts through the film, as ubiquitous and atmospheric as the smoke from Murrow's cigarettes. Ms. Reeves appears on-screen as a CBS contract singer; in the spirit of cinéma vérité, she and her band recorded much of the soundtrack in character, while cameras rolled. The result, oddly enough, is the leanest, most instantly gratifying album of her career. 'I had to say, 'O.K., this is what I have to work with,' ' Ms. Reeves said in a recent phone interview. 'How do I make this the best it can possibly be? It makes you go inward and find the subtleties.' She was referring not only to the logistics of the film, but also to the singing style of the period, which required restraint. 'I have a big voice,' she said. 'I could have had more complex music and been happy. When I perform that music onstage, it takes on a different character.' Ms. Reeves, who turns 50 this year, has blazed a stubbornly circuitous trail through the jazz mainstream. Her recording career, spanning a dozen Blue Note releases since 1987, has included detours into R&B, fusion and world music. 'People would say, 'It's too pop for jazz, too jazzy for pop,' ' she said. 'So I've always been in a kind of middle place, but that was the music that made me feel connected.' Ms. Reeves won her first Grammy in 2000 for 'In the Moment,' a live recording that captures the breadth of her eclecticism, complete with semiautobiographical exhortations and Southern Hemisphere grooves. She won again in 2001 for 'The Calling,' an elaborate tribute with strings to Sarah Vaughan, her most significant vocal influence. Her third award was in 2003 for 'A Little Moonlight,' an exquisitely focused standards album and her finest recorded work. It was the first time a singer had won a Grammy for three consecutive releases, in any genre. The 'Good Night, and Good Luck' soundtrack, on Concord Records, could be seen as a logical next step for Ms. Reeves: it's even sparser than 'A Little Moonlight,' with a similar emphasis on standard fare. The soundtrack's simple clarity has resonated with an especially broad audience, as Ms. Reeves noticed on her most recent tour. (A straight standards repertory, paradoxically, has become the ultimate crossover tool for contemporary jazz singers.) Since its late September release, the album has sold roughly 40,000 copies; that's barely a blip by pop standards, but solid for jazz and almost as many as 'A Little Moonlight' or 'The Calling' to date. But Ms. Reeves describes the soundtrack as a discrete project, not a hint of things to come. She has plans to record her next Blue Note album this summer, after a six-week European tour. (Look for it among the nominees at the 2008 Grammy Awards.) Assessing this year's race, Ms. Reeves places emphasis on the quality of her competition, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Luciana Souza, Nnenna Freelon and Tierney Sutton. 'I would love to win,' Ms. Reeves said, 'I'm not going to lie about that, but I'm really excited about the category that I'm in. They're all great singers. I have their records, I've seen them, I know most of them.' Whoever takes home the award tomorrow night, Ms. Reeves will have reasons for celebrating. 'The music and all of the things in the universe are clicking,' she said. 'I always felt confident, but not like this. I don't even know how to describe it. I just feel very easy and able and — I don't know — mature.'

Subject: Storyteller in the Family From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:39:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/books/06seth.html?ex=1296882000&en=d07f42352b1edc08&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 6, 2006 Storyteller in the Family: Inspiration and Obligation By SOMINI SENGUPTA NOIDA, India — Vikram Seth has a house of his own. He just prefers to live in his parents' house, a few doors down. His father's study is his crash pad. His mother's study, connected by a door, can be invaded at any time. His parents' bedroom, with windows that overlook a small, tidy garden, is in effect the family room, too: before anyone goes on a journey, it is here, on the large square bed, that the family sits and chats. The upstairs quarters belong to Mr. Seth's brother and his wife. Nearly every day, a meal is eaten together, either upstairs or downstairs. What's the point, Mr. Seth asks, of being sequestered in your own house down the road? 'This way, we wander through each other's life, and it's much nicer,' he said. His books are likewise known for wandering through domestic life. His 800,000-word tome, 'A Suitable Boy' (1993), chronicles the twined lives of four families in midcentury India. 'Golden Gate' (1986) a novel in verse, meanders through a family of five friends in California. The latest, a memoir of sorts called 'Two Lives,' published by HarperCollins in November, tells the story of two misfits in marriage: Mr. Seth's great uncle, Shanti Seth, and Shanti's German-Jewish wife, Henny, and their lives before and after World War II. 'Two Lives' is also an autobiography, in a manner of speaking. In it, Mr. Seth comes as close as he ever has to being honest about himself. (It has been nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, in the autobiography category; the winners are to be announced next month.) More to the point, if 'Two Lives' draws daylight on his own kin, it also reveals something about the danger of having a storyteller in the family. (Mr. Seth's family has several; 'On Balance,' by his mother, Leila Seth, is an unusually candid family memoir of loss and belonging.) What Mr. Seth turns up about Shanti and Henny, through letters and interviews and finally a will, is both poignant and painfully revelatory. The letters, he concedes, were private — 'eyes-only letters,' as he puts it. But for a writer, they were also a find. And their discovery presented twin obligations to story and family. 'There's a duty to the living not to hurt them,' Mr. Seth explained. And 'there's a duty to write things as they are.' Mr. Seth got his first glimpses into the lives of his great uncle and aunt when he lived with them in London as a young man. They were far removed from the intimacy — and the stifling heat — of the extended Seth family in India. Henny's mother and sister were killed in the Holocaust. She did not speak of that part of her past. Mr. Seth gleans Henny's story largely from her letters. He gleans his great uncle's largely from interviews he conducted with Shanti in 1994, after Henny's death. And then, in Shanti's death came a new and wrenching puzzle about Shanti's own relationship to family. It is not a riddle that his nephew, the writer, can solve. 'I couldn't have written about Shanti Uncle and Aunty Henny when Uncle was still alive,' he said. In the Seth family house here in Noida, an upmarket suburb of Delhi, the downstairs dining room exists in the shadow of Leila Seth's law books; Mrs. Seth was the first woman to be named chief justice of a state high court in India. Black and white portraits of the family hang above Mr. Seth's parents' bed. A narrow glass bookshelf in what Americans would call a living room (in a house like this, it still ought to be called a drawing room) contains 'Two Lives,' sandwiched between Nelson Mandela's 'Long Walk to Freedom' and V. S. Naipaul's 'Magic Seeds.' 'Two Lives' is the most tender of Mr. Seth's works. It is also the only book in which he directly engages the idea of growing old. 'It's probably the most personal of my books,' he said. That too was somewhat of a duty, he added, for there would be 'an element of falsity in keeping an artificial distance.' In the 1930's Mr. Seth's great uncle signed up to study dentistry in Germany and ended up joining the British troops during World War II. Henny lived in Berlin, where Shanti Seth was a boarder in her family home. She fled to London during the war. In Mr. Seth's rendering, it is unclear whether and how they fell in love, only that there was a kind of love between them. 'Beset by life, isolated in the world, in each other they found a strong and sheltering harbor,' Mr. Seth writes. To peer into a relationship, even for a writer whose métier is to peer into relationships, cannot yield a full portrait. Mr. Seth is the first to admit it. But to peer into two lives that intersect at such a formative historical juncture is the strength of Shanti and Henny's story. Mr. Seth opted not to write a novel based on their lives. He said he wanted the real to be revealed. 'I did feel one had to get not just the facts, but the emotional underpinnings,' he explained. 'You could say it's a study of love, relationships, courage, psychology and moral decisions under incredible pressures.' The Indian imagination has been riven by war since the birth of the nation in 1947: three wars with Pakistan, one with China, many conflicts since pitting Indians against themselves. But World War II was of vital importance to Indian history. There were Indian soldiers in the British Army. There was the Indian independence leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, who sought Hitler's assistance in ousting the British. Not least, during the war years, there was the awakening of Indian ideas of freedom. In 1939, as Mr. Seth writes, Britain declared war on behalf of India, without so much as consulting Indians. In 1942 Gandhi began the Quit India movement, which culminated with independence. 'Two Lives' can also be read as an Indian claim to World War II. Mr. Seth today divides his time between Britain and India, with a house of his own in each country. He is fond of crediting his parents for having allowed him to live off them — 'sponged' is the word he uses — for the many years it took to write 'A Suitable Boy.' Part of the payback is in making sure that his royalties guarantee a lifetime supply of books for his mother and whiskey for his father. He has sponged off his family aesthetically too, as writers are wont to do. By his own admission, some of the characters in 'A Suitable Boy' are thinly disguised proxies of relatives, and they are not altogether flattering. 'Time passes,' is all he will say about whether he has been forgiven. The idea of 'Two Lives' came from his mother over a decade ago, at a time when Mr. Seth was scratching around for something to write about. 'Stop making a fuss,' he recalled her saying. 'There's Shanti Uncle.' 'The family,' as he said, 'is at my heart.'

Subject: Sensing Missed Opportunities From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:36:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/08/politics/08dems.html?ex=1297054800&en=9562f5f4718a9fb2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 8, 2006 Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities By ADAM NAGOURNEY and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG WASHINGTON — Democrats are heading into this year's elections in a position weaker than they had hoped for, party leaders say, stirring concern that they are letting pass an opportunity to exploit what they see as widespread Republican vulnerabilities. In interviews, senior Democrats said they were optimistic about significant gains in Congressional elections this fall, calling this the best political environment they have faced since President Bush took office. But Democrats described a growing sense that they had failed to take full advantage of the troubles that have plagued Mr. Bush and his party since the middle of last year, driving down the president's approval ratings, opening divisions among Republicans in Congress over policy and potentially putting control of the House and Senate into play in November. Asked to describe the health of the Democratic Party, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: 'A lot worse than it should be. This has not been a very good two months.' 'We seem to be losing our voice when it comes to the basic things people worry about,' Mr. Dodd said. Democrats said they had not yet figured out how to counter the White House's long assault on their national security credentials. And they said their opportunities to break through to voters with a coherent message on domestic and foreign policy — should they settle on one — were restricted by the lack of an established, nationally known leader to carry their message this fall. As a result, some Democrats said, their party could lose its chance to do to Republicans this year what the Republicans did to them in 1994: make the midterm election, normally dominated by regional and local concerns, a national referendum on the party in power. 'I think that two-thirds of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction,' ' said Senator Barack Obama, the first-term Illinois Democrat who is widely viewed as one of the party's promising stars. 'They're not sure yet whether Democrats can move it in the right direction.' Mr. Obama said the Democratic Party had not seized the moment, adding: 'We have been in a reactive posture for too long. I think we have been very good at saying no, but not good enough at saying yes.' Some Democrats said they favored remaining largely on the sidelines while Republicans struggled under the glare of a corruption inquiry. And some said there was still time for the party to get its act together. But many others said the party needed to move quickly to offer a comprehensive governing agenda, even as they expressed concern about who could make the case. Their concern was aggravated by the image of high-profile Democrats, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, challenging the legality of Mr. Bush's secret surveillance program this week at a time when the White House has sought to portray Democrats as weak on security. 'We're selling our party short; you've got to stand for a lot more than just blasting the other side,' said Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. 'The country is wide open to hear some alternatives, but I don't think it's wide open to all these criticisms. I am sitting here and getting all my e-mail about the things we are supposed to say about the president's speech, but it's extremely light on ideas. It's like, 'We're for jobs and we're for America.' ' To a certain extent, the frustrations afflicting Democrats are typical for a party out of power. In Congress, the Democrats have become largely marginalized by the Republican majority, depriving them of a ready platform either to make attacks or offer their own ideas. Presidential campaigns typically produce prominent party leaders, followed around the country by a cluster of reporters and television crews, but that is at least two years away. Yet in many ways, the Democratic Party's problems seem particularly tangled today, a source of frustration to Democratic leaders as they have watched opinion polls indicating that the public is souring on the Republican Party and receptive to Democratic leadership. And the problems are besetting Democrats at a pivotal moment, as they struggle to adapt to a shifting American political landscape, and a concerted effort by this White House to make permanent inroads among once traditional Democratic voters. Since Mr. Bush's re-election, Democrats have been divided over whether to take on the Republicans in a more confrontational manner, ideologically and politically, or to move more forcefully to stake out the center on social and national security issues. They are being pushed, from the left wing of the party, to stand for what they say are the party's historical liberal values. But among more establishment Democrats, there is concern that many of the party's most visible leaders — among them, Howard Dean, the Democratic chairman; Senator John Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential candidate; Mr. Kennedy; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader; and Al Gore, who has assumed a higher profile as the party heads toward the 2008 presidential primaries — may be flawed messengers. In this view, the most visible Democrats are vulnerable to Republican attacks portraying them as out of the mainstream on issues including security and budget-cutting. One of the party's most prominent members, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, has been relatively absent for much of this debate, a characteristic display of public caution that her aides say reflects her concern for keeping focused on her re-election bid. Mrs. Clinton, who has only nominal opposition, declined requests for an interview to discuss her views of the party. Mr. Kerry said the party's authority had been diluted because of the absence of one or two obvious leaders, though he expressed confidence that would change. 'We are fighting to find a voice under difficult circumstances, and I'm confident, over the next few months, you are going to see that happen,' Mr. Kerry said in an interview. 'Our megaphone is just not as large as their megaphone, and we have a harder time getting that message out, even when people are on the same page.' Beyond that, while there is a surfeit of issues for Democrats to use against Republicans — including corruption, the war in Iraq, energy prices and health care — party leaders are divided about what Democrats should be talking about and about how soon they should engage in the debate. In a speech last week in Washington and in an interview, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who is considering a run for president in 2008, sharply criticized fellow Democrats who were arguing that the party should focus only on domestic issues and turn away from national security, since that has been the strong suit for this White House since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. 'I think the Republicans are ripe for the taking on this issue,' Mr. Bayh said in the interview, 'but not until we rehabilitate our own image. I think there's a certain element of denial about how we are viewed, perhaps incorrectly but viewed nonetheless, by many Americans as being deficient on national security.' In his speech, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Bayh said: 'As Democrats, we have a patriotic duty and political imperative to lay out our ideas for protecting America. Frankly, our fellow citizens have doubts about us. We have work to do.' Some Democrats argued that the party had time to put up its ideas, and that it would be smarter to wait until later, when voters would be paying attention. 'When you bring it out early, you are going to leave it open for the spinmeisters in Rove's machine, the Republican side, to tear it to pieces,' said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois. But former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the party's 2004 vice-presidential nominee and a prospective presidential candidate for 2008, said he thought Americans were eager to hear the contrasting case. 'What the American people are hungry to hear from us is, what is the difference?' Mr. Edwards said in an interview. 'What will we do? How will we deal with the corruption issue in Washington? How will we deal with the huge moral issues that we have at home? This is a huge opportunity for our party to show what we are made of.' Historically at least, Democrats should be in a strong position. The out-of-power party typically gains seats in the midterm elections of a president's second term. And Democrats said they had a particularly compelling case for voting out the party in power this year because of investigations centered on the White House and Congress, including the influence-peddling case involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. 'We're going to keep hammering this,' said Mr. Dean, the party chairman, referring to the scandals. 'One thing the Republicans have taught us is that values and character matter.' Yet some Democrats warned that it would be a mistake to talk only about ethics. 'It's absolutely required that the party talk about things in addition to the Abramoff scandal,' said Martin Frost, former leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. 'I think the climate is absolutely right to take back the House or the Senate or both. But you can't do it without a program.' And Mr. Bayh said, 'I don't believe we will win by just not being them.' Ms. Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, did not dispute that argument. But, pointing to the Democratic strategy in defeating Mr. Bush's Social Security proposal last year, she said there was no rush. 'People said, 'You can't beat something with nothing,' ' she said, arguing that the Democrats had in fact accomplished precisely that this year. 'I feel very confident about where we are.' And Senator Barbara Boxer, also a California Democrat, said: 'We have a strategy. First is to convince the American people that what's happening in Washington is not working. We have achieved that. Now we have to, at this stage, convince people that we are the ones to bring positive change.'

Subject: Diet Won't Stop Cancer or Heart Disease From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:34:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/health/07cnd-fat.html?ex=1296968400&en=de984b0840dc6b59&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Study Finds Low-Fat Diet Won't Stop Cancer or Heart Disease By GINA KOLATA The largest study ever to ask whether a low-fat diet keeps women from getting cancer or heart disease has found that the diet had no effect. The $415 million federal study involved nearly 49,000 women aged 50 to 79 who were followed for eight years. In the end, those assigned to a low-fat diet had the same rates of breast cancer, colon cancer heart attack and stroke as those who ate whatever they pleased, researchers are reporting today. 'These are three totally negative studies,' said Dr. David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California at Berkeley, who is not connected with the study but has written books on clinical trial design and analysis. And, he said, the results should be taken seriously for what they are — a rigorous attempt that failed to confirm a popular hypothesis that a low-fat diet can prevent three major diseases in women. And the studies were so large and so expensive that they are 'the Rolls Royce of studies,' said Dr. Michael Thun, who directs epidemiological research for the American Cancer Society. As such, he said, they are likely to be the final word. 'We usually have only one shot at a very large scale trial on a particular issue,' Dr. Thun said. The studies were part of the Women's Health Initiative of the National Institutes of Health, the same program that showed that hormone therapy after menopause can have more risks than benefits. In this case, the diet studies addressed a tricky problem. For decades, many scientists have been saying, and many members of the public have been believing, that what you eat — the composition of the diet — determines how likely you are to get a chronic disease. But it has been hard to prove. Studies of dietary fiber and colon cancer failed to find that fiber was protective. Studies of vitamins thought to protect against cancer failed to show an effect. Gradually, many cancer researchers began questioning the dietary fat-cancer hypothesis, but it has retained a hold on the public imagination. 'Nothing fascinates the American public so much as the notion that what you eat rather than how much you eat affects your health,' said Dr. Peter Libby, a cardiologist and professor at Harvard Medical School. But the new studies, reported in the Feb. 8 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet ate significantly less fat over the next eight years. But they had just as much breast and colon cancer and just as much heart disease. And, confounding many popular notions about fat in the diet, the different diets did not make much difference in anyone's weight. The common belief that carbohydrates in the diet lead to higher insulin levels, higher blood glucose levels and more diabetes was also not confirmed. There was no such effect among the women eating low-fat diets. As for heart disease risk factors, the only one affected was LDL cholesterol, which increases heart disease risk. The levels were slightly higher in women eating the higher fat diet, but not enough to make a noticeable difference in their risk of heart disease. The studies follow a smaller one, reported last year, on low-fat diets for women who had breast cancer. That study hinted that eating less fat might help prevent a recurrence. But the current study, asking if a low-fat diet could protect women from breast cancer in the first place, had findings that fell short of statistical significance, meaning they could have occurred by chance. In essence, there was no solid evidence that a low-fat diet helped in prevention. 'These studies are revolutionary,' said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University, who has spent a lifetime studying the effects of diets on weight and health. 'They should put a stop to this era of thinking that we have all the information we need to change the whole national diet and make everybody healthy.' Although all the study participants were women, the colon cancer and heart disease results also should apply to men, said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative. He explained that the observational studies that led to the colon cancer-dietary fat hypothesis included both men and women. As for heart disease, he said, researchers have consistently found that women and men respond in the same way to dietary fat. The results, the study investigators agreed, do not justify recommending low-fat diets to the public to reduce their heart disease and cancer risk. As for the cancer society, Dr. Thun said, with these results that he describes as 'completely null over the eight-year follow-up for both cancers and heart disease,' his group has no plans to suggest that low-fat diets are going to protect against cancer. Dr. Rossouw, however, said he was still intrigued by the breast cancer data, even though it was not statistically significant. The women on low-fat diets had a 9 percent lower rate of breast cancer — the incidence was 42 per 1,000 per year in women in the low-fat diet group, as compared with 45 per 1,000 per year in women consuming their regular diet. That might mean that fat in the diet might have a small effect, Dr. Rossouw said, perhaps in some subgroups of women or over a longer period of time. He added that the study investigators would continue to follow the women to see if the effect became more pronounced. Another of the study's investigators, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski, a medical oncologist at Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, shared Dr. Rossouw's hopes for a low-fat diet. 'There will be different interpretations, but there's a reason for optimism,' Dr. Chlebowski said. While cancer researchers say they were disappointed by the results, heart disease researchers say they are not surprised that simply reducing total fat made had no effect. 'The problem is that this study was designed two decades ago when the fad was low fat,' Dr. Libby said. Now, he said, he and others are persuaded that a so-called Mediterranean diet is best — not necessarily low in fat but low in saturated fats, like butter and cream cheese. That, with exercise, should help prevent heart disease, he says. But, of course, that advice has never been tested in a large randomized clinical trial, Dr. Libby admits. And he says, 'if they did a study like that and it was negative, then I'd have to give up my cherished hypotheses for data.' The low-fat diet was not easy, Dr. Chlebowski notes. Women were told to aim for a diet that had just 20 percent of its calories as fat. Most substantially cut their dietary fat, but most fell short of that 20 percent goal. The diet they were told to follow 'is different than the way most people eat,' Dr. Chlebowski said. It meant, for example, no butter on bread, no cream cheese on bagels, no oil in salad dressings. 'If a physician told a patient to eat less fat, that will do nothing,' he said. 'If you send someone to a dietician one time, that will do next to nothing.' The women in the study had 18 sessions of meeting in small groups with a trained nutritionist in the first year and four sessions a year after that. In the first year, the women on the low-fat diets reduced the percentage of fat in their diet to 24 percent of daily calories and by the end of the study their diets contained 29 percent of their calories as fat. In the first year, the women in the control group were eating 35 percent of their calories as fat and by the end of the study their dietary fat content was 37 percent. Some medical specialists stressed that the study did not mean people should abandon low-fat diets. 'What we are saying is that a modest reduction of fat and a substitution with fruits and vegetables did not do anything for heart disease and stroke or breast cancer or colorectal cancer,' said Dr. Nanette Wenger, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Emory University Medical School. 'It doesn't say that this diet is not beneficial,' she added. But the overall lesson, said Dr. Freedman, is clear. 'A lot of observational data show diet matters, but those studies have big flaws and that's why we have to do experiments,' he said 'We, the scientific community, tend to go off the deep end giving dietary advice based on pretty flimsy evidence.'

Subject: Word of God, as Shaped by Nature From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:33:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/arts/06conn.html?ex=1296882000&en=b1e978c8b35e5caf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 6, 2006 The Word of God, as Shaped by Nature By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The natural world is not given sufficient credit for inspiring human tyranny. A society can manage itself only if it can also, in some way, manage nature, and it can manage nature only by also managing itself: controlling the damage from floods or fires, ensuring that food can be grown or water found, maintaining order in the face of cataclysm and uncertainty. That requires power, over both place and people. Ancient societies that faced regular flooding and required irrigation systems, for example, developed what the scholar Karl A. Wittfogel called 'hydraulic societies,' with strong central authority and rigid hierarchies. But has nature also helped shape other forms of society? What are nature's effects on human culture? There may be a new discipline developing around these kinds of questions, a form of ecological sociology. Jared Diamond examined some historical examples in 'Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies' (W. W. Norton, 1997). The historian David Blackbourn has written 'The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany,' which Norton will publish this spring. What happens, though, if we look closely at one of the most well-documented accounts of cultural evolution in the ancient world? This is the project undertaken in 'The Natural History of the Bible: An Environmental Exploration of the Hebrew Scriptures' (Columbia University Press, 2006) by Daniel Hillel, a senior research scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University. The Hebrew Bible is examined not for its literary, religious or historical meanings, but for its accounts of how societies develop in relationship to the natural world. Mr. Hillel argues that in its invocations of mighty waters and roiling seas, of droughts and floods, of desolation and scorched wilderness, of fallow fields and seasonal harvests, the Bible may also reveal something about the peoples shaped in that ecological cauldron. The results are fascinating. The Bible's story, Mr. Hillel argues, traces a series of encounters that the ancient Hebrews had with a wide variety of environments, ranging from the rugged hills of Canaan to the flooded plains of Mesopotamia. In the beginning, he proposes, was the riverine ecology of Mesopotamia, in which the annual spring floods of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were the sources of all fertility. The names of some Hebrew months stem from Mesopotamia; the Epic of Gilgamesh contains a counterpart to the Bible's flood tale. Perhaps, too, the very idea of exile from Eden was connected with the need to abandon Mesopotamia. Mr. Hillel points out that periodic flooding had troubling consequences: silt could clog irrigation canals, while seeping salination could decrease soil's productivity. Settled populations (and conquerors) would move on to other pastures. Then came a pastoral, seminomadic period in Canaan, Mr. Hillel suggests, represented in the stories of the Patriarchs, in which shepherding is the preferred profession. A pastoral society cannot rely on a large governing social authority: no residence is permanent, grazing areas are too dispersed. So the clan becomes the dominant power; elaborate customs develop, encouraging both hospitality and vengeance. But inevitable droughts would also require migrations to riverine regions, particularly Egypt, which is where Abraham goes for assistance during a famine. So do his descendants, with more lasting consequences. The Bible, Mr. Hillel shows, gives a clear picture of the kind of planning the Egyptian ecology required. Because all agriculture depended on the late summer flooding of the Nile, there could be great variations; years of drought required planning for the years of plenty. The first of the plagues visited upon the Egyptians, in which the Nile turns to blood, may well be, as Mr. Hillel (and others) have suggested, a consequence of the silt-saturated river becoming stagnant and polluted, as it did during periods of low flow (leading, in turn, to other plagues). Mr. Hillel argues that the Hebrews eventually experience a sequence of distinct ecological 'domains': the pastoral, the riverine, and then the desert domain in Sinai, the rain-fed domain of Canaan's hills, the maritime domain of the northern Canaanite coast (where the Phoenicians and Philistines were encountered), and finally the urban domain, as king and cult converge in Jerusalem. Each domain led to a different relationship with the environment, a different social structure and different notions of divine power. Some familiar interpretations, Mr. Hillel suggests, might even be altered when these domains are examined more closely. Consider later rabbinic prohibitions against mixing milk and meat at a meal. They derive from biblical prohibitions against cooking a kid in its 'mother's milk' (in Hebrew: halev imo). But actually, Mr. Hillel argues, this restriction is implausible for seminomadic pastoralists who rely on milk and meat for sustenance. (Abraham serves both to his guests.) The biblical prohibitions may postdate the pastoral period, of course, but Mr. Hillel proposes that perhaps the tradition is based on a misreading: the vowel-less biblical text may not be 'halev imo,' but 'helev imo': hence, you shall not cook a kid in the fat (or tallow) of its mother. This is more consistent with other biblical prohibitions regarding fat (which can also turn dangerously rancid). It would even be ethically and ecologically more sensitive, Mr. Hillel adds: cooking an animal in its mother's fat means that two generations had been simultaneously slaughtered. Such interpretations show the wide range of Mr. Hillel's approach, but his primary argument is still more ambitious. He suggests that these encounters with a series of labile ecological domains gave a distinctive character to Hebraic monotheism, particularly when, during exile, sense had to be made of this varied experience. In the Bible's form of ethical monotheism, Mr. Hillel says, the natural world reflects the people's moral and religious status. But the world is too diverse, its ecological domains too complex, for simple formulas: there must be interpretation and reinterpretation, a continued quest for understanding. It is no accident that Mr. Hillel, an environmental scientist, sees the spiritual and cultural development of the ancient Hebrews not as a result of Mosaic law or divine revelation, but as a product of ecological experience: nature's gift to a particular culture.

Subject: Search for New Birds of Paradise From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:32:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/science/07spec.html February 7, 2006 Search for New Birds of Paradise Also Yields Strange Frogs and Giant Flowers By CORNELIA DEAN More than 25 years ago, Bruce Beehler, an expert on birds of paradise, started planning a trip to the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. Last November, he finally got there — and the trip was worth the wait. In a monthlong expedition, what biologists call a rapid assessment field trip, or RAP, he and his colleagues discovered what they described as evidence of dozens of previously unreported plants and animals. Their finds included more than 20 new frogs, 4 butterflies and a number of plants, including 5 new palms and rhododendrons with the largest flowers on record. Dr. Beehler did not discover a new bird of paradise. But he did discover what he thinks is a new bird species, a honeyeater. And the expedition found the breeding ground of a species of bird of paradise that had been collected more than 100 years ago — not very scientifically, Dr. Beehler says — and then more or less lost to science. 'This is the richest place I have even been in New Guinea for birds,' Dr. Beehler said of the Foja (pronounced FOY-ya) Mountains. 'That's saying a lot.' Colin Poole, director of the Asia Program at the Wildlife Conservation Society, the organization that runs the Bronx Zoo, said it was not surprising that previously unreported species would be identified in the region, which he described as 'a massive area of forests that in scientific terms has only been engaged in relatively recently.' He added, 'The fact that scientists can still find new species means there are still wild areas out there with things we do not yet understand.' Over all, Dr. Beehler said, the RAP team, also led by Stephen Richards of the South Australia Museum in Adelaide, counted 215 species of birds in the mountains, in the Mamberamo Basin on New Guinea's north coast. The area is part of Indonesia, and the expedition was sponsored by the Indonesian Institute of Science and Conservation International, a research and conservation organization for which Dr. Beehler is vice president for Melanesia. The expedition was financed by several other organizations, including the National Geographic Society. The region is a great 'generator of biodiversity,' he said, and the researchers hope their survey will help scientists learn how species developed there. Dr. Beehler said the researchers were preparing their work for submission to journals so that other authorities could evaluate it. Only then will he learn, for example, whether ornithological authorities agree that the honeyeater bird he found is a new species. (If they do, he said, he will name it for his wife.) Meanwhile, he said, the researchers will work with scientific colleagues and government officials in Indonesia to set up another expedition. 'We'll get a new set of people with different strengths, go back and have another look,' he said. Dr. Beehler said the study area was almost lost in the mid-1990's, when a proposal was put forward to dam the Mamberamo River and flood the entire basin. The Asian financial crisis doomed the plan, he said. He says it is important to work with communities in the region so that they can conserve the resources they rely on while bringing sustainable development to the area. 'A lot of what we provide is information, but it's their future,' he said. 'We are trying to empower them to be the long-term stewards of their mountain range. Is it going to be difficult? You bet.' People like Mr. Poole agree. When it comes to new species, he said: 'The challenge is not finding them but working out how to protect them. When we find them, that's when our job begins, working with the government to say, 'How can we help you protect these areas?' '

Subject: Mississippi's 'Heart Man' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:31:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/science/07conv.html?ex=1296968400&en=6445304b7f4423ed&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Mississippi's 'Heart Man' Examines Links Between Race and Disease By CLAUDIA DREIFUS JACKSON, Miss. — When Dr. Herman A. Taylor Jr. goes for breakfast in this city of 180,000, he orders carefully: granola, fresh fruit. 'People look at what I put on my tray,' he said on a recent morning at the Broad Street Bakery, a local cafe. 'They wonder if I practice what I preach.' Around Jackson, where a common breakfast can be eggs fried in lard, Dr. Taylor, a University of Mississippi cardiologist, is known as 'heart man.' He is the director of the Jackson Heart Study, the largest epidemiological investigation ever undertaken to discover the links between cardiovascular disease and race. From now until 2014, Dr. Taylor and his team will be following 5,302 black residents of three Mississippi counties — Hinds, Rankin and Madison — observing their lives and how their heart health is related to their environment. For the study's participants, there will be periodic medical examinations and referrals for care when problems are detected. The ultimate aim of the $54 million investigation, Dr. Taylor said, 'is to gain the information we need to stop an epidemic of cardiovascular diseases within the African-American community.' Q. The Framingham Heart Study, which tracked cardiovascular disease in three generations of New Englanders, is thought to be the most productive investigation in public health history. With Framingham's research continuing, why do something similar here in Jackson? A. Framingham can't tell us everything. You can probably count the number of blacks in the original study on one hand. Well, maybe two. It's no one's fault. When that study was first begun in 1948, the town of Framingham was mostly populated by second-generation immigrants and Yankees. That's just what it was. But if there are unique risks and environmental agents triggering cardiovascular disease in African-Americans, Framingham's data can't be that helpful. Q. Is there a special problem with heart disease in African-Americans? A. For the nation as a whole, death from cardiovascular disease has declined since 1963. Yet, if you look at African-Americans in regions like Mississippi, mortality from heart disease is flat, or trending upward. This is particularly true for women. A middle-aged black woman in Mississippi will have four times the risk of death from cardiovascular disease than a white woman elsewhere in the country. We have reasonable guesses why this is so. We think obesity is hugely important. We also think that smoking, inactivity, high blood pressure and access to health care figure into the problem, too. But we have to pin it down. We need more information on things like social support, anger, hostility, optimism. There may also be some unique buffers against stress within our community — like religion and extended family. When you do a study like this, you want to figure out what's killing people. You enroll a large number and follow them. Over the years, some people will get sick; others won't. So the job is to try to determine the difference between those who got sick and those who didn't. That's how Framingham worked. Q. Why do a health study in Jackson? A. What did the bank robber Willie Sutton answer when asked why he robbed banks? 'Because that's where the money is!' Mississippi is where the heart disease is. We have the highest rates of it in the country. Q. You've just finished collecting your base line data. Have you found anything interesting? A. Very high levels of obesity, higher than the national average. African- American women lead the way in obesity nationally, and our numbers here are significantly higher than that. The rates of diabetes and hypertension are quite high. Interestingly, alcohol consumption among the women is much lower than average. There are some other findings, but we'll have to hold off on announcing them until they are published in professional journals. Q. Are you looking at the unique stresses that African-Americans experience — racial discrimination, for instance? A. We have questionnaires that zero in on discrimination. But we also look at the response, how you cope with it. Also, a lot of the areas where blacks live are economically depressed. One of the things we're looking at is, What kind of access do you have to a healthy lifestyle? Can you get out of there to walk, do exercise — or is the level of violence in your immediate surroundings so high that this would be a risky proposition? We look at how many grocery stores are in a certain area. Do you have to rely on the corner market with its jars of pickled eggs and pigs' feet on the counter? Q. Is the traditional diet of Mississippi a problem related to heart disease? A. Yes. In the traditional diet, the fat and calories are astronomical. They add up to our being the fattest state in the union. The soul food diet needs a lot of tweaking if it's ever to be remotely healthy. There was a study of blacks and whites in a Georgia county in the 1960's. It showed that even given the traditional diet, blacks had a surprisingly low rate of coronary heart disease. The big difference: they were sharecroppers, people who did physical work. They didn't have nearly the access to bad things all day long that people have now. The problem today for people living under stressful conditions is that harmful stuff is sometimes a cheap way to take a load off their lives and feel less stressed. I think that drives a lot of eating and smoking. Q. Do you think that some people are going to hate your message of heart health? A. Some will think we're further stigmatizing a group with a lot of problems already. But if you have conversations with African-Americans from the South, they already suspect that a lot of things they love are no good for them. Q. Do you try to intervene in the lives of the people you're studying? A. We're an observational study. But we have to be careful. If you don't share helpful information because you don't want to interfere with the natural history of their disease, then you're on a slippery slope. That was the rationale behind keeping information from the sick in the Tuskegee study. People around here remember that. So, of course, we take an active role in spreading the word about prevention. Also, when one of our medical exams shows something of clinical importance in a participant, we contact their physician. If they don't have one, we have a group of local doctors who've volunteered to take them on. Q. Did you grow up in the South? A. Near Birmingham. My mother was a teacher; my father a steelworker, active in his union. During my childhood, I think there were two big influences, beyond my family: the incredibly heroic acts you saw from individuals like Martin Luther King, and the space program. I wanted to grow up and help my people. I also dreamed about science. For me personally, the wonderful thing about working on this study is that it's a way for me to do both.

Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:29:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/science/07leec.html?ex=1296968400&en=1803c62c893835ac&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 His Subject: Highly Evolved and Exquisitely Thirsty By CARL ZIMMER The tub full of leeches sat on a table in Mark Siddall's office at the American Museum of Natural History. The leeches, each an inch long and covered in orange polka dots, were swimming lazily through the water. One leech in particular attracted Dr. Siddall's attention. It had suddenly begun undulating up and down in graceful curves, pushing water along its body so that it could draw more oxygen into its skin. 'This is beautiful. Look at that,' Dr. Siddall said. 'It's a very complex behavior. The only other animals that swim in a vertical undulating pattern are whales and seals.' For Dr. Siddall, leeches are a source of pride, obsession and fascination. His walls are covered in leech posters and photographs. He owns a giant antique papier-mâché model of a leech, with a lid that opens to reveal filigrees of blood vessels and nerves. His lab is filled with jars full of leeches that he has collected from some of the most dangerous places in the world. He considers the risks well worth it, because he can now reconstruct the evolutionary history of leeches — how an ordinary worm hundreds of millions of years ago gave rise to sophisticated bloodsuckers that spread across the planet. This was not a case of love at first sight. As a boy growing up in Canada, Dr. Siddall was disgusted by the leeches that attacked him when he went swimming in forest ponds. Their biology began to intrigue him as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where he became interested in how leeches spread parasites among frogs and fishes. 'It was hard for family conversations,' he said. 'You couldn't exactly talk about it over Thanksgiving dinner.' No one knew whether the parasites that leeches carry could hop from species to species or they were restricted in their choice. Knowing that required knowing how leeches are related to one another, something that Dr. Siddall found was an open question. In the late 1990's, scientists were developing methods that could shed light on the evolution of leeches like sequencing animal DNA and computer programs that could use the sequences to reconstruct evolutionary trees. By the time Dr. Siddall joined the museum in 1999, the evolution of leeches had become his chief obsession. There was just one catch. To chart the entire tree, Dr. Siddall had to obtain species from all of its major branches. That required a series of expeditions to places like South Africa, Madagascar, French Guyana, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina. To collect leeches, Dr. Siddall and his colleagues take off their shoes, roll up their pants and wade into the water, even if its waist-high muck full of electric fish. 'You can't set traps for leeches,' Dr. Siddall said. 'We are always the bait. You can turn over rocks. You can turn over branches. But ultimately the interesting stuff is going to come to you.' Turning himself into bait is paying off. Dr. Siddall's research has shown that the ancestors of leeches were probably freshwater worms that fed harmlessly on the surface of fish or crustaceans, as the closest living relatives of leeches do. Not only do these worms have the most leechlike DNA of any animal, but they also grow the same sucker on the base of their tail that leeches use for crawling. The leech evolutionary tree suggests that the earliest land vertebrates may have been the first hosts for leeches. Dr. Siddall has identified several major innovations that early leeches evolved as they became blood feeders. They acquired a proboscis they could push into their hosts to drink blood. Later, some leeches evolved a set of three jaws to rasp the skin. Leeches also needed chemicals that could keep their host's blood thin so that it would not clot in their bodies. Leeches have evolved many different molecules for that work that interfere with different stages in clotting, along with other molecules that prevent inflammation. Pharmaceutical companies have isolated some of these molecules and sell them as anticoagulants. Blood is a good source of energy, but it does not make for a balanced diet. Mosquitoes and other blood feeders have evolved a symbiosis with bacteria that can manufacture the vitamins and amino acids necessary for life. Leeches appear to have evolved their own partnerships, even producing special chambers in their throats where bacteria can live. It is particularly tough to study these bacteria, because scientists need to find leeches with big bacteria-housing organs to dissect. It turns out that some of the biggest are in a species that lives just on the rear end of the hippopotamus. So Dr. Siddall has traveled to South Africa in recent years to wade into crocodile-infested waters to look for them. 'Obviously, we didn't wrestle hippos to the ground,' Dr. Siddall said. Instead, he hoped to attract a few leeches that had dropped off the hippos. He failed to find any. But fortunately for him, a game warden remembered him when a hippo was shot after raiding backyards. He sent Dr. Siddall a leech from the hippo's hindquarters. 'It turned out to harbor a completely unique lineage of bacteria,' Dr. Siddall said. After the original leeches had evolved the basic equipment to feed on blood, they moved into new habitats. Dr. Siddall's research suggests that they first evolved in fresh water and later moved to the ocean and to dry land. Terrestrial leeches became particularly adept at ambushing hosts, using their keen senses to detect carbon dioxide and heat. They have 10 eyespots on their heads that they can use to detect moving objects. 'They've got incredible vision,' Dr. Siddall said. 'You move your hand across their field of view, and they'll track the movement.' In his office, as he waxed poetic about leeches, one in the tub on his table crawled out. 'Oh, jeez, this guy is getting away,' he said. 'Well, that's an interesting story.' He plucked up the leech and let it suck on his finger for a moment before putting it back in the water. The leeches in the tub, Dr. Siddall explained, belong to the species Macrobdella decora, the North American medicinal leech. They are part of a lineage of leeches that returned from dry land to live in fresh water. But they still like to come out of the water to lay their egg cases. After the eggs hatch, the young leeches have to crawl to the water. Dr. Siddall has been making a careful study of North American medicinal leeches in recent years, figuring out which genes do the best job of revealing the variations between different populations of leeches. It turns out that some populations may actually represent entirely new species. 'We think we've found a new species in Harriman State Park here in New York,' he said. But the biggest surprise came when Dr. Siddall applied the new techniques to the best-known leech of all, the European medicinal leech, Hirudo medicinalis. In ancient Rome, physicians used that species to bleed patients to treat maladies like headaches and obesity. The tradition continued for 2,000 years. In the 1860's, London hospitals used seven million medicinal leeches a year. Although physicians no longer bleed their patients, Hirudo medicinalis has been enjoying a renaissance. Surgeons reattaching fingers and ears find that patients heal faster with the help of leeches. By sucking on blood and injecting anticoagulants, leeches increase the flow through the reconnected blood vessels. In 2004, the Food and Drug Administration approved Hirudo medicinalis as a medical device, and a number of companies do a brisk business importing them from Europe to the United States. Working with Peter Trontelj at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, Dr. Siddall began collecting the leeches from across Europe and ordered them from supply houses. When they analyzed the leech DNA, they received a big surprise. 'The European medicinal leech is not one species at all,' Dr. Siddall said. 'It's at least three.' Dr. Siddall and Dr. Trontelj are trying to determine the ranges of the three species and their differences. He expects his discovery will lead to changes in F.D.A. regulations. More important, he hopes it will draw attention to the plight of European leeches. Overharvesting and habitat destruction have cut their numbers drastically. 'The situation for the true European medicinal leech may be a lot more dire than we thought,' Dr. Siddall said. To understand the true condition of all three species, Dr. Siddall plans to go to Europe. He will have to work the trip into a schedule filled with other expeditions. 'There are all sorts of things out there like Dinobdella ferox, which means the terrifying and ferocious leech,' Dr. Siddall said. 'It lives in eastern Bengal, and it will literally crawl up your nose and lodge in the back of your throat.' Dr. Siddall knows that the notion of leech conservation may strike some people as an odd pursuit. He points out how many medical surprises leeches have yielded. New species will presumably yield new surprises. But he also thinks people should be concerned about leeches simply because they are leeches. 'Don't you think the world would be a colder, darker place without leeches?' he asked. He raised his tub with a smile. 'Especially ones with orange polka dots?'

Subject: The Mysteries of Animal Colors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:45:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/science/20colo.html?ex=1248062400&en=3cd64ccdfa9e2ea6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland July 20, 2004 Some Blend In, Others Dazzle: The Mysteries of Animal Colors By NATALIE ANGIER When the Democrats gather in Boston later this month for their national convention, the topic of color will surely be on everybody's lips. Which states are going to go blue for John Kerry, which red for President Bush? How can the blue-blooded Mr. Kerry appeal to grape-jellied Americans? Should the candidate flaunt Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts, or cede the limelight to the 'Golden Boy' running by his side? The impulse to colorize is normal. It is not partisan. It is not even particularly hominoid. From the neon sass of a 'Finding Nemo' clownfish to the peridot flash of a golden poison-dart frog, the whole world is a pigsty of pigment. The feathers of an Eastern bluebird are saturated in such a fat, matte lapis blue, you wonder how the creature gets airborne, while the cardinal is that perfect, can-can shade of lipstick you can't even find in Paris. The face of a male mandrill looks practically patriotic, its brilliant blue and white cheek ridges bisected by a snout as red as the national debt. Animals use colors to persuade or dissuade, stand out from the crowd or blend into the loud, to flaunt their moxie and so be mated, or to warn they're toxic if preyed upon. And while naturalists have long had eyes enough to goggle at the spectacle arrayed before them, and artists have sought to capture on canvas every angstrom's difference between the turquoise of a Mexican Dancer nudibranch and that of a resplendent quetzal, only recently have scientists begun to take the full measure and meaning of animal color. They have been analyzing the physics and chemistry underlying some of the most extraordinary colors in the animal kingdom, and refuting or rethinking previous assumptions about how some of the more spectacular tints are generated. In a report that appears in a recent issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, Dr. Richard O. Prum of Yale University and Dr. Rodolfo H. Torres of the University of Kansas overturn the century-old assumption that the flesh of a mandrill and the feathers of a blue jay appear blue by a scattershot scattering of light, as the sky does, and show instead that the fine structure of the skin and feather fibers precisely amplifies rather than diffuses the blue wavelengths of light. Some researchers are exploring the mechanisms that variously give rise to the deep, dependable reds of birds like the cardinal or red-winged blackbird, and the shifting coloration of a house finch, whose feathers may be chili red one season and tamale yellow the next. Other scientists are probing the structural basis for the iridescent tones that make creatures like a hummingbird or scarab beetle seem to shimmer metallic purple when spied from one angle, or green or black from another. Still others are probing the absence of color, the bizarre engineering challenge of being an utterly transparent animal, as many creatures of the deep ocean are, yet still have a stomach capable of digesting dinner. Researchers are finding subtle correlations between the lighting that illuminates an animal's stage and the colors in which it is costumed. 'Some colors are more conspicuous in one lighting environment than another,' said Dr. Geoffrey E. Hill, a professor of biology at Auburn University and author of 'A Red Bird in a Brown Bag' (Oxford University Press, 2002). 'The light at the floor of a rainforest has different spectral properties than light in an open field.' Many of the most brilliant of the tropical birds live in the upper canopy of the rain forest, where they are bathed in abundant, full-spectrum light and can show themselves to optimal effect. Yet other lushly plumaged birds, like manakins and honeycreepers, take advantage of the stippled sunshine that breaks through to the forest understories, and will choreograph acrobatic mating displays in which their bright colors alternately blink and darken in the broken light, rather like dancers beneath a spinning disco ball. Moreover, contrary to earlier assumptions, researchers have found that many of the creatures with the bluest hues in nature evolved in the deep forest, rather than in open habitats. 'One theory had it that you should signal in the available light, and there's not much blue light inside a forest,' Dr. Prum said. 'This theory predicts that if you want to be conspicuous in a forest, you should be orange.' So whence the woodland blues? Recent research indicates that what many animals are visually sensitive to is anything outside their usual habitat. A forest milieu is green, brown, yellow, sometimes orange. 'Blues and ultraviolets are rare among the background colors,' Dr. Prum said. 'So if you've got them, you stand out strikingly.' Especially to non-people pairs of peepers. Researchers have been astonished to discover just how keen is the color vision of creatures up and down nature's blinking bestiary: birds, fish, reptiles and even some invertebrates see a much more vivid world than do we. Scientists estimate the richness of an animal's perceptual palette by looking at the diversity and density of its cones, the eye cells that respond to color. Humans have three cone types, one sensitive to the red chunk of the light spectrum, another to the green and a third to the blue, resulting in so-called trichromatic vision. Birds have a fourth that is tuned to ultraviolet light, which means that not only can they see in parts of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to us, but also that their total set of color combinations is much higher as well. Moreover, the cone density in bird eyes is about five times greater than in ours. Yet the Oscar in visual virtuosity probably belongs to the manta shrimp family. These small reef-dwelling crustaceans are spectacular even by the Peter Max standards of a coral community; one species is aptly called the peacock shrimp. And the shrimp can take in as much color as they put out. 'Most fish have four cone types,' said Dr. Thomas W. Cronin, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who studies color in marine animals. 'Manta shrimp probably have eight.' Our comparative colorblindness is a mammalian legacy. The vertebrate visual system started evolving hundreds of millions of years ago, and improved over time among diurnal creatures, as many reptiles and fish and nearly all birds are. But during the long reign of the dinosaurs, mammals adapted a nocturnal strategy, and so lost much of their color acuity. Humans and other Old World primates only regained trichromatic vision fairly recently, said Dr. Hill, 'and we haven't gotten very far with it yet.' With less ability to perceive the sexual appeal of bright finery, most mammals are fairly drab, and what color they do have is dependent for its production on melanin, the dark pigments generated by cells in skin and hair follicles that may be black, brown or reddish. More important in a mammal than the color of its coat are its patterns, the spots or stripes that serve to camouflage or confuse. Birds and other orders also have melanin colors - a robin's ruddy breast is the avian equivalent of a redhead's mane - but the richer flames flitting about are more likely the product of diet. Many birds eat foods high in carotenoids, the antioxidant chemicals that make fruits and vegetables red, orange or yellow. But they are not just after a healthy dose of vitamins; they rely on the plant pigments to give flash to their feathers, often in just a few crucial spots - the showy shoulders of a red-winged blackbird, the rouged cheek pads of a zebra finch. Some species like the cardinal are exquisitely efficient at extracting carotenoids from their food, and hence their plumage remains red, although it may lighten or darken depending on the relative abundance of berries. By contrast, the house finch changes color completely with shifts in pigment consumption. Dr. Hill has taken finches into captivity, fed them diets that were alternately low or high in carotenoids, and watched them switch like traffic lights from yellow to red and back again. Among wild finch populations in California, the birds may be scarlet in one neighborhood, orange in another, daisy yellow in the next, and bird watchers often are not aware that they are looking at the same species. But is redder always better? Dr. Hill and his colleagues are now trying to determine if there is some optimal carotenoidal complexion at which the birds are most attractive to each other. Researchers are also exploring a class of colors that are structural in nature, the result of an animal's coat bending, reflecting and refracting light waves to create a lively veneer. The iridescence seen on a hummingbird's throat or a rainbow trout's flashing scales is one type of structural coloring, caused by so-called coherent scattering. The molecular architecture of the feathers and scales is precisely organized in crystalline fashion that breaks incoming sunlight into an array of colors, and the eye then picks up ever-shifting bands of these colors, depending on the angle at which the shimmering specimen is viewed. Another type of structural color results from the incoherent scattering of light, also known as Tyndall or Rayleigh scattering. The sky is the most renowned example of such scattering at work. Sunlight and its complete spectrum of radiation falls on the atmosphere, a diffuse wilderness of particles. Most of the light rays are too wide of wale to be impeded on their journey earthward, but blue light is so short-waved that it invariably meets a molecule it cannot ignore and is scattered across the sky. Scientists had long been impressed by the jazzy blue bits seen on a handful of mammals: the face and buttocks of the West African mandrill, for example, or the scrotum of the vervet monkey. This prized blue flesh was not iridescent, and it did not arise from some weird pigment, like the bile pigment that makes a robin's eggs blue. So by that peerless scientific principle called 'process of elimination,' they attributed it to Tyndall-Rayleigh scattering, an explanation now found throughout the scientific literature. 'Mammalogists and ornithologists tend to be lazy about their physics,' Dr. Prum said. Deciding to test the verity, Dr. Prum and Dr. Torres used an electron microscope to examine tissue biopsies from four blue-skinned mammals: the mandrill, the vervet monkey, and the mouse and wooly opossums of Australia. They found that the collagen fibers, the long, ropy proteins that give skin its heft and pinch, were much more organized in the blue skin than in normal skin. They weren't as monotonously arrayed as the crystalline microstructures found in iridescently outfitted animals, but neither were they diffusely distributed, as they would need to be to scatter light Rayleigh-style. Instead, the fibers were all of identical thickness and packed with a degree of orderliness similar to that seen in a bowl of grapes or a box of spaghetti. 'Grapes are all about the same size, so they're all the same distance from their neighbors,' Dr. Prum said. 'But if you go out beyond one grape it's essentially random. It's a local-scale order that biologists hadn't appreciated before.' The result of this mixing of local order and large-scale randomness, he said, is that blue light waves are selectively amplified by the tightly spaced collagen fibers while other wavelengths of light are scattered and cancel each other out. Any direction you view the skin, you see the same deep blue. The researchers have also determined that this novel form of structural coloration underlies the blues of other cerulean animals long thought to be incoherently scatter-paned, like bluebirds, blue dragonflies or blue butterflies. Even so, the scientists have found at least one case of blue-sky biology. Blue eyes, it turns out, are the result of Rayleigh scattering. That, or a pair of tinted contact lenses.

Subject: A New Kind of Birdsong From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:40:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/02/science/02wing.html?ex=1280635200&en=776f57e7c281bab7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 2, 2005 A New Kind of Birdsong: Music on the Wing in the Forests of Ecuador By CARL ZIMMER Richard Prum, a Yale ornithologist, was hiking through an Ecuadorean forest 18 years ago when he had one of the strangest experiences an ornithologist can have. He watched a bird sing with its wings. Dr. Prum was observing a male club-winged manakin. The tiny red-headed bird was hopping acrobatically from branch to branch in order to attract female manakins. And from time to time, the male would wave its wings over its back. Each time the manakin produced a loud, clear tone that sounded as if it came from a violin. 'I was just utterly stunned,' Dr. Prum said. 'There's literally no bird in the world that does anything that prepares you for it. It's totally unique.' Ever since, Dr. Prum has wondered how the club-winged manakin managed this feat. Now he and a former student, Kimberly Bostwick of Cornell University, believe they have solved the mystery. Club-winged manakins rake their feathers back and forth over one another, using an acoustic trick that allows crickets to sing. While the technique is common among insects, it has never been documented before in vertebrates. The noise-making skill of manakins first came to the attention of naturalists in the 1800's. The club-winged manakin belongs to the manakin family (Pipridae), which includes about 40 species, many of which have peculiarly shaped feathers that allowed them to make sounds. In many species the males use the noises during their courtship displays. 'Some of them pop like a firecracker, and there a couple that make whooshing noises in flight,' Dr. Prum said. Charles Darwin was fascinated by manakins. He believed they were a compelling example of how females could cause evolutionary change simply by the influence of their mating preferences - a process he called sexual selection. If female birds had a preference for males with large tails, for example, males with larger tails would be more successful at reproducing. Darwin argued that the peacock's tail had evolved this way. On the other hand, if females were attracted to noisy males, the males would evolve adaptations that made them noisier - as in the case of manakins. Biologists have documented the effect of sexual selection in a wide range of animals. Dr. Prum has dedicated much of his career to studying it in manakins. His research shows that wing sounds evolved independently in many manakin lineages. 'Mechanical sounds probably evolved a bunch of times in manakins,' Dr. Prum said. The club-winged manakin, with its unique ability to produce musical sounds, was the most extreme example of sexual selection in manakins. Dr. Bostwick began to study how manakins make their various noises in 1995, when she joined Dr. Prum's lab as a graduate student. In 1997, she traveled to South America to film the birds. On that trip, she saw her first live club-winged manakin. 'I was just blown away by what an odd, odd thing it was,' she said. When Dr. Bostwick returned home, she played her films in slow motion to analyze the manakin wing movements. But the club-wing manakin moved so quickly that its wings were nothing but a blur. 'How that motion created that sound was a black box,' Dr. Bostwick said. Over the next few years, this ornithological black box continued to puzzle Dr. Bostwick and Dr. Prum. Dr. Bostwick found a few clues by poring over the preserved club-winged manakins Dr. Prum had brought back from his 1987 trip. She noticed that one feather on each wing had a peculiar feature: its central vane had a series of ridges - seven on average. The club-winged manakin's wing muscles were also remarkably large. 'They were like little Popeyes, with big bulging muscles,' Dr. Bostwick said. The clues began to come together in 2002 when Dr. Bostwick returned to Ecuador with a new digital camera that could record 1,000 frames a second, over 30 times faster than her previous model. She made new films of the club-winged manakin, and when she returned home she found that she could finally see what the bird's wings were doing. It turns out that when the bird raises its wings over its back, it shakes them back and forth over 100 times a second. This alone would be a remarkable accomplishment for a bird. Hummingbirds typically flap their wings only 50 times a second. But the club-winged manakin's fast shaking alone could not produce the bird's sounds. Its wings produce tones at a frequency of around 1,400 cycles a second - about 14 times faster than it shakes its wings. 'We had to have some kind of frequency multiplier,' Dr. Prum said. Dr. Bostwick traveled to New York to study the manakin collection at the American Museum of Natural History. 'I spent a lot of time playing with the feathers,' she said. She noticed that next to the strangely ridged feather was another feather with a stiff, curved tip. She realized that each time a manakin shook its wings, its tip rakes across the ridges of the neighboring feather like a spoon moving across a washboard. Each time it hit a ridge, the tip produced a sound. The tip would strike each ridge twice - once as the feathers collided and once as they moved apart again. Dr. Bostwick realized that this raking movement allowed a wing to produce 14 sounds during each shake. As a result, a bird could shaking its wings 100 times a second could produce a sound with a frequency of 1,400 cycles a second. 'All the questions that hadn't made any sense just clicked into place,' Dr. Bostwick said. This sort of spoon-and-washboard anatomy is unknown in any other vertebrate, but it is well known in insects. Crickets, for example, have ridges on their wings that act like a pick and file when the insects rub their wings together. 'The convergence is simply stunning,' said Dr. Ronald Hoy, a Cornell expert on insect sounds. Dr. Bostwick and Dr. Prum reported their findings in the July 29 issue of the journal Science. The ornithologists plan to test their hypothesis with new experiments. On her next trip to Ecuador, Dr. Bostwick hopes to catch a male club-winged manakin and clip off the raking tip on each wing (a harmless procedure). 'I should be able to completely silence the bird,' she predicted. Dr. Bostwick argues that the new research underscores just how powerful sexual selection can be. The mating preferences of female birds can produce not only the peacock's tail or the rooster's crow, but also feathers with microscopic adaptations that let them sing like crickets. 'Darwin would have loved it if he had known,' Dr. Bostwick said.

Subject: Saving a Species From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:39:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/science/28bird.html?ex=1139374800&en=8f28363a9a66c76c&ei=5070 December 28, 2004 Saving a Species: Can Profit Make the Caged Bird Sing? By BRIAN ELLSWORTH LOS REMOLINOS, Venezuela - The delta of the Orinoco River has always been home to the macaw, one of the parrots most prized by pet smugglers. The delta, 11,000 square miles, is a maze of winding channels separated by marshy mangrove forests that are also home to the jaguar and the Orinoco crocodile. Some 20,000 indigenous people, the Warao, inhabit isolated villages of small wooden huts that dot the shoreline. For years they have subsisted almost entirely on fish caught out of small wooden canoes. But overfishing and environmental degradation have made survival a struggle, pushing many Warao to migrate closer to cities or to join the enterprising poachers who arrive from neighboring Guyana or the island of Trinidad to hunt macaws. Rather than enforcing a strict ban on the sale of macaws, Venezuela's environmental authorities have instead opted to allow some 30 Warao delta residents to capture and sell a controlled number of these birds. The idea is to provide income to the Warao, and an economic incentive to maintain the macaws. Venezuela's macaw program is part of an increasingly popular but controversial conservation movement known as sustainable use. The philosophy is that saving a species may require commercially exploiting it. These days it is easy to find a conservation expert with an opinion about sustainable use programs, but actually tracking down a licensed macaw hunter in the Orinoco delta can be quite a challenge. In Tucupita, a city of 80,000 at the edge of the delta, it took a full day to locate a motorboat and driver to get to the town of Los Remolinos, home to group of macaw hunters. By 8:30 the next morning, two young men from outside Tucupita fluent in both Spanish and Warao were stacking two outboard motors on a 40-foot wooden canoe with two skinny planks to serve as seats and a large blue plastic drum filled with gasoline. The trip was four hours under the roasting delta sun through a maze of canals and channels, some as wide as half a mile and others so narrow the boat could barely squeeze between patches of water hyacinths. To an outsider the twisting canals of the Delta are almost indistinguishable, but natives cruise through this labyrinth as if navigating the blocks of Manhattan, often arguing over the names of channels as if discussing subway lines. Around 1 p.m., the boat pulled into a small channel and stopped in front of a village of 10 huts built about four feet off the ground to avoid flooding. A crowd of women and children, pointing and whispering in Warao, stood along the shore as the boat pulled up. Miguel Beria, 43, a hunter licensed by the state to sell macaws, was ready to speak for the village. 'There are no jobs and no school for the children,' said Mr. Beria, sitting in a wooden hut surrounded by nearly all of the town's 70 residents. 'Selling macaws helps us make a little money so we can buy clothes or shoes. We can't get any of that here,' he added. Macaw hunting also brings in cash, he said, to provide basic foods like pasta and rice to complement a diet made up almost exclusively of fish. Macaw hunting is hard work, Mr. Beria said. It requires scouring isolated patches of the delta in search of macaw nests, usually found in moriche palms. The hunters search for the birds in May and June, then feed and care for the hatchlings for 40 days until they are ready to be sold to licensed pet dealers at the end of August. Mr. Beria says he can sell 30 to 40 macaws in a year, each for roughly $20 - 20 times as much as he can make selling a kilogram of fish. When asked if the macaw program had taught him about species conservation, Mr. Beria stopped to ponder the question. After a few moments he said, 'It helps me make more money.' The program's organizers believe it will take some time to raise consciousness about species conservation among the Warao, but say the program will in the long run provide a net benefit for the macaws. For example, Catalina Herrera of the Warao Council of Elders, says she is teaching Warao hunters to climb up the palm trees that hold the macaw nests rather than cutting them down. 'I tell them that if they cut the tree down, the hen will not come back there to build a nest,' said Ms. Herrera, who is distributing cloth belts to the hunters the help them climb trees. Ms. Herrera, who helps the hunters pay the necessary taxes to sell their catch, insists the program provides benefits to the impoverished Warao communities. 'If the Warao do not take advantage of the macaws, people will come from outside to catch them and sell them illegally,' Ms. Herrera said. Eugene Lapointe, president of the International Wildlife Management Consortium World Conservation Trust and advocate of sustainable use, said conservation programs could not ignore social factors like poverty, which he called the biggest threat to the environment. David Lavigne, science adviser for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, is critical of sustainable use programs. His organization is dedicated to stopping abusive commercial hunting practices. Mr. Lavigne said the sustainable use movement today was promoting a return to 19th-century practices that caused the depletion of many wildlife populations in the first place. In Los Remolinos, families who live isolated from the modern world are willing to do whatever is necessary. 'I have six children to feed,' Mr. Beria said. 'If I don't catch macaws, what else am I supposed to do?'

Subject: For Some Girls, the Problem With Math From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:37:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01math.html?ex=1265000400&en=33bbfa363cb2602c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland February 1, 2005 For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It By CORNELIA DEAN A few years ago, I told Donald Kennedy, editor of the journal Science, that I wanted to write an essay for his publication. It would say, 'Anyone who thinks that sexism is no longer a problem in science has never been the first woman science editor of The New York Times.' I never wrote the essay. But the continuing furor over Dr. Lawrence H. Summers's remarks on women and science reminds me why I thought of it. For those who missed it, Dr. Summers, the president of Harvard, told a conference last month on women and science that people worried about the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science should consider the possibility that women simply cannot hack it, that their genes or the wiring of their brains somehow leave them less fit than men for math, and therefore for science. Dr. Summers has since said clearly that he does not believe that girls are intellectually less able than boys. But maybe his original suggestion was right. If we ever figure out exactly what goes on inside the brain, or how our genes shape our abilities, we may find out that men and women do indeed differ in fundamental ways. But there are other possibilities we should consider first. One of them is the damage done by the idea that there is something wrong about a girl or woman who is really good at math. I first encountered this thinking as a seventh grader who was scarred for life when my class in an experimental state school for brainiacs was given a mathematics aptitude test. The results were posted and everyone found out I had scored several years ahead of the next brightest kid. A girl really good in math! What a freak! I resolved then and there on a career in journalism. I encountered the attitude again shortly after I became science editor, taking up a position I was to hold from 1997 to 2003. I went to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a convention that attracts thousands of researchers and teachers. My name tag listed my new position, and the scientists at the meeting all seemed to have the same reaction when they read it: 'You're the new science editor of The New York Times!?' At first I was deluded enough to think they meant I was much too delightful a person for such a heavy-duty job. In fact, they were shocked it had been given to a woman. This point was driven home a few weeks later when, at a dinner for scientific eminences, a colleague introduced me to one of the nation's leading neuroscientists. 'Oh yes,' the scientist murmured, as he scanned the room clearly ignoring me. 'Who is the new science editor of The New York Times, that twerpy little girl in short skirts?' Dumbfounded, I replied, 'That would be me.' A few weeks after that I was in another group of scientific eminences, this one at a luncheon at the Waldorf. The spokeswoman for the group that organized the event introduced me to one of the group's most eminent guests, a leading figure in American science policy. 'Oh,' he said kindly but abstractedly, 'you work for The New York Times. How nice.' The spokeswoman explained, again, that I was the newspaper's science editor. 'An editor,' he said. 'How nice.' The woman explained again, but again he could not take it in. 'Oh, science,' he said, 'How nice.' At this point the spokeswoman lost patience. She grabbed the honored guest by both shoulders, put her face a few inches away from his and shouted at him - 'She's it!' Not long after, I answered the office telephone, and the caller, a (male) scientist, asked to speak to several of my colleagues, all male and all out. 'May I help you?' I inquired. 'No, no, no,' he replied. 'I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to someone important!' Even at the time, I could laugh at these experiences. After all, I was a grown-up person who could take care of herself. (I informed the caller that all the men he wanted to talk to worked for me, and then I hung up. As for Dr. Twerpy, he should know that he was not the first man to refer to me professionally as 'that little girl.' I reported on the doings of the other one until he was indicted.) But the memories of the seventh grader are still not funny. Neither is it amusing to reflect on what happened to a college friend who was the only student in her section to pass linear algebra, the course the math department typically used to separate the sheep from the mathematical goats. Talk about stigma! She changed her major to American civilization. Another friend, graduating as a math major, was advised not to bother applying for a graduate research assistantship because they were not given to women. She eventually earned a doctorate in math, but one of her early forays into the job market ended abruptly when she was told she should stay home with her husband rather than seek employment out of town. Experiences like hers - the outright, out-loud dashing of a promising mathematician's hopes simply because of her sex - are no longer the norm. At least I hope not. But they are enough, by themselves, to tell us why there are relatively few women in the upper ranks of science and mathematics today. Meanwhile, as researchers have abundantly documented, women continue to suffer little slights and little disadvantages, everything from ridicule in high school to problems with child care, to a much greater degree than their male cohorts. After 10 or 15 years, these little things can add up to real roadblocks. So if I wanted to address the relative lack of women in the upper reaches of science, here is where I would start. By the time these problems are eliminated, maybe we'll know what really goes on inside the brain and inside the chromosomes. Then it will be time to wonder if women are inherently less fit for math and science.

Subject: Hoping a Small Sample May Signal a Cure From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:35:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/business/07place.html?ex=1296968400&en=ffe1fb1ca5ee31cc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Hoping a Small Sample May Signal a Cure By ANDREW POLLACK Joshua Boger might have finally found his billion-dollar molecule. Mr. Boger, the brash founder and chief executive of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, was profiled, along with his company, in a 1994 book 'The Billion-Dollar Molecule: One Company's Quest for the Perfect Drug.' But the drug discussed in the book never made it to market, and after more than 16 years in business and losses totaling about $1 billion, Vertex has still not hit it big. Now, though, the company's hopes, and its stock price, are soaring because of a drug to treat hepatitis C, a liver-destroying virus that infects about three million Americans, kills 10,000 of them a year and is the leading reason for liver transplants in this country. Vertex is expected to announce today that when its drug, VX-950, was added to current common therapy, the virus became undetectable in the blood of all 12 patients tested after four weeks. The results could buttress the company's case that the drug will reduce treatment time for the toughest strain of the virus to three months, compared with about a year under current treatments. 'We haven't seen data like this before, where everybody's negative so early on in treatment,' said Dr. John G. McHutchison, a professor at Duke and a coordinator of VX-950 trials. Dr. McHutchison, a consultant to Vertex and many other companies, said that the existing therapy reduced the virus to an undetectable level in only about 30 percent of patients after a four-week period. The new results could further invigorate Vertex's stock price, which has tripled since May, when the company released its first VX-950 data, based on two weeks of testing. Vertex shares closed yesterday at $34.30, down 24 cents. For all the drug's promise, though, some analysts emphasize that the results are from a very small sample of patients in early-stage clinical trials, and that the stock may be getting ahead of itself. Some are also wary of Mr. Boger's reputation as a zealous cheerleader. The company has had to abandon what it hoped were promising drugs in the past. At a J. P. Morgan health care conference in San Francisco last month, Mr. Boger began his talk on VX-950 by showing a picture of the Apple iPod. 'Every so often,' he said, 'there's a game-changing product — one that transforms a product category, one that transforms a company and one that transforms an industry.' Later, he compared Vertex to Thomas A. Edison's laboratory and concluded, 'This astounding data can actually be a bit terrifying.' VX-950 is at the forefront of a new approach in attacking the hepatitis C virus by using techniques that have had great success against H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Many doctors who treat hepatitis C are as excited as Wall Street has been by VX-950 and other drugs like it under development. If the drugs work, said Dr. Eugene Schiff, chief of hepatology at the University of Miami and a consultant to many companies, 'more people will achieve a sustained viral response over a shorter period of time with fewer side effects.' Such a response, in which the virus remains undetectable six months after treatment ends, is considered by scientists to be evidence of a cure. But so far, VX-950 has not achieved any sustained viral responses. 'I haven't cured a patient yet,' Mr. Boger said in an interview. The company has released data on fewer than 60 patients, each treated for two or four weeks. Side effects that could derail the drug may pop up as it is tested for longer durations in more people. And other companies, including the much larger Schering-Plough, are developing similar drugs. In November, David Witzke, an analyst at Banc of America Securities, lowered Vertex's stock rating to sell, saying that the company had been overly aggressive in predicting that it would be able to apply for federal approval of VX-950 in 2008. He also noted that Vertex was being valued in the same range as ImClone Systems and Amylin Pharmaceuticals, companies with substantial revenue from drugs already on the market. Vertex's market capitalization is now around $3.4 billion. Hepatitis C can cause cirrhosis and liver cancer, though these might not occur until decades after infection. The virus is transmitted by contaminated needles, blood transfusions and less often, sexually. With donated blood now being screened for the hepatitis C virus, virtually eliminating that source of infection, only about 25,000 new infections a year occur in the United States. But because of the large number of baby boomers infected years ago, specialists estimate that the number of deaths from hepatitis C will triple in coming years, to 30,000 annually. The problem is greater outside the United States, with an estimated 170 million infected globally. The current treatment is alpha interferon — either Roche's Pegasys or Schering-Plough's Peg-Intron — combined with ribavirin, which was developed by Valeant Pharmaceuticals but is now generic. Patients must inject themselves with interferon once a week for 24 weeks or for 48 weeks, depending on the strain of virus. The treatment can cost $30,000 and have severe side effects, including flu-like symptoms and depression. Only about half those treated are cured. Sales of hepatitis C treatments in the United States are now about $1 billion, Mr. Boger said. But if the treatment could be made quicker and more tolerable, as with VX-950, he said that such sales could grow to a range of $3 billion to $5 billion. Vertex's drug and similar ones come in pill form. And while interferon and ribavirin are thought to work mainly by spurring the body's immune system to attack the virus, the newer drugs attack the virus directly by inhibiting enzymes it needs to replicate. VX-950 inhibits the hepatitis C protease enzyme. Some other companies, led by Idenix Pharmaceuticals, are focused on another enzyme, polymerase. Most H.I.V. drugs similarly inhibit one of two enzymes — protease or reverse transcriptase. Despite the strong early results for VX-950, there is already some evidence that the virus can rebound, evolving to become resistant to the drug. Mr. Boger said that using VX-950 with interferon would slow viral replication so much that resistance was not likely to develop. Patients would still have to endure interferon injections, though experts say that eventually combinations of newer drugs would suffice. Another question is whether Vertex will be first. Schering-Plough, which also has a protease inhibitor, started Phase 2 trials last fall, a few months ahead of Vertex. But its drug did not produce as sharp a drop in viral levels in its two-week trial as Vertex's did. 'The Vertex protease looks to be the strongest,' said Dr. Robert G. Gish, medical director of the liver-transplant program at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. Moreover, Schering-Plough is testing its drug for 6 or 12 months, like the standard therapies. Vertex is gambling that it can leap ahead with tests lasting only three months. Dr. Douglas Dieterich, a liver-disease specialist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, termed that 'very optimistic.' He said he thought it would take longer to train the immune system to control the virus. Analysts infer that Boehringer Ingelheim and Bristol-Myers Squibb have also begun early clinical trials of hepatitis C protease inhibitors. InterMune has two compounds in the laboratory. Asked who was ahead, Dr. Schiff at the University of Miami replied that 'there are a lot of people on the same playing field.' Andrew McDonald, an analyst at ThinkEquity Partners, said Vertex was worth no more than $30 a share based on VX-950 alone. But he recently upgraded the stock to buy with a $40 price target, based on another potential blockbuster drug he said had been overlooked by Wall Street. That drug, VX-702, is aimed at treating rheumatoid arthritis by inhibiting an enzyme known as P-38. This is a hot area for drug companies, but many P-38 inhibitors caused unacceptable side effects. VX-702 is chemically different, Mr. McDonald said. 'It looks like Vertex has the lead with a compound that may escape the shortcomings of many of the dozen or so that have failed before it,' he said. Results from a midstage trial of VX-702 are expected in the second quarter. If either drug pans out, some analysts predict that Vertex will be acquired by a larger company. Success would also mean vindication for Mr. Boger, who has a doctorate in chemistry from Harvard. He was a rising star at Merck until leaving in 1989 to start Vertex, whose founding premise was to design drugs suited to a target in the body, rather than screen thousands of compounds at random, a standard industry practice. 'The Billion-Dollar Molecule,' by a journalist, Barry Werth, portrayed the egos and ambitions involved in the quest for scientific glory and financial gain. At one point in the book, Mr. Boger, settling for a tie in a race with a rival, is quoted nonetheless as saying, 'I want to rub his nose in the dirt and step on his head.' Vertex has developed two AIDS drugs, Agenerase and a variant, Lexiva, that are sold by GlaxoSmithKline. They have been only modest sellers, and the royalties Vertex receives — $23.1 million in the first nine months of 2005 — have been far too small to make the company profitable. But Vertex, unlike many other biotechnology companies, has never put all its effort behind one drug. It is developing treatments for cancer, cystic fibrosis and pain in addition to hepatitis and arthritis. It has partnerships with many big pharmaceutical companies. 'Right now they've got two potential blockbusters,' said Jay Markowitz, an analyst at T. Rowe Price, one of the largest shareholders in Vertex. 'Boger is a very smart scientist. He's hopefully got the company to a significant inflection point right now.'

Subject: Light Saber to Tired Old Teaching From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:33:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/education/31education.html August 31, 2005 Taking a Light Saber to Tired Old Teaching By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN SAN RAFAEL, Calif. IN a spare bathroom next to the garage, George Lucas set up his darkroom. He had gotten a 35-millimeter camera about the same time he started high school, and had begun shooting everything from posed portraits of his niece and nephew to trick photos of the family cat, lured into midair by a dangling piece of meat. Before long, he was making backyard war movies on an 8-millimeter handed down by his grandfather. Anybody who lived near the Lucas place, 14 miles outside of Modesto in California's Central Valley, recognized these ventures as the latest expressions of a quiet boy's creativity. George had already written a weekly newspaper, designed landscapes around his Lionel train set and built a dollhouse for a neighbor girl, scaled right down to a lamp made of a lipstick tube. Little of this precocity, though, revealed itself in school. A bored, dreamy student, George had struggled with spelling and needed to repeat math the summer after eighth grade. His high school art teacher, looking over George's drawings of space soldiers, admonished him, 'Get serious.' George's father refused to pay for him to study illustration in college, hoping instead he would take over the family's office-furniture store. The filmgoing world knows how this particular story ends. George Lucas, the underachieving teenager, grew up to become George Lucas, the phenomenally successful director, auteur of the 'Star Wars' series, 'Indiana Jones' and 'American Graffiti.' Maybe his experience tricking the cat into jumping was an early lesson in how to treat actors. Except that the story has another prong, far less known, and tied to public policy rather than popular culture. Out of his own uninspiring education, the conviction that his abilities were ignored and throttled by conventional schooling, Mr. Lucas, 61, has assiduously yet quietly built a foundation devoted to education reform over the past dozen years. This is no exercise in designer charity. The George Lucas Educational Foundation has 30 full-time employees, a $4 million annual budget and a headquarters on the founder's Skywalker Ranch here in the Marin County hills. It publishes a magazine, produces documentaries, supports projects in both public and private schools, distributes an e-mail newsletter and maintains an extensive Web site, glef.org. All these enterprises espouse a consistent message firmly in the progressive camp, emphasizing the virtues of hands-on field work, practical experience and the use of film, video and digital materials in preference to the usual textbooks and standardized tests. To hear Mr. Lucas tell it, though, his preferred innovations are in many ways throwbacks. 'Our platform is to say that there are time-tested ways of learning,' he said in an interview earlier this summer. 'Aristotle taught four or five people; he didn't have huge classes. Or you have the mentoring system - the cobbler teaching his assistants. Whether it's Aristotle or learning how to make shoes, you had a reason to learn. Education didn't happen in isolation. Maybe for the very elite, you can learn for the sake of learning. But for millions of students to learn, you need to know why you're learning.' To make those general precepts concrete, the Lucas foundation identifies and illustrates examples from the real world - a teacher in California who uses hip-hop lyrics as a route for his students to understand poets like Dylan Thomas; a school in Washington that makes the field study of rare lizards a way of teaching such fundamental subjects as reading, writing and math. The fierce passion the Lucas foundation brings to its program has much to do with geography. From his base in the Bay Area, Mr. Lucas had early and deep involvement with the innovators of the Silicon Valley. His staff at the foundation includes veterans of Wired and Red Herring magazines, the public radio station KQED-FM and the Web zine Salon, all of which both chronicled and participated in the digital revolution, and these people's certitude echoes the high-tech industry's mantra of evolve or die. 'We grew up or worked in an area where change is encouraged, where innovation is encouraged, where entrepreneurship is nurtured,' said James Daly, the editor in chief of Edutopia, the Lucas foundation's magazine. 'And that's not the way it's been in education. If you feel like you're a hamster on the wheel all day, it's easy to stay that way. But when you get to the change agents, the rock does begin to roll uphill.' Largely female, married and middle-aged, not necessarily a recipe for the cutting edge, Edutopia's 85,000 subscribers actually use technology - e-mail, bulletin boards, listservs - more avidly than teenagers, according to a survey by Grunwald Associates. They perceive themselves as influential on educational issues, even if only in their own classrooms or communities. And by an overwhelming margin, they assail the reliance on standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind law. To its credit, the Lucas foundation stops short of being tendentious, the captive of its own doctrine. Its agenda reflects not only Mr. Lucas's frustrations with his own education (at least until he entered film school at the University of Southern California) but a very deep family commitment to the field. His parents, both denied college by the Great Depression, presided over a household awash in National Geographics, World Almanac volumes, Landmark histories and biographies, crossword puzzles, all those elements of recreational self-education. MR. LUCAS's older sister, Kate Nyegaard, has served since 1992 on the school board in Modesto, which has a heavily Latino, bilingual student body. His younger sister, Wendy Lucas, has taught reading in various California schools, some public and some Christian, for 22 years. They are reality checks for the foundation, Mrs. Nyegaard in a formal way as a member of its board. While Edutopia publishes articles that can only send a chill through a devotee of the written word - 'No Books, No Problem,' read the headline of an article about a chemistry teacher who devises a curriculum without a text - it has also trumpeted the advantages of a longer school year. One of its finest articles profiled a class in St. Johnsbury, Vt., whose teacher had been deployed to Iraq; another trenchantly explored the plight of biology instructors under pressure to add 'intelligent design' to their courses. Even as an exponent of progressive education, Mr. Lucas himself has not escaped the long arm of standardized testing. There is a short essay about him written for fourth graders called 'A Talented Young Man.' It appears in a Steck-Vaughn test-prep book.

Subject: 'Da Vinci Code' Film: It's Just Fiction From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:32:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/national/07opus.html?ex=1296968400&en=aabd1ba0525a1f5e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Catholic Group Says of 'Da Vinci Code' Film: It's Just Fiction By LAURIE GOODSTEIN When 'The Da Vinci Code' became a publishing sensation, leaders of the Roman Catholic organization Opus Dei realized they had an image problem on their hands. The assassin in the best-selling thriller is an albino Opus Dei monk named Silas, and the group is depicted as a powerful but secretive cult whose members practice ritualistic self-torture. In a preface titled 'Fact,' the author, Dan Brown, said his book was more than mere fiction. When plans were revealed for a movie based on the book, Opus Dei leaders say they tried to persuade Sony Pictures to excise any mention of their group, sending a letter last year saying the book was 'a gross distortion and a grave injustice.' Their effort failed. With the film starring Tom Hanks now set for release on May 19, Opus Dei is trying to sate public interest and cast the group in a very different light than the religious home of a fictional assassin. The group is promoting a blog by an Opus Dei priest in Rome, revamping its Web site and even arranging interviews with a member said to be the only 'real Silas' in Opus Dei — a Nigerian-born stockbroker who lives in Brooklyn. Silas Agbim, the stockbroker, said that Opus Dei taught its members to hold themselves to the highest standards. 'If you do your work well, it's pleasing to God,' said Mr. Agbim, a graying father of three grown children who is married to a professor emeritus of library science. 'And if you think you will get holy by reciting 10 rosaries a day and doing your work sloppily, that is wrong.' Still, the 'Da Vinci Code' movie is sure to revive a long-simmering debate among Catholics over whether Opus Dei is a positive or negative influence in the church. Critics say that while the group is relatively small, a few members seem to hold important positions in the Vatican, including the pope's chief spokesman. Questions about whether Opus Dei has outsize influence grew when Pope John Paul II granted the group a unique status in the church in 1982, and 10 years later set the group's founder on an unusually speedy track to sainthood. Opus Dei's reputation for secrecy developed partly because of the group's tradition that members should not publicly proclaim their affiliation. 'Is he or isn't he Opus Dei?' guessing games have focused on prominent figures, particularly in Washington. A controversy exploded last year in England when it surfaced that Ruth Kelly, the young new secretary of education in the liberal Labor Party, was affiliated with Opus Dei. She did not deny it but never clarified her status with the group, prompting even louder criticism. Robert P. Hanssen, an F.B.I. agent who pleaded guilty in 2001 to spying for the Soviet Union, confirmed that he was a member and acknowledged that he had confided his crimes to his priest. Opus Dei leaders say they are neither secretive, nor particularly powerful, nor lockstep conservatives. They say the group is a decentralized network of more than 84,541 Catholic lay people and 1,875 priests around the world, relatively small numbers in a church of 1.1 billion. They say they have no aspirations to control the Vatican and believe their calling is to live out their devotion to God by doing their jobs well, be it janitor, senator or full-time mother. Opus Dei is Latin for 'the work of God.' Lynn Frank, an Opus Dei member in Walden, N.Y., mother of seven and the owner-entrepreneur of a business that promotes healthful eating, said: 'The determination I have definitely comes from my vocation with Opus Dei, because every single day with Opus Dei, you wake up and say, 'I'm giving 100 percent of my day to you, Lord.' And if you slack off, that's a boss you don't want to answer to.' Since its founding in 1928 by a Spanish priest, Josemaría Escrivá, the group has found favor with several popes, in particular John Paul II, whose theological emphasis on holiness, the importance of the family and the dignity of work meshed well with Father Escrivá's beliefs. In 1982, John Paul granted Opus Dei the status of a 'personal prelature,' and it remains the only one in the church, meaning that it has its own bishop who reports directly to the pope. Then in 1992, Father Escrivá leapfrogged other candidates for sainthood and was beatified a mere 17 years after his death. He was canonized a saint in 2002. Joaquín Navarro-Valls, a spokesman for John Paul and now for Pope Benedict XVI, is a member, as was one of the co-authors of a controversial Vatican document released in 2000, Dominus Iesus, on the primacy of Christianity. When the pope wanted to clean up an Austrian diocese where pornography was found on a seminary computer, he appointed a new bishop from Opus Dei. Also feeding the impression of influence is Opus Dei's American headquarters, in New York, a 17-story building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and 34th Street on which the group spent $69 million for the property, construction and furnishing. Mention of the location in 'The Da Vinci Code' has brought a constant stream of the curious and conspiratorial to the door, said the doorman, Robert A. Boone. He says he tells them, 'You think I'd be working here if there were people like Silas walking around?' Some Opus Dei members are incensed about how the three-year-old best seller presents not only Opus Dei, but also Christianity. In 'The Da Vinci Code,' a pair of sleuthing heroes discover that the doctrine of Jesus' divinity was made up by the fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine, and that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children. Mr. Agbim said he had read the book. 'It is poison,' he said. 'It will lead the people to have doubts.' But Opus Dei leaders are taking a less confrontational approach. Opus Dei's United States leader, the Rev. Thomas G. Bohlin, said, 'We don't want the controversy to pump up publicity for the movie.' Father Bohlin sent the letter to Sony Pictures asking that Opus Dei be left out of the movie and said he had received a 'polite but noncommittal' response. Jim Kennedy, a spokesman for Sony Pictures, said: 'We see 'The Da Vinci Code' as a work of fiction and not intended to harm any organization. At its heart the film is a thriller, and we do agree that it really provides a unique opportunity for Opus Dei and other organizations to let people know more about their work and their beliefs.' After researching Opus Dei for a book, John L. Allen, the Vatican correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter, has concluded that its power and wealth have been largely exaggerated. The group's worldwide membership is about equivalent to the number of Catholics in the Diocese of Hobart on the island of Tasmania, Mr. Allen said. Opus Dei keeps no central financial records, but Mr. Allen determined its assets to be $2.8 billion, a figure the group's spokesmen say appears accurate. Much of that is tied up in the schools and hospitals worldwide. Half of the expense for the New York headquarters was paid for by a single donation of stock, said Brian Finnerty, a spokesman. 'Opus Dei certainly is a growing force in church affairs, and they probably have a very disproportionate number of those church positions that have impact, but let's not mythologize that,' said Mr. Allen, author of 'Opus Dei: An Objective Look Behind the Myths and Reality of the Most Controversial Force in the Catholic Church.' Some former members accuse Opus Dei of behaving like a cult, with aggressive recruiting and excessive control over members who choose to live in Opus Dei centers. Tammy DiNicola, who joined Opus Dei as a college student and left in 1990 after two years, said the organization pulled in idealistic and very spiritual people by deceiving them. 'They don't tell you you wouldn't spend any holidays with your family, your mail would be read, you would hand over your salary to them, and you wouldn't be able to watch television or radio or even leave the house without permission,' said Ms. DiNicola, who helped found the Opus Dei Awareness Network to help former members. Mr. Finnerty, the Opus Dei spokesman, said that contrary to accusations by some former members, independence and personal freedom were central to the doctrine. Seventy percent of Opus Dei's members, like Lynn Frank and Silas Agbim, are working people, usually married, who live in their own homes, a category of membership known as 'supernumerary.' Although they maintain a rigorous schedule of daily prayer and reading, weekly confession and meetings with a spiritual director, they carry on with their lives and professions. About 20 percent are 'numeraries,' who give their lives entirely to the organization, living as celibates in an Opus Dei center. Some hold outside jobs, but many work full time in affiliated institutions, like hospitals and schools. Ten percent are 'associates,' who are celibate but live on their own and not in Opus Dei centers. Much of the eerie mystique surrounding Opus Dei comes from the numeraries' practice of 'corporal mortification.' In 'The Da Vinci Code,' Silas the murderous monk is shown whipping himself bloody and wearing a spiked chain around his thigh so tightly that it draws blood. In reality, numeraries do wear a 'cilice,' a chain with points, under their pants for two hours a day. Once a week, they beat their backs with a small cord while reciting a prayer. Opus Dei says corporal mortification is an ancient Catholic practice that promotes penance and identification with the suffering of Christ. Ms. DiNicola, the former member, said that wearing the cilice was supposed to be optional but that numerary members were made to feel guilty if they did not. 'It does cut and it does leave little blood pricks,' she said. Despite the dismal portrayal of their group in 'The Da Vinci Code,' Opus Dei leaders acknowledge some benefits from the attention. Doubleday, the publisher of the book, is about to release 'The Way,' a collection of spiritual writing by Opus Dei's founder. Mr. Finnerty, the group's spokesman, said it was 'The Da Vinci Code' that opened the door for the deal.

Subject: Sleeping Pills Are Causing Worries From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:31:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/business/07sleep.html?ex=1296968400&en=8fd30b9cc937535e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Record Sales of Sleeping Pills Are Causing Worries By STEPHANIE SAUL Americans are taking sleeping pills like never before, fueled by frenetic workdays that do not go gently into a great night's sleep, and lulled by a surge of consumer advertising that promises safe slumber with minimal side effects. About 42 million sleeping pill prescriptions were filled last year, according to the research company IMS Health, up nearly 60 percent since 2000. But some experts worry that the drugs are being oversubscribed without enough regard to known, if rare, side effects or the implications of long-term use. And they fear doctors may be ignoring other conditions, like depression, that might be the cause of sleeplessness. Although the newer drugs are not believed to carry the same risk of dependence as older ones like barbiturates, some researchers have reported what is called the 'next day' effect, a continued sleepiness hours after awakening from a drug-induced slumber. Ten percent of Americans report that they regularly struggle to fall asleep or to stay asleep throughout the night. And more and more are turning to a new generation of sleep aids like Ambien, the best seller, and its competitor, Lunesta. Experts acknowledge that insomnia has become a cultural benchmark — a side effect of an overworked, overwrought society. 'Clearly, there's a significant increase in people who report insomnia and, from my perspective, that is the result of our modern-day lifestyle,' said Dr. Gregg D. Jacobs, a psychologist and assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard. Or at least that is an impression that drug makers are clearly trying to capitalize on, he said. And that concerns him and some other researchers who warn that despite their advertised safety, the new generation of sleep aids can sometimes cause strange side effects. The reported problems include sleepwalking and short-term amnesia. Steven Wells, a lawyer in Buffalo, said he started using Ambien last year because his racing mind kept him awake at night. But he quit after only one month, concerned about several episodes in which he woke up to find he had messily raided the refrigerator and, finally, an incident in which he tore a towel rack out of a wall. 'The weird thing was that I had no recollection of it the next day,' said Mr. Wells, who added that he found the episodes frightening. Ambien's maker, Sanofi-Aventis, said the drug had been used for 12 billion nights of patient therapy. 'When Ambien is taken as prescribed, it's a safe and effective treatment,' said Emmy Tsui, a company spokeswoman. A Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman, Susan Cruzan, said she was not aware of an unusual number of complaints with the drugs. Drug makers spent $298 million in the first 11 months of 2005 to convince consumers that the sleep aids are safe and effective. That was more than four times such ad spending in all of 2004. In the last year, much of the advertising surge has been a result of competition from Lunesta, which the drug maker Sepracor introduced last April to compete with Ambien. Through November, Sepracor led the sleeping pill advertising field, spending more than $185 million, according to figures from TNS Media Intelligence, which did not have final figures for December. In response, Sanofi-Aventis, marketing both Ambien and its controlled-release version, Ambien CR, spent $107 million from last January through November, according to TNS. That was nearly double its ad spending on Ambien in 2004. Even the most infrequent television viewers would have trouble missing the Lunesta ads, which feature a luna moth fluttering around the bed of a peaceful sleeper. Dr. Jacobs said that in one hour of prime-time television recently, he saw three ads for sleeping pills: two for Lunesta and another for Ambien. 'You've got the patient population being bombarded with advertising on TV,' Dr. Jacobs said. 'You've got increased advertising to physicians. You've got a formula for sales going up dramatically.' One financial analyst, Jon LeCroy of Natexis Bleichroeder, said Lunesta's ad campaign last fall was tied to the new season of 'Desperate Housewives,' whose audience is about 55 percent female. Studies have shown that women have insomnia more frequently than men. Last week, Sepracor's stock jumped $8.53 in one day, after Sepracor reported a profit and remarkably strong use of Lunesta in its first year on the market, with sales of $329 million. More than 213,000 doctors wrote 3.3 million prescriptions for it last year, the company says. Sepracor announced the addition of 450 people to its current sales force of 1,500 to increase marketing of the drug to physicians. Sanofi-Aventis, with a sales force of 3,000, is working to shift patients from Ambien, which loses its patent protection in October, to the newer version, Ambien CR. The newer pill has a quickly dissolving outer layer meant to immediately induce sleep, with a slower-dissolving inner layer to sustain sleep. Another drug in the class is Sonata, marketed by King Pharmaceuticals. Because it is short acting, Sonata is recommended for people who have trouble falling asleep but no trouble staying asleep. Drugs in the class are frequently referred to as 'Z' drugs, a play on both their effect and the Z's in their generic names, like zolpidem (Ambien) and eszopiclone (Lunesta). All aim at a brain neurotransmitter that is believed to reduce neural activity. Another new entrant to the market, Rozerem, by the Japanese company Takeda Pharmaceuticals, has been available in drugstores since September but has not yet been heavily advertised. The drug works by a different mechanism from the others, acting on the brain's melatonin receptors, which are believed to play a role in sleep-wake cycles. Mr. LeCroy, the analyst, who is also a medical doctor, predicts the advertising will intensify if Neurocrine Biosciences and its partner Pfizer are permitted to introduce their new sleeping pill, Indiplon; an F.D.A. decision on that is expected in May. 'That's going to make the competition get more cutthroat,' Mr. LeCroy said, predicting that the market for branded sleeping pills, currently about $2 billion a year, could grow to $3.8 billion, even with Ambien set to go generic. 'This is only going to get crazier.' The Carlat Psychiatry Report, a newsletter by Dr. Daniel J. Carlat, a psychiatrist in Newburyport, Mass., reviewed the Z drugs recently and concluded that their differences were merely subtle. But Dr. Carlat warned that Lunesta, because it was longer acting, was more likely to cause next-day sleepiness problems 'in comparison with some of its cousins.' Dr. Carlat cited a 1998 study in Britain, published in The Lancet, which found that taking zopiclone, the compound known as the 'mother' of Lunesta and marketed in Europe, was linked to an increased risk of automobile accidents. But Sepracor's chief financial officer, David P. Southwell, said that Lunesta, while a chemical variant of zopiclone, was a totally different drug. He referred a reporter to the F.D.A.-approved label, which lists clinical studies of next-day effects showing there was no consistent pattern of impaired mental functioning the day after Lunesta use. The possible role of Ambien was investigated in connection with well-chronicled transportation disasters in 2003 — the crash of the Staten Island Ferry, which killed 11 passengers, and an accident involving a Texas church bus in Tallulah, La., which killed 8 passengers. The assistant captain who was piloting the ferry, like the bus driver, had a prescription for Ambien, but there was no evidence either had taken it before the crashes. Dr. David G. Fassler, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont College of Medicine, said he was concerned that the heavy marketing and prescribing of the sleep medications would lead to use in patients who have underlying conditions that are left untreated. 'I'm concerned that difficulty sleeping can be a sign of multiple disorders, including problems with anxiety and depression,' he said, expressing worry that patients who are not thoroughly evaluated might be treated for their insomnia while other problems, like anxiety or decreased appetite, are not addressed. In clinical trials, the most common side effect of the drugs, however, is that people wake up feeling sleepy the next day. Dr. Daniel J. Buysse, a University of Pittsburgh psychiatrist who has consulted for the industry on sleeping pills, said they were a rare example of drugs in which the desired effect and the major side effect were the same thing. 'One occurs when you want it, and the other occurs when you don't,' he said. Another problem associated with using sleeping pills is a condition commonly called traveler's amnesia, in reference to the frequent use by people who travel across time zones. Such amnesia can occur when people return to daytime activities too quickly after taking the drugs. The labels carry warnings that the drugs should be used only when people can devote a full night to sleeping. In some cases, however, users have reported that they awakened during the middle of the night in sleepwalking states, but — like Mr. Wells, the lawyer in Buffalo — had no recollection of their activities. The amnesiac effects of Ambien were a factor in the acquittal last week of a United States Air Force linguist who had been charged with raping a colleague while the two were stationed in Qatar. The woman who said she was the victim, also a linguist, testified that she was not sure whether the incident was a dream because she had taken Ambien, according to the Stars and Stripes report on the military trial, which occurred in Britain. Dr. Buysse said such bouts of nocturnal uncertainty occur occasionally with various Z drugs. 'There have been some case reports of people who have been sleepwalking only when taking the drug,' Dr. Buysse said. 'I think it's rare, and it's the kind of thing that no one is going to have a very good estimate of. But if it happens to you, who cares if you're the only person of many?'

Subject: Justice for Asbestos Victims From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:30:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/opinion/07tue3.html?ex=1296968400&en=0e008dce3e0c1fea&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Justice for Asbestos Victims Just last week, the Democrats' Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, failed to muster the gumption to try to stop the nomination of a right-wing ideologue to a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court. So it's shocking to hear Mr. Reid threatening now to block a bipartisan bill that would finally bring justice and compensation to victims of asbestos-related diseases. We can't imagine what Mr. Reid is trying to achieve, other than showing fealty to the trial lawyers who have been so generous to his party. The Senate should approve the bill, which would replace the current morass of asbestos litigation with a $140 billion fund to pay the claims of victims of asbestos exposure. The fund would be financed by makers of asbestos, a carcinogenic material, and manufacturers that used it, and their insurers. It is the product of an assiduous effort by Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican who is chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and Senator Patrick Leahy, the committee's senior Democrat. That makes it a 21st-century rarity: a thoughtful bipartisan compromise on a vexing national problem. It would create a fund to pay awards to those who are already sick, using detailed medical criteria to determine eligibility and the awards. Under this no-fault system, akin to workers' compensation, those exposed to asbestos at work but not ill would be entitled to free medical screening every three years. Lobbyists for trial lawyers, and various companies, insurers and union interests that feel aggrieved by some aspect of the complex package, are trying to round up lawmakers to block the bill. A key test is to come today, when the majority leader, Bill Frist, has scheduled a vote to allow the Senate to begin formal consideration of the bill. Mr. Reid is trying to derail the measure even before the debate begins in earnest, and Democrats who want to see asbestos victims treated fairly should not support him. There are other dangers ahead, including the possibility of a 'poison pill' amendment that would expand to other communities a special provision that would make residents of Libby, Mont., a town uniquely affected by asbestos contamination, eligible for a guaranteed level of compensation without a need to show occupational exposure. Another worry is that some Republicans will try to amend the payment provisions or medical criteria in ways that would be unfair to victims. No one can be sure that $140 billion would cover all current and future claims. But the bill would give victims the option of going to court should the trust fund run out. It would be a vast improvement over the present method of dealing with the claims of asbestos victims, which is to clog the courts and bankrupt companies while still depriving many victims a measure of justice.

Subject: Haiti's Orphan Democracy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:30:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/opinion/07wilentz.html?ex=1296968400&en=fdb38e8993c4a9bf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Haiti's Orphan Democracy By AMY WILENTZ Los Angeles TWENTY years ago today, in the elegant but down-at-the-heels central square of Port-au-Prince, the Haitian people celebrated the departure of a dictator and the end of nearly three decades of a nightmare dynasty. In the smallest hours of Feb. 7, 1986, Jean-Claude Duvalier, his chain-smoking wife at his side, drove his Mercedes sedan right up to the open door of a United States Air Force jet and fled the country for the South of France. Along with about 50 members of the foreign press corps, I was there at François Duvalier International Airport, named for the fleeing man's father, who had visited disaster after disaster on his native land. Now it was morning, and it seemed all of Haiti had descended into the square, each person waving fanlike branches cut from street-side trees. It was as if a forest had come to town to cover up the traces of the hated regime. A brighter day was dawning, so most people thought, and so I thought, although it was clear that there would be difficult moments ahead. Mobs surged through the city and countryside, hunting down supporters of the ancien régime. Yet Haitians in general were ecstatic. Surely democracy, with that joyous popular will behind it, would triumph. Soon after that brilliant day, I became acquainted with a bunch of boys. They were young and homeless, and every day dozens of them would gather at the school where Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a Catholic priest known for his broadside sermons against the Duvalier regime, lived and worked. The boys spent a lot of time kicking a dead ball around the dusty courtyard in noisy games of soccer. Waldeck was one, another was nicknamed Ayiti (which means Haiti in Creole), another was Ti Johnny. One I did not know so well was Wilmer. There were so many; they all wanted money, and sneakers. Democracy, it turned out, was not within easy grasp. Having suffered through almost 30 years of the Duvaliers' kleptocracy, Haiti had no economy to speak of, hardly any infrastructure, no workable education system and no viable democratic institutions. The little boys were typical. Under Father Aristide's auspices, they eked out a living at the edge of this dysfunctional non-system, sleeping at night in a shantytown warehouse, with a single light bulb, and straw mats for beds. In the wake of Mr. Duvalier's ouster, democratic steps were taken: an electoral council established, a Constitution written, candidates announced. In 1990, Haiti held a free and fair election under international supervision, and — to my amazement — my boys' Father Aristide, the priest who spoke for Haiti's disenfranchised millions, became the country's first honestly elected president. But beneath the veneer of progress, Haiti hadn't really changed. The same ruinous division continued between the tiny upper class, which had long run the country, and the poor. The rich went on living in mansions amid boutiques and restaurants at the literal top of the hill in Port-au-Prince, and the impoverished, unemployed, illiterate and starving majority of the people endured in the mud, sewage, garbage and pig slop in shantytowns at the bottom, or in the remote countryside, unelectrified and dark. Worse yet, the country was essentially bankrupt, relying almost entirely on funds from donor nations and on money sent back to relatives by Haitians abroad. President Aristide had little effect on all this, for all his orphan boys and his dedication to popular empowerment. Many of his immediate projects revolved around himself, though he always bore the people's future in mind. As far as he was concerned, he was the people, and the people were President Aristide. Thus a new house for him, with an echoing living room, was a new sanctuary where the people could come to hear his message. A new swimming pool in his yard was a place where the little boys could come to swim without fear or embarrassment — and they did. Meanwhile, conditions in the shantytowns worsened. None of this was surprising in a Haitian president. But Jean-Bertrand Aristide was supposed to be different. And he really was different. No matter how big his house, how nice his swimming pool, he never lost the respect of a wide swath of the population for whom he remained a commanding symbol of liberation. A powerful sector of Haiti's elite could not stomach that — nor did they like this outsider's control over the country's purse strings. Once in power, President Aristide was damned if he did and damned if he didn't. If he didn't make slum dwellers and heads of popular movements his closest advisers, for example, he would be shunning the Haitian people, the very ones who gave him his legitimacy. But if he did accept the common people into his circle or reject his handful of upper-class advisers, he would be seen as encouraging naïve, unlettered toughs who were likely to be sycophantic and turn to violence when thwarted. Haitian society was so polarized between haves and have-nots that every decision was potentially destructive and only moderation might have saved the day. Yet President Aristide was not a natural moderate, and neither were his most implacable enemies — members of a powerful elite that wielded remarkable influence in Washington. And so President Aristide was overthrown before he had served a year of his term. Reinstated by President Bill Clinton in 1994, Mr. Aristide rightly feared that the same forces — a cabal of elite families, members of the military and American powerbrokers — would conspire to take him down again. He disbanded the army. In 2000, he was again elected president. This time he made stabs at moderation, but his enemies would not budge, and in the end, he believed he needed the militant support of his power base in the shantytowns to stave off another attempt to oust him. Those boys whom I'd met in 1986 were big now — those who had survived. Waldeck had a baby and was helping with security at the presidential palace. Ti Johnny had been shot and killed in a drug-related incident. Ayiti had died, too — of AIDS, it was said. I didn't hear anything about Wilmer for a long time. As he had feared, President Aristide was overthrown again in February 2004, with the support of the right-wing elite and a nod from Washington. Soon after, Wilmer surfaced as an armed street organizer in the giant slum of Cité Soleil, on the outskirts of the capital. A skinny boy not so long ago, he had become a legendary outlaw Aristide supporter known as Dread Wilmer — to some a bandit hero, a Haitian Robin Hood, to others a drug trafficker, gangster and killer. With President Aristide gone, he was vulnerable. Last July, Wilmer and four others, including a woman and her two small children, were killed in a gun battle with the United Nations forces that had been sent to keep the peace in Haiti. Since Mr. Aristide's most recent ouster, things have fallen apart in Haiti in a dramatic way, with kidnappings and street shootouts commonplace. This is not a propitious atmosphere for today's planned presidential vote, in which Réné Préval, a former elected president and a former close Aristide associate, is the front-runner, according to polls. If Mr. Préval wins by a wide margin (less likely since electoral authorities decided not to allow voting inside the restive Cité Soleil), he might be able to take some small steps forward for the country. President Aristide's example, however flawed, makes it hard for any future Haitian leader to rule without a popular mandate. The trouble lies in getting both Haitian elites and American policy makers to accept fair elections and whatever leadership, unpredictable as it might be, that emerges from them. This may not happen today, or even tomorrow. But the new generation of Haiti's elite needs to recognize that regime change in Haiti must come from the electorate. And in the same spirit, Washington — for so long insincere on the question of Haitian democracy — has to put its backing once and for all truly behind the Haitian people.

Subject: Rocky Start for Drug Benefit From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 07:08:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/politics/06medicare.html?ex=1296882000&en=0da4c2c4eca54db4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 6, 2006 Rival Visions Led to Rocky Start for Drug Benefit By ROBIN TONER WASHINGTON — It was clearly intended to be a transformational moment in American politics: At a center for the elderly in Allentown, Pa., on Sept. 5, 2000, George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, paid tribute to one of the signature Democratic programs of the last century and promised to improve it. 'Medicare is an enduring commitment of our country,' said Mr. Bush, locked in a tight race with Vice President Al Gore. 'It must be modernized for our times.' What emerged in the next three years, culminating in the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, was an effort to blend a classic big government program from the Great Society with the conservative, market-oriented philosophy of the Republicans in power. It was supposed to be one of the great domestic policy achievements of the Bush presidency. But today, as state and federal officials struggle to carry out the program, they face widespread complaints from beneficiaries, advocates, pharmacists, lawmakers and others that it is too complex, too cumbersome, too hard to navigate. Congressional committees are holding hearings on problems in the rollout of the plan, which began Jan. 1, and debate has already begun over how to change it. Even Mr. Bush seems, at the moment, reluctant to proclaim its advantages; he never mentioned the long-sought prescription drug benefit in his 52-minute State of the Union address last week. Administration officials say the start-up of any vast new social welfare program is bound to encounter difficulties; they say these are largely growing pains for a system that covers 42 million older and disabled Americans. They testified last week that competition among private health plans was already lowering expected costs for the program, while giving retirees what they were promised: a wide choice of drug plans at reasonable prices. But some experts say the new Medicare program, by its very structure, was destined for trouble. Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, calls it 'a compromise between competing ideologies shoehorned into a fixed budget.' He added, 'I think it was preordained from the moment they passed it that it would be historically complicated to implement.' As they look back, the architects and leading supporters of this plan say that every political decision behind the new Medicare program — its structure, its cost, the way it is delivered — made sense at the time it was made. Taken as a whole, however, the plan's creators came up with a complex hybrid, a melding of government and private markets requiring intricate coordination among insurers, beneficiaries, and state and federal agencies. In recent weeks, older Americans have struggled to choose from a dizzying array of 40 or more drug plans, with different premiums, co-payments and lists of covered drugs. States have intervened to cover many low-income elderly beneficiaries who were falling between the cracks in their transition to the new Medicare program. Pharmacists have reported delays and difficulties in determining who is eligible for which benefits. Representative Bill Thomas, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a principal architect of the program, defended the Medicare law in an interview and suggested that it was the best a bitterly divided Congress could do. 'We got the bill we could get,' said Mr. Thomas, a California Republican. 'And then those who tried to make sure it wasn't law began immediately to attack it.' In fact, the Medicare law is a case study in political accommodation in an ideologically polarized time — the difficulty in bridging sharply different worldviews on the roles of government and private markets — and the consequences of that accommodation in the real world, when the program begins. A Need for Change Republicans began to push for a drug benefit in the late 1990's. By then, drug costs were soaring; elderly men and women regularly rose, tearfully, at public meetings to plead with members of Congress for help. And the demands from AARP, the retirees' lobby, had reached a crescendo. Nobody could afford to ignore a crucial constituency and its demands for relief, certainly not the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate and, by 2001, the White House. Top Republican strategists asserted that their party — which had been haunted, in election after election, by its resistance to the creation of Medicare in 1965 — had to seize the initiative this time. 'It increasingly became the opinion in the White House that this was probably the right thing to do, and it also made sense politically,' said Thomas A. Scully, then the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But the party was led by conservatives and mindful of its base; the conservatives wanted to create a Medicare drug benefit that minimized the role of government as much as possible. 'It was a program that needed to be fixed, but it was fixed in a Republican way,' said John Feehery, a former top aide to J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the speaker of the House. 'A private sector solution, as opposed to a huge increase in government control. If Democrats were in control, they would have just fixed prices and let the government pay for it.' In fact, many liberals argued that the easiest way to add a drug benefit to Medicare was, quite simply, to add a drug benefit to Medicare. Let the federal government use its immense bargaining clout to secure discounts and provide a standard benefit, just as it does for hospitals and doctors, they reasoned. Republicans countered that this approach would amount to government price controls that would stifle innovation. Instead, they envisioned a marketplace of private health insurers that would negotiate prices individually with drug companies, then compete to sell drug benefits to the elderly. The government would subsidize the benefits, with extra help for low-income people. Older Americans would get a choice of plans, and the competition among private plans would hold down costs and keep the benefits up-to-date. Democrats and their allies argued that Republicans were bowing to a powerful industry that was fearful of the negotiating power of the government and desperate to protect its profits. 'This was the product of the special-interest lobbying of the drug industry,' said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group. The pharmaceutical industry did have substantial influence on Capitol Hill. But the structure of the drug benefit was also framed by a core conservative belief: that 'one-size-fits-all' benefit programs, administered by the government, were an outmoded vestige of the Great Society and the New Deal. Some conservative and moderate Democrats shared a preference for pushing more responsibility onto private insurers, including former Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, who would play a crucial role in the 2003 law. 'I got so tired of sitting in the back room of the Finance Committee deciding whether oxygen providers should get a 0.25 percent increase or a 0.36 percent increase,' Mr. Breaux said. But in general, this was a sharply ideological division on Capitol Hill. Even with a market-oriented approach, the drug benefit was a hard sell to many conservatives. They were dismayed at the idea of expanding an entitlement program that was already facing serious financial problems in the next 20 years. They wanted bigger changes in Medicare — and Mr. Bush did, too. Tension Within the Parties By the winter of 2002-03, the administration agreed to set aside $400 billion for a 10-year Medicare plan — a powerful inducement to act. But Mr. Bush insisted that any Medicare law had to include the broader structural reforms that conservatives believed could save money and improve benefits in the long haul. Mr. Bush and his allies were pushing a system in which many more beneficiaries obtained all their medical care — not just their drug benefits — through private health plans, which would receive a fixed sum from the government. That was a striking departure for the traditional government insurance program, in which doctors and hospitals are reimbursed for their services according to rates set by the government. One of the tensions within the Republican Party throughout 2003 was how much of this broader 'reform' needed to be in the legislation. More pragmatic politicians feared any legislation that seemed to be forcing older Americans to leave traditional Medicare, which is still immensely popular, and join private health plans. More conservative politicians pushed back. As the Senate began to move on Medicare legislation, Democrats had tensions of their own. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and others, argued that Democrats should work with Republicans and seize the opportunity to pass drug legislation. The logic was simple: get something passed, lock in the $400 billion and improve it later. The Senate passed a Medicare drug bill in June 2003, with substantial Democratic support. A Complicated Compromise The dynamics were different in the much more conservative House. House leaders struggled, repeatedly, to prevent a large-scale rebellion on the right; the Medicare bill initially squeaked through the House in June 2003 by just one vote. After that, the last thing many House Republicans wanted, when they began negotiations with the Senate, was a bill that moved to the left. Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, then the Democratic leader and a member of the negotiating team, said, 'Those of us with different views were first, not heard, and then physically locked out.' Mr. Thomas, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, dismissed that notion, saying the Democrats interested in reaching a deal — Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Senator Breaux of Louisiana — were welcomed into the room. Another crucial player was AARP, which was also eager for a deal. The final legislation reflects the complicated compromises of those last frenzied months of negotiation. Conservatives insisted on an array of incentives in the bill to attract more private insurers and inject more competition into Medicare. Representative Paul D. Ryan, an influential young Republican from Wisconsin, said he personally called several major insurance executives in the days before the final vote to make sure they would participate in the new program. But AARP and other groups insisted that the traditional Medicare program be protected from a competition rigged to favor private plans. Many lawmakers, who otherwise disdained the market-oriented approach, were drawn to the bill because of its substantial benefits for low-income elderly Americans. Other lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, were drawn by the legislation's new assistance for rural areas. Piece by piece, the legislation grew. 'You really had to fold into this final product many different views,' said Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, a longtime supporter of a drug benefit. 'You had a cross between those who wanted a government-run program and a government delivery system, and those who wanted it totally private or not at all.' The number of lawmakers who said they were voting for the legislation with misgivings was striking. In the end, the bill passed the House, but only after the roll call vote was held open three hours while Republican leaders muscled together a majority. The bill passed the Senate more comfortably, although most Democrats, including Mr. Kennedy, voted against it. The partisan atmosphere was poisonous. Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, an expert on Medicare and a former Congressional budget director, said in a recent interview, 'We have in this country a long tradition of passing seriously flawed legislation, and then spending the next decade trying to fix it, to the extent possible.' Already, lawmakers in both parties are reviewing the rollout of this program, which many say has been handled badly. Even moderates who supported the legislation are put off by the complexity of the new benefits. 'There's just way too many plans,' said Mr. Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. Many conservatives say most of the structural changes they wanted to hold down costs were jettisoned in the legislative process. 'Horrible,' is how John Goodman, a health adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000, describes it today. A Difficult Transition The partisan wars over Medicare are, if anything, intensifying. Many Republicans say the relentless Democratic critique has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'What I find ironic is the Democrats and the labor unions chose to trash this law for two full years, and then in the 11th hour say we need to extend the signup because people are confused,' Mr. Thomas said. 'Who produced the confusion?' He also faults the news media for highlighting those complaints rather than the accomplishments of the program. Polls show that older Americans remain skeptical. In the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, only 14 percent of Americans 55 and older said they expected their prescription drugs to cost less by the end of Mr. Bush's second term than they do today. Many outside analysts say it is too soon to render judgment on the program. Administration officials say the program is already working for the majority of beneficiaries. With a transition this large, people need time to adjust, to learn their way around a new market, said Mark McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. John C. Rother, policy director for AARP, said: 'My own view is it's going to be bumpy and sloppy, but it's going to work. People will work their way through their choices, and the number of plans will consolidate.' Mr. Reischauer, the Urban Institute leader, voiced the realpolitik that animated so much of the support for this plan: 'I'd make the case that it's a lot better health policy than what we had before,' he said, meaning no drug benefit at all. Others wonder whether the system could have done better.

Subject: Holding Fast to a Policy of Tax Cutting From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 05:53:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/politics/07assess.html?ex=1296968400&en=1618224f9abfffd4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 Holding Fast to a Policy of Tax Cutting By ROBIN TONER WASHINGTON — George W. Bush ran for office as a 'compassionate conservative,' arguing that Americans did not have to choose between huge tax cuts and a government that would do its part to address social needs like education and health care. Now into his sixth year in the White House, Mr. Bush offered a budget on Monday that showed more clearly than ever the inexorable limits of that political promise. Mr. Bush is asking Congress, first and foremost, to make his tax cuts permanent and to increase spending on national security, while looking for savings in popular domestic programs like Medicare and vocational education. The tradeoffs, to his critics, are achingly clear, and unfair. Mr. Bush's budget began an ideologically charged debate in a midterm election year, with his party's control of Congress at stake. Democrats said Mr. Bush was proposing spending reductions that went well beyond fat to preserve his tax cuts for the affluent. 'This is cutting lean, muscular programs,' said Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee quickly dispatched talking points tailored to hot Senate races. 'White House budget forces Santorum to choose between Pennsylvania and Bush,' said one set of talking points focused on Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a Republican facing a difficult re-election fight. 'Pennsylvania could lose millions in law enforcement, education, health care dollars.' Republicans countered that failure to renew the tax cuts would mean a dangerous tax increase that would threaten the health of the economy. 'The most important thing we can do with our federal budget is to keep a good, strong, growing economy generating jobs,' said Joshua B. Bolten, the White House budget director. Mr. Bush's marching orders were simple, Mr. Bolten added — to 'focus on national priorities and tighten our belts elsewhere.' Mr. Bush has never fit easily into any category when it comes to his philosophy of government. He has been called a big-government conservative, a supply-sider and, by conservatives who despair of his unwillingness to get even tougher on domestic spending, a spendthrift. To many Democrats, he appears intent on extending and expanding his tax cuts precisely to create the situation the government faces now, leaving it to choose between tolerating large deficits or cutting into domestic programs in a way that begins to alter the social contract. Even now, the dissonance has not been fully resolved. The Bush administration is rolling out the biggest expansion of Medicare in 40 years — the prescription drug benefit enacted in 2003 — but at the same time calling for billions in reductions in projected payments to hospitals and other Medicare providers over the next five years. Still, the new budget underscores the consistent and paramount importance of tax cuts in the Bush philosophy. His first term cuts affected more money than any other initiative undertaken in his presidency, including the costs thus far of the war in Iraq. All told, including tax incentives for health care programs and the extension of other tax breaks that are likely to be taken up by Congress, the White House budget calls for nearly $300 billion in tax cuts over the next five years, and $1.5 trillion over the next 10 years. Most of that lost revenue would be the result of extending Mr. Bush's tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which reduced the income tax rates, offered generous new breaks to families and businesses, and slashed taxes on investment income. Democrats assert that the country simply cannot afford extending all those tax cuts, especially since their benefits would go largely to upper income people. But administration officials argued again on Monday that the nation's economy had suffered serious shocks over the past five years, from the terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, and that Mr. Bush's tax policies had played a crucial role in preserving economic growth. In other words, the 'belt-tightening' must come elsewhere. Mr. Bush proposed an array of savings in domestic programs, including big reductions or cuts in 141 programs. Critics asserted those reductions would do little to ease the deficit even as they imposed real hardship on some people, constituting pain for little gain. Gene B. Sperling, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, compared it to a man who leases three fully loaded Hummers, finds it stretches his family's budget to the breaking point, and decides his family has to start buying cheaper peanut butter. 'They're trying to create a framework where it seems the government can't do anything dramatic on child poverty or helping people between jobs because there's too much discretionary spending,' Mr. Sperling said. 'And their own numbers show that's flat out wrong.' With the deficit expected to be more than $400 billion this year, and having made clear that he does not intend to be lured into negotiations about scaling back his tax cuts, Mr. Bush is increasingly responding to pressure from conservatives to exert more discipline on domestic spending. His budget did win some praise from influential conservatives like Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas. 'Just calling for entitlement spending reform is a step in the right direction,' Mr. Hensarling said. In an election year that could turn on the enthusiasm of his party's conservative base, Mr. Bush is clearly happy to be identified as a budget cutter. But whether his party has the stomach in an election year to push ahead with Medicare trims — always a difficult issue at the grassroots level, where local doctors and hospitals loom large — is another question. Among those lining up to oppose the Medicare spending restrictions were the major hospital associations and the AARP, formidable political lobbies. And even within the ranks of Republicans, there was some immediate opposition. Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, said she was 'disappointed and even surprised' at the proposed restrictions in Medicare and Medicaid, which she said would 'dramatically affect people's access to care' in Maine.

Subject: A Trillion Little Pieces From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 05:52:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/07/opinion/07tue1.html?ex=1296968400&en=6469a3d2edfe7951&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 7, 2006 A Trillion Little Pieces President Bush's $2.77 trillion budget is fiction masquerading as fact, a governmental version of the made-up memoirs that have been denounced up and down the continent lately. The spending proposal is built around the pretense that the same House and Senate that are set to consider a record deficit of $423 billion will now impose a virtual freeze on everything other than Pentagon and homeland security outlays. The budget writers even fantasized an end to Social Security's lump-sum death benefit — a whopping $255 per recipient — as if Congress would dare to do something so heartless and easy to exploit in an election year. The point of all these imaginary financial projections is to give the president leeway to cement in place hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts the nation can ill afford and does not need. The cuts were made temporary in the first place because there was no way to even pretend that budgets could be balanced in the future with such an enormous loss of revenue. Now, to pay for his top priorities — the military and tax cuts — the president is relying on proposed spending cuts. While Congress will never make some of them, it may make others, but only at the peril of the poor and the middle class. Those cuts include basic needs in education, environmental protection, medical research, low-income housing for the elderly and the disabled, community policing, and supplemental food for the needy. The budget is steeped in campaign-year pretensions, billboarding $65 billion in 'savings' across the next five years — more than half of it in Medicare — even as tax revenue is further choked. A Congress up for re-election should be wary of taking that path, particularly as the open-ended costs of the Iraq war dwarf all promised savings. Mr. Bush was praised last week for calling for an end to dependency on oil imports without dragging out the ill-advised — and meaningless — administration fixation on oil drilling in protected parts of Alaska. Yet there it is, back again in the budget. There is little new in the plan, except for small but worthy initiatives that would be paid for with cuts in equally useful programs already on the books. The president's plan was, on the whole, depressingly familiar. The administration that produced shattering deficits is at it again. Even the fiction was plagiarized from failed budgets of the past.

Subject: 'fair' tax From: Jon Face To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 12:55:15 (EST) Email Address: familyguyantiflag@yahoo.com Message: I have been hearing alot of people talk about the national sales tax -- the so-called 'fair tax'. I have been unable to find any good information about it. Specifically, I am looking for a critique of the national sales tax from a progressive tax perspective. Does anybody have any information they can point me towards? Thanks!

Subject: Re: 'fair' tax From: Mik To: Jon Face Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 15:52:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I think your next best bet is to literally turn to your economics text book. The 'political concept' of GST being a fair tax is from the principle that it affects everyone. Certain inferior goods that are a necessity for the poor may have a zero rating on the tax value. And certain luxury goods may even have an extra form of GST placed on top. From this point of view the tax can be seen as a 'fairer' tax. From my studies on our version of GST (called Value Added Tax - VAT) Playing with the GST doesn't really affect the final price. It obviously has to do with the elasticity of the product and the whether we are looking at the short run over the long run (oh and the amount of GST adjustment). So in other words, when the VAT/GST was dropped on milk - in the short run, there was a drop in price - how significant was the drop - well apparently quite significant to the poor. BUT as economics teaches us - the price will be set at a level that maximises revenue and meets the supply-demand curve intersection. So in a short matter of time, the price of milk slowly creeped back to where it was before the GST/VAT was removed. When GST/VAT was increased by 1%, business came out protesting. But within a short span of time, the prices of particularly luxury goods came down to where they were before the GST increase. (which was quite surprising as I would have thought price stickiness would have kicked in). In essence, GST/VAT appears (in my opinion) to be a good form of tax revenue. Adjusting the GST level by minor percentage points should be for the intention of improving revenue collection (whether up or down) and not for any form of greater economic benefit. I could be wrong though.

Subject: Re: 'fair' tax From: Mik To: Jon Face Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 17:00:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Start off (I guess) with the Conservative Party of Canada who will be lowering the GST and their reasoning: http://www.conservative.ca/EN/2023/36862

Subject: Mik make me understand - Im confused From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 01:07:08 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: People are very irrational - they often do things for social or other reasons that are very detrimental because they have bought into the WRONG MEMES for survival - Emma has taught me with Jared Diamond. He talked about nordic folks that lived among the eskimoes but they wouldn't eat fish for some reason and kept trying to raise cows - so thier society died and they starved to death eating their last cows down to thier hooves - while the eskimoes kept eating fish and lived on - check this out: http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ Foregone Pareto improvements? Tyler Cowen In Kenya, four million people are facing hunger due to severe drought. A New Zealand dog food manufacturer offered to donate 6,000 emergency packs of dog food mixture to help feed Kenyan orphans. A Kenyan government spokesman said: 'We appreciate the offer, but we dismiss it as culturally insulting.' That is from Mahalanobis, courtesy of Silly Economist. February 5, 2006 at 07:20 AM in Food and Drink | Permalink | TrackBack (0) Me and one of my bum friends were starving to death out in the woods camping once - I had brought a few MRE's - I whipped mine out and ate that stuff and boy was it good and nutritious - beef terryaki - that guy looked at me and said I am not eating anything like that - only GOOD FOOD for me - lets go back into town and find a KFC - my jaw was gaping in amazement - he died a few years later - weak heart I am told, I bet from lack of proper nutrition - food all around him but he was too GOOD to eat it if it didn't come from starbucks or red lobster!! I meet too many like this - my sis will make that house payment for her big nice mcmansion before she will go to the dentist or make a medical payment or what have you (she is shopping at low class target and walmart now for her goods - trying to keep that from the rest of the family - no more macy's and such for her - hehe) - I dont understand it but I am surrounded by 'shopping machines' who seem to make very dumb decisions to me to thier own long term detriment. Unbelievable how the marketing Dorks have sold so many hook line and sinker on what happiness and success is. I have tried to get my sis to let me take the nieces to some science centers and aquariums and kennedy space center - watch some scifi - they went a long way changing star trek to make it politcally correct with VOYAGER to attract all these diverse people - what a total failure - I try to get them to perform some science experiments - even to use economics education in thier personal shopping adventures - oh my god she has a problem with this - much better for them to go to gym class and watch fear factor so maybe they can make 50K being an athletic contestant one day - I just can't relate. She gets on the net to watch funny commercials she missed on TV and download martha stewart recipes - no other purpose. Keep watching fear factor, I am quite certain one day in the future my nieces will be on there trying to make 50K eating rats and jumping between ibeams because they won't be making money in our knowledge worker/information society :( Ugg why am I so negative? hehe They are the types that if they were starving to death - they would not eat dog food to save thier life - Mik or Emma why why why?

Subject: Re: Mik make me understand - Im confused From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 12:05:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny, Uhmmm geez, after reading your post, I think I should slit my rists and get it over with ;-) I too am guilty of being negative. I think a little perspective on the issues we face: ... I guess. Issues such as watching Fear Factor or downloading commercials off the internet, I think are relatively minor. Issues where people die due to stupidity are relatively major. However, the is a relationship. If the person watching Fear Factor would instead watch a documentary or read up about the issues, then that person may in fact vote for or convince a politician who would really do somethng about the major problems. The major problems burn me the most, because there are people out there living in misery and desperation. If I can just give some perspective of the world we live in - for all the negativity there is around, let's turn back the clock to say the 1800's. The 1800’s saw the ‘Victorian era’ come into full swing. This was a brave new time with absolutely the most amazing break throughs happening on a regular basis. Inventions that literally rocked the world were happening – the motor car, the telephone, medical advances like never before. During those times, Europe was industrializing and life was supposedly getting better. However, pollution levels were simply incredible and growing - on one cold night half of London fell sick from smoke inhalation. Deforestation was happening at an incredible rate, there was absolutely no consideration for the concept of conservation. Animal protection was non-existent, and during that period animals were literally hunted to extinction (look up the Kwagga as an example). Women’s rights were… well virtually non existent. Women were ranked somewhere higher than you pet dog, not allowed to vote and heaven forbid if they stand up to a man. Labour rights were non-existent, London employed child labour to do so many seriously dangerous jobs. On the “Minor Level” the average person didn’t care about any of the environmental or social issues. Take a look at European architecture and think to yourself, if that building had to be built today, how much would it cost? In essence, the social disparity between rich and poor was outrageous. The rich were truly wealthy to the point that they could afford to put up buildings with absolutely amazing handcrafted detail. Who did all the hand crafting?… the poor of course. But the rich didn’t go out of their way uplift the poor and as a result we saw the largest mass migrations of our times. As a typical example – the Irish and Italians left in droves. And for the next century that didn’t change much. The amount of genocides, mass hungers that went on is simply beyond imagination, but it wasn’t reported. Okay in that perspective look at where we were and how far we have come. We truly have a mixed society that every-so-often progresses by one huge step. The most recent step is the legalization of gay marriage. Keep in mind that marriage is a tradition that crosses all religions and cultural groups for literally thousands of years, and has always been between a man and a woman. Today, that has changed. We will always get those absolute mind numbing stupidities, but we some how manage to take another step forward. I would like to be positive about this. My fear is that the problems in the developing world are increasing faster than we can deal with. We may well be facing a huge wave that is going to come crashing down. I will try do my bit, but tonight I may go home and eat my KFC and have to wonder… is my contribution really good or really bad?

Subject: Re: Mik make me understand - Im confused From: Poyetas To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 10:49:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE SELFISH IDIOTS!!!!

Subject: Re: Mik make me understand - Im confused From: Poyetas To: Poyetas Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 10:59:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Harper is truly an idiot, The fact that the country is hauling in record surpluses in excess of inflation and income growth means absolutely nothing! The question is what they are doing with the surpluses. Paying down debt, financing infrastructure, universal health insurance....etc. The list goes on. What IS important is that Canada is in the best financial condition of the G8. Jesus, why is it so difficult to understand how sensitive our financial structure is?

Subject: Re: Mik make me understand - Im confused From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 13:42:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hey I agree. I see it in another way. This is going to be one of Canada's 'glory periods' and who ever rules Canada during this period will most likely go down in the record books as one of the greatest leaders in history. I think Harper knows this and this is his only chance to get into that spotlight. He took a big gamble in the no-confidence motion and it paid off. The sad part is that, I believe, Martin is the true architect behind Canada's success. And Martin may not be recognised for his contribution. As for Harper's actions - dude, I'm sorry to say this but, after me living in a country where the change of government can result in my life being so severily harmed that I would literally have to run away - I look at Canadian politics as a storm in a tea cup.

Subject: Nine Short Scenes of Women in Crisis From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:36:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/movies/redcarpet/15hold.html?ex=1294981200&en=769127dc880db8bb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 15, 2006 Nine Short Scenes of Women in Crisis By STEPHEN HOLDEN EACH of the nine brief scenes in Rodrigo García's 'Nine Lives' is a little epiphany that revolves around a different woman under emotional stress. Together they add up to a collection of wrenching, minutely observed moments that suggest Chekhov short stories. Each is written, acted and directed with such exquisite calibration of tone, subtext and body language that the performances seem less like acting than fleeting, revelatory moments of real life captured on film. The supermarket in which Diana (Robin Wright Penn) and Damian (Jason Isaacs), former lovers now pushing 40, run into each other by chance couldn't be a more banal setting for a shattering reunion. In the fluorescent glare, with barely audible Muzak humming in the background, they reconnect and within minutes dive into the murky emotional depths of their past. Like the other eight stories in the suite, 'Diana' is only about 10 minutes long and filmed in real time. But by the end we've learned more about the inner lives of Diana and Damian than is revealed about most couples in a feature-length movie. Even before Diana, in the final months of pregnancy, spots her ex, traces of anger and disappointment are visible in her face, as she impatiently pushes her shopping cart through the aisles. When they catch up with each other next to the canned soup section, they exchange friendly greetings and chitchat. Both are now married. Diana is expecting her baby in August. Damian, handsome in a lightweight hooded jacket, is back in the city after several years and is about to move to a new apartment with his wife, Lisa. Their conversation ends as Damian extends his hand, and with a tense, too-bright smile, Diana playfully bats it away. The camera trails her from behind as she moves on and then, unable to resist a backward look, turns around to reveal her stricken face. When they bump into each other again moments later in the produce section, Damian makes the leap back in time. 'Actually, I think about you all the time - the stuff we did, the things that happened to us, the people we were - it was lovely for a long time, wasn't it?' he says in a tone of urgent romantic gravity. Diana stiffens. 'It was lovely by fits and starts,' she corrects, adding, 'I think we should talk about something else, if we're going to talk.' They retreat into chitchat in which he tells her about his job as producer of a current affairs show for public radio. Diana's head has lowered, as though she can hardly bear to look at him. 'You never really opened up to me, you know,' she blurts. 'That's not true,' he replies. 'It is true,' she says. 'You made me sad for a long time.' Trying to lighten up, she remarks: 'I'm not hurt, and I'm not angry. It's how I remember it. But none of it matters anymore anyway, right?' By now Diana is ready to move on, but Damian, abandoning his cart, insists on accompanying her. 'Are you going to have kids?' she asks. 'No,' he answers. 'Why?' 'I can't,' he says tonelessly. 'I'm sterile.' At a loss for words, she laughs nervously, then apologizes. When they reach the wine section, Damian takes charge and chooses one red and one white as though he had done it countless times in the years when they were together. Diana observes how they're walking and talking 'like lovebirds,' then covers her face with one hand as her feelings well up. 'Five minutes with you and I always feel like my life is a figment of my imagination,' she confesses, exasperated. 'You've just always been this thing that swallows me.' She pauses. 'I've got to go.' She hurries off, then suddenly turns back, anguished. 'You can't just come up to me after a hundred years, married, and tell me that you think about me. You can't do that,' she says. 'Why not?' 'Do you love your wife?' 'Yeah. Of course I do. You love your husband. And this is different because it's us. We're Damian and Diana. Nothing's going to change it. You might as well accept. You know it's true.' Diana pushes her cart away furiously. But their need to connect drives them to turn around and face each other one last time. 'Damian,' she whispers under her breath. Approaching her, he gently places his hands on the sides of her belly, stoops and softly, reverently, kisses her stomach. For a long moment, they touch their foreheads together, looking beseechingly into each other's eyes. He almost speaks, then stops, and they break apart. She stands there for a moment, her eyes smarting with tears before she continues to shop, dropping a bottle of dishwashing liquid into her cart. When Diana can't bear it anymore, she abandons her cart and races down the aisles frantically searching for him. Rushing to the supermarket entrance, she peers in both directions, but he's gone. Blackout.

Subject: Consent of the Governed From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:32:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05sullivan.html?ex=1296795600&en=e7583147b680aabe&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Consent of the Governed By KATHLEEN M. SULLIVAN ON the first Monday in October, the United States Supreme Court opened its term under the gavel of the new Chief Justice, John G. Roberts Jr., President Bush's first nominee to the court. In promising that the justices he appoints 'will not legislate from the bench and will strictly interpret the Constitution,' Bush has faithfully recited the mantra that conservatives regularly use to signal their belief that the Supreme Court should defer to democratic decision making. But in fact, conservative justices have frequently invoked the Constitution in recent years to strike down laws passed by representatives of the people, especially statutes enacted by Congress. At last month's Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on the nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr., Democrats and Republicans agreed on little except the view that the court presided over by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist had struck down too many of their own statutes. For example, the Rehnquist court held invalid such popular legislation as the Gun Free School Zones Act, the Violence Against Women Act and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act as intrusions by the federal government upon the powers of the states. The Rehnquist court also voted to immunize state governments from federal lawsuits on issues ranging from patent infringement to mismanagement of seaports to discrimination against public employees on the basis of disability or age. Each of these cases was decided by a 5-to-4 vote. And in each decision, Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed to the court in 1994 by President Clinton, was among the dissenters. In his clear and elegant new book, 'Active Liberty: Interpreting Our Democratic Constitution,' based on his 2004 Tanner lectures at Harvard University (where he taught before becoming a federal judge), Breyer offers an extended reflection on why he would have deferred to Congress and upheld the statute in each of these and other cases, as well as why he sometimes finds statutes trumped by a constitutional right. For Breyer, the guiding theme in constitutional interpretation, whether in upholding statutes or enforcing rights, should be enabling democracy — 'a form of government in which all citizens share the government's authority, participating in the creation of public policy.' Such democratic participation is what Breyer means by the 'active liberty' of the book's title. He takes his cue less from any particular provision of the Constitution than from the spirit of the document as a whole, and from Thomas Jefferson's reminder in the Declaration of Independence that, in our system, governments must derive 'their just powers from the consent of the governed.' Yet the fair-minded, balanced and dispassionate tone of 'Active Liberty' cannot conceal its startling premise: that self-professed conservatives who espouse textualism, originalism and strict constructionism often produce results that in fact turn our democratic tradition on its head. It may come as a surprise to some readers to encounter a Clinton nominee — indeed, one of only six justices appointed to the court by Democratic presidents in the past half-century — arguing so powerfully for 'judicial modesty' and 'judicial restraint' in the face of decisions by a court so long dominated by Republican appointees. The great strength of 'Active Liberty' lies in Breyer's detailed application of his general thesis to particular recent controversies. In the federalism cases mentioned above, for example, Breyer would have allowed Congress to regulate in matters like gun possession and domestic violence under a broad reading of the federal commerce power. This, he explains, is because in enacting such laws, 'the public has participated in the legislative process at the national level,' and democratic participation is discouraged when Congress holds 'elaborate public hearings only to find its legislative work nullified.' Justices like Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Connor, who has held state legislative office, have argued that invalidating such federal legislation in fact shifts democratic decision making to the state or local level. Breyer disagrees. In a passage candidly criticizing some of the court's recent decisions as 'retrograde,' he notes that a number of decisions made in the name of states' rights 'paradoxically threaten to shift regulatory activity from the state and local to the federal level.' By telling federal officials they may not enlist county sheriffs to check the backgrounds of handgun purchasers, for instance, the court in effect forces Congress to expand the 'federal enforcement bureaucracy' in order to achieve the same ends. By the same token, Breyer writes approvingly of court decisions that in his view advance democratic values against claims that the statutes in question violate individual rights. His two main examples are recent challenges to campaign finance regulation and race preferences in university admissions. Breyer praises the court's 2003 decision in McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, in which he joined a 5-to-4 majority upholding the McCain-Feingold law's limits on campaign advertisements focused on special issues and on soft money contributions. The statute was challenged on First Amendment grounds. Conceding that McCain-Feingold interferes with speech, Breyer argues that such laws also enhance speech by democratizing 'the influence that money can bring to bear upon the electoral process.' In his view, they 'facilitate a conversation among ordinary citizens that will encourage their informed participation.' Seeing First Amendment interests on both sides, he finds that enhancing the active liberty of speaking together justifies limiting the negative liberty of each of us speaking as we please. Breyer likewise justifies upholding race preferences in university admissions on the ground that such policies enhance democracy. In 2003, in Grutter v. Bollinger, he joined a 5-to-4 majority rejecting a challenge to the University of Michigan Law School's use of racial criteria in admissions. He acknowledges that different theories of equality competed in the case, but holds that democratic values tipped the balance: 'a racially diverse educational environment,' by diversifying the leaders whom the university produces, helps to 'facilitate the functioning of democracy' and foster 'effective participation in today's diverse civil society.' The overwhelming majority of examples in the book come out the same way: in favor of the choices made by elected decision makers. Breyer offers only a few examples that would go the other way — invalidating the work of a political majority in recognition of a constitutional right. He would favor, for instance, Nike's right to publicly contest allegations that it runs sweatshops; a radio station's right to broadcast an illegally intercepted recording of union leaders' threats of violence; and taxpayers' right not to finance public subsidies to religious schools. In each of these cases Breyer sees enforcement of the constitutional right as serving to strengthen democracy — by enhancing public debate or preventing debilitating religious divisiveness. In this respect, 'Active Liberty' echoes John Hart Ely's 1980 masterwork, 'Democracy and Distrust.' Ely argued that judicial intervention in democratic outcomes could be justified only if it would make democracy itself function better. His examples included allowing oppressed minorities to gain representation and permitting dissent as a way to help clear the channels of political change. Breyer goes farther than Ely, however, by applying his theory to statutory as well as constitutional interpretation. He explains why it is best to interpret statutes in the light of testimony before Congress and legislative history rather than their literal texts: 'the interpretative process' should make 'an effort to locate, and remain faithful to, the human purposes embodied in a statute.' HERE Breyer takes on arguments made by Justice Antonin Scalia, who has articulated a very different theory of adjudication. Scalia, like Breyer a former law professor, set forth his principles for deciding cases in his 1997 book, 'A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law.' There Scalia argued that the rule of law should be a law of rules, and that reliance on literal text and original meaning are the only methods that can prevent judges from descending into hopeless subjectivity. On the current court, these arguments are sometimes echoed by Justice Clarence Thomas. Breyer offers a methodical rebuttal to such arguments, taking them seriously but contending that they are wrong. Clear rules are often unfair, he argues, as when petty criminals get life sentences for stealing a golf club or a videotape under a regime of 'three strikes and you're out.' And he suggests that textualism and originalism themselves inevitably involve subjective judicial choices, since the views of the constitution's framers or the canons of statutory construction so often point in more than one direction. While rejecting originalism and textualism, Breyer eagerly embraces another conservative tradition — that of jurists like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Harlan F. Stone, Felix Frankfurter and Learned Hand, to whom he attributes 'an attitude that hesitates to rely upon any single theory or grand view of law, of interpretation or of the Constitution,' but relies instead upon a catholic combination of 'language, history, tradition, precedent, purpose and consequences.' Now, with Samuel Alito succeeding the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, it remains to be seen who will stand at the center of the court in the future and command its vote when it is narrowly divided. With 'Active Liberty,' Stephen Breyer has offered a theory of democratic pragmatism that is very likely to play a powerful role in deciding such controversies. Everyone interested in the trajectory of the new Roberts court should surely read it. Kathleen M. Sullivan is a professor of constitutional law at Stanford Law School.

Subject: Nebraska's Nostalgia Trap From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:21:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/opinion/05Dooling.html?ex=1296795600&en=5954b6705db87999&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Nebraska's Nostalgia Trap By RICHARD DOOLING Omaha ON average, Nebraska's economy is doing just fine. But a man whose head is in the oven and whose feet are in the freezer takes no comfort in knowing that his average body temperature is perfectly normal. In the same vein, a casual glance at a graph of Nebraska's population growth shows slow, steady increases, going all the way back to 1900, and conceals the fact that 74 of Nebraska's 93 counties are in extremis, with lower populations today than they had in 1920. Over a third of the state's 1.7 million residents live in greater Omaha, which is booming by many measures, including population growth. According to Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University here, Omaha is growing faster than Des Moines, Kansas City and St. Louis. What about the rest of Nebraska? Well, it's big: over 77,000 square miles (about 10 percent bigger than the six New England states combined) and 450 miles wide, roughly the distance from Boston to the District of Columbia. Most of the economic growth occurs along the thoroughfares that form what local economists call 'the fishhook': Highway 275 from Omaha to Norfolk being the hook, and Interstate 80 from Omaha to Colorado being the stem. Outside of Omaha and the fishhook, large parts of Nebraska are arguably in trouble. The dismal statistic that trends lower, year after year, for many of these struggling counties, is population. Farms double in size with a regularity that rivals the seasons, while, almost in tandem, the number of farming families falls by half. The costs for schools, roads and police and fire departments remain relatively constant, but the bodies paying taxes, buying goods and developing land keep disappearing. County officials call it rural flight, brain drain or even mass migration, but despite the alarums, nobody has found a way to stop the excursions. States like Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wisconsin have tried to fight the trend by restricting the corporate consolidation of farms: Keep the farmers on their land by stopping vast corporations from buying 10 farms and consolidating them into one, which is basically what keeps happening. In 1982, Nebraska went even farther and embedded a ban on corporations owning and operating farms — Initiative 300 — in its Constitution. Last December, a federal judge in Omaha ruled that the ban violates the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act (because the ban also requires that the person owning most of the farmland also supply most of the daily labor). Some Nebraskans hope the ruling will be overturned, but that seems unlikely. Opponents of these laws, which purport to protect family farmers, view them as economic nostalgia — like trying to protect the local paper by banning Internet news sites and mandating that the newspaper be delivered by a towheaded kid on a bicycle. If rank protectionism is not the solution, then what is? Doug German, executive director of Legal Aid of Nebraska, who lives in the central part of the state, just off the fishhook, in Eustis (pop. 425), and provides legal services to the casualties of the state's poorer counties, agrees that rural Nebraska is at a 'tipping point.' The antidote to its economic depopulation, he believes, does not lie in bringing Intel or Toyota factories to the heartland, but in Nebraskans resolutely blooming where they are planted and developing micro industries capable of flourishing anywhere, with the help of computer and Internet technologies. I hope Mr. German is right, but I wonder what kind of micro industry will save the likes of Arthur County (half the size of Rhode Island), where the population peaked at 1,412 in 1920, was 442 in 2000, and 402 in 2004? In these parts, during election season, the signs along the road say 'Vote for Helen, County Assessor,' because there's only one Helen, and she's running unopposed. Instead of micro industries, a cynical futurist might see mega-farms, owned by global corporations, and farmed by armies of robot combines, controlled by global positioning satellite technology from offices in Omaha.

Subject: Chicago, Upside Down From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:21:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/opinion/05urrea.html?ex=1296795600&en=cf27b9614024fceb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Chicago, Upside Down By LUIS ALBERTO URREA Naperville, Ill. CHICAGO is once more hunched against the winter, though this winter feels strange. It's cold, but it's not Chicago cold: we keep tottering back into the 40's and 50's. Rain storms in January in place of snow. As happy as we are to escape a deep freeze, strange things are happening. A mysterious rust-colored powder, for example, sifted out of the sky one night and covered parked cars on the street. Chicago police officials on the late news couldn't explain it. They had other things to worry about, like the peculiar shift in the murder patterns in Chicagoland. The murder rate in the inner city has dropped. The rate of killings has increased, however, in the suburbs. This is attributed to the movement of poverty. Whereas 'white flight' was a pattern in the city for decades, Chicago is reaping the benefits of the sly social engineering that has taken place in areas like the South Loop around the University of Illinois. Upscale communities tied to the university have systematically replaced tenements. Farther south, stalwart symbols of urban decay like the Cabrini Green housing project are giving way to brighter, shinier developments. As one of my students noted, 'It's awful white up in here, and I don't mean snow.' Displaced members of blighted urban communities (what is a housing project but a vertical village, after all) have been shuffled off to the west and south. Never to return. Once the barrio and 'hood have established colonies in country-club land, aunties and nephews and homies follow. The center of the city 'reclaims' itself, and the untidy wave of need moves elsewhere. Gangs? Drugs? Homelessness? It's Joliet's problem now. The Chicago Tribune faithfully reports more weirdness. In 2005, 65,000 jobs came into Illinois; unemployment held steady at 5.5 percent. This news seems to be good. Why, then, did 24,500 applicants lay siege to a new Wal-Mart last month, looking for 325 jobs? Could it be that these job-seekers are the same people rendered invisible until events like Hurricane Katrina force them onto rooftops? The 24,500 formerly invisible applicants formed the largest job-seeking force in the company's history. Some local politicians suggested that Wal-Mart was faking the numbers. Wal-Mart countered by displaying 22 boxes of applications. A public theater of the absurd rules. Curiouser, perhaps, is the news that the vast majority of those applicants came from inside city limits — even though local officials kept this new Wal-Mart just outside of Chicago proper, refusing the expected $1 million annual tax revenue for the eternally struggling South Side. Too much competition for local business, they say. Though there should be plenty more competition for jobs in June, when Wal-Mart finally opens its first store in Chicago, this one on the West Side. In that neighborhood, the applicant line will probably look like the hundreds of teenagers waiting to audition for 'American Idol.' Perhaps the suburban Wal-Mart will draw crime and murder to it. My police officer friends are still working out the patterns of the homicide migration. Of course, they have their own problems in this healthy economy. Jake, an officer who served in Iraq and is now back on the Chi-town streets, points out that he and his colleagues pay for their own equipment. Just like policemen in Tijuana. And the salaries are tight — tight enough that many younger officers work two or three jobs to make ends meet. Our guardians shovel snow, do yard work and landscape when they're not fielding the effects of the urban mutations that seem, as ever, driven by money. Well, it's February now. They're saying we'll be back down to five degrees within the week. Maybe things will settle back down. We can hunch our shoulders and feel normal again. Don't count on it. Luis Alberto Urrea, the author of 'The Hummingbird's Daughter,' is a professor of English at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

Subject: Above It All in Colorado From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:20:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/opinion/05Houston.html?ex=1296795600&en=9289d93143f3dab4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Above It All in Colorado By PAM HOUSTON Creede, Colo. MAYBE it's growing up under a bowl of bluebird-colored sky, or among groves of quaking aspens, or surrounded by snow that falls and falls and never turns black. Maybe it's learning to ski double black diamond slopes at the age of 3, or the possibility inherent in 53 peaks that rise 14,000 feet above sea level. Maybe it's because the median household income in Colorado is well above the national median, and the people per square mile average is well below it, but Coloradans consistently tend toward the optimistic, rarely confuse cynicism with intelligence and are willing to articulate their hopes for the future without fear. 'Most of us came out here with little more than the shirts on our backpacks,' says Stephen Cunningham, an entrepreneur. 'We always expect this year to be better than last year, and would be shocked if that did not turn out to be the case.' I asked Stephen, and a cross section of other Coloradoans, how hopeful they were feeling in this new year, and what they were hoping for. Tory Read, a photographer and writer who came out West in 1980, is hoping to laugh a little more and work a little less, she's hoping that her mother doesn't have another stroke before she's accepted into a retirement community and she's hoping to deepen her friendships, old and new. She identifies herself as a Westerner because she believes she can continue to invent herself even though she's in her mid-40's, but admits to having that 'edgy, cynical Northeastern thing' lodged somewhere in her soul. A newcomer to Colorado, Kae Penner-Howell is hoping to find good neighbors, friends and a feeling of community. Creative director at an ad agency, she also hopes that her two college-age daughters will find fulfilling paths to work, and that the opportunities open to them will match their education's huge cost. Brian Lee Poe quietly confesses that his life is hard. Ten years ago he got tired of 'working himself to death' and began cobbling together a life that alternates between house-sitting and living in his car. Brian hopes that Colorado's next governor will make art, music and writing classes mandatory for all 12 years of public schooling. 'I've had every kind of job you can think of — shipping clerk, Air Force, post office,' he said. 'If I'd had the chance to study music and writing, I'd be making good money now. That's what every kid in school should have, a shot at figuring out what they love.' Pam Kafir, a massage therapist, dancer and mom, says she doesn't like the word hope because it suggests that the outcome is out of our control. Her goal this year is to live within her values, to find a peaceful balance between work and life. John Howard, a veterinarian in Mineral County, wants to serve his rural community honorably, and hopes the community will continue to grow enough to support him. Stephen Cunningham's hope — to provide for his family with less anxiety and more stability — was echoed by many. Stephen came to Colorado for the crystalline night skies and impenetrable granite faces but has come to value long nights around the table with friends even more than the landscape. Like many people who live within a few steps or a few miles of all the personal space they desire, Coloradans value the spirit of community and cooperation — whether in a village of a hundred or a city of a million — most of all.

Subject: Kentucky's Underground Economy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:19:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/opinion/05Mason.html?ex=1296795600&en=928e658991122e6b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Kentucky's Underground Economy By BOBBIE ANN MASON Lexington, Ky. WHEN you fly over the Appalachians of eastern Kentucky, you can see the gray scars on the mountains, pockmarks reaching far to the north and east that are the results of a kind of strip-mining called mountaintop removal. Most Kentuckians never see that part of the state because it is so isolated, and most people across the nation (which burns the premium coal from these mountains) don't know how costly their cheap electricity really is. It could break your heart to know. It takes just a dozen guys with giant D-9 bulldozers about a year to wreck a mountain. They dynamite it, then shove the shattered vegetation and topsoil (called spoil or overburden) down into the valleys, followed by chunks of bedrock. Everything in this horrific pile dies. Even the streams are buried. Every rain is a flood. Slurry ponds spill black sludge. People living near mine sites hear the cacophony of dynamite, dozers and coal trucks 24-7. Their houses flood and crack. Their children come home from school sick, covered with coal dust. The well water is black. There is a long history here of struggle against exploitation by coal companies. Now, in ever more dramatic circumstances, people are fighting to preserve their land, their homes, their communities, their cemeteries and their lives. Appalachians love the mountains fiercely, yet mining is a way of life. Many don't want to protest the destruction of their mountains for fear the region will lose jobs. But nearly two-thirds of the mining jobs in Kentucky have been lost in the past 25 years because mountaintop mining is more efficient than deep mining. The United States gets half its electricity from coal, and about a seventh of that comes from Kentucky. But coal money has not lifted eastern Kentucky out of poverty. In fact, the strip-mined counties have the highest poverty rates in the state, not much improved from when President Johnson visited about 40 years ago and declared war on poverty. Eighty percent of the coal, more than $2 billion worth, leaves the state, much of the profit going to distant corporations. The coal industry brags about reclaiming the land. It envisions factories and golf courses on flat land, and it will repeat this sunny song to anyone who will listen. But the true wealth of these flattened mountains can't be replaced. It's a loss not only to Appalachia but to the entire nation. According to Erik Reece, in 'Lost Mountain,' a new book about mountaintop mining, the Appalachians are one of a kind — there has never been a forest as diverse as this ancient mesophytic ecosystem. When the glaciers retreated, leaving a sort of strip-mined landscape, the unscathed Appalachian forests reseeded the continent. They remain the continent's seedbed, Mr. Reece says. With mountaintop removal, the ancient forests won't come back in a hurry. The fertile topsoil, which took thousands of years to form, can't be recreated. The timber that might offer economically profitable, self-sustaining industry is flung aside, along with other valuable plants, animal species and minerals. Any miracle medicines the forests might yield will be gone. It's our Brazilian rainforest. The 2006 economic outlook is bleak for the Kentucky mountains, where people's lives are secondary to coal profits, as they have been for more than a century. Eastern Kentuckians are forced to trade their heritage and their children's future for jobs now. And this ecological disaster promises to seriously harm us all if it continues at this pace. Bobbie Ann Mason is writer in residence at the University of Kentucky.

Subject: How Do You Say Shank in Mandarin? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 09:11:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/sports/playmagazine/05golfchina_rev_114_.html February 5, 2006 How Do You Say Shank in Mandarin? By CHARLES McGRATH 'Hao qiu!' your caddie is apt to murmur sweetly if you manage an even halfway decent drive after teeing off in China. Good shot! If you hit a 'bu hao' — a stinker — there will be a moment of embarrassed silence. As in the rest of Asia, caddies are mandatory everywhere in China — nobody would dream of carrying his own bag. And in China caddies are almost always women. They wear white gloves sometimes and long-billed hard hats, designed to protect them from both the sun and errant shots, and they bring to their profession a level of devotion undreamed of in the West. They tote your bag in a hand-pulled trolley, or else, like liveried footmen, they ride on a running board welded to the back of a golf cart and scurry from cart path to fairway bearing fistfuls of clubs. At the tee box, they present your driver as if it were a ceremonial sword, and after you're done, they carefully swaddle the head back in its cover. Chinese caddies do everything, in fact, except hit your shot for you. They hand you your tee; give you your yardage; fill your divots; rake your traps; mark your ball, clean it and then replace it with the logo pointing along the proper line to the hole. They also emote with you, sharing your joy, feeling your pain. When I plopped my second shot into the water on the par-5 14th hole at Sheshan Golf Club in Shanghai last fall, my caddie gave me a look of such surprise and distress it was as if I had drowned our child. Golf is now an international language, and people in China speak it everywhere, lining up their putts like Jack, following through like Freddie. You even spot them in airports, practicing their swings with invisible clubs. But the Chinese version of this language has a subtext. Golf and the imagery of golf, which you see all over, on TV commercials and highway billboards, are a kind of code for the new China, the one where the economy is growing at close to 10 percent a year and where, even though the average wage in the countryside is less than $100 a month, hordes of newly minted millionaires are not in the least embarrassed about flaunting their wealth. Much more than in America, golf in China stands for money, power and social exclusivity. For all intents and purposes, golf in China is just 20 years old. The first modern course, an Arnold Palmer design, opened in 1984. Another dozen or so were added in the decade following. But in the last 10 years the total has soared to 230, making China second in Asia in terms of golf course acreage (behind Japan), and though there is supposed to be a moratorium on constructing courses, new ones seem to spring up every month. In some ways, the most significant thing to happen to Chinese golf was the SARS epidemic of 2003, when some offices were closed for as long as six weeks and Chinese businessmen, who place great stock in personal relationships and face-to-face meetings, began making their deals outside on the fairway. Golf has now replaced karaoke as the preferred way of entertaining business clients. What all this means, though, is that golf hasn't evolved in China: it has arrived more or less full-blown, in its high-end and even slightly decadent form. If you think of the country as a kind of golf laboratory, it's one that skipped over all the populist experiments — the developmental stage of public links and pitch 'n' putt and little rural nine-holers — and went straight to the exclusive clubs and the gated golf course communities whose manicured fairways are lined with McMansions. There are no munis, just a handful of daily-fee courses, and the membership at most clubs would set you back more than it would at Winged Foot. Officially the Chinese government appears to be ambivalent about golf, which it eradicated, along with other vestiges of Western luxury and elitism, in 1949. In Shanghai, for example, where the British introduced golf to the Chinese in the 19th century and where the most famous club, Hung-Jao, was taken over by the municipal authorities and turned into a zoo, government officials are still discouraged from playing. Many do, anyway. They just use assumed names. It has been said that if Hu Jintao, the country's president, were ever photographed holding a club, a million new golfers would come leaping out of the closet. Occasionally you also hear that China is in danger of turning into Myrtle Beach, S.C., with more courses than there are players to keep them profitable. But you would never think so from visiting Chinese clubs, which teem with golfers from dawn to dusk. At Mission Hills, the country's largest golf complex, outside the city of Shenzhen, people play under the lights until two in the morning. 'You must be boss,' Wang Yuhong, the vice general manager of the Shanghai Lujiazui Golf Club, said to me one sweltering Saturday morning after watching me take a few swings with a borrowed club. The Lujiazui is not, strictly speaking, a golf club at all. It's a two-story driving range — 98 stalls — on what must be some of the most expensive real estate in the world: five acres in the heart of Shanghai's financial district, where skyscrapers sprout like weeds. All around me young men in their 20's or early 30's were flailing and slashing at balls. They all had top-of-the-line equipment and trunk-size leather golf bags stamped with the logos of Callaway, Titleist or Mizuno. Out by the 150-yard marker, a guy was pushing a hand-operated ball retriever surrounded by a protective cage. He looked a little like a gerbil on an exercise wheel, and some golfers were trying to hit him — without a great deal of success. One of the consequences of being a 20-year-old golf laboratory is that few people in the lab have grown up with the game, and most are self-taught. The average handicap at most Chinese clubs is probably 26 or 27, much higher than it would be at equivalent American clubs. And even Chinese with access to instruction sometimes resist it. 'These people are so wealthy, some of them, that they're used to getting everything they want right away,' said Linford Jacquelin, an Australian pro who teaches at the David Leadbetter Golf Academy at Mission Hills. 'Some of them are impatient about taking lessons.' Wang explained that in China the bosses were the golfing pioneers. In any office, he said, the boss is always the first to take up the game, followed by the office manager and then by ambitious employees who want to emulate him. The growth of golf in Shanghai, he added, has been directly tied to the city's growth as a world financial center. 'See those buildings?' he said, pointing to the skyscrapers out beyond the giant net stretched behind the 250-yard marker. 'They weren't here when we start.' That was in 2000, and there were hardly any golfers then, either. The few who did show up were mostly from Taiwan or Hong Kong, where golf has much older roots. But starting in 2002, Wang said, the skyscrapers began shooting up, and soon the stalls at Lujiazui were filled with eager hackers. One of them, a young man named Chow Wei, who now has quite a practiced swing, said: 'Golf is like social status. People play because they think they're rich, or because they want you to think it.' A yearly membership at Lujiazui costs about $250, which is a bargain by Chinese standards. You get to book a slot in advance, and a uniformed caddie will tote your bag to the stall, where another caddie, pushing a drinks cart, will very quickly turn up. There is also a pro shop, a restaurant and a snooker room. The place is a sort of training club, where you can park yourself while you save up the roughly $124,000 it costs to join Tomson, one of the best-known of the 15 or so clubs in the Shanghai area. Tomson, the site of the BMW Asian Open since 2004, is just 20 minutes from downtown, and from practically any spot on the course you can see the crowded cityscape and Shanghai's two most famous landmarks: the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, which looks like a shish kebab skewer with an onion in the middle, and the cloud-piercing Jin Mao Tower. But like many Chinese clubs, Tomson is otherworldly, a gated community enclosing hundreds of classical-style villas and condos, and the course itself is so manicured, so stylized, that it doesn't seem quite natural. It was designed by the Japanese architect Shunsuke Kato and resembles a giant Japanese rock garden or, in its hokier moments, a miniature golf course blown up to life size. The fairways, narrow and lined with ornamental trees, are gently mounded along the sides, and strewed around, just for looks, are lots of handsome white boulders. Hundreds of them are stacked across the fairway of the fourth hole, to replicate the Great Wall of China — there is no free drop — and in the middle of the 18th fairway there's an enormous conical pile of them, which you can hit either over or around, depending on how bold you are. This is the highest elevation by far on the golf course, and I was baffled as to its purpose. 'What is that?' I asked Aileen Zhou, an assistant manager at Tomson. 'Mount Fuji,' she said matter-of-factly. About 45 minutes away, on the city outskirts and in the shadow of a real mountain — or what passes for a mountain in the otherwise flat, scrubby landscape of the Shanghai region — is Sheshan Golf Club, the newest and most exclusive of the Shanghai clubs. According to David Townend, the general manager, 'We set out to be the first truly private and exclusive golf course in Shanghai.' Sheshan is only a year old, and had you signed on at the beginning, before ground was broken in October 2002, you could have joined for $30,000 (plus the monthly dues); current memberships go for $165,000, and there are only a few left. If Premier Golf, a bimonthly magazine published by the club, is any indication, the members tend to be corporate bigwigs, and what they are looking for is not just a place to play golf but a full-service haven: in this case, a little slice of Tuscany. The hundred or so villas and equal number of town houses surrounding the course are clad in stone, with Italian archways and terra-cotta roof tiles. There are fountains, a bell tower and an arched Tuscan bridge linking the clubhouse to the fairway on 18. The clubhouse itself, big enough to contain a Tuscan village in its entirety, includes in the locker room a more than passable vision of what the Baths of Caracalla in ancient Rome might have been like. Thanks in part to a connection with IMG, the giant sports-management agency, Sheshan was selected as the site for last November's HSBC Champions tournament, whose $5 million in prize money, the richest purse in Asia, was sufficient to attract even the likes of Tiger Woods, on only his second visit to China. When I was there in September, the place was already quivering with anticipation. 'Tiger Woods!' one member said after spotting me as an American. 'I will be here!' The Chinese revere Woods. They're fascinated by him for all the reasons we are, and also because his mother is Thai. 'Tiger Woods is Asian,' Jim Liu, a member at Mission Hills, explained to me one morning while watching his two sons, 6-year-old Andrew and 8-year-old Michael, take a golf lesson. 'And a lot of Asians think that if he can do it, then it means they have a chance too.' As it happened, Tiger, who finished second, at 17 under, shot the lights out at Sheshan. So did most of the field. The course is not a pushover, though; it's just young, having had insufficient time to grow championship-quality rough. And unlike many of the courses in China, which have an unreal, theme-park quality and seem as if they were rolled out like a magic carpet on alien ground, Sheshan actually looks as if it belongs where it is. This is in part an illusion, like the look of most modern golf courses. An enormous amount of earth had to be bulldozed to give the land some contour and elevation. But the shaping was done tastefully and judiciously, and the result is a course that's both pleasing to look at and, for an amateur, challenging to play. The back nine also benefits from a 250-foot-deep natural quarry, which the finishing holes circle or cross. I played this nine one afternoon with Townend and the club's resident touring pro, Li Chao. Townend did a stint on the Australian tour and still has a sharp game, though like most people in the golf industry he complains about never getting out on the course. Li, who is 25 and, at 6-foot-5, unusually large for a Chinese, is thought to be China's most promising young player. He effortlessly knocked off five birdies. I fell apart, and tied him on just one hole, a par-3 that he bogeyed. 'Listen to that,' Linford Jacquelin, the Mission Hills pro, said to me one morning while we were playing the Nick Faldo course, my favorite of the 10 layouts at the complex, which is the largest not just in China but in the world. 'What?' I said. 'Birds,' he answered. Bird song is rare in parts of China because the countryside is being developed so rapidly. Like most golf courses in China, those at Mission Hills are comparatively ecofriendly. (In a country where labor is so cheap, it's just as efficient to pick weeds by hand as to nuke them with chemicals.) But Mission Hills is a world unto itself: gated and guarded by uniformed security personnel who snap off military salutes to incoming and outgoing vehicles and use dogs to patrol the landscaped grounds of the adjoining, clubhouse-size villas. Surrounding the complex are the industrial cities of Dongguan and Shenzhen, which were designated as part of a special economic zone in 1979 and are now the engine room of Chinese manufacturing. For miles in every direction, the roads are lined with low-rise apartment buildings and sprawling, fenced-in factories and their grim adjoining dormitories. Mission Hills — with a lavish clubhouse, a five-star hotel, pools and spas, and a mall-size pro shop — is a sort of factory itself, turning out rounds of golf on an industrial scale. There are 2,000 caddies on duty: a red-uniformed army, battalions of which are always standing at parade rest in a staging area where golfers assemble before deploying to the courses. The caddies, most of whom are in their late teens or early 20's, live in convent-like barracks, work six days a week and send home much of what they make (from $150 to $400 a month, depending on seniority). The majority come from remote parts of China, where work is hard to find. One of them, Linda Ren, told me that her village in Jilin Province was 35 hours away by train. Mission Hills is the brainchild of David Chu, a native of Hong Kong who was one of the first entrepreneurs to see opportunity in mainland China after the country opened to foreign investment in 1979, and who quickly made a fortune in the corrugated-packaging business. Chu is not much of a golfer himself, but he nevertheless guessed that the game would catch on among tycoons and executives. In 1992, he obtained a lease on some scrubland outside Shenzhen and hired Jack Nicklaus, Jumbo Ozaki, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh to design golf courses. (The Faldo course was added a little later at a separate site down the road, and though less touted than some of the others, it is actually one of the most pleasing because of its more human scale.) The Nicklaus course, the first to open, was the site of the 1995 World Cup tournament — such a big deal at the time that Chu was able to persuade the government to build a new road that cut the driving time to Hong Kong from three hours to less than one. In 2002, Chu decided to build five more courses (giving him a 'Guinness'-certified world record of 180 holes altogether) on a vast spread of mountainous land in nearby Dongguan and enlisted five more celebrity designers: Greg Norman, David Leadbetter, Annika Sorenstam, José Maria Olazabal and David Duval. It normally takes at least two years to build a golf course; the Dongguan courses were built all at once and in just 18 months by 30,000 people working in shifts around the clock to knock the tops off mountains, fill in hollows and push dirt around to create tees, bunkers and greens. Building the pyramids was probably easier. The result is golf on such a scale and in such variety that it's almost unnerving. The original Mission Hills complex is a more or less traditional golf resort; the Dongguan addition, with a towering clubhouse now bulking up, is golf infused with growth hormone. The celebrity designs aren't just gimmicks. Each of the courses is worth playing, and each really does manifest something of its creator's personality. Duval's is old-fashioned and straightforward, with no blind shots or tricky doglegs; Sorenstam's, with six par-3's and six par-5's, is friendly to the short hitter; Olazabal's, in tribute to his mastery as a sand player, has a desert's worth of bunkers, including 24 on the 15th hole alone; and Norman's is long and tough, a forbidding, ball-devouring beast. (Norman probably didn't plan on this, but in addition to all the other hazards, the course is also blessed with the occasional cobra slipping through the rough or sunning itself in a bunker.) The courses are so different, in fact, that they don't really harmonize with one another, or even with the surrounding landscape, which looks just like the kind of Chinese mountainscape you see in scroll paintings. The place feels like a virtual landscape, or a golf fantasy — calendar art come to life — and when you board the shuttle bus and head down the hill, out the gate and past the factories and bleak concrete apartment buildings, dodging bicycles and flocks of pedestrians trudging along the road, it's like waking from a reverie. Starting with its name, in fact, there is very little about Mission Hills that is recognizably Chinese, except for the excellent Chinese food. The $10 million villas, for example, with their elevators, porticoes, marble floors, tiled pools and walk-in humidors, are built in what a brochure calls the 'perfect blend of Italian and Hawaiian style.' The most familiar thing about Chinese golf, and also the most retro, is its fledgling pro tour. In its first year in 2005, the China Tour, promoted by the World Sport Group, a Singapore firm, consisted of only four events and was intended as a training ground of sorts for golfers and fans alike. (At the 1995 World Cup at Mission Hills, many of the spectators turned up in business suits or high heels, and it was widely assumed that balls sprayed into the rough could be plucked as souvenirs.) The purses were tiny ($100,000 per tournament) and the golfers an eclectic, ragtag bunch from all over China. A few, like Li Chao, the prodigy from Sheshan, and his classmate Shang Lei, were products of Secondary School No. 77, an elite sports academy in Beijing that nurtures athletes from several sports. Some were athletes who, in their 20's or 30's, had switched over from other sports. Qi Zengfa, for example, was a former international rower; Ouyang Wen was a former national champion in wushu, the Chinese martial art. Many more were self-taught, guys who had picked up the game from hanging around golf courses as caddies or maintenance men. The first stop on the China Tour was Beijing's Elephant Club in August. I caught up with the second stop, at the Kunming Country Golf Club, in September. The Kunming course is hardly a championship layout: it's short, open and full of almost right-angled doglegs. On the other hand, compared with the clubs in Shanghai, it's homey and down-to-earth, and during the first two days of the tournament, when play was delayed by rain, the atmosphere in the clubhouse resembled that at a country club member-guest tournament. The golfers napped and smoked, waggled a few sample clubs provided by Mizuno, the event's sole sponsor, or else slouched on sofas and swapped yarns, their arms around one another in the companionable, unself-conscious way that Chinese men show affection. The coolest guy by far, and the one everybody else seemed to be aware of, was Zheng Wengen, who is said to be one of China's first professional golfers along with Zhang Lianwei, the first Chinese ever to play in the Masters. The process of becoming a pro in China is a little mysterious, and I got the sense that back in the early 1990's, when there were no pro tournaments to speak of, Zheng simply anointed himself. Handsome and fit at 39, however, he looks like a pro (unlike the younger players, he never turned his hat backward) and radiates a Seve Ballesteros-like glamour and self-confidence. The most ebullient player at Kunming was Zhou Xunshu, who at 32 was playing in his first professional tournament. Through an interpreter, he told me that he was a former army man who went to work as a security guard at Guangzhou Luhu Golf and Country Club, and one day, when no one was looking, he picked up a driver and on his third try hit a ball 300 yards. He practiced by himself for a year or so, using a broken shaft of a club to which he had attached a chunk of concrete, and then began sneaking out on the course in the evenings — until he was caught. For two years after that, he didn't play at all, and then in just eight months he lowered his handicap to single digits. Listening to Zhou's story and to others like it, I suddenly had the realization that this must have been what our own pro tour was like in the 30's — a bunch of self-taught caddies and hustlers, characters most of them, all newly in love with golf and trying to make a buck from it. I mentioned this idea to Johnny Liu, who is the deputy general manager of Kunming and deputy secretary general of the provincial golf association, and he said: 'Yes, golf is still in its infancy here. The other day someone from the foreign press asked one of the golfers if his father had played, and we all just looked at him. Golf! That guy's father was probably trying to find food for his family. I'm 37, and I still remember what it was like to be hungry.' On the first day of the tournament, Li Chao, who had won the first tour event, in Beijing, had seven birdies and jumped off to a substantial lead over the rest of the field, most of which failed to break par. But on the second day, he completed only three holes because of the rain delays, and on the third and last day, after playing 15 makeup holes, he melted down on his final round and shot an 81. Ouyang Wen, the wushu champ, got in a snit the first day, complaining that the officials had unfairly penalized him for slow play, and he never fully recovered his momentum. He was defended by his caddie, a 16-year-old named Jordan Chu, who is also Ouyang's pupil. Chu, who speaks excellent English, comes from a well-to-do family from Singapore that has resettled in Shanghai and, unusual in China, has a genuine golf pedigree. His grandfather, three uncles and two aunts all played. And with his family's encouragement he dropped out of school to pursue his own golf career full time. He had recently enrolled at the David Leadbetter Golf Academy in Orlando, Fla., he told me, but left prematurely because he didn't agree with Leadbetter's style of teaching. 'My goal is to become a professional golfer and get my card in two or three years,' he said. 'My other goal is to break all the Asian beliefs that the Chinese are no good. I don't want to offend you, but frankly, there are other styles of instruction besides the Western ones. My coach understands me,' he added, pointing to Ouyang Wen, who, as if in a martial arts movie, leapt straight up in the air and spun around twice before nailing a perfect landing. Zhou Xunshu, the guy who had learned from swinging concrete, turned out to have a slashing, Arnie-style swing. After a strong opening round, he hung on and finished 36th, at 10 over par, pocketing $950 — not too shabby for a first-timer. The winner was the 26-year-old Richard Qiu Zhifeng, who had also gotten his start sneaking on at Guangzhou but who since 2001 had lacked the money to travel to tournaments and had been thinking of giving up and starting a pro shop. He began the final round two strokes back, but nipped the leader, Liao Guiming, with a 70. 'I want to cry, but the tears won't come,' he said afterward, and added that he would use the prize money — some $17,000 — to buy a house.

Subject: Uses for Glut of Small Logs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 08:59:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10tree.html?ex=1294549200&en=831204ad52083cfb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 10, 2006 New Uses for Glut of Small Logs From Thinning of Forests By JIM ROBBINS DARBY, Mont. - Five years ago, intense forest fires around this logging and tourist town burned more than 350,000 acres of forest. Today huge swaths of charred trees cover the mountainsides. Partly in response to these fires and others on national forest land elsewhere in the West, President Bush introduced the Healthy Forest Initiative in 2002 to reduce the wildfire threat to towns surrounded by publicly owned forests. As work crews thin stands of trees, as called for in the initiative, one result has been a glut of logs smaller than eight inches in diameter. Until recently, most small trees were collected in piles and burned, but now businesses and the Forest Service have begun looking for uses for the tiny trees. 'It's high cost, low value and a lot of pieces to handle, which takes time and effort,' said Dave Atkins, head of the Forest Service's Fuels for Schools program for several Western states. Although loggers might receive $90 a ton for house logs, Mr. Atkins said, they are paid less than half that for smaller trees. Slowly, however, the small-diameter movement, helped along by federal grants and Forest Service research, is helping to find new uses for smaller trees, like heating schools and hospitals and construction materials, including particle board, flooring and laminated beams. Peter Stark of Missoula, a freelance writer, wanted to thin his 80 acres of forest clogged with downed timber and crowded trees to prevent a fire but could not afford to do it, since clearing usually costs $300 to $1,000 an acre. He eventually found someone to remove the trees, most six or seven inches across, and the money he was paid for them covered the cost of thinning. At the same time, he was building a dance floor for his wife, Amy Ragsdale, who teaches dance at the University of Montana. Shocked at the cost of hardwood, Mr. Stark realized that he might be able to turn the waste trees into flooring. Mr. Stark bought back 25 tons of the larch trees and found a custom sawmill that could handle small diameters to turn them into tongue-and-groove flooring. The floor turned out so well that Mr. Stark formed a company, North Slope Sustainable Wood, with two partners, to market small diameter larch, the hardest of the soft woods, from forests being thinned. He sees such activity as a solution to the controversy over logging in Western forests. 'I'm a tree hugger,' he said. 'If we can take the small trees and leave the big ones, the loggers and environmentalists are both happy.' Significant numbers of Westerners see small trees as the future of the timber industry, simply because there are so few big trees left. 'Years ago, we utilized logs that were mostly over 50 inches in diameter,' said Gordy Sanders, resource manager for Pyramid Lumber in Seeley Lake, which has retooled to use small-diameter timber. 'Now, if we see one of those a year we're amazed.' Another project, at the Forest Service's laboratory at the State and Private Technology Marketing Unit in Madison, Wis., used small-diameter trees in a new library here, in the town that bore the brunt of the fires. 'This library was a response to the fires,' Veryl Kosteczko, chairwoman of the library board, said as she pointed out the roof beams that are all six inches or so in diameter. 'We utilized underutilized wood that used to be left as trash.' Another use of small logs is as biomass to be turned into fuel. Under its Fuels for Schools program, the Forest Service is giving grants up to $400,000 for schools and other public buildings to build furnaces that burn biomass. The three public schools in Darby are heated by a large $800,000 furnace that burns a steady stream of tiny branches and wood chips arriving by conveyor. Rick Scheele, the maintenance supervisor for the schools and the mayor of Darby, estimates that heating the school with diesel this year would have cost $125,000 and that using biomass will cost $28,000. 'It's allowed a few extra teachers to stick around,' Mr. Scheele said. 'It's been pretty tight around here.' For the moment, environmentalists are watching the small-diameter movement warily. 'We support hazardous-fuels reduction,' said Bob Ekey, Northern Rockies regional director for the Wilderness Society. 'But we want to make sure it's done well, and done right, so we don't create more demand than the land can sustain.'

Subject: Doctor Is in, but You Wish He Wasn't From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 08:52:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/30/health/30patient.html?ex=1291006800&en=c66eff1ecb203cbf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 30, 2005 When the Doctor Is in, but You Wish He Wasn't By GINA KOLATA Joanne Wong's doctor correctly figured out what was wrong with her. But he would not tell her. Ms. Wong, a software engineer in Sunnyvale, Calif., was having abdominal pain and nausea. Her doctor told her to have a blood test, then ushered her out of his office, ignoring her when she asked what the test was for. 'The test came back, and he said I have a virus,' Ms. Wong said. 'He said, 'Take this medicine for two weeks.' I asked, 'What kind of virus do I have? How did I get it?' But he just said, 'Take the medicine and come back in two weeks.' ' Two weeks later, she still felt ill. 'He said, 'You're fine, you're fine,' ' Ms. Wong said. 'I said, 'At least tell me the name of the virus.' ' But, she said, 'He just patted my shoulder and sent me out,' telling her to return in three months for another blood test. Perhaps, Ms. Wong said, the doctor did not want to spend the time to talk to her, or perhaps he was put off by her Chinese accent and thought she would not understand. In any event, she never returned to that doctor. When she got her medical records, she learned that she had had hepatitis A, a viral liver infection. Ms. Wong had come across a bane of the medical profession: the difficult doctor. These doctors may be arrogant or rude, highhanded or dismissive. They drive away patients who need help, and some have been magnets for malpractice claims. And while such doctors have always been part of medicine, medical organizations say they fear that they are increasingly common - doctors, under pressure to see more patients, are spending less and less time with each one and are replacing long discussions with laboratory tests and scans - and that most problem doctors apparently have no idea of their patients' opinions of them. Patients usually do not confront doctors. Instead, most rant to friends or family members about their experiences or simply change doctors. But in most areas of the country, there is an abundance of patients. If a few patients leave a medical practice, plenty more can take their place, so doctors may never even know what their patients think. 'The reality is that a lot of these doctors don't have a source of objective comments,' said Dr. John Freedman, the medical director for quality management at the Tufts Health Plan in Massachusetts, which includes 18,000 doctors. But now some medical groups are taking steps to address the problem, questioning patients and going so far as to dock the pay of doctors whose patients give them poor ratings. At the Rochester Independent Practice Association in New York, with 3,000 doctors, patients are surveyed, and their satisfaction scores can account for 20 percent of a doctor's pay. At Tufts Health Plan, 3,000 to 4,000 doctors had all or part of their bonuses withheld last year because their patients did not rate them highly, said Richard Lynch, the plan's vice president of network contracting. In California, said Dr. Ronald Bangasser, the past president of the California Medical Association, eight major health insurers have a new program in which they divide $30 million among 35,000 physicians depending on how their patients rate them. 'It could be $3,000, $4,000 or $5,000 per physician,' Dr. Bangasser said. 'That would get their attention.' Dr. Beth A. Lown, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the immediate past president of the American Academy of Physicians and Patients, said: 'This goes to the heart of medicine - the skillful enactment of communication and a truly heartfelt understanding of the patient's circumstances. And it seems to have gotten lost as doctors get involved in medical systems that prioritize speed and technology. Increasingly, people are relying on tests instead of talking to patients.' Patients say the problems come in many guises. The arrogant or dismissive doctor. The impatient doctor with his hand on the doorknob. The patronizing doctor. Or, as one young woman experienced, the doctor who is callous and judgmental. The woman, who lives in Washington, asked not to be identified because she did not want her mother to know about her sex life. Her problem doctor was a new gynecologist she saw for a routine checkup. The doctor began the examination, inserting a speculum into the young woman's vagina. 'She asked if I was sexually active,' the woman said. 'I said I was. She asked if I was sexually active at this moment. I said yes.' Leaving the speculum in, and the woman with her feet in the stirrups, legs spread, the gynecologist walked to the head of the exam table and proceeded to lecture her on the perils of sexual activity outside of marriage. 'I was so humiliated and so scared,' the woman said. 'And so embarrassed.' Other times the doctor seems indifferent. That was the experience of Gloria Erlich, a writer who lives in Princeton, N.J., who saw a neurosurgeon for back pain. He told Mrs. Erlich she needed a myelogram, a scan of the spine that requires a spinal tap to inject dye into the spinal cord. She told him that she had had one, at his request, just a few months before and that the films should have been with her medical records. But the doctor said he could not locate them and asked her to have another one. Months went by, with the doctor telling Mrs. Erlich he could do nothing for her without a myelogram and her saying she had had one and asking why he could not just find it. Finally, she said that perhaps she should contact a lawyer. 'Within half an hour, they found it,' she said. 'It was irretrievable until I said the word 'lawyer.' ' 'It may have been busyness,' she said, 'but it seemed to me a matter of indifference: why bother searching for something when the patient can just repeat the test? Indifference to the pain and risk for me, indifference to the very substantial cost of the test for Medicare.' She changed doctors. Mrs. Erlich's doctor may never learn how irritating he was. Most doctors do not, said Dr. Richard Frankel, a professor of medicine and geriatrics at Indiana University who teaches medical faculty how to communicate with patients. Even doctors who have bad experiences when they see a doctor rarely speak up, Dr. Frankel said. 'You hear their sad story,' he said, referring to doctors who have been patients, 'and then you ask, 'Well, did you say anything to the person who was offensive to you or treated you poorly?' Ninety-nine point nine percent of the time the answer is no.' One reason, of course, is fear of offending the doctor and getting poorer treatment from then on. But doctors who are rated by their medical groups are forced to confront the evidence, and often are asked to get help or are coerced into it. For example, said Dr. Bangasser, doctors at his group, the Beaver Medical Group in Redlands, Calif., who get low patient satisfaction scores have been asked to shadow successful doctors to learn their ways. For other doctors, there are counseling and training sessions as well as courses, including some taught by Dr. Lown's group, to help doctors learn to listen to patients and treat them with dignity and respect. There also are veiled threats at some of the medical groups. 'We have worked with a number of physicians in a confidential way,' said Dr. Freedman, of the Tufts Health Plan. 'We say, 'You appear to have dramatically low scores. We would like to understand your justification for why and explain what actions you intend to take.' ' And, he added, 'if they don't make bona fide efforts to improve, we can go through a disciplinary process that can result in termination.' As for future doctors, they will at least have to show they know the basics of being nice. As of 2011, all new residents will have to exhibit empathy while examining an actor posing as a patient. The residents know they are examining an actor and that the actor will be assessing their performance, Dr. Lown said. 'We are putting teeth in the need to change,' she added. A more subtle problem occurs when doctors who are generally pleasant and communicative act differently toward certain patients, affected more than they realize by their personal prejudices against particular patients, like fat people, hypochondriacs or people who complain about pain. 'If you happen to be the person they don't like, they can respond very differently than they do to most people,' said Dr. Howard Beckman, the medical director of the Rochester Independent Practice Association. Fat people say they know that problem well. It happened last summer to Tina Hedberg of Conover, Wis., who saw a doctor when a diet she was on was no longer eliciting drastic weekly weight loss. The doctor, Ms. Hedberg said, told her that she had a mental problem because she weighed 400 pounds. Ms. Hedberg was trying to commit suicide by getting so fat, the doctor informed her. Then the doctor said Ms. Hedberg had two choices. She could be admitted to a mental institution, or, the doctor said, 'I could wire your jaws shut so tight that you can't move your jaws to talk, and if you can't talk you can't eat.' Other times doctors get so busy that they seem not to understand a patient's experience, as Rori Murell discovered recently. Ms. Murell, a retired therapist who lives in Rochester, was having back pain, so she made an appointment with an orthopedic surgeon recommended by her primary care doctor. When she arrived, a physician's assistant entered the examining room. 'He looked over some of the X-rays and said, 'I recommend spinal injections.' I said, 'I can discuss that when I meet with the doctor.' He said, 'You're not going to see the doctor.' ' The doctor, the physician's assistant explained, was busy seeing patients. 'I said, 'Well, I'm a patient,' ' Ms. Murell said, but she got no reply. 'I realize that doctors get really, really busy,' Ms. Murell said. 'But someone with a back problem is different than someone with a sniffly nose. I don't want to sound like I need to be pampered or babied or that I need sympathy. But what's fair is fair, and what's professional is professional. I'm 68 and I'm old enough to remember a time when you went to the doctor and you saw the doctor.' Doctors say they are chagrined when they hear such stories. But, they say, it can be hard for them to know how a doctor treats a typical patient when they themselves often are treated with kid gloves. 'You'll occasionally get a patient who comes from another physician and says something bad about that doctor, but it's hard to know whether they're a complaining patient or the doctor is really bad,' said Dr. Robert Swerlick, a dermatologist at Emory University. Some patients say they have to rely on each other's experience to know which doctors to seek out and which to avoid. The Council on Size and Weight Discrimination, a nonprofit organization, publishes lists of fat-friendly doctors on its Web site. And after her experience with the doctor who would not tell her her diagnosis, Joanne Wong helped found a Web site, RateMDs.com, where patients can rate doctors. But, said Dr. Swerlick, such ratings are not exactly representative samplings. They also infuriate doctors, who, Dr. Beckman says, 'think these things are capricious and stupid.' It is harder to argue with the methods being used by medical groups, like the Tufts Health Plan and the Rochester Independent Practice Association, that are employing scientific methods to survey satisfaction. Such practices, Dr. Beckman says, are becoming increasingly common in health maintenance and preferred provider groups that are starting to pay doctors according to their performance. Purchasers of insurance plans are demanding it, he added. And, he says, there is a common thread to difficult doctors: most have problems talking to, or listening to, patients. 'What often happens,' Dr. Beckman said, 'is that the patient has something they want to tell the doctor but they're not allowed because of the doctor's style to say what they want to say.' So the doctor does most of the talking, often alienating patients. Dr. Beckman teaches doctors simple ways to let patients tell their stories and to show empathy by responding to a patient's emotionally charged comments. For example, he said, 'A patient comes in and says to the doctor, 'I stopped smoking.' ' Instead of saying, 'That's terrific,' the doctor will say something like, 'How's your weight?' Dr. Beckman said a doctor recently called him, stung by his low scores and asking how it could be that his patients did not like him. 'We looked at his survey results and the area where he was low was the question of, Did the doctor spend enough time with you?' Dr. Beckman said. 'I told him a bit about how a person feels that enough time is spent. You have to uncover the heart of their problems.' Of course, Dr. Beckman said, 'everyone thinks they're listening' to patients. But one method does work, he told the doctor. 'You use continuers. As you're working with people, you say 'uh huh' three times.' He gave an example: 'The patient says, 'I've been having chest pains.' ' Instead of jumping in and suggesting tests, the doctor says, 'Uh huh.' The patient says, 'I've also been having headaches.' The doctor says, 'Uh huh.' So the patient says: 'It all started when my brother died of an aneurysm in the brain. And I wonder if it's related.' The doctor, Dr. Beckman said, 'looked at me like I'm a little nuts,' but agreed to try. Later he returned, elated. Dr. Beckman recalled him saying: 'I can't believe how different it is. I hear things I don't usually hear.' 'That's terrific,' Dr. Beckman said.

Subject: Oil Dependency Problem From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:16:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/international/europe/05swedish.html?ex=1296795600&en=ab239cac51f905e7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Sweden and U.S. Agree About the Oil Dependency Problem, but for Different Reasons By ALAN COWELL STOCKHOLM — After he heard President Bush tell Americans they were 'addicted to oil,' Prime Minister Goran Persson of Sweden said he was relieved that 'at last there's one more who understands the problem.' Indeed, in a conversation, he seemed to suggest that Sweden's example might offer what could be termed an American detox. As the leader of a country that has thrust itself to the fore of environmental protection, and that has promised to greatly reduce its remaining dependence on oil by 2020, Mr. Persson has sought to persuade Sweden's motorists to use less gasoline, fill their tanks with ethanol and promote ways of heating homes without polluting the atmosphere. Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Persson is worried about his country's dependence on vulnerable foreign oil supplies. He is troubled that reliance on oil is itself perilous because of the economic impact of ever-higher petroleum prices. 'So something of what we are doing could also be solutions for the United States,' Mr. Persson said Friday in an interview as he paced his high-ceilinged office, which has broad picture windows that scan the spires of Stockholm's old city. But there are differences, Mr. Persson acknowledged, and this land of nine million people with its vast empty spaces reaching far to the Arctic north is scarcely a perfect exemplar for America. Unlike the United States, it has been blessed with two major sources of energy owing to its geography and recent history: rivers and nuclear power stations, each of which produces nearly half of Sweden's electric power without greenhouse gases. And, Mr. Persson said, his vision of using the country's farms to produce the raw materials for alternative fuels from wheat, trees and other agricultural products is dependent on a resource that parts of the United States cannot always rely on. 'In the end it's about water,' he said. With its abundant rains, Sweden 'is one of those countries that produces a crop that doesn't need an artificial supply of water,' unlike big energy consumers like the United States, India and China. For all that, though, this country offers itself as a model of energy use. Last October, for instance, Mona Sahlin, the minister for sustainable development, raised eyebrows with the ambitious forecast that 'Sweden has the chance to be an international model and a successful actor in export markets for alternative solutions.' 'The aim is to break dependence on fossil fuels by 2020,' she said. 'By then, no home will need oil for heating. By then, no motorist will be obliged to use gasoline as the sole option available. By then, there will always be better alternatives to oil.' Mr. Persson, admitting the date his minister cited was more a goal than a deadline, said: 'It is a bold target — five years ahead of the U.S. If we end up being independent of oil in 2023, no one will accuse us of anything.' Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Persson, along with many Europeans, is propelled by fears that climate change will wreak havoc unless nations and industries cut emissions of greenhouse gases. And, equally, he says he is convinced that renewable energy will make good business sense for those who take the lead in developing it. 'I have an emphasis on climate change; he doesn't,' Mr. Persson said, comparing his policies with those of Mr. Bush. 'I have an emphasis on business opportunities; he doesn't. But otherwise, it's the same argument.' Across Europe, many nations are seeking to reduce their production of greenhouse gases: Denmark now derives nearly 20 percent of its power from windmills. Britain and Germany are reconsidering plans to phase out nuclear power. In Finland, where Europe's first new reactor in 15 years is already under construction, nuclear power seems to be back in favor, as it always has been in France, which relies on nuclear generators for most of its electricity. But Sweden has adopted a more conscious drive to sponsor alternate fuels for homes and cars. In many neighborhoods, for instance, a central furnace using biological fuels provides hot water for all the homes in the area. Tens of thousands of homeowners have replaced oil-fired central heating with boilers using wood-based pellets, significantly reducing Sweden's dependence on oil for home heating. Heating oil sales have fallen by 85 percent in recent years, according to the Swedish Petroleum Institute. Saab and Volvo, Swedish automakers that are owned by General Motors and Ford, respectively, have introduced models using renewable fuels. Around 450 of Sweden's 4,000 gas stations offer fuels made from renewable energy sources like ethanol and the number is expected to rise to 2,400 by 2010. In 2005, Sweden produced about 23 percent of its ethanol, using wheat as the raw material, and most of the rest was imported from Brazil, said Ulf Svahn, managing director of the Swedish Petroleum Institute. Of the 4.2 million cars already on Sweden's roads, he said, fewer than 100,000 have been converted to use alternate fuels. Yet the incentives to trade in that old gasoline-powered Saab or Volvo for a new bio-car are considerable. Tax breaks mean ethanol-based fuel costs about one-third less at the pump than ordinary gasoline, even though ethanol costs about 40 percent more to produce, Mr. Svahn said. Moreover, motorists driving cars powered by renewable energy sources are exempt from certain tolls and from public parking fees. Oil companies have already agreed to mix 5 percent ethanol into their gasoline, he said, to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, and want to double that. But, he said, the consequences of the move toward renewable fuel sources were still unclear. 'We are in a learning curve here,' he said. Mr. Persson's political foes made a similar point. 'The Swedish government is very fond of setting targets,' said Lars Lindblad, the environment spokesman of the opposition Moderate Party. 'But it has problems with delivery.'

Subject: Rocky Start for Drug Benefit From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:15:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/06/politics/06medicare.html?ex=1296882000&en=0da4c2c4eca54db4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 6, 2006 Rival Visions Led to Rocky Start for Drug Benefit By ROBIN TONER WASHINGTON — It was clearly intended to be a transformational moment in American politics: At a center for the elderly in Allentown, Pa., on Sept. 5, 2000, George W. Bush, then a presidential candidate, paid tribute to one of the signature Democratic programs of the last century and promised to improve it. 'Medicare is an enduring commitment of our country,' said Mr. Bush, locked in a tight race with Vice President Al Gore. 'It must be modernized for our times.' What emerged in the next three years, culminating in the passage of the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act, was an effort to blend a classic big government program from the Great Society with the conservative, market-oriented philosophy of the Republicans in power. It was supposed to be one of the great domestic policy achievements of the Bush presidency. But today, as state and federal officials struggle to carry out the program, they face widespread complaints from beneficiaries, advocates, pharmacists, lawmakers and others that it is too complex, too cumbersome, too hard to navigate. Congressional committees are holding hearings on problems in the rollout of the plan, which began Jan. 1, and debate has already begun over how to change it. Even Mr. Bush seems, at the moment, reluctant to proclaim its advantages; he never mentioned the long-sought prescription drug benefit in his 52-minute State of the Union address last week. Administration officials say the start-up of any vast new social welfare program is bound to encounter difficulties; they say these are largely growing pains for a system that covers 42 million older and disabled Americans. They testified last week that competition among private health plans was already lowering expected costs for the program, while giving retirees what they were promised: a wide choice of drug plans at reasonable prices. But some experts say the new Medicare program, by its very structure, was destined for trouble. Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health research group, calls it 'a compromise between competing ideologies shoehorned into a fixed budget.' He added, 'I think it was preordained from the moment they passed it that it would be historically complicated to implement.' As they look back, the architects and leading supporters of this plan say that every political decision behind the new Medicare program — its structure, its cost, the way it is delivered — made sense at the time it was made. Taken as a whole, however, the plan's creators came up with a complex hybrid, a melding of government and private markets requiring intricate coordination among insurers, beneficiaries, and state and federal agencies. In recent weeks, older Americans have struggled to choose from a dizzying array of 40 or more drug plans, with different premiums, co-payments and lists of covered drugs. States have intervened to cover many low-income elderly beneficiaries who were falling between the cracks in their transition to the new Medicare program. Pharmacists have reported delays and difficulties in determining who is eligible for which benefits. Representative Bill Thomas, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and a principal architect of the program, defended the Medicare law in an interview and suggested that it was the best a bitterly divided Congress could do. 'We got the bill we could get,' said Mr. Thomas, a California Republican. 'And then those who tried to make sure it wasn't law began immediately to attack it.' In fact, the Medicare law is a case study in political accommodation in an ideologically polarized time — the difficulty in bridging sharply different worldviews on the roles of government and private markets — and the consequences of that accommodation in the real world, when the program begins. A Need for Change Republicans began to push for a drug benefit in the late 1990's. By then, drug costs were soaring; elderly men and women regularly rose, tearfully, at public meetings to plead with members of Congress for help. And the demands from AARP, the retirees' lobby, had reached a crescendo. Nobody could afford to ignore a crucial constituency and its demands for relief, certainly not the Republicans in charge of the House, the Senate and, by 2001, the White House. Top Republican strategists asserted that their party — which had been haunted, in election after election, by its resistance to the creation of Medicare in 1965 — had to seize the initiative this time. 'It increasingly became the opinion in the White House that this was probably the right thing to do, and it also made sense politically,' said Thomas A. Scully, then the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But the party was led by conservatives and mindful of its base; the conservatives wanted to create a Medicare drug benefit that minimized the role of government as much as possible. 'It was a program that needed to be fixed, but it was fixed in a Republican way,' said John Feehery, a former top aide to J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois, the speaker of the House. 'A private sector solution, as opposed to a huge increase in government control. If Democrats were in control, they would have just fixed prices and let the government pay for it.' In fact, many liberals argued that the easiest way to add a drug benefit to Medicare was, quite simply, to add a drug benefit to Medicare. Let the federal government use its immense bargaining clout to secure discounts and provide a standard benefit, just as it does for hospitals and doctors, they reasoned. Republicans countered that this approach would amount to government price controls that would stifle innovation. Instead, they envisioned a marketplace of private health insurers that would negotiate prices individually with drug companies, then compete to sell drug benefits to the elderly. The government would subsidize the benefits, with extra help for low-income people. Older Americans would get a choice of plans, and the competition among private plans would hold down costs and keep the benefits up-to-date. Democrats and their allies argued that Republicans were bowing to a powerful industry that was fearful of the negotiating power of the government and desperate to protect its profits. 'This was the product of the special-interest lobbying of the drug industry,' said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal advocacy group. The pharmaceutical industry did have substantial influence on Capitol Hill. But the structure of the drug benefit was also framed by a core conservative belief: that 'one-size-fits-all' benefit programs, administered by the government, were an outmoded vestige of the Great Society and the New Deal. Some conservative and moderate Democrats shared a preference for pushing more responsibility onto private insurers, including former Senator John B. Breaux of Louisiana, who would play a crucial role in the 2003 law. 'I got so tired of sitting in the back room of the Finance Committee deciding whether oxygen providers should get a 0.25 percent increase or a 0.36 percent increase,' Mr. Breaux said. But in general, this was a sharply ideological division on Capitol Hill. Even with a market-oriented approach, the drug benefit was a hard sell to many conservatives. They were dismayed at the idea of expanding an entitlement program that was already facing serious financial problems in the next 20 years. They wanted bigger changes in Medicare — and Mr. Bush did, too. Tension Within the Parties By the winter of 2002-03, the administration agreed to set aside $400 billion for a 10-year Medicare plan — a powerful inducement to act. But Mr. Bush insisted that any Medicare law had to include the broader structural reforms that conservatives believed could save money and improve benefits in the long haul. Mr. Bush and his allies were pushing a system in which many more beneficiaries obtained all their medical care — not just their drug benefits — through private health plans, which would receive a fixed sum from the government. That was a striking departure for the traditional government insurance program, in which doctors and hospitals are reimbursed for their services according to rates set by the government. One of the tensions within the Republican Party throughout 2003 was how much of this broader 'reform' needed to be in the legislation. More pragmatic politicians feared any legislation that seemed to be forcing older Americans to leave traditional Medicare, which is still immensely popular, and join private health plans. More conservative politicians pushed back. As the Senate began to move on Medicare legislation, Democrats had tensions of their own. Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, and others, argued that Democrats should work with Republicans and seize the opportunity to pass drug legislation. The logic was simple: get something passed, lock in the $400 billion and improve it later. The Senate passed a Medicare drug bill in June 2003, with substantial Democratic support. A Complicated Compromise The dynamics were different in the much more conservative House. House leaders struggled, repeatedly, to prevent a large-scale rebellion on the right; the Medicare bill initially squeaked through the House in June 2003 by just one vote. After that, the last thing many House Republicans wanted, when they began negotiations with the Senate, was a bill that moved to the left. Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, then the Democratic leader and a member of the negotiating team, said, 'Those of us with different views were first, not heard, and then physically locked out.' Mr. Thomas, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman, dismissed that notion, saying the Democrats interested in reaching a deal — Senator Max Baucus of Montana and Senator Breaux of Louisiana — were welcomed into the room. Another crucial player was AARP, which was also eager for a deal. The final legislation reflects the complicated compromises of those last frenzied months of negotiation. Conservatives insisted on an array of incentives in the bill to attract more private insurers and inject more competition into Medicare. Representative Paul D. Ryan, an influential young Republican from Wisconsin, said he personally called several major insurance executives in the days before the final vote to make sure they would participate in the new program. But AARP and other groups insisted that the traditional Medicare program be protected from a competition rigged to favor private plans. Many lawmakers, who otherwise disdained the market-oriented approach, were drawn to the bill because of its substantial benefits for low-income elderly Americans. Other lawmakers, particularly in the Senate, were drawn by the legislation's new assistance for rural areas. Piece by piece, the legislation grew. 'You really had to fold into this final product many different views,' said Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, a longtime supporter of a drug benefit. 'You had a cross between those who wanted a government-run program and a government delivery system, and those who wanted it totally private or not at all.' The number of lawmakers who said they were voting for the legislation with misgivings was striking. In the end, the bill passed the House, but only after the roll call vote was held open three hours while Republican leaders muscled together a majority. The bill passed the Senate more comfortably, although most Democrats, including Mr. Kennedy, voted against it. The partisan atmosphere was poisonous. Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute, an expert on Medicare and a former Congressional budget director, said in a recent interview, 'We have in this country a long tradition of passing seriously flawed legislation, and then spending the next decade trying to fix it, to the extent possible.' Already, lawmakers in both parties are reviewing the rollout of this program, which many say has been handled badly. Even moderates who supported the legislation are put off by the complexity of the new benefits. 'There's just way too many plans,' said Mr. Baucus, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee. Many conservatives say most of the structural changes they wanted to hold down costs were jettisoned in the legislative process. 'Horrible,' is how John Goodman, a health adviser to the Bush campaign in 2000, describes it today. A Difficult Transition The partisan wars over Medicare are, if anything, intensifying. Many Republicans say the relentless Democratic critique has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 'What I find ironic is the Democrats and the labor unions chose to trash this law for two full years, and then in the 11th hour say we need to extend the signup because people are confused,' Mr. Thomas said. 'Who produced the confusion?' He also faults the news media for highlighting those complaints rather than the accomplishments of the program. Polls show that older Americans remain skeptical. In the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll, only 14 percent of Americans 55 and older said they expected their prescription drugs to cost less by the end of Mr. Bush's second term than they do today. Many outside analysts say it is too soon to render judgment on the program. Administration officials say the program is already working for the majority of beneficiaries. With a transition this large, people need time to adjust, to learn their way around a new market, said Mark McClellan, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. John C. Rother, policy director for AARP, said: 'My own view is it's going to be bumpy and sloppy, but it's going to work. People will work their way through their choices, and the number of plans will consolidate.' Mr. Reischauer, the Urban Institute leader, voiced the realpolitik that animated so much of the support for this plan: 'I'd make the case that it's a lot better health policy than what we had before,' he said, meaning no drug benefit at all. Others wonder whether the system could have done better.

Subject: Paul Krugman: The Effectiveness Thing From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 06:00:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ February 6, 2006 Paul Krugman has an explanation for why Democrats have been unable to take advantage of recent Republican missteps. By Mark Thoma The Effectiveness Thing, by Pal Krugman, Democrat Disunion, Commentary, NY Times: We are ruled by bunglers. Every major venture by the Bush administration ... has turned into an epic saga of incompetence. In retrospect, the Clinton years look like a golden era of good government. Given the Bush administration's evident inability to govern, Democratic electoral victories should be a sure thing. But they aren't. Why? Before I try to answer that question, let me justify my assertion ... that Bill Clinton knew how to govern, while George W. Bush doesn't. ... [C]onsider the rise and fall of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Under the elder George Bush, FEMA was used as a dumping ground for political cronies, with predictable results. Descriptions of FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 sound just like the response to Katrina: for three days FEMA was nowhere to be found, and when it finally arrived its relief efforts were utterly incompetent. Bill Clinton changed all that by choosing James Lee Witt, who knew a lot about disaster management, to run FEMA, and encouraging him to run the agency professionally. The result was a spectacular improvement in performance. ... But George W. Bush restored the practice of stuffing FEMA with cronies; the ludicrous Michael Brown is gone, but others remain. And the agency has reverted to impotence and incompetence. As FEMA went, so went government as a whole. ... [W]hat happened to FEMA starting in 2001 is typical: politicization and cronyism have become standard operating procedure ... That's one main reason President Bush has failed at everything he's tried except cutting taxes — and winning elections. Which brings me to the political puzzle. ...more than half of Americans say that the Bush administration has been a failure. Yet it's not at all clear that Democrats can translate this sentiment into large political gains — because despite the governing skill of the last Democratic administration, the public doesn't think of Democrats as being effective. A lot of this has to do with the way the news media cover politics: ... many news organizations ... prefer to do horse-race stories rather than discuss policy issues. And from that point of view, the Democrats present a sorry spectacle. Not only are they a minority ...; they're an undisciplined minority constantly facing defections from their own ranks on crucial issues. The issue of Iraq epitomizes the political paradox. The war has been a monstrous policy failure, but it remains a political asset to the Bush administration, because it divides the Democrats and makes them look ineffectual. Yet if the Democrats could present a united front on Iraq, they'd probably have a lot of public support. You'd never know it from the ... Sunday talk shows, but a majority of Americans believes both that the administration deliberately misled the nation about W.M.D.'s and that we should set a timetable for withdrawal. And the public's views on other issues seem to favor the Democratic position ... even more strongly. For example, the public believes by two to one that the government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans. The point is that Democrats are largely winning the battle of ideas: on the issues, public opinion is shifting in their direction. But to take advantage of that shift, they have to overcome an image of ineffectiveness that is partly the fault of the news media, but largely the result of their own disunion.

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 19:07:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/30/05 - 2/3/06 Australia 4.9 Canada 8.2 Denmark 3.7 France 6.5 Germany 6.9 Hong Kong 3.2 Japan 3.0 Netherlands 4.6 Norway 9.0 Sweden 4.3 Switzerland 5.2 UK 5.0

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 19:06:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/30/05 - 2/3/06 Australia 2.9 Canada 6.2 Denmark 2.1 France 4.7 Germany 5.1 Hong Kong 3.3 Japan 4.0 Netherlands 2.8 Norway 7.7 Sweden 1.3 Switzerland 3.5 UK 2.4

Subject: How to Get the Women's Movement Moving From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 09:22:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-moving.html November 3, 1985 How to Get the Women's Movement Moving Again By BETTY FRIEDAN HIS IS ADDRESSED TO ANY WOMAN who has ever said ''we'' about the women's movement, including those who say, ''I'm not a feminist, but. . . .'' And it's addressed to quite a few men. It's a personal message, not at all objective, and it's in response to those who think our modern women's movement is over - either because it is defeated and a failure, or because it has triumphed, its work done, its mission accomplished. After all, any daughter can now dream of being an astronaut, after Sally Ride, or running for President, after Geraldine Ferraro. I do not think that the job of the modern women's movement is done. And I do not believe the movement has failed. For one thing, those of us who started the modern women's movement, or came into it after marriage and children or from jobs as ''invisible women'' in the office, still carry the glow of ''it changed my whole life,'' an aliveness, the satisfaction of finding our own voice and power, and the skills we didn't have a chance to develop before. I do believe, though, that the movement is in trouble. I was too passionately involved in its conception, its birth, its growing pains, its youthful flowering, to acquiesce quietly to its going gently so soon into the night. But, like a lot of other mothers, I have been denying the symptoms of what I now feel forced to confront as a profound paralysis of the women's movement in America. And this, in turn, has forced me to think about how we can get the women's movement moving again - a new round of consciousness-raising, for instance, or utilizing the networks of professional women, or ceasing the obsession with the matter of pornography. I see as symptoms of the paralysis the impotence in the face of fundamentalist backlash; the wasting of energy in internal power struggles when no real issues are at stake; the nostalgic harking back to old rhetoric, old ideas, old modes of action instead of confronting new threats and new problems with new thinking; the failure to mobilize the young generation who take for granted the rights we won and who do not defend those rights as they are being taken away in front of our eyes, and the preoccupation with pornography and other sexual diversions that do not affect most women's lives. I sense an unwillingness to deal with the complex realities of female survival in male-modeled careers, with the new illusions of having it all in marriage and equality in divorce, and with the basic causes of the grim feminization of poverty. The potential of women's political power is slipping away between the poles of self-serving feminist illusion and male and female opportunism. The promise of that empowerment of women that enabled so many of us to change our own lives is being betrayed by our failure to mobilize the next generation to move beyond us. EVIDENCE OF THE MOVEMENT'S paralysis has been impinging on my own life in many ways: Over the last few years, I've noticed how the machinery for enforcing the laws against sex discrimination in employment and education has been gradually dismantled by the Reagan Administration, and how the laws' scope has been narrowed by the courts, with little public outcry. Professional lobbyists for women's organizations objected, of course, but there have been no mass protests from the women in the jobs and professions that those laws opened to them. In the early days of the National Organization for Women, nearly 20 years ago, we demanded and won an executive order banning Government contracts to companies or institutions guilty of sex discrimination; it was the first major weapon women could use to demand jobs. Some officials in the Administration are proposing the order's elimination. The Reagan Administration is also urging the courts to undo recent movement victories regarding equal pay for work of comparable value. The crusade against women's right to choice in the matter of childbirth and abortion, preached from the pulpits of fundamentalist churches and by the Catholic hierarchy, first achieved a ban on Federal aid to poor women seeking abortion, then the elimination of United States Government aid to third-world family-planning programs that counsel abortion. The Attorney General announced this summer he would seek to reverse the historic Supreme Court decision, Roe v. Wade, which 12 years ago decreed that the right of a woman to decide according to her own conscience when and whether and how many times to bear a child was as basic a right as any the Constitution originally spelled out for men. At a recent meeting to mobilize women in mass communications to help save that right, I was amazed to hear a one-time radical feminist suggest that abortion should not be defended in terms of a woman's right. ''Women's rights are not chic in America anymore,'' she argued. The main interest of many feminist groups in various states in recent years seems to be outlawing pornography. Laws prohibiting pornography as a form of sex discrimination and violation of civil rights have been proposed in Minnesota, Indiana, California and New York. A former NOW leader who practices law in upstate New York was startled, when she dropped in on a feminist fund-raiser, to be asked to support a nationwide ban on sexually explicit materials. When she warned, ''A law like that would be far more dangerous to women than the most obscene pornography,'' she was greeted with incomprehension and hostility. At a black-tie banquet at the Plaza Hotel in New York in September, I proudly watched a sparkling parade of champion women athletes as they entertained the corporate donors who sponsor their games and scholarships through the 11-year-old Women's Sports Foundation. The women champions in basketball, judo, gymnastics, tennis, skiing, swimming, boxing, running and sports-car and dogsled racing paraded down the runway in sequined miniskirts and satin jumpsuits, clasping their hands over their heads in the victory gesture. They gave credit to parents and teachers, but not one mentioned the recent Supreme Court decision regarding Grove City College in Pennsylvania. That decision threatens to remove school athletic programs from the protection of the law banning sex discrimination in Federally assisted education - which is what provided crucial athletic training to these new female champions in the first place. At another reception, of one of the many new networks of women corporate executives, a woman in her late 30's, holding a job a woman had never been given before in a large insurance company, told me: ''If my slot became open today, they wouldn't give it to a woman. Not because I haven't done a good job - I keep getting raises. But they've stopped talking about getting more women on the board - or in the com-pany. The word has gone out from the White House: They don't have to worry anymore about women and blacks. It's over.'' At a media women's reception for Christine Craft, the last movement heroine to take a case to court against that particular mix of sex and age discrimination that threatens to impose a premature ceiling on the first gener-ation of female broadcasters, women now hitting their 40's, many younger women competing for anchor jobs did not show up to support her. At one company, executives who faced class-action suits a decade ago now boast that their best new employees are the women. They were shocked when one of their star superwomen, on a rung very near the top, became pregnant with her second child and announced she was quitting. The boss even offered her an extended maternity leave, which is not required by law or union contract, but she quit anyway. ''You may never have another chance like this,'' her colleagues, male and female, protested. ''I'll never have these years with my children again,'' she answered. Most of them did not understand. They figured that whatever guilt or pressure she suffered trying to juggle baby and demanding job was her peculiar ''personal problem.'' Another longtime feminist mother, with three ''yuppie'' daughters -banker, lawyer, talent agent - says, regretfully, ''They're not feminists . . . they take all that for granted.'' She goes on to tell me that ''Janey's problem is her love life and her job, and Ann's is her kids and her job, and Phyllis thinks maybe she should go back and get an M.B.A. With all that and exercise class, they don't have time for the meetings we used to go to. Why do they have to be feminists when they never had to suffer like we did?'' But the center for displaced housewives where this mother works - in a not-too-secure administrative job -may close down soon because of a cutoff in Government funds for job training. Seeking a part-time typist at $6,000 a year, the center was amazed to get more than 100 answers to a single ad, including women with degrees and years of job experience. Among the applicants was a long-divorced woman of retirement age who had served as a role model for feminist independence, enjoying brief celebrity for the self-help book she had written about her first brave years alone. Now she is applying for ''any kind of job, typing, sales'' - and has begun studying the ads for ''household help.'' She is, to put it bluntly, desperate. I have breakfast with two of my younger colleagues in the movement, the best and brightest, the kind that should be moving now into national leadership. One tells me she is leaving for a new job in foreign affairs. She has developed her women's rights office into such fine professional shape that ''any good pro can run it now.'' She needs a new purpose, room to grow. The other, barely 30, has the professional skills, honed during 10 years of service to the women's movement, but is not interested in the movement job. ''What's the use of all this professionalism if the grass-roots movement isn't there?'' she shrugs. ''What's wrong with it?'' I ask. ''There's a yearning for the same old music, the same old marches, by the ones who still meet in the church basements,'' she says. ''But they are the desperate ones, the lonely ones and the pros like myself who still make some kind of living off the movement. Let's face it, the yuppies - I hate that word - who are in the halfway decent jobs that the movement opened to women don't relate to the old rhetoric. The new professional networks, which supposedly help them get ahead, don't even pretend to be feminist anymore.'' Thinking of my own daughter-the-doctor and my daughter-in-law the editor-mother, I realize how much more complex, confident, vital and pressured their lives are than ours were. Their problems, putting it all together, keep them too busy to go to meetings. But are their problems as serious as those of the desperate housewives and the invisible women in the offices 20 years ago? Or as serious as those of the women struggling alone for economic and emotional survival today? Do women who are moving ahead in their own lives have less in common with the desperate ones? Do they even want to deny the very possibility of that desperation? (We were all pretty desperate then.) This last year, books, articles and notices of television programs have been piling up on my desk about these new problems of ''the postfeminist generation.'' ''Smart Women, Foolish Choices,'' for instance, and ''Lesser Lives.'' This growing chorus expresses a personal disillusionment with male-defined careers, a faintheartedness about ''having it all,'' a rebellion against superwoman standards, a sense of malaise or guilt or regret about prices paid in marriage or with children - and a recurring theme of ''not wanting to be like a man.'' For most of this year, NOW has been locked in a bitter, vengeful internal power struggle. Eleanor Smeal, for whom the limit of a four-year presidency of NOW had been waived for the duration of the equal rights amendment battle, came out of retirement to run against her successor, Judy Goldsmith, in midterm. She blamed her for NOW's depleted treasury and loss of members, and demanded a return to street demonstrations for E.R.A. and free choice in abortion. Many older feminists, who thought both had been good leaders for their time, deplored the waste of energy in such a clash, as powerful enemies were closing in. Futile nostalgia for the radical marching tunes of another day will not enlist a new generation, in different circumstances, to save the rights now being taken away. But the weakening of the organization and the longing for the old sense of empowerment are real enough - and not likely to be solved by recriminations that, unfortunately, continue to divide NOW since Eleanor Smeal's return to power. A WARE OF THESE symptoms, and yet denying my own sense that the American women's movement was over, not ready to admit defeat but wanting to move on to other things myself, I went to Kenya last summer out of a sheer sense of historic duty to see the thing through to its end. Most card-carrying American feminists were not even bothering with the meeting in Nairobi. NOW had scheduled its own convention in New Orleans at the same time as the United Nations World Conference of Women. Ten years earlier, when the modern women's movement was spreading from America to the world, I had joined women wanting to organize in their countries in appealing to the U.N. to call a world assembly of women. At the first two world women's meetings, in Mexico in 1975 and Copenhagen in 1980, I had seen the beginnings of international networking among women broken up by organized disrupters led by armed gunmen shouting slogans against ''imperialism'' and ''Zionism.'' I had been appalled at the way the official male delegates from Arab countries and other third-world and Communist nations that control the U.N. showed contempt for women's rights, using those conferences mainly to launch a new doctrine of religious and ethnic hate, equating Zionism and racism. And I had been repelled by the way the delegates from Western countries, mostly male officials or their wives and female flunkies, let them thereby rob those conferences of the moral and political weight they might have given to the advance of women worldwide. This year, the United States delegation had instructions from President Reagan to walk out if the question of Zionism was included in the conclusions reached at Nairobi. To my amazement, the women's movement emerged in Nairobi with sufficient strength worldwide to impose its own agenda of women's concerns over the male political agenda that had divided it before. Despite, or because of, the backlash and other problems they face at home, nearly 17,000 women from 159 nations assembled, some 14,000 having paid their own way or been sent by volunteer, church or women's groups to the unofficial forum that is part of every such U.N. conference. Some traveled by plane three and four days, or by bus from African villages. There was a bypassing, or bridging, of the old, abstract ideological conflicts that had seemed to divide women before - a moving beyond the old rhetoric of career versus family, equality versus development, feminism versus socialism, religion versus feminism, or feminism as an imperialist capitalist arrogance irrelevant to poor third-world women. What took the place of all this was a discussion of concrete strategies for women to acquire more control of their lives. Third-world revolutionaries, Arab and Israeli women, as well as Japanese, Greeks and Latins, gathered under a baobab tree where, every day at noon, like some African tribal elder, I led a discussion on ''Future Directions of Feminism.'' We shared common concerns about how to move ahead and earn a living in man's world - as women, even in African villages, now have to do - without losing, even using, one's best values and strengths as women. We talked about how to keep forging ahead as women when other questions - like the Israeli-Arab conflict or the superpowers' nuclear-arms race - are preoccupying our nations and using up their resources. We shared ideas on how to keep advancing, even underground, when fundamentalist groups try to take away a woman's right to control her own body or to move independently in the world, as they are doing in Egypt and the United States and have done in Iran. When the black-veiled Iranian women, in their chadors and with their armed male guards, occupied my tree one day, we moved to another, and when they occupied both trees, we carried on our dialogue in the sun. ''That's the way women have to move now everywhere in the world,'' I said. ''We go forward, we get pushed back, we regroup. It's not a win-lose battle, to be finished in any year.'' ''And we don't waste energy on nonessentials,'' said an African teacher. At the official U.N conference in Nairobi, American women delegates, mainly Republicans led by Maureen Reagan, the President's daughter, were working the hall for consensus on forward-looking strategies on equality that included things American feminists hardly dare dream of in Reagan's Washington - parental leave, child care, family planning and an economic value for women's work in home and field counted in a nation's G.N.P. as well as equal pay for work of comparable value. Many of the other delegations from European, Latin American, African and Asian nations were now led by or included women who had been fighting for women's rights at home. Ninety percent of the world's governments have set up national bodies for the advancement of women, most of them in this last decade, while ours in the United States have been dismantled. At Nairobi, when Arab and Communist delegations engaged, as usual, in ''anti-Zionist'' and ''anti-imperialist'' rhetoric, these strong women delegates, especially the Africans, kept warning that the women of the world would condemn those who blocked consensus on equality. And they forced the male diplomats to negotiate round the clock until they deleted that anti-Zionist expression of hate that has been ritual at every U.N. conference since 1975. To the amazement of experts, a program involving forward-looking strategies to advance women to equality was adopted by consensus of the nations of the world, calling on the U.N. to implement them and to report back to another world assembly of women before the year 2000. I and other Americans - as many black as white among the 2,000 of us at Nairobi -went home strengthened, resolved not to accept backward-nation status for American women. For though we had gone to Nairobi subdued by our own setbacks and sophisticated enough not to of-fer Western feminism as the answer to the problems of women of the third world, it was truly humiliating to discover that we are no longer the cutting edge of modern feminism or world progress toward equality. Even Kenya has an equal rights clause in its Constitution! HOW CAN WE LET THE WOMEN'S movement die out here in America when what we began is taking hold now all over the world? I would like to suggest 10 things that might be done to break the blocks that seem to have stymied the women's movement in America: 1. BEGIN A NEW ROUND OF CON-sciousness-raising for the new generation. These women, each thinking she is alone with her personal guilt and pressures, trying to ''have it all,'' having second thoughts about her professional career, desperately trying to have a baby before it is too late, with or without husband, and maybe secretly blaming the movement for getting her into this mess, are almost as isolated, and as powerless in their isolation, as those suburban housewives afflicted by ''the problem that had no name'' whom I interviewed for ''The Feminine Mystique'' over 20 years ago. Those women put a name to their problem; they got together with other women in the new feminist groups and began to work for political solutions and began to change their lives. That has to happen again to free a new generation of women from its new double burden of guilt and isolation. The guilts of less-than-perfect motherhood and less-than-perfect professional career performance are real because it's not possible to ''have it all'' when jobs are still structured for men whose wives take care of the details of life, and homes are still structured for women whose only responsibility is running their families. I warned five years ago that if the women's movement didn't move into a second stage and take on the problems of restructuring work and home, a new generation would be vulnerable to backlash. But the movement has not moved into that needed second stage, so the women struggling with these new problems view them as purely personal, not political, and no longer look to the movement for solutions. Putting new names to their problems, they might stop feeling guilty for not being able to conduct their professional lives just like men, might give each other support in new patterns of professional advance and parenting, might together demand new political solutions of parental leave and child care from company or profession or community, or even, once again, from government. They might, then, find new energy to save the rights they now take for granted or even secretly resent, because they are so hard to live with. 2. MOBILIZE THE NEW PROFESSIONAL networks and the old established volunteer organizations to save women's rights. We can't fight fundamentalist backlash with backward-looking feminist fundamentalism. Second-stage feminism is itself pluralistic, and has to use new pluralist strengths and strategies. The women who have been 30 and 40 percent of the graduating class from law school or business school and 47 percent of the journalism school classes, the ones who've taken women's studies, the women who grew up playing Little League baseball and cheered on those new champion women athletes, the new professional networksof women in every field, every woman who has been looking to those networks only to get ahead in her own field, must now use her professional skills to save the laws and executive orders against sex discrimination in education and employment. They must restore the enforcement machinery and the class-action suits that opened up all these opportunities to her in the first place. The volunteer organizations, it became clear in Nairobi, have been given new goals and gumption and professional expertise by the women's movement. Let NOW heal its internal wounds and join with these other groups, as it did in the E.R.A. struggle, to face the current emergency, rather than indulge in wishful thinking about refighting the E.R.A. battle. 3. GET OFF THE PORNOG-raphy kick and face the real obscenity of poverty. No matter how repulsive we may find pornography, laws banning books or movies for sexually explicit content could be far more dangerous to women. The pornography issue is dividing the women's movement and giving the impression on college campuses that to be a feminist is to be against sex. More important, it is diverting energies that need to be spent saving the basic rights now being destroyed. Karen DeCrow, who once was elected president of NOW on the slogan ''Out of the mainstream, into the revolution,'' wrote a recent article entitled ''Strange Bedfellows'' for Penthouse. She pointed out that the new feminist-supported proposals to make pornography an illegal violation of the civil rights of women have an unlooked-for effect. They aid the far right agenda that would also ban the teaching of evolution in schools, prohibit a woman's right to choose abortion, cut Government funding for textbooks that portray women in nontraditional roles, and repeal Federal statutes against spouse and child abuse. What is behind some women's obsession with pornography? Women's sexuality has been distorted and suppressed in almost every society, we learned at Nairobi, and that suppression has gone hand in hand with a general attempt to deny women freedom to control their own lives, to move and earn independently in society. Pornography, and also the crusade to suppress pornography, reduce women to a single dimension, defining them as only passive sex objects, not people who can run their own lives. But I think the secret this obsession with pornography may mask for women alone, for aging women, and for women still more economically dependent on men than they would like, is fear of poverty, which is the ultimate obscenity for Americans. I sat at a dinner table recently with several women, who I know are struggling personally with these problems, and could not believe their venom against the young rock star Madonna. I suggested that teen-agers identified with her gutsiness, strength and independence as well as with her not-at-all-passive sexuality, which to me was not a retreat from women's liberation, but a celebration of it. Whoever said that feminism shouldn't be sexy! They were women in their 40's, 50's and 60's, and they virtually spat in disgust. Perhaps an unspoken reason so many women are protesting sexually explicit materials is that their own sexuality is denied by society. But I suspect that as long as sex is distorted by women's economic dependence, or fear of it, it can't be truly, freely enjoyed. The obscenity that not even many feminists want to confront in personal terms is the sheer degradation of being poor in opulent, upwardly mobile America. Of course, the women's movement in America, like all such revolutions everywhere, has been mainly a middle-class movement, but the shameful secret it has never really dealt with is the fact that more and more middle-class women are sinking into poverty. America's first movement for women's rights died out after winning the vote, four generations ago, because women didn't tackle the hard political tasks of restructuring home and work so that women who married and had children could also earn and have their own voice in the decision-making mainstream of society. Instead, those women retreated behind a cultural curtain of female ''purity,'' focusing their energies on issues like prohibition, much like the pornographic obsession of some feminists today. 4. CONFRONT THE ILLU-sion of equality in divorce. Economists and feminists have been talking a lot lately about ''the feminization of poverty'' in theoretical terms, but the American women's movement has not developed concrete strategies that get at its root cause. It's not just a question of women earning less than men -though as long as women do not get equal pay for work of comparable value, or earn Social Security or pensions for taking care of children and home, they are both economically dependent on marriage and motherhood and pay a big economic price for it. And this is as true for divorced aging yuppies as for welfare mothers. A startling new book by the sociologist Lenore J. Weitzman, ''The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences for Women and Children in America,'' reveals that in the 1970's, when 48 states adopted ''no-fault'' divorce laws treating men and women ''equally'' in divorce settlements -laws feminists originally supported - divorced women and their children suffered an immediate 73 percent drop in their standard of living, while their ex-husbands enjoyed a 42 percent rise in theirs. In dividing ''marital property,'' Lenore Weitzman reports, judges have systematically overlooked the major assets of many marriages -the husband's career assets that the wife helped make possible, his professional education that she may have helped support, the career on which he was able to concentrate because she ran the home, and his salary, pension, health insurance and earning power that resulted. They have also ignored the wife's years of unpaid housework and child care (not totally insured by Social Security in the event of divorce) and her drastically diminished job prospects after divorce. And, for most, the ''equal'' division of property means the forced sale of the family home - which used to be awarded to the wife and children. Child support, which has often been inadequate, unpaid and uncollectable, usually ends when the child is 18, just as college expenses begin. Thus the vicious cycle whereby an ever-increasing majority of the truly poor in America are families headed by women. A new generation of feminist lawyers and judges has now drafted, and must get urgent grass-roots political support for, the kind of law needed, a law that treats marriage as a true economic partnership - and includes fairer standards of property division, maintenance and child support. It should be a law that does not penalize women who have chosen family over, or even together with, professional career. 5. RETURN THE ISSUE OF abortion to the matter of women's own responsible choice. I think feminists have been so traumatized by the fundamentalist crusade against abortion and all the talk of fetuses and when life begins that they are in danger of forgetting the values that made abortion a feminist issue in the first place. Underneath the hysteria, poll after poll shows that the great majority of women in this nation, and most men, still want to decide when and whether to have a child in accordance with their own conscience. This includes women of faith, including the majority of Catholic women. Attacks on the Pope and picketing the churches, as some desperate or deranged male and female abortion champions have lately proposed, would play right into the hands of our ''right to life'' enemies, who love to paint feminists as satanic opponents of God and family. We must not surrender family values and religious principles to the far right. Let the new women theologians and feminist women of faith in every church take on the fundamentalist preachers. I think women who are young, and those not so young, today must be able to choose when to have a child, given the necessities of their jobs. They will indeed join their mothers, who remember the humiliations and dangers of back-street butcher abortions, in a march of millions to save the right of legal abortion. I certainly support a march for women's choice of birth control and legal aborion. NOW has called for one in the spring of 1986. 6. AFFIRM THE DIFFER-ences between men and women. New feminist thinking is required if American women are to continue advancing in man's world, as they must, to earn their way, and yet ''not become like men.'' This fear is heard with more and more frequency today from young women, including many who have succeeded, and some who have failed or opted out of male-defined careers. More books like Carol Gilligan's ''In a Different Voice'' and consciousness-raising sessions are needed. First-stage feminism denied real differences between women and men except for the sexual organs themselves. Some feminists still do not understand that true equality is not possible unless those differences between men and women are affirmed and until values based on female sensitivities to life begin to be voiced in every discipline and profession, from architecture to economics, where, until recently, all concepts and standards were defined by men. This is not a matter of abstract theory alone but involves the restructuring of hours of work and patterns of professional training so that they take into account the fact that women are the people who give birth to children. It must lead to concrete changes in medical practice, church worship, the writing of history, standards of ethics, even the design of homes and appliances. 7. BREAKTHROUGH FOR older women. The women's movement has never put serious energy into the job that must be done to get women adequately covered by Social Security and pensions, especially those women now reaching 65 who spent many years as housewives and are ending up alone. The need for more independent and shared housing for older women now living alone in suburban houses they can't afford to sell, or lonely furnished rooms - and the need for services and jobs or volunteer options that will enable them to keep on living independent, productive lives - has never been a part of the women's movement agenda. But that first generation of feminist mothers, women now in their 60's, is a powerful political resource for the movement as these women retire from late or early professional or volunteer careers. Women in their 50's and 60's are shown by the polls to be more firmly committed than their daughters to the feminist goals of equality. Let the women's movement lead the rest of society in breaking the spell of the youth cult and drawing on the still enormous energies and the wisdom that may come to some of us in age. 8. BRING IN THE MEN. IT'S passe, surely, for feminists now to see men only as the enemy, or to contemplate separatist models for emotional or economic survival. Feminist theorists like Barbara Ehrenreich cite dismal evidence of the ''new men'' opting out of family responsibilities altogether. But in my own life I seem to see more and more young men, and older ones - even former male chauvinist pigs - admitting their vulnerability and learning to express their tenderness, sharing the care of the kids, even though most of them may never share it equally with their wives. And as men let down their masks of machismo, and admit their dependence on the women in their lives, women may admit a new need to depend on men, without fear of sinking back into the old abject subservience. After all, even women who insist they are not, and never will be, feminists have learned to defend themselves against real male brutality. Look at Charlotte Donahue Fedders, the wife of that Security and Exchange com-missioner, who testified in divorce court about his repeated abuse - his repeated beatings caused black eyes and a broken eardrum. At one time, a woman in her situation would have kept that shame a secret. The Reagan Administration had to ask him to resign, because wife-beating is no longer politically acceptable, even in conservative America in 1985. I don't think women can, or should try to, take the responsibility for liberating men from the remnants of machismo. But there has to be a new way of asking what do men really want, to echo Freud, a new kind of dialogue that breaks through or gets behind both our masks. Women cannot restructure jobs or homes just by talking to themselves. 9. CONTINUE TO FIGHT for real political power. Although feminists do not now, and never really did, support a woman just because she is a woman, there is no substitute for having women in political offices that matter. But more women are discovering that they have to fight, as men do, in primaries where victory is not certain, and not just wait for an ''open seat.'' After the E.R.A.'s defeat, feminists and their supporters raised money nationally to run women candidates in virtually every district in Illinois, Florida and North Carolina where legislators voted against the amendment. And in that single election they increased sizably women's representation in those state legislatures. 10. MOVE BEYOND SIN-gle-issue thinking. Even today, I do not think women's rights are the most urgent business for American women. The important thing is somehow getting together with men who also put the values of life first to break through the paralysis that fundamentalist backlash has imposed on all our movements. It is not only feminism that is becoming a dirty word in America, but also liberalism, humanism, pluralism, environmentalism and civil liberties. The very freedom of political dissent that enabled the women's movement to start here has been made to seem unsafe for today's young men as well as young women. I think the yuppies are afraid to be political. Women may have to think beyond ''women's issues'' to join their energies with men to redeem our democratic tradition and turn our nation's power to the interests of life instead of the nuclear arms race that is paralyzing it. I've never, for instance, seen the need for a separate women's peace movement. I'm not really sure that women, by nature, are more peace-loving than men. They were simply not brought up to express aggression the way men do (they took it out covertly, on themselves and on their men and children, psychologists would say). But the human race may not survive much longer unless women move beyond the nurture of their own babies and careers to politcial decisions of war and peace, and unless men who share the nurture of their children take responsibility for ending the arms race before it destroys all life. In that sense, I think the women's movement is only a particular moment in human evolution, and once its job is really done, then it can and should be allowed to fade away, honorably discharged.

Subject: Architect of Judaism From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 07:14:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22julius.html?ex=1295586000&en=3dbb04b533b26419&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Architect of Judaism By ANTHONY JULIUS MAIMONIDES lived from about 1135 to 1204, first in cities in Spain, then in Morocco and Palestine, and finally in Egypt, where he eventually became the leader of the Egyptian Jewish community and its principal teacher. As Jewry's pre-eminent legal authority and philosopher, he was humane and tough-minded, a comfort to Jews and a chastiser of heresy. He wrote that it was incumbent upon a Jew restricted in the practice of his worship to depart for another place, as he himself had been repeatedly forced to do at the hands of the Almohads, a violent Islamic sect that took control of the Spanish peninsula in 1148 and gave non-Muslims the choice of conversion or death. But he also wrote: 'If a man asks me, 'Shall I be slain or utter the formula of Islam?' I answer, 'Utter the formula and live.' ' Maimonides transformed Judaism, composing its Thirteen Principles of Faith. The celebrated 12th principle - 'I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah, and though he tarry, I will wait daily for his coming' - has entered popular consciousness. His 'Guide for the Perplexed,' written in Arabic and completed in 1190, further recast Judaism, offering a philosophical interpretation of the Scriptures far removed from the conventional readings of his (and indeed our own) times. Today, Maimonides stands for an austerely intellectual doctrinal Judaism, the castigation of all forms of idolatry and the combining of Jewish learning with secular science and philosophy (in his own times, this meant Aristotle). Maimonides is also known for having been studied intensively by Leo Strauss, the teacher of neoconservatives, who championed and built upon Maimonides' distinction between esoteric and exoteric learning, wisdom for the few and a practical piety for the many. Sherwin B. Nuland's concise account of Maimonides endeavors to find 'the common ground on which Maimonides can walk together with a man or woman of today.' Nuland writes sympathetically, one Jewish doctor considering this most extraordinary of Jewish doctors, who began to practice medicine in 1175 after the death of his brother (and the loss of the family fortune) in a shipwreck sent him into a profound depression. Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and author of 'How We Die,' among other books, is a careful and appreciative expositor, and has taken the trouble to read the critical literature. His book is a guide for those perplexed by Maimonides, as well as those ignorant of him. It is also a useful guide to Jewish ethics. It was good, for example, to be reminded that the punishment in Jewish law for using incorrect weights and measures in business is more severe than the punishment for sexual immorality, because the latter is a sin only against God, while the former is a sin against one's fellow man. There is, of course, a secular ethics implicit in this distinction waiting to be developed (as it would be, centuries later, by John Stuart Mill). Nuland's book is the second in a series entitled 'Jewish Encounters,' whose projected volumes will feature Jewish writers on topics ranging from military Jews and the Jewish body to self-hatred and anti-Semitism, the Hebrew alphabet and the dairy restaurant. In this attractively heterogeneous list, one might imagine Maimonides, the great systematizer, standing for a lost Jewish unity. He would probably not have been happy to find himself in such eclectic company, however. A somewhat forbidding aspect of Maimonides' thought is his severity in the matter of heresy. His relentless rationality and contempt for superstition is also forbidding, though perhaps not quite so antipathetic to modern sensibilities. He was fierce with Jewish thinkers who embraced obscurantism. This is one of my favorite passages from 'The Guide for the Perplexed': 'There is a group of human beings who consider it a grievous thing that causes should be given for any law; what would please them most is that the intellect would not find a meaning for the commandments and prohibitions. What compels them to feel thus is a sickness that they find in their souls, a sickness to which they are unable to give utterance and of which they cannot furnish a satisfactory account. For they think that if those laws were useful in this existence and had been given to us for this or that reason, it would be as if they derived from the reflection and the understanding of some intelligent being. If, however, there is a thing for which the intellect could not find any meaning at all and that does not lead to something useful, it indubitably derives from God; for the reflection of man would not lead to such a thing. It is as if, according to these people of weak intellects, man were more perfect than his Maker; for man speaks and acts in a manner that leads to some intended end, whereas the Deity does not act thus but commands us to do things that are not useful to us and forbids us to do things that are not harmful to us.' Notice the tone of disparagement, amounting to contempt for his intellectual adversaries. Maimonides' writing has a polemical edge: he is impatient with stupidity, especially a stupidity masquerading as piety. The argument in which he is intervening here concerns the question of whether there are reasons for the commandments, specifically those commandments (such as the law forbidding the mingling of wool and linen) not amenable to immediate justification. For Maimonides, even the most puzzling commandments have an instrumental purpose, teaching right opinions, moral qualities or proper civic conduct. Maimonides was concerned with maintaining the simple faith of the uneducated. The arduous business of philosophy, the esoteric understanding of religious truth, was not for them. He had no conviction that the profound truths of Judaism were within equal reach of all Jews. Maimonides was a bold and (to use an anachronism) fundamentally undemocratic thinker. Nuland does not concern himself with the tension between what Maimonides stood for and what modern Judaism stands for; and though he remarks on it, he does not explore the implications of the tension in Maimonides' own thought between the few and the many, the esoteric and the exoteric. Still, his book remains a deeply satisfying and humane introduction to the greatest of Jewish thinkers.

Subject: Overlooked French Knew How to Draw From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 07:11:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/18/arts/design/18glue.html?ex=1289970000&en=8598f0a693970b43&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 18, 2005 The Overlooked French Knew How to Draw, Too By GRACE GLUECK To the tsunami of French art from the past reaching our shores this season, add 'Clouet to Seurat,' a show of 16th- to 19th-century French drawings from the magisterial British Museum that is now on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Concerned that its collection of around 3,500 French drawings had suffered underexposure in comparison with those of the Italian and Northern European schools in its vast holdings, the British institution has selected 95 for presentation at the Met. This sometimes exciting - sometimes not - show provides a spotty outline of modes and methods in French art over three centuries. What makes a drawing - or any work of art, for that matter - particularly French? Or English? Or Italian? Aside from the simple convenience of classifying art by the national identities of its artists, museums and scholars discern qualities peculiar to each culture on the basis of aesthetic ideas and movements, the influence of one powerful artist over others in his vicinity, the shared landscapes, events and heroes of a particular country and the institutions peculiar to it. In France in 1648, for example, the establishment of the Royal Academy, a bastion of French classicism, spread the cool, antiquity-worshiping influence of the philosopher-artist Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665), probably the most important French painter of the 17th century. He actually spent most of his working life in Rome, where his development of mythological and then biblical subjects helped prepare for the rise of French academic history painting. His impact goes as far forward as Cézanne. But, alas, the two sheets by him here - one of antique motifs, the other a very rough sketch for his solidly composed painting 'The Holy Family With the Infant Saint John the Baptist and Saint Elizabeth' (circa 1650-51) - convey more of his working methods than his aesthetic endowments. Of far more graphic appeal are the show's five drawings by Poussin's contemporary Claude Lorrain (circa 1604-1682), the other great French influence of that era, a landscape specialist who also spent most of his career in Rome. There he raised the lowly landscape genre to a major means of expression. Claude's work, more sensual and spontaneous than that of Poussin, is noted for its intense response to light and atmospheric changes. A beautiful example is 'Coast View With Perseus and the Origin of Coral' (1674), a record on blue-toned paper that Claude made of his painting of the same title, in which beasts and higher beings, some winged, are deployed near a huge arched rock on a tiny strip of land - a scene dramatically highlighted by atmospheric effects. Earlier, Jean Clouet (1475/85-1540), a portraitist at the court of Francis I, contributed to the Frenchness of French art by his development of likenesses drawn in color - the mixing of red and black chalk that became a French convention. Most of his drawn portraits were made for paintings. In a charming likeness here of a demure young woman, he blended black and red to create realistic flesh tones, and used graining, a method of coaxing the paper to cooperate with the chalk, recording under-chin and under-nose shadows. A digression, speaking of chalk, about a 17th-century artist little known today, Pierre Dumonstier II (circa 1585-1656), one of a large family of portrait-makers who were also chalkmeisters. He is represented in the show by a delicately beautiful drawing in black and red, dated 1625, of the hand of the Italian Caravaggesque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1652/3), in effect a symbolic portrait. (Aside from her fame as one of the earliest acknowledged female artists, she is known for the sensational trial in which her father brought to justice an art entrepreneur who raped her when she was 19.) In the Dumonstier drawing, Gentileschi's hand daintily holds a poised brush. He proudly signed the painting with an inscription that praised her hands 'for knowing how to make marvels that send the most judicious eyes into raptures.' A maestro of the graphic arts during the first decades of the 17th century was Jacques Callot (1592-1635), who, among other accomplishments, helped bring the technique of etching to full flower. Trained at the Medici court in Florence, he settled back in his birthplace of Nancy, France, around 1622. His wide-ranging subjects ran from court figures and horses to battle paintings chronicling the miseries of war, prefiguring Goya. Callot's dashing rendition in brush and brown wash of Louis de Lorraine, Prince of Phalsbourg (1624), astride a rearing horse as he overlooks a battlefield, has a theatrical swagger absent from three smaller brush drawings also about war, including 'Battle on a Bridge' (date uncertain), an action-packed scene of clashing forces depicted in tiny but horrendous detail. Arriving with the dawn of the 18th century, the Rococo style, descended from Baroque, encouraged asymmetry, artifice - but also the study of nature and natural motifs - and an engagement with elegant whimsy. In France, Rococo's greatest proponent was Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), a highly individualistic draftsman and painter regarded by more than a few as the most influential French artist of his time. A Watteau specialty was the fête galante, putting theatrical and courtly figures together in idyllic settings where romantic fantasy could flourish. Of the five Watteau sheets in the show, the strongest is one intended for a fête galante. On it are two studies of guitarists (circa 1716) strumming their instruments, allegorical heralds of courtship or love-play who were probably candidates for roles in a painting. Romanticism, with its stress on the personal and the emotional, dominated the early part of the 19th century, as opposed to the neo-Classical style exemplified by Jacques-Louis David (poorly represented here by two drawings from the antique) and his followers, who prevailed in France after what were seen as Rococo's excesses. Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863) was the rebel romantic, acclaimed - and sometimes attacked - for his bold colors, emotional use of paint and exotic subject matter. His undated sheet, with brush-and-chalk studies of an Arab, shown in profile as he sits on a chair in a striped cloak and turban, is notable for its eloquent drawing, from the loose but accurate sketching that depicts the flowing robe and turban to the intensity of line and color that captures the face. The show continues into the ferment of the late 19th century with the advent of realism in the work of Gustave Courbet (whose wonderfully confident self-portrait from 1852 in black chalk and charcoal is as good as anything here); the arrival of Impressionism, skimpily represented by Pissarro and Degas; and a couple of drawings by Cézanne that are tokens of his struggles to give his work a post-Impressionist structural discipline. Two conté crayon drawings by Georges Seurat, both tonal studies in shades of gray for his monumental pointillist epic 'La Grande Jatte' of 1884, give the exhibition a dazzling final charge.

Subject: 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau': An Unruly Mind From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:58:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/books/review/06schiff.html?ex=1288933200&en=435ff3514011e691&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 6, 2005 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau': An Unruly Mind By STACY SCHIFF THE well-behaved biographical subject follows a haphazard course to his destiny. He shies from the predictable, shuns the inexorable, plummets into sand traps. Which makes Jean-Jacques Rousseau a paragon of biographical good manners. Generally speaking, penniless provincials were not the stars of the 18th century. Rousseau's early years make the classic underachievers - the Churchills and Einsteins - look distinguished. Late blooming doesn't even begin to cover it. The future political theorist was a clumsy footman, a feckless clerk. Learning that he had written a successful opera, one of his former employers could only sputter: 'What? that imbecile?' In this fine new biography, Leo Damrosch, the Ernest Bernbaum professor of literature at Harvard, sees Rousseau's as a sort of Cinderella story. He is eloquent on the mouse-and-pumpkin phase, entirely central to the tale. Rousseau's early years are familiar to us from his 'Confessions,' but in 'Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius,' Damrosch fleshes them out and corrects the record; Rousseau may have pioneered the art of autobiography, but he did not necessarily get his facts right. Born in Geneva in 1712 to a Calvinist watchmaker, he lost his mother as an infant. A decade later his father abandoned him. Early on, Rousseau distinguished himself for his lack of discipline; his was a sort of hit-and-run adolescence, untainted by formal education and wildly itinerant. It reads like a picaresque, half Sterne, half Cervantes. Damrosch diagnoses dyslexia - Rousseau could think only at his own pace, and away from his desk; he wrote with immense difficulty - but attention-deficit disorder sounds more like it. In any event he was in no realm a stellar student. He was a lousy linguist, and could neither dance nor fence. He struggled with music. (The last did not stop him from composing, badly.) He proved somewhat more adept at petty theft; his various scams include one on which 'The Music Man' appears to have been based. At 15 he defected to Turin where - evidently Rousseau was one tough customer - two baptisms were required to make him a Roman Catholic. His first adventure with the church came complete with his first encounter with a male seducer. On the subjects of both sex and religion he remained squeamish. (He would reconvert in l754.) By the time he turned up in Paris in the early 1740's Rousseau had proved himself unfit as a diplomatic secretary, a monk's interpreter, a tutor, a bureaucrat. But along the way a funny thing happened. 'To know nothing at almost 25, and to want to learn everything,' he noted, 'is to commit oneself to making the best use of one's time.' On his own and between scams and scenes, he had begun to imbibe books. Surely there is a parenting lesson in here somewhere: What to make of the fact that the two seminal autobiographies of the 18th century were written by unschooled teenage runaways, rebellious working-class sons, the original apprentices? The city and the country mouse, Ben Franklin and Rousseau were never to meet except in their legacies, but there are startling parallels in their early years. None of them are lost on Damrosch. By contrast with Franklin, Rousseau began to write only as he floundered toward 40. A 1750 denunciation of modern civilization put him on the map; that brief critique of progress ripened soon enough into a happy primitivism. Swimming against the Enlightenment tide, Rousseau argued that the fall from grace came with the invention of society. (Even the impulse toward sex struck him as a social convention: 'I am persuaded that a solitary person who grew up in a desert without books, instruction and women would die a virgin at whatever age he might reach.') To make a virtue of marginality was, for Rousseau, tantamount to making one of necessity. Socially awkward, he was temperamental and insecure. It is difficult to believe that anyone less hypersensitive to slights could have been so astute on the subject of oppression. Success brought society to the doorstep of the man who claimed to abhor it. Over a 16-month period before his 50th birthday, Rousseau produced three magisterial tomes. The rapturous (and eventless) 'Julie' became the best-selling novel of the century. In it Rousseau put passion on the page - on all 800 of them, in fact. Repeatedly he managed to turn his failings to his advantage. His common-law wife gave birth to five children, each consigned to a foundling hospital. (Rousseau explained later that they would have interfered with his work, which was no doubt true, if not necessarily the opinion of their mother.) From his remorse came the child-rearing guide 'Émile.' The protopreacher of family values was neither exactly a husband - he never legally married - nor father. In 'The Social Contract,' Rousseau did nothing less than turn a political system on its head. He pronounced the people sovereign, and one citizen as good as another. He wrote religion off as a form of tyranny. Perhaps the ultimate tribute to that bombshell came later from Napoleon: 'It would have been better for the peace of France if this man had never existed.' In its author's lifetime the book did a great deal to validate his persecution complex. The church led the charge. Rousseau fled to England, where - outfitted in striped robe and velvet, gold-tasseled hat - he did not exactly fit in with the natives. He did manage to indulge one of his greater talents, that of falling out with those who meant him well. Rousseau set such high standards for friendship that he was better off alone; by his 50's the hypersensitivity bordered on mania. 'Persecution has elevated my soul,' he explained, courting it again and again. He quarreled with David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who had offered him asylum, and with whom he was never reconciled. In the delusional aftermath (Rousseau admitted later that he had succumbed to 'an attack of madness'), he set about composing one of the earliest self-analyses in the history of literature. The paradox was perfectly consistent with the life. 'Confessions' was published only posthumously; it was some time before Rousseau's ideas seeped into the drinking water. In his own day he was provocative but also outlandish. As Damrosch puts it, Rousseau was after all understood to be 'describing a state of nature that never existed, a political system that never could exist and an educational scheme that never should exist.' Social inequality, the will of the people, inalienable rights were meaningless concepts when Rousseau began ranting about them. Imagination was out of fashion; he was tiptoeing around the as-yet-undiscovered unconscious. He advocated idleness in the age of Adam Smith. If he suffered for being so much out of step with his own century, he can too easily be overlooked in ours. Without founding a school - it would have been inappropriate - Rousseau stands squarely if unsystematically at the root of democracy, autobiography, Romanticism, child-centered education, even psychoanalysis. Damrosch restores him to us in all his originality, though his volume is a little spare in the philosophy department. There are rather more of Rousseau's paranoid ravings and persistent ramblings than of ideas in these pages. In part Damrosch is hobbled by a conundrum he acknowledges; the social life is easier to document than the intellectual development. There is no adequate way to explain how a man born in chains became so free. In this case the reader is in no position to complain, however. Rousseau pioneered the concept that ideas fell out of experience, and the erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read, Damrosch comes as close to Rousseau's authentic self as we are likely to get.

Subject: On the Trail of a Missing Caravaggio From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:55:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/02/books/02book.html?ex=1291179600&en=f6608f3b7f286328&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 2, 2005 On the Trail of a Missing Caravaggio By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The prospect of discovering a lost masterpiece in the attic is one of those primal fantasies shared by 'Antiques Roadshow' devotees and art scholars alike - a dream not merely of instant riches, but also of restoring to the world a great artist's vanished work and a missing piece of history. This fantasy provided the premise for Michael Frayn's delightful 1999 novel, 'Headlong,' and it's also the subject of Jonathan Harr's captivating new book, 'The Lost Painting,' which tells the real-life story of the rediscovery in the early 1990's of one of the Italian artist Caravaggio's most sought-after paintings, 'The Taking of Christ.' Mr. Harr, the author of the 1995 nonfiction best seller 'A Civil Action,' recounts the search for the painting as a detective story and scholarly treasure hunt, and by interviewing the principal players at length he has created a narrative that possesses all the suspense and emotional and social detail of a keenly observed novel. The book suffers from two curious lacunae: it fails to give the reader a palpable appreciation of Caravaggio's tumultuous life and darkly potent work, and it declines to delve into the 2004 dispute that erupted when another version of the same painting surfaced in Rome. These lapses aside, 'The Lost Painting' does an engrossing job of showing how art historians and art restorers work, and it demonstrates how their painstaking craft can unearth clues to the past, and how laborious, frustrating and occasionally rewarding that work can be. As the story begins in 1989, Mr. Harr's three chief protagonists are Sir Denis Mahon, one of the world's foremost authorities on Caravaggio; Francesca Cappelletti, a graduate student at the University of Rome, who, along with a fellow student, Laura Testa, begins researching the early history of a pair of Caravaggio paintings; and Sergio Benedetti, an Italian art restorer, who has dreamed for years of making a big discovery that would advance his career. Ms. Cappelletti, who today teaches art history at the University of Ferrara, clearly spent a great deal of time talking with Mr. Harr, and much of the book is told from her point of view, recreating her life as a student and charting, in almost blow by blow detail, the scholarly detective work she conducted with Ms. Testa. The two were hired in 1989 by a man named Giampaolo Correale, who harbored the daunting ambition of creating a computer database for Italy's vast trove of art, and who asked the two students to research the history of two nearly identical paintings of St. John that had both been attributed to Caravaggio. Caravaggio died in 1610, in his late 30's - he had led a violent, brawl-filled life and at the time of his death was on the run from enemies and the law - and, as Mr. Harr writes, fewer than 80 (some would say no more than 60) canvases have been authenticated as his work. After centuries of obscurity, when his work was disdained as grimly naturalistic (John Ruskin wrote that the painter fed 'upon horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin'), his reputation has undergone a remarkable efflorescence, and now any rumor about a new Caravaggio sets the art world abuzz. So it was with a great sense of excitement that Ms. Cappelletti and Ms. Testa made the discovery - in the archives of the once wealthy Mattei family - of records relating not only to Caravaggio's St. John painting, but also to 'The Taking of Christ,' a canvas that had been missing for hundreds of years. The women try to put this information together with an unproven hunch on the part of the Caravaggio scholar Roberto Longhi, who suspected that a painting bought in 1802 from the Mattei family by a Scotsman named William Hamilton Nisbet was in fact the missing Caravaggio canvas 'The Taking of Christ' - not, as the records indicated, a copy by the Dutch artist Gerard van Honthorst. The search takes Ms. Cappelletti to Edinburgh to look for auction records concerning the Nisbet estate, and it also brings her into the orbit of Mr. Longhi's famous rival in Caravaggio studies, Sir Denis. Meanwhile, in Dublin, Sergio Benedetti, who works in the restoration studio at the National Gallery of Ireland, pays a visit to a local Jesuit residence to look at some paintings that it wants cleaned. Among the undistinguished paintings ('all rubbish,' he thinks to himself) is one of Christ and Judas that immediately strikes Mr. Benedetti's eye. An amateur Caravaggio expert, Mr. Benedetti examines the canvas and thinks it is either by the master himself or is the best possible copy. In recounting these dovetailing stories, Mr. Harr does a dexterous job of building narrative tension, conveying both the intellectual thrills experienced by Ms. Cappelletti and Mr. Benedetti as they make their discoveries and the scrupulous research that goes into verifying their finds. Because the author skims so lightly over Caravaggio's own story and the qualities of his work that make him such a presciently modern painter, this is a volume best read in conjunction with another book about the artist - preferably one that is copiously illustrated with pictures of the master's luminous and unsettling art.

Subject: Tolerating Death in the Mines From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:48:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/opinion/05sun2.html?ex=1296795600&en=94cbc547ab300db7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Tolerating Death in the Mines Federal safety officials, faced with the death of two more West Virginia miners, are asking the coal industry to 'stand down for safety' tomorrow to check the nation's mines for lethal working conditions. This smacks of public relations more than worker protection. The safety agency, notorious for its political appointees from the coal industry, is also suddenly finding more inspectors for West Virginia, which has suffered 16 miner deaths recently. The tragedies have laid bare the passivity and pro-industry bias in the Bush administration's stewardship of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Last month, the chief of the now-galvanized agency cavalierly announced more pressing business and walked out of a Congressional hearing into the initial West Virginia deaths, even as shocked lawmakers still had key questions unanswered. We're glad that West Virginia's government has finally enacted laws requiring that miners be equipped with wireless communication and location devices, better oxygen supplies and faster, more organized rescue crews. Five other states are considering similar steps, but the crying need is for the administration to make this a national issue. In Canada, 72 miners were rescued after 20 hours thanks to underground 'refuge stations' required by law to be stocked with oxygen, food and water. No such protection was at hand for the West Virginia victims. The administration should join West Virginia lawmakers calling for tougher inspections, penalties and safety equipment under federal law. The deaths showed that companies have too much leeway in running rescue efforts, and too little concern for crackdowns by the federal mine agency. A pro-industry bias by government should not be tolerated. Yet, at a hearing for the administration's latest choice of still another company veteran to take control of mine safety, Republican lawmakers shamelessly praised the industry for lowering fatality statistics across time — as if those killed in West Virginia were a tolerable cost of Big Coal's doing business.

Subject: Do We Suffer From a Feminist Mystique? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:26:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-second.html November 22, 1981 Do We Suffer From a Feminist Mystique? By HERMA HILL KAY THE SECOND STAGE By Betty Friedan. It is a commonplace that in most societies throughout history the division of household labor has corresponded to gender. Any society that attempts to change this pattern must be prepared to experience the turmoil that accompanies basic social reorganization. If significant groups within the society oppose this fundamental alteration of traditional sex roles, as they now do in the United States, the turmoil is likely to be exacerbated. Thus, it is not surprising that those who are trying to break the old pattern in their own lives should feel the tension most keenly. They are, after all, accurately perceived as threats to established ways, as agents provocateurs. But the strain extends as well to those whose comfortable habits are disturbed in the process. In her new book, Betty Friedan confronts these constraints - as though for the first time - and finds them startling. In conversations with young women around the country, she finds an ''unarticulated malaise'' suggested by a questioning of whether it is really possible to combine marriage, children and career. From men who overidentified with their jobs only to discover that human satisfaction had eluded them, she hears warnings about ''dead ends for women'' if they, too, follow this path. Given such distress signals, and the continuing political backlash against the women's movement (apparent in the stalled effort to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment), Mrs. Friedan concludes that the women's movement has created a ''feminist mystique'' that threatens to become every bit as confining as the ''feminine mystique'' she identified in her earlier book. If it was necessary in the ''first stage'' of the women's movement to break out of the ''feminine'' mystique, with its image of a woman ''completely fulfilled in her role as husband's wife, children's mother, server of physical needs of husband, children, home,'' then in the ''second stage'' it will be necessary to go beyond the ''feminist mystique,'' which has limited women to a reactive stance, as they press their ''grievances against men in office and home, school and field, in marriage, housework, even sex.'' The cost of this feminist reaction against male domination, Mrs. Friedan now believes, is that many women felt forced to abandon or deny their human needs for home, mate and children. She argues that by turning their backs on the family, many members of the women's movement abandoned that institution to the opponents of feminism, who have effectively used the defense of traditional family values as a platform from which to attack the Equal Rights Amendment, procreative choice and homosexuality. In ''The Second Stage,'' Betty Friedan makes a bold attempt to regain control of the family policy agenda. Her strategy calls for a joint effort by men and women to redefine what is meant by success at home and on the job so that the needs of both sexes for achievement, intimacy and nurturance can find adequate expression. She reports on research that contrasts ''Alpha,'' or ''masculine,'' leadership styles, which draw on quantitative analysis, with ''Beta,'' or ''feminine,'' ones, which, according to at least one scientist from the Stanford Research Institute, are based on more ''intuitive'' thinking and a ''contextural'' power style. Mrs. Friedan responds by calling for a type of leadership marked by fewer confrontations and greater adaptability. It is possible to applaud this strategy without embracing the reasoning that produced it. For example, it seems premature to identify a second stage in a social movement when the original goals of the ''first stage'' of the movement are still disputed and largely unrealized. It turns out that what Mrs. Friedan means by the ''second stage'' is an effort to enlist the aid of men to attain some of those original goals - namely, the emancipation of women from the home as a primary source of personal identity and the restructuring of the marketplace to accommodate the human needs of both male and female workers. Hence, one may fairly conclude that no significant completion of the ''first stage'' of the movement has occurred. A second weakness in the argument is the dichotomy Mrs. Friedan poses between ''feminine'' and ''feminist'' mystiques, and, as she puts it, the resulting need for ''a dialectical progression from thesis-antithesis (feminine mystique-feminism) to synthesis.'' The ''dialectical progression'' seems more a forensic device than either a description of actual experience or a valid analysis of the direction the women's movement has taken. The dichotomy seems artificial, and the categories too narrow. Neither the suburban housewives described in ''The Feminine Mystique'' nor the radical feminists who, as portrayed in ''The Second Stage,'' perceived man as ''the enemy'' represented large numbers of American women. For one thing, both groups were composed largely of white, middle-class women; even within that subgroup, certainly the revolutionaries and possibly the suburbanites were far from a majority. Still, Mrs. Friedan is right to insist that the experiences of both groups have been influential beyond their mere numbers. What is misleading is her assumption that either category is capable of containing all women or even one woman throughout her lifetime. A synthesis may indeed be needed, but if so, it must reflect more elements of the female experience than can be isolated from either the ''feminine mystique'' or ''feminism.'' Finally, it seems unnecessary to invoke new models of masculine and feminine leadership - even with the caveat that neither model is ''innate'' to a particular sex - to make the point that a certain amount of flexibility is needed in a period of transition. If men truly want to escape the pressures of their work and the rigidities of their lives, they will find ways to permit women to share these burdens, even as they allow themselves to enjoy an expanded role within the family. Mrs. Friedan's new plea for cooperation between men and women cannot disguise the fact that the women's movement has always represented a struggle for liberation from an ascribed and limited status. Like any other liberation movement, whether that of racial minorities or homosexuals, its basic theme is freedom to choose one's own destiny. But in all such efforts it soon develops that the power to make decisions about one's life without the means to implement them is an illusion. For all disadvantaged groups, the means of implementation include access to education, jobs and social status. In the case of men, the scope of choice can be broadened if race and sexual orientation are eliminated as permissible grounds for legal or social disapproval. But we have learned that we cannot establish freedom of opportunity for women merely by eliminating gender as the stated or unstated basis for distinction. The United States Supreme Court's determination in 1976 in General Electric Company v. Gilbert that distinctions (for purposes of job-related disability plans) based on pregnancy are not based on sex showed us the limitations of the ''sex-blind'' argument. If women workers are to have opportunities for advancement equal to men, and if the human race is to survive, we must find ways to prevent women from being disadvantaged if they choose to have children. Two kinds of initiatives would help. One is public and includes the enactment of laws (already begun in the 1978 Congressional reversal of Gilbert) to prevent employers from treating pregnancy less favorably than other disabilities. The courts must also recognize that such laws do not prevent state legislatures or employers from taking further steps to neutralize the economic impact of pregnancy through, for example, paid maternity leaves - even if such leaves are not available to men. The other kind of initiative, stressed by Mrs. Friedan, is a private one. If a couple wishes to raise a family, it is simply inefficient for two people sharing a household both to work outside the home. The available options are relatively few. Broadly, they include the use of paid help or shared parental responsibility for child rearing. The cost of the first option limits its usefulness, but it clearly permits the greatest flexibility for both partners. If the Government provided children's allowances, or if employers arranged for child-care facilities as part of fringe-benefit packages, this choice might be possible for more families. Virtually every modern industrial society except our own has adopted such a solution in one form or another. Mrs. Friedan doubts whether such programs are ''politically viable'' today in the United States, but the political climate may change, and, in any event, women workers should continue to press for these solutions. The second option, having both parents share in child rearing, is perhaps the more promising one for most families, but it entails significant practical problems. The major obstacle is the present organization of the work force, which assumes 8-hour shifts and even longer hours and more irregular away-from-home schedules for people who reach the higher ranges of executive and professional work. Individual willingness to share child-care responsibilities means nothing unless the work place is restructured to facilitate and even reward such initiatives. Mrs. Friedan's perception that this is the goal toward which both men and women must direct their efforts is a sound one. Her further proposal, that families should create a different model of housing, one that would permit several families to share common kitchen, dining and child-care areas, while having separate apartments for privacy, is a valuable option for those drawn to communal living. Care must be taken, however, lest the ''communal mystique'' become as confining as Mrs. Friedan now finds both the ''feminine'' and ''feminist'' ones. The underlying theme of this book -and it is a valid message - is that both men and women need to be free to discover their own ''personhood'' and to build a new society on that discovery without preconceptions and in the absence of social compulsion. Herma Hill Kay is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.

Subject: Growing Old in the 90's From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:22:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-fountain.html October 3, 1993 Growing Old in the 90's By NANCY MAIRS THE FOUNTAIN OF AGE By Betty Friedan. As a girl, I knew both my grandmothers and three of my great-grandmothers. In fact, two of them lived into their 80's and one into her 90's, their longevity unusual enough to excite admiring comment from the grown-ups, though I'd pretty much taken it for granted. Today, at least a third of the people I routinely spend time with are 70 or older, often much older, and from time to time I've wondered whether I was imagining a demographic shift, perhaps because of my own advancing age, or whether growing old is no longer the rarity it once seemed. In 'The Fountain of Age,' Betty Friedan draws copiously from statistics that answer my question definitively. In this century, life expectancy has grown by 30 years; between 1970 and 1985, the number of people over 65 increased more than 35 percent; and women over 85 form the fastest-growing group of the elderly in the United States and the world. As a consequence, huge numbers of people are taking part in a social experiment both evolutionary and revolutionary. Who better than Betty Friedan to chronicle an adventure of such magnitude and significance? 'Well, 'The Feminine Mystique' certainly changed my life,' a friend recalled fervently when I told her I was reading Ms. Friedan's new book, 'and the lives of a lot of other women I know.' Not to mention the lives of our husbands, lovers, daughters and sons, whether they know it or not. 'I think 'The Fountain of Age' will do the same for old people,' I told my friend, using a term blunter than the one Ms. Friedan chooses. Despite her condemnation of society's dread and denial of age, she consistently prefers 'older' without specifying the terms of the comparison. Clearly, 'old' is still a bit of a dirty word, as 'woman' was in those days when my grandmothers tutored me to grow up a lady. Not that Ms. Friedan is generally mealy-mouthed. On the contrary, her forthrightness is what makes this euphemizing stand out. She began her project reluctantly, she confesses at the outset, having at 60 'no wish to wallow personally in the dreariness of age,' but in the course of (and in part because of) her study, she clearly warmed to her subject even as she began to live its realities. She shows no desire to evade issues, no matter how delicate and difficult, speculating boldly about the impact of differences between men and women on successful aging, for example, and calling into careful question the growing attention to the 'right to die.' 'I am concerned,' she writes, 'that the 'right to die' will be seen not as an individual choice but as a socially acceptable form of euthanasia.' 'The 'problem' of age' that she explores rests on a socially generated 'mystique' in which age 'is perceived only as decline or deterioration from youth' and its victims are 'rendered helpless, childlike and deprived of human identity or activities' so that they 'don't remind us of ourselves.' So pervasive is this myth that even though virtually all the old people I know are intellectually and physically robust, I was startled to learn that of Americans over 65 today, only 5 percent suffer from Alzheimer's disease and at any one time only 5 percent are in nursing homes, fear of which so reinforces our horror of growing old. IN truth, 'previous assumptions about age as genetically programmed catastrophic decline were based on pathological aging,' predominantly in institutionalized men, and so Ms. Friedan and the 'underground' of gerontologists and health professionals on whose expertise she draws really have entered 'uncharted terrain' in conceiving age as a new life stage in which further growth can occur. Several factors may have obscured this possibility in the past: the very novelty of human longevity, disavowal of age in a society that adulates the young, and the use of research tools designed to measure youthful capabilities. But 'The Fountain of Age' enables us to view 'disengagement' and 'decline' anew, not as 'normal aging' but as 'indices of approaching death,' and to get on with our various developmental tasks. One of these, in age, appears to be 'the bridging of the polarization between men and women, and between the 'masculine' and 'feminine' sides of our personhood.' Aging women appear to make this crossover more readily than men, and therefore are less often thrown into crisis by changes in life, a point that may help explain why women's life expectancy, nearly identical to that of men at the turn of the century, now so greatly exceeds men's. Indeed, in Ms. Friedan's analysis, 'disengagement from the roles and goals of youth and from activities and ties that no longer have any personal meaning may, in fact, be necessary to make the shift to a new kind of engagement in age.' 'The attempt to hold on to, or judge oneself by, youthful parameters,' she says, 'blinds us to the new strengths and possibilities emerging in ourselves.' In revising the image of age from a downhill slide to a strenuous, risky, but fulfilling enterprise, Ms. Friedan does not deny the difficulties we encounter along the course. At 65 or even before, we are forced into retirement, if not by law then by social expectation, thereby depriving the work force of the particular strengths age confers and ourselves of the challenge that can keep us vital and alert for years, even decades, thereafter. Trapped in a youthful model of sex, in particular the 'preoccupation with male erection and penetration,' we may fail to move on into 'real intimacy,' which entails sharing the 'truth-telling, authentic self' that emerges with time. Ms. Friedan points out that what happens to us depends in large measure on our economic value. As a 'boom market to take the place of our kids . . . and the receding numbers of 'young' first-home-buying families,' we are encouraged to sequester ourselves in expensive 'hard-sell retirement communities, congregate living and life care complexes.' Moreover, 'the sheer size of the market we represent for the sellers of pharmaceuticals, and the practitioners of cardiac and cancer surgery and other costly high-technology medicine, is enormous -- and enormously profitable.' The sellers of such goods and services have even less motive for detaching age from illness than do the dreaders and deniers. If the paradigm is going to be shifted, those of us engaged in aging will have to do it ourselves. Ms. Friedan is sanguine about the possibilities: new endeavors that resolve the opposition between family and career, seriousness and play, love and work; fresh, consciously created sexual and emotional bonds; housing options that 'meet the need for independence and intimacy . . . without denying the physical and economic realities of aging'; a medical model based not on 'cure' but on 'autonomy and control -- of one's body, one's life, one's days.' To refuse the view of age as decline into decrepitude and instead to venture into it as into a curious new country may prove perilous. In her most engaging chapter, Ms. Friedan offers her experiences on an Outward Bound expedition as a metaphor for the risks and rigors of adventurous aging. At least to this wheelchair-bound reader, her feats are astonishing. But faced with rappelling down a 300-foot cliff, she balks. Instead of chagrin, however, she experiences freedom: 'What a relief, at this age, finally, that I don't have to compete to prove myself -- that I can live with the fact that I'll never rappel and that failure doesn't really matter one way or another.' She has truly gone beyond 'old roles and fantasies' into a world of self-defined meaning. The reward of such a shift, a sense of connection with others and participation in the 'ongoing human enterprise' that transcends death, goes beyond the 'generativity' formulated by Erik Erikson, which Ms. Friedan says is limited 'by the psychoanalytic construct that ends in 'genitality': the metaphor of biological sexuality.' 'Those rigidly separate sex roles of our youth' retired from, death accepted, and our past reviewed and affirmed, shortcomings and all, we can achieve true 'generativity': 'a stage of evolution, in our own lives, that could also be key to the evolution and survival of our aging society.' The hope that has sounded the basso continuo of the book erupts joyously at its close. 'The Fountain of Age' is not, of course, without flaws. Repetitions that grow tedious and sometimes downright irritating make it much too long. A vigilant editor might at least have spared us yet another definition of depression as rage turned inward, on the chance -- quite likely, research indicates -- that in advancing years, our memories are still intact (though I sympathize with the daunting task of suggesting cuts to a writer of Ms. Friedan's eminence). As delightful as some of the sources she cites are, they are too numerous. But in view of her scope, thorough research and radical vision, these are quibbles. More seriously, as in 'The Feminine Mystique,' Ms. Friedan generalizes from the conditions and experiences of a predominantly white middle-class population, and the reader must take care to remember that for people from diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds aging may present altogether different challenges. Among my Latino friends, for instance, old people are far more likely to live with their grown children and grandchildren than to buy a town house by a golf course in Sun City. Writers have spent the 30 years following 'The Feminine Mystique' delineating such distinctions among women, and future writers about age will face a similar task. But in breaking silence once again, Ms. Friedan has provided a foundation for reflection and debate. 'The Fountain of Age' chanced to reach my desk on my 50th birthday, and I can't imagine a more heartening gift for a woman of any age, certain or otherwise. Or a man, for that matter. With Ms. Friedan for a guide, I intend, like her, 'to find new adventures for my third age; and if I'm lucky, I'll die on the move, in the air, on the road.' I can hardly wait to get on with it!

Subject: After 'The Feminine Mystique' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:19:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://nytimes.com/books/99/05/09/specials/friedan-20.html February 27, 1983 Twenty Years After 'The Feminine Mystique' By BETTY FRIEDAN It is 20 years now since 'The Feminine Mystique' was published. I am still awed by the revolution that book helped spark. That I was able to put it together at the time it was needed is something of a mystery to me. Even now, women -and men - stop me on the street to reminisce about where they were when they read it - ''I was in the maternity ward with my third kid, and then I decided to go to law school.'' I keep being surprised, as the changes the women's movement set in motion continue to play themselves out in our lives - the enormous and mundane, subtle and not so subtle, delightful, painful, immediate, far-reaching, paradoxical, inexorable and probably irreversible changes in women's lives - and in men's. Firewomen, chairpersons, housespouses, the gender gap, ms., palimony, takeout food, women priests, women rabbis, women prime ministers, women's studies, women's history, double burden, dress for success, assertiveness training, male consciousness raising, role strain, role reversal, networking, sexism, displaced homemakers, equal pay for work of comparable value, marriage contracts, child custody for men, first babies at 40, the two-paycheck family, the single-parent family, ''Victor/ Victoria,'' ''Tootsie' ... . Who could have predicted some of these changes? Not I, certainly. It's hard enough for me, both personally and politically, to cope with the realities of our revolution, as its daughters and sons take its terms for granted and face new problems, new pressures, new choices and conflicts, and express the need for new dreams. It's hard to go on evolving, as we all must, when some who now follow, or fight, or study, or seek power within this revolution seem to want to lock it in place forever as an unchanging ''-ism.'' Early this year, I fled to Harvard as a fellow at the Institute of Politics of the Kennedy School of Government, pursuing with relief a new scholarly quest, retreating (or so I thought) from feminist power struggles, disheartened, less by the attacks of our acknowledged enemies than by the fury of some of my sister feminists over the position I took in my book ''The Second Stage.'' I said the women's movement had to move anew, that the feminine mystique, which defined women only as husband's wife, children's mother, server of the family's physical needs and never as person, had been transcended. I said that we had come about as far as we could with the male model of equity and that now we needed a model encompassing female experience and female values, which men are beginning to share. ''Thesis, antithesis, synthesis,'' as Karl Marx said. As our revolution converges on larger economic upheavals, I said, we must come to new terms with family and with work. Some didn't like my saying that. Well, we are in the second stage now, whether or not anyone wants to admit it. And I am still a feminist. But I am sick and tired of the new spate of pronouncements claiming that the women's movement is finished and the revolution is lost because the ''postfeminist generation'' is moving from a different place. Of course the postfeminist generation is in a different place. The women's movement put them there. Their mothers were the ones who rejected the feminine mystique and went back to school and went to work and otherwise started to change their lives 20 years ago. I, as a feminist, do not find it a cause for grief that this new genera-tion simply takes the personhood of women for granted. If they take women's rights and the opportunities we fought for too much for granted -if they are worried now about jobs, difficult choices about having children, how to pay for a house with or without two incomes and double burdens they can't refuse now even if sometimes they'd like to - it's a mark of how far our revolution has come, and a summons to its own next stage. As far as I'm concerned, the daughters have to move on; they don't have to say, ''Thank you'' - though it's nice when they do. It's also nice that so many now study women's history in college, even in high school. But I am impatient to get those women's studies integrated into history, into every subject from grade school on. I still remember how surprised I was, taking the bus in from my suburban dream house in Rockland County to the New York Public Library when I was writing my book, 20-odd years ago, to uncover the women's history that had been so buried by the feminine mystique in the 1940's and 50's: Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Fuller, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, women whom most educated women like myself had never studied. Will our memory be buried in another generation as theirs was? Will some future great-granddaughter have to invent feminism once more from scratch? I doubt it. Emily, my own daughter the doctor, went from taking it all for granted in college (''I'm not a feminist; I'm a person. It's not necessary to fight for women anymore'') to fervent feminism after one year in medical school (''There are so many of us now, they don't dare do it openly the way they used to. It's worse now that it's so subtle''). But it's not worse that women are 30 percent of the medical-school class, rather than 3 percent. After organizing the women in her medical school on the unfinished business of sex discrimination, my daughter began to concern herself with fundamental issues as to the practice of medicine itself and her own life. She has decided to go into family practice, dealing with the patient as a whole person in the concrete family setting, not as a specimen of isolated symptoms. Her current problem has to do with 800 miles of distance between her hospital residency and his. Neither of them would consider asking that the other sacrifice his or her own goals for the sake of their relationship, which somehow survives the obstacles of distance and time. y daughter-in-law, Helen, is technically, at the moment, a housewife. The baby was not exactly planned. There were difficult choices to be made, since both she and Jonathan, my younger son, had just finished college, after having dropped out for some years. One day last summer, when they'd brought the baby out to my house in Sag Harbor, Helen overheard me on the phone discussing how to stop new attacks on the Supreme Court decision asserting women's right to legal medical abortion. ''The right to abortion is very important to me,'' said this postfeminist mother, nursing her baby. ''It's important knowing that we had the baby because we chose to. It makes a big difference.'' I relish their mutual joy, their new confident maturity and sense of themselves in their chosen parenthood -which Jonathan truly shares. Watching him skillfully maneuver Rafael into his snowsuit and throw him over his shoulder into the backpack, I sense he gets at least as much of his male identity from being a father as from being an engineer. But Helen is unmistakably the mother. She does not let any male doctor-as-God tell her what to do with her baby the way we let Dr. Spock instruct us. She does not apologize for sometimes being ''bored out of my gourd'' in this ''hiatus'' during which she concentrates on mothering. The choices in themselves seem to create a new sense of values and of self in such a postfeminist woman. And I, as grandmother at last, am the envy of my friends, whose doctor-lawyer-banker daughters are too caught up in their careers to consider babies. With my beautiful, incredible grandbaby - such a beaming, bright bundle of energy, smiling at me with his father's big ears and dimples and his own deep blue eyes, so familiar, so intensely alive, so awesome a miracle - I exult in the generation of life, though I've been too busy this year to baby-sit much. This year, a number of my family of friends had their first babies at 35, at 40, some undergoing rather scary, unexpected complications at birth. Other friends made me fear for their sanity as they suddenly became obsessed, in their mid-40's, after 20 years of brilliant careers, with the wish to have a child. Again and again, in Cambridge or California, one or another notso-young woman would ask my advice about having a baby ''by myself.'' I would reply that it seemed to me difficult enough, and costly enough, to bring up a child with two parents. But the power of this desire to have a child - when women no longer need to have a child to define themselves as women - seems to be as great as or even greater than ever. Choice has liberated an exultant mother; choice has also liberated women to be generative in other ways. Gloria Steinem, for instance, and Germaine Greer have been fine role models for that pattern. But there is unfinished business here for many women. Now that economic necessity dictates that most women must continue to work after they become mothers - nearly one out of two married women with children under 6 now works, compared with 19 percent in 1960; and nearly two-thirds of married women with children over 6 work - someone is going to have to battle, in a new and serious way, for institutions that will help the new family. Imaginative thinking should be done about maternity leave, paternity leave, time off for parents when their children are sick, parental sabbaticals, reduced schedules, flextime, job sharing and child-care supports that don't now exist. But who will take up this battle, and how, in a time when jobs themselves are so scarce that people must take what they can get, when budgets for social programs that already exist are being cut down? It is crucial for feminists to understand the power of the choice to have children and to keep fighting for the right to abortion. But they must give new priority to a child-care crusade and to restructuring work. If these issues are not addressed soon, we can fear a new feminine mystique, invoked to send women home again to have babies instead of competing for dwindling jobs. During this time of recession-depression, President Reagan, who has declared a new campaign against abortion, has also suggested that there wouldn't be as much unemployment if women would stop looking for jobs. After the elections in 1982, political analysts finally began to take seriously the ''gender gap,'' though it had been building for some years, a reaction, in part, to the Administration's attitudes toward the equal rights amendment and abortion. Month after month, women had been indicating their sharp disapproval of President Reagan. The latest Gallup poll found that just 36 percent of women approved of Reagan's job performance, compared with 47 percent of men. The gender gap seemed to be based on women's greater outrage at Reaganomics and a national budget that destroyed services essential to the old, the poor, to children, students, the handicapped and the environment while increasing billions were shoveled into nuclear missiles. The human suffering caused by high unemployment seemed particularly galling to women. It didn't matter that Ed Koch, in his New York gubernatorial race, said the proper words about women's rights, when he had been so opportunistic about Reaganomics. It did not matter that Margaret M. Heckler and Millicent Fenwick were women and had been for the E.R.A.; when they went along with Reagan in 1982, they were defeated. Political analysts now agree that women were crucial to the election of Mario M. Cuomo as Governor of New York and to the defeat or near defeat, in Texas, New Jersey, Missouri and elsewhere, of favorites who had been insensitive to women's basic concerns. At any rate, it is clear now that women's rights and women's issues are no longer minor political items, worth a patronizing sentence on the sixth page of the political speech or tea and cookies in the Rose Garden. President Reagan has just named two women to the Cabinet - Elizabeth H. Dole as Secretary of Transportation and Margaret Heckler as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Getting into position for 1984, Democrats often begin their speeches with passionate pledges to equal rights. ''With the gender gap,'' a Democratic aide said to me recently, ''issues like child care could be politically sexy in '84.'' Indeed, this month, an extraordinary meeting of leaders of women's groups, church groups, unions and civil-rights organizations was held in New York City to plan a child-care crusade for 1983. E.R.A. was reintroduced in Congress this year, and I say there will be an equal rights amendment to the Constitution by the end of the decade, after we get the Government turned around. A few months ago, I was invited to Rome by women leaders of the ruling Christian Democratic Party. The idea was to speak to them and to leading Italian feminist, Socialist and Communist women about ''The Second Stage,'' which had just come out in Italy. But I don't think they had really read it. Evidently the Christian Democrats realized they had made a big political mistake by supporting a referendum that would have taken away Italian women's right to abortion. The referendum was overwhelmingly defeated, and now, it appeared, I was being brought over to show a conciliatory position toward feminism. Someone must have told them I ''believed in the family.'' To my horror, I heard them introducing me as a ''repentant feminist'' (femminista pentita). I had to clear that up, of course. I had to go back to the feminine mystique, and that necessary, wonderful first stage of women's liberation in Italy, when they had marched in the thousands and voted in the millions for women's right to divorce and to abortion. In their country, as in mine, I said, reactionary forces were still trying to take those rights away, as their abortion referendum demonstrated. Of course, I said, I respect those who, out of religious or other personal conviction, would not choose to use that right. ''The value is life,'' I said. ''The life of the woman and the right of the child to be wanted in life. Abortion is simply a necessity for some when birth control fails. ''But that issue is behind you now, as I hope it will be soon for us,'' I continued. ''We must all move into the second stage, where we face new problems of economic survival, personal survival and family survival. We must be able to surmount the dangers of nuclear war, terrorism and economic chaos. We must continue to be able to choose to bear children.'' I don't know if that's what the Christian Democrats quite expected. The other feminist leaders present, the Socialist and Communist women, seemed to pick up my second-stage suggestions about the need for new child-care supports and new kinds of communal housing for working parents and for those divorced or widowed men and women who now live too much alone. I went from Rome to Paris, where Yvette Roudy, who originally translated ''The Feminine Mystique'' into French, is now President Mit-terrand's Minister for Women's Rights. She is no token under secretary but holds a full cabinet ministry for women's affairs. Yvette described her efforts, in all the regions and departments of France, to protect women's rights in jobs, education, marriage and divorce and to give them training for new nontraditional work. As we walked through the lofty arches of the splendid building that houses her ministry, I was proudly shown a ''gallery of honor,'' where, after Colette and Susan B. Anthony, there was a larger-thanlife portrait that was supposed to be me. ''That's not me!'' I said. The artist had painted us all to be pretty. Like taking the warts off Napoleon's nose. Oh, well. Is this new burst of women's power in France and Italy merely a belated epilogue to that same women's movement that they say has crested and is on its way out over here, or a preview of greater power to come? The fact is that women are given credit for having put Mitterrand in power in France, as we did Cuomo in New York State. I'm worried now about the new polarizations hinted at by recent polls, cutting across the gender gap, as sharp differences emerge between the married and the unmarried, those with children and with none, the young and the old, the ones with jobs and the unemployed. While the new census shows that in the 1980's the great majority of young adult Americans will marry, and remarry, and that they will have children within marriage, they are having fewer children, and having themlater, than they used to. And 10 percent of young adults will never marry, a 100 percent increase over the 1970 rate. There is also a 100 percent increase in single-parent households, nine out of 10 of which are headed by women. A fourth of all households now contain no children. ''Nonfamily households'' have risen by 89 percent. But the number of divorces seems to be leveling off at about 50 percent. The need, or the choice, to marry, or to remain married, takes on new existential and economic importance, for women as for men. For families in poverty today tend primarily to be those headed by women, followed by those headed by men where there is no second income. But the fact that women earn only 59 cents for every dollar men earn still cuts through the illusion of equality. Will the married be the new elite and those living alone the underclass? Will men and women who make that cherished, costly choice to have children become the second class, while the singleminded take power? How can the trade-offs within marriage be measured? He makes more than she does, but he feels less strain now because he's no longer carrying it all. She makes less but also feels less stress, if she is just ''helping.'' She feels bitter if he is laid off and she has to carry the whole breadwinning burden, as well as take care of the house and kids. He certainly doesn't spend as much time on housework and the kids as she does; he doesn't feel that responsibility for the kids that a mother never quite escapes. But how much of that power does she really want to give up? Now that we've broken through those rigidly polarized male and female sex roles, will we settle for a diversity of patterns of sharing among women and men? Am I wrong to try to redefine our concept of ''family,'' to link the interests of the old and single with the needs of those in their childbearing years? Those who can't afford to stop working at 60 or 65 might welcome jobs that wouldn't demand a rigid 9-to-5 schedule. The option of shorter hours would not solve the unemployment problem, but it would provide more jobs for more people. My friends now in their 50's and 60's who fought the battles - the first woman to have a seat on the stock exchange, the first female network vice president, the first executive vice president of a major advertising agency, the nun who became a college president, the housewives who survived their own divorces and became labor arbitrators, the women, passed over for corporate promotion, university tenure or union leadership, who brought and won class-action suits -are facing now the frontiers of age. There are new questions to be asked beyond success, beyond marriage and divorce, as we face husbands' strokes and retirement, and our years to come, living alone. Those are the questions that are now my personal and professional concern. Feelings of deja vu wash over me as I hear geriatric experts talk about the aged with the same patronizing, ''compassionate'' denial of their personhood that I heard when experts talked about women 20 years ago. Much is being said among American women today about the strange dearth of vital men. I go into a town to lecture, and I hear about all the wonderful, dynamic women who have emerged in every field in that town. But, frequently, whatever the age of the woman, she says, ''There don't seem to be any men. The men seem so dull and gray now. They're dreary, they're flat, they complain, they're tired.'' And, if they're my age, they're dead. That women are now living so much longer and aging more vitally than men has wide ramifications. The latest census figures show that American women have a life expectancy of 77.8 compared with 69.9 for American men - an eight-year difference compared with just two years in 1900 and five in 1950. Despite all the gloomy predictions, women are not succumbing to men's patterns of Type A stress and heart attack, ulcers and premature death as they take on jobs in business and professions. Despite the phase of ''dressing for success'' and courses that taught women how to be more like men to get into the executive suite, women don't seem to be falling into the ''superwoman'' trap so easily anymore. (They are even spending less time on housework, new studies show.) On the contrary, data just published by Rosalind Barnett and Grace Baruch of the Wellesley Center for Research on Women show that women between the ages of 35 and 55 who combine work, marriage and motherhood do the best of all women in their age group in general psychological well-being. They have more control over their lives, which now seems essential to health; they are able to satisfy their needs for achievement and mastery as well as for pleasure and intimacy. And these women do not show depression, deterioration or traumatic crises at midlife and beyond as much as women used to and men still do. Women are not beginning to die like men. As a matter of fact, I've just been asked to address the Western Gerontological Association this spring on ''Why Can't Men Age More Like Women?'' The very terms of human achieve-ment, of moral values and mental development have, up until now, been defined by men and measured in terms of male experience. The highest peak of moral development was some abstract concept of justice, in terms of which philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Freud and beyond found women wanting. In 1971, a Harvard psychologist named Carol Gilligan began measuring women and men according to a scale based on female experience as well as male, and found a level of moral development beyond abstract justice. The research translated and tested the abstract concept of justice against the concrete experience of daily life in its actual human complexity. On this scale, women reached levels of moral development men did not seem even to conceive of. ''In a Different Voice,'' she called the book that resulted from the study. What new dimensions will emerge in every field as women begin to find that different voice, their own voice, and use it in medicine, law, theology, architecture, in all the arts and all the sciences? I got a curious insight into all this during my year as a fellow at Harvard. I immersed myself, for one, in the study of evolution, for I became increasingly convinced that breaking through the feminine mystique, and the women's movement for equality, and this second stage, as female values begin to be shared by the male, is not really a revolution at all but simply a stage in human evolution, necessary for survival. In that bastion of male excellence, Harvard, women were now admitted on equal terms with men, if not yet in equal numbers. During my year there, I was asked to meet with the women at the law school, women medical students and interns, the women's group at the divinity and ar-chitecture schools. These women were awesome in their competence, but they made me uneasy. They seemed too neat, somehow, too controlled, constricted, almost subdued and slightly juiceless. A dean of one of the professional schools said: ''We take in the most brilliant women, of course. Their record of achievement is breathtaking, as are their scores on the admission tests. But for some reason, they don't do as well as they should when they get here. Can you explain it?'' ''Not without interviewing them,'' I said, ''but I have a hunch it's because your structures - your whole ambiance - is so masculine; it alienates them somehow, though they might not be aware of it. Something around here must not elicit the best of female energy. But if that's so, you'd better find it out. Because it's also having an influence on the men that may not be conducive to the kind of leadership needed now.'' So just before I left, I ran a seminar on ''Masculinism at Harvard,'' sponsored by the Institute of Politics. The seminar made Harvard officials so nervous that it was closed to the public and the press. Women, and a few men, raised questions about the viciously competitive adversary models they were learning in their case studies, and whether, in fact ''a different voice'' was needed now in law, in business and in medicine. Among the men, mainly it was the wise old professors, like David Riesman and David McClelland, and some of the young professors, like Stephen Gould, who seem to be wise in a new way, who wanted to talk about such things. But the women, who had seemed to me so strangely subdued, kept nodding their heads. They knew exactly what it was - masculinism -and maybe even what it was doing to them. It is not easy for a woman to transcend or question the masculinism of a powerful, successful male institution. The first women there will necessarily try to succeed according to the male model. For women may have to reach a point of critical mass in any institution to raise that different voice and the institution may have to face its own critical crisis to hear it. It is not easy to question the masculinism of a powerful and succesful nation, until perhaps its most thoughtful men and women sense that it may be coming too close to economic collapse or nuclear extinction for such questions not to be asked. The political gender gap surfaced first among women on the basic issue of war and peace. But there were a lot of men among the half-million people who marched in Central Park last year for the nuclear freeze. At the first NOW convention after the defeat of the E.R.A., in Indianapolis in October 1982, the foremothers were asking each other which issue would emerge next to mobilize women's passions. I've heard this kind of thing often in these last months, from thoughtful students, from tired women and even from men, all people looking at the wreckage of their own beleaguered movements - liberal politics, civil rights, labor, the environment - and wondering where the kind of life-changing political passion that has fueled the women's movement these last years will come from next. What will be the issue? Equal pay for work of comparable value? Child care? Displaced homemakers? Rape? Lesbian rights? Discrimination in Social Security, in pensions? So diverse have the choices and patterns of women's lives become that there is no single issue now that could hold us all together as firmly as the battle for our constitutional equal rights. Now that women's rights are in danger, and women's outrage has taken concrete political form, that issue is no longer a separate women's issue. It is now an issue that can elect a President; it is an issue that the major political parties are now sprinting to catch up with. I'm not sure there is, or has to be, a separate, single women's issue in the next stage. I think women's most basic issues now converge on men's, the basic issues of war and peace and economic survival, of quality of life for young and old. But when that different voice, now emerging from women in politics and other fields, also begins to be heard from men, it will become a different politics. Are men changing? Those young men, like my son, who carry their little babies so proudly in their backpacks to the supermarket? Those men now suffering the midlife crises? Men must change. They must develop the flexibility and sensitivity to their own feelings and the feelings of others - the attunement to life that has been considered up to now feminine. Crazy? Well, who would have thought that the biggest movie hit of 1983 would be a picture called ''Tootsie,'' in which a male actor impersonates a woman so he can get a part as a hospital administrator in a soap opera and becomes a better man as a woman. And men love it, and so do women, even though some doctrinaire feminists claim it's macho for a man to make a hit playing a woman. But then, the women say, pointedly, Dustin Hoffman was much more attractive as a woman than when he went back to being a man, as if the only choice was between macho and wimp. Actually, the sensitivity he acquired, sharing woman's experience, made him a much better, stronger, more tender man. It was a wonderful, heart-easing, surprising movie. And not a snigger in it. Somethow, putting together the male and female halves of our being seemed to clean up the sexual act. We have clearly now broken through and beyond the masculine mystique for man and woman to find such hilarious joyous adventure in being a woman. Which is not the same thing at all as going back to the feminine mystique. It is the next clue in the human mystery.

Subject: Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:12:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/national/05friedan.html?ex=1296795600&en=30472e5004a66ea3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 Betty Friedan, Who Ignited Cause in 'Feminine Mystique' By MARGALIT FOX Betty Friedan, the feminist crusader and author whose searing first book, 'The Feminine Mystique,' ignited the contemporary women's movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United States and countries around the world, died yesterday, her 85th birthday, at her home in Washington. The cause was congestive heart failure, said Emily Bazelon, a family spokeswoman. With its impassioned yet clear-eyed analysis of the issues that affected women's lives in the decades after World War II — including enforced domesticity, limited career prospects and, as chronicled in later editions, the campaign for legalized abortion — 'The Feminine Mystique' is widely regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century. Published by W. W. Norton & Company, the book had sold more than three million copies by the year 2000 and has been translated into many languages. 'The Feminine Mystique' made Ms. Friedan world famous. It also made her one of the chief architects of the women's liberation movement of the late 1960's and afterward, a sweeping social upheaval that harked back to the suffrage campaigns of the turn of the century and would be called feminism's second wave. In 1966, Ms. Friedan helped found the National Organization for Women, serving as its first president. In 1969, she was a founder of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as Naral Pro-Choice America. With Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and others, she founded the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971. Though in later years, some feminists dismissed Ms. Friedan's work as outmoded, a great many aspects of modern life that seem routine today — from unisex Help Wanted ads to women in politics, medicine, the clergy and the military — are the direct result of the hard-won advances she helped women attain. For decades a familiar presence on television and the lecture circuit, Ms. Friedan, with her short stature and deeply hooded eyes, looked for much of her adult life like a 'combination of Hermione Gingold and Bette Davis,' as Judy Klemesrud wrote in The New York Times Magazine in 1970. A brilliant student who graduated summa cum laude from Smith College in 1942, Ms. Friedan trained as a psychologist but never pursued a career in the field. When she wrote 'The Feminine Mystique,' she was a suburban housewife and mother who supplemented her husband's income by writing freelance articles for women's magazines. Though Ms. Friedan was not generally considered a lyrical stylist, 'The Feminine Mystique,' read today, is as mesmerizing as it was more than four decades ago: 'Gradually, without seeing it clearly for quite a while, I came to realize that something is very wrong with the way American women are trying to live their lives today,' Ms. Friedan wrote in the opening line of the preface. 'I sensed it first as a question mark in my own life, as a wife and mother of three small children, half-guiltily, and therefore half-heartedly, almost in spite of myself, using my abilities and education in work that took me away from home.' The words have the hypnotic pull of a fairy tale, and for the next 400 pages, Ms. Friedan identifies, dissects and damningly indicts one of the most pervasive folk beliefs of postwar American life: the myth of suburban women's domestic fulfillment she came to call the feminine mystique. Drawing on history, psychology, sociology and economics, as well as on interviews she conducted with women across the country, Ms. Friedan charted a gradual metamorphosis of the American woman from the independent, career-minded New Woman of the 1920's and 30's into the vacant, aproned housewife of the postwar years. The portrait she painted was chilling. For a typical woman of the 1950's, even a college-educated one, life centered almost exclusively on chores and children. She cooked and baked and bandaged and chauffeured and laundered and sewed. She did the mopping and the marketing and took her husband's gray flannel suit to the cleaners. She was happy to keep his dinner warm till he came wearily home from downtown. The life she led, if educators, psychologists and the mass media were to be believed, was the fulfillment of every women's most ardent dream. Yet she was unaccountably tired, impatient with the children, craving something that neither marital sex nor extramarital affairs could satisfy. Her thoughts sometimes turned to suicide. She consulted a spate of doctors and psychiatrists, who prescribed charity work, bowling and bridge. If those failed, there were always tranquilizers to get her through her busy day. A Nebraska housewife with a Ph.D. in anthropology whom Ms. Friedan interviewed told her: 'A film made of any typical morning in my house would look like an old Marx Brothers comedy. I wash the dishes, rush the older children off to school, dash out in the yard to cultivate the chrysanthemums, run back in to make a phone call about a committee meeting, help the youngest child build a blockhouse, spend fifteen minutes skimming the newspapers so I can be well-informed, then scamper down to the washing machines where my thrice-weekly laundry includes enough clothes to keep a primitive village going for an entire year. By noon I'm ready for a padded cell. Very little of what I've done has been really necessary or important. Outside pressures lash me though the day. Yet I look upon myself as one of the more relaxed housewives in the neighborhood.' 'The Feminine Mystique' began as a survey Ms. Friedan conducted in 1957 for the 15th reunion of her graduating class at Smith. It was intended to refute a prevailing postwar myth: that higher education kept women from adapting to their roles as wives and mothers. Judging from her own capable life, Ms. Friedan expected her classmates to describe theirs as similarly well adjusted. But what she discovered in the women's responses was something far more complex, and more troubling — a 'nameless, aching dissatisfaction' that she would famously call 'the problem that has no name.' When Ms. Friedan sent the same questionnaire to graduates of Radcliffe and other colleges, and later interviewed scores of women personally, the results were the same. The women's answers gave her the seeds of her book. They also forced her to confront the painful limitations of her own suburban idyll. Bettye Naomi Goldstein was born on Feb. 4, 1921, in Peoria, Ill. Her father, Harry, was an immigrant from Russia who parlayed a street-corner collar-button business into a prosperous downtown jewelry store. Her gifted, imperious mother, Miriam, had been the editor of the women's page of the local newspaper before giving up her job for marriage and children. Only years later, when she was writing 'The Feminine Mystique,' did Ms. Friedan come to see her mother's cold, critical demeanor as masking a deep bitterness at giving up the work she loved. Growing up brainy, Jewish, outspoken and, by the standards of the time, unlovely, Bettye was ostracized. She was barred from the fashionable sororities at her Peoria high school and rarely asked on dates. It was an experience, she would later say, that made her identify with people on the margins of society. At Smith, she blossomed. For the first time, she could be as smart as she wanted, as impassioned as she wanted and as loud as she wanted, and for four happy years she was all those things. Betty received her bachelor's degree in 1942 — by that time she had dropped the final 'e,' which she considered an affectation of her mother's — and accepted a fellowship to the University of California, Berkeley, for graduate work in psychology. At Berkeley, she studied with the renowned psychologist Erik Erikson, among others. She won a second fellowship, even more prestigious than the first, that would allow her to continue for a doctorate. But she was dating a young physicist who felt threatened by her success. He pressured her to turn down the fellowship, and she did, an experience she would later recount frequently in interviews. She also turned down the physicist, returning home to Peoria before moving to Greenwich Village in New York. There, Ms. Friedan worked as an editor at The Federated Press, a small news service that provided stories to labor newspapers nationwide. In 1946, she took a job as a reporter with U. E. News, the weekly publication of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. In 1947, she married Carl Friedan, a theater director who later became an advertising executive. They started a family and moved to a rambling Victorian house in suburban Rockland County, N.Y. Ms. Friedan, whose marriage would end in divorce in 1969, is survived by their three children, Daniel Friedan of Princeton, N.J.; Emily Friedan of Buffalo; and Jonathan Friedan of Philadelphia; a brother, Harry Goldstein, of Palm Springs, Calif., and Purchase, N.Y.; a sister, Amy Adams, of New York City; and nine grandchildren. 'The Feminine Mystique' had the misfortune to appear during a newspaper printers' strike. The reviews that appeared afterward ran the gamut from bewildered to outraged to cautiously laudatory. Some critics also felt that Ms. Friedan had insufficiently acknowledged her debt to Simone de Beauvoir, whose 1949 book, 'The Second Sex,' dealt with many of the same issues. Writing in The New York Times Book Review in April 1963, Lucy Freeman called 'The Feminine Mystique' a 'highly readable, provocative book,' but went on to question its basic premise, writing, of Ms. Friedan: 'Sweeping generalities, in which this book necessarily abounds, may hold a certain amount of truth but often obscure the deeper issues. It is superficial to blame the 'culture' and its handmaidens, the women's magazines, as she does. What is to stop a woman who is interested in national and international affairs from reading magazines that deal with those subjects? To paraphrase a famous line, 'The fault, dear Mrs. Friedan, is not in our culture, but in ourselves.' ' Among readers, however, the response to the book was so overwhelming that Ms. Friedan realized she needed more than words to address the condition of women's lives. After moving back to Manhattan with her family, she determined to start a progressive organization that would be the equivalent, as she often said, of an N.A.A.C.P. for women. In 1966, Ms. Friedan and a group of colleagues founded the National Organization for Women. She was its president until 1970. One of NOW's most visible public actions was the Women's Strike for Equality, held on Aug. 26, 1970, in New York and in cities around the country. In New York, tens of thousands of woman marched down Fifth Avenue, with Ms. Friedan in the lead. (Before the march, she made a point of lunching at Whyte's, a downtown restaurant formerly open to men only.) Carrying signs and banners ('Don't Cook Dinner — Starve a Rat Tonight!' 'Don't Iron While the Strike Is Hot'), women of all ages, along with a number of sympathetic men, marched joyfully down the street to cheering crowds. The march ended with a rally in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library, with passionate speeches by Ms. Friedan, Ms. Steinem, Ms. Abzug and Kate Millett. Not all of Ms. Friedan's ventures were as successful. The First Women's Bank and Trust Company, which she helped found in 1973, is no longer in business. Nor were even her indomitable presence and relentless energy enough to secure passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Though widely respected as a modern-day heroine, Ms. Friedan was by no means universally beloved, even — or perhaps especially — by members of the women's movement. She was famously abrasive. She could be thin-skinned and imperious, subject to screaming fits of temperament. In the 1970's and afterward, some feminists criticized Ms. Friedan for focusing almost exclusively on the concerns of middle-class married white women and ignoring those of minorities, lesbians and the poor. Some called her retrograde for insisting that women could, and should, live in collaborative partnership with men. Ms. Friedan's private life was also famously stormy. In her recent memoir, 'Life So Far' (Simon & Schuster, 2000), she accused her husband of being physically abusive during their marriage, writing that he sometimes gave her black eyes, which she concealed with make-up at public events and on television. Mr. Friedan, who died in December, repeatedly denied the accusations. In an interview with Time magazine in 2000, shortly after the memoir's publication, he called Ms. Friedan's account a 'complete fabrication.' He added: 'I am the innocent victim of a drive-by shooting by a reckless driver savagely aiming at the whole male gender.' Ms. Friedan's other books include 'It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women's Movement' (Random House, 1976); 'The Second Stage' (Summit, 1981); and 'The Fountain of Age' (Simon & Schuster, 1993). The recipient of many awards and honorary degrees, she was a visiting professor at universities around the country, among them Columbia, Temple and the University of Southern California. In recent years, Ms. Friedan was associated with the Institute for Women and Work at Cornell University. Despite all of her later achievements, Ms. Friedan would be forever known as the suburban housewife who started a revolution with 'The Feminine Mystique.' Rarely has a single book been responsible for such sweeping, tumultuous and continuing social transformation. The new society Ms. Friedan proposed, founded on the notion that men and women were created equal, represented such a drastic upending of the prevailing social norms that over the years to come, she would be forced to explain her position again and again. 'Some people think I'm saying, 'Women of the world unite — you have nothing to lose but your men,' ' she told Life magazine in 1963. 'It's not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.'

Subject: NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:07:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/science/04climate.html?ex=1296709200&en=485e8873aed34738&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 4, 2006 NASA Chief Backs Agency Openness By ANDREW C. REVKIN A week after NASA's top climate scientist complained that the space agency's public-affairs office was trying to silence his statements on global warming, the agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, issued a sharply worded statement yesterday calling for 'scientific openness' throughout the agency. 'It is not the job of public-affairs officers,' Dr. Griffin wrote in an e-mail message to the agency's 19,000 employees, 'to alter, filter or adjust engineering or scientific material produced by NASA's technical staff.' The statement came six days after The New York Times quoted the scientist, James E. Hansen, as saying he was threatened with 'dire consequences' if he continued to call for prompt action to limit emissions of heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. He and intermediaries in the agency's 350-member public-affairs staff said the warnings came from White House appointees in NASA headquarters. Other National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists and public-affairs employees came forward this week to say that beyond Dr. Hansen's case, there were several other instances in which political appointees had sought to control the flow of scientific information from the agency. They called or e-mailed The Times and sent documents showing that news releases were delayed or altered to mesh with Bush administration policies. In October, for example, George Deutsch, a presidential appointee in NASA headquarters, told a Web designer working for the agency to add the word 'theory' after every mention of the Big Bang, according to an e-mail message from Mr. Deutsch that another NASA employee forwarded to The Times. And in December 2004, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory complained to the agency that he had been pressured to say in a news release that his oceanic research would help advance the administration's goal of space exploration. On Thursday night and Friday, The Times sent some of the documents to Dr. Griffin and senior public-affairs officials requesting a response. While Dr. Griffin did not respond directly, he issued the 'statement of scientific openness' to agency employees, saying, 'NASA has always been, is and will continue to be committed to open scientific and technical inquiry and dialogue with the public.' Because NASA encompasses a nationwide network of research centers on everything from cosmology to climate, Dr. Griffin said, some central coordination was necessary. But he added that changes in the public-affairs office's procedures 'can and will be made,' and that a revised policy would 'be disseminated throughout the agency.' Asked if the statement came in response to the new documents and the furor over Dr. Hansen's complaints, Dr. Griffin's press secretary, Dean Acosta, replied by e-mail: 'From time to time, the administrator communicates with NASA employees on policy and issues. Today was one of those days. I hope this helps. Have a good weekend.' Climate science has been a thorny issue for the administration since 2001, when Mr. Bush abandoned a campaign pledge to restrict power plant emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, and said the United States would not join the Kyoto Protocol, the first climate treaty requiring reductions. But the accusations of political interference with the language of news releases and other public information on science go beyond climate change. In interviews this week, more than a dozen public-affairs officials, along with half a dozen agency scientists, spoke of growing efforts by political appointees to control the flow of scientific information. In the months before the 2004 election, according to interviews and some documents, these appointees sought to review news releases and to approve or deny news media requests to interview NASA scientists. Repeatedly that year, public-affairs directors at all of NASA's science centers were admonished by White House appointees at headquarters to focus all attention on Mr. Bush's January 2004 'vision' for returning to the Moon and eventually traveling to Mars. Starting early in 2004, directives, almost always transmitted verbally through a chain of midlevel workers, went out from NASA headquarters to the agency's far-flung research centers and institutes saying that all news releases on earth science developments had to allude to goals set out in Mr. Bush's 'vision statement' for the agency, according to interviews with public-affairs officials working in headquarters and at three research centers. Many people working at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that at the same time, there was a slowdown in these centers' ability to publish anything related to climate. Most of these career government employees said they could speak only on condition of anonymity, saying they feared reprisals. But their accounts tightly meshed with one another. One NASA scientist, William Patzert, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, confirmed the general tone of the agency that year. 'That was the time when NASA was reorganizing and all of a sudden earth science disappeared,' Mr. Patzert said. 'Earth kind of got relegated to just being one of the 9 or 10 planets. It was ludicrous.' In another incident, on Dec. 2, 2004, the propulsion lab and NASA headquarters issued a news release describing research on links between wind patterns and the recent warming of the Indian Ocean. It included a statement in quotation marks from Tong Lee, a scientist at the laboratory, saying the analytical tools could 'advance space exploration' and 'may someday prove useful in studying climate systems on other planets.' But after other scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory queried Dr. Lee on the statement, he e-mailed public-affairs officers saying he disavowed the quotation and demanded that the release be taken off the Web site. His message was part of a sequence of e-mail messages exchanged between scientists and public-affairs officers. That string of messages was provided to The Times on Friday by a NASA official. In his e-mail message, Dr. Lee explained that he had cobbled together part of the statement on space exploration under 'the pressure of the new HQ requirement for relevance to space exploration' and under a timeline requiring that NASA 'needed something instantly.' The press office dropped the quotation from its version of the release, but in Washington, the NASA headquarters public affairs office did not. Dr. Lee declined to be interviewed for this article. According to other e-mail messages, the flare-up did not stop senior officials in headquarters from insisting that Mr. Bush's space-oriented vision continue to be reflected in all earth-science releases. In the end, the news release with Dr. Lee's disavowed remark remained up on the NASA headquarters public affairs Web site until The Times asked about it yesterday. It was removed from the Web at midday. The Big Bang memo came from Mr. Deutsch, a 24-year-old presidential appointee in the press office at NASA headquarters whose résumé says he was an intern in the 'war room' of the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. A 2003 journalism graduate of Texas A&M, he was also the public-affairs officer who sought more control over Dr. Hansen's public statements. In October 2005, Mr. Deutsch sent an e-mail message to Flint Wild, a NASA contractor working on a set of Web presentations about Einstein for middle-school students. The message said the word 'theory' needed to be added after every mention of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is 'not proven fact; it is opinion,' Mr. Deutsch wrote, adding, 'It is not NASA's place, nor should it be to make a declaration such as this about the existence of the universe that discounts intelligent design by a creator.' It continued: 'This is more than a science issue, it is a religious issue. And I would hate to think that young people would only be getting one-half of this debate from NASA. That would mean we had failed to properly educate the very people who rely on us for factual information the most.' The memo also noted that The Associated Press Stylebook and Libel Manual specified the phrasing 'Big Bang theory.' Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's boss, said in an interview yesterday that for that reason, it should be used in all NASA documents. The Deutsch memo was provided by an official at NASA headquarters who said he was upset with the effort to justify changes to descriptions of science by referring to politically charged issues like intelligent design. Senior NASA officials did not dispute the message's authenticity. Mr. Wild declined to be interviewed; Mr. Deutsch did not respond to e-mail or phone messages. On Friday evening, repeated queries were made to the White House about how a young presidential appointee with no science background came to be supervising Web presentations on cosmology and interview requests to senior NASA scientists. The only response came from Donald Tighe of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. 'Science is respected and protected and highly valued by the administration,' he said.

Subject: Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:06:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?ex=1296190800&en=51c46d7689bee520&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him By ANDREW C. REVKIN The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists. Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. 'They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,' he said. Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. 'That's not the way we operate here at NASA,' he said. 'We promote openness and we speak with the facts.' Mr. Acosta said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen. Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute on Morningside Heights in Manhattan. Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore. In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide. He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry. But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide. In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase 'to understand and protect our home planet.' He said he was particularly incensed that the directives affecting his statements had come through informal telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents. Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official 'order or pressure to say shut Jim up.' But Dr. Einaudi added, 'That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied.' The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 'a different planet.' The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions. After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be 'dire consequences' if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews. Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews. In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute. Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. 'the most liberal' media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others Mr. Deutsch said his job was 'to make the president look good' and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority. But she added: 'I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal.' Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, in NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so. Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta. Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: 'Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog is this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?' Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred. 'He's not trying to create a war over this,' said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, 'but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public, and this kind of attempted muzzling of the science community is really rather dangerous. If we just accept it, then we're contributing to the problem.' Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled. In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views. 'He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world,' Dr. Cicerone said. 'I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been.' The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone. Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing. One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems. In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identifies the views as his own. 'One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing,' he wrote. Many people who work with Dr. Hansen said that politics was not a factor in his dispute with the Bush administration. 'The thing that has always struck me about him is I don't think he's political at all,' said Mark R. Hess, director of public affairs for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a position that also covers the Goddard Institute in New York. 'He really is not about concerning himself with whose administration is in charge, whether it's Republicans, Democrats or whatever,' Mr. Hess said. 'He's a pretty down-the-road conservative independent-minded person. 'What he cares deeply about is being a scientist, his research, and I think he feels a true obligation to be able to talk about that in whatever fora are offered to him.'

Subject: The Whirlwinds of Revolt From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:05:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05lewis.html?ex=1296795600&en=b4219d5c33452abd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 5, 2006 The Whirlwinds of Revolt By ANTHONY LEWIS We have had nothing like it in this country in living memory: a commanding moral voice, attached to no political party or public office, that moved governments and changed social institutions. That was Martin Luther King Jr. He was despised by many. His ideas were sometimes rejected. He failed as well as succeeded. But he would not retreat from attacking what he came to believe were the three great afflictions of mankind: racism, war and poverty. In little more than a dozen years — from Dec. 5, 1955, when he set the Montgomery bus boycott on its way, to April 4, 1968, when he was murdered — he changed the face of America. This is the last of three volumes in which Taylor Branch chronicles those years. It is a thrilling book, marvelous in both its breadth and its detail. There is drama in every paragraph. Every factual statement is backed up in 200 pages of endnotes. 'America in the King Years,' Branch's running title for the trilogy, is not a mere conceit, a fancy way of describing a biography. It is not a biography of Dr. King. It is a picture of the country and the times as he intersected with them. What a different country it was. I lived through those times, but 'At Canaan's Edge' made me realize that I did not remember how different. It was before the revolution in women's roles, for example, as Branch tells us in a couple of quick sketches. Southerners had added a ban on sex discrimination to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a way to mock the bill, and at first it was widely treated as a joke. A Page 1 article in The New York Times in 1965 raised the question whether executives must let a 'dizzy blonde' drive a tugboat or pitch for the Mets. In 1966 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission wondered, in a newsletter, whether an employer could be penalized for refusing to hire 'a woman as a dog warden.' But of course it is the virulence of Southern racism at that time that is most striking. This was only 40 years ago, after the passage of the 1964 act, but racist violence and murder were still widespread in the Deep South. Everyone knew who the killers were, but juries would not convict — all-white juries. The openness of the violence was staggering. When Viola Liuzzo, a white woman, came down from Michigan to Selma, Ala., to help in the protest movement, a Ku Klux Klan gang pulled up alongside the car she was driving and shot her dead. Branch has been working on these books for more than 20 years, exploring endless materials: newspapers, audiotapes, reports, books, personal memories. He has an incredible command of it all, bringing history to life with a few sentences here, extended chapters there on something like the march from Selma to Montgomery. I can pick out only a few themes to indicate the scope of his work. Selma was about a basic right explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, the right to vote without discrimination. In Alabama, Mississippi and large parts of other states in the Deep South, the right was a myth for blacks. They were threatened, abused, even murdered if they tried to register or vote; they often lost their homes or their jobs. Armed white mobs menaced them. It was in the face of those tactics that King decided to lead a march from Selma to Montgomery as a protest for the vote. At the first attempt marchers were brutalized, the march turned back. But they persisted. Branch, usually given to understatement, lets himself go and speaks of 'yearnings and exertions toward freedom seldom matched since Valley Forge.' Before a second attempt could be made to march to Montgomery, a difficulty intervened. Judge Frank M. Johnson enjoined the march because of likely violence. Johnson was a highly respected federal judge who had made many decisions in favor of civil rights. Justice Department officials pleaded with King not to violate the order lest he sacrifice the movement's reliance on law and the Constitution. But the protesters, many of them, did not want to give way. King did not say what he would do. The march began. He led it onto the Pettus Bridge at the edge of Selma, faced 500 state troopers — and suddenly turned and led the marchers back into Selma. He had made the point and desisted, obeying the law. There followed a remarkable episode. Judge Johnson was now asked to let the march go forward and enjoin interference with it. But in a telephone conversation with the United States attorney general, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, he said he would not do so unless the federal government undertook to protect the marchers. And he wanted that assurance from the president, he said. Katzenbach gave him the assurance. Lyndon B. Johnson called the Alabama National Guard into federal service and sent regular Army detachments. On their third try, the marchers made it to Montgomery. King believed that if Americans outside the South were aware of its brutal racism — as few then were — they would want to end it. The violent response to nonviolent protest made the brutality plain. What Americans read in newspapers and saw on television shocked them, and jump-started the political process. Meaningful civil rights legislation made it past Senate filibusters at last. It was a crucial part of King's thinking to engage the president. As Robert Caro has demonstrated in his biography, Lyndon Johnson had shown streaks of racism in his life. But fundamentally he was for equal rights, and he seized the opportunity presented by the King campaign and the ugly Southern response. In a speech to the nation on March 15, 1965, he memorably adopted the words of the civil rights movement: 'It's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And — we — shall — overcome.' L.B.J. is a second object of Branch's penetrating gaze in this volume: not just what he did on civil rights but his whole whirlwind of activity. Here he is on the telephone with Attorney General Katzenbach in Alabama, warning him not to smoke too much during late-night vigils. On one day in 1965 he takes a phone call from Drew Pearson, the columnist, and lectures him for 15 minutes about Vietnam. He receives the British foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, and a delegation, talking long past the scheduled time and telling them — to their confusion — 'Sometimes I just get all hunkered up like a jackass in a hailstorm.' He has a conference call with House leaders about the legislation to establish Medicare. He gets a telephone report from Selma. FOR Johnson, race and Vietnam were preoccupations in tandem. In the same month as the march from Selma to Montgomery, March 1965, the first American combat units went ashore at Da Nang. King had had a good relationship with the president, but it broke down over the issue that Johnson rightly feared would overwhelm his reputation on social justice. Branch's picture of Dr. King on Vietnam is of a man coming slowly, reluctantly, but irresistibly to embrace the issue — against the advice of many supporters. Finally, at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, he called for the United States to 'set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.' The Riverside speech drew heavy criticism. John Roche, a Brandeis University professor who was then on the White House staff, said King had 'thrown in with the Commies.' He told the president that King was 'inordinately ambitious and quite stupid (a bad combination).' A Washington Post editorial said, 'Many who have listened to him with respect will never again accord him the same confidence.' But King did not give way. He told a church audience that the press had been 'so noble in its praise' when he preached nonviolence toward white oppressors but inconsistently 'will curse you and damn you when you say be nonviolent toward little brown Vietnamese children.' Racism in America was not — and is not — confined to the South. Branch reminds us of that in small ways and large. In 1965, he notes, Mary Travers of the trio Peter, Paul and Mary kissed Harry Belafonte on the cheek at a rally. CBS television, which was showing the rally, was besieged by protesting callers, and took the rally off the air for 90 minutes. In the border state of Kentucky, the famous basketball coach Adolph Rupp kept his University of Kentucky team all white. He complained of calls from the university president, 'That son of a bitch wants me to get some niggers in here.' A little-noted team from Texas Western, with five black players starting, upset Kentucky in the 1966 championship game — a story told just now in the movie 'Glory Road.' Only slowly, after that, did the bar on black athletes break down in the South. Many people watching college sports on television today would not have dreamed that such a policy ever existed. Chicago dramatized the reality of antiblack feelings in the North. Marches organized by King to protest segregated housing and unequal government benefits were met with mob taunts and rocks. 'Burn them like Jews!' one white group shouted at the marchers. Branch concludes that 'the violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners.' The most chilling passages in this book, for me, are about J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director. His hatred of King was not a secret. But Branch shows how far it went — beyond extremity to morbid depravity. Hoover instructed all in the bureau not to warn King of death threats. He told President Johnson that any requests for federal protection of King would come from subversives, and that King was 'an instrument in the hands of subversive forces seeking to undermine our Nation.' He listed King as a prominent target in an order to all F.B.I. offices 'to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist hate-type organizations.' There was no basis in fact for the calumnies. The charge of subversion hung on the dubious thread of an allegation that Stanley Levison, an adviser to King, was a Communist agent — an allegation never shown to have any convincing support. The low point in the Hoover story may have been his performance on the killing of Viola Liuzzo. He tried to conceal the fact that one of the Klansmen who shot at her was an F.B.I. informant, Gary Thomas Rowe — and lied to President Johnson about it. He urged the president not to speak with the Liuzzo family, telling Johnson that 'the woman had indications of needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope; that she was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.' (Liuzzo's arm was cut by a shard of glass from the shattered car window.) Branch calls Hoover's comments 'slanderous Klan fantasy dressed as evidence.' J. Edgar Hoover was either a profoundly disturbed man by this time or that rarity, actual evil. The question that Branch leaves unaddressed is why President Johnson didn't fire him. The familiar explanation is fear of the poison that Hoover would spew out in response. But Lyndon Johnson could have handled that. Under provocation that hardly any other human being could have resisted, King never gave up on nonviolence. The rise of black-power advocates like Stokely Carmichael did not move him. 'I am not going to allow anybody to pull me so low as to use the very methods that perpetuated evil throughout our civilization,' he told a meeting in 1966. 'I'm sick and tired of violence. I'm tired of the war in Vietnam. I'm tired of war and conflict in the world. I'm tired of shooting. I'm tired of hatred. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of evil. I'm not going to use violence no matter who says it!' One cannot read this amazing book without thinking about what King would be saying if he were with us today. He would surely be pointing to the vast racial injustice that remains in this country, and to the growing gap between rich and poor. I think there can be no doubt that he would also be speaking strongly against the war in Iraq, warning that it was killing Americans and Iraqis, nurturing terrorism, eroding the world's regard for America. This third volume of Branch's trilogy deepens a feeling many have had about Dr. King, a mystery. He moved sometimes as if propelled by a force that others could not see. He rose to make a speech, and extemporaneous biblical eloquence would pour forth. His friends and supporters were often uncertain what he would do. But on the great issues he was right, and brave. 'To the end,' Taylor Branch concludes, 'he resisted incitements to violence, cynicism and tribal retreat. He grasped freedom seen and unseen, rooted in ecumenical faith, sustaining patriotism to brighten the heritage of his country for all people. These treasures abide with lasting promise from America in the King years.'

Subject: Climbing the Mountain From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:04:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E0D71F30F93BA25752C0A96E958260&fta=y January 18, 1998 Climbing the Mountain By ALAN WOLFE Pillar of Fire America in the King Years, 1963-65. By Taylor Branch. To recount the life and times of Martin Luther King Jr. is to tell the story of how, more than 50 years after the century began, America finally became a modern society. It did so literally kicking and screaming, when not clubbing and killing. Our century's destiny has been to insure that the ideal of civic equality announced to the world in 1776 would become a reality. Just to help make that come about, King had to overcome the determined resistance of terrorists without conscience, politicians without backbone, rivals without foresight and an F.B.I. director so malicious that he would stop at nothing to destroy a man who believed in justice. Taylor Branch has been working on Martin Luther King Jr.'s biography for more years than King was active in the movement for civil rights. ''Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63,'' the first volume in what is now planned as a trilogy, was published in 1988 and won the Pulitzer Prize for history. ''At Canaan's Edge,'' the final volume, will appear sometime in the future. For the time being, readers fascinated by the story of King and his country can follow events through 1965 in ''Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65.'' And what events they were. Branch's second volume begins and ends with violence: demonstrations in St. Augustine, Fla., and Selma, Ala. In between, John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the United States became deeply involved in Vietnam, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam and paid for it with his life, and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and began furious lobbying for the even more important Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he did in ''Parting the Waters,'' Branch brings to these events both a passion for their detail and a recognition of their larger historical significance. By giving King such epic treatment, Branch implies that he was an epic hero. Was he? The great merit of Branch's stunning accomplishment is to prove definitively that he was. Like Odysseus, King had to break with comforts of home to undergo distant, threatening and often barely comprehensible adventures beyond. As Branch tells the story in the trilogy's opening volume, King was born in 1929 into a world unfamiliar to most white Americans: the black elite of the pre-World War II South. Black Baptist preachers in the former Confederate states, typified by King's father, were usually Republican in their politics and entrepreneurial in their ministries. The younger King fought against his father's insularity all his life. He left the South for the predominantly white Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pa., and then Boston University. When called to the ministry, King rejected the option of eventually becoming his father's successor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in favor of Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala. Unlike Odysseus, King showed no great desire to return home. Indeed, one measure of his accomplishment was that there was no longer a home to which he could return. By leading the campaign to abolish segregation, King not only destroyed the privileges Southern whites enjoyed through racism, he also toppled the complacent black isolationism in which his father had flourished. All his life, King would be plagued by lesser black rivals who resented his success. One of the more fascinating stories told in Branch's first volume involved the power struggle between King and the Rev. J. H. Jackson of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago, an acquaintance of King Sr. who, as president of the National Baptist Convention, was the most powerful African-American of his time. As effective as he may have been as a charismatic leader, King was no match for the wily Jackson, who not only defeated King's challenge to his leadership within the National Baptist Convention but, as Branch reports in this volume, spent $50,000 after King's death to have the entrance of his Chicago church moved around the corner so that it would no longer be on the newly named Martin Luther King Drive. An underlying theme of ''Pillar of Fire'' is King's move to the national stage, which intensified the bitterness of his potential rivals. Branch tells us that Adam Clayton Powell's response to the killing of four children in a Birmingham, Ala., church -- surely the most despicable event of the civil rights era -- was to predict publicly that a civil rights bill would never pass Congress (and then to offer King a job in his church in New York). At a later point Powell asked the House of Representatives to ''forget about Mississippi for a while'' in order to concentrate on the tribulations of Adam Clayton Powell. Every time King was criticized as too militant for the conservative black elite, he would also be criticized as too timid for the bloody taste of Malcolm X, for whom the Mau Mau warrior -- ''He's not humble. He's not nonviolent. But he's free'' -- served as an appropriate model of black protest. Even King's closest advisers allowed their petty jealousies to stand in the way of his leadership. When King was in Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Abernathy, his designated successor, insisted on riding in the same car, objecting, to the embarrassment of all, to the careful plans of the Norwegian protocol chief. ''Ralph's estrangement was much more worrisome to Martin than anything he thought J. Edgar Hoover might do,'' Andrew Young told Branch. Had King actually known what Hoover was doing, he might have been more worried on that front. In August 1963, the F.B.I., in an internal memo, designated King ''the most dangerous Negro of the future in this nation,'' and it began a campaign to tap his telephone and plant bugs in his hotel rooms as he traveled. The systematic character of the F.B.I. vendetta astonishes to this day. After the bureau learned of assassination threats against a number of prominent Americans, each was notified -- except King. The F.B.I. persuaded Marquette University not to award an honorary degree to King. Under F.B.I. prodding, Francis Cardinal Spellman of New York telephoned Pope Paul VI's Secretary of State in a vain effort to prevent a papal audience for King. ''I am amazed that the Pope gave an audience to such a degenerate,'' Hoover wrote after the meeting. Through his bugs, Hoover had picked up evidence of marital infidelity on King's part. ''This will destroy the burrhead,'' Hoover gloated. Doing its best to bring this prophecy about, the F.B.I. sent some of its damaging material to King along with an anonymous suggestion that he do the honorable thing and take his own life. King, of course, did himself no favors by making himself so vulnerable. ''When a man travels like you and I do,'' he once said to James Farmer, ''there are bound to be women,'' hardly a sufficient excuse for his actions. Still, Branch, in one of the few times he loses his dispassionate tone in favor of sarcasm, is right to remark that when the F.B.I. was called upon to investigate such things as bombings, it viewed those tasks ''as an irritating distraction from the serious business of intercepting King's sex life.'' During King's life, black Americans completed their passage from the Republican to the Democratic Party; 96 percent of the black vote went to Lyndon Johnson in 1964. Yet the persistence of quasi-feudal political arrangements in the South gave disproportionate influence to racist politicians bent on obstructing King's goals. John F. Kennedy, ever fearful of the power of Southern oligarchs, appointed outright segregationists to the Federal bench and shied away from any strong commitment to civil rights. Johnson's support for the passage of civil rights legislation dominates the second volume of Branch's trilogy in the way that Kennedy's political cowardice dominates the first. Still, King could never count on the backing of Democratic Party politicians. Branch reports Gov. Carl Sanders of Georgia as saying, ''It looks like we're turning the Democratic Party over to the nigras,'' when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party demanded recognition at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. Nor were Northern politicians welcoming of King. So new was the idea of massive black suffrage in American politics during the 1960's that King took care to campaign among blacks for Johnson in a way that would not arouse suspicion or resentment among whites. Of all the obstacles to King's leadership, none was as paralyzing as the terror unleashed by racists in the South. As befits the time period he covers, Branch devotes considerable attention to the violence that took the lives of Lemuel Penn, James Chaney, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, Vernon Dahmer and others who were in the wrong place at their rightful time. Segregation did not kill; people did. And just as we were made witness to the inhumanity of Mississippi's Parchman penitentiary in ''Parting the Waters,'' so in ''Pillar of Fire'' we learn through Branch's meticulous attention to detail who these murderers were, how they planned their deeds and how they too often escaped the consequences of their acts. Terrorism relied for its effectiveness on the racism of genteel society. Senator George Smathers of Florida told President Johnson that King must have organized most of the violence against himself, because ''he loves the headlines.'' Caught near a violent mob in Neshoba County, Miss., Branch recounts, Claude Sitton, a reporter for The New York Times, ducked into a furniture store that he knew to be owned by the uncle of Turner Catledge, the managing editor of his newspaper. ''I wouldn't lift one damn finger to help you,'' Catledge's uncle told him. Even after King won the Nobel Peace Prize, powerful white Atlantans tried unsuccessfully to stop a dinner in his honor. The South really was another country. To enter its precincts in search of goals as conservative as the right to vote or to drink a cup of coffee in a restaurant, individuals had to entertain the possibility that they would never come out alive. As horrible as slavery was, slaveholders could at least claim that the Constitution gave them sanction. That was no longer possible after passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. In this one way was segregation worse than slavery, for its practitioners not only showed enormous disrespect for human life but in the process corrupted the supreme law of the land. Against all these forces, Martin Luther King Jr. managed to build upon America's religious and moral foundations to uphold the dignity of the individual. ''Mississippi has treated the Negro as if he is a thing instead of a person,'' King declared, echoing Immanuel Kant. On another occasion, he said of civil rights demonstrators: ''The patter of their feet as they walked through Jim Crow barriers in the great stride toward freedom is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua. And the world rocks beneath their tread. My people, my people, listen, listen, the battle is in our hands.'' In the aftermath of the Birmingham bombing, King spoke not of retribution but of redemption: ''We must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and worth of all human personality.'' Words like these are rarely heard in American politics these days, because so few have the moral stature to utter them. But King's accomplishments moved well beyond words. Without him, the United States might not have got the legislation that enabled it to become the democracy it had always proclaimed itself to be. After King, we argue how his dream can best be fulfilled. We forget how significant it is that we no longer argue about whether it should be fulfilled. Taylor Branch's treatment of King's life raises no new issues of historical reinterpretation. It uncovers no new documentary evidence. It tells no story that has not been told before. But it does something more important; it reminds us that there once arose in our midst a man who, as Odysseus' son, Telemachus, said of his father, ''more than all other men, was born for pain.'' America was lifted up because King would not lay his burden down. King's tragic sensibility was the direct opposite of today's feel-good therapeutics. ''If freedom is to be a reality,'' he told the 1964 annual convention of the United Synagogues of America, ''the Negro must be willing to suffer and to sacrifice and to work for it.'' For all the tribulations his enemies confronted him with, it is not those who foolishly and vainly stood in his way whom we remember, but Martin Luther King Jr., our century's epic hero. Alan Wolfe is a University Professor at Boston University.

Subject: How the Dream Was Born From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 06:04:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DF1531F934A15752C1A96E948260 November 27, 1988 How the Dream Was Born By ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON PARTING THE WATERS America in the King Years, 1954-63. By Taylor Branch. THIS has been a year haunted by another. Nineteen eighty-eight has been a year of reflection in books and articles about 1968, the crescendo of a period marked by profound change. At its center was a nonviolent racial revolution that later met its match in violent street rebellions, burning cities and serial assassinations. In 1968, a decade characterized by a sense of determined mission and often chaotic change came prematurely to a cataclysmic close. It is fitting, then, that 1988 ends with a book that helps explain what happened to us during the formative years, 1954 to 1963, of that period whose shadow we seem unable to escape. We are still trying to understand why the 1960's stubbornly insist on marking the boundary between America before and America after. Rather than a work of interpretive history, ''Parting the Waters,'' the first volume of Taylor Branch's massive social history, is right out of the pages of our lives. It tells the story behind the uprooting of America's tragic racial traditions without which a definitive interpretation of post-World War II America cannot be made. Although it is subtitled ''America in the King Years,'' the book's scope is less grandiose. Its achievement lies not in a bold definition of the period, but in the success with which it captures the big and little stories of the zenith of the civil rights movement. The contribution of this book is not that it tells us why racial change occurred, but how. It is least successful when it attempts to be more than a history of the movement. Its references to major unrelated events of the period, such as the Hungarian revolt or the Suez crisis, are necessarily disconnected from the stories of the struggle for civil rights and become mere intermissions to the main attraction. Mr. Branch's burden - to cover and bring together the scattered impressions that convey a movement - is awesome enough. Adding to the mix the nuances of the nation's history proved impossible. What Mr. Branch, a former staff member of The Washington Monthly, Harper's and Esquire, has written is the story of Martin Luther King Jr. Here is the novice preacher promoted at 26 to leader of a mass movement by events, talent and temperament, the nonviolent general totally free of the hubris of leadership, the intellectual self-critical to the point of torturous self-doubt, the Christian saintly in his love and generosity to friends and enemies alike and in his adherence to his principles, and the man whose human frailties are noteworthy because he had so few. While King's life is the focus of this history, ''Parting the Waters'' is more the story of a movement than the biography of a man. King dominates the book as he did the period, and the details of his life pervade this volume. But Mr. Branch's work is not a replication of David J. Garrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, ''Bearing the Cross.'' Both books are arduously researched, with King at the center. But in Mr. Garrow's telling, the story of the movement must be sifted from the minutiae of King's life, while Mr. Branch's wide-ranging search into the details of King's life converges with the onrushing tide that swept up both King and country for a few years of concentrated time. Mr. Branch's fundamental insight is that King shared the movement with an extraordinary array of catalytic personalities. They are all here: the brilliant Ella Baker, whose sex and independence condemned her to a lifetime on the fringes of black leadership; the peripatetic Wyatt Tee Walker, King's officious and indispensable lieutenant; the multitalented Bayard Rustin, the movement's organizational genius. The whites also are all here. There is Stanley Levison, the outsider who became the quintessential insider - to King the gentle friend and sounding board, rather than the subversive menace he was in the obsessions of J. Edgar Hoover. From another world there was Harris Wofford, the Alabama Brahmin who was the closest thing to a movement ''mole'' in the Kennedy White House. Mr. Branch has been irresistibly drawn to the students who radicalized the movement. These young people brought their elders to an understanding that the only power the movement had was the risk of personal jeopardy and the commitment to go to jail and remain there and to recruit others to do the same. They taught this lesson to King, not he to them. It was their determined and nonviolent witness and urging that helped him marry his intellectual grasp of theology to the direct action that made the movement successful. A few of these student activists have since become recognized leaders. Of these, John Lewis stands out, not because he is now in Congress, but because no one submitted himself to greater physical punishment or risk or has traveled a greater distance to eminence. Within the movement, Mr. Lewis had peers whose stories also are told here. Among them are Bob Moses of Harlem and Harvard, the philosophy student at once taciturn and luminously warm, who opened up the terrorist Mississippi Delta to the movement. The selfless Mr. Moses acquired legendary status among young activists for his solitary efforts to register blacks to vote, a devotion as intense as King attracted from church congregations. Mr. Moses is portrayed in the book, accurately, as the only man in the movement as deep as King. Mr. Branch describes the rest of the motley group of less well-known characters in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as well - from the daring odd couple, the fearless, privileged Diane Nash and the worldly, eccentric James Bevel, to Cordell Reagon and the Freedom Singers, who discovered in Albany, Ga., the uses of spirituals to prepare church congregations for battle. There are a number of ways to tell the story of the years from 1954 to 1963. These are the years when America began to stir itself from the comfort it had found in the postwar period of economic growth free from major rivals, the years summed up by the differences between the Presidencies of a retired general and a young Senator. Yet nothing serves so well as a focal point for the period as the history of racial change and challenge. AT the same time, realizing that racial currents defined much that was important about the period is not enough to make us understand it. After all, black progress had proceeded only laboriously since the Civil War when compared with, for example, the extraordinary advancement of the descendants of European immigrants or the improved standard of living of American workers. The steadily rising fortunes of these, the majority of Americans, occurred with the turn of time. To move blacks from their subordinate status required a jolt of concentrated energy. The civil rights movement provided the energy. And after the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955, as the movement gathered force, it gave a jolt to the nation, one that reverberates to this day. It is hard to overstate the difficulty of conveying the story of rapid change. It must be captured from vivid but quickly dissolving moments of accelerated time, and it must be done not with the camera, which has snatched from oblivion so many memorable moments or with documentaries of compelling scenes, such as public television's ''Eyes on the Prize,'' which was first broadcast in 1986. The storyteller whose subject is quick change must find ways to overcome the inert properties of words. By telling the story of the black struggle for equal rights under law from the Montgomery bus boycott to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Mr. Branch shows us how national complacency about race relations was forever broken. In eight short years the original bus boycott demands - which sought only to protect black passengers from surrendering their segregated seats to whites - had surged into the uncompromising March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963. Mr. Branch adroitly weaves the story of the major and minor figures who created the first mass movement since World War II into the larger story of how the country's leaders reacted to the challenge of civil rights activism. ''Parting the Waters'' pays heed to action on the main stage, such as King's first meeting with a President - Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 - but spends more time behind the scenes on the perhaps more significant events in the backwaters of the Deep South. Mr. Branch, with painstaking research, has reached into the crevices where much of the change occurred. There he has found human dramas of heroism and pettiness, of determination and bewilderment. For example, he records the reason given by a judge in Federal District Court (appointed by Kennedy) for issuing an injunction against a demonstration in Albany, Ga. The march, the judge declared, would deny whites equal protection by pulling police from their neighborhoods! Mr. Branch portrays the incredibly violent attacks by white mobs on the Freedom Riders, who tested the nascent Federal ban on segregation in interstate transportation and public facilities. Far from deterring such demonstrations, the bus-burnings and savage beatings created still more converts, who adopted nonviolence and joined the movement. He offers portraits of focused heroism, such as that of Bob Moses. Mr. Branch also reveals the aimlessness of the kind of personal rivalries that doomed the Montgomery movement once the crisis of the bus boycott no longer united black people and their leaders against a compelling target. From the beginning, the movement had to reinvent itself in new places with new campaigns, new symbols and new sacrifices, even as it tried to achieve a coherent purpose. Always the dialectic of ecstasy and depression within the movement threatened to curtail social change. The nonviolent war imitated the dynamic of the battlefield, with a cruel mixture of false starts, progress, regression, despair, joy and death. The campaigns were staged where battles had been fought in the Civil War 100 years before - in Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama, in ''terrible'' Terrell County and Albany in Georgia, and in McComb and Greenwood in Mississippi. In the pages on Greenwood, I was pulled back to unforgettable Mississippi days. Mr. Branch had begun to describe my own life. For me, as for many who experienced these years - whether actively involved in the movement or vicariously - ''Parting the Waters'' often brilliantly evokes the familiar. I found many such road markers, but none like the description of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary in Mississippi. It all came rolling back: the summer day I spent in Jackson, Miss., when Evers took me on his ''rounds''; his case for why a law student like me was needed there, an appeal overridden by my promise to Bob Moses to work with him in the Delta; the drive to the bus station that evening, where Evers put me on a bus to Greenwood. I was alone the next morning in the kitchen of a farm couple who were off picking beans when I heard the knock of a child on the screen door. There, sitting naked in a tin washtub of bath water warmed on the stove, I learned that Evers had been shot to death that same night. Such unforgettable personal memories inevitably will be revived by the stories Mr. Branch tells, but for many they will compete with the book's revelations. Some will be drawn by the occasional stories of intrigue in high places - the Faustian pact between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover allowing wiretaps on King was bought in exchange for secrecy about President Kennedy's affair with an East German woman (hurriedly deported), among others. Yet these few pages pale in significance, and even adventure, to the stories about the movement. Above all, this is a work of special commitment. Mr. Branch's background is in journalism, not history. Yet even without the scholar's incentives, he has penetrated unusually difficult territory, where records are not kept and the story must be laboriously pieced together. He has done so with great skill and often with language literary in its quality. Much of the ambiance of the period would have been lost without a writer of his talent. THERE is much more in this bulky volume than some will want to know, even in a history that moves fast and that is about many people still on the scene and a period that is still unfolding. However, much of the story of a movement is oral history that will be lost unless documented in its own time. Perhaps understandably, Mr. Branch has been reluctant to exclude material he has spent years digging out that will be useful to historians. However, some of the principal actors are scarcely mentioned. Malcolm X, who came to public consciousness in this period, awakened blacks to their need for autonomy as King pressed their quest for freedom. Fannie Lou Hamer, the uneducated Mississippi sharecropper, had no rival except King himself as a speaker with a virtuoso combination of intelligence and power. Much of their public recognition occurred later in the 1960's. Perhaps Mr. Branch will do them justice in his next volume. Although Mr. Branch makes few harsh judgments, this is not a book about saints. It is a set of compelling portraits, placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently. Small steps by timid leaders had proved unavailing for a century. Finally, the people did it themselves with the brilliant combination of strategy and philosophy that became the Southern nonviolent civil rights movement. What has in other countries been changed through ruinous violence was transformed by the principled suffering of those who had already suffered most. Particularly, history is finally recognizing the anonymous cadre who gave everything to the movement and therefore to their country. Thank you, Septima Clark and Charles Sherrod. Thank you, James Lawson. Thank you, Ruby Doris Smith. CONVERTED BY BULL CONNOR Eleanor Holmes Norton, a professor of law at Georgetown University, was chairwoman of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1977 to 1981.

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 19:10:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/05 to 2/3/06 S&P Index is 1.4 Large Cap Growth Index is 1.1 Large Cap Value Index is 1.9 Mid Cap Index is 4.0 Small Cap Index is 6.6 Small Cap Value Index is 5.7 Europe Index is 5.4 Pacific Index is 3.3 Emerging Markets Index is 8.6 Energy is 11.7 Health Care is 2.0 Precious Metals is 14.8 REIT Index is 6.6 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 1.0 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is -0.5

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 19:09:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/05 - 2/3/06 Energy 10.0 Financials 0.5 Health Care 1.3 Info Tech 2.1 Materials 4.1 REITs 6.1 Telecoms 5.9 Utilities 3.2

Subject: Broad Rise in Hiring Last Month From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 07:24:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/business/04jobs.html?ex=1296709200&en=45c438cb1febf7ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 4, 2006 Broad Rise in Hiring Last Month By LOUIS UCHITELLE In one of the strongest job reports since the start of the recovery in late 2001, the government reported yesterday that the unemployment rate fell to 4.7 percent, its lowest level in more than four years. The nation's employers hired workers in nearly every industry. The widespread hiring added 193,000 jobs to the work force, well short of what forecasters had expected. But upward revisions for November and December brought average monthly job growth for the three months to a hefty 229,000. The cumulative effect has been a sharp drop in the unemployment rate — to a level approaching what some economists define as full employment. 'This latest report is unmistakable evidence of an improving economy,' said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist for Global Insights. 'What you have to look for is evidence that the fourth-quarter slowdown in economic growth will continue. And this jobs report is evidence that just the opposite is happening.' For months, the unemployment rate had hovered at 5 percent, dropping occasionally to 4.9 percent, as it did in December. The plunge to 4.7 percent broke the pattern — bringing the unemployment rate to its lowest level since July 2001, when the boom of the late 1990's began to unwind. The January report, compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, raised the likelihood that the Federal Reserve's policy makers will continue their quarter-point rate increases beyond their March meeting, the first one at which the new Fed chairman, Benjamin S. Bernanke, will preside. The new expectation is that the Fed will almost certainly add another quarter-point to short-term interest rates not only in March but also in May. Stock prices fell yesterday and bond prices rose, which often happens when the expectation of rising rates makes bonds seem the more attractive investment. The Bush administration welcomed the jobs news, but cautiously. 'We're actually in a sweet spot in the economy right now,' John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary, said in an interview with the Bloomberg news agency. He argued that the wages of ordinary workers could continue to rise, as they did last month, without forcing companies to push up prices. That can happen, he said, because of rising productivity, which means workers are paying for their own raises by increasing their output. His remarks seemed to be aimed at least in part at Mr. Bernanke and at Wall Street. Many forecasters argue that an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent gives workers the leverage to bargain for raises that may prompt their employers to then increase prices. The Fed, in expectation of a higher inflation rate, could respond with rate increases that might stifle the expansion. 'We are exhausting the pool of the unemployed and of otherwise available workers,' said Jan Hatzius, chief domestic economist at Goldman Sachs. The new jobs report was not all good news. Over the last year job growth averaged 189,000 a month, not counting the impact of Hurricane Katrina. In the early 1990's recovery, by comparison, the work force was growing at 303,000 a month in the fourth year. In past recoveries, the average number of hours worked in a week rose along with employment; this time, employment is rising but hours have been stuck at just under 33.8 a week, on average, for more than three years. And unemployment among blacks, which fell more last month than for any other group, was nevertheless 8.9 percent — more than double the 4.1 percent for white men and women. Still, by the standards of the current recovery, the employment report offered plenty of good news, and this despite the bureau's annual benchmark revisions, which resulted in a slight lowering of job numbers reported last year. The most striking bit of good news was the way in which the unemployment rate dropped in January. Most of the earlier declines in the current recovery have come about in part because many jobless have left the labor force rather than actively hunt for work, which people must do to be listed as unemployed. This time, the unemployment rate fell but not because people left the labor force. The so-called labor force participation rate held steady at 66 percent, suggesting that enough job openings exist to draw people into the hunt for work. The percentage of long-term unemployed — that is, those out of work six months or longer — fell to 16.3 percent from 18.2 percent in December. 'As jobs become more available, people are no longer finding themselves stuck as long in unemployment,' said Jared Bernstein, a senior economist at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute. Employers added workers in virtually every sector of the economy except government and retailing. Construction led the list, with 46,000 new jobs, a result of unseasonably warm weather as well as continued strength in the housing market. Manufacturers, who had been shedding jobs until late last summer, added 7,000 last month, continuing a gradual upward climb. Most of the gains, however, came in services. Education and health services produced 39,000 new jobs, followed by business services, particularly temporary workers; financial services; and leisure and hospitality, which includes restaurants and bars. 'Consumers don't have to go to restaurants and bars,' Mr. Gault said, 'and when they do, that reflects consumer confidence.' The jobs report tracks the wages of production workers, white collar and blue collar, below the rank of supervisor. They represent 80 percent of the nation's workers. Their average wage rose 7 cents, to $16.41 an hour. That brought the 12-month increase in wages to 3.3 percent, not enough to match the annual 3.4 percent rise in the Consumer Price Index through December. Despite this shortfall in purchasing power, most forecasters expect growth in the first quarter to surge to an annual rate of more than 4 percent from 1.1 percent in the fourth quarter. Rising auto sales, business spending on new equipment, relatively low interest rates despite the Fed rate increases, and a still healthy housing market are all listed by the forecasters as likely to contribute to the growth surge. 'The first quarter will be great,' Mr. Gault said. 'The second quarter won't be as good. Maybe we are talking 3 percent growth for that quarter.'

Subject: Paul Krugman's Money Talks From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 07:07:41 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: February 4, 2006 Paul Krugman responds to comments on his column on the Abramoff scandal. By Mark Thoma Steven Schafersman, Midland, Tex.: I am a scientist. I have long been frustrated and angry about the way the press treats cultural controversies as science controversies and gives equal time to non-scientists, psuedo-scientists and anti-science activists, who are usually pro-business... or pro-Bush administration. This happens with the evolution-creationism controversy, the global warming controversy, the environmental destruction controversy, the humans vs. robots in space controversy, the stem cell controversy and many others. The controversy about tobacco being harmful to human health has finally been resolved, but for decades tobacco companies had scientific reports that tobacco wasn't dangerous. In each case, there is an overwhelming scientific consensus about the correct scientific position in each controversy, but a few individuals -- some of whom have scientific credentials but who mainly have a political, economic or ideological agenda -- take the opposite position but get half the press attention. Reporters are trained to present both sides equally, when in fact -- from a knowledgeable scientific perspective -- only one side is actually valid. Thus, most news reports about cultural controversies involving science are biased, giving the false or inferior side much greater legitimacy than it deserves. The result is that the public is often poorly informed about the correct scientific understanding of many important topics, some of which are or will be vital to human health and survival. The press needs to do a better job of reporting on these cultural and political controversies which involve scientific understanding. Jacob Kornbluth, New York: This “wimpy” media movement is an amazingly important problem. The only time the reporting of the news hasn't felt “scared” to me since 9/11 was during Hurricane Katrina. What happened to make the reporting of that disaster so much different than that of the Abramoff scandal? How did they fight through the partisan accusations, blogosphere noise and everything else, and just report the actual situation on the ground? I have a feeling it's because the consequences of the wrong weren't an abstraction, that the pictures of real people experiencing real loss were unspinnable. During that tragedy, however, the reporting left me feeling more hopeful than I was before or have been since. ... Gary Pace, St. Louis: ...I am struck by one consistent theme of today's administration practiced by the Republican Congress: abuse of power. Questionable actions are dismissed with backhanded comments, such as “We must stop terror”, or “We're at war!” Of course, President Bush has already announced victory in the Iraq war, so I'm not sure what war he refers to as he tries to justify his actions. Once a long-time Republican myself, I am appalled by what has taken place within the G.O.P. Moreoever, it's mind-boggling how many fellow conservatives rationalize the current misbehavior within the Republican party... Bill Moore, Norwalk, Conn.: ...Many journalists ... apparently misunderstand what the words “balanced reporting” mean. Paul Krugman: Let me expand a bit on what I said in the column. ... thinking of Jack Abramoff as a lobbyist in the conventional sense misses the whole point ... Mr. Abramoff didn't approach potential clients saying, “I know my way around Washington, and I can tell you who to support.” He came and said, in effect, “I've got powerful friends in Congress and the White House” - Republican friends, of course – “and, if you pay me, I can arrange for them to look kindly on your interests.” And there was, in the case of the Indian tribes, more than a bit of implied threat: 'Nice gambling business you've got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.' And what did Mr. Abramoff do with the money he extracted? He took a big chunk for himself, of course. But he also used it to enrich and reward Republican loyalists. And money from his clients went to a variety of Republican causes, often with no relevance to the clients' interests. In effect, he was running a slush fund for the Republican machine. That's why calling this a bipartisan scandal is such an outrage.

Subject: Housing market & jobs From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 18:57:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dallas News: Danielle DiMartino: Housing's slide will have ripple effect 07:48 AM CST on Thursday, February 2, 2006 After last week's existing-home sales report, National Association of Realtors chief economist David Lereah declared that the speculators were 'pulling out.' The question for the broader economy is: Will the flight crew be limited to the speculators? Last spring, Asha Bangalore, an economist with Northern Trust Co., startled the investment community by attaching a number to the housing boom's impact on the U.S. job market. The number has been widely quoted: From November 2001 to April 2005, housing contributed 43 percent of new jobs created. As it turns out, last spring marked the heyday in housing. In the final three months of last year, sales of existing homes declined at a 17 percent annual rate, the biggest slide since the second quarter of 1994. And housing starts and permits entered 2006 on a much weaker note than expected. With housing slowing, job creation will follow, unless another industry takes up the slack. Recent months' data on payrolls confirm job creation has faltered. Payroll growth averaged 114,000 in the last four months of 2005, down from a 197,000 pace in the 18 months prior. Numbers check These first signs of a slowdown mesh with Ms. Bangalore's most recent figures. By October of last year, the percentage of jobs created that were tied to housing had slipped to 36 percent. As for evidence of housing's impact on specific sectors of the job market, in December, construction hiring fell 9,000, the first contraction in nearly two years. The construction industry created nearly 250,000 jobs last year, 11.4 percent of the total. Two-thirds were tied to residential housing. 'I think what we're seeing is the beginning of the impact of cool-down in the housing market,' Ms. Bangalore said. And construction is just one sector of the housing market. In its recent long-term economic outlook, the Mortgage Bankers Association forecast total residential mortgage production would fall 20 percent in 2006. A major contributor: refinancing activity, which is forecast for a 40 percent slump this year. Of course, these declines will come off housing's hottest year on record. Residential debt, in its various forms, now constitutes more than 60 percent of the loans on banks' books, a record. This tsunami of underwriting has employed masses of people who will be hurt, as will those toiling in the real estate, home improvement and related industries. Other sectors But what about sectors not directly associated with housing? Ms. Bangalore noted that it wasn't happenstance that housing's weakest quarter in more than a decade coincided with a near 40 percent annualized decline in auto sales. 'This does not speak well of the status of the U.S. economy. The ripple effects of the slowdown in housing will be significant.'

Subject: Post Bubble Employment Scenario From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 23:56:14 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/2006/01/post-bubble-employment-scenarios.html Saturday, January 07, 2006 Post Bubble Employment Scenarios One reader asks, 'Housing ATM slump: What will happen to jobs now!' Another Reader put together this post bubble employment scenario. 'In a real estate downturn (and I’ve experienced a couple of them), companies who participate in real estate transactions typically downsize or do not survive. My experience relates to the title insurance business. Fortunately I’m no longer in that business although many people I use to work with have done quite well over the past few years. My hope for them is that they managed to build a nest egg and will survive this downturn. I remember management meetings in 1992 when we discussed who would be let go, and who would stay. I suspect those meetings are currently ongoing at many title companies.' 'When you look at a typical real estate sale transaction, in addition to the usual suspects (real estate brokers and salespeople), others are involved. The lender (loan officers, mortgage brokers, loan processors, etc.), the termite company, an appraiser, home inspector, title company (title officers, examiners, etc.), escrow company, fire insurance agent, and others. My sense relating to this real estate bubble is business is going to drop like we’ve never seen. I don’t think it is unreasonable to conclude that sales and refinances will drop at least 50% from their Summer 2005 level. What I’ve attempted to do below is estimate the percentage of job losses in specific areas based upon a 50% drop in real estate business.' 'As you will note in the example below, I show title companies loosing 40% of their employees and escrow companies loosing 50%. There is a basis for this difference. In a down real estate economy the number of foreclosures increase. Title companies handle the issuance of a trustee’s sale guarantee for the entity handling the foreclosure and often handle foreclosures themselves. The same is not generally true of escrow companies. This new source of business for title companies results in a lessening of the impact of a down real estate market.' 'You will note that I don’t see lenders being hit as hard. That is simply because those currently filling loan origination roles will migrate over to the property management side of the house to manage lender real estate owned (REO) properties.' 'The percentage figures below are my “best guess.” If you think I’m off base, give us your thoughts and basis for your conclusion.' Entity Percentage Remaining Real Estate Brokers 50% Real Estate Salespersons 40% Title Company Employees 60% Escrow Company Employees 50% Appraisers 40% Termite Companies 70% Institutional Lender Employees 70% Mortgage Brokers 45% Fire Insurance Company Employees 80% Homebuilders 40% Remodeling Contractors 30% Home Improvement Retailers 75% 'There are some businesses that will enjoy a marked upturn in business and will be 'bright spots' for those seeking employment during this downturn. They include foreclosure companies, bankruptcy law firms, distressed property managers, funeral homes, embalmers, and the producers of plywood window coverings (AKA Federal Drapes).'

Subject: What Is a Living Wage? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 15:49:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15wage.html?ex=1294981200&en=f7043a8ee7bc6102&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 15, 2006 What Is a Living Wage? By JON GERTNER If It Happened in Baltimore, Maybe It Can Happen Anywhere For a few weeks in the summer of 1995, Jen Kern spent her days at a table in the Library of Congress in Washington, poring over the fine print of state constitutions from around the country. This was, at the time, a somewhat-eccentric strategy to fight poverty in America. Kern was not a high-powered lawyer or politician; she was 25 and held a low-paying, policy-related job at Acorn, the national community organization. Yet to understand why living-wage campaigns matter - where they began, what they mean, and why they inspire such passion and hope - it helps to consider what Kern was doing years ago in the library, reading obscure legislation from states like Missouri and New Mexico. A few months earlier, she and her colleagues at Acorn witnessed an energetic grass-roots campaign in Baltimore, led by a coalition of church groups and labor unions. Workers in some of Baltimore's homeless shelters and soup kitchens had noticed something new and troubling about many of the visitors coming in for meals and shelter: they happened to have full-time jobs. In response, local religious leaders successfully persuaded the City Council to raise the base pay for city contract workers to $6.10 an hour from $4.25, the federal minimum at the time. The Baltimore campaign was ostensibly about money. But to those who thought about it more deeply, it was about the force of particular moral propositions: first, that work should be rewarded, and second, that no one who works full time should have to live in poverty. So Kern and another colleague were dispatched to find out if what happened in Baltimore could be tried - and expanded - elsewhere. As she plowed through documents, Kern was unsure whether to look for a particular law or the absence of one. Really, what she was trying to do was compile a list of places in the U.S. where citizens or officials could legally mount campaigns to raise the minimum wage above the federal standard. In other words, she needed to know if anything stood in the way, like a state regulation or court decision. What she discovered was that in many states a law more ambitious than Baltimore's - one that didn't apply to only city contractors but to all local businesses - seemed permissible. Whether a wage campaign was winnable turned out to be a more complicated matter. In the late 1990's, Kern helped Acorn in a series of attempts to raise the minimum wage in Denver, Houston and Missouri. They all failed. 'It wasn't even close,' she says. In the past few years, though, as the federal minimum wage has remained fixed at $5.15 and the cost of living (specifically housing) has risen drastically in many regions, similar campaigns have produced so many victories (currently, 134) that Kern speaks collectively of 'a widespread living-wage movement.' Santa Fe has been one of the movement's crowning achievements. This month the city's minimum wage rose to $9.50 an hour, the highest rate in the United States. But other recent victories include San Francisco in 2003 and Nevada in 2004. And if a ending bill in Chicago is any indication, the battles over wage laws will soon evolve into campaigns to force large, private-sector businesses like Wal-Mart to provide not only higher wages but also more money for employee health care. It is a common sentiment that economic fairness - or economic justice, as living-wage advocates phrase it - should, or must, come in a sweeping and righteous gesture from the top. From Washington, that is. But most wage campaigns arise from the bottom, from residents and low-level officials and from cities and states - from everywhere except the federal government. 'I think what the living-wage movement has done in the past 11 years is incredible,' David Neumark, a frequent critic of the phenomenon who is a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, told me recently. 'How many other issues are there where progressives have been this successful? I can't think of one.' The immediate goal for living-wage strategists is to put initiatives on the ballots in several swing states this year. If their reckoning is correct, the laws should effect a financial gain for low-income workers and boost turnout for candidates who campaign for higher wages. In Florida, a ballot initiative to raise the state's minimum wage by a dollar, to $6.15, won 71 percent of the vote in 2004, a blowout that surprised even people like Kern, who spent several weeks in Miami working on the measure. 'We would like it to become a fact of political life,' Kern says, 'where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum-wage law in some state.' Though victories like the one in Florida may have done little to help the Kerry-Edwards ticket - George Bush won 52 percent of the state's vote - Kern and some in the Democratic establishment have come to believe that the left, after years of electoral frustration, has finally found its ultimate moral-values issue. 'This is what moves people to the polls now,' Kern insists. 'This is our gay marriage.' Already, during the past few months, a coalition of grass-roots and labor organizations have begun gathering hundreds of thousands of signatures to ensure that proposed laws to increase wages are voted on in November. The first targets, Kern told me, will be Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Ohio. Next in line, either this year or soon after, are Montana, Oklahoma and Arkansas, the home of Wal-Mart. Does America Care About the Gap Between Rich and Poor? I first met Kern on a sunny morning in late September in Albuquerque, a city of 4770,000 that made her list when she was working in the Library of Congress 10 years ago. She was now, at age 35, campaigning for a ballot initiative that would raise the minimum wage in the city to $7.50 an hour from $5.15. There was no face for the placards, no charismatic presence to rally the troops at midnight or shake hands at dawn outside 7-Eleven. Instead, there was a number, $7.50, a troop of campaign workers to canvass the neighborhoods and an argument: that many low-wage workers were being paid poverty wages. That a full-time job at the federal minimum rate added up to $10,712 a year. That local businesses could afford the pay raise. And that it was up to the voters to restore balance. One of the more intriguing questions about campaigns like the one in Albuquerque, and those planned for swing states next fall, is whether they reflect a profound sense of public alarm about the divergence between rich and poor in this country. Certainly most Americans do not support higher wages out of immediate self-interest. Probably only around 3 percent of those in the work force are actually paid $5.15 or less an hour; most low-wage workers, including Wal-Mart employees, who generally start at between $6.50 and $7.50 an hour, earn more. Increasing the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour would directly affect the wages of only about 7 percent of the work force. Nevertheless, pollsters have discovered that a hypothetical state ballot measure typically generates support of around 70 percent. A recent poll by the Pew Research Center actually put the support for raising the national minimum wage to $6.45 at 86 percent. Rick Berman, a lobbyist who started the Employment Policies Institute and who is a longtime foe of living-wage laws, agrees that 'the natural tendency is for people to support these things. They believe it's a free lunch.' On the other hand, the electorate's reasons for crossing party lines to endorse the measures may be due to the simple fact that at least 60 percent of Americans have at one time or another been paid the minimum wage. Voters may just know precisely what they're voting for and why. In the mid-1990's, the last time Congress raised the minimum wage, the Clinton White House was reluctant to start a war over the federal rate, according to Robert Reich, the former labor secretary. For an administration bent on policy innovation, that would have seemed 'old' Democrat. 'Then we did some polling and discovered that the public is overwhelmingly in favor,' Reich told me recently. 'At which point the White House gave the green light to Democrats in Congress.' Reich, now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, happens to view the minimum wage as a somewhat inefficient tool for alleviating poverty (compared with earned income tax credits, say). But he acknowledges that it has a powerful moral and political impact, in states red as well as blue, and especially now, in an era when workers see the social contract with their employers vanishing. 'They see neighbors and friends being fired for no reason by profitable companies, executives making off like bandits while thousands of their own workers are being laid off,' Reich says. 'They see health insurance drying up, employer pensions shrinking. Promises to retirees of health benefits are simply thrown overboard. The whole system has aspects that seem grossly immoral to average working people.' As Reich points out, whatever the minimum wage's limitations may be as a policy instrument, as an idea 'it demarcates our concept of decency with regard to work.' The idea, Reich points out, isn't new, even if the recent fervor for it is. Massachusetts enacted a state minimum wage in 1912, several decades before the federal minimum wage of 25 cents an hour was adopted in 1938. And most of the wage ordinances of the past decade specifically trace their origins back to Baltimore, in 1995. After that moment, in fact, the phrase 'living wage' soon caught on - or, you might say, returned. It was a popular workers' refrain in the late 19th century and was the title of a 1906 book by John Ryan, a Roman Catholic priest. In the late 1990's, a loose national network of advocates sprang up, incorporating organized labor, grass-roots groups like Acorn and the Industrial Areas Foundation and, more recently, the National Council of Churches. Legal advice often came out of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University's law school, where a lawyer named Paul Sonn helped write wage ordinances and ballot measures for various states and cities. By dint of its piecemeal, localized progress, the modern living-wage movement has grown without fanfare; one reason is that until recently, most of the past decade's wage laws, like Baltimore's, have been narrow in scope and modest in effect. Strictly speaking, a 'living wage' law has typically required that any company receiving city contracts, and thus taxpayers' money, must pay its workers a wage far above the federal minimum, usually between $9 and $11 an hour. These regulations often apply to employees at companies to which municipalities have outsourced tasks like garbage collection, security services and home health care. Low-wage workers in the private sector - in restaurants, hotels, retail stores or the like - have been unaffected. Their pay stays the same. In Santa Fe, the City Council passed a similar kind of wage law in 2002, raising the hourly pay for city employees and contractors. Some officials in Santa Fe, however, had decided from the start that its wage rules should ultimately be different - that the small city (population 666,000) could even serve as a test example for the rest of the U.S. Early on, several city councilors told me, they anticipated that Santa Fe - with a high cost of living, a large community of low-paid immigrants and a liberal City Council - would eventually extend its wage floor to all local businesses, private as well as public, so that every worker in the city, no matter the industry, would make more than $5.15. The initial numbers the councilors considered as they began to strategize seemed stratospheric: a living wage that began at $10 or $12 or even $14.50 an hour. For some laborers, that would constitute a raise of 200 percent or more. Nothing remotely like it existed in any other city in the country. The Economists Are Surprised In the years before the enactment of the federal minimum wage in the late 1930's, the country's post-Depression economy was so weak that the notion that government should leave private business to its own devices was effectively marginalized. During the past few decades, though, in the wake of a fairly robust economy, debates on raising the minimum wage have consistently resulted in a rhetorical caterwaul. While the arguments have usually been between those on the labor side, who think the minimum wage should be raised substantially, and those on the employer side, who oppose any increase, a smaller but vocal contingent has claimed, more broadly and more philosophically, that it is in the best interest of both business and labor to let the market set wages, not the politicians. And certainly not the voters. This last position was long underpinned by the academic consensus that a rise in the minimum wage hurts employment by interfering with the flow of supply and demand. In simplest terms, most economists accepted that when government forces businesses to pay higher wages, businesses, in turn ,hire fewer employees. It is a powerful argument against the minimum wage, since it suggests that private businesses as a group, along with teenagers and low-wage employees, will be penalized by a mandatory raise. The tenor of this debate began to change in the mid-1990's following some work done by two Princeton economists, David Card (now at the University of California at Berkeley) and Alan B. Krueger. In 1992, New Jersey increased the state minimum wage to $5.05 an hour (applicable to both the public and private sectors), which gave the two young professors an opportunity to study the comparative effects of that raise on fast-food restaurants and low-wage employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where the minimum wage remained at the federal level of $4.25 an hour. Card and Krueger agreed that the hypothesis that a rise in wages would destroy jobs was 'one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.' Both told me they believed, at the start, that their work would reinforce that hypothesis. But in 1995, and again in 2000, the two academics effectively shredded the conventional wisdom. Their data demonstrated that a modest increase in wages did not appear to cause any significant harm to employment; in some cases, a rise in the minimum wage even resulted in a slight increase in employment. Card and Krueger's conclusions have not necessarily made philosophical converts of Congress or the current administration. Attempts to raise the federal minimum wage - led by Senators Edward M. Kennedy on the left and Rick Santorum on the right - have made little headway over the past few years. And the White House went so far as to temporarily suspend the obligation of businesses with U.S. government construction contracts to pay so-called prevailing wages (that is, whatever is paid to a majority of workers in an industry in a particular area) during the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. David Card, who seems nothing short of disgusted by the ideological nature of the debates over the wage issue, says he feels that opinions on the minimum wage are so politically entrenched that even the most scientific studies can't change anyone's mind. 'People think we're biased, partisan,' he says. And he's probably right. While Card has never advocated for or against raising the minimum wage, many who oppose wage laws have made exactly those assertions about his research. Nonetheless, in Krueger's view, he and Card changed the debate. 'I'm willing to declare a partial victory,' Krueger told me. Some recent surveys of top academics show a significant majority now agree that a modest raise in the minimum wage does little to harm employment, he points out. If nothing else, Card and Krueger's findings have provided persuasive data, and a degree of legitimacy, to those who maintain that raising the minimum wage, whether at the city, state or federal level, need not be toxic. The Economic Policy Institute, which endorses wage regulations, has succeeded recently in getting hundreds of respected economists - excluding Card and Krueger, however, who choose to remain outside the debate - to support raising the federal minimum to $7 an hour. That would have been impossible as recently as five years ago, says Jeff Chapman, an economist at the E.P.I. Even Wal-Mart's president and C.E.O., Lee Scott, recently spoke out in favor of raising the minimum wage. It wasn't altruism or economic theory or even public relations that motivated him, but a matter of bottom-line practicality. 'Our current average hourly wage for workers is $9.68,' Lee Culpepper, a Wal-Mart spokesman, told me. 'So I would think raising the wage would have minimal impact on our workers. But we think it would have a beneficial effect on our customers.' What a Higher Minimum Wage Can Mean to Those Making It One evening in Santa Fe, I sat down with some of the people Wal-Mart is worried about. Like Louis Alvarez, a 58-year-old cafeteria worker in the Santa Fe schools who for many years helped prepare daily meals for 700 children. For that he was paid $6.85 an hour and brought home $203 every two weeks. He had no disposable income - indeed, he wasn't sure what I meant by disposable income; he barely had money for rent. Statistically speaking, he was far below the poverty line, which for a family of two is about $12,800 a year. For Alvarez, an increase in the minimum wage meant he would be able to afford to go to flea markets, he said. I also met with Ashley Gutierrez, 20, and Adelina Reyes, 19, who have low-paying customer-service and restaurant jobs. By most estimates, 35 percent of those who make $7 an hour or less in the U.S. are teenagers. A few months ago, Reyes told me, she was spending 86 hours every two weeks at two minimum-wage jobs to pay for her car and to pay for college. Gutierrez, also in school, was working 20 hours a week at Blockbuster video for the minimum wage. People like Alvarez and Gutierrez and Reyes were the ones who spurred two city councilors in Santa Fe, Frank Monta�o and Jimmie Martinez, to introduce the living-wage ordinance. 'Our schools here don't do so well,' Monta�o told me, explaining that he believed higher-wage jobs would let parents, who might otherwise have to work a second job, spend more time with their children. (At the same time working teenagers like Gutierrez would have more time with their parents.) For Santa Fe residents who were living five or six to a room in two-bedroom adobes, Monta�o said he hoped a higher minimum wage might put having their own places to live at least within the realm of possibility. Monta�o was confident - perhaps too confident, as it would turn out - that businesses would become acclimated to higher payroll costs. He has run a restaurant and a tour-bus company himself, and he knew that the tight labor market in Santa Fe had pushed up wages so that many entry-level workers were already earning more than $8 an hour. 'The business owners believe that government, especially at the local level, should not dictate to business, so to them it was a matter of principle,' Monta�o says. It was to him too. 'We knew that other communities were watching what we were doing,' he explains. He and his colleagues on the council were already receiving help from Paul Sonn at the Brennan Center in New York. 'I knew that their involvement meant that they saw this as something that was important nationally,' Monta�o says. 'As we got our foot in the door in terms of this ordinance being applied to the private sector,' he surmised, that would give the living-wage network the ammunition to help other communities across the country do likewise. 'I always knew, early on,' Monta�o says, 'that if Santa Fe enacted such an ordinance, that it likely would go to court, and that if it passed the legal test, it would be the kind of ordinance that other communities would copy.' The problem, at least from Monta�o's perspective, was getting it enacted in the first place. The Moral Argument Carries the Day in Santa Fe Santa Fe's City Council asked nine residents, representing the interests of labor and management, to join a round table that would settle the specifics of the proposed living-wage law - how high the wage would be, for instance, and how soon it would be phased in. Some members of the round table, like Al Lucero, who owns a popular local restaurant, Maria's New Mexican Kitchen, found the entire premise of a city wage law objectionable. 'I think the minimum wage at $5.15 is ridiculous,' Lucero told me. 'If the state were to raise it overall, to $7 an hour or $7.50 an hour, I think that would be wonderful. I think we need to do it.' But $9 or $10 or $11 was too high, in his view - and it would put Santa Fe at a disadvantage to other cities in the state or region that could pay workers less. Also, there were the free-market principles that Frank Monta�o had anticipated: 'They were trying to push and tell us how to live our lives and how to conduct our business,' says Lucero, who employs about 60 people. Not surprisingly, Lucero's opponents on the round table saw things in a different light. For example, Carol Oppenheimer, a labor attorney, viewed the proposed law as a practical and immediate solution. 'I got involved with the living-wage network because unions are having a very hard time,' she told me. She assumed that local businesses could manage with a higher payroll. Yet after only a few meetings of the task force, both sides dug in, according to Oppenheimer. It was then that the living-wage proponents hit on a scorched-earth, tactical approach. 'What really got the other side was when we said, 'It's just immoral to pay people $5.15, they can't live on that,' ' Oppenheimer recalls. 'It made the businesspeople furious. And we realized then that we had something there, so we said it over and over again. Forget the economic argument. This was a moral one. It made them crazy. And we knew that was our issue.' The moral argument soon trumped all others. The possibility that a rise in the minimum wage, even a very substantial one, would create unemployment or compromise the health of the city's small businesses was not necessarily irrelevant. Yet for many in Santa Fe, that came to be seen as an ancillary issue, one that inevitably led to fruitless discussions in which opposing sides cited conflicting studies or anecdotal evidence. Maybe all of that was beside the point, anyway. Does it - or should it - even matter what a wage increase does to a local economy, barring some kind of catastrophic change? Should an employer be allowed to pay a full-time employee $5.15 an hour, this argument went, if that's no longer enough to live on? Is it just under our system of government? Or in the eyes of God? The Rev. Jerome Martinez, the city's influential monsignor, began to throw his support behind the living-wage ordinance. When I met with him in his parish, in a tidy, paneled office near the imposing 18th-century church that looks over the city plaza, Martinez traced for me the moral justification for a living wage back to the encyclicals of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI and John Paul II, in which the pontiffs warned against the excesses of capitalism. 'The church's position on social justice is long established,' Father Jerome said. 'I think unfortunately it's one of our best-kept secrets.' I asked if it had been a difficult decision to support the wage law. He smiled slightly. 'It was a no-brainer,' he said. 'You know, I am not by nature a political person. I have gotten a lot of grief from some people, business owners, who say, 'Father, why don't you stick to religion?' Well, pardon me - this is religion. The scripture is full of matters of justice. How can you worship a God that you do not see and then oppress the workers that you do see?' I heard refrains of the moral argument all over Santa Fe. One afternoon I walked around the city with Morty Simon, a labor lawyer and a staunch supporter of the living wage whose wife is Carol Oppenheimer. 'This used to be the Sears,' Simon told me as we walked, pointing to boutiques and high-end chain stores. 'And we had a supermarket over here, and there was a hardware store too.' Simon came to Santa Fe 34 years ago as a refugee from New York, he said, and for him the unpretentious city he once knew was gone. The wealthy retirees and second-home buyers had come in droves, and so had the movie stars. Gene Hackman and Val Kilmer had settled here; Simon had recently found out that someone had plans for a 26,000-square-foot house, a new local record. For him, the moral component of the law, the possibility of regaining some kind of balance, was what mattered. 'It was really a question of, what kind of world do you want to live in?' he said. Several Santa Fe councilors had, over the course of the previous year, come to Morty Simon's view that the wage ordinance presented an opportunity to stop the drift between haves and have-nots. Carol Robertson Lopez, for example, had initially opposed the living-wage law but changed her mind after 30 hours of debate. 'We take risks, oftentimes, to benefit businesses,' she told me, 'and we take risks to benefit different sectors. I felt like this was an economic risk that we were taking on behalf of the worker.' She acknowledged that some residents thought the city had started down a slippery slope toward socialism; jokes about the People's Republic of Santa Fe were rampant. But Robertson Lopez says that by the night of the vote she had few reservations. 'I think the living wage is an indicator of when we've given up on the federal government to solve our problems,' she says. 'So local people have to take it on their own.' The living-wage ordinance had its final hearing on Feb. 26, 2003, in a rancorous debate that drew 600 people and lasted until 3 a.m. The proposal set a wage floor at $8.50 an hour, which would increase to $9.50 in January 2006 and $10.50 in 2008. It would also regulate only businesses with 25 or more employees. It passed the City Council easily, by a vote of 7 to 1. A few weeks later, a group of restaurant and hotel owners filed suit in state court on the grounds that the living-wage ordinance exceeded the city's powers and was a violation of their rights under New Mexico's constitution. A judge suspended the wage law until a trial could resolve the issues. Businesses Fight Back To business owners in Santa Fe, the most worrisome aspect of the living-wage law is that the city has sailed into uncharted territory. Most of the minimum-wage campaigns in the U.S. have been modest increases of a dollar or a dollar and a half. The numerous state campaigns for 2006 will probably propose raises to between $6.15 and $7 and hour. (When San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $8.50 an hour in 2004 - indexed to inflation, it is now $8.82 - California's state minimum wage was $6.75, so the increase was 26 percent.) And even staunch supporters of a higher minimum wage accept that there is a point at which a wage is set so high as to do more harm than good. 'There is no other municipality in the country that believes that $9.50 should be the living wage,' says Rob Day, the owner of the Santa Fe Bar and Grill and one of the plaintiffs who sued the city. In fact, the most apt comparison would be Great Britain, which now has a minimum wage equivalent to about $8.80 an hour. 'They have minimum wages that are Santa Fe level,' says Richard Freeman, a Harvard economist. And at least for the moment, he says, 'they have lower unemployment than we do.' As the lawsuit against the city progressed, though, Europe wasn't even a distant consideration. The focus was on the people of Santa Fe. I read through a transcript of New Mexicans for Free Enterprise v. City of Santa Fe one day this fall in a conference room at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the white-shoe law firm in Midtown Manhattan that defended, pro bono, Santa Fe's right to enact the living-wage ordinance. In many respects, the trial, which took place over the course of a week in April 2004, was an unusual public exchange on profits, poverty and class in America. Paul Sonn, the lawyer at the Brennan Center at New York University who wrote the Santa Fe ordinance, had enlisted Sidney Rosdeitcher, a partner at Paul, Weiss, to be lead counsel for Santa Fe's defense. Rosdeitcher told me that before the trial began he wasn't convinced that there were many factual issues in dispute; as he saw it, the living-wage controversy was about the law and, in particular, whether Santa Fe had a legal 'home rule' authority, under the provisions of the New Mexico constitution, to set wages, even for private industry. Nevertheless, several low-wage workers took the stand to relate the facts, as they saw them, of what the wage increase would do to improve their quality of life. The Rev. Jerome Martinez took the stand as an employer of 65 people in his parish and Catholic school. And a number of restaurant owners, in turn, explained how the new law could ultimately force them out of business. The plaintiffs - the New Mexicans for free enterprise - were not unsympathetic: the restaurateurs who took the stand, like Rob Day or Elizabeth Draiscol, who runs the popular Zia Diner in town, opened their books to show that their margins were thin, their costs high, their payrolls large. They cared about their employees (providing health care and benefits), trained unskilled workers who spoke little or no English, gave regular raises and paid starting salaries well above $5.15. They had built up their businesses through an extraordinary amount of hard work. Draiscol testified that her restaurant, for instance, had $2.17 million in annual revenue in the fiscal year of 2003. Though her assets were substantial - a restaurant can be valued at anywhere from 30 to 70 percent of its annual revenues, and Draiscol said Zia had been appraised at 66 percent of revenues, or about $1.4 million - she earned a salary of $49,000 a year. Draiscol testified that the living wage would raise her payroll, which accounted for 55 to 65 employees (depending on the season), by about $43,192 a year. Rob Day put the expenses of a living-wage increase even higher. In addition to labor costs, he estimated that the price of goods would go up as his local suppliers, forced to pay employees higher wages themselves, passed along their expenses to the Santa Fe Bar and Grill. Rosdeitcher showed that the restaurants had made serious errors overestimating their costs. Still, the increase in expenditures was not negligible. Over the past few years, a variety of experts have tried to perfect the science of predicting what will happen to a community in the wake of a minimum-wage change, and one of those experts, Robert Pollin, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, served as the expert witness on behalf of Santa Fe. Pollin projected that the living wage would affect the wages of about 17,000 workers. About 9,000 of those workers would receive raises because of the ordinance, he said; the rest would receive what he called 'ripple effect' increases - which meant that those making, say, $8.50 or more before the raise would most likely receive an additional raise from their employers to reflect their job seniority. Pollin calculated that wage increases would cost businesses a total of $33 million. And to pay for those amounts, restaurants and hotels and stores would probably need to raise prices by between 1 and 3 percent. The question, therefore, was whether business owners were willing to raise prices or make less in profits. In the trial, Pollin cited an obscure 1994 academic experiment in which several economists had set a different price within the same restaurant for a fried-haddock dinner. In varying the price of the haddock between $8.95 and $10.95, the researchers' goal was to find out whether variations in cost affected demand in a controlled environment. As it turned out, they didn't. Customers ordered the haddock at both $8.95 and $10.95. Results From the Santa Fe Experiment That the city of Santa Fe has effectively become a very large fried-haddock-dinner experiment is difficult to deny. A state court judge ruled in favor of the city soon after the trial, allowing the living-wage ordinance to take effect in June 2004; recently, the judge's decision was affirmed by a state appellate court, giving the city, and its living-wage advocates, a sweeping victory. Many business owners have found these legal losses discouraging. This fall, not long after I visited the city, the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce sent a note to its members to gauge their opinion on the $8.50 living wage and the hike on Jan. 1 to $9.50. Some members reported that they had no trouble adjusting to the first raise and supported a further increase. (Some of these owners, whose high-end businesses employ skilled workers, paid more than the $8.50 to begin with.) Others insisted that they were not averse to a state or federal raise in the minimum but that Santa Fe's citywide experiment had put local businesses at a competitive disadvantage: companies could move outside the city limits or could outsource their work to cheaper places in the state. But most respondents opposed the law. The living wage had forced them to raise prices on their products and services, which they feared would cut into business. To look at the data that have accumulated since the wage went into effect is to get a more positive impression of the law. Last month, the University of New Mexico's Bureau of Business and Economic Research issued some preliminary findings on what had happened to the city over the past year and a half. The report listed some potential unintended consequences of the wage raise: the exemption in the living-wage law for businesses with fewer than 25 employees, for instance, created 'perverse incentives' for owners to keep their payrolls below 25 workers. There was some concern that the high living wage might encourage more high-school students to drop out; in addition, some employers reported that workers had begun commuting in to Santa Fe to earn more for a job there than they could make outside the city. Yet the city's employment picture stayed healthy - overall employment had increased in each quarter after the living wage went into effect and had been especially strong for hotels and restaurants, which have the most low-wage jobs. Most encouraging to supporters: the number of families in need of temporary assistance - a reasonably good indicator of the squeeze on the working poor - have declined significantly. On the other hand, the city's gross receipts totals, a reflection of consumer spending and tourism, have been disappointing since the wage went into effect. That could suggest that prices are driving people away. Or it could merely mean that high gas and housing prices are hitting hard. The report calculates that the cost of living in Santa Fe rose by 9 percent a year over the past two and a half years. Rob Day of the Santa Fe Bar and Grill sees this as the crux of the matter. In his view, the problem with Santa Fe is the cost of housing, and there are better ways than wage regulations - housing subsidies, for example - to make homes more affordable. In the wake of the wage raise, Day told me, he eventually tweaked his prices, but not enough to offset the payroll increases. He let go of his executive chef and was himself working longer hours. 'Now in the matter of a year and a half, I think there is a whole group of us who thought, if we were going to start over, this isn't the business we would have gone into,' he says. Al Lucero, the owner of Maria's New Mexican Kitchen, says that the living-wage battle has risked turning him into a caricature. Opponents backing the living wage 'paint us as people who take advantage of workers,' he told me. By contrast, Lucero sees himself as an upstanding member of the community who provides jobs (he has 60 employees) and had always paid well above the federal minimum. Other business owners said similar things but would not speak out publicly. They feared alienating customers. As some told it, they had started businesses with a desire to create wealth and jobs in a picturesque small city. Then they had awakened in a mad laboratory for urban liberalism. The Issue in Albuquerque Long after he did his influential research with David Card on the effect of minimum-wage raises, Alan Krueger says, he came to see that ultimately the minimum wage is less about broad economic outcomes than about values. Which is not to say that workers' values should trump those of owners'. Rather, that when wealth is being redistributed from one party to another - and not, in the case of Santa Fe, from overpaid C.E.O.'s and hedge-fund managers but from everyday entrepreneurs who have worked long hours to succeed in their businesses - things can get complicated. Indeed, while it is tempting to see the wage disputes in Santa Fe and elsewhere as a reflection of whether one side is right or wrong, on either economic or moral grounds, they are, more confusingly, small battles in a larger war (and, in America, a very old war) over where to draw the line on free-market capitalism. On one side there is Al Lucero, on the other someone like Morty Simon, or the economist Robert Pollin, who says: 'The principled position is, 'Why should anyone tell anyone what to do? Why should the government?' I just happen to disagree with that. A minimally decent employment standard, to me, overrides the case for a free market.' And yet, the fact that voters or elected politicians should decide who wins these battles, rather than economists or policy makers, seems fitting. During Albuquerque's living-wage campaign this past fall, Santa Fe - the smaller, wealthier, northern neighbor - served as a rallying point. But it was also a question mark: Was Santa Fe's experience repeatable? Was it even worth pointing to as an exemplar? In the final days of the Albuquerque effort, Jen Kern of Acorn told me she had little doubt that the wage victory in Santa Fe, like the one in San Francisco, was an indication that a battle for creating high base wages in America's cities, in addition to the states, could be won. But these were also rich cities, liberal cities - 'la-la lands,' as she put it. 'I think with citywide minimums, if this is going to be the next era in the living-wage movement, it's got to look like it's winnable,' Kern says. 'The danger or the limitations of just having San Francisco and Santa Fe having passed this is that people in other parts of the country are going to say, 'Well, I'm not Santa Fe, I'm not San Francisco.'' In Kern's view, a win 'in a city like Albuquerque, which I think everyone thinks of as sort of a normal city,' was a truer test. And it didn't pass that test. When the $7.50 ballot initiative lost by 51 percent to 49 percent on Oct. 4, it made many in the living-wage movement wonder how these battles will play out over the next year or two. One political consultant involved in the movement questioned whether the Albuquerque wage itself, at $7.50 an hour, had been set too high by Acorn to win broad support. Matthew Henderson of Acorn, who ran the day-to-day campaign, said he thought they were outspent by their opponents. Most likely, though, the outcome was determined by the actual grounds on which the battle was fought. The businesses that opposed the $7.50 wage, represented mainly by the Greater Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, challenged a small provision in the proposed living-wage law that would allow those enforcing a living wage to have wide 'access' to a workplace. The campaigns soon began trading allegations through television ads and direct mailings about how far such access might go. And so the living-wage campaign had become a surreal fight over privacy (it would allow 'complete strangers to enter your child's school,' one mailing against the measure alleged) rather than wages. When I met with Terri Cole, the president and C.E.O. of Albuquerque's Chamber of Commerce, a few days before the vote, she acknowledged that the chamber opposed the living-wage law on philosophical grounds. But she said she saw the access clause as a legitimate grounds for a fight. Will It Play Nationally? In the aftermath of Albuquerque, Jen Kern took solace in the fact that 10 years after she visited the Library of Congress, and 10 years after she began working on living-wage campaigns, the opposition fought not on the economic merits or risks of a higher wage, but on a side issue like privacy. Still, a loss is a loss. It is possible that the Albuquerque wage campaign may still prevail, in effect: New Mexico's governor, Bill Richardson, has said he would consider a statewide raise this spring, presumably to $7 or $7.50, from $5.15, that would affect all New Mexicans. (It would, in all likelihood, leave Santa Fe's higher wage unaffected.) Yet such an act does little to clarify whether progressives can actually transform strong levels of voter support for higher wages into wins at the polls. Kristina Wilfore, the head of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a progressive advocacy group, says that over the years there has been anywhere from a 2 to 5 percent increase in voter turnout specifically correlated with wage measures. 'But people think it's some big panacea, and it's not,' says Wilfore, who regards success as dependent on how well a local wage coalition (organized labor, grass-roots groups, church-based organizations) can work together at raising money and mobilizing voters. For specific candidates in a state or city where a wage measure is on the ballot, it can be similarly complicated. Representative Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told me that the local battles over living wages reflect the broader debate in the U.S. over health care, retirement security and an advancing global economy. 'Every district is different,' Emanuel says of the slate of Congressional races for 2006, 'But there is not one where the living wage, competitive wages or health care doesn't play out. The minimum-wage issue, if it's on the ballot, is part of the economic argument.' David Mermin of Lake Research Partners, who frequently conducts polls on minimum-wage issues, told me that the dollar level of a wage proposal is important, though it can vary from place to place. ('People have different feelings about what's a lot of money,' he says.) But he has found that quirks can emerge. An increase to $6.15 sometimes doesn't poll as well as an increase to $6.75, which can generate more intensity and broader support from voters. Mermin also says that wage measures have had success in recent years, Albuquerque notwithstanding, not because Americans feel differently but because campaigners are getting smarter about stressing morals over economics. And when handled adroitly, a wage platform can motivate the kind of voters who are difficult to engage in other ways: younger voters, infrequent voters, low-income urban voters. His research, Mermin adds, shows that most people who vote for the minimum wage know it's not going to affect their lives tomorrow: 'It's not like fixing the health-care system, or repairing the retirement system,' he says. 'It doesn't rise to that level directly. And if you list it in 10 issues, it doesn't pop out in priority. But when it is on the ballot, it crystallizes a lot of things people feel about the economy and about people who are struggling.' In his experience, voters seem to process these measures as an opportunity to take things into their own hands and change their world, just as Morty Simon did. Still, as an endgame, many in the living-wage movement see the prize not in a series of local victories in 2006 but in Congressional action that results in a substantial increase in the federal minimum wage - and even better - one that is indexed to inflation, so that such battles about raising the wage don't need to be fought every few years. The long-run trajectory, Paul Sonn told me, is for cities and states to create enough pressure to ultimately force a raise on the federal level. Or to put it another way, the hope is that raising wages across the U.S. will ultimately demonstrate to voters and to Washington lawmakers both the feasibility and the necessity of a significantly higher minimum wage. In the meantime, Sonn says, cities like Santa Fe play an important role in policy innovation, 'really as sort of laboratories of economic democracy.' Richard Freeman of Harvard echoes this point. 'If you go back, a lot of the New Deal legislation, good or bad, came about because there was a lot of state legislation,' Freeman says. Policies from New York or Wisconsin were adapted into the federal system of laws. 'A lot of it came from state variations in the past, and I think we'll see a lot more of this in the next few years. The things that work the best might be adopted nationally.' Of course, it also seems plausible that any kind of national coherence on economic - or moral - matters may have ended long ago. Just as the voters of states and cities have sorted themselves politically into red and blue, and into pro- and anti-gay marriage, in other words, they are increasingly sorting their wage floors and (perhaps soon) their health-care coverage. This trend may produce not progressive national policies but instead a level of local self-determination as yet unseen. Or as Freeman puts it, 'Let Santa Fe do what it wants, but let's not impose that on Gadsden, Ala.' That wouldn't make a federal increase in the minimum wage insignificant, but it would make it something of a backdrop for major population centers. As Robert Reich says, 'The reality is, even if the wage were raised to $6.15, it would not be enough to lift a family out of poverty.' And as Jen Kern points out, even a federal minimum wage that goes up to $7.25, which is the proposal from the Senate Democrats and which probably isn't going anywhere until 2008, doesn't approach what it now costs to live in some cities. This was why, in December, Kern and Acorn were considering the prospects for laying the groundwork for living-wage ordinances in other cities. And it's why, also in December, Paul Sonn was helping to write an ordinance for Lawrence Township, N.J., aimed at forcing the city's big-box retailers like Wal-Mart to pay a higher wage (more than $10 an hour) and to contribute a larger share of employee benefits. Last month, Sonn also pointed out to me that Santa Cruz, Calif., was considering plans to introduce a measure that would establish a minimum wage of $9.25 an hour. It wasn't quite Santa Fe's level, but close. And that suggested that the small New Mexican city, to the delight of its living-wage advocates and the chagrin of many business owners, was no longer just an experiment. Rather, it had already become something best described, for better or for worse, as a model.

Subject: Minimum Wage Destroys Jobs From: Jon Face To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 14:02:41 (EST) Email Address: familyguyantiflag@yahoo.com Message: I have heard before that nearly 90% of economists oppose the minimum wage and think that it destroys jobs. Is this true? Where can I find an estimate of economist support for minimum wage?

Subject: Re: Minimum Wage Destroys Jobs From: Emma To: Jon Face Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 15:46:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though I have no idea what the number might be, any number of economists support the minimum wage and wish the wage were raised to a liveable level.

Subject: Re: Minimum Wage Destroys Jobs From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 19:21:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It's ironic that Wall Street people (not saying that this poster is from Wall Street) worry so much about rising wages as inflationary and they fret that they will bring higher interest rates but fail to see how important wages are to the economy. American consumers represent an outsized portion of the world's consumption and they account for 70% of the US GDP!! It's similar to a boxer who is totally absorbed with the left jabs and is unaware of the haymaker which is about to come from the right side. Without increasing wages consumers continue to go deeper into debt and it is the lack of wage increases combined with record personal debt load (as a ratio to GDP) that will bring down the economy and stock markets along with it! From CSM: The squeeze on American pocketbooks Last year's negative savings rate was the first since the Depression. By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Americans are working as hard as ever, but their paychecks aren't keeping pace with rising inflation. That means trouble for their pocketbooks - and for an economy that's fueled by their spending. Indeed, after two years of a 'jobless recovery' following the 2001 recession, the US economy now faces something equally unsettling: a 'wageless recovery.' Several government reports this week tell the story. For the first year since the Great Depression, the personal savings rate went negative in 2005. Pay and benefits, meanwhile, rose just 3.1 percent last year - the lowest rate since 1996 and not enough to outpace a 3.4 percent jump in the consumer price index. Is there any relief in sight? None came Thursday, as the government reported a decline in worker productivity for the closing months of last year, a trend that could limit future wage growth. The outlook isn't all discouraging, but a four-year-old economic expansion is clearly struggling to maintain its momentum. The reason: Americans are being squeezed from both sides of the household ledger. On the income side, wage growth has been historically low for a period of economic recovery. On the spending side, energy prices and interest rates are higher. Meanwhile, home-equity loans are no longer an easy way out. Soaring property values that turned many houses into two-story ATM machines appear to be flattening out or even falling. 'If the housing market softens ... American consumers will then have little choice other than to bring spending and saving back into more prudent alignment with income,' said Stephen Roach, a Morgan Stanley economist, in a recent analysis. 'The combination of a relatively jobless and wageless recovery puts tremendous pressure on American households.' Economists aren't expecting a recession. But since consumers account for more than two-thirds of the nation's economic output, the health of American wage earners is a central question mark hanging over this year's economy. Other parts of the economy may help pick up the slack. With the world economy expanding, exports should contribute solidly to gross domestic product (GDP). And many economists expect to see businesses invest more of their record profits in new equipment and facilities. That, in turn, could mean more jobs and paychecks. Forecasters generally expect strong economic growth in the first few months of this year, after hurricanes and slower consumer spending dragged down GDP growth to a 1 percent annual pace for the last three months of 2005. Indeed, the Federal Reserve remains more concerned about possible inflationary pressures than about economic growth falling below a normal pace of about 3 percent. Earlier this week, the Fed moved to constrain those pressures for the 14th time since June 2004, bringing its short-term interest rate to 4.5 percent. Another rate hike is considered likely in March. Thursday's productivity report did little to assuage concerns about inflation. For years, unexpectedly strong gains in output per hour - a productivity bonus - helped the economy grow without upward pressure on prices. By becoming more efficient, companies have more cash flowing to their bottom line. Productivity can accelerate economic growth and raise living standards. In the current expansion, it has created record corporate profits. But a lower than normal amount has gone into pay raises. And now, the pace of improving efficiency appears to be slowing down, at least temporarily. The productivity rate actually fell for the fourth quarter of 2005. Meanwhile, the cost of labor per unit of output rose by 2.4 percent for the year, up from 1.1 percent in 2004. Fed policymakers could take that as a sign of inflationary wage pressures starting to build. They would rather see wage hikes matched by productivity gains. Ken Goldstein, an economist at the Conference Board, a business research group based in New York, sees the current trend as a pullback of productivity to a more typical pace. 'We can't be above average all the time,' he says. But the slower productivity growth means it will be hard for wages to rise this year faster than inflation. 'Somebody's going to get squeezed here in 2006,' Goldstein says, referring to workers and businesses. 'It's possible they could both be squeezed.' Not everyone in the economy is feeling that pinch. Many sectors are expanding. 'Things are starting to pick up,' says Andrew Van Tassle, who works at Message Level, high-tech firm in Boston that provides e-mail security. He says he hopes to see a pay raise this year, as the start-up wins more customers. After a slow patch in 2002 and 2003, the economy is creating about 2 million jobs a year. Meanwhile, global competition seems to be holding a lid on wages. Even as the unemployment rate has fallen to 4.9 percent, salary hikes haven't been as robust as in tight labor markets of the past. Along with rising energy prices, these factors help explain why America's personal savings totalled negative 0.5 percent of income last year. It's a sign of thinner wallets, but it doesn't necessarily mean that Americans have stopped funding their 401(k) plans. The rate compares broad measures of disposable income and spending. But on the income side, it fails to factor in pensions and capital gains. When those are included, says economist Ed Yardeni of Oak Associates, an investment firm in Akron, Ohio, the idea that Americans are living beyond their means is 'more of a forecast than it is a reality.' According to Federal Reserve data, American households had a total net worth of about $51 trillion as of last fall. That's up from $40.7 trillion in 2001. The median family net worth - assets minus liabilities - has risen from $61,300 in 1992 to $86,100 in 2001. Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

Subject: Ravi Batra From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Feb 04, 2006 at 16:00:05 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: I watched on Cspan last night - Ravi Batra talk about greenspans Fraud. He said every stock market bust in history was caused by wages trailing productivity - the workers get poorer while the companies get richer. He said we need a minimum wage and need to keep increasing it - that the data shows it does not cost jobs. He also said we need unilateral currency exchange on our exports where we give like 5 yuan to the dollar exchange rates to all our exporters and all foreign importers - this would fix the gutting of our manufacturing. He said we should do this with all nations we have a trade deficit with. According to Federal Reserve data, American households had a total net worth of about $51 trillion as of last fall. I wonder how much Japanese households had before it all blew up and real estate and thier stock market imploded? http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/03/pf/pay_hike_jobseeker/index.htm?cnn=yes 5 careers: Big demand, big pay If you're in one of the jobs listed here, you may be able to negotiate a sweet pay hike for yourself when changing employers. By Jeanne Sahadi, CNNMoney.com senior writer February 3, 2006: 4:42 PM EST NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – Recent surveys show that a lot of people are itching to find new jobs and human resource managers are expecting a lot of movement - both signs that employers may need to sweeten the pot. There also have been predictions that the labor market may start to tilt in favor of job seekers due to a shortage of skilled workers. How much you have in taxable accounts: $ How much you will save annually: $ How much you have in 401(k)s and IRAs: $ How much you will save annually: $ assumes 8% annual return Enter Keyword(s): Help Enter a City: Select a State: – All United States – Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Select a Category: – All Job Categories – AccountingAdmin & ClericalAutomotiveBankingBiotechBroadcast - JournalismBusiness DevelopmentConstructionConsultantCustomer ServiceDesignDistribution - ShippingEducationEngineeringEntry Level - New GradExecutiveFacilitiesFinanceGeneral BusinessGeneral LaborGovernmentGroceryHealthcareHotel - HospitalityHuman ResourcesInformation TechnologyInstallation - Maint - RepairInsuranceInventoryLegalLegal AdminManagementManufacturingMarketingNurseOtherPharmaceuticalProfessional ServicesPurchasing - ProcurementQA - Quality ControlResearchRestaurant - Food ServiceRetailSalesScienceSkilled Labor - TradesStrategy - PlanningSupply ChainTelecommunicationsTrainingTransportationWarehouse - Search by Company CNNMoney.com talked with specialists at national staffing and recruiting firm Spherion to find out which job-hunting workers today are sitting in the catbird seat when it comes to negotiating better pay. Below is a list of in-demand workers in five arenas. Accounting Thanks to Enron and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, those who have a few years of corporate auditing experience working for a large public accounting firm can negotiate a sweet package for themselves when they change jobs. That applies whether they're leaving the accounting firm to go work for a corporation or if they're seeking to return to the public accounting firm from an auditing job at an individual company. College graduates with an accounting degree but not yet a CPA designation might make between $35,000 and $45,000 a year, or up to $50,000 in large cities like New York. After a couple of years they can command a substantial pay hike if they move to large company as an internal staff auditor or to a smaller company as controller. At that point, their salary can jump to anywhere from $50,000 to $75,000. The expectation is that they will obtain their CPA designation. If they choose to return to a public accounting firm as an audit manager after a couple of years at a corporation they can earn a salary of $70,000 to $85,000. Sales and marketing The healthcare and biomedical fields offer some handsome earnings opportunities for those on the business side. Business development directors, product managers and associate product managers working for medical device makers, for instance, can do quite well for themselves if they develop a successful track record managing the concept, execution and sales strategy for a medical device before jumping ship. Typically, they have an MBA in marketing plus at least two to three years' experience on the junior end to between five and eight years' experience at the more senior levels. That experience ideally will be in the industry where they're seeking work. An associate product manager might make a base salary of $55,000 to $75,000. A product manager can make a base of $75,000 to $95,000, while a business development director may make $120,000 to $160,000. Those salaries don't include bonuses. The business development director seeking a vice president position could boost his base to between $150,000 to $200,000 -- depending on whether the new company is a risky start-up or established device maker. Legal Intellectual property attorneys specializing in patent law and the legal secretaries who have experience helping to prepare patent applications are highly desirable these days. The most in demand are those lawyers with not only a J.D. but also an advanced degree in electrical and mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, biotechnology, pharmacology or computer science. Even those patent lawyers who just have an undergraduate degree in those fields have a leg up. Patent lawyers working for a law firm might make $125,000 to $135,000 to start or about $90,000 if they work for a corporation that's trying to get a patent or to protect one they already have. With a couple of years' experience, they can expect a 10 percent jump or better when they get another job. Legal secretaries, meanwhile, might make $65,000 at a law firm or $55,000 at a corporation. Should they choose to move to a new employer, they can command close to a 10 percent bump in pay. Technology Two tech jobs in high demand these days are .NET (dot net) developers and quality assurance analysts. Developers who are expert users of Microsoft's software programming language .NET can make between $75,000 and $85,000 a year in major cities when they're starting out. If they pursue a job at a company that seeks someone with a background in a given field (say, a firm looking for a .NET developer experienced in using software related to derivatives) they might snag a salary hike of 15 percent or more when they switch jobs. Those who work in software quality management, meanwhile, might make $65,000 to $75,000 a year and be able to negotiate a 10 percent to 15 percent jump in pay if they switch jobs. Manufacturing and engineering Despite all the announced job cuts in the automotive industry, quality and process engineers, as well as plant managers certified in what's known as 'Lean Manufacturing' techniques, are hot commodities. The same applies to professionals in similar positions at other types of manufacturers. One Lean Manufacturing technique is to use video cameras to capture the manufacturing process. A quality engineer will analyze the tapes to identify areas in the process that create inefficiencies or excess waste, both in terms of materials and workers' time. Process and manufacturing engineers might make between $65,000 and $75,000. With an LM certification and a few years' experience, they can command pay hikes of between 15 percent and 20 percent if they choose to switch jobs. A plant manager making between $90,000 and $120,000 may expect to get a 10 percent raise or more.

Subject: Re: Ravi Batra From: Poyetas To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 06:47:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Unilateral exchange rates???? Uhhhhh, I thought we operated in a free market! Unilateral exchange rates would do nothing other than create adjustment frictions and high real exchange rates for export oriented countries. It is also, from a practical perspective, impossible to impliment. If America is worried that FX rates are killing manufacturing, then get rid of the tax cuts and war that are causing the country to issue so much debt that it is artificially keeping the US dollar overvalued!

Subject: Re: Ravi Batra From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Tues, Feb 07, 2006 at 14:43:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I would be ever so grateful, if we simply stopped this demoralizing war that is so costly in people and material.

Subject: The Dragons Have Settled In From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 11:42:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/08/international/asia/08letter.html?ex=1260248400&en=22fe705fe03b2ff8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 8, 2004 Shangri-La No More: The Dragons Have Settled In By HOWARD W. FRENCH LHASA, Tibet - They string brilliantly colored flags from the mountaintops here in this land of impossibly crisp blue skies. Here and there, one finds mounds of smooth, flat rocks, lovingly piled, each inscribed with its own Buddhist scriptural narrative. Water wheels are planted in fast-moving streams, not to harness energy but to turn wooden cylinders laden with scripture. Old women sit on doorsteps in the fading evening light kneading and turning their prayer beads. Visitors to Tibet, this remote, landlocked nation within another country, China, cannot help being struck by the fact that Tibet, which long since gave up its dreams of independence, is fighting now to retain its soul. But after driving for a week, covering nearly 1,000 miles across the region, the largest expanse of high altitude territory in the world, a traveler could see clearly that new influences are being felt in this ancient land. Some are on display at the cream and toffee colored Potala Palace, the exquisite traditional seat of Tibetan government, which sits high atop the hill that dominates this city. Three days a week, Tibetans arrive by the thousands, just as they always have, dressed in crimson robes or, more often, well-worn rags, leaning on walking sticks or clutching babies. Many of them have journeyed a week or more in order to make the pilgrimage, often traveling from villages so remote they are not served by roads, yet they wear looks of beatitude upon arrival at the palace. But these days the palace is choked with other, untraditional visitors, Chinese tourists from the east, armed with noisy cellphones and flashing cameras. On the sidewalk in front of the palace these days sit two large concrete dragons, symbols of China's majority Han culture, placed there not long ago in what has every appearance of being a none-too-subtle statement of political domination. In the shops that line the broad boulevard - Sichuan restaurants, clothing stores and mountaineering-gear sellers, massage parlors and even boutiques hawking Tibetan souvenirs - the faces one sees behind the counters are overwhelmingly those of Han migrants from eastern China. They are the vanguard of an invasion of commercialism that has raised a pressing question: can an ancient and distinctive culture steeped in religion maintain its life style and identity in the face of an onslaught of Chinese bearing what Tibetans regard as godless materialism and chauvinism backed by the power of the state? It would seem to be no contest, this struggle between cultures, faiths and peoples. On one side are China's majority Han, who number over a billion, and on the other, Tibet's native population of roughly 2.5 million. China is not only racing to catch up to the West in economic growth and development. Much more quietly, but with determination, it is also pushing to dominate vast spaces on its frontier that have eluded its control for millenniums, much as the United States once settled its great West or Australia tamed its Outback. Everywhere one turns in Tibet, it seems, roads are being built to integrate it with China. The biggest leap forward in this strategy will be the completion of a $3.2 billion railroad in 2007 linking Lhasa to Beijing, a distance of more than 2,400 miles. One can easily foresee the scenes, already common in China's other frontier region, Xinjiang, to the immediate north, of thousands of economic migrants from the east disembarking with each train's arrival. The Chinese government is well practiced in the phrases of fraternal harmony and cooperation. In Bayi, county seat of 26,000 nestled amid 15,000-foot peaks near the Indian border in eastern Tibet, meanwhile, the two most conspicuous buildings are the gleaming Guangdong and Fujian exhibition centers, huge modern buildings recently built in a flourish of interprovincial 'solidarity' with Tibet, China's poorest region. In the center of town, smart new apartment towers are going up, too, a duplicate in miniature of the urban development under way almost everywhere in eastern China. With the province's formal economy and administration firmly in the hands of the Han, though, one imagines with difficulty ethnic Tibetans becoming the main occupants. For visitors and settlers from the east, maintaining the pretense that ethnic Tibetans and Han Chinese constitute one nation, never mind one people, requires too much effort to sustain. When a foreigner showed interest in a Tibetan prayer wheel at a souvenir shop on one of Bayi's main streets, the Han shopkeeper began spinning it the wrong way, counterclockwise. Told of his error, he snorted: 'That's a Tibetan thing. I'm from Gansu, China.' Another day, on a long hike in the mountains with a Chinese television crew in tow, a Beijing TV reporter, frustrated at the inability of even young villagers to speak Chinese, turned to an American and said in her language, with no irony intended, 'It seems as if they are even more foreign than you!' For now, off the beaten path, signs of Han cultural dominance still fade quickly. The riot of Chinese characters omnipresent on billboards and signs throughout China, for example, gives way to Tibet's Sanskrit-derived script. In one tiny village, Xiuba, a cluster of 15 Tibetan farming families atop a bluff overlooking a new highway, not a soul could comfortably hold an extended conversation in Chinese. The village was home to five towering stone pillars, religious monuments said to be more than 1,000 years old. While girls looked on giggling, Zhaxi, a 22-year-old junior high school graduate, wore a pained look as he struggled to answer potentially perilous questions from a stranger: How was your history being taught and your culture preserved? 'There are some differences between our own beliefs and the way we are taught,' he said, diplomatically. 'You could say we have many legends and tales which are not taught to us in school.'

Subject: Government job numbers From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 11:29:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: From Reuters: US overstates job levels, says study The US government routinely over- estimates employment levels, mistakenly counting some three million Americans as having jobs even though they are not working, a report released Thursday shows. Andrea Hopkins Friday, February 03, 2006 The US government routinely over- estimates employment levels, mistakenly counting some three million Americans as having jobs even though they are not working, a report released Thursday shows. A study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research found the government's key source of data on US unemployment overcounts the number of workers because jobless Americans are less likely to participate in Labor Department surveys. 'Current labor market estimates appear to be overstating the share of working Americans by 1.4 percentage points,' said John Schmitt, an economist at the Washington-based think tank and lead author of the report. 'This corresponds to roughly three million fewer people working - almost as big a drop in employment as in a typical recession.' The Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys about 60,000 households each month to calculate the nation's unemployment rate and the employment-to-population ratio. In December, the survey showed 4.9 percent of Americans over the age of 16 were unemployed - that is, not working but still looking for jobs - while 62.8 percent were employed. The remainder of the population were either retired, in school, not job-hunting or doing unpaid work like parenting. The BLS uses a rotating sample of households for the survey, in which respondents participate for four consecutive months, then leave the survey for eight months, then participate again for four straight months. But Schmitt's study found that the response rate for the survey has fallen to below 90 percent from over 96 percent in the mid-1970s. Much broader Census data from the same period in March and April 2000 had an almost perfect 98.8 percent response rate. By comparing the two sets of data, Schmitt discovered that the BLS survey showed a 64.5 percent employment rate in that period - 1.4 points higher than the 63.1 percent employment rate reported by the Census data. He concluded that the people who were not responding to the Labor Department survey were more likely to be unemployed than those who participated. He said the response rate could also be lower because of a decreased trust in government stemming from cuts to many social-assistance programs. The survey's tendency to overstate employment could have broader implications for other government data, since the BLS survey is also the source of official statistics on poverty and health insurance coverage, Schmitt said. 'If non-working adults are disproportionately excluded ... then the survey is understating the true poverty rate and overstating the share of the population covered by health insurance.' REUTERS

Subject: Drive for Global Markets Strains Brazil From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:50:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/27/business/worldbusiness/27infrastructure.html?pagewanted =all&position= October 27, 2004 Drive for Global Markets Strains Brazil's Infrastructure By TODD BENSON SÃO PAULO, Brazil - Every year, as the soybean harvest kicks into high gear, Brazilians are given a stark reminder of the infrastructure obstacles their country must overcome if it is to establish itself as a major trader in the global marketplace. Hundreds of old trucks packed with soybeans and grain line up for more than 50 miles along the highway leading into Paranaguá, a port in the southern state of Paraná that desperately needs investment to keep up with Brazil's ever expanding agricultural exports. At the peak of the Southern Hemisphere's harvest season every March, truck drivers wait at the side of the road for up to 20 days before unloading their cargoes, putting buyers from China to Europe on edge for fear of costly delays. Similar bottlenecks and weak infrastructure can be found across the country, posing a daunting challenge for the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Thanks to a boom in exports, the economy is expanding at its fastest clip since 1996 and is on course to grow more than 4 percent this year, rebounding from a brief recession in 2003. But many economists and business leaders warn that the recovery could start losing steam as early as next year if the government does not find ways to attract billions of dollars in investment to remedy Brazil's infrastructure. 'Unfortunately, if something isn't done urgently, by 2005, we run the risk of selling products and not being able to deliver them on time,' said José Augusto de Castro, the vice president of the Brazilian Foreign Trade Association. 'The economy simply can't keep growing at this pace with the infrastructure this country has.' Brazil has made significant strides in recent years in establishing its trade credentials, first under former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and now under Mr. da Silva, who took office in January 2003. Though Brazil, which is South America's largest economy, still accounts for less than 1 percent of global commerce, exports have risen to 17 percent of gross domestic product from just 6.5 percent in 1998. So far this year, foreign sales have already surpassed the amount reached in 2003, reaching $76.9 billion, and the country is on track to finish 2004 with a record $94 billion in exports, according to the trade ministry's most recent forecast. Most of the growth has come since 1999, when Brazil's decision to devalue its currency, the real, made the country's exports more competitive on world markets. More recently, China's voracious appetite for commodities like soybeans and iron ore has helped fuel Brazil's export bonanza. In addition, Mr. da Silva, who has made increased exports a priority of his administration, has traveled extensively to seek new markets for Brazilian goods. But Brazil's ascendancy on the global stage has also exposed deep fault lines at home. Like Paranaguá, almost all of the country's ports are struggling to accommodate the growing flow of goods. With some rare exceptions in more developed states like São Paulo, roads everywhere are worn and riddled with potholes, making the journey from the farm belt to the coast costly and slow. In addition, Brazil's railway network has barely expanded since 1970, when it transported only 50 million tons of cargo a year. This year, some 300 million tons of goods are expected to be shipped by train. 'The railway network hasn't advanced one kilometer in more than 30 years, and yet it is handling five times the cargo it was built for,' said Paulo Godoy, the president of the Brazilian Infrastructure Association. 'There's only so much more it can take.' The association estimates that for the Brazilian economy to keep growing at an annual rate of 3.5 percent to 4 percent, the country needs to invest at least $20 billion a year in infrastructure, especially in energy and logistics. But because the federal government has to run a large budget surplus to reduce its huge debt load, it can come up with only a fraction of that amount. This year, Mr. da Silva's administration set aside just 10.4 billion reais, or about $3.5 billion, for infrastructure spending. In its budget proposal for 2005, the government earmarked 11.4 billion reais for infrastructure. Congress is expected to raise the amount to closer to 15 billion reais, or just over $5 billion. That leaves the private sector to fill the gap of $15 billion. But some investors have been reluctant to step in, choosing to wait until Mr. da Silva's left-leaning administration - which includes several high-ranking officials who railed against capitalism and foreign investors in the past - comes up with a regulatory framework that is more friendly to private investment. In August, for instance, Mickey Peters, a senior vice president for the Duke Energy Corporation in South America, told a trade conference in São Paulo that his company, which is based in Charlotte, N.C., had put off any new investments in Brazil, saying that the government's plans to regulate the energy sector discouraged investment. Government officials say they have no intention of meddling in the energy market, and insist that Brazil is a safe place to do business. One way the government is trying to woo investment is through legislation it has introduced to lay the groundwork for public-private partnerships to invest in infrastructure projects together. The bill, however, remains bogged down in Congress. 'We're aware of the challenge that infrastructure represents, and we're taking the necessary steps to encourage private investment,' said Demian Fiocca, a senior official at the planning ministry who is coordinating a task force on infrastructure. In the meantime, exporters are scrambling to find quicker ways to get their products to overseas markets. Frustrated with long delays at the port of Santos, in April, Volkswagen, the German automaker, started diverting some of its Brazilian exports to Argentina through a much smaller port in São Sebastião, on the northern coast of São Paulo State. A few months later, it also began rerouting shipments bound for Iran and China, this time through Rio de Janeiro. Other companies like Caramuru Alimentos, a grain exporter, and the mining giant Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, are investing heavily in their own infrastructure to sidestep bottlenecks. Caramuru, for example, is spending $10 million to buy its own trains to guarantee that all its soy harvest is shipped by rail to the port of Santos by 2006. Vale do Rio Doce, the world's biggest iron ore producer and exporter, already owns more than 5,700 miles in railroads and eight port terminals, and is planning to invest $330 million to build an additional 280 miles of railways in the state of Minas Gerais. Other companies also use Vale's infrastructure to transport their products, contributing more than 12 percent of the mining company's revenue. But Vale is not the only Brazilian company that is profiting by offering reliable infrastructure in a country where potholes and bottlenecks are the norm. América Latina Logística, a fast-growing shipping company and railroad operator that went public on the São Paulo stock exchange in June, has more than doubled its revenues in the last four years to 990 million reais. 'Infrastructure is one of the biggest business opportunities there is in Brazil right now,' said Rubens Barbosa, a former Brazilian ambassador to the United States and to Britain who now runs a consulting firm in São Paulo. 'The companies that realize that are going to make a lot of money.'

Subject: Mongols Go From Camels to Jeeps From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:48:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/international/asia/15mong.html July 15, 2004 Mongols Go From Camels to Jeeps and a Superhighway By JAMES BROOKE NALAIKH, Mongolia - Canada has the Trans-Canada Highway. Brazil has the Trans-Amazon. Germany has the Autobahn, and Russia now has the Trans-Russian. This summer, from westernnmost Tsaganuur to Halhyn Gol in the east, road crews are working to add another to the list, the Mongolian Millennium Highway. Long written off as a buffer state between China and Russia, Mongolia, twice the size of Texas but with 13 percent of the population, is embarking on a classic exercise in modern nation building. 'What I understand from reading books and surfing the Internet is that developed countries, like Canada and the United States, greatly spread development through roads,' said Manduul Baasankhuu, policy director of Mongolia's Road, Transport and Tourism Department. Unrolling a glossy map in his office in Ulan Bator, the capital, he traced a finger over a pink line, the east-west route that is to bind this nation together by the end of the decade. The road is to start in the baking plains of the east, home to thundering herds of Mongolian gazelles. Skirting the Gobi desert landscapes of the new documentary film, 'The Story of the Weeping Camel,' the two-lane asphalt runs west over the steppe to snow-cappped mountains, home to the famed Kazakh eagle hunters on the Russian border. 'Mongolians say that someone who lifts a stone from a road collects good karma,' said Enkhbaatar Dorjkhuu, 40, an engineer working on the road, which will bind together a far-flung population that largely follows Tibetan Buddhism. Pausing a few miles east of here, he said: 'We are doing virtues here. A road is like an artery for human beings. This road we're building will play an important role in transportation, tourism, advancement of our economy.' After four years, one-quarter of its planned 1,650-mile length is paved. But with American and European tourists flocking here this summer, tour operators already are plotting the Mongolian summer road trip, circa 2010. 'It will open up new destinations and decrease the amount of time for people to get to faraway destinations,' said Lee M. Cashell, an American businessman in Ulan Bator, who in the last six months has bought a guest house, opened a resort and started a restaurant, the UB Deli. Oddly, in the steppe, one lone strip of asphalt can help the environment. 'People already drive across Mongolia,' said Darius F. Teeter, deputy representative here for the Asian Development Bank. 'But you can have a valley with 14 parallel dirt tracks, each one becoming rutted in the mud. After the paved road comes through, you can see the dirt tracks start to disappear under the grass.' Mongolia's political opposition says the project is called the Millennium Road because it will take 1,000 years to finish. But it remains highly popular with the public. In opinion polls it trails only the decision to cancel 98 percent of the country's Soviet-era debt. The project does have its critics, particularly in Ulan Bator, where as many as half of the nation's 2.5 million people now live. In a modern office building there, where air conditioners muffled the din of cars on traffic-choked streets, Chultem Munkhtsetseg spoke for many urbanites when she dismissed the highway as a road linking 'nowhere to nowhere.' 'Instead of paving roads in deserted places, they should pave streets in U.B., where half of the population lives,' said Ms. Munkhtsetseg, who works for a foreign foundation. 'Instead of building roads across the country, it is much better economically for Mongolia to build roads in the cities.' It would be more sensible, many Mongolians say, to build north-south roads to link up with China. Indeed, Mongolia is following the model of Canada, where each province trades more with the United States than with the rest of Canada. 'Politically the Millennium Road is beneficial for the government,' said Michael Kohn, an American travel writer here who has visited most of this vast nation. 'Economically they would be better off building roads to China.' Some say airplanes are better suited to handling the feeble east-west demand. But for years travelers have thought the initials on the side of the balky Soviet Antonov planes of state-owned Mongolian Airlines, M.I.A.T., stand for 'May I Arrive Today?' But the Antonovs are being retired and a new, more reliable, privately owned airline, Air Mongolia, is gradually taking over domestic routes. That way Mongolia could leap over building a national road. President Bagabandi arrived in the United States on Wednesday for a one-week trip from Washington to Denver to San Francisco. Road critics note that he will not be traveling by car, truck or railroad. Road defenders say paved roads bring prosperity. 'You can see it in the countryside: the motorcycles, jeeps, satellite antennas, solar collectors,' said John Karlsen, a Coloradan who sells mining and road equipment here. 'The people in the countryside are getting to markets. They are hauling their cashmere. The path to economic salvation in Mongolia is in building roads.' His colleague Bob Barrows added: 'Look at what the interstate highway system did in the 50's for the U.S., what the autobahns did for Germany. Bottom line is that the Millennium Road, or any road, is good for this country.' Indeed, here on a newly paved 50-mile stretch of road between the capital and Bagannuur there was a steady flow of trucks loaded down with mounds of wool from the countryside. In the year since this road section was paved, traffic has jumped from 800 vehicles a day to 3,000 a day, said Mr. Manduul of the Transportation Department. In a sign that roads spread development in Mongolia, he added, 'Bagannuur real estate prices are now on a level with the capital.'

Subject: Makers See Brighter Year Ahead From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:46:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/business/03drugs.html?ex=1296622800&en=913cc6844d7e2a28&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 After Dreary '05, Drug Makers See Brighter Year Ahead By ALEX BERENSON Drug industry executives are voicing new hope that their companies are past the worst of the scientific, political and legal problems that dogged them through 2005. After a long drought in finding new medicines, drug companies are filling their early-stage pipelines with promising new treatments, executives and analysts say. And prescription growth seems to be accelerating slightly, after rising only about 3 percent last year. Companies may also be benefiting from slightly higher prices that they are receiving under the Medicare drug benefit, which began on Jan. 1. Even Merck, the most battered of the big companies, now says it expects profit growth of 10 percent a year through 2010, as it asks for federal approval of a half-dozen new drugs and vaccines. The most promising product in Merck's pipeline is Gardasil, a vaccine for cervical cancer that analysts say could become a multibillion-dollar seller. 'There's no question that the company has turned the corner,' Richard T. Clark, chief executive of Merck, said in an interview on Tuesday, after Merck reported fourth-quarter earnings above analysts' estimates. 'Morale is fairly high right now compared to where it was.' Shares of Merck fell 84 cents, to $33.82, near a one-year high and up 30 percent from their lows in October, when concern about Vioxx-related lawsuits peaked. Shares of Pfizer have risen 25 percent since early December, when they fell to an eight-year low. Some analysts warn that the industry's gains are more perception than reality. Sales and earnings fell in 2005 at several big companies, including Merck, Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and they are expected to fall again in 2006. Pfizer was especially hard-hit last year, with its sales in the United States plunging 10 percent, to $27 billion. The pessimists warn that promises about early-stage pipelines have turned out to be false before and argue that the current optimism comes mainly from the short-term success of cost-cutting efforts, a benefit that may last only a few months. And even the most optimistic analysts do not expect the drought of new treatments to end before the end of this decade. Still, after a year of layoffs, missed earnings forecasts and federal warnings about potentially dangerous drugs, the change in attitude is notable. Sidney Taurel, the chief executive of Eli Lilly, noted several recent Food and Drug Administration approvals, including cancer drugs from Pfizer and Bayer; a rheumatoid arthritis treatment from Bristol-Myers; and Exubera, an inhaled insulin from Pfizer whose approval last week received attention as a significant new approach to controlling diabetes. 'There have been a number of product approvals which are showing the world that the industry has not lost its capacity to innovate,' Mr. Taurel said. 'There is a resurgence of productivity in research and development.' The industry's most concrete gains recently have come on the legal front. In December, Pfizer, the world's largest drug maker, won a patent challenge over Lipitor, a cholesterol-lowering treatment that is its top-selling medicine. After losing the first Vioxx-related product liability suit to reach a jury, Merck won the second, and another was dismissed by a judge. Investors appear increasingly comfortable with Merck's refusal to settle any lawsuits, insisting instead on taking cases to trial. Moreover, the image crisis that the industry suffered after Merck's withdrawal of Vioxx appears to be subsiding, in part because drug makers appear to have kept their promise to increase disclosure of data from clinical trials. The cost of drugs remains a hot-button issue for lawmakers and consumer groups, but it seems to have become part of a larger debate about the overall cost of health care and health insurance. Under pressure to approve potentially lifesaving drugs more quickly, the F.D.A. has signaled that it will move to shorten clinical trials of medicines for serious diseases like cancer. Last month, the F.D.A. also loosened rules for the testing of drugs in early-stage development, making it easier for companies to test small samples of drugs on healthy volunteers. Finally, there are signs that drug prescriptions may be on the rise in 2006. A Merrill Lynch research report found that new prescriptions had risen at a 6.6 percent rate for the first full week of January compared with the same period last year. That rate is an acceleration from the fourth quarter of 2005, when new prescriptions rose at only a 3.9 percent rate from the comparable quarter of 2004. 'Seniors appear to be filling incremental prescriptions, given additional drug coverage,' wrote David Risinger, an analyst for Merrill Lynch. Tony Butler, a senior industry analyst at Lehman Brothers, said he believed the industry might be through the worst of its crisis. 'I am optimistic,' Mr. Butler said. 'I see light at the end of the tunnel, revenues improving off of a low base. And I see pipelines improving, midstage pipelines that I've never seen before.' The recent approval of cancer drugs like Sutent, from Pfizer, and Nexavar, from Bayer, has increased hopes that drug makers will be able to find new treatments as scientists unlock the pathways of disease at the cellular level, said Robert Hazlett, an analyst at SunTrust Robertson Humphrey. In the long run, Mr. Hazlett says, new drugs will be crucial to increasing sales and profit. 'What we're seeing is that there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon and that these companies can return to growth post-2006,' he said. 'It's funny how some new drug approvals bolster the spirit of companies.' Richard T. Evans, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, who has been pessimistic — and correct — about the industry's prospects for years, agreed that drug executives appeared to be more optimistic. But he said he remained unconvinced that the industry's fundamentals had improved. Late-stage pipelines remain thin, and drug companies have a poor public image and are under heavy pressure to restrain prices that are viewed as excessive, he said. 'We've got management teams at Pfizer and Merck in particular that are starting cost-cutting plans, significant cost-cutting plans, and they start them with the enthusiasm of the first few days of a diet,' Mr. Evans said. 'The first 5 pounds are easy, but the next 5 or 10 is more difficult.'

Subject: Women, Secret Hamas Strength From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:44:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/international/middleeast/03women.html?ex=1296622800&en=9c38f03be4c7ec9e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 Women, Secret Hamas Strength, Win Votes at Polls and New Role By IAN FISHER GAZA — Hamas has been known and feared for its men, armed or strapped with suicide bombs. But in its parliamentary election triumph here last week, one secret weapon was its women. To a degree specialists said was new in the conservative Muslim society of the Gaza Strip, Hamas used its women to win, sending them door to door with voter lists and to polling places for last-minute campaigning. Now in surprise control of Palestinians politics, Hamas can boast that women hold 6 of the party's 74 seats in parliament — giving the women of the radical group, guided in all ways by their understanding of Islam, a new and unaccustomed public role. 'We are going to lead factories, we are going to lead farmers,' said Jamila al-Shanty, 48, a professor at the Islamic University here who won a seat in parliament. 'We are going to spread out through society. We are going to show the people of the world that the practice of Islam in regards to women is not well known.' If Ms. Shanty's prediction is true, the role of women will certainly not be along the secular Western lines followed largely, and with real strides for women, under decades of leadership by Yasir Arafat's now defeated Fatah faction. The model will be Islam: women in Hamas wear head scarves and follow strict rules for social segregation from men. And one of their role models — one of the few women in Hamas well known before the election — has a pedigree particularly troubling to many in Israel and the outside world. She is Mariam Farhat, the mother of three Hamas supporters killed by Israelis. She bade one son goodbye in a homemade videotape before he stormed an Israeli settlement, killing five people, then being shot dead. She said later, in a much-publicized quotation, that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known as the 'mother of martyrs,' she was seen in a campaign video toting a gun. Now she is one of the six women who are Hamas legislators, elected on the party list. The election rules had quotas for women for all parties. She was swamped this week at a Hamas victory rally at the women's campus at the Islamic University by young, outspoken, educated women who see no contradiction between religious militancy and modernity. 'She is a mother to every house, every person,' said one of the students, Reem el-Nabris, 20, who kissed and hugged Ms. Farhat. Ms. Farhat, 56, who had not been active in politics, said she hoped she deserved their praise as a role model. But she said her role should not be the only one for Hamas's women. 'It is not only sacrificing sons,' she said after the rally. 'There are different kinds of sacrifice, by money, by education. Everybody, according to their ability, should sacrifice.' The Islamic University, an oasis of order in the grit and chaos of Gaza, shows as well as any place the conflicting images of Hamas in relation to the women who strongly support it. A stronghold for Hamas, though not exclusively for its supporters, the university is split in two by sex, and it can be jarring to cross the corridor from crowds without a woman's face to another of only women, all with their heads covered, some wearing the full veil, the nikab. And on the day of the rally, some also plopped a green Hamas baseball cap on top. Yet Hamas encourages, and in some cases pays for, the education of these women. Sabrin al-Barawi, 21, a chemistry student, said she had grown up with Hamas programs for women: social groups, leadership courses, Koran classes. 'It's not only religious,' said Ahlan Shameli, 21, who is studying computers. 'It's the Internet, computers.' 'Before Hamas, women were not aware of the political situation,' she said. 'But Hamas showed and clarified what was going on. Women have become much more aware.' In nearly two decades, the top tier of Hamas's leadership has seemed very much reserved for men. But supporters of Hamas, as well as those of Fatah and other specialists, agreed with Ms. Shameli that Hamas had earned strong support among women. In fact, studies and results from municipal elections show women support the group in higher numbers than men. If the men's most visible role has been fighting Israel, Hamas's social programs have attracted the loyalty of women. Hamas offers assistance programs for widows of suicide bombers and for poor people, health clinics, day care, kindergartens and preschools, in addition to beauty parlors and women-only gyms. Women 'are the ones who take kids to clinics,' said Mkhaimar Abusada, professor of political science at Al Azhar University here. 'They are the ones who take children to schools.' And during the elections, he said, Hamas mobilized these same women as if it had been 'building up for this occasion for 30 years,' using them as grass-roots campaign workers. 'It's something noticeable in the Gaza Strip,' he said. 'In Palestinian society, our values do not accept women to go out and campaign in the street. It's really a new phenomenon, especially for Hamas.' Reem Abu Athra, who directs women's affairs in the Fatah youth wing, said that her party did not seem to understand how mobilized Hamas's women were generally — and that it did not match the grass-roots work by Hamas women during the elections. She said that Fatah seemed to think it would naturally win the women's vote, as the more secular party that has been in some ways a leader in the Arab world in rights for women. 'Fatah took women for granted, and this is one reason it lost,' she said. The questions now seem to be what role Hamas's women will play, and exactly how that will be expressed in the rules of Islam. Naima Sheikh Ali, a Fatah legislator who runs a group for women here, said that Hamas's strict interpretation of Islam would remain a bar to true participation by women. They cannot, for instance, be judges under Islam, she said, and will generally remain segregated and pushed to the side. 'Yes, they respect women, but as they conceive that respect,' she said. 'It is from a religiously fundamental view. For the women's movement, this will set us back several steps.' Ms. Shanty, one of the new Hamas legislators, begged to differ. She said that women, and especially the wives of top Hamas leaders, had long played a central role in Hamas's leadership, though she said that had not been publicized to protect them. 'Every decision that is taken by Hamas is passed to us, not after the decision is made but before,' she said. One measure of participation by women may be the extent that they take part in addressing the main problems facing Palestinians, not only on social issues that affect women, families or children. In an interview before she won a legislative seat, Mouna Mansour, 44, a physics teacher and widow of Jamal Mansour, an assassinated Hamas leader, seemed very much engaged in the central issues. The peace process with Israel, she said, was dead. There should be a Palestinian state, but not at the cost of Jerusalem or the claims of Palestinian refugees, who under previous negotiations would not be permitted to move into what is today Israel. Hamas, she said, needs to rebuild the economy, get rid of poverty and unemployment and, for now, to continue the cease-fire with Israel. But she also defended the decision of a young Nablus man to become a suicide bomber. 'Why not ask the question from another angle?' she said. 'Why would he blow himself up if he was not subject to such great pressures? What leads you to do such a bitter thing? People do this from anger and injustice, to bring back life to their own people by sacrificing their lives.' But there is also unease over what Hamas might mean for women. At least one Islamic University student said Hamas represented an unknown for women like her. The student, Rula Zaanin, 19, said that Hamas had, at least, earned her trust. 'A lot of Palestinians love Hamas and wanted them,' she said. 'But we don't know what will happen.'

Subject: When Trust in Doctors Erodes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:38:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/health/03patient.html?ex=1296622800&en=e1f623102faa5f07&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void By BENEDICT CAREY A few moments before boarding a plane from Los Angeles to New York in January, Charlene Solomon performed her usual preflight ritual: she chewed a small tablet that contained trace amounts of several herbs, including extracts from daisy and chamomile plants. Ms. Solomon, 56, said she had no way to know whether the tablet, an herb-based remedy for jet lag, worked as advertised. Researchers have found no evidence that such preparations are effective, and Ms. Solomon knows that most doctors would scoff that she was wasting her money. Yet she swears by the tablets, as well as other alternative remedies, for reasons she acknowledges are partly psychological. 'I guess I do believe in the power of simply paying attention to your health, which in a way is what I'm doing,' said Ms. Solomon, who runs a Web consulting business in Los Angeles. 'But I also believe there are simply a lot of unknowns when it comes to staying healthy, and if there's a possibility something will help I'm willing to try it.' Besides, she added, 'whatever I'm doing is working, so I'm going to keep doing it.' The most telling evidence of Americans' dissatisfaction with traditional health care is the more than $27 billion they spend annually on alternative and complementary medicine, according to government estimates. In ways large and small, millions of people are taking active steps to venture outside the mainstream, whether by taking the herbal remedy echinacea for a cold or by placing their last hopes for cancer cure in alternative treatment, as did Coretta Scott King, who died this week at an alternative hospice clinic in Mexico. They do not appear to care that there is little, if any, evidence that many of the therapies work. Nor do they seem to mind that alternative therapy practitioners have a fraction of the training mainstream doctors do or that vitamin and herb makers are as profit-driven as drug makers. This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failed surgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening. Haggles with insurance providers, conflicting findings from medical studies and news reports of drug makers' covering up product side effects all feed their disaffection, to the point where many people begin to question not only the health care system but also the science behind it. Soon, intuition and the personal experience of friends and family may seem as trustworthy as advice from a doctor in diagnosing an illness or judging a treatment. Experts say that people with serious medical problems like diabetes or cancer are least likely to take their chances with natural medicine, unless their illness is terminal. Consumers generally know that quackery is widespread in alternative practices, that there is virtually no government oversight of so-called natural remedies and that some treatments, like enemas, can be dangerous. Still, 48 percent of American adults used at least one alternative or complementary therapy in 2004, up from 42 percent a decade ago, a figure that includes students and retirees, soccer moms and truckers, New Age seekers and religious conservatives. The numbers continue to grow, experts say, for reasons that have as much to do with increasing distrust of mainstream medicine and the psychological appeal of nontraditional approaches as with the therapeutic properties of herbs or other supplements. 'I think there is a powerful element of nostalgia at work for many people, for home remedies — for what healing is supposed to be — combined with an idealized vision of what is natural and whole and good, ' said Dr. Linda Barnes, a medical anthropologist at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Barnes added, 'People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all.' Healthy and Dabbling Ms. Solomon's first small steps outside the mainstream came in 1991, after she watched her mother die of complications from a hysterectomy. 'I saw doctors struggling to save her,' she said. 'They were trying really hard, and I have great respect for what they do, but at that point I realized the doctors could only do so much.' She decided then that she needed to take more responsibility for her own health, by eating better, exercising more and seeking out health aids that she thought of as natural, meaning not prescribed by a doctor or developed by a pharmaceutical company. 'I usually stay away from drugs if I can, because the side effects even of cough and cold medicines can be pretty strong,' she said. The herbal preparations she uses, she said, 'have no side effects, and the difference in my view is that they help support my own body's natural capability, to fight off disease' rather than treat symptoms. If these sentiments are present in someone like Ms. Solomon, who regularly consults her internist and describes herself as 'pretty mainstream,' they run far deeper in millions of other people who use nontraditional therapies more often. In interviews and surveys, these patients often described prescription drugs as poisons that mostly mask symptoms without improving their underlying cause. Many extend their suspicions further. In a 2004 study, researchers at the University of Arizona conducted interviews with a group of men and women in Tucson who suffered from chronic arthritis, most of whom regularly used alternative therapies. Those who used alternative methods exclusively valued the treatments on the 'rightness of fit' above other factors, and they were inherently skeptical of the health care system. Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show. 'I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make' for the breakdown in trust in the medical system, said Joyce Newman, 74, of Lynnwood Wash., who sees a natural medicine specialist as her primary doctor. 'The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head.' From here it is a small step to begin doubting medical science. If Western medicine is imperfect and sometimes corrupt, then mainstream doctors may not be the best judge of treatments after all, many patients conclude. People's actual experience — the personal testimony of friends and family, in particular — feels more truthful. To best way to validate this, said Ms. Newman and many others who regularly use nontraditional therapies, is simply to try a remedy 'and listen to your own body.' Opting Out Cynthia Riley effectively opted out of mainstream medicine when it seemed that doctors were not listening to her. During a nine-year period that ended in 2004, Ms. Riley, 47, visited almost 20 doctors, for a variety of intermittent and strange health complaints: blurred vision, urinary difficulties, balance problems so severe that at times she wobbled like a drunk. She felt unwell most of the time, but doctors could not figure out what she had. Each specialist ordered different tests, depending on the symptom, Ms. Riley said, but they were usually rushed and seemed to solicit her views only as a formality. Undeterred, Ms. Riley, an event planner who lives near New London, Conn., typed out a four-page description of her ordeal, including her suspicion that she suffered from lead poisoning. One neurologist waved the report away as if insulted; another barely skimmed it, she said. 'I remember sitting in one doctor's office and realizing, 'He thinks I'm crazy,' ' Ms. Riley said. 'I was getting absolutely nowhere in conventional medicine, and I was determined to get to the root of my problems.' Through word of mouth, Ms. Riley heard about Deirdre O'Connor, a naturopath with a thriving practice in nearby Mystic, Conn., and made an appointment. In recent years, people searching for something outside of conventional medicine have increasingly turned to naturopaths, herbal specialists who must complete a degree that includes some standard medical training in order to be licensed, experts say. Fourteen states, including California and Connecticut, now license naturopaths to practice medicine. Natural medicine groups are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including New York. Licensed naturopaths can prescribe drugs from an approved list in some states, but have no prescribing rights in others. Right away, Ms. Riley said, she noticed a difference in the level of service. Before even visiting the office, she received a fat envelope in the mail containing a four-page questionnaire, she said. In addition to asking detailed questions about medical history — standard information — it asked about energy level, foods she craved, sensitivity to weather and self-image: 'Please list adjectives that describe you,' read one item. 'It felt right, from the beginning,' Ms. Riley said. Her first visit lasted an hour and a half, and Ms. O'Connor, the naturopath, agreed that metal exposure was a possible cause of her symptoms. It emerged in their interview that Ms. Riley had worked in the steel industry, and tests of her hair and urine showed elevated levels of both lead and mercury, Ms. O'Connor said. After taking a combination of herbs, vitamins and regular doses of a drug called dimercaptosuccinic acid, or DMSA, to treat lead poisoning, Ms. Riley said, she began to feel better, and the symptoms subsided. Along the way, Ms. O'Connor explained the treatments to Ms. Riley, sometimes using drawings, and called her patient regularly to check in, especially during the first few months, Ms. Riley said. Other doctors said they could not comment on Ms. Riley's case because they had not examined her. Researchers who specialize in lead poisoning say that it is rare in adults but that it can cause neurological symptoms and bladder problems and is often missed by primary care doctors. Dr. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist who directs the lead research group at the University of Pittsburgh, said DMSA was the pharmaceutical treatment of choice for high blood lead levels. Researchers say there is little or no evidence that vitamins or herbs can relieve symptoms like Ms. Riley's. Still, she said, 'I look and feel better than I have in years.' Life and Death Diane Paradise bet her life on the uncertain benefits of natural medicine, after being burned physically and emotionally by conventional doctors. In 1995, doctors told Ms. Paradise, now 35, that she had Hodgkin's disease. After a six-month course of chemotherapy and radiation, she said, she was declared cancer free, and she remained healthy for five years. But in 2001 the cancer reappeared, more advanced, and her doctors recommended a 10-month course of drugs and radiation, plus a marrow transplant, she said. Ms. Paradise, a marketing consultant in Rochester, N.Y., balked. 'I was burned badly the first time around, third-degree burns, and now they were talking about 10 months,' she said in an interview, 'and they were giving me no guarantees; they said it was experimental. That's when I started looking around. I really had nothing to lose, and I was focused on quality of life at that point, not quantity.' When she told one of her doctors that she was considering an alternative treatment in Arizona, the man exploded, she said. 'His exact words were, 'That's not treatment, that's a vacation — you're wasting your time!' ' she said. And so ended the relationship. With help from friends, Ms. Paradise raised about $40,000 to pay for the Arizona clinic's treatment, plus living expenses while there. 'I had absolutely no scientific reason for choosing this route, none,' she said. 'I just think there are times in our life when we are asked to make decisions based on our intuition, on our gut instinct, not based on evidence put in front of us, and for me this was one of those moments.' Cancer researchers say that there is no evidence that vitamins, herbs or other alternative therapies can cure cancer, and they caution that some regimens may worsen the disease. But Ms. Paradise said that her relationship with the natural medicine specialist in Arizona had been collaborative and that she had felt 'more empowered, more involved' in the treatment plan, which included large doses of vitamins, as well as changes in diet and sleep routines. After four months on the regimen, she said, she felt much better. But the cancer was not cured. It has resurfaced recently and spread, and this time Ms. Paradise has started an experimental treatment with an oncologist in New York. She is complementing this treatment, she said, with another course of alternative therapy in Arizona. She moved in with friends near Phoenix and started the alternative regime in January. 'It's 79 degrees and beautiful here,' she said by phone in mid-January. 'Let's hope that's a good sign.' For all their suspicions and questions about conventional medicine, those who venture outside the mainstream tend to have one thing in abundance, experts say: hope. In a 1998 survey of more than 1,000 adults from around the country, researchers found that having an interest in 'personal growth or spirituality' predicted alternative medicine use. Nontraditional healers know this, and they often offer some spiritual element in their practice, if they think it is appropriate. David Wood, a naturopath who with his wife, Cheryl, runs a large, Christian-oriented practice in Lynnwood, Wash., said he treated patients of all faiths. 'We pray with patients, with their permission,' said Mr. Wood, who also works with local medical doctors when necessary. 'If patients would not like us to pray for them, we don't, but it's there if needed.' He added, 'Our goal here is to help people get really well, not merely free of symptoms.' That is exactly the sentiment that many Americans say they feel is missing from conventional medicine. Whatever the benefits and risks of its many concoctions and methods, alternative medicine offers them at least the promise of affectionate care, unhurried service, freedom from prescription drug side effects and the potential for feeling not just better but also spiritually recharged. 'I don't hate doctors or anything,' Ms. Newman said. 'I just know they can make mistakes, and so often they refer you on to see another doctor, and another.' Seeing a naturopath, she said, 'I feel I'm known, they see me as a whole person, they listen to what I say.'

Subject: Sought For Military in War Zones From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:36:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/politics/03pentagon.html?ex=1296622800&en=5fcf8c38b17e5c66&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 $120 Billion More Is Sought For Military in War Zones By DAVID S. CLOUD WASHINGTON — The Bush administration said Thursday that it would seek about $120 billion in additional financing to pay for continuing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through 2006. The request shows that the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has remained at virtually the same level for several years, despite hopes that a large number of the American troops may leave Iraq by the end of the year. The $120 billion includes money for the fiscal year that began in October in the form of a $70 billion supplemental spending request, which had been expected. It also includes $50 billion in the overall budget request for the first months of the 2007 fiscal year that President Bush will submit to Congress on Monday, a figure that was described as basically a placeholder until a more specific number can be developed. Over all, the Bush administration will propose a Defense Department budget of $439.3 billion for the 2007 fiscal year, almost a 5 percent increase over this year, according to a Pentagon official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the budget request has not officially been submitted to Congress. The figure does not include the proposed new money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been financed in stand-alone supplemental spending bills since 2001. The administration's request for the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan would bring their total cost in the 2006 fiscal year to about $120 billion, some of which Congress has already approved. In a briefing for reporters, Joel Kaplan, the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the costs of military operations this year 'will be roughly similar' to last year's costs. These costs include pay and benefits for reservists, war-related benefits for the active-duty military, fuel, spare parts, transportation and contractor support. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged the growing sentiment for reducing the 130,000 American troops in Iraq in a speech on Thursday at the National Press Club, but reiterated that any further reductions depend on improvements in conditions in Iraq. 'We ought to be able to pull down our troops, but anyone who predicts 100,000 or some other number, I think is making a mistake,' he said. 'As the Iraqis become more capable, and they have a bigger number, one would think we'd be able to continue' troop reductions. A significant amount of the money in the supplemental request to Congress would be spent on training the new Iraqi military forces. Steven M. Kosiak, director of budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group here, said that up until this most recent request, the total cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan had been about $331 billion since Sept. 11, 2001. Mr. Kosiak said the total included $76 billion for operations in Afghanistan; $226 billion for Iraq; and $29 billion for homeland defense (mainly air patrols after 9/11) and other expenses. Mr. Rumsfeld said terrorist groups remained determined to strike American targets. 'The enemy — while weakened and under great pressure — is still capable of global reach, still possesses the determination to kill more Americans and is still trying to do so with increasingly powerful weapons,' he said. Meanwhile, Army officials defended a proposal included in the administration's 2007 budget request to provide funds for a National Guard of 333,000 members, rather than the 350,000 authorized by Congress. The proposal has been criticized by governors and members of Congress, even though recruitment difficulties have kept the Guard from reaching its authorized size. 'We have no intention of cutting' the National Guard, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told reporters at a Pentagon briefing, adding that the Army would find money in its budget if the Guard was able to recruit enough soldiers to meet its authorized level. The Adjutants General Association, a lobbying group representing the leaders of state National Guard organizations, has been lobbying Congress to overturn the plan. Coming up with more money to train and equip recruits above the 333,000 level proposed in the administration's budget will not be easy, the group said.

Subject: For the Love of God From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:33:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/opinion/03albacete.html?ex=1296622800&en=a18f88c317b46e48&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 For the Love of God By LORENZO ALBACETE WHEN Pope Benedict XVI issued his first encyclical ('Deus Caritas Est' or 'God Is Love') last month, it took some people by surprise. Many expected the document to focus on the 'dictatorship of relativism,' which Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had denounced in a speech to his fellow cardinals before his election as pope. But love? After all, the study of human love had never really been a central topic in the cardinal's personal academic work. In that sense, it was surprising that he would choose it as the subject of his first encyclical. I suspect, however, that behind his choice lies a concern that has characterized much of his theological work for the past 40 years or so: the role of religion — or, more precisely, fundamentalism — in the threats we face today. The encyclical's release coincided with the publication in English of a book about the future of Western civilization by Marcello Pera, the president of the Italian Senate and an atheist, in which he argues, perhaps surprisingly, that European civilization is no longer able or willing to defend its commitment to freedom and the dignity of the individual because of the weakening of its Jewish and Christian roots. The book also contains a supportive response from Cardinal Ratzinger, who makes the point that the rejection of this heritage stems from a fear of the intolerance of religious fundamentalism. This is an argument he has advanced before, most notably in a debate with Paolo Flores d'Arcais, an Italian scholar, before an overflow crowd in Rome a few years ago. I believe that interpreted against the background of these discussions, the encyclical offers an important view of where Benedict intends to situate the church in the cultural clashes threatening world peace today. Benedict's conversations with nonbelievers have convinced him that their major concern about Christianity is not its 'other-worldiness' but the very opposite. For them, what makes Christianity potentially dangerous as a source of conflict and intolerance in a pluralistic society is its insistence that faith is reasonable — that is, that it is the source of knowledge about this world and that, therefore, its teaching should apply to all, believers and nonbelievers alike. The Christian faith faced a similar criticism before, Benedict has argued, when it first came into contact with the religious and philosophical world of the Roman Empire. The Roman world celebrated religious pluralism and was willing to welcome Christianity as an ethical or 'spiritual' option, but not as a source of truth about this world — that was considered to be the realm of the philosophers. At that time, Christianity would not accept a place with the religions of the empire. It saw itself as a philosophy, as a path to knowledge about reality, and not primarily as a source of spiritual or ethical inspiration. The problem was that it claimed to be the only path to full knowledge about the meaning and purpose of life. Indeed, throughout history Christians have used this claim to justify their intolerance of other views, even turning to violence in order to affirm and defend their idea of what is true. The events of Sept. 11, 2001, reminded us that this unhappy tendency was not limited to the Christian faith, but seems inherent in religious belief. If a god offers absolute truth, then those who disagree with that god's teachings are enemies of the truth, and thus harmful to society. It makes no difference whether the intolerance comes from a Christian god, who punishes countries and cities with natural disasters, or a Muslim god, who encourages terrorists to kill the innocent. Hence the pope's insistence on the importance of emphasizing that God is, above all, love, and that love and truth are inseparable. 'In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred, this message is both timely and significant,' he wrote. 'For this reason I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us, and which we in turn must share with others.' For Benedict, God 'loves with a personal love.' In fact, human love (eros) and divine love for us (agape) are intertwined. 'God loves, and his love may certainly be called eros, yet it is also totally agape.' That is why God's passionate love can be described 'using boldly erotic images.' Faith reveals God's love to be a 'turning of God against himself' that replaces the demands of justice with the demands of mercy. It's worth noting that in the second part of the encyclical, Benedict says that the charitable mission of the church is informed by the belief that human and divine love are inseparable. This is why believers and nonbelievers can come together to fight poverty and injustice — and why the church can be trusted not to impose its social teachings on 'political life.' It is for this reason that believers and nonbelievers alike should welcome Benedict's reflection on love. In a time when we are rightfully suspicious of the power of religion to stir violence, Benedict has sent a clear message: No one has anything to fear from a God who is love. Lorenzo Albacete is a Roman Catholic priest.

Subject: No Help to Democracy in Haiti From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:32:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/opinion/03fri2.html?ex=1296622800&en=7d07e57d915e9232&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 No Help to Democracy in Haiti Haiti was a deeply troubled democracy when the Bush administration took office. Now it is an even more deeply troubled nondemocracy. One thing contributed to Haiti's present plight, our colleagues Walt Bogdanich and Jenny Nordberg reported Sunday, was a 'democracy building' program financed by the United States government and run by the International Republican Institute. The I.R.I., whose chairman is Senator John McCain and whose president is a former Bush administration official, is one of four institutes (the others are affiliated with the Democrats, the United States Chamber of Commerce and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.) set up during the 1980's to channel taxpayer dollars toward strengthening democracy in other countries. Congress intended this financing system to move American support for democracy in other countries out of the shrouded world of covert intelligence and into the daylight of political training institutes. But according to the Times report, which the I.R.I. disputes, much of the Republican Institute's activities in Haiti from 2001 to 2003 were carried out in a shadowy world of secret meetings and efforts to isolate and destabilize the democratically elected government. Diplomats, including the American ambassador to Haiti in those years, said that the I.R.I. program worked at cross purposes with the State Department's policy of promoting compromise between President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his many powerful opponents. It also undercut mediation efforts that appeared within reach of success. With all hopes of compromise thwarted, a rebel army led by notorious criminals and cashiered police officers crossed into Haiti from the Dominican Republic and drove President Aristide from office. He fled on a United States-supplied plane after Washington made it clear to him that it would not protect his life if he remained or defend the democratically elected government. That was almost two years ago, and Haiti is worse off today. Murder rules the slums of Port-au-Prince, and a United Nations peacekeeping force struggles even to protect itself. Dates for new elections have been repeatedly postponed. The latest date is now set for next week. We hope this begins to undo some of the damage done by the kind of I.R.I. democracy building described in The Times.

Subject: The Lopsided Bush Health Plan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 06:59:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/03/opinion/03fri1.html?ex=1296622800&en=94827fde05a3db38&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 3, 2006 The Lopsided Bush Health Plan The health care proposals put forth by President Bush in his State of the Union address this week will not make much of a dent in the two main problems plaguing the nation's health care system — the escalating costs and the growing legions of the uninsured. His proposals simply show where he and many conservatives want health care financing to go — toward a system where consumers will be expected to pay more of their care themselves, in the hope that they will therefore use medical services sparingly and shop for them more wisely. Proponents believe this approach will wring unneeded expenditures out of the system, by lessening the likelihood that people will seek medical help for every minor ailment or by pushing people to visit a doctor's office rather than an expensive emergency room. But many low- and moderate-income people will most likely pass up care that they need until they become desperately sick and then encounter much higher costs down the line. The president's key proposal calls for expanding the use of tax-free health savings accounts, where consumers who take out a high-deductible insurance policy can invest money in a tax-free savings account for routine medical expenses. The high-deductible policy would cost less than traditional comprehensive coverage, thus making insurance more affordable. Money spent from the savings accounts would escape taxation, thus providing a tax subsidy for all medical purchases. Mr. Bush wants to make the accounts more attractive by increasing the amount that can be deposited in them and tweaking the tax advantages. The tax-free accounts have the virtue of making it possible for some low-income people and the companies that employ them to afford at least bare-bones insurance. Some coverage is clearly better than no coverage. But the accounts seem unlikely to attract more than a small portion of the 46 million people who lack health insurance. Unsurprisingly, the accounts favor the healthy and wealthy at the expense of the poor and chronically sick. Those who are relatively well off get a bigger tax break and have more discretionary income to invest in an account and less need to withdraw money from the account, especially if they are healthy. Indeed, some informed estimates suggest that a substantial chunk of investors would never use the money for medical purposes but would instead treat the accounts as another tax-privileged retirement fund, like 401(k)'s. Many people with low or moderate incomes, by contrast, would find it hard to deposit money in the accounts or allow any deposits to accumulate over the years. So far, the accounts seem to have attracted more interest from banks, which are salivating over the prospect of collecting management fees, and from health plans than they have from consumers, who have been slow to sign up for the accounts or to put money into them. Health savings accounts are not apt to trim the nation's health expenditures by much because they do not attack the root causes of high medical costs, and they will have no effect on the relatively small percentage of high-cost patients who account for most of the nation's medical spending. The great danger is that health savings accounts could accelerate the erosion of traditional employer-provided insurance, as companies try to reduce their health expenditures by shifting more of the costs onto workers. If the healthiest employees jump to tax-free accounts in large numbers, they will leave traditional health plans saddled with sicker and older employees, whose needs will force a rise in premiums, making comprehensive coverage even harder to sustain. These new accounts will need to be studied closely to make sure they do not cause more harm than good.

Subject: Ballerina in 'The Red Shoes' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 05:56:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/arts/02shearer.html?ex=1296536400&en=735633f1b23b9984&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 2, 2006 Moira Shearer, Ballerina in 'The Red Shoes' By ANNA KISSELGOFF Moira Shearer, a luminous star in the galaxy of British ballerinas who brought the Royal Ballet to international attention and whose dramatic portrayal as the doomed heroine of the 1948 film 'The Red Shoes' was searingly impressed on generations of moviegoers, died in Oxford, England, on Tuesday. She was 80. Her death was announced by her husband, the writer and broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy. He said Ms. Shearer had been weak since her birthday last month and died in John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, The Associated Press reported. 'The Red Shoes,' often called the most popular film about ballet, threatened to overshadow Ms. Shearer's reputation as a classical dancer. A Scottish beauty with flaming red hair, she created a sensation with her performance as a London debutante who aspires to be a ballerina but is driven to suicide by leaping in front of a train in Monte Carlo. As Ms. Shearer said in later years, 'The Red Shoes' was very different from the world of ballet that she knew. The image created by the film's directors, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, was of a Russian émigré ballet troupe filled with clashing temperaments. Dominated by a tyrannical impresario inspired in part by Serge Diaghilev, the troupe's backstage life had the ring of overwrought truth. But unlike the film's heroine, Victoria Page, Ms. Shearer did not face a seemingly impossible choice between a career and a marriage. During her dancing career, she acted in films and on the stage. In later years, she wrote two books, including 'Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Balanchine' (1986), and wrote a column for The Daily Telegraph. She also had four children, who, with her husband, survive her. They include a son, Alastair, and three daughters, Ailsa, Rachel and Fiona. The recently established British ballet groups that Ms. Shearer joined in the 1940's were identified with hard work and struggle, devoid of the surface glamour of the émigré companies that succeeded Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. After dancing with Mona Inglesby's Ballet International in 1941, Ms. Shearer joined Sadler's Wells Ballet, which changed its name to the Royal Ballet in 1956. Rising from the ranks to ballerina from 1942 to 1952, Ms. Shearer was identified both with leading roles in the 19th-century classics and works created by the great British choreographer Frederick Ashton. She danced the title role in the premiere of his 'Cinderella' in 1948 and along with Margot Fonteyn and Pamela May, led his seminal neoclassical ballet 'Symphonic Variations' in 1946. Ms. Shearer, however, was never considered the reigning ballerina in Sadler's Wells. That position was clearly held by Ms. Fonteyn, who was promoted from the start by Ninette de Valois, the company's founder. At least two generations of stellar dancers, including Ms. May, Ms. Shearer, Beryl Grey, Violetta Elvin and Nadia Nerina all shared roles with Ms. Fonteyn but not her status in the company. Born Moira Shearer King on Jan. 17, 1926, in Dumferline, Scotland, she trained with the Russian teacher Nicholas Legat and at the Sadler's Wells School. Ashton brought her to the public's attention with a major role as Pride in his ballet 'The Quest' in 1943. She was reluctant to appear in 'The Red Shoes' but did so at de Valois's prodding. When the Sadler's Wells Ballet made its sensational United States debut at the Metropolitan Opera House in September 1949, ticket buyers knew Ms. Shearer from 'The Red Shoes' and thought she would be seen in 'The Sleeping Beauty' on opening night. De Valois, however, cast her in the fourth act in the 'Bluebird' pas de deux. Shortly afterward (1950) she appeared in a film version of 'The Tales of Hoffmann,' making several other films later with and without dancing. She also appeared as a guest artist with Sadler's Wells and with Roland Petit's company. In 1954, she toured the United States as Titania in the Old Vic stage production of 'A Midsummer's Night's Dream.' Among her other films were 'Peeping Tom,' 'The Man Who Loved Redheads,' 'The Story of Three Loves' and 'Black Tights.' Multitalented, she was seen by John Martin of The New York Times in Ashton's 'Wedding Bouquet' in 1949 as exhibiting 'her roguish gift for comedy in a brilliant performance.'

Subject: The Red Shoes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 05:55:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/mem/movies/review.html?title1=&title2=THE RED SHOES (MOVIE)&reviewer=Bosley Crowther&pdate=&v_id=40734&reviewer=Bosley Crowther October 23, 1948 The Red Shoes By Bosley Crowther Over the years, there have been several movies in which attempts have been made to capture the spirit and the beauty, the romance and the enchantment of the ballet. And, inevitably, in these pictures, ballets have been performed, a few times with charm and sincerity but more often—and unfortunately—without. However, there has never been a picture in which the ballet and its special, magic world have been so beautifully and dreamily presented as the new British film, The Red Shoes. Here, in this unrestricted romance, which opened at the Bijou yesterday, is a visual and emotional comprehension of all the grace and rhythm and power of the ballet. Here is the color and the excitement, the strange intoxication of the dancer's life. And here is the rapture and the heartbreak which only the passionate and the devoted can know. In certain respects the whole picture which Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made seems to have the construction and the flow of a romantic dance. For not only is the story a frankly sentimental affair, true to the staunchest conventions of triumphal love and bitter tears, but it is played by a splendid cast of actors who have the grace and the pace of dancers themselves. Indeed, many of them are dancers, as is natural, and they frequently perform, so that the rhythm and movement of their dancing transmits easily into the dramatic scenes. And, for that matter, the story—it being about an English girl who devotes herself to a famous ballet company, becomes its star, and then falls in love—is a symbolic realization of the theme of the principal ballet, which is based on Hans Christian Andersen's fable of the little girl who is bewitched by her red dancing shoes. If there is one objection to the picture, it is that the story plays too long, with much involvement and redundance in a comparatively simple plot. There is no need to have the impresario, even though he is a charming martinet, reiterate with such monotony that dancing and love don't mix. And despite the beauties of the settings and the fascinations of the theater, it is wearying to see so much Monte Carlo and so much of the ebb-and-flow backstage. However, the story is still beguiling, having been written with eloquence and taste, and the performance of Anton Walbrook as the impresario is winning, nonetheless. He gives such a wonderful picture of a forceful, inspired, creative man with a beautiful flair for the dramatic that his overfrequent presence can be borne. And, at least, the length of the picture—a good bit over two hours, not counting an intermission—permits an abundance of dance, which is the particular glory and excitement in this film. Numerous bits and pieces of famous and popular ballets are handsomely and tactfully intruded. And the main ballet, 'The Red Shoes,' is given a full-length performance, playing for about twenty minutes on the screen. The cinema staging of this ballet, conceived in cinematic terms, is a thrilling blend of movement, color, music, and imagery. For it quickly evolves from the confines of the limited settings of the stage into sudden and fanciful regions conceived in the dancer's mind. And here some spectacular decor and some fresh choreography, arranged by Robert Helpmann, spark impressions that are vivid and intense. As the leading ballerina and the romantic heroine of the film, Moira Shearer is amazingly accomplished and full of a warm and radiant charm. Leonide Massine is wonderfully comic in a completely fantastic style as her dancing partner and ballet master, and his dancing (of his own creation) is superb. Mr. Helpmann and Ludmilla Tcherina dance and act remarkably well, too, and Esmond Knight, Albert Basserman, and Eric Berry are good in minor roles. Only Marius Goring, as the young composer who steals the heroine's heart, vaguely distressed this observer. Too flamboyant and insincere. Much could be said of the whole decor, which is set off to brilliant effect by properly used Technicolor, and the music of the ballet. Much could be said of the direction of Mr. Powell and Mr. Pressburger. But right now we must be contented with repeating that The Red Shoes is one you must see.

Subject: Paul Krugman: State of Delusion From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 05:54:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ February 3, 2006 Paul Krugman looks below the surface of the administration's policy announcements and finds little substance to back them up. By Mark Thoma State of Delusion, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: So President Bush's plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan — floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole — to send humans to Mars. But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still — perhaps more than ever — run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don't take the business of governing seriously. ... In the State of the Union address Mr. Bush suggested that 'cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol' and other technologies would allow us 'to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East.' But the next day, officials explained that he didn't really mean what he said. 'This was purely an example,' said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped Tuesday night... Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy 'plan' was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say. For weeks administration sources told reporters that the State of the Union address would focus on health care. But at the last minute the White House might have realized that its health care proposals, based on the idea that Americans have too much insurance, would suffer the same political fate as its attempt to privatize Social Security. ('Congress,' Mr. Bush said, 'did not act last year on my proposal to save Social Security.' Democrats responded with a standing ovation.) So Mr. Bush's speechwriters were told to replace the health care proposals with fine words about energy independence, words not backed by any actual policy. What about the rest of the speech? The State of the Union is normally an occasion for boasting about an administration's achievements. But what's a speechwriter to do when there are no achievements? One answer is to pretend that the bad stuff never happened. The Medicare drug benefit is Mr. Bush's largest domestic initiative to date. It's also a disaster ... So drugs went unmentioned in the State of the Union. Another answer is to rely on evasive language. In Iraq, said Mr. Bush, we've 'changed our approach to reconstruction.' In fact, reconstruction has failed. ... So now, having squandered billions ... America's would-be Marshall Plan in Iraq, reports The Los Angeles Times, 'is drawing to a close this year with much of its promise unmet ...' I guess you can call that a change in approach. There's a common theme underlying the botched reconstruction of Iraq, the botched response to Katrina (which Mr. Bush never mentioned), the botched drug program, and the nonexistent energy program. John DiIulio, the former White House head of faith-based policy, explained it more than three years ago. ... 'There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. ... I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues.' In other words, this administration is all politics and no policy. It knows how to attain power, but has no idea how to govern. That's why the administration was caught unaware when Katrina hit, and why it was totally unprepared for the predictable problems with its drug plan. It's why Mr. Bush announced an energy plan with no substance behind it. And it's why the state of the union — the thing itself, not the speech — is so grim.

Subject: The soul of capitalism From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 01:04:26 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Pete we have a culture of HEROES and leaders - I want a culture where we have a republic of average joes doing good - less jimmy carters required for real change - more cindy sheehan types: http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=mergersNews&storyID=2006-01-20T21355... CalPERS urges SEC to block Sovereign Bancorp deal Fri Jan 20, 2006 4:35 PM ET NEW YORK, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The largest U.S. public pension fund on Friday said it asked the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to block a transaction between Sovereign Bancorp Inc. and Spain's Banco Santander Central Hispano because shareholders are not allowed to vote on it. The California Public Employees' Retirement System said it supports the efforts of Sovereign's largest shareholder, Relational Investors LLC, to block Sovereign (SOV.N: Quote, Profile, Research) from selling a 19.8 percent stake to Santander (SAN.MC: Quote, Profile, Research) (SBP.N: Quote, Profile, Research) for $2.4 billion. Philadelphia-based Sovereign, the No. 3 U.S. savings and loan, would then use proceeds to help buy Brooklyn, New York's Independence Community Bank Corp. (ICBC.O: Quote, Profile, Research) for $3.6 billion. CalPERS said it owns 1.4 million Sovereign shares and 13.8 million Santander shares. An SEC spokesman declined to comment. http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=AP&Date=20060202&ID=54688... http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF-8&q=Sovereign Bancorp &btnG=Search N... February 02, 2006 07:35 PM ETShareholders Blast Sovereign All Associated Press NewsPHILADELPHIA (AP) - The two largest shareholders of Sovereign Bancorp reacted angrily Thursday to Pennsylvania lawmakers' swift passage of a bill that could greatly help the thrift in its fight to push through a controversial deal. The bill, sought by Sovereign and approved Wednesday by the state House and Senate, guts the right of investors even as businesses are moving toward greater accountability, the shareholders said. 'It's shocking,' said Ralph Whitworth, principal of Relational Investors LLC of San Diego, the thrift's largest shareholder. 'We have a pre-Enron board in a post-Enron world. People like this should be flushed out of corporate America.' The bill is awaiting the signature of Gov. Ed Rendell. His spokeswoman, Kate Philips, said Thursday the governor's lawyers were still reviewing the legislation. She would not comment on whether Rendell had supported the legislation or would sign it. Peter Langerman, chief executive of Franklin Mutual Advisers in Short Hills, N.J., Sovereign's second-largest shareholder, sent a letter to Rendell. 'This is an extraordinary abuse of the legislative process,' he wrote. Sovereign did not return a call seeking comment. Last October, Sovereign announced plans to sell a 19.8 percent ownership stake to Spain's Grupo Santander for $2.4 billion and acquire Independence Community Bank Corp. in New York for $3.6 billion. But the deals -- especially the Santander transaction -- are under fire by major shareholders because they dilute ownership and are crafted in a way that bypassed a shareholder vote. Sovereign is getting around a shareholder vote by using both new shares and shares bought back by the company. The Legislature approved a bill that would exclude company-owned shares from being counted. Relational, which is suing Sovereign, also is seeking to remove Sovereign's board of directors. But the bill bars the removal of a Pennsylvania company's directors without cause. DJ Realtors Urge US Fed To Reject Wal-Mart Bank Application WASHINGTON (AP)--The National Association of Realtors is urging new Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke to weigh in against efforts by Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) to operate a bank in Utah. 'We ask that, early in your term, you actively oppose' Wal-Mart's application now pending before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the association said in a letter to Bernanke released Thursday. Bentonville, Ark.-based Wal-Mart is seeking to operate a special breed of bank called an industrial loan company, or ILC, in Utah. It wants to do this so it can process credit card, debit card and electronic check transactions from its retail locations. Bernanke was sworn in as the new Fed chief on Wednesday. Last week, Alan Greenspan - still chairman of the Fed at that time - urged Congress to close a regulatory loophole that lets companies own the type of banks that Wal-Mart wants to operate. 'We hope you share our concern and that of chairman Greenspan about the risks of permitting Wal-Mart to control a bank,' the association said in the letter to Bernanke DJ US Veterans Affairs Dept Used Misleading Accounting - GAO WASHINGTON (AP)--Eager to reduce spending, the Bush administration falsely claimed savings of more than $1.3 billion in the Department of Veterans Affairs to justify cuts to health care services, congressional investigators say. The report by the Government Accountability Office is the latest to document funding woes at the VA, which currently offers health care to 7 million out of 24 million eligible veterans. It found that the agency used misleading accounting methods and lacked documentation to prove its claimed savings. The audit, released Thursday, comes amid growing political debate about streamlining veterans health care. In the last fiscal year, more than 260,000 veterans considered to have higher incomes couldn't sign up for services because of cost-cutting, a move decried by Democrats. 'It's unconscionable,' said U.S. Rep. Lane Evans, D-Ill., the ranking Democrat on the House Veterans' Affairs Committee, who requested the audit. 'Veterans needing health care are being penalized because of an accounting deception promulgated by this administration.' In a written response, the VA acknowledged that its accounting practices aren't 'perfect' and should be improved. But it rejected the report's finding that the agency was motivated simply 'to fill the budget gap.' 'Proper stewardship of taxpayer resources requires that VA strive to become more effective and more efficient in delivering timely, high-quality health care for our veterans,' wrote Gordon Mansfield, deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs. The GAO report found several flaws in the VA's accounting to justify smaller budget requests for the agency while claiming that the quality of health care wasn't hurt. For instance, the VA: - Lacked adequate documentation for $1.3 billion it reported as 'management efficiency savings' in fiscal years 2003 and 2004. - Claimed savings of more than $3 million due to 'efficiencies' from reduced overtime and delayed hiring at VA offices without explaining how the savings were achieved without a reduction in the quality of service. - Often double-counted savings from volume purchasing in government contracts from year to year, resulting in overinflated figures. Audits from the GAO and the VA inspector general last year found the VA could negotiate reduced prices totaling more than $1 billion. 'VA officials told us that the management efficiency savings assumed were savings goals .. to fill the gap between the cost associated with VA's projected demand for health care services and the amount the president was willing to request,' the GAO report stated. In recent years, Bush's budgets have included proposals to require some veterans to pay a portion of their care with co-payments, but Congress has repeatedly rejected that idea. Although Congress has increased the VA's budget in recent years, the agency found itself with a gaping budget hole last year and had to ask Congress for emergency funding. Veterans groups and some lawmakers say the agency's increases have been inadequate, but others say the agency has to set priorities on who gets care. Congress provided about $23.3 billion for VA medical services for this fiscal year, above Bush's request, with about $1.2 billion set aside for when the VA declares the money is needed for an emergency. In 1996, Congress ordered the agency to open health care to nearly all veterans. However, lawmakers also gave authority to the VA secretary to suspend enrollments as needed. DJ NASA Inspector General Under Investigation - Report people are fallable - people that inspect your airplane are fallable - if the bus has a techinical glitch - you pull to the side of the road - the airplane moves in the Z plane though - I will stick to X,Y planes - hehe WASHINGTON (AP)--NASA Inspector General Robert W. Cobb is under investigation for complaints that he failed to investigate safety violations and retaliated against whistle-blowers, according to The Washington Post. Current and former employees of Cobb's office alleged that he suppressed investigations within NASA and penalized his own investigators when they pursued cases, the Post reported on its Web site Thursday night. At least 16 people provided documents and written complaints about Cobb to the Integrity Committee of the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, a group charged with investigating misconduct by agency inspectors general or their staffs, the Post said. According to the complaints described by the Post, Cobb hampered investigations into problems such as a malfunctioning self-destruct procedure during a space shuttle launch and the theft of data on rocket engines. Cobb would not discuss the case with the Post but said, 'The office has been particularly dedicated to ensuring an atmosphere where safety concerns are fully addressed.' Last April, The Daily Press of Newport News, Va., reported on allegations that Cobb had retaliated against NASA research pilot Robert Rivers in a dispute over aircraft safety. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., forwarded the article to NASA Administrator Michael D. Griffin, the Post reported, and throughout 2005, Nelson's office gathered information from Cobb's current and former subordinates. Nelson's office had no comment late Thursday night on the Post story. Dan Samoviski, who retired in 2004 as deputy IG director for audits at NASA headquarters, told the Post, 'Personally, I just think he created a hostile work environment.' Several sources also told the Post that Cobb suppressed audits and stopped investigations to avoid embarrassing NASA or its leadership. Chris Swecker, assistant director of the FBI's criminal investigative division, leads the Integrity Committee. It also includes the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the director of the Office of Government Ethics and several sitting inspectors general. FBI officials did not immediately return phone messages late Thursday night.

Subject: Part 2 - the children are our future From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 01:05:31 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.cavalierdaily.com/CVArticle.asp?ID=25652&pid=1387 LAST WEEK, our fearless president stunned the nation when he offered to take unscripted questions from an audience of college students at Kansas State University in front of CNN cameras. The event proceeded pleasantly until Tiffany Cooper, a sophomore at Kansas State, stepped up to the microphone. She said, 'Recently, $12.7 billion was cut from education. I was just wondering, how is that supposed to help our futures?' Seeming to develop a sudden hearing problem, the president glanced helplessly at his aids while he stalled for time: 'Say it again. What was cut? At the federal level?' It's hard to say whether Bush was feigning idiocy or whether he honestly didn't have a clue. Perhaps he was stalling for time; perhaps the shock of a critical question rendered him temporarily unable to cogitate. But then instinct kicked in, and the president did what he does best: He responded with incoherent talking points. 'Actually, I think what we did was reform the student loan program,' he said. 'We are not cutting money out of it... It is a form of the program to make sure it functions better.' Had Bush been a newspaper reader, he might have learned that his administration recently pushed a 'Deficit Reduction Act' through the Senate that includes a $12.7 billion cut in student loan programs. If the House approves the bill today, the interest rate on Stafford loans will be raised to a fixed 6.8 percent instead of the current variable rate, which is often lower. Since the bill sets interest at a higher rate than lenders are legally allowed to receive for student loans, the difference will be used to pay off the federal deficit. These changes come at a time when tuition costs are rising rapidly at universities across the country, including our own. Currently, undergraduates at the University borrow $14 million per year, while their parents borrow another $9 million per year. Director of Financial Services Yvonne Hubbard expressed concern about the increased financial burden that the new rate will place on students. 'I don't want interest to be fixed,' she said in an interview. 'I want it to float so in good times students have an opportunity for a lower rate.' In the past year, the University has taken steps to make it easier for low-income students to come here, including the expansion of the AccessUVA program.The higher interest rate will work against these efforts and make the cost of college even more daunting. Students who must borrow will be forced to either delay their education or to take on massive debt at a young age. Hubbard said that while no one can argue with the need to pay down the deficit, Congress is 'charging the wrong population' for the cost. By passing the burden on to young people, Congress is collecting from those who can least afford the extra debt. As an alternative source of funding, Congress might consider charging the architects of our adventure in Iraq, or perhaps the private contractors who have been happily collecting at the nation's expense. They might even, God forbid, raise taxes on wealthy Americans who can afford the sacrifice. Unfortunately, college students have little opportunity for recourse when their leaders have already been purchased by private interests. Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, a key author of the legislation, received almost $250,000 in donations from the college loan industry, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. Since college students cannot afford to purchase legislators of our own, we must depend on the compassion of our leaders to represent our interests. In other words, we're screwed. Yet it was a small victory that a sophomore in Kansas forced Bush to confront the consequences of his leadership on national television. If the Republicans must hurt students to pay for a deficit of their own creation, they should have to admit it, or at least clumsily lie about it. At the conclusion of his response, the president promised Tiffany Cooper, 'I will check when I get back to Washington.' He might ask his vice president, who cast the deciding vote on the cuts in the Senate. But the more likely outcome is that it will be some time before another college student is permitted to ask an unscripted question. Cari Lynn Hennessy's usually column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at chennessy@cavalierdaily.com.

Subject: Part 3 - The future city From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 01:08:36 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Detroit the future of america? http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2006/02/political-requirements-of-bridge-met.html http://www.castefootball.us/viewarticle.asp?sportID=14&teamID=0&ID=22899 Detroit Hosts the Super Bowl (1/27/06) The 2006 Super Bowl will be held at Ford Field in Detroit. There is probably no city in America that is less suited to holding a sports extravaganza than Detroit. The whole idea of holding this event, in the middle of the winter, in a dying city like Detroit, is a modern example of the failure to acknowledge reality and instead substitute a preferred fantasy that more befits the ideas of multiculturalism and diversity. The Super Bowl is the holiest of holidays for the national religion that football has become in America. It is hyped beyond any reasonable measure. It is overrated, overblown and overdone. I have no doubt that, within 10 years the Monday after the Super Bowl will be a National holiday and an off day for government workers, unions, and whoever else is left with a job by then. The basic idea of celebrating football’s championship game at a neutral site, replete with a preceding week of parties and hype is understandable. A mid-winter vacation to a warm weather destination at a popular tourist location makes sense in the concept of football as entertainment. Since most of the teams are located in cold weather cities, the opportunity to travel south for a game is an attractive idea. It’s the same rationale for college bowl games and has proven very successful. Why then Detroit? Detroit cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered a tourist destination, unless you are a fan of arson and fires and want to visit on 'Devil’s Night,' the night before Halloween, when Detroiters en masse set fire to a variety of burnable objects in a city full of kindling. Detroit may be one of the least attractive cities in North America, perhaps the world; it's Mogadishu without the nice weather. In the middle of the summer Detroit is unattractive, in the middle of the winter, when there are sub-zero temperatures, with knife-like winds howling down deserted urban corridors, blowing trash in tsunami-like waves by piles of dirty muddy snow down salt-stained streets, it is one of the ugliest environments inhabited by man. Yet someone decided that it would be a good idea to invite thousands of people eager to have a vacation, and hundreds of reporters looking for a story, to that place. Detroit is exhibit A in the annals of American dying cities. The loss of manufacturing in this country especially as it relates to the automobile has hit Detroit like a neutron bomb. Detroit once produced more automobiles annually than any other country in the world. It hardly builds any now. And when the manufacturing base left, it just left. Detroit appears to the outsider like the ancient Mayan ruins must have appeared to the first Westerners that discovered them. It looks as if everyone just picked up and left. It's not just that there is a deserted factory here and there — the deserted factories stretch over dozens of square miles. Remember the Packard automobile? The last one rolled off the assembly line what, 50 years ago? Well the Packard plant is still there. It sits, like it has sat for the last 50 years, deserted, with crumbling walls and broken windows as if the previous inhabitants had fled in haste. It's a lonely relic of a dying civilization, waiting, perhaps like the ancient Mayan temples, for the return of a people that will never come back. When Packard went out of business, like Hudson and American Motors, and the local Chrysler, Ford, and GM plants, it just didn’t close those factories, it closed the thousands of small shops that fed a manufacturing system. The tool and die makers, the electrical suppliers, the plumbing stores, the fabricators, the machine repairers, the specialty designers. And also the places they eat lunch, go for a drink after work, seek entertainment, and do business. And when the base is gone so is the top of the pyramid, the banks, the business complexes, and the manufacturing headquarters. Not only does Detroit have miles and miles of deserted factories, shops and stores but the 'downtown' area is also deserted. There are huge skyscrapers, once proud highrises and formerly busy hotels that sit empty and barren, abandoned relics of a long ago time. A terrorist could crash a plane into one of them and virtually no one would be hurt. Detroit was once the fifth largest city in America with a metropolitan population of several million. It had about 1.5 million people at its peak. It has about 750,000 now. Nearly half a million people have virtually vanished from the city. When they left they left quickly, like someone leaving a burning house. Huge tracts of the city feature wholly deserted neighborhoods. The apocalypse is not coming to Detroit, it already has. Yet Detroit somehow attracts big-time sports venues, and as is typical these days, casinos. The two Detroit area 'royal' families, the Ford family and the Illitch family (Illitch is owner of the Little Caesar pizza empire) continue to pour the last of their families' wealth into investing in the city. The Ford family deserted the perfectly usable 'Silverdome' in Pontiac, a suburb a few miles north of Detroit, to build Ford Field for the Detroit Lions in the heart of the city. Ford Field is located a long punt away from Comerica Park, the baseball home of the Detroit Tigers, owned by Illitch. Across the street from the stadiums is a renovated theater also owned by Illitch and a couple of long homeruns away from all that is 'Joe Louis Arena,' the hockey home of the Detroit Red Wings and several newly built casinos on newly declared 'Indian reservations.' Detroit’s most prominent (still inhabited) skyscraper, the Renaissance Center, was built 30 years ago by investment from the Ford family, and like everything else in the area soon began to die. Now GM uses it to house their armies of unneeded bureaucrats. The desire for the white elites to try and 'save' urban areas from decline is not so much due to a misguided sense of philanthropy but to the realization that their personal fortunes are tied to urban areas as it is well known that the strength of a nation is reflected in the strength of its institutions. Which is bad news for America but if you haven’t gotten the memo yet that our country and civilization is doing poorly then here’s your wakeup call. Detroit is known as a 'black' city. It has long had a reputation that associates it with black culture. Blacks filled the city to get manufacturing jobs in the early and mid-20th century and now remain there mostly in poverty. Motown Records, Joe Louis and other famous black athletes also put this stamp on Detroit, which in reality has been more myth then fact. Detroit has had a large variety of ethnic racial success stories from the French settlers to Polish immigrants, to a new influx of Arabs (oh boy!). Probably because of its reputation as a black city, any major investment into the area centers around two things: sports and gambling. Although that type of thinking should be insulting to blacks, the idea that the key to their economic success lies in playing games and throwing away money at the craps table, there is no getting away from it because the leaders in the black community insist on going in that direction. One may assume their own conclusions about a culture whose leaders see their people’s future in sports and gambling. Bling bling anybody?? What it has meant to Detroit is as follows. This year was to be a 'special' year for the city. The Major League Baseball All-Star game and now the Super Bowl were to redefine the city, according to the local media spin. How a couple of weeks of soon forgotten hype would in any way change a city with deeply rooted and serious problems escaped me but the media likes to buy into these types of stories because: A) it gives them something to write about; and B) they get invited to really great parties that are hosted, frequently at taxpayer expense, so as to get reporters to write nice things about the city in the hopes that somewhere, someone may be foolish enough to invest in such a monetary black hole. So the city goes through the charade of trying to appear as presentable as possible, which is impossible. I traveled through the city around the time of the All-Star game and frankly it was embarrassing. The city tried to dress itself up and attempt to cover up the incalculable amount of disrepair visible everywhere in the city. The effect was like a diseased old lady trying to hide the ravages of sickness and age with copious amounts of makeup and rouge. Any route through the city is full of formerly classy buildings now falling down, with awnings dropping off, windows broken, graffiti-covered boards and bars on doors and windows. There are old movie marquees advertising burlesque shows circa 1974, which was the last time the elegant deserted movie houses had paying customers. In a pathetic attempt to cover up the more egregious scars, curtains were placed over some particularly bad eyesores. The city, which cannot pay its employees or deliver basic services, ponied up money so that they could cover up the windows of once expensive hotels. There is barely enough room to house visitors in the city, in fact most of them have to be bussed in and out from surrounding suburbs. There are huge 60-floor hotels that housed kings and presidents in the city, but now they are empty and cold. And there are burned-out buildings. The buildings were not burned by recent arsonists. Nor did they catch fire due to inattention. They were burned in the 1967 'race riots.' Nearly 40 years ago a large percentage of the black population decided that it would be a good idea to burn and loot the stores and shops that had provided them their goods and livelihoods. The shopkeepers got the message and left. And there they still sit, mute testimony to the pathological problems of the black community. There are no whites who want to rebuild them and no blacks that can. Forty years later, with the scars still visible, the disease still progressing to a long terminal fate, America, actually the whole world, will be invited in to take a look. The impression they get will help fuel the descent of American culture. The guests may speak well, or cover up the truth in their best PC fashion. But reality has a way of forcing out fantasy. Detroit is the future of America. Enjoy the game.

Subject: Part 4 - the beginning of the end From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 01:14:08 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: DJ Fed Bies: Banks' Risk Management Must Avoid Complacency-2 WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--U.S. banks must avoid complacent risk management as their exposures to commercial real estate loans and non-traditional home mortgages have grown rapidly, Federal Reserve Governor Susan Bies said Thursday. 'While most U.S. banking organizations enjoy substantial profitability today, they should remember that continued business success depends on their ability to prepare for unexpected, and potentially much less favorable, events and outcomes,' Bies said in remarks prepared for delivery at an annual meeting of the Financial Services Institute. The Fed governor focused on proposed regulatory guidance the Fed and other supervisors issued recently about the risks of historically volatile business real estate lending and largely untested exotic mortgages such as 'interest only' and 'payment option' loans. For banks with assets of $1 billion to $10 billion, exposure to commercial real estate, or CRE, loans - including owner-occupied CRE - has grown dramatically to more than 300% of capital, compared with a previous peak of about 200% during the bank-sector woes of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Warning of growing risks for some lenders, U.S. regulators earlier this month proposed guidance for banks and thrifts that lend largely for office buildings, rental apartment buildings and other commercial real estate ventures. The guidance, which excludes owner-occupied CRE lending, addresses regulators' concerns that 'banks, in order to attract new business and sustain volume, may be inclined to occasionally make some compromises and concessions to borrowers,' Bies said. Banks should continue watching loan-to-value standards and debt-to-service ratios to avoid looser risk management, she said. 'We also continue to monitor whether these lenders routinely adjust covenants, lengthen maturities or reduce collateral requirements,' she said. Banks with large concentrations of CRE loans may need to both bolster risk controls and boost capital levels, Bies said. 'This is particularly important, since CRE lending in recent years has occurred under fairly benign credit conditions and, naturally, those conditions are unlikely to continue indefinitely,' she said. This month's proposed guidance would set two thresholds for banks and thrifts to consider special measures. The first is when total loans for construction, land development and 'other land' meet or exceed a lender's risk-based capital. The second is when total loans for construction, land development and 'other land' combined with loans secured by multi-unit rental properties and nonfarm, nonresidential buildings represent 300% or more of a lender's risk-based capital. The Fed governor also highlighted proposed guidance, issued last month, on relatively exotic mortgages such as interest-only loans - which allow borrowers to defer principal and, sometimes, interest - and payment-option adjustable-rate mortgages - which allow borrowers to increase the total loan repayment amount. In 2005 these exotic loans made up about one-third of total U.S. mortgage originations, compared with about 10% in 2003, but they still accounted for less than 20% of nearly $8 trillion in outstanding mortgages, Bies noted. While credit quality for residential mortgages 'generally remains strong,' the Fed and other supervisors are concerned risk management hasn't kept up with non-traditional loans, 'a risk that would be heightened by a downturn in the housing market,' she said. A particular concern is that exotic mortgages, historically offered to higher-income borrowers, are making inroads with others, including subprime borrowers. These borrowers are more likely to be shocked when their monthly payments suddenly rise sharply after an initial low-payment period, 'which means they are more likely to default on the loan,' Bies said. Supervisors worry about 'risk layering' with exotic loans, as some lenders may reduce credit documentation and make simultaneous second-lien mortgages, she said. Lenders also should recognize these types of loans haven't been tested through hard times and 'could be particularly affected by a housing price decline,' she said. The Fed governor also identified legal, regulatory and reputational risks banks face in their policies to prevent money laundering and terrorism financing. In this area many U.S. banks are 'ahead of the curve,' and regulators have been trying to issue clear guidance, she said. In all operations, banks and thrifts should take a comprehensive view of risk management, 'making sure the 'right hand' knows what the 'left hand' is doing,' Bies said. -By Campion Walsh, Dow Jones Newswires; 202 862 9249; campion.walsh@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires

Subject: Part 5 - Bhagwati and rising tides From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 01:15:58 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: UK PRESS: Zimbabwe Pres Seizing White-owned City Property LONDON (Dow Jones)--President Robert Mugabe has begun confiscating and vandalizing white-owned property in Zimbabwe's cities, after taking over most farms in the countryside, The Daily Telegraph reports Thursday without naming sources. Police last week evicted hundreds of people from their homes eight miles from the center of the capital Harare. Mugabe began violently evicting and dispossessing some 4,000 white farmers and hundreds of thousands of their workers in 2000. The whites were punished because the president said they supported and funded the opposition which almost beat him in the election that year. UK PRESS: ZIMBABWE Crops Fail Despite Ample Rain White plantation owners get the boot - Kunte Kinte starves :( LONDON (Dow Jones)--Food crops in ZIMBABWE have failed again despite ample rainfall, the Daily Telegraph reports Wednesday without citing sources. ZIMBABWE is expected this year to grow less than half of what it needs to feed the population and the rains have denied President Robert Mugabe his standard explanation of poor weather for slumping production. More than 20 million acres of ZIMBABWE's well-developed agricultural land has been confiscated from about 4,000 experienced white farmers since 2000 and handed to Mugabe's supporters, senior civil servants and members of his extended family. Newspaper Web site: http://www.telegraph.co.uk Do you really think One Jimmy Carter can fix all this stuff? I hope to be proven wrong - maybe I will be - I will keep an open mind Pete.

Subject: Re: Part 5 - Bhagwati and rising tides From: Pete Weis To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 07:52:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'Do you really think One Jimmy Carter can fix all this stuff? I hope to be proven wrong - maybe I will be - I will keep an open mind Pete.' No. No single leader can solve all problems. But having said that, when the 'average Joes' finally really start to feel the damage from all that you posted (for some reason they have yet to notice) they will demand changes and hopefully, we will get a President and a Congress who will make it better for 'Joe' who is the backbone of our economy. Johnny5. IMO, too much damage has already happened to this economy for it to go on being called resilient much longer. As I have said if it gets through the next few years (remainder of Bush presidency) without a significant slump then everything we have been posting is just bologna.

Subject: On India's Roads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:25:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/international/asia/06highway.html?ex=1291525200&en=99e7beb7b6a59b4d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 6, 2005 On India's Roads, Cargo and a Deadly Passenger By AMY WALDMAN NELAMANGALA, India - Hot water: 10 rupees. Cold water: 8 rupees. Toilet: 5 rupees. Sex: no price specified on the bathhouse wall, but, as the condom painted there suggests, safe. Sangeetha Hamam, a bathhouse, sits on the national highway near this gritty truck stop about nine miles north of Bangalore. Its mistress is Ranjeetha, a 28-year-old eunuch who lives as a woman. Her lipstick and black dress provide a touch of glamour in the small dark shack. Her clients are not only truckers, but also Bangalore college students and other city residents. They know to look for sex at highway establishments geared toward truckers. Her customers - as many as 100 on Sundays for her and five other eunuchs - come for a 'massage' and the anal sex that follows, but also for the anonymity the location confers. Ranjeetha knows men will pay more for unprotected sex, but she calculates that the extra money is not worth the risk to her livelihood and life. She knows they can go elsewhere; there are some 45 bathhouses doubling as brothels near this truck stop. She also knows several eunuchs who have died of AIDS. India has at least 5.1 million people living with H.I.V., the second highest number after South Africa. It is, by all accounts, at a critical stage: it can either prevent the further spread of infection, or watch a more generalized epidemic take hold. Global experts worry that India is both underspending on AIDS and undercounting its H.I.V. cases. Its national highways are a conduit for the virus, passed by prostitutes and the truckers, migrants and locals who pay them, and brought home to unsuspecting wives in towns or villages. In its largest infrastructure project since independence, India is in the process of widening and upgrading those highways into a true interstate system. The effort will allow the roads to carry more traffic and freight than ever before. But some things are better left uncarried. The national highways between New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai run through at least six districts where H.I.V. prevalence is above 2.5 percent. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and a photographer drove the route, which has been nicknamed the Golden Quadrilateral. To drive it is to peel back a nation's secret, or not so secret, sex life, and the potent mix of desire, denial and stigma that is helping spread the disease. India's entry into the global economy over the past 15 years may also be furthering the spread of AIDS. With rising incomes, men have more money for sex; poor women see selling sex as their only access to the new prosperity. Cities are drawing more migrants and prostitutes, and Western influences are liberalizing Indian sexual mores. In response, cultural protectionists are refusing to allow even the national conversation about AIDS to reflect this changing reality. The notion of a sexually chaste India is a 'complete myth,' said Ashok Alexander, the director of Avahan, the India AIDS Initiative of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its preservation hurts prevention: 'You say it's not a big problem, only 'those people' are doing that.' Driving the highway also shows the complications in reaching the various constituencies along it. India's AIDS epidemic is as variegated as the country itself, with a multiplicity of high-risk groups. Intravenous drug users concentrate in northeastern states. Devadasis - poor, lower-caste women consecrated to gods as young girls and then consigned to prostitution - live in the south. Many of the groups are deeply fragmented and in perpetual motion, making them difficult for educators to reach: the man who owns a single truck; the woman who works at night out of a thatched hut; the lone migrant who shuttles back and forth between his village and urban work. But a number of AIDS prevention groups have come to see working along the highway as the best hope for targeted interventions. Avahan is pouring much of its $200 million into efforts along the highway. Another group, Project Concern International, sent young men to walk the Golden Quadrilateral - 3,625 miles long - over the course of a year to raise awareness about AIDS. They met truckers, villagers, road workers and migrants, and in some places were cheered as heroes. In others, they were chased out for daring to discuss condoms and H.I.V., accused of spreading promiscuity and disease. Sometimes, construction on the highway blocked the workers' way. But the deeper obstacles were culture, politics and history. The puritanical values of British colonialists repressed sexual expression in this country - essentially criminalizing homosexuality - and stigmatized it in many Indians' eyes as well. Some of the socially conservative Hindu nationalists who governed until 2004 tried to pretend no one was having sex, at least outside marriage. In truth, sex work has flourished in independent India. Red-light districts operate openly in cities like Mumbai, formerly Bombay, and in its new suburbs and industrial areas. Hundreds of girls and women parade the streets at night near 'pharmacies' where quacks peddle fake AIDS remedies. And advocates battling the spread of AIDS say they have learned that men having sex with men, then with their wives, is surprisingly common, but veiled by stigma. Ranjeetha, the bathhouse mistress, believes the real danger is not open eunuchs like her, but the men in denial, who work in offices by day and dress in saris at night. 'People who lead double lives don't use condoms,' she said. Awareness and Denial At least 1,000 trucks a day pass through Nelamangala's trans-shipment point, often waiting hours or days for a new load. In the interim, drivers and their helpers patronize bathhouses like Sangeetha, although many of the sex establishments do not paint condoms on the outside, and use none inside. There are three million to four million trucks on India's roads, at least one million of them traveling long distances. If truckers cannot find sex at trans-shipment points, they can buy it on the roadside, where women signal potential clients with flashlights. As many as 11 percent of truckers may be H.I.V. positive. In some parts of the country, like Tamil Nadu, the stigma around truckers has grown so strong that fathers forbid their daughters to marry them. Yet no one has figured out a comprehensive system for education or testing. There are perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 regional transport companies, but most trucks are owner-driven or run by small companies. The major stopping points, or trans-shipment yards, see so many truckers each day that even if truckers take an AIDS test, there is no way to follow up - an 'amnesiac system' in one advocate's words. In a dusty parking lot at this truck trans-shipment point, an AIDS educator wielded a black dildo and a condom, encircled by truckers who stifled mirth and curiosity. 'Why are you targeting us?' a trucker asked the educator. Truckers asked if AIDS could be transmitted by mosquito bites. They made ribald jokes about their sex lives, and boasted about not using condoms. One trucker interrupted to say he knew people who used condoms and still got AIDS. 'Check the expiration date,' the educator said. 'We are illiterate, we can't read,' the trucker replied. In the country's north, some drivers say they have never heard of AIDS, although their facial expressions may suggest otherwise. In the south, where AIDS is much more common, denial is trickier. Truckers have heard of AIDS, and often know someone who died from it, and word is starting to travel along with the virus. But awareness does not always translate to protection. Bhagwan Singh, 47, a trucker who was halting at the Gujarat-Rajasthan border, said he did not use condoms, because he had paid for sex only a few times. 'What happens if I just go once, twice, thrice?' he said. 'Only if I'm a regular fellow I might contract such things.' Bringing H.I.V. Home Once, twice, thrice or more often, whatever the truckers do on the road, or migrants do in cities, is coming home to oblivious wives. Here, the danger of a culture that is simultaneously licentious and conservative, of seasoned husbands and sheltered wives, becomes clear. This has become especially apparent in India's southern states, which are prospering economically, but have been hit the hardest by AIDS, along with pockets of the isolated northeast. The states the highway runs through in the south all have H.I.V. infection rates of 1 percent or higher. In the government hospital in Guntur, a district with a 2.5 percent H.I.V. infection rate, Sambra Ja Lakshmi, 27, a mother of two, was being counseled. Her husband, a 33-year-old trucker, had done 'thousands of kilometers on the national highway,' as she put it. Where he got H.I.V. is unknown, but he was so sick he could no longer move. She, a homemaker and mother who barely left her village about 15 miles off the highway, was H.I.V. positive, too. The counselor, Sunita Murugudu, had heard it before, and knew she would hear it again. Some 80 percent of truckers' wives who came in for voluntary testing and counseling tested positive, she said, usually because by the time they came in their husbands were on their deathbeds, and denial could no longer be sustained. G. Karuna, 24, was another woman who fell prey to the peregrinations of her husband, a long-distance driver from a family of truckers. When they both sought treatment for tuberculosis or opportunistic infections at hospitals, they hid his occupation, since many private hospitals now turn truckers away. After her husband died, his family blamed her, a cruel vengeance some in-laws inflict on the widows. They have made treatment and prevention that much harder. She was forced to sleep on the path outside; the family refused to share even a loaf of bread that she had touched. Soon their whole village had ostracized her. Ms. Karuna cried as she told her story, but that story also conveyed an uncommon strength. She had left her husband's family and her village to start a new life on her own. She became an activist with the Social Educational and Economic Development Society, an advocacy group in Guntur, trying to save other truckers' wives. She showed women pictures of her handsome husband before he sickened, and after. She told the wives to know what their husbands were doing outside the home, to negotiate the use of condoms with them, to get treated for sexually transmitted diseases. Her husband's relatives still teased her: 'Why are you working so hard? You also will die.' Morality and Stigma In the town of Nippani, outside Lafayette Hospital, a sign warned against unprotected sex, showing a blue demon on a horse slaying a healthy man. But those who fell prey to that demon were not welcomed, explained a doctor, Sunil Sase. AIDS carried a stigma like leprosy, he said, 'so we are not exactly treating the AIDS cases.' They were sent to another hospital 50 miles away. A group working to raise AIDS awareness among prostitutes had been chased from Nippani after being accused of promoting sex. Most of the devadasis and prostitutes, who had been working in the town on the highway for 50 years, had been chased out in a morality crusade. Now they were scattered along the road, impossible to reach with education or condoms. A mob had pulled one prostitute, Reshma Sheikh, and her 7-year-old son out of her house to try to force them from town. 'We have a right to live and work there, we never hurt the sentiments of the people around,' she said. She had stayed, only because she had nowhere else to go. The main group leading the crusade was the Shiv Sena, a Hindu nationalist political party. Sunil Sadashir Dalavi, 32, the local leader, boasted about their success. But he said the women were not the only cause for the spread of AIDS. 'Educated boys don't get jobs, they have extra time, they don't know what to do,' he said. 'They can't marry till they get a job, they have very strong desires, so they go to these women.' Once the men were married they would not do 'these things,' he insisted, despite government surveys showing otherwise. The answer to controlling sex was controlling the culture, he said. A lot of local men went to two nearby cinemas that screened sex movies, he said, and then to brothels. 'We want to close the 'talkies' down,' he said, 'so people will not do this.' A Fragmented Industry In almost every doorway in the red-light district of Chilakaluripet, in Andhra Pradesh, women drape, wearing bright clothes, garish makeup and come-hither expressions that have served to lure both men and disease. For half a century, the town has been a center of sex work, combining its location on the national highway with women from its Domara community, which has come to specialize in prostitution. Truckers passing through know where to stop; if they do not, there are hotel boys, rickshaw pullers and others willing to guide them. In recent years, the town and surrounding area have also become a center of H.I.V. infection, and, given the number of long-distance truckers tarrying here, a likely source for its spread elsewhere. The sex industry has been organized in some cities, like Calcutta, but mostly it is as fragmented as the trucking industry. Chilakaluripet features brothel-based and home-based prostitutes, secret prostitutes and women who sell sex along the highway. A police crackdown on brothels in recent years has further dispersed the women. Venkaimah, a 25-year-old widow, is part of a 'highway brothel' - a small moving coterie of women who work in bushes or fields or restaurants along the road. Her workday starts when the light is gone and the truck traffic heavy. She leaves her two daughters, 10 and 2, behind, and on a good night may get 8 to 10 customers who pay 50 cents to a dollar each. Some prostitutes now use condoms, but the disease continues to spread. One local organization, Needs Serving Society, estimated that 1,000 people had tested positive for H.I.V. in the town and nearby villages, most of them not prostitutes, but locals who may have patronized them. No one, though, had any real idea of the true number. On one narrow lane alone, 20 prostitutes were infected, said one of them, Konda, 38. Venkaimah's children motivated her to use condoms - if she did not, she knew that sooner or later they would be orphaned. But loneliness can loosen defenses: like many prostitutes, she had 'temporary husbands' - longtime boyfriends - with whom she did not use a condom at all. Chilakaluripet, known for sex, was now marked by death. In a courtyard, Venkateswarmma, a mother of two, as thin and brittle as a doll, sat on a cot, unable to move. Her husband, a brothel owner's son, had died 10 days before, infected after sleeping with its employees. She was near death herself, unable to walk for her husband's death ceremony. Her 2-year-old son had already died from AIDS; she would leave behind an 11-year-old boy. A Mobile Society For 15 years, Vilas Jaganath Kamkar had been taking the bus from his village in Maharashtra state to Mumbai, its capital, where he worked as a taxicab driver. In 1994, he had taken a wife, Manisha, but he kept working in Mumbai, with monthly visits home. In this migrant nation, his life was not unique. Nor, in this age of AIDS, was his fate. Migrants may be the hardest group for AIDS educators to reach. As Indian society becomes more mobile, people are leaving villages for urban work at increasing rates. In Maharashtra, new plants and factories are springing up along the revamped highway. As rural migrants come to work in the factories, poor women follow to sexually service the men. Newly rich locals patronize the abundant supply of women, spawning H.I.V. 'hot spots' along the highways. In cities, the migrants live in slums, three or more to a room, and may move often. Away from their families for months at a time, they seek the companionship not just of prostitutes but of girlfriends, with whom safe sex is often ignored. Migrants leave home to work, but go home to die. At the hospital in Satara, a prospering city on the highway south of Mumbai, Mr. Kamkar, the taxi driver, now 32, lay breathless on a hospital bed. His luck had run out, and not just because he had contracted H.I.V. Only 25 hospitals and health centers were prescribing antiretroviral drugs. They were available in Guntur, but not 12 miles south in Chilakaluripet. They could be had in Mumbai - but not in Satara. All Mrs. Kamkar, 25, a mother of two, could do was take her husband back to their village, try to ease his pain and nurse him until the end. 'It's a matter of his destiny,' she said.

Subject: All Roads Lead to Cities From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:24:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/07/international/asia/07highway.html?ex=1291611600&en=dfc796600f94f9db&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 7, 2005 All Roads Lead to Cities, Transforming India By AMY WALDMAN SURAT, India - This western city has at least 300 slum pockets, grimy industry, factory-fouled air and a spiraling crime rate. A 1994 epidemic - reported as pneumonic plague - that originated here caused national panic. It is the kind of place where the body of a woman killed by a passing truck is left in the street because no one knows her. The city hardly seems like a beacon, yet for young men across India it shines like one. In his central Indian village, B. P. Pandey heard that Surat was a 'big industrial town' and made his way here to work. Rinku Gupta, 18, one of Mr. Pandey's five roommates, came from the north. Hundreds of thousands more have traveled from Orissa, in the east, and from Maharashtra, to the south. In the rural mind, Surat, in Gujarat state, looms with outsized allure, and its girth is growing to match. In less than 15 years, its population has more than doubled, to an estimated 3.5 million, making it India's ninth largest city. A majority of Surat's residents are migrants, drawn by its two main industries, diamonds and textiles. Surat's growth spurt is being replicated across India. At least 28 percent of its population now lives in cities and many more of its citizens move in and out of them for temporary work. In some southern states, nearly half the population is in cities. In 1991, India had 23 cities with one million or more people. A decade later it had 35. As the people shift, so does the very nature of India. This is a nation of 600,000 villages, each of them a unit that has ordered life for centuries, from the strata of caste to the cycles of harvest. In this century, cities' pull and influence - not only financial but also psychic - are remaking society. Less visible than the heated consumerism or western sexual habits changing India, this slow churning may be more profound and, for a country weaned on the virtues of village life, more wrenching. 'From all over India, they are coming,' said Kailash Pandey, a milk seller, of the migrants pouring into Kanpur, one of the million-plus cities. Kanpur, Surat and 17 of the other biggest cities sit along the so-called Golden Quadrilateral - 3,625 miles of national highways that circle the country and are being modernized in an epic infrastructure project. Earlier this year, a New York Times reporter and photographer drove that route, looping through India's megalopolises - New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai. The highway brings in and out almost everything cities need, including much of the cheap labor that men like B. P. Pandey supply. So with the road's improvement, Surat and other cities are surging anew, spreading toward the highway as if toward their life source. The redone highway is also shrinking the distance between villages and cities. In the countryside through which the route passed, the buzz was about places like Surat, and the sense of a nation on the move. 'This is rural India - people don't stay,' said Anil Kumar, a shopkeeper in the village of Kaushambi. 'The highway has made it easier.' Compared with China, whose rural population is also moving, India's urbanization has been a saunter, not a sprint - slower, looser and more haphazard. That is partly because some of India's economic policies have served to constrict its cities' possibilities. Decisions made during and even after four decades of quasi socialism have crimped the kind of manufacturing that has spurred China's urban growth. Good jobs or not, India's migrants still come. Their presence is creating new challenges: battles for land, competition for jobs, strained resources and religious and political tensions. So diverse is Surat's population that the municipal corporation now runs schools in eight languages. And when the migrants return home, they bring new views and aspirations with them. Their perspectives are combining with the improved highways to open up, and out, the closed worlds of India's villages. Waiting for a bus at the station in Jaipur, Surender Yadav offered his own village as an example. Bypassed by development, it sat down a wretched road off the highway between Jaipur and New Delhi. There was no medical dispensary, and perhaps more galling to Mr. Yadav, a 26-year-old doctoral candidate in Hindi, no newspaper delivery. But the highway's widening and resurfacing meant villagers were no longer waiting for development to come to them. Every morning, Mr. Yadav said, 20 or so people rode their motorbikes to the highway, parked and hopped on a bus. They went to New Delhi, two and a half hours away, or Gurgaon, even closer, and worked as police officers, low-level clerks or customer care representatives in call centers. India, ever absorptive, had absorbed the highway, and turned out something new: the commuter village. The village is becoming less a way of life than a place to live, a stop on the journey to the metropolis. Brighter Prospects During religious holidays, 200 to 300 buses a day pull out of Surat and head north for 10 hours on the national highway. Their destination: the rural region of Saurashtra. Their cargo: diamond cutters and polishers visiting the drought-parched villages they left to work in the city. By the hundreds of thousands, the young men of Saurashtra have found good livings in Surat, even though most lack good educations. They earn about $2,400 a year - nearly five times the average per capita income - in diamond work, and sometimes significantly more. Rajesh Kumar Raghavji Santoki, 28, had tried farming for a year at home, and given up in the face of a water shortage. After just three years in Surat, he was earning in a month more than the $500 his farmer father earned in a year. He owned a house, a motorcycle and a van. India found its niche in the cutting and polishing of low-cost diamonds for the global middle class, and today more than 7 of 10 diamonds in the world are polished in Surat. It has created close to 500,000 jobs here alone. That is nearly half as many jobs as India's entire information technology industry. Bangalore, the symbol of India's knowledge economy, may be a global buzzword, but the fate of India's rural poor depends more on industrial cities like Surat. Together, the cities' dominance means that India will never return to a farming-based economy. The urban portion of the gross domestic product is roughly double the urban population, a fact not lost on Mr. Santoki or his boss, Savji Dholakia. Nearly 30 years ago, Mr. Dholakia was an impoverished farmer's son, who at age 14 came by bus down the highway from Saurashtra to Surat. Today, he runs a family-owned diamond business, Hari Krishna Exports, that did $103 million in exports last year. He speeds back to his home village on the revamped highway in a silver Mercedes E220. His example spurs more young men to follow him back. In a fine white shirt and gold chain, Mr. Dholakia sat in his round white office, its sterile modishness far from his dusty youth, and analyzed his ascent. In today's India, he said, migrating from country to city was the only way. He was rich enough now to buy his entire village many times over. 'If you want to play international cricket, you need a proper playground; you cannot play in a field,' he said, with six television screens to monitor his workers before him. 'If you want to grow internationally, you have to leave your place.' Dreams to Chase In the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, B. P. Pandey intuited as much, although his dreams were more prosaic than a multi-continental business empire. He came to Surat, he said, 'to earn and enjoy.' Rough nubs, not polished facets, had brought him from the rural hinterland. Surat, once famed for its silks and brocades, has become a synthetic textile hub. The clacking of 600,000 hidden power looms fills its streets. Its factories texturize yarn, produce embroidery thread, weave saris and ship all of it along the highways to Punjab, Tamil Nadu and elsewhere. Mr. Pandey had come to be a cog in this enterprise. Farming back home was dying, and his aspirations rising. He did not want to work in his home area, he said. He wanted what the city offered - energy, opportunity, the rewards of globalization. Those rewards were not yet in reach. Mr. Pandey, 30, working in a yarn texturizing factory, earned only 2,100 rupees, or $46 a month. It was more than he could earn at home, but hardly enough to lift him from poverty. Yet he counted himself lucky to have a job. India's relatively low exports and underdeveloped manufacturing sector - only 25 percent of its economy - meant the demand for factory jobs in the city far outstripped the supply. Many migrants eked out work as street vendors or day laborers. The expanded highway was already giving Surat's textile industry a boost, cutting the time to move goods to ports, and to cities around the country. It had also cut the travel time to Mumbai, formerly Bombay: the 155 miles separating the two cities now could be driven in just over three hours, and Mumbaikars were coming to Surat to invest. But fixing the roads would not be enough to make India competitive. Ports and airports also need work. Inflexible labor laws, excessive bureaucracy and indifference to quality by industries long sheltered from competition have undermined India's race for a larger piece of the global economy. Even Surat's two main industries were vulnerable to these handicaps, and China was hungrily eyeing them both. Rigid and strike-happy labor unions, meanwhile, have cramped growth, and prompted industry to migrate toward cities without them. One result was that workers like Mr. Pandey had no union, and thus no benefits, no contract, no job security. He worked six and a half days a week, his only shift off stemming from a mandatory power cut, when he rested in his room. He lived in a barren tenement above the factory where he worked, in an overcrowded, underserviced industrial estate. Mr. Pandey had come to enjoy, but the city had no real entertainment, and only 774 women for every 1,000 men. For many migrants, alcohol - brought down the highway like everything else here - filled the gaps. Money and Motivation If cities' conditions were grim, and the earnings meager, their fruits still tasted sweet in the village. To the rural poor in India's eastern and northern states, Surat and other cities to the south and west offered the best hope for a decent job. The men in the state of Orissa, on India's eastern coast, had long ago concluded that literally crossing their country to work beat farming the fields next door. In Surat, they had cornered some of the more lucrative textile jobs, and shoehorned relatives and friends from Orissa into them as well. The money-order economy they had created was reconfiguring life back home. Sushant Mohanti and two dozen other men from his village, which sat next to the highway in Orissa, regularly went to work in Surat's textile factories, about 870 miles away. He sent to his family at least one-third of the $150 or more he earned each month, as did the others. For many rural families, having a member working in a city protected against vagaries of weather or crops. But it could also mean enough money for a substantially better life. Mr. Mohanti swept his hand grandly across the product of the migrants' labors: a row of solid, or 'pukka,' houses that had replaced the village's thatched huts. But migrants were bringing home more than money. Five hundred to 700 people from the village of Golantara in Orissa had gone to Surat to work, said Bibuti Jena, a former village head. They came back with new drive, haranguing less motivated peers who used caste barriers, unemployment or a lack of land to justify their inertia. 'I go out and work, why don't you?' the returnees said, and their words resonated. 'People are less lazy,' Mr. Jena said of the village that spread behind him. 'The work culture is changing.' So were desires. A bit north on the highway in Orissa, Nila Madhav, 21, stood on the median, next to fellow villagers selling watermelons to passing cars. After four years of traveling to Bangalore to do embroidery work for $90 a month, he said, he could no longer see himself cultivating watermelon, or farming at all. It wasn't only the money: he had adapted to the city's ways, and south India's gentler climate, in the process rejecting the life of his parents. 'It's very hot here,' he said of the spot his family had farmed for generations, 'and I don't like to work in the heat.' Mr. Madhav had returned from the city with not only a new attitude, but also with a new language. His native language was Oriya, but he was holding forth on the median in Hindi. In cities like Bangalore and Surat, far from the Hindi-speaking north, Hindi had become the migrant lingua franca, the vernacular of a new pan-Indian culture. Urban work was creating new identities. And in a country where caste has determined fates from birth, it also offered something subversive: freedom. The Power of Labor Given that they were sleeping at a highway crossroads in the city of Udaipur, 315 miles north of Surat, Shankar Lal Rawat and his fellow pavement dwellers did not look like liberated men. They had come from a village to the north, and were living day and night on their patch of cement, where they waited for contractors to hire them as porters or construction workers for less than $2 a day. They were farmers, but the dynamics of their village had made farming unprofitable. As Adivasis, members of India's indigenous tribes, their status matched that of the lowest castes. The power in their village, much of the land, the money-lending monopoly and access to the water supply all belonged to a Rajput, or upper-caste, landlord named Jaswant Singh. He paid just over a dollar a day for the men to labor in his fields. He charged prohibitive rates for the water they needed to work their own land, and for the loans they took to pay him for it. In their village, as in much of India, the caste system had conflated ritual status and economic power. So they had chosen to travel down the new highway to the city and its thriving construction industry. The men's migration had deprived Jaswant Singh of his labor supply - a problem emerging for upper-caste landlords across India as lower castes leave - and asserted their financial independence. Gandhi idealized villages as the way to return Indians to their precolonial state. B. K. Ambedkar, the Dalit, or untouchable, leader who helped write India's Constitution, saw it differently: he called villages a cesspool, 'a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism,' and urged untouchables to flee them for urban anonymity. In a modernizing India, Ambedkar's words are being heeded as never before for economic, not social reasons. Over time, the results may be the same. Mr. Rawat, 30, and the other laborers living by the highway had traded rural poverty for urban, and left their families behind. The city's daily wages amounted to only slightly more than they would have earned tilling Jaswant Singh's fields. But in the choice of where to struggle, or whom to owe, was power - hardly a revolution, but a start.

Subject: Re: All Roads Lead to Cities From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 15:16:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: How ironic - we are doing a toll road study from Surat to Manor. There is a lot I would like to add but it has to remain confidential at the moment.

Subject: India, Status Comes With Four Wheels From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:20:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/05/international/asia/05highway.html?ex=1291438800&en=5361526dacb544cd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 5, 2005 In Today's India, Status Comes With Four Wheels By AMY WALDMAN VISHAKHAPATNAM, India - On the dark highway, the car showroom glowed in the night like an American drive-in. Inside, it looked more like a game-show set: bright lights, white floors, huge windows, high ceilings and ad posters of beaming consumers far paler than most Indians. For 36-year-old Ram Reddy, the price was right enough to make a down payment on his fifth family car. He and his brother already had one car 'for the children,' two 'for the ladies,' and so on. Now they were buying the Toyota Innova, a big-as-a-boat luxury van that retails for a minimum of $23,000, 46 times India's per capita income of about $500. The Innova is a new plaything of the moneyed here, one being peddled, like so many products in India today, by a Bollywood star. It is yet another symbol of the kid-in-a-candy-store psyche that has seized India's growing consuming class, once denied capitalism's choices and now flooded with them. Fifteen years after India began its transition from a state-run to a free-market economy, a new culture of money - making it, and even more, spending it - is afoot. This domestic hunger for goods has become an important engine for an economy that still lags in exports. So intense is the advertising onslaught, so giddy the media coverage of the new affluence, that it is almost easy to forget that India remains home to the world's largest number of poor people, according to the World Bank. Still, India's middle class has grown to an estimated 250 million in the past decade, and the number of super-rich has grown sharply as well. And, after more decades of socialist deprivation, when consumer goods were so limited that refrigerators were given pride of place in living rooms, they have ever more wares to spend it on: cellphones, air-conditioners and washing machines; Botox, sushi and Louis Vuitton bags; and, perhaps the biggest status symbol of all, cars. India has become one of the world's fastest-growing car markets, with about a million being sold each year. It once had only two kinds, Fiats and Ambassadors. Now dozens of models ride the roads, from the humble, Indian-made Maruti to the Rolls-Royce, which has re-entered India's market some 50 years after leaving in the British wake. Indians are discovering in cars everything Americans did: control and freedom, privacy and privilege, speed and status. Car showrooms, the bigger the better, are the new temples here, and cars the icons of a new individualism taking root. Foreign car companies, meanwhile, have discovered the Indian consumer - not to mention the country's engineering brain power - and are setting up plants across India. The growing lust for cars also reflects India finally having roads decent enough to drive them on. It is making a historic effort to upgrade its dismal, mostly two-lane national highway system into four- or six-lane interstates, its largest infrastructure project since independence in 1947. A New York Times reporter and a photographer drove one portion of the project, the so-called Golden Quadrilateral, which passes through New Delhi, Calcutta, Madras, officially known as Chennai, and Mumbai, formerly Bombay, earlier this year. The revamped highways mean that, for the first time in India, cars can go fast; thus the new appetite for fast cars. The middle and upper classes, already being lured by one of the world's fastest-growing domestic airline industries, are discovering driving for pleasure as much as need. 'This is the American 1950's happening in India now,' said Padma Chandrasekaran, a Madras resident marveling at the new ease of driving the 205 miles to Bangalore. The new highways have seduced well-off consumers like Mr. Reddy, who plans to use the Innova for family road trips to places like the temple at Tirupati, about 400 miles south of here, a trip he would previously have made by train. The highway's smoother surfaces and additional lanes have also enriched him, by reducing fuel and maintenance costs for his trucking company. 'If the roads were not good, we would not have this many cars,' said the bearded Mr. Reddy, whose 9-year-old son already knows how to steer an automobile. Consumers' Appetites Grow The 8,300-square-foot Toyota showroom had been open only a few months, and its location just outside town on the silky new highway had already turned out to be a prime sales aid. The general manager chuckled, saying that if he gave a test drive on the road, it would be 'a happy ride.' That many of the city's one million residents are what Sastry V. Prakky, the dealership's senior sales and marketing manager, calls 'filthy rich' also does not hurt. Named for Visakha, the god of valor, Vishakhapatnam faces the Bay of Bengal, in the state of Andhra Pradesh. The city is home to one of India's largest ports and the country's oldest shipyard. It is also squarely in India's booming south. Some residents have prospered by going to work in the United States in information technology, others by opening 'business process outsourcing' centers. Many work in pharmaceutical production, or export carpets or shellfish. Pricy hotels line the beachfront, and driving schools the side streets, although Indian driving habits raise questions about the quality of their instruction. Almost every beauty salon also has a 'body weight reduction' center, reflecting the upper-middle-class's new obsession, and plumpness: people are still starving in India, but people are overeating, too. In a historical blink, capitalism, which postcolonial analysis once labeled poverty's cause, is now seen as its solution. Debt, once anathema for the middle class, is now an acceptable means to an end. For a sliver of Indians, the go-go years are here. The same sentiment has permeated the countryside, where young men drive bright yellow motorbikes with names like Ambition and dream of becoming crorepatis, or multimillionaires. America, of course, went through a similar evolution: the making of a postwar consumerist economy; the introduction of credit cards and growing comfort with, and dependence on, debt; the rise of an advertising culture. India today offers the chance to watch it in real time, at a hyper, almost-out-of-control, pace. 'Now the people want to spend and enjoy,' Mr. Prakky said. 'Everyone wants upgradation': the scooter owner wants a motorbike, the motorbike owner a car, the car owner a more expensive one. He was checking the paperwork on another new purchase, including a deposit of 180,000 rupees, or about $4,000. He took it upstairs to the general manager, C. Sudhaker, whose glass-walled office overlooked the showroom floor. In modern times, as Mr. Sudhaker put it, a good car was a business necessity, not just about showing off, although he conceded an appetite for 'recognition in society.' That appetite was on display in other showrooms along the highway. 'Life is short, madam,' said Sanganagouda Patil, a politician and landowner, explaining why he had to buy a new car model every two years. He was at another Toyota showroom, about 600 miles away in the state of Karnataka, inspecting the Innova even though he already owned four cars. Proper vehicles were expected of V.I.P.'s, he said, even if the roads near his home district were not yet good enough to drive them. He wore gold jewelry, Ray-Ban sunglasses and an expensive-looking white kurta of the hand-woven fabric that Mohandas K. Gandhi popularized as a symbol of swadeshi, or homegrown, in an era when all things foreign were mistrusted. Many Indian politicians today see the state merely as an object of plunder, and they are not shy about displaying their spoils. Car salesmen say that when a new model comes in, politicians call and demand to have the first vehicle delivered to them, with a discount. A Shifting Value System India's state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism. Powerful and voiceless, rich and poor - all navigated the same chaotic, crowded stations and rode the same jam-packed trains, if not in the same class. Cars, in contrast, reflect the atomization prosperity brings. This is a far bigger change for Indian society than it was for America, which in many ways was founded around the notion of the individual. Indian society has always been more about duty, or dharma, than drive, more about responsibility to others than the realization of individual desire. That ethos is changing. 'Twenty years back one car was an achievement,' said Maj. Gen. B. C. Khanduri, who as minister of roads from 2000 to 2004 helped shepherd the new highway into being. 'Now every child needs their own car.' To him and others who grew up in a different society, that change bespeaks a larger, and troubling, shift. 'The value system is finishing now,' he said. 'We are gradually increasing everyone for himself.' Luxuries are now necessities, he said, and children are focused more on earning for themselves than on caring for their parents. Indians have always been critical of what they see as American selfishness, the way children relegate parents to retirement homes so they can pursue their own lives. Now, suddenly, they are hearing such stories among themselves. Spreading affluence also has brought new competitive anxiety. Where once everyone in a neighborhood had an Ambassador or a Fiat, the hierarchy of livelihoods, of success, now can be parsed easily through cars. P. V. J. Mohanrao, 48, an assistant college professor, who came to the Toyota showroom to look at the Innova, could afford only cheaper cars: the Indian-made Maruti and Tata Sumo. A neighbor who was with him, P. Srinivas, 41, a businessman dealing in glass, could afford larger monthly installments, and thus the more luxurious Chevrolet Tavera. Another neighbor, a software entrepreneur who, Mr. Mohanrao pointed out, had 'spent time in the United States,' outclassed them both: at any given time, he had three or four cars, none of them cheap. 'He has booked this car, I heard,' Mr. Mohanrao said of his neighbor and the Innova. The car fever here is in part a triumph of marketing to people who did not grow up being marketed to. Advertising in India has succeeded in making, as Mr. Khanduri said, luxuries into necessities, in portraying persuasion as knowledge. The Toyota salesmen here market aggressively, singling out beach walkers and mall shoppers. They aim at people who bought cars in 2002 and convince them they already need an upgrade. Helped by record-low car-loan rates, they have learned to manufacture desire. 'If that fellow has a burning zeal we will add to the fire, we will tempt him,' said Mr. Prakky, the sales manager. The Dangers of the Boom 'Please do not drive in the wrong direction,' a flashing sign implores over the redone highway. The feeble exhortation underscores one of the many downsides of India's auto boom. The country already has one of the world's highest accident rates, with more than 80,000 traffic-related deaths a year. Few police officers patrol its roads, which ensures that pretty much anything goes, even at times on the fancy new highway. With India reveling in its rising global profile, there has been little planning for the traffic, environmental or economic consequences of millions more Indians acquiring new cars. India's economic boom has outpaced any planning for the resources, like oil for auto fuel, it will demand. Urban planning is so poor that in Bangalore and other cities traffic congestion is threatening investment and business expansion. At the same time, the focus on cars threatens to obscure the needs of the many more without them. There are still only about eight million passenger vehicles on Indian roads, in a country of more than one billion people. By the late 1920's, in comparison, the United States had 23 million registered car owners. Poor Indians rely, in addition to their feet, on an extraordinary array of contraptions for transport. They pile on top of buses in the Indian version of the double-decker. They ride tractors and bullock carts and pack 13 strong into Tempo taxis made for 6. What they cannot regularly rely on is public transport. While New Delhi and Calcutta have built subways, most cities have not, and they face severe bus shortages as well. Cars speed by waiting bus riders, who stand like spectators. The rise of the auto, and the investment in highways, dovetails with a larger trend of privatization in Indian life, in which the 'haves' are those who can afford to pay for services the government does not provide: efficient transport, clean water, good schools, decent health care. Most Indians cannot afford the tolls along the Golden Quadrilateral, let alone the cars to drive on it. Gandhi, whose foot marches for social justice defined an era of Indian history, now has an expressway named for him. Its toll of $1.33 is more than about 300 million Indians earn in a day. India's growing material hunger has another downside: it is largely being sated by credit and debt. With borrowing comes the danger of overstretching, and pricy cars purchased in Vishakhapatnam's Toyota showroom can always be taken back. That is where the repo man comes in. He waits at a tollbooth in Rajasthan, cater-corner from Vishakhapatnam on the Quadrilateral, armed with a long list of deadbeats' license plate numbers. In a beat-up Maruti van, with a stick inside, Anil Kumar Vyas, 34, was chasing down Toyota owners behind in their payments. Befitting his upper-caste Brahmin status, he was also a local village head, but that brought more prestige than profit. His may be one of the few lines of work that has benefited from traffic jams and potholes. Bad roads made for easy captures, since no one could drive over 22 miles an hour. On the new, smooth four-lane highway, he has already given chase at more than 60 miles an hour. 'It is harder for us to catch them,' he said. 'We're still working it out.'

Subject: India Paves a Smoother Road From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:19:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/04/international/asia/04highway.html?ex=1291352400&en=d77dd2ca4f760ef0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 4, 2005 Mile by Mile, India Paves a Smoother Road to Its Future By AMY WALDMAN NEW DELHI, India - In the middle of the old Grand Trunk Road a temple sits under a peepul tree. The surrounding highway is being widened to four lanes, and vehicles barrel along either side. But the temple and tree thwart even greater speed, and a passing contractor says they soon will be removed. Kali, Hindu goddess of destruction, thinks otherwise. She is angry, say the colorfully garbed women massing in the holy tree's dappled shade. As evidence, they point to one woman's newly pockmarked face and other mysterious ailments recently visited on their nearby village, Jagdishrai. They have tried to convince Kali that the tree and temple devoted to her must go, but they have failed. Now they have no choice but to oppose the removal, too, even if they must block the road to do it. Goddess versus man, superstition versus progress, the people versus the state - mile by mile, India is struggling to modernize its national highway system, and in the process, itself. The Indian government has begun a 15-year project to widen and pave some 40,000 miles of narrow, decrepit national highways, with the first leg, budgeted at $6.25 billion, to be largely complete by next year. It amounts to the most ambitious infrastructure project since independence in 1947 and the British building of the subcontinent's railway network the century before. The effort echoes the United States' construction of its national highway system in the 1920's and 1950's. The arteries paved across America fueled commerce and development, fed a nation's auto obsession and created suburbs. They also displaced communities and helped sap mass transit and deplete inner cities. For India, already one of the world's fastest-growing economies and most rapidly evolving societies, the results may be as radical. At its heart, the redone highway is about grafting Western notions of speed and efficiency onto a civilization that has always taken the long view. Aryan migration, Mogul conquest, British colonialism - all shaped India's civilization over centuries. Now, in a span of less than 15 years, capitalism and globalization have convulsed India at an unprecedented rate of change. The real start came in 1991, when India began dismantling its state-run economy and opening its markets to foreign imports and investment. While that reform process has been fitful, leaving the country trailing its neighbor and rival, China, India has turned a corner. Its economy grew 6.9 percent in the fiscal year ending in March. India has a new identity, thanks to outsourcing, as back office to the world. The new highway is certain to jump-start India's competitiveness, given that its dismal infrastructure helped keep it behind the economic success stories of the Asian Tigers. 'The perception of India earlier was that it cannot be in the rank of other fast-growing nations,' said Sudheendra Kulkarni, who was an aide to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the former prime minister who championed the project. With the highway, Mr. Kulkarni said, 'People began to see that India is transforming.' To grasp that transformation, and India's transition, a New York Times reporter and photographer spent a month this year driving the first stage of the highway project, which has been dubbed, in awkward but bullish coinage, the Golden Quadrilateral. More jagged than geometric, the four- and six-lane quadrilateral's 3,625 miles run through 13 states and India's four largest cities: New Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai, formerly Madras, and Mumbai, formerly Bombay. The journey along the highway offered a before-and-after snapshot of India, of the challenges of developing the world's largest democracy, and of how westernization is reshaping Indian society. To drive east from New Delhi to Calcutta is to travel through flat fields, almost primeval forests, lush rice paddies - and some of India's poorest, roughest states, where contractors have battled violence and corruption to get the road built. To move south from Calcutta, alongside the Bay of Bengal, through palm-covered hills, then up the west into Rajasthan's desert, is to see the highway as a conduit for the forces molding the new India. Ever-flashier cars, evidence of a frenzied new consumerism, leave bullock carts in the dust. Truckers slow at night for roadside sex workers, each of them potential carriers of H.I.V. Farmers' sons make a beeline for swelling cities that are challenging the village as the center of Indian life. The highway itself brings change. For a nation inured to inefficiency, the improved interstate saves time - for Kailash Pandey, a milk-seller, one-third off a 90-minute commute to market; for Imtiaz Ali, 15, half off the bike ride to school; and half off the travel time for Sarjeet Singh, a trucker. These micro gains make for macro benefit: some $1.5 billion a year in savings, by one World Bank estimate, on everything from fuel costs to faster freight delivery. More intangibly, the highway may turn India into a society in a hurry, enslaving it to the Western notion that time equals money. Nationalists also hope the highway will further unite a country that is home to 22 official languages, the world's major religions, a host of separatist movements, and 35 union territories and states, many more populous than European nations. But coherence may bring collision. Since 1991, India's population of poor has dropped to 26 percent from 36 percent, yet the poor seem poorer than ever. India now juxtaposes pre- and postindustrial societies: citizens who live on dirt floors without electricity and others who live like 21st-century Americans, only with more servants. The highway throws these two Indias into jarring proximity. Outside Jaipur, young men virtually bonded into labor hack with primitive tools at old tires. They work in an archaic assembly line beside the highway, chopping the tires into pieces and loading them onto trucks so they can be burned as toxic fuel at a brick kiln. The tent camp they call home splays out in dirty disarray behind them. A brutish overseer verbally whips them to work faster. 'Please take me out of here,' Rafiq Ahmed, 21, whispered as he bent in the darkness to lift another load. 'My back hurts.' On the revamped road next to him, the darkness has been banished by electric lights overhead. Auto-borne commuters race along six silky lanes toward the Golden Heritage Apartments, the Vishal Mini-Mart, the Bajaj Showroom featuring the New Pulsar 2005 with Alloy Wheels, all the while burning rubber that will eventually fall to the young men, hidden by night, obscured by speed, forgotten by progress, to dispose. Empires and Engines On the highway from New Delhi to Agra, where the Taj Mahal floats over a grimy city, homelier but no less enduring relics line the route. Kos minars - massive pillars that once served as markers - invoke India's last great road-building effort. It was five centuries ago. The Moguls, whose empire stretched into central Asia, understood the importance of transport links for solidifying empire. Most famously, Sher Shah Suri, who ruled in the 16th century, commissioned the Grand Trunk Road along ancient trade routes. The British who began colonizing India a century later also understood that imperial rule required physical connection, not least for moving the raw materials, like cotton, that made empire profitable. But they cemented their rule in the age of the steam engine, laying railways rather than roads across the subcontinent. For decades afterward, India's roads remained better suited to bullock carts than motor cars. In the 50 years after independence, the government built just 334 miles of four-lane roads. The romance of India's railroad, meanwhile, could not obscure the reality of a badly aging system, with state funds bolstering patronage more than service or safety. Over time, more and more traffic shifted to the roads, despite their choked, potholed state. Driving in India has meant more stops than starts, necessitating braking for sacred cows, camel carts, conversational knots, tractors and women balancing bundles of wood on their heads. The new highway, then, is nothing short of radical, which becomes clear after Agra, where large stretches are already complete. An American-style interstate unfurls through villages where mud-brick buildings rarely rise above two stories and women still cook with buffalo dung. The highway is smooth, wide, flat and incongruous: an ambitious road amid still-humble architecture, a thoroughfare from this century amid scenery from a previous one. To drive it is to gain momentum, to not want to stop, and not have to. Drivers no longer pass through towns, but by them, or where the highway soars into the air, over them. The rural landscape, formerly painted in pointillist detail, becomes a blur, an abstraction - a vanishing trick that may portend things to come. Bridging Distances The highway's nerve center sits on the outskirts of the Delhi metropolis, a sleek, six-story building with automatic doors and functioning elevators that radiates immaculacy and efficiency. Most Indian government buildings sit in the British-built heart of the city. They wear a decrepit air, reflecting a fusty bureaucracy hidebound by red tape. The distance, in geography and mien, between the highway headquarters and the rest of India's government is no accident. The highway was conceived in 1998, soon after a Hindu nationalist-led government took power. The prime minister at the time, Mr. Vajpayee, quickly ordered a series of nuclear tests, and later that year announced the highway project. Former aides say that both moves were essential to Mr. Vajpayee's nationalist vision of a secure, competitive India. To circumvent India's entrenched bureaucracy, Mr. Vajpayee empowered an autonomous authority to oversee the highways, streamline the contracting process and privilege the private sector. He allowed foreign companies in to do much of the work, ending four decades of postcolonial self-sufficiency, and imposed taxes and tolls, challenging a political culture engorged with government subsidies. The man responsible for executing these shifts was Maj. Gen. B. C. Khanduri, who had been India's minister of roads. A year after he left the post, he still kept a map of the Golden Quadrilateral on his wall. Political pressures, rushed planning and mixed performance by contractors have led to uneven results along the route. But Mr. Khanduri, a retired army engineer who cites Rudolph W. Giuliani as a role model, did imbue the project with both military discipline and a patriotic ethos. He told contractors, 'You are not only making money, you are building a nation.' But that nation's people had their own opinions, plenty of them. India's democracy may have been imposed by a nationalist elite, but the idea had taken root and was bubbling up from below. Truckers went on strike against the taxes and tolls. Citizens blocked the highway, stopped construction and staged hunger strikes to demand underpasses, overpasses and cattle crossings. Sometimes they won, sometimes they lost, but their point was made. Highway officials say future projects are being designed with far more local input - an accountability that may give India a long-term edge over authoritarian China. Still, Mr. Khanduri is wistful about China, where officials can literally pave over objections. On every infrastructure front, India has fallen well behind China, although debate over whether the blame for that lies with democracy or just with India's short practice of it is an enduring Indian pastime. Having invested more than 10 times as much as India since the mid-1990's, China now has 15 times the expressway length. Mr. Khanduri conceded that China's system has its own price, but concluded of India's experience, 'So many constraints are there in a democratic society.' Clearing a Path The air in Rashidpur village, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, smelled of betel juice and excrement, and festered with raw feelings. The authorities had come and 'done the needful,' to use a favorite Indian saying, smashing houses into piles of bricks to clear a path for the highway. Dust from the demolitions still seemed to hover in the village. Resentment certainly did. Building a highway is by nature a violent act, since everything in its path must yield. So the project has cut a swath of destruction, swallowing thousands of acres of farmland, shearing off the fronts of thousands of homes. Smashed walls and piles of bricks line the route like broken teeth. The process of acquiring the land along the highway - 20,574 acres - has delayed the project more than anything else. Once scheduled to be finished in December 2003, the highway is some three years behind. The government has the power of eminent domain, but it must compensate for land taken, relying on cumbersome regulations and a revolving door of local officials. Land prices recorded on paper routinely bear no relation to actual market value. Often, people have refused to vacate until they received satisfactory payment. Even where the price was right, the emotional toll was heavy. Land and home here are primal possessions - a tie to ancestral roots that extend back centuries, a legacy to children, a link to rural life in an urbanizing society. The process has left bruised feelings, reflecting the distance between impoverished, often illiterate citizens and an administration whose structure and attitude can seem frozen in colonial amber. 'They spoke what you call police language, I can say it was indecent,' an indignant 68-year-old named R. S. Dubey said of the officials who had come to oversee the destruction of his family home. Navigating Religion Neem. Mango. Sisam. Most delicate of all, holy peepul, the Indian fig, which could not be cut without prime ministerial dispensation. In work contracts several phone books thick, every tree that would be felled for the highway's construction was documented before its demise. This reflected not only the bureaucracy that had slowed the project, despite the efforts of Mr. Khanduri, the former roads minister. For Hindus, trees are sacred; one highway official said Muslims were sometimes hired to cut them down at night. Then there were the hundreds, or thousands, of religious institutions that lined the highway. Contractors were required to move or rebuild every one. On some stretches, contractors said they suspected that new religious structures had been hastily nailed together to extract compensation for their moving. Hindu contractors and officials whispered about the 'sensitivities' of moving mosques for fear of offending India's Muslim minority. The process was careful, but imperfect. In the south the earth movers preparing the way for the highway churned up the bones of the dead next to a Shiite Muslim shrine. Muhammad Shah, 74, tender of the shrine, gathered and reburied them. 'They could have been anyone's ancestors,' he said in the purpling dusk, a long beard lengthening an already sorrowful face. 'They could have been mine.' Roadside Attractions In October 2003, Yogendra Singh, a hotel manager, bought a plot of land from a farmer in the village of Raipur. Mr. Singh, from the nearby city of Kanpur, had no interest in agriculture, but every interest in what he saw supplanting it. The land was next to the highway, on which construction was well under way. Mr. Singh foresaw that a steady increase in traffic would follow its completion. He imagined, among other things, tourists driving from the Taj Mahal to Varanasi, an unthinkable passage on the extant roads. He opened Shiv Restaurant, where the chickens are killed in the basement and served on the ground floor, and he planted a garden out back and planned a hotel. America's early interstate years had their own such visionaries, like the men who built an empire of Holiday Inns. Mr. Singh's dreams may not be on that scale, but these are early days, and he is not alone. Land prices along the highway have shot up, as farmers who see little future in farming have cashed out, and entrepreneurs who see gold in asphalt have bought in. 'The entire stretch has been sold off,' Mr. Singh, 40, said of the land along the highway. With construction nearly done in Raipur, Mr. Singh's place was already a popular way station, and his land had almost doubled in value. It was not hard to imagine how different life along the highway could look in a few years. The newly rich farmer who sold his land to Mr. Singh, meanwhile, had moved to the city of Kanpur. Picking Up Speed In the village of Kaushambi, in Uttar Pradesh, Anil Kumar, a 34-year-old shopkeeper, watched truck traffic speed by on the widened highway and explained how the artery's revamping had reconfigured long-held local geography. Because vehicles rarely traveled at more than 25 miles an hour, village life had always happened on both sides of the road. The two-lane highway inhabited space, but did not define it. The railway station and village hand pump were on one side, the school and fields on the other. Women roamed across the land, indifferent to whether soil or asphalt was beneath their feet, gathering wood, water, the harvest. In India roads have been public spaces, home to the logical chaos that governs so much of life. They have been commas, not periods, pauses, not breaks. The redone highway has challenged that, trying to impose borders and linearity, sometimes controlling pedestrian (and bovine) access to ensure drivers' speed. In Kaushambi, the highway planners put concrete walls on both sides to ensure that neither crossing pedestrians nor trucks stopping to shop would slow traffic. There were cuts every 380 yards or so, requiring detours for crossing. Cars and trucks sped along at 70 or 80 miles an hour. The women with bundles atop their heads now had to walk to a cut in the wall, and then sprint across. Even that had not saved Parwathi Devi, 70, from a cut lip and head from a speeding car as she ran across with dried plant stalks on her head. For many rural Indians, insulated from the westernizing of urban India, the highway is the most dramatic change in their lifetimes. All along the route, the disorientation showed in the faces of uncomprehending pedestrians who darted out in front of cars coming fast enough to kill. The highway was bifurcating Kaushambi, too. Villagers had begun pressing district officials for a second hand-pump so women wouldn't have to keep crossing for water. 'It is almost like two villages now,' Mr. Kumar said. Service With a Smile In a perky blue uniform, 34-year-old Pradeep Kumar stepped forward to pump gas with a smile. He had reason to: he had been coached on American-style, customer-comes-first service, and in an area of north India with rampant unemployment, he was thrilled just to have a job. That it made little use of his bachelor's degree in political science was of secondary concern. Where crops once grew along the Golden Quadrilateral, gas stations are sprouting. Mr. Kumar's employer near Allahabad - Reliance Industries Ltd., one of India's largest private conglomerates and a petroleum giant - is planning 5,000 stations. Perhaps more than any company, it has grasped the highway's commercial potential. Commerce along the American interstate system began with quirky roadside establishments. Over time it evolved toward deliberately homogenized chains - McDonald's, Motel 6 - whose signs meant familiarity in unfamiliar terrain. Reliance has leapfrogged that process, making itself the Golden Arches of the Golden Quadrilateral. Its British-designed gas stations are identically bright and streamlined, with computerized billing and clean, airy dhabas, or restaurants. That the stations feel American is not accidental: Reliance had hired as a consultant the Flying J Company of Ogden, Utah, which runs diesel stations and travel plazas across the United States. The growth of gas stations suggested the way India's agricultural society is yielding not to an industrial economy, but a service one. Fifty percent of India's gross domestic product is now in the service sector, compared with 25 percent apiece for manufacturing and agriculture. In 21st-century India, the $50 a month that Mr. Kumar, the attendant, was earning was still more than farming would pay. An Easier Journey Nathu Yadav was burning, his body morphing into a plume of smoke and ash that moved out over the sacred water of the Ganges. His soul, Hindus believe, was being liberated in the process. Mr. Yadav was 95 when he died, the oldest man in his village. His family rode 14 hours in a bus - the body stored on top - to reach Varanasi, Hinduism's holiest city. The river was, in essence, India's first highway, and the bodies were once brought down it. Now they come by train, or the Grand Trunk Road, which had brought Mr. Yadav's body and family from Bihar state. 'God bless Sher Shah Suri for making this road!' his son, Adya Prasad, exclaimed. The road's condition has long been less of a blessing, a state the new highway project is changing. That is welcome news to the family that runs the Harishchandra ghat, where Mr. Prasad's father was burning. Members of the Dom caste have manned this ghat, named for a legendary king, since ancient times. The ritual is essential, but the act of touching the dead is reviled by upper castes. It is a job of smoke-in-the-face indignities consigned to untouchables. The new highway will ease one unpleasant aspect. 'In summer, the bodies start to smell,' said Matru Choudhary, a 47-year-old Dom with a morose mien. 'The faster they can come, the better.' Bureaucracy and Bandits In the shade of a makeshift shelter at the border crossing between Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, two truckers were killing time on string cots. They wanted to move from one state to another, but given India's cumbersome, often corrupt interstate bureaucracy, they might as well have been trying to pass to Pakistan. It was noon, and they had been waiting five hours, their trucks among hundreds parked in endless lines. They figured they would pass by nightfall, after paying a bribe on top of the interstate tax. The improved highway was already easing their passage and saving them time, the truckers said, cutting their drive from New Delhi to Calcutta to three days from five. They relished the new ease of the ride. But the improvements had not addressed other obstacles. Petty extortion by officials was common at many border posts. In the north, bandits, or dacoits, robbed truckers on the highway. 'In Bihar, they'll cut off your neck and leave you six inches shorter,' said Rajesh Sham Singh, 30. Kamludeen Khan, 38, said, 'The police don't do anything,' except join in the extortion, stopping trucks at night to demand bribes. At least with the bandits, there was a chance of escape. Feats of Engineering At night on a floodlit bridge in Bihar, a chain of women moved in graceful tandem, hoisting buckets of cement onto their head and hurrying to pour before it hardened. Imported from southern India, they were living in a meager shanty camp next to the highway, earning less than $40 a month. Such mingling of primitive methods with the mechanization mostly being used to construct the Quadrilateral fascinated the Korean engineers ensconced 12 miles down the road, in a camp near the town of Aurangabad. Employed by Ssangyong, a construction giant in South Korea, they came to the state of Bihar to work on the highway with an Indian company, Oriental Structural Engineers Pvt. Ltd. 'We in Korea have never seen people putting cement on their heads,' said M. S. Won, a planning engineer. 'We only use machines.' His boss, Noh Sung Hwan, was a cheery man who spoke a smattering of Hindi and had taught his Indian cook to make kimchi. Having arrived with an appreciation of India's rich engineering history, he was soon well versed in its current challenges. They had far less to do with building the highway than with the forces circling it. This stretch of Bihar was home to often violent local mafias, some tied to a Maoist insurgency that has spread through at least 11 states. Some three years ago the Maoists attacked a construction plant for the highway, and fractured the bones of a project manager with rifle butts and sticks. The Maoists occupied the plant for months while negotiations dragged on over how much it would cost to buy their cooperation. 'India is very fantastic,' Mr. Noh said. 'Just a little bit risky.' A Study in Limits For four years, the Indian project managers and engineers of Oriental Structural had been living in enclosed camps next to the highway, serenaded nonstop by truck horns. In the camp near Aurangabad, Bihar, 18 families and some 30 single men found their entertainment in a volleyball and badminton court, television and cold beer. Most of them were from Punjab or southern India. Bihar was as much of a foreign country to them as it was to their Korean counterparts, a country they could not wait to leave. The sociologist Yogendra Yadav calls Bihar a metaphor: for the rest of India, it represents being poor. Bihar offers a reflection at which ascendant India recoils. Bihar is home to more than 82 million people and some of India's most storied history. Bodhgaya, where Buddha achieved enlightenment, is only a few miles off the highway. The area was once a center of democracy and learning, and of India's freedom struggle against the British. Today, Bihar is a study in democracy's limits. Villagers depend on doctors who are quacks, schoolteachers who siphon government grain meant for children, policemen who charge businesses to provide security. Bihar, by most measures, is India's poorest state. Migration to other states for work is epidemic. Only 5 percent of rural households have electricity. J. P. Gupta, the jovial Punjabi project manager at the Aurangabad camp, spent his mornings appeasing the gods, praying first in his car, then in his office, then much of the rest of his days appeasing local politicians. Politics was a business here, he said. Biharis did not want the road, one engineer asserted, because they preferred a potholed one that would make it easier to rob passing trucks. Farther east along the highway, near the town of Mahapur, dozens of armed guards patrolled another camp where more Oriental Structural employees had bunkered down. Its chief project manager, P. Nageswara Rao, gray-haired, and on this project, usually grim-faced, never left camp without an armed escort. Buddha preached ahimsa, or nonviolence, in the area, 'but the most crime is here,' he said. 'For nothing they will kill the people.' His camp, to the east of Mr. Gupta's, operated under an even greater threat of violence. What appeared to be an armed robbery nearby took the life of a government engineer working on the project; it took seven months to fill his shoes. Mr. Rao had no pesky politicians to deal with, but only because even they feared the Maoists. Government had all but melted away here. From the highway, the Maoists extorted money and, for followers, jobs. The Maoist movement had begun with a 1968 agrarian peasant uprising in West Bengal. In the years since, Naxalites, as the rebels are known, have flourished, penetrating, with arms and ideology, the many corners where prosperity has yet to reach. Mahapur, Bihar, is one such corner. Poverty and Promise In a gilding morning light on the margins of the Grand Trunk Road, a fight broke out over wet concrete. A hailstorm the night before soaked the ground before the concrete could finish drying. So scarecrow-like scavengers had come out to scrounge the wet muck. An emaciated Bishnuji Bagwan, at least 90 and wearing little more than rags, had brought his wife, children and grandchildren to collect enough of it to shore up his dilapidated house. Malti Devi, mother of four, married to a man she called useless, wanted to smooth her floor. One family accused another of greed, and the fight began. Ms. Devi shrugged off the finger-pointing, hoisted a load atop her head, and headed across the highway. 'It's my share of concrete,' she said. 'If someone takes it, won't I fight?' She called the highway a 'blessing,' and said she had never seen anything like it. And it holds promise for Indians like her, with data showing that proximity to a real highway could alleviate poverty. For now, the villagers living along the route rarely had bus fare to reach nearby Mahapur. For them, the highway was more spectacle than utility. An American Dream As Ms. Devi was lugging wet concrete into her mud house, Mr. Rao, the project manager, was counting the days until he could take highway, train and plane, and escape for a holiday in America. He had three daughters living there, one a computer engineer, the other two married to computer engineers. Most of his engineers - almost all, like him, from the southern state of Andhra Pradesh - had relatives in America, too. If Bihar was enemy territory for the professionals roosting in rugged camps to build India's dream highway, America was the promised land. India's traffic with America has never been higher; sending a child there had become a middle-class 'craze,' in one engineer's word. The founding elites of India were British-educated. Today, the ambitious young pursue degrees from Wharton and Stanford, with some 80,000 Indian students in the United States. Two million Indians live there, working as doctors, software engineers, and motel owners along America's highways. No surprise, then, that America has shaped the ideas of what India's highway can be. Mr. Rao's deputy, B. K. Rami Reddy, also with a daughter in America, was nearly breathless as he described one stretch of finished roadway in southern India: 'You really feel like you are in the U.S., it is so nice. When you go on that road, you feel you are somewhere else.' The implicit effort to make India 'somewhere else,' more like America, more of the first world and less of the third, girds this entire project. With the highway and India's accompanying rise, Mr. Rao predicted that by 2010 or 2020, 'Indians may not feel the need to go abroad.' 'This highway will really change the face of India,' he said. Time Travel The face of West Bengal, home to 28 years of Communist rule and acres of green rice paddies, was already changing. Three satellite townships were being built near the town of Bardwan, which would be only an hour from Calcutta when the new highway was complete. Residents would commute, as they did from suburbs across America. If the highway was enabling the middle class to migrate out of cities, it was also encouraging the poor to migrate in. Beneath a crosshatch of elevated highways on the edge of Calcutta, thousands of rural Indians had burrowed in, constructing homes, creating businesses. Dung patties dried on the highway's underpinnings. Yellow taxis sat in rows. A whole civilization within, or beneath, a civilization, had hatched. Dal bubbled over a wood fire in the single room, constructed from wood and jute bags, that eight men shared. Bal Dev Rai, a 40-year-old from the state of Jharkhand, had called the room home for five years. He drove a bicycle handcart, sending money to his wife and daughters, returning to his village at harvest time. For him and his fellow bottom-dwellers, the improved highway meant a nicer roof over their heads. Each year the permanent residents were joined by temporary migrants, idol-makers who came from their villages to work their craft for Calcutta's festival for the 10-armed goddess, Durga, the invincible killer of demons. Statues of Saraswati, the goddess of knowledge, lay cast off under the highway overpass, waiting to be resurrected. From above came the sound of speeding cars.

Subject: Re: India Paves a Smoother Road From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 15:13:41 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Now this is an interesting article. This is also the reason that I am going crazy with work.

Subject: Turning Asphalt to Gold From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 12:17:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/business/20bank.html?ex=1295413200&en=4a76deb75973919d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 Turning Asphalt to Gold By JENNY ANDERSON In late 2004, Goldman Sachs advised the city of Chicago on the $1.83 billion sale of a 99-year concession for its Skyway toll road. For its work, the firm received a nice $9 million fee. More important, Goldman also got inspiration. Across the negotiating table was an Australian bank that until recently was little known outside its home country: Macquarie Bank. In recent years, Macquarie has become the envy of Wall Street by buying the rights to operate infrastructure projects including ports, tunnels and airports, as well as toll roads, packaging them in funds and reselling the stock in those funds to the public, minting money at each stage along the way. Now Goldman is raising a $3 billion fund to invest in similar public infrastructure deals. Another unit of the bank recently bid on a public-private partnership to run the Dulles Toll Road outside Washington. Mark B. Florian, the municipal finance banker who advised Chicago on the Skyway deal, has moved to New York to oversee the bank's efforts to advise on, invest in and better understand infrastructure assets. And Goldman is not alone. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the best and brightest of Wall Street are for once not complimenting each other, but an outsider on the rise. Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS are all in different stages of exploring how to make money on public infrastructure, both as an adviser to others and as a principal in investing in the deals. Credit Suisse is looking at how to leverage its expertise in buying real estate and advising on the sale of airports; both UBS and Credit Suisse are trying to gauge whether their big private banking clients would be interested in the assets. 'Before anyone else, Macquarie saw the potential of the U.S. market,' said Robert W. Poole Jr., the director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research group. 'They have the most robust model of highways as a new utility that can be an investor-owned utility like gas and electric utilities.' With local and state governments in the United States in search of ways to increase revenue without raising taxes or issuing bonds, public-private partnerships have recently become a hot-ticket investment idea. During the last 12 months, more than $20 billion worth of private sector proposals have been submitted to transportation departments from Georgia to Oregon, according to a study by Mr. Poole. Just last night, bankers from Wall Street firms were working late to polish bids for the Indiana Toll Road. 'There's opportunity popping up all over the U.S.,' said Greg Hulsizer, chief executive of California Transportation Ventures. In 1991, the company won a concession to build the South Bay Expressway, a 10-mile tollway in San Diego, and it is now owned by a Macquarie fund. 'It's not uncommon to see public-private partnerships for infrastructure around the world, especially in Europe,' he said, 'Here in the States, it's a new, emerging trend.' Macquarie came into its own only in 1985, when, as a subsidiary of Hill Samuel & Company, a British merchant bank, it received an Australian banking license. It is now a deal powerhouse; in 2004 and 2005, it bought $17 billion worth of global infrastructure assets, according to Thomson Financial. Its model looks particularly alluring to Wall Street. Using a small capital base, Macquarie acquires giant assets by borrowing other people's money, then packages the assets into funds, which are sold to investors through public offerings or as unlisted funds. Along the way, it makes a killing on fees. 'It's an obvious gold mine,' said one competitor who asked not to be named because his bank is working on its own infrastructure strategy. The pitch to governments is simple: Macquarie will look after the assets - maintaining the roads or ports, raising toll road fees to make the investment more profitable - then give them back, in 99 years or so. 'It's not a sell-off of the family silverware,' says Murray Bleach, head of Macquarie's North American infrastructure advisory business. 'You leave it with someone who can polish it up and earn more money for the use of it.' Unlike private equity funds, which look for rates of return of 20 to 30 percent, these funds expect returns in the low to high teens, according to Macquarie officials, or 6 to 12 percent, according to competitors. Macquarie has recognized that global investors have a seemingly insatiable appetite for dependable returns of 5 to 10 percent, especially since government bond yields have been lower of late. The potential for fees in these public infrastructure deals is astounding, even by Wall Street's obsessive and excessive fee standards. Bankers can make advisory fees on the sale of the often-large assets. Then, once packaged into funds, the assets earn Macquarie management fees (1 to 1.5 percent) as well as incentive fees: 20 percent on profits above a certain threshold. The thresholds vary, based on benchmarks appropriate to the assets in the funds. The model has risks. Low interest rates have provided flush financing for Macquarie. In essence, its deals are like leveraged buyouts: it provides the equity, borrows the debt and rakes in rich fees. Higher interest rates would make debt financing less attractive and could affect returns across the board. This week, Macquarie's chief financial officer told Bloomberg News that the bank would earn no performance fees for any of its infrastructure or specialized funds for the six months that ended Dec. 31, which will reduce the bank's revenues. 'The rush into this will create some opacity around risk,' said one Wall Street executive who is also looking at this strategy and insisted on anonymity because his bank did not yet have its strategy developed. 'There will be other shoes to drop on this.' For its part, Macquarie welcomes Wall Street's crashing its party. 'We've been saying it's a great asset class and now some of our dear friends are joining,' Mr. Bleach of Macquarie said. 'The market is not static. There will be plenty of assets to buy.' The Australian bank's model is a result of national circumstances. A 1992 law required employers to set aside a percentage of their employees' income for retirement. Today, workers are required to set aside at least 9 percent, which has helped build a national retirement nest egg of $591 billion, with $70 billion to $80 billion added every year - providing a huge cushion of capital to Australian banks. Macquarie bankers had been advising the Australian government on the sale of public assets when it started a privatization drive in the early 1990's. Nicholas Moore, the head of investment banking in Sydney, decided the bank should get in on the action. In 1996, a Macquarie fund made an investment in an Australian toll road. Today, Macquarie has roughly $23 billion invested in what the bank calls specialized infrastructure funds. The specialist funds have contributed heavily to the bank's bottom line. For the half-year that ended September 2005, corporate finance, which includes the specialist funds as well as advisory and financing work, contributed 41 percent of the bank's profit of 482 million Australian dollars ($360.5 million). Macquarie shares have risen more than 900 percent since they made their debut on the Australian Stock Exchange in July 1996. Macquarie's funds are invested all over the world and trade on various global exchanges: Macquarie Infrastructure Company Trust trades on the New York Stock Exchange, for example. Macquarie's name is everywhere - its deals have been called Macquisitions - including a listing as a lead bidder for the London Stock Exchange. Recently, Macquarie has bought cooling systems in Chicago, satellite parking lots at various American airports and, most recently, with Black Diamond Capital Management, the Smart Carte Corporation, the concessionaire for baggage carts and strollers at airports across the United States. The bank is frequently accused of overpaying. When it bid $1.83 billion for the Chicago Skyway with Cintra, a Spanish private sector developer of transportation infrastructure, the next closest bid was $700 million. 'Our view was we didn't overpay,' Mr. Bleach said. 'The market says we didn't.' The bank refinanced about $1 billion of the debt in 2005, recouping about half of that for the equity partners. The Chicago Skyway deal sheds some light on why such a concession might be attractive to governments. When Macquarie, together with Cintra, won the 99-year concession to run the Skyway, the city set aside a rainy day fund of $500 million, paid down $855 million in Skyway and city debt, set up an eight-year $375 million annuity and even had some money left over, which it will use to deliver heat to the city's neediest people. In exchange, Macquarie and Cintra will operate the toll road, which generates about $20 million in cash flow a year, for 35 years. The concessionaires will be able to raise tolls and will be required to maintain the tollway. 'The economic analysis in favor of doing the deal was overwhelming.' said John R. Schmidt, a lawyer from Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw who represented the city. California has also seen advantages in doing a deal with Macquarie. In 1991, California Transportation Ventures won the right to build Route 125, a 10-mile toll road connecting one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Chula Vista, to a major thoroughfare. But it took more than a decade to have environmental permits approved - the Quino checkerspot butterfly was discovered on the land - forcing the company to look for an infusion of capital. In two deals, Macquarie bought 100 percent of the partnership rights to the concession, and the toll road is under construction. 'We get a much-needed facility without having to divert funds from other projects to build it,' said Laurie Berman, deputy district director for the California Department of Transportation. Now that most of Wall Street is rushing in, it is unclear whether there will be enough investors who want to put their money in public infrastructure funds. And more competitors may just raise the prices of available assets. As it grows, Macquarie will face its own challenges. It has had only two major mistakes, investments it has since sold: a power station and a fiber optic network, both in Australia. It cannot afford many more. 'It's not like we will make 50 percent on one asset and zero on another,' Mr. Bleach of Macquarie said. 'It's more like 13, 14, 15. We can't have any zeros.'

Subject: thanks Emma From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 14:41:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: Emma From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:48:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Could I ask you if you could repost that article about toll roads (for which I threw comment). Thanks

Subject: Flour, Eggs, Sugar, Chocolate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 10:36:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/science/28bake.html?ex=1262062800&en=7a3e3544aa6bcb2e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 28, 2004 Flour, Eggs, Sugar, Chocolate . . . Just Add Chemistry By KENNETH CHANG ATLANTA - With two bad knees, Shirley O. Corriher is not quite as nimble as she once was when she performs her 'protein hop' - an interpretive dance of sorts to demonstrate the molecular transformations that turn flour, eggs and sugar into a cake. Her arms wave vigorously, mimicking how proteins in wheat flour interlock to provide the structure that holds a baked good together. 'When you add water to flour and stir,' she says, 'these two little proteins - glutenin and gliadin - grab water first, and each other, to make these springy elastic sheets of gluten.' Ms. Corriher, who trained as a biochemist and once cooked for 140 boys in a boarding school she started with a former husband, has found a comfortable niche dispensing folksy, scientific wisdom about what really happens during cooking. Her home phone number is the 911 for chefs and cookbook authors with kitchen crises. Susan G. Purdy, author of 'The Perfect Cake' who is working on a book about baking at high altitudes, called Ms. Corriher in a panic when a chocolate cake recipe that had previously worked perfectly ended up as a chocolate puddle at 9,000 feet. Ms. Corriher found that Ms. Purdy was using so-called Dutch-processed cocoa, treated with an alkaline substance like baking soda to produce what many consider a better, less bitter taste. Before the glutenin and gliadin proteins can clump together as gluten, they must first partly unwind and unfold, and acidity in the batter induces that unwinding. The Dutch-processed cocoa neutralized the acidity; the glutenin and gliadin did not unwind; and Ms. Purdy's cake never solidified. Ms. Corriher had a simple solution: throw out the Dutch-processed cocoa. 'It's a disaster for you,' she told Ms. Purdy. Ms. Purdy substituted natural cocoa. The cake worked. On the other hand, too much gluten produces a chewiness that, while welcome in bread, is usually not a quality sought in a cake. That is why cake flour contains 7.5 to 8.5 percent protein, while bread flour is more protein rich, 11.5 to 12.5 percent. (All-purpose flour is somewhere in between and thus not ideal for either use.) Cooking is often taught as a step-by-step progression of instructions or an art learned through some nebulous communion with the ingredients, but it is also chemistry, predictable, repeatable molecular reactions brought about by mixing ingredients - which are, after all, chemicals - and applying heat to them. Ms. Corriher's 1997 book, 'CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking, ' brought such scientific facts to home cooks, and although the first 150 pages of the book discuss baking, her publisher wanted a sequel devoted entirely to baking. The publisher gave her three years to deliver the manuscript. Today, four years after her deadline, Ms. Corriher is still working on the book, to be titled 'BakeWise.' For the last two years, she has been stuck on the cake chapter. 'She's - how should we say it? - a very thorough writer,' said her friend Harold McGee, author of 'On Food and Cooking.' For example, Ms. Corriher performed an experiment on sifting. Many recipes call for sifting to mix flour with the other dry ingredients, and it is especially important to disperse the leavener - typically, baking powder - so that a cake rises evenly. So Ms. Corriher took a black powder with roughly the same characteristics as baking powder and sifted it with flour. Sifting, it turns out, is not particularly effective. 'You just didn't get a good mix, even after three or four times,' Ms. Corriher said. 'You can see little dark streaks.' Simply stirring the dry ingredients together with a wooden spoon is better, she said. The other historical need for sifting was to fluff up the flour after it had been compacted during shipping, but that is also no longer necessary, because flour, sifted at the factory, is now shipped in individual packages instead of large barrels and is not crushed as much. Contributing to the delay, Ms. Corriher has also not been able to stop herself from making yet another variation of a familiar cake recipe, in search of yet one more refinement. 'Oh, I've been making cakes and making cakes and making cakes and making cakes,' she said. 'I end up making five or six or seven cakes testing out things that I think up.' Last year, she and her husband, Arch Corriher, ate more pound cakes than they could remember. The traditional pound cake got its name because it contained a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs and a pound of butter. That was also a large cake, so modern day recipes usually cut those quantities in half. It is also a fairly dense, dry cake. Bakers over the years have improved the traditional pound cake by adding other ingredients: buttermilk or sour cream to make it moister, baking powder to make it airier. Ms. Corriher has her own wrinkles to the recipe, substituting cooking oil for part of the butter - that greases the wheat proteins, producing less gluten and leaving more moisture for the cake - and potato starch for some of the flour. Potato starch granules are considerably longer than the starch granules found in wheat flour. 'It really absorbs water like crazy,' Ms. Corriher said. 'And it makes things really moist.' (Potato starch is not a panacea for all cakes. When she tried potato starch in a basic white cake, the result was grainy. 'It was awful, awful, awful,' Ms. Corriher said, recoiling at the memory. 'Life goes on.') While her pound cake was delicious, Ms. Corriher was not satisfied, because it sagged when baked in a loaf pan. She tried more variations, like additional flour, to produce an attractive, domed top, but those turned out drier. 'Of course, the one with too much butter and sugar is going to taste better,' she said. Finally, she decided the solution was to bake the pound cake in a Bundt or tube pan, so that the shape of the pan held the cake together. 'The moral of the story is, Here is a cake that is technically wrong,' Ms. Corriher said, 'but the taste is great.' Taking the destabilizing effects of sugar to an extreme is the tunnel-of-fudge cake. 'It is so deadly, you can't believe how deadly it is,' she said. 'We are deliberately doing a cake with way too much sugar.' Sugar, she explained, binds to the flour proteins, preventing them from forming the structural lattice. 'Glutenin runs off with sugar,' Ms. Corriher said. 'Gliadin runs off with sugar, and you don't get much gluten.' When baked, the outer portions reach a high enough temperature that they harden, but the cooler inner part remains soft and gooey. 'We've eaten a whole cake, the two of us,' Ms. Corriher said. Her husband interjected, 'Over a period of time.' 'It was a very brief period of time,' Ms. Corriher said. 'It's very addicting.' 'It's really rich,' Mr. Corriher said. 'And wonderful,' Ms. Corriher added. The original tunnel-of-fudge cake won second place in the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off Contest for Ella Rita Helfrich of Houston. That version used a fudge icing mix to create a gooey chocolate center. But Pillsbury discontinued the icing mix, and the resulting clamor of home bakers led Pillsbury to release a recipe for making tunnel-of-fudge cake from scratch. Ms. Corriher again applied her standard tricks, substituting two yolks for one of the eggs, substituting oil for part of the butter. In addition, she substituted dark brown sugar for some of the white sugar. 'The reasoning there is dark brown sugar brings out a fudgy taste in chocolate,' she said. She also roasted the nuts. 'You get much more flavor,' she said. 'You know how much better a roasted nut tastes than a plain old raw nut.' Dutch-processed cocoa in a tunnel-of-fudge cake would probably spell disaster, preventing even the outside of the cake from setting, she said. Ms. Corriher said she had learned much about cakes by making one that leaves out one of usual ingredients. 'You really learn what flour does and what eggs do,' she said. A chocolate cake called crazy cake leaves out the eggs. Ms. Corriher suspects it dates to World War II when staples like eggs were rationed. Without the egg proteins, which also help a cake hold together, gluten is essential for the cake to hold its shape. Thus, cake flour, with its lower protein levels, will not work for crazy cake. Ms. Corriher improved the recipe by cutting down on the vinegar - needed to make the batter acidic - and the leavener, but she hit a snag when she tried adding buttermilk to make it moister. The resulting cake remained pudding. That led to a debate with Harold McGee about why the cake did not set. She thought that the buttermilk was affecting the acidity. Mr. McGee thought the milk proteins were preventing the flour proteins from holding together. Mr. McGee was correct. When she added more flour, the cake again set. Milk proteins differ from egg and flour proteins in that they do not coagulate, Mr. McGee said. 'You can boil milk for hours and it doesn't set,' he said, 'whereas if you boil an egg for 20 seconds, it turns into a solid.' Milk solidifies - into yogurt or cheese, for instance - only if it has been treated with an enzyme that knocks off part of the proteins, making them more like other proteins. Meanwhile, Ms. Corriher said she wanted to finish 'BakeWise' within a few months. She thinks that maybe it will even be in bookstores by next Christmas. 'I really think I'm on the homestretch on the cake chapter,' she said.

Subject: Sushi at Masa Is a Zen Thing From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 10:35:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/29/dining/29REST.html?ex=1262494800&en=33e95b447c464d58&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 29, 2004 Sushi at Masa Is a Zen Thing By FRANK BRUNI I COULD reach deep into a heady broth of adjectives to describe the magic of the sushi at Masa. I could pull up every workable synonym for delicious. Or I could do this: tell you about watching a friend bite into one of Masa's toro-stuffed maki rolls. His eyes grew instantly bigger as his lips twitched into a coyly restrained grin. Then the full taste of the toro, which is the buttery belly of a bluefin tuna, took visible hold. Forget restraint: he was suddenly smiling as widely as a person with a mouthful of food and a modicum of manners can. His eyes even rolled slightly backward. This play of emotion mirrored my own toro-induced bliss. It also explains why Masa, despite its chosen peculiarities and pitiless expense, belongs in the thinly populated pantheon of New York's most stellar restaurants. Simply put, Masa engineers discrete moments of pure elation that few if any other restaurants can match. If you appreciate sushi, Masa will take you to the frontier of how expansively good a single (and singular) bite of it can make you feel. If you don't, you have no reason to visit this restaurant, which stakes its claim for the most part on a narrow patch of culinary turf. The unyielding boundaries of a meal here are just one of many ways in which Masa bucks the increasingly wobbly traditions of fine dining in this city. The chef and owner, Masayoshi Takayama, who operated Ginza Sushiko in Beverly Hills before relocating to Manhattan, does not present you with a menu or choices. You are fed what he elects to feed you, most of it sushi, in the sequence and according to the rhythm he decrees. You do not seize control at Masa. You surrender it. You pay to be putty. And you pay dearly. The price fluctuates with the season and the availability of certain delicacies. It now stands at $350 a person before tax, tip and sip of sake or bottled water. Masa, which reopens Jan. 11 after a holiday break, is arguably the most expensive restaurant in New York. Lunch or dinner for two can easily exceed $1,000. Justifiable? I leave that question to accountants and ethicists. Worth it? The answer depends on your budget and priorities. But in my experience, the silky, melting quality of Masa's toro and uni and sea bream, coupled with the serenity of its ambience, does not exist in New York at a lower price. Masa is not merely sushi. The first third of a nearly three-hour meal here entails other indulgences, presented at methodically paced intervals and in prudently restrained portions. There may be an uni risotto with white truffle; dollops of a perilous blowfish's prized liver; slices of foie gras, to be cooked slightly in a ceramic hot pot; a mound of toro tartare and caviar to be spread on toasted rectangles of Japanese sweet bread. But the last two-thirds of a meal are devoted to sushi, and Masa is devoted to doing this one very worthy thing to perfection. You get the best sense of this pursuit if you sit in one of the 10 seats at the hinoki wood bar, sanded so frequently that you catch its faint scent the second you leave the glare and hubbub of the Time Warner Center and enter this diffusely lighted, windowless sanctuary. Behind the bar stands Mr. Takayama, in a simple white or gray shirt that looks like the top of a monk's robe. He is often flanked by two other chefs, both in simple black shirts, both with extremely short hair or heads shaved like his, as if any grooming more fanciful would compete with their calling to be vessels for immaculate yellowtail. A chef makes your sushi a piece or two at a time, reaching for a pristine slab of fluke or Spanish mackerel and using a bone-handled knife to carve a sliver. He presses wasabi or maybe shiso flakes onto a bed of warm rice, lays the fish atop it and then anoints this jewel with soy sauce, yuzu or sudachi, a limelike Japanese fruit. From just inches away, you watch this ritual, which culminates in the chef's placing the sushi in front of you with a bare hand. You in turn use a bare hand to lift it to your lips. Now the chef watches you, palpably anticipating your delight. This whole exchange has an immediacy and intimacy unlike anything at more conventional restaurants or for that matter at other upscale sushi bars, which tend not to have Masa's low ratio of sushi priests to sushi supplicants, sometimes one to two, especially at lunch. Masa deals not in wide-angle splendor and broad-canvas fireworks but in tight close-ups and miniaturist flares. It prizes simplicity not only in its cuisine but also in its uncluttered environment, which keeps the focus on the food. Other restaurants strive to be extravagant theaters. Masa, with 26 seats in all, intends to be a minimalist temple, all neutral colors and reverential hush. The servers, who bring you finger bowls of lemon water and tell you to turn off your cellphone, seem to have been hired for their genetic inability to speak above a whisper. The only implements they give you are the ones you need at a given instant, and these are usually made not of silver and crystal but of lacquered wood and bamboo. Masa is the first Japanese restaurant to receive four stars from The New York Times since Mimi Sheraton gave that rating to Hatsuhana in 1983, and it speaks a culinary idiom distinct from that of New York's other current four-star establishments, all French-inspired. But it is very much a restaurant of this time and place. Of a dining culture in which linens and petit fours are no longer nonnegotiable badges of class. In which a blockbuster main course often cedes its eminence to a subtler succession of small plates. In which a chef's seriousness is judged not only by his skill but also by the distances he will reach — and the courier bills he will amass — in the service and worship of superior ingredients. Mr. Takayama trawls the globe, reeling in bay scallops from as nearby as New England and grouper from as far as Japan. He receives shipments daily and whittles down what he receives to what he finds worthy: yellow clam and red clam; squid and octopus; eel, cooked and brushed with a sweetened reduction of its cooking liquids; needlefish, upon which are drizzled purple shiso flowers. Some of this flesh was so luxurious it made me feel flushed, giving me a buzz that undulated across a meal and crested with the toro rolls: insanely dense, obscenely intense clumps of fatty red tuna surrounded by rice and seasoned with wasabi and scallions. After these Masa gently brought me down, starting with a combination of rice, cucumber and sesame seeds wrapped in a shiso leaf. Dessert was a bowl of snowy grapefruit granité, as clean, pure and exquisite as the seafood before it. Masa certainly has drawbacks, including its reverie-rupturing location in a mall. If you do not reserve a spot at the bar and wind up sitting at one of the tables away from it, some of the immediacy of the ritual is diminished, and the restaurant's pleasures are dimmed. But they are by no means extinguished. It was at a table, in fact, that I dined with my toro-tipsy friend. Three nights later he called and left a message. He said that he had almost gone to eat sushi for lunch but had decided that he needed a longer pause after experiencing what he called 'the sushi of the gods, so it's not so painful when I have to go back to mortal living.' He had it just right. Masa is divine.

Subject: Foreign Mining in Ghana Approved From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:17:06 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/international/africa/01africa.html?ex=1296450000&en=6eb2e47465509302&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Loan for Foreign Mining in Ghana Approved By CELIA W. DUGGER The board of the International Finance Corporation, the World Bank's investment agency, yesterday approved a $75 million loan to a subsidiary of Newmont Mining, the world's largest gold producer, for a project in Ghana that the investment agency's managers say they hope will be a model for the developing world. An alliance of advocacy and environmental groups urged the I.F.C. to postpone approval until it won additional safeguards to protect the thousands of people who are losing land and livelihoods to the gold mine's development, and to prevent contamination of drinking water from mine waste. But a senior official at the agency said the loan had been approved on the condition that the company meet stringent social and environmental standards. The more than 9,000 people, many of them subsistence farmers, whose homes or land are being displaced by the project, are being resettled in new villages or compensated for their losses. 'The company is really committed, and the fact that they have deep pockets will help address many of these issues as they come up,' said Rashad Kaldany, who heads the oil, gas, mining and chemicals department for the World Bank and its investment agency. The $470 million project, already three-quarters built, will create 620 permanent jobs, I.F.C. officials said, and, depending on the price of gold, generate $300 million to $700 million for Ghana over the next 20 years. Newmont could have finished the project without the loan, Mr. Kaldany said, but wanted the agency's stamp of approval for meeting social and environmental standards. A spokeswoman for Newmont did not return several phone calls yesterday. In a report to the I.F.C., the mining company's Ghana subsidiary said it aspired to be 'a model corporate citizen.' The company's huge operation in Peru has generated fierce protests among peasants there. And in Indonesia, the government brought criminal charges of polluting against the Denver-based mining giant, charges the company has denied. In its summary of the Ghana project, I.F.C. managers describe it as one 'expected to become a demonstration for how to handle environmental, social and community development issues in Ghana.' Another project that was supposed to be a model for developing a poor African country's natural resources, the construction of a $4.2 billion oil pipeline through Chad and Cameroon, suffered a major setback less than a month ago. The World Bank suspended all loans to Chad after determining that its government had broken an agreement to dedicate most of the oil revenue to alleviating poverty. Years ago, nonprofit groups advocated that the bank delay its loan to Chad until the country strengthened the institutions that could ensure that oil revenues were spent honestly and well. The groups counseled delay in the Ghana case and considered the I.F.C.'s decision to go forward with the loan a disappointment. 'The project poses a serious threat to the livelihoods and long-term well-being of the people in the area,' said Keith Slack, a senior policy adviser for the international aid group Oxfam. 'The I.F.C. has taken a very significant risk by approving this project.' A World Bank evaluation in 2003 of its own earlier investments in Ghana's mining industry raised questions about the benefits of large-scale mining by foreign companies. It noted that creation of jobs had been modest, local communities had seen little benefit and corporate tax payments had been low. But Mr. Kaldany said the gold project approved yesterday would improve conditions for local residents and generate substantial revenue, enabling the government of Ghana to spend more on health, education, roads and other public works that would reduce poverty. 'Our goal and the company's goal is that people be better off after this,' he said.

Subject: Hidden Heart Disease Risk From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:15:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/health/01heart.html?ex=1296450000&en=6d6deba8ce976b42&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Women Are Said to Face Hidden Heart Disease Risk By DENISE GRADY Women are more likely than men to have a hidden type of coronary disease in which their heart muscle is starved for oxygen even though their coronary arteries look clear and free of blockages on X-rays, doctors are reporting. The condition, which may affect three million American women, greatly increases the risk of a heart attack. Its main symptom is chest pain or discomfort. In many women, the pain occurs but nothing shows up on an angiogram, a test in which dye is injected into the coronary arteries and they are X-rayed in a search for blockages, so doctors conclude that no treatment is needed. But patients may then go on to have heart attacks or develop heart failure, a weakening of the heart muscle that can be debilitating and ultimately fatal. 'When there are no blockages, everybody slacks off, including the patient, and we don't want to do that,' said Dr. George Sopko of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Such patients almost certainly need treatment, he said. The best way for a woman to find out whether she has the artery disease is to undergo tests, including certain type of stress tests, that measure blood flow to the heart. But not everyone needs to be tested; women with symptoms, a family history of heart disease or severe risk factors may be candidates. The findings are among those in a series of articles to be published today in two medical journals — the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, and Circulation — exploring the differences in heart disease between men and women. The subject has drawn increasing interest in recent decades, as scientists began to realize that the results of previous studies, done mostly in men, did not always apply to women. Among the differences already known are that women with heart disease tend to be sicker than men by the time it is diagnosed, to benefit less from bypass surgery and to have more severe symptoms when they develop heart failure. Some of the difference is because women are older and frailer when they develop heart disease, but that does not account for all of it. Symptoms of heart attack also tend to differ. Men report crushing pain in the chest, while women are more likely to feel dizzy, sick, short of breath and sweaty. Heart disease, strokes and other cardiovascular diseases are the leading causes of death in the United States and other developed countries. They killed 910,600 people in the United States in 2003, the most recent year for which data are available; more than half the deaths, 484,000, were among women. Although women's risk is greatest after menopause and increases with age, heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in all women older than 25. Overall death rates from coronary disease have declined in the past few decades, but most of the improvements have been in men's rates. The cause of the hidden disease being described today is a diffuse buildup of fatty deposits inside the walls of the coronary arteries and in the very small arteries in the heart. The deposits, or plaques, do not show up as blockages on X-rays, but they still interfere with blood flow and can damage the heart muscle, causing ischemic heart disease. ('Ischemia' means 'inadequate blood flow.') But often the condition is not recognized, and the women are told they have nothing to worry about. Instead, Dr. Sopko said, they should be treated aggressively for other problems that lead to artery disease like high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. If necessary, he added, they should also be advised to quit smoking, lose weight and exercise more. The researchers report that compared to a nonsmoker, a woman who smokes has a risk of dying from heart disease equal to the risk she would have if she weighed 90 pounds more than the nonsmoker. 'To women as patients, the message is, look, if you have symptoms, don't think because you are a woman you are immune to having a heart problem,' Dr. Sopko said. The findings are based on a government-sponsored study called Wise, for Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation. Begun in 1996, it included 936 women who had symptoms that led doctors to order angiograms. The women's average age was about 58, but a quarter were young enough to be premenopausal. Despite their symptoms, only a third of the group had obvious blockages in their coronary arteries. In a similar group of men, three-quarters or more would have a severe blockage, said Dr. Carl J. Pepine, the chief of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Florida in Gainesville and one of the lead investigators in the Wise study. In the remaining two-thirds of the women — that is, those without blockages — more than half had abnormalities in their arteries, like an inability to dilate when needed, that could cause ischemia, Dr. Pepine said. The abnormalities occurred in both the coronary arteries and smaller ones that feed the heart, a network of tiny vessels called the microvasculature. Tests showed that the artery walls were full of plaque but had grown outward to accommodate it, so that the opening appeared normal. But, eventually, the condition may progress enough to start pinching the artery shut, Dr. Pepine said. After four years, the rate of deaths or heart attacks in the group without blockages was 10 percent. 'That's much too high for somebody with a normal coronary angiogram,' Dr. Pepine said. It is not clear why women seem more prone to the hidden vascular disease, the researchers said, though it may be linked to hormonal imbalances and a greater tendency to suffer from inflammation, which plays a role in artery disease.

Subject: Celebrating Mozart From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:14:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/travel/01viennaletter.html?ex=1296450000&en=f2bf6fd5169c651c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Celebrating Mozart By DONALD MORRISON For a city of such studied formality — where women still wear dresses, a man wouldn't be caught dead in public without a tie, and strollers routinely greet each other with handshakes — Vienna sure knows how to party. The winter social calendar features nearly 300 all-night balls, bars and restaurants routinely stay open until the small hours, and a popular local specialty is the 'kanterfrüstuck,' or hangover breakfast. But nothing compares to the party Vienna threw last weekend to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of its all-time favorite son, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This marzipan metropolis astride the Danube played host to a nonstop round of celebrations, concerts, lectures, readings, film showings, museum openings and multimedia extravaganzas. The events marked the start of Vienna Mozart Year, a series of cultural happenings throughout 2006, many of them scheduled for the summer. Tourism officials expect the festivities will draw 300,000 visitors. Sometimes last weekend it seemed as if all of them had already arrived, braving sub-freezing winds as they surged up and down the Kartnerstrasse, the city's main pedestrianized thoroughfare. Throughout the picturesque town center, municipal employees were handing out free yellow helium-filled balloons bearing the composer's visage. Free concerts and recitals were taking place back-to-back in a huge tented complex next to St. Stephen's Cathedral. At some 50 'Calling Mozart' kiosks around town you could dial a number on your mobile phone (at local calling rates) or rent a handset for 5 euros and hear what the musical genius had done on that very spot. Mozart did much in Vienna, where he lived for the last 10 of his 35 years. But he was born in Salzburg, then as now a much smaller town 200 miles away, where an equally ambitious birthday program will dominate the 2006 cultural calendar. (For more details, go to www.mozart2006.at.) Salzburg also offered a slate of musical events last weekend that matched Vienna's. Indeed, a visitor might assume that the two cities were locked in a fierce struggle for the ownership of Mozart's lucrative legacy. Viennese, however, seemed oblivious to the goings-on in what many consider a charming provincial outpost. 'I don't sense any particular rivalry,' said Walter Auer, a young flautist on his way to perform at Vienna's newly refurbished Theater an der Wien. 'They have their things, we have ours.' Mozart was somewhat more passionate on the subject. 'You are well aware how I detest Salzburg,' he wrote to a friend in 1778. The musician felt stifled in his job as concert master for Salzburg's archbishop and was thrilled when he got fired three years later for insubordination. He decamped to Vienna, setting himself up as an independent composer and teacher. 'I assure you this is a magnificent place,' he wrote to his father from his new home, 'the best in the world for my profession.' In fact, Mozart had a dozen homes during his decade in Vienna, and last weekend marked the official reopening of the Mozarthaus, an 11,000-square-foot museum in the house at 5 Domgasse where he spent several of his last years. The city suspended the museum's regular 9-euro entry fee and, because the building can hold only 200 people at a time, kept it open round the clock to accommodate the crowds. (Toward midnight Saturday, I faced a half-hour wait.) Inside, there is an imaginative reconstruction of Mozart's spacious apartment, some period furniture, a bronze death mask, multimedia exhibits featuring his music, and the score of his Symphony No. 40, handwritten in brown ink. Across town at the National Library, crowds were also gathering — during normal business hours — to see the score of the very last of Mozart's 626 known works, the famous 'Requiem,' which he wrote on his deathbed. It was a moving display, despite the accompanying black Lucite casket with blazing pink neon lettering. A more ambitious exhibit, 'Mozart: The Enlightenment Experiment,' will open March 17 at the Albertina Museum. Zaha Hadid, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect, designed the installation, which will trace Mozart's links to classicism, romanticism, the rococo and the Enlightenment. Some of the year's most imaginative Mozart confections are not so serious. On a stroll down the Kartnerstrasse, you can buy Mozartkugln, the pistachio-cream-filled chocolates Austria has been producing for decades. Also on sale are Mozart golf balls, coffee cups, snow globes, key chains, kitchen matches, paper napkins, sausage, yoghurt, coffee, tea, wine, underwear and T-shirts — though the latter don't yet seem to be out-selling the ones of a road sign picturing a familiar marsupial and the legend, 'No Kangaroos in Austria.' For most visitors drawn to Vienna this year, the real attraction will be the major local industry: music. A galaxy of international music stars, including Seiji Ozawa, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Simon Rattle and Thomas Hampson — will perform the composer's operas, from first ('Bastien und Bastienne') to last ('The Magic Flute'), as well as his symphonies and chamber music. In addition, Vienna Mozart Year has commissioned new jazz, theater, dance and multimedia works based on Mozartian themes. Many will be part of an avant-garde festival organized by the director Peter Sellars in November and December. Chick Corea's new Concerto No. 2 will be performed at the Vienna State Opera in July, and Thomas Pernes' 'Magic Flute 06,' a full-length opera featuring Mozart's beloved characters but with an entirely different story, will be offered in March. (More information of programs is at www.wienmozart2006.at.) 'The one thing we are determined to avoid' said Peter Marboe, artistic director of Mozart Year, is for 'contemporary young, creative artists to feel that they have fewer chances than usual because Mozart is stealing the show.' But then, he always steals the show. In the first major musical event of Mozart Year, the Vienna State Opera staged the composer's 'Idomeneo' at the Theater an der Wien last Friday, with the Brookyn-born tenor Neil Shicoff in the lead. After struggling with one of the composer's more difficult arias, Mr. Shicoff was booed by purists in the second balcony. He nonetheless received respectable applause at the end of the opera, and then — unexpectedly — blew kisses in the direction of his detractors. Charmed by a gesture of such Mozartian effrontery, they cheered wildly.

Subject: Good to Eat Before It's Sweet From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:13:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/dining/01mini.html?ex=1296450000&en=7740dc6b0ef12cfa&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 A Fruit That's Good to Eat Before It's Sweet By MARK BITTMAN I HAVE no idea why the common bunch banana, which is almost always eaten ripe and sweet and is consequently sometimes called a 'dessert' banana, became a staple in the United States, while the equally important plantain has remained largely a part of Latino cuisines. There's nothing negative to be said about common bananas, but of the several hundred species of bananas, plantains are probably the most popular, in part because they can be eaten at any stage of ripeness. Unlike dessert bananas, plantains are always cooked, and that's not the only difference. Plantains are tricky to peel (Amanda Hesser addresses this problem in her article about Edwin Rodriguez's plantain peeler, First Dining Page), they aren't sold in bunches, and they keep well. They can sit on your counter for two weeks. Sometimes the most difficult part of preparing plantains is waiting for them to ripen, slowly turning from green to green-yellow to banana yellow, right through to black. Real black. Unless you shop in a Latino market (where dessert bananas are the rarity) you'll most often buy plantains green. I suggest you buy several at a time; this allows you to cook a few when they're green, then wait a few days and cook some when they're riper. If you develop a preference for green plantains, just keep them in the refrigerator; ripening can be retarded for weeks with no loss of quality. At each stage plantains are not only useful but wonderful, and at each stage, there's an appropriate (and distinctly different) way to prepare them. Green or green-yellow, they're good grated and are excellent substitutes for potatoes in a rösti-like preparation or in little latke-like pancakes. There are three more common ways to use green plantains. In one, they're sliced and fried to make platanitos (chips). In another, they're cooked once to soften them and then, after a quick squashing with a fist, a plate or a tostonera (available from markets and Web sites specializing in Latino ingredients; Mr. Rodriguez also sells one) to double their size, they're cooked again to produce tostones, a starchy, crisp, slightly sweet side dish best with lime and salt. The third, and possibly highest use of unripe plantains is in mofongo, a magnificent blend of mashed sautéed plantains, garlic and bacon or other crisp-cooked pork. Here, I've borrowed and adapted a sophisticated version of mofongo from Wilo Benet, the chef who runs Pikayo in San Juan, known for its updated Latino cuisine; his, made the old-fashioned way using a mortar and pestle (I use a food processor), is the best I've ever tasted, doused in a flavorful chicken broth, which is traditional. Riper, yellowish plantains can be cooked in stews, where they will hold together. They can also be made into a slightly sweeter tostone-like side dish, and eaten straight or added to stews or other dishes. Plantains then just get riper and sweeter until they rot. Before that happens, they're black: the flesh is soft, delicate and pink-tinged. At this stage, they are sweet enough to make into dessert, though most often they're used to produce one of the easiest and most delicious weeknight side dishes a home cook can have in his or her repertory, plátanos maduros. They're simply cut into chunks (the chunks are easily and almost naturally divided lengthwise into thirds, which is kind of nice) and cooked in a little oil until nicely browned. Their sweetness is never cloying, and is nicely offset by liberal pinches of salt and a squeeze of lime.

Subject: In London, a 'Soldier's Tale' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:12:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/theater/newsandfeatures/01sold.html?ex=1296450000&en=6cfb22a5b5dc734e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 In London, a 'Soldier's Tale' Told in English and Arabic By ALAN RIDING LONDON — How London's legendary Old Vic Theater came to be presenting a British and Iraqi version of 'The Soldier's Tale' this week is almost as strange as what transpires on stage: Charles F. Ramuz's text is spoken in English and Arabic, Igor Stravinsky's score alternates with Arabic music and a music theater work written during World War I is updated to the Iraq war. For this to happen, Andrew Steggall, the young British director who conceived the production, flew to Baghdad in May to hold a workshop in Iraq's National Theater. When security problems prevented him from working during a second trip there in October, he traveled to Sulaymaniyah in Iraq's Kurdish region and held auditions in a former prison. Finally, three Iraqi actors and an Iraqi director joined three British actors in London last month. With them, Mr. Steggall began the real work of turning an idea into a play. The original play, written in 1918, is itself unusual. While antiwar in that it highlights the moral bankruptcy surrounding World War I, it is essentially a reworking of the Faustian legend, this time borrowed from a Russian folk tale in which a soldier is persuaded by the devil to trade his fiddle for a book containing the secret for becoming rich. Mr. Steggall, 27, also sees 'The Soldier's Tale' as an antiwar story. But despite widespread opposition here to Britain's military presence in Iraq, he has not turned it into an anti-Iraq war story. 'I'm not a passionate demonstrator,' he said in a telephone interview. 'I did go on one antiwar march, but then was not sure why I did so. I was not politically engaged. What I felt was how alien Iraq and the Arab world were to me. And that scared me. I wanted to take responsibility for my own naïveté. I thought the work could serve as a platform for debate.' He got the idea after directing a conventional production of 'The Soldier's Tale' in Bristol two years ago. Mr. Steggall then won support for an Anglo-Iraqi version from numerous figures in the British art world, including Jeremy Irons, the actor, and Peter Brook, the director. To help raise money, the Old Vic's artistic director, Kevin Spacey, also lent the theater for a single English-language performance of 'The Soldier's Tale,' in which Mr. Irons played the narrator. Finally, bolstered by a $176,000 grant from the Louise T. Blouin Foundation, the new bilingual version was scheduled for nine performances through Saturday. 'It became increasingly obvious that our piece could not be polemic,' Mr. Steggall said. 'Every Iraqi I spoke to was thrilled by the fall of Saddam Hussein and confused by the present situation in Iraq. So, in our version, we have not made clear who the devil is. But we try to suggest it is ideology, not money, which leads you to Hell, the idea that there is only one truth, our truth.' For staging purposes, the real challenge was to create not only a single text from new English and Arabic translations of Ramuz's French-language libretto, but also a coherent score weaving Stravinsky's music with Arabic music composed for the occasion by Ahmed Mukhtar. In this, combining the music proved the easier task. On a stage that suggests a bombed building, seven 'Western' musicians dressed in World War I army uniforms stand across from four Iraqi musicians playing traditional Arabic instruments. While each band plays separately, with the Iraqi musicians accompanying two haunting Iraqi songs, the two also occasionally overlap. Reworking the libretto was trickier. Because the story needs to stand on its own in both languages, there are in effect two casts, each comprising a narrator, a soldier and the devil. But they also constantly interrelate, so that in practice the play becomes a story of two soldiers (dressed in modern army fatigues) and two devils (who at one point don the medal-heavy uniforms of tin-pot dictators). The outcome is a fast-paced, highly theatrical show, true to the instructions of Ramuz and Stravinsky that it be 'read, played and danced.' 'In all my years in theater, I have never been involved in anything as extraordinary as this,' said Julian Glover, 70, who plays the English narrator. 'We didn't know which way to jump. To be involved in something so improvisatory, to use one's craft, well, you don't usually get asked to do things like this at my age.' Still, while the production was warmly applauded by an audience that included a good number of Iraqi expatriates, British theater critics were more impressed by Mr. Steggall's daring than by the result. 'I was left feeling that the extraordinary story of the show's cross-cultural creation is probably more riveting than the finished product,' Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian. And in The Daily Telegraph, Charles Spencer concurred. 'Unfortunately as a piece of music-theater, the show proves a good deal less impressive than the high-mindedness that inspired it,' he wrote, albeit praising both Stravinsky's music and Mr. Mukhtar's 'exotic and hypnotic' score. For Mr. Steggall, however, the adventure is not yet over. He hopes to take the production to Philadelphia, New York and Paris and, most importantly, to Baghdad. 'I'm keen to take a scaled-down version to the National Theater there,' he said. 'Baghdad is a city where people read books. It's full of erudite, witty, ironic people. I don't want this show to be just for an English audience.'

Subject: Inca Show Pits Yale Against Peru From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:10:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/arts/design/01mach.html?ex=1296450000&en=3af78fb1f14bf60e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Inca Show Pits Yale Against Peru By HUGH EAKIN NEW HAVEN — By any conventional measure, Yale's exhibition about Machu Picchu would seem a windfall for Peru. As one of the most ambitious shows about the Inca ever presented in the United States, drawing over a million visitors while traveling to half a dozen cities and back again, it has riveted eyes on Peru's leading tourist attraction. Yet instead of cementing an international partnership, the exhibition, which returned to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale in September, has brought a low ebb in the university's relations with Peru. At issue are a large group of artifacts that form the core of the show, excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912. The government of Peru wants all of those objects back. Peru contends that it essentially lent the Machu Picchu objects to the university nearly a century ago and that the university has failed to return them. Yale has staunchly rebuffed Peru's claim, stating that it returned all borrowed objects in the 1920's and has retained only those to which it has full title. The dispute is inflamed by the swashbuckling exploits of Hiram Bingham III, a Yale professor, aviator and later senator, and the special dispensations he brokered with the Peruvian government to take Inca bones and ritual tomb objects out of Peru. Add a Peruvian president who has made the country's indigenous heritage a central theme of his administration and an Ivy League archaeology department with a towering reputation in the Inca field, and the dispute has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones movie. 'The irony is that for years the collection was just left in cardboard boxes,' said Hugh Thomson, a British explorer who has written about the early-20th-century Yale expeditions to Machu Picchu. 'It's only when they rather conscientiously dusted it off and launched this rather impressive exhibition that the whole issue has surfaced again.' For much of the three years since the show first opened at Yale, Peru's claim on the objects has been played out in behind-the-scenes talks in Lima, Washington and New Haven between Yale and the government of President Alejandro Toledo. But in recent months the Peruvian government has taken its campaign public, threatening legal action if the university does not comply with its demands. The Peruvian claim has gained additional momentum from a recent wave of disputes about national property issues and the collecting ethics of large American museums. Over the last few months, Italy has pursued an aggressive campaign to recover prized classical antiquities from several American museums, including the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Both Yale and the Peruvians say they hope for an amicable resolution, and talks continue. In December, Yale even offered to return numerous objects to Peru and help install and maintain them in a Peruvian museum. Up to now Peruvian officials have not responded to this proposal, saying that recognition of Peru's title to the entire collection must be the basis of any agreement. 'Yale is assuming that it owns the collection, and can negotiate with us which objects it wants to return and which it wants to keep,' Luis Guillermo Lumbreras, director of Peru's National Institute of Culture in Lima, said in a telephone interview. 'But that's not what we're talking about.' Unlike the cases involving the Getty and the Met — which center on ancient treasures that Italian officials say were dug up by looters in recent decades — the Machu Picchu objects have a far older and more complex history. They were removed during an authorized archaeological dig nearly a century ago; they were inspected by the Peruvian government before they left the country; and even Peruvian officials acknowledge that the objects themselves — which consist largely of bones, ceramic pots and common Inca tools — do not have great aesthetic or museum value. On the other hand, Peru did have laws in force at the time governing archaeological finds, and its government in theory had ownership of any artifacts unearthed from Peruvian soil. As a result, the dispute has become something of a test case for the limits of cultural property claims against American institutions. At the heart of the controversy is the complicated legacy of Bingham, who stumbled upon Machu Picchu in 1911. Before his arrival, the Inca complex, which occupies a spectacular remote site in the Peruvian Andes, had been unknown to all but a few local farmers around nearby Cuzco. Bingham's discovery stirred enormous interest in the site. With the backing of the National Geographic Society, he returned to do excavations in the Machu Picchu area in 1912 and in 1914-15— the two expeditions that are at the center of the dispute. Initially, he enjoyed considerable support from the Peruvian government. His early expeditions benefited from a letter of introduction from Lima and a Peruvian military escort; in 1912, he entered negotiations to give Yale an exclusive 10-year concession that would allow it to bring to the United States whatever it found. But the negotiations fell through after a formal protest from Harvard that Yale was trying to shut its archaeologists out of Peru. Still, in October 1912, Bingham managed to secure a decree allowing him to take the contents of some 170 tombs he excavated at Machu Picchu. As a condition, the decree stated that Peru 'reserves the right' to ask for the return of the objects, but did not state a specific time period for such a request to be made. By the time of the second National Geographic expedition, however, Peru had become increasingly hostile to Bingham's activities, and the explorer was accused of spiriting Inca gold out of the country. After that, he did no further work at Machu Picchu, and the material he excavated elsewhere in Peru was subject to a far more stringent 1916 loan agreement of 18 months. 'It became very political,' Lucy C. Salazar, one of the curators of the Yale exhibition, saied of that era. 'A new indigenous movement was beginning to use the country's Andean roots to legitimize themselves.' Yale officials maintain that the university has complied with both the 1912 and 1916 agreements, and that after a series of loan extensions, all of the 1914-15 materials were returned to Peru in the 1920's. The university maintains that it is under no such obligation to return the earlier material from 1912. 'Bingham understood that he had the right to keep the objects from 1912 in New Haven for research, and that he had fulfilled his obligations,' Yale said in a statement to The New York Times. Records made available by the National Geographic Society show that about half of the 1914-15 materials were returned to Peru in 1921. But there is no document recording the return of the remaining objects in that expedition, a society spokeswoman said. Mr. Lumbreras, the Peruvian culture official, says that Yale returned only 'a few bones' in the 1920's, but that there was never any question that the other objects should ultimately go back to Peru. He said that Yale had no need for the objects. 'After 90 years, Yale has had time to do all the research it wants,' he said. Yet Yale's recent research on the Bingham collection has been pivotal to cracking the mystery of Machu Picchu, a site whose purpose had eluded scholars for decades. Bingham argued variously that the site was a fabled early capital of the Incas or one of the empire's most important religious complexes where 'virgins of the sun' were regularly sacrificed. Others have speculated about its possible astrological significance. But research led by Dr. Salazar and her husband, Richard L. Burger, a professor of anthropology at Yale and also a curator of the show, suggests that the site was simply one of many royal estates used as a country retreat away from Cuzco, the Inca capital. Other researchers, citing the Yale team's extensive scientific work on the burials and the scholarly exhibition it assembled, suggest that Peru's campaign to get back the collection is politically motivated. As the first indigenous Peruvian to hold the office, Alejandro Toledo has saluted the country's Inca heritage, even choosing to have part of his inauguration ceremony held at Machu Picchu in 2001. 'There has certainly been some beating of the Inca drum,' said Mr. Thomson, the explorer. But others argue that Peru has made great progress in protecting its once-neglected cultural heritage and the collection should go back. 'Machu Picchu has tremendous symbolic value to Peru,' said Johan Reinhard, an Inca specialist who is explorer in residence at the National Geographic Society. 'By refusing to acknowledge Peruvian ownership, it may be losing the cultural battle.'

Subject: The Past Lingers in Changing Vietnam From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:08:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/travel/28vietnam.html?ex=1282881600&en=81bba89f71412f40&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 28, 2005 The Past Lingers in Changing Vietnam By AMANDA HESSER BREAKFAST at the Morin Hotel in Hue was a game of Russian roulette. As my husband, Tad, and I sat sipping Vietnamese coffee in the courtyard, nuts from the bang trees above us dropped like bombs onto the stone patio. I asked our waiter, Dinh, a slender young man, if they ever hit people. 'Yes,' he said, pointing to his forearm and shoulder with a shrug. 'One broke a table.' If you're not left unconscious, the Morin's terrace can be quite pleasant, a refuge from the choking summer heat and the buzz of motor scooters in central Hue. Small birds with bright yellow beaks - called chim sao - hop around, scavenging food from your table. 'They follow the farmers,' Dinh told us. 'We used to have 10. Now there are only four or five.' 'Maybe they went to another hotel,' Tad said. 'No,' Dinh replied, taking him seriously, 'no better place than here.' At the moment, that's true. But the Morin, a landmark since 1901, is a four-star hotel, and the tourism boom here has led to the construction of five-star hotels all around the city. A 12-story one was rising next door to the Morin. I asked Dinh if he was concerned about the impending competition. 'No,' he said, puzzled. 'Why would you want to stay up high like that?' For nearly two decades, Vietnam's two big metropolises, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), have embraced capitalism and the modern world. But here in the center of the country, a belt of land only 40 or so miles wide that acts as a divider between the north and the south - and that consequently saw some of the Vietnam War's fiercest battles - the mood is often less aggressive. As we saw in Hue when we went there last summer, and later when we drove down Route 1 through Da Nang to the old fishing town of Hoi An, change is met with a mixture of desire and reluctance. Small vendors continue to sell bunches of temple incense gathered like colored brooms. Grooming is still done right on the street, with sidewalk salons for ear cleaning and facials that are conducted by running a thread over a customer's face in tiny strokes. And although motor scooters have taken over even in the villages, water buffaloes are never far from view. But for every contented Dinh, we discovered, there is an entrepreneur who won't rest until you buy his wares. The night we arrived, we dined at Lac Thanh, a restaurant that we had heard good things about. The moment our pedicabs - cyclos, as they are called - pulled up out front, we were surrounded by waiters from Lac Thanh, as well as two neighboring restaurants, all of them tugging at our arms and imploring us, 'Here! Here!' We stuck to our original plan and were whisked upstairs to a balcony with three tables. The walls were painted a swimming pool green and cluttered with the scribblings of bygone diners. A very short man approached our table holding out a handful of coins. 'Hello, where are you from?' he said. His voice was quick and boyish and he looked remarkably like Linda Hunt in 'The Year of Living Dangerously.' 'I have nice coins from Vietnam,' he continued, adding that his name was Mr. Coin. 'This is Miss Scarlet, and I am Colonel Mustard,' Tad said. Sensing that there would be no sale, he shuffled off. Next came our waiter, who took our order and then returned - not with the beers we had ordered but with a water buffalo painting he wanted us to buy. Vietnam thrives on this sort of jack-in-the-box capitalism. The Morin's lobby doubled as a cluttered knick-knack shop where you could buy paintings, T-shirts and jewelry. And in downtown Hue, what appeared to be a women's hair salon turned out to provide full-service massages on the side. (I discovered this when I stepped inside to ask directions and found myself interrupting a male client's special moment. But he very politely gave us a great restaurant recommendation: Chi Teo on Hai Ba Trung street.) Once we finally got our beers at Lac Thanh, we began to enjoy the circus. When a large table of Australians arrived, Mr. Lac, the owner, swung into action. He arranged five beers in a small semi-circle on their table, and attached one of his homemade bottle openers - a slat of wood with a screw protruding from one end - to each. He clapped to command the diners' attention, and then with a karate chop, he whacked the line of bottle openers. All the bottle caps popped off in unison. The Australians whooped and applauded, and Mr. Lac handed everyone a free bottle opener. Our guide for several days was Do Ba Dat, a reticent man with dark still eyes and cheekbones like hamburger buns. On our first morning together, we headed toward the Perfume River - some say its name, Huong Giang, should translate as Fragrant River - to board a narrow old wooden motorboat. Bamboo fishing boats crowded the riverbank across from us. Children were jumping into the water from a nearby island. Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, ordered the planting of fragrant trees along the river in the early 1800's, and much of the riverfront remains grassy and untouched. As we headed west, Dat said little, except to point out an imposing modern tower on the riverbank. 'This is a water purification tower,' he said, proudly. (Meanwhile, the first mate pulled out her buffalo woodcarvings and offered them for sale.) Just as the temperature reached 103, we docked upriver and walked into the old Thien Mu pagoda and monastery. In 1963, an elderly monk from Thien Mu, Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem's policies of discrimination against Buddhists. The baby blue Austin in which the monk made his fatal trip to Saigon is kept in an open building, where it rusts slowly in the room next to where the monks eat their meals. Atop the car is a grim photo of Quang Duc sitting in the lotus position, his body consumed by flames. A fire extinguisher sits nearby. 'The Green Berets were stationed 45 miles from here,' Dat said, in one of his many sudden, oblique references to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as 'the American War'). Dat had the manner of a schoolteacher with a love of facts and figures, and he spoke English well, with a command of odd words like 'magnolia' and 'ornamentation.' But he was guarded, almost defiantly so, and deaf to humor. He grew up in Hue. When he was 15, he saw Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, pass through the city in a motorcade. Recalling the moment, he said: 'People always wondered whether or not he can shoot. Because he's dressed very civilian. He comes from Ford, so we don't know if he can be any good. The Vietnamese think someone from West Point is maybe better.' The war was never far from view (at the Citadel, which once contained the royal palace - a small-scale version of Beijing's Forbidden City - the walls are still peppered with bullet holes from the Tet offensive, and some of Hue's nightclubs have names like 'Apocalypse New'). But while no one expressed resentment about our involvement in their country's affairs, no one wanted to talk about it much, either. Surrounding Hue are a number of emperors' tombs, many built as summer retreats and eventual burial sights. We arrived at the tomb of Tu Duc, the 19th-century emperor who had the longest reign - 35 years- of the Nguyen dynasty, at noon, when the temperature had soared to a level that I never wish to repeat. Tu Duc spent summers in Hue and the pondside pavilion where he would write poetry and relax with his concubines - 'a boring job,' Dat said - still stands among frangipani trees. Tu Duc is one of the few emperors who left a postmortem of his job performance. On a large stone table near his tomb, Tu Duc criticizes himself for losing to the French and for lacking a direction. He did build a lovely tomb, though. Afterward, we stopped at one of the outdoor cafes along the Dong Ba canal; they are packed together so tightly it's hard to know which one you're in. We drank Huda beer served over giant ice cubes and ordered a bowl of chao, a rice porridge with shrimp, and watched as the cooks washed their dishes in buckets, dumping the water into the canal. After three days in Hue, we left early for a daylong drive through Da Nang to Hoi An, following Route 1 - sometimes referred to as the 'route of the mandarins' - which runs like a vein through Vietnam from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The route took us on a high-speed trip through the tiny theaters of Vietnamese daily life. As our car weaved around motor scooters and bicycles, we passed a woman on her haunches wearing a non (the conical peasant hat) and splitting wood; women carrying babies; computer stores and coffin shops; rice fields; haystacks for cooking fuel; bungalows and new McMansions trapped behind iron fences. The villages are small and pass by in a breath. After about two hours on the road, we began climbing Cloudy Pass, a harrowing 13-mile stretch that marks the country's climate divide, separating the wet north from the dry, hot south. At the top, Dat pointed out Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where the first regular American ground troops landed in March 1965. To the east was Monkey Mountain, a spit of land, and to the south, Da Nang, nestled by mountains, hung under a band of haze. During the war, Da Nang was called 'shelled city,' because the Communist forces attacked it from all angles. We stopped in Da Nang for the only reason anyone stops in Da Nang: to see the Cham Museum, at the south end of town (2 Tieu La; phone 84-511 821-951). The open-air galleries are jammed with Cham sculpture, mostly from the 9th to the 11th centuries, which was a great moment for free expression. Stone apsaras bend seductively. Breasts wrap around pedestals. Lions strike burlesque poses, and giants shake their fists. Many of the works were gathered in the early 20th century by a Frenchman, Henri Parmentier, and they are kept, trustingly, behind a fence that could be scaled by a child. As we returned to our car, a man crossing the street was nearly hit by a man on a motor scooter. Dat shook his head. 'People who cross the street without thinking or looking, we call them 'poets,' ' he said. ONE of the treats of Vietnam is fresh-pressed sugar cane juice. In the late afternoon in Hoi An, about 17 miles south of Da Nang, the cafes along the Thu Bon River fill with people drinking beer, eating rice cakes and drinking gallons of the cane juice, called nuoc mia. It comes out of the press pale green and cloudy with a fluff of foam on top. It's sweet, zesty - due to being pressed with tiny limes - and pleasantly faint. As we drank with all the others, we watched boats at the dock loading up with commuters. More than 60 people and 40 bicycles crammed into a rickety 30-foot-long boat before it lurched into the open water. A man with an ice cart pulled up nearby. He began chiseling ice from a large block, then pounded the ice with a stick until it was crushed. Then he hauled the crushed ice from vendor to vendor, filling their coolers. Hoi An, which means 'peaceful life union,' is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of the road, tossing bricks up to the second floor where another man caught them. A house was being built, one brick at a time. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans, heaps of cucumber. But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors. More than one woman grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me to her store. I was more charmed by Xuan, a tailor on Hoang Dieu, who simply posted a sign in English, which read: 'Stop looking, you've found the most honest, friendly, non-pressuring accurate craftswoman in Hoi An. Surpassed all expectations with her creative flair. Gucci move aside!!!' Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China. At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position. A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said 'Netnam' - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism. The Netnam group reminded me of Phan Thuan An, an elderly scholar and relic of a vanishing Vietnam, whom we had met earlier in Hue. He would have been pleased to know that these techies were keeping up old traditions, although he would have been scandalized to see T-shirts in the temple. Thuan An is a member of the former royal family, and his painstaking documentation of the palace helped the Imperial City in Hue win status as a World Heritage Site. When we visited him at his traditional house in Hue, he was wearing an ao trong, the white two-piece tunic and pants, with a pair of wooden clogs. He took us for a tour of the grounds of his home, designed in a feng shui style with a koi pond in the center and a screen of bamboo at the back. Inside, he showed us the altar in his home dedicated to his ancestors. It was piled with mangoes and cake and his grandmother's ivory chopsticks - a time capsule in a time capsule. Like many people in a country undergoing so much change, Thuan An is worried about Hue's future. 'If more people come here, the atmosphere in the city is not good,' he said. 'The number of foreign visitors, they destroy the cultural atmosphere in our city. When they go to the pagoda, and to the Imperial City, they wear shorts. I don't know what to say.' In Hoi An, Dat finally told us his own story, over beers and fried wontons at a small, forgettable restaurant, Wan Lu. He had been a high school teacher until 1975 when the North Vietnamese government took over. 'People who taught literature and history were replaced,' he said. For seven years, he farmed peanuts - 'like Jimmy Carter,' he said, brightening - then began teaching English to people emigrating to America. He wants to visit America himself one day. I pointed out how handsome the restaurant's lanterns - made of loosely draped rings - were. 'They were designed after grenade rings,' Dat said, 'the kind that soldiers used to hang on their helmets.' That night a steady rain fell on the town. I was sure it would soften the mood, but the energy only shifted. The Internet cafes filled up, the motor scooters sped up and two weaving factories I passed were in high gear, the looms clacking relentlessly, echoing through the streets of Hoi An - feeding the tourists, driving the economy, shuttling into the modern world.

Subject: Seducing the Medical Profession From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:07:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/opinion/02thu3.html?ex=1296536400&en=f4bb3b78fd10a961&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 2, 2006 Seducing the Medical Profession New evidence keeps emerging that the medical profession has sold its soul in exchange for what can only be described as bribes from the manufacturers of drugs and medical devices. It is long past time for leading medical institutions and professional societies to adopt stronger ground rules to control the noxious influence of industry money on what doctors prescribe for their patients. Last week two new cases came to light that reveal the lengths to which companies will go to buy influence with doctors, pharmacists and other medical professionals. Reed Abelson reported in The Times on Jan. 24 about a whistle-blower's lawsuit alleging that Medtronic had paid tens of millions of dollars in recent years to surgeons in a position to use and recommend its medical devices. In one particularly egregious example, a prominent Wisconsin surgeon received $400,000 for just eight days of consulting. In last Saturday's Times, Gardiner Harris and Robert Pear revealed that a Danish company paid a pharmacist, doctors' assistants and a drug store chain to switch diabetic patients to the company's high-priced insulin products. In the wake of past reports of industry's influence over prescribing practices, medical and industry groups have issued guidelines defining appropriate behavior. But as an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association made clear last week, these guidelines are far too weak. The influential authors called for a complete ban on all gifts, free meals and payments for attending meetings. They urged doctors to reject free drug samples because they are a powerful incentive to use medicines that are expensive but not more effective. And they called for a ban on consulting arrangements that entail no specific scientific duties. These proposals are hardly onerous. Kaiser Permanente, a California-based managed care group, has adopted nearly all of the recommendations. Its doctors prescribe heavily marketed medicines far less frequently than most other doctors. The critical issue is that doctors must have the best interests of their patients at heart in prescribing drugs or recommending medical devices. Their judgment must not be clouded by financial self-interest or the desire to please industrial benefactors.

Subject: The March of the Straw Soldiers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:04:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/opinion/02thu2.html?ex=1296536400&en=71e976a5eef2c33a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 2, 2006 The March of the Straw Soldiers President Bush is not giving up the battle over domestic spying. He's fighting it with an army of straw men and a fleet of red herrings. In his State of the Union address and in a follow-up speech in Nashville yesterday, Mr. Bush threw out a dizzying array of misleading analogies, propaganda slogans and false choices: Congress authorized the president to spy on Americans and knew all about it ... 9/11 could have been prevented by warrantless spying ... you can't fight terrorism and also obey the law ... and Democrats are not just soft on national defense, they actually don't want to beat Al Qaeda. 'Let me put it to you in Texan,' Mr. Bush drawled at the Grand Ole Opry House yesterday. 'If Al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know.' Yes, and so does every American. But that has nothing to do with Mr. Bush's decision to toss out the Constitution and judicial process by authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without a warrant. Let's be clear: the president and his team had the ability to monitor calls by Qaeda operatives into and out of the United States before 9/11 and got even more authority to do it after the attacks. They never needed to resort to extralegal and probably unconstitutional methods. Mr. Bush said the warrantless spying was vetted by lawyers in the Justice Department, which is cold comfort. They also endorsed the abuse of prisoners and the indefinite detention of 'unlawful enemy combatants' without charges or trials. The president also said the spying is reviewed by N.S.A. lawyers. That's nice, but the law was written specifically to bring that agency, and the president, under control. And there already is a branch of government assigned to decide what's legal. It's called the judiciary. The law itself is clear: spying on Americans without a warrant is illegal. One of the oddest moments in Mr. Bush's defense of domestic spying came when he told his audience in Nashville, 'If I was trying to pull a fast one on the American people, why did I brief Congress?' He did not mention that some lawmakers protested the spying at the briefings, or that they found them inadequate. The audience members who laughed and applauded Mr. Bush's version of the truth may have forgot that he said he briefed Congress fully on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We know how that turned out.

Subject: A Young Doctor's Hardest Lesson From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:01:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/health/28essa.html?ex=1262062800&en=71b489d6ffa2b35c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 28, 2004 A Young Doctor's Hardest Lesson: Keep Your Mouth Shut By KENT SEPKOWITZ, M.D. An unspoken but ever-present issue in the life of any doctor is an immodest, completely nonmedical concern: are doctors boring people? Sober and serious, surely. Respectable and educated, one hopes. A bit stuffy at times, perhaps. But dreary? As a profession, I think we do tend to run on the dry side, though till recently the reason had eluded me. Then, last month, my wife and I bumped into an acquaintance of hers while walking along the street. The person, unbeknownst to my wife, is a patient of mine, someone whom I treat for a chronic infection. After the patient and I shared a moment of mutual panic, we three chatted amicably and moved on. Except, that evening, my wife kept asking me why I was being so quiet and, well, boring. And I suddenly saw the problem: doctors are waterlogged with secrets, hundreds of them, thousands of them. Each day brings a new batch: patients' admissions about drug use or sexual indiscretion, a hidden family, a long-held dream, an ancient heartache, undisclosed H.I.V. infection. Over the years, this begins to add up, the bulge expands, the joints get stiff. Yet the secret - the consequences of our ever-expanding repository of others' secrets - remains, well, secretive. The situation simply is not addressed, not at the start, middle, or the end of a career. The most difficult aspect of a training doctor's life is not suddenly bearing witness to someone else's pain and death; it is not adjusting to arduous work hours; it is not the imposing amount to be learned and synthesized. These surely are intense, life-transforming endeavors but are still related to other experiences. No, the biggest shock along the road to becoming a doctor is the startling revelation that you can ask and the patient will tell anything. Young doctors, when they first meet patients, don't know quite how to react. After all, most people are raised to be careful in their interactions, discreet in their inquiries, fair-minded in the way they might pursue personal information. Now, suddenly, everything goes. As doctors, we can and must ask a battery of questions about last weekend's big night out, about how that rash may have occurred, about why you have been sniffling for so many months. And sure enough, right on schedule, most patients answer with little or no discomfort. But with this intoxicating power comes an equally strong interdiction: shut your trap. You can ask what you want but you'd better keep quiet about it. A person's trust in you, in medicine, in society's ability to assure someone's safe passage through illness requires learning quickly how to keep secrets. This sober business of maintaining confidences is the closest we come to the priesthood. Forget healing, forget laying on of hands: it is the importance we place on silence that is our most important spiritual activity. Yet the world offers few hints (or incentives) on how to button your lips across the decades. Indeed, we celebrate the most unbuttoned among us: movie stars and gossip columnists, Barbara Walters and blabby neighbors. How much juice can they squeeze out of someone? Other professions that traffic in secrets typically maintain silence for a fixed period: lawyers and spies, accountants and politicians, mobsters and four-star generals. Power or leverage is at stake, but once things settle, the gabfest can resume. But for us, the silence is forever. The consequence of this tight-lipped life is readily evident anywhere young doctors have congregated. Exploiting the single loophole in the code of silence - chatting up one another - they busily swap stories about patients. Near-maniacal peals of laughter are heard as the latest 'I once saw this woman in the E.R. who' tale is recounted. The hilarity, the need to yelp, surely derives from something other than the quality of the story at hand. I know this because, um, I have transgressed a few times, to try out a story on someone not medical. And rather than hearing the appreciative party guy hoot of laughter, I receive only a confused squint. So we learn to keep quiet about the whole thing, trusted advisers in the persistent palace intrigue. But conducting business this way is confusing. What is off limits, and what remains in play? Can I say this or that? Pretty quickly, it becomes clear that the easiest and safest - though the quietest and dullest - approach is simply to shut up concerning just about everything. It makes for some admittedly dim evenings, perhaps, but at least this way everybody's odds and ends stay locked up and out of reach.

Subject: Devoid of Content From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 07:00:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/opinion/31fish.html?ex=1275192000&en=5b9064f5bb67f352&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss May 31, 2005 Devoid of Content By STANLEY FISH Chicago WE are at that time of year when millions of American college and high school students will stride across the stage, take diploma in hand and set out to the wider world, most of them utterly unable to write a clear and coherent English sentence. How is this possible? The answer is simple and even obvious: Students can't write clean English sentences because they are not being taught what sentences are. Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way. On the first day of my freshman writing class I give the students this assignment: You will be divided into groups and by the end of the semester each group will be expected to have created its own language, complete with a syntax, a lexicon, a text, rules for translating the text and strategies for teaching your language to fellow students. The language you create cannot be English or a slightly coded version of English, but it must be capable of indicating the distinctions - between tense, number, manner, mood, agency and the like - that English enables us to make. You can imagine the reaction of students who think that 'syntax' is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that 'lexicon' is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like 'tense,' 'manner' and 'mood' mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet 14 weeks later - and this happens every time - each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision. How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that over the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: A sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. 'Here,' I say, 'are five words randomly chosen; turn them into a sentence.' (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with 20 sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. 'What is it,' I ask, 'that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?' A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, 'I put the words into a relationship with one another.' Once the notion of relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions they perform and the objects of those actions. The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English allow you to tell who is the doer and whom (or what) is the doee; and how do you know whether there is one doer or many; and what tells you that the doer is doing what he or she does in this way and at this time rather than another? Notice that these are not questions about how a particular sentence works, but questions about how any sentence works, and the answers will point to something very general and abstract. They will point, in fact, to the forms that, while they are themselves without content, are necessary to the conveying of any content whatsoever, at least in English. Once the students tumble to this point, they are more than halfway to understanding the semester-long task: they can now construct a language whose forms do the same work English does, but do it differently. In English, for example, most plurals are formed by adding an 's' to nouns. Is that the only way to indicate the difference between singular and plural? Obviously not. But the language you create, I tell them, must have some regular and abstract way of conveying that distinction; and so it is with all the other distinctions - between time, manner, spatial relationships, relationships of hierarchy and subordination, relationships of equivalence and difference - languages permit you to signal. In the languages my students devise, the requisite distinctions are signaled by any number of formal devices - word order, word endings, prefixes, suffixes, numbers, brackets, fonts, colors, you name it. Exactly how they do it is not the point; the point is that they know what it is they are trying to do; the moment they know that, they have succeeded, even if much of the detailed work remains to be done. AT this stage last semester, the representative of one group asked me, 'Is it all right if we use the same root form for adjectives and adverbs, but distinguish between them by their order in the sentence?' I could barely disguise my elation. If they could formulate a question like that one, they had already learned the lesson I was trying to teach them. In the course of learning that lesson, the students will naturally and effortlessly conform to the restriction I announce on the first day: 'We don't do content in this class. By that I mean we are not interested in ideas - yours, mine or anyone else's. We don't have an anthology of readings. We don't discuss current events. We don't exchange views on hot-button issues. We don't tell each other what we think about anything - except about how prepositions or participles or relative pronouns function.' The reason we don't do any of these things is that once ideas or themes are allowed in, the focus is shifted from the forms that make the organization of content possible to this or that piece of content, usually some recycled set of pros and cons about abortion, assisted suicide, affirmative action, welfare reform, the death penalty, free speech and so forth. At that moment, the task of understanding and mastering linguistic forms will have been replaced by the dubious pleasure of reproducing the well-worn and terminally dull arguments one hears or sees on every radio and TV talk show. Students who take so-called courses in writing where such topics are the staples of discussion may believe, as their instructors surely do, that they are learning how to marshal arguments in ways that will improve their compositional skills. In fact, they will be learning nothing they couldn't have learned better by sitting around in a dorm room or a coffee shop. They will certainly not be learning anything about how language works; and without a knowledge of how language works they will be unable either to spot the formal breakdown of someone else's language or to prevent the formal breakdown of their own. In my classes, the temptation of content is felt only fleetingly; for as soon as students bend to the task of understanding the structure of language - a task with a content deeper than any they have been asked to forgo - they become completely absorbed in it and spontaneously enact the discipline I have imposed. And when there is the occasional and inevitable lapse, and some student voices his or her 'opinion' about something, I don't have to do anything; for immediately some other student will turn and say, 'No, that's content.' When that happens, I experience pure pedagogical bliss. Stanley Fish is dean emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Subject: Budget Cutbacks From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:57:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/politics/02spend.html?ex=1296536400&en=4d0415ec01898859&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 2, 2006 House Approves Budget Cutbacks of $39.5 Billion By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG WASHINGTON — House Republicans eked out a victory on a $39.5 billion budget-cutting package on Wednesday, with a handful of skittish Republicans switching their votes at the last minute in opposition to reductions in spending on health and education programs. The vote helped President Bush deliver on his promise to rein in federal spending while underscoring deep anxiety within his party over cutting social welfare programs in an election year. The measure represents the first major effort by lawmakers since 1997 to cut the growth of so-called entitlement programs, including student loans, crop subsidies and Medicaid, in which spending is determined by eligibility criteria. It passed 216 to 214, with 13 Republicans voting against. The Senate, with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the decisive vote, approved the spending cuts in December. The bill now goes to the White House for Mr. Bush's signature. Coming on the heels of the State of the Union address, the vote was a critical test of Mr. Bush's ability to hold his fractured party together. The House also voted Wednesday to extend the broad antiterrorism bill known as the USA Patriot Act until March 10, giving House and Senate negotiators time to settle differences on another of Mr. Bush's priorities, a measure to revamp the act and make it permanent. The spending bill, which covers a five-year period ending in 2010, will achieve savings of $6.4 billion in Medicare, the health care program for the elderly, through a variety of changes that include higher premiums for all beneficiaries, with steeper increases for the more affluent and a freeze in payments to home health care providers. In the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled, $4.8 billion will be saved in part by increasing co-payments and reducing payments for prescription drugs. Mr. Bush said that he looked forward to signing the legislation and that the budget proposal he would send to Congress on Monday 'will continue to build on the spending restraint we have achieved.' After years of cutting into social programs, the budget vote spotlighted how difficult it will be for Mr. Bush to press ahead with even deeper cuts this year. While the bill has strong appeal to fiscal conservatives who are Mr. Bush's Republican base, it makes party moderates nervous — so much so that four switched their votes to oppose the bill after intensive lobbying from advocacy groups over the holiday break. Determined to see the measure pass even as they knew it would make life tough for party members, Republican leaders waged their own intense lobbying campaign. Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, the Republican whip and acting majority leader, could be seen on the House floor deep in conversation with his colleagues as the roll was being called, apparently counting votes until the last minute so he could determine which moderates could be released to vote no. With House leadership elections set for Thursday, Mr. Blunt, the front-runner for majority leader, had a personal stake in the outcome. 'Clearly, if we hadn't won it would be a huge thing,' Mr. Blunt said after the vote. 'But it's really not about me. It's about the members coming back and taking a very tough vote.' So tough that some moderates who voted in favor of the measure later felt compelled to defend themselves. Among them was Representative Sherwood Boehlert, Republican of New York, who called it 'a very agonizing' decision. But Mr. Boehlert, one of three Republicans to vote against a recent tax-cutting bill, said he had become convinced that entitlement programs must be revamped before they gobbled up the entire federal budget. 'The present course is unsustainable,' he said. 'We can't keep cutting taxes and cutting revenues, while cutting programs to protect the most vulnerable in society.' But conservatives, who pushed hard within their caucus for the cuts, were delighted. Representative Mike Pence, Republican of Indiana, a leader of a group of House conservatives, called the vote 'a step toward restoring public confidence in the fiscal integrity of our national legislature.' With the Senate taking up a tax-cutting measure at the same time, Democrats used debate on the measure to sound what will be a major election-year theme: that Republicans are cutting taxes for the rich at the expense of services for the poor. 'A vote for this bill is a vote, literally, to take away from health care from our children so we can give more money to the super-rich,' Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, said. At a time Congress is consumed by a lobbying scandal, Democrats complained bitterly that the measure had been written without them, with the help of paid representatives from the drug and insurance industries, and then presented for a vote before they had a chance to review it. 'This is a product of special interest lobbying,' said Representative John D. Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, 'and the stench of special interests hangs over the chamber as we consider it today.' The budget-cutting bill is actually a holdover from last year. It first passed the House just before Christmas in an all-night marathon session. The vote was 212 to 206, with nine Republicans joining 196 Democrats and one independent in opposition. The bill then went to the Senate, which made a few minor changes, forcing the House to reconsider it on returning this week. Those tweaks, and the resulting delay, gave groups like AARP, which represents retirees, and Americans United, a progressive advocacy group that fought Mr. Bush's plan to revamp Social Security, time to mount an aggressive campaign against the cuts, and they did. Brad Woodhouse of Americans United, said his group ran more than 300 events nationwide during the Congressional winter recess 'to create the type of wave we created against the privatization plan.' John Rother, AARP's policy director, said his group had run print advertisements and focused on Congress members in swing districts. Mr. Rother said AARP objected in particular to a provision in the bill that would temporarily strip Medicaid coverage from elderly nursing home residents if they had given away money in the previous five years. The provision would cover money given to charity, he said, or to a grandchild for tuition; recipients would lose coverage in an amount equal to what they had given, he said, adding that lawmakers were often surprised to learn of the language. 'It's really punitive — inhumane is the other word I would use,' he said. 'I think a lot of these guys had no idea that was in there when they voted on this.' Still, he said it had been difficult to persuade lawmakers to switch their votes. 'It's tough for these people to say openly, 'I made a mistake; I didn't know what I was voting on.' ' The four who did were Representatives Rob Simmons of Connecticut, who announced his decision last week, Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania, John E. Sweeney of New York and Jim Ramstad of Minnesota. In a statement after the vote, Mr. Gerlach said he was 'very concerned about how the legislation reduces funding for mental health and education as well as important health care areas that will ultimately target our nation's most needy citizens.'

Subject: Curry, Stirred in India From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:54:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/books/01grim.html?ex=1296450000&en=266fa4c5da77be90&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 How Curry, Stirred in India, Became a World Conqueror By WILLIAM GRIMES A couple of years ago, as a spoof, a London newspaper designed the cover for an ultranationalist magazine. It showed a lout in a leather jacket and Union Jack T-shirt sitting down to an Indian meal, surrounded by the slogans 'Keep Curry British!' and 'Bhuna! Nan! Pilau! Curry is your birthright!' The lout may be right, as Lizzie Collingham tells it in 'Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors,' her fascinating if digressive inquiry into curry and how it grew. Curry, which originated in India, has become one of the most internationalized foods on the planet, right up there with pizza. Karee raisu (curry rice) is one of Japan's most popular foods. Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. In New York, several restaurants on the stretch of Lexington Avenue known jokingly as Curry Hill do a brisk business selling kosher curries. The British, having mastered the art of curry and chips, have moved along to culinary innovations like chicken Kiev filled with curry sauce. Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Ms. Collingham. She is a good postmodernist who scoffs at the idea of authenticity when it comes to food. One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision. The very dishes, flavors and food practices that we think of as timelessly, quintessentially Indian turn out to be, as often as not, foreign imports or newfangled inventions. That includes chili peppers and tea. What could be more Indian than chilies? Yet before the Portuguese arrived at the beginning of the 15th century, Indians had never seen or tasted a chili, a New World spice that Columbus called 'pepper of the Indies.' The heat in Indian dishes came from a red pepper known as long pepper or from the black pepper familiar in the West. In addition to chilies, the Portuguese brought carne de vinho e alhos, or pork cooked slowly in wine vinegar and garlic. Local cooks in Goa, Portugal's trading headquarters, reinterpreted the dish. They fashioned an ersatz vinegar from tamarind, and threw in lots of spices, especially chilis. Thus vindaloo, a corruption of vinho e alhos, was born, and with it a new traditional Indian food. Ms. Collingham, the author of 'Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj,' ranges far and wide. Her subject is much larger, in fact, than curry. She traces the evolution of Indian cuisine, its often bizarre cultural exchanges with the invading British and its eventual export to the world outside. She roams geographically from the northwest frontier to the shores of Sri Lanka, and historically from the culinary innovations of the Mughals in the 15th century to the triumph of chicken tikka masala, which Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, hailed as the new British national dish in 2001. Along the way, she sometimes loses the narrative thread, but the byways and even the dead ends tend to be intriguing. Curry is not, strictly speaking, Indian at all. It is a British invention. From the Portuguese, the early British traders learned to apply the word 'caril,' or 'carree,' incorrectly, to sauces made from butter, crushed nuts, spices and fruits that were then poured over rice. (In various South Indian languages, 'karil' or 'kari' referred to spices for seasoning or to dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat.) Eventually, the word evolved into a catchall. 'Curry became not just a term that the British used to describe an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts,' Ms. Collingham writes, 'but a dish in its own right, created for the British in India.' With the Raj, 'Curry' really hits its stride. Ms. Collingham skillfully weaves her way through the complex cultural transactions that yielded a specialized Anglo-Indian cuisine based, in large part, on mutual misunderstanding. The English were used to starting a meal with soup. The Indians do not divide meals into courses, and have no soup. Liquids are poured over rice. Nevertheless, eager to please, Indian cooks in Madras used the most souplike dish ready to hand, a peppery tamarind broth called molo tunny, and jazzed it up with rice, vegetable and meat. This cultural mishmash became an Anglo-Indian classic, mulligatawny soup. Many others followed. The British rarely stayed put in India, and as they moved from city to city they carried their hybrid foods with them. Authentic or not, the Anglo-Indian repertory was 'the first truly pan-Indian cuisine, in that it absorbed techniques and ingredients from every Indian region and was eaten throughout the entire length and breadth of the subcontinent,' Ms. Collingham writes. In their clueless search for palatable food, the British managed to invent curry powder, Worcestershire sauce and ketchup (made from mushrooms until tomatoes became popular in the 19th century). Most impressively, they also turned India, where scarcely a cup of tea was drunk before 1900, into a nation of avid tea drinkers. As Indians and their curries made their way from the West Indies to South Africa to the Pacific Islands, the culinary give-and-take continued. Ms. Collingham turns up all sorts of cultural odds and ends, like the 'Mexican-Hindu' cuisine that appeared in California in the early 20th century when Punjabi laborers integrated jalapeño peppers and tortillas into their native dishes. She also explains how Indian carry-out and curry and chips became working-class British, and why almost all Indian restaurants in Britain and the United States are Bangladeshi. Are they authentic? Don't ask.

Subject: A Taste of Ghana From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:52:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/dining/01ghana.html?ex=1296450000&en=f3280623069f2c20&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 A Taste of Ghana By LYDIA POLGREEN ACCRA, Ghana PEOPLE travel to Africa for history and for scenery but never the food. I don't get it. I have found that Africa, with thousands of languages and cultures, each with its own cuisine, always rewards an adventurous eater. Maybe the problem most travelers have is that finding good African food isn't always easy. Tourists are usually advised to stick to the hotel buffet. While a few countries, especially French-speaking ones like Ivory Coast and Togo, have developed an indigenous take on restaurant culture, many Africans prefer to eat at home. Barring that, they'd rather grab a bite on the fly. Even as a correspondent based in Africa, I am not always lucky enough to snag an invitation to eat at someone's house, so my main source of authentic African food is on the street. And few countries reward the sidewalk chowhound as well as Ghana. From rough-hewn sheds, women sell sharp wedges of starchy yam, perfectly fried in splendorously saturated palm oil and slathered with a fiery sauce of pulverized Scotch bonnet peppers and garlic. From stainless steel bowls perched atop their heads, women dish out hearty bowls of perfectly spiced stew and rice, endlessly customizable with a plethora of condiments, from crunchy vegetables to a hard-boiled egg. On a recent reporting trip to Ghana, I sought out some of my old favorites and discovered some new ones. In both cases, to find good street food you have to go where Africans eat on the run: bus stations, markets, busy intersections, construction sites. 'You have to look where people stop and rest a minute,' said Eddie Nelson, a Ghanaian businessman and fellow street food devotee I met over a fistful of kelewele, a delicious snack of cubes of ripe plantain tossed in hot pepper, ginger and other spices, then fried until the sugar in the plantain caramelizes along the squared edges. We were standing on a busy street just after sunset in Osu, a shopping district in Accra, next to Rosemary Nutsungah's kelewele shack. Ms. Nutsungah explained the secret to perfect kelewele. 'You got to have hot oil, that is No. 1,' she said. 'Then the plantain, it can't be too soft. It will drink the oil and become too oily. Also, you have to have very fresh ginger so it be sweet.' Mr. Nelson nodded approvingly, tossing cubes of plantain into his mouth from the crumpled newspaper in his hand. He then explained to me the finer points of selecting the right street food vendor. 'You have to look at the whole person,' he said. 'First, is her hair braided in neat rows, or does it go every which way? If it is neat, you are safe.' I put this wisdom to the test the next day on a trip to Kwame Nkrumah Circle, a roundabout at the heart of the city where thousands of minibuses converge, bringing commuters from across the sprawling metropolis. Even in the chaos of honking horns and swirls of dust, it was evident that the street food business has a clear hierarchy and well-defined gender roles. At the top are the kebab sellers, always male, who sell a relatively high-end product because it contains meat, a prized addition to any meal. Ghanaian kebabs are a particular treat, called kyinkyinga. They are made of small, tender chunks of beef dusted with a spicy rub of peanut flour and hot pepper, dabbed with oil and then grilled over charcoal Dairy products have similar status — cool bags of frozen yogurt and ice cream are sold exclusively by men. Women sell any food that requires extensive preparation, usually from a container perched atop their heads. Fried yams, cassava and sweet potato all require slaving over a hot stove and skillful timing to get just right. Selling rice and stew from a basin perched on your cranium means rising early to make the food, carefully wrapping it in layers of plastic bags as a kind of homemade insulation, then carrying it all the way to the bus station and serving it up in banana leaves to hungry commuters. I tried to follow Mr. Nelson's rules, but after a few minutes I was not looking at hair, because I was distracted by the endless array of food. There were fritters made of plantain just this side of too ripe, mushed up with some hot pepper and then fried. There were balls of fried dough spiced with a bit of nutmeg, crunchy on the outside and tender on the inside. I had to stop after the fried wedges of cassava served with a pepper sauce called shito, made of tiny shrimp ground with hot pepper and oil. Then there are some sidewalk meals you can't buy at any price. I found one such feast one day in Elmina, a coastal city west of Accra, where the oldest slave fort in the country bristles on a peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean, the portal through which countless Africans were shipped off as chattel to the New World. Wandering the old fish market as the sun set, I stumbled upon Aba Theresa Mensah, a fish seller who was winding down a long day of hawking octopus, snapper and prawns by making a little dinner for herself and the other market women. The customary 'you are invited,' was uttered as I eyed her glowing charcoal stove, and I eagerly plopped down on a simple wooden stool. I spoke only English and she mostly Fante, but we managed. On a stone she ground plum tomatoes and Scotch bonnet peppers, which she stirred into bubbling pot of blood-red palm oil. In went some bits of seafood culled from the catch of the day — a bit of octopus, a couple of plump red snapper fillets, a handful of prawns and, finally, the secret ingredient — a scoop of saltwater from the Atlantic. 'We go chop now,' she said with some satisfaction, using the pidgin word for eat. She motioned to a young girl carrying kenkey, fermented gobs of cornmeal wrapped in leaves, a sort of African take on polenta that is the staple starch in this part of Ghana, and purchased a few balls. She sliced the kenkey onto a plate, then ladled on the juicy bits of fish and octopus swimming in a fragrant bath of spicy stew. 'Chop,' she commanded. I dug in, the kenkey sticking to my fingers and the sharp heat of the peppers warming my skin. It is called Fanti Fanti, and it is as simple and delicious a fisherman's stew as anything the Mediterranean has produced. 'It be sweet?' Ms. Mensah asked. 'Yes,' I replied. 'It be sweet.'

Subject: Japan Loves Its Little Villages From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:51:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/international/asia/13japan.html December 13, 2005 Japan Loves Its Little Villages, but Wants Fewer of Them By JAMES BROOKE SHIKABE, Japan - Perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean on the shores of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost large island, Shikabe is the timeless image of a maritime village, defined by the cry of gulls, the wash of waves on sea walls and the sight of fishing boats rocking in the distant swell. But unlike fishing villages elsewhere in the world, Shikabe has a car and driver for the mayor. Rolling along roads as smooth as glass, the mayor, Shigeru Kawamura, proudly points out projects built in the last 15 years, paid largely with subterranean rivers of yen flowing from Tokyo, about 500 miles to the south. For this town of 4,856 inhabitants there is a new heated municipal swimming pool, a new multisport gymnasium, a new garbage recycling plant and a new $3.8 million park around the town's 50-foot natural geyser, the only one in Hokkaido. Work is under way on a $33 million 'hygienic management port' designed to protect freshly landed squid, the principal catch here, from the excrement dropped by seagulls as they circle overhead. But that new dock may represent the high-water mark for government spending here, and Shikabe itself may soon disappear from the map, along with hundreds of other small towns, as Tokyo seeks ways to rein in its traditional share-the-wealth spending habits. After years of printing government bonds to pay for projects like these, Japan now has the highest ratio of debt to gross domestic product in the industrialized world: 160 percent, compared with 65 percent for the United States in 2004. Japan's deeply rooted sense of egalitarianism will undoubtedly keep tax money flowing for years to come to hinterland villages like this one, where the number of fishermen has dropped in half, to 400, since 1985. But Tokyo is tightening the taps. In nearly five years of rule by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, spending on public works, as measured as a percent of gross domestic product, has declined from about 6 percent in 2001 to about 4 percent today. In the search for further savings, Tokyo is resorting to a financial sleight of hand that is largely invisible to visitors to the countryside. It is cutting the numbers of towns and villages nearly in half. From 3,232 municipalities in 1999, Japan is expected to wake up on March 31 with only 1,821. As the population ages and shrinks, the government believes that larger municipalities will make for more economical spending on services. To persuade thousands of mayors and city council members to vote themselves out of office, Tokyo has offered what amounts to municipal buyouts: the promise that funding will continue near current levels for a decade. For refusenik towns, there is a stick: the threat that funding will dwindle. The goal is to do away with the inefficiencies of towns with fewer than 10,000 people. Here on this rocky arm of Hokkaido, the number of municipalities has already shrunk to 12 from 17 a year ago as the smaller towns acquiesced. Shikabe, a fishing and tourism town, held off a merger with Nanae, a farming town almost six times its size. In talks, the farmers rubbed the fishermen the wrong way. 'All our surrounding towns and a village have merged, and we are now alone,' Mayor Kawamura said, recalling the nearly unanimous rejection by Shikabe's council. 'We decided to go by ourselves for now.' Shikabe residents said their neighbors were high-handed. Then there was a fight over the name. Leaders of Nanae Town proposed Nanae City. Leaders of Shikabe, 25 miles away, proposed a more neutral solution: Onuma, or Big Swamp, in recognition of a prominent landmark. In 1929, Mount Komagatake, the volcano that dominates the landscape, erupted, blocking a local river and creating a lake and a large marsh. But with Tokyo's financing offer due to expire at the end of March, Shikabe is aware that another town in the region is throwing in the towel this winter and becoming a district of a larger city. 'Financing to local towns will be smaller and smaller in the future,' Mr. Kawamura said, noting that Tokyo covers almost half of his town's budget. 'So we think it would be better to merge with another.' Hakodate, a nearby city, swallowed up three villages in the last year, swelling its population to 305,000. Hiroshi Inoue, the mayor there, sees mergers as helping to promote the region to the five million tourists who visit annually. 'Now with the bullet train coming here in 10 years, we have to get prepared,' he said with a touch of Japan's old-time 'build it and they will come' construction ethic. Indeed, six months ago Mr. Inoue and a determined band of regional politicians broke ground on a 10-year, $4 billion project to build a 92-mile bullet train extension from the southern main island of Kyushu to Hokkaido. At $43 million a mile, the project is to bring bullet trains to Hakodate by 2016. Partly because of tenacious local support for projects like these, Mr. Koizumi has so far failed to hold to his often-stated goal of keeping the issuing of government bonds to $250 billion a year, even with the disappearance of hundreds of small towns.

Subject: Holding Loved One's Hand From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:05:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/health/psychology/31marr.html?ex=1296363600&en=eb01697ad18f2684&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 Holding Loved One's Hand Can Calm Jittery Neurons By BENEDICT CAREY Married women under extreme stress who reach out and hold their husbands' hands feel immediate relief, neuroscientists have found in what they say is the first study of how human touch affects the neural response to threatening situations. The soothing effect of the touch could be seen in scans of areas deep in the brain that are involved in registering emotional and physical alarm. The women received significantly more relief from their husbands' touch than from a stranger's, and those in particularly close marriages were most deeply comforted by their husbands' hands, the study found. The findings help explain one of the longest-standing puzzles in social science: why married men and women are healthier on average than their peers. Husbands and wives who are close tend to limit each other's excesses like drinking and smoking but not enough to account for their better health compared with singles, researchers say. 'This is very imaginative, cutting-edge science, linking this complex response to stress to different areas of the brain,' said Dr. Ronald Glaser, director of the Institute for Behavioral Medicine Research at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study. In the study, to appear in the journal Psychological Science this year, neuroscientists at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Virginia used newspaper advertisements to recruit 16 couples from the Madison, Wis., region. The couples were all rated as very happily married on an in-depth questionnaire asking about coping styles, intimacy and mutual interests. Lying in the jaws of an M.R.I. scanning machine and knowing that they would periodically receive a mild electric shock to an ankle, the women were noticeably apprehensive. Brain images showed peaks of activation in regions involved in anticipating pain, heightening physical arousal and regulating negative emotions, among other systems. But the moment that they felt their husbands' hands — the men reached into the imaging machine — each woman's activity level plunged in all the regions gearing up for the threat. A stranger's hand also provided some comfort, though less so. 'The effect of this simple gesture of social support is that the brain and body don't have to work as hard, they're less stressed in response to a threat,' said Dr. James A. Coan, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and the study's lead author. His co-authors were Dr. Hillary Schaefer and Dr. Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin. Relaxing in the face of a perceived threat is not always a good idea. The brain's alarm system, which prompts the release of stress hormones that increase heart rate and move blood to the muscles, prepares people to fight or run for their lives, researchers say. But this system often becomes overactive in situations that are nagging but not life threatening like worries over relationships, deadlines, money or homework. Easy access to an affectionate touch in these moments — or to a hug, a back rub or more — 'is a very good thing, is deeply soothing,' Dr. Coan said. The most profoundly comforting hand-holding was between 'supercouples,' whose scores on the marriage questionnaire reflected a extremely close relationship, the study found. The brain region involved in anticipating pain was particularly sensitive to this marital quality, suggesting that a touch between close partners can blunt the sensation of physical pain, which is related to the level of anticipation. All of which also explains why the withdrawal or absence of affectionate touch can be so upsetting. In research published late last year, Dr. Glaser and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, reported that blisters lingered longer during marital strife. And rejection, the ultimate withdrawal of touch, registers in the brain much like an ankle shock, said Dr. Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Fear of the shocks activated a region in the brain 'that we saw activated in people looking at a beloved who had recently rejected them,' Dr. Brown wrote in an e-mail message. 'Love has its risks,' she added. 'It can make us very unhappy,' too.

Subject: Black Family Trees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:04:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/arts/television/01heff.html?ex=1296450000&en=8df1a60536269b13&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Taking Black Family Trees Out of Slavery's Shadow By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN The idea that race is a function of language, myth, social conventions and even personal style captivated academic circles in the 1990's. The concept was a boon for philosophers and literary critics, who churned out books on how racial codes are engineered and deployed. Some of this work was called deconstruction. The literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., now chairman of the African and African American Studies department at Harvard, wrote with particular force and imagination on those themes. As provocative as the best of those books were — and, sure, the worst of them were fanciful, jargony and obscure — they lacked drama and suspense. Great novels did not come out of this way of regarding race; it inspired more analysis than narrative. In fact, despite its passion for storytelling in the abstract, 90's race philosophy didn't generate many actual stories. Its proponents were too busy writing theory. That has changed, and a less rarefied way of thinking about race has tapped a miraculous wellspring of great American stories. Tonight 'African American Lives,' a four-hour series, begins on PBS; it's the most exciting and stirring documentary on any subject to appear on television in a long time. Once again, Professor Gates, the program's host and an executive producer, is first among academics to exploit the dramatic potential of the new intellectual apparatus — only this time, it's genealogy, science and DNA analysis. In spite of its uninspired title (Professor Gates, what were you thinking?), 'African American Lives' is a quest romance. It chronicles the exhilarating search by nine black Americans, including Professor Gates, for their ancestry. Of course, it adds to the documentary's excitement that many of the nine are serious celebrities, including Quincy Jones, Chris Tucker, Bishop T. D. Jakes, Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey. The others — the surgeon Ben Carson, the astronaut Mae Jemison and the Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot — are no less distinguished. The not-so-muted question of 'African American Lives' is: what's the genetic recipe for these superstars? As Professor Gates points out on the first of tonight's two episodes, most African-Americans lack complete family trees, and he admits to envying American friends who can find records of their relatives' immigration through Ellis Island. It turns out that a discontinuity — the making of an exception — is, in fact, one of the first components of family life that Professor Gates uncovers in interviews with his guests. For many, that break seems to be the starting point of their identities. Ms. Winfrey tells of watching her grandmother boil clothes in a black pot: ' 'One day you're going to have to learn this for yourself,' she said to me.' 'I watched and looked like I was paying attention,' Ms. Winfrey says, 'but distinctly recall a feeling that: No, I'm not. No, I'm not. That this will not be my life.' Acknowledging that these celebrities live very differently from their parents and grandparents (Ms. Winfrey's father is a barber), Professor Gates, who recruits various historians and geneticists throughout the documentary, begins by reconnecting his guests with the 20th century. For this part, he uses photographs and fairly thorough documentation, as well as oral histories. The stories from the last century — of perseverance, rape, murder, flight, poverty, humor, ingenuity — are each worth a novel. But then the series turns to the 19th century, in which many of the discoveries represent revelations to the guests themselves. Professor Gates, for example, has always believed that a white slave owner named Samuel Brady bought his great-great-grandmother, Jane Gates, a house; Brady was also said to be the father of her children. What he finds in his research is quite different — and still more intriguing. Ms. Winfrey discovers that an ancestor of hers owned land after the Civil War, and had a school for black children on it. She is astonished and moved to discover that education has been a priority of her family for more than a century. Equally striking revelations turn up in the family trees of the others. Professor Gates's laughing and tearful discussions with the guests, as they all try to sort out what having a family history might mean to them, are some of the best scenes in the show. The series — which visits 18th-century America and finally Africa — grows progressively more fascinating. The quest and the detective story sharpen, and the documentary turns riveting. I couldn't stop watching. When the guests all swab the inside of their cheeks for DNA, and subsequently learn where exactly their ancestors came from, you're on the edge of your seat. A teaser: one of the 'African Americans' turns out to be largely European, and another is considerably East Asian. But what to make of all this? The excitement of it, as well as the hooey of it, are both alive to Professor Gates, who is an excellent host — funny, canny, generous. This exquisitely produced and brilliantly conceived documentary doesn't miss a trick. The comic difficulties, for example, of reconciling the new genetic information with family mythology is part of what Professor Gates explores, as when he discovers that the Gateses are not, in fact, related to Samuel Brady, as family lore had it. His cousin is amused by this news, but doesn't want to give up the old tales. Professor Gates is amused back. 'Even if I send you the DNA results, you're still going to tell the Brady story?' he asks. His cousin answers: 'It'll be one of the stories, yeah. The DNA's one story, and the Brady story is another.'

Subject: China's Bold 'Swan,' Ready for Export From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 06:04:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/02/arts/dance/02swan.html?ex=1296536400&en=7a33d8c5bfa603ab&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 2, 2006 China's Bold 'Swan,' Ready for Export By DAVID BARBOZA BEIJING — In November, a performance of a sensationally popular acrobatic version of 'Swan Lake' in Shanghai was abruptly canceled. Refunds were issued to more than 3,000 ticketholders. And the show's two lead performers were summoned here to the nation's capital. 'We flew to Beijing and arrived on Saturday,' said Wu Zhengdan, the female lead. 'We knew we were going to perform for someone special. We just didn't know who it was.' That Sunday evening, Ms. Wu and her partner, Wei Baohua, performed at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People, one of China's landmark government buildings, for dignitaries who included President Bush and China's president, Hu Jintao. Demonstrating the unconventional blend of classical ballet and traditional Chinese acrobatics they perfected for the new 'Swan Lake,' the delicate Ms. Wu, 24, did a pirouette, aloft on the shoulder and outstretched arm of the muscular Mr. Wei, 34, who is also her husband. She also rose up, stunningly, on pointe on Mr. Wei's head. There followed a gymnastic pas de deux. Such bravura moves have delighted crowds in China over the past year, helping turn this radical reworking of 'Swan Lake' by the Guangdong Military Acrobatic Troupe into a box office hit and transforming the couple into stars. Now, the acrobatic 'Swan Lake' featuring Ms. Wu and Mr. Wei is preparing for a world tour that will include Russia, Japan, Germany and the United States, where the couple already won high praise last October when they took part in the 'Festival of China' at the Kennedy Center in Washington. What audiences will see is not your usual 'Swan Lake.' Although this 19th-century Russian ballet has been a fixture on the Chinese stage for decades, the current version contains several decidedly Chinese twists. It opens with Prince Siegfried dreaming of a beautiful girl who has been transformed into a swan by an evil eagle, a vision that propels him into a quest that takes him from Europe through Africa, the Middle East and South Asia before landing him in Beijing — a journey that provides the acrobatic troupe with ample opportunity for displays of local color. There, in the Forbidden City, he meets the young Chinese swan-woman he will make his bride. This West-meets-East take on 'Swan Lake' is emblematic of the broad shift under way in China as state-sponsored cultural institutions move toward more market-oriented offerings. Film producers, dancers, musicians — even military performing groups — that long depended on the government for financial support are now aggressively pursuing commercial opportunities. They are seeking private sponsors and hoping to profit by luring bigger audiences at home or exporting cultural extravaganzas to the rest of the world. Filmmakers, often backed by state-owned production houses, are now trying to make Hollywood blockbusters. Even the monks of Shaolin Temple, famed for their martial arts skills, have gone commercial, forming their own for-profit company to produce kung fu movies and promote the Shaolin brand. The choreographer behind the new 'Swan Lake,' Zhao Ming, says China's state-run performing arts system is packed with hidden talent waiting to be discovered. 'There are a lot of people with great technique here, but because they're in the military troupe, they have less chance to let people know,' said Mr. Zhao, who also choreographs the Beijing Military Troupe. Both Ms. Wu and Mr. Wei are products of a similarly rigid system, the socialist-era sports school programs that are still geared toward producing Olympic champions. They grew up in Liaoning Province, in northeast China, and first met at the Shenyang Sports School, one of the region's premier sports schools, when he was 16 and she 6. The school typically recruits children as young as 5 to spend the rest of their youth in the boarding school, training for national and international competition. But Ms. Wu and Mr. Wei say they went by choice. Mr. Wei was introduced to the sport through his father, an accountant at the local acrobatics school. Ms. Wu responded to an advertisement for a gymnastics program. She was among 3,000 youths who tried out for 20 slots, but she didn't make the cut. 'The teacher said I was not very tall, and a little fat — not good,' she said in a backstage interview before a performance here in Beijing. But a teacher from the local sports school saw her routine and asked her to join a eurythmics program. And so she became a nearly full-time child athlete, usually training 10 hours a day. The teachers were strict, Ms. Wu recalled, forcing children to run endless laps around the track or to do splits by placing their legs on two separate chairs and holding a perfect position for 30 minutes at a time. At 12, she joined the provincial sports school and began teaming up with Mr. Wei to compete in sports acrobatics, which involved human pyramids and synchronized athletic movements. Three years later, in 1995, the pair won the national championship. In that same year, in Germany, they were crowned world junior champions. But a year later, Ms. Wu fell during an event, injuring her neck. For a year, they didn't compete. In 1997, they placed a disappointing third in the World Championships in Britain. Ms. Wu was discouraged and weary of the training regimen. She considered quitting and entering a university. Mr. Wei was ready to leave the school and the sports acrobatic team himself, but he was also determined to win the world title. Eventually, the two joined the Guangdong Military Acrobatic Troupe, in the far southern city of Guangzhou. Their careers picked up. They won another national championship. In 2001 they were asked to perform for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Shanghai before Mr. Bush and Jiang Zemin, China's president at the time. Troupe officials say Mr. Bush left before the couple's performance, but Mr. Jiang was so impressed he later presented Mr. Bush with two DVD's of the show, one for the president and another for his father. That year, the couple had begun to add some ballet and dance elements to their acrobatic routine with the help of Mr. Zhao, the choreographer, who was recruited by the Guangdong troupe to help develop routines in preparation for the world title event at the XXVI International Circus Festival of Monte Carlo in 2002. They took first prize. 'They both have very good technique,' Mr. Zhao said, explaining the difference he made in their first collaboration. 'The most difficult thing was to get them to have the feeling of a dance. I told them to be beautiful, to have rhythm and listen to the music.' By then, the couple's gradual evolution into dancers was apparent. They were mixing ballet moves with acrobatics, training with Mr. Zhao and the National Ballet of China. And officials at the Guangdong Military Acrobatic Troupe were looking for a market opportunity after they struck a deal with Shanghai City Dance Company to create a new show. They came up with the acrobatic 'Swan Lake,' a show featuring dozens of acrobats swinging from ropes, juggling balls and tumbling and hopping across the stage as Siegfried seeks his beautiful white swan. Whether they are acrobats or ballet stars, no one is sure. But Ms. Wu and Mr. Wei, who were married in 2003, say they're willing to see where this strange act leads. 'I'm not sure what it is,' Ms. Wu said of their performance, gazing at Mr. Wei in their dressing room. 'I can't leave the acrobatics world, but I'm not 100 percent in ballet. I guess we'll just see where it goes. If people like the performance, I'll continue to do it.'

Subject: Hope for a Bit of the Buffett Effect From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:08:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/business/yourmoney/08buff.html?ex=1294376400&en=add0c6b505f5cea1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 8, 2006 Fund Managers Hope for a Bit of the Buffett Effect By JAMES PETHOKOUKIS WARREN E. BUFFETT seems like an uncomplicated fellow, as multibillionaire financial legends go. Now 75, he lives in Omaha, loves Cherry Cokes and Dairy Queen hamburgers, and buys profitable but prosaic companies in businesses like insurance, building products and wholesale grocery distribution. Even his annual report to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, his investment vehicle, is a noted model of economy in language. But Berkshire Hathaway itself is a complex $137 billion conglomerate - part insurer, part holding company, part stock fund. 'The only way to value the business is to look at each of the enterprises separately,' said Gerald Martin, visiting scholar at the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University, 'and that takes some doing.' Even Mr. Buffett has trouble wrapping his arms around the company. He wrote in his 2004 letter to shareholders that commenting on Berkshire 'with both clarity and reasonable brevity becomes more difficult as Berkshire's scope widens.' In fact, Berkshire is such a strange financial hybrid that it seems that any sort of large-cap portfolio manager can justify buying it. Morningstar data shows that of the 15 domestic stock funds with the greatest percentage of their assets in Berkshire, most were classified as blend funds, which straddle the line between growth and value. But you could also find buy-'em-cheap value plays like a threesome of Weitz funds and buy-'em-pricey growth plays like the Janus Mercury fund. Wally Weitz, a Buffett devotee whose investment firm is situated near Berkshire in downtown Omaha, said that among portfolio managers, 'discussing what sort of valuation Berkshire should get has become a great parlor game.' Berkshire's Class A shares - which have never split - are trading at around $89,000 each. The stock was pretty much flat in 2005, although it drifted as low as $80,500 in September because of concerns about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on the company's property-casualty business and because of securities investigations into Berkshire's Gen Re reinsurance subsidiary. (Berkshire has a second class of common stock, the so-called B shares, which trade at roughly a thirtieth the price of the original A shares and are popular with individual investors. Money managers will buy either, depending if one is trading at a slight discount to the other.) 'At $90,000 I am very comfortable holding it,' Mr. Weitz said of the A shares. 'And I think you can make a case for $110,000 or $120,000.' Part of that case might involve Berkshire's price-to-book value, calculated by dividing the price of Berkshire stock by its book value (assets minus liabilities) per share; the book value is now about $58,000. The math shows that Berkshire is trading at about 1.5 times its book value, on the low end of its 10-year range. If Berkshire were trading at the high end of the range, at twice book value, its price would be $116,000. But as Mr. Weitz suggested, there are plenty of other valuation approaches, many of them complex. One method, called float-based analysis, tries to attach a present value to the flow of cash that Berkshire will generate in the future. Depending on certain assumptions, like one for the annual growth in Berkshire's float - money from insurance premiums that the company holds and earns a return on - analysts say that a $120,000 valuation is not unreasonable. But in some ways, Berkshire looks like a growth stock. A recent report by a Standard & Poor's equity analyst used an old reliable, the price-to-earnings ratio: it found Berkshire trading at 20 times earnings. That is at a premium to many of its insurance industry competitors like Chubb or Safeco. And rightly so, contends Stephen Leeb, who runs the $15 million Megatrends fund from U.S. Global Investors. The portfolio, which was up 11.9 percent in 2005, contains such typical growth name s as Microsoft and Electronic Arts. Yet Megatrends' top holding, at 4.4 percent of the fund, is Berkshire. 'Oh, Berkshire's a growth stock,' Mr. Leeb said. 'You're looking at 15 percent earnings growth, and it is a totally dominant company. God forbid California should fall into the ocean. But if it did, every other insurer would be out of business - other than Berkshire.' That's tough to verify, but Berkshire does have top credit ratings from both S.& P. and Moody's Investors Service. Bruce Ballentine, a Moody's analyst, says Berkshire has an extraordinary amount of equity relative to its debt obligations, while S.& P. describes Berkshire's capitalization, competitive position and financial flexibility as 'extremely strong.' One reason for those superlatives is the $41 billion in cash and cash equivalents that Berkshire reported on hand at the end of the third quarter of 2005 - a chunk of dough on which Patrick English, co-manager of the $87 million FMI Large Cap fund in Milwaukee, is focused. 'Buffett is not going to waste that money by overpaying for stocks or something,' said Mr. English, whose fund gained 9.1 percent last year. 'That's not his style as a portfolio manager. So what we really own is a call option on the productive investibility of those cash balances.' Such confidence was further confirmed when Berkshire's third-quarter report showed that the company owned 19.9 million shares of Wal-Mart, worth $919 million. Wal-Mart is one of FMI Large Cap's top five holdings. 'We love being on the same page as Buffett,' Mr. English said. Those who say that Berkshire is undervalued may be asking themselves why the investment arm of the so-called world's greatest investor trades at a discount. Here are some theories: It was tough to be a big-cap stock in many recent years, as small-cap stocks often fared much better. Or maybe it's the overhang from the Gen Re investigation. Or just maybe the reason is Mr. Buffett himself. The Cherry Coke and Dairy Queen diet makes for great color in newspaper profiles, but is it a healthy nutritional regimen for a 75-year-old? In a parallel world, where a 55-year-old Mr. Buffett with a fondness for kale was running the show, Berkshire stock might be trading higher as investors gave more weight to his involvement with the company. Yet Mr. Buffett's presence is still valued enough that a suddenly Buffett-less Berkshire would be a real shock to investors. 'If there was a sudden announcement that Warren was going to go sit on the beach and not run Berkshire, it's very possible the stock would go down a lot initially,' Mr. Weitz said. 'But the board might then choose to buy back a lot of stock.' OF course, Mr. Buffett isn't going to get any younger. So what else may provide a catalyst for the stock? A distinct return to favor for large-cap stocks would be one. Some big investments by Mr. Buffett might be another. Mr. Weitz explained that the repeal of the 1935 Public Utilities Holding Company Act should make it easier for Mr. Buffett to follow up his 1999 investment in MidAmerican Energy Holdings with similar moves. 'It is now possible he will make $5- to-10-billion acquisitions in the utilities sector,' he said. The portfolio manager Whitney Tilson of the value-oriented Tilson funds suggests that investors might warm to a bold move like buying Anheuser-Busch, a company in which Berkshire already has a 5.8 percent stake. As he figures it, Berkshire could use that $41 billion to pay a 20 percent premium for the whole company, in the process adding $2.2 billion in annual net income to Berkshire's $8.4 billion in pro forma profits. A burst of financial activity might offer a fitting end to Mr. Buffett's career. Mr. English suggested that if Mr. Buffett were a fictional character, his story might conclude like this: 'Buffett waits for a large correction in the market and then deploys that $40 billion in a handful of terrific values that benefits Berkshire for decades to come. Then he sails off into the sunset.'

Subject: G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82 From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:07:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/politicsspecial1/30alito.html?ex=1296277200&en=485566ed216e5a11&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82 By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded jurists. The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick. 'We boxed them in,' one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said with pride in an interview over the weekend. This lawyer and others present who described the meeting were granted anonymity because the meetings were confidential and because the team had told its allies not to exult publicly until the confirmation vote was cast. Now, on the eve of what is expected to be the Senate confirmation of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, coming four months after Chief Justice Roberts was installed, those planners stand on the brink of a watershed for the conservative movement. In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group. Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court 'would have been beyond our best expectations,' said Spencer Abraham, one of the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees. He added, 'I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a friendly wager.' Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement. Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court. 'It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true,' said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. 'It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives.' As each progressed in legal stature, others were laying the infrastructure of the movement. After the 1987 defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork conservatives vowed to build a counterweight to the liberal forces that had mobilized to stop him. With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships. During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991 confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. Many conservative Christian pastors and broadcasters had railed for decades against Supreme Court decisions that outlawed school prayer and endorsed abortion rights. During the Clinton administration, Federalist Society members and allies had come to dominate the membership and staff of the Judiciary Committee, which turned back many of the administration's nominees. 'There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the nature of the nominations being made,' said Mr. Abraham, the Federalist Society founder who was a senator on the Judiciary Committee at the time. By 2000, the decades of organizing and battles had fueled a deep demand in the Republican base for change on the court. Mr. Bush tapped into that demand by promising to name jurists in the mold of conservative Justices Thomas and Scalia. When Mr. Bush named Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as the successor to Justice O'Connor, he faced a revolt from his conservative base, which complained about her dearth of qualifications and ideological bona fides. 'It was a striking example of the grass roots having strong opinions that ran counter to the party leaders about what was attainable,' said Stephen G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and another founding member of the Federalist Society. But in October, when President Bush withdrew Ms. Miers's nomination and named Judge Alito, the same network quickly mobilized behind him. Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray. They laid out a two-part strategy to roll out behind whomever the president picked, people present said. The plan: first, extol the nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away from the nominee's possible influence over hot-button issues. Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush nominee. The team worked through a newly formed group, the Judicial Confirmation Network, to coordinate grass-roots pressure on Democratic senators from conservative states. And they stayed in constant contact with scores of conservative groups around the country to brief them about potential nominees and to make sure they all stuck to the same message. They fine-tuned their strategy for Judge Alito when he was nominated in October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the nickname 'Scalito,' which would have linked him to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. In November, some Democrats believed they had a chance to defeat the nomination after the disclosure of a 1985 memorandum Judge Alito wrote in the Reagan administration about his conservative legal views on abortion, affirmative action and other subjects. 'It was a done deal,' one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. 'This was the most evidence we have ever had about a Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs.' Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced them it was 'a big deal' that could become the centerpiece of the Democrats' attacks, one of the people said. 'The call came in right away,' said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and another lawyer on the Alito team. Responding to Mr. Alito's 1985 statement that he disagreed strongly with the abortion-rights precedents, for example, 'The answer was, 'Of course he was opposed to abortion,' ' Mr. Sekulow said. 'He worked for the Reagan administration, he was a lawyer representing a client, and it may well have reflected his personal beliefs. But look what he has done as judge.' His supporters deluged news organizations with phone calls, press releases and lawyers to interview, all noting that on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito had voted to uphold and to strike down abortion restrictions. Democrats contended that those arguments were irrelevant because on the lower court Judge Alito was bound by Supreme Court precedent, whereas as a justice he could vote to overturn any precedents with which he disagreed. By last week it was clear that the judge had enough votes to win confirmation. And the last gasp of resistance came in a Democratic caucus meeting on Wednesday when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, joined by Senator John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the party to organize a filibuster. No one defended Judge Alito or argued that he did not warrant opposition, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. Instead, opponents of the filibuster argued about the political cost of being accused of obstructionism by conservatives. Still, on the brink of this victory, some in the conservative movement say the battle over the court has just begun. Justice O'Connor was the swing vote on many issues, but replacing her with a more dependable conservative would bring that faction of the court at most to four justices, not five, and thus not enough to truly reshape the court or overturn precedents like those upholding abortion rights. 'It has been a long time coming,' Judge Bork said, 'but more needs to be done.'

Subject: Mistrust Funds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:00:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29madrick.html?ex=1296190800&en=b07385bb67401325&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Mistrust Funds By JEFF MADRICK If anyone still harbors the fantasy that the business scandals of the past few years were the handiwork of just a few bad apples, they should read John C. Bogle's 'Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.' Bogle has been a Wall Street insider for 50 years, the founder and long the chief executive of Vanguard in Philadelphia, one of the three or four largest mutual fund management groups in the nation. At Vanguard, he refused to charge the high annual fees that his competitors did. He was also among the first to offer investors index funds, at a time when most mutual fund managers were still claiming they could easily beat the market averages. (Index funds essentially duplicate the market averages, and have typically outperformed most of the pros over time.) In this book, Bogle abhors what he sees as rampant cheating among his peers - not only mutual fund managers but brokers, bankers, lawyers and accountants. It's not just a few bad apples, he says: 'I believe that the barrel itself - the very structure that holds all those apples - is bad.' Consider Jack Grubman. He may have been the best paid of the analysts who made fortunes partly if not largely based on conflicts of interest. But he was not alone. Grubman earned $20 million in a single year in part by urging brokerage customers to buy the stocks of the corporations that his parent company, Citigroup, had as investment banking clients. When Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York State charged a wide swath of investment banks with similar conflicts of interest, however, 8 of the 10 largest companies on Wall Street decided they had better settle the suit. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, among others, gave back profits and paid penalties of $1.4 billion, and altered the inherent conflicts in their managerial policies as well. Nor was it only a handful of notorious companies like Enron and WorldCom that, under the tutelage of the most prestigious lawyers, bankers and accountants in the business, overstated their profits. Bogle totes up about 60 major corporations that had to restate their earnings - and this was not an inclusive list. Their stock market value equaled $3 trillion. That is 'an enormous part of the giant barrel of corporate capitalism,' he writes. Or take the mutual fund industry, which Bogle knows best and which angers him most. Leaders boasted how clean they were compared with their colleagues at the investment banks and brokerage firms. But the relentless Spitzer found that dozens of them were rewarding good customers with secret and highly lucrative trading favors. As for executive stock options, which tied compensation to the company's stock price and made so many businessmen extraordinarily rich, they encouraged managers to manipulate short-term earnings to prop up stock prices. Many people are still reluctant to concede that abuse was so widespread, since what they fear most is an assault by government in the form of tougher regulations. Unsurprisingly, loud complaints are now being lodged by influential lobbyists in Washington about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the only serious measure passed in the wake of the scandals to control business excess. And the tough-minded chairman of the Securites and Exchange Commission, William Donaldson, recently stepped down in the face of opposition from the White House and business interests. Unfortunately, Bogle is less good at telling us how to fix the problems than he is at telling us what went wrong. He wants to believe that if we put the owners - that is, the shareholders - back in charge, most of the fraud, deceit and greed would dissipate like the morning mist. Genuine shareholder democracy, he argues, would require chief executives to worry about the long-term health of the company, not the short-term fluctuations of stock prices. They would be far less tempted to manipulate earnings. In particular, if shareholders had appropriate voting power, the abuses associated with executive stock options could be reduced. Because shareholders do not have adequate voting rights, Bogle says, reform continues to be stymied. But are shareholders inherently more ethical than corporate managers? Did they complain about 'short-termism' when stock prices were at their heights in the late 1990's, or only after their stunning fall? Wouldn't they tolerate a little manipulation for a higher stock price? It seems as if Bogle prefers to avoid the more obvious issue: that government looked the other way. Bogle acknowledges this lack of effective regulation, but he considers it a side issue. The fact is that Washington has relaxed financial regulations under both Democratic and Republican administrations, opening the doors to conflicts of interest between brokers and investment bankers. In 1998, government, despite concerns, refused to separate consulting and auditing business. Although the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management nearly pushed the world's financial markets over the brink that same year, the government demanded no further disclosure of the well-concealed financing of the industry. But the open and honest flow of information is the only true check on the manipulation of the markets. Government regulation and independent scrutiny are critical to the process. Such regulation is a public good, like education and the highway system. If it requires a little expense on the part of business now, it will make them more money in the long run. Bogle should have pushed his fine analytical ability and strong moral sense farther. Still, we should be grateful that an insider like him is willing to elucidate the often murky and apparently deceptive workings of the Street. John Bogle has been making Wall Street a better place for decades. His book is yet another important contribution in an illustrious career. Jeff Madrick is the editor of Challenge magazine and teaches at Cooper Union and The New School.

Subject: Re: Mistrust Funds From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:44:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Unfortunately, there aren't enough John Bogles out there.

Subject: Even Vanguard From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 22:06:20 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: There are more growing everyday Pete - I have friends on diehards.org that called up Vangaurd to see how Vangaurd voted thier shares of HP and other companies - the folks at Vangaurd basically told them to buzz off. http://www.poorandstupid.com/chronicle.asp THE TRUE NEXUS OF CORRUPTION Austrian econ guru George Reisman cuts to the paradigmatic quick: [Paul] Krugman [link] wants the media to harp on the fact that the current lobbying scandal is a Republican scandal and argues that those journalists who don’t “are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.” The truth is, as Mises showed, that corruption is an inevitable by-product of an interventionist economy....If one is serious about fighting corruption, the first and most important thing that must be fought is all discretionary power on the part of the government and its officials. The powers of Congress, state legislatures, and city councils must be strictly limited to protecting the citizens against the initiation of physical force (including fraud), and nothing else. The more the government is pressed back within these limits, the less will be the problem of corruption, because the less discretionary power will the government and its officials have to inflict harm or bestow benefits, and thus the less will be the need and the opportunity for citizens to bribe them. As part of the same process, elections will cease to be bidding wars between pressure groups. The pressure groups will dissolve once the government loses the power to harm or benefit them. Thanks to reader Jameson Campaigne for the link.

Subject: John Rawls, Theorist on Justice From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:57:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0E14FF345D0C758EDDA80994DA404482 November 26, 2002 John Rawls, Theorist on Justice By DOUGLAS MARTIN John Rawls, the American political theorist whose work gave new meaning and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism, died on Sunday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 81. The cause was heart failure, his wife, Margaret, said. She said he had been incapacitated in varying degrees since suffering a stroke in 1995. The publication of his book 'A Theory of Justice' in 1971 was perceived as a watershed moment in modern philosophy and came at a time of furious national debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for racial equality. Not only did it veer from the main current of philosophical thought, which was then logic and linguistic analysis, it also stimulated a revival of attention to moral philosophy. Dr. Rawls made a sophisticated argument for a new concept of justice, based on simple fairness. Before Dr. Rawls, the concept of utilitarianism, meaning that a society ought to work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people, held sway as the standard for social justice. He wrote that this approach could ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. Moreover, the liberty of an individual is of only secondary importance compared with the majority's interests. His new theory began with two principles. The first was that each individual has a right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with the same liberty for others. The second was that social and economic inequalities are just only to the extent that they serve to promote the well-being of the least advantaged. But how could people agree to structure a society in accordance with these two principles? Dr. Rawls's response was to revive the concept of the social contract developed earlier by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. For people to make the necessary decisions to arrive at the social contract, Dr. Rawls introduced the concept of a 'veil of ignorance.' This meant that each person must select rules to live by without knowing whether he will be prosperous or destitute in the society governed by the rules he chooses. He called this the 'original position.' An individual in the 'original position' will choose the society in which the worst possible position ?which, for all he knows, will be his ?is better than the worst possible position in any other system. The result, Dr. Rawls argued, was that the least fortunate would be best protected. The lowest rung of society would be higher. Though inequalities would not be abolished by favoring the neediest, they would be minimized, he argued. In later works, Dr. Rawls expanded his arguments to suggest how a pluralistic society can be just to all its members. His idea was that the public could reason things out, provided comprehensive religious or philosophical doctrines are avoided. Dr. Rawls, like Kant, whom he revered, believed that as liberal democracies capable of such reasonableness spread, wars would be avoided. Damon Linker in National Review in 2000 spoke for many conservative critics when he called Mr. Rawls's formulation hopelessly utopian. Mr. Rawls, he said, had 'a childlike innocence about the ways of the world.' The conservative philosopher Robert Nozick likewise considered Dr. Rawls's argument egalitarian nonsense, but its impact is suggested by the 5,000 books or articles that took up the discussion. Many who bought Dr. Rawls's book ?which sold 200,000 copies, a huge number for an academic work ?were dazzled by his intellectual dexterity and moral clarity. Ben Rogers wrote in 1999 in The New Statesman that 'Rawls has been recognized as the most important English-speaking philosopher of his generation.' Mr. Rogers went on to say that Dr. Rawls 'through a mixture of bold thought experiment, conceptual rigor and historical imagination, more or less invented analytic political thought.' John Bordley Rawls was born the second of five sons in Baltimore on Feb. 21, 1921. His father, William Lee Rawls, did not attend law school but through a clerkship at a law firm learned enough to become a lawyer and argue cases before the Supreme Court. His mother's advocacy of voting rights for women, among other issues, greatly influenced his own political and moral development. He loved family vacations to Maine and would go on long sailing trips in a leaky boat. His love of the outdoors was later expressed in mountain climbing. He graduated from the Kent School in Connecticut and from Princeton University, and planned to become a minister. But after serving as a combat infantryman in the South Pacific in World War II, he gave up his aspiration without explaining why, his wife said. He returned to Princeton and earned a doctorate in philosophy, a decision he always explained by joking that he was not good enough in music or math. His interest in developing a theory of justice began in graduate school. He taught at Oxford, Cornell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before settling at Harvard, where his final position was James Bryant Conant university professor emeritus. His books included 'Political Liberalism' (Columbia, 1993); Collected Papers (Harvard, 1999); 'The Law of Peoples ; with, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited' (Harvard, 1999) and 'Justice as Fairness, a Restatement' (Harvard, 2001). A modest, tweedy man, he turned down hundreds of honorary degrees, and accepted them only from universities with which he was associated (Oxford, Princeton, Harvard). In 1999, he won a National Humanities Medal, with the citation noting his success in helping women enter the ranks of a male-dominated field. In addition to his wife, Dr. Rawls is survived by his brother William Stow Rawls of Philadelphia; his daughters, Ann Warfield Rawls of Beverly Hills, Mich., and Elizabeth Fox Rawls of Cambridge, Mass.; his sons, Robert Lee, of Woodinville, Wash., and Alexander Emory, of Palo Alto, Calif.; and four grandchildren. Dr. Rawls's concern for justice and individual happiness is seen in a story from Harvard. When a candidate was defending his dissertation, Dr. Rawls noticed the sun shining in his eyes. He positioned himself between the candidate and the sunlight for the rest of the session.

Subject: Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:47:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/books/30lee.html?ex=1296277200&en=8cf6240e805411bb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 Harper Lee, Gregarious for a Day By GINIA BELLAFANTE TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Of all the functions at the president's mansion of the University of Alabama here, none has acquired the mystique surrounding a modest annual luncheon attended by high school students from around the state. They come with cameras dangling on their wrists and dressed, respectfully, as if they were about to issue an insurance policy or anchor the news. An awards ceremony for an essay contest on the subject of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' the occasion attracts no actor, politician or music figure. Instead, it draws someone to whom Alabamians collectively attach far more obsession: the author of the book itself, Harper Lee, who lives in the small town of Monroeville, Ala., one of the most reclusive writers in the history of American letters. With more than 10,000,000 copies sold since it first appeared in 1960, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' exists as one of the best-selling novels of all time. For decades, Ms. Lee has remained fiercely mindful of her privacy, politely but resolutely refusing to talk to the press and making only rare public appearances, in which she always declines to speak. She has maintained her resolve despite renewed attention in the wake of the film 'Capote,' in which Ms. Lee is portrayed as the moral conscience of her childhood friend Truman Capote; the coming 'Infamous,' another Capote movie in which Sandra Bullock plays Ms. Lee; and a biography of Ms. Lee scheduled for May. But since the essay contest, sponsored by the Honors College at the University of Alabama, got going five years ago, Ms. Lee, who is 79, has attended the ceremony faithfully, meeting with the 50 or so winners from most of the state's school districts and graciously posing for pictures with the parents and teachers who accompany them. 'What these people have done for me is wonderful,' Ms. Lee, who agreed to speak to a reporter about the event, said during the luncheon on Friday. She was referring specifically to the two people who had conceived the contest in her honor, Thomas N. Carruthers, a prominent Birmingham lawyer, and Cathy Randall, a former administrator at the university. Ms. Lee said she was struck by the perspective young people bring to the book. 'They always see new things in it,' she added. 'And the way they relate it to their lives now is really quite incredible.' The students write with longing for the kind of unmanaged childhood experienced by Jem and Scout Finch in the rural 1930's Alabama of Ms. Lee's rendering. Some tell of the racial tensions they witness in their school cafeterias, others of the regional prejudices they experience at the hands of Northern peers who assume anyone from Alabama must drive a pickup truck or live in a mobile home. In an essay a few years ago one girl likened the trial of the book's Tom Robinson, a black man unjustly accused of raping a white girl, to the 1999 murder of Billy Jack Gaither, a young man living in Sylacauga, killed because he was gay. The recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' remains the only book Ms. Lee has written. It is difficult to overestimate the sustained power of the novel or the reverence with which Ms. Lee is treated here: it is not uncommon to find live staged versions of the story, hear of someone who has devoted his life to playing Atticus Finch in road shows, or meet children named Scout or ones named after the author herself. At a book signing after the ceremony on Friday afternoon, a little girl in a velvet dress approached Ms. Lee with a hardback copy of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' announcing that her name was Harper. 'Well, that's my name, too,' Ms. Lee said. The girl's mother, LaDonnah Roberts, said she had decided to make her daughter Ms. Lee's namesake after her mother-in-law gave her a copy of the book during her pregnancy. Another girl, Catherine Briscoe, 15, one of the essay contest winners, had read the novel six times. She trembled and held her hand to her heart as she spoke of its author: 'It was breathtaking to meet the most important person in my life.' Sometimes Ms. Lee will encounter someone who will claim to know exactly where Boo Radley lived. 'I had a girl come up to me here,' Ms. Lee recalled, referring to an awards ceremony a few years ago, 'and she said, 'Boo Radley lives across the street from my grandparents.' ' 'Well, I didn't know what to say to that,' she said, laughing. Ms. Lee lives with her 94-year-old sister, Alice, a lawyer who still practices, and keeps an apartment in New York. She is not a judge in the essay contest, nor does she make any formal statement at the ceremony. Her one stipulation for the contest was that children who were home-schooled be eligible to compete. The story of Ms. Lee's involvement with the contest begins five years ago with her induction to the Alabama Academy of Honor, a society that pays homage to influential people born or living in the state. In 2001, as the academy was casting about to include more women, Mr. Carruthers, chairman of the academy, called Ms. Randall to see whom the group might have overlooked, he said. When Mr. Carruthers went back to the committee and recommended that they approach Ms. Lee, the other members decreed that he could try but that surely, because of her outsized reputation for shyness, she would have no part of such a group. Mr. Carruthers was not deterred. 'I had a vested interest in this whole thing,' he joked, 'because I wanted to prove them all wrong.' He approached Ms. Lee about the possibility of a nomination. 'I couldn't promise that she would win,' he said. To everyone's surprise, Ms. Lee accepted the nomination. She was elected to the academy in 2001, one year after Rosa Parks and one year before Condoleezza Rice. Fearing that too much pomp and fuss might scare her off, Mr. Carruthers asked academy members not to bring fawning grandchildren to the induction ceremony. Many brought them anyway, with books to sign, all of which Ms. Lee cheerfully autographed. Mr. Carruthers and Ms. Randall devised the essay contest to commemorate her entry into the academy. Ms. Lee is quick-witted and gregarious. At the ceremony she greeted a server at the mansion whom she remembered from luncheons past. 'I went back to my friends and I told everyone that I'd met you,' the young woman said. 'Nobody believed me. I said, 'Oh, yeah, I did, and she is the nicest, sweetest lady.' Ms. Lee looked at her with amused suspicion and started to laugh. During lunch she reminisced about her old friend Horton Foote, who wrote the screenplay for the acclaimed 1962 film of 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' starring Gregory Peck. Ms. Lee spent three weeks on the set, she said, and took off when she realized everything would be fine without her. 'I think it is one of the best translations of a book to film ever made,' she said. Ms. Lee attended Peck's memorial service in California three years ago. About her friend Mr. Foote, who is 89, she said, 'He's become quite amazing looking in old age, like God, but clean-shaven.' When Mr. Carruthers approached and asked why he hadn't received a letter from her in so long — the two have become good friends — she answered that she would get to him 'once I finish off all the letters I have to write.' Since the release of 'Capote,' much of her time has been spent writing demurrals to reporters seeking interviews about her life. Someone suggested she come up with a form-letter response to such requests. What it would say, she joked, 'is hell, no.'

Subject: How Bernanke Could Outshine Greenspan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 07:14:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/business/01leonhardt.html?ex=1296450000&en=293ea37af6122bbf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 How Bernanke Could Outshine Greenspan By DAVID LEONHARDT EVERYONE has felt the tangle of nerves and excitement that comes with a new job. So imagine what it must be like to be Ben Bernanke this morning. Four years ago, he was an economics professor who had never held a government job outside his local school board. Today he will walk into an office that has been Alan Greenspan's for almost two decades, cross a red-and-navy Oriental rug and take his place behind Mr. Greenspan's desk. From there, Mr. Bernanke is supposed to keep the American economy running smoothly. I suspect that many people don't know exactly what he will be doing as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but they do know that he has a hard act to follow. Mr. Greenspan was a crossover star, a towering figure to Wall Street and the public at large. He is more popular than any politician, according to polls, and nearly as admired as Pope John Paul II, Queen Elizabeth or Oprah Winfrey. So it is understandable that most of the talk leading to today's transition has focused on all the ways that Mr. Bernanke will struggle to live up to the Greenspan standard. Almost no one has talked about the things Mr. Bernanke may do better than Mr. Greenspan. But there are some, believe it or not, and he has already shown some real promise in one particular area. MR. GREENSPAN'S main accomplishment, as the tributes of the last few months have pointed out, was the taming of inflation. He built on the success of his predecessor, Paul A. Volcker, and used the Fed's biggest policy tool — the interest rate on overnight loans between banks — to keep the economy growing without letting prices get out of control. Today, a box of cereal is just 60 percent more expensive than it was when Mr. Greenspan joined the Fed 18 years ago. In the decade before, the price had more than doubled. This is a big deal. Families can afford more, and businesses can do a better job planning for the future. Recessions come less often, and do not linger as long. But interest rate policy is not the reason Mr. Greenspan's image is what it is. He rose above his job because he became a symbol of a remade American economy. He promoted a new flexibility, led by entrepreneurs and technological change, that is the envy of Japan and Europe. To put it another way, he was a singular force in telling us that the unsettling changes of the last couple of decades — especially globalization — really were making us better off. In his office hung an 1819 treatise by David Ricardo, the British economist who came up with the classic argument in favor of trade: When England specializes in cloth and Portugal in wine, they end up better off than if each tries to make everything. Mr. Greenspan made a similar case, again and again, and his prestige helped create a bipartisan consensus for opening American borders. The North American Free Trade Agreement passed in 1993 with support from both parties and was signed by a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Your shoes, your sofa, your cellphone and your car are all less expensive because of global trade. But as Mr. Greenspan exits, these benefits are not the main thing on people's minds. The costs of the changes are. When we start buying lower-priced goods from abroad, it often means American jobs are lost. When we embrace new technology, these productivity gains also often come at the expense of someone's job. If Mr. Greenspan had one blind spot, it was that he never really figured out how to talk about those costs. Instead, like most economists, he called for a better-educated work force and repeated the idea that the long-term gains from trade easily outweigh the short-term costs. While that is undoubtedly true, it is not exactly a persuasive argument to unemployed workers for whom the 'short term' encompasses the rest of their lives. In recent years, even the elite consensus in favor of freer trade has begun to break down. Around the world, trade talks are largely stalled. Few Democrats in Congress are willing to vote for trade deals these days. After N. Gregory Mankiw, an adviser to President Bush, suggested in 2004 that outsourcing of jobs was good for the economy, some Republicans called for his head. Many of us are torn. By a wide margin, Americans still say trade is good for the economy, but a solid and growing majority also wants restrictions to protect domestic industries. This is where Mr. Bernanke comes in. What the country is missing right now is a public figure who can bridge this gap, somebody who can point out that no nation has lifted living standards by shutting its borders but who can also talk eloquently about the downsides of open trade. And who might even help come up with some solutions. Almost two years ago, as a member of the Fed's board, Mr. Bernanke traveled to North Carolina, home to many people whose jobs had moved overseas. There, he gave a speech that began with the standard argument for trade, complete with a mention of Ricardo. He finished, though, with words that are hard to imagine coming from Mr. Greenspan. Laid-off workers need help, Mr. Bernanke said. 'Reducing the burdens borne by displaced workers is the right and fair thing to do,' Mr. Bernanke said. 'If workers are less fearful of change, less pressure will be exerted on politicians to erect trade barriers or to take other actions that would reduce the flexibility and dynamism of the U.S. economy.' He did not take a position on specific ideas, but he mentioned a few possibilities. Laws could be changed so that pensions and health care did not disappear when a job did. Wage insurance could make up some of the difference between a lost job and a new one. The insurance benefits would be low enough that people still had incentive to find new work, but high enough to soften the blow. In the weeks leading to today's handover, some experts — including, quietly, some inside the Fed — have urged Mr. Bernanke to have smaller ambitions than Mr. Greenspan did. Don't talk about big ideas, they say; stay focused on interest rates. So I put the question to Mr. Mankiw, the last high-profile economist to get himself in trouble by talking about trade. I began the conversation by pointing out the obvious, that selling people on trade is hard. Mr. Mankiw laughed. 'I learned that the hard way,' he said. So should Mr. Bernanke stick to platitudes? Absolutely not, Mr. Mankiw said. 'Having a smart economist like Greenspan or Bernanke in a position where people will listen to him is too valuable,' he said. 'Bernanke comes from a background of being a teacher and a textbook writer. He may prove to be very good at boiling things down to their essence. He may prove to be a fantastic communicator.' So speak up, Mr. Chairman.

Subject: There's only hope!!!! From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:26:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: The State of Energy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 06:58:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01wed1.html?ex=1296450000&en=b97e73e3be513dbd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 The State of Energy President Bush devoted two minutes and 15 seconds of his State of the Union speech to energy independence. It was hardly the bold signal we've been waiting for through years of global warming and deadly struggles in the Middle East, where everything takes place in the context of what Mr. Bush rightly called our 'addiction' to imported oil. Last night's remarks were woefully insufficient. The country's future economic and national security will depend on whether Americans can control their enormous appetite for fossil fuels. This is not a matter to be lumped in a laundry list of other initiatives during a once-a-year speech to Congress. It is the key to everything else. If Mr. Bush wants his final years in office to mean more than a struggle to re-spin failed policies and cement bad initiatives into permanent law, this is the place where he needs to take his stand. And he must do it with far more force and passion than he did last night. • American overdependence on oil has been a disaster for our foreign policy. It weakens the nation's international leverage and empowers exactly the wrong countries. Last night Mr. Bush told the people that 'the nations of the world must not permit the Iranian regime to gain nuclear weapons,' but he did not explain how that will happen when those same nations are so dependent on Tehran's oil. Iran ranks second in oil reserves only to Saudi Arabia, where members of the elite help finance Osama bin Laden and his ilk, and where the United States finds it has little power to stop them. Oil is a seller's market, in part because of America's voracious consumption. India and China, with their growing energy needs, have both signed deals with Iran. Rogue states like Sudan are given political cover by their oil customers. The United Nations may wish to do something about genocide in Darfur or nuclear proliferation, but its most powerful members are hamstrung by their oil alliances with some of the worst leaders on the planet. Even if the war on terror had never begun, Mr. Bush would have an obligation to be serious about the energy issue, given the enormous danger to the nation's economy if we fail to act. His own Energy Department predicts that with the rapid development of India and China, annual global consumption will rise from about 80 million barrels of oil a day to 119 million barrels by 2025. Absent efforts to reduce American consumption, these new demands will lead to soaring oil prices, inflation and a loss of America's trade advantage. It should be a humbling shock to American leaders that Brazil has managed to become energy self-sufficient during a period when the United States was focused on building bigger S.U.V.'s. Part of the answer, as Mr. Bush indicated last night, is the continued development of alternative fuels, especially for cars. The Energy Department has addressed this modestly, and last night the president said his budget would add more money for research. That's fine, but hardly the kind of full-bore national initiative that will pump large amounts of money into the commercial production of alternatives to gasoline. When it comes to cars, much of the research has already been done — Brazil got to energy independence by figuring out how to get its citizens home from work in cars run without much gasoline. The answer is producing the new fuels that have already been developed and getting cars that use them on the lots. There are several ways to make that happen. The president could call for higher fuel economy standards for car manufacturers. He could bring up the subject of a gas tax — the most effective way of getting Americans to buy fuel-efficient cars, and a market-based tax on consumption that conservative lawmakers ought to embrace if they are honest with themselves and their constituents. But Mr. Bush took the safe, easy and relatively meaningless route instead. There is still an enormous amount to be done to find new sources of clean, cheap power to heat homes and create electricity. But regrettably, the president made it clear last night that he would rather spend the country's resources on tax cuts for the wealthy. The oil companies are currently flush with profits from the same high prices that have plagued consumers, and the president might have asked the assembled legislators whether their current tax breaks might be redirected into a real energy initiative. • Simply calling for more innovation is painless. The hard part is calling for anything that smacks of sacrifice — on the part of consumers or special interests, and politicians who depend on their support. After 9/11, the president had the perfect moment to put the nation on the road toward energy independence, when people were prepared to give up their own comforts in the name of a greater good. He passed it by, and he missed another opportunity last night. Of all the defects in Mr. Bush's energy presentation, the greatest was his unwillingness to address global warming — an energy-related emergency every bit as critical as our reliance on foreign oil. Except for a few academics on retainer at the more backward energy companies, virtually no educated scientist disputes that the earth has grown warmer over the last few decades — largely as a result of increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide produced by the burning of fossil fuels. The carbon lodged in the atmosphere by the Industrial Revolution over the last 150 years has already taken a toll: disappearing glaciers, a thinning Arctic icecap, dead or dying coral reefs, increasingly violent hurricanes. Even so, given robust political leadership and technological ingenuity, the worst consequences — widespread drought and devastating rises in sea levels —can be averted if society moves quickly to slow and ultimately reverse its output of greenhouse gases. This will require a fair, cost-effective program of carbon controls at home and a good deal of persuasion and technological assistance in countries like China, which is building old-fashioned, carbon-producing coal-fired power plants at a frightening clip. Mr. Bush said he would look for cleaner ways to power our homes and offices, and provide more money for the Energy Department's search for a 'zero emission' coal-fired plant whose carbon dioxide emissions can be injected harmlessly into the ground without adding to the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But once again he chose to substitute long-range research — and a single, government-sponsored research program at that — for the immediate investments that have to be made across the entire industrial sector. That Mr. Bush has taken a pass on this issue is a negligence from which the globe may never recover. While he seems finally to have signed on to the idea that the earth is warming, and that humans are heavily responsible, he has rejected serious proposals to do anything about it and allowed his advisers on the issue to engage in a calculated program of disinformation. At the recent global summit on warming, his chief spokesmen insisted that the president's program of voluntary reductions by individual companies had resulted in a reduction in emissions, when in fact the reverse was true. • The State of the Union speech is usually a feel-good event, and no one could fault Mr. Bush's call for research, or fail to applaud his call for replacing more than 75 percent of the nation's oil imports from the Middle East within the next two decades. But while the goal was grand, the means were minuscule. The president has never been serious about energy independence. Like so many of our leaders, he is content to acknowledge the problem and then offer up answers that do little to disturb the status quo. If the war on terror must include a war on oil dependence, Mr. Bush is in retreat.

Subject: Re: The State of Energy From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:23:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'If Mr. Bush wants his final years in office to mean more than a struggle to re-spin failed policies and cement bad initiatives into permanent law, this is the place where he needs to take his stand. And he must do it with far more force and passion than he did last night.' Unfortunately it will likely be left up to the next administration to begin the repairs. For all the talk about technology saving our bacon at some point down the road, the best immediate steps must be taken by the federal government - to lead the country on a path of energy conservation.

Subject: Re: The State of Energy From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:49:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Well, there will be a national election this fall and possibly hopefully this dreadful Congressional majority will change even a little.

Subject: Re: The State of Energy From: Pete Weis To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:46:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Let's hope it does. But it may take until the next president to really change direction.

Subject: My Precious From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 21:42:26 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: A president with unrivaled power is the very PROBLEM - no matter the party - look at how with bated breath the whole world looks at BERNANKE. I read a report on asian CEO's - one of the CEO's said you cannot pay a man to fight to the death in battle for you, but you can instill in him your beliefs and he will die to defend them. He said our whole capitalist model over here is Bankrupt - we have 1 high paid CEO or 1 high powered gubbment figurehead carrying so much influence - this will not do in today's time. He says in his organization they have teams of people and no one person has so much influence - if he were to die tomorrow it would be a non-event - one of his VP's would carry on and nothing would change - now if Greenspan had died in a terrible car accident a few years back or the Prez - could we say the same? I have provided studies where people say the centralization of government has concentrated too much power into too few people and positions and we need to spread the government out some more. As our population has grown - our representative gubbment did not adapt and too much influence is held by far too few. Here a brief comment: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22123546 http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~jblowers/index_files/image011.jpg http://vanir-lag.org/gallery/albums/Mereks-Miscellanea/Frodo_Inspects_The_Ring.jpg Big government has become like the RING in lord of the rings. Everyone wants to control it for thier selfish power interests. We have one fix that will make a major difference, according to mises, bogle, ron paul, kessler etc etc - just like the RING - its too tempting - have to disband it - shrink government and decentralize the power that attracts bribes and lobbying. Until my redneck buddies dont vote for a leader because he says 'heckuva job' while their mothers die from lack of medicine there will be little change. Pete passing the RING off to another Prez doesn't heal the fundamental problem - too much power in too few hands. They will grow corrupt just like any other holder of the RING. As to Bush's policies on education - he passed no child left behind but then gave them no funding - not smart - instead our money went into houses - I hope he is serious about helping the kids get smart and gives them funding to do so - but we already hit our quota for H1B visas and it is a troubling trend - then he says this in his speech with his HOLY WAR views: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/upload/2006/02/pig-man.jpg http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/02/president_panders_to_antimanim.php President panders to anti-manimal lobby! Dr Moreau flees country in rage! Category: Science I didn't listen to the State of the Union Address last night, preferring to maintain my equanimity by attending a talk on quantum physics, but I knew I could trust my readers to email me with choice weird science bits. I'm getting a lot of 'WTF?' email about this statement from Bush: Tonight I ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms, creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human-animal hybrids, and buying, selling or patenting human embryos. It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote…and we know which one has the majority here. But guess what? Creating chimeras is legitimate and useful scientific research; it's really happening. Of course, it isn't with the intent of creating monstrous half-animal/half-human slaves or something evil like that, and scientists are well aware (or should be well aware) of the ethical concerns, and it's the topic of ongoing debate. Let's consider one recent example of such an experiment. Down syndrome is a very common genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. That kind of genetic insult causes a constellation of problems: mild to moderate mental retardation, heart defects, and weakened immune systems, and various superficial abnormalities. It's also a viable defect, and produces walking, talking, interacting human beings who are loved by their friends and families, who would really like to be able to do something about those lifespan-reducing health problems. We would love to have an animal model of Down syndrome, so that, for example, we could figure out exactly what gene overdose is causing the immune system problems or the heart defects, and develop better treatments for them. So what scientists have been doing is inserting human genes into mice, to produce similar genetic overdoses in their development. As I reported before, there have been partial insertions, but now a team of researchers has inserted a complete human chromosome 21 into mouse embryonic stem cells, and from those generated a line of aneuploid mice that have many of the symptoms of Down syndrome, including the heart defects. They also have problems in spatial learning and memory that have been traced back to defects in long-term potentiation in the central nervous system. These mice are a tool to help us understand a debilitating human problem. George W. Bush would like to make them illegal. He's trusting that everyone will think he is banning monstrous crimes against nature, but what he's really doing is targeting the weak and the ill, blocking useful avenues of research that are specifically designed to help us understand human afflictions. His message isn't 'We aren't going to let the mad scientists make monsters!', it's 'We aren't going to let the doctors help those 'retards.'' Once again, the ignorance and the bigotry of the religious right wins out over reason and humanitarianism. I think I know who the real pig-men are. Finally Pete you say where is the growth coming for the underdog - well ITT tech is building a campus in flint michigan - but do you think all those auto workers can retrain to be IT people and knowledge workers? He talks about permanent tax cuts - but the CBO used the expiring of those tax cuts to get our deficit back in line - that was thier projection - if you make the cuts permanent - we are toast no? Bush is making key appointments at fannie freddie and Fed Govenors that are his buddies and politicizing our economic stewards and institutions - the dems will do it too - the temptation is too great. Continues below--

Subject: Re: My Precious From: Pete Weis To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 08:27:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'Pete passing the RING off to another Prez doesn't heal the fundamental problem - too much power in too few hands. They will grow corrupt just like any other holder of the RING.' Johnny5. You may be right - I hope not. Jimmy Carter was tossed to the political wolves after the Iran hostage situation. I voted for him a second time (Reagan's 'voodoo' economics) but with less enthusiasm. But time and subsequent events have changed my view of Jimmy Carter. Having been an engineer trained in the science of energy production, Carter led the way toward energy conservation through government mandates which cut American oil consumption almost in half during the 80's. I think back now about his successful efforts in the Middle East - not the Iran hostage episode. What really sticks in my mind is the moment when Anwar Sadat, Menachem Bagen and Jimmy Carter are clasping hands after the peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. You can see the emotion in Anwar Sadat and his appreciation for what Jimmy Carter had done to make it possible. Somewhere along the line we lost the vision and effort that Jimmy Carter had started. If we had kept it going I wonder if we would be in the same predicament in which we now find ourselves. I hope you are not right Johnny5 - I hope there are other Jimmy Carters out there!!

Subject: Hillary Quote From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 23:59:31 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: If our nation can only survive and our world prosper because of one mortal man's few choices - we are in for bad times Pete. I fundamentally disagree with you that we are stronger because of 1 man - the flip side means we will go to hell in a hand basket because of one bad man - the system should be more robust than that! I would much rather we have a society of good citizens than 1 great leader. Terri will like this - from Hillary: The economy creates consumers but cannot create citizens. (Jun 1999)

Subject: FREE trade? All boats rising? From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 21:50:14 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: More Deception from the Bush White House By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS Gentle reader, if you prefer comforting lies to harsh truths, don't read this column. The state of the union is disastrous. By its naked aggression, bullying, illegal spying on Americans, and illegal torture and detentions, the Bush administration has demonstrated American contempt for the Geneva Convention, for human life and dignity, and for the civil liberties of its own citizens. Increasingly, the US is isolated in the world, having to resort to bribery and threats to impose its diktats. No country any longer looks to America for moral leadership. The US has become a rogue nation. Least of all did President Bush tell any truth about the economy. He talked about economic growth rates without acknowledging that they result from eating the seed corn and do not produce jobs with a living wage for Americans. He touted a low rate of unemployment and did not admit that the figure is false because it does not count millions of discouraged workers who have dropped out of the work force. Americans did not hear from Bush that a new Wal-Mart just opened on Chicago's city boundary and 25,000 people applied for 325 jobs (Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 26), or that 11,000 people applied for a few Wal-Mart jobs in Oakland, California. Obviously, employment is far from full. Neither did Bush tell Americans any of the dire facts reported by economist Charles McMillion in the January 19 issue of Manufacturing & Technology News: During Bush's presidency the US has experienced the slowest job creation on record (going back to 1939). During the past five years private business has added only 958,000 net new jobs to the economy, while the government sector has added 1.1 million jobs. Moreover, as many of the jobs are not for a full work week, 'the country ended 2005 with fewer private sector hours worked than it had in January 2001.' McMillion reports that the largest sources of private sector jobs have been health care and waitresses and bartenders. Other areas of the private sector lost so many jobs, including supervisory/managerial jobs, that had health care not added 1.4 million new jobs, the private sector would have experienced a net loss of 467,000 jobs between January 2001 and December 2005 despite an 'economic recovery.' Without the new jobs waiting tables and serving drinks, the US economy in the past five years would have eked out a measly 64,000 jobs. In other words, there is a job depression in the US. McMillion reports that during the past five years of Bush's presidency the US has lost 16.5% of its manufacturing jobs. The hardest hit are clothes manufacturers, textile mills, communications equipment, and semiconductors. Workforces in these industries shrunk by 37 to 46 percent. These are amazing job losses. Major industries have shriveled to insignificance in half a decade. Free trade, offshore production for US markets, and the outsourcing of US jobs are the culprits. McMillion writes that 'every industry that faces foreign outsourcing or import competition is losing jobs,' including both Ford and General Motors, both of which recently announced new job losses of 30,000 each. The parts supplier, Delphi, is on the ropes and cutting thousands of jobs, wages, benefits, and pensions. If the free trade/outsourcing propaganda were true, would not at least some US export industries be experiencing a growth in employment? If free trade and outsourcing benefit the US economy, how did America run up $2.85 trillion in trade deficits over the last five years? This means Americans consumed almost $3 trillion dollars more in goods and services than they produced and turned over $3 trillion of their existing assets to foreigners to pay for their consumption. Consuming accumulated wealth makes a country poorer, not richer. Americans are constantly reassured that America is the leader in advanced technology and intellectual property and doesn't need jobs making clothes or even semiconductors. McMillion puts the lie to this reassurance. During Bush's presidency, the US has lost its trade surplus in manufactured Advanced Technology Products (ATP). The US trade deficit in ATP now exceeds the US surplus in Intellectual Property licenses and fees. The US no longer earns enough from high tech to cover any part of its import bill for oil, autos, or clothing. This is an astonishing development. The US 'superpower' is dependent on China for advanced technology products and is dependent on Asia to finance its massive deficits and foreign wars. In view of the rapid collapse of US economic potential, my prediction in January 2004 that the US would be a third world economy in 20 years was optimistic. Another five years like the last, and little will be left. America's capacity to export manufactured goods has been so reduced that some economists say that there is no exchange rate at which the US can balance its trade. McMillion reports that median household income has fallen for a record fifth year in succession. Growth in consumer spending has resulted from households spending their savings and equity in their homes. In 2005 for the first time since the Great Depression in the 1930s, American consumers spent more than they earned, and the government budget deficit was larger than all business savings combined. American households are paying a record share of their disposable income to service their debts. With America hemorrhaging red ink in every direction, how much longer can the dollar hold on to its role as world reserve currency? The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is the cradle of the propaganda that globalization is win-win for all concerned. Free trader Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley reports that the mood at the recently concluded Davos meeting was different, because the predicted 'wins' for the industrialized world have not made an appearance. Roach writes that 'job creation and real wages in the mature, industrialized economies have seriously lagged historical norms. It is now commonplace for recoveries in the developed world to be either jobless or wageless--or both.' Roach is the first free trade economist to admit that the disruptive technology of the Internet has dashed the globalization hopes. It was supposed to work like this: The first world would lose market share in tradable manufactured goods and make up the job and economic loss with highly-educated knowledge workers. The 'win-win' was supposed to be cheaper manufactured goods for the first world and more and better jobs for the third world. It did not work out this way, Roach writes, because the Internet allowed job outsourcing to quickly migrate from call centers and data processing to the upper end of the value chain, displacing first world employees in 'software programming, engineering, design, and the medical profession, as well as a broad array of professionals in the legal, accounting, actuarial, consulting, and financial services industries.' This is what I have been writing for years, while the economics profession adopted a position of total denial. The first world gainers from globalization are the corporate executives, who gain millions of dollars in bonuses by arbitraging labor and substituting cheaper foreign labor for first world labor. For the past decade free market economists have served as apologists for corporate interests that are dismantling the ladders of upward mobility in the US and creating what McMillion writes is the worst income inequality on record. Globalization is wiping out the American middle class and terminating jobs for university graduates, who now serve as temps, waitresses and bartenders. But the whores among economists and the evil men and women in the Bush administration still sing globalization's praises. The state of the nation has never been worse. The Great Depression was an accident caused by the incompetence of the Federal Reserve, which was still new at its job. The new American job depression is the result of free trade ideology. The new job depression is creating a reserve army of the unemployed to serve as desperate recruits for neoconservative military adventures. Perhaps that explains the Bush administration's enthusiasm for globalization. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com

Subject: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 06:11:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I agree Pete, However I would say that conservatism's rise has not been a constant one since the 1980's. There have been backlashes since then, particularly in the 1990's. What does it mean to be a conservative? I guess its because I find myself in the middle, there is no black or white, right or left. I don't necessarily blame the extreme right for making inroads into our basic social structure, what amazes me is how ignorant and complacent our social structure has become. THIS is the central and constant theme throughout the last 25 years, and it has been driven, in large part, by a technological, social and cultural revolution that has broken down existing value systems and left human beings not knowing where they stand.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Pete Weis To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 08:11:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Poyetas. I wonder if our social awareness and, hence, political direction doesn't simply shift with the winds of perceived financial wellbeing. When we felt we were doing well financially in the 80's and 90's we became more conservative and the government was viewed as an entity which stood in the way of our growing prosperity (more regulation, higher taxes, etc.). When times are harder (like the 30's) we want the government to come to our rescue and we want change. So economic conditions drive our social awareness and political direction and I believe those conditions are changing. Political direction, in fact, may go overboard in the other direction with too much regulation and this very well may mean that it will take longer to get things turned around once again. There are those who talk about economic waves (K-waves, Elliot waves, etc.) but you can also see the political waves throughout history.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:15:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Right now the ruling feelings in voting are a vague fear that is cultivated by Republicans and a corresponding wish for security. When voters understand that we really are secure and Democrats will keep us more secure still voting patterns will change.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:51:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I think the Democrat's response by the newly elected Virginia governor - 'there has got to be a better way' - is a good theme for just about everything including security. His statement that we were 'misled' into an invasion of Iraq and his inference that this has made us less secure is a truth which can resonate with the electorate.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Poyetas To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 11:49:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Chicken and egg argument, Does economic change precipitate social change or vice-versa? Or maybe the two are intertwined in such a dynamic way that sometimes the chicken IS the egg and the egg IS the chicken.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Pete Weis To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 12:08:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I don't think social change comes about on its own and then that brings about economic change. Generally it is the anger that comes from economic slumps that causes both social and political change. And whatever change takes place is not always good - Germany, for instance in the 30's. The economic hardship in Russia during and right after WW1 brought the Bolsheviks to power. The economic hardship of the 30's brought 20 years of control by the Democrats before Ike (a war hero) finally broke the trend. During the relative good economic times of post WW2, conservative Republican presidencies have predominated - broken only by two charismatic Democrats (Kennedy & Clinton) and Carter (following the economic slump of the 70's). Even Clinton followed the early 90's recession. LBJ was an incumbant president the one time he was elected during a war and the Democrats successfully framed Goldwater as a radical who might 'push the button' with TV images of a mushroom cloud. Can you think of a time in history when social and political change occured during a relativey good economic period - especially since the beginings of the industrial revolution?

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 13:34:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting comments for me to think through.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Poyetas To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 11:22:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sorry it took so long to get back to your point Pete, Here is my thesis: From one side, I agree with you completely. The examples you gave are fully relevant. However!, lets take the last 30 years and the one trend that is shaping our society is the increasing rate of information liquidity. This is increasing the rate of innovation and consequently stretching the traditional barriers of human conception to their limits. As a result, the world we live in today is fundamentally different than that of 30 years ago. Globalisation is the direct result of this social change, and is further forcing countries to rethink their economic policies.

Subject: Re: On the rise of conservatism (cont'd) From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 18:41:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is a clever and important comment, to which I will reply in future.

Subject: Russia's Sweetheart Deal for Iran From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 05:59:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/01/opinion/01milhollin.html?ex=1296450000&en=31d035e4c21ca6ae&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss February 1, 2006 Russia's Sweetheart Deal for Iran By VALERIE LINCY and GARY MILHOLLIN Washington FINALLY, we are told, there is a breakthrough in the Iranian nuclear crisis: the Bush administration and its European allies have persuaded Russia and China to vote, at tomorrow's meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to send Iran's nuclear violations before the United Nations Security Council. Allow us to point out the gray lining in the silver cloud. Although the agency is now likely to report Iran to the Security Council, America and the Europeans agreed that the United Nations will wait at least a month before deciding on any punishment. There is little doubt what this cooling-off period is intended for: further negotiations on a proposal that would have Iran shift its large-scale, energy-related uranium enrichment work to Russia. The Americans, British, French, Germans and Chinese have all shown support for the Russian proposal. Iran, however, showed little interest before mid-January, when it became clear the West was intent on getting tough. Last Wednesday, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator called the Russian suggestion 'positive' and predicted that it could be 'perfected' through further talks. While this may seem hopeful, the Russian deal actually poses more problems than it solves. First, even if Russia took over Iran's nuclear energy work, the religious radicals in Tehran would be left with a huge amount of dangerous equipment. The deal covers only the commercial-scale enrichment program Iran has planned for its plant at Natanz. But Iran also has a string of shops for manufacturing centrifuges — which can be used to enrich uranium to weapon grade — a large inventory of centrifuge parts, a stockpile of uranium gas needed to feed the centrifuges (plus a factory to produce more), and a pilot-scale enrichment plant under construction. Second, Iran draws a distinction between the energy-related work that would go to Russia and other enrichment activity that it likes to call 'research.' When Iran broke the international seals at three enrichment sites last month and resumed work, its Foreign Ministry said the move was done only for scientific interests and had nothing to do with weapons. Even with a Russian deal, Iran is likely to insist on its right to continue such research, which would allow its scientists to develop the skills necessary to process uranium for bombs. Last, the proposal, if accepted, would shatter the coalition of states that is finally working together to restrain Iran. Russia would certainly end its tepid support for Security Council action and would agree to let the Iranians continue their 'research.' The United States is equally certain to refuse such a concession. The Europeans would be torn between the desire to see a successful end to their years of diplomatic effort and their belief that Iran's nuclear ambitions would not be adequately contained. If we are going to negotiate with Iran, we must hold out for a solution like the one Libya accepted in 2003. Libya allowed everything useful for enriching uranium to be boxed up and carted out of the country. It also answered all questions about its nuclear past and it revealed the names of its shady suppliers, allowing the West to counter the nuclear smuggling network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. Only greater pressure from the Security Council is likely to force Iran to accept a similar agreement. The Russian proposal is a red herring aimed at helping Iran, a major trading partner of Moscow's, get out of harm's way at the very moment when the world is uniting against it. A Security Council referral came into play only because of Iran's recent behavior: the inflammatory anti-Israel statements of its president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and its ill-timed decision to resume nuclear work. If Iran snaps up the Russian offer, our last, best chance to pressure Iran in the Security Council may be lost.

Subject: Reconstruction Revisited From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 05:57:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29goodman.html January 29, 2006 Reconstruction Revisited By JAMES GOODMAN ERIC FONER wrote 'Forever Free' to combat what he calls our 'sheer ignorance' of the 15 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877. Yet when it comes to those years, ignorance is progress, a step in the right direction. What could be worse than ignorance? Horrible history: the distortions, misinformation and myths that passed for 'the facts of Reconstruction' for nearly a century after 1877. In that history, Lincoln's magnanimous plan for reunion died with him, as power-hungry, South-hating Radical Republicans in Congress rolled over Andrew Johnson and set out to punish the South for the war. What followed was a 'tragic era' of military occupation, corrupt state governments, heavy taxation, wasteful spending and, worst of all, 'Negro rule': the enfranchising of ignorant, gullible, bestial black men. All seemed lost, until the Ku Klux Klan arose and expelled the carpetbaggers, dragged the scalawags back to the white side of the color line and put the former slaves in their place. Home rule was restored, the South redeemed. That's not a caricature. That was Reconstruction at our finest universities (nowhere more than at Columbia, where Foner now holds an endowed chair) and it was Reconstruction in popular novels, histories and films, most notably D. W. Griffith's repugnant classic, 'The Birth of a Nation.' Woodrow Wilson, a political scientist and Princeton professor before he became president, viewed the film in the White House. It is 'like writing history with lightning,' he said, 'and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.' It was terrible, but not true - as African-Americans knew. 'One fact and one alone explains the attitude of most recent writers toward Reconstruction,' W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in a blistering critique in 1935: 'they cannot conceive Negroes as men.' Du Bois saw Reconstruction as a noble effort to establish genuine democracy in the South. His white contemporaries ignored him, but a generation later his sources and insights contributed mightily to a new history, a history that has been elaborated and refined but remains the standard one today. 'Forever Free' will not supersede 'Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877,' the grand synthesis Foner published in 1988. His new book is aimed at readers basically unfamiliar with American history. For their benefit, he opens with a short account of slavery and emancipation. He then turns to the struggle to determine the meaning of freedom and the character of American democracy after the war. 'The vast economic and political power of the South's white elite hung in the balance,' he writes. So did the 'lives and dreams' of four million former slaves. Landowners and merchants wanted laborers to plant and pick their cotton - on terms as close to those of slavery as they could get. Freedmen and women wanted land of their own. They also wanted schools, churches, equality before the law and the franchise. They didn't get land. But by the early 1870's, they had achieved a measure of economic autonomy, and the legal and political tools - especially the Civil Rights Acts and the 14th and 15th Amendments - necessary to protect it. Black men voted, served on juries and held local, state and national office. 'For a brief moment, the country experimented with genuine interracial democracy,' Foner writes. But it wasn't easy or pretty, and it provoked a ferocious reaction. In the face of fraud and terror, the freedmen's white allies, north and south, abandoned them. In his last two chapters, with the uninitiated again in mind, Foner traces the lines of race and politics that run from Reconstruction to the age of segregation to the civil rights movement to our own time. And throughout, the history lesson is enhanced by Foner's collaboration with Joshua Brown, a social historian and cartoonist. Brown selected the book's 'illustrations' (scores of drawings, engravings, paintings, photographs and cartoons), and he wrote six short 'visual essays.' Those essays, set among Foner's chapters, vividly show how images - a Republican buying one black man's vote, Klansmen lynching another - are never merely illustrations of historical experience. They are another dimension of that experience. 'Forever Free' is a good book: passionate, lucid, concise without being light. But will it be a match for ignorance? The old history took hold when Northerners concluded that the freedmen and women were as hopeless as white Southerners said they were; their fate was best left in white Southern hands. Through decades of lynching, segregation, disfranchisement, debt peonage, heightened prejudice and abject poverty, history justified inaction by demonstrating that federal interference only made race matters worse. The new history took hold in the 1960's, during the civil rights movement and Lyndon Johnson's 'Great Society,' when many Americans came to believe that the government had an obligation to join the struggle for equality, and that they had a huge stake in the outcome of that struggle. Four decades and untold political abuse later, our federal government is again held in low esteem. Many wonder if it is even competent to do what it used to do best: wage war. I would like to think that the prejudice at the heart of the old history of Reconstruction would prevent its revival. But as long as Americans continue to see government simply as a problem, we won't know much, or care, about Reconstruction. James Goodman is a professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark.

Subject: The Education of Abraham Lincoln From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 05:56:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405EFDB173DF933A25751C0A9649C8B63&fta=y February 10, 2002 The Education of Abraham Lincoln By ERIC FONER LINCOLN'S VIRTUES An Ethical Biography. By William Lee Miller. More words have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any historical personage except Jesus Christ. There are scores of biographies of every size, shape and description, as well as books on Lincoln's views on everything from cigarette smoking to Judaism. Is it possible to say something new about Lincoln? The somewhat surprising answer, as William Lee Miller demonstrates in ''Lincoln's Virtues,'' is yes. A scholar in residence at the University of Virginia, Miller has long been interested in the intersections of practical politics and moral principle. In his previous book, ''Arguing About Slavery,'' he related how a small band of congressmen led by John Quincy Adams fought to overturn the ''gag rule'' that prohibited discussion of antislavery petitions in the House of Representatives. He describes ''Lincoln's Virtues'' as ''an ethical biography'' -- not a conventional narrative of Lincoln's career but a study of his moral and intellectual development up to the Civil War. Many readers are apt to find the book rough going. ''Lincoln's Virtues'' is filled with digressions, irrelevancies, arguments with other historians and annoying asides. (''What? What? What is that young politician saying up there in front of the crowd of temperance advocates in the Second Presbyterian Church?'') Miller has yet to learn the lesson of Lincoln's greatest speeches, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural, which are testaments to the power of brevity. Those who persevere, however, will emerge convinced of Miller's essential point: that Lincoln was not simply an astute politician but ''an extraordinary thinker, on moral-political subjects,'' who reached down to first principles to illuminate the essence of his era's controversies. Rarely have Lincoln's speeches and writings, both well known and obscure, been subjected to such painstaking analysis. Miller shows that from his youth Lincoln thought for himself and trusted his own judgment. He notes how many elements of frontier culture the young Lincoln -- who did not hunt, drink, use tobacco or gamble -- rejected. In a region dominated by Jacksonian Democrats and swept by religious revivals, Lincoln adhered to the Whig Party and never joined a church. Having received almost no formal education, Lincoln embarked on a quest for learning and self-improvement. He read incessantly, beginning as a youth with the Bible and Shakespeare. During his single term in the House of Representatives, his colleagues considered it humorous that Lincoln spent his spare time poring over books in the Library of Congress. The result of this ''stunning work of self-education'' was the ''intellectual power'' revealed in Lincoln's writings and speeches. He relied, Miller notes, on in-depth research and logical argument to persuade his listeners rather than oratorical flights. Before 1854, Lincoln had expressed antislavery views but was not a leader in antislavery politics. But in that year, having recently retired from political activity, he was swept back into the public arena by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the heartland of the trans-Mississippi West to the expansion of slavery. In ''the first great speech of his life,'' at Springfield, Ill., he condemned the further spread of slavery because of ''the monstrous injustice of slavery itself'' and because it undermined the country's historical mission as a beacon of freedom for the world. For the next six years, Lincoln hammered home his argument: slavery was a ''vast moral evil'' whose existence in the South was unfortunately guaranteed by the Constitution but whose expansion must be resisted because it threatened the moral foundations of the Republic. More and more eloquently, he identified how slavery threatened the core rights of all Americans -- personal liberty, self-government and enjoyment of the fruits of one's labor. Hovering over ''Lincoln's Virtues'' is the shadow of another recent study, Lerone Bennett Jr.'s ''Forced Into Glory,'' a full-scale assault on Lincoln's reputation that paints him as a supporter of slavery and an inveterate racist. If Bennett's book is a somewhat intemperate prosecutor's brief, Miller offers the case for the defense. Miller acknowledges that Lincoln opposed allowing blacks in Illinois to vote, hold office or intermarry with whites, and that he never called for repeal of the state's draconian Black Laws, which severely restricted the rights of the small black population. He points out in extenuation that most of Lincoln's racist statements were defensive responses to Democrats' far more overt and insidious appeals to racism. In the great 1858 Senate campaign, Lincoln's rival, Stephen A. Douglas, repeatedly insisted that blacks were not entitled to share in the inalienable rights cited in the Declaration of Independence. To this, Lincoln responded that blacks might not merit political equality but that the natural rights enumerated by Jefferson applied to all mankind. Miller makes clear Lincoln's deep hatred of slavery. Regarding race, however, his defense is not entirely successful. Having earlier praised Lincoln for moral independence, he explains that when it came to blacks, Lincoln ''acquiesced in the racial prejudice by which he was surrounded.'' He insists, however, that Lincoln's inclusion of blacks within the Declaration of Independence was meant surreptitiously to subvert the philosophical underpinning not simply of slavery but of racism as well. The problem with this argument was pointed out half a century ago by Richard Hofstadter in his brilliant essay on Lincoln in ''The American Political Tradition.'' How could blacks exercise and defend their natural rights while denied the vote, the right to testify in court and access to education, as they were in Illinois? Nor does Miller deal, except in passing, with Lincoln's nearly lifelong support for colonization. In his great Springfield speech of 1854, Lincoln asserted that he would prefer to send the slaves, if freed, ''to Liberia -- to their own native land'' (a phrase he used even though some blacks' ancestors had been in North America longer than his own). Lincoln's support of a policy that might be called the ethnic cleansing of America was no transitory fancy. He promoted it in numerous prewar speeches, two State of the Union addresses, several cabinet meetings and a notorious exchange with black leaders at the White House in 1862. Lincoln's bias should not blind us to his many virtues, yet it cannot be denied that, like many of his contemporaries, he held prejudiced views regarding blacks even as he believed that slavery was a crime. Miller's discussion of race is the linchpin of a broader argument about politics and the possibilities of moral action. Among his purposes is to restore readers' respect for politicians, whose reputation has been tarnished by Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-contra and other examples of malfeasance in office. Lincoln was a professional politician. As a Republican leader, he worked to have the party focus on its most popular position -- opposition to the expansion of slavery -- and put aside divisive questions (like the repeal of the fugitive slave law, hostility to immigrants, demands for immediate abolition and, of course, the rights of blacks) that would endanger its success. Yet he never compromised his core belief in the wrongness of slavery. As a politician, Miller claims, Lincoln realized ''that role's fullest moral possibilities.'' Miller's conception of political leadership is informed by Max Weber's famous essay ''Politics as a Vocation,'' originally an address to students at the University of Munich during the proto-revolutionary year 1918. A believer in constitutional reform, not radical overturn, Weber insisted that the politician must be devoted to a cause yet attentive to the practical consequences of his actions. Miller insists that this ''responsible realism'' -- a combination of moral clarity and prudent responsibility -- marks Lincoln and all great political leaders. ACCOUNTS of Lincoln always seem to require some kind of antithesis to set his greatness in sharper relief. Often this is provided by his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, unfairly depicted as a shrew who made his life miserable. For Miller, Lincoln's foils are the era's ''utopians, perfectionists, moralizers, fanatics and absolutists,'' chief among them the abolitionists who, heedless of political consequences, demanded immediate Emancipation and equal rights for blacks. In ''Arguing About Slavery,'' Miller gave abolitionists full credit for helping to bring the moral issue of slavery to the forefront of national life. Here, however, he repeatedly indicts the movement for ''haughty superiority,'' ''self-righteousness'' and ''moralizing oversimplification.'' His argument not only caricatures a complex, multifaceted movement but betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the road to Emancipation. Drawing on Weber, Miller insists that the politician has no choice but to act ''within fairly narrow limits of the possible.'' He seems not to have noticed Weber's observation at the end of his long essay: ''What is possible would never have been achieved if, in this world, people had not repeatedly reached for the impossible.'' ''Lincoln's Virtues'' ends as Lincoln assumes the presidency during the nation's greatest crisis. The reader can only regret that Miller does not take his story all the way to 1865. Stopping in 1861 ignores Lincoln's real claim to greatness -- the moral and intellectual growth that was the hallmark of his presidency. By the time of his death, Lincoln had embraced Emancipation, abandoned colonization, enrolled black soldiers in the Union Army and favored enfranchising at least some blacks. Miller notes that only at the very end of his life did Lincoln come to deem a ''biracial society'' possible in the United States. How and why this happened, how Lincoln drew on principles forged before the war while responding to the pressure of military events, the actions of slaves demanding freedom and, yes, the pressure of those moralistic abolitionists, forms an essential part of Lincoln's ''ethical biography.'' Eric Foner is the DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University.

Subject: Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 05:54:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/27/nyregion/27middle.html?ex=1293339600&en=71f1a17366f4a5f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 27, 2005 In Middle Class, Signs of Anxiety on School Efforts By SUSAN SAULNY The Bloomberg administration's efforts to invest immense attention and resources on low-income students in low-performing schools are causing growing anxiety among parents from middle-class strongholds who worry that the emphasis is coming at their children's expense. Some of the very changes that Chancellor Joel I. Klein has made his hallmark - uniform programs in reading and math for most schools; drilling that helped produce citywide gains last spring on standardized tests; changes in rules for admission to programs for the gifted and talented, designed to make them more equitable - have caused unease among that important constituency. In interviews and at public meetings, dozens of parents from the middle class and upper middle class have complained of an increasing focus on standardized test preparation and remedial work, of a decreasing focus on science education and the arts, of large class sizes and of the absence of a powerful mechanism for parental influence. Take Heidi Vayer, a former public school teacher and guidance counselor. She decided to remove her two daughters this year from public school in District 2 on the East Side of Manhattan and enrolled them instead in an independent school, Friends Seminary. 'I didn't see things getting better,' Ms. Vayer said. 'The school increased class sizes, and I felt no attention was being paid to middle-class students who were there.' Her most particular concern was test preparation. 'I felt, how could I be doing this to my own children?' she said. 'I could understand if test prep was part of the curriculum, but test prep was all of the curriculum.' After particularly impressive results were recorded this year by fifth graders, principals and officials of the Department of Education said the improved test scores reflected real achievement, not high-pressure test preparation, and stemmed from a variety of initiatives, such as expanded availability of pre-kindergarten schooling and increased spending. Many parents say, however, that there are extremely limited public school options in the middle school years, and some chafe at how the new rules for gifted programs in the elementary schools and for certain select schools have made competition for admission stiffer. 'My concern is that the mayor is driving families out,' said Rose Ann Watson Ansty, whose son attends Public School 9 on the Upper West Side. 'It's very frustrating.' Whether parents are doing more than complaining is hard to determine. City officials say that judging by the number of children eligible for free lunch, the class divide in the system remains stable: About 80 percent of the children are poor, with no increase in middle class flight. Yet Emily Glickman, a consultant who advises parents in the city on winning admission for their children to private schools, said, 'The last two years the interest in private schools has exploded, as I see it with people coming to me.' Driving the anxiety is simple arithmetic. Even in some high-income ZIP codes, parents perceive neighborhood schools as academically substandard. That creates an extraordinary amount of competition for the select schools and the programs for the gifted and talented. Some of that competition is taking place now, with the latest round of applications for magnet and gifted programs just submitted and the kindergarten application process under way. The city has 239 programs for the gifted and talented, and 69 schools offer opportunities for accelerated study or enrichment activities outside the standard curriculum. 'The Department of Education has one problem: There aren't enough good schools,' said Tim Johnson, the chairman of the chancellor's Parent Advisory Council and a parent leader in District 2, which covers much of Manhattan. 'That's why parents are so possessive of the 'X' number of good schools. Everyone wants to protect a good school.' Issues of race and class are never far from the surface in this debate: The school system is overwhelmingly minority and poor, and many of the parents who have fared best at getting their children seats in choice programs are white. Some say that middle class parents should not feel so aggrieved. 'Nobody gets shortchanged the way the poor do,' said Joseph Viteritti, a professor of public policy at Hunter College. 'I'm sympathetic to the need to accommodate the middle class community and the dilemma it presents, but the bottom line is that the people who get shortchanged the most are the people who have no options.' Even critics of the school system acknowledged that the city faced a difficult balancing act. 'I don't agree with a lot of what the chancellor has done, and I think in some ways he's made things worse,' said Mindy Gerbush, who lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and serves on the District 13 Community Education Council, an elected, unpaid panel of parents. 'But in some ways it's like being in the role of Solomon: What do you do with the child?' She continued, 'What do you do for the middle class while providing for the tremendous needs of the non-middle class - after they've been forgotten for years?' Michele Cahill, senior counselor for education policy for Chancellor Klein, said that the schools could straddle the class divide and that the department remained committed to the 'twin and intertwined goals of equity and excellence.' 'I think the chancellor has listened to the concerns of what I would call middle class parents and parents of students who are achieving,' she said, 'and he has responded.' Ms. Cahill said that the city had not only changed the rules for gifted programs, it had also expanded the programs, making good on an election-year promise by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to make such slots more widely available. She also cited the creation of additional specialized high schools, and she spoke of the introduction of better options for teachers to accommodate advanced children with suitable learning materials. 'Our responsibility is to create a system that offers the most opportunity for every student at every level, and the priority has to be to address both,' Ms. Cahill said. 'We have to do two things at once.' Not everyone said the Bloomberg-Klein Education Department has been doing that. Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers' union, faulted the administration for using a 'Robin Hood' approach. 'You have to simultaneously work to help your struggling students in particular schools and keep your middle class - you have to do both these things at the same time,' she said. 'When you do one at the expense of the other, you get the rebellion and revolt you see in District 3,' she said, referring to the Upper West Side, where some parents have complained that their children were suddenly being shut out of admission to top public school programs. Part of the sense of grievance in the middle class comes from how much energy those parents typically pour into searching for schools and then, once their children are accepted, into working to support the schools. They organize libraries. They donate toilet paper and crayons and cash. And when there's not enough, they raise funds for more. Jennifer Freeman, for example, is not an employee of Public School 166 in Manhattan, but that would not be clear from her schedule. Early in the day and often late at night, she writes grant applications for theater props or for extra science lessons, and she meets with teachers to offer help with field trips and art projects. 'It's a lot of work,' said Ms. Freeman, a freelance science writer who has one son enrolled at P.S. 166, on West 89th Street, and another at Hunter College Elementary School, on East 94th Street. 'I'm sure the money that I've lost by remaining freelance and doing that is probably equal to a private school education.' But Ms. Freeman said she felt she had been able to have an effect on P.S. 166 and was content with her sons' education. Ms. Gerbush of Brooklyn, who evaluates bonds on Wall Street and owns a restaurant, said that she could have afforded the annual $20,000-plus tuition bill at many private schools, but that she had wanted her son to experience more of the 'real world.' That experience still came at a cost - not in tuition, but in her own time. Even though her son has graduated from the Institute for Collaborative Education, a progressive middle and high school in the East Village that was given a waiver from the chancellor's uniform curriculum, Ms. Gerbush continues her involvement with the schools. 'I think he is a lot better for having had the experience, but I worked very hard to get the options that would work for him,' she said. 'A lot of people don't have the kind of time or knowledge to work the system.' The surge in discontent can be traced back about three years, when Mr. Klein exempted 200 top schools from the uniform curriculum - many with largely white enrollments in relatively well-heeled neighborhoods. Some parents argued that the mayor was creating a caste system by allowing successful schools to do what they wanted, while others were forced into regimentation. Others parents, who said their schools should have made the list, expressed resentment that their children would have to use the same curriculum as those in low-performing schools. Aware of middle-class concerns, Mayor Bloomberg announced last February a significant expansion of programs for the gifted, bringing them to more corners of the city. But on the Upper West Side in particular, two recent decisions handed down from Mr. Klein revived the outcry: the use of standardized citywide criteria for admissions to programs for the gifted, and the implementation of a lottery to distribute coveted seats at underused but highly regarded schools. In both cases, individual schools had established their own rules for admission, and many parents within the schools were generally pleased with the results, because, for instance, the schools often gave preference to siblings, allowing families to stick with one school, and there was a preference in admission to gifted programs for families who lived near the schools. But even those who supported modifications to the admissions process were left feeling angry, saying they had been largely ignored in the decision-making. 'I volunteer and I go to all the Community Education Council meetings that I can, and it's very frustrating that you find out they're going to do these things at the meetings and they're telling you instead of asking, 'Do you think this is a good idea?' ' Ms. Ansty said. Ms. Ansty said that she was considering applying to parochial schools for her two daughters, who are not of age to attend school yet, and taking her son out of P.S. 9. That sort of disillusionment, if it translates into an exodus, would be difficult for the city. 'It's the middle class that makes the New York City school system better than Philadelphia or Chicago,' said Eva S. Moskowitz, a District 2 parent who is chairwoman of the City Council's Education Committee and will be executive director of a new charter school in Harlem. 'If we become a school system of the exclusively poor, we are going to be in big trouble.' There are moral reasons to address the educational inequity that exists for the poorest students, but there are also moral and pragmatic reasons to focus on those who are better off financially, Ms. Moskowitz said. The Bloomberg administration, she said, has not confronted the 'problem of the top quartile with the zeal that it should.' And some, like Ms. Vayer, are opting out. 'This was not an easy decision,' she said. 'We really tried to make a go of it.'

Subject: Vive la Welfare State! From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 05:53:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/01/29/vive_la_welfare_state?mode=PF January 29, 2006 Vive la Welfare State! The Case for Euro-Optimism. By Christopher Shea - Boston Globe IN A DOOMSAYING essay in this month's issue of The New Criterion arguing that Europe was either about to shrink into global irrelevance or get overrun by angry Muslim immigrants, the Canadian journalist Mark Steyn offered some impressive supporting evidence. ''The CIA,' he wrote, ''is predicting that the EU will collapse by 2020.' Dramatic stuff. But Steyn's claim, which made its way into the blogosphere (the article also appeared on the Wall Street Journal's website on Jan. 4), was less than half right. Last year, the National Intelligence Council-not the CIA-outlined possible scenarios that could befall the world by 2020. If Europeans didn't have the courage to cut their welfare spending and make their labor markets more flexible, the report said, an economic crisis would force such changes. And if politicians were crazy enough to ignore such a crisis, then collapse was possible. Not quite the end of Europe. Still, there's no denying the report was far from sanguine about current European economic trends-or that many economists share that pessimism. ''The welfare state is dead,' Edward Prescott, the 2004 Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Arizona State, said via e-mail. European nations, he added, must either slash their health and unemployment benefits and pensions systems or be left in the dust. But is the outlook in Europe really that grim? In the face of rampant Europessimism, some contrarian scholars insist that European countries can thrive without embracing American-style labor markets (where most people can be fired at will) and relatively lean social programs. . . . Two years ago, the MIT economist Olivier Blanchard made news with an article claiming that Europe was gaining on the United States. True, gross domestic product per person was only 70 percent of America's, a gap that has existed for a generation. But by the measure of output per hour of work, Europe had reached 90 percent of American levels. Europeans were simply choosing to work fewer hours, Blanchard suggested-not an obviously dumb move. They were trading income for more leisure. Now, in the book ''Inequality and Prosperity: Social Europe vs. Liberal America,' out this month from Cornell, the Princeton political scientist Jonas Pontusson goes even further in holding up European economies as viable rivals of the United States. For comparison's sake, leaving aside outliers like Estonia and Cyprus, Pontusson places European economies into two categories: ''continental social-market economies' (Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland) and ''Nordic social-market economies' (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway). Among other differences, the continental countries tend to have fewer workers in unions than their Nordic peers and less state-run day care to make it easier for women to join the workforce. (For complicated reasons, France, Italy, and Spain don't fit comfortably into either of these models, he says-but he discusses these countries individually. Critics might object that omitting these high-unemployment countries gives Europe an unearned lift.) Despite his subtitle (''Social Europe vs. Liberal America'), Pontusson says it's unfair to compare Europe to the United States alone. So his third category is the ''liberal-market economies': America, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. Within this framework, it's not clear that liberal economies generate more wealth. Americans do make more per capita than anyone else: $36,100 a year in 2002, for example, but social-market Norway is right on its heels, at $35,500, and most of the other nations fall into a narrow band of $26,000 to $29,000. All of which makes the supremacy of either social or liberal approaches far from obvious. Then there's inequality. Correcting for purchasing power in each country (which helps the United States), Pontusson comes up with a poverty rate of 15 percent in the liberal-market economies, more than three times that in the other two groups. The American rate is 11.7 percent; the rates in liberal-market Ireland, Australia, and the United Kingdom are higher. Even when it comes to unemployment-the pothole for European economies in recent years-the liberal- and social-market figures aren't as divergent as you might think. Germany had a dismal average unemployment rate from 2000 to 2003 of roughly 8.4 percent. But, overall, the continental social-market economies saw 5.2 percent unemployment over that period, compared with 5.6 percent for the liberal-market economies. (Pontusson doesn't weight the countries by size; if he did, Germany would drag down the European average.) It's indisputable that Europeans stay unemployed longer than Americans-and that, in a not-unrelated phenomenon, Europe isn't creating many new jobs, an issue masked by stagnant population growth. Pontusson concedes that Europe needs to make it easier to fire people, which would make employers more willing to hire them in the first place. But he rejects the idea that deep cuts in health or employment benefits, or pensions, are imperative. The so-called Dutch miracle, he says, shows the possibility of improving growth through tweaks, not wholesale abandonment of social programs. The Netherlands have created new jobs from 1995 to 2002 at an annual rate of 2.2 percent, more than any country in Pontusson's sample except Ireland. The main reasons, he says: Labor's collective bargainers moderated their wage demands and labor-market restrictions were relaxed. Economists who think otherwise are unlikely to be convinced. Prescott, the Arizona state Nobel laureate, scoffs at the idea that Europeans work fewer hours than Americans because they like going to the beach more than Americans do. It's clear, he says, that high taxes, not some ''contagion of laziness,' explain why Europeans work less. Across the industrialized world, he says, hours worked correlate quite closely with tax levels. Pontusson is picking a fight with economists like Prescott. But the economists are so dismissive, it's not clear he'll get one.

Subject: Who's right? From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 19:06:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Surveys in the press show a majority of Americans who think that George W is doing a poor job with the economy. Only about 37% (CNN poll) thought he was doing a good job. So a majority of Americans do not think the economy is doing well. Yet we hear every day from Wall Street pundits and most economists and politicians that the economy is doing very well. So who is right and why the difference in opinion???

Subject: Re: Who's right? From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 09:12:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The economy is healthy as a whole, but many households are not sharing much in the growing wealth and that leads to the differences in perspective. However, though this is not healthy for the long term the conditions can prevail for quite a while. There must also be a change in voter attitudes to create the conditions of change.

Subject: Re: Who's right? From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 12:33:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Supposedly, the consumer is more important to the economy than ever accounting for 70% of GDP. If a majority of consumers do not feel that the economy is doing well, isn't this a better indicator of where things are headed than Wall Street analysts or a consensus of economists who have never in history predicted a coming recession? If overall wages are not keeping up with inflation (and remember that the headline inflation numbers don't include energy, housing and food inflation) doesn't this mean fairly immediate trouble for the economy with the slumping ability for consumers to extract spending money from their house price appreciation? And what about all of these home equity, interest only, and ARM's monthly payments which are set to rise? Furthermore what are we to make of the inverted yield curve which has preceded 14 of the last 16 recessions? What about the 4th QTR 2005 1.1 GDP number? True, the 2nd QTR will probably be better, but will it excede 2.0 or 2.5? What has the trend in GDP been over the last year? How can these conditions (resilient economy) prevail for 'quite awhile'? During the last 5 years, one can easily make a case that the $100's of billions pored into the economy by the housing boom has kept the economy afloat, but what keeps it going for 'quite awhile' now? I haven't yet seen an answer to these questions from those who are bullish on the economy. Their only reply seems to be that 'well things have held up so far so they should continue thus for the foreseeable future'. But you could have made this argument preceding every recession/depression we have ever had and so I don't see the validity of it now.

Subject: Correction From: Pete Weis To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 12:36:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'True, the 2nd QTR will probably be better...' I meant to say 1st QTR 2006.

Subject: A New Kind of Care From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 12:03:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/national/31wounded.html?ex=1296363600&en=0c66b478a96a33f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 A New Kind of Care in a New Era of Casualties By ERIK ECKHOLM TAMPA, Fla. — Morning rounds at the Tampa veterans hospital, and a phalanx of specialists stands at Joshua Cooley's door. Inert in his bed, the 29-year-old Marine reservist is a survivor of an Iraq car bombing and a fearsome scramble of wounds: profound brain injury, arm and facial fractures, third-degree burns, tenacious infections of the central nervous system. Each doctor, six in all on a recent day, is here to monitor some aspect of his care. As they cluster at the threshold, one gently closes the door — not to shield their patient from bad news, but to avoid overstimulating the nervous system of a man whose frontal lobe has been ripped by shrapnel. Not that the news right now is good: Corporal Cooley is spiking a fever, presumably because of his newest problem, blood clots in his left leg. The doctors sort through a calculus of competing interests. Should they prescribe a blood thinner to dissolve the dangerous clots, even though that could cause more bleeding in the brain? Or should they just wait? At this point, the doctors decide, the clots pose the greater risk. Thousands of miles from the battlefield, intricate medical choices have become routine here, at one of four special rehabilitation centers the government created last year to treat the war's most catastrophically wounded troops. 'These soldiers were kept alive,' said Dr. Steven G. Scott, the Tampa center's director. 'Now it's up to us to try and give them some meaningful life.' With their concentrated batteries of specialists and therapists, these centers are developing a new model of advanced care, a response to the distinctive medical conundrum of the Iraq war. With better battlefield care and protective gear, the military is saving more of the wounded, yet the insurgents' heavy reliance on car bombs and buried explosives means the survivors are more damaged — and damaged in more different ways — than ever before. To describe the maimed survivors of this ugly new war, a graceless new word, polytrauma, has entered the medical lexicon. Each soldier arriving at Tampa's Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center, inside the giant veterans hospital, brings a whole world of injury. The typical patient, Dr. Scott said, has head injuries, vision and hearing loss, nerve damage, multiple bone fractures, unhealed body wounds, infections and emotional or behavioral problems. Some have severed limbs or spinal cords. 'Two years ago we started seeing injured soldiers coming back of a different nature,' recalled Dr. Scott, who is also the hospital's chief of physical medicine and rehabilitation. Then last spring, with a Congressional mandate, the Department of Veterans Affairs created the four new centers, formalizing changes that a few top veterans hospitals were already starting to make. After weeks or months of intensive care in military hospitals, more than 215 soldiers and a few more each week — still a tiny fraction of the roughly 16,000 soldiers who have been wounded in Iraq — have been sent here or to the other centers, inside V.A. hospitals in California, Minnesota and Virginia. The surge in complex casualties, doctors found, required major reorganizing, enabling them to focus extraordinary medical and therapeutic expertise on each patient and to offer counseling, housing and other aid to their often shellshocked wives, children and parents. 'In the outside world you might have two or three consultants seeing a patient,' said Dr. Andrew Koon, a specialist in internal medicine who was checking laboratory results on a portable computer during bedside rounds. 'Here it's not unusual to have 10 specialists on board.' The multiple wounds have required medical balancing acts and unusual cooperation across departments. One quadriplegic patient was so weakened by recurring infections that doctors had to wait a year before removing shrapnel from his neck. In other cases, the risk of new infection has delayed treatment of the spasms that some paralyzed patients suffer, which can require an implanted pump to inject medicine into the spinal column. Of some 90 soldiers with extreme injuries who were treated in Tampa over the last year only one has died, of a rare form of meningitis. The drama here is more excruciatingly drawn out: Over months and months of painstaking physical and psychological therapy, the patients and their families start learning the boundaries of their future lives. Quiet Struggles The medical challenges are often persistent and daunting, but the real focus of the new centers is rehabilitation. Even as doctors battle drug-resistant bacteria blown into wounds with Iraqi dirt, patients start relearning to talk and focus their thoughts, to walk and run or maneuver a wheelchair. Some go home in almost normal shape; for others, simply swallowing is a milestone. To spend several recent days here is to witness a panorama of quiet struggles. A young man with brain and nerve damage slowly fits big round pegs into big round holes. Another beams after jogging a full minute for the first time since his injury, but cannot voice his mix of pride and impatience because shrapnel destroyed the language center in his brain. A quadriplegic is lifted by a giant sling from his bed to a high-tech wheelchair, which he has learned to drive with a mouthpiece. Progress on these wards can be measured in agonizing increments. Corporal Cooley, a 6-foot 6-inch former deputy sheriff, arrived in Tampa on Sept. 29 after more than two months at the Bethesda Naval Hospital outside Washington. His doctors and relatives were encouraged when, after another couple of months, he wriggled his fingers and feet, and answered yes-no questions with blinks. 'They got him to make noises the other day,' offered his wife, Christina. 'He's doing really well.' At 'rehab rounds' one recent day, assorted therapists took up Corporal Cooley's case, reporting on small steps forward and compromises along the way. The speech therapist said he was responding to questions with blinks about 30 percent of the time when she was alone with him, but less if distracted. She described her gingerly efforts to train him to swallow, using thin pudding, apple sauce and ice chips. The respiratory therapist said his tracheotomy had to be changed to a larger, cuffed device that would allow them to expand his lower right lung. The speech therapist groaned, 'That will make it harder to swallow.' They agreed that the lung had to take priority, but the speech therapist added, 'Let's get rid of that cuffed trach as soon as possible.' Brain injuries — the signature wounds inflicted by the blast waves and flying shrapnel of explosives — are pervasive, and they tend to dictate the arc of care. 'It's really the brain injury that directs how we approach other impairments,' Dr. Barbara Sigford, V.A.'s national director of physical medicine and rehabilitation and chief of the Minneapolis polytrauma center, said in a telephone interview. 'Many types of rehab rely on intact thinking, learning and memory skills.' Using advanced prosthetic limbs, for example, requires control of specific muscles; patients without that capacity must use simpler models. Blind people are normally taught to navigate using their memory of the environment; if memory is spotty, they must find other ways. In the recreational therapy room in Tampa on a recent day, several men are being led through a round of Uno, a card game that involves matching numbers and colors. Some play well. Some fumble trying to pick up cards. One rocks in frustration at his inability to summon the word 'blue.' Sgt. Antwain Vaughn, 31, an Army combat engineer who took a roadside blast in the face on Aug. 31, arrives late and in a wheelchair. A padded helmet covers a large indentation where his shattered skull will receive a metal plate. Sergeant Vaughn came to Tampa after two months on a ventilator and feeding tube. In addition to brain damage, facial fractures, pulmonary problems, blood clots and infections, he lost an eye and has trouble with complex tasks, something the card game could help. Here he has learned to swallow and eat and in daily therapy, when he is feeling up to it, he is working to reclaim a life. But this time, he will not join the game. 'My head's hurting a lot,' he quietly tells the group. Head injuries have also left some soldiers in a peculiar psychological box. Before Iraq, most head injuries at the Tampa hospital involved car accidents, said Dr. Rodney D. Vanderploeg, the chief of neuropsychology. Though it may seem counterintuitive, soldiers with penetrating brain injuries, in which a fragment crashed through their skulls, are far more likely to remember the attack and its bloody aftermath, perhaps including the deaths of friends, he said. These memories often cause great psychological stress. But psychotherapy becomes especially difficult if injury has impaired a patient's insight and understanding. Making Progress In the hallways, the banter tends to be upbeat, as perhaps it needs to be for patients and staff. A patient shows off his stair-climbing wheelchair. Others compare the merits of prosthetic leg models. Nearly every patient vows, not always realistically, that he will get back on his feet and more. 'The way I see it, if I get able to walk a little bit, then eventually I'm going to walk a lot,' said Specialist Charles Mays, 31, who was left with multiple fractures and partial paralysis of his legs after being blasted out of his Humvee by a vertically buried rocket south of Baghdad. Sometimes the hallways bring success stories like Specialist Nicholas Boutin, who was slowly walking on his own to speech therapy in a hockey helmet, apparently not at all self-conscious about the red pit where an artificial eye will be implanted or about the large dent where a piece of skull will be replaced. Specialist Boutin, 21, had arrived in Tampa just five weeks before, mute and hardly able to swallow, his right arm and leg almost useless. During a midnight patrol in a village near Samarra, an insurgent dropped a grenade into his Bradley fighting vehicle. Fragments sprayed into his face and the left side of his brain, leaving him with Broca's aphasia — able to comprehend but not to speak. He weathered fungal infections, facial pain where nerves were damaged and the destruction of his pituitary gland and a maxillary sinus, the kind of internal wound that can torment a person for life. But now, after hard hours each day in therapy, he can jog briefly and write messages with his right hand. As speech therapists coax the right side of his brain to take over lost functions from the left, he has begun to make one-word responses and spontaneously utter a few words at a time. Soon he will head home to Georgia for continued therapy. 'Yes,' he uttered instantly when asked if he felt he was progressing. Determination gleamed from his remaining eye. Behind closed doors, though, bravado sometimes gives way to depression, explosive anger, survivors' guilt. Some patients sit quietly with glum faces or obsess endlessly about their buddies and time in Iraq. As much as the nurses are often buoyed by their patients' progress, they say the relentless intensity of the work can sometimes bring them to tears. They spend as much time interacting with stressed-out relatives as with the patients. 'Relatives take out their frustrations on the nurses,' said Laureen G. Doloresco, assistant nursing chief. 'It's also hard on the nurses because of the youth of the patients. Many of them have sons the same age.' Support Systems At the bedsides of many of these young men are their equally young wives, whose lives have also been wrenched onto unexpected paths. Before he was sent to Iraq last Jan. 1, Corporal Cooley and his wife were partners on the vice/narcotics squad of a sheriff's department in central Florida. They married just before his deployment. Soon after the car bombing on July 5, she and her husband's parents were summoned to the American military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and warned to expect the worst. After the car bomb detonated, near the town of Hit, Corporal Cooley had been pulled from his burning amtrack, an armored vehicle, unconscious and with a gaping hole in his head. The medics had at first refused to load him onto the evacuation helicopter, Christina Cooley later learned. They changed their minds when they heard a moan. Ms. Cooley recalled telling doctors that they were showing her the wrong patient, that this bloated figure was not her husband. She was convinced only after she saw his tattoos. She also saw, though, that he was breathing on his own. Days later, he was flown to the Bethesda Naval Hospital, and for two months, his wife and the in-laws she still barely knew shared a hotel room and spent their days around Corporal Cooley's bed in intensive care. Here in Tampa, despite continued medical setbacks like the blood clots, attention was turning to his potential for physical and mental recovery. So far, he had been put in a chair for a few hours a day and strapped into a 'tilt board' at a 45-degree angle for 10 minutes at a time, to forestall the drops in blood pressure that occur when long-prone patients raise up. His wife finds hope where she can. Corporal Cooley often stares vacantly, she said, and 'you don't know if he's there.' But one day when she asked him, 'Who's my hero?' he pointed a finger toward himself. Their home county, outside Tampa, has raised money that she plans to use on an accessible house. 'I hope he'll walk through the door of that house,' she said. 'If not, I'll take him as a vegetable. I'll take care of him the rest of my life. I love that man to death.' Overhearing her, Dr. Scott, the center's director, marshaled his characteristic optimism. 'He can already move both legs,' he said. 'It's possible he can be rehabbed to walk. How far he'll go we just don't know.' The polytrauma centers themselves remain works in progress, sharing lessons with one another and with the major military hospitals by videophone, and pushing scientific inquiry into the myriad, often invisible effects of explosive blasts. The Department of Veterans Affairs says it has not calculated the cost of establishing the centers, bolstering their staffs and treating patients so long and intensively. The Tampa hospital's director, Forest Farley Jr., said that here alone, it was 'several millions of dollars.' Though the average stay in polytrauma centers is 40 days, many patients remain for months and some for more than a year. In the end, a few must go to nursing homes, but most go home, where they receive continued care at less-specialized veterans hospitals, with oversight from the centers. Some require round-the-clock home aides and therapists and costly equipment, paid for by the government on top of monthly disability payments. Even so, wives or parents often must give up their jobs. For the worst off, the ongoing annual costs — largely hidden costs of this war — can easily be several hundred thousand dollars or more. 'We expect to follow these patients for the rest of their lives,' Dr. Scott said. 'But I have a great deal of concern about our country's long-term commitment to these individuals. Will the resources be there over time?'

Subject: Struggling Back From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 12:02:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/national/22wounded.html?ex=1295586000&en=0bf4951d95707932&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds By DENISE GRADY PALO ALTO, Calif. - It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk. At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates. Even so, those who know Corporal Poole say his personality - gregarious, kind and funny - has remained intact. Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he considers himself lucky to be alive. So do his doctors. 'Basically I want to get my life back,' he said. 'I'm really trying.' But he knows the life ahead of him is unlikely to match the one he had planned, in which he was going to attend college and become a teacher, get married and have children. Now, he hopes to volunteer in a school. His girlfriend from before he went to war is now just a friend. Before he left, they had agreed they might talk about getting married when he got back. 'But I didn't come back,' he said. Men and women like Corporal Poole, with multiple devastating injuries, are the new face of the wounded, a singular legacy of the war in Iraq. Many suffered wounds that would have been fatal in earlier wars but were saved by helmets, body armor, advances in battlefield medicine and swift evacuation to hospitals. As a result, the survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war - seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II. But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress. Dr. Alexander Stojadinovic, the vice chairman of surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said, 'The wounding patterns we see are similar to, say, what Israel will see with terrorist bombings - multiple complex woundings, not just a single body site.' [American deaths in Iraq numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20. Of 16,472 wounded, 7,625 were listed as unable to return to duty within 72 hours. As of Jan. 14, the Defense Department reported, 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades.] So many who survive explosions - more than half - sustain head injuries that doctors say anyone exposed to a blast should be checked for neurological problems. Brain damage, sometimes caused by skull-penetrating fragments, sometimes by shock waves or blows to the head, is a recurring theme. More than 1,700 of those wounded in Iraq are known to have brain injuries, half of which are severe enough that they may permanently impair thinking, memory, mood, behavior and the ability to work. Medical treatment for brain injuries from the Iraq war will cost the government at least $14 billion over the next 20 years, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia. Jill Gandolfi, a co-director of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, where Corporal Poole is being treated, said, 'We are looking at an epidemic of brain injuries.' The consequences of brain injury are enormous. Penetrating injuries can knock out specific functions like vision and speech, and may eventually cause epilepsy and increase the risk of dementia. What doctors call 'closed-head injuries,' from blows to the head or blasts, are more likely to have diffuse effects throughout the brain, particularly on the frontal lobes, which control the ability to pay attention, make plans, manage time and solve problems. Because of their problems with memory, emotion and thinking, brain-injured patients run a high risk of falling through the cracks in the health care system, particularly when they leave structured environments like the military, said Dr. Deborah Warden, national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a government program created in 1992 to develop treatment standards for the military and veterans. So many military men and women are returning with head injuries combined with other wounds that the government has designated four Veterans Affairs hospitals as 'polytrauma rehabilitation centers' to take care of them. The Palo Alto hospital where Corporal Poole is being treated is one. 'In Vietnam, they'd bring in a soldier with two legs blown off by a mine, but he wouldn't have the head injuries,' said Dr. Thomas E. Bowen, a retired Army general who was a surgeon in the Vietnam War and who is now chief of staff at the veterans hospital in Tampa, Fla., another polytrauma center. 'Some of the patients we have here now, they can't swallow, they can't talk, they're paralyzed and blind,' he said. Other soldiers have been sent home unconscious with such hopeless brain injuries that their families have made the anguished decision to take them off life support, said Dr. Andrew Shorr, who saw several such patients at Walter Reed. Amputations are a feature of war, but the number from Iraq - 345 as of Jan. 3, including 59 who had lost more than one limb - led the Army to open a new amputation center at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in addition to the existing center at Walter Reed. Amputees get the latest technology, including $50,000 prosthetic limbs with microchips. Dr. Mark R. Bagg, head of orthopedic surgery at Brooke, said, 'The complexity of the injuries has been challenging - horrific blast injuries to extremities, with tremendous bone loss and joint, bone, nerve, arterial and soft tissue injuries.' It is common for wounded men and women to need months of rehabilitation in the hospital. Some, like Corporal Poole, need well over a year, and will require continuing help as outpatients. Because many of these veterans are in their 20's or 30's, they will live with their disabilities for decades. 'They have to reinvent who they are,' said Dr. Harriet Zeiner, a neuropsychologist at the Palo Alto veterans center. No Memory of the Blast Corporal Poole has no memory of the explosion or even the days before it, although he has had a recurring dream of being in Iraq and seeing the sky suddenly turn red. Other marines have told him he was on a foot patrol when the bomb went off. Three others in the patrol - two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter - were killed. Shrapnel tore into the left side of Corporal Poole's face and flew out from under his right eye. Metal fragments and the force of the blast fractured his skull in multiple places and injured his brain, one of its major arteries, and his left eye and ear. Every bone in his face was broken. Some, including his nose and portions of his eye sockets, were shattered. Part of his jawbone was pulverized. 'He could easily have died,' said Dr. Henry L. Lew, an expert on brain injury and the medical director of the rehabilitation center at the Palo Alto veterans hospital. Bleeding, infection, swelling of the brain - any or all could have killed someone with such a severe head injury, Dr. Lew said. Corporal Poole was taken by helicopter to a military hospital in Iraq and then flown to one in Germany, where surgeons cut a plug of fat from his abdomen and mixed it with other materials to seal an opening in the floor of his skull. He was then taken to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. His parents, who are divorced, were flown there to meet him - his father, Stephen, from San Jose, Calif., and his mother, Trudie, from Bristol, England, where Jason was born. Jason, his twin sister, Lisa, and a younger brother, David, moved to Cupertino, Calif., with their father when Jason was 12. His interest in the Marine Corps started in high school, where he was an athlete and an actor, a popular young man with lots of friends. He played football and won gold medals in track, and had parts in school plays. When Marine recruiters came to the school and offered weekend outings with a chance to play sports, Corporal Poole happily took part. He enlisted after graduating in 2000. 'We talked about the possibility of war, but none of us thought it was really going to happen,' said his father, who had to sign the enlistment papers because his son was only 17. Jason Poole hoped the Marines would help pay for college. His unit was among the first to invade Iraq. He was on his third tour of duty there, just 10 days from coming home and leaving the Marines, when he was wounded in the explosion. A week later, he was transferred to Bethesda, still in a coma, and his parents were told he might never wake up. 'I was unconscious for two months,' Corporal Poole said in a recent interview at the V.A. center in Palo Alto. 'One month and 23 days, really. Then I woke up and came here.' He has been a patient at the center since September 2004, mostly in the brain injury rehabilitation unit. He arrived unable to speak or walk, drooling, with the left side of his face caved in, his left eye blind and sunken, a feeding tube in his stomach and an opening in his neck to help him breathe. 'He was very hard of hearing, and sometimes he didn't even know you were in the room,' said Debbie Pitsch, his physical therapist. Damage to the left side of his brain had left him weak on the right, and he tended not to notice things to his right, even though his vision in that eye was good. He had lost his sense of smell. The left side of the brain is also the home of language, and it was hard for him to talk or comprehend speech. 'He would shake his head no when he meant yes,' said Dr. Zeiner, the neuropsychologist. But he could communicate by pointing. His mind was working, but the thoughts were trapped inside his head. An array of therapists - speech, physical, occupational and others - began working with him for hours every day. He needed an ankle brace and a walker just to stand at first. His balance was way off and, because of the brain injury, he could not tell where his right foot was unless he could see it. He often would just drag it behind him. His right arm would fall from the walker and hang by his side, and he would not even notice. He would bump into things to his right. Nonetheless, on his second day in Palo Alto, he managed to walk a few steps. 'He was extremely motivated, and he pushed himself to the limit, being a marine,' Ms. Pitsch said. He was so driven, in fact, that at first his therapists had to strap him into a wheelchair to keep him from trying to get up and walk without help. By the last week of September, he was beginning to climb stairs. He graduated from a walker to a cane to walking on his own. By January he was running and lifting weights. 'It's not his physical recovery that's amazing,' his father said. 'It's not his mental recovery. It's his attitude. He's always positive. He very rarely gets low. If it was me I'd fall apart. We think of how he was and what he's had taken from him.' Corporal Poole is philosophical. 'Even when I do get low it's just for 5 or 10 minutes,' he said. 'I'm just a happy guy. I mean, like, it sucks, basically, but it happened to me and I'm still alive.' A New Face 'Jason was definitely a ladies' man,' said Zillah Hodgkins, who has been a friend for nine years. In pictures from before he was hurt, he had a strikingly handsome face and a powerful build. Even in still photographs he seems animated, and people around him - other marines, Iraqi civilians - are always grinning, apparently at his antics. But the explosion shattered the face in the pictures and left him with another one. In his first weeks at Palo Alto, he hid behind sunglasses and, even though the weather was hot, ski caps and high turtlenecks. 'We said, 'Jason, you're sweating. You have to get used to how you look,' ' Dr. Zeiner said. 'He was an incredibly handsome guy,' she said. 'His twin sister is a beautiful woman. He was the life of the party. He was funny. He could have had any woman, and he comes back and feels like now he's a monster.' Gradually, he came out of wraps and tried to make peace with the image in the mirror. But his real hope was that somehow his face could be repaired. Reconstructive surgery should have been done soon after the explosion, before broken bones could knit improperly. But the blast had caused an artery in Corporal Poole's skull to balloon into an aneurysm, and an operation could have ruptured it and killed him. By November 2004, however, the aneurysm had gone away. Dr. H. Peter Lorenz, a plastic surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, planned several operations to repair the damage after studying pictures of Corporal Poole before he was injured. 'You could say every bone in his face was fractured,' Dr. Lorenz said. The first operation took 14 hours. Dr. Lorenz started by making a cut in Corporal Poole's scalp, across the top of his head from ear to ear, and peeling the flesh down over his nose to expose the bones. To get at more bone, he made another slit inside Corporal Poole's mouth, between his upper lip and his teeth, and slipped in tools to lift the tissue. Many bones had healed incorrectly and had to be sawed apart, repositioned and then joined with titanium pins and plates. Parts of his eye sockets had to be replaced with bone carved from the back of his skull. Bone grafts helped to reposition Corporal Poole's eyes, which had sunk in the damaged sockets. Operations in March and July repaired his broken and dislocated jaw, his nose and damaged eyelids and tear ducts. He could not see for a week after one of the operations because his right eye had been sewn shut, and he spent several weeks unable to eat because his jaws had been wired together. Dr. Lorenz also repaired Corporal Poole's caved-in left cheek and forehead by implanting a protein made from human skin that would act as a scaffolding and be filled in by Corporal Poole's own cells. Later, he was fitted with a false eye to fill out the socket where his left eye had shriveled. Some facial scars remain, the false eye sometimes looks slightly larger than the real one, and because of a damaged tear duct, Corporal Poole's right eye is often watery. But his smile is still brilliant. In a recent conversation, he acknowledged that the results of the surgery were a big improvement. When asked how he felt about his appearance, he shrugged and said, 'I'm not good-looking but I'm still Jason Poole, so let's go.' But he catches people looking at him as if he is a 'weird freak,' he said, mimicking their reactions: a wide eyed stare, then the eyes averted. It makes him angry. 'I wish they would ask me what happened,' he said. 'I would tell them.' Learning to Speak Evi Klein, a speech therapist in Palo Alto, said that when they met in September 2004 Corporal Poole could name only about half the objects in his room. 'He had words, but he couldn't pull together language to express his thoughts,' Ms. Klein said. 'To answer a question with more than one or two words was beyond his capabilities.' Ms. Klein began with basics. She would point to items in the room. What's this called? What's that? She would show him a picture, have him say the word and write it. He would have to name five types of transportation. She would read a paragraph or play a phone message and ask him questions about it. Very gradually, he began to speak. But it was not until February that he could string together enough words for anyone to hear that he still had traces of an English accent. Today, he is fluent enough that most people would not guess how impaired he was. When he has trouble finding the right word or loses the thread of a conversation, he collects himself and starts again. More than most people, he fills in the gaps with expressions like 'basically' and 'blah, blah, blah.' 'I thought he would do well,' Ms. Klein said. 'I didn't think he'd do as well as he is doing. I expect measurable gains over the next year or so.' With months of therapy, his reading ability has gone from zero to a level somewhere between second and third grade. He has to focus on one word at a time, he said. A page of print almost overwhelms him. His auditory comprehension is slow as well. 'It will take a bit of time,' Corporal Poole said, 'but basically I'm going to get there.' One evening over dinner, he said: 'I feel so old.' Not physically, he said, but mentally and emotionally. On a recent morning, Ms. Gandolfi of the brain injury unit conducted an exercise in thinking and verbal skills with a group of patients. She handed Corporal Poole a sheet of paper that said, 'Dogs can be taught how to talk.' A series of questions followed. What would be the benefits? Why could it be a problem? What would you do about it? Corporal Poole hunched over the paper, pen in hand. He looked up. 'I have no clue,' he said softly. 'Let's ask this one another way,' Ms. Gandolfi said. 'What would be cool about it?' He began to write with a ballpoint pen, slowly forming faint letters. 'I would talk to him and listen to him,' he wrote. In another space, he wrote: 'lonely the dog happy.' But what he had actually said to Ms. Gandolfi was: 'I could be really lonely and this dog would talk to me.' Some of his responses were illegible. He left one question blank. But he was performing much better than he did a year ago. He hopes to be able to work with children, maybe those with disabilities. But, Dr. Zeiner said, 'He is not competitively employable.' His memory, verbal ability and reading are too impaired. He may eventually read well enough to take courses at a community college, but, she said, 'It's years away.' Someday, he might be able to become a teacher's aide, she said. But he may have to work just as a volunteer and get by on his military benefits of about $2,400 a month. He will also receive a $100,000 insurance payment from the government. 'People whose brains are shattered, it's incredible how resilient they are,' Dr. Zeiner said. 'They keep trying. They don't collapse in despair.' Back in the World In mid-December, Corporal Poole was finally well enough to leave the hospital. With a roommate, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, the town where Corporal Poole grew up. His share of the rent is $800 a month. But he had not lived outside a hospital in 18 months, and it was unclear how he would fare on his own. 'If he's not able to cope with the outside world, is there anywhere for him to go, anyone there to support him if it doesn't go well?' asked his mother, who still lives in Bristol, where she is raising her three younger children. 'I think of people from Vietnam who wound up on the streets, or mental patients, or in prison.' He still needs therapy - speech and other types - several times a week at Palo Alto and that requires taking three city buses twice a day. The trip takes more than an hour, and he has to decipher schedules and cross hair-raising intersections on boulevards with few pedestrians. It is an enormous step, not without risk: people with a brain injury have increased odds of sustaining another one, from a fall or an accident brought about by impaired judgment, balance or senses. In December, Corporal Poole practiced riding the buses to the hospital with Paul Johnson, a co-director of the brain injury unit. As they crossed a busy street, Mr. Johnson gently reminded him, several times, to turn and look back over his left shoulder - the side on which he is blind - for cars turning right. After Corporal Poole and Mr. Johnson had waited for a few minutes at the stop, a bus zoomed up, and Corporal Poole ambled toward the door. 'Come on!' the driver snapped. Corporal Poole watched intently for buildings and gas stations he had picked as landmarks so he would know when to signal for his stop. 'I'm a little nervous, but I'll get the hang of it,' he said. He was delighted to move into his new apartment, pick a paint color, buy a couch, a bed and a set of dishes, and eat something besides hospital food. With help from his therapists in Palo Alto, he hopes to take a class at a nearby community college, not an actual course, but a class to help him to learn to study and prepare for real academic work. Teaching, art therapy, children's theater and social work all appeal to him, even if he can only volunteer. Awaiting his formal release from the military, Corporal Poole still hopes to get married and have children. That hope is not unrealistic, Dr. Zeiner said. Brain injuries can cause people to lose their ability to empathize, she said, and that kills relationships. But Corporal Poole has not lost empathy, she said. 'That's why I think he will find a partner.' Corporal Poole said: 'I think something really good is going to happen to me.'

Subject: A Genius Finds Inspiration From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 10:26:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/science/31essa.html?ex=1296363600&en=6140e0b7973197b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 A Genius Finds Inspiration in the Music of Another By ARTHUR I. MILLER Last year, the 100th anniversary of E=mc2 inspired an outburst of symposiums, concerts, essays and merchandise featuring Albert Einstein. This year, the same treatment is being given to another genius, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born on Jan. 27, 250 years ago. There is more to the dovetailing of these anniversaries than one might think. Einstein once said that while Beethoven created his music, Mozart's 'was so pure that it seemed to have been ever-present in the universe, waiting to be discovered by the master.' Einstein believed much the same of physics, that beyond observations and theory lay the music of the spheres — which, he wrote, revealed a 'pre-established harmony' exhibiting stunning symmetries. The laws of nature, such as those of relativity theory, were waiting to be plucked out of the cosmos by someone with a sympathetic ear. Thus it was less laborious calculation, but 'pure thought' to which Einstein attributed his theories. Einstein was fascinated by Mozart and sensed an affinity between their creative processes, as well as their histories. As a boy Einstein did poorly in school. Music was an outlet for his emotions. At 5, he began violin lessons but soon found the drills so trying that he threw a chair at his teacher, who ran out of the house in tears. At 13, he discovered Mozart's sonatas. The result was an almost mystical connection, said Hans Byland, a friend of Einstein's from high school. 'When his violin began to sing,' Mr. Byland told the biographer Carl Seelig, 'the walls of the room seemed to recede — for the first time, Mozart in all his purity appeared before me, bathed in Hellenic beauty with its pure lines, roguishly playful, mightily sublime.' From 1902 to 1909, Einstein was working six days a week at a Swiss patent office and doing physics research — his 'mischief' — in his spare time. But he was also nourished by music, particularly Mozart. It was at the core of his creative life. And just as Mozart's antics shocked his contemporaries, Einstein pursued a notably Bohemian life in his youth. His studied indifference to dress and mane of dark hair, along with his love of music and philosophy, made him seem more poet than scientist. He played the violin with passion and often performed at musical evenings. He enchanted audiences, particularly women, one of whom gushed that 'he had the kind of male beauty that could cause havoc.' He also empathized with Mozart's ability to continue to compose magnificent music even in very difficult and impoverished conditions. In 1905, the year he discovered relativity, Einstein was living in a cramped apartment and dealing with a difficult marriage and money troubles. That spring he wrote four papers that were destined to change the course of science and nations. His ideas on space and time grew in part from aesthetic discontent. It seemed to him that asymmetries in physics concealed essential beauties of nature; existing theories lacked the 'architecture' and 'inner unity' he found in the music of Bach and Mozart. In his struggles with extremely complicated mathematics that led to the general theory of relativity of 1915, Einstein often turned for inspiration to the simple beauty of Mozart's music. 'Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music,' recalled his older son, Hans Albert. 'That would usually resolve all his difficulties.' In the end, Einstein felt that in his own field he had, like Mozart, succeeded in unraveling the complexity of the universe. Scientists often describe general relativity as the most beautiful theory ever formulated. Einstein himself always emphasized the theory's beauty. 'Hardly anyone who has truly understood it will be able to escape the charm of this theory,' he once said. The theory is essentially one man's view of how the universe ought to be. And amazingly, the universe turned out to be pretty much as Einstein imagined. Its daunting mathematics revealed spectacular and unexpected phenomena like black holes. Though a Classical giant, Mozart helped lay groundwork for the Romantic with its less precise structures. Similarly, Einstein's theories of relativity completed the era of classical physics and paved the way for atomic physics and its ambiguities. Like Mozart's music, Einstein's work is a turning point. At a 1979 concert for the centenary of Einstein's birth, the Juilliard Quartet recalled having played for Einstein at his home in Princeton, N.J. They had taken quartets by Beethoven and Bartok and two Mozart quintets, said the first violinist, Robert Mann, whose remarks were recorded by the scholar Harry Woolf. After playing the Bartok, Mann turned to Einstein. 'It would give us great joy,' he said, 'to make music with you.' Einstein in 1952 no longer had a violin, but the musicians had taken an extra. Einstein chose Mozart's brooding Quintet in G minor. 'Dr. Einstein hardly referred to the notes on the musical score,' Mr. Mann recalled, adding, 'while his out-of-practice hands were fragile, his coordination, sense of pitch, and concentration were awesome.' He seemed to pluck Mozart's melodies out of the air. Arthur I. Miller is professor of the history and philosophy of science at University College London.

Subject: Exploring Mental Illness From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 10:26:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/health/psychology/31comm.html?ex=1296363600&en=59352caf5bc378de&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 Exploring Mental Illness and Battling Her Own By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. Lucy Freeman, who died at the end of 2004, thought that there was nothing wrong with being crazy. As a reporter for The New York Times in the 1940's and 50's she worked to remove the stigma of mental illness, even writing a revealing book that chronicled her own psychoanalysis. Ms. Freeman's efforts recall a heady time in the history of psychiatry, when two competing groups, the followers of Sigmund Freud and those who favored physical manipulation of the brain, each believed it had found a 'cure' for mental illness. We know more today, but all the answers are not in. Ms. Freeman was born in 1916, the daughter of Lawrence Greenbaum, a prominent New York lawyer, and his wife, Sylvia. In 1940, after graduating from Bennington College, she became one of the few women on the reporting staff of The Times. Seven years later, she married William Freeman, an editor. But Ms. Freeman had a troubled personal life. As she said in her 1951 book 'Fight Against Fears,' she was angry, unhappy and unable to sleep. She also had a series of ailments, including sinus headaches. That Ms. Freeman turned to a psychoanalyst was not surprising. The teachings of Freud, who believed that emotional problems in adulthood resulted from unresolved childhood conflicts, were at the height of popularity then, and his solution was psychoanalysis — spending years revisiting one's life history with a trained therapist. Still, Ms. Freeman's family and friends were displeased with her decision to go into analysis, responding, she said, with 'skepticism, jeers and outright disapproval.' One acquaintance told her, 'You're crazy if you go to a psychiatrist.' This type of response stemmed from the prevailing beliefs of the era, which viewed mental illness scornfully and its victims as deviants. Compounding this stereotype was the reliance on imposing state hospitals, like the one depicted in the 1948 Hollywood film 'The Snake Pit,' to house people with severe schizophrenia or depression. In truth, many psychiatrists were trying to convert such institutions from overcrowded, custodial facilities to state-of-the-art medical centers. Believing that mental illness stemmed from organic problems within the brain, psychiatrists had devised a series of treatments, including electroshock therapy and lobotomy. It was these advances that Ms. Freeman relentlessly publicized as The Times's reporter on mental health. Writing scores of articles like 'Action Now Urged on Mental Cases' and 'State Mental Care Entering New Era,' she willingly blurred the roles of reporter and advocate. But Ms. Freeman's heart lay in promoting psychoanalysis, which she believed had greatly improved her own condition, most likely a severe form of neurosis. By helping her confront her childhood conflicts, which included hating her mother, having sexual feelings for her father and envying her siblings, her analyst, she said, had cured her headaches and eased her psychological pain. Psychoanalysis, she wrote, 'is part of today's struggle for survival.' Ms. Freeman and her analyst saw unexplored childhood and adult fears as the cause of mental illness — even of psychotic conditions like schizophrenia. As she wrote, fear had 'incited the anger, the hatred, the guilt' and thus 'split me into pieces.' Not surprisingly, perhaps, this emphasis on fear had great currency during the cold war, leading former mental patients to start 'Fight Against Fear' clubs across the nation. From our modern perspective, viewing fear as the cause of most mental illnesses seems quite outdated. Even Freud had intended that only neurotics, as opposed to people with more severe diseases, explore their childhood conflicts. Moreover, recent studies have demonstrated that disorders like schizophrenia have a genetic basis and result from chemical abnormalities in the brain. While lobotomy has been abandoned, electroshock therapy is still used to treat depression. And over the last 50 years, scientists have developed numerous effective medications to treat psychosis and other symptoms of mental illness. Meanwhile, the grand claims made by Ms. Freeman and others for psychoanalysis have been challenged. Researchers argue that the effectiveness of psychoanalysis, like other medical interventions, needs further validation through studies. Lucy Freeman wanted to hear none of this. According to her niece, Dale Schroedel, she remained 'absolutely devoted and committed to Freud even when he became archaic.' Many therapists still agree with Ms. Freeman. Analysis, and its less intensive cousin, psychotherapy, remain a cornerstone of psychiatric practice. Ms. Freeman eventually wrote 78 books, many of them addressing the connection of emotions and health. In so doing, she further fought the stigma that plagued her and others suffering from mental illness. 'By saving them,' she wrote, 'in some way I also saved myself.' Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University.

Subject: 'I Was Not A Political Person' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:59:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/15/books/review/STAR15.html?ex=1138770000&en=ab1311afad5af96f&ei=5070 August 15, 2004 Orhan Pamuk: 'I Was Not A Political Person' By ALEXANDER STAR Istanbul ALEXANDER STAR: In your novel, Turkey is a somewhat surreal country, where secular nationalists and theocrats compete to impose what seem to be equally dubious ideas of how to force people to be free. Is this the Turkey you know? ORHAN PAMUK: Well, that gap between my character's consciousness and the country's poetic reality is perhaps the essential tension of my novel. I wanted to go and explore both worlds and write about them as they are -- the Westernized intellectual's worldview coming to terms with the poorest, most forgotten and perhaps most ignored part of the country. The most angry part, too. STAR: A key concern in ''Snow'' is the desire of many Muslim women to wear headscarves to school -- an issue that raises delicate questions about where you draw the line between, say, the tolerance of religion and the imposition of religion. The current Turkish government has, controversially, attempted to assist the graduates of religious schools. Do you feel that is a legitimate cause for them? PAMUK: Look, I'm a writer. I try to focus on these issues not from the point of view of a statesman but from the point of view of a person who tries to understand the pain and suffering of others. I don't think there is any set formula to solve these problems. Anyone who believes there is a simple solution to these problems is a fool -- and probably will soon end up being part of the problem. I think literature can approach these problems because you can go into more shady areas, areas where no one is right and no one has the right to say what is right. That's what makes writing novels interesting. It's what makes writing a political novel today interesting. STAR: And yet your novel expresses a lot of anxiety over whether it's possible to fully understand the misery and humiliation of people living in unfamiliar circumstances. PAMUK: Spiritually and morally, I am close to my central character. As he goes to the poorest sections of Turkish society, he falls into the traps of representation -- talking in the name of the others, for the most poor. He realizes these issues are problematic. In fact, they may sometimes end up being immoral: the problem of representing the poor, the unrepresented, even in literature, is morally dubious. So in this political novel, my little contribution -- if there is any, I have to be modest -- is to turn it around a bit and make the problem of representation a part of the fiction too. STAR: How did you come to write a political novel? PAMUK: I was not a political person when I began writing 20 years ago. The previous generation of Turkish authors were too political, morally too much involved. They were essentially writing what Nabokov would call social commentary. I used to believe, and still believe, that that kind of politics only damages your art. Twenty years ago, 25 years ago, I had a radical belief only in what Henry James would call the grand art of the novel. But later, as I began to get known both inside and outside of Turkey, people began to ask political questions and demand political commentaries. Which I did because I sincerely felt that the Turkish state was damaging democracy, human rights and the country. So I did things outside of my books. STAR: Such as? PAMUK: Write petitions, attend political meetings, but essentially make commentaries outside of my books. This made me a bit notorious, and I began to get involved in a sort of political war against the Turkish state and the establishment, which 10 years ago was more partial to nationalists. Anyway, I said to myself, Why don't I once write a political novel and get all of this off my chest? STAR: Did you have trouble publishing ''Snow'' in Turkey? How was it received by Islamists and others? PAMUK: Before the publication of the book I told my friends and my publisher that I was finishing an outspoken political novel. Shall we show this to lawyers? And they said, No, no, no, now that Turkey is hoping to get in touch with Europe and now that you're nationally -- internationally -- ''famous,'' you don't need to do that. O.K. And after some time I gave my publishers the book. Here is the book, I said. And a week later they called me and said they'd read the book, loved the book, but they wanted my permission to show it to a lawyer. They were worried that the public prosecutor might open a case, or confiscate the book before its publication. The first printing was 100,000 copies. They were essentially worried about the economic side of the thing. For example, they hid the book in a corner, so if it were confiscated, they could keep some copies for themselves. But none of these pessimistic things happened. In fact, the country seriously discussed the book. Half of the political Islamists and people who backed the army attacked me. On the other hand, I survived. Nothing happened to me. And in fact it worked the way I hoped it would. Some of those radical Islamists criticized the book with very simplistic ideas, such as ''You're trying to describe Islamists but you have to know that an Islamist would never have sex with a woman without getting married.'' On the other hand, more liberal Islamists were pleased that at least the harassment they had been exposed to by the Turkish Army is mentioned. STAR: When George Bush was in Istanbul recently for the NATO summit, he referred to you as a ''great writer'' who has helped bridge the divide between East and West. Citing your own statements about how people around the world are very much alike, he defended American efforts to help people in the Middle East enjoy their ''birthright of freedom.'' Did you think he understood what you meant? PAMUK: I think George Bush put a lot of distance between East and West with this war. He made the whole Islamic community unnecessarily angry with the United States, and in fact with the West. This will pave the way to lots of horrors and inflict cruel and unnecessary pain to lots of people. It will raise the tension between East and West. These are things I never hoped would happen. In my books I always looked for a sort of harmony between the so-called East and West. In short, what I wrote in my books for years was misquoted, and used as a sort of apology for what had been done. And what had been done was a cruel thing. STAR: Is the novel as a form something you think is alive and well in the Middle East or the non-Western world more broadly? Or do you feel you're doing something rather unusual? PAMUK: No, the art of the novel is well. It's surviving. It has lots of elasticity. I'm sure it will continue to live in the West, in the United States and Europe. But it will have a very strange and new future in countries like China and India, where now there is an unprecedented rise of the middle classes. Legitimizing the power of these new middle classes creates problems of identity both in China and in India. This involves their nationalism when they are faced with the distinct identity of Europe and the West, and their Occidentalism when they are faced with the resistance of their poor people. I think the new modern novel that will come from the East, from that part of the world, will again raise these tensions of East-West modernity and the slippery nature of these rising middle classes in China and India. And also in Turkey, of course. STAR: In ''Snow,'' the radical Islamist Blue remarks at one point that the best thing America's given the world is Red Marlboros. Would you agree with that? PAMUK: I used to smoke them a lot when I was young. We distribute our personal pleasures in our characters. That's one of the joys of writing fiction.

Subject: The Way Forward for Turkey From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:58:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/opinion/31tue2.html?ex=1296363600&en=2bcce992f37111bc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 The Way Forward for Turkey The judge in the free-speech trial of the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk dismissed all charges last week, sparing Turkey further international scorn. But the case was thrown out on a technicality. Turkey still needs to change the repressive law under which Mr. Pamuk was arrested and drop similar cases against dozens of other lesser-known Turks. The most powerful motivation for making such changes has always been Turkey's desire to join the European Union. But public support for joining is now waning, down from a high of 85 percent to 65 percent recently. In part, that reflects a lingering bitterness over 11th-hour issues that tainted the start of Turkey's membership talks. The European Union repeatedly stressed to Turkey the political need to reunify Cyprus, but then failed to deliver the support of Greek Cypriots, who voted against reunification after Turkish Cypriots had voted in favor. Austria tried to block the talks, France promised its citizens that they would ultimately have the chance to veto Turkey's membership, and prominent Germans nattered on about a 'privileged partnership' for Turkey, rather than full membership. Feeling slighted, a segment of the Turkish public is receptive to a vocal minority that is trying to build a nationalist wave against pro-European, reform-minded politicians. Bringing cases like the one against Mr. Pamuk is part of that strategy — it's a sure way to provoke an international outcry at a time when some Turks are resentful of criticism. Turkey's prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, must convince his people not to give up on the reforms that precede union membership. And Washington and Brussels need to help him make the case. The United States should remind Turkey's generals, traditionally friendly with Washington, that continued support of liberalizing reforms will help usher Turkey into the 21st century. Washington and Brussels should also renew pressure on the Greek Cypriots for reunification and reward Turkish Cypriots, economically and politically, for their efforts. Such a Western initiative on Cyprus could take the sting out of a coming vote in the Turkish Parliament to expand Turkey's trade treaty with Europe to the union's 10 newest members, including Cyprus. The treaty is vital, but would be seen by some Turks as a de facto recognition of a divided Cyprus. Mr. Erdogan did not create that bind; indeed he made all the right moves to reunify the island. But nationalists in Turkey are already playing up the issue as an example of the government selling out Turkish interests to please Europe. Mr. Erdogan needs to push back, with a little help from his friends.

Subject: Budget to Hurt Poor People on Medicaid From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:55:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/30budget.html?ex=1296277200&en=29a9610a28b30eb1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 Budget to Hurt Poor People on Medicaid, Report Says By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON — Millions of low-income people would have to pay more for health care under a bill worked out by Congress, and some of them would forgo care or drop out of Medicaid because of the higher co-payments and premiums, the Congressional Budget Office says in a new report. The Senate has already approved the measure, the first major effort to rein in federal benefit programs in eight years, and the House is expected to vote Wednesday, clearing the bill for President Bush. In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush plans to recommend a variety of steps to help people obtain health insurance and cope with rising health costs. But the bill, the Deficit Reduction Act, written by Congress over the last year with support from the White House, could reduce coverage and increase the number of uninsured, the budget office said. Over all, the bill is estimated to save $38.8 billion in the next five years and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015, with cuts in student loans, crop subsidies and many other programs, the budget office said. Medicaid and Medicare account for half of the savings, 27 percent and 23 percent over 10 years. The report gives Democrats new ammunition to attack the bill. But they appear unlikely to defeat it, since the House approved a nearly identical version of the legislation by a vote of 212 to 206 on Dec. 19. Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, said the bill was needed because Medicaid had been growing at an unsustainable rate. But Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, said the budget office report confirmed that the bill would 'cut access to care for some of our most vulnerable citizens.' The bill gives states sweeping new authority to charge premiums and co-payments under Medicaid. 'In response to the new premiums, some beneficiaries would not apply for Medicaid, would leave the program or would become ineligible due to nonpayment,' the Congressional Budget Office said in its report, completed Friday night. 'C.B.O. estimates that about 45,000 enrollees would lose coverage in fiscal year 2010 and that 65,000 would lose coverage in fiscal year 2015 because of the imposition of premiums. About 60 percent of those losing coverage would be children.' The budget office predicted that 13 million low-income people, about a fifth of Medicaid recipients, would face new or higher co-payments for medical services like doctor's visits and hospital care. It said that by 2010 about 13 million low-income people would have to pay more for prescription drugs, and that this number would rise to 20 million by 2015. 'About one-third of those affected would be children, and almost half would be individuals with income below the poverty level,' the report said in addressing co-payments for prescription drugs. Under the bill, states could end Medicaid coverage for people who failed to pay premiums for 60 days or more. Doctors and hospitals could deny services to Medicaid beneficiaries who did not make the required co-payments. The budget office said the new co-payments would save money by reducing the use of medical services. 'About 80 percent of the savings from higher cost-sharing would be due to decreased use of services,' the report said. The official estimates take into account the fact that 'savings from the reduced use of certain services could be partly offset by higher spending in other areas, such as emergency room visits.' After talking to federal and state officials and reviewing Medicaid data, analysts at the Congressional Budget Office predicted that states would charge premiums to 1.3 million low-income people and cut benefits for 1.6 million people. Most of the cuts would affect dental, vision and mental health services, it said. The bill also makes it more difficult for people to qualify for Medicaid coverage of nursing home care by transferring assets to children or other relatives for less than fair market value. This provision would delay Medicaid eligibility for 120,000 people, or about 15 percent of the new recipients of Medicaid nursing home benefits each year, the budget office said. Under another provision of the bill, Medicaid would deny coverage of nursing home care to any person with home equity exceeding $500,000. States could increase the ceiling to $750,000. About 2,000 people a year would be denied nursing home benefits because of the cap on home equity, the budget office said. Taken together, these provisions, requiring people to use more of their own assets to pay for nursing home care, are expected to save the federal government $6.4 billion over 10 years. The budget office estimated that 35,000 Medicaid recipients would lose coverage because of new, more stringent requirements for them to prove United States citizenship. Most of those losing coverage would be illegal immigrants, but some would be citizens unable to supply the necessary documents, the report said. Other provisions of the bill would establish stricter work requirements for welfare recipients and cut federal payments to the states for enforcing child support orders. The cut would save the federal government $4.1 billion over 10 years, but child support collections would decline as a result, the budget office said.

Subject: Jailing a Critic in Kurdistan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:53:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon3.html?ex=1296277200&en=eb959c72d1d10d06&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 Jailing a Critic in Kurdistan Kurdistan is one of Iraq's most prosperous and westernized regions. And, thanks to an American military shield, it got a 12-year head start on the post-Saddam Hussein era. Kurdistan's leaders ought to be setting a positive example for the rest of the country in expanding the boundaries of political criticism. Instead they are making an example of a Kurdish journalist who dared to criticize leaders of the inaptly named Kurdistan Democratic Party and its secret police, the Parastin. Kamal Sayid Qadir has been a harsh and persistent critic of the powerful Barzani family, which runs the K.D.P., and through it, the western part of Kurdistan, like a family fiefdom. Mr. Qadir's language has been intemperate, by conservative Kurdish cultural standards, and his accusations have not always been adequately substantiated. But these journalistic excesses are not unheard of in the rest of the world and are certainly no justification for the 30-year jail sentence he is now serving — imposed, he says, after a trial that lasted only 15 minutes. The K.D.P. is one of two clan-based parties that have carved up the Kurdish region between them, and through their partnership with fundamentalist Shiites hold the balance of power in Iraq as a whole. It was once thought that these secular parties would use their influence to temper the religious extremism and the authoritarian politics of their Shiite partners. So far, it has not been working out that way. Mr. Qadir is not the only Kurdish journalist to complain of intimidation by the K.D.P.'s secret police. And there have been problems elsewhere as well. Two journalists face prison terms in east central Iraq for criticizing a provincial governor. In the south, fundamentalist Shiite militias enforce their own version of Islamic mores with the full support of local governmental authorities. Iraq's elected leaders have no legitimate reason to fear an uninhibited press. But Iraqis have reason to worry about leaders who lock up their critics.

Subject: Comedy, Character, Reflection From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:48:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9E0CE2DD143EF930A15753C1A964958260 October 23, 1992 Wasserstein: Comedy, Character, Reflection By MEL GUSSOW 'The Sisters Rosensweig' is Wendy Wasserstein's captivating look at three uncommon women and their quest for love, self-definition and fulfillment. Unified by their sisterhood, they are as different as only sisters (or brothers) can be, as each tries to live up to an image imposed by her family. At the same time, each performs her own act of rebellion -- or is it penitence? Because of their disparities, they are heroines to one another. Ms. Wasserstein's generous group portrait (at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater) is a not only a comedy but also a play of character and shared reflection as the author confronts the question of why the sisters behave as they do. The immediate answer is that they are Rosensweigs and are only doing what is expected of them. The play offers sharp truths about what can divide relatives and what can draw them together. The oldest sister is Sara (Jane Alexander), an overachiever, the only woman ever to head an international Hong Kong bank. She is an expatriate in England who is, we are told, 'assimilated beyond her wildest dreams.' Second is Gorgeous (Madeline Kahn), a triple threat as 'housewife, mother and radio personality' in Newton, Mass. The youngest is Pfeni, nee Penny (Frances McDormand), a globe-trotting journalist who lives her life as if she were on 'an extended junior year abroad.' The three come together in London for Sara's 54th birthday. One of the show's surprises is that in a play essentially about women, the sisters are subtly upstaged by two of the men in their lives, characters enhanced in performance by Robert Klein and John Vickery. The play is steeped in Jewish culture and humor, but the emotional subtext is broader. None of the sisters can find happiness; they have all been nurtured in a family in which heartbreak has been confused with heartburn. With effort, the women arrive at a new understanding. Bonding as siblings, they can anticipate a more promising future. With Sara, additional hope comes from a most unlikely source: a wealthy New York furrier (Mr. Klein) who in politically correct parlance manufactures 'synthetic animal protective covering.' In dealing with social and cultural paradoxes, Ms. Wasserstein is, as always, the most astute of commentators. Along the way, she shatters the myth that Jewish men don't drink ('a myth made up by our mothers to persuade innocent women that Jewish men make superior husbands') as well as national patterns of speech (when an Englishman praises a stew as 'brilliant,' Mr. Klein adds, 'the chicken was very bright, too'). But underlying the comedy is an empathetic concern for the characters and for the prospects of women today. At the same time, the play has its imperfections. There are gratuitous remarks and irrelevancies. Both Ms. Wasserstein and her director, Daniel Sullivan, should have been more judicious in their editing, especially in dealing with the author's penchant for labeling characters and offering information in the guise of conversation. There is no need, for example, to keep saying that Sara is so intelligent; the character and the actress should speak for themselves. In addition, two stock characters represent the polarities of English society: an upper-class snob and a young radical with incredible gaps in his knowledge (and too many easy jokes made at his expense). These flaws do not substantially detract from a play with wit as well as acumen. 'The Sisters Rosen sweig' grows naturally out of the author's previous work. With its Jewish themes and reference to a mother's strong influence on her adult daughters, it looks back to 'Isn't It Romantic?' In contrast to the title character in 'The Heidi Chronicles,' each sister is focused on her life to an obsessive degree. But as with Heidi, each has difficulty with men. Those they meet seldom seem worthy of the Rosensweigs. It is in this area that the play is at its funniest and most observant, with Mr. Klein's faux furrier and Mr. Vickery as a flamboyant theater director. Both roles could lead actors into excess, but the pitfalls are assiduously avoided. Acting as armchair counselor, the furrier sees through Sara's protective screen. As written, and as played by Mr. Klein, he is an unpretentious wise man who forces Sara to see herself as he sees her. Shrewdly, the actor plays the role straight, eradicating all thought of his background as a stand-up comic. Mr. Vickery's character is Pfeni's man of many moments, who is unable to commit himself either in love or in art. Evidently a serious man of the theater, he has made his reputation by staging an Andrew Lloyd Webber-like musical of 'The Scarlet Pimpernel,' from which we hear exuberant excerpts. Mr. Vickery is both dashing and self-mocking, winning laughs with looks and pauses as well as with Ms. Wasserstein's lines. The women also rise above stereotype. As the expatriate, Ms. Alexander assumes an artful Englishness. Despite her admission of being humorless, she wryly observes her postmarital situation: because her second husband has been married so many times, his wives, past and present, could form a club with 'branches in Chicago, New York, London and Tokyo.' In the course of the play, Ms. Alexander reveals a vulnerability beneath the ladylike veneer. For Ms. Kahn, Dr. Gorgeous (who advises everyone including her sisters) is the choicest of roles. Restlessly changing her costumes and interrupting conversations, she is a delirious combination of extravagant plumage and native intuition. Of the three, Pfeni is the most problematic, and the problem is in the character as well as the performance. Given Pfeni's eccentric life style, one would have imagined a more vivid, Auntie Mame-ish personality instead of someone overshadowed by her sisters and by her suitor. Although Rex Robbins is miscast as the English snob, Patrick Fitzgerald manages to invest the young radical with a certain zeal; and Julie Dretzin, in her professional stage debut (as Ms. Alexander's daughter), easily holds her own with her more experienced colleagues. On John Lee Beatty's tasteful town-house set, Mr. Sullivan leads the actors to play scenes for their reality rather than for their comic effect. As he did with his production of Herb Gardner's 'Conversations With My Father,' the director reveals his expertise in dealing with a Jewish milieu. Overlooking the play is the symbolic figure of Anton Chekhov, smiling. Although the characters do not directly parallel those in 'The Three Sisters,' the comparison is intentional. The Rosensweigs have their own dreams of reclamation by romance, of escaping to a metaphorical Moscow. Ms. Wasserstein does not overstate the connection but uses it like background music while diverting her attention to other cultural matters, as in Mr. Vickery's statement that he would like to make a film entitled, 'Three Days That Shook the Rosensweigs.' For the two acts, the Rosensweigs (and friends) are entertaining company. As the characters in Ms. Wasserstein's plays have become older, moving on from college to New York careers to the international setting of the current work, the author has remained keenly aware of the changes in her society and of the new roles that women play. In her writing, she continues to be reflexively in touch with her times. Drawing upon his strength as a nurturer of plays and playwrights, Andre Bishop has made an auspicious debut as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater.

Subject: Wasserstein's Women Try Holding On From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 08:44:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9C04EED61130F93AA25751C0A9679C8B63 February 19, 2001 Wasserstein's Women Try Holding On to Love and Independence By BRUCE WEBER There is no punctuation mark in the title of Wendy Wasserstein's early play ''Isn't It Romantic,'' a clever signal of its theme and tone. It's not a question but a gently sarcastic shoulder shrug, a wry lament in the Jewish mode: so who said life is romantic? The play, about two intelligent young women in New York -- and their mothers -- was written in the early 1980's, and the compromises in the romantic ideal that life urges upon them were particularly resonant at that time. The important messages of feminism had become, in Ms. Wasserstein's telling here, popularly consumed as a slogan, with misleading consequences for a generation. The two young women are Janie Blumberg, an aspiring writer, witty, self-deprecating, rumpled in style and not incidentally Jewish, and her childhood friend, Harriet Cornwall, a striking blond gentile with corporate ambitions. The divide in their backgrounds and predilections makes the case that in a confusing modern world the concerns they share as women override their differences. It's a theme made explicit when Harriet importunes her mother, Lillian, a powerful business executive, divorced and living alone, who is spending evenings watching reruns of ''The Rockford Files.'' ''Mother,'' says Harriet, ''do you think it's possible to be married, or living with a man, have a good relationship and children that you share equal responsibility for, and a career, and still read novels, play the piano, have women friends and swim twice a week?'' ''You mean what the women's magazines call 'Having it all?' '' Lillian replies. ''Harriet, that's just your generation's fantasy.'' In the script this is a climactic exchange, but it feels rather quaint today. And that is the primary effect of the Off Broadway revival of ''Isn't It Romantic,'' the first in New York since 1983, by the Worth Street Theater Company. The production, which opened on Wednesday (Valentine's Day, of course) at the TriBeCa Playhouse, directed by Jeff Cohen, is somewhat rickety; the set, a pastel-colored pop-up box of the city skyline, is low-budget inventive, but the scene changes are slow and awkward, and the play is unevenly cast. But it is pleasant to be reintroduced to Ms. Wasserstein's youthful wisecracks, to be reminded of her once-innovative use of the telephone answering machine, to recall cultural icons (remember Tab, the pervasive diet cola?), even to groan at a progenitive form of cross-cultural humor: ''You and I deserve a little nachos,'' Harriet tells Janie, meaning ''naches'' (guttural ''ch''), the Yiddish word for happiness. One of the interesting effects of two decades of perspective is that Janie (Maddie Corman) and Harriet (Susie Cover), who are 28 in the play, seem, by today's lights, considerably younger than that. Their girlish greetings, their career panic, the persistent aggravation of their relations with parents are all rendered at a level of sophistication that current collegians might identify with more than women approaching 30. This is also true of their consuming romantic yearnings, which lead both of them into liaisons that are so evidently foolish that they test credibility. Harriet conducts an office romance with Paul Stuart (Tom Wiggin), a cardboard serial philanderer who also happens to be married, and Janie tries to persuade herself she is in love with Marty Sterling (Hillel Meltzer), a Jewish doctor (natch) who manipulates her into a commitment to live together and patronizes her as well; he calls her ''monkey.'' Neither actor gives the slightest hint as to why any woman would find either of them attractive, and Mr. Meltzer, in particular, makes Marty so whiny and self-serving that Janie's attachment to him is simply appalling. That's unnerving to the audience because Ms. Corman, a slightly built actress -- the weight jokes in the script are a bit odd -- gives Janie a high adorability quotient; she has the perplexed quality of someone simply amazed by the runaway train of her life and the Martians who populate it. Janie of course is the author's stand-in here, and she, along with her mother, Tasha (Barbara Spiegel), have all the best lines. Tasha, ''an untraditional Jewish mother with traditional values,'' in the playwright's description, is a leftover hippie of sorts, a woman who takes dance classes and wears skirts over black leotards -- the dialogue refers to tie-dyed shirts, though we don't see them -- and celebrates, as she puts it, ''life life life.'' This mother and daughter are the play's most rounded characters; they feel lived in, where the others feel observed. And Ms. Spiegel is a winningly eccentric noodge. Like Ms. Corman, she raises the level of performance in each of her scenes. Her chance meeting with Lillian (Jennifer Bassey) on a park bench turns into a discussion about motherhood that brings out an emotional response in Lillian and a depth of characterization in Ms. Bassey that is never otherwise evident. And without Ms. Corman to thaw her out, Ms. Cover, charged with portraying a kind of rectitude, often seems awkwardly chilly instead. The real love affair in the play is Janie and Tasha's; their struggle to love each other and remain independently themselves is the one that Ms. Wasserstein and this production most satisfyingly explore. It isn't romantic exactly, but it isn't merely nostalgic either.

Subject: Masters of Chocolate Look Abroad From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:11:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/international/europe/30chocolate.html?ex=1296277200&en=a3fd120e60ef34d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 Masters of Chocolate Look Abroad and See Something Even Richer By JOHN TAGLIABUE BRUSSELS — Every three weeks, a FedEx flight departs Zaventem Airport on the edge of Brussels carrying Michel Boey's products to the United States. Call it the chocolate bomber. Mr. Boey is part of a new crop of Belgian chocolate makers that has sprung up after many of the big names were swallowed decades ago by multinational food giants. One of the last to go was Godiva, which caused Belgians to shudder when it was acquired in 1974 by the Campbell Soup Company. Mr. Boey, 49, a former banker, took over Mary Chocolaterie, a family-run chocolate maker, in 1998. Since then, sales have grown so vigorously that he is shipping his chocolates to the United States and Japan from his shop along Rue Royale, which looks like a grandmother's parlor with its mix of period furnishings and comfortable armchairs. 'It is exactly as in wine,' he said, receiving a visitor amid heavy aromas of dark chocolate. 'Once, wine was wine. Now we appreciate smaller quantities, but the quality is better.' For the Belgians, who know their ganache from their gianduja, and relish the difference, names like Mr. Boey's have become household words. And now they are stretching their palates to create new chocolate recipes, and looking abroad, above all in the United States, to find connoisseurs for them. Five years ago, the Belgian chocolate maker Jean Galler collaborated in opening a restaurant in southern Namur where the main courses are flavored with chocolate. 'For example, you might have a foie gras with a touch of chocolate in a sauce,' he said, 'or a salmon salad with a vinaigrette with white chocolate.' The restaurant was a huge success, and last year Mr. Galler, who trained in Switzerland and has 30 stores, 13 of them in Belgium, opened a chocolate shop in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., and plans to open other outlets in the United States. 'The Mayas and the Aztecs used chocolate as a spice,' he said, over hot chocolate in his shop in the upscale Uccle neighborhood of Brussels. And indeed, a package of three of his chocolates contains varieties spiced with curry, ginger and angelica. 'Mexico is our roots,' he said. Then, recalling his early Swiss training, he added, 'Switzerland is our fortress.' Now, at 50, Mr. Galler has surrendered the reins of his company to his financial director to return to his real passion, the creation of new chocolates. In the heart of Brussels, in a neighborhood otherwise given to art and antique galleries, Pierre Marcolini's store, with its lean furnishings and black-glass-topped cabinets, more closely resembles a Tiffany jewelry store than a chocolate shop. His chocolates, with their tiny gold lettering or gold filament decorations, evoke microchips more than Mars bars. Mr. Marcolini, the grandson of Italian immigrants, worked in his 20's for Hermès, the Paris fashion house, and also for the food emporium Fauchon. Eleven years ago, he returned to his native Brussels and opened his first chocolate shop. He now has 17 stores, including eight in Brussels and one in New York on Park Avenue. His dream is a big store in New York, fashioned like his flagship in Brussels. 'The idea is to bring nobility to chocolate,' he said. 'It's our homage to chocolate.' Today's philosophy of food, he says, is best captured by the 1987 film 'Babette's Feast,' in which an exiled Parisian chef prepares a banquet as if she's possessed. 'Food is not only nourishment,' he said. 'It is also pleasure.' For all these chocolate makers, the temptation to expand to the United States is rooted in the belief that the tastes of the world's most lucrative market have gone beyond Hershey's and are appreciative of a more sophisticated product. And they are cashing in on the Internet. Mr. Boey estimates that about 15 percent of his sales go to Americans, either those who visit his store in Brussels or those who order over the Internet. But none of the new wave of Belgian chocolatiers say they will alter their recipes to suit American tastes. 'It would be a grave error to go to the United States to change my taste,' said Mr. Marcolini. 'It's like Château Margaux,' he said, referring to the famed Bordeaux wine. 'You want to preserve its origins, its personality.' Indeed, the comparison with a premium Bordeaux is apt, for while fine Belgian chocolate can be found in shops that are sprinkled throughout the narrow lanes of Brussels's old city, in places like New York it is as rare and expensive as vintage wine. At the Neuhaus chocolate shop on Broadway near 76th street, a pound of its Belgian-made chocolate sells for $48. But Tim Quinn, the store manager, says customers are willing to pay for the real thing. Godiva, the Campbell subsidiary, he points out, now makes most of its chocolate for the American market in Virginia. The new wave has shaken some of the older brands, including Neuhaus. Founded in 1857 by a Swiss pharmacist and amateur chocolate maker who migrated to Brussels, Neuhaus fell on hard times in the early part of this decade, posting losses in three consecutive years. So the company hired a turnaround specialist, replaced a Japanese distributor, closed unprofitable stores and refurbished old ones, like the one in Grand Central Terminal in New York. By last year, Neuhaus was profitable once more. 'The quality was there, and has been there since 1857,' said Jos Linkens, the chief executive, leading a visitor through the intensely aromatic Neuhaus chocolate factory on the edge of Brussels. 'It was time to rejuvenate the look.' 'It's luxury and chocolate,' said Mr. Linkens, who stopped at a basket for rejected chocolate eggs, scooped one out and gleefully swallowed it. 'When I enter the store, it should feel chocolate, look chocolate. Chocolate is not only a gift, it is a self-indulgent item.' Mr. Linkens stopped to watch David Deyaert, 35, a nine-year veteran chocolate maker, deftly massage a mass of chocolate as big as a small person with two spatulas on a marble-topped table. 'This is what makes the chocolate crack when you bite into it,' Mr. Deyaert said, scooping the chocolate into a large pan. He gazed at the quivering chocolate, then added, 'It's a living thing.'

Subject: Wendy Wasserstein From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:10:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/theater/31wasserstein.html?ex=1296363600&en=5f3fd4293e8b451e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 Wendy Wasserstein; Her Plays Spoke to a Generation By CHARLES ISHERWOOD Wendy Wasserstein, who spoke for a generation of smart, driven but sometimes unsatisfied women in a series of popular plays that included the long-running Pulitzer Prize winner 'The Heidi Chronicles,' died yesterday at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. She was 55 and lived in New York. The cause was complications of lymphoma, said André Bishop, the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater. Starting in 1977 with her breakthrough work, 'Uncommon Women and Others,' Ms. Wasserstein's plays struck a profound chord with women struggling to reconcile a desire for romance and companionship, drummed into baby boomers by the seductive fantasies of Hollywood movies, with the need for intellectual independence and achievement separate from the personal sphere. 'She was known for being a popular, funny playwright, but she was also a woman and a writer of deep conviction and political activism,' Mr. Bishop said. 'In Wendy's plays women saw themselves portrayed in a way they hadn't been onstage before — wittily, intelligently and seriously at the same time. We take that for granted now, but it was not the case 25 years ago. She was a real pioneer.' The lights on Broadway are to be dimmed tonight in her honor. Her heroines — intelligent and successful but also riddled with self-doubt — sought enduring love a little ambivalently, but they didn't always find it, and their hard-earned sense of self-worth was often shadowed by the frustrating knowledge that American women's lives continued to be measured by their success at capturing the right man. Ms. Wasserstein drew on her own experience as a smart, well-educated, funny Manhattanite who wasn't particularly lucky in romance to create heroines in a similar mold, women who embraced the essential tenets of the feminist movement but didn't have the stomach for stridency. For Ms. Wasserstein, as for many of her characters and fans, humor was a necessary bulwark against the disappointments of life, and a useful release valve for anger at cultural and social inequities. Her work, which included three books of nonfiction and a forthcoming novel as well as about a dozen plays, had a significant influence on depictions of American women in the media landscape over the years: Heidi Holland, the steadily single, uncompromising heroine of 'The Heidi Chronicles,' can be seen as the cultural progenitor of 'Sex and the City's' Carrie Bradshaw. (Coincidentally, Sarah Jessica Parker, who starred in that HBO series, played a series of small roles in the original production of 'The Heidi Chronicles.') Ms. Wasserstein, who grew up in New York, recalled attending Broadway plays as a young woman and being struck by the absence of people like herself onstage: 'I remember going to them and thinking, I really like this, but where are the girls?' she once said. Ms. Wasserstein would fill the stage with 'girls' — a term she used with a wink despite taking flak for it — in a series of plays that pleased loyal audiences even when the critics did not always embrace them. 'The Heidi Chronicles,' her most celebrated and popular play, opened on Broadway in 1989 after receiving critical acclaim Off Broadway. It ran for 622 performances and collected the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle awards for best play as well as the Pulitzer Prize. Joan Allen created the title role in the play, which toured nationally and was later filmed for television with Jamie Lee Curtis. Reviewing the play in Newsday, Linda Winer called it 'a wonderful and important play.' She continued, 'Smart, compassionate, witty, courageous, this one not only dares to ask the hard questions ... but asks them with humor, exquisite clarity and great fullness of heart.' Ranging across more than two decades, 'The Heidi Chronicles' was an episodic, seriocomic biography of an art historian seeking to establish a fixed and fulfilling sense of identity amid the social convolutions of the 1960's and 70's, a period when the rulebook on relationships between men and women was being rewritten. Heidi's allegiance to her ideals and her unwillingness to compromise them for the sake of winning a man's attentions caused conflict with friends who chose easier or different paths. Looking around at her materialistic, married, self-obsessed peers two decades after the exhilarating birth of feminism, Heidi observes: 'We're all concerned, intelligent, good women. It's just that I feel stranded. And I thought the whole point was that we wouldn't feel stranded. I thought the point was that we were all in this together.' In the play's bittersweet final scene, Heidi has become a single mother to a new infant — a path Ms. Wasserstein would herself pursue many years later, ultimately at great physical cost, when she gave birth, at age 48, to her daughter, Lucy Jane, in 1999. Her next play, 'The Sisters Rosensweig,' brought the issues of ethnicity and religion into her continuing conversation about the making and remaking of women's identities as it focused on three sisters with different relationships to their Jewish roots. It opened on Broadway in 1993, ran for 556 performances and was nominated for a Tony Award for best play. Less successful was her 1997 play, 'An American Daughter,' inspired by the harsh attacks on women in politics, which lasted only 89 performances on Broadway, though Ms. Wasserstein later adapted it for television. Ms. Wasserstein's other plays were produced Off Broadway, and included 'Isn't It Romantic' (originally produced, to mixed notices, in 1981 and revised in 1983, when it was largely acclaimed) and 'Old Money' (2000), a time-traveling comedy about the well heeled. Her most recent play, 'Third,' about a female professor who is forced to question her staunchly held ideas about politics and ethics, opened in the fall at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center. Ms. Wasserstein's abundant gift for comedy and her plays' popularity disguised the more serious ambitions underpinning her writing. 'My work is often thought of as lightweight commercial comedy,' she told The Paris Review in 1997, 'and I have always thought, No, you don't understand: this is in fact a political act. 'The Sisters Rosensweig' had the largest advance in Broadway history,' for a play (not a musical). Therefore, she continued, 'nobody is going to turn down a play on Broadway because a woman wrote it or because it's about women.' When Ms. Wasserstein won the best-play Tony for 'Heidi Chronicles,' it was the first time a woman had won the prize solo. Ms. Wasserstein was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 18, 1950, the youngest of five siblings. Her father was a textile manufacturer, her mother an amateur dancer. In addition to her daughter, Ms. Wasserstein is survived by her mother, Lola Wasserstein; her brothers, Abner and Bruce, the chairman of the investment banking giant Lazard and the owner of New York magazine; and her sister Georgette Levis of Vermont. The family moved to Manhattan when Ms. Wasserstein was 12. After earning her undergraduate degree from Mount Holyoke College in 1971, she studied creative writing at City College with Joseph Heller and Israel Horovitz. Her first play, 'Any Woman Can't,' found its way to Playwrights Horizons, then a small Off Broadway company, and was produced in 1973, shortly before she began to study playwriting in earnest at the Yale University School of Drama. ('My parents only let me go to drama school because it was Yale,' she said in an interview for the magazine Bomb. 'They thought I'd marry a lawyer.') Ms. Wasserstein's career would be closely linked both with Playwrights Horizons, which under its artistic director, Mr. Bishop, would first produce 'The Heidi Chronicles,' and with many of the artists she met at Yale, including the designer Heidi Ettinger and the director James Lapine, who remained lifelong friends. (Mr. Bishop left Playwrights Horizons to move to Lincoln Center Theater, which has produced all her subsequent plays.) Ms. Wasserstein's classmate, the playwright Christopher Durang, was a particular friend; she used his introductory icebreaker — 'You look so bored, you must be very bright' — directly in 'The Heidi Chronicles,' and they collaborated on a revue for the school's cabaret group. After receiving a master's degree in fine arts in 1976, Ms. Wasserstein returned to Manhattan, and essentially never left. Her first major success came quickly, with 'Uncommon Women' in 1977, produced by the Phoenix Theater. Depicting an informal reunion of a group of Mount Holyoke graduates that dissolves into scenes of their college days, it was described as 'funny, ironic and affectionate' by Edith Oliver in The New Yorker, who added, 'Under the laughter there is ... a feeling of bewilderment and disappointment over the world outside college, which promised so much, and with their own dreams, which seem to have stalled.' The play, which was filmed and telecast on PBS's 'Great Performances,' was also an important breakthrough in the careers of the actresses Glenn Close, Swoosie Kurtz and Meryl Streep, who played Ms. Close's role in the television version. Ms. Wasserstein's other writing included a spoof of self-help literature, 'Sloth' (Oxford University Press, 2005), and two books of essays, 'Bachelor Girls' (Knopf, 1990) and 'Shiksa Goddess' (Knopf, 2001), eclectic collections that embraced such disparate topics as Chekhov, her sister's battle with breast cancer, and the life and career of Mrs. Entenmann, creator of a bakery empire and fosterer of much guilt. Included in 'Shiksa Goddess' was an essay Ms. Wasserstein wrote for The New Yorker, as poignant as it was hilarious, in which she discussed the medical complications of her late-life pregnancy and her newborn daughter's early struggles. 'Although I remain a religious skeptic,' she wrote, referring to the disorienting days following Lucy Jane's premature birth, 'I had a kind of blind faith. I believed in the collaboration between the firm will of my one-pound-twelve-ounce daughter and the expertise of modern medicine. Of course, there was more than a bit of random luck involved, too.' Lucy Jane will live with Ms. Wasserstein's brother Bruce. Ms. Wasserstein also wrote a children's book, 'Pamela's First Musical,' which she adapted for the stage in collaboration with Cy Coleman and David Zippel, and wrote the libretto for 'The Festival of Regrets,' one of three one-act operas presented under the collective title 'Central Park' at the New York City Opera. She had also completed a libretto for another opera with music by Deborah Drattell. Ms. Wasserstein worked intermittently for Hollywood, although her sole produced screenplay credit was for 'The Object of My Affection,' a 1998 romantic comedy that starred Jennifer Aniston. Her first novel, 'Elements of Style,' is to be published by Knopf in April. But the object of Ms. Wasserstein's deepest affection was always the stage, and her relationship with the theater permeated all aspects of her life. Her friendships in the theatrical community (and out of it) were wide and deep, and she generously gave of her time and resources to benefits of all kinds. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, she later served on the Guggenheim Foundation board, and she also taught playwriting at several universities. In 1998, seeking to help instill her love for theater in a new generation of New Yorkers, she personally instigated a program to bring smart, underprivileged students from New York's public high schools to the theater. In an essay about the program for The New York Times, she wrote: 'As far as I'm concerned, every New Yorker is born with the inalienable right to ride the D train, shout 'Hey, lady!' with indignation and grow up going regularly to the theater. After all, if a city is fortunate enough to house an entire theater district, shouldn't access to the stage life within it be what makes coming of age in New York different from any other American city?' The program, administered by the Theater Development Fund, has steadily expanded since Ms. Wasserstein first held a pizza party for eight students from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx after a matinee of 'On the Town.' Now officially called Open Doors, it consists of 17 groups (more than 100 students), chaperoned to a season's worth of theater offerings by interested mentors. Of course Ms. Wasserstein's devotion to theater took its purest and most enduring form in her writing for the stage, which allowed her the freedom to explore the evolving lives of American women with a fluidity and frankness that befitted the complex experience she was writing about. Although it was always laced with comedy, her work was also imbued with an abiding sadness, a cleareyed understanding that independence can beget loneliness, that rigorous ideals and raised consciousnesses are not always good company at the dinner table. But she shared her compassion among a wide array of characters, those who settled and those who continued to search. 'No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive,' a character says in 'Isn't It Romantic,' 'the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.' The popularity of her work speaks for her ability to salve a little of that feeling of aloneness in her audiences with her deeply felt portraits of women — and occasionally men — seeking solidarity in their individuality, finding comfort in the knowledge that everybody else is sometimes uncomfortable with the choices they've made, too.

Subject: An American Woman From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:10:06 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/31/opinion/31tue3.html?ex=1296363600&en=e7c7c3c66df3f75c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 31, 2006 An American Woman By GAIL COLLINS Wendy Wasserstein and I had a running e-mail joke in which we took turns taking responsibility for everything bad that happened. 'I'll bring the Iraqi constitution and we can work on it in the bar,' she wrote last year before a theater date. I congratulated her for getting Michael Brown the FEMA job. We both claimed to be in charge of the Middle East peace process. We were making fun of Wendy's reputation for good-heartedness. Her outrageously premature death yesterday deprived the nation of a beloved playwright, but it also stripped the city of one of its best people. The first time I met her, she was rushing to a speaking engagement at a small library in a faraway section of Brooklyn. I assumed that either this was the historic spot where she had learned to read or that she was related to the librarian. But no, it was simply a place that had the moxie to ask a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright to come and do its event. 'Last month I was voted Miss Colitis,' Wendy once wrote. 'I was honored at the Waldorf-Astoria and presented with a Steuben glass bowl — by Mary Ann Mobley Collins, a former Miss America. It's not that the treatment of colitis is an unworthy mission, but I have no connection to the cause except that I received a letter from the Colitis Committee asking me to show up. In other words, I became Miss Colitis because I am very nice.' Sometimes it was almost impossible to resist taking advantage. Wendy and I once jointly agreed to give talks at a convention of women journalists being held in Montana, under the theory that it would be an excellent opportunity to see one another. (We had reached that circle of scheduling hell in which two people who live less than a mile apart have to traverse the continent in order to have coffee.) After I arrived, I got a call from Wendy, who had missed the plane. Her only alternatives were to cancel or fly in at midnight, give her address at breakfast and then immediately return to the airport. 'You should do whatever you think best,' I said cruelly. 'The only thing I can tell you is that these women are really nice and they're looking forward to meeting you.' I picked her up at midnight. 'You were right,' she said, as we drove back to the airport 10 hours later. 'They were awfully nice women.' Wendy was a charter member of the company of nice women, a river of accommodating humanity that flows through Manhattan just as it flows through Des Moines and Oneonta, N.Y., organizing library fund-raisers, running day care centers, ordering prescriptions for elderly parents, buying all the birthday presents and giving career counseling to the nephew of a very remote acquaintance who is trying to decide between making it big on Broadway and dentistry. In the essay that began with the Miss Colitis story, she noted that niceness had become unfashionable, and promised to be crankier in the future. It was just a literary device. Wendy understood that being considerate in a society of self-involved strivers was not for wimps. It required a steely inner toughness that was the hallmark of many of her heroines. She also knew her own nature. 'Frankly, I never want to leave a room and be thought of as a horrible person,' she admitted. But Wendy never explained what the rest of us were supposed to do when she left the room before us.

Subject: Feminism Ages, Uncertainty Still Wins From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:08:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?html_title=Third (Play)&tols_title=Third (Play)&pdate=20051025&byline=Ben Brantley&id=1123663814957 October 25, 2005 As Feminism Ages, Uncertainty Still Wins By BEN BRANTLEY An urgent bulletin for baby boomers who regard the work of Wendy Wasserstein as their own personal timeline: Heidi is having hot flashes. O.K., so the name of the brow-mopping heroine of ''Third,'' the thoughtful and imbalanced new comedy by Ms. Wasserstein that opened last night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, is not the same as the title character of ''The Heidi Chronicles,'' Ms. Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize winner from 1988. But it's easy to see Laurie Jameson, the lovably perplexed 54-year-old college professor portrayed by Dianne Wiest in ''Third,'' as a reassuringly familiar cousin to Heidi, the lovably perplexed 40-ish college professor first played by Joan Allen 17 years ago. Like Heidi, Laurie is a strong and vulnerable, independent and emotionally needy woman. She is, in other words, a feminine feminist of the stripe that has endeared Ms. Wasserstein to many theatergoers over the years, starting in 1977 with her ''Uncommon Women and Others,'' a portrait of bright college chums contemplating their place in a world where fixed gender roles are coming unglued. Since then Ms. Wasserstein has shepherded her fearful brave new women (who have usually been roughly the ages of their creator when she conceived them) through single motherhood (with ''Heidi''), lonely peaks of success (''The Sisters Rosensweig'') and the fishbowl of national politics (''An American Daughter''). Now this cozy alter ego to the generation of women who came of age amid the tumult of the late 1960's is hitting menopause. And she's still having problems figuring out who she is. It's the certainty of uncertainty in life that makes ''Third,'' directed by Daniel Sullivan, so affecting despite itself. Using the hot button of academic plagiarism to trigger the plot, ''Third'' suffers from problems common to Ms. Wasserstein's plays: an overly schematic structure, a sometimes artificial-feeling topicality and a reliance on famous names and titles as a shorthand for establishing character. Less typically, this play's central figure is its least believable, both as written and as acted by the wonderful but miscast Ms. Wiest. Yet ''Third'' exhales a gentle breath of autumn, a rueful awareness of death and of seasons past, that makes it impossible to dismiss it as a quick-sketch comedy of political manners. A gracious air of both apology and forgiveness pervades its attitude to its characters, as Ms. Wasserstein, who has described herself as a typical ''New York playwright liberal,'' dares to wonder if liberals now require a few lessons in tolerance. Like ''Heidi,'' ''Third'' begins with a teacher putting forward views with a corrective feminist slant. ''Rest assured this classroom is a hegemonic-free zone,'' Laurie announces to her English literature class. In introducing ''King Lear,'' she states that the play is less the tragedy of its title monarch (''the ultimate privileged paternal white male'') than that of Goneril and Regan, the ''girls with guts.'' Cordelia is just a girly wimp. ''Lear'' hovers over ''Third'' the way Chekhov's ''Three Sisters'' haunted ''The Sisters Rosensweig.'' Laurie has an aged, senile father, Jack (a bracingly humble Charles Durning), given to Lear-like rantings (including a scene set during a rainstorm). And since the role she plays to Jack's Lear is basically that of Cordelia, she would seem to suffer from a Lear-like lack of self-knowledge. Shakespeare's bleakest tragedy is also the subject that jump-starts the play's pivotal confrontation -- between Laurie and Woodson Bull III (Jason Ritter), nicknamed Third, a Groton graduate on a wrestling scholarship whom Laurie instantly classifies as a child of patrician privilege and a distasteful emblem of the age of George W. Bush. As Third says, he is in her eyes ''a living dead white man.'' He would seem to threaten every victory Laurie has won as a pioneering female professor at the small New England college she had joined three decades earlier. And when Third turns in a well-written, intelligently argued paper on ''King Lear,'' Laurie is quick to accuse him of plagiarizing. This face-off never gathers much dramatic tension. First of all, it taxes credibility that an academic standards committee would pursue such charges without evidence. More important, though, Ms. Wiest is simply too much of a sweetheart to convey the requisite hostility. Hers is, by nature, a melting presence. (Think of her delicious studies in crinkly-eyed insecurity in Woody Allen's movies.) And she is truly touching in the scenes that show Laurie's inner anxieties about her place in a world in flux, especially in a bravura monologue on a psychiatrist's couch. But it is essential that the outer Laurie be a woman of steel and of a willful shallowness, evident in her exaggerated obsession with intellectual brand names. (''How could you have a problem with Rena? She's a Guggenheim poet.'') The supporting characters feel more convincingly drawn. Amy Aquino is terrific as Laurie's sardonic, cancer-plagued best friend and fellow academic, a finely gauged portrait of wryness as the best defense in the shadow of death. Mr. Durning movingly underplays geriatric dementia. Ms. Wasserstein's younger characters also register with impressive restraint and credibility. Mr. Ritter's scenes with the disarmingly dry Gaby Hoffmann (as Laurie's younger daughter, a student at Swarthmore, natch) and Ms. Aquino are the play's sharpest and most subtle. Indeed, such an appealing case is made from the beginning for Third's not being the ''walking red state'' Laurie mistakes him for that she seems grotesquely deluded. And while ''Third'' would seem to be striving for the he-said, she-said ambiguity of John Patrick Shanley's ''Doubt,'' the easygoing direction of Mr. Sullivan, Ms. Wasserstein's frequent collaborator, lacks the tautness to sustain any suspense. Yet ''Third'' ultimately registers as more than the fractured sum of flawed parts. And on one level, its defects -- Ms. Wiest's palpable soft-heartedness, Mr. Sullivan's contemplative pace -- work to its advantage. For Ms. Wasserstein is politely asking audiences who have grown older with her to acknowledge their fears, their limitations and the possibility that they might be wrong on subjects they were once sure about. In taking her uncommon women through the decades, she sweetly but shrewdly suggests that life is an unending identity crisis.

Subject: Heffalump in Search of Herself From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 06:07:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?_r=1&html_title=&tols_title=HEIDI CHRONICLES, THE (PLAY)&pdate=19881212&byline=By MEL GUSSOW&id=1077011432498&oref=slogin December 12, 1988 A Modern-Day Heffalump in Search of Herself By MEL GUSSOW Deep into ''The Heidi Chronicles,'' Wendy Wasserstein's enlightening portrait of her generation, the title character makes a speech to her high school alumnae at a ''Women, Where Are We Going?'' luncheon. In the speech, a tour de force for the author, Heidi vividly describes an aerobics class that proved to be an epiphany. While exercising, she was surrounded by an Inferno of ''power women'' both young and old. With sudden intuition, she realized that as a child of the 1960's - as a woman subjected to judgment by men and as a humanist trying to position herself among feminists - she is stranded, and no one is about to rescue her. She simply wants to be Heidi, but the closest she can come to self-definition is ambivalence, empathizing with the Heffalump in ''Winnie-the-Pooh.'' As chronicled by Ms. Wasserstein (and as acted by Joan Allen), Heidi's search for self is both mirthful and touching. In ''The Heidi Chronicles,'' which opened last night at Playwrights Horizons, the author looks beyond feminism and yuppie-ism to individualism and one's need to have pride of accomplishment. We are what we make of ourselves, but we keep looking for systems of support. As Heidi learns, her friends are her family. Ms. Allen plays the title role with an almost tangible vulnerability and a sweetness that is never saccharine. In her hands, Heidi always remains sympathetic even when she forgets to be self-protective. The role calls for the actress to seem happy (a smile, as for the camera) when she is really contemplative. Ms. Allen fills the role with a quiet gentility, while also conveying Heidi's natural wit. In ''Uncommon Women and Others'' Ms. Wasserstein offered a collage of Seven Sisters school graduates. In ''Isn't It Romantic?'' she sharpened her focus on a single woman (and her best friend) trying to be grown up. With her ambitious new play, she both broadens and intensifies her beam, to give us a group picture over decades, a picture of women who want it all - motherhood, sisterhood, love and boardroom respect. The play opens with Heidi as art historian, delivering a lecture on the neglect of female painters from ''the dawn of history to the present,'' and uses that neglect as an artful motif to depict man's exclusionist attitude toward women. During a series of pithy flashbacks, we see Heidi on her own rock-strewn path to liberation. As she moves from high school intellectual to awakening feminist, in the background we hear about political and cultural events. Heidi and her group are emblematic of their time, but the historical references never become intrusive. They form a time line on which Heidi teeters like a tightrope walker. Around her, women take advantage of opportunity and one man, Scoop Rosenbaum, takes advantage of Heidi. Scoop is an arrogant idealist. Even as he offers Heidi no choice but subjugation to his will, he is becoming a prime mover of his generation, through his high-flying magazine, Boomer, the beacon of the baby-boomer crowd. In one of the play's few minor weaknesses, neither the character nor the actor (Peter Friedman) is as charming as he is supposed to be. One necessarily wonders why Heidi has such a diehard affection for him. Far more believable is Peter Patrone (Boyd Gaines), a hugely successful pediatrician, who is gay. In all matters except sexuality, he is Heidi's soulmate. Ms. Wasserstein has always been a clever writer of comedy. This time she has been exceedingly watchful about not settling for easy laughter, and the result is a more penetrating play. This is not to suggest, however, that ''The Heidi Chronicles'' is ever lacking in humor. Several of the episodes are paradigmatic comic set pieces - a consciousness-raising session, the aerobics speech and a hilarious television program in which Heidi, Scoop and Peter are brought together as representative spokespersons. The colloquy is misguided by an airhead talk-show hostess (delightfully played by Joanne Camp). When Scoop becomes characteristically self-serving, the pediatrician steals the spotlight, as is often the case - a credit both to the character and to Mr. Boyd's sensitive performance. As Heidi's childhood friend, Ellen Parker transforms herself from ''sister shepherdess'' on the front lines of feminism to queenpin of the movie and television industry, trying and failing to convince the heroine to become a sitcom consultant. Ms. Camp, Sarah Jessica Parker and Anne Lange amusingly play all the Jills, Debbies, Betsys and Beckys who complicate Heidi's life. At a critics' preview, Ms. Allen and Mr. Friedman had moments of uncertainty with their dialogue - in an otherwise confident production (the director is Daniel Sullivan). Among the assets is Thomas Lynch's set design, so assured in its many changes as to make the designer's hand invisible. Subtly the play parallels aspects of the original ''Heidi'' novel. As we are reminded, in the first two chapters the heroine travels and then ''understands what she knows.'' At the beginning of her journey, Ms. Wasserstein's Heidi is adamant that she will never be submissive, especially to men. To our pleasure, the endearing character finally finds selfless fulfillment. Following the chronicles of Heidi, theatergoers are left with tantalizing questions about women today and tomorrow.

Subject: Jailing a Critic in Kurdistan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 31, 2006 at 05:59:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/opinion/30mon3.html?ex=1296277200&en=eb959c72d1d10d06&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 Jailing a Critic in Kurdistan Kurdistan is one of Iraq's most prosperous and westernized regions. And, thanks to an American military shield, it got a 12-year head start on the post-Saddam Hussein era. Kurdistan's leaders ought to be setting a positive example for the rest of the country in expanding the boundaries of political criticism. Instead they are making an example of a Kurdish journalist who dared to criticize leaders of the inaptly named Kurdistan Democratic Party and its secret police, the Parastin. Kamal Sayid Qadir has been a harsh and persistent critic of the powerful Barzani family, which runs the K.D.P., and through it, the western part of Kurdistan, like a family fiefdom. Mr. Qadir's language has been intemperate, by conservative Kurdish cultural standards, and his accusations have not always been adequately substantiated. But these journalistic excesses are not unheard of in the rest of the world and are certainly no justification for the 30-year jail sentence he is now serving — imposed, he says, after a trial that lasted only 15 minutes. The K.D.P. is one of two clan-based parties that have carved up the Kurdish region between them, and through their partnership with fundamentalist Shiites hold the balance of power in Iraq as a whole. It was once thought that these secular parties would use their influence to temper the religious extremism and the authoritarian politics of their Shiite partners. So far, it has not been working out that way. Mr. Qadir is not the only Kurdish journalist to complain of intimidation by the K.D.P.'s secret police. And there have been problems elsewhere as well. Two journalists face prison terms in east central Iraq for criticizing a provincial governor. In the south, fundamentalist Shiite militias enforce their own version of Islamic mores with the full support of local governmental authorities. Iraq's elected leaders have no legitimate reason to fear an uninhibited press. But Iraqis have reason to worry about leaders who lock up their critics.

Subject: 200 BILLION broadband scandal From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 19:36:32 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Book Release: '$200 Billion Broadband Scandal' [Uncut, unedited and in its original format] --- - Press Release: Teletruth News Alert: January 30th, 2006 Contact: Kelly Deegan, kelly@teletruth.org Bruce Kushnick, bruce@teletruth.org, 718-238-7191 For details about the book, chapters, more reading, etc. http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm $200 Billion Broadband Scandal New investigative ebook offers a micro-history of Verizon, SBC, Qwest, and BellSouth’s (the Bell companies) fiber optic broadband promises and the consequence harms to America’s economic growth because they never delivered and kept most of the money, about $200 billion. New York: This is one of the largest scandals in American history. America is 16th in the world in broadband and the US DSL current offerings are 100 times slower than other countries such has Japan and Korea. How did we go from Number 1 in the web to 16th in broadband and falling? But more importantly, are customers owed $2000 for a fiber optic service they paid for but never received? Did towns and cities, libraries and schools, government agencies, and every residential and business customer subsidize new networks that never showed up? And did America lose $5 trillion in economic growth, $500 billion annually, because of these missing networks? Broadband Scandals is a well-documented expose, 406 pages and 528 footnotes. Using the phone companies' own words (and well as other sources), the book outlines a massive nationwide scandal that affects every aspect of state of the Internet. Not only the web but broadband, municipalities laying fiber or building wifi networks, not to mention related issues such as such as VOIP, cable services, the cost of local phone service, net neutrality, the new digital divide, and even America's economic growth. The fiber optic infrastructure you paid for was never delivered. Starting in the early 1990's, with a push from the Clinton-Gore Administration’s 'Information Superhighway', every Bell company — SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest — made commitments to rewire America, state by state. Fiber optic wires would replace the 100-year old copper wiring. The push caused techno-frenzy of major proportions. By 2006, 86 million households should have had a service capable of 45 Mbps in both directions, (to and from the customer) could handle over 500 channels of high quality video and be deployed in rural, urban and suburban areas equally. And these networks were open to ALL competition. In order to pay for these upgrades, in state after state, the public service commissions and state legislatures acquiesced to the Bells’ promises by removing the constraints on the Bells’ profits as well as gave other financial perks. They were able to print money — billions of dollars per state — all collected in the form of higher phone rates and tax perks. (Note: each state is different.) * ADSL is not what was promised and paid for. It goes over the old copper wiring, can’t achieve the speed, has problems in rural areas and is mostly one-way. * 0% of the Bell companies’ customers have 45 Mbps residential services. Harms and Outcomes This investigative book isn’t just a history, but a warning — the Bell companies can not be trusted with our digital future. Worse, what they have done has resulted in serious repercussions to local, state and national economy. * The public subsidies for infrastructure were pocketed. The phone companies collected over $200 billion in higher phone rates and tax perks, about $2000 per household. * The World is Laughing at US. Korea and Japan have 100 Mbps services as standard, and America could have been Number One had the phone companies actually delivered. Instead, we are 16th in broadband and falling in technology dominance. * Harm to the economy. Five trillion dollars was lost because new technologies and services that America would have developed, happened in Korea. * Municipalities around America are waking up to the fact that the phone companies failed to deliver and are now doing Wifi and fiber-based work-arounds. Broadband Scandals delivers serious revelations. In fact, the book has been designed as the data source for Teletruth’s complaint to the FTC against SBC and Verizon. * The promised networks couldn’t be built in 1993 and state laws were changed based on 'deceptive speech'. The technology today still has problems delivering 500 channels. * The phone companies pulled a bait and switch. In order to offer DSL over copper, it was not necessary to have state regulation changed. Their plan was to get rid of regulations and enter long distance. * The Bell mergers resulted in the death of the state plans for fiber optic broadband. Over 26 states had fiber optic projects closed when the mergers of SBC and Verizon were completed. That affected almost 80% of all phone customers in the US. Broadband Scandal contains some additional special chapters. * 20th Anniversary Summary of the Bells’ Financials. The core of the book is a 20-year analysis of revenues, profits, construction, etc.. Starting in1984, their own data shows revenues up 128%, and concludes profits shot through the roof on the promise of broadband. Meanwhile, compared to revenues, employees are down 65%, construction down 60%. Why did prices increase? * Case Studies: New Jersey, California, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania. — State-by-state the book outlines the same pattern of deception. By 2010, 100% of New Jersey is supposed to have 45 Mbps service; by 2000, California should have had 5.5 million homes completed, and each state paid billions for services they never received. * Verizon’s 'FIASCO' and SBC’s’ 'Dim-Speed' — Verizon and SBC are rolling out new fiber optic services but want the laws changed again. These services are crippled, closed networks that do not fulfill the state obligations, like New Jersey and can’t compete globally. FIOS’s top speed is only 35% of the Asian standard, and yet it cost $199 vs Korea, $40 for 100 Mbps. * Fake and co-opted consumer groups, biased non-profit think tanks are now the major force in broadband regulation and policy. The book goes into groups like Consumers for Cable Choice, TRAC, APT, Issue Dynamics and New Millennium Council and how these groups are attempting to block municipalities from offering new services to harming new services, like VOIP. These groups are sending out deceptive messages that make the formulation of the policy that is in the public interest impossible. Broadband Scandal’s conclusion: Publicly paid for infrastructure is being held hostage and needs to be freed. Customers funded the fiber optic networks and the Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN) should be opened to ALL competition with strict rules of Net Neutrality. The Bells have harmed America’s economic growth and our global competitiveness. Investigations into all of the monies collected in the name of fiber optic broadband in America should start immediately. These investigations should include how the Bells improperly funded their DSL and long distance rollouts. The Bells should be forced into refunds or giving the money to municipalities. This would be a better solution than allowing the companies who have harmed our digital future to control America’s digital destiny. Author. According to Broadband Reports: 'Bruce Kushnick has been dubbed everything from the 'Leading Visionary in the Telecom Industry' to a 'Phone Bill Fanatic'; but what's certain is that nobody in the industry is ignoring him.' Kushnick has been a telecom analyst for 24 years, and is one of the founders of Teletruth, an independent customer advocacy group focusing on broadband and telecom issues, as well as executive director of New Networks Institute, a market research firm. Teletruth was a member of the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee in 2003-2004 and has active cases with the IRS, FCC and FTC pertaining to broadband and the cost of the networks. Research through Teletruth's phone bill auditing services has led to class action suits and major refunds for phone bill overcharging, Ebook only: $20 Contact: Kelly Deegan, kelly@teletruth.org Bruce Kushnick, bruce@teletruth.org , 718-238-7191 For details about the book, chapters, more reading, etc. http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm

Subject: Substantiate your RUBBISH comment please From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 17:01:02 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uswalm0126,0,3743891.story?coll=ny-leadnationalnews-headlines Clinton: cover employees Senator pushes for Wal-Mart’s contribution to workers’ health plans, but is unclear whether she took that stand as retailer’s board member Vote: Hillary in 2008? Evaluating Hillary (NEWSDAY / RICHARD CORNETT) BY GLENN THRUSH WASHINGTON BUREAU January 25, 2006, 10:18 PM EST WASHINGTON -- Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants Wal-Mart to contribute to health insurance for its employees -- but can't recall if she pushed for worker benefits during six years as a paid board member for the nation's largest retailer. 'Cities and states are saying we can't keep holding the bag here,' Clinton said yesterday, praising a new Maryland law requiring Wal-Mart to spend at least 8 percent of payroll on health benefits or contribute to insurance plans for the poor. About 20 state legislatures have similar bills pending -- and Suffolk County has a similar law -- reflecting frustration with paying Medicaid and other state health care expenses incurred by company employees. Clinton never explicitly endorsed Maryland's law during her speech before the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington, but she later told reporters, 'I certainly understand their need to try to take some action because the burden is getting shifted onto the taxpayer.' Asked if she had advocated better benefits while serving as a board member with Arkansas-based Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1991, Clinton replied, 'Well, you know, I, that was a long time ago ... have to remember,' adding that 'obviously I believe every company should' contribute to benefit plans. 'Her tenure on the board ended nearly 14 years ago, and it's a very different company now,' said Philippe Reines, a spokesman for Clinton. The Maryland bill was passed earlier this month over the veto of Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich Jr. Calls to a Wal-Mart spokesman weren't returned. Company founder Sam Walton was a donor to Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign. The Clintons owned between $50,000 and $100,000 in company stock at that time, according to press accounts.

Subject: Re: Substantiate your RUBBISH comment please From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 18:56:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The previous post was taken from a professional right wing extremist, and meant only for name calling.

Subject: Re: Substantiate your RUBBISH comment please From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 22:01:27 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Dont think I like Mccain Terri - he is a keating 5 crook - but I think Hillary is a lying cheating crook too: http://www.poorandstupid.com/chronicle.asp THE TRUE NEXUS OF CORRUPTION Austrian econ guru George Reisman cuts to the paradigmatic quick: [Paul] Krugman [link] wants the media to harp on the fact that the current lobbying scandal is a Republican scandal and argues that those journalists who don’t “are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade.” The truth is, as Mises showed, that corruption is an inevitable by-product of an interventionist economy....If one is serious about fighting corruption, the first and most important thing that must be fought is all discretionary power on the part of the government and its officials. The powers of Congress, state legislatures, and city councils must be strictly limited to protecting the citizens against the initiation of physical force (including fraud), and nothing else. The more the government is pressed back within these limits, the less will be the problem of corruption, because the less discretionary power will the government and its officials have to inflict harm or bestow benefits, and thus the less will be the need and the opportunity for citizens to bribe them. As part of the same process, elections will cease to be bidding wars between pressure groups. The pressure groups will dissolve once the government loses the power to harm or benefit them. Thanks to reader Jameson Campaigne for the link.

Subject: Re: Substantiate your RUBBISH comment please From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 05:54:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is complete rubbish. What a mean person you are.

Subject: The TRUTH hurts From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Feb 02, 2006 at 23:57:07 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message:

Subject: Executive Paywatch Database From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 12:35:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The AFLCIO puts out a database documenting CEO compensation. It has to be pretty demoralizing for millions of wage earners (and families) who work for these companies being required to take cuts in pay and/or benefits and witness the top honcho at the company get huge compensation at the same time they are being told they must sacrifice! How can company execs expect to get quality work from employees when they are getting so rich off the backs of workers? Google 'Executive Paywatch Database' and you will find the CEO at IBM getting over $20,000,000 in a single year while IBM lays off thousands of workers. GM CEO gets over $10,000,000 in yearly compensation while telling GM employees they need to take big cuts in benefits. This after GM leadership as shown little to no foresight when it comes to designing and producing anything but a bunch of gas guzzlers! When it comes to our present administration and Congressional leadership (lack of military service and corruption) and corporate leadership, there is almost no leadership by example.

Subject: La Times - From: David E.. To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 15:17:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The LA times has an article about the huge disconnect between workers who will receive no pensions and executives who will receive grandiose pensions of one million dollars. The world is good for the rich, they accrue yearly benefits worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while regular folks are limited to IRA's of $4000 and 401K's of $15,000 per year. Social justice seems to be getting fainter and fainter every year.

Subject: 100 million From: Johnny5 To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 17:17:42 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: =DJ UPDATE: Wachovia Exec To Retire With $100M-Plus Package>WB . By David Enrich Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Wallace D. Malone Jr.'s 15 months as a Wachovia Corp. (WB) vice chairman are paying off big-time. Malone is retiring Tuesday and is poised to pocket more than $100 million in cash, stock and other benefits. The size of the package rankled someWachovia shareholders. Malone, 69 years old, was chief executive of SouthTrust Corp., which Charlotte-based Wachovia acquired for about $14 billion in November 2004. He then took on the title of vice chairman and joined Wachovia's board of directors. His board term expires this spring. At least $33 million of Malone's exit package stems directly from his brief tenure at Wachovia. Due to his departure for 'good reason,' Wachovia - the nation's fifth-largest by market value - will make five annual 'termination payments' to Malone of $6.67 million each. Malone, who joined the predecessor company in 1959, also will collect almost $34 million under SouthTrust's pension and retirement plans, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday. In addition, he stands to receive more than $42 million worth of deferred benefits that have piled up during his career at the banks. In addition, Wachovia will pay Malone 'retirement benefits' of $321,250 a year for the next 10 years, and $1.3 million a year for the subsequent 15 years. Those amounts are 'subject to earnings adjustments,' Wachovia said. Under another deferred-pay plan, Malone is entitled to $480,000 annually for the rest of his life. As an added bonus, Wachovia is letting Malone keep his company car, which is valued at about $58,500. He also will get office space and an administrative assistant for five years. The company also has promised to 'gross-up' any taxes incurred if the retirement payments are considered 'excess parachute payments' under federal tax law. Pearl Meyer, a compensation expert with Stephen Hall & Partners in New York, estimated the value of Malone's package as $119 million. That doesn't include the value Malone is gaining through accelerated vesting of stock options and restricted shares. 'That will considerably enhance the $119 million,' she said. Meyer said the five annual $6.67 million severance payments Wachovia is paying Malone are unusually generous. Normally, such payments to chief executives occur for three years, not five, and Wachovia's non-compete agreement with Malone only lasts for three years. In addition, the payments are based on the sum of Malone's salary and highest bonus in the past five years, instead of using a target or average bonus, which is standard practice, Meyer said. While such lavish packages are hardly unheard of - executives who are looking to sell their companies often demand that lavish exit packages be included in the deals - they nonetheless draw fire from shareholders and corporate-governance advocates. 'The ivory tower club basically looks out for themselves. It's become common-place to have these huge payouts,' said Peter Kovalski, a fund manager at Alpine Woods Investments LLC, which owned about 4.9 million Wachovia shares as of Sept. 30. Malone's 'excessive' severance deal 'takes away from the shareholders.' Wachovia, which earned $6.64 billion last year, said the hefty package is due in part to changes in Malone's job duties, which allowed him to leave the company for 'good reason' and in the process become eligible for additional severance payments. Wachovia didn't say why Malone was stepping down, but said it wasn't because of any disagreements between him and Wachovia management. Company representatives weren't available to comment. Malone - who works out of the Birmingham, Ala., offices where SouthTrust was headquartered - also wasn't immediately available. -By David Enrich, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2123; david.enrich@dowjones.com (Phyllis Plitch contributed to this report.) (END) Dow Jones Newswires

Subject: Re: La Times - From: Pete Weis To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 15:33:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: David E. The loss of pensions, lack of good healthcare coverage for so many, and, IMO, future poor performance of 401k's as well as lower wage growth expectations will not bode well for the US economy against a rising wall of energy costs and the crumbling foundation of a housing ATM.

Subject: The chart does not lie From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 17:16:43 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://home.comcast.net/~markthoma/Graphics/dist1.1.25.06.gif http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/01/dist112506.html January 28, 2006 The Very Top of the U.S. Income Distribution Mark Thoma is wishing he had already found time to read Piketty and Saez (2006), 'The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective' (Cambridge: NBER WP 11955: Abstract: This paper summarizes the main findings of the recent studies that have constructed top income and wealth shares series over the century for a number of countries using tax statistics. Most countries experience a dramatic drop in top income shares in the first part of the century due to a precipitous drop in large wealth holdings during the wars and depression shocks. Top income shares do not recover in the immediate post war decades. However, over the last 30 years, top income shares have increased substantially in English speaking countries but not at all in continental Europe countries or Japan. This increase is due to an unprecedented surge in top wage incomes starting in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1990s. As a result, top wage earners have replaced capital income earners at the top of the income distribution in English speaking countries. We discuss the proposed explanations and the main questions that remain open. Thoma reproduces what are by far the most interesting figures in Piketty and Saez, which show that the pretax income share of the top 1% of the American income distribution jumped from 8% in 1980 to 9% in 1985 to 13% in 1990 to 17% in 2000 to 14% today. Over the same period the income share of the next 4% has risen from 13% to 15%, and the income share of the still next 5% has stayed at 12%. The top tenth of the American income distribution increased its share from 33% in 1980 to 41% today--with three-quarters of that increase going to the top 1% and fully one-quarter of that increase going to the top 0.01%. What skills and assets do the top 1% of America's pretax income distribution have today that lead the market to grant them 14% of total income, when their counterparts back in 1980 were granted only 8% of total income? What skills and assets do the top 0.01% of the American pretax income distribution--that's 12,000 tax units--that led the market to grant them 100 times average income in 1980, and 300 times average income today? The flip side: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2006/01/skewness_in_ear.html He cites this paper by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez. I suspect that two things are going on. One is that we have added a lot more low-income households, because of immigration and family break-ups. This pushes some high-income households into the top of the income distribution who previously were closer to the middle. The second development is increased entrepreneurship, which takes some people out of the middle of the income distribution and moves them either toward the bottom or the top. For example, suppose that we have one hundred families, and the top family gets $1.8 million, the next family gets $1.7 million, the next family gets $1.6 million, and so on, until the tenth family gets $0.9 million. Families 11 through 100 each earn $40,000. Total income is $18 million, and the share of income earned by the top one percent (the top earner) is 10.0 percent. Next, add 100 new families, consisting of immigrants, single-parent households, and so on, earning $30,000 per year. The total income in the economy is now $12 million, so the share of the top earner has declined a bit. However, with 200 families in the population, the top one percent now includes the top two earners, whose combined income of $3.5 million is now 16.67 percent of the total. The other factor is entrepreneurship. For me, becoming an entrepreneur meant that for several years, my income went down. It increased when the business became successful, and it spiked when the business was sold. Since then, it has been below what I would have earned as a salary, but the one-time spike makes up for that. As Paul Graham put it, Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. The rise of the personal computer has increased the potential for entrepreneurship. More entrepreneurship means that more people are compressing their working lives and generally increasing the variation in incomes.

Subject: Greenspan legacy? From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 11:38:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Greenspan leaves nation steeped in debt By NELL HENDERSON The Washington Post 01/29/2006 WASHINGTON -- Beverly Wilmore is bracing for the tuition bills about to start rolling in after her 19-year-old daughter starts at Towson (Md.) University this week. But she's not too worried -- she figures she and her husband can borrow against their four-bedroom Gaithersburg, Md., home, which has appreciated from $250,000 when they bought it in 2000 to about $400,000 now. And as the home's value rose, two years ago the Wilmores refinanced their mortgage, cutting their monthly home-loan payments by hundreds of dollars, she recalled. Like many families who caught the housing boom, the Wilmores now have more debt than before they bought their home, but they also are wealthier. 'I'm thankful for the low interest rate,' said Wilmore, 42, a special-education teacher. Advertisement The Wilmores are among the millions of Americans who have prospered during Alan Greenspan's 18 years as chairman of the Federal Reserve. They lived through nearly two decades of generally stable economic growth with low inflation, low unemployment and modest interest rates. Under Greenspan's watch, the economy thrived despite stock market crashes, international financial crises, terrorist attacks, wars and other shocks. No wonder, as Greenspan prepares to retire next week, economists have lauded him as the greatest central banker ever. Still, his legacy will be judged not just by his record at the Fed, but also by the economy he bequeaths. And when he leaves office Tuesday, Greenspan leaves a nation awash in debt -- record household debt and a record trade gap. Many analysts say his low interest rate policies contributed to these huge imbalances, which threaten the economy he nurtured. 'The jury is out on his legacy in large part because of the debt' and the trade deficit, said Stephen Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley. 'You will not be able to truly judge his accomplishments until we see how this plays out in the post-Greenspan era.' A borrowing culture Greenspan and his Fed colleagues agree that part of the growth in household debt and the trade gap is the side effect of policies that helped steady the U.S. economy after the stock bubble burst in 2000. The Fed's low interest rates encouraged consumers to borrow and spend on houses, autos and other goods, spurring economic growth for several years when businesses were cutting jobs and reluctant to invest. And consumers spent much of their borrowed money on imports, causing the trade deficit to swell. But in the view of central bank policymakers, the alternative would have been worse -- a longer and more painful downturn. Greenspan's Fed didn't do it alone, economists agree. Other factors helped fuel the borrowing binge, including global financial trends that have helped keep mortgage rates low and prompted lenders to extend more credit to more people. The result is a prosperity built on borrowing, say many economists, pointing to a string of recent records and firsts: •U.S. household debt hit a record $11.4 trillion in last year's third quarter, which ended Sept. 30, after shooting up at the fastest rate since 1985, according to Fed data. •U.S. households spent a record 13.75 percent of their after-tax, or disposable, income on servicing their debts in the third quarter, the Fed reported. •The trade deficit for last year is estimated to have swollen to another record high, above $700 billion, increasing America's indebtedness to foreigners. 'The economy's increasing reliance on unprecedented levels of debt is clearly unsustainable and extremely troubling,' said Charles McMillion, chief economist with MBG Information Services, a financial analysis firm. 'The only serious questions are when and how will current imbalances be addressed and what will be the consequences.' The Fed chairman told Congress in June: 'I think we've learned very early on in economic history that debt in modest quantities does enhance the rate of growth of an economy and does create higher standards of living, but in excess, creates very serious problems.' Greenspan didn't define 'excess,' but economists see troubling possibilities: A sudden reversal in housing prices could trigger a recession if consumers cut back on spending and households have trouble paying their mortgages. The trade gap could swell to a point that forces a sharp fall in the dollar and surge in interest rates, also causing a recession. Even without a crisis, the debt load will weigh on the economy simply because of the interest to be paid on it. How it began To understand how all this debt built up, recall how things looked in early 2001. In January 2001, Beverly and Kevin Wilmore were overseeing construction of their home, looking forward to moving in with their two children the following year. But from his Fed headquarters office, Greenspan saw that the economy was sputtering. Stock prices had been sliding for nearly a year after peaking in early 2000 at the height of the tech boom. Retail sales had soured. Businesses were throttling back on production and investment. On Jan. 3, 2001, Greenspan convened a conference call meeting of the central bank's top policymakers. They agreed to cut the Fed's benchmark short-term interest rate for the first time in more than two years, to 6 percent from 6.5 percent. That action marked the beginning of an aggressive campaign by Greenspan and his colleagues to prevent the bursting of the stock market bubble from devastating the U.S. economy. An eye on past mistakes Greenspan had studied the Great Depression of the 1930s and believed it resulted largely from the Fed's mistakes in tightening credit after the 1929 stock market crash. He also had seen Japan's central bank ease credit too cautiously after that country's property bubble burst in the early 1990s, triggering a decade-long economic slump. He would do the opposite, dramatically easing credit -- by cutting interest rates -- to cushion the economy's landing. The Greenspan Fed lowered its benchmark rate another 12 times over the next 2 1/2 years as the economy struggled to regain its footing, cutting the rate to 1 percent by June 2003, the lowest level since 1959. The benchmark federal funds rate, the overnight rate on loans between banks, influences many other longer-term rates in the economy, including those on mortgages, car loans and business loans. The Fed's rate cuts had little effect on corporate America, which had overinvested in equipment, software and factories during the late 1990s boom; businesses retrenched, slashing both payrolls and spending plans, tipping the economy into recession from March through November of 2001. But low interest rates worked like an intoxicant on consumers, who snapped up new cars and trucks with no-interest loans and seized on low mortgage rates to buy new homes and refinance old home loans. Those sales and refinancings freed up more cash to spend. But household debt rose faster in recent years than wealth or disposable income, reaching an unprecedented 126.1 percent of after-tax income in the third quarter, double its 1980 level. AP file Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan takes his seat before the start of the Senate Banking Committee hearing Feb. 16, 2005. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's legacy will be judged by his record and the economy he leaves. AP file A nameplate identifies the chair used by Alan Greenspan in the main meeting room of the board of the Federal Reserve in Washington.

Subject: New Rules, Same Game From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 17:23:40 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.house.gov/paul/tst/tst2006/tst012306.htm New Rules, Same Game January 23, 2006 Last week I mailed each of my congressional colleagues a copy of a speech outlining my views on the lobbying and ethics scandals engulfing Washington. I’m afraid many of them won’t like my conclusion: to reduce corruption in government, we must make government less powerful-- and hence less interesting to lobbyists. I find it hard to believe that changing the congressional ethics rules or placing new restrictions on lobbyists will do much good. After all, we already have laws against bribery, theft, and fraud. We already have ethics rules in Congress. We already have campaign finance reform. We already require campaigns and lobbyists to register with the federal government and disclose expenditures. We already require federal employees, including the president and members of congress, to take an oath of office. None of it is working, so why should we think more rules, regulations, or laws will change anything? Lobbying, whether we like it or not, is constitutionally protected. The First amendment unequivocally recognizes the right of Americans to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” We can’t deal with corruption in government by ignoring the Constitution. I don’t believe the problem is corrupt lobbyists or even corrupt politicians per se. The fundamental problem, in my view, is the very culture of Washington. Our political system has become nothing more than a means of distributing government largesse, through tax dollars confiscated from the American people-- always in the name democracy. The federal budget is so enormous that it loses all meaning. What’s another million or so for some pet project, in an annual budget of $2.4 trillion? No one questions the principle that a majority electorate should be allowed to rule the country, dictate rights, and redistribute wealth. It’s no wonder a system of runaway lobbying and special interests has developed. When we consider the enormous entitlement and welfare system in place, and couple that with a military-industrial complex that feeds off perpetual war and encourages an interventionist foreign policy, the possibilities for corruption are endless. We shouldn’t wonder why there is such a powerful motivation to learn the tricks of the lobbying trade-- and why former members of Congress and their aides become such high priced commodities. The dependency on government generated by welfarism and warfarism, made possible by our shift from a republican to a democratic system of government, is the real scandal of the ages. If we merely tinker with current attitudes about the role of the federal government in our lives, it won’t do much to solve the ethics crisis. True reform is impossible without addressing the immorality of wealth redistribution. After all, criminals by definition ignore laws; unethical people ignore the rules of ethics. Changing the rules or the players is merely a band-aid if we don’t change the nature of the game itself.

Subject: Debt - then & now From: Pete Weis To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 11:41:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Savings Rate at Lowest Level Since 1933 Monday January 30, 11:22 am ET By Martin Crutsinger, AP Economics Writer Savings Rate Hits Lowest Level Since 1933 As Consumers Use Money to Finance Big-Ticket Purchases WASHINGTON (AP) -- Americans' personal savings rate dipped into negative territory in 2005, something that hasn't happened since the Great Depression. Consumers depleted their savings to finance the purchases of cars and other big-ticket items. The Commerce Department reported Monday that the savings rate fell into negative territory at minus 0.5 percent, meaning that Americans not only spent all of their after-tax income last year but had to dip into previous savings or increase borrowing. The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before -- in 1932 and 1933 -- two years when the country was struggling to cope with the Great Depression, a time of massive business failures and job layoffs. With employment growth strong now, analysts said that different factors are at play. Americans feel they can spend more, given that the value of their homes, the biggest asset for most families, has been rising sharply in recent years. But analysts cautioned that this behavior was risky at a time when 78 million Americans are on the verge of retirement. 'Americans seem to have the feeling that it is wimpish to save,' said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor's in New York. 'The idea is to put away money for old age and we are just not doing that.' The Commerce report said that consumer spending for December rose by 0.9 percent, more than double the 0.4 percent increase in incomes last month. A price gauge that excludes food and energy rose by a tiny 0.1 percent in December, down from a 0.2 percent rise in November. This inflation index linked to consumer spending is closely watched by officials at the Federal Reserve. The central bank meets on Tuesday, when it is expected it will boost interest rates for a 14th time. However, many economists believe those rate hikes are drawing to a close with perhaps another quarter-point hike at the March 28 meeting as the central bank is starting to see the impact of the previous rate hikes in a slowing economy. The government reported on Friday that overall economic growth slowed to a 1.1 percent rate in the final three months of the year, the most sluggish pace in three years. That slowdown was heavily influenced by a big drop for the quarter in spending on new cars, which had surged in the summer as automakers offered attractive sales incentives. A negative savings rate means that Americans spent all their disposable income, the amount left over after paying taxes, and dipped into their past savings to finance their purchases. For the month, the savings rate fell to 0.7 percent, the largest one-month decline since a 3.4 percent drop in August. The 0.5 percent negative savings rate for 2005 followed a 1.8 percent rate of savings in 2004. The last negative rates occurred in 1932, a drop of 0.9 percent, and a record 1.5 percent decline in 1933. In those years Americans exhausted their savings to try to meet expenses in the wake of the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. One major reason that consumers felt confident in spending all of their disposable incomes and dipping into savings last year was that a booming housing market made them feel more wealthy. As their home prices surged at double-digit rates, that created what economists call a 'wealth effect' that supported greater spending. The concern, however, is that the housing boom of the past five years is beginning to quiet down with the rise in mortgage rates. Analysts are closing watching to see whether consumer spending, which accounts for two-thirds of total economic activity, falters in 2006 as Americans, already carrying heavy debt loads, don't feel as wealthy as the price appreciation of their homes would seem to indicate. For December, the 0.4 percent rise in incomes was in line with Wall Street expectations. It followed a similar 0.4 percent increase in November, with both months lower than the 0.6 percent rise in October. The 0.9 percent rise in spending with slightly above the expectation for a 0.8 percent increase and was almost double the 0.5 percent increase in November.

Subject: 1000 words From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 17:11:48 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.idorfman.com/Charts/housecashaspercliab.png

Subject: AFRICAN statistical agencies need to fix From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 11:12:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Posted to the web on: 30 January 2006 South African Minister of Finance, Trevor Manuel takes swipe at stats agencies AFRICAN statistical agencies need to fix 'glaring data gaps' for governments to able to measure developmental progress, Finance Minister Trevor Manuel said today. 'If we cannot measure it, we cannot manage it,' he told delegates to a continental symposium on statistical development being held in Cape Town. The gathering seeks to galvanise Africa’s contribution to a 2010 global round of population and housing censuses. Manuel expressed concern about a decline in African statistics, saying 19 of 56 African countries and areas had conducted no population censuses in the last 10 years. This was nearly double the number of the previous decade. That data which did exist was often unreliable. 'The history of census taking in Africa has been characterised by irregularity, incompleteness, inaccuracies and subsequently a gross under-utilisation of census data,' the minister said. Africa could not continue to lobby for its cause to be put at the centre of the world agenda if it presented data with little credibility, he said. 'How can we ask governments and donors to direct resources towards areas of need if we cannot empirically establish where the need exists?' Statistics were the 'undergirding' of Africa’s poverty reduction policies and programmes. 'If the undergirding is unsound, the programmes built on such foundations will be severely compromised.' Problems faced by African statistical agencies included inadequate legal and institutional frameworks, a lack of co-ordination and weak management, the minister said. Their relationship with political principals was a 'real difficulty'. 'In politics, we don’t always wish to hear unpleasant truths. It is far easier to convince ourselves, our donors and the entire world that the situation is a vast improvement on reality.' Such disinformation could, however, fool donors into believing resources were no longer needed. The executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Abdoulie Janneh, said statistical development had been ignored in many African countries, leaving policy makers unable to confidently report on development targets. Having data on population and housing numbers was vital for delivery and good governance, Janneh said.

Subject: Re: AFRICAN statistical agencies need to fix From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 07:16:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: A helpful article and needful proposal.

Subject: The Shrinking Snows of Kilimanjaro From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:26:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/opinion/26WED4.html?ex=1385182800&en=1511a3edc7c32773&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND November 26, 2003 The Shrinking Snows of Kilimanjaro Give credit for bold thinking to Prof. Euan Nisbet, a Zimbabwean scientist now working at the University of London. While the rest of us have been wringing our hands at the accelerating disappearance of glaciers, Professor Nisbet has come up with a proposal to slow the melting of the famous glaciers atop Tanzania's Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa and an iconic symbol of the continent's beauty. The crux of his plan is to drape huge tarpaulins over the edges of two glaciers to retard their melting and buy time for more lasting solutions. It would be a mammoth undertaking yielding dubious benefits. The glaciers on Kilimanjaro have been in retreat for at least a century, shrinking by 80 percent between 1912 and 2000. Although it is tempting to blame global warming, the most likely culprit is deforestation. Forests at the base of the mountain, which once exhaled moisture that replenished and protected the ice fields, have largely disappeared, leaving the glaciers to the mercy of hot, dry winds that erode and melt the high cliffs that form their edges. Experts say the glaciers could disappear within a decade or two, taking with them a frozen record of East Africa's climate over the ages. Enter Professor Nisbet, who suggests that huge white tarpaulins be draped over the edges to retard wind erosion and reflect the sunlight, much as the artist Christo adorns the countryside with miles of white fabric. The goal is to slow the melting long enough to replant the forests. An enthusiastic Op-Ed article in this newspaper suggested that the effort to save Kilimanjaro's ice could become a powerful way to say that we do not have to accept environmental change, even when it looks inevitable. But at least one scientist has wondered if the plan might backfire, allowing a little heat to penetrate the tarpaulins and get trapped inside, thus speeding up the melting. Science might be better served by pouring more resources into collecting and studying ice cores before the glaciers disappear and leave Africa with a new icon — a bare mountaintop underscoring the folly of reckless destruction of the forests.

Subject: While bush silences scientists From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 19:20:10 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Hear in FL - prez's brother Jeb has gotten in trouble for silencing scientsts who said the road buildouts were destroying the fla ecosystems and swamps. When does it end?

Subject: Climate Expert From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:25:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/science/earth/29climate.html?ex=1296190800&en=51c46d7689bee520&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him By ANDREW C. REVKIN The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists. Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. 'They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public,' he said. Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. 'That's not the way we operate here at NASA,' he said. 'We promote openness and we speak with the facts.' Mr. Acosta said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel whom the public could perceive as speaking for the agency. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen. Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, is a leading authority on the earth's climate system. He directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute on Morningside Heights in Manhattan. Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore. In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide. He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled, and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry. But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide. In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase 'to understand and protect our home planet.' He said he was particularly incensed that the directives affecting his statements had come through informal telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents. Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official 'order or pressure to say shut Jim up.' But Dr. Einaudi added, 'That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied.' The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth 'a different planet.' The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions. After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be 'dire consequences' if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews. Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews. In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute. Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. 'the most liberal' media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others Mr. Deutsch said his job was 'to make the president look good' and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority. But she added: 'I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal.' Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, in NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so. Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta. Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: 'Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog is this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?' Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred. 'He's not trying to create a war over this,' said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, 'but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public, and this kind of attempted muzzling of the science community is really rather dangerous. If we just accept it, then we're contributing to the problem.' Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled. In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views. 'He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world,' Dr. Cicerone said. 'I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been.' The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone. Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing. One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems. In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identifies the views as his own. 'One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing,' he wrote. Many people who work with Dr. Hansen said that politics was not a factor in his dispute with the Bush administration. 'The thing that has always struck me about him is I don't think he's political at all,' said Mark R. Hess, director of public affairs for the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., a position that also covers the Goddard Institute in New York. 'He really is not about concerning himself with whose administration is in charge, whether it's Republicans, Democrats or whatever,' Mr. Hess said. 'He's a pretty down-the-road conservative independent-minded person. 'What he cares deeply about is being a scientist, his research, and I think he feels a true obligation to be able to talk about that in whatever fora are offered to him.'

Subject: Mistrust Funds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:21:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29madrick.html?ex=1296190800&en=b07385bb67401325&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Mistrust Funds By JEFF MADRICK If anyone still harbors the fantasy that the business scandals of the past few years were the handiwork of just a few bad apples, they should read John C. Bogle's 'Battle for the Soul of Capitalism.' Bogle has been a Wall Street insider for 50 years, the founder and long the chief executive of Vanguard in Philadelphia, one of the three or four largest mutual fund management groups in the nation. At Vanguard, he refused to charge the high annual fees that his competitors did. He was also among the first to offer investors index funds, at a time when most mutual fund managers were still claiming they could easily beat the market averages. (Index funds essentially duplicate the market averages, and have typically outperformed most of the pros over time.) In this book, Bogle abhors what he sees as rampant cheating among his peers - not only mutual fund managers but brokers, bankers, lawyers and accountants. It's not just a few bad apples, he says: 'I believe that the barrel itself - the very structure that holds all those apples - is bad.' Consider Jack Grubman. He may have been the best paid of the analysts who made fortunes partly if not largely based on conflicts of interest. But he was not alone. Grubman earned $20 million in a single year in part by urging brokerage customers to buy the stocks of the corporations that his parent company, Citigroup, had as investment banking clients. When Attorney General Eliot Spitzer of New York State charged a wide swath of investment banks with similar conflicts of interest, however, 8 of the 10 largest companies on Wall Street decided they had better settle the suit. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, among others, gave back profits and paid penalties of $1.4 billion, and altered the inherent conflicts in their managerial policies as well. Nor was it only a handful of notorious companies like Enron and WorldCom that, under the tutelage of the most prestigious lawyers, bankers and accountants in the business, overstated their profits. Bogle totes up about 60 major corporations that had to restate their earnings - and this was not an inclusive list. Their stock market value equaled $3 trillion. That is 'an enormous part of the giant barrel of corporate capitalism,' he writes. Or take the mutual fund industry, which Bogle knows best and which angers him most. Leaders boasted how clean they were compared with their colleagues at the investment banks and brokerage firms. But the relentless Spitzer found that dozens of them were rewarding good customers with secret and highly lucrative trading favors. As for executive stock options, which tied compensation to the company's stock price and made so many businessmen extraordinarily rich, they encouraged managers to manipulate short-term earnings to prop up stock prices. Many people are still reluctant to concede that abuse was so widespread, since what they fear most is an assault by government in the form of tougher regulations. Unsurprisingly, loud complaints are now being lodged by influential lobbyists in Washington about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the only serious measure passed in the wake of the scandals to control business excess. And the tough-minded chairman of the Securites and Exchange Commission, William Donaldson, recently stepped down in the face of opposition from the White House and business interests. Unfortunately, Bogle is less good at telling us how to fix the problems than he is at telling us what went wrong. He wants to believe that if we put the owners - that is, the shareholders - back in charge, most of the fraud, deceit and greed would dissipate like the morning mist. Genuine shareholder democracy, he argues, would require chief executives to worry about the long-term health of the company, not the short-term fluctuations of stock prices. They would be far less tempted to manipulate earnings. In particular, if shareholders had appropriate voting power, the abuses associated with executive stock options could be reduced. Because shareholders do not have adequate voting rights, Bogle says, reform continues to be stymied. But are shareholders inherently more ethical than corporate managers? Did they complain about 'short-termism' when stock prices were at their heights in the late 1990's, or only after their stunning fall? Wouldn't they tolerate a little manipulation for a higher stock price? It seems as if Bogle prefers to avoid the more obvious issue: that government looked the other way. Bogle acknowledges this lack of effective regulation, but he considers it a side issue. The fact is that Washington has relaxed financial regulations under both Democratic and Republican administrations, opening the doors to conflicts of interest between brokers and investment bankers. In 1998, government, despite concerns, refused to separate consulting and auditing business. Although the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management nearly pushed the world's financial markets over the brink that same year, the government demanded no further disclosure of the well-concealed financing of the industry. But the open and honest flow of information is the only true check on the manipulation of the markets. Government regulation and independent scrutiny are critical to the process. Such regulation is a public good, like education and the highway system. If it requires a little expense on the part of business now, it will make them more money in the long run. Bogle should have pushed his fine analytical ability and strong moral sense farther. Still, we should be grateful that an insider like him is willing to elucidate the often murky and apparently deceptive workings of the Street. John Bogle has been making Wall Street a better place for decades. His book is yet another important contribution in an illustrious career. Jeff Madrick is the editor of Challenge magazine and teaches at Cooper Union and The New School.

Subject: Street-Fighting Man From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:19:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/books/review/29feingold.html?ex=1296190800&en=2e982eb4cc8b2600&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Street-Fighting Man By MICHAEL FEINGOLD PEOPLE who complain that we have so few biographical facts about Shakespeare, and use that lack of data as an excuse for indulging in fantasies about who 'really' wrote his plays, should ponder the case of Christopher Marlowe (at one time a favorite candidate for that ghostwriter role), about whom even less is known. He flashed across the Tudor literary scene for a stunningly brief period, raising the standards of poetic achievement and transforming Elizabethan theater. Few pre-Shakespearean English plays still hold the stage; they include at least four of Marlowe's. In recent decades, 'Tamburlaine the Great' (its two parts usually condensed into one evening), 'The Jew of Malta,' 'Doctor Faustus' and 'Edward II' have had regular revivals. This is all the more remarkable because Marlowe (1564-93), unlike Shakespeare, is not the writer to comfort an audience with a jolly evening in the theater. A contrarian of epic stature, he's most often celebrated as an embodiment of rebellion in every form: a cynic about all received ideas of society and religion; almost certainly a homosexual; most likely a government spy; probably an atheist; possibly even a dabbler in the occult; and, to round off the list, a glorifier of violence who died in a tavern brawl. Much of the eyewitness testimony we have of Marlowe was supplied by people anxious to depict him, for their own petty reasons, as an evil influence: he is the man who supposedly said that Jesus' mother was 'dishonest' and that 'all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools.' Among Renaissance bad-boy artists, he ranks in the top echelon, along with his equally notorious Italian contemporary, the painter Caravaggio. The hot-blooded, wickedly sardonic rebel Marlowe, however, can be glimpsed only intermittently in Park Honan's new biography, 'Christopher Marlowe: Poet and Spy.' Honan, best known for his widely read 'Shakespeare: A Life,' has an agenda. He does not want to whitewash Marlowe (hardly possible anyway, given the evidence), but he does want to rescue his subject from the bad-boy image that makes Marlowe a figure of popular myth, and restore him to his full value as poet and dramatist. The result is a book that frustrates, and occasionally infuriates, as often as it fascinates, because at its core the myth fits the facts of Marlowe's life and art only too well, driving Honan into an apologetic swarm of digressions, speculations, half-evasions and logic-choppings. He gives a sumptuously detailed picture of Marlowe's world, but rarely brings the poet himself into focus. In its unsteady shifts from topic to topic, his work sometimes resembles one of those Renaissance miscellanies in which scholars delight: from it you can learn about Elizabethan wills, trade guilds, ecclesiastical politics, real estate deals, military maneuvers, family trees, college living conditions and every kind of courtly or legal intrigue. But when it comes to Marlowe himself, Honan buries the scant available evidence in a small forest of imagined scenes and unwarranted assumptions. 'With success, Marlowe had become fonder than ever of personal display.' About Marlowe and Shakespeare: 'Did they meet often? Or become intimate? Plainly, no record of their talk together survives.' In fact, we know nothing about Marlowe's fondness for personal display, or whether he and Shakespeare ever met. One can't wholly blame Honan for making free with such limited materials. The information on Marlowe is so tenuous that there is uncertainty even about his last name, which appears variously in the existing documents as Marlow, Marle, Marley, Morley, Marlen, Marlin and Marlinge. The son of a debt-ridden cobbler in the cathedral town of Canterbury, Marlowe, or whatever his name was, must have shown his gift for language early on: he was granted a scholarship to the best local school and a subsequent one to Cambridge, from which he emerged after six years with an M.A. degree in 1587. By that time, Marlowe was apparently both an aspiring poet and a spy. Recently unearthed documents cited by Honan suggest he received his degree, after academic years that included long, unexplained absences, only at the intervention of the Privy Council, on grounds of his unspecified 'good service' to the nation. More than likely, this 'service' involved posing as a Roman Catholic. In Tudor England, religion and politics were one: roiled by sectarian strife, the country was menaced on one side by Catholics, with support from France and Spain, and pressured on the other by Puritan extremists who viewed the official Church of England as too dangerously close to 'papistry.' Expatriate English colleges at Reims and elsewhere sent home streams of double agents, intending to reconvert England to Catholicism, by assassination if necessary. Elizabeth's advisers maintained an elaborate network of agents and couriers, to keep tabs on one another as well as on these infiltrators and on heretical Puritans; more than one of Marlowe's Cambridge classmates ended up martyred or in exile. We know little of Marlowe's own activities as a spy, any more than we do about the composition of his plays or what profit he derived from their tremendous success. That they were successful is undoubted. Once produced, plays in that era were the theater company's property, kept out of print (to avoid rival productions) until they went out of use, unless demand for them was exceptional. Marlowe's effect on the public can be gauged by noting that the two parts of 'Tamburlaine' and 'Doctor Faustus' were both published within a few years of their production; the latter went through an extraordinary nine quarto editions by 1632. Part of what made, and still makes, Marlowe's drama fascinating makes Honan uncomfortable. Wishing to find something in the plays besides a brute, unrepentant nihilism, he tries to present a case for Marlowe as a philosopher, struggling to analyze society and religion, and as a satirist attacking the abuse of power. This leads to some of his fuzziest writing, for the plain truth is that Marlowe is admirable exactly to the extent that he is unredeemable. The world of his plays is a vicious one, in which the temptations to attain power and, once attained, to abuse it are mankind's principal motives. No one would deny either Marlowe's analytic gifts or his darkly satiric temperament, but they are put at the service of an all-encompassing negativity. Writing for a Christian nation that lived in constant suspicion of foreigners and heretics, he finds Muslims, Jews, overt homosexuals and other outsiders marginally preferable to Christians, because their bloodlust and greed come without Christian hypocrisy attached. His superheroes are all also supervillains. ('Tamburlaine,' C. S. Lewis memorably quipped, is 'the story of Giant the Jack Killer.') When they die, fighting or defeated, they may regret, but never repent, their deeds. The obvious affinity between Marlowe's bleak vision and those of our own time, from the ultraviolent Terminators and Hannibal Lecters of filmdom to the wholehearted despair of Beckett's desolate mindscapes, makes him seem, in many unnerving ways, more our contemporary than Shakespeare. Even the disheartening fixation on gratuitous cruelty in so many plays today finds an ancestor in him. Shakespeare learned from him technically, in matters of both verse and stagecraft, and was inspired by him to take risks. That he can't be equated with Shakespeare (and could not possibly have written Shakespeare's plays) is self-evident precisely because his own sensibility is so distinctive. Honan had no need to defend Marlowe's reputation from imaginary detractors. Marlowe's forthrightness proves that a bold attack is the best defense. But though his absence from his own biography is a pity, the rich, complex vision of Elizabethan life that 'Christopher Marlowe' supplies can make his poetic gift for cutting to the passionate core of that life seem even more astonishing.

Subject: Corporate Wealth Share Rises From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:18:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/national/29rich.html?ex=1296190800&en=784822e4b0735ee5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Corporate Wealth Share Rises for Top-Income Americans By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON New government data indicate that the concentration of corporate wealth among the highest-income Americans grew significantly in 2003, as a trend that began in 1991 accelerated in the first year that President Bush and Congress cut taxes on capital. In 2003 the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, up from 53.4 percent the year before, according to a Congressional Budget Office analysis of the latest income tax data. The top group's share of corporate wealth has grown by half since 1991, when it was 38.7 percent. In 2003, incomes in the top 1 percent of households ranged from $237,000 to several billion dollars. For every group below the top 1 percent, shares of corporate wealth have declined since 1991. These declines ranged from 12.7 percent for those on the 96th to 99th rungs on the income ladder to 57 percent for the poorest fifth of Americans, who made less than $16,300 and together owned 0.6 percent of corporate wealth in 2003, down from 1.4 percent in 1991. The analysis did not measure wealth directly. It looked at taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and rents. Income from securities owned by retirement plans and endowments was excluded, as were gains from noncorporate assets such as personal residences. This technique for measuring wealth has long been used in standard economic studies, though critics have challenged that tradition. Among them is Stephen J. Entin, president of the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation in Washington, which favors eliminating most taxes on capital and teaches that an unintended consequence of the corporate income tax is depressed wage rates. Mr. Entin said the report's approach was so flawed that the data were useless. He said reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains may have prompted wealthy investors to sell profitable investments. That would show up in tax data as increased wealth that year, even though the increase may have built up over decades. Long-term capital gains were taxed at 28 percent until 1997, and at 20 percent until 2003, when rates were cut to 15 percent. The top rate on dividends was cut to 15 percent from 35 percent that year. The White House said it did not believe that the 2003 tax cuts had much influence on wealth shares. It also said that since wealth is transitory for many people, a more important issue is how incomes and wealth are influenced by the quality of education. 'We want to lift all incomes and wealth,' said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman. 'We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap.' 'The president thinks we need to close the income gap, and he has talked about ways in which we can do that,' especially through education, Mr. Duffy said. The data showing increased concentration of corporate wealth were posted last month on the Congressional Budget Office Web site. Isaac Shapiro, associate director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, spotted the information last week and wrote a report analyzing it. Mr. Shapiro said the figures added to the center's 'concerns over the increasingly regressive effects' of the reduced tax rates on capital. Continuing those rates will 'exacerbate the long-term trend toward growing income inequality,' he wrote. The center, which studies how government affects the poor and supports policies that it believes help alleviate poverty, opposes Mr. Bush's tax policies. The center plans to release its own report on Monday that questions the wisdom of continuing the reduced tax rates on dividends and capital gains, saying the Congressional Budget Office analysis indicates that the benefits flow directly to a relatively few Americans.

Subject: Unions Pay Dearly for Success From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:16:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/business/yourmoney/29view.html?ex=1296190800&en=452ac4a9c7603667&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Unions Pay Dearly for Success By EDUARDO PORTER WANT to hear some good news for the labor movement? The percentage of American workers who are union members remained almost steady in the private sector last year. The bad news is that the figure stood at 7.8 percent — less than a third of the rate of the early 1970's. Even worse for labor, the rate of unionization has further to fall, according to most labor economists and experts in industrial relations. 'In the immediate future, unions will carry on shriveling in the private sector,' said Richard Freeman, a professor of economics at Harvard. While union leaders attribute the weakness to everything from insufficient organizing vigor to a hostile political environment, unions, in a way, are victims of their own success. They have obtained better wage and benefit packages for workers, and in an increasingly competitive business world, that is working against them. Businesses in some competitive industries cannot afford unions. In the United States, unions may have done their job only too well. Last year, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, private-sector workers who were members of unions typically made 23.1 percent more per week than their nonunion colleagues, up from a 22.4 percent premium in 2004. In a recent study, David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth, and Alex Bryson, a researcher at the Policy Studies Institute in Britain, found that this wage premium was higher in the United States than in most other big industrial countries — including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Britain and New Zealand. This success is coming at a steep price. The high premium, Mr. Bryson said, 'could well be why management is particularly anti-union in the U.S.' Pressured by increasing competition from producers in cheap labor markets like China and nonunion rivals at home, businesses are resisting unions with an increasing fervor. Union organizing has plummeted. The number of representation elections in American workplaces has declined sharply. And the share of these elections won by unions is down to about half, from more than 70 percent in the 1950's. And even as employment in nonunion businesses has grown, union jobs have disappeared. Companies either moved them overseas or, overwhelmed by competition, eliminated the work entirely. 'The more competitive a market the more limited is unions' bargaining power and ability to organize,' said Barry T. Hirsch, a professor of economics at Trinity University in San Antonio. 'Unions raise wages and so reduce profits. This is less and less feasible the more competitive the environment.' Consider the ailing auto industry. In the past two months, the top two American automakers announced plans to cut some 60,000 jobs, most of them union positions. That's roughly the number of nonunion jobs created in the American transplants of the German, Japanese and Korean car companies who are dining quite nicely at the expense of the American companies once known as the Big Three, and at a table that used to be their exclusive domain. While the auto sector remains heavily unionized, relative to other businesses, this dynamic helped to drive down union penetration in the industry to around 30 percent in 2004 from about 60 percent 20 years ago. Competition has ravaged unions in other sectors. Trucking de-unionized after the industry was deregulated in the 1970's — prompting a stampede of nonunion owner-operators into the market. Unionization in the steel industry has dropped by half in the past 20 years as the big integrated steel mills have come under pressure from foreign steelmakers and nonunion domestic minimills. The central problem for unions stems from a core strategy: to organize all the businesses serving a given market, and thus avoid putting unionized companies at a disadvantage relative to their competition. 'One of unions' most fundamental jobs is to take wages and benefits out of competition,' said Bruce S. Raynor, the general president of Unite Here, the union of workers in the textile and hotel industries. While this strategy worked well when a few industrial giants had a virtual lock on the nation's consumers, it started to fall apart as deregulation and trade liberalization took hold in the 1970's, ushering in an era of more intense competition in business. 'Regulation in many cases put a floor under competition,' said Ruth Milkman, director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Los Angeles. 'In a way it made unionization possible by eliminating cutthroat competition. In manufacturing what's changed is international competition.' Despite the long odds, unions still have potential pockets of growth. In the public sector, where there is little competition, unionization rates remain at more than 35 percent. Mr. Bryson said that even in the private sector, there were still industries in which competition was modest and corporations could raise prices without fear of losing markets to rivals. On economic grounds, these industries would seem prime candidates for union expansion. What kind of businesses are we talking about? Hospitals would be one place to look. Energy companies would be another. Or why not an even bigger prize? Perhaps the labor movement should forget about cars and focus instead on a company that has crushed much of its competition: Wal-Mart.

Subject: Some Successful Models Ignored From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:12:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/04/business/04MEDI.html?ex=1378008000&en=c37240b2abd9467e&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND September 4, 2003 Some Successful Models Ignored as Congress Works on Drug Bill By ROBERT PEAR and WALT BOGDANICH By most measures, the Department of Veterans Affairs has solved the puzzle of making prescription drugs affordable for at least one big group of Americans without wrecking the federal budget. Wielding its power as one of the largest purchasers of medications in the United States, the V.A. has made it possible for millions of veterans to pay just $7 for up to a 30-day prescription. Thousands are signing up for the program every month. Yet for all its apparent success, lawmakers have disregarded the V.A. model — and others like it that use the government's immense power to negotiate lower prices — as they try to give older Americans relief from rising drug costs while reshaping how the elderly get medical services. Instead, a Congress deeply divided by ideology has given birth to legislation that would add prescription drug coverage to Medicare, but that many experts say would fall short of meeting the needs of the elderly. The benefits, costing $400 billion over 10 years, are complex and limited, and the legislation relies in part on cost control mechanisms that are untested or unproven. In fact, Congress would exempt the drug industry from the kind of cost controls that are in place for virtually every other major provider of Medicare services. 'The legislation pending in Congress does more to deform than to reform Medicare,' said Dr. Paul M. Ellwood, a noted health policy analyst who was an early proponent of managed care. 'Instead of creating a system of readily understandable choices based on cost and quality, Congress is writing legislation that will increase the complexity of Medicare, so it will be more difficult for seniors to navigate.' The effort to forge a final deal on Capitol Hill, blending separate House and Senate measures, was high on the agenda as Congress returned to work this week. Lobbyists and health policy experts say the likelihood that a comprehensive drug bill will become law this year seems no better than 50-50. But Thomas A. Scully, administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said yesterday that he was '95 percent sure we will get a Medicare bill out of Congress.' Politically, the legislation is a marriage of convenience, combining drug benefits, long sought by Democrats, with a Republican approach to administering the benefits, through private health plans and insurance companies. To secure votes, the Senate bill was festooned with provisions aiding various interest groups. There is language that would, for examples, aid chiropractors; marriage and family therapists; doctors in Alaska; hospitals in Iredell County, N.C.; operators of air ambulance services; and many other groups. The need for bipartisan support 'led to a series of compromises that resulted in a hodgepodge of a bill,' said Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, who opposed the Senate bill. Michael Valentino, a manager of the V.A.'s drug benefit program, praised Congress for trying to help Medicare patients buy prescription drugs. But he added that the coverage could be expanded if Medicare took full advantage of its purchasing power. John C. Rother, policy director for AARP, the lobbying group for older Americans, said the legislation was a 'real godsend' for people with low incomes or high drug expenses. 'But for many others,' he said, 'the benefits will be seen as inadequate.' Premiums and drug benefits could vary from plan to plan, state to state and year to year. The Senate and House bills both establish a standard drug benefit, with substantial coverage upfront and catastrophic coverage for high costs. But beneficiaries would have to pay all drug costs in the middle, until their out-of-pocket costs reached a certain level — $3,700 a year under the Senate bill and $3,500 under the House bill. Robert D. Reischauer, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, said the gap in coverage 'defies rational policy analysis' and was not found in commercial insurance. Congress engineered the gap to keep the drug plan's cost under the $400 billion limit. `Political Judgment' Drug companies say they support covering prescription drugs under Medicare. But in the last few years, they have invested several hundred million dollars in campaign contributions, lobbying and advertising to head off price controls. The legislation 'reflects a political judgment that the pharmaceutical industry' would block 'price controls or any arrangement that used the concentrated purchasing power of the government to buy prescription drugs,' said Paul B. Ginsburg, president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a private research institute. The V.A. plan, by contrast, owes its relative success to its buying power — and a willingness to use it. Its doctors and pharmacists analyze research to establish a list of preferred drugs for various conditions. The V.A. obtains discounts through bulk purchasing arrangements — using generic drugs where possible — and competitive bidding. 'We are so far ahead of anybody else, it's almost ridiculous,' Mr. Valentino said. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences found that the V.A.'s methods had achieved nearly $100 million in savings over the previous two years. But Congress decided not to adopt the V.A.'s approach; in fact, it was not seriously considered. Lawmakers also passed up other alternatives, including vouchers for the purchase of health insurance and proposals to assist only people with low incomes. Representative Michael Bilirakis, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, said that if Medicare pooled its purchasing power, it would amount to 'a form of price controls.' 'That's not America,' Mr. Bilirakis said. 'Many of my constituents would feel that price controls are a great thing. But ultimately some of us have to be responsible.' The political imperative that seems to have produced today's fragile consensus stems from complaints that every lawmaker has heard from constituents: prescription drugs cost too much. At Medicare's inception in 1965, policy makers chose not to cover outpatient drugs, because medicines now so indispensable to treating disease either did not exist or were relatively inexpensive. Instead, Medicare focused on big-ticket items like hospital care and doctors' services. For years, Medicare mostly paid whatever bills health care providers submitted, but by the 1980's Congress decided it needed to restrain rising costs. In subsequent years, Medicare prospectively set limits on what it paid major health care providers, including hospitals, doctors, skilled nursing homes and home health agencies. The controls have never been popular with the health care industry. 'In Medicare, the tendency is to set prices too low,' said Dr. Donald J. Palmisano, president of the American Medical Association. Indeed, Carmela S. Coyle, senior vice president of the American Hospital Association, said 67 percent of hospitals lose money on Medicare. By and large, however, the measures have managed to slow the growth of Medicare costs, say many health policy experts, including Bruce C. Vladeck and Nancy-Ann DeParle, who ran Medicare under President Bill Clinton. Drug costs, however, have skyrocketed, and while most of the elderly get some help from retiree health benefits, Medicaid or state programs, at least one-fourth of Medicare beneficiaries have no drug coverage. Under the bills passed this year, the government would subsidize drug coverage provided to Medicare beneficiaries by private insurers and health plans. They would bargain with drug companies to secure discounts and rebates, a task likely to be delegated to pharmaceutical benefit managers, or P.B.M.'s, the companies that already perform the service for many employers. Both bills stipulate that Medicare officials cannot 'interfere in any way' in those negotiations. For President Bush and Republicans in Congress, the concept makes sense: let the marketplace set the prices, rather than government. For years, lawmakers have found fault with Medicare's arcane and voluminous regulations. Congress has frequently intervened to tweak the formulas, taking money from some providers while giving more to others — often to those with the most persuasive lobbyists. That, in turn, contributes to anomalies in medical care, because doctors have financial incentives to perform certain services and not others. Mr. Scully, the Medicare administrator, said such anomalies were inevitable because Medicare was 'a big dumb price-fixer.' Still, Medicare has been a boon to the elderly and their children. Surveys show that beneficiaries are overwhelmingly satisfied with their care. Before Medicare, only 56 percent of the elderly had hospital insurance; the program has contributed to an increase in life expectancy and a sharp reduction in poverty among the elderly. Moreover, some studies show Medicare has done better at controlling medical costs than private health insurance. Cristina Boccuti, a researcher at the Urban Institute, and Marilyn Moon, a former public trustee of the Medicare program, said Medicare spending grew more slowly than private health insurance costs from 1970 to 2000. Republicans say such comparisons are misleading and contend that Medicare's cost controls have slowed access to new treatments and technology. Negotiated Discounts But that does not seem to be a problem for the V.A. The study by the National Academy of Sciences found that its approach had 'meaningfully reduced drug expenditures without demonstrable adverse effects on quality.' Mr. Valentino said: 'When we make our recommendations, it's not because Doctor A, in his or her opinion, believes it is the best drug. It is because the evidence says it's the best drug.' Echoing the criticisms of government investigators, he added that P.B.M.'s, by contrast, sometimes make deals favoring expensive drugs for their own financial benefit. Under the House and Senate bills, Medicare beneficiaries would have access to drug discounts negotiated on their behalf by private insurers and P.B.M.'s. Supporters of the legislation say these discounts could reduce retail drug prices by 20 percent. But Congress consciously decided to disperse Medicare's purchasing power. It did not want Medicare to establish a uniform nationwide list of preferred drugs or a price list for those drugs — mechanisms that the drug industry opposes. 'Price controls cause artificially low prices,' said Jeffrey L. Trewhitt, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. And low prices for a government program, he added, would reduce the money available for researching new drugs and could prompt drug makers to seek higher prices from patients with private insurance. Critics of the drug industry dispute such arguments — and say that they obscure the obvious. 'The obvious is that if you control prices, you pay less,' said Mr. Vladeck, the former Medicare administrator. 'There are some problems with it, and not all price controls work as well as others. But the pharmaceutical industry does have enough political juice to prevent any reasonable price controls.' The idea of giving people a choice between traditional Medicare and private health plans has deep roots. 'We must promote diversity, choice and healthy competition in American medicine if we are to escape from the grip of spiraling costs,' the Nixon administration said in 1970, in words similar to those of President Bush in 2003. In 1978, Alain C. Enthoven, a Stanford University economist, called for regulated competition among private health plans. Medicare, he said, would subsidize premiums, and the most efficient health plans would pass on their savings to consumers, so patients would have a financial incentive to enroll. Prompted by such thinking, the government offered new private alternatives to the traditional Medicare program in the 1980's, and Congress encouraged the development of health maintenance organizations. Enrollment grew, in part because many H.M.O.'s offered drug benefits not available in traditional Medicare. Medicare beneficiaries generally praised the care they received in H.M.O.'s, but the plans did not control costs as their proponents had hoped. Many H.M.O's began reducing some benefits, including drug coverage. They also pressed Congress for more money, saying that their costs were rising 10 percent a year — five times the increase in payments from Medicare. Unable to persuade Congress to close the gap, many H.M.O.'s abandoned Medicare or curtailed their participation. That track record has heightened critics' skepticism about the current legislation. 'The myth of the market,' said Lynn M. Etheredge, who worked at the White House Office of Management and Budget from 1972 to 1982, 'has a powerful sway over people's minds, despite evidence that it is not working in the Medicare program.' The Congressional Budget Office estimates that under the legislation, many private plans will cost slightly more than traditional Medicare. Moreover, there is widespread doubt that insurers — who do not now sell stand-alone drug insurance — will begin to do so. Even Mr. Scully concedes that such drug coverage 'does not exist in nature' and would probably not work in practice. The elderly are heavy users of prescription drugs, so few insurers are eager to write coverage for their drug costs alone, separate from their other medical expenses. 'It would be like providing insurance for haircuts,' Charles N. Kahn III said several years ago, when he was president of the Health Insurance Association of America. Limits of Coverage Even if President Bush signs a Medicare drug bill in the coming year, it will not be the last word. Health policy experts say that costs may well grow faster than the official projections suggest. That would increase pressure on Congress to hold down drug costs, just as lawmakers continually try to slow the growth of Medicare payments to hospitals. At the same time, when Medicare beneficiaries realize the limits of the new drug coverage, they can be expected to lobby for more generous benefits. In supporting the Senate bill, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, made clear that it was only a down payment, a foundation for more comprehensive drug benefits. Ms. DeParle predicts that the legislation will produce a huge demand for drugs, and she is far from certain that competition will do much to control costs. 'It is pretty much theory, and that is what worries me about it,' she said. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that per capita drug spending for the Medicare population will increase about 10 percent a year over the next decade. Critics of the legislation doubt its cost can be kept to the $400 billion budgeted by Congress. 'Utilization will go up dramatically, and costs could explode,' said Senator Don Nickles, Republican of Oklahoma. For now, however, politicians have chosen to favor drug companies over Medicare beneficiaries, said Prof. Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health care economist at Princeton University. 'On one hand, there is the taxpayer and, in fact, patients who would benefit from having costs controlled,' Dr. Reinhardt said. 'But on the other hand, those people do not finance the campaigns of these legislators.' Ms. Coyle of the hospital association declined to address the question of why her industry, but not the pharmaceutical industry, had been subject to price controls. Her group's biggest concern about the legislation, she said, is that 'we are not addressing the larger problem: a health care system that is fundamentally broken.' The nation, she said, wants the best care for everyone, but needs to decide if it is willing to bear the cost. So who would be the big winners if the legislation is signed into law? 'The short-run political winner is George Bush, because this law will not be understood by anyone,' Dr. Reinhardt said. 'It is so complex. But he can go in 2004 and say, `Look, for 30 years you tried to get a drug benefit — I got you one.' ' And, he added: 'The elderly will benefit, too, relative to nothing. Who loses? Obviously the people who pay for it.'

Subject: Imprint on Drug Bill From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:10:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/05/business/05MEDI.html?ex=1378094400&en=29aaa8783a44b1da&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND September 5, 2003 Industry Fights to Put Imprint on Drug Bill By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and GARDINER HARRIS In the thick of the 2000 presidential campaign, executives at Bristol-Myers Squibb, one of the nation's largest drug companies, received an urgent message: donate money to George W. Bush. The message did not come from Republican campaign officials. It came from top Bristol-Myers executives, according to four executives who say they donated to Mr. Bush under pressure from their bosses. They said that they were urged to donate the maximum — $1,000 in their own name and $1,000 in their spouse's — and were warned that the company's chief executive would be notified if they failed to give. Bristol-Myers said no one was forced to donate. But elsewhere in the drug industry, the message about the election was much the same. At some companies, officials circulated a videotape of Vice President Al Gore railing against the high price of prescription drugs. A torrent of contributions for Mr. Bush and other Republicans resulted. And the money kept flowing, right through the elections of 2002. Those donations may soon pay off handsomely for the pharmaceutical business. Four years ago, a Democrat was in the White House and the industry was bitterly fighting a prescription drug proposal that it said would have led to price controls. Today, a Republican-controlled Congress is preparing to send a Republican president a measure with a central provision — the use of private health plans to deliver Medicare prescription drug benefits — that is tailor-made to the industry's specifications. The story of how pharmaceutical manufacturers helped shape the Medicare drug benefit is, in part, that of a calculated decision by a lucrative industry to throw its financial weight behind one political party — with $50 million in campaign contributions over the last four years, the vast majority to Republicans. It is also the story of a dogged, mostly unseen campaign that included a small army of lobbyists in Washington and a network of industry-financed groups, which carried the drug makers' message to the public. Throughout, the industry had a single goal: to defeat any legislation that would let Medicare negotiate steep discounts on the prices of medicines for its 40 million beneficiaries. Instead, if there had to be a prescription drug benefit, industry executives agreed that it should be administered by the private sector, where insurance companies would negotiate on their own, without Medicare's influence. That is precisely what will occur if bills passed by the House and Senate are reconciled and a law is signed by President Bush. Both measures envision taxpayers spending $400 billion over the next 10 years on the drug makers' products, while banning government officials from even seeking volume discounts. 'The drug lobby has just emasculated Congress with tons of money,' said Representative Pete Stark of California, the senior Democrat on the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, whose Republican leaders wrote the House Medicare bill. 'They bought themselves a deal.' But Republicans say that their legislation will lead to discounts and that the industry gave up as much as it got. 'I think the drug industry would rather not have any bill,' said Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is a driving force behind the legislation. 'But they know there is going to be a bill because of public demand for it, and I think they are just swallowing hard.' For the manufacturers, the stakes could hardly be higher. The United States, the last industrialized country with unregulated drug prices, provides half of the industry's revenues, up from less than a third a decade ago, and most of its profits. And the elderly are its best customers. Some companies estimate that up to half of their sales in the United States come from drugs bought by the elderly. Pfizer alone sells medicines to treat cholesterol, blood pressure and arthritis problems that brought in $17 billion last year — nearly all from Medicare-eligible patients. Some companies, like Merck, are pressing hard for the legislation, while others are lukewarm. A number of drug executives say they fear that the proposed benefit is so skimpy that Congress will be forced over time to improve it — a move that will eventually lead to price controls. One described the measure as 'deeply flawed.' Yet even those drug executives with reservations say they will not stand in the legislation's way. A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry trade group, said that passing a Medicare drug benefit 'remains the top priority.' 'I kind of hate to say the industry got what it wanted,' said Ian Spatz, vice president for public affairs at Merck. 'But I think it's a fair solution that does give people access to our medicines, and does it in a way that is least likely to lead to price controls.' The Beginnings Clinton Plan Spurred Industry Into Action It was the White House — the Clinton White House — that provided the impetus for the drug makers' long-running campaign to shape the public discussion about a Medicare drug benefit. Late in his second term, Mr. Clinton proposed giving elderly Americans some relief from the cost of prescription drugs. Knowing that a benefit administered by Medicare would never pass muster with Republicans, he called for Medicare to contract with private pharmaceutical benefits managers, or P.B.M.'s — one per region of the country — to manage drug purchases for the government. The drug industry hated the idea. Private benefits managers had muscled their way into positions of considerable power just a few years earlier, and drug makers were stunned by their ability to drive down prices and even shift sales to competitors' pills. So the drug makers took a page from the insurance industry's successful Harry and Louise advertising campaign, which helped defeat the Clinton health care plan in 1994. This time, an arthritic bowler named Flo was featured in a $30 million ad campaign. Flo's message was simple and direct: 'I don't want big government in my medicine cabinet.' The ads were devastatingly effective — and infuriating to the Clinton administration, which responded by threatening the industry with price controls and issuing reports that excoriated drug prices and profits. With the drug companies being painted as pariahs, a handful of executives concluded that they could not stand in the way of a Medicare drug benefit forever. Among them was Raymond V. Gilmartin, the chief executive of Merck. 'We came to believe that people will deal with the affordability of medicines one way or another — either through access and competition or price controls,' Mr. Gilmartin said. 'We decided that getting seniors access reduced the risk of price controls.' On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, was quietly reaching out not just to Mr. Gilmartin, but to Gordon Binder, then the president of the industry trade group. 'It was apparent to me that if they were going to block it, nothing was going to be achieved,' Mr. Kennedy said. 'I've been around here long enough to know that was the case. So the question was whether you could find any common ground.' Administration officials also had talks with industry officials, hoping for a compromise. But when news of conciliatory moves between drug makers and Democrats became public, some Republicans and a few industry executives were furious. Executives at several companies suspected that Mr. Gilmartin supported a drug benefit because he had hopes that Medco, a Merck pharmacy benefits subsidiary, would land a crucial role in buying drugs. 'Having the whole benefit run through a couple of P.B.M.'s — especially if one were Merck-Medco — could be a disaster,' said one industry executive, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another, at a different pharmaceutical company, said, 'Gilmartin wrapped himself in some clever rhetoric of private-sector solutions, and it used to drive us crazy.' Merck has since spun off Medco, and Mr. Gilmartin said that his support of a Medicare drug benefit had nothing to do with Medco. In the end, the talks between the drug industry and Democrats went nowhere. The industry pinned its hopes on the election of Mr. Bush, who supported a Medicare drug benefit, so long as it was administered through the private sector. In early 2000, the pharmaceutical industry announced it would do the same. 'When Bush came out for it, that nailed it,' one industry executive said. 'Where else are we going to go?' The Contributions A Push for Money, Mostly for the G.O.P. Republican campaign officials were keenly aware of the drug industry's growing anxiety about how a drug benefit might be set up. In a letter dated April 9, 1999, Jim Nicholson, then the Republican National Committee chairman, wrote to Charles A. Heimbold Jr., then the chief executive of Bristol-Myers, to discuss plans for a coalition to lobby for issues important to drug companies. 'We must keep the lines of communication open if we want to continue passing legislation that will benefit your industry,' Mr. Nicholson wrote in the letter, which has since become public as part of litigation on campaign finance rules. He encouraged Bristol-Myers — already a major donor to Republicans — to give $250,000 to join the national committee's Season Pass program, which offered donors 'premier seating' at a fund-raising gala and 'V.I.P. benefits' at the Republican convention in Philadelphia in 2000. Bristol-Myers and its employees contributed $2 million to the party and its candidates during the 2000 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks campaign financing. That ranked Bristol-Myers second, behind Pfizer. Mr. Heimbold, who was a co-host at a fund-raiser for Mr. Bush, gave $206,830 to Republicans in the 2000 campaign, according to the center. In one letter from Richard J. Lane, who at the time was president of Bristol-Myers's worldwide medicines division and co-chairman of its employee political action committee, company executives were chided for failing to contribute in sufficient numbers. 'The politically motivated attacks against our industry have intensified during this election season and hostile candidates have one goal in mind — to shackle our industry with price controls,' Mr. Lane wrote. Although the letter said contributions were voluntary, four former Bristol-Myers executives, all speaking on condition of anonymity, said the company's huge contributions resulted in part from aggressive internal solicitations. Each said they were told that a list of those who did not contribute would be given to Mr. Heimbold. 'The need to gather in money to provide green power for our Washington activities was spelled out in excruciating detail to all company officers,' one of these executives said. A spokeswoman for Mr. Heimbold, now the United States ambassador to Sweden, said she had no comment. Federal election law bars companies from using coercion to force someone to make a political contribution. A spokesman for Bristol-Myers, John Skule, said yesterday that while 'we ask for active participation in the political process,' no one was forced to donate, and the company 'takes very seriously its duty' to comply with election laws. 'There was not one person in the company who lost their job because they didn't donate,' Mr. Skule said. The push to gather money for Republicans was prevalent throughout the drug industry during the 2000 campaign. With Vice President Gore saying that drug makers were gouging the elderly, the industry contributed $20 million to candidates and parties during the campaign, 79 percent of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. More important, the industry bought $50 million in TV commercials and millions more in radio, newspaper and direct-mail ads. The ads assured voters that Republican lawmakers were fighting for a Medicare drug benefit. Drug makers also gave the United States Chamber of Commerce $10 million more to run ads under its name. Months before the election, House Republicans passed a bill along the industry's preferred lines. The bill never gained traction in the Democratic-controlled Senate. And when Mr. Bush won the election, the drug makers celebrated. As one industry executive said, 'There were a lot of high-fives around here.' The Victories A New Congress and a New Outlook Having a Republican in the White House, however, was not enough to bring elderly people the relief they were clamoring for. In the two years after the 2000 election, a Medicare drug benefit remained bogged down in partisan politics on a divided Capitol Hill. The drug industry contributed $26 million in the 2002 election, again mostly to Republican candidates. And it again spent millions on television ads in crucial districts around the country — this time telling voters that Republican incumbents had been fighting to add prescription drugs to Medicare. 'What they did, which was so clever, was run ads in Republican districts saying, `Thank Congressman X for coming up with a prescription drug program for seniors,' ' said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, who voted against this year's Medicare bill, saying it favored drug makers while providing the elderly scant relief. 'They were helping these guys get re-elected who had done nothing.' Afterward, the drug industry claimed credit for several crucial victories that helped keep Republicans in charge of the House — and, more important, helped them win back the Senate. Once again, industry executives celebrated on election night. 'Having both houses of Congress Republican-controlled was great,' one drug lobbyist said. 'Like in Monopoly, when you get to add hotels.' By the time the 108th Congress convened in January 2003, drug makers no longer faced the danger of a benefit administered by Medicare. Lobbyists for consumer groups knew not to bother trying. 'The whole question of Medicare being the direct purchaser was off the table at the beginning of this Congress,' said John C. Rother, the chief lobbyist for AARP, the organization representing retired people. Changes within the drug industry also increased the likelihood of a drug benefit delivered through the private sector. Merck's spinoff this year of Medco assuaged much of the concern in the industry that any bill would give Merck an unfair advantage. With the framework of a privately delivered benefit already settled, industry lobbyists went to work on the details. A critical issue was ensuring that Medicare administrators could not press directly for discounts. Both the House and Senate bills have language barring Medicare officials from interfering 'in any way with negotiations' between insurers and drug companies. The industry also won a provision in the House bill that puts Medicare in charge of drug benefits for the elderly poor. That would strip the responsibility from state Medicaid programs, which have begun to rein in costs by limiting purchases of high-price drugs. In addition, several drug companies pressed lawmakers to include provisions that would allow patients to appeal insurers' decisions to deny coverage for certain drugs, and they fought an amendment to the Senate bill, offered by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York, that would have included money for studies comparing drugs' cost-effectiveness. 'It seems to me if we are going to move toward a market mechanism — which I have a lot of questions about — markets thrive on information, and this is information which is largely within the province of the drug companies,' Mrs. Clinton said. Her amendment failed, receiving just 43 votes. That was no surprise to Senator Clinton, or to others who voted against the Senate bill, including Senator McCain. 'There's no doubt in my mind that the drug industry got everything it wanted and more,' he said. 'It perhaps should be called the `Leave No Lobbyist Behind Bill.' ' In fact, the industry did not win every battle. Both the House and Senate bills contain provisions that would speed generic drug approvals — a move the manufacturers of brand-name drugs oppose. And in the House, a provision that would make it easier for Americans to import cheap drugs from Canada and Europe passed, despite intense industry lobbying against it. Later, the industry persuaded 53 senators to sign a letter saying they oppose the provision. The matter must now be settled in conference. While the lobbyists worked behind closed doors, the industry financed citizens' groups to bring its message to the public. One such group was the United Seniors Association, whose national spokesman, Art Linkletter, took to the airwaves this spring, congratulating lawmakers who voted to add prescription drugs to Medicare. Gone was the strident campaign featuring Flo, the bowler. Mr. Spatz, of Merck, said there was no need. 'Back then it was really about opposing President Clinton's proposal,' he said. 'This wasn't about opposing anything. This was about supporting something.' The industry's silence could change, of course, as the House and Senate reconcile their bills. But so far, the behind-the-scenes strategy seems to have been successful. Industry opponents see the low public profile as evidence of the drug makers' satisfaction. 'The dog is not barking,' said Bill Vaughan, a lobbyist for Families USA, a consumer group. 'I think the dog got what it wanted.'

Subject: An Exotic Tool for Espionage From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:09:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/politics/28ethics.html?ex=1296104400&en=a9a5e2de7987dc7b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 28, 2006 An Exotic Tool for Espionage: Moral Compass By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — Is there such a thing as an ethical spy? A group of current and former intelligence officers and academic experts think there is, and they are meeting this weekend to dissect what some others in the field consider a flat-out contradiction in terms. The organizers say recent controversies over interrogation techniques bordering on torture and the alleged skewing of prewar intelligence on Iraq make their mission urgent. At the conference on Friday and Saturday in a Springfield, Va., hotel, the 200 attendees hope to begin hammering out a code of ethics for spies and to form an international association to study the subject. Conference materials describe intelligence ethics as 'an emerging field' and call the gathering, not sponsored by any government agency, the first of its kind. The topics include 'Spiritual Crises Among Intelligence Operatives,' 'Lessons From Abu Ghraib,' 'Assassination: The Dream and the Nightmare' and 'The Perfidy of Espionage.' Organizers said conferees would ponder such timely issues as how many civilian deaths can be justified in a C.I.A. Predator missile strike to kill a known terrorist, or what legal assurances a National Security Agency eavesdropper should demand before singling out the phone calls of an American who was linked to Al Qaeda. 'As an intelligence officer, you are confronted with ethical dilemmas every day,' said Melissa Boyle Mahle, who retired from the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002 after 14 years as a case officer, much of it under cover in the Middle East. Ms. Mahle, now a foreign policy consultant, was scheduled to speak Saturday on the practice of rendition, in which terrorism suspects are seized abroad and delivered either to trial in the United States or to imprisonment in other countries. But in a required security review, the C.I.A. refused to clear about one-fourth of her proposed 23-page text, Ms. Mahle said Friday. She said the deletions 'gutted' the paper and made it impossible to deliver. She decided to attend the conference anyway, because she believes its goal is 'so important.' While she had received C.I.A. training on agency rules and the law, Ms. Mahle recalled that she got 'none whatsoever' in ethics. But she found that her work demanded constant moral balancing. Ms. Mahle said she came up with her own ad-hoc ethical checklist, including imagining what her mother would say about a proposed action or how she herself would feel if it were described on the front page of an American newspaper. But she believes any officer would benefit from more rigorous training in moral decision-making. 'You're the point of the spear, and no one's going to be there to make decisions for you,' she said. Not all agree. 'It doesn't make much sense to me,' said Duane R. Clarridge, who retired in 1988 after 33 years as a C.I.A. operations officer and who will not attend the conference. 'Depending on where you're coming from, the whole business of espionage is unethical.' To Mr. Clarridge, 'intelligence ethics' is 'an oxymoron,' he said. 'It's not an issue. It never was and never will be, not if you want a real spy service.' Spies operate under false names, lie about their jobs, and bribe or blackmail foreigners to betray their countries, he said. 'If you don't want to do that,' he added, 'just have a State Department.' Mr. Clarridge's view may be colored by his history; he was indicted on perjury charges in 1991, accused of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra affair. He was pardoned in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush. But skepticism about the ethics project inside the agencies is widespread, conference participants said, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by their agencies to be quoted. 'A lot of current intelligence practitioners are afraid to come,' said one who is attending. 'They think it could be held against them.' Judith A. Emmel, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence, said American intelligence officers received training on 'legal issues appropriate to their responsibilities,' and on ethical regulations governing matters like conflicts of interest. Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said the agency had 'a robust ethics training program' that focused on 'integrity, honesty and accountability' and included the use of case studies. As for the agency's deletions from proposed speeches, by Ms. Mahle or any other former employee, he said such editing was based on the secrecy agreement employees sign and was 'only to ensure that they contain no classified material,' not to censor anyone's opinions. One conference organizer, Jan Goldman, a 25-year intelligence veteran who teaches at the Joint Military Intelligence College, edited a just-published collection of articles on the subject called 'Ethics of Spying' (Scarecrow Press). The book includes 22 imaginary cases, from a female operative who must decide whether to have sex with a 'repulsive' terrorism suspect in order to stay in contact, to a counternarcotics officer who must decide whether to relocate a drug lord-informant to protect him from arrest. Less dramatic but more common ethical choices come routinely to intelligence analysts, who must decide each day what gets reported to policy makers. Melvin A. Goodman, a C.I.A. analyst from 1966 to 1990, is speaking at the conference on his experience with the politicization of intelligence during the cold war, which he believes has been echoed in the Iraq war. 'My feeling is that every problem with the intelligence in the run-up to the war was an ethical question,' from the handling of the dubious defector code-named Curveball to the cherry-picking of evidence on Iraq's nuclear program, Mr. Goodman said. 'There's a lot of pandering at the C.I.A.,' with the White House being given intelligence reports that suit known policy preferences, he said. Mr. Goodman is a critic of the Bush administration's policies, but conference organizers say they have tried to avoid bias. The top intelligence officer of the National Guard, Brig. Gen. Annette L. Sobel, is a scheduled panelist. And one organizer, Fritz Allhoff, who teaches philosophy at Western Michigan University, has written an essay arguing that torture in interrogation is ethical in some circumstances. Ms. Mahle, the former C.I.A. officer, says merely taking a tough line is not enough. If intelligence tactics are not supported by a public consensus of Americans, they can backfire, she said. For example, the past capture of terrorists abroad who were then convicted in American courts stirred little controversy. But more recent rendition cases, like the delivery of a suspect to Egypt, where he complained of torture and provided information that turned out to be false, shifted the public focus from the would-be terrorist to the actions of the C.I.A. 'If there's not a consensus, then the public focus will be not on the bad guy you got off the street, but on what the C.I.A. was doing,' Ms. Mahle said.

Subject: The Ambassador From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 07:21:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/arts/music/29sont.html?ex=1296190800&en=6eb5da1f6807de08&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 The Ambassador By DEBORAH SONTAG RAIN, a Korean pop star, actor and pan-Asian heartthrob, is preparing for two concerts at Madison Square Garden this week by studying. Day and night, an English tutor trails him through Seoul, peppering him with conversational phrases as he labors to polish his singing, his martial arts-inflected dancing and, presumably, his chest baring. You can never be too prepared to go global. At 23, Rain, who has been labeled the Korean Justin Timberlake and the Korean Usher, is a serious and driven performer (with washboard abs, winsome looks and a Gene Kelly-like ability to leap through puddles while performing his hit song, 'It's Raining'). He wants nothing less than to break down barriers, build cultural bridges and become the first Asian pop star to succeed in America. 'The United States is the dominant music market,' he said through an interpreter in a recent phone interview from Seoul. 'I would really like to see an Asian make it there. I would like that Asian to be me. That's why I'm studying the language, reading up on the culture and practicing every day to correct my weaknesses.' Since his debut in 2002, Rain, whose real name is Ji-Hoon Jung, has been riding what is known as the Korean Wave. As South Korean products, from cellphones to the music known as K-pop, have swept across Asia, Koreans have coined a new term, hallyu, to describe the phenomenon. Through his leading roles in soap operas and his music, Rain has become the personification of hallyu, which some see as a high-quality regional alternative to American cultural dominance. Rain is inspired by American pop music, but his interpretations provide, at the least, an Asian face and filter. His producer, Jin-Young Park, describes Rain's music as more 'sensitive and delicate' than American R & B and says that his choreography is crisper and more precise, influenced by classical dance and martial arts. 'In Rain, Asians might see the spirit of Usher or Timberlake or even Michael Jackson, but he makes the music theirs,' said Nusrat Durrani, senior vice president and general manager of MTV World. 'He is a huge star in the making, but, at the same time, he is a very indigenous artist and a source of local pride.' Last year, Rain sold out arenas across Korea, China and Japan, playing to more than 40,000 in Beijing and 20,000 in the Budokan in Tokyo. America, with its growing interest in Asian popular culture, from Pokémon to Bollywood, was the obvious next frontier. But Mr. Park — a 34-year-old impresario who is Rain's Henry Higgins — said that Rain will be not be officially ready to cross over until approximately October. That, according to a meticulously devised business plan, is when he is expected to achieve basic fluency in English, to release an English-language album and to smite the hearts of American young women. The performances at the Theater at Madison Square Garden on Thursday and Friday are merely a prelude. 'This is for the American music industry,' said Mr. Park, 'basically introducing Rain, giving a taste, and everybody is coming.' Most of the 10,000 people coming, however, will need no introduction. Like Julie Cho, 25, vice president of the Young Korean American Network in New York, who considers Rain 'a really good dancer' and 'very humble,' they are already fans. Immigrants or children of immigrants, they live in an era when technology makes it easy to connect with their homeland. Small-time entrepreneurs have long catered to the immigrant appetite for culture from back home. But what used to happen on a neighborhood level — a Colombian dance troupe at a Queens community center — is now taking place on a much larger scale. Like Rain, foreign artists are filling mainstream venues, their fans primed by the songs, videos, television shows and films that are ever more accessible through the Web, satellite television and new media outlets targeting hyphenated Americans. Thus, word spread very quickly through New York's Korean community that a Korean pop star was coming to town. 'There is definitely a sense of Rain-mania washing across the 32nd Street land here in Manhattan,' Minya Oh, a D.J. on New York's Hot 97 radio station, said, referring to the city's small Koreatown. This is not Rain's first performance in the States. He played at a Korean festival at the Hollywood Bowl last year, and Susan Kim, a sociologist in Los Angeles, regrets that she missed the show. She and her American-born children discovered Rain, whom they refer to by his Korean name, Bi (pronounced Bee), on a Korean music Web site called Bugs. Then they sought out videos of a Korean mini-series, 'Full House,' in which Rain plays a pop star. As of this month, 'Full House' became available with English subtitles on New York cable, too, through ImaginAsian TV, which bills itself as America's first 24/7 Asian-American network. And soon, Rain's music videos will find a platform on MTV-K, a channel catering to Korean-Americans that will begin later this year. MTV-K will feature a diverse array of Seoul music, including hip-hop artists like M.C. Mong, boy bands like HOT and melodic harmonizers like SG Wannabe (the SG stands for Simon and Garfunkel). Inevitably, non-Asian-Americans are discovering such easily accessible foreign culture, too. Because of the 'multidirectional flow of cultural goods around the world,' there is a 'new pop cosmopolitanism,' according to Henry Jenkins, professor of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In an essay in 'Globalization' (University of California Press, 2004), Professor Jenkins writes that 'younger Americans are distinguishing themselves from their parents' culture through their consumption of Japanese anime and manga, Bollywood films and bhangra, and Hong Kong action movies.' Indeed, Michael Hong, chief executive officer of ImaginAsian Entertainment, said that 60 percent of those who watch his company's Asian channels are not of Asian ethnicity. Similarly, at his company's two-year-old East 59th Street movie theater in Manhattan, which shows only Asian films, 70 percent of the audience is non-Asian. 'There is a great deal of interest in Asian content right now,' said Mr. Hong, who helped set up and promote the Madison Square Garden concert. 'Rain is just the tip of the iceberg.' In the recent interview, Rain said that he had been dreaming about Madison Square Garden since he was a child imitating Michael Jackson's moves. 'It is an incredible honor to perform there,' he said. And yet he is preparing himself for failure: 'In the case that my music is not loved by the American people, I will work very hard to fix things and hope to please them the next time.' Rain is a self-flagellating superstar. 'He thinks he's not good at all,' Mr. Park, who spoke from Los Angeles, said in flawless English. 'He's always worried. He thinks he's not blessed or talented. He thinks people are being fooled, that it's an illusion. He wants to catch up to that illusion.' Rain's family was living in a one-room house in Seoul when Mr. Park and Rain first met. 'There was something sad about him then, and there still is, something cool and gloomy,' Mr. Park said. That's how the stage name came about. 'I was told that when I'm dancing I give off the feeling of a rainy day,' Rain said, in a speaking voice that is deep and rich. Rain said that he first discovered 'the euphoria' of performing during a sixth-grade talent show, after which he tried to hang around some professional dancers in his neighborhood. But he said they treated him terribly, finally beating him up and stealing his winter jacket. He went on to be rejected — he kept count — 18 times by artistic management companies. Again and again, he was told that he would never be 'hot,' that he was too tall and 'too ugly,' primarily because he lacked a 'double eyelid.' Without cosmetic surgery to create a fold above his eyes — a relatively common procedure, though one often decried as a capitulation to Western beauty standards — he could forget about a show business career in Korea, he was told. By the time he presented himself for an audition at Mr. Park's performing arts academy, Rain was in a state of desperation. His mother was quite ill, and he himself had not been eating regularly. Rain, then 19, gave the longest and most passionate audition he could muster, nearly four hours of singing and dancing. Mr. Park (who goes by the initials J.Y. or J.Y.P.) accepted him into the JYP Academy. 'He had this hunger,' Mr. Park said. 'That is true,' Rain said. 'I was literally hungry.' Mr. Park himself had made his debut in 1994 as a 'crazy, lunatic hip-hop artist from the Ivy League' of South Korea. He was a bad-boy performer who wore see-through vinyl costumes, but he got away with being outlandish because he had graduated from a prestigious university, he said. After finding high-powered backers for an entertainment management and production company, Mr. Park opened the academy in 1998. He aimed to discover and make stars, and Rain clearly had potential as well as need. 'As soon as I signed Rain, he asked me to help his mother and explained the situation,' Mr. Park said. 'I was like, 'Yo, get in the car.' We went to his house, and I saw his mom lying there on this cold floor. We got a big surgery done on her. But then she insisted on no more treatment. She wanted me to spend my money on her son. He would tell her, 'Yo, Mom, J.Y.P. has enough money to support both of us.' She passed away a year before he debuted.' After three years of training, Rain's first stage experience came as a backup dancer for Mr. Park. Mr. Park, who still writes all his songs, created Rain's first album, 'Bad Guy,' in 2002. With the second album, 'Running Away From the Sun,' Rain said that he began asserting himself in the realm of choreography. 'By the time his third album came out in 2004, they stopped calling him little J.Y. and started calling me Rain's producer,' Mr. Park said. Soap operas are the engine of celebrity in Asia for Koreans, and so Rain's move into television was a calculated one. 'We saw Korean drama flowing all over Asia,' Mr. Park said. 'I said to Rain, 'Since you know how to act, we should use this to make you go overseas.' As soon as his second TV drama, 'Full House,' exploded all over Asia, we went over to hit them with concerts.' In Rain's most recent soap opera, 'A Love to Kill,' he plays a martial arts fighter. To alter his physique for the role, he told Korean journalists, he was jumping rope 2,000 times a day and eating only chicken breast and mackerel. This kind of discipline defines him. In addition to his acting, recording and some modeling, he is finishing a university degree in postmodern music. Although unable to attend many classes, he does all the homework, he said, plus studies not only English but Chinese and Japanese, too. Mr. Park said that Rain was motivated by a sense of obligation to his late mother. 'He promised his mom that he was going to be the No. 1 singer in the whole world,' he said. 'That's why he never parties, never drinks, never goes out and practices hours every day.' It was Mr. Park who, with 20 CD's in his backpack, set their global journey into motion. He took off for Los Angeles and went door to door 'being nobody.' After a year, he got his first call, from Bad Boy, P. Diddy's entertainment company, expressing interest in one of his songs for the rapper Mase. After that, the collaboration with Americans began. Mr. Park said he believed that other Asian pop stars have failed in the United States by trying 'to impersonate what was going on here.' He said that he and Rain wanted to avoid 'being another couple of Asian dudes trying to do black music,' by embracing their inner delicacy and letting their Asian-ness show. The moment is ripe, Mr. Park said. 'Every market has been tapped except for the Asian market, and that's 5 percent of America,' he said. 'That's our base. But I believe that we can move beyond that, and I believe that the American music industry needs to partner with us to make inroads into Asia, too.' Mr. Park said that it has been easier for him, working as a songwriter in the United States, than it will be for Rain since 'songs don't have color.' But Rain is convinced that he has crossover appeal based on his own informal market research: he had women — 'real American women' — climbing all over him at a bar in Los Angeles last year. At the end of the interview, Rain was asked if he took some pride in defying those naysayers who once thought he would never be 'hot.' 'Yeah, sure!' Rain answered in English, and then switched to Korean, leaving his female interpreter in a sputter of giggles. 'Um,' she said. 'He say, um: 'You have to come see me in my concert, and you have to be attracted to me!' '

Subject: Ms. Monk's Master Class From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 05:59:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/arts/music/29midg.html?ex=1296190800&en=5d948d8328deefb6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Ms. Monk's Master Class: Advanced Cries, Clucks and Panda Chants By ANNE MIDGETTE MEREDITH MONK's music is ethereal, visceral and direct. It relies on building blocks of sound, bits of chanted tune interwoven with cries and clucks and other manifestations of what is known as extended vocal technique. It is about using the voice as expression without mediating elements, like words. And people often describe it as simple. But anyone who thinks it is easy has never tried to sing it. This month, 19 singers learned firsthand just how 'simple' Ms. Monk's music is. Brought together in a professional training workshop offered by the Weill Music Institute of Carnegie Hall, they stood in a semicircle in a rehearsal studio on the far West Side of Manhattan one cold afternoon and nearly foundered on a complicated vocal piece. The basic elements didn't seem hard: a catchy tune for the women, a constellation of sounds refracted out of it for the men. But the tune was repeated in a four-part canon and varied subtly with each repetition at the direction of one of the singers, so that everyone had to watch for what was coming next. There wasn't much margin for error. Ms. Monk had a gimlet eye for detail, zeroing in on every bar. 'Your entrance was great,' she told one singer. 'But on the second repetition, your pitch was flat.' One participant, Holly Nadal, said later: 'You listen, and it sounds so free and improvised. You don't realize how much structure is there until you start trying to pick it apart. A lot of people who love her music, and who hate her music, think there's a certain randomness there. But it's highly, highly structured.' Ms. Nadal, a big fan of Ms. Monk, has transcribed many of her pieces from recordings. Yet, Ms. Nadal said, even she had been 'surprised at, I don't want to say rigid, but how firm and sure she is: this is right and this is wrong.' If it was new territory for the singers, the workshop, which culminated in a concert on Jan. 15, was also a departure for both Carnegie Hall and Ms. Monk. For Carnegie, it was part of an effort to vary the format of the large-scale choral workshop that has been an annual feature since Robert Shaw founded it in 1990. Last September, the Weill Institute offered a smaller workshop led by the Bach specialist Ton Koopman, an oddly matched partner to the Monk event. In addition, the Monk workshop was a step toward incorporating the broader definition of music that has been evident in programming at Zankel Hall into educational initiatives. For Ms. Monk, it was possibly even more of a departure. She has long resisted allowing anyone else to perform her work. Having begun the exploration of extended vocal technique with her own voice in 1965, she focused on solo work for years before moving on to ensemble pieces like 'Quarry' (1976), or 'Dolmen Music' (1979), which incorporated male voices for the first time. In 1978, she founded her own ensemble, and while she has cautiously expanded her reach over the years - creating pieces for the New World Symphony or the Houston Grand Opera, which commissioned 'Atlas' in 1991 - she has generally guarded the pieces created for it. Working like a choreographer, in that she develops her work with the people who perform it, she was even reluctant to write her music down. It took the publisher Boosey & Hawkes five years to get permission to publish selected works, and only two are available. (Others are in preparation.) So it was a major step last November when, as the culmination of some 18 months of events celebrating her 40th anniversary of performing, Ms. Monk allowed a marathon concert at Zankel Hall in which a number of different artists, from Bjork to the contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, offered her work back to her. The workshop furthered the idea of Ms. Monk's passing on her work, although she still didn't seem entirely comfortable with the idea. 'I sometimes think, 'Why bother with paper?' ' Ms. Monk, 63, said of the labor of scoring her pieces. ' 'Let it die with me.' But members of my ensemble, like Tom Bogdan and Katie Geissinger, said, 'We want to keep performing this music.' It's important to share the joy of doing it.' It sounded like a reminder to herself. Young singers today may be more open to Ms. Monk's work than those of an earlier generation. Ara Guzelimian, the senior director and artistic adviser of Carnegie Hall, who helped pare the original pool of more than 50 applicants to the final 19, said, 'This generation of performers is naturally able to do a wide range of things.' The participants came from many countries - including Norway and the former Yugoslavia - and represented an eclectic range of backgrounds. Caleb Burhans, for one, is a composer, violinist and singer who, as a member of Alarm Will Sound, performed at the Zankel Hall tribute in November. Another, Matthew Ryan Hoch, is a classical singer and an assistant professor of music at the University of Wisconsin. For singers, the workshop was a rare chance not only to work with Ms. Monk but also to get any kind of formal training in contemporary music. 'There's not much conservatory training for this,' said Silvie Jensen, a mezzo-soprano who has sung everything from Hildegard von Bingen to a setting of the American Constitution by Ben Yarmolinsky. 'And we all sing in ensembles to make a living, but there is no vocal degree in America for ensembles. We just learn to do it on our own.' There were challenges from the start. For Mr. Koopman's Bach workshop, participants had to show up knowing their music. But it is difficult for the uninitiated to learn Ms. Monk's music on their own. The singers were sent CD's and the scores that exist: often transcriptions of single performances, which weren't necessarily the most helpful means of conveying what was actually going on in the music. Ms. Monk and her ensemble members repeatedly urged the singers to create their own maps or cheat sheets, setting out clearly, for example, how many repetitions of a given unit they had to do, or in what order. 'If you look at the score, it will drive you batty,' Ms. Monk said of an excerpt from 'Atlas.' At one point in 'Dolmen Music,' one of Ms. Monk's greatest and most difficult pieces, the transcriber seemed simply to have given up. Furthermore, because Ms. Monk is concerned with the way her music looks as well as how it sounds, it is not something you can perform while holding a piece of paper. So the performers had a week to learn an entire two-hour concert of extremely tricky music, far outside their comfort zone, by heart. SURPRISINGLY, perhaps, given the kinds of sounds Ms. Monk's work demands, her vocal technique is relatively straightforward. The workshop focused less on the mechanics of making the unusual sounds in her pieces than on getting the forms of the music right, drilling rhythms and notes as one would in any kind of music. Morning warm-ups included a range of exercises promoting breathing and diaphragm support, including a couple handed down from Ms. Monk's mother, Audrey, who sang jingles on the radio for Muriel Cigars. Ms. Monk herself has taken voice lessons for more than 20 years with Jeannette LoVetri, who, Ms. Monk said, has given her 'a strong technical basis.' Ms. Monk is as interested as any singer in promoting vocal health; she wants to be able to go on singing for as long as possible. She isn't about to shred her voice. But she does want to push the envelope. 'Sometimes in the classical tradition there's a small parameter of what's possible,' Ms. Monk said, adding that teachers can 'transmit fear to people: 'If you do this, you'll ruin your voice.' Of course, you don't do an extended technique 19 times. You just do it once.' But Ms. Monk's aesthetic does run against conventional wisdom in that she is not interested in who can make the most beautiful sound. She is looking for other qualities. 'The best singers aren't always the best performers,' she said. For some of the singers at the workshop, even those with extensive backgrounds in contemporary music, this concept took a lot of getting used to. Furthermore, her focus extends beyond music. Often called a choreographer, and embraced by the dance world as one of its own, she integrates movement into the fabric of her pieces to a higher degree than may be immediately evident (as in the 'Panda Chant' from 'The Games,' which has everyone stepping to 6/8 time while chanting in 4/4, something Ms. Monk equated to rubbing your tummy while patting your head). She is also concerned with how the piece looks onstage, down to the last detail of what everyone is wearing. 'It's the 20th-century version of the gesamtkunstwerk,' Mr. Hoch said, referring to Wagner's ideal of a total work of art. 'It's about the whole thing.' For this reason, it is impossible to codify Ms. Monk's work into a series of performance directives. She equates her work to a sculptor's, molding a vowel color here, a movement there, illustrating with her own body and voice what she wants. 'We work years on pieces,' she said of her ensemble. 'There's a commitment of understanding that's different from me just handing people scores. These are living forms. They need time to be nurtured, developed. Each piece is a world, and the techniques of that world are revealed by that world. It's not, 'I'll just throw in a ululation here.' ' For the singers, the intensity of the experience was made all the more nerve-racking by the demands this music makes on each and every performer. 'It's more like a string quartet,' said Mr. Hoch. 'Everyone has his own individual responsibility.' The key to Ms. Monk's ensemble work is maintaining a balance between following the rules and allowing individuality to shine through, which lends the performers onstage an extra dose of vulnerability. Ms. Nadal equated it to 'soldiers at the front lines.' 'If you're not covering each other's backs,' she said, 'you're really in trouble.' Of course, as Ms. Monk pointed out to them repeatedly beforehand, the audience wouldn't be able to tell if there were mistakes. But she could. Simple? No. The Sunday concert, the culmination of all this hard work, was imperfect. Yet it was effective and impressive, given the speed at which it was put together. And Ms. Monk, conflicted to the last minute by the contradictory impulses to praise the singers' hard work and cringe at their mistakes, conceded that 'it's special to pass this on and feel that the music will go on.' She has agreed to another teaching stint this year, at the Bang on a Can summer institute in North Adams, Mass. She is now rehearsing her continuing piece 'Impermanence'; the latest incarnation will open in Tempe, Ariz., next Saturday and tour before coming to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November. Dealing with terminal illness, the piece, too, raises thoughts of her legacy. 'What have you left behind?' Ms. Monk asked. 'What have you given? What are all of us doing here?' Discounted in this is the illuminating revelation of her process that the workshop afforded - even if it ultimately confirmed that the best exponent of Ms. Monk's music remains Ms. Monk herself.

Subject: G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82 From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 05:48:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/30/politics/politicsspecial1/30alito.html?ex=1296277200&en=485566ed216e5a11&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 30, 2006 In Alito, G.O.P. Reaps Harvest Planted in '82 By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK Last February, as rumors swirled about the failing health of Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a team of conservative grass-roots organizers, public relations specialists and legal strategists met to prepare a battle plan to ensure any vacancies were filled by like-minded jurists. The team recruited conservative lawyers to study the records of 18 potential nominees — including Judges John G. Roberts Jr. and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — and trained more than three dozen lawyers across the country to respond to news reports on the president's eventual pick. 'We boxed them in,' one lawyer present during the strategy meetings said with pride in an interview over the weekend. This lawyer and others present who described the meeting were granted anonymity because the meetings were confidential and because the team had told its allies not to exult publicly until the confirmation vote was cast. Now, on the eve of what is expected to be the Senate confirmation of Judge Alito to the Supreme Court, coming four months after Chief Justice Roberts was installed, those planners stand on the brink of a watershed for the conservative movement. In 1982, the year after Mr. Alito first joined the Reagan administration, that movement was little more than the handful of legal scholars who gathered at Yale for the first meeting of the Federalist Society, a newly formed conservative legal group. Judge Alito's ascent to join Chief Justice Roberts on the court 'would have been beyond our best expectations,' said Spencer Abraham, one of the society's founders, a former secretary of energy under President Bush and now the chairman of the Committee for Justice, one of many conservative organizations set up to support judicial nominees. He added, 'I don't think we would have put a lot of money on it in a friendly wager.' Judge Alito's confirmation is also the culmination of a disciplined campaign begun by the Reagan administration to seed the lower federal judiciary with like-minded jurists who could reorient the federal courts toward a view of the Constitution much closer to its 18th-century authors' intent, including a much less expansive view of its application to individual rights and federal power. It was a philosophy promulgated by Edwin Meese III, attorney general in the Reagan administration, that became the gospel of the Federalist Society and the nascent conservative legal movement. Both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Alito were among the cadre of young conservative lawyers attracted to the Reagan administration's Justice Department. And both advanced to the pool of promising young jurists whom strategists like C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel in the first Bush administration and an adviser to the current White House, sought to place throughout the federal judiciary to groom for the highest court. 'It is a Reagan personnel officer's dream come true,' said Douglas W. Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine University who worked with Mr. Alito and Mr. Roberts in the Reagan administration. 'It is a graduation. These individuals have been in study and preparation for these roles all their professional lives.' As each progressed in legal stature, others were laying the infrastructure of the movement. After the 1987 defeat of the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Robert H. Bork conservatives vowed to build a counterweight to the liberal forces that had mobilized to stop him. With grants from major conservative donors like the John M. Olin Foundation, the Federalist Society functioned as a kind of shadow conservative bar association, planting chapters in law schools around the country that served as a pipeline to prestigious judicial clerkships. During their narrow and politically costly victory in the 1991 confirmation of Justice Clarence Thomas, the Federalist Society lawyers forged new ties with the increasingly sophisticated network of grass-roots conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and the American Family Association in Tupelo, Miss. Many conservative Christian pastors and broadcasters had railed for decades against Supreme Court decisions that outlawed school prayer and endorsed abortion rights. During the Clinton administration, Federalist Society members and allies had come to dominate the membership and staff of the Judiciary Committee, which turned back many of the administration's nominees. 'There was a Republican majority of the Senate, and it tempered the nature of the nominations being made,' said Mr. Abraham, the Federalist Society founder who was a senator on the Judiciary Committee at the time. By 2000, the decades of organizing and battles had fueled a deep demand in the Republican base for change on the court. Mr. Bush tapped into that demand by promising to name jurists in the mold of conservative Justices Thomas and Scalia. When Mr. Bush named Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, as the successor to Justice O'Connor, he faced a revolt from his conservative base, which complained about her dearth of qualifications and ideological bona fides. 'It was a striking example of the grass roots having strong opinions that ran counter to the party leaders about what was attainable,' said Stephen G. Calabresi, a law professor at Northwestern University and another founding member of the Federalist Society. But in October, when President Bush withdrew Ms. Miers's nomination and named Judge Alito, the same network quickly mobilized behind him. Conservatives had begun planning for a nomination fight as long ago as that February meeting, which was led by Leonard A. Leo, executive vice president of the Federalist Society and informal adviser to the White House, Mr. Meese and Mr. Gray. They laid out a two-part strategy to roll out behind whomever the president picked, people present said. The plan: first, extol the nonpartisan legal credentials of the nominee, steering the debate away from the nominee's possible influence over hot-button issues. Second, attack the liberal groups they expected to oppose any Bush nominee. The team worked through a newly formed group, the Judicial Confirmation Network, to coordinate grass-roots pressure on Democratic senators from conservative states. And they stayed in constant contact with scores of conservative groups around the country to brief them about potential nominees and to make sure they all stuck to the same message. They fine-tuned their strategy for Judge Alito when he was nominated in October by recruiting Italian-American groups to protest the use of the nickname 'Scalito,' which would have linked him to the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. In November, some Democrats believed they had a chance to defeat the nomination after the disclosure of a 1985 memorandum Judge Alito wrote in the Reagan administration about his conservative legal views on abortion, affirmative action and other subjects. 'It was a done deal,' one of the Democratic staff members of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the staff is forbidden to talk publicly about internal meetings. 'This was the most evidence we have ever had about a Supreme Court nominee's true beliefs.' Mr. Leo and other lawyers supporting Judge Alito were inclined to shrug off the memorandum, which described views that were typical in their circles, people involved in the effort said. But executives at Creative Response Concepts, the team's public relations firm, quickly convinced them it was 'a big deal' that could become the centerpiece of the Democrats' attacks, one of the people said. 'The call came in right away,' said Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice and another lawyer on the Alito team. Responding to Mr. Alito's 1985 statement that he disagreed strongly with the abortion-rights precedents, for example, 'The answer was, 'Of course he was opposed to abortion,' ' Mr. Sekulow said. 'He worked for the Reagan administration, he was a lawyer representing a client, and it may well have reflected his personal beliefs. But look what he has done as judge.' His supporters deluged news organizations with phone calls, press releases and lawyers to interview, all noting that on the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Judge Alito had voted to uphold and to strike down abortion restrictions. Democrats contended that those arguments were irrelevant because on the lower court Judge Alito was bound by Supreme Court precedent, whereas as a justice he could vote to overturn any precedents with which he disagreed. By last week it was clear that the judge had enough votes to win confirmation. And the last gasp of resistance came in a Democratic caucus meeting on Wednesday when Senator Edward M. Kennedy, joined by Senator John Kerry, both of Massachusetts, unsuccessfully tried to persuade the party to organize a filibuster. No one defended Judge Alito or argued that he did not warrant opposition, Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. Instead, opponents of the filibuster argued about the political cost of being accused of obstructionism by conservatives. Still, on the brink of this victory, some in the conservative movement say the battle over the court has just begun. Justice O'Connor was the swing vote on many issues, but replacing her with a more dependable conservative would bring that faction of the court at most to four justices, not five, and thus not enough to truly reshape the court or overturn precedents like those upholding abortion rights. 'It has been a long time coming,' Judge Bork said, 'but more needs to be done.'

Subject: Spies, Lies and Wiretaps From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 05:47:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/opinion/29sun1.html?ex=1296190800&en=4785bb029b806e38&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 29, 2006 Spies, Lies and Wiretaps A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies. The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant. • Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. 'President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why,' he told Republican officials. 'Some important Democrats clearly disagree.' Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier. Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway. The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful. As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from 'probable cause' to 'reasonable belief' and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review. Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance. The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to 'reasonable suspicion' for a 'non-United States person.' But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised 'both significant legal and practical issues' and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable. So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know. War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument. The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a 'wartime measure.' That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything. Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican. • The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

Subject: Paul Krugman: A False Balance From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 05:33:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ January 30, 2006 Paul Krugman wonders why some members of the media find it necessary to paint the Abramoff scandal as bipartisan when there is no evidence that it is. By Mark Thoma A False Balance, by Paul Krugman, Media Imbalance, Commentary, NY Times: How does one report the facts,' asked Rob Corddry on 'The Daily Show,' 'when the facts themselves are biased?' He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that 'facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda,' and therefore can't be reported. Mr. Corddry's parody of journalists who believe they must be 'balanced' even when the truth isn't balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as 'bipartisan.' ... Here's how a 2004 Washington Post article described Mr. Abramoff's background: 'Abramoff's conservative-movement credentials date back more than two decades to his days as a national leader of the College Republicans.' In the 1990's, reports the article, he found his 'niche' as a lobbyist 'with entree to the conservatives who were taking control of Congress. He enjoys a close bond with [Tom] DeLay.' ... Mr. Abramoff is a movement conservative whose lobbying career was based on his connections with other movement conservatives. His big coup was persuading gullible Indian tribes to hire him as an adviser; his advice was to give less money to Democrats and more to Republicans. There's nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican connections. Yet over the past few weeks a number of journalists, ranging from The Washington Post's ombudsman to the 'Today' show's Katie Couric, have declared that Mr. Abramoff gave money to both parties. In each case the journalists or their news organization, when challenged, grudgingly conceded that Mr. Abramoff himself hasn't given a penny to Democrats. But in each case they claimed that this is only a technical point, because Mr. Abramoff's clients ... gave money to Democrats as well as Republicans... But the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. ... donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word 'directed,' Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them. ... Bear in mind that no Democrat has been indicted or is rumored to be facing indictment in the Abramoff scandal, nor has any Democrat been credibly accused of doing Mr. Abramoff questionable favors. There have been both bipartisan and purely Democratic scandals in the past. Based on everything we know so far, however, the Abramoff affair is a purely Republican scandal. Why does [this] matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn't. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory. More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff's web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform. So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It's not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade. I wish the media would show more courage and stand up to the pressure that brings this about. Reporting the unpleasant truth will bring howls of protest, cries of bias, the usual chorus of voices attacking the credibility of the messenger. By some measure, some count of the number of words on the topic assessed subjectively as favorable or unfavorable, the number of guests on certain T.V. or radio programs, the particular page in the newspaper that stories appear on, how many minutes were devoted to reporting this or that, bias will be found in most any direction one is looking. I have the impression that fear of being attacked by the smear machine, fear of being labeled as biased or of some other tactic, has affected the way the news gets reported.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: A False Balance From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 09:27:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It's sad, but Republican conservatives have successfully alienated most Americans from our 'free' press to such an extent that many Americans only follow their local news if any at all. Consequently, the news media has felt the need to report a 'neutral' view of just about everything or suffer as a business.This has resulted in a very poorly informed electorate and our country has wasted little time getting into a boatload of trouble. Conservative newspaper mogal, Rupert Murdoch, (who has resurrected failing newspapers into business successes by turning them into tabloids) saw the folly in being 'neutral'. He made a huge success out of Fox news by slanting news toward a very conservative minority and in the process becoming the most successful news outlet. Murdoch is using a fundamental human flaw - we want news media to tell us what we want to hear. This is unadulterated marketing. So news media tends to go through cycles. Its message changes with the mood of its viewers. We have just gone through a conservative upswing (from the 80's to the present) and I believe we will soon be headed the other way, unless conservatives continue to be successful in scaring the public (our privacy must be extensively sacrificed to 'deal with terrorism' and the 'Democrats are soft on terrorists who have weapons of mass destruction'). In the 80's, conservatives were cutting 'taxes' (while boosting payroll taxes) and spending trillions on defending against an impending attack by the Soviets - successful manipulation of the public by spreading fear. One of the big 'successes' of those years was helping to boot the Soviets out of Afganistan. But now we are in real trouble in Iraq and a cold reality is slowly finding its way into the minds of the electorate. Legislation has been passed in the last 5 years to shield business from the obligations to provide promised pensions and health insurance to retired employees while, at the same time, punish over-indebted wage earners by making it much harder for them to file for bankrupcy protection. Small investors are not being protected from large investment brokerages taking their life savings and handing it over to their investment banking clients whose executives line their pockets with huge stock compensation packages. Legislation instituted in the 30's like Glass-Stiegel (sp?) to protect the small investor has been overturned and the conflicts have become rampant. This will not come to a good end. All of this will turn the tide as it has done in the past and conservatism will be on the outgoing tide.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman: A False Balance From: Poyetas To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Feb 01, 2006 at 06:07:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I agree Pete, However I would say that conservatism's rise has not been a constant one since the 1980's. There have been backlashes since then, particularly in the 1990's. What does it mean to be a conservative? I guess its because I find myself in the middle, there is no black or white, right or left. I don't necessarily blame the extreme right for making inroads into our basic social structure, what amazes me is how ignorant and complacent our social structure has become. THIS is the central and constant theme throughout the last 25 years, and it has been driven, in large part, by a technological, social and cultural revolution that has broken down existing value systems and left human beings not knowing where they stand.

Subject: South Africa a lesson to Palestine From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 13:58:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I’m going to give a brief history of South Africa’s change over to democracy and the significance of what was achieved. While you read my words, I ask that keep relating the words back to what is happening in Palestine. Use the African Black people (and their rulers) as a metaphor for the Palestinian majority. Use the White South Africans as a metaphor for the Israelis. Use the Black collaboration type groups and a metaphor for the Fatah party. The current leading party of South Africa is the African National Congress (ANC) and before the change over to democracy (up until the late 1980s), the ANC was by all standards a terrorist movement. The ANC had a carefully organized strategy of systematically placing bombs in civilian areas and causing mass terror in their killing campaign. Nelson Mandela was very much a part of this organization, before he was caught and put in jail. The ANC had what it (and most of the world) thought was a, just cause. After all, Africans had lived in Southern Africa for literally thousands of years only to have total White domination in a matter of 300 years. The majority Black population were not only stripped of their political rights but were literally prevented from having free movement in their own land. There was a relatively sizeable (but yet minority) groups of the Black population that sided with the Whites. These groups were either given their own homelands or were employed to help police the majority. As much as many may claim otherwise, the ANC was very closely linked to the Communist party. Their leaders were mostly full blown members of the Communist party and they preached many communist ideals, even Nelson Mandela once spoke of nationalizing South Africa’s large corporations. There is no way that the majority of White people (and their leadership) were willing to trust a form of leadership among the Black people primarily because of what had happened consistently in Africa: Black dictators taking over from colonizing powers only to have the country spiral into total economic and social poverty. Except for Botswana (Africa’s oldest democracy) 51 African countries had proved that proper western style responsible governance could not be possible (since the mid 1990’s this has changed). For this reason there was no chance that the White people would trust handing over any sort of power, no matter how just it sounded. Black people on the other hand, had suffered the terrible hand of political oppression for 40 years and had no trust in the White government structures at all levels, particularly no trust for the police services. This mistrust even stretched to the police who were themselves Black but were in essence working for the white oppressors. Under these circumstances, how on earth would the white people be convinced that this time, handing over the country was going to be different to what has happened in Africa, keeping in mind that Zimbabwe (currently mis-run by a ruthless dictator) is right next door to South Africa and serves as a consistent reminder? How were the black people ever going to trust the police, the very structure one needs to install law and order? How was the military ever going to be integrated between the Black “terrorists” and White forces who once fought each other? One must understand that the change over was not easy. It dragged on for many years with many thousands of lives lost in the process. And even after the change over, many hardships in the integrations continue to this day. The winds of change came blowing through South Africa and a momentous turn of events unfolded: Mandela stopped talking about nationalization and rather started talking about respecting the Whites for their valued contribution to a working society. From the White side, FW De Klerk, made a series of statements that slowly raised the thought in the minds of the White population, that power will not be handed over without the correct checks and balances, but implied that a hand over of power was necessary. This was not easy, and radical groups on both sides tried to undermine the whole change process. The Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO) and the Pan African Congress (PAC) tried to raise support to take over power and rid South Africa of White people. On the White side the Neo-Nazi party, Afrikaaner Weerstands Bewiging (AWB) with a symbol that looks very similar to the Nazi swastika even tried to invade the facilities where the peace negotiations were held and staged a sit-in. There are countless stories of conspiracies, criminal actions and gruesome murders from both sides that almost undermined the whole process. The true miracle came from Nelson Mandela and FW De Klerk, not only changing their own ways, but also convincing their followers to change. No one is perfect in this situation, but the outcome of their compassion for the joint benefit of a greater peace and prosperity is truly awe inspiring and they even received a joint Nobel prize for their efforts. Nelson Mandela’s story is probably the greatest, in that he came from very humble beginnings to land up in jail for over 20 years and then came out to change his people. He is without a doubt the greatest leader of our time. A living legend. Now turning to Palestine, I am sure one can see the similarities. I will now ask the same questions: Given the history between Hamas and the Israelis, the ongoing calls by Hamas for the total destruction of the Israeli state, how can the Israelis ever trust Hamas? How can the Hamas supporters ever trust the police that were appointed by Fatah to arrest Hamas activists? How does one consolidate the police, the very structures needed to install law and order? There are many more difficult questions to ask about the possibility of peace, but there are also many more similarities to South Africa and many answers to be found in South Africa’s achievement. It is appropriate that this is a very religious region and it will be a true miracle for the leader of Hamas along with the leader of Israel to not only change their own ways, but also convince their followers to change. No one is perfect in this situation, but the outcome of their compassion will be for the joint benefit of a greater peace and prosperity of the region. Most of all the leader of Hamas has opportunity to surpass Nelson Mandela as the greatest leader of our time and even go further to create a lasting peace that will transcend all the problems in Palestine to bring stability in the entire Middle East. Have the winds of change come blowing through the Middle East and are we about to witness a momentous turn of events unfold?

Subject: Interesting and important commentary From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 06:03:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting and important commentary, to which I basically agree though I do not think Hamas has the democratic political philosophy that was worked out over decades by the African National Congress. But, I am not unhopeful as long as Hamas is willing to stop violence and negotiate and work on economic development.

Subject: Appreciating Brendel at 75 From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:44:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/arts/music/27bren.html?ex=1296018000&en=e08bb6a0f2ee3f01&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 Appreciating Brendel at 75 By LEON WIESELTIER [As the pianist Alfred Brendel, who celebrated his 75th birthday this month, begins a series of performances with the Berlin Philharmonic tonight at Carnegie Hall, Leon Wieseltier, who has known Brendel for many years, offers these thoughts on his approach to life and music.] The company of Alfred Brendel is a mental spur, a kick to consciousness. In performance and in conversation, he does nothing less than dispel the tedium of life. He quickens people as he quickens pieces, not by making everything 'interesting,' which itself is tedious, the philosophy of dinner parties, but more radically, by penetrating the thick crusts of convention that form around art and emotion and sweeping them away, so that his listener, his interlocutor, is left on a higher plane, and with the memory of a revelation, large or small. Brendel has a reliably epiphanous effect. He possesses the least indolent of minds, and he embarrasses one's own mental indolence. (I can attest to such mortification, because the daemon in question is my friend.) The quality of Brendel's alertness — his sensual intellectuality or his intellectual sensuality, whatever it is — is breathtaking; and it is refined, solidified, by technique and scholarship and reflection, so that he never falls back solely upon the force of his own subjectivity. Like all musicians, he is an interpreter, but he is not another jolly manufacturer of 'interpretations.' It is the music itself that Brendel desires to disclose. He believes that at the piano he can narrow the distance from the real. Brendel's pianism is neither personal nor impersonal. That is its uncanny achievement. 'If it is not given to you to embody in works of your own creation the inmost visions of your imagination,' the soulful Edwin Fischer told a gathering of young musicians in 1937, 'then you can turn to the works of the great masters. These stand like vessels ready to receive your inspiration.' Fischer was Brendel's teacher, and Brendel reveres him. Fischer must have puzzled his disciples with his injunction. Receive their inspirations? Surely they, and not the monuments that they had come to study, were the vessels! But Fischer was imparting a significant teaching about the infinite tangle of the vessels, of the subjective and the objective, the inner and the outer, the self and the world; and this wisdom has been consistently exemplified by Brendel's recitals and recordings. For the paradoxical result of Brendel's fierce and highly idiosyncratic temperament has been to release the music. A listener may feel with perfect sincerity that hindrances and impediments on the road to the thing itself have been removed, that a path to a primary experience has been cleared. Whether or not Brendel's Beethoven is Beethoven's Beethoven, it is never merely Brendel's Beethoven. And there is nothing naïve about such a claim. This is because Brendel does not represent, or obey, a single doctrine, or method, or tendency or idea. Instead he has made himself the master of the whole epistemological mess. Brendel, you might say, is an empiricist of the piano. This great guardian of the Central European repertory, this shining knight of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, intensely dislikes the religiose abstractions of German idealism. He recalls that when, in 1971, he moved from Austria to England, he was acting partly on his attraction to the empiricism of the English. In fact, he was already practicing empiricism at the keyboard. Brendel's analysis of music has nothing to do with the importation into it of prior concepts or categories. What he knows about an individual work he learns inductively, from his strenuous immersion in the work itself. And not from any ideologically or historically preferred element in the work: the mark of a work of art, for Brendel, is the multiplicity of its strengths and the diversity of its energies. Rhythm, harmony, tone, dynamics, color, atmosphere, the structure of the piece and the spirit of the piece, Brendel investigates them all, so as to determine their most persuasive relationship to each other. And what finally unlocks the secret of a piece may not be a formal property at all. 'I believe that music as something purely abstract has tended to be the exception throughout the history of music,' he has remarked. '... It is absolutely legitimate to think about music metaphorically.' Since he believes, moreover, that 'most piano works should not be interpreted merely in keyboard terms' that most composers for the piano, titans included, have approached the instrument from extra-pianistic standpoints, with the voice or the orchestra in mind, this, too, must be taken into account in arriving at a proper apprehension of a score. (Chopin, in Brendel's opinion, may have been the only pure piano composer of consequence. But he never plays Chopin, for reasons that I do not entirely understand; it is his only sin against the musical richness of his time.) The fruits of Brendel's empiricism may be observed, to choose only one example, in his treatment of the famous four-voiced staccato chords that begin Beethoven's sonata in C major, Op. 53, the 'Waldstein.' How to balance the voices in these pianissimo eruptions? Arthur Schnabel's recommendation was to stress the extremes, the soprano and the bass, and leave the middle voices in the background — but this, Brendel quarrelsomely insists, 'will get a great deal of clarity but a totally wrong atmosphere.' For this reason, he explains, 'I play the inner voices slightly stronger than the outer voices. That makes the chord sound softer. This is an important matter.' But on what ground does Brendel choose this resolution? On the ground of an intuition that 'the external movements of the 'Waldstein' sonata seem to me like landscapes that unfold before the musical eye.' And even more specifically, on his surmise that the 'Waldstein' depicts not the daylight but the dawn; the French name for this work is 'L'Aurore.' So it is mystery that the chords must portray — and it is mystery that Schnabel's chords do not portray. In Schnabel's recording of 1934, the chords are essentially percussive, a sharp and fast hammering, almost like the music for a chase scene in a silent movie. In Brendel's recording of 1993, by contrast, percussion is brought firmly under the control of pastoral, as a lyrical rhythm of unlikely delicacy is produced out of a mixture of structural and poetical considerations. And Brendel's ravishing restraint in the sonata's short second movement, on the same recording, is an unforgettable lesson about the role of silence in music. Brendel's aversion to expectations that precede his own familiarity with the musical text has emboldened him also to challenge, and to depose, many myths. He has been a vigorous revisionist about the repertory. Against the old stereotype of sweet and diligent 'Papa' Haydn, he demanded a fuller recognition of Haydn's artistic explorations, and ardently championed Haydn's neglected piano sonatas, which in Brendel's hands were shown to be adventurous and even groundbreaking works, not least for their whimsy. Brendel has been a pioneer also in the new admiration for Liszt's writing for the piano. He toiled for decades (along with scholars and musicologists) to rescue Liszt from his own legend, showing that Liszt's works for the piano — not all of them, of course — give the lie to the glossy portrait of the composer as a high priest of bombast and sentimentality, a kind of geistlicher Liberace. In Brendel's recordings of the 'Années des Pèlerinage,' Liszt's gorgeous reminiscences of his wanderings through Italy and Switzerland, nature and culture seem to melt miraculously into each other, and it becomes hard to remember that feeling was ever regarded as a danger to form. And Brendel has refreshed much more. In his recordings and performances of Mozart's piano works in recent years, he has destroyed, or so one hopes, the incomprehensible but stubborn prejudice about the simplicity and the preciosity of these compositions; certainly no such condescension can survive his account of the Adagio in B minor, K. 540, in which he finds the amplitude of tragedy. He has also demonstrated how big the 'small' Beethoven can be: he makes the Bagatelles, Op. 126, sound like the late works that they are — sublimity at ease. On his shattering live recording of Schubert's Winterreise with Matthias Goerne, he raises accompaniment into collaboration, and reveals even more blackness in Schubert's black cycle. He inspires still more gratitude for his devotion to certain works by Weber, a composer whom it is easy to love; and also for his declaration that 'I can only see myself as a hero when I have to sit through Rachmaninoff's third piano concerto.' And here I must record the appreciation of a zealous Rossinian for the kind words that I once heard my friend speak about the 'Prélude Inoffensif.' Rossini's piano pieces belong to the history of musical pleasure, not to the history of musical greatness; but this prelude is a little jewel of its century. Brendel approaches pieces as characters, in a profoundly literary manner. 'It is the interpreter's responsibility to play the roles of different characters,' he observed in an essay on Beethoven's sonatas. 'Like every person, it would seem, every sonata has distinct qualities and potentialities.' He once described the 'Tempest' sonata as 'an angel between two demons,' and that is how he plays it. At least since Theophrastus, the fascination with the variety and the individuality of character has been closely linked to comedy, and Brendel's twinkling physiognomic interest in musical works is no exception. The discovery of humor in 'absolute' music is one of his favorite activities, his mischievous musicological retort to the humorlessness of the religion of self-expression. He delights in incongruities. Ever since the young man in Graz in the aftermath of the worst war came upon a copy of a Dada Almanach with a wicked drawing of Beethoven in a mustache on its cover, the confirmed classicist has also been a confirmed Dadaist, which is itself a delightful incongruity. Brendel possesses an invincible sense of the absurdity of life, but there is nothing weary or lugubrious about it. It is playful, not pessimistic; Brendel is the most impish man of substance I have ever known. And now he has turned 75, according to the time signature in which we all are written. When I observe this tribune of irony perfecting the techniques of rapture, and watch this skeptic in tails regularly elevating souls, I have proof of the spirituality of the humanist.

Subject: Students Score Well in Math From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:39:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/education/28tests.html?ex=1296104400&en=6ff5a9d1ca8c2799&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 28, 2006 Public-School Students Score Well in Math in Large-Scale Government Study By DIANA JEAN SCHEMO WASHINGTON — A large-scale government-financed study has concluded that when it comes to math, students in regular public schools do as well as or significantly better than comparable students in private schools. The study, by Christopher Lubianski and Sarah Theule Lubianski, of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, compared fourth- and eighth-grade math scores of more than 340,000 students in 13,000 regular public, charter and private schools on the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress. The 2003 test was given to 10 times more students than any previous test, giving researchers a trove of new data. Though private school students have long scored higher on the national assessment, commonly referred to as 'the nation's report card,' the new study used advanced statistical techniques to adjust for the effects of income, school and home circumstances. The researchers said they compared math scores, not reading ones, because math was considered a clearer measure of a school's overall effectiveness. The study found that while the raw scores of fourth graders in Roman Catholic schools, for example, were 14.3 points higher than those in public schools, when adjustments were made for student backgrounds, those in Catholic schools scored 3.4 points lower than those in public schools. A spokeswoman for the National Catholic Education Association did not respond to requests for comment. The exam is scored on a 0-to-500-point scale, with 235 being the average score at fourth grade, and 278 being the average score at eighth grade. A 10-to-11-point difference in test scores is roughly equivalent to one grade level. The study also found that charter schools, privately operated and publicly financed, did significantly worse than public schools in the fourth grade, once student populations were taken into account. In the eighth grade, it found, students in charters did slightly better than those in public schools, though the sample size was small and the difference was not statistically significant. 'Over all,' it said, 'demographic differences between students in public and private schools more than account for the relatively high raw scores of private schools. Indeed, after controlling for these differences, the presumably advantageous private school effect disappears, and even reverses in most cases.' The findings are likely to bolster critics of policies supporting charter schools and vouchers as the solution for failing public schools. Under President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind law, children in poorly performing schools can switch schools if space is available, and in Washington, D.C., they may receive federally financed vouchers to attend private schools. Howard Nelson, a lead researcher at the American Federation of Teachers, said the new study was based on the most current national data available. The federation, an opponent of vouchers that has criticized the charter movement, studied some of the same data in 2004 and reported that charter schools lagged behind traditional public ones. 'Right now, the studies seem to show that charter schools do no better, and private schools do worse,' Mr. Nelson said. 'If private schools are going to get funding, they need to be held accountable for the results.' Supporters of vouchers and charter schools, however, pointed to the study's limitations, saying it gave only a snapshot of performance, not a sense of how students progressed over time. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, said other state and local studies showed results more favorable to charter schools. Nelson Smith, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said that many students went to charter schools after doing poorly in traditional public schools, and took time to show improvement. 'Snapshots are always going to be affected by that lag,' Mr. Smith said. Officials at the federal Education Department, which has been a forceful proponent of vouchers and charter schools, said they did not see this study as decisive. 'We've seen reports on both sides of this issue,' said Holly Kuzmich, deputy assistant secretary for policy. 'It just adds one more to the list.' The study was financed with a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences at the Education Department, but was independent. The federal government is expected to issue two more studies looking at the same data and using similar techniques. Those studies are still undergoing peer review, but are expected to be released in early spring. The current study found that self-described conservative Christian schools, the fastest-growing sector of private schools, fared poorest, with their students falling as much as one year behind their counterparts in public schools, once socioeconomic factors like income, ethnicity and access to books and computers at home were considered. Taylor Smith Jr., vice president for executive support at the Association of Christian Schools, which represents 5,400 predominantly conservative Christian schools in the United States, said that many of the group's members did not participate in the national assessment, which he thought could make it a skewed sample. Mr. Smith said he did not know how many schools from other Christian organizations participated. The report found that among the private schools, Lutheran schools did better than other private schools. Nevertheless, at the fourth-grade level, a 10.7 point lead in math scores evaporated into a 4.2 point lag behind public schools. At the eighth-grade level, a 21 point lead, roughly the equivalent of two grade levels, disappeared after adjusting for differences in student backgrounds.

Subject: Mittal Steel Makes Bid for a Rival From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:37:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/business/worldbusiness/28steel.html?ex=1296104400&en=b9c0b275414fa165&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 28, 2006 Mittal Steel Makes Bid for a Rival By HEATHER TIMMONS LONDON — The biggest steel company in the world wants to get much bigger. Mittal Steel, whose founder, Lakshmi Mittal, has never been bashful about his global ambitions, shocked the industry on Friday with an unsolicited $22.8 billion bid for the world's second-biggest steel company, Arcelor. A combination with Arcelor, itself the product of a merger of French, Spanish and Luxembourg companies in 2002, would create a steel giant with a leading position in the Americas, Europe and Africa and annual revenue of nearly $70 billion. With 320,000 employees, the combined company would have over 100,000 more workers than United States Steel employed at its height. The steel industry has been fragmented into lots of local players, which then became victims when local economies faltered. By creating a global player, Mr. Mittal, ranked the world's third-richest person, behind Bill Gates and Warren E. Buffett, hopes to ride out those boom-and-bust cycles. 'This is a great opportunity for us to take the steel industry to the next level,' Mr. Mittal said at a news conference in London. 'Our customers are becoming global; our suppliers are becoming global; everyone is looking for a stronger global player.' Because steel production continues to be dominated by local businesses, combining the two largest companies would probably not raise the same competition issues that it would in other industries. Together, Mittal and Arcelor would control just 10 percent of the total market, meaning that they would probably not have an immediate effect on global steel prices. Still, a combined company could become a stronger negotiator with raw materials suppliers and with customers. Arcelor's management did not share in Mr. Mittal's excitement. Arcelor, based in Luxembourg, said Friday that the deal had a 'hostile character.' Its board members met in the afternoon to decide whether to try to counteract it, but did not issue a statement afterward. With its bid of 18.6 billion euros, Mittal is offering Arcelor shareholders cash and stock worth 28.21 euros a share, a 27 percent premium over the company's closing price of 22.22 euros on the Euronext exchange in Paris on Thursday. Arcelor's options are limited: Mittal's offer is contingent on receiving just 50 percent of Arcelor's shares, and Arcelor's shareholders are mainly institutions that are likely to have few qualms about swapping one share for the next, analysts said. There is not another steel company large enough to make an obvious 'white knight,' though Arcelor may try to do a deal of its own, which would make it too large to be swallowed by Mittal. The markets reacted favorably to the offer. Arcelor's shares traded up 28.44 percent, to close at 28.54 euros on Friday on the Euronext exchange, as investors bet that the deal would go through and that Mittal Steel would be forced to raise its price. Shares of Mittal, with headquarters in Rotterdam and London, also rose on Friday in New York, closing at $34.26, up $1.96, or 6 percent. If the deal does go through, Mittal Steel would sell Dofasco, a Canadian steelmaker that Arcelor recently agreed to buy, to ThyssenKrupp of Germany. Dofasco had been the target of a hotly contested bidding war between Arcelor and ThyssenKrupp, which Thyssen recently exited. Mittal Steel estimated that it could achieve $1 billion in savings if it acquired Arcelor after cutting overlapping administrative and manufacturing units. Together, the companies would produce 115 million tons of steel a year, dwarfing their nearest competitor, Nippon Steel of Japan, which produces just over 30 million tons a year. Mittal is offering four Mittal shares and 35.25 euros in cash for every five Arcelor shares, or about one-quarter of the price in cash. Analysts and investors said the company would probably be forced to raise its price to win Arcelor, but might not be able to raise that much more money. Mittal is using a 5 billion euro bank loan from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to finance the deal, and will have $14 billion in debt if the deal goes through. Ratings agencies warned on Friday that Mittal's ratings could be cut if it paid too much. Mittal is highly rated for the steel industry, said Fitch Ratings in a note, but 'there are numerous risks surrounding the acquisition plans, including the high likelihood the price will need to be raised.' Getting the deal done is a 'question of how much Mittal wants to push it,' said Matt Watkins, an analyst with CRU Group, an independent research firm in London. Mr. Mittal told journalists that he had tried at first to do a friendly deal, approaching Arcelor's chief executive, Guy Dollé, on Jan. 13 about the prospect, but was rebuffed. Mr. Dollé 'saw difficulties' with the plan, Mr. Mittal said. Mr. Dollé canceled their next meeting, because he had won the Dofasco bid, and then did not return another call, Mr. Mittal said. Still, Mr. Mittal and his son, Aditya Mittal, who is the company's chief financial officer, both said at the news conference that they would like Arcelor's management to become part of the new organization. The two executives also said that they would honor all of Arcelor's existing agreements with its subsidiaries and staff, and that there would be no plant closings. If the deal goes through, the Mittal family would own 51 percent of Mittal Steel, down from 88 percent. Other Mittal investors said they welcomed the deal. 'I'm very much in support of it,' said the American financier Wilbur Ross, who sold his International Steel Group to Mittal Steel last year, and is now a shareholder and member of the board. 'The industrial logic of the deal is impeccable.' ThyssenKrupp's chief executive, Ekkehard Schulz, told surprised shareholders at the company's annual meeting in Bochum, Germany, that Mittal had agreed to sell Dofasco to it after all, if the merger goes through. Mr. Schulz said that after the announcement on Tuesday that Arcelor had won the Dofasco bid, Mr. Mittal called him to offer Dofasco for 68 Canadian dollars a share, provided Mittal takes control of Arcelor. The winning bid by Arcelor was 71 Canadian dollars. Mr. Schulz said the deal would allow ThyssenKrupp to take 'this strategically meaningful step in an economically sensible framework.' Some French officials expressed some concern about Mittal's bid for Arcelor, in part because they said they received the news on Friday morning, with no prior warning. Arcelor employs many French workers and has deep roots in France.

Subject: Insulin in Inhaled Form From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:35:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/28/health/28diabetes.html?ex=1296104400&en=92b26f71c9af6016&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 28, 2006 U.S. Regulators Approve Insulin in Inhaled Form By ANDREW POLLACK and ALEX BERENSON An inhaled form of insulin won federal approval yesterday, offering the first alternative to injections for millions of people with diabetes since the drug was introduced in the 1920's. The new inhaler could offer more convenience and less pain for many of the roughly five million Americans already using insulin, diabetes experts say. Analysts predict that the therapy, called Exubera and sold by Pfizer, will be popular, with worldwide sales of as much as $2 billion a year by 2010. Pfizer said it planned to begin selling Exubera this summer. But some doctors say they are concerned that Exubera's risks to the lungs have not been properly tested, especially because Exubera works no better than injected insulin at controlling blood sugar. In clinical trials, Exubera caused a slight reduction in patients' ability to breathe. The Food and Drug Administration is recommending that patients have their lung function checked before starting Exubera and every 6 to 12 months afterward. Assuming Exubera proves safe for long-term use, the therapy could have a big impact on public health by overcoming the reluctance of some Type 2 diabetics to use insulin. Insulin is the most reliable method of controlling blood sugar, the key to reducing the risk of complications of diabetes, which affects about 20 million Americans. 'The thing that people with diabetes who have to take insulin hate the most are shots,' said Dr. Robert Goldstein, chief scientist of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International. 'So anything that can replace shots patients are going to be very pleased to have.' Exubera uses a powdered form of insulin and a special inhalation device initially developed by Nektar Therapeutics, a biotechnology company in San Carlos, Calif. The inhaler is about the size of an eyeglass case when not in use and about a foot long when it is used. It combines pressurized air with the insulin powder to create a powdered cloud of insulin that diabetics breathe in over several seconds. David Kliff, who takes insulin for his Type 2 diabetes and publishes the Diabetic Investor newsletter about diabetes-related companies, said the inhalation device might be too big and cumbersome to attract users. 'I can't see somebody whipping this out in public and using it,' Mr. Kliff said. 'People with diabetes are sensitive enough as it is.' But Paul Matelis of Miami, who has used the device in clinical trials for seven years, disagreed. 'I've used it at the Orange Bowl,' he said. Mr. Matelis, 54, who has Type 1 diabetes, said the inhaler was much more convenient than syringes. 'It's much easier to take a puff than to load up a syringe and inject yourself in a moving vehicle,' he said. Nektar licensed the insulin and the device to Pfizer, the world's largest drug company, which will pay Nektar a royalty of 15 percent on sales. Pfizer has not announced a price for Exubera, though analysts project it will cost two or three times as much as injected insulin. About 90 percent of Americans with diabetes have Type 2, which has been linked to obesity and inactivity. In Type 2 diabetes, the body does not effectively use its insulin, a hormone that is needed to process blood sugar, and can slowly lose the ability to produce it. Most people with Type 2 do not take insulin, although some experts say more patients should because they do not control their blood sugar adequately. In Type 1 diabetes, which often begins in childhood, the body is unable to produce insulin, and so people depend on injections. Exubera was approved for adults with either type of diabetes. It is designed to be taken at mealtime, meaning that people with Type 1 and some with Type 2 will still have to take one or two injections a day of longer-acting insulin. They will also still have to prick their fingers to measure their blood sugar levels. The F.D.A.'s approval yesterday marks the end of a long medical quest, said Dr. Michael Berelowitz, a senior vice president of Pfizer. Scientists have tried to find ways to make insulin inhalable almost since they began to produce it, he said. 'It is not natural to have to inject insulin, and many people find it difficult,' Dr. Berelowitz said. It took Nektar years to develop insulin with particles of a size that could make it into the lungs and be stable without refrigeration. Insulin is a protein, and it cannot be taken orally because it would be destroyed by acids in the stomach. Pfizer, in consultation with the F.D.A., delayed seeking approval for Exubera for at least two years while conducting more research because of concerns that it might damage the lungs. Since 2004, lawmakers and consumer groups have sharply criticized the F.D.A. for approving potentially unsafe drugs like Vioxx. But an advisory panel to the agency recommended approval of the product in September, at least for patients without pre-existing lung diseases. The agency itself, after putting off a decision for three months, concurred. 'I think that we and the advisory committees felt that there was very robust data with regard to the safety of the drug in patients without underlying lung disease,' said Dr. Robert Meyer, director of the F.D.A. office overseeing diabetes drugs. But some experts say the risks of using the product day after day for life have not been ascertained. 'We don't have long-term studies on this medication,' said Dr. Marc Sandberg, the medical director of the Diabetes Health Center in Flemington, N.J. Because of the safety questions, Exubera was not tested much in children and is not approved for them. It is also not recommended for people with asthma, bronchitis or emphysema. Also, smokers or those who have quit smoking within six months are not supposed to use the product because their lungs absorb too much of it, posing the risk of an overdose. Pfizer has committed to conduct additional safety studies and will monitor whether problems arise as Exubera goes into widespread use. Other companies are now racing to develop their own inhaled insulins, including big manufacturers like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk and smaller ones like MannKind and Kos Pharmaceuticals. But Pfizer is considered two years or more ahead of the competitors. One reason could be that big insulin producers initially were not interested in Nektar's invention, thinking there would not be a big market for it, said John Patton, co-founder and chief scientist of Nektar. But Pfizer was not in the insulin business and saw a new opportunity, he said. To obtain insulin, Pfizer made a deal with Aventis, now known as Sanofi-Aventis. Pfizer recently agreed to pay $1.3 billion to buy out its partner. Analysts predict that Exubera will rapidly become a blockbuster drug, a term used in the industry to describe a treatment with more than $1 billion in annual sales. Ian Sanderson, an industry analyst at SG Cowen, predicted that Exubera, which was also approved in Europe this week, will have $1.8 billion in annual sales worldwide by 2010, including $1.1 billion in the United States. 'I've been astounded at the patient response to Exubera,' Mr. Sanderson said. Mr. Sanderson predicted that Exubera would cost between $120 and $150 a month, roughly comparable to the price of pills taken by some people with Type 2 diabetes but about three times the price of injectable insulin. Dr. Jay Skyler, associate director of the diabetes research center at the University of Miami, said thinner needles and penlike injectors have taken much of the sting out of shots. He said the benefit of inhaled insulin would be mainly for 'people who have never been on an injection, that are really desirous of going onto this instead of injections because they think the injections are going to be difficult for them.'

Subject: From Paris, Revolution and Roses From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:52:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/fashion/thursdaystyles/26COUTURE.html?ex=1295931600&en=10ed424c91b390d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 From Paris, Revolution and Roses By CATHY HORYN Paris THE GRAND PALAIS was built for expositions — many Parisians in the last century saw their first airplane there — and since its reopening last fall Karl Lagerfeld has used it to display Chanel's new clothes and, of course, himself. Last October he had a giant video screen erected, with his image blown up like Kong. For his spring haute couture show on Tuesday he put up what looked like a missile silo. At the end of the show, the tube lifted toward the glass ceiling, revealing the models on a spiral staircase. It's easy to snicker at Mr. Lagerfeld. He is 70-something, he speaks brutally fast, and he has an eccentric collection of jewelry. The other day he had on a porcelain carnation made for Madame de Pompadour and retouched with gold by Jean Schlumberger. 'He was kind of gifted, Schlumberger,' Mr. Lagerfeld said, squinting behind his dark glasses and breaking into a huge grin. But — from Madame de Pompadour's breast to Karl Lagerfeld's lapel — that is the arc of couture's incredible comet. If you are gifted like Mr. Lagerfeld, or like John Galliano at Dior, you don't have to ask whether couture is dead. It's relevant if you can make the meaningful connections between the past and present. On Monday, Mr. Galliano sent out a provocative collection with allusions — in the rough work boots and red-splattered white organza — to the French Revolution and, not incidentally, to the recent riots in France. 'Hopefully, it goes to the heart of what's happening today,' said Mr. Galliano, who began work on the collection around the time the disturbances — the worst since the student riots of 1968 — started. Mr. Lagerfeld and Mr. Galliano are couture's twin engines of creativity, and as the German-born Mr. Lagerfeld has said, couture has never needed more than two houses to be relevant. So there is Dior and Chanel. Jean Paul Gaultier put on a good show on Wednesday, with Madonna's arrival creating a disturbance of its own. But while Mr. Gaultier's Turkish trousers and sack dresses were expertly rendered in paper-thin pleats of spice-colored chiffon (with plaited hairpieces the length of a butler's pull), they didn't quite summon couture's magic. The magic is how a jacket is constructed with one or two seams. At Chanel the flat, corseted look of wool day dresses and jackets was achieved by molding the fabric onto the body. A spectacular long dress in white satin had hardly a seam and was draped and gathered in three loose bows at the back. As a counterpoint to the severe, almost nullifying line, Mr. Lagerfeld added fluffy skirts of feathers or shredded fabric. And he was sly about his references. You would think that flat white boots were a nod to the space age, but Coco Chanel wore the style in the 50's with her tweed suits. And the crinkled white organza collars and cuffs were inspired by her image as well. Who knew? 'He does,' Amanda Harlech, his assistant, said before the show. Although Mr. Galliano's way into his collection was through the erotica of the Marquis de Sade (hence the hardcore corsets and the suggestive placement of straps), you never felt the drag of history. Instead, you felt a kind of liberation in the cutting: the leather coats treated as lightly as the white organza skirts, the folds of red skirt creating a pagan alcove for a black beaded skeleton. The embroidery was ingenious — and modern — as couture can be. Valentino was on form Monday evening, with a stupendous showing of front-row ladies that ended with David Furnish, recently wed to Elton John. Nothing ever changes in Valentinoland, nor is it meant to. There is always a glossy wedding-cake perfection to the clothes, a ritual of bows, efficient suits and evening décolleté set off by diamanté, and to suggest that it might be otherwise — tougher, fractured, more contemporary — would only draw a peevish complaint from Valentino: 'But why?' Missing from recent collections has been the element of lightness; you had the feeling that for all that perfection you were sitting down to a hot meal on the equator. But this time Valentino seemed eager to strip off the effects, reduce the shape of his day dresses and coats to a brisk A-line, and use the shimmer of couture silk to do his heavy lifting. Particularly pretty was a short dress in lilac crepe with a wide neckline, small cap sleeves and an apronlike skirt of lilac satin. The prints were mottled peonies and roses, the colors picture-book shades of the desert, and several of the front-row ladies were especially taken with a long white dress with a tight square-neck bodice and a skirt of vertical ruffles tipped in silver. That evening Valentino gave a party at the Ritz Club, where one of the most popular guests was Sheetal Mafatlal. Ms. Mafatlal, who lives in London and Delhi, is to open the first Valentino boutique in India. She had on a low-cut black Valentino pants outfit and an enormous emerald ring, and every so often someone would lift her hand off her lap and show the ring to another guest. Ms. Mafatlal was a good sport about it though. The emerald was about 200 carats, she said. That's about the size of an iPod video screen. On the pink embossed show notes for Christian Lacroix's 38th couture collection was a skull and bones, set between the first 'u' and the 't' of couture. Whatever the death's-head signified here, there is an element of self-destruction in the creative process: you get to have to your heart ripped out every six months, with every collection, and if you're as sensitive and honest as Mr. Lacroix is, you can't hide the gloom under anodyne lace. It wouldn't do justice to those emotions that first brought Mr. Lacroix to our attention. As it was, Mr. Lacroix seemed borne back to Arles and the Camargue, to the bull ring and the festal prints, but now with more softened clarity, wisdom and less innocence. There's a reason designers return to their roots: Mr. Galliano to the French Revolution, Mr. Lacroix to the South of France. Will Mr. Lagerfeld, like Helmut Newton, eventually find his way back to Germany? The more they fester, the more responsive they become to the original flame. They see that moment as their truest self-expression, and the rest as a kind of goading abstraction. So here was Mr. Lacroix with a Spanish-style jacket in black organza with an airy white lace skirt, and a short Infanta dress in pristine white organza with a broderie anglaise hem. A pale blue silk sash finished a mid-length dress of brown printed chiffon, its sleeves ripped and ruched into gauzy puffs. He had taken the familiar elements — the blood red, the flamenco ruffles — and reduced them to a strong, sober line. Without heavy embroideries or tipsy patterns. Where there was decoration it was painted on, in gold leaf, by hand. Three seasons of Paris couture has finally released Giorgio Armani from the grip of his self-image. He has been hugely successful in ready-to-wear by sticking to his game plan, and proud of that fact, but the workmanship in couture is so precise and nuanced that it exposes a person's orthodoxy and doubts. Compared to his first uptight collections, the one Mr. Armani showed on Monday morning was loose, engaging and lighthearted, especially the black sequined evening pajamas and a blazer embroidered in mirrors and crystals and shown with a ribbon-print organza skirt. He also overcame a clammy discomfort with sexy clothes, showing a black lace and sequined dress with a deep halter neckline and racy swimsuit back. Couture's playing field may just help widen Mr. Armani's imagination, and restore to his ready-to-wear a more real sense of surprise. His day clothes — ladylike pantsuits in sand and nut-colored wools with bow-front jackets — could lighten up, though. Mr. Armani changed the course of fashion with tailoring, and it would be interesting to see him adapt it in a fresh way to haute couture. That's the secret weapon he's not using. Judging from his fondness for galactic white and cometlike seams, Riccardo Tisci, the new designer at Givenchy, must have grown up with a heavy dose of 'Star Trek.' And that may also explain why there is so little humor in his dramatic clothes. Mr. Lagerfeld and Mr. Galliano at least make you laugh with their self-aware antics, but with Mr. Tisci you feel you are being asked to participate in an earnest young man's reveries at a sci-fi convention. The trouble is, Mr. Tisci seems stuck between two worlds: between the world of Audrey Hepburn, whose Givenchy dress form was on display at the show, its small cotton-wad bust slightly crushed, and the world of Tomorrow. Mr. Tisci is very talented; you can see that from a lantern-sleeve trench coat with a swishy hem and a series of tulle and chiffon dresses with bits of fabric on the bodices. But it's almost as if Mr. Tisci is so excited about doing haute couture he can't focus on a single thought. His problem seems peculiar to the fashion world at the moment. As Jean-Jacques Picart, a consultant to LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, which owns Givenchy, said before a white satin gown: 'We're all looking for something fresh. But where is the wind coming from?'

Subject: Gray Matter and Sexes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:50:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/24/science/24women.html?ex=1264482000&en=42da5acf95d82da5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland January 24, 2005 Gray Matter and Sexes: A Gray Area Scientifically By NATALIE ANGIER and KENNETH CHANG When Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, suggested this month that one factor in women's lagging progress in science and mathematics might be innate differences between the sexes, he slapped a bit of brimstone into a debate that has simmered for decades. And though his comments elicited so many fierce reactions that he quickly apologized, many were left to wonder: Did he have a point? Has science found compelling evidence of inherent sex disparities in the relevant skills, or perhaps in the drive to succeed at all costs, that could help account for the persistent paucity of women in science generally, and at the upper tiers of the profession in particular? Researchers who have explored the subject of sex differences from every conceivable angle and organ say that yes, there are a host of discrepancies between men and women - in their average scores on tests of quantitative skills, in their attitudes toward math and science, in the architecture of their brains, in the way they metabolize medications, including those that affect the brain. Yet despite the desire for tidy and definitive answers to complex questions, researchers warn that the mere finding of a difference in form does not mean a difference in function or output inevitably follows. 'We can't get anywhere denying that there are neurological and hormonal differences between males and females, because there clearly are,' said Virginia Valian, a psychology professor at Hunter College who wrote the 1998 book 'Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women.' 'The trouble we have as scientists is in assessing their significance to real-life performance.' For example, neuroscientists have shown that women's brains are about 10 percent smaller than men's, on average, even after accounting for women's comparatively smaller body size. But throughout history, people have cited anatomical distinctions in support of overarching hypotheses that turn out merely to reflect the societal and cultural prejudices of the time. A century ago, the French scientist Gustav Le Bon pointed to the smaller brains of women - closer in size to gorillas', he said - and said that explained the 'fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason' in women. Overall size aside, some evidence suggests that female brains are relatively more endowed with gray matter - the prized neurons thought to do the bulk of the brain's thinking - while men's brains are packed with more white matter, the tissue between neurons. To further complicate the portrait of cerebral diversity, new brain imaging studies from the University of California, Irvine, suggest that men and women with equal I.Q. scores use different proportions of their gray and white matter when solving problems like those on intelligence tests. Men, they said, appear to devote 6.5 times as much of their gray matter to intelligence-related tasks as do women, while women rely far more heavily on white matter to pull them through a ponder. What such discrepancies may or may not mean is anyone's conjecture. 'It is cognition that counts, not the physical matter that does the cognition,' argued Nancy Kanwisher, a professor of neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When they do study sheer cognitive prowess, many researchers have been impressed with how similarly young boys and girls master new tasks. 'We adults may think very different things about boys and girls, and treat them accordingly, but when we measure their capacities, they're remarkably alike,' said Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. She and her colleagues study basic spatial, quantitative and numerical abilities in children ranging from 5 months through 7 years. 'In that age span, you see a considerable number of the pieces of our mature capacities for spatial and numerical reasoning coming together,' Dr. Spelke said. 'But while we always test for gender differences in our studies, we never find them.' In adolescence, though, some differences in aptitude begin to emerge, especially when it comes to performance on standardized tests like the SAT. While average verbal scores are very similar, boys have outscored girls on the math half of the dreaded exam by about 30 to 35 points for the past three decades or so. Nor is the masculine edge in math unique to the United States. In an international standardized test administered in 2003 by the international research group Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development to 250,000 15-year-olds in 41 countries, boys did moderately better on the math portion in just over half the nations. For nearly all the other countries, there were no significant sex differences. But average scores varied wildly from place to place and from one subcategory of math to the next. Japanese girls, for example, were on par with Japanese boys on every math section save that of 'uncertainty,' which measures probabilistic skills, and Japanese girls scored higher over all than did the boys of many other nations, including the United States. In Iceland, girls broke the mold completely and outshone Icelandic boys by a significant margin on all parts of the test, as they habitually do on their national math exams. 'We have no idea why this should be so,' said Almar Midvik Halldorsson, project manager for the Educational Testing Institute in Iceland. Interestingly, in Iceland and everywhere else, girls participating in the survey expressed far more negative attitudes toward math. The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores. Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers. Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT's in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong. For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius. But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men's greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists. For one thing, said Kimberlee A. Shauman, a sociologist at the University of California, Davis, getting a high score on a math aptitude test turns out to be a poor predictor of who opts for a scientific career, but it is an especially poor gauge for girls. Catherine Weinberger, an economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has found that top-scoring girls are only about 60 percent as likely as top-scoring boys to pursue science or engineering careers, for reasons that remain unclear. Moreover, men seem perfectly capable of becoming scientists without a math board score of 790. Surveying a representative population of working scientists and engineers, Dr. Weinberger has discovered that the women were likelier than the men to have very high test scores. 'Women are more cautious about entering these professions unless they have very high scores to begin with,' she said. And this remains true even though a given score on standardized math tests is less significant for women than for men. Dr. Valian, of Hunter, observes that among women and men taking the same advanced math courses in college, women with somewhat lower SAT scores often do better than men with higher scores. 'The SAT's turn out to underpredict female and overpredict male performance,' she said. Again, the reasons remain mysterious. Dr. Summers also proposed that perhaps women did not go into science because they found it too abstract and cold-blooded, offering as anecdotal evidence the fact that his young daughter, when given toy trucks, had treated them as dolls, naming them 'Daddy truck' and 'baby truck.' But critics dryly observed that men had a longstanding tradition of naming their vehicles, and babying them as though they were humans. Yu Xie, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and a co-author with Dr. Shauman of 'Women in Science: Career Processes and Outcomes' (2003), said he wished there was less emphasis on biological explanations for success or failure, and more on effort and hard work. Among Asians, he said, people rarely talk about having a gift or a knack or a gene for math or anything else. If a student comes home with a poor grade in math, he said, the parents push the child to work harder. 'There is good survey data showing that this disbelief in innate ability, and the conviction that math achievement can be improved through practice,' Dr. Xie said, 'is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian society and among Asian-Americans.' In many formerly male-dominated fields like medicine and law, women have already reached parity, at least at the entry levels. At the undergraduate level, women outnumber men in some sciences like biology. Thus, many argue that it is unnecessary to invoke 'innate differences' to explain the gap that persists in fields like physics, engineering, mathematics and chemistry. Might scientists just be slower in letting go of baseless sexism? C. Megan Urry, a professor of physics and astronomy at Yale who led the American delegation to an international conference on women in physics in 2002, said there was clear evidence that societal and cultural factors still hindered women in science. Dr. Urry cited a 1983 study in which 360 people - half men, half women - rated papers about politics, education and the psychology of women on a five-point scale. On average, the men rated them a full point higher when the author was 'John T. McKay' than when the author was 'Joan T. McKay.' There was a similar, but smaller disparity in the scores the women gave. Dr. Spelke, of Harvard, said, 'It's hard for me to get excited about small differences in biology when the evidence shows that women in science are still discriminated against every stage of the way.' A recent experiment showed that when Princeton students were asked to evaluate two highly qualified candidates for an engineering job - one with more education, the other with more work experience - they picked the more educated candidate 75 percent of the time. But when the candidates were designated as male or female, and the educated candidate bore a female name, suddenly she was preferred only 48 percent of the time. The debate is sure to go on. Sandra F. Witelson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, said biology might yet be found to play some role in women's careers in the sciences. 'People have to have an open mind,' Dr. Witelson said.

Subject: Bad Dog Finds His Forte: Selling Books From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:45:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/books/26marl.html?ex=1295931600&en=3e47be729baf0359&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 Belatedly, a Bad Dog Finds His Forte: Selling Books By DINITIA SMITH LOWER MILFORD TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Why this dog and no other? Why has 'Marley & Me,' the story of an overly friendly, wildly energetic, highly dysfunctional yellow Labrador retriever, spent the last three months on the best-seller lists, climbing to the No. 2 spot on the forthcoming New York Times hardcover nonfiction list? 'I was pretty confident the book would be big, but not this big,' said John Grogan, the book's author and Marley's owner, sitting in his large brick house surrounded by fields and woods in rural Pennsylvania. So far, 'Marley & Me,' published by William Morrow in November, has sold close to 500,000 copies. It is now in its 20th printing, with 870,000 books in print, the publisher said. As readers of the book know, Marley is dead, but as Mr. Grogan, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said, 'Marley's ghost is everywhere.' 'Here, he was locked in here,' he said, opening the basement door. He pointed to where Marley had scraped at the wall with his claws and gnawed at the door frame trying to escape. 'The wood door frame was totally gone to the studs,' Mr. Grogan said. ('He was an obnoxious greeter of guests,' he explained later. 'For the sake of our company, unless they were really, really good friends, we would lock him there so they could come over without being slobbered on.') Then he walked over to another spot where Marley had scraped at the drywall and gnawed at the wood corner piece. 'I sanded it and filled it with putty and painted it,' he said. Marley was, in a way, a dog who loved too much. He would hurl himself through screen doors to get to Mr. Grogan or his wife, Jenny Vogt. When they locked him in a metal dog crate, he separated the steel bars. 'It looked like the Jaws of Life had pulled it open,' Mr. Grogan said. Marley flung drool on guests. He stole Ms. Vogt's underwear. He ate her jewelry. Thunderstorms gave him anxiety attacks, and then he would chew through things, mattresses, the couch. But 'Marley & Me' is not just a book about a dog. In fact, it is a love story, of Mr. Grogan and his wife, a young married couple contemplating having a family. 'We were young,' the book begins, irresistibly. 'We were in love.' Ms. Vogt was nervous about caring for a baby and thought a dog 'would be good practice,' Mr. Grogan writes. A breeder offered them a discount on a puppy. 'The little guy's on clearance,' Ms. Vogt begged her husband as Marley somersaulted into their laps, gnawed on their fingers and clawed his way up to lick their faces. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it 'a very funny valentine to all those four-legged 'big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world.' ' 'It's a book with intense but narrow appeal,' she continued, 'strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog.' The book follows the couple through their efforts to have a child. When Ms. Vogt suffered a miscarriage, Marley seemed to mourn with her. 'His tail hung flat between his legs,' Mr. Grogan writes, 'the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly.' When their three children did arrive, he became their guardian, delicately licking their faces and ears, allowing them to crawl all over him. The problem, Mr. Grogan writes, was not keeping Marley from hurting one of the babies, but keeping him out of the diaper pail. After Marley died in 2003, Mr. Grogan wrote a column about him for The Inquirer and was stunned when he got 800 responses from other dog owners. He thought Marley's story might make a book and wrote a proposal; the final manuscript was sold to Morrow for $200,000. Lisa Gallagher, William Morrow's publisher, said she began to suspect the book would do well when she noticed staff members passing it around among themselves. Morrow printed nearly 6,000 readers editions and sent them to booksellers. It also gave away copies at last June's BookExpo America, the industry trade show, in New York. In a nod to the book's tearjerker qualities, the company distributed tissue with Marley's image on it at regional bookseller meetings; it also sent Frisbees with the book's title on them to stores. Dan Mayer, who buys pet books for Barnes & Noble, was enthusiastic about the book because, he said, it is 'more of a memoir.' And then there's the book's cover, a photograph of Marley as a puppy looking appealingly up at the reader. 'It's really hard to walk past the cover of this book and not want to pick it up,' Mr. Mayer said. Barnes & Noble chose 'Marley' for its Discover program, which earns a book prominent display space in the company's stores and on its Web site, reviews in in-store brochures and often priority for advertising and author readings. Of course, a large part of the book's appeal is that Marley was a very, very bad dog. And the book is a lesson in unconditional love. The Grogans tried obedience school, but Marley was expelled. They sent him again, and this time he came in seventh in a class of eight. The dog behind him was 'a psychopathic pit bull,' Mr. Grogan writes. Marley ate his own obedience certificate. These days, Marley lies buried in an unmarked grave in the garden at the edge of the woods. The Grogans now have a successor, Gracie, who is 18 months old. She is a female Lab. Like all Labs, she is exuberant and high-spirited. 'But what she has is what Marley didn't have,' Mr. Grogan said, 'the ability to calm down.' 'We call her the anti-Marley,' Mr. Grogan said.

Subject: A Spanish Hero for Hire From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:44:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01E4D71331F93BA15757C0A9639C8B63&fta=y April 28, 2005 Have Sword, Will Travel: A Spanish Hero for Hire By JANET MASLIN Captain Alatriste By Arturo Pérez-Reverte. The roiling 17th-century Madrid of ''Captain Alatriste'' is ''a place where a man had to fight for his life on a street corner lighted by the gleam of two blades.'' It is a place fit for swashbuckling and derring-do, and also for the occasional verse celebrating the panache of its boldest citizens. Or its most unfortunate: ''Here lies Señor Pérez, the swine/ whose life was Satan's appetizer.'' One of those upon whom fortune smiles is Diego Alatriste, a brave soldier turned sword-for-hire. Captain Alatriste, as he is nicknamed because of his battlefield experience in the Thirty Years' War, is ''one of those small, tough, adamant men with whom Spain was always so well supplied.'' He is a born hero. And he is a fictional character who already enjoys great renown among Spanish readers. Alatriste is now being introduced to readers of English with this jaunty translation (by Margaret Sayers Peden), the first in a string of neo-Dumas adventure novels. Arturo Pérez-Reverte, whose earlier books include ''The Queen of the South,'' has created Alatriste with obvious affection. The author shares a dynamic flair with the swordsman he celebrates. ''Captain Alatriste''-- to be followed by a second installment, ''Purity of Blood,'' next January -- is written with courtly panache and contagious enthusiasm for the genre it revives. Here is entree to the world of capes and blackguards, of firearms like the harquebus and tactics born of pragmatism. The book's noble characters know that ''fighting a clean fight when risking one's hide might have contributed to salvation of the soul in the life eternal.'' They also know that playing by the rules is ''the shortest path to giving up the ghost, and looking like a fool with a handspan of steel in one's liver.'' ''Captain Alatriste'' unfolds in the language of bravado. The Prince of Wales, who arrives surreptitiously in Spain during the course of this story, is referred to not only as the heir to Britain's throne but also as the ''cub of the English lion.'' The book's setting is ''that marvelous and tragic stage we call Spain.'' And the beautiful blue-eyed blonde who will become the series's embodiment of wickedness is more than a mere menace. When the novel's narrator first encounters her, he claims to be ''oblivious of the fact that I had just met my sweetest, most dangerous and mortal enemy.'' That narrator is Íñigo Balboa, whose father was Alatriste's friend and died in battle. Now the boy has been recruited as Alatriste's sidekick, ''at a rank somewhere between servant and page.'' Despite Íñigo's youth at the start of ''Captain Alatriste,'' the novel at one point flashes forward 30 years and suggests that the Íñigo telling the story will grow far more world-weary than he was in adolescence. Thus the book also suggests that Mr. Pérez-Reverte will have a lot more Alatriste exploits up his sleeve. But ''Captain Alatriste'' is the novel that sets up the series's major conflicts and characters. It begins doing so when Alatriste is commissioned to waylay two English travelers in Spain. Each is known as Mr. Smith, but they prove to be men who will shape England's destiny. Alatriste's sparing of their lives will hold him in good stead for a long time to come. Of course, Alatriste's range of acquaintances will encompass more than royalty in mufti. ''It was one of Diego Alatriste's virtues that he could make friends in hell,'' Íñigo observes, and the book bears out that assessment. One ally, the man modestly known as Álvaro Luis Gonzaga de la Marca y Álvarez di Sidonia, Conde de Guadalmedina, has a list of attributes to match his many names. (''Bachelor, womanizer, courtier, sophisticate, a bit of a poet, a gallant and a seducer.'') As for the heavies, they, too, are worthy of Alatriste's colorful world. Most notable is the silent Italian assassin Gualterio Malatesta, ''a man so accustomed to killing his victims from behind that when by chance he faced them, he sank into deep depressions, imagining that he was losing his touch.'' In Malatesta's recurring capacity in the series, he will apparently remain ''one of those slippery, duplicitous, whichever-way-the-wind-blows types, with a bag of dirty tricks.'' The historical events that frame ''Captain Alatriste'' are the defeats of Spain's supposedly invincible Armada and the first stirrings of the Inquisition. So a sinister cleric, Fray Emilio Bocanegra, part of the Holy Tribunal of the Inquisition, will loom over the story and add further menace to the series's mix. Additional intrigue concerns the prospect of a royal marriage uniting England and Spain. Among Spanish advisers to King Philip IV, the idea ''that an infanta of Castile should marry an Anglican prince brought the smell of sulfur to their nostrils.'' Equipped with a quick-witted, charismatic hero and much to provoke and goad him, Mr. Pérez-Reverte has the makings of a flamboyantly entertaining series. ''Captain Alatriste'' ends with a wicked flourish, an evil laugh and a strong likelihood that the best is yet to come.

Subject: Spanish Adventurer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:43:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/books/26masl.html?ex=1295931600&en=c4124a44e3d8cca2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 Spanish Adventurer Makes His Swashbuckling Return By JANET MASLIN The furtive figure slips quietly into the darkened house, dressed in mufti rather than in his usual swirling cape. He is armed lightly, with only oiled flintlock, sword and dagger. As he slips toward the bed of his sleeping prey, his aquiline profile and luxuriant mustache are visible by the shadowy light of an oil lamp. Holding a knife to the chin of his latest conquest, he asks: 'Do you know who I am?' You bet we do. He is Capt. Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, the brooding, charismatic hero of Arturo Pérez-Reverte's wildly successful Spanish swashbuckling novels. He is profoundly cynical yet quietly principled, weary of battle yet ready to duel if he must. He is a man of few words but many melancholy gazes into the void. He has pale, steely eyes and a face that, when glacially calm, delivers 'fair notice that it is advisable to take three steps back.' This cool, taciturn 17th-century dreamboat will be played by Viggo Mortensen in a large-scale screen adaptation later this year. Although this Spanish series began a decade ago, it is only now being translated into English by Margaret Sayers Peden, who shows obvious appreciation for the author's abundant brio. 'Captain Alatriste' was the introductory volume, and now it is followed by 'Purity of Blood.' Although the second book must do some awkward recapitulating of the first one's plot, it is soon embroiled in a story of its own. The Spanish Inquisition sets the menacing tone for this second escapade, set in 1623. The Spain of this period, according to an author who plays historian as well as storyteller, is a place of rampant corruption: 'Vengeful, cruel, dazzling in its sterile grandeur but indolent and vicious in everyday life.' Its debasement is a source of much pain to closet idealists like Alatriste. 'It seemed that to be lucid and Spanish would forever be coupled with great bitterness and little hope,' Mr. Pérez-Reverte writes. Much of the blame for this decline is ascribed to King Philip IV, whose failings are at the heart of the dire events here. 'Elegant, chivalrous, affable and weak, he was the august plaything of his advisers,' the book explains. Religion plays a crucial role in 'Purity of Blood,' for reasons involving both the overall plot and the title. The story begins with a complaint about a convent: it is being run by a corrupt priest, 'a pervert who has turned the convent into his own private seraglio.' The family of a young novice would like to rescue her from this priest's clutches, and Alatriste is enlisted to help her. Although he is a seasoned, battle-scarred hero who has fought in the Thirty Years' War, Alatriste is a man for hire: 'Diego Alatriste's line of 'employ' tended to take place in dark alleyways, at so much per swordthrust.' But in 'Purity of Blood,' his motives of course become more altruistic. Alatriste comes to the defense of the novels' narrator, a boy named Íñigo, who is 13 when the story takes place but is looking back upon it from a much later date and a more jaded perspective. Íñigo is the son of Alatriste's fallen battlefield comrade, and that makes the Captain's sense of obligation incontrovertible. He is also galvanized because Íñigo's situation is grave: the boy becomes a prisoner of the Inquisition and is accused of having Jewish blood. In the Spain of this period, he is in danger of being burned at the stake for that transgression The purity of the title refers to Christianity. 'Although we have the misfortune of not being old Christians, our family is without blemish,' protests one character whose Jewish-born great-grandfather was a Christian convert. In describing this brand of anti-Semitism, Mr. Pérez-Reverte is nothing if not historically accurate, but the developments of the plot are his own. Alatriste saves Íñigo by discovering hidden Jewish lineage among the boy's tormentors. Some aspects of the Alatriste stories translate better than others. (The title of the installment scheduled for 2009, 'The Caballero in the Yellow Doublet,' might warrant rethinking.) What work best are the books' ripely atmospheric touches, which are best enjoyed when the Inquisition is not occupying center stage. Walking through Madrid with a pensive smile, Alatriste typically looks from side to side, skirts a pile of stinking garbage and distractedly greets a scantily dressed woman winking at him from a wine shop. The ambience also includes the many miscreants who gather outside churches and try to sneak into Mass as a way of escaping prosecution. Íñigo describes all this with irresistible enthusiasm. ('I would have followed Captain Alatriste to the Gates of Hell at one word, one gesture, one smile. I was far from suspecting that was precisely where he was leading me.') His narrative voice also incorporates Mr. Pérez-Reverte's many references to poets, painters and courtiers of the time: some characters will be painted by Velázquez, one is a relative of the famous Don Juan. 'A sonnet or two praising my policy in Flanders would not go unappreciated,' a poet is told by one member of the king's inner circle. On the whole, once it extricates itself from a backlog of long names and previous plot developments, 'Purity of Blood' hits the high note of 'Captain Alatriste' and sustains the series' uncommon verve. As this story ends, Alatriste corners his foremost rival ('You,' Alatriste says, 'are a whoreson and a viper') but declines to finish off their battle. He will wait for another day. Readers will welcome that decision.

Subject: Year of Strong (or Even Better) Growth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:42:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/business/worldbusiness/26yuan.html?ex=1295931600&en=ed41d28f0e533174&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 China Reports Another Year of Strong (or Even Better) Growth By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG — China's economy surged 9.9 percent last year, government statisticians said in Beijing Wednesday, amid signs that growth may have been stronger still. For a third consecutive year, China reported growth that nearly grazed the 10 percent mark. That left some economists wondering if the figures had been deliberately kept beneath that level to avoid drawing the anger of other industrialized nations and furthering calls for a higher yuan. Over the last two years, China has shown a penchant for issuing quarterly and annual growth statistics barely under 10 percent, and then revising them upward many months later, when few are paying attention. This month, China revised upward the growth in 2003 and 2004, previously set at 9.5 percent in both years, to 10 percent in 2003 and 10.1 percent in 2004. The statistics for 2005, showing national economic output of $2.26 trillion, sent China soaring past France, Britain and Italy to become the world's fourth-largest economy, after the United States, Japan and Germany. Some economists, however, adjust China's figures for the low value of its currency and its modest domestic prices to suggest that at comparable prices, the actual value of China's output has surpassed Germany's as well. Given the clumps of tall cranes that dot the skylines of Chinese cities; the shopping malls packed with buyers; and the containers full of exported shirts, toys and other goods that clog Chinese docks, the economy is growing so fast that some experts suggested Wednesday that China is perhaps again underestimating the true level of growth. The country may well have reason to do that. A figure of 10 percent or higher might send prices for oil and other commodities that China imports even higher, and might prompt the United States to make even stronger demands that China's currency be permitted to rise appreciably in value against the dollar, said Stephen Green, a China economist with Standard Chartered Bank. China, like most countries, calculates its economic output mainly from data supplied by factories and other producers. But the government's own data on spending by the government, investors, consumers and foreign buyers suggest that the true rate of growth last year may have been as high as 15 percent, Mr. Green said. Rising exports in particular have helped lift China to an average annual growth rate of 9.6 percent over the last quarter of a century. But economists said that Wednesday's figures showed that consumer spending was becoming increasingly important. Liang Hong, an economist in the Goldman Sachs office in Hong Kong, noted that retail sales in China climbed 12.5 percent last year. 'We believe domestic demand will increasingly become a much more important driver for growth, and China will become a more positive force for global demand in the coming years,' she said in a research report. Some experts continue to question whether China is too reliant on investment spending. They also ask whether too much of that investment involves ill-considered splurges on new factories and the latest equipment, even in industries like auto manufacturing and steel making, where overcapacity is becoming a serious problem. China has been gradually whittling away at the serious problem of bad loans at state-owned banks. But China remains heavily dependent on continued borrowing by companies to build ever more factories and apartment buildings, even as they struggle to earn enough from existing operations to repay past loans. 'Given the evidence of deteriorating investment efficiency, China needs to rebalance its growth by shifting away from investment toward consumption,' said Qu Hongbin, the senior economist for China at HSBC. Strong Chinese demand for new power plants, cranes, high-speed locomotives and trucks has fed a boom in Chinese imports of these and other kinds of capital equipment from Germany and Japan in particular. Tao Dong, chief Asia economist for Credit Suisse, said a detailed analysis showed that exports to China played a critical role in recent signs of a revival in the German and Japanese economies. 'China has become one of the forces lifting these two countries out of recession,' he said. The economic figures released Wednesday are so strong that they suggest the Chinese economy may even be reaccelerating this winter, despite the government's efforts to discourage property speculation through tax changes and administrative measures, Mr. Tao said. One reason for the economy's strength is that the People's Bank of China, the central bank, has raised its benchmark interest rate only slightly more than a quarter of a percentage point in three years, even as the Federal Reserve has pushed through 13 quarter-point increases. Many consumer-oriented service businesses are now palpably running at capacity as a result. Mr. Tao said that when he visited Beijing last week, he had to call seven high-end restaurants before he could find one with a table free for dinner. 'After six restaurants turned me down,' he recalled, 'I said, 'Gee, the economy is booming.' '

Subject: Be More Like Gucci From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:40:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/business/26luxury.html?ex=1295931600&en=3dc2bc109414e08d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 Retailer Wants Its Other Brands to Be More Like Gucci By JOHN TAGLIABUE PARIS — Those who drink Château Latour wine or buy Gucci handbags or order a sweater from the Lerner or Lane Bryant catalogs are all doing business with companies owned by François-Henri Pinault, heir to one of France's biggest luxury groups. But the multibrand model of retailing Mr. Pinault inherited from his father is facing strains. He owns brands from the gilt-edged Yves Saint Laurent and Bottega Veneta to the middle-brow Printemps department stores and Fnac book and record chain in France. Recently, however, Europe's economies have been limping, and the group's sales of everyday items have been sluggish. In luxury goods, results are mixed: Gucci remains a star brand and a money tree, but some of Mr. Pinault's other brands, like Yves Saint Laurent, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney, are struggling, showing either losses or only marginal profit. All of which has raised questions about the group's hydra-headed business model. Mr. Pinault's father, François, 69, created the idea of clustering brands, putting them in a holding company, Artemis, and managing them through an operating company, PPR, formerly Pinault-Printemps-Redoute. The elder Mr. Pinault would shuffle brands and products, selling less favorable businesses and buying more promising ones. But some say the clustering approach is weakening the whole. In 2004, the company had 940.6 million euros ($1.14 billion) in profit on 24 billion euros in sales, but those figures included two companies that have since been sold. Revenue for the first nine months of 2005 were 12.3 billion euros, a rise of 5.2 percent from the previous year using comparable figures. No profit figures for 2005 have been released. In periods when consumer spending is slow, ordinary retailing acts as a brake on the luxury assets of PPR, burning up profits that luxury goods, which are international attractions, bring in. The luxury brands in particular have done well lately in North America and Asia. But Mr. Pinault shows no sign of jettisoning his father's idea. 'Always the philosophy of the business has been not to put all your eggs in one basket,' he said recently. Over the years, Mr. Pinault's father, a high school dropout, switched the baskets frequently, moving from wood and building materials to retailing to luxury. The words that come to people's lips when the elder Mr. Pinault is mentioned are 'instinctive,' 'visionary' and sometimes 'genius.' He never ran the operating company, PPR, himself, preferring to delegate. And he had a reputation for hiring strong managers, like Serge Weinberg, who preceded the younger Mr. Pinault at the helm of PPR, and Domenico De Sole, the former lawyer who engineered the rebirth of Gucci in the 1990's. Slender and sandy-haired, the younger Mr. Pinault, 43, earned a degree from HEC, a French business school. His first practical experience came in the United States, where in place of French military service he spent 18 months working in a French government trade office promoting haute couture. Mr. Pinault, a collector of luxury watches who favors Gucci suits, joined the family company in the 1980's, rotating through various subsidiaries, like a unit that specialized in African trade; Fnac; and the company's Internet business. He was considered a success at each, expanding the business at every stop. After his father handed him control of the group in 2003, Mr. Pinault tightened his grip, dismissing both Mr. Weinberg and Mr. De Sole, and bringing in other HEC graduates. Among them are Valérie Hermann at Yves Saint Laurent; Jean-François Palus, PPR's financial director; and Christophe Cuvillier, head of Conforama, a furniture unit. Yet Mr. Pinault denies there is a fundamental difference between his and his father's philosophy. 'It has always been the balanced approach,' he said, over breakfast in his wood-paneled office. 'We always thought in sectors, when they had a chance for growth. Hence, in wood products, we went into parquet, distribution, rather than just investing.' Château Latour, the Bordeaux winery, also seemed a good real estate investment. While PPR's retail activities may be widespread, it is also true that they are overly dependent on the domestic French market. Antoine Belge, an analyst at HSBC, said in a report that department store retailing was hampering PPR's overall earnings growth, noting that the division accounted for 67 percent of earnings, before interest and taxes, last year. The French market, he said, 'accounts for 58 percent of the business.' Mr. Pinault acknowledges the problem. 'We are very subject to the French economy,' he said. Mr. Pinault said it was his goal over the next three years to increase the share of non-French markets to 60 percent, notably by expanding PPR's activities in southern Europe, including Italy, Spain and Greece, where it is opening Fnac stores and Conforama furniture showrooms. In the United States, beyond the luxury brands like Gucci, he hopes to expand the activities of Redcats, the third-largest home-shopping network in the country, which owns brands like Lerner, Chadwick's and Lane Bryant. Quick results are all the more urgent for multibrand conglomerates like PPR, because they risk over-reliance on a single brand. While Gucci has been the powerhouse of PPR, much of the cash it generates has gone to shore up less fortunate relations, like Yves Saint Laurent. 'Gucci is definitely very, very good in both turnover and profitability,' said Armando Branchini, president of InterCorporate, a fashion consulting firm in Milan. The challenge facing Mr. Pinault, he said, was to make money in the lesser brands. Discussing the luxury brands, Mr. Pinault gave the impression of a man in charge, listing the company's four main luxury brands and commenting on their prospects, a bit like a bookmaker reviewing his horses. Gucci, he said, which generated roughly 1.5 billion euros in sales last year, could be expected to double that amount in the next three years. The struggling Yves Saint Laurent, he said, showed impressive results with its most recent November collections, and had generated double-digit revenue growth in recent months. He set Saint Laurent's revenue target at 300 million euros by 2009, after what analysts estimate was revenue of roughly 160 million euros in 2005. Balenciaga, which the company was ready to shut down several years ago, was lauded. 'We underestimated its potential,' Mr. Pinault said, praising the way its designer, Nicolas Ghesquière, exploited the archives of Cristóbal Balenciaga, the brand's creator. But Mr. Pinault came closest to fervor when he discussed Bottega Veneta, the Italian brand that Gucci acquired in the 1990's. 'Last year it was profitable, and it continues to grow,' he said, adding that revenue grew more than 50 percent in 2005, albeit from a low base. 'Bottega is almost where Saint Laurent is now,' he said, referring to its revenues. Mr. Pinault was largely echoing projections given last year by Gucci's chief executive, Robert Polet, for the company's smaller luxury brands to become profitable within the next three years. 'Individual brands are more limited in their influence on the market,' Mr. Pinault said, defending the company's strategy. 'The only way to do it is with a portfolio of brands.'

Subject: Benedict's First Encyclical From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:39:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/international/europe/26pope.html?ex=1295931600&en=8fd9045f1daadd62&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 Benedict's First Encyclical Shuns Strictures of Orthodoxy By IAN FISHER VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI issued an erudite meditation on love and charity on Wednesday in a long-awaited first encyclical that presented Roman Catholicism's potential for good rather than imposing firm, potentially divisive rules for orthodoxy. The encyclical, titled 'God Is Love,' did not mention abortion, homosexuality, contraception or divorce, issues that often divide Catholics. But in gentle, often poetic language, Benedict nonetheless portrayed a tough-minded church that is 'duty bound,' he wrote, to intervene at times in secular politics for 'the attainment for what is just.' He also suggested that terrorism — which violates Christ's command to 'love your neighbor' — had helped inspire his first major statement. 'In a world where the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence, this message is both timely and significant,' he wrote. 'For this reason, I wish in my first encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes on us and which we in turn must share with others.' The encyclical is the highest form of papal teaching, and there had been much anticipation in the church for Benedict's first, given his long service as Pope John Paul II's outspoken, conservative defender of the faith. But in contrast to his public reputation, Benedict, 78, who was elected in April, began his encyclical with a perhaps surprising first premise: conceding that the church has at times viewed sexuality as something 'negative,' he placed erotic love between married men and women at the center of God's plan. Sex, he wrote, should mature into unselfish concern for the other, creating a love that leads to working for charity and justice for others. 'Love is indeed 'ecstasy,' ' he wrote in a document that ran 71 pages in the English translation. 'Not in the sense of a moment of intoxication, but rather as a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.' In some measure, this is an encyclical of two popes: its second half, on charity and the role of the church in society, was begun under John Paul, who died in April. But church officials said the finished document, beginning with a section on love, was very much the work of Benedict. 'You cannot say that this pope added the first or the second part,' said Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes, the pope's top adviser on charities. 'You have to see that this pope is always following the steps, the traces, of John Paul II, and in this way it is a continuation, but not much.' Before becoming pope, when he was known as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Benedict was often seen as a divisive figure, lauded by conservative Catholics for his devotion to orthodoxy and criticized by liberal ones for not sharing their vision for a changing, more modern church. But Benedict's elaboration on love and charity was largely praised across the church on Wednesday as a document that sought to express what is common to all Catholics. 'He's not wagging his finger about what's wrong with contemporary culture,' said Msgr. Kevin W. Irwin, dean of the School of Theology and Religious Studies at Catholic University of America, in Washington. 'He's saying, this is the big picture, and out of that you get a positive, optimistic ultimate vision of what Catholicism is.' Christian Weisner, spokesman for the German chapter of the liberal Catholic group We Are Church, called the encyclical 'a sign of hope' that Benedict would prove to be a 'human face for Christianity and for the Catholic Church.' He said, however, that he hoped that the pope's emphasis on love would make him more open to opposing views. 'Loving your neighbors also means loving critical theologians, he said. 'He also has to apply these ideas within the church itself.' The Rev. Joseph Fessio, editor of the conservative St. Ignatius Press, which publishes Benedict's books in English, said the themes and gentle tone of the encyclical should finally put to rest the stereotype of Benedict as a conservative ideologue. 'I can suggest a subhead for all the major media: 'Is this the Panzer Cardinal?' ' Father Fessio said, referring to a nickname for Cardinal Ratzinger that was sometimes used in the press. Nonetheless, Father Fessio said that in the encyclical Benedict was true to traditional church teachings: his definition of love in it applied to men and women, married and monogamous 'forever.' 'What is he doing there?' Father Fessio asked. 'He is saying no divorce. He is saying no promiscuity. He is saying no multiple wives. No homosexuality. He's completely positive, but if you accept the teaching, consequences follow.' The subject of love, some church officials said, was not the most obvious one for a first encyclical. Monsignor Cordes joked this week to reporters that some people considered celibate priests talking about love as they would 'a blind man talking about colors.' But the encyclical presents love as a fundamental force, and Benedict sought to unite the ideas of sexual love and a broader, more altruistic love. He paraphrased Nietzsche as saying Christianity's moral rules had blown 'the whistle' on sexuality, a vital part of human nature. Benedict admitted the charge to some degree, but said the church was not alone in distorting sex. 'Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed,' he said. 'Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is also deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure 'sex,' has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought or sold.' He said that through monogamous relationships between married men and women, love grew and was 'less and less concerned with itself, increasingly seeks the happiness of the other.' This love, he wrote, mirrors God's love for humankind, reflects Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, and leads to a larger love for neighbors, then for mankind. This leads to the second part of the encyclical, on charity, which he said represented love as an 'ordered service to the community.' The new document also carefully outlines the church's rationale for weighing in on political issues. 'The church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible,' Benedict wrote. 'She cannot and must not replace the state.' 'Yet at the same time,' he added, 'she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice.'

Subject: Wagner Demystified, With a Human Face From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:33:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/15/arts/15vien.html?ex=1263531600&en=3f5e1923bbf87bdd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland January 15, 2005 Wagner Demystified, With a Human Face By ANNE MIDGETTE VIENNA - Sir Simon Rattle, arguably the leading conductor in the world, had never conducted at the Vienna State Opera until Wednesday night, when he made his debut with a bang, and with Wagner's five-hour 'Parsifal.' 'Parsifal' is commonly labeled Wagner's Christian opera. At the very least it is a tale about redemption, and many conductors limn it in hovering clouds of mysticism. But Sir Simon gave it a human face. His reading was anchored at every moment in what was happening on stage, aiming not for transcendence but for human emotions expressed in human terms. He drew lyrical passages of pure singing out of the score, as if even the orchestra were speaking with a human voice. Another major factor in this humanity was the Amfortas of Thomas Quasthoff, who first did the role here when the production opened last April. Mr. Quasthoff, one of the most gifted singers alive, was born with physical deformities caused by the drug Thalidomide: around four feet tall, with hands growing almost directly out of his shoulders and no knee joints, he long avoided the opera stage in favor of concerts and recitals. Sir Simon helped persuade him to take the plunge into opera, starting with the small role of Don Fernando in Beethoven's 'Fidelio' at the Salzburg Easter Festival in 2003. Amfortas is only his second opera role. He was brave to try it, and right to do so. Mr. Quasthoff has a deep, pliant and vital voice, and he invests everything he sings with emotional significance, so the only vocal question about his entry into opera was how he would adjust to the unfamiliar demands of singing while moving around the stage over a full orchestra. The answer is, very well. The real surprise was the extent of his dramatic power. The character of Amfortas has been incurably wounded by the evil magician Klingsor before the opera begins, and in most stagings he lies helplessly on a litter. But Christine Mielitz, the director of this production, was smart enough to see that Mr. Quasthoff could poignantly convey the idea of injury without being inactive. This Amfortas, his torso swathed in bloody bandages, moved freely around the stage. His activity stripped the figure of his usual passive pathos and brought a whole new passion and virility - and anger - to the part. Impotence - power crashing against its own limitations - is in any case a major theme of the opera. Ms. Mielitz made it a dramatic crux of her staging, not only for Klingsor, who, again before the opera begins, has castrated himself, but even for Parsifal, intensely frustrated at his own ignorance. ('I don't know!' Thomas Moser spat out when Stephen Milling's Gurnemanz asked him his name.) Curious about everything around him, this Parsifal was so profoundly moved by Amfortas's outburst in the Grail scene that he reached out to embrace him just as the offstage chorus intoned the word 'sympathy' in the prophecy about the pure fool who would be the king's salvation. Every fiber of Mr. Quasthoff's body quivered with a wild hope that quickly gave way to cruel disappointment - how can this guy help me? - as he turned away. And indeed, Parsifal was powerless to help, not knowing how. The other singers had a hard act to follow. Not that they were bad. Sir Simon's lyric approach brought out some of the most sensitive singing I've heard from Mr. Moser, who turned in an impressive performance, although he still showed strain when trying to pump out big sounds. Waltraud Meier, the attractive German mezzo-soprano, made a compelling Kundry, her hard-edged voice showing an impressive top, though little on the bottom. Mr. Milling, also making his house debut, displayed a marvelous warm bass voice that lost color in a few patches in the long and difficult role of Gurnemanz. Wolfgang Bankl was a suave, tortured Klingsor. The Vienna State Opera Orchestra sounded oddly human itself. Little, unimportant flaws gave a handmade quality to the musical fabric spinning out like something fresh and new before our ears. In Sir Simon's hands, the Good Friday music became less about majesty than about nightmare, its tolling bells a dark cry of anguish as Mr. Quasthoff's Amfortas, wearing a high crown with jagged points, tottered across the stage, half mad with anguish. Opera as drama to be sure, and in the best sense of the word. The audience received the work, and Sir Simon, with a storm of applause.

Subject: Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:28:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/movies/27shan.html?ex=1296018000&en=c8ea60c0b01b8d25&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 An Unfilmable Book, Now Made Into a Movie By A. O. SCOTT 'The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman,' a staple of college English Literature surveys, is so widely believed to be unfilmable that you can almost imagine that when Laurence Sterne wrote it in the middle of the 18th century, one of his intentions was to flummox future cinéastes enamored of wigs, breeches and quill pens. This may not be as farfetched as it sounds, since there is something uncannily ahead of its time about Sterne's novel. In Michael Winterbottom's 'Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story' — not a movie version of the book but rather a movie about a movie about the book — one of the characters describes the original as 'a masterwork of postmodernism before there was any modernism to be post.' An irritatingly glib description, to be sure — all the more so since the character in question has not read the book — but not altogether inaccurate. The 600-odd (sometimes very odd) pages of 'Tristram Shandy' abound in digressions, chronological displacements and self-referential stunts, all of which seem to prophesy later innovations in novel-writing, as well as guaranteeing failure for even the most imaginatively resourceful filmmaker. Which might be an apt way to characterize Mr. Winterbottom, who is apparently capable of anything except repeating himself. Since the decade began, he has veered from Thomas Hardy ('The Claim') to hard-core pornography ('9 Songs') and from quasidocumentary realism ('In This World') to dystopian science fiction ('Code 46'). His wily, tongue-in-cheek 'Tristram Shandy,' far from refuting the idea that the novel could never be adapted for the screen, proves it in the most ingenious and entertaining manner. This is not just a movie-within-a-movie, but a movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie, something that sounds unbearably arch but that is swift, funny and surprisingly unpretentious. At a stately English manor house, a motley, harried crew is grappling both with the intricacies of their ill-chosen literary source and with the hourly chaos of setting up shots, adjusting makeup and costumes and managing egos. The largest of these belongs to Steve Coogan, the onetime British television star who also appeared in Mr. Winterbottom's '24 Hour Party People.' Mr. Coogan plays Tristram Shandy; his father, Walter; and most impressively and obnoxiously, himself. That character — let's call him Steve — is vain and insecure, an utterly believable caricature of movie-star self-absorption. His co-star and rival, who plays Tristram's Uncle Toby in the film-within-the-film, is Rob Brydon (Rob Brydon), and there is no matter too petty for them to compete over. Rob is eager to promote himself from sidekick to second lead, and Steve is anxious to protect his dominant position on the marquee. He badgers a costume designer to build up the heels on his buckled shoes so that he will be taller than Rob — not for any selfish reasons, of course, but in the interest of artistic integrity. When he asks for regular coffee and Rob requests 'a macchiato,' Steve quickly changes his order, though there is no macchiato to be found. Meanwhile, Steve's girlfriend, Jenny (Kelly Macdonald), has arrived on the set with their infant son, hoping for some intimate conjugal time with her mate. He, however, is distracted by a flirtation with a production assistant, also named Jenny (Naomie Harris), who is apparently the only person in 'Tristram Shandy' who has actually read 'Tristram Shandy.' She also seems to be the only person who knows or cares anything about cinema. Except, of course, Mr. Winterbottom, who lives, breathes and thinks through his camera. 'Tristram Shandy' moves so rapidly and easily along its hectic, tangled course that it seems effortless. Its on-the-fly, pseudodocumentary style owes something to trompe-l'oeil inside-show-business movies and television programs like 'Extras,' 'The Larry Sanders Show,' 'Day for Night' and 'The Player.' The feeling of being behind the scenes is captured in hurtling tracking shots and a sound mix that embeds delicious jokes in clipped, offhand snatches of dialogue. Quite a few reasonably well-known, mostly British actors flutter across the screen, including Shirley Henderson, Gillian Anderson, Ian Hart, Stephen Fry and Jeremy Northam, who stands in for Mr. Winterbottom as the busy, impressively unflappable director. His production must contend not only with the obstinacy of Sterne's book, but also with pushy journalists, financial pressures and a historical consultant whose concern with accuracy verges on the pathological. In the midst of it all, Mr. Coogan, Mr. Winterbottom and the screenwriter, Martin Hardy, mischievously conspire to shape a dog's breakfast of riffs and gags into a coherent and at times touching story. Steve is an appalling jerk, but it is possible to detect a hint of vulnerability beneath his preening, sarcastic put-upon manner, and also a secret, almost shamefaced desire to prove himself a serious artist and a decent person. Mr. Winterbottom, meanwhile, has performed a valuable service both to movie audiences and to devotees of classic literature. He has, for one thing, inoculated Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy' against the depredations of earnest, prestige-minded adapters, while preserving a lot of the book's insouciant, inventive spirit (and some of its best moments). He has also paid loving, knowing tribute to the crazy enterprise of film-making, a torment to those mad enough to pursue it and a delight, at least in this case, for those of us lucky enough to sit and watch.

Subject: Sundance, Now a Study in Paradox From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:26:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/movies/27sund.html?ex=1296018000&en=7d1052bf1c0f08b5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 Sundance, Now a Study in Paradox By A. O. SCOTT PARK CITY, Utah — A few nights ago, I was walking down Main Street with a critic from another publication who was reminiscing, as folks at film festivals are inclined to do after a long day of so-so movies, about the old days. As we elbowed our way through throngs of yahoos in ski parkas ('Dude, I just saw Jennifer Aniston!') and choked on the exhaust fumes from idling S.U.V.'s, my friend evoked a long-ago time, a quarter-century distant, when Sundance was still known as the USA Film Festival, and Main Street was a quaint and quiet Old West thoroughfare. Back then, he said, the festival was so eager for press attention that it would arrange to pick up visiting journalists at the Salt Lake City airport and drive them into the mountains for a monastic week or so of small, serious films, many unlikely to be seen anywhere else. He might as well have been harking back to the days of the silver mines. The small, serious movies are still here, some never to be seen again, though these days a great many — the majority in the American dramatic and documentary sections — are shot on high-definition video rather than on film. The setting is now a mobbed, sprawling, media-saturated mini-metropolis, complete with traffic jams and parking nightmares, shuttle buses as packed as Tokyo subway cars, overpriced restaurants with two-hour waits for a table and important people hammering on their Blackberry keypads in darkened movie theaters. In other words, to those of us parachuting in from New York or Los Angeles, it feels a lot like home. Even so, the friendliness of the locals, especially the volunteers who load us onto the buses and shepherd us through the lines into screenings, is positively shaming. So no more complaints, and no more nostalgia. To appreciate the Sundance Film Festival, 10 days winding up Sunday, as it is, you must embrace its contradictions. Here, the most high-minded artistic and moral aspirations coexist with hype, corporate self-congratulation and a ravening hunger for money and attention. All the values and pathologies that define the movie industry, — and perhaps American culture in general — are concentrated into a bitter, dizzying espresso shot. To take one example (and speaking of coffee), Starbucks is one of the festival's many sponsors this year (as is The New York Times). It is also the target of a muckraking documentary called 'Black Gold,' which looks at the poverty and exploitation of the workers and farmers who harvest and process the beans in Ethiopia used by Starbucks. That the festival feels free to program an indictment of one of its patrons is evidence of a healthy — or at least an unavoidable — paradox. Movies, documentary and otherwise, that deal with social inequality and economic injustice are a staple of the festival, whose underwriters and attendees are among the most affluent people and organizations in the world. Sometimes this convergence can yield surprising results. 'God Grew Tired of Us,' directed by Christopher Quinn, is a documentary about a group of young men who fled civil war in southern Sudan and lived for years in a refugee camp in Kenya. The film follows a few of these 'lost boys' to Pittsburgh and Syracuse, where they adjust to a life that is infinitely safer and more comfortable than what they had left, but hard in its own ways. After one screening, one of the film's subjects, John Bul Dou, whose calm resilience is at the heart of the film, talked about his efforts to raise money to help the thousands of lost boys still in Africa. A member of the audience handed him a check for $25,000. Utah is among the most reliably Republican states in the union, which lends a certain piquancy to the fact that the surest way to elicit boos from a Sundance audience is to put George Bush's face on the screen. Al Gore was here, warmly received and celebrity-spotted at a few parties; Ralph Nader, meanwhile, was the subject of a probing and informative documentary called 'An Unreasonable Man.' As ever, political subjects pervaded the documentary categories, nearly always addressed from a left-of-center perspective. It would be nice, if only for variety's sake, to encounter a pro-war or pro-death-penalty documentary here, but that seems unlikely. Some of the topics included the recent Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, the unsettled state of the border between the United States and Mexico, the cruel vagaries of the criminal justice system and the sufferings of wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. All matters much in need of illumination, from whatever angle. And, in any case, it is not such a bad thing for an event like this to have a point of view. Documentary filmmaking is, at the moment, a mode of argument, and it is possible to learn a great deal from films that forgo objectivity in favor of polemic. 'The Death of the Electric Car,' for instance, a work in progress by Chris Paine (shown out of competition), is a prosecutorial examination of the role of oil companies, the automobile industry and the Bush administration (them again) in stymieing the development of emission-free electric vehicles. The film does give some time to the other side, but its intentions are overtly activist, and its interviews with scientists, engineers, regulators and executives provoke as well as inform. The Sundance audience, one of the most passionate I've ever encountered here, was certainly fired up by the story of a promising technology quashed, in the filmmaker's view, by greed and timidity. As the film chronicled General Motors's shutdown of its electric car line — the company reclaimed every single vehicle it had sold, and destroyed almost all of them — a woman behind me exclaimed, 'That's crazy!' But pointing the camera need not always involve pointing a finger. James Longley's 'Iraq in Fragments' is the latest entry in the crowded field of documentaries from that war. It is also one of the best, partly because it is more concerned with exploring daily life and individual destinies than with articulating a position. The title has several meanings, referring both to Mr. Longley's collagist method and to the communal fractures that threaten the country's stability. It takes the form of a trilogy, with one section devoted to Sunnis, one to Shia and one to Kurds, but it also reminds us that we generalize about those groups at our peril. Whether you think the war is right or wrong, 'Iraq in Fragments' is a necessary reminder of just how painful and complicated it is. Which brings us to another paradox, one not unique to Sundance. Film festivals are artificial ecosystems, sealed off from the rest of the world, in which you can encounter a new painful and complicated reality on screen every two hours. A good laugh can seem as rare as a parking space or a restaurant table, which may be why comedies attract inordinate attention, as well as big money. So far this year, the noteworthy deals have been Fox Searchlight's purchase of distribution rights for 'Little Miss Sunshine,' Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's crowd-pleasing family road farce starring Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Steve Carell, and Warner Independent's pickup of 'The Science of Sleep,' Michel Gondry's whimsical, trilingual surrealist romance with Gael García Bernal and Charlotte Gainsbourg. But in the American dramatic competition, trouble — especially the trouble facing young people in small towns and tough neighborhoods — predominates. The earnest, closely observed coming-of-age story is one of Sundance's defining genres, represented this year most notably by Dito Montiel's 'Guide to Recognizing Your Saints' and So Yong Kim's 'In Between Days.' Mr. Montiel's film, his first, is both an autobiography — the main character, played as a young man by Shia LaBeouf and in later life by Robert Downey Jr., is named Dito — and a mostly successful attempt to breathe fresh life into the 'Mean Streets' tradition of volatile neighborhood drama. The film succeeds not just because the material is so close to the director's heart, but also because his loose, fluid directing style and his easy way with actors make it feel lived in, rather than merely familiar. 'In Between Days' is a quieter film, a wisp of a story about a young Korean girl living in a wintry American city and trying to figure out her feelings about her best friend, a boy named Tran, and herself. Ms. Kim generates an extraordinary sense of intimacy without seeming invasive or prurient, and without insulting the audience or the character with too much explanation. It's a small, serious film that shows great promise and that may have a hard time being seen outside this festival. So maybe not much has changed, after all.

Subject: Chinatowns, All Sojourners Can Feel Hua From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 06:25:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/arts/27luna.html?ex=1296018000&en=61204592d025512b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 In Chinatowns, All Sojourners Can Feel Hua By JENNIFER 8. LEE There is no consistent name for 'Chinatown' in Chinese. Newspapers use one name, popular speech uses others. At the Canal Street subway station on Broadway the chosen translation is delicately pixeled together from colorful tiles: 'huabu.' Hua means 'Chinese,' but with a sense that transcends geography, independent of the nation of China. Bu means 'place' or 'town.' The characters were not there when I was growing up on the amorphous border between Harlem and Columbia University, when my family made regular pilgrimages to Chinatown by subway, later replaced by weekly trips to Flushing, Queens, by car. At the Kam Man grocery store on Canal Street, my parents would treat us to Haw Flakes, sweet tangy disks that tasted like bits of hard Fruit Rollups. The ingredients were listed as 'haw' and 'sugar,' which left a generation of Chinese-American children wondering what exactly haw was. (It is the fruit of the hawthorne.) On Mott Street's open storefronts, my parents would pick through the bins of live crabs, sluggish but still menacing to a wide-eyed girl. And Chinatown was our source for paraphernalia for the Lunar New Year, which always arrived in a frenzy of smoky firecracker pops and chiming gongs. The firecrackers planned for this Sunday, celebrating the Year of the Dog, have been centralized by the city government to a controlled ceremony. For all our trips down there, I never knew Chinatown was known as huabu until I saw the characters appear after the station renovation. Hua is the distilled essence of being Chinese, free of fissures caused by wars and colonization. You can be hua even if you hold a passport from Singapore, the United States or Peru. You can be hua even if you have never set foot in China and don't speak a word of Chinese. Like many Asian professionals who came after the 1965 immigration reforms, my parents were liberated from the confines of working-class, Cantonese-speaking Chinatown by education and English. My family, like other Chinese who live abroad, are often called huaqiao, Chinese sojourners. The label sticks, as though one day we all might return, even generations later: pulled back by the tentacles of Chineseness. In the meantime, huaqiaos seek and create Chinatowns. Manhattan's Chinatown might not have been classy, but we got satisfaction in knowing we found better deals by braving the cramped streets. Haircuts were cheaper. The restaurants were yummier. Seamstresses were quicker. Chinatown was a bargain hunter's dream, a word-of-mouth economy before online ratings guides democratized shoppers' secrets. We went there for things you could get nowhere else in the city (like a white silk Chinese dress made for my sixth-grade graduation) as well as services that had no cultural basis, like film developing. My mom would hoard rolls of film and take them to a photo store at the base of Confucius Tower. Often spring or summer arrived before we saw pictures from Christmas. American Chinatowns have been beacons since waves of anti-Chinese violence in the late 19th century drove Chinese workers out of California and into self-protective pockets across the country. Then, Chinatowns promised physical safety. Today they offer comfort for those who long for home. Fujianese restaurant workers who take on tens of thousands of dollars of debt to be smuggled to workplaces east of the Rocky Mountains flock to East Broadway on their days off. Suburban Chinese drive into Flushing for groceries. Homesick graduate students rent DVD's by the boxful. I knew it was only a matter of time before my Chinese friend, Charlene, who had begun studies at Syracuse University in the fall, would come. Charlene is originally from the Chinese city of Xian. We had been students together at Beijing University, where I decided that 'Beryl' (she was given this English name by a middle-school teacher) was out of date, and renamed her. She called to say a group of Chinese Syracuse students were coming to New York City in January. Her roommate wanted to get a haircut at a salon on Mott Street. The officers of the Chinese student association wanted to go to Flushing to buy food for the Lunar New Year banquet. One classmate wanted preserved plum and dried cuttlefish snacks, which she could buy at Aji Ichiban, the Hong Kong chain. Charlene wanted to eat real Chinese food, not General Tso's chicken. She was fixated on hotpot, a festive Chinese dining ritual where food is tossed into a pot of boiling water. When we arrived at Canal Street, Charlene noticed the huabu markers on the station walls. I realized they were written in the traditional Chinese characters used in China before the Communists took over. New York's Chinatown predates the Communist government, and even the one before that. When Chinese first settled in the crooked intersection of Doyers, Pell and Mott Streets, an emperor still ruled. We browsed the cluttered vendors stalls on Canal Street. I found a hairclip I liked. 'How much?' I asked. 'Three dollars,' the vendor replied. As I reached for my money, Charlene smoothly stepped in. 'Can't you do a little better?' she asked. I blushed. When I lived in China, I would put up fervent fights over half a yuan, 6 cents. Here, I had grown soft. He offered two for $5. I took it. Bargain hunters of all sorts still come to Chinatown: women looking for imitation designer handbags, lawyers and jurors from the nearby courthouses in search of a cheap, filling meal. One man asked us where he could get an ID. He had heard that this was the place to buy one. Chinatown exudes density. It not only rivals Times Square as the most crowded pedestrian area in the city, but also is one of the most visually cluttered, greeting you with a jumble of fire escapes, colorful store signs and streams of tattered flags. Like many crowded Asian cities, Chinatown has mastered the art of the vertical, inspired by languages that can be written up and down, not just side to side. 'Why do Chinese like America?' Charlene asked, rhetorically, as we were swept along by the crowds on Canal. 'Because you can drive and have a big house. But not in New York City. Here, it's just like in China. Why bother living here?' Chinatowns, she said, had a bad reputation in China: dirty. They are not the face that a rising China wants to present to the world. Having explored many Chinatowns, I am amused to report that perhaps only Japan, in Yokohama, had the discipline to create one that is both clean and expensive. But I take pride in the vibrancy of New York City's immigrant communities. You can spot a dying Chinatown: vestigial restaurants, but no doctors' offices, no barbershops, no funeral parlors, no businesses required by daily living. Outside New York and San Francisco, many urban Chinatowns have dwindled to Chinastreets, or even Chinablocks, as the population centers have shifted to the suburbs. Washington's Chinatown is superficially preserved: the storefronts, including Starbucks and Subway, must display Chinese names. The Hooters sign says 'Owl Restaurant' in Chinese. In contrast, New York now has three Chinatowns — one each for Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, though only the original can claim the name. In 1946, a small group of United Nations delegation members from the Nationalist Chinese government settled in Flushing, in what was then a largely white middle-class community. Since the 1980's, the neighborhood has flourished as the Chinatown for Mandarin speakers from Taiwan, Shanghai and northern China. More recently, Manhattan's working-class Chinese population has been squeezed down the N subway line, emerging on Eighth Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and in other satellite clusters farther out. Manhattan's Chinatown has fought off the forces of urban decline. It has even grown, with a churn of immigrants that provides both fresh customers and new entrepreneurs. Starting in the late 1960's, Chinatown expanded as Little Italy and the Jewish community of the Lower East Side receded. Small reminders of the Italian presence peek out on the southern part of Mulberry Street. Chinatown's only park, where the elderly can be spotted doing tai chi or playing Chinese chess, is named after Columbus. The Antica Roma restaurant, renamed Asian Roma, offers dumplings along with spaghetti to the courthouse crowd. Today Chinatown is large enough to have two main arteries: Canal Street, the tourist-friendly thoroughfare that is still predominantly Cantonese, and East Broadway, which has become Main Street for Fujianese immigrants. East Broadway, Charlene agreed, looks like China — from the stripped-down restaurants with folding tables to the vendors selling piles of snacks for long bus rides, to the signs unapologetically free of English. The center of Chinatown has shifted east, engulfing the Grand Street subway station. Perhaps one day it will get a huabu sign as well. Charlene, raised in the north, didn't want the southern Chinese food all around us. We could do better. She wanted hotpot. So after we bought some dried fungus and preserved fruit, we hopped on a small shuttle bus to Flushing. The buses, which charge $2.50 for a ride, don't run on a fixed schedule. They wait at the base of the Confucius Tower on Division Street and leave when they are full. My parents chauffeured me to Flushing every Sunday for folk dance lessons, martial arts and Chinese chorus; it's where I learned to twirl silk ribbons and sing 'Doe, a deer' in Mandarin. Equipped with widely available parking and easy highway access, it draws the professional Chinese who live in the suburbs. This was the Chinatown that Charlene and her friends had heard of, where they could shop in boutiques carrying stylish clothing and stop in at bubble tea cafes on the side streets. Her Syracuse classmates were even staying in Flushing. Instead of paying for a hotel, they bunked in one of the $60 rooms in private residences that are advertised in Chinese newspapers — bed and breakfasts without the breakfast. For this rising class of Chinese-American professionals, Chinatown can be an uncomfortable echo of a time when Chinese immigrants were almost exclusively male laborers. The geographic and class divides are visible. Flushing has many more Chinese bookstores and more men in suits. It is home to the World Journal, a national Chinese-language paper owned by a Taiwan media company, and to the Taiwan government's cultural offices. When I was a bridesmaid for a Chinese-American friend who was a medical student at Columbia, she hired a white limo to take us from her Washington Heights dorm room to the Flushing Mall to get our hair and makeup done before the wedding. Where Chinatown is shrouded in history, Flushing is bright and contemporary. The broad, flat cityscape of Queens is spiced up with the shiny metal-and-mirror aesthetic popular in industrial East Asia. 'In Chinatown, everything is right in front of you,' Charlene said, putting her hand right in front of her face. 'In Flushing, you can breathe.' The street food is more northern and western Chinese. We bought Xinjiang-styled lamb kabobs on Main Street for $1. Charlene, raised in a city with a Muslim influence, quickly devoured them. 'Do you like America?' we asked the vendor, who had come from the western Chinese city of Urumqi on the Silk Road. 'I like American money,' he said. But he would never raise his kids here — he doesn't like the values. Charlene, too, wants to return to China after graduate school. With its roaring expansion, the opportunities are better for her there, she said — a philosophy opposite that of my parents, who had arrived a generation before. We trudged to Minni's Shabu Shabu, a hotpot restaurant off Main Street that is one of my mother's favorites for family occasions. Charlene ordered the thin slices of lamb, which she flash-cooked in the hot water; I ordered fish balls. It was definitely hotpot as an American experience, she observed. In China, everyone would use one big boiling pot, mixing their food together. Not here. 'Each person has their own hotpot,' she said. She had been lectured on American individualism in college and smiled at this simple example. Even so, the hotpot tasted authentic. It was the meal she had been waiting for for five months since coming to Syracuse. For both of us, it was a taste of home.

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:56:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/30/95 - 1/27/06 Australia 6.1 Canada 7.4 Denmark 2.6 France 8.2 Germany 8.0 Hong Kong 5.5 Japan 3.8 Netherlands 5.0 Norway 10.1 Sweden 5.0 Switzerland 5.8 UK 6.2

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:52:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/30/95 - 1/27/06 Australia 3.7 Canada 5.6 Denmark -0.2 France 5.2 Germany 5.0 Hong Kong 5.5 Japan 2.8 Netherlands 2.0 Norway 8.3 Sweden 0.6 Switzerland 2.6 UK 2.9

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:42:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/05 to 1/27/06 S&P Index is 2.9 Large Cap Growth Index is 2,7 Large Cap Value Index is 3.4 Mid Cap Index is 5.3 Small Cap Index is 7.4 Small Cap Value Index is 6.9 Europe Index is 6.6 Pacific Index is 5.1 Energy is 13.1 Health Care is 3.2 Precious Metals is 14.5 REIT Index is 7.4 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 0.9 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is -1.1

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:37:39 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/05 - 1/27/06 Energy 12.2 Financials 2.2 Health Care 2.4 Info Tech 4.6 Materials 5.4 REITs 7.5 Telecoms 5.7 Utilities 3.2

Subject: Krugman's Money Talks: The V.H.A. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 05:19:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/01/krugmans_money_.html#comments January 27, 2006 Paul Krugman responds to comments on his recent column Health Care Confidential. By Mark Thoma The V.H.A.: Not Wealthy, but Sometimes Wise, Paul Krugman, Money Talks: C.J. Stimson, Nashville, Tenn.: ...[We] often find ourselves debating the V.A. and its tremendous advances. The quality and cost figures reported over the last decade do seem to paint a very optimistic picture. But ... I often wonder whether it's actually replicable. The patient base for the V.A. makes it very unique and lends itself to improved outcomes and increased efficiency. The V.A. is a closed system where variables in the delivery of care, the most important of which is the patient, can be well controlled. If this degree of control could be exercised over a broader population, perhaps U.S. Health Care, Inc., would be feasible. I am afraid, however, that the American psyche is not ready to cede such control. ... Paul Krugman: As you say, the V.A. is a closed population, which is what makes it work. Big plans like Kaiser share some of the same advantages, and have partially matched the V.A.'s achievement. But to replicate the achievement nationwide, we'd need a nationwide health system - which is sort of a 'well, duh' conclusion. I am highly skeptical of claims that the obstacle to such a system lies in something deep about the American psyche. After all, people tell us that even the more limited goal of single-payer health care is deeply unacceptable to Americans, yet every American over 65 benefits from Medicare, which is single-payer pure and simple, and it's highly popular. So I think the problem is politics, not national character. ... Jennifer C. Jaff, Farmington, Conn.: Your view of the Veterans Administration as a model of successful single-payer healthcare ignores the daily reality of patients -- especially those with chronic illness. Veterans Administration doctors routinely cut off all medication -- no tapering even where normal protocol is to taper, ... without reason, disregarding long-standing diagnoses ... of other Veterans Administration doctors. If you talk to patients with chronic conditions, you will find that the Veteran's Administration vastly under-treats, withholding medication and treatment that are used routinely in the private sector... In theory, you may be right. In practice, unless those engaging in this important debate about health care financing focus on the real experience of patients with chronic diseases -- those patients whose health care is the most expensive, and who have the most contact with the health care system -- these sorts of misimpressions of how things really work will lead to disastrous outcomes. ... Health care policy that is made only for the healthy will jeopardize the care and financial stability of millions of Americans with chronic diseases. I, for one, am terrified when even the well-intentioned like you get this wrong. I see bankruptcy court in my future, and the future of fully half of Americans who suffer from at least one chronic disease, unless our needs and the cost of our care is addressed in any plan to reform the health care system in America. Donna Whaley, Tennessee Colony, Tex.: I feel compelled to comment that this Op-Ed is obviously written by someone who is not dependent on the V.A. for health care. Someone who is not waiting for MONTHS for follow-up to a heart attack and a subsequent failed stress test, wondering if you will last until they can work you in. Or who discovered that her recent kidney stone procedure was done with outdated equipment and no anesthesia unnecessarily causing excruciating pain that could have been avoided. The V.A., I believe, does the best they can with what they have, but it is far from good enough. ... What I ask is that you please address the problems, too -- your article makes it sound utopian. ... Paul Krugman: The V.A. does have some waiting time issues; as you say, they're due to lack of funds. The fact remains, however, that despite its shoestring budget the V.A. by all accounts does a better job in many dimensions than private health care. Still, you've touched on my biggest worry about the V.A., which is that it will be starved for funds by politicians who prefer to use the money for, say, tax cuts. That's what happened to Britain's National Health Service, which is better than Americans think, but was nickel-and-dimed by successive British governments down to the point where it currently spends only about 40 percent as much per capita as the U.S. system. Robert Feinberg, Chicago: Enjoyed your article on the V.A. My own experience as a retired naval officer differs. While I have had some positive experiences with V.A. care, on the whole, I have found the system still reflective of the old stereotypes. ... The fact is, among the retired officer community, most of us will do almost anything not to use the V.A. system .... But I am glad that it exists to provide care for those less fortunate ... By the way, did you know that the V.A. treats service-connected conditions only and that an entire generation of vets have no carte blanche access to the system? ... Tom Lewis, Colebrook, Conn.: You missed one important point about the VHA. It emphatically does not serve all veterans. It means-tests them and serves generally the oldest, sickest and poorest. This makes its mission far harder because it does not cherry-pick the way the privatized, insured health care system does. With that in mind, it is an even more interesting model for a national health care system. On the other hand, all of its statistics are self-reported. I'm told that some V.H.A. institutions cook their statistics. There is no federal health care oversight agency for any of the federal health care agencies: D.O.D., prisons, V.H.A., etc. Bear in mind also, that the V.H.A. is very bureaucratic. Patients get bumped around a lot in the course of care. And access and quality of care vary considerably. The south and southwest are underbedded. The northeast and rust belt are wrongly bedded. Many vets do not have access to V.H.A. medical centers or clinics. Inpatient mental health care, for example, can be very uneven. (The writer is the former director of the New York State Division of Veterans Affairs.) Ben Hadad, Houston: Please don't wax too poetic on V.A. health care unless you like most appointments three to four hours late and six months or more to make an appointment. Once they get you in they are great. Prescription drugs flow seamlessly by mail, certainly at an affordable cost. ... Paul Krugman: The comments on the V.A. have been greatly informative ... Let me say something about how to interpret what you're reading. First, experiences with the V.A. are by no means uniformly positive. That's what you'd expect. We're talking about a real-world system run by fallible human beings. So negative stories don't condemn the system, just as positive stories don't validate it. For that you need careful, systematic quality assessments - and these give the V.A. system very high marks. Second, waiting times are a bit of an issue. This reflects the tightness of the V.A.'s budget. And there is, to be honest, some reason to think that this is always a risk with government-run health care: politicians see an opportunity to squeeze a bit, to make funds available for their pet projects, then to squeeze a bit more, and after a decade or two quality has really suffered. That's what happened to the British system, although that system remains much better than Americans have been told. But - and this is my last point - consider the alternative. Out here in the non-veteran world, corporations are reacting to rising health care costs by dropping insurance; states are reacting by throwing people off Medicaid; and people without health insurance are leaving chronic problems untreated, then ending up in emergency rooms - or dead. Meanwhile, the V.A. is containing costs while providing excellent if not always perfect care.

Subject: Slow Growth, Fast Stocks From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 12:46:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice how the stock market is reacting to the slowing growth of the last quarter. The thought is the Federal Reserve will soon be done raising short term interest rates, and the bull market in stocks continues. The global bull market also continues. Pleasing.

Subject: Re: Slow Growth, Fast Stocks From: Emma To: Terri Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 07:55:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What matters is low long term interest rates. The slowing of growth last quarter was likely artificial because of less government spending than normal and a delayed reaction to the severe damage along the Gulf Coast. But, the bond market will tell us more about the economy in coming weeks.

Subject: Bank win, bondholders lose From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 15:08:12 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Terri with this info - how do you think we should alter our Vanguard bond holdings? =DJ Bondholders Squeezed By Increasingly Powerful Vise . By Simona Covel Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--It isn't easy holding bonds. For months, bond investors have lamented companies' swing to shareholder-friendly practices like equity dividends, which often lead to credit rating downgrades and take money away from bond-friendly pursuits like debt repayment. At the same time, the syndicated loan market - debt that carries recovery claims senior to bonds - has exploded. That means reduced recovery prospects for bondholders in some cases, because bank debt holders have the first claim on collateral. Bondholders are forced to become more vigilant, keeping one eye trained up to the bank debt on the top of a company's capital structure and one eye below them on stockholders, who are growing increasingly insistent on shareholder-friendly moves. 'If they can find ways to go above us, they are,' said Eric Misenheimer, who manages $500 million in high-yield assets as head of the high-yield group at J. & W. Seligman & Co. in New York, referring to issuers' increasing reliance on the bank debt market. 'They don't really need us.' Companies like now-bankrupt Calpine Corp. (CPNL) made a habit of stacking more debt on top of existing bondholders, he added. And a slew of recent giant leveraged buyouts - including the recent NRG Energy Inc. (NRG) deal - includes billions in bank debt that has first dibs on collateral. That's a shift from the LBOs of yore, which were more heavily reliant on junk bonds. Earlier this month, Moody's Investors Service knocked Georgia-Pacific Corp.'s ratings further into junk territory after the company's acquisition by Koch Forest Products Inc. (KOH.XX). Bondholders were slammed by billions in new bank debt that came as part of the $21.5 billion deal. The growth of the loan market 'should raise alarm bells for bond investors,' said Steven Kerr, director in Standard & Poor's bank loan and recoveries group. 'Additional senior secured debt almost certainly reduces recovery opportunities for bond investors.' Buyer Beware The robustness of the loan market - especially in leveraged loans of riskier companies - has profound implications for credit markets. Demand for the loans has soared. Last year, leveraged loan issuance topped the $500 billion mark, dwarfing the junk bond market's $95 billion in new deals. Investors like loans' floating interest rates, which reset periodically. They also appreciate loans' senior spot in a company's capital structure. That factor has helped the loan market hold steady when bond markets sold off following such events as the downgrades of General Motors Corp. (GM) and Ford Motor Co. (F) to speculative grade last May. The demand in that market means that issuers and their bankers can practically name their terms, unlike in the high-yield bond market, where investors are pickier. Loan investors are more willing to accept higher debt levels and other risky measures because they have a greater chance to recover their investment in the case of default and because unlike bondholders, bank debt holders are privy to periodic financial status updates from an issuer. 'Even participants who have trepidation about the increasing leverage can't really speak up because if they do, they won't get a good allocation in the deal,' said one Wall Street banker who didn't want to be named. The growing loan market brings with it opportunities for bond investors who have the flexibility to expand into that market. Loans are becoming increasingly liquid and available for intraday trade, a factor that kept some investors from that market in the past. As the market matures, bond investors 'have a tremendous opportunity' to diversify outside of traditional fixed-rate subordinated debt, said Lorraine Spurge, managing director at Post Advisory Group LLC in Los Angeles, which has $8 billion in assets under management. Even before the advent of leveraged loans, companies could still come in and pile more bonds senior to existing debt, point out veteran investors. Unsecured bonds are 'buyer beware,' said Steve Persky, managing partner at Los Angeles hedge fund Dalton Investments LLC, with $1.2 billion in assets under management. 'That's why debt that's secured by covenants trades at a much tighter spread (to Treasury bonds).' Years of historically low default rates and a benign credit environment may have led some investors to become less vigilant about their recovery prospects. That factor will suddenly matter when companies begin to default more frequently, as is predicted over the next couple of years. As a bondholder, 'you have to make sure the covenants protect you from (other debt) securing all of the assets above you,' said Spurge. 'Our job is to make sure you read through the prospectus.' When the defaults begin to trickle in, the growing role of hedge funds in the risky loan market - they now hold about 30% of that debt - means those sophisticated investors will have a seat at the creditors' table. 'Many have more resources to apply, both legally and structurally,' said S&P's Kerr. Hedge funds, for example, may have short positions in certain securities, giving them different motivations as a creditor. Hedge funds 'have the opportunity and the wherewithal to be more aggressive,' Kerr added. -By Simona Covel, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2371; simona.covel@dowjones.com

Subject: Re: Bank win, bondholders lose From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 19:43:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Individual bonds are often more difficult to buy safely than stocks, and are always fairly costly, which is why I only buy Vanguard bond funds. The funds are either indexes or conservatively enough managed that credit or call conditions are never going to be an issue. The only question is whether the interest rate at any time is attractive. There is little reason to expect capital gains from bond funds with the long term Treasury yield at 3.5%.

Subject: World on a String From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 11:46:53 (EST) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Is Bernanke ready? By Robert J. Shiller Ben Bernanke, the nominee to replace Alan Greenspan this month as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, is a highly capable economist who has devoted his professional life to understanding the historical role of central banks and the problems that they have faced. His views represent, as much as can be expected, a consensus among those who have studied the issues carefully. But that does not mean that Bernanke is prepared to ensure that healthy economic growth continues in the US in the coming years and provide the kind of leadership that the world needs. By the standards of what is generally understood today, he will do a good job. Unfortunately, that may not be enough. John Maynard Keynes once said that monetary policy may work like a string. A central bank can pull the string (raise interest rates) to rein in an economy that is galloping ahead unsustainably. But it cannot push the string up: if economic growth stalls, as when confidence is seriously damaged, lowering interest rates may not be enough to stimulate demand. In that case, a recession can occur despite the central bank’s best efforts. Bernanke made his name as an economist by analyzing the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930’s – good expertise to have, since preventing such disasters is a central bank head’s most important job. The Great Depression, which followed the stock market crash of 1929, saw unemployment rise sharply in many countries, accompanied by severe deflation. In the US, consumer prices fell 27% between 1929 and 1933, and the unemployment rate topped out in 1933 at 23%. According to Bernanke’s “debt deflation” theory, the collapse in consumer prices was one of the causes of the Great Depression, since deflation raised the real value of debts, making it difficult to repay loans. As Bernanke pointed out, 45% of US farms were behind on mortgage payments in 1933, and in 1934, default rates on home mortgages exceeded 38% in half of US cities. The debt burden destroyed consumer confidence and undermined the banking system, crippling the economy. Bernanke’s research also stressed that the sooner a country abandoned the gold standard, the better off it was. Adhering to the gold standard during the Great Depression implied a deflationary monetary-policy bias, since it required keeping interest rates relatively high to encourage investors to hold deposits in banks rather than demanding the gold that backed them. Once a country eliminated convertibility into gold, it was free to pursue monetary expansion, and deflation tended to end. But Bernanke’s impressive research on the Great Depression does not mean that he can prevent the next recession or depression, for stopping deflation hardly solves all problems. After all, the US went off the gold standard in 1933, and the Fed cut the discount rate to 1.5% in 1934, ending deflation (except for minor episodes); but the unemployment rate did not fall consistently below 15% until 1941 and the onset of World War II. Bernanke will therefore have to be careful about over-generalizing from his past research, just as medical specialists must be careful not to over-diagnose diseases in their own specialty and military strategists must be careful not to over-prepare to fight the last war. Of course, this does not mean that we should ignore the past altogether. A 2005 study headed by Guillermo Calvo, Chief Economist for the Inter-American Development Bank, found important similarities between the Great Depression of the 1930’s and economic crises since 1980 in 31 emerging countries. But the study also found important differences. The fundamental experience of the Great Depression has repeated itself, on a smaller scale, many times and in many countries in recent decades: a shock in financial markets, followed by a sharp decline in gross domestic product. But the behavior of consumer prices in the post-1980 crises is fundamentally different from that seen in the 1930’s. In contrast to the Great Depression, collapsing national output was in recent decades accompanied by accelerating inflation, not deflation. The Calvo study thus concludes that Bernanke’s debt deflation theory of the Great Depression does not generally apply to the more recent crises. At the same time, Bernanke is inheriting a pair of economic vulnerabilities that are unusual by historical standards, and that did not precede the Great Depression of the 1930’s. We are now in the late stages of the biggest real estate boom in US (or world) history, driven by frenzied market psychology. In contrast, US home prices were uneventful before the Great Depression, and actually fell slightly in real terms between 1925 and 1929. Moreover, we are now experiencing a fundamental change in expectations about oil prices: not only are today’s prices quite high in real terms by historical standards, but the futures markets indicate that prices are expected to remain high for years to come. In contrast, real oil prices were flat leading up to 1929, and down nearly 50% in real terms from the 1925-6 “fuel folly” peaks. In the near future, substantially higher oil prices, lower real estate prices, or both, could, depending on public reaction, put Bernanke into uncharted territory for economic stress. If confidence declines, his historical understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930’s could leave him ill-equipped to prevent such shocks from sinking the US, and the world, economy. He might find himself pushing on a string. Robert J. Shiller is Professor of Economics at Yale University, Director at Macro Securities Research LLC, and author of Irrational Exuberance and The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\01\14\story_14-1-2006_pg5_23

Subject: Re: World on a String From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 12:49:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excellent article, but I'll bet on Ben Bernanke and against Robert Shiller. I know, I'm always wrong to be a bull, the bears always tell me so, but not actually :)

Subject: Re: World on a String From: Pete Weis To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 20:20:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'Excellent article, but I'll bet on Ben Bernanke and against Robert Shiller.' Shiller, of course, turned out to be amazingly prophetic with his book, Irrational Exuberance. But it was an unpopular message as is his prediction for serious trouble ahead for housing. So the story is once again the same - nearly everyone is blindsided by asset busts and the economic downturns which accompany them. I wonder about Bernanke's own confidence in the tools he will have at his disposal to deal with the economic threats which Robert Shiller describes in this piece. As this piece points out, we seem to have the personal debt build-up and stock market problems (at least 2000-2002 and I think will continue) of the early 30's, the oil crunch of the 70's, and the housing boom/bust threat of the 80's thru early 90's.

Subject: Re: World on a String From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 07:41:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Since we have managed for more than 70 years with no Depression, and fewer and, in the last 25 years, milder recessions, I am little worried about a slowing of growth that cannot be readily reversed. The only instance that should be worrisome is the long term slowing in Japan, but I think we have learned from the Japanese experience. Besides, the economy and markets move slowly enough to respond properly. Robert Shiller, as almost all perpetual bears, never seems to have a constructive word on investment.

Subject: Re: World on a String From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 08:17:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: '...I think we have learned from the Japanese experience.' The last 200 years or so have shown that we get major economic dislocations every 60-70 years or so (usually associated with spurts in productivity brought on by major technological advances). These periods have a number of things in common including a major build-up in personal debt coupled with slow growth in wages. It's unclear to me exactly what we have 'learned' from Japan or what we are doing differently to avoid their problems! Certainly there are differences but not all of them are comforting - we have a large current account deficit while Japan has a surplus current account for instance and hence much less personal debt.

Subject: Re: World on a String From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Jan 28, 2006 at 09:20:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The sensationally successful attempt by Democrats to cut our debt, led to a Republican Congress and Republican President. Then, an attempt to lessen debt led to a Republican Governor of California. People are content to have debt at this time, so why should I worry? There are more important things to worry about in politics, and likely economics. Still, there is always Europe for investing. As for long term cycles, there is no necessary reason. Long term interest rates are low, an I am content.

Subject: Being content From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 13:19:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'People are content to have debt at this time, so why should I worry?' I don't think this is an accurate statement (just my opinion) other than the part about your not being worried. No one really likes or is necessarily 'content' with debt (especially high levels of debt which is so extensive in America today). On the one hand, so many of us are used to the 'good life' we have forgotten the frugality of our grandparents who experienced the last great boom/bust cycle and so we feel we are entitled to these doo-dads that provide so many frills to our life. On the other hand, many of us are finding that our very large debt levels, combined with much higher home heating costs, gas tank fill-ups, grocery bills, etc. are causing more of us to depend on our credit cards to get by. Hence many of us are getting deeper into debt. I have noticed this among family, friends and neighbors. I hear it from folks I talk to which coincides with many news articles regarding folks having to exist day to day on their credit cards. This is the outcome of our current account which, in simple terms, means that we don't earn enough for the things we produce or the services we provide to pay for all the products and services we buy (much of it coming from abroad). Besides, I'm not comforted just because the public is 'content'. Afterall, a majority of the public was 'content' with their selection of Bush as their president. Being 'content' doesn't necessarily mean that one is not in trouble. On the contrary, being 'content' is often the problem to begin with. With regard to future long term interest rates - with continued large deficits and continued rising energy costs, it's a very, very good bet that they will begin to rise in the next couple of years. Even if they don't, there are enough people on 'creative' financing (where monthly payments are automatically set to rise) to cause some real problems in the near term.

Subject: Eternal Vigilence From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 01:02:15 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Besides, I'm not comforted just because the public is 'content'. Afterall, a majority of the public was 'content' with their selection of Bush as their president. Being 'content' doesn't necessarily mean that one is not in trouble. On the contrary, being 'content' is often the problem to begin with. ' Meanwhile, the indoctrination of the people merrily continues. “In a ‘State of the First Amendment Survey’ conducted by the University of Connecticut in 2003, 34 percent of Americans polled said the First Amendment ‘goes too far’; 46 percent said there was too much freedom of the press; 28 percent felt that newspapers should not be able to publish articles without prior approval of the government; 31 percent wanted public protest of a war to be outlawed during that war; and 50 percent thought the government should have the right to infringe on the religious freedom of ‘certain religious groups’ in the name of the war on terror.”http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0128-23.htm http://www.thestalwart.com/the_stalwart/ Efficient Market Theory Finally Debunked ...just last night. Last night, shares of closed-end muni-bond fund Nuveen Massachusetts Premium Income Municipal Fund (Ticker: NMT) gained 46% after-hours, run up by traders watching Jim Cramer's Mad money. Just one problem, Cramer wasn't recommending the bond fund, but rather a company called NMT Medical (Ticker: NMTI) which also rose 34%. Read the whole story at Ticker Sense. January 28, 2006 in Finance | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Subject: The cost of freedom? From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 01:06:50 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.poorandstupid.com/chronicle.asp ALWAYS HYPOCRISY, ALWAYS Why is this story about Hillary Clinton not evidence of the revolving-door corruption of influence peddlars who alternate between the corporate and governmental spheres? From Newsday: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton wants Wal-Mart to contribute to health insurance for its employees - but can't recall if she pushed for worker benefits during six years as a paid board member for the nation's largest retailer. 'Cities and states are saying we can't keep holding the bag here,' Clinton said yesterday, praising a new Maryland law requiring Wal-Mart to spend at least 8 percent of payroll on health benefits or contribute to insurance plans for the poor... Asked if she had advocated better benefits while serving as a board member with Arkansas-based Wal-Mart from 1986 to 1991, Clinton replied, 'Well, you know, I, that was a long time ago ... have to remember,' adding that 'obviously I believe every company should' contribute to benefit plans.

Subject: Re: The cost of freedom? From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Mon, Jan 30, 2006 at 08:50:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is complete rubbish.

Subject: New Orleans Blacks May Not Return From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 11:00:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/national/nationalspecial/27orleans.html?ex=1296018000&en=8779837a92a2fb55&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 Study Says 80% of New Orleans Blacks May Not Return By JAMES DAO WASHINGTON — New Orleans could lose as much as 80 percent of its black population if its most damaged neighborhoods are not rebuilt and if there is not significant government assistance to help poor people return, a detailed analysis by Brown University has concluded. Combining data from the 2000 census with federal damage assessment maps, the study provides a new level of specificity about Hurricane Katrina's effect on the city's worst-flooded areas, which were heavily populated by low-income black people. Of the 354,000 people who lived in New Orleans neighborhoods where the subsequent damage was moderate to severe, 75 percent were black, 29 percent lived below the poverty line, more than 10 percent were unemployed, and more than half were renters, the study found. The report's author, John R. Logan, concluded that as much as 80 percent of the city's black population might not return for several reasons: their neighborhoods would not be rebuilt, they would be unable to afford the relocation costs, or they would put down roots in other cities. For similar reasons, as much as half of the city's white population might not return, Dr. Logan concluded. 'The continuing question about the hurricane is this: Whose city will be rebuilt?' Dr. Logan, a professor of sociology, writes in the report. If the projections are realized, the New Orleans population will shrink to about 140,000 from its prehurricane level of 484,000, and the city, nearly 70 percent black before the storm, will become majority white. The study, financed by a grant from the National Science Foundation, was released Thursday, 10 days after the mayor of New Orleans, C. Ray Nagin, who is black, told an audience that 'this city will be a majority African-American city; it's the way God wants it to be.' Mr. Nagin's remark was widely viewed as an effort to address criticism of a proposal by his own rebuilding panel, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, that calls for a four-month building moratorium in heavily damaged areas. He said later that he had not meant to suggest that white people would not be encouraged to return. 'Certainly Mayor Nagin's comments reflected a concern on the ground about the future of the city,' Dr. Logan said. 'My report shows that there is a basis for that concern.' The study coincides with growing uncertainty about what government assistance will be available for property owners and renters. Louisiana will receive $6.2 billion in federal block grants under an aid package approved by Congress in December, part of which will be used to help homeowners. But that will not be enough money to help all property owners in storm-damaged areas, Louisiana officials say. Those officials have urged Congress to enact legislation proposed by Representative Richard H. Baker, Republican of Louisiana, creating a corporation that would use bond proceeds to reimburse property owners for part of their mortgages, then redevelop the property. But the Bush administration has said it opposes the bill, out of concerns that it would be too expensive and would create a new government bureaucracy. Asked Thursday about his opposition to the measure, President Bush told reporters that the $85 billion already allocated for Gulf Coast restoration was 'a good start.' He added that he was concerned that Louisiana did not have a clear recovery plan in place. But Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco of Louisiana, a Democrat who has clashed frequently with the White House, said Mr. Baker's bill provided a clear plan. 'Administration officials do not understand the suffering of the people of Louisiana,' Ms. Blanco said in a statement. Demographers are divided over the likelihood of a drastic shift in New Orleans's population. William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who has studied the hurricane's impact on the city, called Dr. Logan's projections 'a worst-case scenario that will come about only if these evacuees see that they have no voice in what is going on.' But Dr. Frey also said low-income evacuees might indeed begin to put down roots in cities like Houston or Dallas if they did not see movement toward reconstruction in the next six months. Elliott B. Stonecipher, a political consultant and demographer from Shreveport, La., said that unless New Orleans built housing in flood-protected areas for low-income residents, and also provided support for poor people to relocate, chances were good that many low-income blacks would not return. 'If they didn't have enough resources to get out before the storm,' Mr. Stonecipher said, 'how can we expect them to have the wherewithal to return?'

Subject: Prognosis Is Mixed for Health Savings From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 09:48:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/26/business/26accounts.html?ex=1295931600&en=4d57648cf2a57e32&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 26, 2006 Prognosis Is Mixed for Health Savings By MILT FREUDENHEIM President Bush has made 'consumer-directed' health savings plans a cornerstone of his policy for addressing runaway medical costs, and he plans to push them again in the State of the Union address next week. But so far there is little evidence that the approach is helping many consumers come to grips with the high price of health care. In a way, the early results do offer some hope. More than two million people have signed up for the plans, which were created as part of Medicare overhaul legislation in 2003 but were not an option for many people until the health insurance sign-up season last fall. While that is a tiny fraction of the 180 million Americans with health insurance, some experts say the numbers show a notably fast adoption rate for a complicated new consumer program. By other measures, though, workers and employers have been slow to embrace health savings plans, which are intended to reduce corporate health care costs while giving individuals more control of their medical spending. In essence, health savings plans are high-deductible insurance policies that people can obtain through their employers or buy independently from insurance companies. In exchange for paying at least the first $1,050 of their medical expenses each year (or for families, a deductible of the first $2,100, consumers are supposed to benefit in two ways: lower monthly premiums and the ability to put pretax dollars into a savings account that grows tax-free. Those savings, in theory, could be used toward the deductible in future years and help pay additional health bills not covered by the underlying insurance policy. As with a 401(k) retirement account, the health savings are the individual's to keep when changing employers — a portability feature that Bush administration officials like to cite. But in many cases, people have evidently signed up not because they are eager to direct their own medical spending but because the plan looked cheap or they had no other insurance option. And at least half of those enrolled have not put money in their health savings accounts. So there will be no money building up for next year's out-of-pocket expenses — a big selling point for these health plans. In addition, many employers have been slow to offer the plans. And companies that do so have been reluctant to encourage worker participation by contributing money to the savings accounts. The employers figure that 'portability' means that their money will go out the door with workers who leave. 'That is our main concern,' said Eric Airola, benefits director of J. B. Hunt Transport Services, a trucking company based in Lowell, Ark. 'Turnover in the truckload industry as a whole is very high,' he said. As the plans were conceived, people using their own money could be expected to spend less on health care, switching to lower-cost drugs, for example, and adopting healthier lifestyles. Employers were promised savings as they shifted responsibility to workers for thousands of dollars in costs. Uninsured employees of small companies and self-employed people would be able to set aside pretax dollars for low-cost, limited coverage. But for those who criticized the idea of health savings plans from the start, the early results simply confirm their gloomier forecasts. The critics say this approach is increasing many people's out-of-pocket expenses and warn that it will make them less likely to seek routine preventive care that might stave off bigger problems down the road. Pat Schoeni, executive director of the National Coalition on Health Care, a group seeking better, more affordable medical care, said, 'The savings accounts are not designed to help people pay for health care; they are designed to help employers unload their health care costs.' Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio talk last Saturday, said he would call on Congress in the State of the Union speech to make the plans 'more available, more affordable and more portable.' Among other steps, White House officials say, he will propose raising the tax-free contribution ceiling, which for 2006 is $2,700 for individuals and $5,450 for families. Frank McArdle, a health policy expert in Washington for Hewitt Associates, the big benefits-consulting firm, predicted that 'expanding health savings accounts to make them more attractive to employers and their people will be a hot issue in Congress this year.' For people with modest incomes who are hard put to save for medical needs or much else, raising the contribution limit may be a moot point. But for those who have the money to set aside, the savings accounts can be attractive. Eric Kok, 32, a printing and packaging company manager in Lancaster, Pa., says he will put part of his pay this year into a tax-free health savings account. 'Because I'm young, I'm still maxing out my 401(k),' he said of his retirement plan at the Banta Corporation. He calls that Step 1. 'Step 2 is opening a health savings account and trying to put as much into it as possible.' He and his wife, Susan, who has her own insurance from her employer, together have a six-figure income. Mr. Kok said that when he retires, he can use the health savings tax-free for care and for premiums in the company's retiree health plan. If he dies with a balance in the account, his survivors can inherit the money, as with a 401(k) account. Stacy Ryan, the benefits manager at Banta, said the company saw the plan as 'the new wave of health care.' Banta added health savings accounts and eliminated company-subsidized health benefits for its 4,000 nonunion workers this year. She said the health savings plan had already had 'a huge impact' on employees' actions. They are 'making better decisions, such as not going to the emergency room if it is not an emergency.' Based on the acceptance of health maintenance organizations in the 1980's, some industry analysts predict the pace of people signing up for the plans will continue to grow quickly. Forrester Research, a market research firm, projects that nearly 22 million people will have health savings plans by January 2008 — about 12 percent of those with insurance. While nonunion employees of Banta have no insurance alternative, workers at large companies that still offer a choice have been slow to abandon coverage like H.M.O.'s and preferred-provider networks. At I.B.M., only 'a very small number' of employees have selected the health savings account option, according to Marianne E. DeFazio, the director of global health benefits, who declined to provide a specific figure. Industry experts estimated that 3 percent of I.B.M. employees had signed up for the savings plans, which the company has offered for the last two enrollment periods. UnitedHealth Group, the largest provider of the savings plans, says that of the 24 million people insured under its various types of policies, 654,000 now have health savings plans. But so far, only about half have started setting aside money, a spokesman, Daryl Richard, said. Among UnitedHealth's policy holders, a larger number — 846,000 — are still covered under an older type of policy that, like health savings plans, has low premiums and high annual deductibles. But instead of employees' setting aside money, the employer contributes to an account that gradually grows in value and is available for the employee to draw down for health expenses. The money in these plans, known as health reimbursement accounts, reverts to the employer when workers leave their jobs. That is one reason some large employers are sticking with this older form of insurance. Schneider National, a big trucking company in Green Bay, Wis., went further last year and chose such a plan as its only insurance option. A happy beneficiary of Schneider's insurance plan is Lara Hobbs, 36, of Spring Hill, Fla. Ms. Hobbs, who drives 18-wheelers cross-country, has the liver disease hepatitis C. 'It's terminal and deadly unless you cure it,' said Ms. Hobbs, who is being treated with an expensive drug, a form of alpha interferon. 'I've already been tested,' she said. The hepatitis was not detectable. 'They are hoping that I've beat it.' Last year, Schneider contributed $750 to Ms. Hobbs's health reimbursement account. She paid $1,500 more herself. But beyond that, her insurance covered 100 percent of weekly injections and six pills a day, whose total cost exceeded $50,000 — more than her annual income. For Schneider, the first year was 'pretty challenging,' a spokeswoman, Janet Bonkowski, said. 'There was a lot of learning that goes on. Our associates had to become much more involved and active in their care.' But Schneider saved money and intends to continue the program, she said, though it is also considering whether to offer the savings plans. At the White House, the deputy press secretary, Trent Duffy, said the president had no preference between the older health reimbursement plans and the new savings accounts he has been promoting. But these days, Mr. Duffy said, people change jobs so frequently that they need a health plan they can take with them when they move. Mr. Bush, he said, believes 'that the health care system that worked 30 or 40 years ago isn't working.'

Subject: The Durable Czeslaw Milosz From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 07:22:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A01E4D7153AF931A35751C1A9679C8B63 December 2, 2001 The Durable Czeslaw Milosz By HARVEY SHAPIRO NEW AND COLLECTED POEMS 1931-2001. By Czeslaw Milosz. TOWARD the end of this Hardy-sized collection, and after more than 70 years of writing, Czeslaw Milosz wants to make a clean breast of things. At the beginning of the last book included in the collection, a book that is in his own words ''a closing of accounts,'' he places his title poem, ''This.'' It is in the form of a direct address to the reader, though it is the poet pretending to break through all his strategies of art (itself a strategy) in order to confront a truth: ''If I could at last tell you what is in me, / if I could shout: people! I have lied by pretending it was not there, / It was there, day and night.'' This poet whose late work has been such a celebration of the beauty of this world now recants: ''And I confess my ecstatic praise of being / Might just have been exercises in the high style. / Underneath was this, which I do not attempt to name.'' And now he attempts to describe the unnamable: ''This. Which is like the thoughts of a homeless man walking in an alien / city in freezing weather. / And like the moment when a tracked-down Jew glimpses the heavy helmets of the German police approaching. . . . This. Which signifies knocking against a stone wall and knowing that the wall will not yield to any imploration.'' Milosz has stated repeatedly in his poems his belief in the power of language to rescue from the void all he has seen and all the people he has known in a long life. But beneath this belief, it now appears, was the deeper belief that none of this was possible because of the inadequacy of language to capture reality, though he maintains this always has to be the poet's goal. As he says a few pages later in ''Prayer,'' another poem of direct address, but this time to God: ''Now You are closing down my five senses, slowly, / And I am an old man lying in darkness. / Delivered to that thing which has oppressed me / So that I always ran forward, composing poems.'' So terror and fear of failure were his engine. One has to put these lines against a poem written at the start of his old age, in his early 70's, when the erotic imagination could still open a world for him, to see how far Milosz has traveled in this phase of his life. ''The Garden of Earthly Delights'' begins: In the July sun they were leading me to the Prado, Straight to the room where The Garden of Earthly Delights Had been prepared for me. So that I run to its waters And immerse myself in them and recognize myself. The twentieth century is drawing to its close. I will be immured in it like a fly in amber. I was old but my nostrils craved new scents And through my five senses I received a share in the earth Of those who led me, our sisters and lovers. How lightly they walk! Their hips in trousers, not in trailing dresses, Their feet in sandals, not on cothurni, Their hair not clasped by a tortoiseshell buckle. Yet constantly the same, renewed by the moon, Luna, In a chorus that keeps praising Lady Venus. Their hands touched my hands and they marched, gracious, As if in the early morning at the outset of the world. This concentration on the self and a personal story is a far cry from the public image of the poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1980. He was then singled out as the leading poet of the group in Poland that entered literature under the schooling of two tyrannies -- the Nazi and the Soviet (a group that famously included Zbigniew Herbert and Wislawa Szymborska). They produced poetry so steeped in the terror of the 20th century as to make much of the poetry then being written in the West seem trivial. (Recently The New Yorker concluded its special issue on the destruction of the World Trade Center with a poem by Adam Zagajewski -- Try to Praise the Mutilated World'' -- as if America were entering the nightmare of history for the first time and only a Polish poet could show us the way.) Milosz began his career in 1931, writing pantheistic verses in a kind of international surrealist style then in vogue, a fusion of Polish poetry with French. But he was only 25 when he wrote ''Encounter,'' the first poem in which we recognize his voice: We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn. A red wing rose in the darkness. And suddenly a hare ran across the road. One of us pointed to it with his hand. That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive. Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture. O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. In 1939 this world changed for Milosz, along with his earlier notions of poetry. As he observes in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures of 1981-82 (''The Witness of Poetry''), ''What occurred in Poland was an encounter of a European poet with the hell of the 20th century, not hell's first circle, but a much deeper one.'' In that environment, he goes on, ''People's attitude toward the language also changes. It recovers its simplest function and is again an instrument serving a purpose; no one doubts that the language must name reality, which exists objectively, massive, tangible, and terrifying in its concreteness.'' There is a jump of two years between ''Encounter'' and his next poem, ''A Book in the Ruins,'' and now we are in a gutted Warsaw in 1941, in a ruined library: ''You pick a fragment / Of grenade which pierced the body of a song / On Daphnis and Chloe.'' These Warsaw poems -- including the famous ''Campo dei Fiori'' and ''A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto'' -- end with a ''Dedication,'' which contains the strongest statement of his poetics thus far: ''What is poetry which does not save / Nations or people? / A connivance with official lies, / A song of drunkards whose throat will be cut in a moment, / Readings for sophomore girls.'' Throughout his career and throughout this vast collection, Milosz argues with himself about his poetics. In the introduction to this book, written in his 91st year, he questions the validity of the poems of the war: ''I lived amidst scenes of horror in the 20th century -- that was reality, and I could not escape into a realm of 'pure poetry' as some descendants of French symbolism advised. Yet our hot-blooded reactions to inhumanity rarely result in texts artistically valid.'' He is harder on himself than posterity will be. Milosz's longest treatment in verse of his poetics, and his most ambitious poem at this stage of his career, is ''A Treatise on Poetry'' (1957). It was suggested by the young Karl Shapiro's book-length verse ''Essay on Rime.'' (In the period immediately after the war Milosz was interested in doing an anthology in Polish of contemporary American and British poetry but the project never got off the ground.) Its 42 pages contain an informal history of modern Polish poetry from 1900 to 1945, that poetry's chief characters and the background against which it was written. These are the most heavily footnoted pages in the book because the cast of characters is unknown to us, though their presentation is often comic and concise: ''What of Slonimski, sad and noble-minded? / Who thought the time of reason was at hand, / Giving himself to the future, proclaiming it. . . . '' It contains some of his most vivid writing about the war, a brilliant three-stanza description of Warsaw on the eve of the German invasion, and impressions of other poets caught in this hell, as in these lines spoken by a poet of the Warsaw ghetto: ''When they put a rope around my neck, / When they choke off my breath with a rope, / I'll turn around once, and what will I be?'' The entire poem constitutes a plea for argument in verse on public issues and in plain speech, reinforced by the penultimate lines: ''In us storm winds drowned that stanza of Horace / A pen-knife worked into a wooden bench at school.'' Of course, Milosz is resurrecting Horace, not drowning him, by writing his own ''Ars Poetica.'' Indeed, at various points in his career he directly contradicts his stance as an activist poet. One of the most brilliant of these turn-around poems is ''A Lecture,'' written in his 80's, in which he initially describes himself as a somewhat contemptuous student in Paris attending a reading by Paul Valéry. The student, in his head, ''was fleeing across frozen fields / Where behind rimed barbed wire / The miserable souls of his friends / And enemies would remain.'' The famous French poet before him ''was counting verse syllables. / A servant of architecture, / A grower of crystals.'' But now years have passed -- The earth took in the screams, / No one anymore remembers / How and when it occurred.'' And only the sumptuous, golden Decasyllabic verse Lasts and will last for its own Harmonious reason. And I, late, am returning To his cemetery by the sea, In the always commencing noon. (In his most recent prose book, ''Milosz's A B C's,'' he remarks that he has carried lines from Valéry's ''Cimetière Marin'' in his head almost all his life.) The Milosz who won the Nobel Prize was a ''Child of Europe''; ''We sealed gas chamber doors, stole bread, / Knowing the next day would be harder to bear than the day before.'' He was the poet who dipped his pen in acid to pay his respects to the Communist rulers of Poland: ''You who wronged a simple man / Bursting into laughter at the crime. . . . You'd have done better with a winter dawn, / A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight.'' Lines from ''You Who Wronged'' were placed on a monument in Gdansk erected by Solidarity to honor the workers killed there by the police. The ''Child of Europe'' became a wanderer. His journey from Vilna, where he had spent his high school and university years, to Berkeley took him through occupied Warsaw, and later Washington and Paris, where he spent several years as a cultural attaché for the Polish government. He broke with that government in 1951 and asked for political asylum in France. After a decade there, he came to the United States as a tenured lecturer in Slavic languages at the University of California, Berkeley. Milosz's poetry during this period of dislocation and relocation suffers from, to borrow a phrase, an air of lost connections. He writes long, Whitman-like poems in which he juxtaposes scenes from his present life with scenes from his past, but the juxtaposition fails to strike sparks. All the while, and for the rest of his life, he continues to write in Polish. There is only one poem in this collection written in English, ''To Raja Rao,'' and it is convincing evidence that he continued in his native language entirely by choice. Polish was a fortress for him, a defense against the world's indifference, as he writes elsewhere -- if he had few readers, well, how many people read Polish? In Berkeley, toward the end of the 1960's, he writes a moving declaration of loyalty to the language: Faithful mother tongue, I have been serving you. Every night, I used to set before you little bowls of colors so you could have your birch, your cricket, your finch as preserved in my memory. . . . Faithful mother tongue, perhaps after all it's I who must try to save you. So I will continue to set before you little bowls of colors bright and pure if possible, for what is needed in misfortune is a little order and beauty. (The last line is a diminished echo of Baudelaire's ''Invitation to the Voyage,'' to a fictive land where there is nothing but order and beauty.) From the 70's on Milosz rarely falters. He is sure in his judgments, sure in his humanist values, at ease with the past that he means to memorialize, secure in his Catholic faith -- an exuberant admirer of the world placed before him. True, his focus gradually shifts from the world he has left and the world he anticipates leaving to the drama of the aging poet. Yet everything he cares about manages to find its way into his poems; they are capacious, hospitable and often rise to quietly ecstatic heights. Many stand with his war poems and his ''Treatise on Poetry'' as work of the highest order: ''Winter,'' ''A Confession,'' ''La Belle Époque,'' ''Linnaeus,'' ''Sarajevo.'' (These are all translated by Milosz and the American poet Robert Hass, as are most of the poems in the book.) Some poems of the last two decades might be grouped under the rubric ''You would like to hear how it is in old age?'' -- the opening line of one of them. But they are all really about what it is like to be Czeslaw Milosz in old age. One of the most moving is a prose poem, ''Awakened,'' which goes in part: ''In advanced age, my health worsening, I woke up in the middle of the night, and experienced a feeling of happiness so intense and perfect that in all my life I had only felt its premonition. . . . And it was suddenly included, was a necessary part of the whole. As if a voice were repeating: 'You can stop worrying now; everything happened just as it had to. You did what was assigned to you, and you are not required anymore to think of what happened long ago.' '' The last poem in the book, ''Late Ripeness,'' reads like a beginning. Here are its opening verses: Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year, I felt a door opening in me and I entered the clarity of early morning. One after another my former lives were departing, like ships, together with their sorrow. And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas assigned to my brush came closer, ready now to be described better than they were before.

Subject: In the Mideast, a Giant Step Back From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 06:04:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/opinion/27fri1.html?ex=1296018000&en=3e26f1680faaba85&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 In the Mideast, a Giant Step Back For 20 years Ariel Sharon and other Israeli hard-liners have claimed that they had no negotiating partner interested in or capable of securing peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That always seemed a debatable point, until now. There are many reasons to explain why Palestinians voted to hand over their government to Hamas, an organization that revels in terrorism and is sworn to destroy Israel. The inability of President Mahmoud Abbas's party, Fatah, to run its affairs is first on the list, if pre-election polls of Palestinians were accurate. Fatah has been corrupt and inept, and it represented the status quo, not a happy position given the lawlessness in Gaza, the unemployment rate in Nablus and the despair among young people in Jericho. Mr. Abbas didn't help matters much, proving weak and incapable of imposing control over the battered Palestinian Authority. Israeli hard-liners can blame themselves as well. Even though most reasonable people have recognized Mr. Abbas as a far more pragmatic negotiating partner than Yasir Arafat was, Prime Minister Sharon failed to give Mr. Abbas any concession that he could point to as an achievement. Instead, Israel has busied itself with carrying out Mr. Sharon's doctrine of unilateral separation from the Palestinians, a doctrine that is sure to gain more favor now that the Palestinians have chosen Hamas. But all of this is peripheral to two central facts. Hamas grew out of a terrorist organization that has undermined every small step toward peace with mass murder. And on Wednesday, Palestinians voted almost two to one to put Hamas in charge of running their government. For there to be any hope of getting out of the impasse in the Middle East, one of those two things must change. It would be nice to believe that Hamas, now that it is assuming the reins of power and the burden of actually having to govern, will renounce its call for the destruction of a sovereign state, disarm its private army, get into the business of making life better for Palestinians and try to negotiate the creation of a real Palestinian state. While we're not hopeful, we are reminded that the Palestine Liberation Organization of the late Mr. Arafat, of which Mr. Abbas was once second in command, was born in terrorism. For many years Mr. Arafat and his gunmen were hunted by Israel, much as Hamas has been in recent years. President Bush was absolutely right when he urged Mr. Abbas to remain in office as a sign of stability and set Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice the task of seeing whether the shards of the peace process could be reassembled. But he was also absolutely right when he said, 'A political party that articulates the destruction of Israel as part of its platform is a party with which we will not deal.' Hamas has a choice between governing and terror. Is the party more interested in making sure that the electricity and water stay on, that Palestinian boys and girls make it to school, and that these battered people finally get a state of their own? Or is it more interested in continuing its campaign to destroy Israel? If Hamas chooses the latter, it's more than likely that it will not be around for long, and rightly so.

Subject: Savings Accounts for Health Costs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 06:03:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/27/business/27health.html?ex=1296018000&en=26d63ee710813b07&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 27, 2006 Savings Accounts for Health Costs Attract Wall St. By ERIC DASH When it comes to medical benefits, millions of Americans already have a health insurer. Soon, many will also have a debit card and a bank tied to their medical plan. Banks, credit unions and money management firms are now quietly positioning themselves to become central players in the business of health care, offering 401(k)-type accounts to cover future medical expenses. Bank of America, J. P. Morgan Chase, Fidelity Investments and hundreds of others are hoping to capitalize on the latest wrinkle in medical care paid by consumers: health savings accounts, which have been around since 2003 but are moving to the fore of the national agenda in anticipation of the State of the Union address on Tuesday. These supercharged checking accounts, which must be linked to a high-deductible health insurance plan, allow consumers to invest their own money for current and future medical expenses and have it grow tax-free. They are the centerpiece of President Bush's plans on health care, just as private accounts were offered as a Social Security fix. Currently, only about three million Americans have signed up for the high-deductible insurance policy required for such accounts, up from slightly more than one million last March, according to findings released yesterday by America's Health Insurance Plans, an industry group. It is not clear how many of those people have actually opened a linked account. Still, the number is expected to rise sharply over the next five years. By 2010, more than 15 million Americans, or about 10 percent of all those insured, will have a health savings account, according to an estimate by DiamondCluster International, a management consulting firm. The average individual's account balance, it projects, will grow from $1,500 today to about $3,500 in 2010. Even if people pull out some or all of their money to pay their medical bills, the ballooning balances may mean that $75 billion or so in new money to manage will soon be at stake. Banks and others are drawn by the promise of lucrative fees they can generate by offering consumers mutual funds and other investment vehicles as their account balances grow. Most also charge $50 to $75 to set up a health savings account, and they collect perhaps $40 or more each year in maintenance charges and service fees. Not since the creation of the individual retirement account in the mid-1970's has such a potentially huge mountain of money landed in the lap of the financial services industry. 'Billions of dollars that used to be written in the form of checks with insurance companies' names on them would instead go to credit unions, banks, and long-term investment houses,' said Dan Perrin, the publisher of H.S.A. Insider and executive director of the H.S.A. Coalition, a lobbying group backed by 70 small-business and medical industry groups as well as the American Bankers Association. 'You know America: you see a financial opportunity and it sets off a gold rush.' Two years ago, not a single major bank offered a health savings account. Only seven small banks had any sort of plan. Today, more than 300 financial services companies, including big banks, are taking deposits or will be soon. About 150 more are on the way. Some of the country's biggest health insurance providers have started their own banks. To be sure, health savings accounts will make up only a small fraction of earnings at a financial giant like Citigroup. But at a time when deposit growth has slowed and higher interest rates have hurt profits, they represent a steady stream of new income that is increasingly hard to find. Banks are betting that what the administration calls consumer-directed health care catches on. Supporters say that the discipline and marketing might of financial services giants could spur the adoption of consumer-directed care. Critics argue that the banking industry's involvement only bolsters their case: the accounts are more about wealth than health. 'We already have a large number of retirement savings vehicles in the United States,' said Jonathan Gruber, an economist and Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. 'It is not clear why we need yet another tax break for savings for rich guys.' Corporations, of course, want relief from soaring health care costs, and have been steadily shifting more of the burden to their employees. Small businesses were among the first to offer health savings accounts to their employees. But over the last year or so, a number of big companies — from Guidant to Wal-Mart Stores — have started signing up. Health savings accounts are akin to the private accounts that were proposed to help overhaul Social Security. Much of Wall Street liked private retirement accounts, but their support was guarded because they feared a potential negative reaction. Banking lobbyists have met with White House officials at least three times over the last year to discuss the rules governing health savings vehicles. But until recently, most have been shy about their interest in such plans. Now, they have established a lobbying group, the H.S.A. Council, and are spending millions of dollars to roll the plans out. The idea behind the accounts is simple: forced to pay out of pocket for medical care, Americans workers will spend health care dollars more wisely. The way it works is more complex. Americans under the age of 65 with a high-deductible health care plan can contribute tax-free to the new 401(k)-like account as much as $2,700 this year for individuals and $5,450 for families, or the amount of their deductible if it is less. Unlike health reimbursement plans, which were controlled by the employer, health savings accounts belong to employees even if they change jobs. The money can be used to pay for medical, dental and vision expenses as well as a portion of qualified premiums for long-term-care insurance. The rest can be invested in stocks, bonds and mutual funds — and grow tax-free. That money would be available to pay for a broad range of health care expenses in the future, and would remain untaxed as long as it was spent on health care. At any time after age 65, money can be withdrawn for any reason without penalty, but the entire amount taken out would be taxed. For wealthier people, the tax break could provide a generous incentive to build a nest egg for future health care; poorer people with smaller annual contributions could wind up spending all the money they put away during the year. Geoff Dougall's accounting firm in Beaverton, Ore., is among the thousands of employers that have switched from a conventional health insurance plan to offering health savings account. 'We are very much talking about it as a savings vehicle,' said Mr. Dougall, who is giving each of his employees $2,500 this year to cover the deductibles of their health insurance policies. The savings accounts, in effect, give financial institutions a vital, but behind-the-scenes role in shaping the nation's health care system. Banks hope to use their close ties with their customers to enter the health insurance market. For now, they collaborate with insurance providers as much as they compete. Health savings accounts must be opened in conjunction with a high-deductible health insurance plan. After choosing an insurance policy, the consumer must pick a bank. Even though the health plan and savings account are separate products, big banks and insurance companies pitch them together as an 'integrated solution' and split the fees. Health insurers keep the premiums; banks retain the investment management fees and the debit card transaction fees. The two split the money earned for opening and maintaining the accounts. Health insurers, said David Josephs, J. P. Morgan's vice president for health care business development, 'are good at explaining benefits.' 'They are good at eligibility. They are good at enrollment. Managing risk. Contracting with doctors and hospitals. Banks are good at managing transactions. Managing deposits. Making investments.' 'As you look at consumer-directed health care,' he added, 'it really requires both of those skill sets.' Even without the lucrative investment management fees, bank executives like Daniel Kelly, manager of H.S.A. services at U.S. Bancorp, say health savings accounts are attractive. Banks make money each time a customer swipes his debit card at a doctor's office. Payment processing alone could generate some $2.3 billion over the next five years, the DiamondCluster study estimates. Some big medical plans have already entered the health saving account arena by starting their own bank. Four years ago, United Healthcare started Exante Financial Services, a Utah-based bank that allowed it to become the first company to offer its customers the high-deductible health insurance policies as well as savings accounts. In December, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association said it was planning to charter a similar institution, Blue Healthcare Bank, an online bank. Executives at both companies say they are not being lured into the banking business by the prospects of wealth management; nor do they plan to offer traditional banking services and loans. Instead, they say having both products under one roof will allow them to provide better customer service, like more smoothly processing transactions at doctors' offices or quickly resolving billing disputes. 'This has nothing to do with an assets-under-management play,' said John M. Prince, chief executive of Exante Financial Services. 'There will be huge falloff in people who are trying to play that role. Eighty percent of the money are assets that go right in and go right out.' Just a few years ago, the idea that the titans of health care and banking would be battling for business would have been nearly impossible to imagine. Even after the Bush administration began pushing for the creation of health savings accounts with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003, the banking industry mainly stayed on the sidelines. The American Banking Association lent its name to the H.S.A. Coalition lobbying group but did not contribute any money. Industry lobbyists viewed the idea as a health care issue; they raised questions about its prospects of passing as the 2004 presidential race heated up. Banking executives did not see the profit potential after an experiment with Medical Savings Accounts, aimed at small businesses, failed. 'Put it this way, the impact of this law did not really become clear to them until after it passed,' said Mr. Perrin, the H.S.A. Coalition director. Once they understood how the accounts worked, however, the big banks realized the next I.R.A. had landed at their feet. Now, some financial institutions are urging the Bush administration and Congress to raise the tax-deductible contribution limit to encourage consumers to put more money in their accounts — a proposal that President Bush is expected to endorse in his State of the Union speech. Banks are already champing at the bit. 'We happen to be in the camp that the H.S.A. is a second retirement account to be used for medical expenses,' said Nancy Todor, an executive who will oversee health savings accounts when Citigroup introduces them this year.

Subject: Paul Krugman: Health Care Confidential From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 05:47:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ January 27, 2006 Paul Krugman continues the health care theme from recent columns and in the post below this one with ideas on how to reform the health care system. He says there are lessons to be learned from a government run program that is not too far away. By Mark Thoma Health Care Confidential, by Paul Krugman, NY Times: American health care is desperately in need of reform. But what form should change take? Are there any useful examples we can turn to for guidance? Well, I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system's success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn't just pay the bills ... it runs the hospitals and clinics. No, I'm not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate. In the 1980's and early 1990's, says ... The American Journal of Managed Care, the V.H.A. 'had a tarnished reputation of bureaucracy, inefficiency and mediocre care.' But reforms beginning in the mid-1990's transformed the system, and ... 'have allowed it to emerge as an increasingly recognized leader in health care.' Last year customer satisfaction with the veterans' health system ... exceeded that for private health care for the sixth year in a row. This high level of quality (which is also verified by objective measures ...) was achieved without big budget increases. ... How does the V.H.A. do it? The secret of its success is the fact that it's a universal, integrated system. Because it covers all veterans, the system doesn't need to employ legions of administrative staff to check patients' coverage and demand payment from their insurance companies. Because it's integrated, ... it has been able to take the lead in electronic record-keeping and other innovations that reduce costs, ensure effective treatment and help prevent medical errors. Moreover, the V.H.A., as Phillip Longman put it in The Washington Monthly, 'has nearly a lifetime relationship with its patients.' As a result, it 'actually has an incentive to invest in prevention and more effective disease management. ...' Oh, and one more thing: the veterans health system bargains hard with medical suppliers, and pays far less for drugs than most private insurers. I don't want to idealize the veterans' system. In fact, there's reason to be concerned about its future: will it be given the resources it needs to cope with the ... wounded and traumatized veterans from Iraq? But the ... V.H.A. is clearly the most encouraging health policy story of the past decade. So why haven't you heard about it? The answer, I believe, is that pundits and policy makers ... can't handle the cognitive dissonance. (One prominent commentator started yelling at me when I tried to describe the system's successes in a private conversation.) For the lesson of the V.H.A.'s success story ... runs completely counter to the pro-privatization, anti-government conventional wisdom that dominates today's Washington. The dissonance ... is one reason the Medicare drug legislation looks as if someone went down a checklist of things the veterans' system does right, and in each case did the opposite. For example, the V.H.A. avoids dealing with insurance companies; the drug bill shoehorns insurance companies into the program... The V.H.A. bargains effectively on drug prices; the drug bill forbids Medicare from doing the same. Still, ideology can't hold out against reality forever. Cries of 'socialized medicine' didn't, in the end, succeed in blocking the creation of Medicare. And farsighted thinkers are already suggesting that the Veterans Health Administration, not President Bush's unrealistic vision of a system in which people go 'comparative shopping' for medical care the way they do when buying tile, represents the true future of American health care.

Subject: More corruption - more misallocation From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 16:11:15 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://thehousingbubble2.blogspot.com/ Regulators, Wall Street Confront Subprime Loans More reports on the changing landscape for lenders. 'About 450 workers at Irwin Mortgage in Fishers face an uncertain future after the firm's parent said it might put the mortgage unit up for sale. Home mortgages used to be a cash cow for Irwin Financial. But officials said they fear profits will shrink as big competitors take more of the market.' ''Indymac delivered outstanding results in 2005. This performance was achieved despite less than favorable conditions for mortgage lenders including the flat yield curve and industry volumes and declining profit margins,' said Michael W. Perry, Indymac's Chairman and CEO. Two milestones were particularly noteworthy as annual revenues surpassed $1 billion for the first time in the Company's history and we became one of the nation's top ten mortgage lenders.' 'As the housing market slows, the booming subprime real estate loan market, loans for people with less-than-stellar credit, is also slowing, observers say. 'In general, there's been a subprime boom over the last two years,' said Jeffrey DerGurahian, 'but Wall Street is getting concerned about the risks in these loans.'' 'One industry veteran predicted that 'exotic' loans, a category that includes subprime loans, would be curtailed in 2006. 'The secondary market is tired of creative financing products and is starting to price against them,' said Pat Stone.' 'Subprime loan originations grew more than ninefold, from $35 billion to $332 billion, between 1994 and 2003. Subprime loans totaled $403 billion in 2004, 17.6 percent of all originations. But the party may be over, with bonds backed by subprime home loans losing about 2.5 percent since September.' 'America's mortgage market will shrink about 20% to $2.24 trillion this year, heightening the temptation of some borrowers and lenders to bend the rules, industry officials said. 'Lenders looking to keep their volumes up maybe won't be looking closely at loans,' said Regina M. Lowrie, chairman of the Mortgage Bankers Association. 'Look at what happened during the period of peak volumes we've seen since 2003; the largest increase in fraud in the last decades. This year, we need to be more vigilant.'' 'Mortgage fraud losses exceeded $1 billion last year, more than double the $429 million a year earlier, FBI figures show. The crime, perpetrated against or in collusion with lenders, has ballooned, increasing seven-fold in the last five years alone, said Kurt Pfotenhauer, the MBA's senior vice president of government affairs.' And from an editorial at the Voice of San Diego. 'Appraisal inflation is the product of pressure from lenders and others to pump up the value of homes. Essentially, more money exchanges hands among sellers, lenders, real estate agents, title companies and others. A growing number of appraisers are going public with their professional experiences dealing with this pressure.' 'One important fact for consumers to know is that independent appraisers receive a flat fee and do not take a percentage of the selling price. So when honest appraisers refuse to 'hit the price,' they sacrifice future business, and suffer financially. Some appraisers, however, work as staff for lenders or for a company owned by the lender. This is not illegal, but the lender must ensure complete independence between the loan production staff and its appraisers.' 'Many states, including California, as well as the federal government are considering legislation that would require more oversight of the appraisal industry. It is important, however, for all of those involved in the housing industry to not wait for the future implementation of regulations, but to come together on this issue. Our goal is to give honest appraisers the ability to do their jobs; to ensure lenders are providing accurate loans; and make certain homebuyers can fulfill their dreams of becoming homeowners without overpaying.'

Subject: Re: More corruption - more misallocation From: Pete Weis To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 07:47:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It's amazing how much of this is going on right under our noses and so few are paying any attention!!

Subject: America's Shame in Montreal From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:34:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/13/opinion/13tue1.html?ex=1292130000&en=16890ab75ba802ec&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 13, 2005 America's Shame in Montreal The best that can be said of the recently concluded meeting on climate change in Montreal is that the countries that care about global warming did not allow the United States delegation to blow the whole conference to smithereens. Washington was intent on making sure that the conferees required no more of the United States than what it is already doing to restrain greenhouse gas emissions, which amounts to virtually nothing. At least the Americans' shameful foot-dragging did not bring the entire process to a complete halt, and for this the other industrialized countries, chiefly Britain and Canada, deserve considerable praise. It cannot be easy for America's competitors to move forward with costly steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while the United States refuses to carry its share of the load. Nevertheless, the Europeans and other signatories to the 1997 treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions - a treaty the Bush administration has rejected - promised to work toward new and more ambitious targets and timetables when the agreement lapses in 2012. For its part, the Bush administration deserves only censure. No one expected a miraculous conversion. But given the steadily mounting evidence of the present and potential consequences of climate change - disappearing glaciers, melting Arctic ice caps, dying coral reefs, threatened coastlines, increasingly violent hurricanes - one would surely have expected America's negotiators to arrive in Montreal willing to discuss alternatives. They did not. Instead, the principal negotiators, Paula Dobriansky and Harlan Watson, continued to tout the benefits of an approach that combines voluntary reductions by individual companies with further research into 'breakthrough' technologies. That will not work. While a few companies may decide to proceed on their own, the private sector as a whole will neither create new technologies nor broadly deploy them unless all countries are required to do their share under a regime that combines agreed-upon targets with strong financial incentives for reaching them. To believe that companies will spend heavily to reduce emissions while their competitors are not doing the same is to believe in the tooth fairy. The Europeans are finding solace in the fact that the Americans - after much kicking and screaming, and after public rebukes by Canada's prime minister and a surprise visitor named Bill Clinton - finally agreed to join informal 'nonbinding' discussions that will try to entice developing countries like China and India into the process. It's certainly true that without the developing nations on board, any effort to keep greenhouses gases at manageable levels will be for naught. China, for example, is building coal-fired power plants at a rapid clip and is expected to overtake the United States as the biggest producer of greenhouse gases in 20 years. But talk is cheap, and nonbinding talk is even cheaper. And talk alone will not get the developing world into the game. Why should India and China make major sacrifices while the United States, in effect, gets a free ride? The battle against global warming will never be won unless America joins it, urgently and enthusiastically. Our grandchildren will look back with anger and astonishment if we fail to do so.

Subject: Model Highlights Arctic's Vulnerability From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:31:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/science/earth/01warm_web.html October 31, 2005 New Climate Model Highlights Arctic's Vulnerability By ANDREW C. REVKIN If emissions of heat-trapping gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere at the current rate, there may be many centuries of warming and a near-total loss of Arctic tundra, according to a new climate study. Over all, the world would experience profound transformations, some potentially beneficial but many disruptive, and all at a pace rarely seen in nature, said the authors of the new study, which is being published on Tuesday in The Journal of Climate. 'The question is no longer whether we will need to address this problem, but when we will need to address the problem,' said Kenneth Caldeira, an author of the study and a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, based at Stanford University. 'We can either address it now, before we severely and irreversibly damage our climate, or we can wait until irreversible damage manifests itself strongly,' Dr. Caldeira said. 'If all we do is try to adapt, things will get worse and worse.' The paper's lead author, Bala Govindasamy of the Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said it might take 20 or 30 years before the scope of the human-caused changes becomes evident, but from then on there is likely to be no debate. The researchers ran a computer model that simulates both the climate system and the flow of heat-trapping carbon into the air in the form of carbon dioxide, then back into soils and the ocean. Most simulations of the potential human impact on climate have been confined to studying the next 100 years or so, but in this case the scientists started the calculations in 1870 and let the computers churn away through 2300. The authors stressed that the uncertainties were high over such a time span, and said the study was intended to illustrate broad consequences rather than project specific ones. In the simulation the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, on average, rose about 0.45 percent per year through 2300. That is slightly less than the current rate, about 0.5 percent. At that rate, the concentration of carbon dioxide doubles from pre-industrial levels in 2070, triples in 2120, and quadruples in 2160. The results are sobering, Dr. Caldeira and other climate experts said, because the computer model used in this study tends to produce less warming from a greenhouse-gas buildup than many of the other climate simulations being run by other research teams. It also presumes that plants and the ocean will continue to sop up carbon dioxide in the future, limiting the amount retained in the atmosphere. Many other independently developed models calculate that at some point, chemical and biological shifts caused by warming would reverse that flow and cause even more greenhouse gases to flood into the atmosphere. Consistent with many other studies, the model showed that the Arctic would see the most warming, with average annual temperatures in many parts of Arctic Russia and northern North America rising more than 25 degrees Fahrenheit around 2100. Antarctica would follow suit later, with temperatures there rising sharply around 2200. The impact on vegetation and landscapes would transform large areas of the earth. In the simulation, at least one ecosystem, the scrubby Arctic tundra largely vanishes as climate zones shift hundreds of miles north. Tundra would decline from about 8 percent of the world's land area to 1.8 percent. Alaska, in the model, loses almost all of its evergreen boreal forests and becomes a largely temperate state. But vast stretches of land that were once locked beneath permanent ice cover would open up. The area locked beneath ice would diminish from 13.3 percent of the planet's total land area to 4.8 percent. Conditions that nurture tropical and temperate forests could expand substantially, so that the two forest types could grow on nearly 65 percent of land surfaces instead of 44 percent now. But the pH of the oceans would fall because of a buildup of carbonic acid from dissolving carbon dioxide, eroding coral reefs and the shells of plankton and other marine life, Dr. Caldeira said. Several climate scientists not associated with the study said its main benefit was akin to the murky visions of possible futures experienced by Ebenezer Scrooge in 'A Christmas Carol.' 'It's a cautionary tale,' said Gerald A. Meehl, a climate modeler at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who has conducted similar studies. 'The message is not to give up because the changes appear overwhelming, but instead the message should be the longer we wait to do something, the worse the consequences.'

Subject: Centrist Recasts Warming Debate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:29:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/10/science/10conv.html?ex=1294549200&en=d2fde8dc2e248fb4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 10, 2006 With Findings on Storms, Centrist Recasts Warming Debate By CLAUDIA DREIFUS For decades, Kerry Emanuel, the meteorologist and hurricane specialist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was known as a cautious centrist on questions of global warming and hurricane ferocity. Professor Emanuel asserted often that no firm link had been established between warming and the intensity and frequency of hurricanes. But in August, two weeks before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, Professor Emanuel wrote in the journal Nature that he had discovered statistical evidence that hurricanes were indeed affected by global warming. He linked the increased intensity of storms to the heating of the oceans. 'His paper has had a fantastic impact on the policy debate,' said Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford. 'Emanuel's this conservative, apolitical guy, and he's saying, 'Global warming is real.' ' On a recent visit to New York, Professor Emanuel, who is 50, said, 'It's been quite a ride since the Nature article.' He added, 'But it's a really bad thing for a scientist to have an immovable, intractable position.' Q. Let's go back to late August. What were your feelings as you watched television and saw Hurricane Katrina heading toward New Orleans? A. I'll go back to a few days before that. As Katrina was making up off the coast of Florida, it was already an interesting storm. Though she was weak, the prediction was she was going to hit Florida. But when Katrina came off the west coast of Florida, there were new predictions taking it into the central gulf and then up toward New Orleans, and I became concerned. Many people in my profession had been worried about New Orleans for a very long time. And we had always envisioned these worst-case scenarios, and this was beginning to look like one of those. And so I plotted out the position of the 'loop current,' which is this warm current of water in the Gulf of Mexico, and the forecast had the hurricane going right up the axis of this loop current. I remember looking at that, and alarms went off. I had this terrible feeling of dread, which deepened when the hurricane was elevated to a Category 5. We all knew that the pumps that kept New Orleans dry wouldn't be able to handle more than about a Category 3. My mother has an elderly friend in New Orleans, and I did something I never do. I sent her a message: 'You ought to get out, now!' In retrospect, I will say that had Katrina been 30 miles further west, the death toll could have been much worse. New Orleans would have flooded more rapidly and to deeper levels. Q. Because last year's hurricane season was so intense, many people declared: 'Ah, ha! Global warming!' Were they right? A. My answer is, Not so fast. That may have been a contributor. But the fact we had such a bad season was mostly a matter of chance. On the other hand, though the number of storms globally remained nearly constant, the frequency of Atlantic storms has been rising in concert with tropical ocean temperature, probably because of global warming. There is no doubt that in the last 20 years, the earth has been warming up. And it's warming up much too fast to ascribe to any natural process we know about. We still don't have a good grasp of how clouds and water vapor, the two big feedbacks in the climate system, will respond to global warming. What we are seeing is a modest increase in the intensity of hurricanes. I predicted years ago that if you warmed the tropical oceans by a degree Centigrade, you should see something on the order of a 5 percent increase in the wind speed during hurricanes. We've seen a larger increase, more like 10 percent, for an ocean temperature increase of only one-half degree Centigrade. Q. So what are the implications of increased ocean temperatures? A. Not much for storms at the time of landfall. But if you look at the whole life of storms in large ocean basins, we are seeing changes. And even if that doesn't have an immediate effect, people ought to be concerned about this because it is a large change in a natural phenomenon. Q. There are scientists who say of fossil fuel consumption and global warming, We may not have all the evidence yet, but we ought to be acting as if the worst could happen. Do you agree? A. It's always struck me as odd that this country hasn't put far more resources into research on alternative energy. Europeans are. France has managed to go 85 percent nuclear in its electrical generation. And the Europeans have gotten together to fund a major nuclear fusion project. It almost offends my pride as a U.S. scientist that we've fallen down so badly in this competition. Q. How did hurricanes become your specialty? A. When I was a child, we lived in Florida for three years, and I went through of a couple of hurricanes and was very impressed by them. Later, at M.I.T., I was asked to teach a course in tropical meteorology, which included hurricanes. As I started preparing, I realized I didn't understand what I'd been taught on the subject. As with many things, you think you understand something until you try to teach it. After some reading, I realized that the reigning theory had to be wrong. This theory held that the main thing that drives a hurricane is just ingestion of enormous quantities of water vapor from the atmospheric environment. It made predictions that weren't true. So it became a very big intellectual challenge to me. The more I got into it, the more interesting it became. Q. Given what you know about hurricanes, should we be building beachfront housing on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts? A. Disaster specialists will tell you that part of the increasing lethality of land-falling hurricanes isn't related to nature. A lot of it has to do with human activity. We're moving to the coasts in droves, like lemmings. We're building waterfront structures there that aren't necessarily strong. We're taxing the infrastructure and paying a big price for doing that. Q. Would you ever buy a house on the beach? A. I'd love to! But if I could do that, I'd insist on paying for my risk. And I'd do what is now being called 'the Fire Island option,' which involves putting up flimsy houses that you don't mind losing to a storm. You don't insure them. Q. Almost concurrent to Hurricane Katrina, you published a beautifully packaged book, 'Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.' How did you feel about the timing of its publication? A. Not terribly good. If one is just interested in sales, I suppose it was fortuitous. But I was trying to convey a sense of hurricanes as not just things of scientific interest, but as beautiful. A leopard is a very beautiful animal. But if you took it out of its cage, it would go for your jugular. Anyone can understand that neither a leopard nor a hurricane is a willful killer.

Subject: Fading as the Arctic Thaws From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:28:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/science/earth/20arctic.ready.html?ex=1287460800&en=c77ac003845eeb1c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss October 20, 2005 Old Ways of Life Are Fading as the Arctic Thaws By STEVEN LEE MYERS, ANDREW C. REVKIN, SIMON ROMERO and CLIFFORD KRAUSS TIKSI, Russia - Freed by warming, waters once locked beneath ice are gnawing at coastal settlements around the Arctic Circle. In Bykovsky, a village of 457 on Russia's northeast coast, the shoreline is collapsing, creeping closer and closer to houses and tanks of heating oil, at a rate of 15 to 18 feet a year. Eventually, homes will be lost, and maybe all of Bykovsky, too, under ever-longer periods of assault by open water. 'It is eating up the land,' said Innokenty Koryakin, a member of the Evenk tribe and the captain of a fishing boat. 'You cannot do anything about it.' To the east, Fyodor V. Sellyakhov scours a barren island with 16 hired men. Mammoths lived here tens of thousands of years ago, and their carcasses eventually sank deep into sediment that is now offering up a trove of tusks and bones nearly as valuable as elephant ivory. Mr. Sellyakhov, a native Yakut, hauls the fossils to a warehouse here and sells them for $25 to $50 a pound. This summer he collected two tons, making him a wealthy man, for Tiksi. 'The sea washes down the coast every year,' he said. 'It is practically all ice - permafrost - and it is thawing.' For the four million people who live north of the Arctic Circle, in remote outposts and the improbable industrial centers built by Soviet decree, a changing climate presents new opportunities. But it also threatens their environment, their homes and, for those whose traditions rely on the ice-bound wilderness, the preservation of their culture. A push to develop the North, quickened by the melting of the Arctic seas, carries its own rewards and dangers for people in the region. The discovery of vast petroleum fields in the Barents and Kara Seas has raised fears of catastrophic accidents as ships loaded with oil and, soon, liquefied gas churn through the fisheries off Scandinavia, headed to markets in Europe and North America. Land that was untouched could be tainted by pollution as generators, smokestacks and large vehicles sprout to support the growing energy industry. But the thaw itself is already causing widespread anxiety. In Russia, 20 percent of which lies above the Arctic Circle, melting of the permafrost threatens the foundations of homes, factories, pipelines. While the primary causes are debated, the effect is an engineering nightmare no one anticipated when the towns were built, in Stalin's time. Coastal erosion is a problem in Alaska as well, forcing the United States to prepare to relocate several Inuit villages at a projected cost of $100 million or more for each one. Across the Arctic, indigenous tribes with traditions shaped by centuries of living in extremes of cold and ice are noticing changes in weather and wildlife. They are trying to adapt, but it can be confounding. Take the Inuit word for June, qiqsuqqaqtuq. It refers to snow conditions, a strong crust at night. Only those traits now appear in May. Shari Gearheard, a climate researcher from Harvard, recalled the appeal of an Inuit hunter, James Qillaq, for a new word at a recent meeting in Canada. One sentence stayed in her mind: 'June isn't really June any more.' Changing Traditions In Finnmark, Norway's northernmost province, the Arctic landscape unfolds in late winter as an endless snowy plateau, silent but for the cries of the reindeer and the occasional whine of a snowmobile. A changing Arctic is felt there, too. 'The reindeer are becoming unhappy,' said Issat Heandarat Eira, a 31-year-old reindeer herder and one of 80,000 Samis, or Laplanders, who live in the northern reaches of Scandinavia and Russia. Few countries rival Norway when it comes to protecting the environment and preserving indigenous customs. The state has lavished its oil wealth on the region, and Sami culture has enjoyed something of a renaissance. There is a Nordic Sami Institute, a Sami College, a state-sponsored film festival and a drive-in theater where moviegoers watch from snowmobiles. And yet no amount of government support can convince Mr. Eira that his livelihood, intractably entwined with the reindeer, is not about to change. Like a Texas cattleman, he keeps the size of his herd secret. But he said warmer temperatures in fall and spring were melting the top layers of snow, which then refreeze as ice, making it harder for his reindeer to dig through to the lichen they eat. He worries, too, about the encroachment of highways and industrial activity on his once isolated grazing lands. 'The people who are making the decisions, they are living in the south and they are living in towns,' said Mr. Eira, sitting inside his home made of reindeer hides. 'They don't mark the change of weather. It is only people who live in nature and get resources from nature who mark it.' Other Arctic cultures that rely on nature report similar disruptions. For 5,000 years, the Inuit have lived on the fringe of the Arctic Ocean, using sea ice as a highway, building material and hunting platform. In recent decades, their old ways have been fading under forced relocations, the erosion of language and lore and the lure of modern conveniences, steady jobs and a cash economy. Now the accelerating retreat of the sea ice is making it even harder to preserve their connections to 'country food' and tradition. In Canada, Inuit hunters report that an increasing number of polar bears look emaciated because the shrinking ice cover has curtailed their ability to fatten up on seals. In Alaska, whale hunters working in unusually open seas have seen walruses try to climb onto their white boats, mistaking them for ice floes. Hank Rogers, a 54-year-old Inuvialuit who helps patrol Canada's Far North, said the pelts of fox, marten and other game he trapped were thinning. As for the flesh of fish caught in coastal estuaries of the Yukon, 'they're too mushy,' he said. Slushy snow and weaker ice has made traveling by snowmobile impossible in places. 'The next generation coming up is not going to experience what we did,' he said. 'We can't pass the traditions on as our ancestors passed on to us.' Even seasoned hunters have been betrayed by the thaw, stepping in snow that should be covering ice but instead falling into water. And on Shingle Point, a sandy strip inhabited by Inuvialuit at the tip of the Yukon in Canada, Danny A. Gordon, 70, said it was troubling that fewer icebergs were reaching the bay. It has become windier, too, for reasons people here cannot explain. 'In the summer 40 years ago, we had lots of icebergs, and you could land your boat on them and climb on them even in summer,' Mr. Gordon said. 'Now in the winter they are tiny. The weather has changed. Everyone knows it. It's global warming.' Sinking Cities Vorkuta, a coal-mining city of 130,000, is crumbling. Many of the city's homes and factories were built not on hard rock, but on permafrost, a layer of perpetually frozen earth that covers 65 percent of Russia's territory. If the permafrost underneath melts, the ground turns to mush. 'Everything is falling apart,' said Lyubov I. Denisova, who lives in a cramped apartment on Lokomotivnaya Street. The ceiling has warped, the walls cracked, the window frames splintered. Some buildings have been declared unsafe and abandoned. Vorkuta lies on the edge of Russia's permafrost boundary, and some scientists predict that continued warming could advance that border hundreds of miles northward, weakening the earth beneath the vast infrastructure built during the days of the Soviet Union's industrialization of the Arctic. According to the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, the average temperature of the permafrost has already increased a degree or two. While most Arctic climate experts say the warming trend is driven by heat-trapping emissions and is unlikely to reverse, many scientists and officials in Russia predict the warming of the last 30 years will give way to a new period of cold. Vorkuta's mayor, Igor I. Shpektor, hews to that line. He said the damage in the city - 80 percent of all buildings show signs of it, one study found - resulted from faulty construction or maintenance, not a general thaw. Still, Mr. Shpektor acknowledged, 'the permafrost is unforgiving.' Any significant warming, said Anatoly A. Chumashov, the city's chief engineer, would leave officials like him scrambling to save the city. 'It is an example of how fragile it is and how careful we should be,' he said. But he added: 'If the permafrost melts, this city will not collapse overnight. There is time to adjust, but it requires very serious investments in labor and money.' Spills and Depredation 'One oil spill would be the end of us,' said Borge Iversen, a fisherman on the Lofoten Islands, a striking archipelago north of the Arctic Circle in the Norwegian Sea. As recently as 2000, Russian tankers were rarely spotted passing the jagged peaks and sheltered inlets, surrounded by seas with the world's largest stocks of cod and herring, as well as killer and sperm whales. So far, there has not been a major accident, but the ships appear more and more, a harbinger of Russia's expanding efforts to extract oil and, increasingly, gas in the Arctic. As much as a quarter of the world's remaining oil and gas resources are believed to exist in the Arctic. And as technology improves, oil prices rise and the seasonal ice cap retreats, countries like Norway and Russia are acting with startling speed. Oil shipments from the White Sea and the coast of the Barents Sea have soared, said Mikhail M. Kalenchenko, director of the World Wildlife Fund's branch in Murmansk, the Russian port. 'It was supposed to increase over the next 10 years, up to 20 million tons of oil,' he said. 'It's 20 million this year,' or 146 million barrels. At this rate, he said, 'we can expect up to 100 million tons, over 10 to 20 years, to be transported through our area.' Russia's history of environmental protection is a poor one. The Soviet drive for industrial development paid little heed to the natural spaces around its mines, factories and ports. Its disregard is evident in the poisoned wasteland around the nickel smelter in Monchegorsk, south of Murmansk, where hundreds of square miles of what was once forest is now almost entirely devoid of life. Western countries have paid millions to help Russia dismantle its aging fleet of nuclear submarines in the area and safely store the nuclear material aboard them, but Mr. Kalenchenko said far less attention had been paid to the environmental risks of expanding oil shipments in the same area, most in single-hull tankers. 'What has never happened before is a big accident in the high seas in the Artic,' he said. For the entire Barents region, he said, Russia has only two bases with the equipment necessary to fight an oil spill. 'In Norway, they have at least 50 bases of this kind,' he said. David Dickins, an engineer from San Diego who has spent 30 years studying how to clean up oil spills in icy waters, said that while the ice impeded the use of tools like booms that hold a slick in place, the ice also naturally contained the oil, giving response teams more time to act before environmental damage occurred. 'People ought not paint the Arctic in some sort of raving sense where a spill is somehow going to be catastrophic,' he said. But he added: 'A spill is always serious. In the Arctic it will naturally take longer to clean up because there is less wave action, and breakdown is slower in colder temperatures.' That is what worries Mr. Iversen, who sails each morning from the village of Ballstad, into the coastal waters around the Lofoten Islands. The village's history, islanders say, reaches back to the Vikings, and fishing is central to the region's social and economic life. 'We've fished these waters for centuries, and while it's a hard life, we've survived in doing so,' he said. Although the fishing industry accounts for less than 1 percent of Norway's gross domestic product, as against the nearly 18 percent brought in by oil and gas, the fisheries are Norway's second-largest earner of foreign exchange and are viewed as a more sustainable resource. 'We need a policy for the Arctic that considers the next 100 years, not just the next 10 years,' Mr. Iversen said. Such sentiment goes far in Norway, where fishing is still part of the oil-rich nation's soul. On Oct. 13, a new leftist coalition upheld a ban on drilling in the waters around the Lofoten Islands until 2009, while allowing exploration to proceed further north in the Barents Sea. As for the tanker traffic, Oslo is looking at other ways of advancing its concerns. Norway and the seven other Arctic nations have started to discuss ways to protect the environment they share in a forum called the Arctic Council, established nine years ago. In 2002, the council issued guidelines for offshore oil drilling, calling for drilling projects to be preceded by studies on environmental effects and the availability of cleanup equipment. The guidelines come with no enforcement powers, but several experts say they think they will have some effect, particularly because Russia is preparing for entry into the World Trade Organization and seeking closer ties with the European Union. A Less Wild Future One day last summer, the 1,200 residents of Pangnirtung, a windswept outpost on a fjord in Nunavut, Canada's Inuit-administered Arctic territory, were startled to see a 400-foot European cruise ship drop anchor unannounced and send several hundred tourists ashore in small boats. While small ships have stopped in the Canadian Arctic, visits from large liners are increasing as interest grows in the opening Northwest Passage, said Maureen Bundgaard, chief executive of Nunavut Tourism, a trade association. Ms. Bundgaard has been training villagers how to stage cultural shows, conduct day tours and sell crafts and traditional fare - without being overrun. 'We're not prepared to deal with the huge ships, emotionally or in other ways,' she said. Inuit leaders say they are trying to balance tradition with the inevitable changes that are sweeping their lands. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, which represents 155,000 Inuit scattered across Canada, Greenland, Russia and the United States, has enlisted lawyers and movie stars like Jake Gyllenhaal and Salma Hayek to draw attention to its imperiled traditions. The group's leaders hope to submit a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in December, claiming that the United States, by rejecting a treaty requiring other industrialized countries to cut emissions linked to warming, is willfully threatening the Inuit's right to exist. The commission, an investigative arm of the Organization of American States, has no enforcement powers. But legal analysts say that a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the foundation for a lawsuit either against the United States in international court or American companies in federal courts. But some Inuit question the wisdom of the petition. They ask, how can they push countries to stem global warming when the Inuit's own prosperity in places like Nunavut is tied to revenues from oil and gas, which are sources of greenhouse gases when burned? Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the elected chairwoman of the group, said the goal was not to stop development but to make sure that native cultures had a say in how development was carried out. 'It's how we do the business that's more important,' she said. 'There are more environmentally friendly ways in which we can do development and still live a certain way, with a way of life and business that can balance both.' While it is the people of the Arctic who will feel the melt and the rush for development most directly, the world, too, will have to give up something - its treasured notion of the Far North as a place of wilderness, simplicity and unspoiled cultures. In a report on Arctic development, the United Nations Environment Program estimated that 15 percent of the region's lands were affected in 2001 by mining, oil and gas exploration, ports or other industrial incursions. But that figure is likely to reach 80 percent in 2050, it said. The Arctic, then, is probably making the same transition that swept the coastal plains of the North Slope of Alaska starting 38 years ago when the first oil was struck in Prudhoe Bay, said Charles Wohlforth, an Alaskan and author of 'The Whale and the Supercomputer,' describing Arctic climate change. Since then, a lacework of pipelines and wells has steadily spread west and east from that central field, ending the sweeping sense of emptiness that defined the Arctic landscape through the ages. 'Even if you support oil development and think it makes sense, there's a point at which it becomes West Texas or the Gulf of Mexico and is not really the Arctic any more,' Mr. Wohlforth said.

Subject: Antarctica, Warming From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:27:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/science/earth/25ice.html?ex=1264568400&en=b1ea9b38fe6c11ca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland January 25, 2005 Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable By LARRY ROHTER OVER THE ABBOTT ICE SHELF, Antarctica - From an airplane at 500 feet, all that is visible here is a vast white emptiness. Ahead, a chalky plain stretches as far as the eye can see, the monotony broken only by a few gentle rises and the wrinkles created when new sheets of ice form. Under the surface of that ice, though, profound and potentially troubling changes are taking place, and at a quickened pace. With temperatures climbing in parts of Antarctica in recent years, melt water seems to be penetrating deeper and deeper into ice crevices, weakening immense and seemingly impregnable formations that have developed over thousands of years. As a result, huge glaciers in this and other remote areas of Antarctica are thinning and ice shelves the size of American states are either disintegrating or retreating - all possible indications of global warming. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in December that in some parts of the Antarctic Peninsula hundreds of miles from here, large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under a frozen cloak. 'The evidence is piling up; everything fits,' Dr. Robert Thomas, a glaciologist from NASA who is the lead author of a recent paper on 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 digital cameras. For most parts of Antarctica, reliable records go back less than 50 years, and data from satellites and overflights like the ones going on here have been collected over only the past decade or so. But that research, plus striking changes that are visible to the naked eye, all point toward the disturbance of climate patterns thought to have been in place for thousands of years. In 1995, for instance, the Larsen A ice shelf disintegrated, followed in 1998 by the collapse of the nearby Wilkins ice shelf. Over a 35-day period early in 2002, at the end of the Southern Hemisphere summer, the Larsen B ice shelf shattered, losing more than a quarter of its total mass and setting thousands of icebergs adrift in the Weddell Sea. 'The response time scale of ice dynamics is a lot shorter than we used to think it was,' said Dr. Robert Bindschadler, a NASA scientist who is director of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative. 'We don't know what the exact cause is, but what we observe going on today is likely to be what is also happening tomorrow.' Thus far, all of the ice shelves that have collapsed are located on the Antarctic peninsula. In reality a collection of islands, mountain ranges and glaciers, the peninsula juts northward toward Argentina and Chile and is 'really getting hot, competing with the Yukon for the title of the fastest warming place on the globe,' in the words of Dr. Eric Steig, a glaciologist who teaches at the University of Washington. According to a recent study published in Geophysical Research Letters, the discharge rate of three important glaciers still remaining on the peninsula accelerated eightfold just from 2000 to 2003. 'Ice is thinning at the rate of tens of meters per year' on the peninsula, with glacier elevations in some places having dropped by as much as 124 feet in six months, the study found. But the narrow peninsula contains relatively little inland ice. Glaciologists are more concerned that they are now beginning to detect similar signs closer to the South Pole, on the main body of the continent, where ice shelves are much larger - and could contribute far more to sea level changes. Of particular interest is this remote and almost inaccessible region known as 'the weak underbelly of West Antarctica,' where some individual ice sheets are as large as Texas or Spain and much of the land on which they rest lies under sea level. 'This is probably the most active part of Antarctica,' said Dr. Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., and the principal author of the Geophysical Research Letters paper. 'Glaciers are changing rapidly and increasingly discharging into the ocean, which contributes to sea level rise in a more significant way than any other part of Antarctica.' According to another paper, published in the journal Science in September, 'the catchment regions of Amundsen Sea glaciers contain enough ice to raise sea level by 1.3 meters,' or about four feet. While the current sea level rise attributable to glacier thinning here is a relatively modest 0.2 millimeters a year, or about 10 percent of the total global increase, the paper noted that near the coast the process had accelerated and might continue to do so. As a result, the most recent flights of NASA and the Chilean center have been directed over the Thurston Island and Pine Island zones of West Antarctica, near the point where the Bellinghausen and Amundsen Seas come together. The idea is to use the laser and radar readings being gathered to establish a base line for comparison with future measurements, to be taken every two years or so. 'We're not sure yet how to connect what we see on the peninsula with what we observe going on further south, but both are very clearly dramatic and dynamic events,' Dr. Bindschadler said. 'On the peninsula, large amounts of melt water are directly connected to disintegration of the ice shelf, but the actual mechanism in West Antarctica, whether melt water, a slippery hill or a firmer bedrock, is not yet clear. Hence the need for more data.' The information being gathered here coincides with the recent publication of a report on accelerating climate change in the Arctic, an area that has been far more scrutinized than Antarctica. That study, commissioned by the United States and seven other nations, found permafrost there to be thawing and glaciers and sea ice to be retreating markedly, raising new concerns about global warming and its impact. 'The Arctic has lots of land at high latitudes, and the presence of land masses helps snow melt off more quickly,' said Dr. Steig. 'But there's not a lot of land to speak of in the high latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere,' making the search for an explanation of what is going on here even more complicated. The hypotheses scientists offer for the causes of glacier and ice shelf thinning in Antarctica are varied. Rising air, land and ocean temperatures or some combination of them have all been cited. Some scientists have even proposed that a healing of the seasonal ozone hole over the South Pole and southernmost Chile, a phenomenon expected to take place in the next 50 years or so, could change the circulation of the atmosphere over the frozen continent in ways that could accelerate the thinning of Antarctic ice fields. But even without that prospect, the situation developing in Antarctica is already sobering, glaciologists agree. The data being collected here in West Antarctica and on the peninsula farther north make that obvious, they say, though the degree to which that should be cause for concern around the rest of the planet will become clear only with more research. 'If Antarctica collapses, it will have a major effect on the whole globe,' Dr. Rignot cautioned. He warned that 'this is not for tomorrow, and Antarctica is such a big place that it's important to look at other areas' around the perimeter of the giant continent, but added, 'Nature is playing a little experiment with us, showing us what could happen if the plug were to be removed.'

Subject: Warming in Austrian Alps From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:26:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/europe/08glacier.html?ex=1281153600&en=bb471fc234631f64&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 8, 2005 Melting Mountain Majesties: Warming in Austrian Alps By RICHARD BERNSTEIN KAISER-FRANZ-JOSEFS-HÖHE, Austria - The jagged peak of the 11,361-foot mountain known as the Johannisberg looms against the sky at the end of a stunningly beautiful valley here in the Austrian Alps, and the Pasterze, Austria's biggest glacier, extends slowly downward and away from it for five miles. The glacier is broad and grand, like the river of ice it is, and yet something about it is visibly not right, and you can tell right away what it is from the steep cable car that was built a bit more than 40 years ago to take tourists from the heights above down to the glacier itself. 'When it was built, it went right down to the glacier,' recalled Erhard Trojer, owner of the Hotel Lärchenhof in the nearby ski resort village of Heiligenblut. But now, if you stand at the bottom of the cable car line and look down at the tourists disporting themselves on the glacier, it is as though you are looking at them from an airplane. 'It's going down from four to eight meters a year,' or about 13 to 26 feet, said Mr. Trojer, who grew up in this valley. 'In the early 1960's, they used to have a ski race every spring from the top of the Grossglockner to the bottom of the glacier.' The Grossglockner, which looms above the Pasterze, is, at 12,460 feet, Austria's highest mountain. 'They can't do it anymore,' Mr. Trojer said a bit sadly. 'It's warmed up, and there isn't enough snow.' Austria's glaciers - there are 925 of them - are shrinking fast, and as they shrink, this part of the world is slowly losing one of its many attractions, those rivers of ice that, figuratively and almost literally, reflect the grandeur of the mountains around them. This is not happening only in Austria, of course. It's a worldwide phenomenon. One Chinese expert on glaciers, Yao Tandong, director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has said that the glaciers in the Himalayas shrink annually by an amount equivalent to all the water in the Yellow River, Agence France-Presse has reported. In Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, some ski resorts - Ischgl, about 100 miles west of here, is one example - are so eager to retain the glaciers that they are covering them with vast sheets of white, sun-reflecting insulation in order to save them. All kinds of hazards are being predicted as consequences of the glacial shrinkage, among them the possibility that desert towns in China's Xinjiang Province, which depend on seasonal glacial melting, will lose their underground water supplies. Two European geologists, Andrea Hampel of the University of Bern and Ralf Hetzel of the University of Münster, wrote in the journal Nature earlier this year that the retreat of glaciers could cause an increase in the number of earthquakes. Other scientists have warned that lakes forming in the back of glaciers because of melting ice could burst through cracks in the glaciers and cause tsunami-like devastation to towns down below. 'The problem is that the permafrost is going away,' Hans-Erwin Minor, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said in a telephone interview. 'And there will be instabilities in the mountains, debris flows, mud flows, erosion of loose material.' Mr. Minor and other scientists attribute the speed of Pasterze's slow disappearance to the same global warming that is melting the polar ice caps. But they say that even without the impact of human activity the glacier would probably be shrinking anyway, as glaciers have always done in response to the earth's long cycles of relative warmth and cold. 'If you go back in history, there have been very large temperature changes,' Mr. Minor said. 'And now we are having a temperature change most likely influenced by man, and that accelerates the shrinkage. It's definitely the case that human action has an influence.' The Pasterze is Austria's best-known glacier, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year, who drive, motorcycle or bicycle over the Grossglocknerstrasse, an amazing mountain road open only in summer, that was built in the early 1930's to attract tourists to this region. On a recent Thursday, there were so many visitors that the immense multistoried parking garage at Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe (Emperor Franz Joseph's Heights) was full, and people in cars on the road below had to wait up to an hour for a space. Standing at the bottom of the tram and looking across the valley, a visitor can see a sort of divide, perhaps 150 yards above the valley floor, marking the highest point of the glacier's bed. A line demarcates the moss-covered rocky mountain above from a steeply slanted, crumbled moraine below. The swift, stone-colored stream emanating from the glacier's edge flows past. The glacier records show that Pasterze reached its greatest extent in the middle of the 19th century and has been retreating ever since. At the moment it is 1.5 miles shorter than it was 150 or so years ago. A bit over four decades ago, when the tram was built to bring visitors to the glacier, it was almost 500 feet higher than it is now, which is why the people scrambling around on top of it look so small from the tram bottom now. 'Normally the snow on the glacier should be there until the middle of July,' said Bernhard Pichler, who trained as a geologist and now works for the tourist office in Heiligenblut, a few miles away at the end of the Grossglocknerstrasse. 'If there is enough snow,' he continued, 'the sun can melt some of it without reduction of the glacier, but we used to get five to seven meters of snow each winter and now we only get about three, and now the snow melts away by the beginning to middle of May.'

Subject: Global Warming Devastates Frogs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:25:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/science/11cnd-frog.html?ex=1294635600&en=c7d220a995b7b341&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 11, 2006 Scientists Say Global Warming Devastates Frogs in Latin America By ANDREW C. REVKIN Scientists studying a fast-dwindling genus of colorful frogs in Central and South America say that recent global warming has combined with a spreading fungus to create a killing zone, driving many species restricted to misty mountainsides to extinction. The researchers said they had implicated widespread warming, as opposed to local variations in temperature or other conditions affecting the frogs, by finding that patterns of fungus outbreaks and species loss in widely dispersed patches of habitat were synchronized in a way that was statistically impossible to explain by chance. Climate scientists have already linked most of the recent rise in the earth's average temperature to the buildup of greenhouse emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes. Thus the new findings, according to the researchers and some independent experts on amphibians, imply that warming driven by human activity may have already fostered outbreaks of disease and imperiled species with restricted habitats. The study, led by J. Alan Pounds, the resident biologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, is to be published on Thursday in the journal Nature. In an accompanying commentary, two scientists not involved in the research, Andy Dobson, a Princeton University ecologist, and Andrew R. Blaustein, a zoologist at Oregon State University, said the research provided 'compelling evidence' that warming caused by human activity was already disrupting ecology. 'The frogs are sending an alarm call to all concerned about the future of biodiversity and the need to protect the greatest of all open-access resources -- the atmosphere,' they wrote. But other climate and amphibian experts criticized the paper, saying there were several layers of significant uncertainty that were not eliminated by the analysis. Among those, they said, it is still unclear whether the lethal fungus, which attacks amphibian skin, has long been in the affected areas and dormant or is a recent arrival. Some amphibian and climate experts who read the paper said it contained definitive statements - like 'our study sheds light on the amphibian-decline mystery by showing that large-scale warming is a key factor' - that were not supported by data. Over 110 species of brightly colored harlequin frogs, in the genus Atelopus, once lived near streams in the American tropics, but about two-thirds of them have vanished since the 1980's. Implicated in many of those vanishings, as well as amphibian die-offs around the world, is a chytrid fungus that grows on amphibian skin from deserts to lowland tropical forests to mountainsides. A paradox confronting biologists studying possible links to climate change is that the fungus thrives best in cooler conditions, challenging the theory that warming is contributing to the amphibian declines. But Dr. Pounds and his team, in studying trends in temperature and disease around the American tropics and, in particular detail, in the cloud-shrouded ridges of Costa Rica where he lives and works, found patterns that they say explain the situation. Rising cloudiness, a long-projected consequence as warming increases evaporation, can keep days cooler by blocking some sunlight and nights warmer by holding in some heat. At intermediate elevations on the mountain slopes of places like Costa Rica, that could have created a favorable zone for the spread of the chytrid fungus, Dr. Pounds said in an interview. He said that because the apparent harlequin frog extinctions have occurred in lockstep in widely dispersed field sites, they are hard to attribute to anything other than the broad warming trend linked by other scientists to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. While the fungus is the bullet, he said, the broader ongoing warming and resulting shifts in clouds are the trigger. Cynthia Carey, an expert in amphibian diseases who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that while both climate and amphibian die-offs are serious problems, this particular paper failed to offer anything beyond circumstantial evidence of links between the fungal illness and warming. 'It is difficult to prove cause and effect on the ground where multiple factors interact in complex ways,' Dr. Carey said.

Subject: 'State of Fear': Not So Hot From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:23:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30BARCOTT.html?ex=1264827600&en=02ae39ac09c1b1c4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland January 30, 2005 'State of Fear': Not So Hot By BRUCE BARCOTT STATE OF FEAR By Michael Crichton. There's a problem with Michael Crichton's new thriller, and it shows up before the narrative even begins. In a disclaimer that follows the copyright page, Crichton writes: ''This is a work of fiction. Characters, corporations, institutions and organizations in this novel are the product of the author's imagination, or, if real, are used fictitiously without any intent to describe their actual conduct. However, references to real people, institutions and organizations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.'' Footnotes? Yes, there will be footnotes. Although ''State of Fear'' comes dressed as an airport-bookstore thriller, Crichton's readers will discover halfway through their flight that the novel more closely resembles one of those Ann Coulter ''Liberals Are Stupid'' jobs. Liberals, environmentalists and many other straw men endure a stern thrashing in ''State of Fear,'' but Crichton's primary target is the theory of global warming, which he believes is a scientific delusion. In his zeal to expose the emperor's nudity the author cites, ad nauseam, actual studies that seem to contradict the conventional wisdom on global warming. Hence, footnotes. Scholarly trappings aside, ''State of Fear'' does follow the basic conventions of the mass-market thriller. There are villains, there are heroes and there is an evil plot to be foiled. Chief among the baddies is Nicholas Drake, head of an environmental group called the National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF), who has conspired with radical eco-terrorists to trigger a series of climate-related catastrophes. Drake believes the disasters will convince the public that global warming is an imminent crisis that can be averted only by writing big fat checks to NERF. As Drake explains to a P.R. man, John Henley, global warming simply isn't scary enough. ''You can't raise a dime with it, especially in winter,'' he says. ''Every time it snows people forget all about global warming. Or else they decide some warming might be a good thing after all. They're trudging through the snow, hoping for a little global warming. It's not like pollution, John. Pollution worked. It still works. . . . You tell 'em they'll get cancer, and the money rolls in. But nobody is scared of a little warming.'' Opposing Drake is John Kenner, an M.I.T. professor who moonlights as a 007-style agent for the National Security Intelligence Agency. When he's not dispatching thugs, Kenner spends most of his time disabusing new acquaintances of the wrongheaded scientific notions they've absorbed from the news media. Global warming, he says, was ''a setup from the beginning,'' a wrongheaded theory foisted upon the public by unscrupulous scientists and fear-mongering environmental leaders. Between Kenner and Drake stands Peter Evans, a mild-mannered attorney for NERF whose loyalty to the do-gooding tree huggers melts away in the heat of Kenner's relentless climatology lectures. In the cartoonish political world Crichton creates in ''State of Fear,'' Kenner and Drake exist as extreme symbols of a good red conservative and an evil blue liberal struggling to win a swing state. Peter Evans is Ohio. Crichton clearly enjoys drawing the line between fact and fiction exceedingly fine. Nicholas Drake's fellow travelers include George Morton, a billionaire philanthropist who's pledged $10 million to NERF; Ted Bradley, an actor and environmental activist who plays the United States president on a popular TV drama; and a shadowy band of eco-terrorists known as the Environmental Liberation Front (ELF). The author's disclaimer notwithstanding, it's impossible not to identify these folks as stand-ins for the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the ''West Wing'' star Martin Sheen and the real-life Earth Liberation Front. The nonfictional N.R.D.C. finds itself burdened with an acronym, NERF, symbolizing all that is soft, squishy and childish. Sheen's doppelgänger comes in for portraiture so villainous -- a drunken lecherous crybaby blowhard, he suffers the novel's most gruesome demise -- that one wonders what the poor actor did to earn such emnity. ''State of Fear'' is so over-the-top, in fact, that it wouldn't take much to turn it into a satiric parable of a liberal coming to his conservative senses. Take the scene where Kenner, Evans and Sarah Jones, George Morton's plucky assistant, arm themselves to confront the eco-terrorists: ''When was the last time you were on a range?'' Kenner asks Evans. ''Uh, it's been a while,'' answers Evans, whose lack of military training and anti-gun politics instantly put his manhood in doubt. ''In the passenger seat, Sarah looked at Peter. He was good-looking, and he had the strong physique of an athlete. But sometimes he behaved like such a wimp.'' Her suspicions aroused by Evans's metrosexual gunslinging, she presses him further. ''You ever do any sports?'' she asks. Sure, he says. ''Squash. A little soccer.'' Wrong answer, blue boy. ''She was disappointed with him and not even sure why. Probably, she thought, because she was nervous and wanted somebody competent to be with her. She liked being around Kenner. He was so knowledgeable, so skilled. He knew what was going on. He was quick to respond to any situation. Whereas Peter was a nice guy, but. . . .'' But she'll be voting red this year. Sarah -- for some reason the author refers to Peter Evans as Evans and John Kenner as Kenner, but Sarah Jones, well, she's just Sarah -- functions as Crichton's own Dame Commonsense. She sees through Ted Bradley's self-righteous bluster: ''Sarah thought: Ted really is a fool. He has a severely limited understanding of what he is talking about.'' She appreciates the road clearance of a good gas-guzzler: ''The vehicle was bouncing over the dirt road, but it was an S.U.V. and it rode high so Sarah knew they would be all right.'' Thank God they didn't take Evans's hybrid wimpmobile. Really -- the guy drives a Prius. This might all be good if not screamingly clever fun -- but for the footnotes. The annoying citations make it apparent that the author desperately wants to be taken seriously on the global warming stuff. That would be perfectly fine in a Weekly Standard cover story. In a thriller, it's a little like having the author interrupt the story to insist that Dr. Evil actually has a death ray. Crichton's proof is itself laughably rigged. Kenner cites study after study but Drake, the scheming NERF leader, is allowed no evidence. ''Just trust me, it's happening,'' Drake says of global warming. ''Count on it.'' There are, of course, thousands of scientific studies that raise disturbing questions about climate change and the human role in its cause. To claim that it's a hoax is every novelist's right. To criticize the assumptions and research gaps in global warming theory is any scientist's prerogative. Citing real studies to support the idea of a hoax is ludicrous. In case anybody misses his point, Crichton tacks a bibliography and two ''author's message'' essays to the end of the book. In these the author compares global warming to the early 20th-century belief in the ridiculous theory of eugenics, and treats us to a bullet-point presentation of his thoughts about science and the environment. One of those thoughts bemoans the lack of ''rational'' and ''systematic'' research on wilderness preservation. For this sorry state of affairs, he writes, ''I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners.'' Crichton thus leads his readers to one of two possible conclusions: one, there exists a world yet unrevealed in which strip miners wrestle with the issue of proper wilderness management; or two, this fellow has completely lost all sense of perspective. The evidence in ''State of Fear'' forces this reader to embrace the latter.

Subject: Beware! Tree-Huggers Plot Evil From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:22:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/13/books/13kaku.html?ex=1260680400&en=ed14541c4a8df27f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 13, 2004 Beware! Tree-Huggers Plot Evil to Save World By MICHIKO KAKUTANI The odious villains in Michael Crichton's new thriller, the folks (as President Bush might put it) who kill, maim and terrorize, aren't members of Al Qaeda or any other jihadi movement. They aren't Bondian bad guys like Goldfinger, Dr. No or Scaramanga. They aren't drug lords or gang members or associates of Tony Soprano. No, the evil ones in 'State of Fear' are tree-hugging environmentalists, believers in global warming, proponents of the Kyoto Protocol. Their surveillance operatives drive politically correct, hybrid Priuses; their hit men use an exotic, poisonous Australian octopus as their weapon of choice. Their unwitting (and sometimes, witting) allies are - natch! - the liberal media, trial lawyers, Hollywood celebrities, mainstream environmental groups (like the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society) and other blue-state apparatchiks. This might all be very amusing as a 'Saturday Night Live' sketch, but Mr. Crichton doesn't seem to have amusement on his mind. This thriller comes equipped with footnotes, charts, an authorial manifesto and two appendixes ('Why Politicized Science Is Dangerous' and 'Sources of Data for Graphs'). The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie 'The Day After Tomorrow.' In that special effects extravaganza, global warming (its dangers ignored by a Dick Cheneyesque vice president) is the enemy, leading to deadly climate changes and disturbances in the weather that leave New York flooded and frozen, and Los Angeles beset by swarms of killer tornadoes. In Mr. Crichton's ham-handed novel, the dangers of global warming are nothing but a lot of hype: scare scenarios, promoted by shameless environmentalists eager to use bad science to raise money and draw attention to their cause. For that matter, the ludicrous plot revolves around efforts by radical members of an environmental group called NERF (National Environmental Resource Fund) to surreptitiously trigger a series of natural disasters including a supersize hurricane and a giant tsunami that would hit California with 60-foot waves; these disasters would be timed to coincide with the group's big media conference, thereby awakening the public to the dangers of climate change wrought by global warming. As in earlier Crichton books, the characters in this novel practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys. The radical leaders of the environmentalists - including the head of NERF, Nicholas Drake, an ascetic Ralph Nader type - are ruthless control freaks (in another novel, they might well have been greedy corporate tycoons or power-mad politicians). Their followers are a bunch of self-righteous bubble-headed Gulfstream liberals, Hollywood types who drive sport utility vehicles while preaching the virtues of gasoline conservation. One tree-hugger, who will meet a particularly horrifying fate, shares the résumé of the real-life actor and activist Martin Sheen: he is best known for having played the president of the United States in a once-popular television show. As for Mr. Crichton's good guys - the people trying to thwart the nefarious NERF plot to wreak natural destruction in the name of saving the planet - they are led by a brainy former M.I.T. professor named John Kenner, who, it's suggested, knows everything about everything. Kenner is accompanied on his global peregrinations by a 'Jurassic Park'-like crew of handsome young people, who prove adept at surviving all manner of perils, from frostbite in Antarctica to death by multiple lightning strikes to captivity by cannibals in the South Pacific. People say standard-issue thriller things like 'Time is short, Sarah. Very short.' That is, when they aren't dropping scientific terms like 'cavitation units' and 'propagation time.' One subplot in 'State of Fear' involves the disappearance or death of a wealthy contributor to NERF; another, a proposed lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency to be filed by a small Pacific island nation. Half movie treatment, half ideological screed, 'State of Fear' careers between action set pieces (the requisite car chases, shootouts and narrow escapes from grisly ends) and talky disquisitions full of technical language and cherry-picked facts meant to hammer home the author's points. And Mr. Crichton does indeed have a message, as an afterword titled 'Author's Message' attests. Among his stated beliefs: 'I suspect the people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don't think we have to worry about them.' And: 'I blame environmental organizations every bit as much as developers and strip miners' for current failures in wilderness management. In an appendix, he goes on to draw parallels between global warming theories and the notorious theory of eugenics floated a century ago: 'I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed.'Given these dogmatic assertions and his lumbering efforts to make the novel's story line illustrate these theories, it seems disingenuous in the extreme of Mr. Crichton to claim: 'Everybody has an agenda. Except me.' Of course, he could simply be trying (like some of the characters in the novel) to drum up publicity for himself by being provocative and contrarian. After all, it's hard to imagine people buying this sorry excuse for a thriller on its storytelling merits alone.

Subject: The Crux: To Worry or Not to Worry From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:21:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/14/books/14cric.html?ex=1260853200&en=a453af567738d97c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 14, 2004 The Crux: To Worry or Not to Worry By CHARLES McGRATH Almost every Michael Crichton novel has embedded in its clockwork plot machinery a microchip of alarm, intended to start readers fretting about something they hadn't sufficiently worried about before. In his first book, 'The Andromeda Strain,' Mr. Crichton introduced us to space-borne plagues. In 'Jurassic Park' and its sequel, 'The Lost World,' we found out what could happen if genetic engineering ran amok. 'Airframe,' it seems safe to say, did not swell the ranks of frequent fliers, and 'Timeline' ought to have made any sensible person think twice about stepping into a quantum teleportation machine. 'Rising Sun' raised the specter of a Japanese takeover of the American economy. 'Disclosure' revised that scenario somewhat to suggest that an even bigger problem might be rapacious female executives. And 'Prey,' Mr. Crichton's last book, refined that message still further to suggest that an overly ambitious mother who worked outside the home might find herself caught up in nanotechnology research and unwittingly turning the world into goo. In an interview last week, Mr. Crichton suggested that we have become a nation of worrywarts. 'There are many groups in contemporary society who find it in their interest to promote fears,' he said. 'A free society, a free press, has a lot of good features, but giving you an accurate view of the world is not one.' Mr. Crichton himself, of course, is not without blame for this state of affairs. His scary techno-thrillers typically spend lengthy sojourns on the loftiest slopes of the best-seller lists and bounce up there again, in paperback, when they're made into movies Mr. Crichton's newest novel, which came out last week, has the classically Crichtonian title 'State of Fear,' and it's about a subject so menacing that it's surprising he hadn't got to it long before now. This time he has taken on global warming, which provides the book with some cliffhanging action sequences including an ice slide, tidal waves, a flash flood and some SUV-melting lightning strikes - except they're all engineered, it turns out, by a new kind of fear monger. The villains here are the sinister agents of an environmental group called NERF, reverse eco-terrorists, bent on making us think that the earth is in much worse shape than it actually is. In a review of the book yesterday in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called the plot 'ludicrous' and said the characters 'practically come with Post-it notes on their foreheads indicating whether they are good guys or bad guys.' Plot aside, the not-so-hidden message of 'State of Fear,' spelled out in copious footnotes, a lengthy afterword, an appendix and a 20-page bibliography, is an oddly reassuring one for a Crichton book, even if many scientists would disagree with it: there is no such thing as global warming, or not that anyone can prove or predict, and when it comes to climatic change, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself and the compromised and politicized experts who are in the business of purveying it. For good measure the book also includes a number of mini-lectures challenging some of the green movement's most cherished beliefs and arguing, for example, that DDT is safe enough to eat, that the giant sequoias are practically junk trees and that the methane emitted by termites is potentially a greater hazard than the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide. 'For most of my life I have felt burdened by highly publicized fears that decades later did not turn out to be true,' Mr. Crichton wrote in a recent article for Parade magazine, and the new novel appears in some ways to be a heave of exorcism. Throughout the novel and in the afterword, he takes the opportunity to disparage a number of other widely held fears. Fossil fuel shortage? Not to worry, we'll come up with something. Population explosion? Nope, birthrates are coming down. Cancer from power lines? Please, you've got to be kidding. Mr. Crichton, who was in New York last week to promote his new book, could easily be mistaken for one of his own creations. He is himself an example of superior bioengineering: extremely tall (6 feet 7 inches), almost unnaturally youthful looking (62, but you'd never know it), and opinionated about all manner of scientific subjects. (He is also a medical doctor, a successful film director and the creator of a long-running television series.) He speaks slowly, without much inflection, in perfectly outlined paragraphs that frequently begin with a topic sentence and include subsections and analogies. Sitting in his hotel room, he had at hand a stack of photocopied graphs and articles, but he seldom needed to refer to them as he patiently explained what he thinks is wrong with the theory of global warming: temperatures have not increased at anything like the rate that was originally predicted, and temperature data are not especially reliable to begin with; back in the 70's we were worried about global cooling. He was particularly dismissive of the various computer models for climate change, saying, 'You have to remember, I come from an experience where you can use a computer to make a photo-realistic dinosaur, and I know that isn't real.' He began idly looking at temperature records about three years ago, he explained, and even after he became convinced that climate changes were impossible to predict and the threat of global warming much less than environmentalists were claiming, he resisted writing about it. 'I didn't want the hassle,' he said, adding that at first he didn't see a way to turn his findings into a novel. 'My message is there isn't a problem,' he said. 'That's not a very good message - it's not a smash-bang one.' Eventually Mr. Crichton shamed himself into starting 'State of Fear' - he 'felt like a coward,' he admitted - and his most important breakthrough came when he hit upon the notion of inverting everything and turning the ostensible good guys into bad ones. The book's action sequences, he said, were modeled on the old Saturday-morning movie serials, though he added that 'no one in the contemporary world knows what a Saturday-morning serial is.' And, indeed, for readers who may not remember how often cannibals figured in Saturday-morning cliffhangers, 'State of Fear' includes a doozy of a scene in which the heroes are captured and tied to posts by some man-eating Solomon Islanders led by a menacing chief called Sambuca, as in the liqueur. ('Don't ask why this name,' another character says. 'Him crazy man.') 'This book has been the most wrenching experience for me personally - in terms of what changes it has brought about in my view of the world,' Mr. Crichton said. He explained that two years ago some armed robbers entered his house in California and held him and his daughter at gunpoint. 'That changed me,' he said. It taught him 'that there really are events that are going to take place about which you can do nothing - things that really do happen.' 'But I think it heightened my attunement,' he continued. 'I mean, if that was a real fear - then what about all the other fears that maybe weren't so real?' Mr. Crichton also said that in his opinion the message of 'State of Fear' is cautionary. 'What you're reading may not be right,' he explained. 'Take it easy, just be careful. Could be overstated, could be not entirely accurate.'

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 19:22:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/05 to 1/25/06 S&P Index is 1.4 Large Cap Growth Index is 1.2 Large Cap Value Index is 1.9 Mid Cap Index is 3.7 Small Cap Index is 5.4 Small Cap Value Index is 5.1 Europe Index is 5.2 Pacific Index is 1.4 Energy is 10.9 Health Care is 1.6 Precious Metals is 11.6 REIT Index is 5.6 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 0.8 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is -1.0

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 19:18:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/05 - 1/25/06 Energy 10.4 Financials 0.5 Health Care 0.5 Info Tech 2.9 Materials 3.4 REITs 5.6 Telecoms 3.9 Utilities 3.4

Subject: Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 07:02:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/science/24geom.html January 24, 2006 Mastering the Geometry of the Jungle By NICHOLAS BAKALAR An indigenous group called the Mundurukú, who live in isolated villages in several Brazilian states in the Amazon jungles, have no words in their language for square, rectangle, triangle or any other geometric shape except circles. The members use no measuring instruments or compasses, they have no maps, and their words for directions are limited to sunrise, sunset, upstream and downstream. The Mundurukú language has few words for numbers beyond five except 'few' and 'many,' and even those words are not used consistently. Yet, researchers have discovered, they appear to understand many principles of geometry as well as American children do, and in some cases almost as well as American adults. An article describing the findings appears in the Jan. 20 issue of Science. 'Across cultures that live extremely different lives, we see common foundational sets of abilities,' said Elizabeth Spelke, a co-author of the paper and a professor of psychology at Harvard, 'and they are not just low-level kinds of abilities that humans share with other animals, but abilities that are at the center of human thinking at its highest reaches.' To test their understanding of geometry, the researchers presented 44 members of a Mundurukú group and 54 Americans with a series of slides illustrating various geometric concepts. Each slide had six images. Five of them were examples of the concept; one was not. The Mundurukú subjects, tested by a native speaker of Mundurukú working with a linguist, were asked to identify the image that was 'weird' or 'ugly.' For example, to test the concept of right angles, a slide shows five right triangles and one isosceles triangle. The isosceles triangle is the correct answer. In data that do not appear in the article but were presented by e-mail from the authors, Mundurukú children scored the same as American children - 64 percent right - while Mundurukú adults scored 83 percent compared with 86 percent for the American adults. The researchers also tested the Mundurukú with maps, demonstrating that people who had never seen a map before could use one correctly to orient themselves in space and to locate objects previously hidden in containers laid out on the ground. The indigenous people were able to use the maps to find the objects, even when they were presented with the maps at varying angles so that they had to turn them mentally to match the pattern on the ground in front of them. Dr. Spelke found this particularly significant. 'The Mundurukú, who aren't themselves in a culture that relies on symbols of any kind, when they were presented with maps were able to spontaneously extract the geometric information in them,' she said. The idea that an understanding of geometry may be a universal quality of the human mind dates back at least as far as Plato. In the Meno dialogue by Plato, written about 380 B.C., he describes Socrates as he elicited correct answers to geometric puzzles from a young slave who had never studied the subject. Do these findings among the Mundurukú confirm Socrates' contention that concepts of geometry are innate? Stanislas Dehaene, another co-author and a professor of psychology at the College of France, is not willing to go quite that far. People learn things, after all, just by living in the world. 'In our article we do not use the word 'innate,' ' he said in an e-mail message. 'We do not know whether this core knowledge is present very early on - the youngest subjects we tested were 5 years old - or to what extent it is learned. The Mundurukú, like all of us, do interact with 3-D objects, navigate in a complex spatial environment, and so on.' Instead, Dr. Dehaene described an innate ability, rather than an innate knowledge. 'Our current thinking is that the human brain has been predisposed by millions of years of evolution to 'internalize,' either very early on or through very fast learning, various mental representations of the external world, including representations of space, time and number,' he explained. 'I have proposed that such representations provide a universal foundation for the cultural constructions of mathematics,' he added. Dr. Spelke sees in these results evidence of the universality of human thought processes. 'Geometry is central to the development of science and the arts,' she said. 'The profile of abilities that the Mundurukú show is qualitatively very similar to what we see in our own culture. This suggests that we are finding some of the common ground at the center of human knowledge.'

Subject: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 05:55:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/politics/23environment.html?ex=1295672400&en=4a46ee655af5d776&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 23, 2006 United States Ranks 28th on Environment, a New Study Says By FELICITY BARRINGER WASHINGTON - A pilot nation-by-nation study of environmental performance shows that just six nations - led by New Zealand, followed by five from Northern Europe - have achieved 85 percent or better success in meeting a set of critical environmental goals ranging from clean drinking water and low ozone levels to sustainable fisheries and low greenhouse gas emissions. The study, jointly produced by Yale and Columbia Universities, ranked the United States 28th over all, behind most of Western Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Chile, but ahead of Russia and South Korea. The bottom half of the rankings is largely filled with the countries of Africa and Central and South Asia. Pakistan and India both rank among the 20 lowest-scoring countries, with overall success rates of 41.1 percent and 47.7 percent, respectively. The pilot study, called the 2006 Environmental Performance Index, has been reviewed by specialists both in the United States and internationally. Using a new variant of the methodology the two universities have applied in their Environmental Sustainability Index, produced in four previous years, the study was intended to focus more attention on how various governments have played the environmental hands they have been dealt, said Daniel C. Esty, the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and an author of the report. The earlier sustainability measurements 'tell you something about long-term trajectories,' Mr. Esty said. 'We think this tool has a much greater application in the policy context.' For instance, Britain ranked 65th in last year's sustainability index, but 5th in the latest study, among the 133 nations measured. Among the reasons for the earlier low ranking, Mr. Esty said, was that 'they cut down almost all their trees 500 years ago and before,' something that modern British governments could not control. The 16 indicators used in the latest study, the report says, provide 'a powerful tool for evaluating environmental investments and improving policy results.' The report will be issued during the World Economic Forum, an annual conclave of business and political leaders which meets in Davos, Switzerland, this week. Mr. Esty said the report was also intended as a tool to help monitor progress on the environmental issues included among the Millennium Development goals adopted by 189 nations at the United Nations Millennium Summit. 'It's like holding up a mirror and having someone help you see what you couldn't see before,' he said. But the report acknowledges 'serious data gaps' that resulted in leaving more than 65 countries out of the rankings. In addition, some thorny methodological issues, like how to measure land degradation or loss of wetlands, have no widely accepted solutions, the report noted, and the authors used the best measures they had available. Like the sustainability index produced last year, the pilot study ranks countries within their geographic peer groups, so that nations in arid regions or tropical ones can be measured against one another. So Belgium's overall ranking of 39, with a 75.9 percent score, can be viewed by region and by issue. Belgium ranks last, for instance, among European countries in protection of its water resources. Air quality rankings tend to favor less industrialized nations like Uganda, Gabon, Ecuador and Sri Lanka. Among the countries of the Americas, the United States ranks in the bottom third on this scale. In the Americas, the United States is at the bottom of the scale measuring agricultural, forest and fisheries management, in part because the study is weighted against countries with a high level of crop subsidies. The study's authors say that such subsidies 'in agriculture, fisheries and energy sectors have been shown to have negative impacts on resource use and management practices.' In the area of environmental health, the study measured such factors as sanitation, lead exposure and indoor air pollution, a particular concern in the least developed countries, where indoor home fires may be common. In those measures, the richest countries, including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, France, Britain, Ireland and the countries of Northern and Central Europe score near 100 percent. On the same scale, the poorest countries fared worst, with 32 of 37 sub-Saharan African nations, along with Bangladesh, Haiti, Yemen, Tajikistan, Laos, Cambodia and Papua New Guinea, scoring at or below 40 percent. Chad and Niger rank last in the world, with scores of 0 percent and 1 percent, respectively. 'In the zone we capture as the field of play, they're at the very bottom,' Mr. Esty said. 'It doesn't mean that nobody there has a toilet. It means a very, very small percent do.' The energy sustainability portion of the index factors national wealth into measurements of energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas emissions. Nonetheless, all but three of the top 25 spots in the worldwide rankings are occupied by countries in economic distress, including Uganda, Chad and Myanmar. Switzerland, Costa Rica and Peru are the exceptions. The study's definition of renewable energy resources does not include nuclear power - in part, Mr. Esty said, because countries with a high proportion of nuclear-fueled energy, like Japan, the Czech Republic and France, reaped the benefits of their energy choices by earning high rankings on the study's other scales, like the air quality index measuring particulate matter. To create another scale that disproportionately favored nuclear-energy users would have undermined the overall reliability of the study, he said. As a result, the renewable-energy rankings tilt heavily toward countries reliant on hydropower, like tiny Bhutan. The study shows that annual carbon dioxide emissions, measured as metric tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, average about 363 tons. North Korea, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Mongolia rank at the bottom of the scale, with amounts ranging from Mongolia's 1,992 tons to North Korea's 4,859 tons. Carbon dioxide emissions from nations with rapid economic expansion, like China and India, are more than double the world average (731 tons and 621 tons, respectively). The United States, at 171 tons per $1 million of gross domestic product, ranks well behind some other nations in the Group of 8, the major industrial powers - France (56), Japan (57), Germany (80) and Britain (118) - but close to Canada (168), ahead of Australia (209) and far ahead of Russia (914).

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Poyetas To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 08:20:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I just read Crichton's 'State of Fear', interesting points. I don't know if I fully agree with Crichton, but he makes a convincing case. Has anybody else read the book? Any opinions???

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 11:20:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Forgive me, but Crichton is a complete and mean fraud even if we enjoy a fiction.

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 26, 2006 at 19:11:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Read Crichton for fun, though I prefer other writers, but there is only nuttiness on ecology or global warming. Imagine, this was the 'authority' asked by Republicans who live only in a fictional land to testify before Congress.

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Poyetas To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 05:53:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I am as anti-GOP as anyone, and I admit to not having researched further into Global Warming, however, the point being made in the book is actually an interesting one. I don't think Crichton is necessarily conservative because other views expressed in his book would put him dearly at odds with any Republican. But the books central thesis, that global warming is not so much a result of CO2 levels as it is human population growth (although the two are inexorably correlated), may have some validity. But then again, I am no scientist.

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 07:26:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: OK, OK. I will read or at least start the book. I may be unfair, but the reviews were not assuring and listening to Crichton was even less assuring. I will try, but there is 30 years of evidence that global warming is increasingly caused by industrial emissions and elimination of environment.

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:14:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sorry, I too have listened to Crichton on global warming and he is bizarre no matter what his political affiliation. Yuch.

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: poyetas To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:35:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: LOL!!! I had the same reservations when I picked up the book. However, I think you will be pleasantly surprised. What is amazing is that Crichton has been painted out to be a GOP hack but the central arguments being made here are the same that have been made throughout his earlier novels like 'Jurassic Park'. The irony of the whole thing is how critical he is of what he calls a current practice of exercising control through fear. Hmmmm didn't Michael Moore say the same thing??? Once one reads the book, you realize that there is NO way that Crichton is a Republican because he contradicts so many conservative ideals in the book. That is why it is amazing that the administration would use him to back up their position!

Subject: Re: United States Ranks 28th on Environment From: Emma To: poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 10:59:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I promise, unlike my sister :), to read the book. Besides, I have enjoyed Crichton in the past. The stories have been fun.

Subject: Trouble in Kenyan Paradise From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 05:53:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/international/africa/22kenya.html?ex=1295586000&en=7e8eac936a5898fc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Trouble in Kenyan Paradise: Poverty, Poaching and Death By MARC LACEY LAKE NAIVASHA, Kenya - There is trouble beneath the surface of this majestic lake in Kenya's Rift Valley. For one thing, huge carp, introduced years back, are stirring up the bottom where tilapia, which had been the dominant fish, reproduce. Also, unlicensed fishermen are dragging finely sewn nets through the murky water, trapping species before they come of age. Then there is the pesticide problem, the sewage and the steady decline in the water level, additional signs of an ailing ecosystem. But it is on the shoreline that Lake Naivasha's real problems lie, and this month it all led to homicide not far from the water's edge. Joan Root, a noted conservationist, lived for decades on a prime piece of Naivasha's lakefront before gunmen stole her life. From her veranda, she could see fish eagles soaring above the trees and hear the chirping of the lilac-breasted roller and the red-billed fire finch, some of the hundreds of birds on Naivasha. Hippos would emerge from the water at night and rumble through her 88 acres of wonderland. But like everyone else who lives around Naivasha, Ms. Root, at 69, had seen the pristine surroundings lose much of their charm. Huge flower farms bought up much of the lakefront, using the water to irrigate their roses and carnations, which are exported to Europe. Some of the farmers introduced banned pesticides into the lake, government officials say. Even more of an affront to Ms. Root were the illegal fishermen - poachers, she called them - who treaded out along the shoreline with their nets, scooping up sackloads of undersize fish. By hauling in the juveniles, they depleted the lake's stock and cut off the eagles' food supply. Overfishing in Naivasha has for years been at crisis levels. In 2000, the fish population collapsed, with fishermen seeing their catches drop to virtually nothing. The government, which has largely taken a hands-off approach toward Naivasha, stepped in and imposed a one-year ban on fishing. The approach seemed at first to have the desired effect. When fishing was permitted again in 2002, authorities issued fewer commercial fishing licenses and yields grew steadily. But the human population of Naivasha grew nearly tenfold in the last 20 years, and the poor residents ringing the lake struggled to make a living. Many turned to unlicensed fishing, taking in hauls that exceeded those of the commercial operations and raising the question of whether of Naivasha was a doomed lake. Not if Ms. Root could do anything about it. Joining with others, she helped prepare action plans aimed at protecting the fragile ecosystem. But Ms. Root got far more involved than most. 'Her dedication to conservation of wildlife was unbelievable,' said Barry Gamer, a neighbor and fellow conservationist who is president of the Nakuru Wildlife Conservancy. 'She was tireless at it. She never gave up.' Ms. Root, the daughter of a British settler in colonial Kenya, was a quiet but determined woman who became known for the innovative nature films she produced in the 1970's with her husband then, Alan. But in recent years, she entered a world of nefarious characters, where bribes were taken and threats were made. Ms. Root's property became the unofficial headquarters of the conservation effort - until unknown assailants crept up to her bungalow on Jan. 13 and shot her dead. 'She felt like the Titanic was sinking before her eyes, and she was trying to save it,' said Dodo Cunningham-Reid, a neighbor and fellow conservationist. The police say the men who sneaked onto her property appeared to be looking not to rob Ms. Root but to kill her. When the men spotted the light from a flashlight that she had turned on in her bedroom, they fired at it, hitting her twice in the chest, said police officers, who based their account on security guards on Ms. Root's property who had watched the attack after activating an alarm. The assailants then moved in closer, fired two more shots into Ms. Root's legs and fled, the police said. The police have taken in four suspects for questioning, including, they say, an unlicensed fisherman and one of the men Ms. Root was paying to chase down the poachers. If she was killed for her conservation work, she would not be the first. George Adamson, for instance, who owned a house just down the lake from Ms. Root's, was killed by poachers in 1989 near his remote lion sanctuary in Kenya. While the investigation of Ms. Root's killing continues, it is clear that she knew in the final weeks of her life that she was a target. Intruders tried to gain entry to her home in December, but she escaped through the back door and the security man who lived on her premises fired a shot to scare the intruders away. After that incident, she reinforced the doors and windows of her house and improved the alarm system. Ms. Root had been financing what was known as 'the task force,' a quasi-official group that would go out onto the lake to round up illegal fishermen. The group included government officials but was mainly made up of poachers familiar with the lake. The task force succeeded at first in reducing the illegal fishing, but then the group seemed to veer out of control. Conservationists say some members of the task force began roughing up fishermen, stealing their catch and engaging in other rogue acts. Still, the members would visit Ms. Root for their pay. Even after community support for the task force eroded, the men continued to come by Ms. Root's place. A friend of Ms. Root's said some of the men began to make thinly veiled threats, telling her that if she did not pay them, the poachers would get her. Shortly before her death, the task force was disbanded and Ms. Root's payments stopped. The police are investigating whether a disgruntled task force member was behind her killing. Or perhaps, they say, it was a poacher threatened by her efforts to reduce overfishing. 'It's like a war on that lake, with so many people out to get each other,' said Simon M. Kiragu, the police officer in charge in Naivasha. 'It's premature to establish a motive but it looks like they hunted for her from one room to another until they got her.'

Subject: Film About Despair in South Africa From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 05:51:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/02/movies/MoviesFeatures/02eber.html?ex=1277956800&en=bcfbafbc01ce0a9d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss July 2, 2005 Film About Despair in South Africa, and School That Offers Hope By RICHARD SANDOMIR Charlie Ebersol's need to tell the story of the Ithuteng Trust school in Soweto - where traumatized and violent teenagers learn to overcome their young lives' horrors - began with a visit to the South African township two years ago and has produced a new documentary, 'Ithuteng (Never Stop Learning).' 'I have a great life, and I felt I had a responsibility to tell this story,' said Mr. Ebersol, 22, who was a film major at the University of Notre Dame and graduated in May. The documentary, which was honored in May as best humanitarian film at the MountainFilm festival in Telluride, Colo., is a raw but inspiring journey into the lives of teenagers ravaged by abuse, crime and AIDS. All were recruited by Jacqueline Maarohanye, a fiercely devoted teacher known as 'Mama Jackey' who set up the school in 1999. Although some students board there, most come from their own schools around Johannesburg for after-hours and Saturday programs that combine academics, culture, sports, peer counseling, therapeutic dramatizations of the teenagers' own lives and outings to a maximum-security prison. Mr. Ebersol, who now lives in Los Angeles and recently completed a stint as a production assistant on the film 'Yours, Mine and Ours,' produced the documentary with a friend, Kip Kroeger, also 22, with whom he had made music videos. They hired Mr. Ebersol's brother, Willie, 18 and a student at the University of Southern California, to direct a 17-day shooting schedule in the summer of 2003 because they admired a short student film he had made on a classmate's dating problems. 'I should have been intimidated, but I wasn't,' Willie Ebersol said. 'He came back from South Africa, gave me a blanket as a gift and asked me to direct.' The students provided brutally candid narratives of their lives to the young American filmmakers, none more than Lebo, a girl who described being raped twice and contracting H.I.V. 'They poured out their lives and didn't hold back,' Mr. Kroeger, a North Carolina State University graduate, said in a telephone interview. 'It sears right into you. Here's a girl you met two hours and ago she's telling us about being raped? How can she sit there and tell us that?' In another scene from the film, an orphan named Dineo, who is described as having been sexually abused by her foster father, the head of an anti-abuse charity, confronts an older girl whose behavior toward her had made her want to give up the program. 'I thought you were a bad person,' Dineo says to the older girl. 'I hated you so much, but now I'm going to be your mother and you're going to be my mother.' While they embraced, Mama Jackey tried to hold back her tears. 'Here are these kids, who are not taught about love, teaching each other to love,' Charlie Ebersol said in an interview. 'They will learn to love and share it because Mama said you have a chance now, you have a way to dream.' Although the film does not yet have a distributor, it is winning notice beyond the award. Oprah Winfrey had already known about Ithuteng (pronounced IT-uh-teng) and Mama Jackey, but it was watching a DVD of the documentary during a flight to Johannesburg in June that prompted her to donate a total of $1.14 million to the school, said Gayle King, editor at large of O, the Oprah Magazine. When Ms. King told Charlie Ebersol of the donation, she said: 'He was incoherent with joy. He said, 'Oh, my God, Gayle, I was just trying to raise $10,000 to keep Mama's electricity on.' 'Ms. Winfrey's gift was the largest to the school so far, but it has received support from numerous groups, including the National Basketball Association, which built a reading center there, and from Dikembe Mutombo, the Congolese player for the Houston Rockets, who donated $150,000 to build two dormitories. Kathy Behrens, a senior vice president of the N.B.A., said: 'I was with Charlie when he first showed the film to Mama. It was very emotional for her. It was very hard for her to watch Lebo, who had died of AIDS.' The lessons of Ithuteng resonated with unexpected power for the Ebersol brothers. Until last year, theirs had been a charmed life, as the older sons of Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Universal Sports and the retired actress Susan Saint James. Dick Ebersol bankrolled the film for about $90,000, after Charlie Ebersol and Mr. Kroeger began raising money on their own. Their father gave them guidance on the documentary and helped find film veterans to help his sons in Soweto. Their mother helped edit the film. But last Nov. 28, a private jet carrying Dick, Charlie and the youngest Ebersol son, Teddy, crashed after takeoff in Montrose, Colo., near the family's winter home in Telluride. Teddy, 14, was killed; Charlie suffered a broken wrist, and eye and back injuries; Dick broke several ribs, his sternum, his pelvis, his coccyx and several vertebrae. 'I walked off the plane with my father in my arms, and my brother behind me,' Charlie Ebersol recalled. 'I said, 'Oh, God, how can I get through this without my father, and then I had to find Ted. In talking to God, I said: 'How can you empower me, and take away my father's power? I need him.' ' He said the openness of the students at Ithuteng helped him deal with his grief. 'Mama believes you must cry yourself dry,' he said of Ms. Maarohanye, 'and that people shouldn't prevent you from crying. Willie and I employed what Mama taught us in the context of real tragedy.' Willie Ebersol said: 'South Africa taught me that I can talk about what's eating me up inside. We learned from the kids that it's O.K. to be sad. If you've been raped, it's O.K. to say you've been raped. You don't bury your grief if you speak about it. You open up.' The film also underwent a transformation after the crash, becoming more overtly emotional with additional music to underscore the painful pasts and altered lives of the students. 'We had a fear of exploiting the emotion,' Mr. Kroeger said of their initial framing of the material. 'But after the crash, we realized we weren't tapping into our emotions. We had to make changes.' Now, Charlie Ebersol said, the film 'represents our trying to find hope in the face of loss.'

Subject: Topic: Essays Are Useful. Discuss. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 09:16:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/06/opinion/06sittenfeld.html?ex=1267851600&en=f4765709643f6943&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland March 6, 2005 Topic: Essays Are Useful. Discuss. By CURTIS SITTENFELD Washington MORE than once, it has occurred to me that I'm the only person ever to forget her own SAT scores. While I'm generally no good with numbers, this memory lapse may have been intentional: I've always been able to recall just enough to know that my scores were low compared with those of my boarding school classmates - I graduated from Groton School in 1993 - and compared with those of my three siblings. Recently, while talking to my older sister, I mentioned my SAT haziness. Without hesitating, she said, 'You got 1180.' She also remembers her own scores (1380) and those of our younger sister (1440) and younger brother (1400). My older sister is a well-adjusted person with a successful career, so of course having come in third out of four siblings doesn't matter to her at all. She does, however, feel compelled to announce, on the infrequent occasions when the topic of the SAT arises, that our younger siblings' higher scores are misrepresentative because they took the test after the scoring was adjusted in 1995. But, really, not that it matters. Now the SAT is about to change again, and the biggest change is the inclusion of an essay. I applaud this addition, and not just because I'm pretty sure it would have raised my score. It's a positive development because - unlike the verbal analogies about to be eliminated - the essay will test a skill that really does matter both during and outside of school. Not once as an adult have I needed to know that, as one SAT-practice Web site tortuously explained, 'impecunious' is to 'money' as 'verify' is to 'doubtful.' But over and over and over, I've had to write. Because I work as a journalist, a novelist and a part-time English teacher, I write far more than the average person. Obviously, most people do not produce either books or newspaper articles. But they do need to write e-mail messages to their bosses, or pleas to the city treasurer explaining why, in point of fact, they don't deserve that parking ticket. As an English teacher, I write comments for all my students once a semester - and so do my students' art teachers, and so do their science teachers. Whether you're applying for a job as a journalist or an engineer, you still write a cover letter. And if you can write well, whatever the context - if you can say what you mean coherently and vividly - you're at a great advantage. Critics claim that the SAT essay section will invite a hasty, generic effort: the standard five-paragraph model containing an introduction, three paragraphs with one example each and a conclusion. Even worse, they argue, schools will now devote class time specifically to preparing students for this essay. But what's so wrong with the five-paragraph essay? I learned from my own teachers that the success or failure of any piece of writing hinges above all on its structure - on what information the writer presents or withholds, and when. If students can master the five-paragraph essay's rigid format, surely they can write just about anything else; and if they understand the rules, then they can break them. As for the notion that such training stifles creativity, I've read enough writing by both high school students and graduates to know that stifling creativity might not be such a bad thing. Ultimately, learning to express yourself clearly will take you much further than learning to express yourself 'poetically.' Poetry may be in the eye of the beholder, but clarity is less subjective. That's why I don't share the fear that grading the SAT essay (scored on a six-point scale) will be particularly complicated. With or without an essay component, the SAT represents a flawed system, and it's undeniable that the same students with access to unfair advantages - classes, coaches and other forms of academic grooming - will now be groomed in more writing-focused, equally unfair ways. I, alone among my siblings, did not take an SAT prep course. I wish I could say I declined this opportunity out of a sense of social justice, but it was more because I didn't care that much. I didn't feel like investing time in something - a standardized test - that seemed so boring and, frankly, so inconsequential. Would any of it matter within a few months? Having such a perspective creates its own problems, but I can't say that I think I was wrong. Although the cottage industry preying on the SAT anxieties of parents and students has grown since I was a teenager, I still don't believe the test matters very much. I'm glad the SAT is including an essay not because I think the SAT is important, but because I think writing is.

Subject: The Gulf Between Us From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 09:13:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/opinion/24leverett.html?ex=1295758800&en=58871b8c8bba074e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 24, 2006 The Gulf Between Us By FLYNT LEVERETT Washington AS the United States and its European partners consider their next steps to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, let's recall how poorly the Bush administration has handled this issue. During its five years in office, the administration has turned away from every opportunity to put relations with Iran on a more positive trajectory. Three examples stand out. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, Tehran offered to help Washington overthrow the Taliban and establish a new political order in Afghanistan. But in his 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush announced that Iran was part of an 'axis of evil,' thereby scuttling any possibility of leveraging tactical cooperation over Afghanistan into a strategic opening. In the spring of 2003, shortly before I left government, the Iranian Foreign Ministry sent Washington a detailed proposal for comprehensive negotiations to resolve bilateral differences. The document acknowledged that Iran would have to address concerns about its weapons programs and support for anti-Israeli terrorist organizations. It was presented as having support from all major players in Iran's power structure, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. A conversation I had shortly after leaving the government with a senior conservative Iranian official strongly suggested that this was the case. Unfortunately, the administration's response was to complain that the Swiss diplomats who passed the document from Tehran to Washington were out of line. Finally, in October 2003, the Europeans got Iran to agree to suspend enrichment in order to pursue talks that might lead to an economic, nuclear and strategic deal. But the Bush administration refused to join the European initiative, ensuring that the talks failed. Now Washington and its allies are faced with two unattractive options for dealing with the Iranian nuclear issue. They can refer the issue to the Security Council, but, at a time of tight energy markets, no one is interested in restricting Iranian oil sales. Other measures under discussion - travel restrictions on Iranian officials, for example - are likely to be imposed only ad hoc, with Russia and China as probable holdouts. They are in any case unlikely to sway Iranian decision-making, because unlike his predecessor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disdains being feted in European capitals. Alternatively, the United States (or Israel) could strike militarily at Iran's nuclear installations. But these are spread across Iran, and planners may not know all of the targets that would need to be hit. Moreover, a strike could prove counterproductive by hardening Iranian resolve to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity. Is there a way out of this strategic dead end? Nuclear diplomacy with Iran, never an easy proposition, has been made harder not only by poor policy choices in Washington, but also by trends in Iranian politics. Mr. Ahmadinejad's electoral victory last year against former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani suggests that a significant number of Iranians linked Mr. Rafsanjani's call for rapprochement with the West with his corrupt past and rejected both in favor of Mr. Ahmadinejad's populist nationalism. Moreover, Mr. Ahmadinejad's execrable rhetoric about Israel and the Holocaust threatens to make future Western engagement look like appeasement. These developments have severely circumscribed the possibilities for diplomacy between the United States and Iran. Iranian officials with ties to the Ayatollah Khamenei continue to stress in private conversations that key players on Iran's National Security Council - the chief decision-making body for foreign policy - remain interested in a strategic dialogue with Washington. But the popularly elected President Ahmadinejad could easily marshal resistance to any 'grand bargain' with the United States. And absent a more positive strategic context, efforts to reopen discussions on a discrete issue of mutual interest, like Iraq, would at best only reprise the experience of short-lived tactical cooperation over Afghanistan. Last week, the Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, suggested a way out of this impasse - one that might also help address other pressing challenges in the Persian Gulf. The Saudi prince noted that if Iranian nuclear weapons were deployed against Israel, they would kill Palestinians, and if they missed Israel, they would hit Arab countries. And so he urged Iran 'to accept the position that we have taken to make the Gulf, as part of the Middle East, nuclear free and free of weapons of mass destruction.' While Prince Saud blamed Israel for starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, his implication that a nuclear-weapons-free Gulf might precede a regionwide nuclear-weapons-free zone is a nuanced departure from longstanding Arab insistence that regional arms control cannot begin without Israel's denuclearization. The United States and its partners should build on this idea and support the creation of a Gulf Security Council that would include Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the other Arab states in the Gulf, as well as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. The Gulf Security Council would not replace American alliances with traditional security partners, but it would operate alongside them, much as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has operated alongside NATO. The council would provide a framework under which the United States could guarantee that it would not use force to change Iran's borders or form of government, provided that Iran committed itself to regionally defined and monitored norms for nonproliferation (including a nuclear weapons ban), counterterrorism and human rights. States concerned about Iran's nuclear activities would then have new leverage to ensure Iranian compliance with these commitments. Additionally, pressing Iran to abide by standards defined and administered multilaterally might be more acceptable to China and Russia than pushing Iran to accept an American reinterpretation of its nonproliferation obligations. Such a framework would leapfrog over proposals for establishing a 'contact group' of Iraq's neighbors and offer all parts of the Iranian political spectrum - even the hard-liners around Mr. Ahmadinejad - something they want: recognition of Iran's leading regional role. Besides rejuvenating efforts to contain the Iranian nuclear threat, it could provide essential support for stabilization in Iraq, as the inclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia would bring together the two states that could be most useful in brokering compromises between Shiite and Sunni communities there. A diplomatic resolution of the Iranian nuclear problem is still within reach. But successful diplomacy will require a bold new vision. The next time the five permanent members of the Security Council convene to discuss Iran, perhaps they should meet in Riyadh rather than London.

Subject: Labor Board's Critics See a Bias From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 08:46:08 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/02/national/02labor.html?ex=1262408400&en=65536c38a87dcbe3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland January 2, 2005 Labor Board's Critics See a Bias Against Workers By STEVEN GREENHOUSE The rulings of the National Labor Relations Board have poured out one after another in recent months, with many decisions tilting in favor of employers. The Republican-dominated board has made it more difficult for temporary workers to unionize and for unions to obtain financial information from companies during contract talks. It has ruled that graduate students working as teaching assistants do not have the right to unionize at private universities, and it has given companies greater flexibility to use a powerful antiunion weapon - locking out workers - in labor disputes. And in a decision that will affect 87 percent of American workers, the board has denied nonunion employees the right to have a co-worker present when managers call them in for investigative or disciplinary meetings. The party-line decisions have been applauded by the Republican Party's business base, which sees them as bringing balance after rulings that favored labor during the Clinton administration. But some academic experts on labor relations say the recent rulings are so hostile to unions and to collective bargaining that they run counter to the goals of the National Labor Relations Act, the 1935 law that gave Americans the right to form unions. 'These decisions come close to or even match the Reagan board in their intensity and vigor in promoting employer powers,' said James A. Gross, a professor at Cornell University who has written several books about the board. 'They are pressing the outer limits of what could be a reasonable or legitimate interpretation of the balance between employer prerogatives and worker rights. In my mind, this is fundamentally inconsistent with the purpose of the National Labor Relations Act, which is to encourage the practice and procedures of collective bargaining.' Robert J. Battista, the labor board's chairman, denied that the panel was stretching the law to help corporations. 'All the cases that we've decided have been well reasoned,' Mr. Battista said. 'They're certainly consistent with the act. I wouldn't characterize them as pro-business or pro-union. I'd like to say they're pro-employee.' The board's defenders say it is merely continuing a long tradition of swinging back and forth: toward management when a Republican is in the White House and toward labor during Democratic presidencies. 'After eight years of a liberal Clinton board and an extremely liberal general counsel, there is of course going to be some turning back toward a conservative agenda,' said Randel Johnson, vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits at the United States Chamber of Commerce. 'The board has turned a corner here, but it's not a wholesale reversal of the case law in favor of the business community.' Several recent board decisions, Mr. Johnson pointed out, have reversed Clinton-era rulings that overturned precedents set by Republican boards. In a case involving I.B.M., the board voted 3 to 2 to overturn a Clinton board ruling that gave nonunion workers the right to have a colleague accompany them to investigative or disciplinary meetings with supervisors. The Clinton-era ruling was a reversal of a 1980's decision. In a case involving Brown University, the board reversed a Clinton-era ruling involving New York University - a reversal of a 1970's decision - that gave graduate student teaching assistants the right to unionize. Mr. Battista said, 'What we did restores the precedent that has been time-honored and had never been overturned by a court or by Congressional action.' Labor unions say the reversals will make it much harder to organize workers at a time when the percentage of Americans belonging to unions is declining. Jonathan Hiatt, the general counsel for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said, 'The notion that in 15 or 20 recent cases the Republican majority has changed board law in ways that take away worker rights, deny workers protection in organizing and collective bargaining, and give employers more latitude, that is really striking and very political.' The labor board has five seats, and the president appoints members to five-year terms. For much of 2004, Republicans had a 3-to-2 majority, but two members stepped down in December, resulting in a 2-to-1 Republican majority until the seats are filled. Unions are alarmed by the board's decision to hear several cases that question the legitimacy of card checks, one of labor's most successful tactics in adding members recently. In the procedure, companies agree to grant union recognition after a majority of workers sign cards saying they want a union. By agreeing to card checks, companies waive the right to hold a secret ballot to determine whether workers favor organizing. With pro-business groups saying union organizers sometimes intimidate workers, Mr. Battista said, it was time to take a critical look at card checks. But the board's Democratic members vigorously objected. 'The issues raised by the petitioners were settled 40 years ago,' they wrote. 'To revisit it serves no purpose but to undermine a principle that has been endorsed time and again by the board and the courts.' Many unions say unionization elections are less fair than card checks because they involve expensive and bitter campaigns in which companies often fire and intimidate union supporters and warn that plants may close if they become unionized. Charles Craver, a professor of labor law at George Washington University, said the board's conservative tilt would hurt unions, but less so than the conservative tilt of the federal judiciary, which he said was increasingly unfriendly to labor. 'I think we have a labor board as conservative as any time since the Reagan board,' Professor Craver said. 'It really troubles me because we're revisiting a lot of cases that have been fairly well settled.' In October, the board upheld a company's decision to fire a worker who had asked a colleague to testify before a state agency to support her claim of sexual harassment by a manager. The National Labor Relations Act prohibits employers from retaliating against workers who engage in concerted activity for mutual protection, but the board found that the fired woman was acting only in her interests and not for mutual protection to safeguard other workers from harassment. 'Taken one by one, I do not think these are the kinds of decisions that make one sit back and say, 'This is outrageous,' ' said Theodore St. Antoine, an emeritus professor of labor law and former dean of the University of Michigan Law School. 'At the same time, I have to concede that once more we're in the nibbling process. While none of them consist of a great big bite, the cumulative effect is to decrease the capability of unions to organize.' In September, in a case involving a trucking company that said it was 'in distress' and 'fighting to stay alive,' the board ruled that such claims did not trigger an obligation for management to furnish financial information to the union. Traditionally, when companies in contract talks say they cannot afford what the unions are seeking, they are required to provide information detailing their financial condition. The same month, the board ruled that disabled janitors could not join a union with able-bodied janitors, on the grounds that the disabled workers' relationship with their employer was 'primarily rehabilitative' and not a traditional employee-employer relationship. 'We haven't got a particular agenda,' Mr. Battista said. 'Nor are we attempting to press the outer limits of management rights. We're trying to strike a balance between union rights, management rights and employees' rights.'

Subject: Doctors, Too, Ask: Is This Drug Right? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 08:44:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/30/business/30doctors.html?ex=1262322000&en=35ec515c0363187e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland December 30, 2004 Doctors, Too, Ask: Is This Drug Right? By BARRY MEIER Across the country, doctors are struggling to decide which pain relievers to prescribe now that they know that popular drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex pose potentially serious heart risks. 'We are desperately in need of information,' said Dr. Stephen Brenner, an internist in New Haven. Yet for at least two years, doctors at the Mayo Clinic, the federal Veterans Affairs Department and the Kaiser Permanente health plan have been sharply limiting their use of Vioxx and Celebrex. That is because those three institutions, after undertaking separate reviews of test data available on various painkillers, reached the same conclusion: For most patients, Vioxx, Celebrex and a related drug, Bextra, did not work any better than older pain relievers or provide any safety benefits beyond them. A growing number of health care organizations have in recent years taken rigorous steps to close one of medicine's biggest information gaps. They are scrutinizing findings about all drugs, new and old, available to treat a particular health condition to determine which work best at the lowest cost. Such evidence-based reviews, as they are known, are an effort to separate scientific wheat from chaff by examining not just the quantity, but also the quality of clinical trials and studies on a given drug. They also seek to determine how a drug's risks and benefits stack up against competing treatments. These reviews have been applied to every major category of medication, from blood pressure treatment to antidepressants. Practitioners like Dr. Brenner do not typically consult such reviews when deciding which drugs to prescribe, but instead rely on their own experience. But that may change as government agencies and academic centers disseminate drug review research more broadly. The drive to base medical practice on such reviews is not new, but it is taking on more urgency as health care costs rise and many newer drugs prove to be only marginally better, if that, than older ones. Dr. Eric L. Matteson, a rheumatologist with the Mayo Clinic, said such reviews also help to counterbalance the forces that influence doctors in writing prescriptions, like drug company pitches, medical specialists championing certain medicines and patients eager to get the latest drug advertised on television. 'The pressures to prescribe are enormous,' Dr. Matteson said. 'You constantly have people at your door.' One of the leading institutions doing drug class reviews is the Evidence-based Practice Center at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. In recent years, some states have started to use reviews produced by the center to draw up lists for preferred drugs that their Medicaid programs will cover. Today, about 12 states, including Washington, Oregon and Missouri, use the center's reports to differing degrees. Earlier this month, the federal government announced that it was planning to spend $15 million in coming years to pay for evidence-based reviews that will compare the effectiveness of various procedures and drugs used to treat 10 of the most common health conditions, including stroke, arthritis, pneumonia, diabetes and ulcers. The studies will be made available to doctors and the public as well as to government and private health plans. Physicians like Dr. Brenner may welcome the help in deciding which painkillers are appropriate for certain patients. In recent weeks, studies have linked Vioxx, Bextra and Celebrex - all of which are in the class of drugs known as COX-2 inhibitors - to increased heart risks under certain conditions. In late September, Vioxx was withdrawn from the market by its manufacturer, Merck. Pfizer, the maker of Bextra and Celebrex, continues to sell both drugs but has limited marketing. Another recent study has suggested that an older pain reliever, naproxen, which is sold as Aleve, might also increase heart attacks, though several experts said the Aleve data was less troubling because the numbers appeared too small to be statistically significant. Drug companies say they support the idea of evidence-based medicine. But they also contend that the Oregon center's approach is more about cutting costs than about science. 'What Oregon is doing is hiding a cost-cutting agenda that they are marketing widely under the rubric of evidence-based medicine,' said Dr. Mark Horn, the medical director for the government relations group at Pfizer. Dr. Mark Helfand, the director of the Oregon center, dismissed that suggestion. And Dr. Matteson said he had heard similar complaints about the Mayo Clinic's work from drug company representatives. 'We've had plenty of criticism from the representatives of different companies that market these drugs to us that we are just looking at the bottom line and not to the patient's best interest,' he said. Advocates of evidence-based reviews say they can help make sense of the incomplete and conflicting state of knowledge about different drugs used for the same problem. Newer drugs, for example, are typically tested more extensively than older ones, and not all drugs in the same class are tested against each other. Moreover, the quality of clinical drug trials run on each drug and their relevance to medical practice can also vary sharply. Those advocates have also long called upon pharmaceutical companies to disclose all clinical trials run on a drug so that all evidence about the drug is available to the public. Legislation to require companies to register their drug trials was recently introduced in Congress. To do an analysis, researchers try to pull together published and unpublished clinical trials and studies about all drugs in a treatment class by doing extensive literature reviews and asking pharmaceutical companies for data. They analyze the studies to determine their scientific rigor, eliminating those that they believe do not make the cut. Even clinical trials, which are considered the most thorough because they test medications under controlled conditions, can be flawed or misleading because of their design. 'The biggest contribution that we make is in laying out the evidence,' Dr. Helfand said. Because responses to pain relievers varies among individuals, a drug that works for one patient might not work for another. But after reviewing all relevant data, the Oregon group and others doing similar studies decided that Vioxx, Celebrex and Bextra did not relieve arthritis-related pain any better than other drugs they had been tested against, like ibuprofen, which is also a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug, or Nsaid. In terms of safety, Vioxx showed the strongest evidence of reducing the incidence of stomach bleeding associated with older Nsaids. Stomach bleeding is a problem that is generally limited to older patients or those with a history of gastrointestinal problems. So even as the prescribing of COX-2 drugs by doctors in general was increasing, the use of these drugs by doctors working for organizations doing evidence-based studies was falling. Doctors working for the Veterans Affairs Department have been curtailing their use of COX-2 drugs since late 2001. The Mayo Clinic decided two years ago to cut down its use of the medications by 50 percent. Those groups and Kaiser Permanente, which also sharply limited its COX-2 prescriptions, saved money. Their actions may have also saved lives. A study conducted by an F.D.A. researcher that was released in September found that Kaiser patients relied on high doses of Vioxx, which can increase the risk of heart attacks, less than half as often as the general population. In undertaking its drug review, Veterans Affairs also re-examined the value of a lesser-known pain reliever, etodolac, and began using it more. The drug was first sold in 1991 as Lodine by a company that is now part of GlaxoSmithKline. Like many older medications, however, it was not extensively tested. A study based on a review of V.A. patient records that was published last month in a medical journal, Gastroenterology, found that the rate of stomach bleeding caused by etodolac was substantially lower than that caused by naproxen and comparable to that of Vioxx. Dr. Byron Cryer, a researcher at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas who led the study, said his group was reviewing those same patient records in effort to determine whether etodolac increased heart risks. Dr. Cryer said that analysis should be completed in about a month. Dr. David Campen, a medical director at Kaiser, said that his organization had not yet changed its prescribing guidelines for Celebrex, which was reported to pose heart risks during a trial of the drug as a cancer treatment. The Mayo system, which operates hospitals and clinics in several states, meanwhile, has decided to reduce its use of the COX-2 drug even further. Previously, any patient over 60 qualified for Celebrex, Dr. Matteson said. But earlier this month, a group of Mayo Clinic doctors, epidemiologists and pharmacists, after reviewing old and new test data, decided to limit the drug's use to patients at risk of stomach bleeding or to others with highly specific conditions.

Subject: Canadian Voters Oust Incumbent From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 08:41:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/international/americas/24canada.html?ex=1295758800&en=0486b6854abe6777&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 24, 2006 Canadian Voters Oust Incumbent for Conservative By CLIFFORD KRAUSS TORONTO - Stephen Harper and his Conservative Party defeated the long entrenched Liberal Party in Canadian elections on Monday. A Conservative victory is a striking turn in the country's politics and is likely to improve Canada's strained relations with the Bush administration. Prime Minister Paul Martin had hoped to build on a string of four consecutive Liberal national election victories in the past 13 years, but his campaign was damaged by two years of investigations into party scandals that spurred a backlash and a desire for change. Mr. Martin tried to cut into Mr. Harper's lead in the final days with a campaign of rancorous advertising, as opinion polls indicated that many urban voters were wary of allowing the country to veer into uncharted ideological waters. But in the end, Mr. Harper seemed to reassure the public that he had evolved into a centrist in recent years and that his government would emphasize cutting taxes and cleaning up corruption, rather than social issues like abortion and gay rights. In a concession speech, Mr. Martin announced that he would leave the party leadership before the next national election. 'I telephoned Stephen Harper and congratulated him on being chosen by the people of Canada,' he said. 'We differ on many things, but we all share the belief of the potential and the promise of Canada and the desire of our country to succeed.' Preliminary data showed that the Conservatives won more than 36 percent of the popular vote, and fell short of a majority in the 308-seat House of Commons. Incomplete results showed the Conservatives leading in 125 districts to 102 for the Liberals, followed by the Bloc Québécois with 51 districts and the labor-aligned New Democratic Party with 29. One independent candidate won. The Bloc Québécois fell well short of its goal of winning a symbolically important majority in Quebec because of the Conservative gains. The Conservatives showed strength across the country, but particularly in rural and suburban areas. Mr. Harper, 46, is a free-market economist who expressed strong support for Washington at the time of the American-led invasion of Iraq and shares the Bush administration's skepticism of the Kyoto climate control protocol, which Canada has signed and ratified. His party was formed three years ago as a coalition of two conservative parties. Such positions are in sharp contrast with those of Prime Minister Martin, who rejected cooperation with President Bush's missile defense program, ratcheted up criticism of American trade policies and caustically criticized Washington during the campaign for not supporting the Kyoto protocol. Mr. Harper did not emphasize his closeness to the Bush administration during the campaign, and there was no indication that Canadians had suddenly embraced American foreign policy. Mr. Harper pointedly promised not to send Canadian troops to Iraq, and said he would be a tough bargainer in trade talks with the United States. But he did promise $5 billion in new military spending, which would go to forming a new airborne battalion and buying large transport aircraft to airlift troops and supplies during world crises. By falling far short of winning a clear majority in the House of Commons, Mr. Harper may lead a shaky government and could face another national election within two years. He will probably have to compromise with lawmakers from three left-of-center parties to pass legislation and remain in power. But in foreign policy the prime minister has broad powers, and he is expected to reach out quickly to Washington to improve a relationship that has been declining since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Canada opposed. 'It is in the DNA of this Harper government to improve the relationship with Washington,' Janice Stein, director of the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, said before the vote was counted.' In domestic affairs, Mr. Harper promised to provide allowances to families with children under age 6 to help with child care, to introduce mandatory prison sentences for serious drug trafficking and gun crimes, to reduce the national sales tax and to provide tax breaks for retirees. Mr. Martin promised a vast government-financed child care program, tax cuts for the middle class and a ban on handguns, and said he was committed to cleaning up pollution in the Great Lakes. He emphasized the period of prosperity and social peace under the recent Liberal governments. But as Mr. Martin fell behind in the opinion polls, his campaign came to rely on attack advertisements that were unusually caustic for Canada. He tried to depict Mr. Harper as a fanatical American-style conservative and an ally of President Bush, who is unpopular in Canada. The campaign lasted two months, unusually long for Canada, because of holidays. But a turning point came on Boxing Day, the day after Christmas, during a break in the campaigning, when an innocent 15-year-old girl and six others were wounded in a shootout between two gangs in downtown Toronto. That unusual appearance of public lawlessness was followed by hints of lawlessness within the government. On Dec. 28, the federal police announced that they were opening a criminal investigation of what appeared to be a flurry of insider trading, set off by what some suspect were leaks from the Finance Ministry about changes in taxes on dividends and income trusts. ' The biggest surprise of the campaign was the breakthrough Mr. Harper made in Quebec, where the Conservatives have been weak for a generation. By taking votes from the Bloc Québécois, he dealt a blow to a sovereignty movement that had been rebounding on a wave of anger over Liberal scandals. 'That there is a room for a new federalist voice in Quebec is a Rubicon,' said Antonia Maioni, a political scientist at McGill University.

Subject: 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 08:40:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/opinion/24tue2.html?ex=1295758800&en=2649b6471d7db790&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 24, 2006 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm' We know that American high-tech companies often look abroad for workers who are cheaper. But the situation gets much more dire if they say they need to go overseas just to find employees who are skilled in math and science. The scope of this problem is made clear in an alarming report, 'Rising Above the Gathering Storm,' from the National Academies, the country's leading advisory group on science and technology. It decries the dismal state of math and science education and calls for an ambitious national program that would retrain the current teacher core, while attracting 10,000 new math and science teachers into the profession every year for the foreseeable future. Congress is considering proposals that would offer substantial scholarships to math and science majors who enter teaching, as well as to low-income college freshmen from high schools that offer appropriately rigorous curriculums. Although it's far from clear how the program would work, it might be a good way to pressure the states that have thus far ignored education reform for the upper grades. But, commendable as this impulse is, it hardly addresses the central problem of teacher preparation. Many education colleges have become diploma mills where the curriculum has little or nothing to do with the employment needs of the public schools in the state. Thanks to poor planning - or no planning - they place no particular emphasis on training teachers who actually major in subject areas like math and science. The data suggests that more than 60 percent of the public school students in some areas of math and science learn from teachers who have not majored in the subject taught or have no certification in it. The No Child Left Behind Act, which was passed four years ago, was supposed to take care of this problem by requiring the states to improve teachers' training and to make sure that all teachers were 'highly qualified' by the end of this school year. Instead, the federal government has allowed the states to simply define the problem away - by relabeling the same old teaching force as 'highly qualified.' States aren't even required to report on how many teachers have actually majored in the subjects they teach. It will be impossible to improve math and science education until we assess teachers' preparedness based on the same high standards in all parts of the country. Teachers must gradually be held accountable for majoring in the areas they teach, especially when the areas are math and science, and for demonstrating that they have mastered those subjects by passing rigorous tests. Even Bush administration insiders realize that Washington has dropped the ball on this issue. While the latest round of proposed reforms is welcome, it will have little effect without skilled, well-educated teachers.

Subject: Same old story.... From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:46:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Is it me or do conservatives just DON'T GET IT!!!?? Doesn't this sound strangely familiar???.... From the CBC: 'Canada's next prime minister said his first act in Parliament will be to propose a federal accountability act. He said this will be followed by his plan to cut the GST (general sales tax), provide a child-care allowance to families, toughen criminal sentencing and establish a patient wait times guarantee.' Hmmmmm, cutting taxes and increasing social promises...Budget Deficits, here we come!!!

Subject: The nasty truth From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:20:41 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The following article in Reuters simply confirms previous lengthy pieces in the NYT's and BBC regarding huge increases in reported proven reserves by OPEC producers during the 80's when OPEC set production quota's for each of its members. Those who have countered the arguments of geologists such as Princeton's Dr. Defeyus regarding the arrival of peak oil have accepted OPEC member's official reports of proven reserves. From Reuters: Kuwait oil reserves only half official estimate-PIW LONDON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - OPEC producer Kuwait's oil reserves are only half those officially stated, according to internal Kuwaiti records seen by industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW). 'PIW learns from sources that Kuwait's actual oil reserves, which are officially stated at around 99 billion barrels, or close to 10 percent of the global total, are a good deal lower, according to internal Kuwaiti records,' the weekly PIW reported on Friday. It said that according to data circulated in Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), the upstream arm of state Kuwait Petroleum Corp, Kuwait's remaining proven and non-proven oil reserves are about 48 billion barrels. Officials from KOC were not immediately available for comment to Reuters. PIW said the official public Kuwaiti figures do not distinguish between proven, probable and possible reserves. But it said the data it had seen show that of the current remaining 48 billion barrels of proven and non-proven reserves, only about 24 billion barrels are so far fully proven -- 15 billion in its biggest oilfield Burgan. Kuwait has been adding up to 500 million barrels a year at Burgan which means the remaining non-proven reserves of some 5.3 billion barrels will likely be upgraded to proven, according to PIW. Three consortia led by BP , Chevron and ExxonMobil are in the race for Project Kuwait, a 20-year operating service contract to raise crude capacity at four oilfields in the north of Kuwait.

Subject: A Country and a Continent From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:16:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/international/africa/23nigeria.html?ex=1295672400&en=3e4a1bb14769c9d3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 23, 2006 A Country and a Continent, Hanging in the Balance By LYDIA POLGREEN ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast - The past week was a busy one for Olusegun Obasanjo, the Nigerian president. There he was Monday morning, beaming as Liberia's new president took the oath of office, cementing a peace Mr. Obasanjo had worked to build. And here he was Wednesday, perched on a settee and clasping the hand of the president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, trying to put out the flames engulfing that country as militant youths rampaged against the United Nations and France. By week's end he was preparing to head to Khartoum for a meeting of the African Union, of which he is the departing chairman, to weigh in on the long list of crises besetting the continent at the moment: brutal warring in the Darfur region of Sudan, political violence in Ethiopia and bellicose posturing between Chad and Sudan, to name a few. But two crises unlikely to make the agenda in Khartoum are the ones Mr. Obasanjo faces at home: one in the Niger Delta and the other on the country's contentious political scene. Those fraught situations are tearing at the delicate threads that hold together the ethnic and religious crazy quilt of vast, populous Nigeria - about twice the size of California, with a population nearing half that of the United States. In the always volatile delta, fresh violence from militants seeking more local control over oil wealth has slashed oil production and helped send prices to a four-month high. The militants, from the delta's dominant Ijaw tribe, have attacked pipelines and captured four oil workers, demanding that the government release two of their jailed leaders and $1.5 billion from Shell, Nigeria's biggest oil producer. [On Sunday, a militant group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, promised more attacks if their leaders were not freed, and threatened in an e-mail message that it could hold the hostages for years, Reuters reported.] The political crisis has emerged from widespread speculation that Mr. Obasanjo will seek to alter the Constitution in order to run for a third term in 2007, a possibility that Mr. Obasanjo has not ruled out. The crisis has already upset the delicate ethnic and religious balance in national politics, with each group staking a what it believes is an ironclad right to claim the presidency. Nigeria, despite its history of dictatorial military rule within its borders, has long been an enforcer and guarantor of democracy in Africa, a role that Mr. Obasanjo has expanded. Its troubles come at a time when the stakes for Africa could not be higher. With crucial elections scheduled in many countries this year and next, including Congo, Uganda, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, the fulcrum between democracy and good governance and autocracy and tyranny could shift significantly. And so the prospect of new ferment in Nigeria could reverberate with deep and lasting impact. Nigeria's Nobel laureate and longtime pro-democracy agitator, Wole Soyinka, recently declared that he and his fellow activists must prepare to head 'back to the trenches' of the struggle, so grave is the current threat. 'Even the incurable optimists, as some of us are, are deeply worried,' said Kayode Fayemi, director of the Center for Democracy and Development in Nigeria, a political scientist and longtime pro-democracy activist. 'Six years down the line in the attempt to build democracy this is what we get: violence in the land, and a government in breach. The only thing happening is politics. It is motion without movement.' Political violence of the type that preceded the country's elections in 1999 and 2003 appears to be on the rise as well. The wife of a prominent northern politician was found stabbed to death in her home. Nothing was taken from the house, according to Nigerian newspaper reports, leading many to conclude that her killing was a warning to her husband, Abubakar Rimi, a crucial member of a coalition of powerful northerners opposed to any extension of Mr. Obasanjo's rule. Nigeria's vice president, Atiku Abubakar, a former general and northerner, would like to succeed Mr. Obasanjo, but the president has made it clear that he opposes that, and a deepening political row in the governing party has broken out over the succession question. In the complex ethnic politics of Nigeria, factions have emerged in the People's Democratic Party urging that the presidency shift to a different ethnic group. Ruled for most of its history by Muslim generals from the north, Nigerians in the South-South, as the Niger Delta is known, say it is their turn, while northerners say that after two terms of Mr. Obasanjo, a Yoruba Christian from the southwest, they should get the presidency again. The two crises are not entirely separate. The political confusion has created the space for delta militants seeking more local control over oil wealth to seize the national stage. Attacks on oil facilities and kidnappings have long been used to extort jobs, development projects and cash from oil companies, but the latest violence appears to be political in nature and pure sabotage, a worrying development, according to Sebastian Spio-Garbrah, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, a private research firm. Taken together, these situations pose a huge challenge for Nigeria as it enters a period of great uncertainty. Indeed, nearly 46 years after its independence, a period in which the country seesawed between civilian and military rule, the unity of Nigeria is still by no means assured. Though it is undoubtedly among the most powerful, wealthy and influential African nations - South Africa is its only serious rival in this regard - it has always struggled to make sense of its volatile mix of cultures, languages, religions and even landscapes. In its awesome diversity, it is the whole of Africa in microcosm. 'Nigerian unity is only a British invention,' said the northern politician Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, in 1948, 12 years before independence made him Nigeria's first federal prime minister. Of course a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then. The searing experience of the Biafran War, a brutal conflict in which Mr. Obasanjo played a crucial role in ending as a junior army officer, has long given Nigerians contemplating secession pause. And the discovery of oil in the 1950's in the delta has given Nigeria an economic logic for unity for decades. Still, a report on the future of sub-Saharan Africa published by the National Intelligence Council, a government think tank for the United States intelligence services, after a conference on the topic last March, identified the collapse of Nigeria as the most important risk facing Africa today. 'While currently Nigeria's leaders are locked in a bad marriage that all dislike but dare not leave, there are possibilities that could disrupt the precarious equilibrium in Abuja,' the report said. 'If Nigeria were to become a failed state, it could drag down a large part of the West African region.' 'Further,' it continued, 'a failed Nigeria probably could not be reconstituted for many years - if ever - and not without massive international assistance.' Nevertheless, Nigeria has along history of ferment, but also a long history of pragmatism that has kept it together despite its troubles. 'This is a very critical moment for Nigeria,' Mr. Fayemi said. 'But we have a history of going to the edge, then pulling back from the brink.'

Subject: An SAT Without Analogies Is Like: From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:13:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/opinion/13sun3.html?ex=1268456400&en=bb8675b337877741&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland March 13, 2005 An SAT Without Analogies Is Like: (A) A Confused Citizenry... By ADAM COHEN When Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, was on the NPR program 'Fresh Air' a while back, he casually made a comparison that left the host, Terry Gross, sputtering in disbelief. 'Excuse me,' she said. 'Did you just ... compare the estate tax with the Holocaust?' Yes, he did. We are living in the age of the false, and often shameless, analogy. A slick advertising campaign compares the politicians working to dismantle Social Security to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In a new documentary, 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,' Kenneth Lay compares attacks on his company to the terrorist attacks on the United States. Intentionally misleading comparisons are becoming the dominant mode of public discourse. The ability to tell true analogies from false ones has never been more important. But to make room for the new essay portion of the SAT that was rolled out this weekend with much fanfare, the College Board has unceremoniously dropped the test's analogy questions, saying blandly that analogical reasoning will still be assessed 'in the short and long reading passages.' Replacing logic questions with writing is perfectly in keeping with these instant-messaging, 500-cable-channel times, when the emphasis is on communicating for the sake of communicating rather than on having something meaningful to say. Obviously, every American should be able to write, and write well. But if forced to choose between a citizenry that can produce a good 25-minute writing sample or spot a bad analogy, we would be better off with a nation of analogists. To the literature of embarrassing childhood revelations, let me add this: When I was growing up there was a Miller Analogies workbook on our living room bookshelf, and I spent many a happy hour flipping through the pages and quizzing myself. The questions looked something like this: Poverty: money:: (A)Wealth: gold; (B) Hunger: food; (C) Car: Driver; (D) Cook: Stove. On a good day, I would guess (B), because just as poverty stems from a shortage of money, hunger is the result of a shortage of food. Questions of this sort are the building blocks of arguments by analogy, which are a mainstay of many disciplines. Philosophers like Aristotle relied on analogies to reason about man and nature. Scientists have long analogized from things they know to things they do not, to form hypotheses and plot experiments. Law is almost entirely dependent on analogies. In my first year of law school, my contracts professor, Gerald Frug, said something brilliant in its simplicity: 'All things are alike in some ways and different in other ways.' It was a warning that for the next three years, we would hear endless arguments that a case must be decided a particular way because a previous case or a statute required it. The two cases, or the case and the statute, would always be alike in some ways and different in others - and law school was really about arguing whether the similarities or the differences were more important. Nowhere are analogies more central than in politics. When Karl Marx wanted to arouse the workers of the world, he compared the proletariat's condition to slavery and, in 'The Communist Manifesto,' urged them to throw off their figurative chains. When Roosevelt argued for a balanced budget, he put it in homespun terms. 'Any government, like any family, can for a year spend a little more than it earns,' he said. 'But you and I know that a continuation of that habit means the poorhouse.' The power of an analogy is that it can persuade people to transfer the feeling of certainty they have about one subject to another subject about which they may not have formed an opinion. But analogies are often undependable. Their weakness is that they rely on the dubious principle that, as one logic textbook puts it, 'because two things are similar in some respects they are similar in some other respects.' An error-producing 'fallacy of weak analogy' results when relevant differences outweigh relevant similarities. On 'Fresh Air,' Mr. Norquist seized on a small similarity between the estate tax and Nazism and ignored the big difference: that the Holocaust, but not the estate tax, involved the murder of millions of people. The last election was decided, in significant part, on specious analogies. A man who went to war, and came back to protest that war, was compared - by a group whose name helpfully contained the phrase 'for truth' - to men who betray their country. Today, the federal tax system - which through much of the nation's history kept government income and expenditures in rough balance - is being compared to 'theft' and recklessly dismantled. The College Board's Web site explanation that analogies are being dropped because they are 'less connected to the current high school curriculum' itself shows a stunning lack of logic, since it does not explain what the 'less connected' refers to. Less connected than they used to be? Than other parts of the test? But in any case, it is a dangerous concession. Since the SAT no longer contains analogy questions, here is one: A nation whose citizens cannot tell a true analogy from a false one is like - fill in your own image for precipitous decline.

Subject: A New Port in Shanghai From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:10:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/12/business/worldbusiness/12port.html?ex=1292043600&en=cdcdc7dede8b455b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 12, 2005 A New Port in Shanghai, 20 Miles Out to Sea By DAVID BARBOZA SHANGHAI - China has opened the first phase of what could eventually become the world's largest container shipping port, a deepwater facility on an island about 20 miles out to sea. The Yangshan Deep Water port is this city's effort to keep up with the explosive growth of exports in the Yangtze River Delta region, which has grown into a strong rival to China's long-dominant Pearl River Delta area. Some experts say the new port could eventually help Shanghai overtake Hong Kong as the world's biggest container shipping port, while also posing new challenges to Singapore and Busan, South Korea, two of Asia's leading trans-shipment hubs. 'This is a major development,' said Wu Wenhua, a researcher at the Institute of Comprehensive Transportation in Beijing. 'This port will help make Shanghai a major shipping and financial center. They didn't have a deepwater port, so this was a major breakthrough for them.' Other experts say the city of Shanghai might have to spend up to $18 billion over the next 15 years to complete the construction of this complex port, which will be able to accommodate much bigger cargo ships and by 2020 could handle alone as many as 20 million 20-foot-equivalent containers. The Yangshan Deep Water port is another one of China's large infrastructure projects, which are meant to ensure that the country's soaring economic growth does not stall because of energy shortages, transportation bottlenecks or land and labor restrictions. And few cities in China are as ambitious as Shanghai, which is building skyscrapers, superhighways and bullet trains, as well as leveling entire districts and relocating tens of thousands of people to prepare itself for the 2010 World Expo. Shanghai now operates the world's third-busiest container shipping port behind Hong Kong and Singapore, which each handled just over 20 million 20-foot-equivalent unit containers last year. Shanghai's ports handled nearly 15 million of the containers last year, up from about 6 million in 2001, even though this city lacked a deepwater port that would have allowed bigger ships to dock. Its existing ports along the Yangtze and Huangpu Rivers are about 23 feet deep. And they are prone to silting and other problems that have helped create transportation and export bottlenecks. But on Saturday, Shanghai opened the first five berths of the Yangshan Deep Water port, which can handle as many as three million 20-foot containers. The port, which sits amid a cluster of islands far out in the East China Sea, is 49 feet deep. To get cargo to and from the Yangshan Deep Water port, the government built a six-lane bridge 20 miles long - one of the world's longest bridges - to connect the coastal region of Shanghai to a pair of islands that belong to nearby Zhejiang Province. The bridge took two and half years to build with 6,000 full-time workers. It will soon be tested by armies of cargo truck drivers who may sometimes have to navigate fog and high winds to reach the Yangshan Islands to unload. The coastal city of Ningbo, also near the new Yangshan port, has also been growing fast. And officials in Ningbo, a city in Zhejiang Province, pushed to make their city the site of the biggest port in the Yangtze River Delta region. But Shanghai officials were able to persuade Zhejiang officials to allow them to virtually annex a cluster of islands and stretch a bridge from Shanghai into their territory, helping Shanghai retain its regional dominance. At a news conference here Saturday, Shanghai officials said the city government financed the project, but now some of the world's biggest cargo port operators are negotiating with Shanghai officials for a role. By 2020, if necessary, the islands could have as many as 50 berths. But some experts here say that building the Yangshan port is as much about prestige as money. Shanghai seems determined to be a financial and trading capital. And without a new deepwater port, it could have faced losing out to rival ports in the nearby coastal city of Ningbo or other areas of China and Asia. 'This speeds up the process of positioning Shanghai as an international shipping center in northeast Asia,' said Yang Xiong, deputy mayor of Shanghai.

Subject: Foreign Film the New Endangered Species? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:09:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/movies/22kauf.html?ex=1295586000&en=e400cfd6ed661ef0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Is Foreign Film the New Endangered Species? By ANTHONY KAUFMAN NOT long ago, the wall between American audiences and foreign-language movies seemed about to collapse, as Ang Lee's Chinese martial arts blockbuster 'Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' scooped up 10 Oscar nominations in 2001, and more than $128 million in ticket sales for its United States distributor, Sony Pictures Classics. But far from crumbling, the barrier has since grown more forbidding, and film industry insiders warn that dwindling attention from the news media and an unexpected boom in lower-budget prestige movies like Ang Lee's 'Brokeback Mountain' are making matters even worse. In 2005, just 10 foreign-language films had ticket sales of more than $1 million in the United States. Like 'Crouching Tiger,' the leaders were martial arts fantasies. The top grosser, Stephen Chow's 'Kung Fu Hustle,' ranked No. 116 at the domestic box office, with $17.1 million in receipts. That was a sharp drop from 2004, when 18 films crossed the million-dollar mark, and Zhang Yimou's 'House of Flying Daggers' had $11 million in ticket sales (much of that from 2005). But some of the best-reviewed foreign films of 2005 - 'The Holy Girl,' 'Kings and Queen,' '3-Iron,' 'Kontroll,' 'Turtles Can Fly,' 'Best of Youth' - struggled to crack $300,000. 'What's changed and what's regrettable is that there are fewer successful foreign-language films than in the past,' said Michael Barker, a co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which distributed both 'Kung Fu Hustle' and 'House of Flying Daggers' in the United States. The Sony unit, in the past a mainstay of the foreign-language market, has cut its subtitled offerings to between one-half and one-third of its slate, down from two-thirds in the past. 'We're becoming more and more selective,' Mr. Barker said. 'There is long-term business in foreign-language films, but it's still very tough.' Increased selectivity has left dozens of smaller movies in the dust. For this year's Academy Awards, for example, a record 91 countries submitted entries to the foreign-language category; only seven have American distribution, the lowest number in years. By comparison, more than 20 entries for the 2003 awards were distributed here. (Just recently, Harvey Weinstein, the distribution maven once famous for releasing foreign-language movies like 'Cinema Paradiso' and 'Life Is Beautiful,' pulled out of a deal to distribute China's Oscar submission, 'The Promise,' because of disagreements over the film's Academy Awards campaign.) Foreign movies are generally regarded as more dependent on reviews and publicity than domestic ones, and Mark Urman, head of theatrical releasing for the art-house distributor ThinkFilm, blames the lack of media attention on dwindling audience interest. 'Nobody's writing about them, because nobody cares, and nobody cares because they don't penetrate the culture,' he said. 'It's a vicious cycle.' Meyer Gottlieb, the president of Samuel Goldwyn Films and another veteran distributor, agrees. 'You have to throw a bomb at a paper to get them to pay attention to foreign films,' he said. 'And if you don't have pre-opening media coverage, it's very, very difficult,' because, he continued, 'seeing an ad isn't what gets an audience to see a foreign film.' Even strong reviews didn't sustain Jacques Audiard's 2005 release 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped,' a French remake of the 1978 American film 'Fingers,' which would have done better at the box office three or four years ago, said the film's distributor Marie Therese Guirgis, head of Wellspring Media. 'It's done well in every single market, but a few years ago, it would have made closer to $2 million as opposed to $1 million,' she said. 'The big challenge today is that it's much harder to stay on screens.' Along with the media, Ms. Guirgis also faulted the profligacy of 'mini-major pseudo-indie productions' - star-studded films like 'Brokeback Mountain' and Fernando Meirelles's 'Constant Gardener' - which are distributed by divisions of the major Hollywood studios (NBC Universal's Focus Features, in the case of 'Brokeback' and 'Gardener'), but compete for the same art house space as foreign titles. 'Those films take up those screens because the studios have realized that they can make money on them,' Ms. Guirgis said. 'Every studio now has a specialty division.' Those divisions, and their giant corporate parents, generally gun for bigger profits than most foreign-language films can provide. As for foreign films that don't offer high-flying action scenes, Bob Berney, president of the distributor Picturehouse, said, 'I don't see Focus or Fox Searchlight doing them.' His previous company, Newmarket films, did well last year with the Hitler drama 'Downfall,' but Picturehouse, owned by Time Warner, won't release another foreign-language film until 2007, when it handles 'Mongol,' a Mongolian epic about Genghis Khan. 'The Constant Gardener,' an English-language film set largely in Africa, exemplifies another threatening trend for subtitled films. Foreign-born directors like Mr. Meirelles, known for his Brazilian gang drama 'City of God,' quickly make the leap to films that rely on American stars and are made for American tastes. So fewer accomplished foreign directors are working in the culture and craft of their homelands. 'The residual effect,' Mr. Urman said, 'is that national cinemas don't get a chance to gain traction. There's no such thing as an affinity with German films, because the second you find a German director you like, then he becomes an English-language director.' 'I feel as if there's almost no auteur draw anymore,' Ms. Guirgis said. 'As opposed to 20 years ago, you were marketing the movies around the filmmaker - Fassbinder's new film, Godard's new film. We still do it, but the honest truth is that the filmmaker matters increasingly little today.' Documentaries are also encroaching on foreign film turf, noted Mr. Urman, whose company released this year's nonfiction hit 'The Aristocrats.' 'They're taking space in the media and the marketplace,' he said. 'If I want a Hollywood alternative, I don't need to see a film with subtitles. I can see several new documentaries.' Even the industry-wide boom in DVD sales has been a mixed blessing for foreign-language movies, which might seem suited for the intimacy of home viewing but do the bulk of their business in theaters. 'Subtitled films and home-viewing are not ideally suited to each other,' Mr. Urman said. 'The smaller the screen, the more problematic it is that you're looking at subtitles.' Still, Sony Pictures Classics and Wellspring have built up large libraries of foreign gems that continue to sell well on DVD. (Wellspring's home video release of Akira Kurosawa's 'Ran' has been a consistent top-seller.) And some art house distributors hail the arrival of Netflix, the mail-order rental company that has leveled the playing field for smaller pictures. According to Netflix, the percentage of foreign film rentals has varied little; it was 5.3 percent in 1999, when the company was founded, and 5.8 percent today. But to many cinephiles, home screens are not much of a haven. 'Imagine never seeing an Antonioni movie on the big screen,' Ms. Guirgis said. 'There are so many filmmakers you wouldn't like if you just rented them on video.'

Subject: The gap & the dollar From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:00:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: US current account deficit ‘unsustainable’ – NY Fed chief >By Christopher Swann in Washington >Published: January 23 2006 18:29 | Last updated: January 23 2006 18:29 >> Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Federal Reserve, on Monday dismissed the view that the US current account deficit was sustainable, suggesting the risk of a sudden fall in the dollar would grow the longer the trade gap widened. In a speech at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, Mr Geith-ner said the problem could not necessarily be expected to solve itself. “Time does not necessarily help. The longer these gaps continue to build, the greater the ultimate adjustment required, and the greater the risks that accompany that process,” he said. “The plausible outcomes range from the gradual and benign to the more precipitous and damaging,” he said. “The size and duration of these [global] imbalances, perhaps the most visible of which is the US current account deficit, present challenges – and risks – for the world economy.” His warning came as Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, repeated his concern over the risk of a run on the dollar. “You cannot discount a run on the dollar. But you cannot fully quantify that risk at the moment,” he said at the same meeting. Mr Geithner has long focused in public speeches on the risks associated with the current account deficit. But he does not see a role for monetary policy in responding to the current account by raising interest rates to slow domestic demand growth and so the demand for imports. Rather, he believes the risks on the external side make it more important for the Fed to keep inflation under control, to avoid adding to the problems and to preserve the Fed’s flexibility in a crisis. Many economists have argued that the risks to the dollar from the bloated current account deficit are mitigated by support for the currency from Asian central banks, which wish to prevent an appreciation of China’s yuan undermining export growth. However, Mr Geithner said this should provide little comfort over the long term. “A prolonged continuation of the exchange rate ar-rangements that have given rise to the large increase in foreign official investments in US financial assets is unlikely to be consistent with the domestic requirements of those economies and for this reason many are already in the process of change,” he said. “Even if we could be confident that the world would be comfortable financing the US on these terms for some time, that fact alone does not mean that it is prudent for the US to continue borrowing on this scale.” Mr Geithner repeated his call for US politicians to reduce the budget deficit. The fact that the US is using much of the money borrowed from abroad to finance public spending, he said, increased the dangers. If it was being invested in the productive capacity of the US tradeable goods industries, this would at least help the US to pay back its foreign obligations.

Subject: When gubbment fails - Privatize From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 07:36:16 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: =DJ FOCUS: Private Equity Rides European Privatization Wave . By Nicole Lee Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES LONDON (Dow Jones)--European governments are increasingly turning to buyout houses to finance and manage companies that are providing essential public services, from mail delivery to waste incineration. Behind the move to privatize assets and outsource more services previously provided by the state is the growing budgetary pressure European governments are facing, particularly as populations age and the social security burden increases. So although some European politicians remain wary of private equity firms - Franz Muntefering, chairman of Germany's Social Democratic party, famously dismissed the investment giants as asset-stripping 'locusts' last year - the privatization trend is likely to create more opportunities for private equity investment. Over the years, private equity has built a strong track record owning and managing European companies and, in the end, 'so long as regulation is in place to ensure an asset is not exploited, there's no reason why financial buyers would be viewed negatively relative to a trade buyer,' said Neil King, a partner with U.K.-based global private equity firm 3i PLC's (III.LN) infrastructure team. Among the state-owned assets likely to be put up for sale in 2006 are several transport businesses whose steady cash flows are expected to attract private equity investors. Just this week, the Dutch Finance Ministry said it sees no obstacles to privatizing national bus operator Connexxion. London-based 3i is one of several likely bidders for Connexxion, people familiar with the matter said earlier. Also likely to entice private equity bidders is ferry operator Scandlines, owned jointly by the Danish government and by German state-owned railway operator Deutsche Bahn AG (DBU.YY). The company, reportedly valued at up to EUR800 million, is expected to kick off the sales process in the next quarter. Aside from transport, other state-owned assets that could draw private equity firms include Europe's gas and electricity networks, said Hugo Peek, managing director, power and utilities, at ABN Amro Corporate Finance, part of Dutch bank ABN Amro Holding NV (ABN). The value of these deals could be in the tens of billions of euros, he estimated. 'Some governments - for example, the Dutch - believe that to prevent utilities from using their ownership of these networks to cross-subsidize their commercial activities, they need to demerge the utilities,' Peek said. 'Privatizing the grids is a next step - and private equity parties are considered to be neutral parties who wouldn't have that conflict of interest.' Cash-Rich Private Equity Firms Can Offer Higher Prices One reason why private equity firms are increasingly welcomed as buyers of state-owned assets is because these cash-rich firms can afford to pay higher prices. Just this month, three private equity firms - European house CVC Capital Partners (CVC.YY), U.S.-based Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR.XX), and Dutch investment firm Oranje-Nassau Groep B.V. - outbid a corporate buyer, Spanish building group Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas SA, to snap up Rotterdam-owned Dutch waste-management company AVR for EUR1.4 billion including debt. CVC last June fended off a rival bid from Dutch postal and logistics company TNT (TP) to buy a 22% stake in state-owned Post Danmark A/S for 1.27 billion Danish kroner, in the first-ever private equity investment in a European national postal operator. As buyout firms have raised multi-billion-dollar funds, 'the transaction size they vie for has risen considerably and the price levels private equity can afford to pay are very attractive to sellers,' said ABN Amro's Peek. ABN Amro advised KKR and Oranje-Nassau in the AVR transaction. European governments are also more accustomed to private equity's standard method of using leveraged finance to boost returns, and are comfortable with leverage as long as it can be shown that such financial engineering doesn't harm buyout firms' ability to invest in and maintain those businesses, he said. European governments understand that 'private equity firms focus on value creation, not simply cost-cutting - and they generate jobs by supporting management teams to create more efficient companies able to accelerate growth,' said Rob Oudman, director of corporate finance at French bank BNP Paribas. BNP Paribas advised CVC in the AVR transaction. It isn't just governments that seem to be won over by private equity's financial firepower. Sometimes, as in the AVR deal, management and even labor representatives come to favor a buyout over an offer from a corporate buyer. 'The management and labor representatives shifted from wanting a strategic buyer to wanting a private equity buyer because they thought there would be more opportunities to expand and have management responsibilities with a financial buyer rather than by becoming a subsidiary of a strategic partner,' said Wim Van Sluis, alderman of economic affairs, ports, labor, environment and physical infrastructure at the Rotterdam municipal authority.

Subject: Swensen doesnt want you in hedge funds From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:58:11 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: DJ Hedge Fund Demand Slowed Sharply In 2005 - Hennessee . LONDON (Dow Jones)--Investor demand for hedge funds dropped sharply last year according to data released Monday, with just $40 billion in new money allocated to the asset class. New York-based consultancy Hennessee Group estimates that hedge fund assets under management swelled by 12% over the year to $1.12 trillion, but that two-thirds of the growth came from performance returns. Net inflows in 2005 raised total assets by just 4%, down from 19% in 2004 and off a peak of 34% in 2001. 'The hedge fund industry continues to grow as investors diversify their portfolios,' E. Lee Hennessee, managing principal of the Hennessee Group said in a statement, though 'it is still just a small part of the U.S. equity and bond markets, which combined comprise over $28 trillion.' Hedge fund assets under management have doubled over the past four years as wealthy individuals and institutions sought double-digit returns and portfolio diversification. But modest returns over the past two years and high fees have led some investors to scale back their allocations. Hennessee found that direct investments by high net wealth individuals and family offices continue to be the largest source of capital for hedge funds, accounting for an estimated 44% of total industry capital. Funds of hedge funds represent an estimated 28% of assets under management, while corporations and institutions, pension plans and endowments and foundations make up the remainder of investors in hedge funds. Within hedge fund strategies, Hennessee Group said total assets for arbitrage and event-driven funds were up by about 12.2% in 2005, and that the majority of assets in this area were allocated to multi-strategy arbitrage funds. According to Hennessee data released two weeks ago, arbitrage and event driven funds tracked by the consultancy gained 5.3% in 2005, indicating that most of their growth in assets came from new capital. Long/short equity assets under management increased by about 11.5%, with just under 7% of the growth coming from performance gains. The overall Hennessee Hedge Fund Index climbed 8% in 2005, beating U.S. equity market benchmarks such as the Standard & Poor's 500 and the Nasdaq Composite, which returned 4.9% and 1.4%, respectively. The average annual return of the Hennessee Hedge Fund Index between 1987 and 2004 was 14.9%. Company Web site: http://www.hennesseegroup.com -Margot Patrick, Dow Jones Newswires; 44 20 7842 9451; margot.patrick@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires January 24, 2006 05:42 ET (10:42 GMT)

Subject: Day in the Sundance Rays From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:12:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/movies/MoviesFeatures/23sund.html?ex=1295672400&en=f8cfca07cdcc4e00&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 23, 2006 A Small Film Nearly Left for Dead Has Its Day in the Sundance Rays By SHARON WAXMAN PARK CITY, Utah - It was a small, quirky comedy, written by Matthew Broderick's former assistant, with a pair of first-time directors, no movie stars and no foreseeable foreign box office. So of course, everyone in Hollywood passed it up - except for Focus Features, which worked on the project for two years before deciding: Never mind. Classic Sundance Cinderella story: someone finally wrote a check; the movie was made and opened on Friday night to a rapturous response at the Sundance Film Festival, becoming the subject of a bidding war until the wee hours of the morning. The film was 'Little Miss Sunshine,' at $9 million a relatively pricey independent movie, underwritten by the self-financing producer Marc Turtletaub. With an ensemble cast of Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin, the film is a silly yet endearing story of a family on an increasingly catastrophic road trip, headed to a beauty pageant for 7-year-old Olive. (Olive is played by a long-haired, bright-eyed Abigail Breslin, who was 8 when the movie was shot last year.) Along the way each family member grows and changes from a stock comic character - cranky Grandpa, sullen teenager, overbearing dad - to a more nuanced individual. The movie takes place mostly over a single day, but it took five years to make. In 2001 Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, now 48 and 47 respectively, were directors of commercials and music videos, and had waited for years to make a feature film. When they read the script by Michael Arndt, Mr. Broderick's former assistant, they didn't hesitate. 'This film really struck a chord,' said Ms. Faris, who often finishes the sentences of Mr. Dayton, her husband. 'We felt like it was written for us.' Though many directors, including Goldie Hawn, were seeking the assignment, the pair's enthusiasm won over Mr. Turtletaub and his fellow producers, who had bought the script for $150,000. Together they pitched the project to the specialty divisions of Hollywood studios, which had all already passed on the script once before, when the directors were not involved. Only Focus Features - at the time called USA Films - showed interest, but the timing and the chemistry proved difficult. USA's parent company, Universal, was being bought by a big corporation; USA disappeared and Focus took its place, with a new set of executives. And there were casting issues. Various actors were considered - Laura Linney, Alec Baldwin, Bill Murray, Robin Williams - but the executives kept hesitating. 'They didn't think the movie would travel,' said one of the film's producers, David T. Friendly. 'And there wasn't enough star power.' Focus Films tried briefly to make the movie in Canada, where it would cost less. But the directors had spent months on the beauty-pageant circuit, winning the trust of the pint-size contestants and their parents, who they wanted as extras in the film. They couldn't afford to bring all those people to Canada. After two years of frustration, Mr. Dayton and Ms. Faris were sure the movie wouldn't be made, though they kept hoping they were wrong. One day in August 2004, Mr. Dayton received a call: Focus was not going to proceed. It was then that Mr. Turtletaub, whose family used to own the Money Store, a loan-servicing company, stepped in and wrote a check, paying Focus $400,000 in development costs to get the project back. 'I said: 'You know what? We'll stick our neck out,' ' Mr. Turtletaub said. 'I'm willing to take a risk on a movie that is there to uplift and enlighten.' It all turned out well, as Cinderella stories do. As the standing ovation faded at the Eccles Theater here on Friday, the 20th Century Fox co-chairman Tom Rothman was already on the phone to the producers, urging them to choose his company. Soon after, John Sloss, the film's broker, could be found hiding in the lobby of the tiny Holiday Village theater, where another of his films was about to have its premiere. How goes the bidding, he was asked? He smiled, like a Cheshire cat. 'Every company is in it,' he said. 'We could easily set a record. But I'm more interested in the back end.' As he spoke, he was keeping Agnes Mentre, an acquisitions executive with the Weinstein Company, holding on his cellphone. Through the night, snow-flecked executives from competing specialty-film divisions tramped through the Riverhorse restaurant on Main Street, where Mr. Turtletaub held court. Paramount Classics dropped out early. So did the new Miramax. Focus Features decided the film had too small a foreign audience, and bowed out. Harvey Weinstein hung on until late in the game. In the end - around 8 a.m. on Saturday - 'Little Miss Sunshine' went to Fox Searchlight, the home of 'Napoleon Dynamite' and 'Garden State,' for $10.5 million, plus 10 percent of all gross revenues on the film, a hefty figure that set tongues wagging. Mr. Turtletaub, who turns 60 in a week, was delighted. Mr. Dayton said, 'We really could quit right now, and we'd be happy.' 'Little Miss Sunshine' is expected to open in midsummer.

Subject: Standing the Whole World on Its Ear From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:10:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/arts/music/22eich.html?ex=1295586000&en=a0bdcc951594b645&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Standing the Whole World on Its Ear By JEREMY EICHLER Atlanta — Late one night a few weeks ago, Jesús Montoya, a Seville-born flamenco singer dressed in a velour track suit, stood resolutely on the stage of a darkened concert hall and, without warning, unleashed a riot of sound. His voice was raw and exhilarating as he swooped up and down Eastern-inflected scales, spinning endless improvisations. The words he sang spoke of 1930's Spain, but the sound felt like a primal wail from a more distant past, an ancient coloratura of longing. The music filled the large, empty hall and poured into a recording booth at spine-tingling volume. Inside, an astonished German recording team from Deutsche Grammophon started fumbling with the consoles. But Osvaldo Golijov, the composer who had flown Mr. Montoya in to record this small but memorable part in his opera, 'Ainadamar,' sat calmly, smiling and nodding to himself. 'Very good,' he said. Mr. Golijov (pronounced GO-lee-hoff) is exceedingly modest, but he is one of the few composers today whose works are profoundly shifting the geography of the classical music world, dumping the old Eurocentric map with its familiar capitals and trading routes in the dustbin of history. In Mr. Golijov's universe, the pristine temple of art music has opened branch offices in places like Argentina, Brazil, Jerusalem and an imagined Eastern Europe. And they have been built with porous walls. For Mr. Golijov, slipping sizzling flamenco improvisation into the middle of an opera is as natural as slipping a tenor aria in might have been for Verdi. Of course, classical composers have often turned to folk and popular styles for inspiration, but that has usually meant scrubbing the music clean of its grit. Mr. Golijov, 45, brings it directly into his compositions without transcription, without translation, without sapping its vitality through modernist abstraction. And flamenco is only the beginning. Klezmer, tango, fado, Sephardic song: Mr. Golijov speaks of sliding among genres the way other composers modulate to different keys, yet his works move brilliantly beyond collage to grab the ears with palpable force. They may also reflect the coming of age of a broader global sensibility within the secluded world of classical composition, and they suggest that the freshest voices may be hailing from the most distant shores. And audiences are responding, less to this mash-up of genres in itself than to the profound honesty and sheer conviction at the music's core. Mr. Golijov's works jump off the stage with exuberant rhythm and passionate song; they swing seamlessly from the earthy to the sublime and tap rich veins of aching lyricism. Over the course of a few short years, and while still strikingly young, he has emerged as a major energizing force in a classical world desperately in need of a new vision. 'Ainadamar,' or 'Fountain of Tears,' will have three performances beginning this afternoon in the Rose Theater as the first event in a monthlong festival at Lincoln Center, 'The Passion of Osvaldo Golijov.' Other institutions are lining up to present his work; he was named composer of the year for 2006 by Musical America; and he has won a rare commitment from Deutsche Grammophon, which will bring out the opera later this year, with Robert Spano conducting the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Golijov lives with his family in Newton, Mass., but he was born and brought up in La Plata, Argentina, and studied for three years in Israel before moving to the United States in 1986. He has neatly trimmed dark hair specked with gray, and his eyes peer alertly through rimless glasses. Sometimes they narrow or close during a conversation, when he is thinking hard or searching for words. He speaks English with warm Spanish vowels, punctuated by a quick laugh that has a way of flashing up unexpectedly. 'I think I'm lucky that the audience is ready to enjoy what I want to say,' he said over brunch in Atlanta a few weeks ago, adding with typical modesty: 'I don't know how much longer it will last. I also don't know where I am going.' The conversation eventually turned to the problems of 20th-century classical music, and the powerful myth of progress that spurred composers to scale the heights of esotericism in their quest for the new, meanwhile leaving audiences baffled and restless in the valley below. Some of Mr. Golijov's favorite composers, like Luciano Berio and Gyorgy Kurtag, found ways out of this cul-de-sac, but Mr. Golijov realized early on that he was on a different path. He dabbled with atonal music, but said he could never bring himself to finish a straight 12-tone piece. 'I wanted to learn everything,' he said, 'but I also wanted to feel like what I was doing was something from me and not from my teachers, or from Vienna, so to speak. Part of it is acknowledging that as human beings, we are not philosophizing all the time. There are many realities. I think modernism only acknowledges one reality, which is here' - he motioned toward his head - 'and that's fine. But in my music, I want to cover everything.' These ambitions required an alternative take on the classical tradition, which is also to say that Mr. Golijov's story rightfully begins in Argentina. It is the most European country in South America, once home to millions of immigrants from the Old World. It has a capital lined with Parisian-style boulevards and a concert hall, the Teatro Colón, built of marble imported from Italy. But Argentina's closeness to Europe is paired with a very real physical distance that Mr. Golijov has found liberating. 'There is a true and deep love for European literature, theater and so forth,' he explained, 'but you are so far away, you can reinvent it. Argentina gives you the freedom to reimagine everything.' This freedom was doubly vivid for Mr. Golijov, who grew up as part of Argentina's small but vibrant Jewish community. His family immigrated from Romania and the Ukraine in the 1920's, and his mother grew up in a religious home. Mr. Golijov studied Yiddish until the sixth grade, and the shtetl world and its destruction in the Holocaust are essential parts of his cultural inheritance. He drew from them early on with his Latin-klezmer inflected clarinet quintet, 'The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind.' A more recent piece, 'Tekyah,' was written to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It ends in a tangle of raucous cries produced by a sextet of blasting shofars. Peter Sellars, who directed the current production of 'Ainadamar,' hears in Mr. Golijov's music the rebirth of a tradition cut short by war. 'The high energy in Bartok and Stravinsky's music was this ethnic energy, a Jewish energy, a Gypsy energy, and it was precisely the energy that was literally exterminated in the death camps of Europe,' Mr. Sellars said. 'It is what has been missing from most European music for a while. It's that huge, unbearable melody of lament which is devastating and life-affirming at the same time. Which is, of course, a huge tradition of Jewish music, and which has been missing in action. Osvaldo has brought it back from Eastern Europe, through Israel, through Argentina. It is transformed but still wailing.' Mr. Golijov speaks of the traditional synagogues he attended in Argentina and Jerusalem as a primary musical model, less for their liturgical melodies than for the churning energy he heard emerging from the semi-chaos of a restless congregation engaged in a thousand varieties of prayer. 'You enter,' he said, 'and somebody's screaming, somebody's mumbling, somebody's meditating, and you don't know how, but they suddenly start singing the same tune.' It's a model that he has brought to subjects far removed from the synagogue. The big break in his career was a commission from the Bach Academy in Stuttgart to write a new Latin American setting of the Passion for the Bach anniversary year of 2000. It might have seemed like a stretch, but after growing up in a Roman Catholic country and imbibing its music and its religious culture, Mr. Golijov said he had all the material he needed. From the outset, he knew he had to set Jesus' story to music that would be accessible to those who hold the Gospel dear. So for his 'St. Mark Passion' he welded together a dizzying array of popular Latin styles, from fevered Afro-Caribbean chanting and Cuban drumming to soaring Brazilian ballads and music for caterwauling choirs from Caracas. He even included a Brazilian capoeira dancer. The styles stream by in an exhilarating parade, building a giant emotional arc that ends with a transcendent setting of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The premieres in Stuttgart (in 2000) and Boston (2001) were triumphant, earning rapturous ovations and overnight stardom for Mr. Golijov. A few dissenters wondered about the Passion's originality as a concert work, given its heavy reliance on existing idioms. For his part Mr. Spano, who led the Boston performances and will return to conduct the work at Lincoln Center on Feb. 20 and 21, said he sensed something radical from the moment he saw the score. 'It was clear to me that he was doing something I've never encountered, which is to engage these traditions on their own terms,' Mr. Spano said. 'What's amazing is that he does that and always still sounds like himself. I don't know how. It is a mystery I will never understand.' The music forced Mr. Spano to learn what he called 'a new language of gesture.' He has now led the Passion many times, he said, but 'it still never feels normal.' 'Maybe I have a mystical streak,' he added, 'but I always feel like something otherworldly is going on.' The Passion raised high expectations for Mr. Golijov's next big work, and some critics felt that those expectations were not met when 'Ainadamar' had its premiere in a student production at Tanglewood in 2003. Mr. Golijov is, famously, a last-minute composer, and he concedes that the work needed more time to grow. After the premiere, Mr. Sellars joined the creative team, and Mr. Golijov and his librettist, David Henry Hwang, overhauled the libretto and the score. The revised version played to critical raves in a new Sellars production last summer at the Santa Fe Opera. It is an arresting work of history and reverie about the Spanish writer Federico García Lorca, his loves, his legacy and his murder at the hands of Franco's forces during the Spanish Civil War. But the starring role is that of Margarita Xirgu, an aging Spanish actress who once loved Lorca and has kept his memory alive for decades by performing his plays in exile in Uruguay. Her role in Atlanta was grippingly sung by Dawn Upshaw, who also sings it at Lincoln Center. Nestled in the orchestra, two flamenco guitarists and a full battalion of flamenco percussion provide rippling energy throughout, whether from the foreground or by burbling away on the periphery, like the mumbling voices in Mr. Golijov's imagined synagogue. The middle section is built around a devastating confession scene, in which Lorca, written as a trouser role for mezzo-soprano, is forced at gunpoint to confess his supposed crimes. Mr. Golijov here fashions a beautifully mysterious interlude: the marimba rustles like wind over an eerie field of muted strings. The orchestra is haunted by giant deep-breathing glissandos. Mr. Golijov uses common tonal chords in odd combinations to make the music sound at once strange and familiar. There is a deep stream of emotion running through 'Ainadamar,' an unguarded openness that often wins over audiences but also, Ms. Upshaw said, makes it extremely difficult to sing. 'When I perform his music,' she said, 'I always feel like I'm using absolutely all of my resources. I'm totally exhausted at the end. You have to be as truthful and vulnerable as possible, and there's no place to hide. I don't know if he's even conscious of it, but he's tugging and pulling me into a new realm that I would have never imagined possible.' 'Ainadamar' does not linger on the tragedy of Lorca's death. His vision of freedom lives on in Margarita Xirgu, and as she dies, she passes on her legacy to a student. In the final scene, memories of violence and suffering drift away as the three female voices come together in a deliriously lush Straussian trio. It is a bold theatrical gesture that Mr. Golijov makes without hesitation, a courageous leap for redemption, or for what Stendhal once called simply 'the promise of happiness.' Mr. Golijov would have it no other way. 'Transcendence is the most important thing,' he said. 'If there was not that, then nothing has meaning. Even the most irreligious artists have those moments. Think of Fellini at the end of '8½' or at the end of 'La Dolce Vita.' That's what art is about. It's at least the hope of hope. For 'no hope,' we have reality.'

Subject: Army Troglodytes in Spain From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:09:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/opinion/24tue4.html?ex=1295758800&en=ccc65278e45eec54&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 24, 2006 Army Troglodytes in Spain It is a basic principle of democracy that army officers do not publicly challenge the legitimacy of elected governments or talk about marching their troops into the capital to overturn decisions of Parliament. Yet that is just what has happened twice this month in Spain, a country whose 20th-century history compels it to take such threats seriously, even when the chances of insubordinate words' leading to insubordinate actions seems quite unlikely. The response of the center-left government of Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero has been appropriately firm, including the dismissal and arrest of one of the culprits, a senior army general. Regrettably, the center-right Popular Party, the main opposition group, seems more interested in making excuses for the officers than in defending the democratic order in which it has a vital stake. Spain's swift and smooth passage to modern democracy after the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 makes it easy to forget the horrors of the civil war and the brutal dictatorship that preceded it. Those nightmares began when right-wing army officers rebelled against an elected left-wing government they considered to be illegitimate and too deferential to regional separatists. Spanish society, Spanish politicians and, for the most part, Spanish military officers have come a long way from that era, moderating their views and deepening their commitment to democratic give-and-take. But the Popular Party has had a hard time getting over its electoral defeat nearly two years ago, days after the terrorist bombings of commuter trains in Madrid. It has never really accepted the democratic legitimacy of that vote. It is time for the Popular Party to move ahead. Spanish democracy needs and deserves vigorous bipartisan support.

Subject: Boarding-School Irish From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 06:05:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22lewine.html January 22, 2006 Boarding-School Irish By EDWARD LEWINE IN spite of his distinguished career, John Gregory Dunne may be best remembered as 'Joan Didion's husband.' If this was in the cards before 2003, when Dunne died of a sudden heart attack, it seems inevitable now following the success of Didion's memoir 'The Year of Magical Thinking,' which has fixed Dunne in the public mind, but as a tragic absence rather than as a man. So it is refreshing, and just, to have Dunne restored to prickly, engaging life in 'Regards,' a new collection of 28 nonfiction pieces he wrote during a career spanning 40 years. Born in Hartford in 1932 to a prosperous Irish Catholic family, Dunne started out at Time magazine in New York, met and married Didion, and decamped with her to Los Angeles and the uncertainties of freelancing. He found success with serious nonfiction and novels and financed a rather grand lifestyle for a writer by collaborating with Didion on screenplays, including the one for 'A Star Is Born' (1976). But the techniques of nonfiction were central to Dunne's work in all genres, as he tells George Plimpton in the Paris Review interview that closes this book: 'I'm a great believer in the novelist . . . reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.' Among the many pleasures of 'Regards' are crisp reportage on subjects like life at a nuclear missile base during the cold war, 20th Century Fox's efforts to preview the film 'Dr. Dolittle' and an aging Willie Mays; tough-minded essay-reviews from The New York Review of Books; and musings, published in other magazines, on topics like adoption, California and the writing life. The man could turn a phrase. He dismisses a film critic who had also tried acting, editing and writing novels as 'a Renaissance failure.' His film-producer brother and sister-in-law are described as 'peers in Hollywood's version of Debrett's.' Unfortunately, the anonymous editor of this book has not served Dunne well. The pieces are lumped under vague, thematic headings ('An American Education,' 'Star,' 'Critical') and presented with only title and year of publication, when fuller context would help. It is annoying to spend the first page of an article trying to determine whether it is a review or a profile. Dunne's fans will be further disappointed to find work that has appeared in earlier compilations. Despite many excellent individual essays, the book sags under Dunne's tiresome Hollywood obsession. The movies were his employer and his main subject, and they are the subject of a third of the entries in this book. After wading through gratuitous name-dropping and insights that repeat, many readers will wish that such a talented writer had widened his focus. Dunne moved back to New York long before his death, but he would have swatted away this last observation as typical East-Coast-writer provincialism. 'I've never believed in Hollywood the Destroyer,' he tells Plimpton. 'The naysayers are people who would have been destroyed at Zabar's.' Dunne - who lived, loved and wrote like a prince - deserves the last laugh. A different kind of husband might have resented Didion for exploiting his death in a book, but Dunne probably wouldn't have. He knew that writers take inspiration where they find it. In one essay Dunne recalls attending the funeral of a prominent colleague. At the church he meets Gore Vidal, who asks him, 'Are you working?' Dunne finishes this anecdote, and his essay, with the following: 'The answer . . . should have been 'Always.' '

Subject: Tests That Confer Citizenship From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 05:58:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/arts/23conn.html?ex=1295672400&en=88269934557a60fa&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 23, 2006 Refining the Tests That Confer Citizenship By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN Where does Father Christmas come from? How old do you have to be to buy a lottery ticket? If your adult son declares he's a homosexual, what do you do? If a film or a book insults your religious feelings, what is your reaction? Why are aboriginal peoples seeking self-government? Who has the power to declare war? Answering such questions appropriately may not define you as a citizen of the world, even in this era of supposed globalization, but it would help get you citizenship in Britain (the first two questions), Germany (the second two), Canada (the next) or the United States (the last). Perhaps never before in human history has so much energy been devoted to trying to establish citizenship tests to define national identity. Judging from the debates raging and the confused choices made, there is as little agreement within each country as there is between them. In the United States, discussions about creating a new citizenship test have been going on for a decade. About $3.5 million has been spent since 2001 when the Immigration and Naturalization Service promised a redesign. In 2004, a report from the National Research Council recommended more bureaucratic consultation, leading to concern that the process was going to become an extended series of debates. A nonprofit concern, the American Institutes for Research, was then asked to make a more practical 'feasibility study.' Tomorrow, the Citizenship and Immigration Service (the successor to the I.N.S.) will announce recommendations about how much the tests should be modified or whether they should be changed at all. Britain, meanwhile, introduced a new citizenship test in November and is beginning formal induction ceremonies like those in America. Last week, the newspaper The Guardian reported that the Netherlands was beginning a pilot program in which tests about Dutch language and culture would be administered to prospective immigrants in their native countries; the government also planned to require all immigrants who stay in the Netherlands more than three years to take citizenship classes. And earlier this month, the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany instituted questions to be asked only of Muslims from particular countries - questions dealing with women's rights, religious freedom and domestic life. One reason for the flurry of activity has been just what the German questions so bluntly address: the phenomenon of Muslim immigrants and citizens in Europe who not only are segregated from a nation's culture but also hostile to it. In 2004, for example, a poll found that 21 percent of Muslims in Germany believed the Koran and the German Constitution were incompatible. Hence these attempts to establish a shared identity based on particular beliefs and facts. But which ones? Even where the notion of identity would seem to be fairly secure, notions of citizenship can be slight. In Britain, the Home Office minister in charge said the new procedures were meant to 'help new citizens to gain a greater appreciation of the civic and political dimensions of British citizenship.' But while the 45-minute test includes questions about the structure of the British government and stresses Britain's religious identity ('What is the Church of England and who is its head?'), the main emphasis is on the test's title: 'Life in the U.K.' Judging from news reports and sample questions, the test treats British culture not as a product of centuries of evolution and political struggle with stunning achievements (and failures) - in fact, there is almost no history on the test at all - but as a set of practical behaviors along with correct attitudes toward women and ethnic minorities. The practical can be trivial: If you spill someone else's beer in a pub, what should you do? What is the voltage of British electric outlets? It is as if too much shouldn't be expected, because there is not too much worth championing. Prospective citizens less fluent in English are met with even lower expectations: they take a 'skills for life' course instead of an exam and demonstrate their competence to the instructor. By comparison, the existing American test of history and civics knowledge seems fairly robust. Objections to it arose partly because in the 1990's - a record decade for immigration - standards had become so lax, that in many cases background checks of aspirants failed to turn up significant criminal records. In 1997, the Commission on Immigration Reform also found that there was no consistency in administering or scoring the tests; often delivered orally in regional offices, they were sometimes informally scaled by the examiners. The commission also objected to the tests' reliance on memorization of facts rather than on broader concepts. When the redesign began in earnest in early 2001, 'stakeholder groups' - social service and legal agencies, schools, advocates for immigration - objected, some arguing that the intention was to make the test more difficult and leave less discretion for the examiners. The planned date for a new test, 2006, has been abandoned; Alfonso Aguilar, the chief of the Office of Citizenship, suggests that a more realistic goal would be 2007 or 2008. The current test covers a fair amount of trivia: the name of the Pilgrims' ship; in which month a president is inaugurated. But there are also important questions about government structure ('Why are there 100 senators in the Senate?') and ideas ('What is the basic belief of the Declaration of Independence?'). No specific replacement questions have been publicly proposed. 'We see the test as an instrument to promote civic learning and patriotism,' Mr. Aguilar said in a telephone interview last week. The purpose, he said, is not to limit immigration but to create a system in which the process of naturalization works. 'Our history has been one of expanded citizenship,' he said. A new test could do no better than emphasize that point and demonstrate the kinds of commitments made in citizenship. The process, after all, is called naturalization because it really does change the alien into the natural, the foreign into the familiar. The immigrant is giving up one identity and taking on another; in the process, both country and citizen are transformed. This has tended to be easier in the United States, where the very idea of the nation is bound up with immigration, than in countries whose idea of the nation is bound up with an inherited past. Yet now, even European nations must present themselves in another form, as sets of ideas and customs, as cultures being offered in exchange for sacrifices demanded. That social contract is not being negotiated with much confidence in Britain, and it seems shaky enough elsewhere, too. The United States generally seems more sure of what it is offering; coming months will show how sure it is of what it is asking.

Subject: Trains and the Market for Them From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 05:52:02 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/30/business/worldbusiness/30trains.html?ex=1293598800&en=dd55a07930348817&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 30, 2005 Overseas, the Trains and the Market for Them Accelerate By JOHN TAGLIABUE KREFELD, Germany - Even more high-speed trains? Europe must be kidding. In one vast hall, workers in blue overalls are putting the finishing touches on what would, on an old-fashioned train, be a locomotive, except that it houses a spacious conference room with a large table and seven comfortable armchairs. In an adjacent hall, others are attaching what look like ordinary wheel trucks to a rail car, except that these contain electric motors that will essentially do the locomotive's job of pulling the train. 'We're now turning out a car every one or two days,' said Michael Gessner, project manager at the Siemens rail car plant in Uerdingen, a suburb of this industrial city. 'When we begin the Chinese order, it will be two a day.' Work at the Siemens factory illustrates a coming together of two developments in high-speed passenger train travel: technical breakthroughs in the way the bullet-shaped trains run, and the opening of vast new markets in Eastern Europe and Asia that are combining to give a steady boost to the business. Unless they have traveled abroad, most Americans have had little first-hand experience with high-speed trains, and the problems with the Acela service on Amtrak have left its customers with a slightly bad taste. Hence, as countries including Italy and Spain - and emerging markets like China and Russia - open their pocketbooks for huge high-speed railway development, the United States remains on the sidelines, vulnerable to losing out on new technologies for propulsion and vehicle control. For those who thought railroads were basically 19th-century technology, think again. Thanks to miniaturization, newer trains have motors built into the axles of every second rail car, rather than concentrating the pulling power in the locomotive, as was done in traditional pull-push trains. The technology makes the trains lighter and enables them to go faster and to brake and accelerate more easily, while causing less wear on rails and wheels. And the newer generation of very high-speed trains has other breakthrough features, including so-called eddy current brakes, which employ electromagnetic fields rather than brake disks for slowing and stopping. 'The carriages are stable and light and of very high speed,' said Francois Lacôte , senior vice president in Alstom's transport division, which will install the new technology in the fourth generation of its TGV. (The French manufacturer Alstom, like most of the industry, considers high-speed trains to be those with a top cruising speed of 150 miles per hour; trains with a top cruising speed 210 miles per hour are considered very high speed. The Acela's top cruising speed is about 125 miles per hour.) In November, Siemens landed a $804 million contract to supply 60 sleek-nosed high-speed trains to the Chinese railways. The order is just one in a 15-year program to upgrade China's rail network, including the introduction of 180-mile-per-hour bullet trains. 'Up to 2020 they want 12,000 kilometers of high-speed rail,' or 7,200 miles, said Dietrich G. Möller, president of Siemens' trains division. At about the same time, Siemens signed a preliminary contract for high-speed trains to connect Moscow and St. Petersburg. Like China, Russia, too, has gigantic railway ambitions. The line may one day continue beyond St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland, and past Moscow to Russian cities like Nizhny Novgorod. In South Korea, Alstom, the inventor of the train à grande vitesse, or TGV, is supplying 185-mile-per-hour trains for a five-year $17 billion project that has connected Pusan and Seoul. The growth in Asia is giving the small club of high-speed passenger train manufacturers a lift just as Western European governments are watching their budgets more closely. Europe's dense population and geographical features like the Alps make the construction of high-speed lines costly. Moreover, environmental groups often resist the construction of new train lines, saying they bring noise and unwanted development and divert money from more urgent needs. Nonetheless, Spain hopes to have a Madrid-Barcelona link open by 2008; France and Germany are upgrading the line from Paris through Strasbourg and on to the German cities of Stuttgart and Frankfurt for 210-mile trains. 'What has happened is that cuts in travel time have stimulated demand' for trains, said Ernest Godward, an economist with Scott Wilson Railways, a British consultancy. American industry is largely sitting this one out. While some American companies, like the electro-motive division of General Motors and the MotivePower Industries division of the Wabtec Corporation, are doing brisk business with Chinese rail operators, their business is mainly freight, while the market for high-speed passenger trains is limited to a small group that has shrunk in recent years through a wave of mergers and acquisitions. In 2001, Bombardier, the Canadian transport company, acquired Adtranz, a German-based rail equipment maker; at about the same time, Alstom bought Fiat Ferroviaria, Fiat's rail equipment division and the original developer of technology that enables high-speed trains to tilt into curves, much the way a motorcycle can. (Alstom and Bombardier installed the technology on the Acela in the United States, but faulty measurements of the train's right-of-way rendered it virtually useless.) Within Europe, the three leaders are vying to grab market share with snazzier and ever faster models. Siemens introduced distributed power, meaning that electric motors pulling the train are distributed through the train's cars; that technology was used in trains for a high-speed line from Frankfurt to Cologne and will be used in trains on the Barcelona-Madrid connection. Alstom will introduce similar technology on the new Paris-to-Strasbourg TGV line. Bombardier, fearful of being left out of the running, introduced in October a concept train called the Zefiro, which will include most of the technology employed by the market leaders. Neil Harvey, Bombardier's communications director for Europe, said the Zefiro would have all the latest traction and braking technology and would be loaded with features like electronic seat reservations, power outlets at every seat and free Wi-Fi. In Europe, to be sure, the growth of the market is not without its obstacles. Some argue that the cost of high-speed rail is excessive, compared with the operation of no-frills airlines, and that it only indulges a European penchant to go first class whenever possible; others say the environmental damage is too great. In northwest Italy, near the site of the next winter Olympics in February, environmental groups are opposing a new high-speed line and tunnel to connect Lyon in France and Turin in Italy, arguing they would drag even more industrial traffic into the Alps. The train will cross a valley that already has a conventional train line and a superhighway. 'It's incredibly costly, they're talking 13 billion euros,' almost $16 billion, said Marco Ponti, a transportation expert at Milan's Polytechnic Institute who backs the protesters. Mr. Ponti likened the project to the English Channel rail tunnel, whose construction cost was almost double the original estimates. 'The Channel tunnel went bankrupt not once, but twice,' he said. Mr. Ponti, a former World Bank consultant, acknowledged, however, that 'there is a place for high-speed trains for medium distances and in very densely populated areas.' Still, the governments in Rome and Paris are throwing their full weight behind high-speed rail. West of Turin, engineers are blasting a tunnel through the craggy Alps, and this fall Italy took tenders on 30 very high-speed trains and says it wants to acquire 100 in all. Its master plan foresees building high-speed lines in the shape of a T, from Milan in the north to Naples in the south, and from Turin in the west to Venice in the east. In Asia, too, the European train builders face challenges. For one, there is competition from the fabled Shinkansen of Japan, the first high-speed train to go into service. That design was chosen by Taiwan for a 210-mile-per-hour train inaugurated last year from Taipei to the southern port of Kaoshiung. And while Asian contracts are lucrative, most countries insist on technology transfers including the assembly of most of the trains in local factories. Such requirements put pressure on the Europeans to continuously upgrade their technology or risk being overtaken by their own customers. 'The key is new technology,' said Mr. Lacôte of Alstom. 'The Chinese market is very interesting,' he said. 'They have the culture; they want to acquire the technology.' Of course, not all of the Chinese acquisitions will be very high speed. Bombardier, which has a strong presence in China thanks to its Adtranz acquisition, does a brisk business in light rail and subway car construction. This year, Bombardier signed a long-range agreement to supply trains to China with cruising speeds of 120 miles per hour. The Siemens contract for China calls for it to supply 60 trains with a cruising speed of 180 miles an hour to link Beijing to the coastal city of Tianjin. And the United States? Despite the debacle of the Acela, European rail executives say that heavy population concentrations on the East and West Coasts and in the Midwest around Chicago make high-speed trains a natural. Mr. Moller of Siemens said, 'When the skies and the roads are full, they will turn to trains.' Mr. Lacôte of Alstom said three conditions had to be fulfilled for a country to turn to high-speed rail: the political will, large population concentrations, and a level of economic prosperity adequate to pay for a rail system. 'In the United States you have the second two,' he said. 'I am not sure that you have the first.'

Subject: Parenting a Common Loon From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 05:50:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/opinion/05sun3.html?ex=1252123200&en=38746385b03c8c39&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland September 5, 2004 Parenting a Common Loon By ELEANOR RANDOLPH A pair of exquisite common loons returned this year to the lake in the Adirondacks where the birds and I both feel serenely at home. Sometime in late July, these loons produced a chick, a small, brown thing that could barely be spotted riding the lake on its mother's back. This new addition was cause for a great deal of celebratory clucking among the humans who registered its birth at a respectful distance. We greeted this year's loon chick as an assuring sign that despite the world's ecological perils - the acid rain, the mercury poisoning, the warming globe - there is a little good news in our environment. The next generation of this splendid species had arrived. Yet our celebrations were quickly tempered by concern about the odds for this fragile ball of down. There are dangers from the motorboats, from curious humans, from birds of prey circling overhead. With each passing week, we also began to worry about a larger question: Will our little loon have time to mature and fly south before the lake freezes? Nina Schoch, who runs the Adirondack Cooperative Loon Program, sent word to our anxious flock of surrogate parents that only after a loon chick survives four or five weeks can you really start hoping that it will survive at all. Ours has now passed that threshold, but it needs another six or seven to get airborne. This is cutting it close. In much of the Adirondacks, July is summer. August is when the leaves turn. September and October can get too cold for things without fur, and November can be the absolute deadline: it's liftoff or nature's freezer. If this year's weather makes enough time for our bird, this family threesome will head for Long Island or possibly even farther south to New Jersey. As the nights signal oncoming winter, Gary Lee, a retired New York State forest ranger for our area, has added our baby loon to his own very long watch list. Mr. Lee is a busy man, caring for the north country's loons. Some of these large birds, which can live over 30 years, barely ruffle a feather when his canoe slides close to their nest. They know him as the creature who untangles the fishing line from around their beaks or who helps band them for naturalists assessing the loon population in the park. Some pairs trust him to hold their newborns in his hand. 'I talk to all my birds,' Mr. Lee says fondly, 'They know me.' Our loon couple is not so trusting, he says, so our chick is viewed by even Mr. Lee at a distance. He gives it a chance, a maybe. The rest of us will not stay long enough into the winter to actually watch what happens to our little one. Maybe that is just as well. We do know how it will be treated if it ever tries to return to momma's alluring summer nest. In noises that do not sound anything like the tapes of loon tremolos and yodels that they sell in Adirondack souvenir shops, our splendidly feathered mom will tell it to buzz off. Meanwhile, if all goes well, she and the humans around her will already be cooing over the next summer's newborn loon.

Subject: Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 05:45:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/24/international/middleeast/24reconstruct.html?ex=1295758800&en=a75e40af61a6a236&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 24, 2006 Iraq Rebuilding Badly Hobbled, U.S. Report Finds By JAMES GLANZ The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft. The document, which begins with the secret prewar planning for reconstruction and touches on nearly every phase of the program through 2005, was assembled by the office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and debated last month in a closed forum by roughly two dozen experts from outside the office. A person at the forum provided a copy of the document, dated December 2005, to The New York Times. The inspector general's office, whose agents and auditors have been examining and reporting on various aspects of the rebuilding since early 2004, declined to comment on the report other than to say it was highly preliminary. 'It's incomplete,' said a spokesman for the inspector general's office, Jim Mitchell. 'It could change significantly before it is finally published.' In the document, the paralyzing effect of staffing shortfalls and contracting battles between the State Department and the Pentagon, creating delays of months at a stretch, are described for the first time from inside the program. The document also recounts concerns about writing contracts for an entity with the 'ambiguous legal status' of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the question of whether it was an American entity or a multinational one like NATO. Seemingly odd decisions on dividing the responsibility for various sectors of the reconstruction crop up repeatedly in the document. At one point, a planning team made the decision to put all reconstruction activities in Iraq under the Army Corps of Engineers, except anything to do with water, which would go to the Navy. At the time, a retired admiral, David Nash, was in charge of the rebuilding. 'It almost looks like a spoils system between various agencies,' said Steve Ellis, a vice president and an authority on the Army corps at Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization in Washington, who read a copy of the document. 'You had various fiefdoms established in the contracting process.' One authority on reconstruction who attended the session last month, John J. Hamre, said the report was an unblinking and unbiased look at the program. 'It's gutsy and it's honest,' said Mr. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a public policy group based in Washington. He was not the source of the leaked document. Even in the early stages of writing the draft, Mr. Hamre said, one central message on the reconstruction program was already fairly clear, that 'it didn't go particularly well.' 'The impression you get is of an organization that had too little structure on the ground over there, that it had conflicting guidance from the United States,' Mr. Hamre said. 'It had a very difficult environment and pressures by that environment to quickly move things.' A situation like that, Mr. Hamre said, 'creates shortcuts that probably turn into short circuits.' The draft report is emerging as the rebuilding comes under fresh criticism in the United States and Iraq. Partly because of sabotage to oil and gas pipelines and electrical transmission lines, Iraq's oil exports have plummeted over the last several months, and its national electrical output has again dipped below prewar levels. After years of shifting authority, agencies that have come into and out of existence and that experienced constant staff turnover, the rebuilding went through another permutation last month with almost no public notice. The Corps of Engineers has been given command of the severely criticized office set up by President Bush to oversee some $13 billion of the reconstruction funds. The shift occurred days before Mr. Bush said the early focus of the rebuilding program on huge public works projects - largely overseen by the office, the Project and Contracting Office - had been flawed. That office is now under Brig. Gen. William H. McCoy, commander of the gulf region division of the Corps of Engineers, said Lt. Col. Stan Heath, a spokesman for the corps who has served in Iraq. Officials with the contracting office said the move was natural as more and more projects went from the contracting phase to construction and completion. A spokesman for the office, James Crum, said 1,636 projects of 2,265 originally under the office had been completed. Mr. Ellis, of the taxpayers group, said it was unclear that the change would satisfy critics of the rebuilding program. 'At one level,' he said, 'you would say, 'Wow that makes a lot of sense.' But if your concern is that the previous organization built big New Deal-style projects, then the corps is not going to give you much of a change of pace.' The draft report by the inspector general says the rebuilding program began with a task that is tiny in retrospect but cast a long shadow. The Army appropriated $1.9 million in November 2002 to create a 'contingency plan' for what to do if Iraqi forces damaged or destroyed the nation's oil complexes and pipelines. That 'task order,' under a running contract, went to Kellogg, Brown & Root, a Halliburton subsidiary. The Army later used that task order as a justification for awarding the company a new $1.4 billion noncompetitive contract to restore oil equipment, a program that became one of the most criticized moves of the conflict partly because Vice President Dick Cheney was once the top executive at Halliburton. Until January 2003, reconstruction planning was conducted in secrecy 'to avoid the impression that the U.S. government had already decided on intervention,' the draft history says. Possibly as a result, the American administrative authority arrived with no written plans or strategies for purchasing and contracting and no personnel with expertise in the area. Among the first challenges the program faced were the impossibly great needs of crumbling public works. Mr. Nash is cited in the document as saying that officials realized early on that Iraq would need $70 billion to $100 billion over several years. They were forced cut the list of projects down again and again. 'No matter how we pared the list, we needed $20 billion more than we had available or Iraqi reconstruction and transition would stall,' Mr. Nash is quoted as saying. Finally, a list of mostly large projects in several infrastructure areas, including oil, electricity, water, health care and security, was settled on. But a bottleneck immediately arose as the contracting process descended into chaos, the document says. One informer for the inspector general said there were 'about 20 different organizations undertaking contracting.' 'The C.P.A. was contracting, companies were contracting subcontractors, and some people who didn't have authority such as the ministries were also awarding contracts,' the informer told the inspector general. In the midst of that confusion, at the offices that were actually charged with carrying out those duties 'the contracting function was grossly understaffed,' the document says. 'They were in need of both larger numbers of personnel, and personnel with qualifications more in line with the work that needed to be done,' the document says.

Subject: Judge Alito's Radical Views From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 16:50:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/23/opinion/23mon1.html?ex=1295672400&en=4605317ecdc3b5da&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 23, 2006 Judge Alito's Radical Views If Judge Samuel Alito Jr.'s confirmation hearings lacked drama, apart from his wife's bizarrely over-covered crying jag, it is because they confirmed the obvious. Judge Alito is exactly the kind of legal thinker President Bush wants on the Supreme Court. He has a radically broad view of the president's power, and a radically narrow view of Congress's power. He has long argued that the Constitution does not protect abortion rights. He wants to reduce the rights and liberties of ordinary Americans, and has a history of tilting the scales of justice against the little guy. As senators prepare to vote on the nomination, they should ask themselves only one question: will replacing Sandra Day O'Connor with Judge Alito be a step forward for the nation, or a step backward? Instead of Justice O'Connor's pragmatic centrism, which has kept American law on a steady and well-respected path, Judge Alito is likely to bring a movement conservative's approach to his role and to the Constitution. Judge Alito may be a fine man, but he is not the kind of justice the country needs right now. Senators from both parties should oppose his nomination. It is likely that Judge Alito was chosen for his extreme views on presidential power. The Supreme Court, with Justice O'Connor's support, has played a key role in standing up to the Bush administration's radical view of its power, notably that it can hold, indefinitely and without trial, anyone the president declares an 'unlawful enemy combatant.' Judge Alito would no doubt try to change the court's approach. He has supported the fringe 'unitary executive' theory, which would give the president greater power to detain Americans and would throw off the checks and balances built into the Constitution. He has also put forth the outlandish idea that if the president makes a statement when he signs a bill into law, a court interpreting the law should give his intent the same weight it gives to Congress's intent in writing and approving the law. Judge Alito would also work to reduce Congress's power in other ways. In a troubling dissent, he argued that Congress exceeded its authority when it passed a law banning machine guns, and as a government lawyer he insisted Congress did not have the power to protect car buyers from falsified odometers. There is every reason to believe, based on his long paper trail and the evasive answers he gave at his hearings, that Judge Alito would quickly vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. So it is hard to see how Senators Lincoln Chaffee, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, all Republicans, could square support for Judge Alito with their commitment to abortion rights. Judge Alito has consistently shown a bias in favor of those in power over those who need the law to protect them. Women, racial minorities, the elderly and workers who come to court seeking justice should expect little sympathy. In the same flat bureaucratic tones he used at the hearings, he is likely to insist that the law can do nothing for them. The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around this nomination. But there is no reason to believe that Judge Alito is any more popular than the president who nominated him. Outside a small but vocal group of hard-core conservatives, America has greeted the nomination with a shrug - and counted on its senators to make the right decision. The real risk for senators lies not in opposing Judge Alito, but in voting for him. If the far right takes over the Supreme Court, American law and life could change dramatically. If that happens, many senators who voted for Judge Alito will no doubt come to regret that they did not insist that Justice O'Connor's seat be filled with someone who shared her cautious, centrist approach to the law.

Subject: For Mik - Bankers in Panama From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 15:06:19 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Bankers got to make thier fees eh? Damn everyone else. hehe =DJ Panama's $1.06 Bln Bond Exchange Perplexes Investors . By Matthew Cowley Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Investors and analysts were left slightly perplexed by Panama's bond exchange last week, with some disappointed at the small size of the deal and others unsure why it was even done. The debt swap was far smaller than many had expected, given strong investor interest. And although it partly met the government's goal of lowering interest payments, it failed to retire smaller bond issues, which will now become even more illiquid. The government exchanged $1.06 billion of existing bonds for $1.36 billion of new 30-year bonds, in a transaction managed by HSBC and JPMorgan. The new bond due in 2036 will be settled on Jan. 26 with a coupon of 6.7%, priced at 98.418 to yield 6.826%. According to Panama's public credit department, the 6.7% coupon is the lowest on any of Panama's outstanding bonds - the second lowest being the 7.125% payable on $980 million of bonds issued in December. The government also improved the country's debt profile by reducing yields on longer-dated bonds. Immediately after the offer was unveiled, Panama's longer-dated bond prices rose. Because prices move inversely to yields, Panama was able to flatten its so-called yield curve by lowering the yield on its longer-term bonds. This should make it cheaper for Panama when it brings more bonds to the market in the future. The new 2036 bond and exchange structure is 'consistent with the new Panama administration's ongoing effort to enhance the efficiency of its curve and achieve lower costs of funding moving forward,' said Gerardo Mato, managing director and head of Latin America Global Investment Banking and Financing at HSBC Securities in New York, which coordinated the deal alongside JPMorgan. Some analysts and investors were nonetheless slightly mystified by the market's reaction, given that there was no real premium being paid, and attributed it to the current overall enthusiasm toward emerging markets. There is also the perception that, with many countries having pre-financed 2006 requirements, there will be a shortage of new bonds coming to the market this year. Investor participation was 'fantastic,' with holders of about 75% of $2.88 billion in eligible bonds offering to exchange them, said HSBC's Mato. Furthermore, about 90% of the bids were non-competitive, meaning investors would accept whatever premium Panama chose to pay. 'This was one of the highest, if not the highest, acceptance rates ever on an emerging market debt exchange,' said Mato. But Panama opted to buy back just some of the bonds from its outstanding 2020, 2023, and 2034 issues, and none from the 2027 and 2029 issues. Instead of getting rid of these smaller bond issues altogether, investors are now left holding small amounts of very illiquid bonds. In a written response to questions, Panama's public credit director, Aracelly Mendez, said the issue was limited by a $1.4 billion shelf-registration in the U.S. that few investors were fully aware of, as well as by a desire not to increase the country's overall debt burden. 'The decision was taken as a function of the impact of an increase in debt, and the bonds selected (to be exchanged) were those that would allow greater liquidity on the Republic's debt curve,' Mendez said, declining further comment. From a ratings perspective, the debt exchange won't make much difference, said Theresa Paiz Fredel, lead analyst for Panama and Director of Latin American Sovereign Ratings at Fitch. Fitch rated Panama's new bond at BB . Panama's main weaknesses is its high level of government debt, and, while the trends are 'improving,' it is 'still going to take some time to get debt levels down to where we might put on a positive outlook,' said Paiz Fredel. Nevertheless, Paiz Fredel said the debt operations that Panama has been undertaking are welcome, as they have lengthened the yield curve and reduced financing costs. But some investors still wonder why Panama carried out the exchange at all. John Peta, who manages some $400 million of emerging market fixed income for Standish Mellon Asset Management, used the price rise following the announcement as an opportunity to sell his 2027 Panama bonds. He said he was 'surprised' by the offer, and that, from his investor point of view, it 'didn't make sense.' 'There seemed to be a lot of transaction costs for not a lot of gain,' he said. He said the 2027 bonds were relatively liquid assets, and that had Panama offered to buy back shorter-dated maturities, it might have been more attractive. Alternatively, rather than trying to buy back the bonds and replace them with a larger bond, the country could have just tapped existing bond issues and made them larger, said Peta. Peta said he used a recent dip in the 2027s to buy back into Panama. -By Matthew Cowley, Dow Jones Newswires; 201 938 5692; matthew.cowley@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires

Subject: Re: For Mik - Bankers in Panama From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 20:35:03 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: DJ MUNI WATCH: Indiana Gets $3.85B Bid For Toll Road Lease . By Stan Rosenberg A DOW JONES NEWSWIRES COLUMN NEW YORK (Dow Jones)--Indiana is on the verge of closing a $3.85 billion deal that would allow a Spanish-Australian consortium to lease and operate the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road for 75 years. If approved by the state's legislature before the end of its session March 14, the transaction would become the largest of its kind to date in a growing trend of states leasing major assets to raise sorely needed revenue. A year ago, Indiana faced a fiscal deficit, as well as a $3 billion transportation funding shortfall, Gov. Mitch Daniels said in a statement Monday. 'This morning, in one bold stroke, we announce the closing of Indiana's second deficit.' The $3.85 billion, to be paid in a lump sum by Statewide Mobility Partners, would fully fund transportation construction needs for the next 10 years, Daniels said, with $220 million of that being used to pay off remaining Indiana Toll Road bonds. About $180 million of the outstanding bonds are immediately callable, said State Pubic Finance Director Ryan Kitchell. The state is working on ways to redeem the balance, he said, including asking holders of some of the bonds to voluntarily tender them, possibly at a premium. All of the debt will be paid off on or before closing of the deal, which is anticipated for June 30, Kitchell said. Statewide Mobility Partners was formed by Cintra Concessiones de Infraestructuras de Transporte, SA (CIN.MC) of Madrid, Spain, and Macquarie Infrastructure Group (MIC) of Sydney, Australia. Its bid was the best of four submitted last Friday. 'Every bid offered an enormous amount of money, far beyond anything the state could generate on its own,' Daniels said. Statewide Mobility's capital plan for the next few years calls for more than twice as much investment to upgrade the toll road as the state has managed in recent years, he added. Among Macquarie-Cintra's projects is the 7.8-mile Chicago Skyway that was leased for $1.83 billion in 2004, the largest previous lease deal for a U.S. toll road. It also leased the Dulles Greenway in Washington, D.C. States have been increasingly tapping into toll road revenues, and leases or sales of major roads are said to be under consideration in Delaware and in New Jersey. Indiana, meanwhile, received a one-notch upgrade from Standard & Poor's Ratings Services Monday that placed its issuer credit rating at double-A-plus. 'The upgrade reflects the state's improving financial position and management's commitment to returning the state's budget to structural balance,' said S&P analyst Eden Perry. An improving economic environment also is translating into tax revenue growth, she said. Perry said that, while she knew the toll road lease was a possibility, 'it wasn't a factor in the upgrade.' (Stan Rosenberg, a veteran observer of the municipal bond industry, writes about issues and trends in the muni market for Dow Jones Newswires.) -By Stan Rosenberg, Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-2143; stan.rosenberg@dowjones.com (END) Dow Jones Newswires January 23, 2006 18:46 ET (23:46 GMT)

Subject: Thanks for the posts From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Tues, Jan 24, 2006 at 12:01:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: On the Banking one - I still can't get over your previous post about how the Japanese have a 'family loan' crossing generations. That to me is incredible. Just imagine one Japanese dude talking to another: 'Yeah I can't afford going out. I still have to pay off grandpa's loan. He bought himself a Suicide-Samurai-Sword back in the mid forties.' 'Huh why?' 'Well he was trying to impress my grandma. It was the really hip thing to have back then.' 'Samurai suicide sword?' 'Yeah, kind of like, what they needed during the war. I wish the b@stard used the damn thing. I could have claimed the insurance money and paid off his loan.' On the issue of the Toll road - I am very interested in the Spanish-Australian consortium. I think it may well be the same consortium that got the 407 Toll road concession here in Toronto. I will check up on this one. Cheers.

Subject: Livedoor executive had honor From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 00:57:32 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Some livedoor executive did kill himself - so there are still some folks with honor. HAHA - I love your little chat - that is probably how it will really go down: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1990/05/21/73567/index.htm JAPAN'S 100-YEAR BANK LOANS By Susan Moffat May 21, 1990 (FORTUNE Magazine) – The Japanese, famous for saving, are now loading their future generations with debt. Nippon Mortgage and Japan Housing Loan, two big home lenders, are offering 99- and 100-year multigeneration loans with interest rates from 8.9% to 9.9%. Borrowers put up their homes as collateral. Such deals represent sound fiscal planning for some families, especially the very wealthy living in Tokyo who, perversely, can almost not afford to inherit a house: Japan's graduated inheritance tax can take up to 70% of a family's assets, including its home. Under the 100-year loan plan, a second generation can move into a deceased parent's home and pay inheritance taxes on only a fraction of the house's value. Most Japanese, of course, don't have such problems. Their challenge is to find a house they can afford, especially if they want to live in Tokyo. The housing crunch there inspired Robinsons on the Sand, a 1989 hit movie that's now No. 8 on Japan's VCR rental list. It tells the story of a salaryman and his family, who are willing to do anything to escape the misery of their tiny rented apartment. The ''anything'' turns out to be living on constant display as a ''model family'' in a spacious model home while potential buyers tramp through. Jealous neighbors bully the children and make obscene phone calls. Before long, one of the two sons turns delinquent, the daughter is killing kittens, and the father ends up homeless in the street. Mom and the kids finally return to their old apartment, where they watch TV in the closet in blessed privacy. So much for that particular family's Japanese dream. And in India: http://www.akdn.org/microfinance/reviews.html Special instruments have been designed to assist indentured workers repay usurious multigenerational loans that were keeping them in perpetual servitude. Other instruments reward families for sending their kids to school.

Subject: Too funny! From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Wed, Jan 25, 2006 at 01:12:27 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: And from our fav housing blogger: http://thehousingbubble.blogspot.com/2005/05/close-your-eyes-and-buy-some-land.html A poll of recent buyers in LA showed they believed that their houses would apprecitate an average of 22% A YEAR FOR THE NEXT DECADE!!! How's that for delusional. Prof Piggington (piggington.com) figured out a the rate current income was increasing that would put the median income at $54,535; and the median home price at over $3,000,000 by the year 2015. No, everyone is very rational here in LA, thinking logically, absolutely no bubble here. At 12:49 PM, killerinstinct said... (that would put the median income at $54,535; and the median home price at over $3,000,000 by the year 2015.) You got a problem with that? We'll just have to come up with a way to finance it, that's all. No money down, of course. Interest-only. No payments for the first five years. 100-year duration. Neg-am after first five years. Most of the principal amort. would come in final 10 years of 100-year duration with giant balloon payment in final year. If your grandchildren can't handle the balloon in the final year, they will just refi and get another 100yr duration and start the process all over again. You gotta think creatively! There's no price we can't figure out how to finance our way out of...

Subject: Women on the Verge From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 11:34:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/books/review/22frey.html January 22, 2006 Women on the Verge By HILLARY FREY SUSPENSE fiction is like a powerful drug: one page, one taste, can induce such a tingly, speedy feeling that it takes an almost superhuman effort not to finish everything off in just one sitting. At least, that's how it is with Joyce Carol Oates's new collection of mystery and suspense stories. Even as her unrepentant, selfish characters repel you, their tales hold you hostage. It's impossible to leave one of Oates's antiheroines for long without wanting to pick the book back up, to discover what gruesome end she'll meet - or, more likely, inflict on someone else. In 'The Female of the Species,' these characters are unremarkable women - the proverbial girls next door - who double as adulteresses, whores and cold killers. For some, killing is an act of mercy; for others, it's pure pleasure. For a little girl in a story called 'The Banshee,' it's an accident - kind of. Taken together, Oates's nine stories seem to suggest that the fairer sex is more capable of calculating cruelty and brutality - and that women have less reverence for the lives of others - than we'd like to think. Mystery and horror fans are most likely to relish this collection, which works best as a source of cheap thrills. The short stories have all appeared elsewhere: some in literary quarterlies, many more in publications like Spook, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine and Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. As with much genre fiction, the plot lines tend to be predictable. In 'Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi,' a teenage prostitute's taste for slicing up johns hardly comes as a revelation. Yet the familiarity of the tale is part of what makes it fun. Suspecting what will happen whets the appetite for Oates's icy, often gory, conclusions, and the relief that comes when it's all over. Will we ever tire of reading about adulterous affairs as they go horribly awry? The story called 'Hunger' centers on a 34-year-old mother vacationing on Cape Cod with her daughter. She's a character we've seen a million times before in books and movies, on 'Desperate Housewives' - a beautiful, wealthy woman, a former dancer married to a decent man but with a yearning to escape the deep sleep of domestic bliss. Walking along the beach, she spies, as convention demands, an enigmatic outsider, possessed of a mysterious limp, and something happens inside her. 'He's tall, very thin. He has a childlike eager look. A hungry look. . . . A wounded dancer, an ex-dancer like me.' The sex, of course, is hot. Returning to Boston, she fights to adjust to her comfortable reality. But when her lover shows up at her front door - demanding her, daring her - she knows she'll have to choose between him and her husband, and the only choice a story like this allows is for one of them to die. Like Patricia Highsmith or Rachel Ingalls, Oates adroitly shows how one bad decision leads to a host of others, and how those choices can change a woman from a mistress to a murderer. 'Hunger' runs roughly 50 pages. Like the collection's last story, 'Angel of Mercy' - composed of the intertwined narratives of a long-dead nurse with a penchant for mercy killings and that of a nurse with a similar mission in the present day - it feels the most complete. The shorter stories here seem more like sketches, and perhaps they are. Oates's best form is still the novel. Yet stories don't have to be great to be addictive; they just need a trick - and Oates has nailed that. Even as you're wishing you could, you can't put this book down.

Subject: Struggling Back From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 06:33:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/national/22wounded.html?ex=1295586000&en=0bf4951d95707932&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Struggling Back From War's Once-Deadly Wounds By DENISE GRADY PALO ALTO, Calif. - It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk. At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates. Even so, those who know Corporal Poole say his personality - gregarious, kind and funny - has remained intact. Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he considers himself lucky to be alive. So do his doctors. 'Basically I want to get my life back,' he said. 'I'm really trying.' But he knows the life ahead of him is unlikely to match the one he had planned, in which he was going to attend college and become a teacher, get married and have children. Now, he hopes to volunteer in a school. His girlfriend from before he went to war is now just a friend. Before he left, they had agreed they might talk about getting married when he got back. 'But I didn't come back,' he said. Men and women like Corporal Poole, with multiple devastating injuries, are the new face of the wounded, a singular legacy of the war in Iraq. Many suffered wounds that would have been fatal in earlier wars but were saved by helmets, body armor, advances in battlefield medicine and swift evacuation to hospitals. As a result, the survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war - seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with just two per death in World War II. But that triumph is also an enduring hardship of the war. Survivors are coming home with grave injuries, often from roadside bombs, that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills like depression and post-traumatic stress. Dr. Alexander Stojadinovic, the vice chairman of surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said, 'The wounding patterns we see are similar to, say, what Israel will see with terrorist bombings - multiple complex woundings, not just a single body site.' [American deaths in Iraq numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20. Of 16,472 wounded, 7,625 were listed as unable to return to duty within 72 hours. As of Jan. 14, the Defense Department reported, 11,852 members of the military had been wounded in explosions - from so-called improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, mortars, bombs and grenades.] So many who survive explosions - more than half - sustain head injuries that doctors say anyone exposed to a blast should be checked for neurological problems. Brain damage, sometimes caused by skull-penetrating fragments, sometimes by shock waves or blows to the head, is a recurring theme. More than 1,700 of those wounded in Iraq are known to have brain injuries, half of which are severe enough that they may permanently impair thinking, memory, mood, behavior and the ability to work. Medical treatment for brain injuries from the Iraq war will cost the government at least $14 billion over the next 20 years, according to a recent study by researchers at Harvard and Columbia. Jill Gandolfi, a co-director of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, where Corporal Poole is being treated, said, 'We are looking at an epidemic of brain injuries.' The consequences of brain injury are enormous. Penetrating injuries can knock out specific functions like vision and speech, and may eventually cause epilepsy and increase the risk of dementia. What doctors call 'closed-head injuries,' from blows to the head or blasts, are more likely to have diffuse effects throughout the brain, particularly on the frontal lobes, which control the ability to pay attention, make plans, manage time and solve problems. Because of their problems with memory, emotion and thinking, brain-injured patients run a high risk of falling through the cracks in the health care system, particularly when they leave structured environments like the military, said Dr. Deborah Warden, national director of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a government program created in 1992 to develop treatment standards for the military and veterans. So many military men and women are returning with head injuries combined with other wounds that the government has designated four Veterans Affairs hospitals as 'polytrauma rehabilitation centers' to take care of them. The Palo Alto hospital where Corporal Poole is being treated is one. 'In Vietnam, they'd bring in a soldier with two legs blown off by a mine, but he wouldn't have the head injuries,' said Dr. Thomas E. Bowen, a retired Army general who was a surgeon in the Vietnam War and who is now chief of staff at the veterans hospital in Tampa, Fla., another polytrauma center. 'Some of the patients we have here now, they can't swallow, they can't talk, they're paralyzed and blind,' he said. Other soldiers have been sent home unconscious with such hopeless brain injuries that their families have made the anguished decision to take them off life support, said Dr. Andrew Shorr, who saw several such patients at Walter Reed. Amputations are a feature of war, but the number from Iraq - 345 as of Jan. 3, including 59 who had lost more than one limb - led the Army to open a new amputation center at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio in addition to the existing center at Walter Reed. Amputees get the latest technology, including $50,000 prosthetic limbs with microchips. Dr. Mark R. Bagg, head of orthopedic surgery at Brooke, said, 'The complexity of the injuries has been challenging - horrific blast injuries to extremities, with tremendous bone loss and joint, bone, nerve, arterial and soft tissue injuries.' It is common for wounded men and women to need months of rehabilitation in the hospital. Some, like Corporal Poole, need well over a year, and will require continuing help as outpatients. Because many of these veterans are in their 20's or 30's, they will live with their disabilities for decades. 'They have to reinvent who they are,' said Dr. Harriet Zeiner, a neuropsychologist at the Palo Alto veterans center. No Memory of the Blast Corporal Poole has no memory of the explosion or even the days before it, although he has had a recurring dream of being in Iraq and seeing the sky suddenly turn red. Other marines have told him he was on a foot patrol when the bomb went off. Three others in the patrol - two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter - were killed. Shrapnel tore into the left side of Corporal Poole's face and flew out from under his right eye. Metal fragments and the force of the blast fractured his skull in multiple places and injured his brain, one of its major arteries, and his left eye and ear. Every bone in his face was broken. Some, including his nose and portions of his eye sockets, were shattered. Part of his jawbone was pulverized. 'He could easily have died,' said Dr. Henry L. Lew, an expert on brain injury and the medical director of the rehabilitation center at the Palo Alto veterans hospital. Bleeding, infection, swelling of the brain - any or all could have killed someone with such a severe head injury, Dr. Lew said. Corporal Poole was taken by helicopter to a military hospital in Iraq and then flown to one in Germany, where surgeons cut a plug of fat from his abdomen and mixed it with other materials to seal an opening in the floor of his skull. He was then taken to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. His parents, who are divorced, were flown there to meet him - his father, Stephen, from San Jose, Calif., and his mother, Trudie, from Bristol, England, where Jason was born. Jason, his twin sister, Lisa, and a younger brother, David, moved to Cupertino, Calif., with their father when Jason was 12. His interest in the Marine Corps started in high school, where he was an athlete and an actor, a popular young man with lots of friends. He played football and won gold medals in track, and had parts in school plays. When Marine recruiters came to the school and offered weekend outings with a chance to play sports, Corporal Poole happily took part. He enlisted after graduating in 2000. 'We talked about the possibility of war, but none of us thought it was really going to happen,' said his father, who had to sign the enlistment papers because his son was only 17. Jason Poole hoped the Marines would help pay for college. His unit was among the first to invade Iraq. He was on his third tour of duty there, just 10 days from coming home and leaving the Marines, when he was wounded in the explosion. A week later, he was transferred to Bethesda, still in a coma, and his parents were told he might never wake up. 'I was unconscious for two months,' Corporal Poole said in a recent interview at the V.A. center in Palo Alto. 'One month and 23 days, really. Then I woke up and came here.' He has been a patient at the center since September 2004, mostly in the brain injury rehabilitation unit. He arrived unable to speak or walk, drooling, with the left side of his face caved in, his left eye blind and sunken, a feeding tube in his stomach and an opening in his neck to help him breathe. 'He was very hard of hearing, and sometimes he didn't even know you were in the room,' said Debbie Pitsch, his physical therapist. Damage to the left side of his brain had left him weak on the right, and he tended not to notice things to his right, even though his vision in that eye was good. He had lost his sense of smell. The left side of the brain is also the home of language, and it was hard for him to talk or comprehend speech. 'He would shake his head no when he meant yes,' said Dr. Zeiner, the neuropsychologist. But he could communicate by pointing. His mind was working, but the thoughts were trapped inside his head. An array of therapists - speech, physical, occupational and others - began working with him for hours every day. He needed an ankle brace and a walker just to stand at first. His balance was way off and, because of the brain injury, he could not tell where his right foot was unless he could see it. He often would just drag it behind him. His right arm would fall from the walker and hang by his side, and he would not even notice. He would bump into things to his right. Nonetheless, on his second day in Palo Alto, he managed to walk a few steps. 'He was extremely motivated, and he pushed himself to the limit, being a marine,' Ms. Pitsch said. He was so driven, in fact, that at first his therapists had to strap him into a wheelchair to keep him from trying to get up and walk without help. By the last week of September, he was beginning to climb stairs. He graduated from a walker to a cane to walking on his own. By January he was running and lifting weights. 'It's not his physical recovery that's amazing,' his father said. 'It's not his mental recovery. It's his attitude. He's always positive. He very rarely gets low. If it was me I'd fall apart. We think of how he was and what he's had taken from him.' Corporal Poole is philosophical. 'Even when I do get low it's just for 5 or 10 minutes,' he said. 'I'm just a happy guy. I mean, like, it sucks, basically, but it happened to me and I'm still alive.' A New Face 'Jason was definitely a ladies' man,' said Zillah Hodgkins, who has been a friend for nine years. In pictures from before he was hurt, he had a strikingly handsome face and a powerful build. Even in still photographs he seems animated, and people around him - other marines, Iraqi civilians - are always grinning, apparently at his antics. But the explosion shattered the face in the pictures and left him with another one. In his first weeks at Palo Alto, he hid behind sunglasses and, even though the weather was hot, ski caps and high turtlenecks. 'We said, 'Jason, you're sweating. You have to get used to how you look,' ' Dr. Zeiner said. 'He was an incredibly handsome guy,' she said. 'His twin sister is a beautiful woman. He was the life of the party. He was funny. He could have had any woman, and he comes back and feels like now he's a monster.' Gradually, he came out of wraps and tried to make peace with the image in the mirror. But his real hope was that somehow his face could be repaired. Reconstructive surgery should have been done soon after the explosion, before broken bones could knit improperly. But the blast had caused an artery in Corporal Poole's skull to balloon into an aneurysm, and an operation could have ruptured it and killed him. By November 2004, however, the aneurysm had gone away. Dr. H. Peter Lorenz, a plastic surgeon at Stanford University Medical Center, planned several operations to repair the damage after studying pictures of Corporal Poole before he was injured. 'You could say every bone in his face was fractured,' Dr. Lorenz said. The first operation took 14 hours. Dr. Lorenz started by making a cut in Corporal Poole's scalp, across the top of his head from ear to ear, and peeling the flesh down over his nose to expose the bones. To get at more bone, he made another slit inside Corporal Poole's mouth, between his upper lip and his teeth, and slipped in tools to lift the tissue. Many bones had healed incorrectly and had to be sawed apart, repositioned and then joined with titanium pins and plates. Parts of his eye sockets had to be replaced with bone carved from the back of his skull. Bone grafts helped to reposition Corporal Poole's eyes, which had sunk in the damaged sockets. Operations in March and July repaired his broken and dislocated jaw, his nose and damaged eyelids and tear ducts. He could not see for a week after one of the operations because his right eye had been sewn shut, and he spent several weeks unable to eat because his jaws had been wired together. Dr. Lorenz also repaired Corporal Poole's caved-in left cheek and forehead by implanting a protein made from human skin that would act as a scaffolding and be filled in by Corporal Poole's own cells. Later, he was fitted with a false eye to fill out the socket where his left eye had shriveled. Some facial scars remain, the false eye sometimes looks slightly larger than the real one, and because of a damaged tear duct, Corporal Poole's right eye is often watery. But his smile is still brilliant. In a recent conversation, he acknowledged that the results of the surgery were a big improvement. When asked how he felt about his appearance, he shrugged and said, 'I'm not good-looking but I'm still Jason Poole, so let's go.' But he catches people looking at him as if he is a 'weird freak,' he said, mimicking their reactions: a wide eyed stare, then the eyes averted. It makes him angry. 'I wish they would ask me what happened,' he said. 'I would tell them.' Learning to Speak Evi Klein, a speech therapist in Palo Alto, said that when they met in September 2004 Corporal Poole could name only about half the objects in his room. 'He had words, but he couldn't pull together language to express his thoughts,' Ms. Klein said. 'To answer a question with more than one or two words was beyond his capabilities.' Ms. Klein began with basics. She would point to items in the room. What's this called? What's that? She would show him a picture, have him say the word and write it. He would have to name five types of transportation. She would read a paragraph or play a phone message and ask him questions about it. Very gradually, he began to speak. But it was not until February that he could string together enough words for anyone to hear that he still had traces of an English accent. Today, he is fluent enough that most people would not guess how impaired he was. When he has trouble finding the right word or loses the thread of a conversation, he collects himself and starts again. More than most people, he fills in the gaps with expressions like 'basically' and 'blah, blah, blah.' 'I thought he would do well,' Ms. Klein said. 'I didn't think he'd do as well as he is doing. I expect measurable gains over the next year or so.' With months of therapy, his reading ability has gone from zero to a level somewhere between second and third grade. He has to focus on one word at a time, he said. A page of print almost overwhelms him. His auditory comprehension is slow as well. 'It will take a bit of time,' Corporal Poole said, 'but basically I'm going to get there.' One evening over dinner, he said: 'I feel so old.' Not physically, he said, but mentally and emotionally. On a recent morning, Ms. Gandolfi of the brain injury unit conducted an exercise in thinking and verbal skills with a group of patients. She handed Corporal Poole a sheet of paper that said, 'Dogs can be taught how to talk.' A series of questions followed. What would be the benefits? Why could it be a problem? What would you do about it? Corporal Poole hunched over the paper, pen in hand. He looked up. 'I have no clue,' he said softly. 'Let's ask this one another way,' Ms. Gandolfi said. 'What would be cool about it?' He began to write with a ballpoint pen, slowly forming faint letters. 'I would talk to him and listen to him,' he wrote. In another space, he wrote: 'lonely the dog happy.' But what he had actually said to Ms. Gandolfi was: 'I could be really lonely and this dog would talk to me.' Some of his responses were illegible. He left one question blank. But he was performing much better than he did a year ago. He hopes to be able to work with children, maybe those with disabilities. But, Dr. Zeiner said, 'He is not competitively employable.' His memory, verbal ability and reading are too impaired. He may eventually read well enough to take courses at a community college, but, she said, 'It's years away.' Someday, he might be able to become a teacher's aide, she said. But he may have to work just as a volunteer and get by on his military benefits of about $2,400 a month. He will also receive a $100,000 insurance payment from the government. 'People whose brains are shattered, it's incredible how resilient they are,' Dr. Zeiner said. 'They keep trying. They don't collapse in despair.' Back in the World In mid-December, Corporal Poole was finally well enough to leave the hospital. With a roommate, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino, the town where Corporal Poole grew up. His share of the rent is $800 a month. But he had not lived outside a hospital in 18 months, and it was unclear how he would fare on his own. 'If he's not able to cope with the outside world, is there anywhere for him to go, anyone there to support him if it doesn't go well?' asked his mother, who still lives in Bristol, where she is raising her three younger children. 'I think of people from Vietnam who wound up on the streets, or mental patients, or in prison.' He still needs therapy - speech and other types - several times a week at Palo Alto and that requires taking three city buses twice a day. The trip takes more than an hour, and he has to decipher schedules and cross hair-raising intersections on boulevards with few pedestrians. It is an enormous step, not without risk: people with a brain injury have increased odds of sustaining another one, from a fall or an accident brought about by impaired judgment, balance or senses. In December, Corporal Poole practiced riding the buses to the hospital with Paul Johnson, a co-director of the brain injury unit. As they crossed a busy street, Mr. Johnson gently reminded him, several times, to turn and look back over his left shoulder - the side on which he is blind - for cars turning right. After Corporal Poole and Mr. Johnson had waited for a few minutes at the stop, a bus zoomed up, and Corporal Poole ambled toward the door. 'Come on!' the driver snapped. Corporal Poole watched intently for buildings and gas stations he had picked as landmarks so he would know when to signal for his stop. 'I'm a little nervous, but I'll get the hang of it,' he said. He was delighted to move into his new apartment, pick a paint color, buy a couch, a bed and a set of dishes, and eat something besides hospital food. With help from his therapists in Palo Alto, he hopes to take a class at a nearby community college, not an actual course, but a class to help him to learn to study and prepare for real academic work. Teaching, art therapy, children's theater and social work all appeal to him, even if he can only volunteer. Awaiting his formal release from the military, Corporal Poole still hopes to get married and have children. That hope is not unrealistic, Dr. Zeiner said. Brain injuries can cause people to lose their ability to empathize, she said, and that kills relationships. But Corporal Poole has not lost empathy, she said. 'That's why I think he will find a partner.' Corporal Poole said: 'I think something really good is going to happen to me.'

Subject: Paul Krugman: Iraq's Power Vacuum From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 05:58:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ January 23, 2006 Infrastructure is essential in allowing an economy to reach its potential, a fact Paul Krugman illustrates with Iraq. He explains how the failure to develop Iraq's infrastructure through effective reconstruction efforts has undermined the chance of a successful outcome. By Mark Thoma Iraq's Power Vacuum, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: In the State of the Union address, President Bush will assert ... that he has a strategy for victory in Iraq. I don't believe him. ... To explain myself, let me tell you some stories about electricity. Power shortages are a crucial issue for ordinary Iraqis, and for the credibility of their government. As Muhsin Shlash, Iraq's electricity minister, said ..., 'When you lose electricity the country is destroyed, nothing works, all industry is down and terrorist activity is increased.' ... In today's Iraq, blackouts are the rule rather than the exception. ... Baghdad and 'much of the central regions' - in other words, the areas where the insurgency is most active and dangerous - currently get only between two and six hours of power a day. Lack of electricity ... prevents businesses from operating, destroys jobs and generates a sense of demoralization and rage that feeds the insurgency. So why is power scarcer than ever...? Sabotage by insurgents is one factor. But as ... The Los Angeles Times ... showed, the blackouts are also the result of some incredible missteps by U.S. officials. Most notably, ... U.S. officials ... decided to base their electricity plan on natural gas: ...American companies were hired to install gas-fired generators in power plants across Iraq. But ... 'pipelines needed to transport the gas' - ... to the new generators - 'weren't built because Iraq's Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production.' Whoops. Meanwhile, ... U.S. officials chose not to raise the prices of electricity and fuel, which had been kept artificially cheap under Saddam, for fear of creating unrest. But as a first step toward their dream of turning Iraq into a free-market utopia, they removed tariffs and other restrictions on ... imported consumer goods. The result was that wealthy and middle-class Iraqis rushed to buy imported refrigerators, heaters and other power-hungry products, and the demand for electricity surged ... This caused even more blackouts. In short, U.S. officials thoroughly botched their handling of Iraq's electricity sector. They did much the same in the oil sector. But the Bush administration is determined to achieve victory in Iraq, so it must have a plan to rectify its errors, right? Um, no. ... all indications are that the Bush administration ... doesn't plan to ask for any more money for Iraqi reconstruction. Another Los Angeles Times report ... contains some jaw-dropping quotes from U.S. officials, who now seem to be lecturing the Iraqis on self-reliance. 'The world is a competitive place,' declared the economics counselor at the U.S. embassy. 'No pain, no gain,' said another official. 'We were never intending to rebuild Iraq,' said a third. We came, we saw, we conquered, we messed up your infrastructure, we're outta here. Mr. Shlash certainly sounds as if he's given up expecting more American help. ... Yet he also emphasized the obvious: partly because of the similar failure of reconstruction in the oil sector, Iraq's government doesn't have the funds to do much power plant construction. In fact, it will be hard pressed to maintain the capacity it has, and protect that capacity from insurgent attacks. And if reconstruction stalls, as seems inevitable, it's hard to see how anything else in Iraq can go right. ...[T]he Bush administration... doesn't have a plan; it's entirely focused on short-term political gain. Mr. Bush is just getting by from sound bite to sound bite, while Iraq and America sink ever deeper into the quagmire.

Subject: Bolivia's Leader From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:57:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/international/americas/22bolivia.html?ex=1295586000&en=9d804a00d88dafe5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 Bolivia's Leader Solidifies Region's Leftward Tilt By JUAN FORERO and LARRY ROHTER TIWANAKU, Bolivia - When Evo Morales, an Aymara Indian and former head of the Bolivian coca growers union, is sworn in as president on Sunday, it may be the hardest turn yet in South America's persistent left-leaning tilt, with the potential for big reverberations far beyond the borders of this landlocked Andean nation. While mostly vague on details, and recently moderating his tone, Mr. Morales promises to transform Bolivia and 'end the colonial and neoliberal model,' as he put it on Saturday in an elaborate ceremony at the sacred ruins of this pre-Incan civilization. He has said he would 'depenalize' cultivation of coca, the prime ingredient for cocaine, which Washington has spent hundreds of millions of dollars and more than two decades trying to eradicate. He pledges to inject the state in Bolivia's oil and natural gas industry, troubling the multinational energy companies that first flocked here in the late 1990's, even though Mr. Morales recently said he would not expropriate foreign holdings. He has disparaged American-backed free trade policies, and seems certain to stand as the southernmost outpost of a new anti-American nexus with Cuba and Venezuela, whose president, Hugo Chávez, has become among the Bush administration's most ardent critics. Any and all of those steps in a country where coca tracts and rich energy holdings give it a strategic importance far outweighing its tiny population could unsettle Washington and the region. Bolivia's gas reserves, the continent's second-largest, help power South America's largest economies. Brazil has plowed $1.5 billion into energy investments in Bolivia and worries about rising drug and crime problems in its urban slums if Bolivia's coca crop is not controlled. Mr. Morales is at least the seventh Latin American leader to take power since 2000 from the left, a varied crop that ranges from Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Ecuador to Venezuela, with strong leftist contenders surging in Peru and Mexico, both of which will also hold elections this year. His success is also the most prominent example of Latin America's recent democratic revolutions. Throughout the region, the indigenous and the poor, increasingly mobilized by frustration with Washington-backed economic prescriptions, have used the ballot box to put in place a group of leaders more representative of their interests for the first time in nearly five centuries. With the exception of Mr. Chávez, who is bankrolled by Venezuela's oil wealth, most of the continent's other left-leaning leaders, like Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, have pursued pragmatic policies once faced with the real task of governing. In recent weeks, Mr. Morales has toned down some of his more strident language and struck a more accommodating note with American officials. But in Bolivia's case, political analysts here say, it is far harder to know exactly how Mr. Morales might rule. Mr. Morales, a former congressman, is untested as an executive and known less as a pragmatist than as a fiery orator and protest leader. Several of his associates, including Vice President-elect Álvaro García and Carlos Villegas, who will oversee economic planning, are leftist academics with no experience in government. 'There could be realism and pragmatism in their policies, or they could allow ideology to guide them,' said Roberto Laserna, a political analyst with San Simón University in Cochabamba, the city where Mr. Morales makes his home. 'But we do not have a way to gauge their management experience.' What is clear is that Mr. Morales's compelling storybook rise to power has brought this isolated country of nine million people the kind of international attention it has rarely received. A former llama herder who saw four siblings die in childhood, Mr. Morales won Bolivia's Dec. 18 election in a landslide not seen since the country's return to democracy in 1982. The first Indian elected president in a country where most people are indigenous, Mr. Morales, dressed notably casually in an open-collar shirt and sweater, embarked on a 10-day world victory tour. He met this month with the President Jacques Chirac of France, President Hu Jintao of China and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez of Spain. On Saturday, in a ceremony attended by tens of thousands of Aymara and Quechua Indians at this archaeological site some 14,000 feet above sea level, Mr. Morales donned the replica of a 1,000-year-old tunic similar to those once used by Tiwanaku's wise men, was purified in an ancient ritual and accepted the symbolic leadership of the myriad indigenous groups of the Andes. 'We are not alone,' Mr. Morales told the crowd. 'The world is with us. We are in a time of triumph, a time of change.' On Sunday, for his official state inauguration, he expected about a dozen foreign leaders, far more than have ever attended a Bolivian inauguration. Part of that solidarity stems from his role as representative of a new Latin American pole in global politics, as the region coalesces as a counterpoint to unpopular United States policies. More and more Latin American countries are taking exception to Washington's economic prescriptions and those of the International Monetary Fund. Some are strengthening ties with China, which is investing heavily in the region. Many have refused to go along with Bush administration demands to exempt Americans from criminal prosecutions at the International Criminal Court at The Hague. No South American countries have sent soldiers to support the war in Iraq. And anti-American criticism has become political sport, as opinion surveys give President Bush the lowest standing in Latin America of any American president in the region's history. As varied as the region is, no other part of the world has seen as uniform a shift in its political landscape. Mr. Morales, however, has already had to find middle ground between the explosive populist talk that helped propel him to power and a pragmatic path that will help Bolivia's tiny $9.5 billion economy grow, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Washington-based Center for Global Development, which studies economic issues affecting developing countries. In a 2002 interview, Mr. Morales told The New York Times that the solution to Bolivia's economic troubles was 'communal socialism,' having peasant communes run mineral and metals mines and agriculture. Mr. Morales, while railing at globalization, now says that trade agreements can work, if fair to both sides, and that foreign investment is needed. Since calling Mr. Bush a 'terrorist' in December, he has sounded a more conciliatory tone. He noted this week that he, too, had been the target of harsh barbs from American officials. 'Everything here is pardoned,' Mr. Morales said. 'We are in new times. Let us start talking, not in a dialogue of submission, but to find solutions.' Among those who will advise Mr. Morales is Juan Ramón Quintana, a moderate academic who has worked extensively with international organizations and governments. 'There is still the perception of Evo Morales as a radical leader,' he said in an interview. 'But Evo Morales is undergoing an important transformation. We all believe that he can become a statesman.' The United States, too, has been more accommodating. Thomas Shannon, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, recently told reporters that Washington wanted dialogue with Mr. Morales and to continue 'positive relations' between the two countries. On Saturday night, he and the American ambassador, David Greenlee, met with Mr. Morales to lay the groundwork for future discussions. 'We want the Bolivian people to succeed, and for the Bolivian people to succeed, this government has to succeed,' Mr. Shannon told reporters after the meeting. 'It's a democratically elected government, and we hope that we're going to be in a position to work with them.' Still, if the Bush administration decides that Mr. Morales is pursuing policies that run counter to American interests, either in trade or on drug policy, aid could be frozen or cut - and the United States is this country's largest donor. It has provided $655 million from 2000 to 2004, two-thirds of it for development, and is considering a Bolivian request for $600 million to build roads. Solidarity aside, for Bolivia's neighbors, too, Mr. Morales's ascension creates new challenges as well that are hardly mitigated by the fact that most are led by nominally leftist governments. The main concern is assuring access to Bolivia's vast natural gas reserves. More than any other country, Brazil has vital economic interests to protect. About half the natural gas consumed in Brazil comes from Bolivia, one third of Bolivia's exports go to Brazil, and Brazilian companies are the largest group of investors in Bolivia, led by the state-dominated oil company Petrobras. So Brazil has watched with concern as Bolivia has become increasingly unstable in recent years. President da Silva's government has been careful not to arouse Bolivian nationalism, reacting calmly to Mr. Morales's statements that he is seeking 'partners, not bosses' in developing its gas reserves. When Mr. Morales visited Brazil this month, Mr. da Silva invited Bolivia to become a full member of Mercosur, the South American trade union that Brazil dominates. Membership, some analysts in the region say, could constrain any Bolivian temptation toward radicalism. 'We have the advantage, in that we are not run by a Brazilian Bush but a president whose origins, like those of Morales, are in the labor movement and who wants to avoid excessively dramatic conflicts,' said Helio Jaguaribe, a leading Brazilian foreign policy analyst. The stakes are high for Argentina, too. Until now, Bolivian governments have provided it with gas at below market prices. Mr. Morales said during a visit to Buenos Aires this week that he planned to end that arrangement, a step that is likely to add inflationary pressures. But Bolivia's most prickly relations will be with Chile, even with the election last week of the Socialist Michelle Bachelet as president. Chile's victory in a 19th-century war that cost Bolivia its coastline continues to bedevil the relationship. Mr. Morales has even criticized Chile's capitalism and close relations with the United States, and anti-Chilean sentiment remains rampant here. 'The United States wants to convert Chile into the Israel of Latin America,' Mr. Morales charged in a newspaper interview that has been widely quoted in Chile. The two countries have not had full diplomatic relations since the 1970's, and Mr. Morales led a campaign against a pipeline that would have sent Bolivian gas to Mexico and the United States via a Chilean port. Still, Mr. Morales has invited Chile's departing president, Ricardo Lagos, to the inauguration, the first Chilean leader to visit Bolivia for such an occasion in decades. Ms. Bachelet has said she favors greater integration between Chile and its poorer neighbors. Indeed, Mr. Morales begins his term with good will - and wariness - all around. Venezuela has pledged diesel fuel and energy cooperation, while Spain has offered debt relief, according to Bolivian officials. Other countries have pledged stronger ties. Mr. Morales, while welcoming trade with countries as far away as Belgium and South Africa, has been besieged by requests from countries with investments here to ensure that Bolivia maintains a healthy environment for foreign companies. Mr. Morales has tiptoed around them so far. But there is little doubt he will also give more authority to the state, remaking some ministries and creating others. 'The state needs to be the central actor to plan economic development,' he explained.

Subject: Scientist Rode a Wave of Korean Pride From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:56:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/science/22clone.html?ex=1295586000&en=b7cc491994fe1322&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 22, 2006 In a Country That Craved Respect, Stem Cell Scientist Rode a Wave of Korean Pride By NORIMITSU ONISHI SEOUL, South Korea - After first gaining attention in South Korea for cloning a cow in 1999, Dr. Hwang Woo Suk, the fallen stem-cell scientist, promised to clone next an animal with deeper meaning to Koreans: a tiger. A holy animal according to Korean lore, tigers once populated the peninsula but were hunted to virtual extinction during Japanese colonial rule. They are believed to exist today, if they exist at all, in North Korea's Mount Paektu, which Koreans consider their ancestral origin. 'I'll spread the Korean people's spirit by cloning the Mount Paektu tiger,' Dr. Hwang said at the time. From his promise to clone a tiger half a decade ago to his apology for disgracing his country last week, Dr. Hwang never shied away from the strong appeals to nationalism that helped turn him into a hero. The scientist's spectacular rise and fall, as well as one of the biggest scientific frauds in recent history, took place in the crucible of a country whose deep-rooted insecurities had been tempered by a newfound confidence and yearning for international recognition. 'Dr. Hwang was going to give South Korea the momentum to leap ahead in its position in the world,' said Won Suk Min, 26, an electrical engineering student at Korea University here. 'A lot of people around me feel empty now. They feel that there is nothing to look forward to.' Last week, an investigative panel appointed by Seoul National University, where Dr. Hwang was a professor, concluded that he had faked the evidence for landmark papers on stem-cell and embryonic research in 2004 and 2005. The conclusion was a psychological blow to South Koreans, for whom Dr. Hwang's success had appeared to confirm their country's new place in the world. In the past half decade, South Korea had surged forward on different levels, as companies like Samsung overtook Sony, the 'Korean Wave' of pop culture spread throughout Asia and the country became the world's most wired nation. By contrast, in 1999, recapturing South Korea's spirit resonated powerfully in a country that was still reeling from the Asian financial crisis of 1997. 'It was a beacon of light in the dark,' said Kim Ki Jung, a political scientist at Yonsei University here. 'Hwang triggered Korean sentiments of nationalistic pride,' Mr. Kim said, adding that the sentiments eventually led to a national mood of 'blind patriotism' toward the scientist. Dr. Hwang began drawing the country's adulation when, in February 2004, he became an international celebrity for writing in the leading scientific journal, Science, that he had cloned human embryos. In June 2005, he published a paper, again in Science, to the effect that he had developed a technique to extract embryonic stem cells from fewer human eggs than previous methods required. This further raised the hopes for therapeutic cloning and the possibility of converting a patient's own cells into new tissues to treat various diseases. The papers transformed Dr. Hwang into a national hero: a handsome 53-year-old scientist who had risen from humble origins to lead South Korea to places it and the rest of the world had not seen. Web sites went up in his honor, women volunteered to donate eggs, Korean Air volunteered to fly him anywhere free. The government of President Roh Moo Hyun, who had embraced and promoted him aggressively, gave him millions of dollars in research money, made him the country's top scientist and assigned him bodyguards. It issued a postage stamp that engraved Dr. Hwang's promise to make paralyzed people walk through images of a man in a wheelchair who stands up, dances and embraces a woman. The government also extolled his exploits in government school textbooks, describing him in a sixth-grade textbook as a challenger for the Nobel Prize. 'He was going to change our country's image and make South Korea No. 1 in the world in this sector,' said Huh Hyun, 37, who was shopping on a recent day at the Carafe megastore with her husband. 'We don't have someone to represent us to the world. South Africa, for example, has Mandela.' South Koreans also spoke of Dr. Hwang in terms of national interests. 'Because we are a homogenous people, we identified ourselves with this one individual and overlooked his faults,' said Cheon Jeong Seok, 34, another shopper. Mr. Cheon said the worship of Dr. Hwang was also rooted in the fierce nationalism fostered during the decades of military dictatorship, until the late 1980's. 'We were taught constantly about national interests and that the ends justified the means,' Mr. Cheon said. In this atmosphere, Dr. Hwang became untouchable. 'Many of us didn't trust him,' Kim Jae Sup, professor of developmental biology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, said of Korean scientists. 'But the pressure from the public and government to support him actually inhibited our criticism. We couldn't say anything. That's why scientists posted evidence against him on Web sites. It was anonymous.' A whistleblower scientist also contacted 'PD Notebook,' an investigative program at the television network MBC, which exposed Dr. Hwang. The producer of the program later said that, in response, ' 'PD Notebook' was treated like a Judas who sold off Jesus Christ.' Huge protests and boycotts were aimed at the program. After Japanese researchers published a paper on dog stem cells, The Chosun Ilbo, the largest South Korean daily newspaper, contended that Dr. Hwang had been preparing such a paper before he was 'pestered by 'PD Notebook.' ' The newspaper touched upon one of the undercurrents in the wave supporting Dr. Hwang: South Korea's sense of rivalry with Japan, its former colonial power, and its fixation with elevating its position in the world. That goal was manifested in what some call the country's 'Nobel Prize disease' or its obsession with winning its first Nobel Prize in the sciences. (South Korea's only Nobel laureate, Kim Dae Jung, the former president, won a Nobel Peace Prize.) With Dr. Hwang, the prize had seemed within easy grasp; now there were other worries. 'I hear that this is being reported around the world, in the United States and in Japan,' said Park Soon Yeh, a woman in her 60's who sells handbags and suitcases at the Namdaemun Market here. 'I'm worried that when young Korean scientists go abroad now, foreigners will not have confidence in them.' As his research imploded in recent weeks, Dr. Hwang grasped at the same kind of nationalistic sentiments that had propelled him to stardom. He said he would keep 'fighting in a white robe,' a reference to Yi Sun Shin, the naval commander who repelled a Japanese invasion in the 16th century and saved Korea. Last Thursday, after the government announced that it would discontinue the stamps in his honor and edit out references to him in textbooks, Dr. Hwang insisted that he still had the technology to extract stem cells from human embryos, saying, 'This is the Republic of Korea's technology.' He apologized for the fraudulent data in his work, blaming a research partner. 'I was crazy with work,' Dr. Hwang said. 'I could see nothing in front of me. I only saw one thing and that is how this country called the Republic of Korea could stand straight in the center of the world.' Like many other South Koreans interviewed, Lee Yong Koo, 50, who also sells clothes at the market, said that even if he no longer trusted Dr. Hwang, he was willing to give him another chance. He was not pegging the country's future on him anymore, though. 'I don't expect him to bring foreign money into South Korea or make this country rich,' Mr. Lee said. 'We have Samsung and other companies to do that.'

Subject: Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:30:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/business/28cheer.html?ex=1290834000&en=1f0e2dde86b66153&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 28, 2005 Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales By STEPHANIE SAUL As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves - flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America's sweetheart smile - to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman. Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors' offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products. Ms. Napier says the skills she honed performing for thousands of fans helped land her job. 'I would think, essentially, that cheerleaders make good sales people,' she said. Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor's waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks. Known for their athleticism, postage-stamp skirts and persuasive enthusiasm, cheerleaders have many qualities the drug industry looks for in its sales force. Some keep their pompoms active, like Onya, a sculptured former college cheerleader. On Sundays she works the sidelines for the Washington Redskins. But weekdays find her urging gynecologists to prescribe a treatment for vaginal yeast infection. Some industry critics view wholesomely sexy drug representatives as a variation on the seductive inducements like dinners, golf outings and speaking fees that pharmaceutical companies have dangled to sway doctors to their brands. But now that federal crackdowns and the industry's self-policing have curtailed those gifts, simple one-on-one human rapport, with all its potentially uncomfortable consequences, has become more important. And in a crowded field of 90,000 drug representatives, where individual clients wield vast prescription-writing influence over patients' medication, who better than cheerleaders to sway the hearts of the nation's doctors, still mostly men. 'There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep,' said Dr. Thomas Carli of the University of Michigan. He led efforts to limit access to the representatives who once trolled hospital hallways. But Dr. Carli, who notes that even male drug representatives are athletic and handsome, predicts that the drug industry, whose image has suffered from safety problems and aggressive marketing tactics, will soon come to realize that 'the days of this sexual marketing are really quite limited.' But many cheerleaders, and their proponents, say they bring attributes besides good looks to the job - so much so that their success has led to a recruiting pipeline that fuels the country's pharmaceutical sales force. T. Lynn Williamson, Ms. Napier's cheering adviser at Kentucky, says he regularly gets calls from recruiters looking for talent, mainly from pharmaceutical companies. 'They watch to see who's graduating,' he said. 'They don't ask what the major is,' Mr. Williamson said. Proven cheerleading skills suffice. 'Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm - they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want.' Approximately two dozen Kentucky cheerleaders, mostly women but a few men, have become drug reps in recent years. While there are no statistics on how many drug representatives are former or current cheerleaders, demand for them led to the formation of an employment firm, Spirited Sales Leaders, in Memphis. It maintains a database of thousands of potential candidates. 'The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people,' said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders. He started Spirited Sales Leaders about 18 months ago because so many cheerleaders were going into drug sales. He said he knew several hundred former cheerleaders who had become drug representatives. 'There's a lot of sizzle in it,' said Mr. Webb. 'I've had people who are going right out, maybe they've been out of school for a year, and get a car and make up to $50,000, $60,000 with bonuses, if they do well.' Compensation sometimes goes well into six figures. The ranks include women like Cristin Duren, a former University of Alabama cheerleader. Ms. Duren, 24, recently took a leave from First Horizon Pharmaceuticals to fulfill her duties as the reigning Miss Florida U.S.A. and prepare for next year's Miss U.S.A. pageant. Onya, the Redskins cheerer (who asked that her last name be withheld, citing team policy), has her picture on the team's Web site in her official bikinilike uniform and also reclining in an actual bikini. Onya, 27, who declined to identify the company she works for, is but one of several drug representatives who have cheered for the Redskins, according to a spokeswoman for the team, Melanie Treanor. Many doctors say they privately joke about the appearance of saleswomen who come to their offices. Currently making the e-mail rounds is an anonymous parody of an X-rated 'diary' of a cheerleader-turned-drug-saleswoman. 'Saw Dr. Johnson recently,' one entry reads. 'After the 'episode' which occurred at our last dinner, I have purposely stayed away from him. The restraining order still remains.' Federal law bans employment discrimination based on factors like race and gender, but it omits appearance from the list. 'Generally, discriminating in favor of attractive people is not against the law in the United States,' said James J. McDonald Jr., a lawyer with Fisher & Phillips. But that might be changing, he said, citing a recent ruling by the California Supreme Court, which agreed to hear an employment lawsuit brought by a former L'Oreal manager who ignored a supervisor's order to fire a cosmetics saleswoman and hire someone more attractive. But pharmaceutical companies deny that sex appeal has any bearing on hiring. 'Obviously, people hired for the work have to be extroverts, a good conversationalist, a pleasant person to talk to; but that has nothing to do with looks, it's the personality,' said Lamberto Andreotti, the president of worldwide pharmaceuticals for Bristol-Myers Squibb. But Dr. Carli, at the University of Michigan, said that seduction appeared to be a deliberate industry strategy. And with research showing that pharmaceutical sales representatives influence prescribing habits, the industry sales methods are drawing criticism. Dr. Dan Foster, a West Virginia surgeon and lawmaker who said he was reacting to the attractive but sometimes ill-informed drug representatives who came to his office, introduced a bill to require them to have science degrees. Dr. Foster's legislation was not adopted, but it helped inspire a new state regulation to require disclosure of minimum hiring requirements. Ms. Napier, the former Kentucky cheerleader, said she was so concerned about the cute-but-dumb stereotype when she got her job that she worked diligently to learn about her product, Prevacid. 'It's no secret that the women, and the people in general, hired in this industry are attractive people,' she said. 'But there so much more to it.' Still, women have an advantage with male doctors, according to Jamie Reidy, a drug representative who was fired by Eli Lilly this year after writing a book lampooning the industry, 'Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman.' In an interview, Mr. Reidy remembered a sales call with the 'all-time most attractive, coolest woman in the history of drug repdom.' At first, he said, the doctor 'gave ten reasons not to use one of our drugs.' But, Mr. Reidy added: 'She gave a little hair toss and a tug on his sleeve and said, 'Come on, doctor, I need the scrips.' He said, 'O.K., how do I dose that thing?' I could never reach out and touch a female physician that way.' Stories abound about doctors who mistook a sales pitch as an invitation to more. A doctor in Washington pleaded guilty to assault last year and gave up his license after forcibly kissing a saleswoman on the lips. One informal survey, conducted by a urologist in Pittsburgh, Dr. James J. McCague, found that 12 of 13 medical saleswomen said they had been sexually harassed by physicians. Dr. McCague published his findings in the trade magazine Medical Economics under the title 'Why Was That Doctor Naked in His Office?' Penny Ramsey Otwell, who cheered for the University of Maryland and now sells for Wyeth in the Dallas area, says she has managed to avoid such encounters. 'We have a few of those doctors in our territory,' said Ms. Otwell, 30, who was a contestant on the CBS television show 'Survivor.' 'They'll get called on by representatives who can handle that kind of talk, ones that can tolerate it and don't think anything about it.' But there have been accusations that a pharmaceutical company encouraged using sex to make drug sales. In a federal lawsuit against Novartis, one saleswoman said she had been encouraged to exploit a personal relationship with a doctor to increase sales in her Montgomery, Ala., territory. In court papers responding to the lawsuit, Novartis denied the accusation. The company has also said it is committed to hiring and promoting women. For her part, Ms. Napier, the TAP Pharmaceutical saleswoman, says it is partly her local celebrity that gives her a professional edge. On the University of Kentucky cheering squad, Ms. Napier stood out for her long dark hair and tiny physique that landed her atop human pyramids. 'If I have a customer who is a real big U.K. fan, we'll have stories to tell each other,' Ms. Napier said. 'If they can remember me as the cheerleader - she has Prevacid - it just allows you do to so many things.'

Subject: Founding Father From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:24:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/books/review/31ELLISL.html?ex=1280548800&en=0a5392972c3fded4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss July 31, 2005 'Thomas Paine and the Promise of America': Founding Father of the American Left By JOSEPH J. ELLIS WHAT we might call the Founders' Surge keeps rolling along. Harvey J. Kaye's ''Thomas Paine and the Promise of America'' is the newest entry in the founders' sweepstakes, making a spirited argument that Paine merits a place on the Mall or Tidal Basin as the only authentically radical voice, the only unblinkered democrat, the only patriotic prophet whose vision remains relevant and resonant for our time. If the criteria were exclusively journalistic, Paine's status would be assured. In 1774 this working-class unknown from London, uneducated and a former corset maker, arrived in Philadelphia. Less than two years later he did what every American journalist since then has dreamed of doing: changing the course of history with a piece of writing. His ''Common Sense'' (1776) galvanized popular opinion around the idea that American independence was not impossible, but indeed inevitable. Several months later he became America's first embedded journalist, accompanying the tattered remnants of the Continental Army as it fled across New Jersey after a devastating defeat in New York. In retrospect, this was the most vulnerable moment the American republic ever faced, the greatest threat to what we now call national security. In this all-consuming context, Paine wrote the defiantly reassuring words that would echo through the ages: ''These are the times that try men's souls.'' Long before Edward R. Murrow could tingle spines during World War II with ''This is London,'' Paine had already set the standard against which all subsequent American journalists would be measured. Kaye's core argument, however, goes far beyond the claim that Paine was a great journalist. Writing with the passion of a defense attorney whose client has been wrongfully sentenced to obscurity by what he calls a plutocratic phalanx of ''the powerful, propertied, prestigious and pious,'' Kaye contends that Paine, alone among the founding generation, saw to the very heart of the American promise embodied in the principles of 1776. Even more than Thomas Jefferson, whose revolutionary vision was blurred by the stigma of slavery, Paine was a cleareyed radical. The key document here is not ''Common Sense'' but ''The Rights of Man'' (1791-92), which advocated that both France and America embrace the full implications of their respective revolutions: the end of slavery; equality for women; abolition of all property requirements to vote; complete separation of church and state; global peace enforced by an international confederation of republican governments. In other words, Paine was a radical visionary because he insisted on the immediate adoption of the liberal agenda destined to triumph, though quite gradually, over the next two centuries. Ironically, the very feature of Paine's mentality that Kaye most admires -- its radicalism -- is precisely the feature his most ardent critics at the time found most troubling. Kaye, the author and editor of several books, including ''Are We Good Citizens?,'' tends to label Paine's enemies elitists, wealthy aristocrats deaf to the authentically egalitarian ethos of his working-class politics. But this quasi-Marxist gloss obscures the fundamental ideological difference between Paine and most of the other founders. John Adams, for example, who was the son of a shoemaker, loathed Paine. Adams regarded the effort to implement the full revolutionary agenda immediately as a path leading over the cliffs of Dover. What separated Paine and Adams was not class so much as a classic disagreement over how to manage and secure a revolution. Adams believed in gradual change, in an evolutionary revolution. Paine believed that the revolutionary agenda, ''the spirit of '76,'' did not need to be managed, only declared. Adams regarded the Revolution as the Big Bang in the American political universe, which should radiate its radical energies and implications only slowly into the future. The Paine approach was, in fact, the more radical course followed by the French Revolution. It ended up, as Adams predicted, in barrels of blood and Napoleonic despotism. Paine himself nearly perished in the process he had helped to start, saved from the guillotine only when a prison guard neglected to remove him from his cell on the day of executions. Perhaps this is the reason one scholar named Paine the ''Peter Pan of the Age of Reason.'' The second half of ''Thomas Paine and the Promise of America'' is a brisk walk through the corridors of time in quest of Paine's legacy. Though a self-confessed partisan, Kaye provides the most comprehensive assessment yet of Paine's controversial reputation, and the results congeal into three categories: first, the Paine haters, like Theodore Roosevelt, who called him a ''filthy little atheist'' because of ''The Age of Reason'' (1794-95), a frontal assault on Christianity; second, prominent American statesmen and authors like Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who quoted selectively from Paine but only to serve their own political purposes; third, the longer list of radicals, a kind of roll call of the American left, who drew inspiration from Paine's uncompromising convictions. A selection from the last, in rough chronological order, includes Robert Owen, William Lloyd Garrison, Victoria Woodhull, Henry George, Eugene Debs, Clarence Darrow, Henry Wallace, Saul Alinsky, C. Wright Mills, Tom Hayden and Bob Dylan. Oddly enough, however, over the past 30 years Paine's chief fans have appeared within the conservative wing of the Republican Party, making Paine, like Jefferson, the proverbial man for all seasons. Though weird, and surely not the legacy Kaye has in mind, the Goldwater-Reagan-Gingrich persuasion has a plausible claim on the libertarian side of the Paine legacy, which is deeply suspicious of all forms of consolidated political power and views government as ''them'' rather than ''us.'' Paul Wolfowitz would also be able to cite Paine in support of George W. Bush's Iraq policy, since Paine believed that democratic values were both universal and self-enacting. History makes strange bedfellows. WHICH is to say that ''the promise of America'' that Paine glimpsed so lyrically at the start cannot be easily translated into our 21st-century idiom without distorting the intellectual integrity of its 18th-century origins. Paine, like Jefferson, was a product of the Enlightenment who sincerely believed there was a natural order of perfect freedom and equality that had been hijacked by medieval kings and priests. If only, as Diderot put it, the last king could be strangled with the entrails of the last priest, the natural order would be restored, naturally. Marx's later formulation of the same illusion was that the state would wither away, leaving a harmonious and classless society. In the wake of Darwin's depiction of nature, Freud's depiction of human nature, the senseless slaughter of World War I and the genocidal tragedies of the 20th century, Paine's optimistic assumptions appear naïve in the extreme. What a reincarnated Paine would say about our altered political and intellectual landscape is impossible to know. Kaye hears his voice more clearly and unambiguously than I do, a clarity of conviction that I envy. My more muddled position is that bringing Paine's words and ideas into our world is like trying to plant cut flowers.

Subject: Road to 'Animal Farm,' Through Burma From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:21:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/07/books/07grimes.html?ex=1275796800&en=ea8f8956abcbb6c4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 7, 2005 The Road to 'Animal Farm,' Through Burma By WILLIAM GRIMES Fresh out of Eton, George Orwell spent five years in Burma as a policeman in the colonial service. He left in 1927, fed up with 'the dirty work of Empire,' but the country never quite left him. It provided the material for the novel 'Burmese Days' and one of his most famous essays, 'Shooting an Elephant.' In his final days, as he lay dying of tuberculosis, he sketched out a novella, 'A Smoking Room Story,' about a young Englishman changed forever by his experiences in colonial Burma. Emma Larkin pursues the young Eric Blair (the pseudonym would come later) all over Burma in 'Finding George Orwell in Burma,' revisiting the places where he lived and worked to reimagine the experiences that helped shape his political outlook and his writing. Her mournful, meditative, appealingly idiosyncratic book is a hybrid, an exercise in literary detection but also a political travelogue that uses Burma to explain Orwell, and Orwell - especially the Orwell of 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' - to explain the miseries of present-day Myanmar (as it is now known). 'Burmese Days' is set in Katha, in the northern part of the country, but it took Orwell several years to get there. He began his tour of duty in Mandalay, at the Police Training School, and then drew the short straw. Just 19 years old, he was posted to the delta region of lower Burma, an area renowned, Ms. Larkin writes, for having 'the largest, liveliest mosquitoes in the Empire.' Britons who had spent time in the delta, it was said, were easy to spot because of their habit of darting into a room and quickly slamming the door shut behind them, still pursued by phantom insects. Orwell later dismissed his time in Burma as 'five boring years within the sound of bugles.' In fact, he landed right in the middle of a fearsome crime wave. Roving gangs bent on robbery, mayhem and murder had turned Burma into 'the most violent corner of the Indian Empire.' It was Orwell's job to gather intelligence and, sailing up the delta's canals, track down criminals. The fine-meshed net of British surveillance, and its attendant bureaucracy, Ms. Larkin theorizes, proved invaluable to Orwell when it came time to write 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' So did his overpowering sense of isolation, as he labored for a system he came to loathe. In Orwell's time, Burma was a prosperous country. Today, under a tenacious dictatorship that has lasted more than 40 years, Myanmar has the lowest income in Southeast Asia and ranks as one of least-developed countries in the world. With no external enemies, it supports an army nearly as large as that of the United States. A Stasi-style system of secret police and citizen informers closely monitors the population. All-embracing censorship laws extend to 'incorrect ideas,' 'opinions which do not accord with the times' and statements that, although factually accurate, are 'unsuitable because of the time or the circumstances of their writing.' The ruling party of this militaristic, underdeveloped nation has adopted a satisfyingly Orwellian name: the State Peace and Development Council. The only safe topics for public discussion are things like the lottery, the weather and football. Yet in her travels, over endless cups of tea, Ms. Larkin elicits the hushed testimony of frightened citizens desperate for breathing room. Some simply want to try out their English, like the would-be hipster who thinks that 'see you later, alligator' is up-to-date American slang. An elderly Anglo-Burmese woman, left stranded by the end of colonial rule, reminisces about the good old days as she fondles her last piece of English china. Others pour out their hearts. And still others distill their anguish into a single bitter remark. 'We Burmese people are totally content,' one man tells Ms. Larkin. 'Do you know why? Because we have nothing left. We have been squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until there is nothing left.' Ms. Larkin, in reading Orwell's two political novels as sequels to 'Burmese Days,' is not being eccentric, not in Myanmar. When the BBC's Burmese service broadcast a radio dramatization of 'Animal Farm' a few years ago, listeners talked about it for weeks. For them, Orwell's parable clearly described Myanmar's plight. The only matter of debate was which animals represented which real-life figures. As Ms. Larkin makes her way across the country, her movements are tracked, sometimes blocked, by the police, military personnel, bureaucrats, spies, informers and ordinary citizens instructed to report on any encounters with foreigners. When registering at a guest house she must fill out forms to be sent to nine separate departments. Shopping at a local market, a police informer dogs her heels, asking, over and over, who she is, where she is going and what she is trying to find out. She has changed the names of most of the Burmese she talked to and, lest she be barred from returning to Myanmar, has published this book under a pseudonym. Ms. Larkin eventually makes her way to Katha, to which, she suggests, Orwell might have been posted as punishment for shooting that elephant, a highly valuable asset for its owner. The Katha Tennis Club, centerpiece of 'Burmese Days,' still stands. The club building is now a government cooperative. The tennis court, oddly enough, remains intact, complete with umpire chairs and night-time floodlights. For Orwell, the club symbolized all the injustice of the empire. The empire has disappeared, but not the injustice. A Burmese friend of Ms. Larkin's, old enough to have lived through both systems, tells her, 'The British may have sucked our blood, but these Burmese generals are biting us to the bone!'

Subject: Art and Architecture, Together Again From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:18:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/arts/design/19muse.html?ex=1295326800&en=f3433698f40b75bd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 19, 2006 Art and Architecture, Together Again By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF Those with long memories may recall the days when New York modern art institutions were not only in tune with contemporary culture but also determined to drive it forward. At the New Museum of Contemporary Art, that spirit is back in force. In late November, the museum broke ground on its new home on a decrepit strip of the Bowery on the Lower East Side. And while some of the design details are still being tweaked, it is now razor-clear that the building will do more to freshen the bond between Manhattan's art and architecture communities than any building since Marcel Breuer's Whitney Museum of American Art opened on Madison Avenue four decades ago. The aluminum-clad building, designed by Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, founders of the Tokyo architectural firm Sanaa, evokes a stack of mismatched boxes on the verge of toppling over. Firmly rooted in the present, it is a remarkably sensitive exploration of the relationship between art, architecture and the human beings who animate them. The project, scheduled for completion in the fall of 2007, could not come at a better time. In recent years, it has become dismally clear that the art institutions that redefined New York culture in the 20th century are no longer invested in propelling it forward in the 21st. Despite its elegance, the recent $850 million expansion of the Museum of Modern Art had more to do with consolidating the museum's position as an arbiter of high taste than with engaging in the messy, ever-shifting realities of the art and cultural scenes. In 2003 the Whitney Museum signaled that it valued security over experimentation when it dropped a radical design for an addition by Rem Koolhaas, eventually replacing it with a conservative proposal by Renzo Piano. It would be unfair to expect the Modern to play the same cultural role it did in the 1930's, when it was probably the single most powerful force in introducing Americans to European Modernism. Yet as these institutions have quietly receded into middle age, they have left a void in the heart of the city. The New Museum is one of the few New York art institutions with the courage to fill it. Rising seven stories at a choice site where Prince Street ends at the Bowery, the museum clearly sought to bind itself to what's left of the youthful downtown scene. Its position at the end of Prince, one of SoHo's main axes, suggests a link to the SoHo art scene of the 1960's and 1970's - a nod to the creative fervor that reigned in the neighborhood before it was transformed into a glorified shopping mall. The ghosts of SoHo drift in and out of the design. Wrapped in a woven aluminum mesh skin, the stacked forms give the composition a mysterious quality, suggesting a culture in constant flux. They are also tough enough to stand up to the Bowery's mix of restaurant supply stores, dying single-room-occupancy hotels and shiny new residential towers. Amid the crush of commercial traffic from the Manhattan Bridge, the building will seem solid and industrial. At night, when the streets are barren, it is apt to be more ethereal and moody. Sanaa is known for both the clean precision of its forms and a knack for unearthing the softer qualities of glass. The layering of transparent and reflective surfaces in the marvelous Christian Dior building in Tokyo, for example, give the interiors a luxurious milky quality, like layers of veils. But the New Museum's design is intended as more than a metaphor; it is also to be a concrete realization of the museum's values. The street-level façade will be entirely transparent, like a shop window. The idea is to bring the experience of viewing art to the street, reaffirming the institution's role as a public forum. The main floor is divided lengthwise into a lobby and a loading dock that will be visible from the street, so that the process of transporting art is open to public view. The lobby, echoing the proportions of an old downtown loft, is divided into a series of lively public zones, beginning with a ticket counter and cafe and culminating in a large glass-enclosed gallery - a fish bowl of the art world. The informality of the arrangement reflects how the contemporary art world is changing as barriers between the various arts dissolve. Creation is a collaborative act in which the audience plays a role: at the New Museum, art, architecture, graphic design, film and the public will all jostle for attention. That embracing vision extends to the very top of the museum, where a 3,000-square-foot multipurpose space will offer sweeping views over the area's old tenement blocks to the dense cluster of towers on Wall Street. The quiet simplicity of the galleries, sandwiched in the middle floors, offers a momentary repose. The beauty of the shifting setbacks on each floor is that it allowed the architects to create skylights on every level, illuminating them with a blend of natural and artificial light. In the fourth-floor gallery, for example, natural light will wash down the south wall through a long slotlike skylight while the rest of the room will be illuminated by lights hidden above a mesh ceiling. Purists who believe that architecture should take a back seat to art may grumble that the uneven blend of natural and artificial light will be distracting. But the result will be atmospheric, with the mood of each room shifting slightly over the course of the day depending on the weather. In their choice of materials - from the smooth concrete floors to the exposed steel I-beams - the architects sensitize the visitor to the tactile qualities of the world around them. The aim is to lure us out of our everyday stupor, to open our hearts to the art. Of course, one building alone cannot remake a culture. But Lisa Phillips, the museum's director, clearly found the right architect for her building. And she has brought in curators who have no interest in preserving the status quo; instead they envision the museum as a laboratory for cultural change. The question on every New York architect's lips is whether the museum will be willing to organize the kind of architecture shows we so desperately crave: shows with a strong critical point of view, like the ones that MoMA mounted in its glory days. Rarely, in today's New York, does a building project inspire so much confidence in the future.

Subject: The Rose That Is a Thorn From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:16:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/19/international/19machado.html?ex=1290056400&en=aae1dc41fbab1446&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 19, 2005 The Rose That Is a Thorn in Chávez's Side By JUAN FORERO CARACAS, Venezuela SHE'S the Venezuelan government's most detested adversary, a young woman with a quick wit and machine-gun-fast delivery who often appears in Washington or Madrid to denounce what she calls the erosion of democracy under President Hugo Chávez. In a highly polarized country, María Corina Machado has emerged as perhaps the most divisive figure after Mr. Chávez, a woman who is either beloved or reviled. Ms. Machado, 38, attractive and a fluent English speaker, is lionized by her allies in the opposition as a worldly sophisticate fighting for democracy. But she is demonized by the government, which characterizes her as a member of a corrupt elite that is doing the bidding of the much reviled Bush administration. Ms. Machado does not hide her close relations with Washington, which has provided financial aid to Súmate, the anti-Chávez, election-monitoring organization she helps run. In May, she infuriated the government when she met with President Bush at the White House, and she further antagonized officials in September by announcing that Súmate had received a fresh infusion of $107,000 from Washington. Ms. Machado casts her role as that of a watchdog uncovering the electoral shenanigans she says Mr. Chávez uses to consolidate his hold, a precarious job in Venezuela these days. 'You can push and push, but at some point they are going to get tired and say, 'It is time to get her off our backs,' ' Ms. Machado said. That time arrived for Ms. Machado in September 2004. In a case that Human Rights Watch says is riddled with violations of due process, the attorney general's office charged her and three other Súmate officials with treason and other crimes for having accepted American financing to mount a referendum last year asking voters whether they wished to remove Mr. Chávez from the presidency. Accepting prosecution arguments that Súmate's work amounted to an effort to 'destroy the nation's republican form,' a Venezuelan judge ruled in July that the four should face trial. The trial is set for Dec. 6, and a conviction could carry a 16-year prison term. 'It was the first time I discovered what it was like to have my legs tremble,' she said, recalling her interrogation before a prosecutor. AFTER being charged last year, Ms. Machado, a divorced mother of three, sat down with her daughter, then 14, and told her of the dangers that lay ahead. She then sent the girl and her two younger brothers off to stay with their grandparents because of fears that pro-government fanatics could ransack the house. 'Tears rolled down my face,' she recalled recently over a strong dose of Venezuelan coffee at a trendy cafe in a solidly anti-Chávez neighborhood. 'My lawyer had worried that they'd show up at midnight looking for me.' She then leaned across the table, slightly embarrassed, and said she did not want to present herself as a victim. 'I think that would be pathetic,' she said. She has never been accosted, she said, and she drives around Caracas alone, with no bodyguards. While one of the most visible public figures in Venezuela, Ms. Machado is sparing with details about her personal life, one of comfort and privilege. She was the eldest of four girls growing up in a conservative, staunchly Catholic family. There was the elite Catholic girls' school in Caracas; the boarding school in Wellesley, Mass.; the trips to Europe; the occasional escapes from Venezuela's teeming capital to her family's airy mountain retreat. 'It was a childhood protected from contact with reality,' she admits. Many weekends were spent romping with a brood of cousins in a vast, rambling house in Caracas belonging to her grandmother, Ana Teresa Machado. That house also held the history of Venezuela, and Ms. Machado's grandmother had stories to tell of a wider world and of their forebears, who had literally helped write Venezuela's past. One was Eduardo Blanco, Ms. Machado's great-great-grandfather, who published 'Heroic Venezuela' in 1881, still a classic of independence-era history for Venezuelan children. Another was Armando Zuloaga Blanco, her great-uncle, who became a martyr for democracy when he was killed in a failed uprising in 1929 against the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez. 'I would sit down on my grandmother's knee and hear about our country's history,' Ms. Machado said. 'It was all very much a part of growing up. She would tell me stories, and I would listen for hours.' Now, it is Ms. Machado who is making history. AT first, though, she followed in the footsteps of her father, Henrique Machado, studying engineering at Catholic University in Caracas. She married young and in 1990 began her career working to improve quality controls in an auto plant in Valencia. Three years later, she was back in Caracas, having decided to join her mother in running a home for 140 abandoned and troubled children. Her life took a turn in 2001. That was the year her marriage broke up, but also year three of Mr. Chávez's rule, and Ms. Machado and her friends were growing worried. She now says it was concern over 'tensions' that prompted them to form Súmate, with the purpose of mounting the referendum on Mr. Chávez. 'The idea was not, how do we get rid of this government,' Ms. Machado said. 'The idea was how do we resolve the profound social differences.' That account, of Súmate as an organization independent of other groups intent on removing Mr. Chávez from office, does not squarely line up with history. Súmate, in fact, earned the government's undying enmity when it loudly questioned the results of the August 2004 referendum, even though international observers said Mr. Chávez had won handily. The Chávez camp also took a dim view of the fact that Ms. Machado was in the Miraflores Palace on the day in April 2002 when Pedro Carmona, an opposition businessman, installed an interim government just hours after Mr. Chávez was overthrown in a coup. With a sigh, Ms. Machado says that she and her mother were in the palace that day only to visit Mr. Carmona's wife, a family friend. 'I have a clear conscience,' she said. 'There was no double meaning in what happened.' In recent months, Ms. Machado has toned down her rhetoric on Mr. Chávez. She said she understood why so many Venezuelans support the populist government, which has showered the poor with social programs underwritten by a flood of oil money. 'We have to recognize the positive things that have been done,' she said. Still, she has not stopped criticizing the president, who she charges is increasingly intolerant. 'The intimidation has given us more reasons to keep working,' she said. 'Our organization seeks to preserve citizens' rights, and the way to do that is by exercising those rights.'

Subject: Design Hothouse From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:15:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/garden/19Orlean.html?ex=1295326800&en=6901069ea7e593be&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 19, 2006 For the 'Orchid' Lady, a Design Hothouse By ELAINE LOUIE SUSAN ORLEAN and John Gillespie Jr. met on a blind date in New York in February 2000, and from that moment on they moved like lightning. On their second date, they went to Rio de Janeiro. On their fourth date, they went to Thailand. 'We spent the first year trying to go to every single continent,' said Ms. Orlean, the author of 'The Orchid Thief' and 'My Kind of Place,' a collection of travel essays, most of them from The New Yorker. Only hiring an architect to build a house finally slowed things down. The summer before they were married, the couple followed Cooper, their Welsh springer spaniel, up a meadow across from the house in southern Columbia County that Ms. Orlean had been renting for 14 years. They stumbled upon a 'For Sale' sign - 55 acres for $385,000 - and bought the land in two days. 'Since it was on my road, it felt like home,' Ms. Orlean said. A few months later, Mr. Gillespie, the chief financial officer of the Mentor Network, a health care organization in Boston, was in the Salt Lake City airport, scanning a magazine rack, when he saw a spectacular house of stone, wood and glass on the cover of Sunset magazine. He returned home to Boston, where the pair live, and showed the magazine to his wife. She took one look, picked up the phone, and called the architects, Cutler Anderson of Bainbridge Island in Washington. 'I said we'd like to buy the plans for the house,' Ms. Orlean said. 'That was so naïve. The plans belong to the owner.' They did not know at the time that the firm had built Bill Gates's house in Medina, Wash., with Peter Bohlin. They met James Cutler, a principal of the firm, for dinner in Boston two weeks later. 'It was like a great blind date,' Ms. Orlean said. A month after that they flew to Seattle, where they hired a bush pilot to take them to see six Cutler Anderson houses, on Bainbridge Island, Orcas Island and Lopez Island. 'They're not formal and grand and imposing,' Ms. Orlean said of the houses. 'They're like a great piece of sculpture.' She and Mr. Gillespie hired Mr. Cutler, and things started to move more slowly. Mr. Cutler is a believer in architecture as a process. 'I want to make people become emotional' about their homes, he said. 'Houses are dreams. Architecture is an avenue to learn how to love.' He asked the couple to write letters to him, separately, stating exactly what each one wanted from the house. 'Don't make any compromises, don't even talk about it,' Mr. Cutler said to them. 'If you compromise - and houses are so emotional - at some point what you really want will come out, and I don't want to redesign the building.' Ms. Orlean and Mr. Gillespie wrote similar letters, each asking for an easy, informal house of stone, glass and wood, with elements of Japanese architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright. They wanted it nestled into the land, facing south to the view of the Taconic mountains and the wildlife. They wanted an open living and dining area with built-in furniture, like the nooks at Wright's Fallingwater, that would provide places to read, and to sit and talk while one of them cooked. They wanted a separate wing for bedrooms, and several doors leading outside. They also wanted something harder to define: a house with surprising details. Over the next two years, Mr. Cutler, a meticulous architect who is obsessive about detail, obliged, developing what he calls the 'choreography' of the house. He surveyed the land himself, paying close attention to the landscape. Mr. Gillespie describes Mr. Cutler's philosophy towards nature, as 'He doesn't like to harm a single tree.' Mr. Cutler began with the entrance, a long, narrow passage running from the driveway to the front door, bordered by carefully laid stone walls whose colors shade from gray to taupe to a chalky-white. The wall on the left is twice the height of that on the right, creating an illusion of protection, though its function is to block the view, to make the vista a surprise. As visitors pass through the front door and turn into the kitchen, they tend to stop and stare, mesmerized, through floor-to-ceiling windows that run the length of the house. The view is south toward Stissing Mountain, which towers over the rolling hills of the Taconic range. A meadow falls gently away from the house, opening up the vista, and the sky looks immense, as if you were in New Mexico. 'I made the entrance darker, denser, so the view explodes,' Mr. Cutler said. Ms. Orlean spoke admiringly of the experience of entering the house: 'The modesty of the entrance, the small, beautiful door - and then, gasp!' Although the view is the focal point of the house - every room faces it - a visitor finds plenty of other pleasing details. A fireplace with a stone surround soars 14 feet to the ceiling to dominate the living room. Built-in window seats, upholstered in pale green fabric, create ample space for bookshelves and wine storage beneath, without seeming to impinge on the wall of glass. Beech kitchen cabinets facing the dining area have panels that drop down to become serving counters. Moving into the house, which is 2,700 square feet and cost $1.7 million, was 'like unwrapping the biggest Christmas present,' Ms. Orlean said. Because of all the built-ins, the couple did not need to buy much furniture. 'It's like a boat,' Ms. Orlean said. 'It's so fitted out.' Mr. Gillespie's mother gave them a dining table from a Goodwill shop in Boston and 10 Hans Wegner chairs that she bought in Copenhagen in 1970. They found their mossy green sectional sofa, big enough for some several people to recline on at once, at ABC Carpet & Home. In the office, part of the second wing, they collaborated on their first screenplay together, a romantic comedy about a couple who live in two places, Boston (Mr. Gillespie's home base) and Manhattan (Ms. Orlean's former turf). 'I'd write something completely bad, and we'd quote some bad lines to each other, for months,' said Mr. Gillespie, 52, who honed his writing skills at Harvard, working for the Lampoon, and also as a political speechwriter. The pair also have a passion for saunas and steam rooms. In Manhattan, they visit the Osaka Health Spa on West 56th Street for shiatsu, saunas and the steam room. 'We wanted to have that feeling here,' Mr. Gillespie said, as he was standing in the bathroom, taking in the 180-degree view. So Mr. Cutler cheerfully designed what he calls a 'world class' double-size soaking tub next to the window. A carved wood goose perches on the kitchen counter, behind a gaggle of terra cotta ducks. 'I'm a serial monogamist when it comes to collections,' Ms. Orlean said. A taxidermy rooster stands on the refrigerator, a papier-mâché lion mask guards the hearth and four silk-screened cows by Andy Warhol line the rear wall of the house. Mr. Gillespie, meanwhile, covets a barnyard full of live animals - red ones, to match Ms. Orlean's flame-colored hair. 'I want a couple of Scottish cattle, with shaggy forelocks and long eyelashes, and some red pigs, three little pigs,' he said. (Conveniently, their 1-year-old son, Austin, was born with light red hair.) On weekends, they fill the house with people. In October, they had a 50th birthday party for Ms. Orlean and invited 100 guests, 10 of whom slept over, splayed out on the sofa and window seats. On New Year's Eve, they had 12 people stay overnight. Most weekends, Mr. Gillespie's 20-year-old son by his previous marriage, Jay, a sophomore at nearby Bard College, drops by. Even when the house is full of guests, its design slows the couple's rhythm down, Ms. Orlean said. 'The house gives you so many incentives to sit quietly. It encourages contemplation and we watch the clouds move over the hills,' said the intrepid adventuress, now content to watch a bird at a feeder for an hour.

Subject: Audiences Love a Minimalist 'Ring' Cycle From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:11:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/02/arts/music/02ring.html?ex=1288587600&en=1be22ea23cc8c5b6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 2, 2005 Audiences Love a Minimalist 'Ring' Cycle; Critics Aren't Sure By ALAN RIDING PARIS - Productions of Wagner's 'Ring des Nibelungen' have one thing in common: rarely do director, designer, conductor, orchestra and singers all emerge unscathed. The reason is simple. Audiences and critics often embark on this four-opera cycle with firm views on how its immense musical and mythical universe should look and sound. Still, with Robert Wilson's 'Ring,' first presented at the Zurich Opera from 2000 to 2002 and now at the Théâtre du Châtelet here, Parisians at least know what to expect. Over the last three decades, in both opera and theater, they have grown used to Mr. Wilson's signature stagecraft of dramatic lighting, costumes in solid colors, minimalist décor and stylized acting. (Forget about naked Rhinemaidens, burning castles and helmeted Valkyries.) The question was how this abstract approach would serve Wagner's monumental work. So far, opinions are divided or, rather, fragmented. Audiences have responded with great enthusiasm to 'Das Rheingold' and 'Die Walküre,' the first two works in the 'Ring.' In contrast, French critics have dissected the productions to identify what they liked and disliked, with their sharpest criticism aimed at Christoph Eschenbach, who is conducting the Orchestre de Paris. But the final verdict must await the new year. The last chapters, 'Siegfried' and 'Götterdämmerung,' will be presented in January and February, followed by two complete cycles from March 30 to April 15. And in April, Plácido Domingo will replace Peter Seiffert as Siegmund in 'Die Walküre.' Of course, the basic 'look' of Mr. Wilson's 'Ring,' with its strong echoes of Japanese Noh theater, is unlikely to change. Indeed, as Mr. Wilson has done before in, say, 'Parsifal' and Debussy's 'Pelléas et Mélisande,' rejecting what he calls 'decorative' illustration of the narrative, he uses austerity and self-control to create a space in which music and libretto can breathe freely. Here his lighting is the star: innumerable shades of color reflect the changing mood of the plot, while spotlights isolate the face or hands of silhouetted figures. The gods, including the one-eyed Wotan, seem no less otherworldly. Wearing Frida Parmeggiani's single-color, neo-Cubist costumes, they move with almost robotic gestures. But even the 'human' lovers, Siegmund and Sieglinde, avoid any physical contact. 'Above all, I try not to impose my interpretation on the work in order to leave room for interrogation,' Mr. Wilson explained in an interview in the Châtelet's program book. 'Theater is often too dictatorial. A writer, director or designer has an idea and insists on it. This leaves no room for exchanges, for other ideas.' Defending the sobriety of his approach to the 'Ring,' he added: 'In my view, with a work that is already full of overwhelming emotions, a production that is equally moving and emotional makes no sense.' What this means in practice is that it is left largely to the orchestra and voices to convey the drama. In 'Das Rheingold,' for instance, the giants Fasolt and Fafner, who want to ransom Freia for gold, tower over the set, but they are menacing only in the words they sing. Somewhat more sinister is Alberich, who takes the gold of the Rhinemaidens in exchange for renouncing love. In both 'Das Rheingold' and 'Die Walküre,' the cast pleased the audience more than it did the critics. Jukka Rasilainen's Wotan, Mr. Seiffert's Siegmund, Petra-Maria Schnitzer's Sieglinde and Linda Watson's Brünnhilde were all warmly applauded, but French critics felt that the singers were somewhat miscast. In contrast, there was unanimous praise for both the timbre and stage presence of Mihoko Fujimura's Fricka, the guardian of marriage. Mr. Eschenbach, never much loved by French music critics since taking over the Orchestre de Paris in 2000, fares less well. Writing in Le Figaro, Christian Merlin said he had 'nothing of an opera conductor,' adding that he failed to control the 'thunder' of the orchestra's brass. In Le Monde, Marie-Aude Roux wrote that his conducting was 'heavy, despite some often enigmatic and disturbing tempo changes.' Yet every 'Ring' audience is also crowded with Wagner experts, and they, at least, went overboard with cheers for Mr. Seiffert and Ms. Schnitzer's long love duet, which dominates Act I of 'Die Walküre.' Even Mr. Eschenbach was heartily applauded - if only to drown out some boos - at the final curtain of this opera. Nonetheless, the program interviews illustrate how the director and conductor of the same production can have different views of Wagner's 15-hour masterpiece. 'The Ring is a family saga,' said Mr. Wilson, a Texas-born American. 'It is a children's story. It has a god, dwarves, giants and bad guys. I would not want to make my 'Ring' too heavy, too intellectual. All true theater people I know have a little child hidden inside them.' But for Mr. Eschenbach, who shares Wagner's German nationality and culture, the composer was inspired by the 'very pessimistic' philosophy of Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. ' 'Der Ring des Nibelungen' is a dark work,' he noted, 'full of uneasiness, about capitalism and the obsession for power and money.' That said, whatever the interpretation, the 'Ring' is always an occasion, above all in Paris, where it was last staged at the Châtelet in 1994, but where the Paris National Opera has not taken it on since the mid-1950's. And Wagner lovers can look forward to 2006. After completion of the Châtelet's cycle, the Bayreuth festival is planning a new production of the 'Ring.' For Parisians, the Aix-en-Provence festival may be more convenient. Starting next summer, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in a production by Stéphane Braunschweig, the four operas of the 'Ring' will be presented in successive years through 2009.

Subject: Vows of New Aid to the Poor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:03:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/business/worldbusiness/15aid.html?ex=1292302800&en=23474edbbf0840ba&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 15, 2005 Vows of New Aid to the Poor Leave the Poor Unimpressed By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG - The United States, the European Union and Japan have taken turns this week at the World Trade Organization ministerial conference promoting plans to provide billions in foreign aid and eliminate trade barriers on exports from the world's poorest countries. But ministers from those countries are not sure they like what they see. In fact, some of them say that the offers are so littered with obscure exemptions, murky calculations and special conditions that they will not help much, and may even hurt. Delegates here from some poor countries are so unhappy with rich nations' efforts to help them that they are warning of a possible move to block completion of a global trade agreement. 'It will be very difficult for us to be a party to an agreement that will make us lose our markets,' said Madan M. Dulloo, the foreign minister and trade minister of Mauritius and the leader of a 79-nation coalition of low-income African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. The last W.T.O. ministerial conference collapsed two years ago in Cancún, Mexico, over complaints by West African nations about American cotton subsidies and objections by Botswana to streamlining customs regulations. Proposals in the last few days by industrial nations are meant to avoid a repetition, but they have created new problems. The biggest difficulties involve plans by the United States, the European Union and Japan to eliminate duties and quota on almost all goods from up to 50 of the world's poor nations, 32 of which are W.T.O. members. Countries on this list complain that rich nations are excluding the few products in which they are most competitive - the United States is leaving out textiles, for example. But the loudest complaints are coming from other developing countries that are just well off enough to escape the category of poorest countries, but still compete with these countries in many markets. The matter of bananas, for instance, dominated discussions here on Wednesday night. No Central American nation qualifies for the list of poorest countries. But their ministers said they fear competition some day from the poorest. Very poor countries like Angola grow few bananas now, but could start doing so if granted trade preferences, said Alicia Martin, Nicaragua's representative here. 'Multinationals could very easily go there,' she warned early this week. Sugar-growing countries with incomes too high for special treatment are especially worried that they will lose markets to countries that do qualify for duty-free, quota-free access to markets in advanced economies, especially since sugar cane is a labor-intensive crop that may be appealing to nations with high unemployment. 'Any drastic tariff cut would squeeze us out of the market and leave us with nothing,' said Kaliopate Tavola, Fiji's foreign minister and trade minister, while adding that he doubted that the W.T.O. would let this happen. The proposal for duty-free, quota-free treatment is so divisive among developing countries that even some negotiators from lands that qualify are saying that the plan must be broadened or scrapped. 'We do not want to segregate, or just ask for a few' countries to benefit, said Love Mtesa, the ambassador to the W.T.O. of Zambia, a country that qualifies. Details of the aid packages being offered to poor nations are also a matter of dispute here. The United States trade representative, Rob Portman, announced on Wednesday that Washington planned to increase its annual aid to poor countries that may need help if new global trade rules are adopted. The Bush administration plans to seek an increase in assistance by 2010 to $2.7 billion, from $1.3 billion now. But other American officials said that they could not estimate how much of the increased spending would represent additional foreign aid, and how much would come from redesignating portions of the existing foreign aid budget as trade assistance. They noted that any foreign aid would be subject to Congressional approval, and that some of the money might also qualify as part of an American pledge early this year through the Group of 7 industrial nations to increase aid. Nongovernmental organizations were unimpressed. 'The American money has already been pledged at least once this year,' Phil Bloomer, head of the Make Trade Fair campaign for the relief group Oxfam, said in a statement. 'Furthermore, it comes with an unacceptable and explicit push for rapid market opening from poor countries, which poses a grave threat to development.' Japan had begun the spate of aid announcements last Friday when it said that it would give $10 billion over the next three years to help poor countries, an offer that was widely reported as a new effort. But Yoshinori Katori, the Japanese foreign ministry's director general for press affairs, acknowledged at a news conference on Wednesday that the amount was calculated mainly by adding up how much assistance Japan would provide anyway if it continued to increase aid at the same pace as it had been doing in recent years. The $10 billion assumes some acceleration in the average annual increase in foreign aid, Mr. Katori said, while declining to specify how much acceleration. Lori Wallach, trade director of Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer group, said that the objections here from poor countries were a bad sign, considering that the current round of trade talks is supposed to focus on promoting economic development. 'It sort of says it all when you need a development package to get developing countries to agree to a development round,' she said.

Subject: Chance for Japanese Cellphone Makers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 06:00:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/17/business/17japancell.html?ex=1289883600&en=0aaa03af7e81052a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss November 17, 2005 A Second Chance for Japanese Cellphone Makers By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO - Cellphones here have cash chips that let shoppers swipe them at the register like debit cards. They have crisp color screens for watching television shows and music videos. They have full-fledged Web browsers, and they even have fingerprint readers and cameras with face-recognition software that lock up a phone if a stranger tries to use it. Interested in getting one? Good luck. You cannot buy one outside Japan. And that is a problem, not just for consumers in the rest of the world but for Japanese companies, which have flooded the world with sophisticated consumer electronics from flat-panel televisions to digital cameras - but not cellphones. For years, companies here were slow to look abroad while sales in Japan soared. Moreover, the Japanese government and cellphone carriers had adopted a technology different from that used in most countries, which would make it difficult to break into overseas markets. So, when growth in handset sales in Japan started slowing in 2001, many other opportunities had passed: Nokia in Finland, Motorola in the United States and Samsung in South Korea had already sewn up many of the world's biggest markets. Japanese companies were left kicking themselves for missing out on potentially billions of dollars in sales. 'We were thinking only about Japan,' Atsutoshi Nishida, the president of Toshiba, one of Japan's largest electronics makers, said in an interview in August. 'We really missed our chance.' But now, Toshiba and other Japanese cellphone makers say they think they see a second chance to compensate for past mistakes and catch up in the global marketplace. Their opportunity is the coming spread of so-called third-generation, or 3G, high-speed wireless networks. Four years ago, Japan led the world in completing a fully 3G network. Now, the technology is finally taking off in the rest of the world, most rapidly in Europe and Asia but also in the United States. Japanese companies hope their longer experience with 3G will enable them to break into leading world markets, where demand for more sophisticated handsets is growing. Analysts caution that many consumers may find Japanese handsets too complex and too expensive - prices average about $400 - to be appealing. But they also say the world's move to 3G could give Japanese companies a window to increase their global market share, which in the three months through June was less than 13 percent, according to Gartner, a research company in Stamford, Conn. 'There is a whole set of technologies that Japanese firms are way ahead on,' said Jeffrey Funk, a business professor at Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo. '3G gives newcomers a chance to break in.' With data transmission speeds 40 times those of existing second-generation networks, 3G makes it possible to download short movies and transmit live video from cellphones. But the high cost of installing the technology, which requires a new network of computers, routers and antennas, has made it slow to catch on. It is only doing so now in the United States, where Verizon has installed the first 3G network in 50 cities. Cingular and Sprint are rushing to complete similar networks. Analysts say 3G promises to be the hottest corner of the world cellphone market, which will total an estimated 820 million handsets this year, according to the European-based investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. Of that, sales of 3G sets are expected to reach 58 million units by the end of this year and could double next year, the bank said. So far, one of the few real global players from Japan has been Sony- Ericsson, which held 6.2 percent of the world market in the second quarter, according to Gartner. About the only Japanese company that has had noticeable success in the American market is Sanyo, which provides phones to Sprint. Japan's absence overseas is an odd predicament, given the technological level of its handsets. A typical phone here can surf the Internet by sizing Web pages to fit a credit-card-size screen, play television programs and short movies downloaded from the Web. Their digital cameras are often as powerful as many stand-alone models. Newer models have telephoto lenses, can store more than 100 digital songs like an iPod and even serve as digital camcorders, filming moving images and then replaying them on a full-size television via a cable hookup. Compared with these futuristic devices, other phones look downright primitive. When Vodafone added Motorola and Nokia phones to its lineup in Japan earlier this year, most of the models had dismal sales because Japanese consumers rejected them as too clumsy, according to Vodafone. Despite their woes in Japan, the world's biggest phone makers expect to be able to defend their dominance elsewhere even as the Japanese try to regain ground. 'You can't take any company lightly,' Peter Skarzynski, who runs Samsung's mobile phone division in the United States, said of Japanese challengers. But he said established makers like Samsung - which has more than 20 percent of the American market - have a head start because 'carriers will defer to people they know.' The biggest shortcoming of Japanese handsets is their price, which is about twice the average price of cellphones for sale in the United States and Europe, analysts say. Japanese makers say success may depend on getting enough sales volume to drive down prices, though their products will probably remain at the high end. Japanese makers say they are trying to improve sales by linking up with foreign service providers and tapping into their broad sales networks. Two of Japan's biggest cellphone makers, Toshiba and Sharp, have allied themselves with Vodafone of Britain. NEC builds four 3G phones for Hutchison 3G, a mobile operator in Europe and Asia. In the United States, Sanyo is already supplying Sony with phones that have mobile TV and push-to-talk functions. Ryan Watson, a Sanyo spokesman, said his company had also started selling 3G phones in Europe with the British carrier Orange and in Hong Kong with SmarTone. Japanese makers are also trying to develop their own knowledge about overseas markets. Last month, Toshiba sent a team of engineers to London to study European designs, and in June it rolled out its first 3G phone in Europe via Vodafone. Sharp had an earlier start, buying a mobile software development company in Britain four years ago. '3G levels the playing field because Japan's ahead in a lot of 3G technologies,' said Masafumi Matsumoto, a senior executive director in charge of Sharp's cellphone business. The seeds of the failure by Japanese manufacturers to emerge earlier on the global stage go back more than a decade, when the Japanese mobile service companies chose a different technical standard from much of the rest of the world. With the advent of 3G, handset makers say, they pressed the government to ensure that Japan did not make the same mistake twice. Japanese companies joined in the development of global technical standards. Then Japan, along with South Korea, rushed to build 3G networks first, partly to create new demand in its saturated home market. Japanese makers enjoy a technological advantage in crucial components like liquid-crystal-display screens and high-resolution cameras. The Japanese makers, most of them huge electronics conglomerates, make these components themselves, unlike Nokia and other rivals, which buy them from others - often these same Japanese companies. But analysts caution that the complexity of Japanese-made handsets, and their hefty price tags, will limit their sales. The 3G technology has been slow to take off outside Japan, in part because many consumers balked at the cost of acquiring features they considered excessive. European and American phone designs have also proved simpler and more elegant for the vast majority of mobile phone users. 'You'll probably get a situation,' said Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Tokyo, 'where Japan gets the high end of the world handset market.'

Subject: Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:59:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01evo.html?ex=1265259600&en=9e95969d09ff39ad&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland February 1, 2005 Evolution Takes a Back Seat in U.S. Classes By CORNELIA DEAN Dr. John Frandsen, a retired zoologist, was at a dinner for teachers in Birmingham, Ala., recently when he met a young woman who had just begun work as a biology teacher in a small school district in the state. Their conversation turned to evolution. 'She confided that she simply ignored evolution because she knew she'd get in trouble with the principal if word got about that she was teaching it,' he recalled. 'She told me other teachers were doing the same thing.' Though the teaching of evolution makes the news when officials propose, as they did in Georgia, that evolution disclaimers be affixed to science textbooks, or that creationism be taught along with evolution in biology classes, stories like the one Dr. Frandsen tells are more common. In districts around the country, even when evolution is in the curriculum it may not be in the classroom, according to researchers who follow the issue. Teaching guides and textbooks may meet the approval of biologists, but superintendents or principals discourage teachers from discussing it. Or teachers themselves avoid the topic, fearing protests from fundamentalists in their communities. 'The most common remark I've heard from teachers was that the chapter on evolution was assigned as reading but that virtually no discussion in class was taken,' said Dr. John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, an evangelical Christian and a member of Alabama's curriculum review board who advocates the teaching of evolution. Teachers are afraid to raise the issue, he said in an e-mail message, and they are afraid to discuss the issue in public. Dr. Frandsen, former chairman of the committee on science and public policy of the Alabama Academy of Science, said in an interview that this fear made it impossible to say precisely how many teachers avoid the topic. 'You're not going to hear about it,' he said. 'And for political reasons nobody will do a survey among randomly selected public school children and parents to ask just what is being taught in science classes.' But he said he believed the practice of avoiding the topic was widespread, particularly in districts where many people adhere to fundamentalist faiths. 'You can imagine how difficult it would be to teach evolution as the standards prescribe in ever so many little towns, not only in Alabama but in the rest of the South, the Midwest - all over,' Dr. Frandsen said. Dr. Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education, said she heard 'all the time' from teachers who did not teach evolution 'because it's just too much trouble.' 'Or their principals tell them, 'We just don't have time to teach everything so let's leave out the things that will cause us problems,' ' she said. Sometimes, Dr. Scott said, parents will ask that their children be allowed to 'opt out' of any discussion of evolution and principals lean on teachers to agree. Even where evolution is taught, teachers may be hesitant to give it full weight. Ron Bier, a biology teacher at Oberlin High School in Oberlin, Ohio, said that evolution underlies many of the central ideas of biology and that it is crucial for students to understand it. But he avoids controversy, he said, by teaching it not as 'a unit,' but by introducing the concept here and there throughout the year. 'I put out my little bits and pieces wherever I can,' he said. He noted that his high school, in a college town, has many students whose parents are professors who have no problem with the teaching of evolution. But many other students come from families that may not accept the idea, he said, 'and that holds me back to some extent.' 'I don't force things,' Mr. Bier added. 'I don't argue with students about it.' In this, he is typical of many science teachers, according to a report by the Fordham Foundation, which studies educational issues and backs programs like charter schools and vouchers. Some teachers avoid the subject altogether, Dr. Lawrence S. Lerner, a physicist and historian of science, wrote in the report. Others give it very short shrift or discuss it without using 'the E word,' relying instead on what Dr. Lerner characterized as incorrect or misleading phrases, like 'change over time.' Dr. Gerald Wheeler, a physicist who heads the National Science Teachers Association, said many members of his organization 'fly under the radar' of fundamentalists by introducing evolution as controversial, which scientifically it is not, or by noting that many people do not accept it, caveats not normally offered for other parts of the science curriculum. Dr. Wheeler said the science teachers' organization hears 'constantly' from science teachers who want the organization's backing. 'What they are asking for is 'Can you support me?' ' he said, and the help they seek 'is more political; it's not pedagogical.' There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that all living things evolved from common ancestors, that evolution on earth has been going on for billions of years and that evolution can be and has been tested and confirmed by the methods of science. But in a 2001 survey, the National Science Foundation found that only 53 percent of Americans agreed with the statement 'human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals.' And this was good news to the foundation. It was the first time one of its regular surveys showed a majority of Americans had accepted the idea. According to the foundation report, polls consistently show that a plurality of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago, and about two-thirds believe that this belief should be taught along with evolution in public schools. These findings set the United States apart from all other industrialized nations, said Dr. Jon Miller, director of the Center for Biomedical Communications at Northwestern University, who has studied public attitudes toward science. Americans, he said, have been evenly divided for years on the question of evolution, with about 45 percent accepting it, 45 percent rejecting it and the rest undecided. In other industrialized countries, Dr. Miller said, 80 percent or more typically accept evolution, most of the others say they are not sure and very few people reject the idea outright. 'In Japan, something like 96 percent accept evolution,' he said. Even in socially conservative, predominantly Catholic countries like Poland, perhaps 75 percent of people surveyed accept evolution, he said. 'It has not been a Catholic issue or an Asian issue,' he said. Indeed, two popes, Pius XII in 1950 and John Paul II in 1996, have endorsed the idea that evolution and religion can coexist. 'I have yet to meet a Catholic school teacher who skips evolution,' Dr. Scott said. Dr. Gerald D. Skoog, a former dean of the College of Education at Texas Tech University and a former president of the science teachers' organization, said that in some classrooms, the teaching of evolution was hampered by the beliefs of the teachers themselves, who are creationists or supporters of the teaching of creationism. 'Data from various studies in various states over an extended period of time indicate that about one-third of biology teachers support the teaching of creationism or 'intelligent design,' ' Dr. Skoog said. Advocates for the teaching of evolution provide teachers or school officials who are challenged on it with information to help them make the case that evolution is completely accepted as a bedrock idea of science. Organizations like the science teachers' association, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science provide position papers and other information on the subject. The National Association of Biology Teachers devoted a two-day meeting to the subject last summer, Dr. Skoog said. Other advocates of teaching evolution are making the case that a person can believe both in God and the scientific method. 'People have been told by some evangelical Christians and by some scientists, that you have to choose.' Dr. Scott said. 'That is just wrong.' While plenty of scientists reject religion - the eminent evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins famously likens it to a disease - many others do not. In fact, when a researcher from the University of Georgia surveyed scientists' attitudes toward religion several years ago, he found their positions virtually unchanged from an identical survey in the early years of the 20th century. About 40 percent of scientists said not just that they believed in God, but in a God who communicates with people and to whom one may pray 'in expectation of receiving an answer.' Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, said he thought the great variety of religious groups in the United States led to competition for congregants. This marketplace environment, he said, contributes to the politicization of issues like evolution among religious groups. He said the teaching of evolution was portrayed not as scientific instruction but as 'an assault of the secular elite on the values of God-fearing people.' As a result, he said, politicians don't want to touch it. 'Everybody discovers the wisdom of federalism here very quickly,' he said. 'Leave it at the state or the local level.' But several experts say scientists are feeling increasing pressure to make their case, in part, Dr. Miller said, because scriptural literalists are moving beyond evolution to challenge the teaching of geology and physics on issues like the age of the earth and the origin of the universe. 'They have now decided the Big Bang has to be wrong,' he said. 'There are now a lot of people who are insisting that that be called only a theory without evidence and so on, and now the physicists are getting mad about this.'

Subject: For Some Girls, the Problem With Math From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:58:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01math.html?ex=1265000400&en=33bbfa363cb2602c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland February 1, 2005 For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They're Good at It By CORNELIA DEAN A few years ago, I told Donald Kennedy, editor of the journal Science, that I wanted to write an essay for his publication. It would say, 'Anyone who thinks that sexism is no longer a problem in science has never been the first woman science editor of The New York Times.' I never wrote the essay. But the continuing furor over Dr. Lawrence H. Summers's remarks on women and science reminds me why I thought of it. For those who missed it, Dr. Summers, the president of Harvard, told a conference last month on women and science that people worried about the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science should consider the possibility that women simply cannot hack it, that their genes or the wiring of their brains somehow leave them less fit than men for math, and therefore for science. Dr. Summers has since said clearly that he does not believe that girls are intellectually less able than boys. But maybe his original suggestion was right. If we ever figure out exactly what goes on inside the brain, or how our genes shape our abilities, we may find out that men and women do indeed differ in fundamental ways. But there are other possibilities we should consider first. One of them is the damage done by the idea that there is something wrong about a girl or woman who is really good at math. I first encountered this thinking as a seventh grader who was scarred for life when my class in an experimental state school for brainiacs was given a mathematics aptitude test. The results were posted and everyone found out I had scored several years ahead of the next brightest kid. A girl really good in math! What a freak! I resolved then and there on a career in journalism. I encountered the attitude again shortly after I became science editor, taking up a position I was to hold from 1997 to 2003. I went to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a convention that attracts thousands of researchers and teachers. My name tag listed my new position, and the scientists at the meeting all seemed to have the same reaction when they read it: 'You're the new science editor of The New York Times!?' At first I was deluded enough to think they meant I was much too delightful a person for such a heavy-duty job. In fact, they were shocked it had been given to a woman. This point was driven home a few weeks later when, at a dinner for scientific eminences, a colleague introduced me to one of the nation's leading neuroscientists. 'Oh yes,' the scientist murmured, as he scanned the room clearly ignoring me. 'Who is the new science editor of The New York Times, that twerpy little girl in short skirts?' Dumbfounded, I replied, 'That would be me.' A few weeks after that I was in another group of scientific eminences, this one at a luncheon at the Waldorf. The spokeswoman for the group that organized the event introduced me to one of the group's most eminent guests, a leading figure in American science policy. 'Oh,' he said kindly but abstractedly, 'you work for The New York Times. How nice.' The spokeswoman explained, again, that I was the newspaper's science editor. 'An editor,' he said. 'How nice.' The woman explained again, but again he could not take it in. 'Oh, science,' he said, 'How nice.' At this point the spokeswoman lost patience. She grabbed the honored guest by both shoulders, put her face a few inches away from his and shouted at him - 'She's it!' Not long after, I answered the office telephone, and the caller, a (male) scientist, asked to speak to several of my colleagues, all male and all out. 'May I help you?' I inquired. 'No, no, no,' he replied. 'I don't want to talk to you, I want to talk to someone important!' Even at the time, I could laugh at these experiences. After all, I was a grown-up person who could take care of herself. (I informed the caller that all the men he wanted to talk to worked for me, and then I hung up. As for Dr. Twerpy, he should know that he was not the first man to refer to me professionally as 'that little girl.' I reported on the doings of the other one until he was indicted.) But the memories of the seventh grader are still not funny. Neither is it amusing to reflect on what happened to a college friend who was the only student in her section to pass linear algebra, the course the math department typically used to separate the sheep from the mathematical goats. Talk about stigma! She changed her major to American civilization. Another friend, graduating as a math major, was advised not to bother applying for a graduate research assistantship because they were not given to women. She eventually earned a doctorate in math, but one of her early forays into the job market ended abruptly when she was told she should stay home with her husband rather than seek employment out of town. Experiences like hers - the outright, out-loud dashing of a promising mathematician's hopes simply because of her sex - are no longer the norm. At least I hope not. But they are enough, by themselves, to tell us why there are relatively few women in the upper ranks of science and mathematics today. Meanwhile, as researchers have abundantly documented, women continue to suffer little slights and little disadvantages, everything from ridicule in high school to problems with child care, to a much greater degree than their male cohorts. After 10 or 15 years, these little things can add up to real roadblocks. So if I wanted to address the relative lack of women in the upper reaches of science, here is where I would start. By the time these problems are eliminated, maybe we'll know what really goes on inside the brain and inside the chromosomes. Then it will be time to wonder if women are inherently less fit for math and science.

Subject: Was the War Pointless? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:57:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/international/asia/01malipo.html?ex=1267419600&en=2e5209bf2b92b15b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland March 1, 2005 Was the War Pointless? China Shows How to Bury It By HOWARD W. FRENCH MALIPO, China - After a walk up a steep stone staircase, first-time visitors are astonished when the veterans' cemetery just outside this town finally pops into view: as far as the eye can see, the curving arcade of hillside is lined with row after row of crypts, each with its concrete headstone emblazoned with a large red star, a name and an inscription. Long Chaogang and Bai Tianrong, though, had both been here before. The two men, veterans of China's war with Vietnam, which began with intense combat in mid-February of 1979, return from time to time looking for lost friends. And for more than an hour this day, they climbed up and down the deserted mountainside near the Vietnam border searching in vain through the names of the 957 soldiers buried here, stopping now and then to light a cigarette and place it on a tomb in offering to a comrade. The silence that prevails here, disturbed only by a gentle breeze rustling through the cemetery's bamboo groves, is fitting for a war that is being deliberately forgotten in China. By official reckoning, 20,000 Chinese died during the first month of fighting, when this country's forces invaded Vietnam in the face of spirited resistance, and untold others died as the war sputtered on through the 1980's. There are no official estimates of Vietnamese casualties, but they are thought to have been lower. Sixteen years on, China has produced no 'Rambo,' much less a 'Deer Hunter' or 'Platoon.' There have been a few movies, novels and memoirs about the suffering of the soldiers and their families. But no searing explorations of the horror or moral ambiguity of war. There are no grander monuments than cemeteries like these, found mostly in this remote border region. China, in short, has experienced no national hand-wringing, and has no Vietnam syndrome to overcome. Many of the veterans themselves are hard-pressed to say why they fought the war. Most are reluctant to discuss it with an outsider, and even rebuff their families. Asked what the war was about, Long Chaogang, a reticent 42-year-old infantryman who saw heavy combat, paused and said, 'I don't know.' Asked how he explained his past to his family, he said that when his 12-year-old daughter had once inquired he simply told her it was none of her business. Forgetting on such a great scale is no passive act. Instead, it is a product of the government's steely and unrelenting efforts to control information, and history in particular. Students reading today's textbooks typically see no mention of the war. Authors who have sought to delve into its history are routinely refused publication. In 1995, a novel about the war, 'Traversing Death,' seemed poised to win a national fiction award but was suddenly eliminated from the competition without explanation. If the Chinese authorities have been so zealous about suppressing debate it is perhaps because the experience, which effectively ended in a bloody stalemate, runs so contrary to the ruling Communist Party's prevailing narratives of a China that never threatens or attacks its neighbors, and of a prudent and just leadership that is all but infallible. The ungainly name assigned to the conflict, the 'self-defense and counterattack against Vietnam war,' seeks to reinforce these views. That China initiated hostilities is beyond dispute, historians say, and the conflict was fought entirely on Vietnamese soil. It is also generally held that if the war did not produce an outright defeat for China, it was a costly mistake fought for dubious purposes, high among them punishing Vietnam for overthrowing the Khmer Rouge leader of Cambodia, Pol Pot, a Chinese ally who was one of the 20th century's bloodiest tyrants. Since then, some historians have speculated that the war may also have fit into the modernization plans of China's former paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, by highlighting the technological deficiencies of the Maoist People's Liberation Army, or P.L.A. Others say the war was started by Mr. Deng to keep the army preoccupied while he consolidated power, eliminating leftist rivals from the Maoist era. Today, veterans often cling to these explanations but also fume about being used as cannon fodder in a cynical political game. 'We were sacrificed for politics, and it's not just me who feels this way - lots of comrades do, and we communicate our thoughts via the Internet,' said Xu Ke, a 40-year-old former infantryman who recently self-published a book, 'The Last War,' about the conflict. 'The attitude of the country is not to mention this old, sad history because things are pretty stable with Vietnam now. But it is also because the reasons given for the war back then just wouldn't stand now.' Mr. Xu, who now works as an interior designer in Shanghai, said he had traveled the country at his own expense to research the book and found that at library after library materials about the war had been removed. A compendium about the 1980's so complete as to have the lyrics of the decade's most popular songs said nothing of the conflict. 'It's like a memory that's been deleted, as if it never even happened,' Mr. Xu said. 'I went to the P.L.A. historians for materials, and they said 'Don't even think about it.' The attitude of China is like, let's just look toward the future and get rich together.' The war did produce one star of popular culture. A singer named Xu Liang, who lost a leg in combat, became a hero and idol when he appeared on national television seated in a wheelchair in uniform and sang about the virtues of personal sacrifice. Mr. Xu (who is unrelated to the author of 'The Last War') went on to give more than 500 pep talks around the country before disappearing from public view around 1990, just after the war's end. Today, he is so disillusioned that he tells people who recognize him on the streets of Beijing that they must be mistaken. Asked whether the war was just, he said China's leaders used Vietnam as a convenient enemy to quell internal conflict. 'Propaganda is in the government's hands,' he said. 'What does a worthless ordinary man know? When they want to do something, they can find a thousand justifications, but these are just excuses. They are not the genuine cause.'

Subject: Runners to Limit Their Water Intake From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:52:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/14/health/14water.html?ex=1271131200&en=735f6a932fd3284a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss April 14, 2005 Study Cautions Runners to Limit Their Water Intake By GINA KOLATA After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk. An increasing number of athletes - marathon runners, triathletes and even hikers in the Grand Canyon - are severely diluting their blood by drinking too much water or too many sports drinks, with some falling gravely ill and even dying, the doctors say. New research on runners in the Boston Marathon, published today in The New England Journal of Medicine, confirms the problem and shows how serious it is. The research involved 488 runners in the 2002 marathon. The runners gave blood samples before and after the race. While most were fine, 13 percent of them - or 62 - drank so much that they had hyponatremia, or abnormally low blood sodium levels. Three had levels so low that they were in danger of dying. The runners who developed the problem tended to be slower, taking more than four hours to finish the course. That gave them plenty of time to drink copious amounts of liquid. And drink they did, an average of three liters, or about 13 cups of water or of a sports drink, so much that they actually gained weight during the race. The risks to athletes from drinking too much liquid have worried doctors and race directors for several years. As more slow runners entered long races, doctors began seeing athletes stumbling into medical tents, nauseated, groggy, barely coherent and with their blood severely diluted. Some died on the spot. In 2003, U.S.A. Track & Field, the national governing body for track and field, long-distance running and race walking, changed its guidelines to warn against the practice. Marathon doctors say the new study offers the first documentation of the problem. 'Before this study, we suspected there was a problem,' said Dr. Marvin Adner, the medical director of the Boston Marathon, which is next Monday. 'But this proves it.' Hyponatremia is entirely preventable, Dr. Adner and others said. During intense exercise the kidneys cannot excrete excess water. As people keep drinking, the extra water moves into their cells, including brain cells. The engorged brain cells, with no room to expand, press against the skull and can compress the brain stem, which controls vital functions like breathing. The result can be fatal. But the marathon runners were simply following what has long been the conventional advice given to athletes: Avoid dehydration at all costs. 'Drink ahead of your thirst,' was the mantra. Doctors and sports drink companies 'made dehydration a medical illness that was to be feared,' said Dr. Tim Noakes, a hyponatremia expert at the University of Cape Town. 'Everyone becomes dehydrated when they race,' Dr. Noakes said. 'But I have not found one death in an athlete from dehydration in a competitive race in the whole history of running. Not one. Not even a case of illness.' On the other hand, he said, he knows of people who have sickened and died from drinking too much. Hyponatremia can be treated, Dr. Noakes said. A small volume of a highly concentrated salt solution is given intravenously and can save a patient's life by pulling water out of swollen brain cells. But, he said, doctors and emergency workers often assume that the problem is dehydration and give intravenous fluids, sometimes killing the patient. He and others advise testing the salt concentration of the athlete's blood before treatment. For their part, runners can estimate how much they should drink by weighing themselves before and after long training runs to see how much they lose - and thus how much water they should replace. But they can also follow what Dr. Paul D. Thompson calls 'a rough rule of thumb.' Dr. Thompson, a cardiologist at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut and a marathon runner, advises runners to drink while they are moving. 'If you stop and drink a couple of cups, you are overdoing it,' he said. Dr. Adner said athletes also should be careful after a race. 'Don't start chugging down water,' he said. Instead, he advised runners to wait until they began to urinate, a sign the body is no longer retaining water. The paper's lead author, Dr. Christopher S. D. Almond, of Children's Hospital, said he first heard of hyponatremia in 2001 when a cyclist drank so much on a ride from New York to Boston that she had a seizure. She eventually recovered. Dr. Almond and his colleagues decided to investigate how prevalent hyponatremia really was. Until recently, the condition was all but unheard of because endurance events like marathons and triathlons were populated almost entirely by fast athletes who did not have time to drink too much. 'Elite athletes are not drinking much, and they never have,' Dr. Noakes said. The lead female marathon runner in the Athens Olympics, running in 97-degree heat drank just 30 seconds of the entire race. In the 2002 Boston Marathon, said Dr. Arthur Siegel, of the Boston Marathon's medical team and the chief of internal medicine at Harvard's McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., the hyponatremia problem 'hit us like a cannon shot' in 2002. That year, a 28-year-old woman reached Heartbreak Hill, at Mile 20, after five hours of running and drinking sports drinks. She struggled to the top. Feeling terrible and assuming she was dehydrated, she chugged 16 ounces of the liquid. 'She collapsed within minutes,' Dr. Siegel said. She was later declared brain dead. Her blood sodium level was dangerously low, at 113 micromoles per liter of blood. (Hyponatremia starts at sodium levels below 135 micromoles, when brain swelling can cause confusion and grogginess. Levels below 120 can be fatal.) No one has died since in the Boston Marathon, but there have been near misses there, with 7 cases of hyponatremia in 2003 and 11 last year, and deaths elsewhere, Dr. Siegel said. He added that those were just the cases among runners who came to medical tents seeking help. In a letter, also in the journal, doctors describe 14 runners in the 2003 London Marathon with hyponatremia who waited more than four hours on average before going to a hospital. Some were lucid after the race, but none remembered completing it. That sort of delay worries Dr. Siegel. 'The bottom line is, it's a very prevalent problem out there, and crossing the edge from being dazed and confused to having a seizure is very tricky and can happen very, very fast,' he said. Boston Marathon directors want to educate runners not to drink so much, Dr. Siegel said. They also suggest that runners write their weights on their bibs at the start of the race. If they feel ill, they could be weighed again. Anyone who gains weight almost certainly has hyponatremia. 'Instead of waiting until they collapse and then testing their sodium, maybe we can nip it in the bud,' Dr. Siegel said.

Subject: Crouching Tiger, Swimming Dragon From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:51:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/11/opinion/11chanda.html?ex=1270872000&en=5d9bd18daf83f97d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland April 11, 2005 Crouching Tiger, Swimming Dragon By NAYAN CHANDA NEW HAVEN FIVE hundred and ninety years after a Chinese fleet cast anchor at Hormuz, the Chinese are back in the Arabian Sea. When Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China visited Pakistan last week, one of the many deals he signed was for the deepening of the port at Gwadar, whose Chinese-built facilities symbolize China's return to an area that was, briefly, a playground for its navy. The port's just completed first phase - three berths that can accommodate very large ships - is relatively insignificant. But its projected size and strategic location have sent ripples of anxiety through Washington, Tokyo and New Delhi about the potential establishment of a permanent Chinese naval presence near the Strait of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil passes. For the sake of regional stability, Beijing should forgo any ambitions to use Gwadar for its naval vessels. Yet China has valid reasons to help develop a commercial port that other powers must accept. Its return to the Indian Ocean is the logical outcome of its blazing economic growth, which the West has encouraged, applauded and profited from. A China that depends increasingly on imported oil transported great distances can justifiably seek commercial refueling and repair facilities, just as European powers dependent on far-flung coaling stations for their ships did in the 19th century. For a brief time in the 15th century, China had the means, but no deep-rooted rationale, for overseas expansion. The Middle Kingdom's maritime glory can be traced to the personal enthusiasm of a single ruler, the Ming emperor Yongle, who dispatched 63 vessels to the Indian Ocean in seven waves. China's first and thus far only blue-water navy consisted of multimasted ships weighing 1,500 tons - Vasco da Gama's weighed only 300 tons - and carried 27,500 men up to the Persian Gulf and Africa's eastern shore. Aside from battling pirates and pretenders to the throne, the fleet served primarily as a propaganda vehicle for the emperor. Chinese sailors dazzled Asian states with their technological and military prowess, transported barbarian envoys willing to pay tribute to the Son of Heaven, and brought home exotic products, from aphrodisiac rhinoceros horns to live giraffes. But the expeditions ended as suddenly as they had begun. By the time the Portuguese Navy appeared in the Indian Ocean in 1497, the Chinese had already gone home. This time, China's thirst for energy is dictating its turn to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Since 1993 China has been a net oil importer; as its need has grown to 40 percent of total consumption, so has its dependence on oil from the Middle East. Eighty percent of China's oil imports pass through the Malacca Straits, the closing of which would wreak havoc upon the Chinese economy. To reduce this dependence, China has been working to build alternative supply routes through Myanmar to the south and Pakistan to the west. A road, and eventually a pipeline, from Gwadar could give China an alternative energy route that it urgently needs and spur the development of its westernmost provinces. Hence its plan to provide more than a billion dollars in aid and loan guarantees for building at Gwadar. China's search for energy security also dovetails, however, with its long-term strategic effort to expand its regional influence and box in India. Analysts see Chinese-operated listening posts in Myanmar's Coco Islands, China's support for a port near Yangon for handling 10,000-ton ships (of which the Burmese have only a few) and another deep-water port at Kyaukpyu in western Myanmar, Chinese aid to the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong and plans to improve Cambodia's Sihanoukville as part of an incremental effort to build a 'string of pearls' presence on the Indian Ocean rim. Many believe it is only a matter of time before the Chinese Navy, much strengthened by recent purchases of ships and technology, arrives in Gwadar. Pakistani officials boast that Gwadar's Chinese connection will help to frustrate India's domination of regional waterways. A Chinese maritime presence in the area would enable the mainland to monitor naval patrols by the United States and protect Chinese sea lines of communication. China Economic Net, an online news outlet sponsored by China's leading business paper, calls Gwadar 'China's biggest harvest.' The fact remains, however, that with the exception of the Chinese 'fishing trawlers' occasionally found mapping the ocean floor (information needed by submarines), the Chinese Navy has yet to show up. So for now, instead of raining on China's parade at Gwadar, India and the United States should welcome China's contribution to expanded maritime commerce and the additional sense of security that Beijing might derive from it. The port at Gwadar will be a boon to the regional economy; and to deny China's need for a secure oil supply while pumping billions of dollars into China to produce more gas-guzzling cars is both illogical and, in an indirect but palpable way, hostile. China should be left in no doubt, however, that using the Gwadar port for its military would increase tensions and weaken the energy security that it ostensibly seeks. Checking its frigates and submarines at the door would be a good way for China to ensure that others are also able to enjoy the party.

Subject: How quickly things change From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Jan 23, 2006 at 01:28:08 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/HA21Df03.html South Asia Jan 21, 2006 China's pearl loses its luster By Sudha Ramachandran BANGALORE - The port project at Gwadar in Pakistan's restive Balochistan province appears to be in trouble. Baloch insurgents battling Islamabad are opposed to the project and have been attacking people working on it. Besides, some differences appear to have cropped up between the Pakistan government and the project's main funder - China - over financial aspects of the project. Gwadar is on Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, just 72 kilometers from Iran. It is near the mouth of the Persian Gulf and is 400km from the Strait of Hormuz. The Pakistani government identified Gwadar as a port site way back in the 1960s, but it was only in 2001-02 that concrete steps on the proposal were taken. It was the arrival of US troops in Afghanistan - literally at China's doorstep - in the autumn of 2001 that spurred Beijing into action. China agreed to participate in funding, construction and development of a deepsea port and naval base in Gwadar and in March 2002 Chinese premier Wu Bangguo laid the foundation for the port. Its engineers are engaged in the port's design and construction. China insists its interest in Gwadar is purely commercial. No doubt it is hoping that the port will transform the economy of its landlocked Xinjiang province. However, Gwadar port has a far-larger significance in China's scheme of things. It is said to be the western-most pearl in China's 'string of pearls' strategy (this is a strategy that envisages building strategic relations with several countries along sea lanes from the Middle East to the South China Sea to protect China's energy interests and other security objectives), the other 'pearls' being naval facilities in Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and the South China Sea. [1] China's interest in the Gwadar project stems from the port's proximity to the Strait of Hormuz. A base at Gwadar enables China to secure the flow of its oil - 60% of its energy supplies come from the Middle East - through the strait. More important, Gwadar is said to be a 'listening post' for the Chinese, one that will enable Beijing to monitor movement of US and Indian ships in the region. Pakistan is eyeing huge economic and strategic gains, with Gwadar poised to become a key shipping hub at the mouth of a strategic waterway. A port at Gwadar provides Pakistan with strategic depth vis-a-vis India. Gwadar is 725km to the west of Karachi port, making it that much less vulnerable than Karachi to an Indian naval blockade. Not surprisingly, the construction of Gwadar port and Sino-Pakistan cooperation in the project are causing concern for India, the United States and Iran. The Chinese presence in the Arabian Sea heightens India's feeling of encirclement by China. Iran fears that the development of Gwadar port will undermine the value of its own ports as outlets to Central Asia's exports. As for the US, it has been uncomfortable with Chinese presence at the mouth of a key waterway. And now in the run-up to a possible war with Iran, Washington appears to be eyeing Gwadar's naval facilities all the more. It appears that the US is pressuring Pakistan to reduce Chinese involvement in the project and to involve Washington instead. The New Delhi-based online Public Affairs Magazine has reported that the US 'could be [pressuring] Pakistan to outprice the Chinese from Gwadar to take over the entire facility'. Citing diplomats, the report said: 'Pakistan has now raised the cost of Chinese participation to US$3 billion in addition to the $1.5 billion yearly payment, which China has refused, saying it is steep, and in breach of the terms of the contract. China has said that it had already agreed to offset construction costs by giving Pakistan four frigates, but Pakistan is unmoved, and offered to return all the Chinese investment, if they would have it that way.' Dismissing such reports as 'wishful thinking on the part of India', a Pakistani government official told Asia Times Online that the Gwadar project was 'very much on track' and that 'Sino-Pakistan cooperation in the venture remains strong'. But even if the reported differences between China and Pakistan in the Gwadar project were indeed 'wishful thinking on the part of India', the project is under fire from Baloch insurgents. Balochis are not opposed to the Gwadar port project or other megaprojects per se. What they are opposed to is the way these projects have been conceived and implemented. They resent the fact Balochis have been excluded from the benefits of these projects and that 'outsiders' have grown rich by exploiting Baloch resources. Balochistan's Sui gas reserves, for instance, meet 38% of Pakistan's energy needs, but only 6% of Balochistan's 6 million people have access to it, and the royalties Balochistan receives for its gas are very low, especially when compared with what other provinces receive. Likewise, the Gwadar project does not seem to be transforming Baloch lives for the better. Baloch nationalists see Gwadar as 'a non-Baloch project', one that has been conceived and implemented without provincial approval or participation, in which 'outsiders' have gained the most. They point out that land in Gwadar is being sold at throwaway prices to non-Baloch civil-military elites. There is concern, too, that the Gwadar project would leave Balochis a minority in their homeland. As the Baloch leader, the Khan of Kalat, pointed out in an interview to the Pakistani daily Dawn, the entire project would need at least a million people, and with Gwadar being a town of 60,000, people from 'Karachi, mostly Urdu-speaking', would be brought in. Not surprisingly, then, the Gwadar project has been repeatedly targeted by Baloch insurgent groups such as the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA), the Baloch Liberation Front and the Baloch People's Liberation Army. Insurgents have struck repeatedly with bombs and rocket attacks. In 2004 for instance, Gwadar airport was the target of rocket attacks. Several of the insurgent attacks in Gwadar have targeted Chinese working on this project. About 500 Chinese engineers are employed in Gwadar. On May 3, 2004, three Chinese engineers were killed and nine others injured in a bomb blast by the BLA. On May 14 last year, four bombs went off in Gwadar. Then in October, several Chinese engineers had a narrow escape when the vehicle in which they were traveling missed a landmine. The following month, insurgents launched a rocket attack on a Chinese construction company in the Tallar area of Gwadar district. The Chinese engineers and other staff escaped unhurt but several vehicles were damaged. In total, according to official data, there were 187 bomb blasts, 275 rocket attacks, eight attacks on gas pipelines, 36 attacks on electricity-transmission lines and 19 explosions on railway lines in 2005. At least 182 civilians and 26 security force personnel died in the province during 2005. An interesting aspect about Baloch nationalist insurgents, who are by and large secular, and the religious militants is that while both view China as an enemy, their opposition to Chinese involvement in the Gwadar project differs. Tarique Niazi, a specialist on resource-based conflict, said: 'Baloch nationalists, for instance, are opposed to the Chinese government for advancing its strategic goals at the expense of their freedom and autonomy. But several religiously inspired groups are opposed to the Chinese government for its putative persecution of the Uighur Muslim minority in the autonomous region of Xinjiang.' The kidnapping of two Chinese engineers in October 2004 by members of the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) is said to have been a response to Pakistan's killing of ETIM chief Hasan Mahsum, to whom it had provided shelter in South Waziristan, on Beijing's request. While India, Iran and the US might be wary of the Sino-Pakistan cooperation in Gwadar, internal opposition to the bonding seems far greater, as indicated by the ferocity and frequency of attacks on the Gwadar project and Chinese employees there. With the Baloch insurgency growing in intensity and the Pakistani government's military approach to the problem only fueling Baloch resentment and the insurgency further, it does seem that even if the Gwadar port project is, as officials claim, 'on track', it will be near impossible to realize its full potential. Note [1] In Bangladesh, China is building a container port facility at Chittagong and is 'seeking much more extensive naval and commercial access', according to reports. In Myanmar, China is building naval bases and has electronic intelligence-gathering facilities on islands in the Bay of Bengal and near the Strait of Malacca. In Cambodia, China signed a military agreement in November 2003 to provide training and equipment. In Thailand, Chinese navy ships took part in a joint search-and-rescue exercise with the Thai navy in the Gulf of Thailand December 13, 2005. The drill, the first between the two navies, was launched after a Chinese navy ships formation concluded a four-day visit.

Subject: The Zelig Among the Modernists From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:49:55 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/arts/design/08cott.html?ex=1270612800&en=9bf9c494a371d5d7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland April 8, 2005 The Zelig Among the Modernists By HOLLAND COTTER MAX ERNST, an artist who had the eye of a miniaturist, the disposition of a scientist and the uncreased face of a Gothic angel, is one of modernism's mystery men. He is here, there and everywhere in the history of European art between the wars, closely associated with two of the century's wild and craziest movements, Dada and Surrealism. Yet he never quite materializes, never comes into focus. And he continues to be everywhere but invisible in 'Max Ernst: A Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a large solo that looks like a group show. Walk through the first few galleries and try to get a bead on him: on his style, his concerns, his feelings, whatever it is that makes him him. It's a challenge. The artist who painted that Mannerist Madonna, and that De Chiricoesque still life, and that abstract landscape, is one and the same. And he painted them all in a single year, 1926. Such versatility is, of course, admirable. But to the brand-name art shopper in all of us, it is also disconcerting. Which picture represents the real Max Ernst, the Ernst we can expect to see more of? Which one has the recognizable 'look' that will let us say with some confidence to ourselves, as we walk into the modernist collection of some other museum: Oh, and that's a Max Ernst. It is both in spite of and because of his elusiveness that Ernst (1891-1976) remains an artist of some interest. He certainly had an interesting life. He was born near Cologne in 1891 into a big, middle-class, Roman Catholic family. His father was a teacher of deaf children, an amateur painter and a censorious man. Ernst, by his own account, ran away from home a lot and, steeped in the darkling world of late Romanticism, dreamed all the time, often about birds and forests. In university, he studied literature, philosophy and - an unusual choice at the time - psychology, developing an interest in poetry and the art of the mentally ill. Eventually, he took up painting and paced himself through the standard gamut of influences, from van Gogh and Cézanne to Picasso. Drafted by Germany in World War I, he fought on the front. It was a scarifying experience and prompted his affiliation with Dada, a movement born of, and devoted to, existential disruption. Although Europe was psychologically shattered, it was creatively on the boil. Ernst sought out Paul Klee, a hero of his. He encountered the work of Giorgio de Chirico, a revelation. De Chirico instantly joined Dürer, Leonardo, Piero della Francesca, El Greco, Goya and popular illustrators like Gustave Doré in Ernst's active visual archive. A constant reader, Ernst related viscerally, one suspects, to the self-contained, inherently private book format and turned it into a primary art medium with a stream of hermetic page-size collages. In 1921, he met the writers André Breton and Paul Éluard, who saw in his work a visual embodiment of the Surrealist aesthetic they were formulating, and invited his collaboration. So, despite having a wife and child, Ernst left Germany for Paris and a ménage à trois with Éluard and his wife, Gala, future spouse of Salvador Dalí. The affair culminated in an impulsive trip by all three to Southeast Asia, where Ernst seems to have visited the ruined temple city of Angkor Wat. He was back in Paris in 1924, when Surrealism officially declared itself a revolutionary movement. But revolution wasn't really his thing. Art was, and in Paris in the mid-1920's he produced most of his best work. And, in fact, he was already on a roll as early as 1921, with paintings like the gross, hilarious 'Celebes,' and the sadistic fantasy of piercing and slicing titled 'Oedipus Rex,' pictures that sent Breton and Éluard into raptures. What Surrealism gave Ernst in return was permission to make full use of chance in art. In a controlled way, he had been doing so in his free-associational Dada-inspired collages. But now he discovered the liberating potential of physical accident. By making rubbed impressions of natural surfaces like stones or wood, in a technique called frottage, he tapped into a rich database of manipulable, interpretable 'found' forms. Another technique, called decalcomania, which involved pressing a freshly painted surface against a receiving surface, then separating the two, generated other kinds of patterns. In addition to their value as a resource, such techniques appealed to Ernst's anti-authoritarian instincts because they messed up the standard Western view of creativity. With chance in charge, the sovereignty of 'genius,' ego and personality in art was dislodged. Technically, paintings could be made according to recipes that anyone could follow, and having a signature style became irrelevant, even constrictive. Ernst spoke of himself as a controller, not a creator, a conduit for energies and images already there. Possibly this self-description was his way of lending a veneer of unity to a prolific output that grew ever more varied as time passed and as his formal skill increased. Elaborated eclecticism is the basic story line of the chronologically arranged show at the Met, which has been organized by the Ernst scholar Werner Spies and Sabine Rewald, a Met curator. It is set in a clarifying visual frame by Michael Langley, a Met exhibition designer who must be given credit for making Ernst's art - paintings, collages and a few sculptures - look as collectively harmonious as it does. Harmony is inherent in the case of the occasional series of paintings, two of which seem to refer back to Ernst's Southeast Asia trip. One series, exemplified by a wicked picture titled 'Joy of Living' (1936), offers a worm's-eye view of jungle undergrowth infested with predatory beasts. It's a paranoid riff on Henri Rousseau. The other series is more abstract, with images of stepped pyramids, vegetation licking up around them, lying crushed and desolate under enormous tropical moons. Some observers have read in this work premonitions of looming catastrophe in Europe with the rise of fascism. There is no question that such fears, and the anger they provoked, prompted 'Fireside Angel' (1937), a painting of a howling, stamping, demonic war god that was Ernst's direct response to the defeat of the Republican forces in Spain. And war itself is the subject of 'Europe After the Rain' (1940-42). An exercise in decalcomania gone mad, it is like a brutal autopsy performed on the Romantic landscape of Ernst's childhood, here ripped open and turned inside out to reveal malignancy metastasized out to the horizons. Ernst began this picture when he was living in the south of France, trying to escape internment as an illegal alien. (He had already been arrested twice.) In 1941, he left Europe for the United States and finished the painting there. Almost nothing he did subsequently has its force. Its will to ugliness devolved to shtick, and a certain witty sweetness, even cuteness, marks many of the paintings produced in this country and after his return to Europe in 1953. Actually, those qualities are incipient in much of his art, particularly in his collages, including the five-volume collage-novel 'Une Semaine de Bonté' ('A Week of Kindness'), often cited as his masterpiece. Such work is, by any standard, brilliantly virtuosic and inventive. But it is a tedious, eye-glazing brilliance. Here Surrealist automatism feels all too literally automatic, with one perfect, airtight image banged out after another, each mildly provocative in more or less the same way, like an elevated species of busywork. Similar features have been ascribed to the small-scale, tightly knit, draftsmanly work in vogue among young artists in New York now. For them, Ernst might well serve as a stimulus, but also as a cautionary model of a truism that is actually true: nothing turns boring faster than listening to other people tell you their dreams. In the end, Ernst looks best in the artists he influenced most. Almost any single assemblage by Joseph Cornell is more stirringly creepy - and uncute - than a whole book of Ernst collages, in part because Cornell's art seems to come from someplace personal, from an in-there that's really there. It's genuinely neurotic, genuinely fetishistic, genuinely self-probing and revealing. With Ernst, you almost never feel this. What you may feel - I do - is appreciation of a career that was an extended, progressive experiment in destabilizing tradition. And young artists, at a time when the idea of tradition is being reasserted and recherished, can learn from that. But ask other things from him - a broad sustained line of thought, expressive density, a kindred soul - and chances are you'll come up empty. Remote and cool as an apparition, Ernst has always just left the building.

Subject: India's Economy Tracks the Monsoon From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 05:47:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/business/worldbusiness/03monsoon.html?ex=1275451200&en=195b39e644f68fb6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 3, 2005 Downpour or Drought? India's Economy Tracks the Monsoon By SARITHA RAI BANGALORE, India - Each year, stock market analysts, company chief executives, government planners and even foreign investors eagerly await word on an indicator pivotal to India's economy: the forecast for the June-September monsoon season. So on Thursday, when the government's weather research center backtracked from a rosy prediction in April and made a bleak forecast for rains in the first half of the season, it cast a pall on hopes for India's agricultural output and boded ill for the country's economic growth. The Center for Mathematical Modeling and Computer Simulation said Thursday that rains would be 34 percent below normal in June, a reversal of the April prediction of more than 22 percent above normal. The revision sent the benchmark Sensex index in Mumbai down 74 points, a 1 percent drop. The monsoon forecasts in India are riveting enough without twists and turns. While India - the world's second-fastest-growing economy, after China - has recently been better known for its high technology and outsourcing, about two-thirds of the country's one billion people still depend on farming for a livelihood, and agriculture accounts for about one-quarter of gross domestic product. Growth in the farm sector bolsters consumption in the villages, and any slowdown is bad news for rural demand. 'We sincerely hope and pray rains are bountiful this year and crops do not suffer,' India's finance minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, was quoted by news services as saying on Thursday while introducing an insurance plan for farmers to protect them from the vacillations of the rains. Though the impact of the monsoon on the economy is waning somewhat, as nonagriculture sectors grow, the anxiety over the rains is still all pervasive even a month before the first official pronouncement. 'Financial analysts start calling us from the beginning of March, but so far the forecast has never been leaked,' said M. Rajeevan, director of the government's National Climate Center based in the Western city of Pune, which makes the official long-range monsoon forecast. This year's worry began when the rains did not reach the southwestern coast of Kerala as they generally do by June 1, heralding the start of the season. The earlier prediction - for the timely arrival and even distribution of the rains - immediately raised optimism about a third consecutive year of strong growth in India, after the 8.5 percent expansion in the year ended in March 2004 and the estimated growth of nearly 7 percent in the year ended this March. Investors greeted the prediction with a nearly 3 percent rise in the Sensex index in the following few days. Though floods from the monsoons cause death and destruction, only about a third of India's crops are grown on irrigated land and the rest rely on the rains, which also bring relief from the searing heat. 'Good rains ensure higher farm incomes and fuel favorable demand for products ranging from soaps to televisions to motorbikes,' said Alroy Lobo, co-head of institutional equities at Kotak Securities in Mumbai. The rural areas, where some 600 million Indians live, are markets with huge potential - and appetites - for growth. Companies like Hindustan Lever, the country's largest consumer products company, see a direct correlation between the monsoon and disposable income in the villages. The first scientific monsoon forecast by the India Meteorological Department, in 1886, was based solely on a single factor: slow-melting snow cover on the Himalayan Mountains in the north indicated delayed and scanty rains. And that turned out to be the case. Officials now rely on computers and sophisticated models to weigh multiple weather factors. But, as it has with this year's contradictory predictions, the modern computer forecast wizardry proved lacking last year. While timely, average and evenly distributed rainfall was predicted, the stop-start rains were 13 percent deficient. A resulting slowdown in the farm sector held down overall economic output. Some aspects of the monsoon forecast have remained unchanged for decades. The start date of the monsoon, critical for planting crops, is still done by direct study of cloud patterns and signals from the ocean. 'In the old days, there was much fanfare around the annual monsoon forecast,' recalled D. R. Sikka, who retired as director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology after five decades of predicting rainfall. In the 1960's 1970's, officials in the southern state of Kerala would send a message to the office of the prime minister in New Delhi at the first sign of clouds. In past decades, economic growth contracted to almost zero after a particularly bad monsoon. While the weather is still a potent influence, economic output more recently has dipped to around 4 percent in years of bad monsoons and rose past 8 percent during particularly good years. The contribution of agriculture to the gross domestic product has dropped from more than 40 percent in the 1960's and 70's to just 23 percent, according to Jyoti Narasimhan, principal analyst in the Global Macroeconomics Group at Global Insight, a research and forecasting firm based in Waltham, Mass. And, with the nonagricultural sector in China also strengthening, said Joydeep Mukherji, director of the sovereign ratings group at Standard & Poor's, 'the macroeconomic performance of both countries is less dependent than before on the bounty of the rain gods.'

Subject: World Sugar Prices From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:07:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Have you guys noticed what has been going on in the World Sugar Market? The Europeans have just removed the tariffs and subsidies on the European market. I am trying to find more News Paper articles on this topic but I am only getting bits and pieces. Have you found anything? Please post it here. From what I have been able to work out - and I can be wrong two things have come into play at the same time. Brazil – the world’s biggest exporter of sugar has over supplied the market and kept the world sugar price at about US$200 to US$250 per ton. Brazil has also mastered the system of converting sugar into Ethanol for use as motor car fuel. With the price of oil going up, Brazil has been committing more and more of their sugar resource into their own ethanol market and reducing the amount of sugar on the world market slowly increases the price of sugar. Most protected economies have their sugar prices at about US$400 to US$450 per ton (including the USA). Europe subsidies were assisting sugar farmers/produces by paying approximately US$300 per ton raising the EU price to about US$700 to US$750. Brazil’s sugar season has come to an end (they have just finished exporting all their main stocks) and are between growing season. I think on the back of speculation that Brazil’s next crop will see a dramatic diversion towards Ethanol, and far less actual sugar on the world market, the price came up to US$430 per ton. At about the same time that they sugar price hit that mark, the EU jumped in and removed tariffs on importing sugar from the world market and have also removed their subsidies on local sugar. Although Brazil is not selling sugar right now (and cannot take advantage of the amazingly high price of sugar) Brazil’s currency is also starting to sky rocket. As soon as Brazil’s crop is ready what are they going to do? Oil may well be cheaper for them (with an improved currency value) and selling below the US$400 mark may not be worth their while (under the improved currency value). We are right now in a state of flux. What the hell is going to happen? So it looks like the US$400 or so mark may well stick. This is about the price of Sugar in the USA protected market. The USA should jump at this opportunity and also remove all trade barriers to the US sugar industry…. (This is my prediction) We may well for the first time see the world sugar market start to become a truly free market. I don’t think it is going to upset the price of our products as products whether imported from Europe or made in the USA has always had their sugar prices pegged around the US$400 mark. Sugar growers in Europe who enjoyed a subsidy over the US$400 mark may well be in serious trouble. In the short run, many small countries like Costa Rica will have a lot to gain by being allowed to sell their sugar in the bigger market of the EU at a bloody good price. EU farmers and a couple African farmers (who got special privileges to sell within the EU) will be VERY hard hit and may close down. In the long run if the EU farmers do close down, that will mean an even bigger market for the developing countries. The big question on whether the price of sugar will go up or down depends on whether Brazil will come back to the sugar market in a big way. This in turn depends on their currency value and the price of oil. If the price of oil stay high (and goes up any more) then the price of sugar will stay high too and the smaller developing countries may well start to get ahead. I predict that within the next couple of months the USA may well take advantage of this situation and start opening up the sugar market for foreign imports. We should at least see tariff changes on sugar imports. The USA government, will want to watch this situation just for a while to see if prices stabilize at the high US$400 odd mark. The prices should stabilize as Brazil is currently planting their next crop and it will still be months before Brazil is ready to make a new decision. For this reason I predict that by the end of 2006 we should see a serious move by the USA to dismantle the sugar tariff structures. The only way to upset this is if someone succeeds in linking the rebuilding of New Orleans with the protection of the sugar industry in the region. In the medium run between now and 2008, I do predict oil will stabilize at the US$55 a barrel and perhaps come down a little as Canada’s Alberta oil sands really pick up pace and sales increase dramatically. I predict Brazil’s currency stabilizes (Brazil seems to have their monetary and fiscal act together), the price of sugar may well drop as Brazil picks up speed and their new cane farms open up. The lowering in the price of sugar will make a drastic affect on the price of our food products. You will be surprised how many products actually contain sugar. So if the US sugar market opens, we may well see an easing of the price of food products. Now can someone here verify what I have just written. Am I talking bull?

Subject: Little Saigon Exports Its Prosperity From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:22:52 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/business/19sbiz.html?ex=1295326800&en=470e585ddb8a8c81&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 19, 2006 Little Saigon Exports Its Prosperity By JAMES FLANIGAN Three decades ago immigrants from Vietnam started coming in sizable numbers to the United States, fleeing the rule of the Communist government after the Vietnam War. The newcomers arrived with little money or possessions, but they have built a beehive of commerce bridging two cities in Orange County, Calif. - Westminster and Garden Grove. The two cities are home today to more than 150,000 Vietnamese-Americans and more than 5,000 Vietnamese-owned businesses. Yet, there was no Vietnamese-owned bank in the community - known today as Little Saigon - until last year. The banking needs of the immigrant companies were served by major institutions, like the Bank of America and Wells Fargo, or by Chinese and Korean banks. But now, two new banks with investors and owners from the Vietnamese community have opened, indicating the rising prosperity of Vietnamese businesses in America and growing economic connections with a vibrant entrepreneurial sector back in Vietnam. First Vietnamese American Bank raised more than $11 million in capital and opened in May. 'We can provide leadership to this community,' said Hieu T. Nguyen, the bank's president. 'When Vietnamese businesspeople come to this bank, they can deal with the bank president personally. They can come home,' said Mr. Nguyen, who has worked for banks in California and Asia since immigrating to the United States in 1980. More than pride is at stake for ethnic groups in having banks of their own, said John J. Kennedy, president of the other new institution, Saigon National Bank, which opened in November. 'When the local people put money in a bank like this, they know that it understands their community and its opportunities,' Mr. Kennedy said. 'Its loans and activities, in turn, help to further the community's economy.' Mr. Kennedy, who has 31 years leading small banks in California and other states, was hired to get Saigon National going by its founding investors, led by Kiem D. Nguyen, owner of one of the largest supermarkets in Little Saigon, as well as fertilizer and plastics businesses in Vietnam. The new banks answer a need for California's Vietnamese population, which numbers close to half a million people - 55 percent of America's total. An estimated $8 billion a year in cash remittances and trade in goods and services flow between ethnic Vietnamese in America and relatives and business partners in Vietnam. Sending cash to relatives through informal transfer agencies can be expensive for the families and a source of concern for bank regulators worried about irregularities. That is one reason state and federal authorities welcomed the new banks. 'At the very least, we can handle those money transfers more efficiently and at a lower cost to the families,' said Walter L. Hannen Sr., a director of the First Vietnamese American Bank. Also, there is plenty of business to do. The economy of Vietnam, a country of 83.5 million people, has been growing at 7 percent to 8 percent a year for almost a decade. A bilateral trade agreement with the United States in 2001 has helped accelerate that expansion, according to George A. Baker, who opened a bank branch 13 months ago in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, the city formerly known as Saigon, for Far East National Bank, a Los Angeles institution that is owned by a Taiwan banking company. 'Few people realize that Vietnam is one of the world's largest exporters of coffee and rice and that it has special capabilities in garments and high-tech components,' Mr. Baker said. For example, Jocelyn Tran, who worked in the fashion industry in Southern California for 20 years, now runs a subsidiary of Limited Brands in her native Vietnam and ships more than 200 million garments a year to the company's chains, which include Victoria's Secret, Limited and Henri Bendel stores. 'China does large mass-merchandise orders, but for hand-beading and intricate needlework, Vietnamese workers' skills give us a good niche,' Ms. Tran said. Vietnamese immigrants also found work in Silicon Valley in the 1980's and '90s and now are employing their expertise in the both the old country and the new. Thinh N. Nguyen, for example, founded Pyramid Development Software in 2001 after working for 20 years for start-ups in California. The firm has its headquarters and a small marketing staff in Milpitas, Calif., about 45 miles south of San Francisco, but 60 engineers in Ho Chi Minh City do software support for American companies including Novellus Systems and Motorola. Similarly, Nguyen Huu Le, who worked for 22 years in research and development for Nortel Networks, is today chairman of TMA Solutions, a company in Ho Chi Minh City that does software engineering for clients like Lucent Technologies, Nortel and NTT-Data of Japan. 'Vietnam today is the most optimistic country in Asia for 2006,' Mr. Le said, citing a CNN poll. American entrepreneurs, too, see a lot of potential. Rick Bakanoff, of Capitola, Calif., on Monterey Bay about 25 miles west of San Jose, Calif., has built the Machinery Corporation of America over three decades by buying up cannery equipment, refurbishing it and selling it to the food processing industry in Thailand. Now Mr. Bakanoff is expanding operations in Vietnam. 'It could be big in fruit and vegetable processing, if its small farmers formed cooperatives to combine crops and feed a processing plant,' Mr. Bakanoff said of Vietnam. Walter Blocker, formerly of Louisville, Ky., has lived in Ho Chi Minh City for 12 years, representing global consumer product companies, including L'Oréal and Walt Disney. His company, the Gannon Group, has built a beverage processing plant and now is organizing the construction of an electric power plant. 'Industry is growing here, and the greatest need is for electricity, roads and airports,' Mr. Blocker said. Vietnam's economic progress is cheered these days in California. To be sure, the bitterness of immigrants who fled the aftermath of the war in the mid-1970's has not entirely faded; one still sees Vietnam Republic flags - three red stripes on a yellow field - waving in some front yards in Orange County. But business beckons. 'I want our bank to serve all the Vietnamese communities in America and one day serve business in Vietnam, as well,' Mr. Nguyen of First Vietnamese American Bank said. One of the bank's major clients supports the idea. 'It is great that we have First Vietnamese Bank for our community,' said Paul Nguyen, owner of the Pacific Machinery Company, an airplane parts supplier, in Garden Grove. The success of Pacific Machinery speaks loudly of the spirit that enabled once-penniless immigrants from Vietnam to build prosperous communities in America - and undoubtedly is helping other Vietnamese to build entrepreneurial companies in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam today. A former first lieutenant in South Vietnam's army who was educated in the United States, Mr. Nguyen was imprisoned in Vietnam for 10 years when North Vietnam won control of the South. He said he returned to America in 1985 at age 37. While working in machine shops, Mr. Nguyen taught himself computer-aided design and manufacturing. In 1992, he opened his company and qualified as a minority contractor, supplying parts to Boeing. 'I work hard, 12, 13 hours a day,' Mr. Nguyen said. Today, he owns three buildings and a company employing 70 people, with annual revenue of $10 million, supplying Northrop Grumman and Raytheon as well as Boeing. Mr. Nguyen, now 58, said he was ready for the next phase. 'I am going to invest $5 million to buy a larger plant and machinery so I can supply Boeing's new planes,' Mr. Nguyen said. Raising capital is no obstacle, he said. 'I can raise $5 million,' he said. 'Bankers are happy to lend to me. The people from Boeing say, 'Paul, you are the American dream.' I say 'thank you, America.' '

Subject: Darwin Wins Point in Rome From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:20:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/science/sciencespecial2/19evolution.html?ex=1295326800&en=6adc61e25d24673d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 19, 2006 In 'Design' vs. Darwinism, Darwin Wins Point in Rome By IAN FISHER and CORNELIA DEAN ROME - The official Vatican newspaper published an article this week labeling as 'correct' the recent decision by a judge in Pennsylvania that intelligent design should not be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution. 'If the model proposed by Darwin is not considered sufficient, one should search for another,' Fiorenzo Facchini, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Bologna, wrote in the Jan. 16-17 edition of the paper, L'Osservatore Romano. 'But it is not correct from a methodological point of view to stray from the field of science while pretending to do science,' he wrote, calling intelligent design unscientific. 'It only creates confusion between the scientific plane and those that are philosophical or religious.' The article was not presented as an official church position. But in the subtle and purposely ambiguous world of the Vatican, the comments seemed notable, given their strength on a delicate question much debated under the new pope, Benedict XVI. Advocates for teaching evolution hailed the article. 'He is emphasizing that there is no need to see a contradiction between Catholic teachings and evolution,' said Dr. Francisco J. Ayala, professor of biology at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Dominican priest. 'Good for him.' But Robert L. Crowther, spokesman for the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a Seattle organization where researchers study and advocate intelligent design, dismissed the article and other recent statements from leading Catholics defending evolution. Drawing attention to them was little more than trying 'to put words in the Vatican's mouth,' he said. L'Osservatore is the official newspaper of the Vatican and basically represents the Vatican's views. Not all its articles represent official church policy. At the same time, it would not be expected to present an article that dissented deeply from that policy. In July, Christoph Schönborn, an Austrian cardinal close to Benedict, seemed to call into question what has been official church teaching for years: that Catholicism and evolution are not necessarily at odds. In an Op-Ed article in The New York Times, he played down a 1996 letter in which Pope John Paul II called evolution 'more than a hypothesis.' He wrote, 'Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.' There is no credible scientific challenge to the idea that evolution explains the diversity of life on earth, but advocates for intelligent design posit that biological life is so complex that it must have been designed by an intelligent source. At least twice, Pope Benedict has signaled concern about the issue, prompting questions about his views. In April, when he was formally installed as pope, he said human beings 'are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution.' In November, he called the creation of the universe an 'intelligent project,' wording welcomed by supporters of intelligent design. Many Roman Catholic scientists have criticized intelligent design, among them the Rev. George Coyne, a Jesuit who is director of the Vatican Observatory. 'Intelligent design isn't science, even though it pretends to be,' he said in November, as quoted by the Italian news service ANSA. 'Intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science.' In October, Cardinal Schönborn sought to clarify his own remarks, saying he meant to question not the science of evolution but what he called evolutionism, an attempt to use the theory to refute the hand of God in creation. 'I see no difficulty in joining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, but under the prerequisite that the borders of scientific theory are maintained,' he said in a speech. To Dr. Kenneth R. Miller, a biology professor at Brown University and a Catholic, 'That is my own view as well.' 'As long as science does not pretend it can answer spiritual questions, it's O.K.,' he said. Dr. Miller, who testified for the plaintiffs in the recent suit in Dover, Pa., challenging the teaching of intelligent design, said Dr. Facchini, Father Coyne and Cardinal Schönborn (in his later statements) were confirming 'traditional Catholic thinking.' On Dec. 20, a federal district judge ruled that public schools could not present intelligent design as an alternative to evolutionary theory. In the Osservatore article, Dr. Facchini wrote that scientists could not rule out a divine 'superior design' to creation and the history of mankind. But he said Catholic thought did not preclude a design fashioned through an evolutionary process. 'God's project of creation can be carried out through secondary causes in the natural course of events, without having to think of miraculous interventions that point in this or that direction,' he wrote. Neither Dr. Facchini nor the editors of L'Osservatore could be reached for comment. Lawrence M. Krauss, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, said Dr. Facchini's article was important because it made the case that people did not have to abandon religious faith in order to accept the theory of evolution. 'Science does not make that requirement,' he said.

Subject: Rocking the Boat in Japan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:14:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/19/business/worldbusiness/19place.html?ex=1295326800&en=9084dbdff5fc19bf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 19, 2006 Rocking the Boat in Japan By FLOYD NORRIS and MARTIN FACKLER Is the Japanese establishment out to destroy an upstart who had the gall to try hostile takeovers and expand aggressively through acquisitions? Or is Takafumi Horie simply a 33-year-old crook who fooled investors with fake numbers? Whatever the reality, a raid by prosecutors on the offices of the Livedoor Company in Tokyo set off something akin to panic among Japanese investors yesterday, sending share prices sharply lower and forcing the Tokyo Stock Exchange to close early. Mr. Horie, a college dropout, is the founder and chief executive of Livedoor, an Internet portal company that used to be called the Livin' On the Edge Company. He has been the most un-Japanese of Japanese executives: a T-shirt-clad young Internet tycoon who became a national celebrity by breaking the rules and getting extremely rich along the way. He made headlines last year with a hostile takeover bid for Nippon Broadcasting, a radio broadcaster that he hoped would give him control of an affiliated company, Fuji Television. The effort failed, but the settlement brought Livedoor an alliance with Fuji, which ended up as a substantial shareholder in Livedoor. Through 20 acquisitions, Livedoor became a force in broadcasting and the Internet, offering services like concert tickets and travel packages. It split its stock three times in recent years. An investor who bought one share of stock in early 2003 now has 10,000 shares. At issue, according to Japanese news reports based on unnamed sources, are suspicions that a strong profit reported in 2004 may have actually been a loss. In addition, there are reports that Japanese stock regulations may have been violated because Livedoor Marketing, an affiliated company, announced in December 2004 that it would acquire Money Life, a publisher, for shares, when, in fact, it had already secretly bought it for cash. Mr. Horie also made unsuccessful efforts to buy a baseball team and to run for Parliament as an independent committed to reform. But it was the takeover bid for Nippon Broadcasting in 2005 that caught the most attention in the business world. It was financed with an unusual type of convertible bond and featured a purchase of 35 percent of Nippon during after-hours trading. It turned out there was a loophole - since closed - in Japanese law that did not cover after-hours purchases of large blocks and thus Livedoor was able to escape some regulations. On Monday evening, prosecutors raided Livedoor's offices in the Roppongi district of Tokyo. There has still been no announcement of what they were investigating, but the news leaks and the somewhat tepid response from the company did not restore confidence. 'We are conducting our own investigation, and we will report the results as soon as possible,' Mr. Horie said Tuesday, looking frazzled after being interrogated for most of the night. 'I would like to apologize to all the people involved for raising concerns about our company.' Other company officials said they had done nothing wrong. On Tuesday, Livedoor traded in small volume at the lowest allowable price under Tokyo Stock Exchange rules, 596 yen, a fall of 100 yen. Yesterday, the price fell the limit again, to 496 yen, but there were no buyers. At that price, the company is valued at 520 billion yen (about $4.5 billion). Even at those prices, many owners of Livedoor may have large profits - assuming they can cash in their shares. In early 2003, before the first split, the shares traded for the equivalent of 12 yen. The company had reported surging sales and profits. In the year ended September 2004, it reported sales of 10.81 billion yen, up 38 percent, and profits of 1.2 billion yen, up 239 percent. Earnings per share climbed to 2.17 yen, a rise of 163 percent. The Yomiuri newspaper reported yesterday that investigators think the company may have actually lost money that year. Reported profits came down in the year through September 2005, but still seemed good, and the shares climbed to a high of 794 yen late last year. During December, 949 million shares traded, only 100 million less than the total number outstanding. It was a stock that many investors embraced. Now, those investors seem to be fleeing, and not just from Livedoor. Livedoor did not trade yesterday, but sale orders for many stocks overwhelmed the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which was forced to close early because it could not handle the volume. The Nikkei 225-stock average fell 2.9 percent, or 464.77 points, to 15,341.18. Far deeper drops were suffered yesterday by Internet-related companies. Yahoo Japan fell 9.8 percent, while Softbank, a large provider of Internet access services, lost 13 percent of its value. That followed steep drops for both stocks on Tuesday. If the leaked suspicions of Livedoor prove to be accurate, the fallout could damage public confidence in the Japanese market. Individual investors largely bailed out in the years after the Japanese bubble burst in the early 1990's, but last year's 40 percent rise in the Nikkei 225 helped to bring more investors back. Proof that Livedoor falsified its books could be seen as a significant indictment of corporate governance procedures and safeguards in Japan, which has not followed the United States in requiring that a majority of directors be outsiders who are not company employees. Of the five Livedoor directors listed by Bloomberg, four are Livedoor employees, including Mr. Horie. The only nonemployee director of the company, Noriyuki Yamazaki, is a former employee who left in 2001. He is now an executive of Planex Communications, an electronics company whose shares fell 28 percent, or 51,000 yen, to 132,000 yen in trading on Tuesday and yesterday. Until this week, Mr. Horie had enjoyed the status of a movie star in Japan, with crowds gathering to catch a glimpse of his well-known boyish, pudgy face and spiked hair. Now, some fear the establishment is exacting its revenge on a brash young maverick who for a time had seemed to herald a new era of bolder, more aggressive corporate leadership. Part of his allure was a success story that made him appear to be the Bill Gates of Japan. Mr. Horie dropped out of a top university after starting his company in 1996. He built Livedoor into one of Japan's most heavily trafficked Internet portal sites, offering free e-mail, a blog that he wrote, travel reservations, consumer financing and even lists of used cars for sale. Mr. Horie was known for zipping around town in a silver-blue Ferrari with his bikini-model girlfriend. He dismissed, as a 'club of old men,' the leaders of Japan's clannish business elite. 'Those salarymen chief executives don't have many personal assets compared to business owners who started their own business,' he said in an interview two years ago after the owners of a baseball team in Osaka refused his offer to buy the team. 'They're smug in their little world and, lacking fresh blood, they can only think about shrinking the industry.' Now Mr. Horie is left to deal with his own troubles. According to the Nikkan Sports newspaper, he has shelved plans for his next venture, a compact disc of his band with pop songs about his philosophy. Even though there are still no official allegations against Livedoor, the exchange authorities are not waiting. Yesterday, Taizo Nishimuro, the exchange chairman, gave the company until tomorrow to provide more information and threatened to delist it if the information was not adequate.

Subject: More proof of swensens lies From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:55:02 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Bogle published a book on the soul of capitalism - swensen says we got to restrict the little guys options - only richie can be sophisticated - I dont think Bogle agrees - we dont need to restrict the little guys choices - we just need to make a fair and level playing field for ALL - with proper accounting, proper reporting, regulation, information - etc etc - Bogle says our corporate governance is bad and needs some fixing - but not as bad as japan obviously: Proof that Livedoor falsified its books could be seen as a significant indictment of corporate governance procedures and safeguards in Japan, which has not followed the United States in requiring that a majority of directors be outsiders who are not company employees. Now according to swensen, if we had restricted the little guy - the smart rich investors wouldn't have fallen for these same accounting shenanigans - what crap. I saw a movie with heath ledger called a KNIGHTS TALE - he was a poor little guy - but when he got on that battlefield with this english noblemen - he kicked ass with the best of them. I saw a movie called CHARIOTS of FIRE - Eric Liddel was a poor scumbag scotsman in the 24 olympics - but he kicked ass out there with those rich lords and kings - swensen has made me very upset with his smugness.

Subject: Turning Asphalt to Gold From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:12:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/business/20bank.html?ex=1295413200&en=4a76deb75973919d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 Turning Asphalt to Gold By JENNY ANDERSON In late 2004, Goldman Sachs advised the city of Chicago on the $1.83 billion sale of a 99-year concession for its Skyway toll road. For its work, the firm received a nice $9 million fee. More important, Goldman also got inspiration. Across the negotiating table was an Australian bank that until recently was little known outside its home country: Macquarie Bank. In recent years, Macquarie has become the envy of Wall Street by buying the rights to operate infrastructure projects including ports, tunnels and airports, as well as toll roads, packaging them in funds and reselling the stock in those funds to the public, minting money at each stage along the way. Now Goldman is raising a $3 billion fund to invest in similar public infrastructure deals. Another unit of the bank recently bid on a public-private partnership to run the Dulles Toll Road outside Washington. Mark B. Florian, the municipal finance banker who advised Chicago on the Skyway deal, has moved to New York to oversee the bank's efforts to advise on, invest in and better understand infrastructure assets. And Goldman is not alone. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the best and brightest of Wall Street are for once not complimenting each other, but an outsider on the rise. Credit Suisse, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS are all in different stages of exploring how to make money on public infrastructure, both as an adviser to others and as a principal in investing in the deals. Credit Suisse is looking at how to leverage its expertise in buying real estate and advising on the sale of airports; both UBS and Credit Suisse are trying to gauge whether their big private banking clients would be interested in the assets. 'Before anyone else, Macquarie saw the potential of the U.S. market,' said Robert W. Poole Jr., the director of transportation studies at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian research group. 'They have the most robust model of highways as a new utility that can be an investor-owned utility like gas and electric utilities.' With local and state governments in the United States in search of ways to increase revenue without raising taxes or issuing bonds, public-private partnerships have recently become a hot-ticket investment idea. During the last 12 months, more than $20 billion worth of private sector proposals have been submitted to transportation departments from Georgia to Oregon, according to a study by Mr. Poole. Just last night, bankers from Wall Street firms were working late to polish bids for the Indiana Toll Road. 'There's opportunity popping up all over the U.S.,' said Greg Hulsizer, chief executive of California Transportation Ventures. In 1991, the company won a concession to build the South Bay Expressway, a 10-mile tollway in San Diego, and it is now owned by a Macquarie fund. 'It's not uncommon to see public-private partnerships for infrastructure around the world, especially in Europe,' he said, 'Here in the States, it's a new, emerging trend.' Macquarie came into its own only in 1985, when, as a subsidiary of Hill Samuel & Company, a British merchant bank, it received an Australian banking license. It is now a deal powerhouse; in 2004 and 2005, it bought $17 billion worth of global infrastructure assets, according to Thomson Financial. Its model looks particularly alluring to Wall Street. Using a small capital base, Macquarie acquires giant assets by borrowing other people's money, then packages the assets into funds, which are sold to investors through public offerings or as unlisted funds. Along the way, it makes a killing on fees. 'It's an obvious gold mine,' said one competitor who asked not to be named because his bank is working on its own infrastructure strategy. The pitch to governments is simple: Macquarie will look after the assets - maintaining the roads or ports, raising toll road fees to make the investment more profitable - then give them back, in 99 years or so. 'It's not a sell-off of the family silverware,' says Murray Bleach, head of Macquarie's North American infrastructure advisory business. 'You leave it with someone who can polish it up and earn more money for the use of it.' Unlike private equity funds, which look for rates of return of 20 to 30 percent, these funds expect returns in the low to high teens, according to Macquarie officials, or 6 to 12 percent, according to competitors. Macquarie has recognized that global investors have a seemingly insatiable appetite for dependable returns of 5 to 10 percent, especially since government bond yields have been lower of late. The potential for fees in these public infrastructure deals is astounding, even by Wall Street's obsessive and excessive fee standards. Bankers can make advisory fees on the sale of the often-large assets. Then, once packaged into funds, the assets earn Macquarie management fees (1 to 1.5 percent) as well as incentive fees: 20 percent on profits above a certain threshold. The thresholds vary, based on benchmarks appropriate to the assets in the funds. The model has risks. Low interest rates have provided flush financing for Macquarie. In essence, its deals are like leveraged buyouts: it provides the equity, borrows the debt and rakes in rich fees. Higher interest rates would make debt financing less attractive and could affect returns across the board. This week, Macquarie's chief financial officer told Bloomberg News that the bank would earn no performance fees for any of its infrastructure or specialized funds for the six months that ended Dec. 31, which will reduce the bank's revenues. 'The rush into this will create some opacity around risk,' said one Wall Street executive who is also looking at this strategy and insisted on anonymity because his bank did not yet have its strategy developed. 'There will be other shoes to drop on this.' For its part, Macquarie welcomes Wall Street's crashing its party. 'We've been saying it's a great asset class and now some of our dear friends are joining,' Mr. Bleach of Macquarie said. 'The market is not static. There will be plenty of assets to buy.' The Australian bank's model is a result of national circumstances. A 1992 law required employers to set aside a percentage of their employees' income for retirement. Today, workers are required to set aside at least 9 percent, which has helped build a national retirement nest egg of $591 billion, with $70 billion to $80 billion added every year - providing a huge cushion of capital to Australian banks. Macquarie bankers had been advising the Australian government on the sale of public assets when it started a privatization drive in the early 1990's. Nicholas Moore, the head of investment banking in Sydney, decided the bank should get in on the action. In 1996, a Macquarie fund made an investment in an Australian toll road. Today, Macquarie has roughly $23 billion invested in what the bank calls specialized infrastructure funds. The specialist funds have contributed heavily to the bank's bottom line. For the half-year that ended September 2005, corporate finance, which includes the specialist funds as well as advisory and financing work, contributed 41 percent of the bank's profit of 482 million Australian dollars ($360.5 million). Macquarie shares have risen more than 900 percent since they made their debut on the Australian Stock Exchange in July 1996. Macquarie's funds are invested all over the world and trade on various global exchanges: Macquarie Infrastructure Company Trust trades on the New York Stock Exchange, for example. Macquarie's name is everywhere - its deals have been called Macquisitions - including a listing as a lead bidder for the London Stock Exchange. Recently, Macquarie has bought cooling systems in Chicago, satellite parking lots at various American airports and, most recently, with Black Diamond Capital Management, the Smart Carte Corporation, the concessionaire for baggage carts and strollers at airports across the United States. The bank is frequently accused of overpaying. When it bid $1.83 billion for the Chicago Skyway with Cintra, a Spanish private sector developer of transportation infrastructure, the next closest bid was $700 million. 'Our view was we didn't overpay,' Mr. Bleach said. 'The market says we didn't.' The bank refinanced about $1 billion of the debt in 2005, recouping about half of that for the equity partners. The Chicago Skyway deal sheds some light on why such a concession might be attractive to governments. When Macquarie, together with Cintra, won the 99-year concession to run the Skyway, the city set aside a rainy day fund of $500 million, paid down $855 million in Skyway and city debt, set up an eight-year $375 million annuity and even had some money left over, which it will use to deliver heat to the city's neediest people. In exchange, Macquarie and Cintra will operate the toll road, which generates about $20 million in cash flow a year, for 35 years. The concessionaires will be able to raise tolls and will be required to maintain the tollway. 'The economic analysis in favor of doing the deal was overwhelming.' said John R. Schmidt, a lawyer from Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw who represented the city. California has also seen advantages in doing a deal with Macquarie. In 1991, California Transportation Ventures won the right to build Route 125, a 10-mile toll road connecting one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, Chula Vista, to a major thoroughfare. But it took more than a decade to have environmental permits approved - the Quino checkerspot butterfly was discovered on the land - forcing the company to look for an infusion of capital. In two deals, Macquarie bought 100 percent of the partnership rights to the concession, and the toll road is under construction. 'We get a much-needed facility without having to divert funds from other projects to build it,' said Laurie Berman, deputy district director for the California Department of Transportation. Now that most of Wall Street is rushing in, it is unclear whether there will be enough investors who want to put their money in public infrastructure funds. And more competitors may just raise the prices of available assets. As it grows, Macquarie will face its own challenges. It has had only two major mistakes, investments it has since sold: a power station and a fiber optic network, both in Australia. It cannot afford many more. 'It's not like we will make 50 percent on one asset and zero on another,' Mr. Bleach of Macquarie said. 'It's more like 13, 14, 15. We can't have any zeros.'

Subject: Re: Turning Asphalt to Gold From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 13:11:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: These Bankers offering advisory services for a 'killing' in fees are going to spoil this for everyone. Roads like all forms of infrastructure required revenue for upkeep, maintenance and rehabilitation. Like all forms of infrastructure roads require a revenue stream. Traditionally the revenue comes from the tax on your fuel (or gasoline). You see we can easily calculate that for every mile driven, each car has consumed ‘x’ amount of gallons of gas and hence contributed ‘y’ amount of fuel tax to that particular portion of road. The calculations become very sophisticated when you have to take into consideration that trucks contribute far more wear and tear on the road in comparison the gas they consume and of course there are also vehicles that use diesel which need to be specially considered. So in essence, the same way you pay for home heating or water or phone infrastructure, you also pay for the use of roads. The only difference is that the road tax is indirect. Now there are many cases where a particular road operates at a deficit, and the USA has a fantastic toll road program on the government owned interstate highways that charges nominal amounts to bring a particular road back into a surplus. Private toll roads on the other hand are ‘extra’ to the road network. In essence, you pay your road tax (through your gasoline) to drive on a road that is not being covered by the fuel tax but instead you have to pay extra to get onto that road. The government road department pockets that fuel tax as an extra (they don’t need to do maintenance work to cover the damage of the road because you are driving on a private road). Toll roads are also inherently un-efficient in money transactions - a significant portion of the money collected on a toll road actually goes to the people collecting the money, whether in an electronic toll system or manual toll system. So already, private toll roads can be seen as a way to make us pay more. However, there are many complications – it is possible to drive on a toll road without paying the toll instead government pays the toll concessionaire directly out of our fuel tax – this is called shadow tolling but is becoming very rare. The biggest problem is when a government department sells a road concession that was originally paid for with tax money to a concessionaire and the concessionaire charges a toll to drive the road. That is like a double tax which is totally unfair. But because of the sophistication, complicated wording, etc, etc, government and consultants tend to hide the reality. Now it is okay to have toll roads, but it is not okay when the toll roads become a single main infrastructure that is very inelastic, meaning that they are in essence turning the toll road into a monopoly type business. This is the main attraction to big investors – a secure business. Then the big investors do what all lazy money thirsty idiots tend to do – abuse the scenario and hopelessly over charge for everything. Whether it’s the advisory/consultancy fees or even the toll fees to the public. This is what your article is starting to point out. I firmly believe that many of these companies flirt with toll-rejection and seriously forget that the public can and does say, “No, I will not be ripped off.” Amazingly the first case of toll rejection that I know of is right here in Canada on the Moncton highway. The government department sold the concession on an already built highway. Commuters were being squeezed in paying charges for driving the highway every day. A toll-busting campaign got under way and they pushed the various local politicians to make the promise, “If I get elected I will take away those toll booths.” Well the one politician who did make the promise, was voted in and today the Moncton highway has been turned into a shadow toll system squeezing the government department for the tax revenue and making that department learn one seriously harsh lesson. Toll busting type campaigns are underway in many places. In some cases privatization makes a whole lot of sense, but in many cases the privateers are simply abusing. The abuse becomes ammunition for the toll busters. The saddest part here is that private sector participation in infrastructure, if run properly, has the potential to unlock so much development particularly in developing countries. Governments can make ‘off balance sheet’ investments in their infrastructure and accelerate development. But in a developing country you normally get a particular infrastructure concession that will cost, say, 80 million US$, instead of the billion dollar price tag you would see for something similar in the western world. Then you get these advisory services idiots such as KPMG or PWC (and so many others) abusing the opportunity coming in and charge advisory fees that are in excess of 10% of the entire concession. This service fee alone raises the overall price and making the final concession unaffordable or result in its failure (I can name many cases where this has already happened). Again we have a situation where private sector participation has in theory so much value to offer, but some degenerate idiots who don’t care about the rest of the world but only in the maximizing of their bottom line using every trick in the book spoil it for everyone. We then have to create regulatory bodies to ensure abuse doesn’t get out of hand – who pays the regulator? By the time we are done paying for the advisory services, the profit of the concessionaire, the actual operating costs (money collection) of the toll road and the regulator; you have to ask the question, “Is it really worth it or should we not have government simply sell bonds and build and maintain the road themselves?”

Subject: How China avoids this situation From: Mik To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 13:32:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: China as we all know is building roads at an incredible rate. They are building expressways all over the place. I worked on a project where there is two cities divided by a mountain range on the South West part of China. There is a relatively modern road (5 year old) weaving through the mountains connecting the two cities. Some high ranking official placed a ruler on a map between the two cities and drew a straight line saying this is where the new expressway must go. The road is incredible, 87km (approx. 55 miles) of road that has 224 bridge and 48 tunnels. 20 of those bridges are super long suspension bridges. This is a relatively small project by Chinese standards but there has been no such engineering feit in the USA or any other part of the world. Not even the Alpine roads in Italy or Switzerland can duplicate what these guys are pulling off. China has learned one VERY big lesson from the USA. To ensure your economy will continue to grow well and stay very competitive…. Build roads… good roads… build more roads and more roads and build and build and build those damn roads. But China has succeeded in making all their expressways toll roads from day one… without paying a cent to those abusing consultancy/advisory services idiots. You see the consultants/advisors only come in when you are setting up a concession for the first time. They spend a lot of time doing traffic volume predictions, insert oh so many clauses to protect against currency devaluation, traffic volume decreases, overloading of trucks (which is meant to be enforced by the police), maintenance standards, escalation on tolling, etc, etc. The preparation of a Build Operate Transfer (BOT) concession is just so sophisticated with the greatest (and some time devious) minds battle it out between the concessionaire and the advisory service consultants for prolonged periods of time. The concession documents for one project make up a small library. This is where so much money is spent (maybe those consultants/advisors aren’t that bad). So the Chinese took a novel approach… sorry let me correct myself. The Chinese took a very clever approach. The Chinese borrow money from the Asian Development Bank or the World Bank (IBRD) at amazing terms: something like 3% interest over 90 years. They build the road and set up the tolling system. Once the road is up and running and making surplus cash, they then sell the concession. But this time they are selling a running, working business with all the track records of traffic volumes, operations costs, etc, etc. They don’t need these expensive advisors and complicated contracts as they are simply selling a going-concern on a concessionaire basis. The Concessionaire pays out the millions (or billions) of dollars, the Chinese turn around and immediately pay off their debt to the Asian Development Bank which then alleviates their debt status and allows them to borrow again and build another road. Now if you want to build up your country’s infrastructure in a hurry that is how you should do it.

Subject: Early repayment penalty From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:09:26 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: all lazy money thirsty idiots tend to do We have toll roads down here in fl and I see some troubling trends with some of them too - the toll collectors are monopolies on critical public infrastructure - the middleman have got to go in so many areas of our gubbment and business sectors - they don't really add value anymore. Mik we have a representative gubbment - now from what I understand of history - farmer joe couldn't take a few months off from tending crops to go on a horse to washington and vote on issues directly - so he nominated a guy to do it for him and all the other farmers - but today with technology do we really need all these middle men? Cant our citizens in so many parts of the developed world have a more direct gubbment? We all have computers and instant acces to all the news and information of the globe with the click of a mouse - do we need to concentrate power in institutions of gubbments, banks, business, wall street that have proven time and again they will abuse it no matter the safeguards? Anyways - the loans paid back early by the chinese to the world bank - is there no prepayment penalty? It would seem to me an reverse robin hood banker would see all the profit china was making and start changing the rules where they would have a payoff penalty so the could capture some of the profit.

Subject: YOU HAVE HIT THE NAIL ON THE HEAD From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:53:19 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I firmly believe you have just hit the nail on the head with the question about bank charges for early repayment. Let me ask you a couple questions: Why should a bank really charge you for early repayment? Why should a car be traditionally paid off within 5 years? Why should a credit card limit not be set higher and repayments over a longer period? Here we are complaining about how the USA is living off borrowed money and expanding that borrowing on a consistent basis. What happens when interest rates go up and people can't afford their home loans? Okay let's go back to China. China takes out a loan over 90 years and the Bank’s book shows that they have assured debtors for 90 years. In essence the Bank’s book looks good and secure for a prolonged period. 5 years later the loan repayment has 85 years to go and the bank’s book looks 5 years weaker than it did at the beginning. So the Chinese pay up their loan (good cash injection for the Bank) and then turn around and start up another 90 year loan... all of a sudden the Bank’s book is looking good again and the Bankers are looking pretty (perhaps they even get a bonus). Now why should the Bank charge for early repayment?... well hey due to some weird tradition, they think they should charge something for early repayment and well, heck go ahead charge 0.000001% which a huge lot of service fees on such a large amount of money and some extra money has been made in the whole process. Okay now let's come back to my original questions and my recent experience. In South Africa we suffered an economic shock during the Asian crisis. Their was a run on our currency. The value of the Rand went from about R6 to the US$ to about R14 to the US$ within a couple of days. Interest rates went from about 14% to a whopping 22% in one week. People couldn't afford their homes. So that bank (to avoid a mass of repossessions) quickly worked out a new deal for home owners to extend their bonds to 40 years (who the hell has heard of a 40 year bond?). This lowered the monthly repayments and eased the deal. Once the crisis was over, the bonds were re-calculated to about 25 years (keeping in mind that many people had already paid about 10 years of the bond and now had an extra 25 years). Hey the bank’s book all of sudden looks good again kind of like the China situation. Soon after words South African Banks started offering amazing deals on lending instruments including 6 month repayment holidays and just so many more amazing products. I think the experience taught the South African Banks a great deal about 'thinking outside the box' with regards to money lending. My one bank in South Africa has recently agreed to extend my home loan on what they call the 'Access Bond'. I have just been approved for a $200,000 extension of 25 years and can do what ever I want with the money. I can even buy a car and pay it off over 25 years at a 9% interest rate. I can pay it off within one year and restart my credit line. It is as if I have an open credit line that I can loan, repay, re-loan as I want. And the clinche - I live in Canada! Hey take a look at their site: http://www.standardbank.co.za/SBIC/Frontdoor_07_02/0,2493,176061_7354184_0,00.html So now let's tie this back to the USA living off borrowed money - the housing bubble etc, etc. When interest rates finally come up in the USA, I don't predict we will see mass repossessions of houses. I predict the USA banks will follow suit and simply recalculate the home loan periods and make their loan book look a little better again... ironic? Also, I predict that credit card companies may well extend repayment schedules far beyond we ever imagined. Yes this is spooky - give out so much more credit than ever before. But hey our grand parents would be spooked to see what our current credit card limits are today. It's all relative... I guess. Also what is the default rate and what is the interest rate. You can literally balance one against the other. The balance of default rate against the interest probably has to do with the recent boom in micro-lending in developing countries: Small micro-finance institutions are learning that this isn’t as risky a business as many thought it is. Now your question about becoming a more efficient society and cutting out the middle man... wellll... I agree of course... but that middle man is going to convince you and every institution to ensure they keep their job and that they get rich in the process.

Subject: Billions for the Bankers - Debt for the People From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 18:24:56 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Let me ask you a couple questions: Why should a bank really charge you for early repayment? Why should a car be traditionally paid off within 5 years? Why should a credit card limit not be set higher and repayments over a longer period? In the 20's in the USA - I think loans were only for 5 or 7 years - they then expanded to 30 year loans to deal with the problems - remember Japan went to 100 year multi generational loans when her problems hit - grandpa, son, and grandson all taking on the debt for entire lifetimes. happens when interest rates go up and people can't afford their home loans? I posted about this a few posts down to David E - the BIG QUESTION? This guy thinks very bad things gonna happen. http://bankdersysrisk.blogspot.com/ Bankers are looking pretty (perhaps they even get a bonus). Now why I am sure they get a bonus - hehe. should the Bank charge for early repayment?... well hey due to some weird tradition, Will you please elaborate on this wierd tradition? I remember Jesus walking into the temple and overturning the tables of the moneychangers - he didn't want the bankers in his house eh? Neither a borrower or a lender be eh? hehe - Usury not liked even 2000 years ago. You know the jewish folks I know get interest free loans and can pay back anytime NO PENALTY - but us gentiles - we not so lucky - hehe. they think they should charge something for early repayment and well, heck go ahead charge 0.000001% which a huge lot of service fees on such a large amount of money and some extra money has been made in the whole process. Yes Mik - I see many hedge funds want 20% of the profit - heck why stop there - make it 30% - banks same difference - why .000001 and not .00002 the next deal eh? hehe in one week. People couldn't afford their homes. So that bank (to avoid a mass of repossessions) quickly worked out a new deal for home owners to extend their bonds to 40 years (who the hell has heard of a 40 year bond?). Japan have 100 year multigenerational loan - hehe - and I read US just started longer dated stuff again. South African Banks a great deal about 'thinking outside the box' with regards to money lending. yes definitely - the National Association of Realtors is very powerful group in the USA, but worried about the bankers stealing thier business - bankers have and will become very creative in finding ways to keep themselves in power and keep the sheeple working for them. loan on what they call the 'Access Bond'. I have just been approved for a $200,000 extension of 25 years and can do what ever I want with the money. The US congress is passing reverse mortgage legislation in this session MIK - we have lots of baby boomers about to get old - and this legislation lets anyone thats over 62 take the equity out of thier house and do whatever they want with the money and NEVER have to repay unless they die or sell the home - congress going to increase the limits - read my post over here: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22057344&srchtxt=REVERSE MORTGAGE I can even buy a car and pay it off over 25 years at a 9% interest rate. Yes - bankers have to keep you taking money - very important - hehe. the housing bubble etc, etc. When interest rates finally come up in the USA, I don't predict we will see mass repossessions of houses. No, the banks dont want houses - they want earnings - they will have wage slaves sending all thier productivity to the banker - hehe. I predict the USA banks will follow suit and simply recalculate the home loan periods and make their loan book look a little better again... ironic? Sounds like a plan. Also, I predict that credit card companies may well extend repayment schedules far beyond we ever imagined. Yes - new bankruptcy legislation in the USA is to keep people from defaulting on debt - but paying back forever - hehe. micro-lending in developing countries: Small micro-finance institutions are learning that this isn’t as risky a business as many thought it is. Yes - the gubbment always bail you out eh? http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22086813 Does this increase interest rates? Interest rates are set by supply verses demand. So as long as the government can provide policies which induce the expansion of credit, then interest rates can remain low and actually be forced lower if the supply of credit increases and the demand for credit decreases. How does this further affect hedge fund hedging strategies? Hedge funds are part of the financial economy, therefore they are very vulnerable to low interest rates. Therefore the government may rig the system to always pay for the counter-party, but the buying power of that money may decrease, and decrease very quickly. In the end if the government keeps with this policy then the all assets are then owned by the financial economy as the government transfers wealth to the financial economy at the expanse of the real economy via bailouts and increasing the money supply. Much like the system we have today whereas the real economy is now much smaller than the financial economy. Therefore the strategy for any hedge fund or financial institution is to take as much risk as possible due to a lack of any real downside risk for major players. The only way this will end is if the other countries stop accepting our currency. Then the value of the real economy shall increase again. The first sign of a currency rebellion will be when other countries refuse to pay the counter-party failures in their financial systems. Since all financial systems are closely connected, this will effect the US very quickly. that middle man is going to convince you and every institution to ensure they keep their job and that they get rich in the process. Jesus threw out the money changers - the founding fathers fled because they could not throw out the oppressors - will the bankers be able to pull it off today? When I see oprah on TV telling mainstream folks to get upset - I think we will have a real change - but I dont see her doing that yet.

Subject: Re: How China avoids this situation From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 13:58:45 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please please keep all of the comments you add. I use Gmail because there is unlimited storage and far more ease than the university mail system. Gmail is my library, and should be yours. These notes will give you and others all sorts of ideas. Notice the post on the critical U.N. warning on the new malaria drug. I agree with these insights completely.

Subject: pssst Emma From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:10:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I am a transport economics consultant. I work only in developing countries. My forte is private sector participation in infrastructure. Believe me - I have way too many documents with these kinds of words. But thank you for the kind remarks.

Subject: Re: pssst Emma From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 18:18:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Oh, I know, save all you write in any event even when repetitive :)

Subject: What to Make of Dance From Japan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:10:51 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/arts/dance/20japa.html?ex=1295413200&en=d39e74a8ffeef038&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 The Enigmas, the Oddities: What to Make of Dance From Japan By JOHN ROCKWELL Modern dance from Japan is much among us these days, ubiquitous and mysterious. One can try to understand it historically: how various more or less Western, more or less tradition-based dancers first made their marks in Europe in the 1920's; how German modern dance (for various not entirely savory reasons) was a big influence in the 20's and 30's; how Butoh, so clearly reflecting postwar and postnuclear trauma, has permeated the world; how American modern and postmodern dance have been the biggest outside influences in recent decades; and how the Japan Society in particular has served as an invaluable showcase for new Japanese dance in New York. Or one can tiptoe into cultural stereotypes. The Japanese have always had an extraordinary ability to adapt foreign ideas and make them their own. They began with China 1,000 years ago and continued with the West after 1853. But through it all, something specifically Japanese remained. For me, Japan is the most seductively alien of all foreign high cultures. There is something about its mixture of samurai masculinity and geisha docility, about the Ginza and punks and neon lights, about the controlled violence of Yukio Mishima's novels and the controlled Impressionism of Toru Takemitsu's music. But that's a dangerous path to tread. Images of the German character propagated in holdovers from World War II propaganda argued that something buried deep in the German soul led inexorably to Nazism. Never mind that this was a classic case of working backward along the causational chain, and that maybe Hitler was not the only possible destiny of German history and culture. Similar stereotypes abounded in anti-Japanese propaganda: the 'Chrysanthemum and the Sword' syndrome, one might call it, to cite a book by Ruth Benedict (1946) that argued for an inherent tension between aesthetics and bellicosity in the Japanese character. In San Francisco in the late 1940's, there were still lingering fears of Japanese attacks and lingering hostilities based on cartoon Japanese distortions. But maybe the best way to approach Japanese dance is neither historically nor stereotypically, but experientially. There are plenty of opportunities to see new Japanese dance now and to come to one's own conclusions as to what it all means. Tonight and tomorrow, for instance, the Japan Society is presenting its ninth annual Japanese Contemporary Dance Showcase, with three United States debuts and two premieres. Not having yet seen these particular dancers, I can't speak to their quality. But I can recall and describe the varied Japanese dance I encountered last year. Almost all of it was engrossing. Perhaps the two examples most striking in their Japaneseness were the Project Fukurow, seen last summer at Jacob's Pillow, and Kakuya Ohashi and Dancers at the Kitchen in September. Project Fukurow was notable for its diabolical puppets and machines, especially three miniature radio-controlled robots with monster jaws, tanklike bodies and wriggling, scythelike centipede legs. Designed by Fukurow Ishikawa, the company's director, these were ostensibly benign - or 'not evil,' as he called them. They looked evil to me, and the whole scenario of a protagonist helplessly under siege from the dark side of his own subconscious was pretty scary. Mr. Ohashi's 'dancers' consisted of himself and a bedraggled young woman named MiuMiu; live electric guitar sounds were provided by a young man named Skank. Supposedly reflecting the alienation of Tokyo today, their piece evoked anomie, isolation, the humiliation of women, the fixations of men. It was strange, off-putting and compelling. Mr. Ohashi appeared on a double bill with the American choreographer Beth Gill; the program was organized by Yasuko Yokoshi, who seems a prime example of the lure of postmodernism and New York for Japanese choreographers today. Ms. Yokoshi will have her own program March 23 to 26 at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church. Eiko and Koma are quintessentially Japanese, and also longtime New York residents. Late last summer they participated in a quintuple bill of choreographers throwing dances together on short notice at the old Tobacco Warehouse in Dumbo, Brooklyn. They represent the always fascinating tension within Westernized Japanese artists as to how to come to terms with Japan's rich artistic tradition; the same tensions are faced by young Japanese composers and painters. Eiko and Koma's stock in trade is extreme slow motion, the grotesqueries of Butoh stretched to infinity, anguished and calm. The other Japanese choreographers whose work I saw last year were all at the Japan Society. In February came the Condors, all men and all cute. Their routines involve them dressing like the young Beatles (onstage and in their Richard Lester-like films, shown during their performances) and acting out vaudevillian routines. They are very clever - the Hello Kitty side of the Japanese character - but they could profitably focus a little more on movement, at which they're also very skilled. A program in May, presented in a series called 'Cool Japan' and in conjunction with Takashi Murakami's brilliantly creepy 'Little Boy' exhibition, consisted of three short performances, as well as a prelude in the lobby. Osamu Jareo and Misako Terada offered an implied narrative reminiscent of the hushed intimacies of recent Asian film. More disturbing (and hence, somehow, more Japanese) were Natsuko Tezuka, who put together a whole performance based on strange bodily tics and quivers and spasms, and Shigemi Kitamura, who deals with isolating body parts and a degree of oddness that builds to a screaming crescendo (yelling, flailing, hitching her skirt over her head). And then in October came Akemi Takeya, who performed post-Butoh ritual, goofy skits and, at the end, a surreal piece called 'Moon Moss Blossom' that involved bronze body makeup, toplessness, a brown hoop skirt and silhouettes. It was eerie and very beautiful. So does this mean that all Japanese dancers, or the best and most characteristic ones, are rapt and strange, filtering (to Western eyes and ears) the masked impassivity of Noh and the puppetry of Bunraku and the extreme makeup and movements of Kabuki through a Western sensibility? Not exactly. By now there are Japanese ballet dancers and Japanese tap dancers and Japanese ballroom dancers (see the original and superior 1996 Japanese version of the film 'Shall We Dance?'). Perhaps there soon won't be, or there already isn't, a viable category of 'Japanese dance' that can be described and categorized; perhaps all that will be left will be globalized individuals. But as long as Japan retains its unique character, its potent blend of tradition and cutting-edge modernity, its natural beauty and urban flash, its isolation and guarded openness to the world, its computer games and manga and anime and woodcuts and meditational rock gardens, there will always be something recognizable as Japanese dance. And we'll all be better for it.

Subject: U.S. Cuts Duty on Cement From Mexico From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:09:16 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/business/worldbusiness/20cement.html?ex=1295413200&en=4d5ef23d1b4a1bd0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 U.S. Cuts Duty on Cement From Mexico By ELISABETH MALKIN MEXICO CITY - The United States and Mexico agreed on Thursday to phase out American duties on Mexican cement imports, a move aimed at easing cement shortages caused by a building boom in Asia and rising demand for cement to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. The agreement would reduce duties on Mexican imports to $3 a metric ton, from $26, but limit imports to three million tons a year in the Southern states for the next three years, according to a statement from the Commerce Department. After that, all duties and quotas would be ended. The agreement ends a 16-year dispute that began after the United States imposed duties on Mexican cement imports, responding to cement producers in Southern states who argued that Mexican producers were selling cement in the United States for less than in Mexico. At the same time, American producers contend that they face obstacles to selling in Mexico. Commerce Secretary Carlos M. Gutierrez said, 'The agreement will help ensure that Gulf Coast communities have the resources to rebuild and it will also help U.S. cement producers access the Mexican market.' The dispute over cement duties has been a constant irritant in the trade relationship between Mexico and the United States. Mexico has filed numerous complaints against the duties under the North American Free Trade Agreement and with the World Trade Organization. Under the agreement, the litigation is suspended. 'This is one of those classic agreements where all the stakeholders can claim victory,' said Joe Dorn, legal counsel for the Southern Tier Cement Committee, a group of 23 American cement companies that has supported the duties. The main beneficiary of the decision is Cemex, the world's third-largest cement company, which is based in the northern Mexico industrial capital of Monterrey. The American construction industry uses about 125 million tons of cement a year, importing about a quarter of it, said Michael S. Carliner, an economist with the National Association of Home Builders in Washington.

Subject: Medical Devices Are Hot From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 10:07:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/business/21device.html?ex=1295499600&en=895353d507339369&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 21, 2006 Medical Devices Are Hot, Which Is Why Guidant Is By BARNABY J. FEDER Think of it as the fight for the Bionic Baby Boomer. From head to toe, aging boomers are being kept alive and kicking - or at least walking - by an expanding array of devices that combine the newest medical knowledge with the latest breakthroughs in digital electronics and material sciences. Already, the medical device field has become one of the most innovative and profitable segments of the economy. And as wave after wave of baby boomers enter their prime health care spending years, the medical device market is expected to grow by double digits for years to come. That trend more than any other may explain the current bidding war for the medical device maker Guidant. Many analysts have questioned the financial sanity of Boston Scientific's latest offer: $27 billion. Guidant's original suitor, Johnson & Johnson, whose most recent offer was around $25 billion, has until midnight Tuesday to indicate whether it will make yet another bid for the company. In many ways, Guidant is a damaged company. Its market share has plunged, and its potential legal liabilities have mounted, after disclosures of fatal product defects that executives evidently knew about long before notifying doctors. But Guidant's continuing allure is its prime location in the booming medical device industry. The industry's sweet spot now is the $10 billion market for implanted devices that regulate heartbeats; Guidant has been second only to Medtronic in that field. Forecasts call for that market to expand by 15 percent annually for the next five years, with the fastest growth likely to come from the most expensive and profitable products. Guidant is also a player in the $7.6 billion market for balloon devices that can be threaded through arteries to clear blockages in blood vessels, and for the tiny metal cylinders called stents that are inserted to keep those vessels from reclosing. The worldwide market for such devices is expected to top $10 billion by 2010. The fight for Guidant, though, is only one sign of the boom in medical devices. Even products that have been on the market for decades, like artificial hips and knees, are undergoing technology-driven makeovers. The industry ranges from inexpensive equipment like disposable syringes, crutches and home pregnancy test kits to $1.3 million robotic surgery machines used to remove cancerous prostate glands and equally expensive M.R.I. diagnostic machines that can cost additional hundreds of thousands of dollars to install. But right now the financial spotlight is on cardiovascular devices like Guidant's, which treat breakdowns in the heart and circulatory system associated with aging and progressive diseases like diabetes. Drug-coated stents like Taxus from Boston Scientific are estimated to have profit margins approaching 90 percent. Heart-regulating devices like those made by Guidant, Medtronic and St. Jude Medical can cost $25,000 or more and carry gross margins as high as 70 percent. The market enthusiasm for medical devices is a bright contrast to the currently cloudy outlook for many traditional drug companies and biotechnology start-ups, which have hit snags in developing major new products. 'Devices are an area where technology rapidly fuses with medicine,' said Amit Hazan, an analyst at Suntrust Robinson Humphrey in New York who focuses primarily on device companies with market values below $1 billion. With big companies like Boston Scientific and Johnson & Johnson looking to grow by acquiring new product lines and few major medical device players like Guidant for sale, Wall Street has come to regard many of the smaller fry as prime takeover candidates. 'The index of small-cap companies I follow was up over 40 percent last year,' Mr. Hazan said. As always when markets start looking giddy, there are caution flags. Many doctors say that some of the device industry's innovations, as with a number of drugs, are being marketed too aggressively. Often, too, regulators approve devices based on relatively short-term evidence of benefits that may not end up justifying their costs. And some costs are commonly overlooked. Companies like Guidant, for example, are selling ever more sophisticated heart regulating devices. New features include ones enabling the units to deliver more varied forms of stimulation to more regions of the heart. But doctors say the new features, which can add thousands of dollars to a device's cost and more rapidly drain the battery, are often never employed. Besides the burden on the checkbook of the patient or - more likely, the insurer - the battery-sapping features may require a patient to have a replacement operation in three or four years instead of six or seven. And compared with their ties to the drug industry, doctors are much more involved with device companies in developing new products and making improvements to older ones. The sometimes tangled relationships can speed innovation. But they can also lead to overly aggressive use of new products and procedures on patients who might have benefited as well, or better, from other, less profitable treatments. Even if insurers and regulators bring some of the excesses to heel, the device companies will continue to be fueled by the same baby boomer demographics on which traditional drug companies and the newer biotechnology industry are also placing their hopes. Wall Street firms like Lazard Capital Markets project that the number of Americans over age 60 will increase by at least 30 percent over the next eight years. On average, they will spend more on health care between the ages of 60 and 70 than they did in all their previous decades combined. And by the time they are 85, they will each be spending over $16,000 annually - more than their average bills for food or shelter, according to Alexander K. Arrow, the device industry analyst at Lazard. 'Baby boomers are descending upon the health care infrastructure of the United States like locusts upon a cornfield,' Mr. Arrow wrote in an industry overview he published last month. As recently as the 1990's, Wall Street was watching the boomer demographic wave mainly for its impact on big drug companies. They flourished as the number of $1 billion drugs jumped from 4 in 1992 to 55 in 2000. Health care investors with a tolerance for risk flocked to biotechnology companies like Amgen, Genentech and Biogen that were using novel methods to create drugs. And many of the drug makers that did own device companies viewed them as a drag on growth. Eli Lilly split off Guidant in 1994, and in 2001 Bristol-Myers Squibb did the same with Zimmer Holdings, now the largest maker of hips and other artificial joints. But since 2000, earnings growth has slowed for drug makers as blockbuster drugs of the 1990's came off patent and successors proved hard to find. In the meantime, leading device companies have proved adept at racking up year after year of double-digit revenue and earnings growth. Unlike drug makers, device company can continually tinker with hit products to produce a steady stream of incremental improvements that can be used to justify price increases. And unlike drugs, devices can be designed with electronic components that link them to computers and communications networks, allowing data from patients with implants to be monitored remotely. Guidant's innovations in such patient monitoring and networking, marketed under the Latitude brand name, are among the enhancements it is counting on to help rebuild market share. Stock activity in the last five years attests to the diverging fortunes of drug and device makers. From the beginning of 2000 to the end of 2005, the share price of Pfizer, the largest drug company, declined 10.7 percent, while the stock of Medtronic, the largest independent device company, was rising 63.2 percent. During the same period Lilly's share price declined 4.3 percent (assuming dividends were reinvested) while the stock of Guidant, its device offspring, climbed more than 40 percent. Bristol-Myers's stock fell more than 53 percent, while Zimmer's rose more than 135 percent. Many of the most successful devices emerged in response to the limitations of drugs. Balloon angioplasty and stents clear blockages in blood vessels where blood-thinning drugs can no longer maintain flow. Pacemakers and defibrillators correct heartbeat abnormalities that are impossible to manage chemically. Spinal fusion devices and, more recently, artificial spinal disks have become treatments of last resort in patients for whom drugs and exercise can no longer control back pain. Device makers frequently get clearance to sell new products far more easily than drug makers. That is partly because devices rarely have broad side effects. In addition, most new devices are classified as variations on previously approved products, while each new drug is considered a chemically novel substance requiring a full review of its safety and efficacy. Regulators have allowed even devices with relatively low or short-term success rates to enter the market after makers positioned them as therapies of last resort. That happened last year with the Food and Drug Administration's controversial approval of Cyberonics' electrical stimulator of the vagus nerve, used to treat depression in cases where drug therapy has failed. Few drug makers have a clearer view of these dynamics than Johnson & Johnson, whose vast health care empire includes pharmaceuticals - 44 percent of revenue through the first three quarters of last year - but whose many device divisions already contribute more than a third of its revenue and are collectively bigger than Medtronic, the largest independent device company. Now Johnson & Johnson's working knowledge of the device market is being put to the test, as the company assesses how much value even a damaged Guidant is worth in the Battle for the Bionic Boomer.

Subject: A TV 'King' Pushes the Limits From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:58:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/international/asia/21li.html?ex=1295499600&en=fe7d16f8f7c2a431&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 21, 2006 A TV 'King' Pushes the Limits, Flashily but Gently By JIM YARDLEY Beijing THE third floor of the fashionable coffee shop is empty, so when Li Yong reaches the top of the staircase and steps onto the landing, his entrance is greeted with silence. But Mr. Li, a popular television host known for his flamboyant style, makes an entrance, nonetheless. He is dressed in a black leather jacket with studded metal shoulders matched by studded leather pants. His white boots are faux alligator skin. His fingernails shimmer with translucent white polish. His famously flowing mane of brown hair is streaked with gold highlights. He is not your typical Beijing coffee shop patron. 'I've just come from a fitting,' he offered by way of explanation as he dropped into a large red chair, seeming a bit tired. In recent days, Mr. Li, 37, has juggled rehearsals, fittings and other demands as he prepares for the annual Spring Festival Gala, the four-hour-plus variety show to be broadcast next Saturday. The program, perennially one of the world's most-watched shows, falls on the eve of the Lunar New Year holiday, when Chinese families get together to eat dumplings and, not always gleefully, watch the gala. Indeed, complaining about the show - with its blend of comedy, singing, dancing and propaganda - is as much a tradition as watching it. Mr. Li, one of the program's four hosts, is aware of the complaints, just as he understands that the exposure he gets is the Chinese equivalent of being host of the Academy Awards. 'There are more than 500 hosts and hostesses on CCTV,' he said. 'Each of them wants to be part of the gala. I'm very honored to be chosen.' Known for his theatrical gestures, his exuberant style and his slightly unorthodox looks (to put it politely, not everyone thinks he is handsome), Mr. Li is considered one of the most popular and bankable stars among a stable of more subdued personalities at China Central Television, or CCTV, the central government's television network. One study publicized by state media - though not independently verified - declared that Mr. Li was the most valuable host in China, with a projected annual value of $50.8 million to CCTV. As a Communist Party member and an employee of one of the party's leading propaganda organs, Mr. Li has a job description that differs from Jay Leno's. The nightly monologue in which Mr. Leno skewers political figures like President Bush would be career suicide for Mr. Li, given that the Chinese media are strictly forbidden to criticize top leaders. But within the confines of what is permissible on the entertainment side of state television, Mr. Li thinks himself a bit of a rebel. He uses a trademark punching gesture on one game show while on another he has taken to flicking away question cards in Lettermanesque fashion. He sometimes speaks with bits of slang even though censors forbid hosts from using the Hong Kong or Taiwanese accents that are popular with Chinese youth. 'I don't talk in slogans,' he said. 'I don't distinguish the stage from life. My habits and flaws come out on the stage.' MR. LI'S appeal also reflects a new reality for CCTV, namely that public opinion matters. If CCTV was once virtually unchallenged, the rise of provincial, local and Hong Kong-based television channels has steadily splintered market share in entertainment shows. Last November, CCTV failed to meet its revenue goals in its auction of advertising rights for 2006. Meanwhile, a provincial station produced the top hit of 2005, a knockoff of 'American Idol' known as 'Super Girls' that became so wildly popular that CCTV reportedly schemed to undermine it. Mr. Li was drawn into the controversy because one of his programs, 'Dream of China,' was considered CCTV's counterpunch, a point he denies. But the fact that CCTV apparently considered Mr. Li the network's best weapon only underscored his importance. His big break came in 1998 when he was host of a game show called 'Lucky 52.' He had never imagined himself a television celebrity, growing up in the remote western region of Xinjiang. His parents had moved there to heed the 'patriotic call' from the party to develop the west. Mr. Li said his fondest childhood wish was to get away. 'I just wanted to get away from parents and family, have an independent life and do as I pleased,' he recalled. His chance came when he enrolled at the Communication University of China in Beijing. He graduated in the early 1990's, when the competition for jobs was less fierce than it has become, and was assigned a job at CCTV. He worked on the news side as a reporter and producer, but it was his shift to entertainment that made him famous. He said his style on 'Lucky 52' - his sweeping hair, his stylized attire and his loose on-air demeanor - was so unorthodox that scholars invited him to attend a conference to discuss whether he should be encouraged or if the show should be canceled. But these days, many commentators have come to see his style as far preferable to that of hosts who seem to be stiffly reciting memorized lines. 'The concept of hosting has changed,' said Wang Xiaofang, a prominent journalist who covers the entertainment industry. 'Now the audience expects to see brains, technique and charm.' Mr. Li is still the host of 'Lucky 52,' as well as two other programs. He said he had sometimes studied British game shows but did not actually watch much television. He lives in one of the fashionable apartment developments in downtown Beijing with his wife and their 3-year-old daughter. His wife, a college sweetheart, is a CCTV producer who is often credited in helping her husband's rise. The foibles of China's television and movie stars feed the growing corps of paparazzi, but Mr. Li and other CCTV stars are expected to keep a relatively low profile. He reportedly bristled over articles about his Porsche. He was also once scolded in the news media after he was photographed smoking in public, a habit shared by most men in China. (At the coffee house, he happily smoked a Cuban cigar.) THIS will be the fifth consecutive year that Mr. Li has been a host for the Spring Festival Gala. When it started in 1983, the show attracted almost every person with a television set. But with growing competition and changing public tastes, it has steadily lost viewers, even though it still is believed to have an audience of a few hundred million people. Often, the show is playing in Chinese households, even if no one is watching. Producers, eager to attract younger viewers, have signed up popular singers in recent years. But Mr. Li emphasized that the show also had political, social and cultural 'responsibilities,' given that it is expected to announce the government's theme for the year. For 2006, it is harmony, a reflection of President Hu Jintao's call for a 'harmonious society.' Mr. Li said his role on the program was that of a tailor, stitching one performance to another. By comparison, 'on my own programs, I am a king,' he said, laughing at his own joke. Even a king, though, faces limitations on Chinese television. He said he had tried out a new gesture to match his trademark punch - blowing kisses. But so far, it has always ended up on the editing room floor. 'Blowing kisses,' he said, 'is not as easily accepted as the punch.'

Subject: Medicare Woes Take High Toll From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:25:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/21/politics/21drug.html?ex=1295499600&en=36653ab6ce813dba&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 21, 2006 Medicare Woes Take High Toll on Mentally Ill By ROBERT PEAR HILLIARD, Fla. - On the seventh day of the new Medicare drug benefit, Stephen Starnes began hearing voices again, ominous voices, and he started to beg for the medications he had been taking for 10 years. But his pharmacy could not get approval from his Medicare drug plan, so Mr. Starnes was admitted to a hospital here for treatment of paranoid schizophrenia. Mr. Starnes, 49, lives in Dayspring Village, a former motel that is licensed by the State of Florida as an assisted living center for people with mental illness. When he gets his medications, he is stable. 'Without them,' he said, 'I get aggravated at myself, I have terrible pain in my gut, I feel as if I am freezing one moment and burning up the next moment. I go haywire, and I want to hurt myself.' Mix-ups in the first weeks of the Medicare drug benefit have vexed many beneficiaries and pharmacists. Dr. Steven S. Sharfstein, president of the American Psychiatric Association, said the transition from Medicaid to Medicare had had a particularly severe impact on low-income patients with serious, persistent mental illnesses. 'Relapse, rehospitalization and disruption of essential treatment are some of the consequences,' Dr. Sharfstein said. Dr. Jacqueline M. Feldman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that two of her patients with schizophrenia had gone to a hospital emergency room because they could not get their medications. Dr. Feldman, who is also the director of a community mental health center, said 'relapse is becoming more frequent' among her low-income Medicare patients. Emma L. Hayes, director of emergency services at Ten Broeck Hospital, a psychiatric center in Jacksonville, said, 'We have seen some increase in admissions, and anticipate a lot more,' as people wrestle with the new drug benefit. Medicare's free-standing prescription drug plans are not responsible for the costs of hospital care or doctors' services. 'They have no business incentive to worry about those costs,' said Dr. Joseph J. Parks, medical director of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, who reported that many of his Medicare patients had been unable to get medicines or had experienced delays. At least 24 states have taken emergency action to pay for prescription drugs if people cannot obtain them by using the new Medicare drug benefit. Florida is not among those states. In an interview, Alan M. Levine, secretary of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, said: 'We've set up a phone line and an e-mail address for pharmacists. We try to solve these problems on a case-by-case basis. We have stepped in to get drug plans to pay for prescriptions, so people don't leave the pharmacy without their medications.' Federal officials said they were moving aggressively to fix problems with the drug benefit. About 250 federal employees have been enlisted as caseworkers to help individual patients. The government has told insurers to provide a temporary supply - typically 30 days - of any prescription that a person was previously taking. And Medicare has sent data files to insurers, supposedly listing all low-income people entitled to extra help with premiums and co-payments. But in many cases, pharmacists say, they still cannot get the information needed to submit claims, to verify eligibility or to calculate the correct co-payments for low-income people. And often, they say, they must wait for hours when they try to reach insurers by telephone. S. Kimberly Belshé, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said the actions taken by the federal government 'have not been sufficient to address the problems that California residents continue to experience.' At Dayspring Village, in the northeast corner of Florida near Jacksonville, the 80 residents depend heavily on medications. They line up for their medicines three times a day. Members of the staff, standing at a counter, dispense the pills through a window that looks like the ticket booth at a movie theater. Most of the residents are on Medicare, because they have disabilities, and Medicaid, because they have low incomes. Before Jan. 1, the state's Medicaid program covered their drugs at no charge. Since then, the residents have been covered by a private insurance company under contract to Medicare. For the first time, residents of Dayspring Village found this month that they were being charged co-payments for their drugs, typically $3 for each prescription. The residents take an average of eight or nine drugs, so the co-payments can take a large share of their cash allowance, which is $54 a month. Even after the insurer agreed to relax 'prior authorization' requirements for a month, it was charging high co-payments for some drugs - $52 apiece for Abilify, an anti-psychotic medicine, and Depakote, a mood stabilizer used in treating bipolar disorder. The patients take antipsychotic drugs for schizophrenia; more drugs to treat side effects of those drugs, like tremors and insomnia; and still other drugs to treat chronic conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. 'If I didn't have any of those medications, I would probably be institutionalized for the rest of my life,' said Deborah Ann Katz, a 36-year-old Medicare beneficiary at Dayspring. 'I'd be hallucinating, hearing voices.' Michael D. Ranne, president of the Jacksonville chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said the use of powerful psychiatric medications 'virtually emptied out state mental hospitals' in the 1970's and early 80's. Ms. Katz said she had been 'in and out of hospitals' since she was 13. Sponsors of the 2003 Medicare law wanted to drive down costs by creating a competitive market for drug insurance. They focused on older Americans, not the disabled. They assumed that beneficiaries would sort through various drug plans to find the one that best met their needs. But that assumption appears unrealistic for people at Dayspring Village. Heidi L. Fretheim, a case manager for Dayspring residents, said: 'If I take them shopping at Wal-Mart, the experience is overwhelming for them. They get nervous. They think the clerks are plotting against them, or out to hurt them.' Residents of Dayspring Village see worms in their food. Some neglect personal hygiene because they hear voices in the shower. When nurses draw blood, some patients want the laboratory to return it so the blood can be put back in their veins. Under the 2003 Medicare law, low-income people entitled to both Medicare and Medicaid are exempted from all co-payments if they live in a nursing home. But the exemption does not apply to people in assisted living centers like Dayspring Village. Douglas D. Adkins, executive director of Dayspring Village, said: 'Some of the pharmacists have been saying, 'No pills unless we get a co-payment.' Well, how are these people going to get the money for a co-payment? They don't have it.' Eunice Medina, a policy analyst at the Florida Department of Elder Affairs, said the state was trying to 'find a solution' for people in assisted living centers. 'We are all aware that the next couple of months will be difficult for these clients, and that the possibility of a transition to a nursing home is their only option if prescriptions are not covered in assisted living facilities,' Ms. Medina said in a memorandum to local social service agencies. Luis E. Collazo, administrator of Palm Breeze, an assisted living center for the mentally ill in Hialeah, Fla., said many of his residents were forgoing their medications on account of the new co-payments. 'Because of their mental illness,' Mr. Collazo said, 'they don't have the insight to realize the consequences of not taking their medications. Without their medicines, they will definitely go into the hospital.'

Subject: Invest at Your Own Risk From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:23:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/19/opinion/19swensen.html?ex=1287374400&en=a1c7feec8d44ac94&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss October 19, 2005 Invest at Your Own Risk By DAVID F. SWENSEN New Haven THE current mania for hedge funds reaches into every corner of the investment world. As is often the case with financial excesses, what began as a reasonable opportunity for sophisticated investors has become a killing ground for naïve trend-followers, with scandals and frauds prompting predictable calls for increased regulation of hedge funds. But if Congress and the Securities and Exchange Commission really want to protect individual investors, they should prohibit unsophisticated players from participating in hedge funds. Although the roughly 8,000 hedge funds now in existence pursue so many strategies that hedge funds almost defy definition, generally they promise to deliver every investor's dream - high returns with low risk. In some respects, hedge funds are like mutual funds on steroids: they pursue complex investment strategies, charge huge fees and reward only those few investors able to identify funds that are worth the money they charge. Unfortunately, the track record of individual investors with plain-vanilla mutual funds fails to inspire confidence. Actively managed mutual funds overwhelmingly fail to beat the market. In a well-structured study published in 2000, an investment manager, Robert Arnott, showed that over a two-decade period, excessive management fees and frantic portfolio trading reduce the chance that a mutual fund investor will beat the market to less than one in seven. Most mutual funds do not produce even minimally acceptable results because of the conflict between the mutual fund company's profit motive and the mutual fund manager's fiduciary responsibility. Mutual fund companies profit by gathering assets, charging high fees and churning portfolios. Mutual fund managers produce superior investment returns by limiting assets, assessing low fees and trading infrequently. In case after case, profits trump returns. The mutual fund manager abrogates fiduciary responsibility for personal gain. Hedge fund investors confront even more dismal circumstances. As with mutual funds, undisciplined asset accumulation seems to be the norm. But hedge fund management fees are even more exorbitant than those levied by mutual funds; hedge funds typically add a 'profit participation' fee, say 20 percent of any gains, to the already-too-large base fee. Portfolio turnover often surpasses the feverish pace posted by mutual funds, generating soft dollar kickbacks - basically hidden credits granted by brokers for trading securities - that line the manager's pocket at the investor's expense. In the zero-sum world of active portfolio management, where every winning position requires an offsetting losing position, over-the-top hedge fund fees virtually guarantee subpar results for investors. Just as in the mutual fund arena, hedge fund investors confront a problem that economists call adverse selection. The best money managers seldom operate in a mutual fund format, preferring to manage money for sophisticated institutional investors. Similarly, top-tier hedge fund managers favor stable, long-term institutions over fickle, performance-chasing individuals. As a result, individuals have access mostly to lower-quality hedge funds, increasing their likelihood of being defrauded by charlatans at places like the Bayou Group, Wood River Partners and KL Group. Less informed investors rely on an intermediary (often a fund that invests in a variety of hedge funds) to make fund choices. Again, the principle of adverse selection applies. The best fund managers avoid these 'funds of funds,' which operate with shorter time horizons, in favor of a direct relationship with big long-term investors. Of course, the funds of funds add more fees to the already overburdened hedge fund investor, further reducing chances for success. In the mutual fund world, investors consistently amplify the negative impact of poor fund management. They chase what has done well, shun what has done poorly, buy high, sell low and damage returns. A recent study by Morningstar, the fund research firm, shows that in each of its equity fund categories, ill-timed moves caused investors to earn lower returns than the funds' officially reported returns. In a worrying fact for hedge fund investors, the most volatile mutual funds exhibited the largest gap between posted returns and investor results. If investors in the capricious hedge fund world behave like mutual fund investors, they are likely to suffer even more substantial self-inflicted pain. What about the prospect of government regulation of hedge funds? Again, evidence from the mutual fund industry provides cold comfort, in part because Congress and the S.E.C. respond to the desires of the regulated. In providing official sanction for soft dollar kickbacks, supplemental fund marketing fees and product placement arrangements, the regulatory authorities have feathered the mutual fund industry's bed. Of course, the cost of those feathers comes right out of investors' pockets. Starting in February, the commission will require hedge fund advisers to provide their address, their professional history and any record of infractions, and will start subjecting them to random audits. But this registration holds no power to improve returns; it simply adds to the already voluminous pile of routinely ignored disclosure data that investors already receive. The prospect of random audits likewise carries little potential benefit; the already overburdened commission can barely deal with its mutual fund caseload. A better approach would be to restrict access to hedge funds. In 1996, Congress made the mistake of relaxing the requirements for investors in private investment vehicles like hedge funds. Regulators should now reverse course. First, hedge funds should be required to have direct relationships with their investors, eliminating the use of funds of funds. Second, hedge funds should be obliged to demonstrate that their investors have sufficient expertise to participate in this treacherous arena. Third, the existing net worth and investment portfolio size standards should be increased substantially to weed out inexperienced or smaller players. Only by restricting hedge fund access to large sophisticated investors can regulators ensure a fair fight when the hedge fund manager lines up across from the hedge fund investor. David F. Swensen is the chief investment officer at Yale.

Subject: Does Vangaurd have any bear funds? From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 14:37:33 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: I made a lot of money this week shorting certain companies - the money flow into our out of thier stock before earnings announcement gave me a good indicator where the 'smart' money was going and I profited handsomely. Why should we limit little people like me from being able to hire a professional to do this for us while we go maximize our utility making dunkin donuts or what have you? Swensen says: Third, the existing net worth and investment portfolio size standards should be increased substantially to weed out inexperienced or smaller players. Only by restricting hedge fund access to large sophisticated investors can regulators ensure a fair fight when the hedge fund manager lines up across from the hedge fund investor. To which I reply - KL FINANCIAL - I knew several people that got burned who lived in west palm beach and were very smart and very rich with those guys - weeding out poor people would not have made those guys be honest and not be crooks - being a smart rich doctor or lawyer or accountant does not keep you from getting crooked - crooks scam anyone they can - rich or poor - smart or dumb. What was it gordon gecko said? 2/3 of the rich are idiot sons and widows - I tend to agree - through sophisticated tax strategies the rich pass on their wealth to thier widows and heirs. Phil Grande says when was the last time you heard CNBC say to SHORT a stock? Thats right - NEVER - because wall street pays for 53% of thier programming - and wall street doesn't need little guys or professionals hired by little guys in there market arbitraging thier big gains. Analysts upgrade a stock to buy at the top - and downgrade it to sell at the bottom - long after the big moves have been made by the insiders and smart money and the little guy is used as the dumping ground. Answer me this - why out in front of wall street is there only a statue of a bull? Where is the bear statue? No thanks swenson - I know a lot of good guys that help little people, and bad guys that burn them - just like I know a lot of good guys that help big people, and bad guys that burn them too - removing the little guy from the short side of the market decreases its efficiency and restricts power to a few and keeps the rich richer for no effort - just stacking the deck unfairly in their favor.

Subject: Better Diet in Poorer Neighborhoods From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:22:04 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/nyregion/20bodega.html?ex=1295413200&en=50ef183c04fc064e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 New York Pushing Better Diet in Poorer Neighborhoods By MARC SANTORA Look in just about any bodega in the city's poorer neighborhoods and it is easy to find shelves well-stocked with potato chips, sodas and doughnuts. But just try to find something healthier like fruits or vegetables. For many low-income city residents, such bodegas are more common shopping options than supermarkets with a much larger roster of healthy items. So in an effort to provide healthier food choices, city health officials have enlisted bodega owners in an effort to encourage the sale of low-fat milk. The program, which health officials hope to extend to items like fruits and vegetables if it proves successful, is an attempt to combat the city's obesity epidemic. As the rate of obesity in the city continue to rise, so do associated chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes. The milk program follows studies indicating that healthy food is scarcer and more expensive in poorer neighborhoods. Many of those communities are served primarily by bodegas in which, compared with supermarkets, the sale of fresh fruit is limited, unhealthy foods are heavily promoted and vegetables are almost nonexistent. Besides announcing the milk program yesterday, the Health and Mental Hygiene Department released the results of its survey of the availability of various healthy foods in the Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick neighborhoods of Brooklyn. The agency found that only one in three bodegas there sold reduced-fat milk, but that 9 out of 10 supermarkets in the neighborhoods did. More than 80 percent of the 373 food stores surveyed in the two neighborhoods were bodegas. The department is beginning the milk program in three areas with similar food problems: central Brooklyn, the South Bronx and Harlem. Those areas have some of the city's highest obesity rates. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, for example, 30 percent of adults are obese, though the citywide rate is 20 percent. For several months, the two dozen bodegas that have signed up for the milk program will offer customers discounts on low-fat milk and pass out fliers provided by the health department. There is no financial incentive for the bodegas to participate, but health officials said they have received a positive response. 'Bodegas are essential food providers in our communities, but healthy options are often unavailable,' said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city's health commissioner. 'Cutting down on unnecessary calories and saturated fat can prevent diabetes, heart disease and other serious health problems. Most people want to be healthier, and even small lifestyle changes - like switching to 1 percent milk, eating more fruits and vegetables and increasing physical activity - can make a big difference over the long term.' The department's survey in the two Brooklyn neighborhoods found that a scarcity of low-fat milk was just one of many obstacles to healthier eating. The most common products advertised by bodegas, the survey found, are sugar-laden sodas and sports drinks. Nearly half the stores also advertised cigarettes. 'A typical school has five stores advertising cigarettes within a three-block radius,' according to the report. Bodegas are also much less likely than supermarkets to stock fruits and vegetables, it said. While the majority of bodegas and supermarkets carry some kind of fresh fruit, only 21 percent of the bodegas in Bedford-Stuyvesant offered apples, oranges and bananas. Supermarkets were four times more likely to carry all three. Leafy green vegetables like spinach and kale were found in only 6 percent of the bodegas surveyed. Bodega owners said an important reason they did not carry healthier foods was that they are not very popular. Even when healthy food is available, bodegas often charge more for it than supermarkets do. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, the average cost of a gallon of milk was 79 cents more in a bodega than in a supermarket. In order to compile the report, health department workers visited all food stores within a five-mile radius in central Brooklyn. In the bodegas and supermarkets, they recorded both the availability of certain types of food as well as the prices. They also examined the restaurants in the same area. While national fast-food chains like Burger King and KFC accounted for 13 percent of 168 restaurants surveyed, three out of four restaurants sold only takeout food. The most common categories in the survey were Chinese, Latin American and pizza. Health officials concede that it is hard to get people to change their eating habits, but they believe they can make a start by heavily promoting good habits and making nutritious food more available. At a bodega in Harlem, where the milk program was starting yesterday, children at nearby Public School 57 were happy to try low-fat milk. As crossing guards passed out the department's fliers on the product's health benefits, Tiffany Rodriguez, 11, said that she had drunk only whole milk before but that she liked her first sip of the low-fat alternative. 'I think this tastes better than the regular milk,' she said.

Subject: Perils of India's Rise From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:20:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/international/asia/20india.html?ex=1295413200&en=211e97710963072e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 Fatal Clash at Mill Site Shows Perils of India's Rise By SOMINI SENGUPTA KALINGANAGAR INDUSTRIAL AREA, India - On the first Monday morning of the year, four bulldozers, accompanied by nearly 300 police officers, arrived on a rocky patch of farmland on the edge of a wooded village and began leveling the earth. It was meant to be the first step in the construction of India's third-largest steel mill. Soon, from the bowels of the wooded village came an army of resistance. Armed with scythes and swords, stones and sticks - and according to the police, bows and arrows - the indigenous people who live on these lands in eastern India advanced toward the police line by the hundreds. Exactly what happened next is a matter of contention, except that by the day's end, the land was littered with the gore of more than a dozen dead and a fury that lingers. 'We will not leave our land,' Chakradhar Haibru, a wiry, stern-faced leader of the indigenous people, vowed in an interview. 'They are trying to turn us into beggars.' Reminiscent of the peasant uprisings in China, the standoff here has reverberated across the country and snowballed into a closely watched political storm. The confrontation is effectively a local territorial dispute, over whether and how one of India's most prominent industrial conglomerates, Tata, will build a plant on land that its current occupants, mostly indigenous villagers, refuse to vacate. But the dispute also raises a far wider challenge for India: how to balance industrial growth against the demands of its most marginalized citizens. Orissa, the mineral-rich state where the clash took place, is one of India's most stellar examples of the economic boom of recent years, just as it is among the most left-behind states, and its unprecedented growth spurt has mirrored the two faces of India's ambitions. In 2005, Orissa attracted the largest foreign investment ever in India, with the promise of a $12 billion steel plant by Posco, of South Korea. The same year, Orissa also held the record for the highest rate of poverty in India, which included nearly half its population, or 17 million people. How Orissa deals with the current crisis bears broader lessons for other states. As in much of eastern and central India, the land here is chockful of iron ore, coal and copper and is also home to tribal people known here as adivasis. But today the area's defiant villagers are blocking a major road that connects iron mines to the state's main port on the Bay of Bengal, and it is no longer safe for the police to venture into tribal villages. The Congress Party, which rules the central government but plays opposition here in Orissa state, has seized on the episode, flying in its party president, Sonia Gandhi, to console grieving tribal villagers - an important constituency for the party. Orissa authorities privately grumble that Maoist guerrillas, resurgent across the tribal belt, had a hand in the troubles. Since the Jan. 2 confrontation, Naveen Patnaik, the Orissa chief minister, has promised to revise the state relief policy for villagers displaced by new industry. In an interview in his office in the state capital, Bhubaneshwar, he repeatedly called the incident 'tragic,' but declined to comment on how it developed, or how it could be calmed. He said he would visit the affected area once 'normalcy is restored.' 'I certainly hope it will not affect industry that wish to come up here,' he said. Orissa began grooming itself as the country's steel hub in the early 1990's, shortly after the Indian economy opened up. Within a few years, steel makers began pouring in to what the government demarcated as the 13,000-acre Kalinganagar Industrial Area, drawn by the rich deposits of iron and chromium in the nearby hills, an abundance of water, a nearby seaport and a web of railways and roads. The new investments have already given Orissa a radical makeover. New buildings have been erected in the capital, potholed highways in the interior have been repaired and widened, and the smokestacks of steel and aluminum factories have sprung up across this hardscrabble land. The blueprint for future development envisions an airstrip and a new township here in Kalinganagar, along with two new ports on the coast. Tata's would-be plant at Kalinganagar is slated to produce six million tons of steel a year. Further east, the proposed Posco mill would generate double that amount. A report by Morgan Stanley predicts that the state could draw $30 billion to $40 billion in new investments over the next five years. But that industrial boom has not yet brought new schools and hospitals to the subsistence farmers who live here. One village that sits on the Tata land still has no electricity. Not least, at the heart of the industrial surge has been a high-pitched contest over rural lands. On paper, at least, the government has acquired the land that makes up the Kalinganagar Industrial Area. On paper, too, the government has awarded varying amounts of compensation to some of the roughly 1,800 families who have been displaced, though the state's industrial development agency now says an estimated 1,500 families are yet to be fully compensated. All plants in the industrial area are obliged to employ one member of each family displaced, but not all those jobs have yet materialized, the agency adds. In Tata's case, the company says it paid the government a handsome $16 million for the 2,000-acre property where it wants to build its mill over a year ago. That land now officially belongs to the company. The government says compensation was granted to eligible villagers more than a decade ago. They were allowed to continue to live and work on the land, while negotiations went on with a number of companies that expressed interest in setting up in the area, but then backed out. The villagers acknowledge that some of them got paid. Mr. Haibru, the village leader in Gobarghati, reaped $26,000 in compensation for his 28 acres, for instance. But those without legal claims to the land - and there seem to be a great many among the villagers here - got little or nothing. Some seem unaware that the land now belongs to Tata. Others are not entirely sure exactly what benefits they are entitled to. Most here seem convinced of three things, however. First, that whatever relief they have received is not enough in exchange for abandoning their land forever. Second, that considering Kalinganagar's ambitions, their sorry patches of land will soon be worth a great deal more than what they have been offered. And third, that the factories that have mushroomed across their lands have delivered few opportunities to their communities. But if the people here were once open to negotiation, the Jan. 2 incident has left them seething. 'If we die, we die,' spat Amba Tiria, in the village of Champakoila, on the edge of the battlefield. 'We will not leave our land. We're dying anyway.' To anyone following the currents here, what ultimately unfolded here should not have been unexpected. Industrial projects have faced increasingly militant protests over the last year. Tata's plans to build a fence around its property, for instance, encountered furious villagers last May, and in the confrontation, a local government administrator's front teeth were knocked out. In the latest standoff, the residents of Champakoila saw the first bulldozers on the horizon. Word quickly spread from village to village. Men, women and children streamed out of their homes and marched toward the bulldozers. 'Shut it down, shut it down,' they yelled, and they advanced toward the police line. Several villagers, interviewed separately, said they had wanted to lay down before the bulldozers, to persuade Tata to withdraw its machines. They said they did not imagine the police would fire, killing 12 people, including a 12-year-old boy and a woman who had gone to the fields that morning to relieve herself. More than 30 villagers were injured; some had been shot in the back. One police officer was hacked to death; 32 others were injured. A few days later came a macabre coda: it turned out that the hands of six corpses had been chopped off. The police blamed doctors performing the autopsy. The superintendent of police has been suspended, pending a government inquiry, though the police insist they had been prepared to act with restraint. Each 30-man platoon was allowed only three rifles. Protesters were warned to step back. Tear gas, followed by stun grenades, followed by rubber bullets were fired to disperse the crowd. The villagers said they had no idea these things were precursors to gunshots. The police say they fired in 'self-defense' and only after coming under attack. The villagers dispute this. Some say they were shot as they turned around and tried to flee. For now, Tata's Kalinganagar project has been delayed. But neither Orissa government officials nor Tata seem deterred. Tata's chief of communication, Sanjay Choudhry, blamed 'extremist activity' for the violence and said the company had no plans to pull out of the project. He maintained that Tata had aided other communities in which it works and would seek to do the same here. 'Industrialization is the best way to improve quality of life, especially of the tribal people,' Mr. Choudhry said. 'We're not thinking of backing out. We'll work with the government and tribal people and see if there's a way out, a proper way of doing this.'

Subject: Canada Comments From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 07:15:26 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Poyetas, I agree with you 100%. Canada is poised to become a super growing economy for the next 10 to 20 years. Everything is in place. Who ever rules Canada for the next 10 to 20 years will most likely go into the history books as on of the great leaders of our time who led Canada during its hey-day. The unfortunate part is that Paul Martin (as ex Minister of Finance) is in my opinion the Architect of Canada's amazing position and Harper (of the conservatives) may well take the credit for the foundation set by Paul Martin. On the issue of the Quebec situation I sort of agree with you. The base problem is laziness on the part of the English Canadians not to learn to speak French. I come from a country with two official languages and we HAD to learn and pass both languages right through out school. The same could easily be done here in Canada. The French Canadians are far more bilingual than the English Canadians. The English Canadians just don't get it. To the English Canadians, the French are just whining all the time, the English don't actually listen. And for not listening we may well lose the French. The Bloc is going to get the overwhelming majority of Quebec support in this election. The Bloc will then be perfectly placed to continue promoting separation... AND the leader of the Bloc is truly an amazing charasmatic person. Emma, The Conservatives just want elections to make use of the recent corrrpution scandal (that happened in Quebec) to get into power. The health care system of Canada is the actual reason why we are really facing elections. The conservatives are in the same mind set as the Liberals with regards to the health care system.... HOWEVER !!! The NDP are the spoilers. Canada's Public Health Care System cannot go on for ever. With an aging society, and invention of new expensive drugs, one cannot expect the government to continue paying for everything for ever. The Health Care budget will slowly consume this entire nation... but we are generation(s) away from the Public Health Care being a serious financial problem. One way out is to allow the private sector to take off the pressure on the public sector. Right now, the private sector does operate in Canada in a very minor role. So let's keep the private sector around until things get worse and worse, then perhaps look to a private sector that has been around for a while. However the NDP does not see it like this. The problem is that the NDP looks to the USA and says, 'See the USA's mess - we must avoid that.' Well for starters it is typically Canadian to only look to the USA and totally unfair of the NDP to use the USA as an example of private health care gone wrong. The NDP has in parliament joined the Liberals in out voting the Conservatives and passing so many socialist laws such as legalising gay marriage, Kyoto, etc, etc. But the NDP pushed a motion to have any form of private clinics outlawed in Canada. This the Liberals would not do. Private clinics have absolutely no effect on the public health care - let's not slam the door on them as we will most likely need them in the future. When the Liberals said, 'NO!' to the NDP, then the NDP (out of spite) made an about turn and joined the conservatives in a no confidence motion that has brought us into elections now. The real stupid part is that the conservatives look to win, in which case the NDP will still not get their way in the future and will most likely have a tougher time getting any social type laws passed. In essence they may have 'cut-off their noses to spite their face'. Idiots The saddest part is that the Liberals were in the process of pioneering a new plan to guarantee child care support for young parents. A huge plan covering so many issues facing young parents from subsidized day-care to amazing tax breaks. This is about to be the newest pure social program of our generation. If the conservatives win they will kill the program. Ironically enough - in the short run, if the Conservatives win, I will personally be better off. Less tax for me. However - I would prefer to continue paying more tax knowing that the less fortunate are being better cared.

Subject: Keating Five for Terri From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 07:00:11 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: What were your impressions of the robin hood in reverse keating 5 Terri? As all that was playing out years ago? http://www.azcentral.com/specials/special39/articles/1003mccainbook5.html It all started in March 1987. Charles H Keating Jr., the flamboyant developer and anti-porn crusader, needed help. The government was poised to seize Lincoln Savings and Loan, a freewheeling subsidiary of Keating's American Continental Corp. ....Now Keating had a job for DeConcini. He wanted him to organize a meeting with the regulators. The message: Get off Lincoln's back. Eventually, DeConcini would set up a meeting between five senators and the regulators. One of them was John McCain. McCain had also carried a little water for Keating in Washington. While in the House, McCain, along with a majority of representatives, co-sponsored a resolution to delay new regulations designed to curb risky investments by thrifts like Lincoln. Sounds familiar eh? Congress trying to do that now in the data I posted a few messages down. .....Someone hurled a computer from the second floor, shattering a window. Keating, all 6-feet-5 of him, struck a Superman pose and ripped open his shirt to display a hand-drawn skull and crossbones over the letters FHLBB - the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. A secretary climbed onto a desk to take photos, and American Continental executive Robert Kielty joined her. Keating grabbed a roll of tape and lashed their legs together. Potted plants were knocked over. Beer and champagne were spilled on the carved wood desks. Kielty took a bottle of champagne and poured it down another secretary's blouse. ''Get this champagne colder,'' Keating yelled. Back in San Francisco, Black was fuming. ''Clearly, we were shot in the back,'' he would say later. Lincoln's losses eventually were set at $3.4 billion, the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal. On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. ...McCain also belittled the reporters when they asked about his wife's ties to Keating. ''It's up to you to find that out, kids.'' And then he played the POW card. ''Even the Vietnamese didn't question my ethics,'' McCain said.

Subject: Re: Keating Five for Terri From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:51:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Deregulation can be highly helpful in making markets more efficient, but there must be tough oversight. Without oversight powerful financial institutions have and will periodically become abusive.

Subject: Drug Makers Get a Warning From the U.N. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 17:48:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/health/20malaria.ready.html?ex=1295413200&en=26e92d251aeca291&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 20, 2006 Drug Makers Get a Warning From the U.N. Malaria Chief By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Warning that misuse of the most promising new malaria drug could create an incurable strain of the disease, the new chief of the World Health Organization's malaria program demanded yesterday that 18 pharmaceutical companies stop selling some forms of the drug. After several of the companies refused the demand, the official, Dr. Arata Kochi, made an unusually strong threat for an official of the health organization, saying he would publicly name the companies still selling the drugs three months from now and, if they persisted, would try to disrupt sales of their other medicines. The new drug, artemisinin, a derivative of sweet wormwood isolated by Chinese scientists, is the most powerful new weapon in the antimalaria arsenal. Health agencies consider it the best hope for controlling the disease, one of the world's leading killers, which takes more than a million lives each year, mostly those of young children. But these agencies say artemisinin should be used only in a cocktail with other malaria drugs, usually including a slower-acting one that lingers longer in the blood. Combination therapy, which is routine with AIDS and tuberculosis drugs, not only attacks a disease more effectively, but slows the emergence of microbes resistant to drugs. But at least 18 companies from Belgium, China, France, Ghana, India, Kenya, Switzerland and Vietnam make the drug as a pill that can be taken by itself, in what doctors call monotherapy, and sell it cheaply in Africa, Asia and Latin America. People with fevers often buy drugs at small shops without a prescription or a test to make sure that their fever is caused by malaria. That is a recipe for disaster, Dr. Kochi said. 'We can't afford to lose artemisinin,' he said. 'If we do, it will be at least 10 years before a drug that good is discovered. Basically, we're dead.' If companies refuse to stop selling artemisinin in monotherapeutic form, Dr. Kochi said, he will ask his agency to stop endorsing their other drugs, including AIDS drugs, that they sell to poor countries, and he will approach the Global Fund, the World Bank and other donors and ask them to stop buying from those companies. The World Health Organization, a United Nations agency, is usually far more cautious in its public declarations, seeking consensus from many member countries before taking a position. Executives of some companies he named disagreed about how they would react. Dr. Robert Sebagg, chief of access to medicines for Sanofi/Aventis, the world's third-largest drug company, said it now sold two artemisinin cocktails and was 'step by step' withdrawing its old monotherapy products. But Dr. Bruno Jansen, president of Dafra, a small Belgian company that makes drugs in generic form, argued that artemisinin monotherapy in China and Vietnam had virtually wiped out malaria there without creating resistance. Also, he said, patients often refuse combination therapy. In Burundi, he said, his company phased out its monotherapy at the government's request and introduced artemisinin and amodiaquine pills packaged together, as recommended by the W.H.O. 'But patients refused to take the amodiaquine because it made them feel ill, and doctors refused to prescribe the combination,' he said. 'Now monotherapy continues happily with illegal imports from Uganda and the Congo. That's Africa.' Told of that, Dr. Kochi argued that giving patients anything they wanted, whether good for them or not, 'was like saying you should sell heroin or cocaine because there is demand.' Dr. Yusuf Hamied, chairman of Cipla, the third-largest drug company in India, also disagreed with Dr. Kochi's policy. Although Cipla makes a combination pill and he favors two-drug therapy, 'all drugs should be available and doctors should decide what they want,' he said. Of Dr. Kochi's threat, he said: 'I don't think he can succeed in that. But that's his prerogative.' No proven artemisinin resistance has been documented yet, but the history of antimalarial medicines is one of miracle cures that fade through overuse. Chloroquine, an artificial form of quinine that was developed in the 1940's and was so effective that world health authorities used it in a drive to eliminate malaria ­ along with a new pesticide, DDT, to kill the mosquitoes that carry the disease. Resistance became so common that chloroquine is now virtually useless against malaria. Dr. Kochi explained that artemisinin, when taken alone, knocks fevers down rapidly but takes seven days to cure most cases of malaria. When mixed with other drugs, the combination can cure in as little as three days. But many patients stop taking their pills as soon as their fever drops, and the parasites left in the blood when that happens are the most likely to be drug-resistant strains, which can be passed to other people by mosquito bites.

Subject: Re: Drug Makers Get a Warning From the U.N. From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 15:29:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Oh geez.... I don't know what to say. I want to suggest we act a little draconian just for a short while and discuss the pro’s and cons with regards to people’s lives. Not nice – I know, but hopefully it can answer some very difficult situations. The problem we have is here today and is ever growing. We are not winning this fight, by no means. Throwing money at this may alleviate the situation, in the short run, but will not set us on the right path and worsen the long run. We have an incredible situation where the population rates in Africa (and many developing countries) is just growing so fast that trying to keep up is a pure losing battle. We need education as a strong principle to ensuring that the population starts to change their habits. We can't even keep up with building schools let alone disease control. Most of these developing countries living under the plague of Malaria or Aids have an incredible uneducated population believing in the most outrageous myths. I believe we are losing this battle not because the amount of malaria cases or aids cases are growing bigger in the population (the disease has already hit their terminal percentage), but rather because the populations are exploding and along with the population explosion the amount of disease cases are growing. The accurate figures for population growth are actually very weak. For example the UN and World Bank estimate that the population of Ethiopia is in the 70 million category… maybe 100 million.. that’s a 30 million difference (the size of Canada). The UN world food program in Ethiopia allocated food grain to the starving regions based on their population size, only to later find out the were only serving one 8th of the population. Meaning that their counting of the population is way, way, way off. Now let’s not blame the UN, as it is not easy to count people in areas where you simply have no access and where the population increases exponentially in a matter of 5 years, But let’s blame our leaders for not putting pressure on the leaders of developing countries to at least stop promoting this population explosion. In Uganda for example the president openly promotes the concept of having more children only because he knows it fits in with the much accepted tribal tradition. And by speaking the language of the tribe he gains favour with the people. I was horrified to find out (first hand) that it is a common belief (even among the more educated) that having 20 children is a good number. When I asked about where this is all going, the response was always some fumbled statement about, 'the laws of nature will take over'. In a spooky way they may well be right. We really need a hold on the population growth before we look at how to deal with the outrageous number of malaria and HIV/AIDS. Here we (the West) are consistently trying to come up cures to this ever growing problem where the base of the problem is being fuelled by their own leaders. Again this brings me back to the theme that we really need to focus attacking the leaders of these countries… perhaps make them contribute more towards the fight against disease and make them realize that they must change their stance. Now for the real draconian issue… your article mentions DDT. This is the spray used to kill mosquitoes, especially Malaria carrying Mosquitoes. The invention of DDT really revolutionized our societies in the 1950’s without it they literally could not even built the Panama Canal (workers were dieing from Malaria at a high rate). Full regions were sprayed in the USA, South Africa and more countries actually ridding these regions of the dangerous mosquito for just about ever. The wonder spray had a dangerous side – it was much much later found to have a negative impact in something like 0.001% of the population. For this reason, the UN and other aid agencies will not fund any DDT programs as they will not fund a program that has a proven harmful component. Hhhmmm now look at the theme of your article. But, playing the draconian card, is DDT or the drug REALLY that harmful? If it cures say 100 people and kills 1 in the process is that not better odds that no drug or no DDT? Okay let me put my socialistic cap back on. It is easy for me to say this and this is simple conversation. I definitely would not want to be given the responsibility to decide whether to enforce the DDT or drug and at the same time I definitely would not want to be given the responsibility to decide whether to remove DDT or the drug. People are going to die either way. I know what we should be doing in the long run: get our high ranking politicians to start arguing with high ranking politicians in developing countries (which is not happening probably because our politicians don’t full understand what is really going on). In the short run?... I don’t know… but I do know that throwing more money only worsens the situation for the next generation.

Subject: Re: Drug Makers Get a Warning From the U.N. From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 16:01:43 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Can you imagine an accutely acting disease like Malaria that can effect tens of millions and no satisfactory treatment?

Subject: Jared Diamond From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 20:45:20 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: On the one hand if I look at Jared Diamond's assessment, he talks about how 'us' Europeans overcame gastly diseases such as the Plague. Is it possible that the one true inhibitor of Afica's development is a disease that could not be overcome.... Malaria? Is it possible that because Malaria does not really affect the economic rich populations, that we don't put anywhere as much resources as we should to find a cure?

Subject: 'Wittgenstein's Poker' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 13:08:28 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/30/books/review/30HOLTLT.html?ex=1133413200&en=c997d4f6d7572ce6&ei=5070&8bl December 30, 2001 'Wittgenstein's Poker': Reconstructing a Legendary Debate By JIM HOLT ENCOUNTERS between great literary figures are often anticlimactic. The one time that Marcel Proust and James Joyce crossed paths, for example, each reportedly inquired of the other whether he liked truffles, received an affirmative answer, and that was that. When great philosophers bump into each other, however, the results can be more dramatic. Take the sole encounter between Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) and Karl Popper (1902-94). It occurred the night of Oct. 25, 1946, during a meeting of the Moral Science Club in a small and crowded room in Cambridge, England. Though lasting only 10 minutes, it ended up becoming a famous bit of philosophical lore. Wittgenstein was presiding over the meeting; Popper was the invited speaker, addressing the question ''Are there philosophical problems?'' Supposedly Wittgenstein got so angry at Popper's remarks that he picked up a poker from the fireplace and began waving it around in an intimidating way. Then he stormed out of the room. At some point Popper, pressed to give an example proving his claim that there were valid moral rules, said something like, ''Thou shalt not threaten a visiting lecturer with a poker.'' This face-off makes for a great anecdote, but can it sustain a whole book? I wouldn't have thought so before reading ''Wittgenstein's Poker.'' David Edmonds and John Eidinow, both journalists with the BBC, were shrewd enough to spot three terrific angles. First, there is the biographical/historical angle: how did two characters like Wittgenstein and Popper, both of them refugees from the morbid culture of fin de siecle Vienna, come to confront each other in the phlegmatic cloister of Cambridge? Second, there is the detective angle: precisely what happened that night, and why are the surviving witnesses still squabbling about it? Finally, there is the purely intellectual angle: what does the fleeting clash between Wittgenstein and Popper say about the schism in 20th-century philosophy over the significance of language? Can we declare one of the antagonists the victor? At the time of the poker incident, Wittgenstein was regarded as a sort of deity, at least in Cambridge. ''God has arrived,'' John Maynard Keynes said. ''I met him on the 5:15 train.'' Other philosophers were bewitched by Wittgenstein's incandescent genius, his austere ways, his devotion to rigor and clarity and -- not least -- his good looks and eccentric mannerisms. (Disciples could not resist imitating his way of clapping his hand to his forehead and shouting ''Ja!'') His ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,'' written in the trenches during the First World War, inspired awe with its lapidary, numbered propositions on logic, language, solipsism and the unsayable. Popper, by contrast, was a homely, ordinary-seeming fellow whose most important work, ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery,'' had yet to appear in English and whose chief intellectual attribute was -- unexcitingly -- common sense. Whereas Wittgenstein was homosexual (the authors decline to join the controversy over just how active he was), Popper had an adored wife, albeit one whom he could never bring himself to kiss on the lips. Even their common Viennese origin set these two men apart. Wittgenstein came from the patrician class. His family's home was a palace where the likes of Brahms, Mahler and Klimt were routinely received. When his father, a steel magnate, died in 1913, Wittgenstein became the richest man in Austria and one of the richest in Europe -- at least until he gave his fortune to his siblings and took up an ascetic existence. Popper, the son of a lawyer, had a thoroughly bourgeois upbringing; the deprivations he experienced as a Viennese schoolteacher in the 1930's were not self-imposed. Both Wittgenstein's and Popper's families had converted from Judaism, and ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' gives an especially absorbing account of the uneasy existence of assimilated Jews in Vienna, the seedbed for Hitler and the Holocaust. One arresting detail: to secure non-Jewish status for his sisters so that they could escape Nazism after the Anschluss, Wittgenstein and one of his brothers had to turn over a staggering 1.7 metric tons of gold to the Third Reich, equivalent to 2 percent of Austria's gold reserves. Despite their differences, Wittgenstein and Popper did have an important trait in common: their ''sheer awfulness,'' as the authors put it, with slight understatement. Popper was a wrathful bully in argument, unable to brook dissent. But Wittgenstein's manner was ''unearthly, even alien''; he inspired fear even in those who loved him, and his astringency of character could cause men and women alike to burst into tears. A tortured soul, obsessed with his own sinfulness, he thought constantly of suicide. (Three of his four brothers had died by their own hands.) The authors, in foreshadowing the poker incident, note that Wittgenstein had a history of shaking sticks at people. They neglect, however, to connect this with a more disquieting incident: when he briefly taught school in a poor Alpine village between the wars, he was forced to resign over allegations that he had repeatedly struck a sickly student, causing him to collapse. And there was another element that night at the Moral Science Club that promised good theater: Popper, the outsider, was gunning for Wittgenstein. He hated Wittgenstein's idea that philosophy was merely a kind of therapy aimed at releasing us from the confusion caused by the misuse of ordinary language -- that its purpose was, in Wittgenstein's round phrase, ''to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.'' Popper passionately believed that philosophy should be concerned with genuine problems -- the relationship between mind and body, the ideal structure for society, the nature of science -- and not just linguistic puzzles. ''I admit that I went to Cambridge hoping to provoke Wittgenstein . . . and to fight him on this issue,'' he later wrote. And, as the authors show, Popper was egged on to the battle by Bertrand Russell. Russell had been an ardent champion of the young Wittgenstein, agreeing with him that language pictured the logical structure of reality. But when Wittgenstein renounced the metaphor of language-as-a-picture for the new one of language-as-a-tool, Russell professed to find his subsequent philosophizing ''completely unintelligible.'' The philosophical bits of ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' are simple enough to enlighten the beginner and breezy enough not to bore the expert. If Wittgenstein was preoccupied with language, the authors explain, Popper was preoccupied with ''openness.'' The mark of a scientific theory, he held, was that it be open to the possibility of falsification by evidence; the mark of a good society was that it be open to change of government without bloodshed. The book also contains a creditable account of some of the harder problems that Popper thought philosophers should be grappling with, like probability and infinity -- both of which, we learn, came up during the poker incident. As for what else happened, of the 30 or so dons and students in the room that night, nine have survived to give testimony to the authors. Did Wittgenstein brandish the poker menacingly at Popper, or did he merely shake it for emphasis? Did Wittgenstein leave the room after having words with Russell, or when Popper made the crack about not threatening visiting lecturers with pokers? Although none of the witnesses could agree on these terribly important points, the authors nevertheless manage to come up with an enthralling reconstruction of the episode. So who won on Oct. 25, 1946? If you mean whose legacy has prevailed, the easy answer is Wittgenstein's. In a 1998 poll of professional philosophers, Wittgenstein was ranked fifth among the all-time greats, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant and Nietzsche, and ahead of Hume and Descartes. Popper may remain the favorite philosopher of Margaret Thatcher and his former student George Soros (who says that he made his billions by investing along Popperian lines), but his influence in the academy, never great, is fading. In another sense, though, Popper is the victor. As the authors acknowledge, it is his vision of philosophy that has largely prevailed. Today philosophers carry on as if there are indeed real philosophical problems, problems that transcend the use and misuse of language. (Wittgenstein's attempt to reduce the mind-body problem to a linguistic puzzle, for example, now strikes most philosophers as forced and unconvincing.) In the culture at large, of course, it is Wittgenstein who dominates. ''The invocation of Wittgenstein in a stream of literary and artistic works,'' the authors write, ''is a striking confirmation of the hold he exercises long after his death.'' Their ''Wittgenstein's Poker'' now takes its place on the shelf next to such titles as ''Wittgenstein's Ladder,'' ''Wittgenstein's Nephew'' and ''Wittgenstein's Mistress.'' Against which the Popperians have nothing to set, I suppose, except ''Mr. Popper's Penguins.''

Subject: Unflappable American consumer? From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 10:37:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The following from Morgan Stanley's chief economist follows Paul Krugman's appearance on CNBC a couple of days ago where he talked about serious consequences for the US economy from a popping of the US housing bubble: Stephen Roach (New York) So far, so good, for an unbalanced world -- the sky has yet to fall. And the longer a lopsided global economy continues to chug along with impunity, the more the broad consensus of opinion becomes convinced that this is a sustainable outcome. This increasingly complacent mindset may be about to meet its toughest challenge: A likely turn in the liquidity cycle appears to be on a collision course with ever-widening global imbalances. This could well be a lethal combination that triggers the long-awaited capitulation of the American consumer -- heretofore the mainstay of a US-centric world. With the benefit of hindsight, the hows and whys of a benign outcome for the world economy in 2005 are crystal-clear. Basically, it was another year of “follow the leader,” as a US-centric world continued to draw sustenance from the seemingly unflappable American consumer. Sure, there were a number of other factors that came into play elsewhere around the world -- namely, the apparent healing of the Japanese economy, an improvement in Euroland late in the year, and the ongoing boom in China. But suffice it to say, were it not for another year of solid support from US consumer demand -- our latest estimates put real consumption growth at an impressive 3.5% in 2005 -- the rest of a largely externally dependent world would have been in big trouble. What did it take for the American consumer to deliver yet again? It certainly didn’t come from the traditional income-generating capacity of the US labor market. Private sector compensation outlays expanded only 2.5% in real terms over the 12 months ending November 2005 -- a full percentage point below trend and an especially disappointing outcome following the anemic pace of labor income generation in the first three years of this expansion. In fact, by our reckoning, in November 2005, private compensation remained nearly $390 billion below the composite trajectory of the past four US business cycles. With America’s internal income-generating capacity continuing to lag, US consumers once again tapped the home equity till to draw support from the Asset Economy. According to Federal Reserve estimates, equity extraction by US households topped $600 billion in 2005 -- more than enough to compensate for the shortfall of earned labor income. Comforted by this asset-based injection of purchasing power, consumers had little compunction in stretching traditional income-based constraints to the max. The personal saving rate fell deeper into negative territory that at any point since 1933, and outstanding household sector indebtedness -- as well as debt service burdens -- hit new record highs. So much for what happened in 2005. The big question for the outlook -- and quite possibly the most important macro issue for world financial markets in 2006 -- is whether the American consumer can keep on delivering. My answer is an unequivocal “no.” Three factors lead to me to this conclusion, the first being the distinct likelihood that a shortfall in internal labor income generation persists. Specifically, I do not expect the US labor market to break the shackles of globalization and unwind the increasingly powerful global labor arbitrage that has played a key role in restraining employment and real wage growth over the past four years. Second, I believe that asset effects will be far less supportive to the American consumer in 2006 than has been the case in recent years. This reflects the likelihood of a distinct slowing in home equity extraction -- driven by the combination of moderating house price inflation and a sharp deceleration in home mortgage refinancing. Third, in an environment of subpar income generation, in conjunction with diminished wealth effects from the Asset Economy, the saving-short, overly indebted American consumer will instantly become more vulnerable to ever-present shocks. Look no further than 4Q05 for validation of the “vulnerability factor” -- a likely “zero” growth rate for real personal consumption expenditures in the immediate aftermath of a Katrina-related supply shock to the energy complex. Of those three factors, the asset effect is most likely to be the swing factor for the US consumption outlook. This is precisely where the liquidity cycle comes into play. In my view, the froth in asset markets -- first equities in the late 1990s and, more recently, property -- is a direct by-product of a powerful surge in global liquidity. In 2005, our global liquidity proxy -- the ratio of the narrow money supply to nominal GDP for the G-5 (US, Euroland, the UK, Japan, and Canada) plus China -- rose to a level that we estimate to be nearly 60% higher than that prevailing in 1995. That may now be about to change. Courtesy of central bank policy normalization -- led by America’s Federal Reserve -- in conjunction with an important shift in the mix of global saving, there is good reason to look for a much slower flow from the global liquidity spigot in 2006. A turn in the global liquidity cycle is likely to affect the American consumer through domestic and international channels. The domestic angle comes from a dramatic flattening -- and periodic inversion -- in the slope of the US yield curve. In my view, the slope of the curve matters a great deal in driving the equity-extraction effects of the Asset Economy. From the standpoint of financial intermediaries, a flatter curve alters the economics of the cut-rate lending programs that have been supporting such activities. A sharp recent deceleration of home mortgage refinancing activity -- down 45% from the mid-2005 peak -- is a perfect example of this development. The international angle arises from a likely reduction in non-US saving, a natural outgrowth of increasingly successful efforts to stimulate domestic demand in the world’s major surplus saving economies -- Japan, Germany, and China. That would tend to absorb saving and, therefore, reduce the flows of private sector excess liquidity that have been recycled into dollar-denominated assets in recent years. That, in turn, would draw into question the overseas subsidy to domestic US interest rates, as well as the equity extraction fueled by such an abnormally low rate structure. Foreign central banks, of course, have the option to fill the void through official purchases of dollar-denominated assets. But, as recent public statements from monetary authorities in China and Korea suggest, the pendulum is swinging more toward increased diversification in the mix of foreign exchange reserve portfolios. All this points to a shift in the non-US liquidity cycle -- a development that could have important implications for America’s massive current-account financing needs. That would then heighten pressure on the dollar and US real interest rates, thereby putting America’s equity extraction cycle under even greater pressure. That does not bode well for the income-short US consumer. Experience tells us it is usually unwise to bet against the American consumer. While I think there are compelling reasons to go against the grain in 2006, I do so with great trepidation. Excess domestic liquidity is the high-octane fuel of the Asset Economy and the consumer-led growth dynamic it fosters. Excess global liquidity is also responsible for the funding of America’s massive current-account deficit. Yet as the liquidity cycle now turns, the rules of engagement in the Asset Economy are likely to meet their sternest challenge. That’s a big deal for the income-short US consumer, leaving households with little choice other than to cut back discretionary spending. From the start, that’s been the only real option for meaningful progress on the road to global rebalancing. The irony of complacency is about to strike again. The day of reckoning for an unbalanced world could be close at hand.

Subject: Re: Unflappable American consumer? From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:42:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Stephen Roach always makes sense, but he has been a bear for more than a decade while never giving a sense of how to invest and I finally stopped reading him because I was not learning.

Subject: Where the Zebra and the Wildebeest Roam From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 07:17:12 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/international/africa/20africa.html January 20, 2006 Where the Zebra and the Wildebeest Roam, Cows Do, Too By MARC LACEY CHYULU HILLS, Kenya - A new species, endangered in its own way, may soon join the black rhino, zebra, buffalo and wildebeest that roam this hilly reserve: the cow. Vast herds of livestock, many of them feeble from the long journey here, are clustering around Chyulu Hills, an out-of-the-way park in southeastern Kenya several hours from Nairobi. They are also wandering into the park, prompting rangers to chase down and arrest the nomads watching over them. 'It's against the law,' said Simon Mutuku, a ranger for the Kenya Wildlife Service at Chyulu Hills National Park. His job is the protect the park's two dozen black rhinos, some of the relatively few indigenous rhinos in Kenya to have survived rampant poaching in the 1970's. The influx of cattle into nature parks is but one sign of a fierce drought that has devastated nomadic communities, especially those in the remote and neglected north and northeast. Desperate to save their herds, nomads have driven their cows into areas normally off limits, setting off a fierce debate in Kenya, which relies heavily on its unspoiled natural areas for tourism. Drought is a regular feature in this part of the world, where the rains are fickle and the climate harsh. Just before Christmas, when Kenyans usually hold lavish holiday feasts, emaciated babies began appearing in hospitals in Wajir and Mandera, in the north. At least 40 people are reported to have died in recent weeks. Kenya's drought is part of a crisis affecting millions in the Horn of Africa. The World Food Program has appealed for resources to feed 2.5 million people in Kenya, 1.4 million in Somalia, 1.5 million in Ethiopia and 60,000 in Djibouti. 'The emergency we face in the Horn today is the result of successive seasons of failed rains,' Holdbrook Arthur, the group's regional director for eastern and central Africa, said in a statement. 'Consequently, pastoralists living in these arid, remote lands have very few survival strategies left and require our assistance to make it through until the next rains.' As the Kenyan government and relief agencies scramble to respond, nomads have scattered in search of pasture and water for their herds. Tens of thousands of cows are now believed to be grazing in the forests around Mount Kenya, a popular draw for visitors. Cows have also approached and in some cases entered the grasslands at Nairobi National Park, Amboseli National Park and Tsavo East National Park. As the suffering grows, pressure is building on the government to relax its ban on grazing in the parks. To drive home the point, herdsmen took about 60 cows to the Nairobi residence of President Mwai Kibaki on New Year's Day. During a drought in 2002, the former president, Daniel arap Moi, had opened the gates of the presidential compound to livestock, but Mr. Kibaki's guards rebuffed the herdsmen, who moved on to Uhuru Park, in the city center. Francis X. ole Kaparo, speaker of the National Assembly, contends that the government ought to open protected areas to cattle until the crisis passes. 'What would be the need of preserving forests and other natural resources when people are dying?' he asked at a recent news conference. 'Of whose benefit will the resources be if people perish due to the current famine?' But the tourism minister, Morris Dzoro, has argued against opening the parks, saying that Kenyans would suffer even more if tourism, a major source of foreign currency, were adversely affected, and that in any event, the reserves could provide only a tiny fraction of the grazing space needed by the cows. Outside the Chyulu Hills reserve, herdsmen say they are losing dozens of cows each day. When the cows become so weak they can no longer stand, they are often abandoned on the road, where they lie for days until they die. Then they are skinned, with the hides providing a little compensation. Given the difficulty of keeping them alive, cows are rapidly losing value. An animal that once fetched well over $100 is now going for a third of that, nomads say. Lemaiyan Shangwa, one of the herdsmen camped on the outskirts of the reserve, said two of his brothers had been arrested for crossing park boundaries with the family cows. The fine in each case, he said, amounted to about one cow. But the family's herd is dwindling by the day, Mr. Shangwa said. He had 250 cows a month ago, and now has only 54 still standing. 'That's all my family has in the world,' he said. Mr. Shangwa said one elder saw so many of his cows die that he began crying openly, shocking all the other herdsmen, who are known for their stoic ways. Simon Kipaipei, who has lost about 20 of his 200 cows, said the government had to act soon because the cows were becoming too weak to walk any further. The herdsmen gathered here now huddle with their livestock near water in Makindu, where the animals guzzle water meant for the local population. Peter Njoroge, a water specialist with German Agro Action, predicts that Kenya's situation will grow still worse until more water resources are developed in remote communities. Until then, though, he sees the opening up of Chyulu Hills National Park to cattle as a sensible stopgap measure. 'Inside the game reserve there is grass,' he said. 'The herdsmen can see the grass. But they are told that the grass can't be eaten.'

Subject: Business-Cycle Theory From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 07:13:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ January 20, 2006 Milton Friedman: 'I Think the Austrian Business-Cycle Theory Has Done the World a Great Deal of Harm.' This is from a 1998 interview. By Mark Thoma EPSTEIN You were acquainted with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and also are familiar with the work of Ludwig von Mises and his American disciple, Murray Rothbard. When you were talking about bad investments, you were alluding to Austrian business-cycle theory. A certain concept that has pretty much gone into our parlance and understanding fits in with what you said about what happened in Asia. There can be times and conditions in which the stage can be set for malinvestment that leads to recession. FRIEDMAN That is a very general statement that has very little content. I think the Austrian business-cycle theory has done the world a great deal of harm. If you go back to the 1930s, which is a key point, here you had the Austrians sitting in London, Hayek and Lionel Robbins, and saying you just have to let the bottom drop out of the world. You’ve just got to let it cure itself. You can’t do anything about it. You will only make it worse. You have Rothbard saying it was a great mistake not to let the whole banking system collapse. I think by encouraging that kind of do-nothing policy both in Britain and in the United States, they did harm.

Subject: El Presidente's New Clothes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 05:49:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/opinion/20pazsoldan.html January 20, 2006 El Presidente's New Clothes By EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN Ithaca, N.Y. THE day after Bolivians elected the populist Evo Morales as their first-ever indigenous president, a colleague of mine back in New York called to ask about the fate of my relatives still in the country. 'I mean,' he said, 'now that the machete-wielding, coca-chewing campesinos have taken over, shouldn't they leave before it's too late?' He also asked me to describe what was happening in the streets of La Paz, which I was then visiting. Were white middle-class owners boarding up their shops? Had they stopped wearing Western clothing and, as a cartoonist suggested, flocked to buy ponchos? I normally would have complained about his stereotypical view of Bolivians - a people with such a penchant for coups and civil unrest that governing them has become an impossible feat - but this time I could not. I was too shocked by the maturity of Bolivians' reaction to Mr. Morales's election. Only seven months ago, the country was on the brink of civil war and regional disintegration, and Mr. Morales was seen by the urban, non-indigenous middle class as a rabble-rouser who, by ordering former miners, trade unionists and community activists to blockade roads and airports, had paralyzed the economy, isolated Bolivia from the rest of the world and toppled two elected presidents. People in the wealthy, eastern, lowland state of Santa Cruz, complaining of the 'unruly Indians back in the West,' were already demanding more autonomy from the central government; some were even calling for secession. But when Evo Morales is inaugurated on Sunday, it will be thanks to the support of the educated middle class who used to be scared of him. Even in Santa Cruz, where middle-class white youngsters frequently pelted Mr. Morales with eggs upon his arrival at the airport, his Movement Toward Socialism party garnered enough votes on Election Day last month to acquire a seat in the national Senate. In truth, I had underestimated the ability of Bolivians to adjust to a new situation - indeed, to any situation. I should have known better. When I was growing up in a fairly affluent neighborhood of Cochabamba, Bolivia's third largest city, I blithely rearranged my soccer games and dating adventures around each new ordinance or curfew imposed by the revolving military juntas. 'There never are solutions in Bolivia,' says my father, a retired doctor. 'But there are always exits.' And this time Mr. Morales offered an artful exit from what had come to seem like an endless economic and political crisis. The politicians of the traditional parties did not realize how weary Bolivians had grown of the corruption of the white-collar establishment, and of a 20-year-old neoliberal model that had been able to stabilize the economy but could not make it grow. As my uncle reminded me shortly before the election, Mr. Morales was likely to win in some measure because one of the indigenous people's three main commandments was 'do not steal' - a rather surprising comment from my uncle, a retired general who, in 1993, had urged me to pray for the sitting president's health after an Aymara Indian had been elected vice president. All Mr. Morales had to do was to say time and again that while he was going to change the political and economic model, he would respect private property. He said that in plazas full of campesinos in the countryside, and in five-star hotel restaurants brimming with anxious businessmen. Perhaps this is why some of my friends and relatives in Bolivia, even those who sometimes worried out loud about the coming Indian revenge against their former criollo rulers, willed themselves to pay attention only to the part of Mr. Morales's message that they wanted to hear. And Mr. Morales made it easy for them by quickly learning the main rule for a politician aspiring to the presidency: to adapt his message so that he can be whoever his listeners want him to be. Thus, in his first trip abroad as president-elect, he was the old-school radical leader when in the company of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro, but a reassuring voice in Spain and France, countries with interests in the Bolivian gas and oil industry who fear a nationalist confiscation of their holdings. At home, Mr. Morales has tempered his promise to abandon the neoliberal model with warnings that 'we cannot undo in five years something that has been in place for decades.' Now, Bolivians have been fixating on what Mr. Morales will wear when he is invested as president Sunday. Will he choose traditional Indian dress, or, as a cousin of mine who voted for him wants, a 'more appropriate' Western-style suit? Judging by what he has done and said lately, Mr. Morales seems likely to find a sartorial compromise aimed at pleasing as many voters as possible. Edmundo Paz Soldán is a professor of Hispanic languages and literature at Cornell.

Subject: Paul Krugman: The K Street Prescription From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 05:20:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ Paul Krugman continues his discussion of health care reform with a look at how the influence of lobbyists corrupted the Medicare reform process. By Mark Thoma The K Street Prescription, Medicare on Drugs, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: The new prescription drug benefit is off to a catastrophic start. Tens of thousands of older Americans have arrived at pharmacies to discover that their old drug benefits have been canceled... More than two dozen states have taken emergency action. ... [T]his was a drug bill written by and for lobbyists. Consider the career trajectories of the two men who played the most important role in ... the Medicare legislation. Thomas Scully was a hospital industry lobbyist before President Bush appointed him to run Medicare. ... Mr. Scully had good reasons not to let anything stand in the way of the drug bill. He had received a special ethics waiver from his superiors allowing him to negotiate for future jobs with lobbying and investment firms - firms that had a strong financial stake in the form of the bill - while still in public office. He left public service, if that's what it was, almost as soon as the bill was passed, and is once again a lobbyist, now for drug companies. Meanwhile, Representative Billy Tauzin, the bill's point man on Capitol Hill, quickly left Congress once the bill was passed to become president of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the powerful drug industry lobby. Surely both men's decisions while in office were influenced by the desire to please their potential future employers. And that undue influence explains why the drug legislation is such a mess. The most important problem with the drug bill is that it doesn't offer direct coverage from Medicare. Instead, people must sign up with private plans offered by insurance companies. This has three bad effects. First, the elderly face wildly confusing choices. Second, costs are high, because the bill creates an extra, unnecessary layer of bureaucracy. Finally, the fragmentation into private plans prevents Medicare from using bulk purchasing to reduce drug prices. It's all bad, from the public's point of view. But it's good for insurance companies ... and it's even better for drug companies... So whose interests do you think Mr. Scully and Mr. Tauzin represented? Which brings us to the larger question of cronyism and corruption. Thanks to Jack Abramoff, the K Street project orchestrated by Tom DeLay is finally getting some serious attention in the news media. ... But most reports on the project still miss the main point by emphasizing the effect on campaign contributions. The more important effect of the K Street project is that it allows the party machine to offer lavish personal rewards to the faithful. If you're a congressman, toeing the line on legislation brings you free meals in Jack Abramoff's restaurant, invitations to his sky box, golf trips to Scotland, cushy jobs for family members and a lavish salary once you leave office. The same rewards are there for loyal members of the administration... I don't want to overstate Mr. Abramoff's role ... he doesn't seem to have been involved in the Medicare drug deal. It's interesting, though, that Scott McClellan has announced that the White House, contrary to earlier promises, won't provide any specific information about contacts between Mr. Abramoff and staff members. So I have a question for my colleagues in the news media: Why isn't the decision by the White House to stonewall on the largest corruption scandal since Warren Harding considered major news?

Subject: Model Portfolio From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 05:10:25 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Whether we are bulls or bears there need to be model portfolios that can be relied on to take us through the years. I believe there are easily bought, easily followed, simple, high quality, low cost portfolios that can be developed. I prefer to use only Vanguard for investment. Vanguard Model Portfolio 30% American total stock market index 15% Europe stock market index 5% emerging stock market index 20% real estate investment trust index 30% total bond market index Vanguard Alternatives American large cap value stock index American middle cap stock index international developed stock market index international explorer stock fund health care fund energy fund precious metals and mining long term investment-grade bond fund high yield tax free bond fund

Subject: Government Bonds? From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 07:38:15 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Vanguard is a great place to invest Terri, I have investments there myself, you keep asking bears - where to invest - Pancho posts the wealth gap is getting greater and greater - I just read this and thought you would like so as well: http://www.isop.ucla.edu/profmex/volume1/4fall96/Art3/Great.html The most universal example of counterproductive government policy was the effort to keep a balanced budget. Doing so proved impossible because the depression caused tax revenues to decline at the same time that the government was being forced to spend more in relief for the needy. With prices falling, unemployment high and economic activity stagnating, deliberate deficit spending would have provided stimulation to the economy, however the contrary was done, expenditures were reduced to a minimum and additional taxes were imposed. During the period between 1931 and 1932, Herbert Hoover made no fewer than 21 public statements stressing the need for a balanced federal budget. After loosing the election in 1932, he even pleaded Franklin D. Roosevelt to maintain fiscal discipline 'even if further taxation is necessary'. These measures were fully backed by the big corporations and the very wealthy individuals to whom the tightness of Hoover’s policies made perfect sense. Regardless of the crisis, many conglomerates such as U.S.Steel, DuPont, Shell Oil, Gulf Oil and General Motors managed to expand. After the crash they were able to buy businesses and properties at basement bargain prices (13). However the policies described above made no sense for the ordinary citizen because by the early thirties the United States’ economy was in obvious depression. (doesn't that sound like today Terri - with bush and big business?) Two months after the crash several million people had lost their jobs, many businesses had closed, sellers had been fired and factories had cut their production and decided not to grow further. Office buildings, homes, apartments and hotels everywhere had few tenants and the construction industry came to a complete halt. Banks curtailed their loans and the industry ceased to receive funding. The automotive industry exploded like an inflated balloon, the Ford Motor Company which had 128,000 workers in March of 1929 lowered the payroll to 37,000 eighteen months later. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company estimated that in the large cities unemployment had reached 24% of the economically active population . Prices of many goods began to fall as companies sacrificed their margins or even operated with losses. That prompted further layoffs and lower wages which in turn meant less consumption and an aggravation of the slump. Deflation followed the depression and both started feeding each other, creating a vicious circle Millions had no shoes, yet footwear factories were operating at marginal capacity. Hundreds of thousands had no food, yet gallons of milk and silos of grain were dumped and burned. Meanwhile, concentration of wealth increased. Those who had money invested in government bonds which always honored their obligations even while sacrificing infrastructure, education, social security and public safety projects.

Subject: Investing From: Emma To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 11:54:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting and proper post. Fortunately we will not make the mistake again of Herbert Hoover. We will properly use monetary and fiscal policy to sustain the economy, though some will complain. Investing in government bonds however was a proper thing to do, and the complaint about honoring the bonds makes no sense. The Constitution reuires us to honor government bonds. Bond investors were not and would not be a problem in a recession or even Depression. Policy is all important.

Subject: Govt Milking wokers with Bonds? From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:46:22 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml;jsessionid=1TFYDRYPY2SSHQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/money/2006/01/20/ccbond20.xml&menuId=242&sSheet=/money/2006/01/20/ixcoms.html How bonds are bleeding the nation's pensions dry (Filed: 20/01/2006) Falling yields have trapped funds in a costly Catch 22, writes Philip Aldrick 'This is the last thing the pensions industry needs,' Jeremy Toner, portfolio manager at Investec Asset Management, sighed. Even those with no interest in the arcane world of pensions will recognise the gloomy tenor. Generous company pension schemes are being scrapped, staff are being asked to make larger contributions and companies are going bankrupt on account of their pension problems. Mention pension and the first word most people think of now is 'crisis'. What's troubling Mr Toner is the most arcane problem of them all: falling bond yields. In the past two weeks alone the combined FTSE 100 pension deficit has risen by £35billion to £110billion as a result of tumbling yields, according to accountants Deloitte. 'When you consider companies topped up their contributions by just an extra £8billion in 2004, you get an idea of the scale of the problem,' Stephen Yeo, a partner at actuaries Watson Wyatt said. Pension funds' liabilities are measured using bond yields. The lower the bond yield, the greater the liability. And the greater the liability, the worse the pension deficit. The best way to match a scheme's liabilities is to invest in assets that will track them. And the closest money can buy are index-linked long term Government bonds. But they are in short supply. This year just £17.9billion of long-dated, index-linked gilts will be issued by the Government compared with the market value for defined benefit pension scheme assets of £900billion. It doesn't take a financial whizz to spot a little imbalance between demand and supply there, and that anomaly is having a perverse effect on the market. Demand is pushing up bond prices and, consequently, yields are falling, which, in turn, are leading to higher pension deficits. Self-perpetuating, the problem is the pension industry's very own Catch 22. No matter what the trustees do, the deficits are growing and contributions are just draining away. 'Pension funds are caught in a vicious circle,' Chris Hartley, a director in the fixed-income team at Insight Investment, said. 'The UK gilt market has now almost completely detached itself from economic fundamentals and has become a story of pension fund demand and Government supply.' Mr Toner went even further, laying the blame for the current spike in deficits squarely at the feet of the Government. He believes new regulations drove pension funds into the gilt market. 'Is it right for a Government to force pension funds into buying these assets and then to sell them at extremely high prices?' Mr Toner asked. He is not alone. Most observers say the march into bonds was kicked off by regulations drawn up in 2003 that matched pension liabilities to yields. But it was the formation of the Pension Protection Fund last month that has really concentrated minds. Under the PPF, companies will have to pay an annual levy based on a risk-based analysis of their pension deficits. Mr Hartley said: 'Schemes have until March 31 to prepare their assets so they are presented in the best possible light to minimise the levy. If they are going to get their assets more closely matched to their liabilities, they need to get into bonds.' The move to bonds is not new but it is accelerating markedly. About 21pc of pension fund assets are currently held in UK bonds. That may be the same level as three years ago, but it represents a shift out of equities because stock market values have risen. It comes as little surprise that the principal beneficiary has been the Government. Public debt can rarely have been so cheaply financed. The 50-year gilt had a real yield (after inflation) of just 0.45pc on Wednesday, compared with 0.77pc at the start of the year. The industry is now lobbying the Government to issue more gilts, and the Debt Management Office is considering their pleas. Next year's offer is expected to be significantly larger than the £17.9billion in 2005-06. But observers say even that may not be enough. Mr Toner reckons the problem needs closer attention. His main concern is the Pension Regulator's requirement that all deficits must be cleared within 10 years. 'The Government has pressured companies into addressing these deficits too quickly,' he said. 'It has created a huge structural demand for long-dated assets but the market is simply too small.' He added that by focusing regulations on funding alone, the pension industry has been making investment decisions it would never normally contemplate. At their current level, gilts are not an enticing prospect but their low-risk profile and the fact that they closely match pension liabilities has brought out the industry's herd instinct. According to Mr Hartley: 'The fear is that if everyone else is buying gilts, deficits will widen anyway. So they all are just shutting their eyes and jumping. Better that than be left with a huge deficit and a poor risk profile.' Mr Toner would like the Government to wed its regulations on funding requirements to others on investment policies. He said: 'There should be more about companies taking a longer-term view of their investment policies. 'The current set-up is focused purely on short-term risk reduction and that has clearly had a damaging effect.' He suggested setting a minimum yield requirement, which would have stopped fund managers moving into equities when the stock market peaked and prevented them from buying gilts now. If the Government is the main beneficiary, the losers have been company workers who have lost their generous pensions. 'New legislation may have the public interest at heart but it's had a lot of unintended consequences,' Mr Hartley noted. 'Companies have had to close their final salary schemes to new and even existing members. That saddens me.' The regulations are also sapping business of investment capital, as funds are diverted away from growth opportunities and into pension funds and the PPF levy. A collapse in yields is far from the first problem the industry has had to address. The crisis started in 1997, when Gordon Brown withdrew the dividend tax credit in a move that cost the industry £5billion a year. Then the stock markets plummeted. Resurgent equities offered a glimmer of hope but, just as the market rose, actuaries decided that pension liabilities should be much higher because people were living longer. In 1991, the average male life expectancy was 79.1 years. By 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics, it will be 84. The industry must now wonder what other nasty surprises lie in store.

Subject: Re: Govt Milking wokers with Bonds? From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:53:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sorry, I do not understand this article, nor do I understand the headline.

Subject: Re: Govt Milking wokers with Bonds? From: Terri To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 13:39:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Britain, like America, has gone through a splendid investment period from1980 till now, even with the recent bear market in stocks. Why then should there be a pension fund problem after all the fine investment years? Why are bonds the problem? NO; I do not understand at all.

Subject: Greenspan Worried about GSE From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 03:28:12 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://today.reuters.com/investing/financeArticle.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=2006-01-19T230418Z_01_N19223071_RTRIDST_0_FINANCIAL-GSES-UPDATE-2.XML UPDATE 2-Greenspan warns senators of GSEs' systemic risk Thu Jan 19, 2006 6:03 PM ET Printer Friendly | Email Article | Reprints | RSS (Page 1 of 2) (Adds comments, details, background) By Kristin Roberts WASHINGTON, Jan 19 (Reuters) - Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan fired the first shots of the year against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in a letter to senators calling on Congress to take aim at the mortgage giants' $1.5 trillion investment portfolios. Greenspan, in a Jan. 3 letter released on Thursday by New Hampshire Republican Sen. John Sununu, said Congress must give the federal regulator for the companies 'clear and unambiguous' guidance on the purpose and function of those portfolios. He said a bill passed last year by the House of Representatives fails to do that, and would not create an effective regulator for the government-sponsored enterprises or address the risk that he and others say the companies' investments pose to the broader financial system. In contrast, Greenspan backed legislation in the Senate, which would force the companies to reduce their portfolios by restricting the types of investments they may hold. 'The bill approved by the Senate Banking Committee in July 2005 (S. 190) provides this much-needed anchor and would refocus Fannie and Freddie on their important public policy mission,' Greenspan said in the letter to Sununu. Republican Sens. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska received identical letters. Greenspan's comments largely reiterated his stance on oversight of Fannie (FNM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Freddie (FRE.N: Quote, Profile, Research) -- companies owned by shareholders but chartered by Congress to support homeownership by keeping money flowing in the mortgage market. But the letter marked the opening shots of 2006 in the push to stiffen oversight of Fannie and Freddie following multibillion-dollar accounting scandals at both companies. Fannie and Freddie buy mortgages from originators, giving lenders money to make more loans. They then pool those loans into securities for sale to investors. The companies also keep some loans and securities in their portfolios. The companies say those portfolios help them fulfill their mission of keeping the market liquid, especially in times of crisis. But Greenspan and the Bush administration argue the large portfolios pose a risk to the financial system by aggregating interest rate and prepayment risk within two companies. 'As Fannie and Freddie increase in size relative to the counterparties for their hedging transactions, their ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions and correct the inevitable misjudgments inherent in their complex hedging strategies becomes more difficult, especially when vast reversal transactions backed by their thin capital holdings are required to rebalance portfolio risks,' Greenspan said in the letter. RENEWED FOCUS The House in October passed legislation that would overhaul supervision of the companies by creating a new regulator with sweeping authorities over Fannie's and Freddie's management and operations. But it was dubbed weak by the White House because it would only authorize, not direct, the regulator to cut the companies' portfolios. The Bush administration and Greenspan supported a Senate bill, but that legislation did not advance beyond committee passage because Republicans could not forge agreement with Democrats. Key lawmakers have called GSE legislation a priority in 2006, including Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican. But some analysts and lobbyists have questioned whether a bill will be passed.

Subject: Re: Greenspan Worried about GSE From: David E.. To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 18:53:44 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I thought the worry was who was going to hold the bag when interest rates go up. And those who have borrowed short and lent long have to pay the piper. That risk is supposed to be hmanaged with derivatives. And Greenspan is worried that the guys holding the GSE's derivatives are not going to be able to come thru because they don't have the size or will to meet their obligations. This is a possible train wreck of historic proportions, making the S&L crisis of the early 90's seem picayune. Greenspan's money quote - ''As Fannie and Freddie increase in size relative to the counterparties for their hedging transactions, their ability to quickly respond to changing market conditions and correct the inevitable misjudgments inherent in their complex hedging strategies becomes more difficult, especially when vast reversal transactions backed by their thin capital holdings are required to rebalance portfolio risks,' I welcome being disabused of this fear. Carpet baggers from Texas profited immensely from the disruption in California in the early 90's.

Subject: The big question From: Johnny5 To: David E.. Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 17:58:57 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: David - Terri and I want to know - if you see this scenario soon - where to invest? M3 and bigger M kept money out of circulation - inflation could not arise increasing the general level of goods and services (remember a house is not a good - rent substitutes house in CPI) but when money hits the lower m's - inflation gonna be here eh? Feds right, M3 not critical to CPI - but if M3 start to change fast one way or another - it can be a leading indicator to where money about to go maybe eh? But they no longer want to tell us about that - for our own good - hehe. http://bankdersysrisk.blogspot.com/ The Big Question How many bankruptcies and foreclosures on a world wide scale will it take to endanger the derivatives market, causing an international banking crisis of historic magnitude. With 90% of all derivatives exposure located in the eight largest banks and 99% of all exposure through the 25 biggest banks on the planet, the question becomes, did we really move the risk onto the counter party, or just fool ourselves into thinking we did. At this time there is 45 trillion to 55 trillion dollars worth of derivatives exposure. With a major banking crisis forming due to bankruptcies and foreclosures, is their really any way to escape the damage in a heavily leveraged monetary system? ..... The Central Banks have called for a crusade of liquidity with the mantra 'give loans to anyone who asks for it'. Flood the cities of world with newly created money and the populous shall compete with each other over property. Using leveraged money to bid up the property, the seller walks away and buys another home which he then bids up. So the circle of abundant cash following limited assets begins. The circle injects money into the building industry, new homes are built, fortunes are created. People become employed in the mortgage, construction, and other related fields. The people rejoice at the miracle of their new found prosperity. Housing valuations go up and increased taxes are collected. But something is amiss. Rents remain the same or lower as housing prices ascend into the realm of the heavens. It becomes much cheaper to rent than to buy. Some of the foolish mortals not in hallowed halls of the Central Banks begin to wonder 'Where is all this demand for housing coming from?' The black death of bankruptcy hangs over the central banks. The Allen Greenspan's of the world know what is up. They sit in their offices in fear of the black death. They understand that if the population stops borrowing and creating new money, than the black death shall creep in, fester, and take back what was stolen, take back the leveraged money created through deceptive demand. The derivates market has made it possible to transfer mortgages from the originating bank to investors in the form of an asset backed security called a mortgage backed security (MBS). These securities take the form of bonds sold onto the international market, where pension funds and banks all over the world use them as assets and reserves. These securities in America track the 10 year Treasury bond very closely. This is due to the fact that they are seen as just as safe, as the investor still has the property to fall back upon in case of default by a delinquent borrower. Like unthinking troglodytes, investors buy them up, never questioning the actual value of the property supporting the MBS. The sickness of greed hits the population. Bankers and buyers pressure the appraisers to artificially raise the price of there property. Bankers lower their lending standards to the lowest possible point, even lending to a dead man (True story). The population thinks it has found a way to get rich without working or knowledge. It must be gods grace. God must really love America, or the United Kingdom, or Australia, or Spain. So much love, they all must be hippies. The feeling of wealth and success is better than drugs. Housing continues to rise in all of the countries. Leveraged money inflating the housing values to the heavenly clouds. The black death of bankruptcy is still waiting, waiting for the people to come to the edge of affordability, waiting for the panic, waiting for some minor event to change the hearts and minds of gods chosen people from a feeling of success, to one of panic, fear, and doubt.

Subject: Re: The big question From: David E.. To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sun, Jan 22, 2006 at 23:51:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I was very glad to see your post, Johnny5. Your link put meat on the bones of what Greenspan was talking about. It was a surprise that a few large US banks bear most of the risks. Modern portfolio Theory applies to this situation. And the answer is diversification. Diversification to take care of my two biggest downside fears. The fear of a depression and the fear of an inflation burst. My other fear is the fear of missing out on GDP growth by not investing in enough stock. I am aggressively trying to capture the benefits of a growing GDP by weighting my stock portfolio (30% Of total portfolio) in rough proportions to the world market. With an overweight to EM. To meet the risks of inflation in my stock portfolio I have tilted my stock asset allocation to a hard asset-real estate and a Suiss fund. The Suiss work hard to keep their inflation to 2% per year. Their economy depends on their success and the worlds reliance on their performance - so I am relying on the Suiss to repeat their past performance. If real estate is truly and hard asset and the Suiss live up to their reputation I have done as much as I can to protect my stock portfolio against deflation. To meet the risks of inflation in my bond portfolio I have invested in TIPS and short term bonds. Short term bonds will ride inflation with low losses as my short term bonds quickly turnover into bonds carrying higher interest rates. I can profit from deflation using my short term bonds's liquidity to profit from buying opportunity. But mostly what a portfolio can do is just wait for stocks to recover. I took my Econ classes in banking in 1965. Things have changed a lot since then. I don't understand the importance of M1, M2, M3 anymore. It seems to me that GSE's have turned everything on its head. GSE's are creating long term debt at the same time they are turning loose buckets of cash. I dont think the Federal Reserve controls these buckets of cash, I imagine they could, but they don't seem interested in tightening up on the banks. Anyways, I don't do economic forecasts. I just balance my appetite for profits with my fear of losses. If we are lucky, the next big downturn will not be as severe as the two 20 year events of the 20th century. Both of them were almost equal in economic impact and took 20 years for an investor to recover the real value of his portfolio's original balance. For an investor who isn't making new purchases of stock, waiting 20 years for the recovery is the only option. The two events were of course, the depression and inflation in the 70's and 80's. I am heavily into bonds because they are my bridge to the end of a possible 20 year dry spell. The 20 year dry spell is not the worst case scenario of course. But a possible scenario- because it happened twice in the last century. If the future is like the past, however, the portfolio will return 8.5% taking less than 9 years every time to double in value with a 3-5% SD risk. Steady and slow. Probably not the kind of answer you were expecting Johnny5, but it is the only answer I have found that makes sense to me. I have tried bear funds and decided they are a waste of time. The only way you win is when the market loses. This makes diversification difficult. Bear funds mess up the purity of diversification. It is like trying to go two ways at the same time with the same asset. I have been told that bear funds are 'market timing', I don't buy into that, but I won't buy them anymore.

Subject: Re: Greenspan Worried about GSE From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:46:40 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Private mortgage lenders have been lobbying against Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for years, and there is considerable Republican support for limiting the scope of the semi-public companies. Hopefully, there will be no status change for change would likely raise mortgage rates and add no more liquidity or safety to the mortgage market.

Subject: Fundamental Capitalist From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 17:22:41 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Fundamentally I thought you to be a capitalist terri - with the vanguard investments - have you ever read the book by william black on robbing banks? Fannie freddie can't be as efficient as the market in allocation can they? Senators say in that bit of data fannie freddie are no longer meeting their mandate - but making profits for shareholders at the risk of taxpayers - this is not helping poor people get homes - that is robin hood in reverse.

Subject: Re: Fundamental Capitalist From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 07:09:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is not a shred of evidence to argue that fully private mortgage banks have led to less expensive mortgages, and every reason to believe the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have. The attacks on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are partisan lobbying induced rubbish as much else for the idiocy of deregulation. When commercial banks begin to compete with Vanguard on investments, I will be impressed and pay attention.

Subject: Andy Kessler From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 07:50:54 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: There is not a shred of evidence to argue that fully private mortgage banks have led to less expensive mortgages, and every reason to believe the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have. Many people - like greenspan and other economists and senators say that the systemic risk is going up - there is no real counter party with all the derivatives and such. Kessler thinks we should get rid of the banks too - they are obsolete - the market is more informed today and a better steward of our capital allocations - we dont need all these middle men - banks or gubbment - they all siphon off too much or get too corrupt with all that concentrated power - I think Bogle is going along these lines too with his recent book on the dying soul of capitalism. http://www.andykessler.com/andy_kessler/2004/11/running_money_t.html Currency rates do float. And there are 100,000 or more computer screens on Wall Street and around the world armed by bond and currency traders that keep countries honest. Countries caught cheating see their currencies plummet, their interest rates pop and their economies slow. It is a tightly wound system. But banks are still a problem. They profit from lending, but there is no decent mechanism to keep them from overlending. Banks are as dead as gold. Neither is any good anymore at allocating capital. Stock markets, on the other hand, are quite good at providing access to capital for great companies and starving those that have dim prospects. Banks still loan to son-in-laws!

Subject: Re: Andy Kessler From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Jan 21, 2006 at 09:47:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting, but there is need for policies to encourage more actual financial competition and responsibility to owner-share holders while toughening regulation.

Subject: Freud and His Discontents From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 07:01:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/08/books/review/08SIEGELL.html?ex=1273204800&en=ba2bfe251ccd4af6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss May 8, 2005 Freud and His Discontents By Lee Siegel ''CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS'' first appeared in 1930, and on the occasion of its 75th anniversary has been reissued by Norton ($19.95). A new edition of a classic text of Western culture is a happy occasion, not least because it offers the opportunity to debate the book's effect on the way we see the world -- or whether it has any effect at all. ''Classic'' can mean that an intellectual work is indisputably definitive in its realm, or it can mean that its prestige has outlived its authority and influence. Being leatherbound is sometimes synonymous with being timebound. Freud's essay rests on three arguments that are impossible to prove: the development of civilization recapitulates the development of the individual; civilization's central purpose of repressing the aggressive instinct exacts unbearable suffering; the individual is torn between the desire to live (Eros) and the wish to die (Thanatos). It is impossible to refute Freud's theses, too. All three arguments have died in the minds of many people, under the pressure of intellectual opposition, only to remain alive and well in the minds of many others. To clarify the status of Freud's influence today is to get a better sense of a central rift running through the culture we live in. In one important sense, Freud's ideas have had an undeniable impact. They've spelled the death of psychology in art. Freud's abstract, impersonal concepts have worn away the specificity of fictional character. By the 1950's, here and in Western Europe, it was making less and less sense to fashion the idiosyncratic, original inner and outer lives of a character in a novel. His or her behavior was already accounted for by the universal realities of id, ego, superego, not to mention the forces of repression, displacement and neurosis. Thus the postwar rise of the nouveau roman, with its absence of character, and of the postmodern and experimental novels, with their many strategies -- self-annulling irony, deliberate cartoonishness, montage-like ''cutting'' -- for releasing fiction from its dependence on character. For all the rich work published after the war, there's barely a fictional figure that has the memorableness of a Gatsby, a Nick Adams, a Baron Charlus, a Leopold Bloom, a Settembrini. And that's leaving aside the magnificent 19th century, when authors plumbed the depths of the human mind with something on the order of clairvoyance. Of course, before that, there was Shakespeare. And Cervantes. And Dante. And . . . It seems that the further back you go in time, away from Freud, the deeper the psychological portraits you encounter in literary art. Nowadays, often even the most accomplished novels offer characters that are little more than flat, ghostly reflections of characters. The author's voice, or self-consciousness about voice, substitutes mere eccentricity for an imaginative surrender to another life. But if we have Freud to blame for the long-drawn-out extinction of literary character, we also have Freud to thank for the prestige of film. The depiction of fictional people's inner lives is not the strength of the silver screen. Character gets revealed to us by plot turns, camera angles, musical scores -- by abstract, impersonal forces, much like Freud's concepts. In a novel, character is shaped from the inside out; in a film, it's molded from the outside and stays outside. How many movie characters can you think of -- with the exception, perhaps, of Citizen Kane -- whose names have the archetypal particularity of Isabel Archer or Sister Carrie? For better or for worse, film's independence from character is the reason it has replaced the novel as the dominant art form in our culture. Yet Freud himself drew his conception of the human mind from the type of imaginative literature his ideas were about to start making obsolete. His work is full of references to poets, playwrights and novelists from his own and earlier periods. In the latter half of his career, he applied himself more and more to using literature to prove his theories, commenting, most famously, on Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky. ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' brims with quotations from Goethe, Heine, Romain Rolland, Mark Twain, John Galsworthy and others. If Freud had had only his own writings to refer to, he would never have become Freud. Having accomplished his intellectual aims, he unwittingly destroyed the assumptions behind the culture that had nourished his work. Freud's universal paradigm for the human personality didn't mean only the decline of character in fiction. Its authoritative reduction of the human personality to developmental flaws undermined authority. The priest, the rabbi, the minister, the politician, the general may refer to objective facts and invoke objective truths and even ideals. They may be decent, reasonable people who have a strong sense of the reality principle, and of the reality of other people. But in Freud's eyes, they are, like everyone else, products of their own narrow, half-perceived conditions, which they project upon the world around them and sometimes mistake for reality. Nothing they say about the world goes unqualified by their conditions. ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' itself is the product of a profoundly agitated, even disturbed, mind. By the summer of 1929, when Freud began the book, anti-Semitism -- long a staple of Austrian politics -- had become at least as virulent in Austria as in neighboring Germany. Hatred of Jews played a central role in Austria's Christian Socialist and German Nationalist parties, which were about to win a majority in parliament, and there was widespread enthusiasm for Germany's rapidly growing National Socialists. It's not hard to imagine that Freud, slowly dying from the cancer of the mouth that had been diagnosed in 1923, and in great pain, felt more and more anxious about his life, and about the fate of his work. Perhaps it's this despairing frame of mind that leads Freud into sharp contradictions and intellectual lapses in ''Civilization and Its Discontents.'' He writes at one point that ''the low estimation put upon earthly life by the Christian doctrine'' was the first great expression of hostility to civilized society in the West; yet elsewhere, he cites the Christian commandment to love one's neighbor as oneself as ''one of the ideal demands, as we have called them, of civilized society.'' Later, in the space of two sentences, he gets himself tangled up when he tries to identify that commandment with civilization itself. He describes the sacred injunction as being ''undoubtedly older than Christianity,'' and then catches himself, as if realizing that the idea of universal love was unique to Christianity, and adds, ''yet it is certainly not very old; even in historical times it was still strange to mankind.'' Throughout the essay, Freud's hostility to Christianity is so intense that he seems determined to define civilization in Christian terms. The book should have been called ''Christian Society and Its Discontents.'' That is what it really is. And then there is the aggressive instinct, a universal impulse that Freud claims presents the sole impediment to Christian love and civilized society, but which he cannot quite bring in line with his earlier theories. It's as if he were, understandably, sublimating into theory his own feelings about the Christian civilization that, even before Hitler's formal ascension to power in 1933, seemed about to devour him and his family. Certainly, Freud's rage against the dark forces gathering against him has something to do with his repeated references, throughout the book, to great men in history who go to their deaths vilified and ignored. In one weird, remarkable moment, Freud introduces the idea of ''the superego of an epoch of civilization,'' thus supplanting even Jesus Christ with a Freudian concept -- thus supplanting Christ with Freud. But the most enigmatic, or maybe just incoherent, element of ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' is Freud's contention -- fancifully laid in 1920, in ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' -- that every individual wishes, on some level, to die. In ''Civilization and Its Discontents,'' he does not account for this outrageously counterintuitive idea, explain his application of it to history or even elaborate on it. The notion appears toward the end of the book and then does not occur again. Nine years later, in exile in England, weak and ill, Freud committed physician-assisted suicide, asking his doctor to give him a lethal dose of morphine. For all Freud's stern kindness toward humanity, for all his efforts to lessen the burden of human suffering, Thanatos seems to be the embittered way in which he universalized his parlous inner state. It hampers the understanding to read ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' without taking into consideration all these circumstances. If Freud has taught us anything, it's that any evaluation of authority has to examine the condition of those who stand behind it. As for repairing to ''Civilization and Its Discontents'' to gain essential elucidation of our own condition, the work seems as severely circumscribed by its time as by its author's situation. Today, Freud's stress on the formative effect of the family romance seems less and less relevant amid endless deconstructions and permutations of the traditional family. His argument that society's repressions create unbearable suffering seems implausible in a society where permissiveness is creating new forms of suffering. His fearless candor about sex appears quaint in a culture that won't stop talking about sex. And a great many people with faith in the inherent goodness of humankind believe that they are living according to ideal sentiments, universal principles or sacred commandments, unhampered by Freudian skepticism. Yet there are, unquestionably, people for whom Freud's immensely powerful ideas are a permanent condition of their lives. Behind the declaration of ideal sentiments, universal principles and sacred commandments, they see a craven sham concealing self-interest, greed and the wish to do harm. Neither of these two groups will ever talk the other out of its worldview. In this sense the conflict is not between the Islamic world and the ''liberal'' West; it is between religious people everywhere and people who, like Freud, see faith as an illusion, a set of self-deceiving notions about life. To put it another way, Freudianism is not a science; you either grasp the reality of Freud's dynamic notion of the subconscious intuitively -- the way, in fact, you do or do not grasp the truthfulness of Ecclesiastes -- or you cannot accept that it exists. For that reason, the most intractable division in the world now is between those who believe that the subconscious plays a fundamental role in human life, and those who don't. That's the real culture war, and maybe even the real clash of civilizations.

Subject: In Movies, Big Issues, for Now From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 06:26:32 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/movies/18glob.html?ex=1295240400&en=ddd330e52b3bf5fd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 18, 2006 In Movies, Big Issues, for Now By DAVID CARR BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - The preoccupations of the Golden Globes are generally frivolous ones. Who are you wearing? Where are you going? Did you ever dream you would actually win? But backstage at the Globes this year at the Beverly Hilton, entertainers spent an awful lot of time talking about gay-bashing, about the role of film in public discourse and whether the president should be impeached. 'I think we could all agree that this is not the spot to have a conversation about issues like that,' said George Clooney, who won for best supporting actor for his role in the politically charged 'Syriana.' 'This was not an attack on the Bush administration, it was an attack on 60 years of failed Mideast policy,' he said, and then tried to change the mood by mentioning he was contemplating using the Globe trophy as a hood ornament on his car. Mr. Clooney, who is also in the running for an Oscar as the director of 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' a meditation on the role of the news media in turning back an intrusive government, should not be surprised that the press, and in some instances, the public, is treating this year's hopefuls like so much homework. Hollywood, which tried in vain to use money and might to influence the last election, is thinking aloud and has a lot on its mind. Only after dealing - or not - with those issues of public moment did the stars head off to party their hearts out. And then the industry retreated to form for a few hours. The preening 'Mean Girls' version of Hollywood - 'Reese is so, so cute!' and 'What in the world was Drew thinking wearing that!' - was everywhere to see and hear. At parties after the event on Monday night, replete with the vogueing action figures of Paris and Nicky Hilton, various studios and publications teamed up to serve up enough vodka, shrimp and bad D.J. music to make the Iraq war and a political culture beset by division and scandal seem distant. The industry and some of its increasingly important voices feel some dissonance, no doubt. Ang Lee, who received both a best director's Globe for his 'Brokeback Mountain' and a handoff of the torch from the western icon Clint Eastwood, spoke from the dais with obvious sincerity about 'the power of movies to change the way we're thinking.' But in the pressroom afterward, when he faced persistent efforts to force him to declare his film - it is both marketed and described as 'a universal love story' - as a Message Movie, he gently but firmly resisted. 'We'll see how it plays out, but it's not why I made the movie,' Mr. Lee said. 'Whether it's a cultural milestone, it's not for me to say.' Philip Seymour Hoffman confronted a similar gantlet of questions, about whether it was difficult to portray Truman Capote, a man who was out and gay when that was a difficult choice. 'A role is difficult to play because of the internal drama of the character,' he said. 'Those are the things that are scary, not his sexual preference. Later, when asked about the treatment of gays in America, he added, 'I don't think this film really takes a side.' But of course, we live in a time when taking sides is what people do. It is an odd moment in cultural history, with the year's string of weighty contenders, plus less-heralded efforts like 'Munich' and 'Jarhead,' doing their own form of reality programming. (Imagine: Only two years ago, our big Oscar-film issue was whether Frodo and Sam would destroy the ring.) The current movie mood was probably inevitable. In an atomized news media culture, Jon Stewart is not the only nontraditional source of political thought. His selection as host of the Oscars can be read as one more reaction to the shock of the election to the industry's liberal elite and perhaps a sign that it may be willing, for the moment anyway, to grab that opportunity with both hands. 'With 'Syriana,' 'Good Night, and Good Luck' and 'The Constant Gardener,' some people are saying it is almost a 70's revival in terms of political movies,' said Rachel Weisz, who won for her supporting role in 'Gardener.' She was asked about her wishes for the coming year. 'A healthy baby, of course,' said Ms. Weisz, who compared baby bumps with Gwyneth Paltrow when they saw each other in the restroom. What else? 'Hmmm. I feel like a candidate for Ms. World - world peace and the troops to come home,' she said, laughing at the cliché but maintaining the sentiment. What's easy to forget in all this is the fact that Hollywood - with a lead time of well over a year when it comes to making a major film - generally follows, but does not lead, cultural and political trends. That means the movies honored at the Globes offer a peek into the industry 18 months ago, when film executives were on high alert about the war, about the election, about the growing divide in the country. It was way back then that feel-good, the vibe that Hollywood is largely in the business of manufacturing, took on this new gravitas. After years of angst and conference calls over what 14-year-old males will come out to see, major studios like Warner Brothers were saying yes to films like 'Syriana,' an ambitious, prismatic look at America's foreign policy means and objectives. We, the viewing public, now get to feel good about ourselves because we are watching movies that take on actual issues, and then take a stand, at least until its time to market the film or accept an award. 'Brokeback Mountain,' 'TransAmerica,' 'Syriana' and 'The Constant Gardener' - all honored by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association - reflect on hatred, greed and poverty. 'Good Night, and Good Luck' and 'Capote' use the past to reflect journalism's shortcomings. (Meanwhile, 'King Kong,' the ultimate escapist fare with a Gable-Lombard overlay on an old-fashioned monster movie, has been all but ignored this season, and even 'Walk the Line,' which surged at the Globes, carries a significant message abut the wages of fame.) But just as inevitably, the pendulum will swing back of its own accord. After all, portent and meaning do not always sell a lot of popcorn, and can create some indigestion along the way. So the new seriousness was probably at a peak, or close to it. Remember, in the 1980's, Hollywood was all about the Benjamins. In the 90's, it was more about the stars, who received a lot of Benjamins. The latest big thing has been true stories about real events that engage adult audiences. And the coming year will see a few more of those, including Oliver Stone's look at the attacks of Sept. 11; 'Sicko,' another Michael Moore broadside; and the delayed 'All the King's Men.' But new versions of Superman, X-Men and Spider-Man films will soon swoop in to rescue the day, and perhaps the industry, from a persistent bout of heavy thought. It is fun, or at least interesting, while it lasts.

Subject: No Frames, No Brushes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 06:24:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/arts/design/17poli.html January 17, 2006 No Frames, No Brushes, Just a Limitless Flickering Screen By HOLLAND COTTER Political anxiety pulses away in practically every corner of American culture, including contemporary art. It's an odd kind of anxiety, almost independent of individual events like wars and terrorist threats. It's amorphous and atmospheric, like an enveloping data stream with no off-switch. American mainstream culture has trouble dealing with such a condition, one that eludes packaging and marketing, that can't be turned into a movie or a painting, or even a protest poster. But artists are smart. Although many have recently appeared to be softening or dropping political content, others were doing something else. They were altering the delivery system, twisting the angle of approach, changing their mode of address from declarative to interrogative. That change is the subtext of 'Low-Intensity Conflict,' a modest but potent program of 10 short films and videos being screened at 7 tonight at the Swiss Institute, 495 Broadway, near Spring Street, in SoHo. As a medium, film is well suited to a socially engaged art. It can be duplicated endlessly and cheaply and circulated widely. It does not need galleries and museums; it can be shown on the exterior of a skyscraper or the wall of a tent, on television or on the Internet. And it can cast 'political' in many forms, as documentary or fiction, tragedy or comedy, in forms polished or rough, conclusive or open-ended. All these turn up in the Swiss Institute program, an intense hour and a half of looking and thinking organized by a young New York curator, Miriam Katzeff. Some of the pieces are straightforward agitprop, like a two-minute film titled '30 Second Hate/Suckers' by the San Francisco filmmaker Bryan Boyce, which uses a fast-paced montage of news clips and cartoons to zap the current White House administration. Also clocking in at two minutes is 'In Search of the Suspicious' by the Dutch artist Marc Bijl, a kind of docudrama send-up. Filmed in Berlin, it shows armed military police directing startled subway commuters through a metal detector, and searching those who set off alarms. In fact, the police are actors and Mr. Bijl supplied the detector. But the subway riders are real, and few of them question or protest the procedures. The British artist Phil Collins documents a different kind of manipulation in his stinging film series 'How to Make a Refugee,' shot in war-torn Eastern Europe in 1999. In the segment to be shown tonight, a Western European camera crew interviews a large refugee Kosovar family, quizzing them about their hardships and urging them to expose their wounds, before herding them together for a group picture, like exotic animals in a zoo. An element of exoticism is also at work in 'Enema to Capitalism' (2005), a documentary of an anarchist squatter community in St. Petersburg made by the Russian artist Dmitry Vilensky. To a New Yorker, the punk style of the young subjects is a downtown look from the early 1980's, though in Russia, the same look, not to mention the implied political sentiments, would have been unthinkable until fairly recently. Is the film evidence of a vaunted new international culture of resistance, or of an imported lifestyle more effective as theater than as politics? The New York artist Seth Price asks a similar question in 'Folk Music and Documentary,' in which a young man stands in front of the camera voicing negative views about war and globalism. But he looks as if he were performing for a screen test with a script he hadn't fully memorized. 'Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screed No. 20' is Sharon Hayes's talking-head re-creation of a video made by Patty Hearst and her captors after her kidnapping in 1974. She upbraids her parents for their wealth, accuses the American government of trying to kill her and declares solidarity with the revolution. Ms. Hayes performed the piece in front of a live audience to whom she had given transcripts of the speech, instructing them to hold her to word-for-word accuracy, and they do. The stumbling results come close at times to stand-up comedy; but in presenting history as a constantly corrected script, she makes sure you consider every last strange word. Andrea Geyer's 'Reference Over Time' is also a monologue, though one with several voices, as an on-screen actress rehearses a passage from a Bertolt Brecht text titled 'Conversation Among Refugees.' In the text, written while Brecht was in exile from Germany in the 1940's, two men, also refugees, talk bitterly about politics and come to the realization that talking is all they do. The German-born Ms. Geyer made the film in the United States in 2004, when debates over the Patriot Act were in the air. As the actress rehearses Brecht's loaded words she experiments with ways to deliver them, pointedly or passively. Tone isn't an issue - it's straightforward - in the newest and most challenging of the films Ms. Katzeff has chosen, Paul Chan's portrait of Lynne F. Stewart, the New York lawyer convicted last year of aiding Islamic terrorism by smuggling messages out of jail from a client she was defending, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. Now disbarred, Ms. Stewart faces a 30-year jail sentence. The film, which Mr. Chan calls a work-in-progress, simply shows Ms. Stewart talking; in a sense it is a self-portrait. She talks about her trial, about her career as an activist lawyer and about a personal politics that sounds instinctual rather than ideological. She also reads poetry. One of the poems she reads is William Blake's 'On Another's Sorrow,' from 'Songs of Innocence.' It isn't 'political' in any overt way. It is filled with both questions and answers. While she reads, Mr. Chan turns the screen into a field of changing colors, so that we concentrate on the music of the words, the activism of the soul that poetry is, the power outlet that art can be. It's a simple device, and like any effective political action, right or wrong, brilliant because it works.

Subject: Crossing the Border From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 06:23:10 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/opinion/l18immig.html Crossing the Border To the Editor: In your article about Mexican women who immigrate to the United States, you do not mention that there are important cultural reasons they cross the border, not just financial ones. Poor Mexican women are frequently subject to early 'marriages' that result in desertion or physical abuse. Wives may not have control of family finances and bear the burden of housework and child-rearing. America offers the hope that they can control their own destinies and make a better future for their children. And thankfully, even though these women are illegal immigrants, they are entitled to law enforcement protection in the event of domestic abuse. Ellen G. Rafshoon Atlanta, Jan. 10, 2006 The writer is a visiting lecturer in history, Georgia State University.

Subject: A New Old Way to Make Diesel From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 06:22:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/18/business/worldbusiness/18diesel.html?ex=1295240400&en=facffc4bc0f15489&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 18, 2006 A New Old Way to Make Diesel By SIMON ROMERO RAS LAFFAN INDUSTRIAL CITY, Qatar - In this tiny emirate near the border with Iran, the world's largest oil companies are betting billions of dollars on an obscure method for making diesel fuel that stems from apartheid South Africa's aggressive efforts to wean its economy off imported oil. Yellow school buses shuttle thousands of Indian and Pakistani workers from nearby labor camps each day to work in a giant meandering knot of pipes and turbines, showcased with a logo of an oryx, Qatar's antelope mascot. No one is angling for oil here. In fact, rising oil prices have lifted the fortunes of a once-shunned technology that converts another fossil fuel, natural gas, into clean-burning diesel. Even as geologists fiercely debate whether depleting oil fields can satiate intense demand for oil in the rising economies of Asia, the actions of the international energy industry may speak louder than words. Big oil is betting on once-derided unconventional energy sources, like this stranded natural gas in the Persian Gulf and remote tar deposits in Canada and Venezuela, to help meet surging demand for transportation fuel. 'It's time to take the genie out of the bottle,' Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, Qatar's energy minister, said in an interview. 'We want to be the capital of the world for this new age of fuels.' These different types of fuels may have clunky nicknames, like G.T.L. and L.N.G. But they draw big money. Mr. Attiyah rattled off a roster of ventures with Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and Sasol of South Africa to produce a new form of diesel from natural gas and said they were expected to invest more than $14 billion in capital over the next five to seven years. This new diesel fuel is far cleaner than the diesel commonly used in passenger cars in Europe and heavy trucks in the United States. Diesel is usually made from the sulfur-laden parts of crude oil and traces its origins to the sturdy 19th-century engine invented by Rudolf Diesel. Exxon Mobil and Qatar Petroleum are working together on one venture to produce cleaner diesel from natural gas that is expected to require $7 billion over the next several years. It would be the single largest investment in Exxon Mobil's history. Qatar, a small peninsula nation off Saudi Arabia, is not alone in what may be the largest multination experiment with alternative fuels. Chevron is building another $3 billion complex in Nigeria to produce 34,000 barrels a day. Elsewhere, Syntroleum, based in Tulsa, Okla., is trying to advance similar ventures in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, while in Algeria, companies including Shell, Statoil of Norway and Sasol of South Africa are vying for a project focused on that country's Tinhert gas field. Energy companies are also looking at gas-rich nations like Australia, Iran, Egypt and Trinidad and Tobago for other projects. By 2015, overall production of this fuel may reach more than one million barrels a day, according to an estimate by Cambridge Energy Research Associates. That is roughly equivalent to Venezuela's current daily oil exports to the United States. Qatar has attracted the largest projects thanks to its plentiful natural gas reserves and an aggressive investment strategy that builds on a longstanding cultivation of American and European energy companies. Only Russia and Iran are believed to have more natural gas than Qatar, a nation of 800,000 people - mostly foreign laborers - that is already positioned to soon become the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. The liquefied natural gas industry in Qatar, however, is much different from the wager on technology to convert gas to a liquid fuel. Liquefied natural gas is extremely complex to transport, requiring an elaborate system of cooling plants near gas deposits, double-hulled tankers and reheating facilities in the markets where the fuel is consumed. Liquefied natural gas is largely used to generate electricity. The gas-to-liquid method, on the other hand, provides an alternative to oil as a transportation fuel. Gas-to-liquids essentially transforms natural gas into liquid diesel that can be transported and sold using existing tankers, refineries and gas stations. Diesel is much more commonplace in Europe than in the United States, where consumers still think of it as a heavily polluting fuel used in big trucks and machinery. Two German scientists, Franz Fischer and Hans Tropsch, developed the process in the 1920's after discovering a way of converting coal into a liquid fuel. Energy analysts say gas-to-liquid plants become competitive when oil prices climb above $30 to $35 a barrel, as they have during the last two years. [On Tuesday, crude oil prices closed at $66.31 on the New York Mercantile Exchange, more than double the price on Dec. 31, 2003.] Gas-to-liquid producers contend the fuel might attract a premium in nations looking for alternatives that reduce toxic diesel emissions. A report by the California Energy Commission recently recommended blending the cleaner diesel with existing fuel stocks to meet stringent fuel standards. 'One key aspect of the fuel is its low smog formation,' said Andrew Brown, Shell's country manager in Qatar, who has imported a gas-to-liquid-powered Audi sedan to Doha to show how the fuel burns quietly and without the smell of early forms of diesel. Transforming gas-to-liquids into an environmentally-friendly fuel source is new, even if production methods have already gone through several incarnations. During World War II, Germany developed methods to convert coal into fuel for their army. And, apartheid leaders in South Africa adapted methods to convert coal into a transportation fuel to survive economic isolation. The United States flirted with the method after the oil shocks of the 1970's, but eventually withdrew most funding of synthetic fuel research when oil prices fell. Then, breakthroughs enabled companies to use cleaner-burning natural gas instead of coal to produce a fuel that emits far fewer pollutants than diesel that is made from crude oil. Though methods vary, the process essentially combines natural gas with water and oxygen, then exposes that mixture to cobalt to produce a transparent liquid fuel. This fuel currently amounts to a minuscule portion of total global fuel production, with Shell operating the largest such plant in Bintulu, Malaysia, a pilot operation with output of about 14,700 barrels a day. Overall global oil production, by comparison, is more than 80 million barrels a day. A small experimental plant also exists in Ponca City, Okla., though gas-to-liquid production in the United States is likelier to one day come from coal since the nation's natural gas is expensive and in short supply. Still, worldwide gas-to-liquid production is set to grow rapidly over the next decade. It joins fuel sources like bitumen, which is mined in vast open-pit operations in Canada, and ethanol, which is widely consumed in sugar-cane-rich Brazil, in easing reliance on crude oil for transportation. Although the use of oil in factories and power plants has declined in the last two decades, the United States still relies on oil for more than 95 percent of its transportation needs. Qatar's projects capture the ambitions and risks of turning gas-to-liquid into an internationally viable fuel. The first shipments of gas-to-liquid out of the country are expected to be marketed this year with the opening of Oryx GTL, a venture by Chevron, Sasol and Qatar Petroleum producing 34,000 barrels a day. Shell is also forming a venture with Qatar Petroleum to produce 140,000 barrels a day of gas-to-liquid by 2009. Exxon Mobil's larger venture is aiming for production of 154,000 barrels. Wayne A. Harms, Exxon Mobil's country manager for Qatar, said in an interview in Doha that the company was drilling appraisal wells for the project in the North Field, the world's largest pure natural gas field. Qatar shares the field with Iran, and there are plans to start production by 2011. 'Qatar is in a unique position,' Mr. Harms said, 'in that it has a large field that's accessible, a politically stable government and a good vision of what it's doing.' The dizzying scale of these projects, though, presents challenges for Qatar and its Western partners. Construction costs, for instance, have been climbing in the last year as companies scramble to acquire building material not just in Ras Laffan but also in the capital, Doha, where dozens of skyscrapers are going up. The cost of a bag of cement is up more than 20 percent since the start of 2005, according to the Doha office of Davis Langdon, a construction consulting firm. Higher project costs, as well as concern over managing the extraction of gas from the North Field, weighed on Qatar's abrupt move last year to delay the start of other gas-to-liquid ventures with ConocoPhillips and Marathon Oil of Houston. Still, huge projects are finally taking off here above all for one reason. More than any other gas-rich country, Qatar has aggressively seized on new ways of monetizing its natural gas. And Qatar's model is likely to be studied in a world that has more natural gas than oil, with global gas reserves expected to last another 67 years compared with 41 years of annual supply of crude oil, according to BP, the British energy giant. The ample supplies of gas, of course, are far away from the largest markets for the fuel, in industrialized countries. That explains why the investments in Qatar, Nigeria and other countries might signal an extension of the international trade in energy. Even as renewable energy captures the public imagination, hydrocarbons, whether found in oil or natural gas or bitumen, are growing more vital in meeting energy needs. 'It's simply a shift away from crude oil to natural gas,' said Bernard J. Picchi, international oil and energy technology analyst with Foresight Research Solutions in New York. 'I'm not particularly concerned about the ability of hydrocarbons to survive, even thrive, well into this century.'

Subject: Scorched Earth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 06:20:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/opinion/15park.html?ex=1294981200&en=3c78dbe25878b2ac&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 15, 2006 Scorched Earth By ROBERT L. PARK College Park, Md. NASA has quietly terminated the Deep Space Climate Observatory, citing 'competing priorities.' The news media took little notice. Few Americans, after all, had even heard of the program. But the entire world may come to mourn its passing. Earth is growing warmer. Even the most strident global-warming deniers have taken to saying that a little warming is a good thing. If the trend continues, however, it will have catastrophic consequences for life on this planet. Correctly identifying the cause could be the most important problem facing humanity. Most scientists link global warming to unrestrained burning of fossil fuels, which shrouds Earth in a blanket of carbon dioxide, trapping the Sun's energy. Others, backed by industries that spew pollutants into the atmosphere, insist that greenhouse emissions are not the problem. They prefer to attribute warming to natural variations in solar output. Scientists are skeptical, but they don't deny the possibility. The issue cries out to be resolved. Even in a world wracked by wars, battles are not fought over scientific disagreements. In science, nature is the sole arbiter. Disputes are resolved only by better experiments. The better experiment when it comes to global warming was to be the climate observatory, situated in space at the neutral-gravity point between the Sun and Earth. Called Lagrange 1, or L1, this point is about one million miles from Earth. At L1, with a view of the full disk of the Sun in one direction, and a full sunlit Earth in the opposite, the observatory could continuously monitor Earth's energy balance. It was given a poetic name, Triana, after Rodrigo de Triana, the sailor aboard Christopher Columbus's ship who first sighted the New World. Development began in November 1998 and it was ready for launching three years later. The cost was only about $100 million. For comparison, that is only one-thousandth the cost of the International Space Station, which serves no useful purpose. Before Triana could be launched, however, there was a presidential election. Many of the industries favored by the new Bush White House were not anxious to have the cause of global warming pinned down. The launching was put on hold. The disdain of the Bush White House for Triana goes much deeper than just a desire to avoid the truth about global warming. Triana began life in early 1998 as a brainchild of Al Gore, who was then the vice president. Mr. Gore, the story goes, woke up one morning wondering if it would be possible to beam a continuous image of the full Earth back from space to inspire people with the need to care for our planet. The 1972 portrait of the full Earth, taken from the Moon, had inspired millions with the fragile beauty of our blue planet. Why not beam the image live into classrooms, allowing students to view weather systems marching around the globe? Scientists had dreamed of such an observatory for years. They hoped Mr. Gore's influence would make it happen. Mr. Gore's support would end up destroying it. Those who hated him, hated Triana. His dream of inspiring environmentalists and schoolchildren served only to trivialize the project. It was ridiculed as 'Gore's screen saver.' Triana is terminated, but global warming is not. Someday, there will have to be an observatory at L1. Perhaps the most important lesson from our exploration of the solar system is that the most terrible place on Earth is a Garden of Eden compared to the best place anywhere else. We must find out how to keep it that way. Robert L.Park is a professor of physics at the University of Maryland.

Subject: corruption From: byron To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 22:03:35 (EST) Email Address: bluefin76020@yahoo.com Message: At a time when the Bush Administration is telling other countries how to run there business corruption is running rampant in our own backyard. This is like the pot calling the kettle black. What a joke! What do you think these people in all these countries are saying as they watch this corruption going on over here.

Subject: Re: corruption From: Mik To: byron Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 16:20:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I wouldn't worry too much about that. Canada is currently facing elections and may well have a change of government all due to a stupid corruption scandal. The president of South Africa recently fired the vice-president for corruption. The EU's one governing department known as the 8th directorate (responsible for all contract awards) had every single member resign (we are talking about a couple hundred officials) to avoid being fired or worse - arrested; all linked to corruption. I think the biggest issue is the level of corruption. Interestingly enough, the World Bank has a measure of corruption. And it seems accepted that every single country on earth faces corruption. It is obvious that when you employ so many people in government, you cannot guarantee that some officials will welcome 'personal enrichment schemes'. The issue is about rampant corruption, to the level where it hampers economic growth. There are many countries where corruption is so wide spread that the country is literally stalled. I think the corruption level of the USA (and most other countries) is so low that it doesn't even feature on the World Bank's indicator. It is those countries with high corruption that we need to say, 'Guys we may not have our house perfectly in order, but your house is in shambles, clean in up.'

Subject: Re: corruption From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 16:57:48 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Will the likely change in government in Canada effect national health care, and if so how might you suppose? I am not sure what a conservative government might wish in social and economic policy, especially as this is a fine time for Canada.

Subject: Re: corruption From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 17:59:58 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Canada as a counter to America is a fine arrangement. I surely would not wish Canada to imitate us, but I have no clear sense of what Candaian Conservatives represent.

Subject: Re: corruption From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 21:46:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma, Don't worry - let me put it this way... where the Democratic Party of the USA stops heading leftward, that is where the Conservatives of Canada start. Our politics is so leftist that the Democratic Party of the USA would be regarded as right wing extremists (okay so that is an exaggeration but you get the point). The conservatives would not even dare touch the Canadian Health Care system. The conservatives will however allow private clinics to operate side by side (so long as it does not affect the public system). The conservatives do have a few weird sides and some of the conservatives have even been caught praising the US right wingers. But in essence the conservative policy is just sooooo liberal it is incredible. I am not a conservative supporter, primarily because they are playing pure dirty politics and using the scandal as the sole excuse (and they may just get away with it). Also the conservatives want to pull out of Kyoto - which I think is absolutely insulting. The New Democratic Party (NDP) which is the left wing party is a little too leftist. They are totally against any private sector involvement in health care (which I have reservations against), they see big business and only being evil (I don't think they full understand what it means to make a place investor friendly) and to top it all off they want to end NAFTA... unbelievable. So the Liberal party has the best middle ground. But this election is stupid. Who ever wins between the Conservatives or the Liberals will be stuck with a minority government. In our system no law can be passed without majority support of the house and even now no political party can achieve any 'hidden' agenda without the support of one or more of the other parties. If the conservatives win, I predict it won't be long before we will be back in a stupid election. Simply because the NDP who normally balance the vote can find common ground with the Liberal Party, but I seriously doubt they will find any common ground with the Conservatives. In essence, even if the Conservatives win, without Liberal sanction no law will be passed. The spooky part is that Quebec has their own party (the Bloc) which is only found in the province. The real absolute spooky part is that the Bloc looks to win its biggest majority in Quebec ever and the Bloc is pro-separation. The leader of the Bloc has made a very serious statement about English Canadian attitude towards Quebec. If the French language (the core of their culture) is not going to remain a supreme language (along side English) in Canada but rather relegated to the same status as our other immigrant languages; then English Canadians have to come to terms with the fact that Quebec has no place in Canada. This is spooky because I don't think there is a Canadian who in their right mind can say the leader of the Bloc is wrong. In essence, he goes onto say, English Canadians must get over themselves and respect that Quebec is no better or no worse than the rest of Canada, but that Quebec needs to protect their culture and not be relegated to the same status as other immigrants. I think the majority of Canadians may well accept that Quebec is right to leave Canada. We may well see a major turn in our history - now that a pro-seperatist party has its highest support ever.

Subject: Oh, Canada From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 05:12:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excellent; I am completely assured.

Subject: Re: Oh, Canada From: Poyetas To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 08:35:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Not me, The canadian economic model has been built around years of liberal party control. I have absolutely no faith in any other party. Imagine having Harper as a PM? Jesus, it would totally remove my political bragging rights. Nevertheless I do agree that they need to allow for private clinics as long as people are willing to pay extra for as long as it does not take away from the tax base. The Canadian health system is in desperate need of more money and more doctors, especially in highly urbanized areas... If Quebec separates, which I don't think it will, it would be a huge blow to both economies. This whole language thing is stupid. This whole English vs. French thing comes down to one thing: Human Laziness from both sides.

Subject: Re: Oh, Canada From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 12:14:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please do continue to add to comments on Canada, for it is curious how scant coverage is here even in the New York Times. Of course, I would prefer to have a Liberal government and there must be more support for public health care.

Subject: Re: Oh, Canada From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 19:43:31 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Poyetas - I agree with you 100%. Canada is poised to become a super growing economy for the next 10 to 20 years. Everything is in place. Who ever rules Canada for the next 10 to 20 years will most likely go into the history books as on of the great leaders of our time who led Canada during its hey-day. The unfortunate part is that Paul Martin (as ex Minister of Finance) is in my opinion the Architect of Canada's amazing position and Harper (of the conservatives) may well take the credit for the foundation set by Paul Martin. On the issue of the Quebec situation I sort of agree with you. The base problem is laziness on the part of the English Canadians not to learn to speak French. I come from a country with two official languages and we HAD to learn and pass both languages right through out school. The same could easily be done here in Canada. The French Canadians are far more bilingual than the English Canadians. The English Canadians just don't get it. To the English Canadians, the French are just whining all the time, the English don't actually listen. And for not listening we may well lose the French. The Bloc is going to get the overwhelming majority of Quebec support in this election. The Bloc will then be perfectly placed to continue promoting separation... AND the leader of the Bloc is truly an amazing charasmatic person. Emma, The Conservatives just want elections to make use of the recent corrrpution scandal (that happened in Quebec) to get into power. The health care system of Canada is the actual reason why we are really facing elections. The conservatives are in the same mind set as the Liberals with regards to the health care system.... HOWEVER !!! The NDP are the spoilers. Canada's Public Health Care System cannot go on for ever. With an aging society, and invention of new expensive drugs, one cannot expect the government to continue paying for everything for ever. The Health Care budget will slowly consume this entire nation... but we are generation(s) away from the Public Health Care being a serious financial problem. One way out is to allow the private sector to take off the pressure on the public sector. Right now, the private sector does operate in Canada in a very minor role. So let's keep the private sector around until things get worse and worse, then perhaps look to a private sector that has been around for a while. However the NDP does not see it like this. The problem is that the NDP looks to the USA and says, 'See the USA's mess - we must avoid that.' Well for starters it is typically Canadian to only look to the USA and totally unfair of the NDP to use the USA as an example of private health care gone wrong. The NDP has in parliament joined the Liberals in out voting the Conservatives and passing so many socialist laws such as legalising gay marriage, Kyoto, etc, etc. But the NDP pushed a motion to have any form of private clinics outlawed in Canada. This the Liberals would not do. Private clinics have absolutely no effect on the public health care - let's not slam the door on them as we will most likely need them in the future. When the Liberals said, 'NO!' to the NDP, then the NDP (out of spite) made an about turn and joined the conservatives in a no confidence motion that has brought us into elections now. The real stupid part is that the conservatives look to win, in which case the NDP will still not get their way in the future and will most likely have a tougher time getting any social type laws passed. In essence they may have 'cut-off their noses to spite their face'. Idiots The saddest part is that the Liberals were in the process of pioneering a new plan to guarantee child care support for young parents. A huge plan covering so many issues facing young parents from subsidized day-care to amazing tax breaks. This is about to be the newest pure social program of our generation. If the conservatives win they will kill the program. Ironically enough - in the short run, if the Conservatives win, I will personally be better off. Less tax for me. However - I would prefer to continue paying more tax knowing that the less fortunate are being better cared.

Subject: Iran more than politics From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 12:50:17 (EST) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Rememeber terri - in march Iran is to open an oil exchange that wont trade US dollars for black gold. US is trying to stop that - for the dollar dies after that. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011806_world_stories.shtml IAEA meeting on Iran N-program to be held January 18, 2006 12:29 IST Rediff.com http://in.rediff.com/news/2006/jan/18iran.htm In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. France, Germany, Britain, China, Russia and the United States have agreed to hold an emergency two-day meeting of the board of the International Atomic Energy Agency on Iran's nuclear programme from February 2. US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs R Nicholas Burns participated in informal talks with the other five countries, which led to the decision. Talking to reporters on Tuesday, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the London discussions allowed the parties to exchange views over Iran's decision to resume uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities, which eventually could allow the government in Tehran to produce nuclear weapons. 'What all parties agreed was that the regime's actions raise serious issues and it should return to the suspension of all enrichment and reprocessing activity,' he said. McClellan echoed British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw's comments on Monday that the issue is one of confidence and '...the behaviour of the regime in Iran... has a long history of concealing its activities from the international community, and therefore must show the international community that it is not developing nuclear weapons under the guise of a civilian programme.' At the United Nations, US Ambassador John Bolton said, 'The issue of Iran's nuclear weapons programme is a classic threat to international peace and security, which is why the United States has felt for some time that the matter belongs on the Security Council's agenda.' Bolton, who is the chief US envoy to the United Nations, said involving the Security Council will not displace the IAEA, but will 'strengthen the hand' of the agency in dealing with Iran. Asked if the Bush administration was considering placing oil sanctions or an oil embargo on Iran, McClellan said the United States was 'not going to prejudge what may take place at the United Nations Security Council,' if the council addresseds the matter. 'The first step is to go forward with this board meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency,' he said, adding that the current focus is on the continuing discussions with the Europeans and others in the run-up to the meeting.

Subject: Re: Iran more than politics From: Terri To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 16:49:06 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Whether Iran trades in dollars or other currencies seems of absolutely no account. Dollars will still buy and sell oil quite nicely, as far as I can tell. The dollar rises and falls in value. When we think a fall is likely, we can easily own international assets to conpensate.

Subject: Re: Iran more than politics From: Emma To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 19:25:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is every reason to believe there will be a diplomatic settlement of the problem with Iran, since every developed nation along with Russia, China and India has an interest in a negotiated understanding. We can be calm, all will be settled.

Subject: Re: Iran more than politics From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 16:06:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma, I'm a whole lot more pessimistic on this one. I can guarantee you the USA and perhaps even Nato have already commenced secret talks on a military strike strategy. I firmly believe the Iraq fiasco has sent a message to Iran that they'd better get their Nuclear weapons up and running ASAP in case of 'future intimidation'. Exactly the opposite message the White House thought they'd give by invading Iraq. Also keep something else in mind - the Shiites may well have an opportunity to lead Iraq - this is the same group who are very closely connected to the main religious sect of Iran. Something is brewing and it definitely involves Iraq. Saddam went into war with Iran because (according to him) he needed to cut off that Shiite rise from the root. This political/religious issue is resurfacing with whole new dynamics. There is a chain of events that has been kicked off with Iraq and Iran most likely realises that now is their opportunity to do.... blech.... I don't know intentions, but when their premier makes claims to end Israel and that the holocaust is a myth... I get VERY spooked. Even Canada currently has sanctions against Iran. This is definitely a rogue nation. At best - get ready to pay higher gas prices.

Subject: Re: Iran more than politics From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 17:01:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The level of protest is loud, but I believe that Russia and China have enough leverage with Iran to temper her moves, while there is not likely to be an attack both because of the involvement of Russia and China and because war with Iran would be far more difficult than Iraq. Dismiss the shouting from Iran.

Subject: I wish every day could be like christmas From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 12:01:22 (EST) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: America’s Perpetual Christmas By Kenneth Rogoff Has the United States transcended the laws of economics? As the New Year begins, the US continues to race ahead of its rich-country counterparts. The gargantuan US trade deficit? No problem. In 2005, it widened further, and the dollar only strengthened. Low investment and a deteriorating primary education system? Not to worry. The super-flexible US economy keeps managing to produce more with less. Nor are there any signs of America’s economic hegemony starting to fold under the weight of maintaining its unilateral military dominance. Instead of feeling the pinch of wartime privations, like in any ordinary country, American consumers are binging as if it were Christmas all year round. There are those who truly believe in the idea that America is exceptional. Those true believers argue that America’s consumers can long pursue their spendthrift ways because their country’s economy is better than everyone else’s. The US labor market is more flexible than Europe’s, enabling it to react more nimbly to the ever shifting sands of globalization. And, unlike most countries, especially in Latin America and Asia, the US system ruthlessly prunes weak corporate leadership. Moreover, the true believers cite America’s better-funded and hyper-competitive university system, which sucks in a disproportionate share of the world’s top students and researchers. Many ultimately choose to immigrate to America permanently, and it is relatively easy for them to do so, thanks to a society that still welcomes outsiders with open arms (even if things have become more difficult since 2001). On top of all this, the US military, rather than being a burden, feeds the country’s technological superiority by subsidizing basic research. By contrast, skeptics hold that the US economy already contains the seeds of its own socio-economic decline. They point to worsening income inequality, as images beamed worldwide from post-hurricane New Orleans illustrated all too clearly. Poor children do not have reasonable access to health care. Nor are the non-poor faring particularly well, as wage growth has remained virtually flat for a very long time, even as corporate profits are booming. Indeed, this disconnect may explain why polls do not give President Bush the credit for economic management that his strong record would seem to merit. Nor does it help Americans’ mood that they spend far more of their lives working than do citizens in Europe or, these days, even Japan. All of these factors place deep stresses on the social fabric which, so the skeptics argue, will ultimately play out in the political arena. Interestingly, both sides cite America’s gaping trade deficit – believe it or not, the US is soaking up two-thirds of global excess saving – to support their arguments. The true believers view the deficits as evidence that the world recognizes how special the US is and wants to buy in. Skeptics see an empire living on borrowed money and borrowed time. So which is it? In my view, those who think that America is about to collapse are likely to be disappointed. Nevertheless, I suspect that the age of American exceptionalism is near an end, and soon per capita income in Europe and Japan will approach that of the US, rather than falling farther behind. Though the next few years are likely to underscore some of the weaknesses that the skeptics highlight, the end will come mainly because other countries will find creative ways to mimic the most effective US institutions, albeit within their own legal, political, and social frameworks. We would do well to recall how, at the beginning of the 1990’s, book after book was still being written urging US and European corporations to imitate Japan or face certain doom. The last 15 years have of course revealed deep flaws in Japan’s financial system. But another major factor contributing to Japan’s decline was that firms elsewhere began adopting Japanese methods, such as just-in-time supply chains. Surely, imitation will someday impinge on superior US growth performance as well. Perhaps the biggest weakness in the true believers’ argument is the trade deficit. For the moment, America’s ability to borrow vast sums at low interest rates acts like a huge dose of steroids on the economy. It artificially props up consumption growth and allows the government to defer hard choices between taxes and military expenditures. At some point, the party is going to end. The unwinding of the US economy might even begin in 2006, particularly if Japan continues to grow out of its doldrums, the US housing market softens dramatically, and Europe’s economic recovery accelerates. Individually, these are each highly plausible scenarios, and collectively they would hit the US trade deficit like a perfect storm. Perhaps the end will come in a different way, but it is difficult to imagine the age of US exceptionalism lasting indefinitely. Can the end come abruptly in 2006? This is not the most likely scenario, but it is not unthinkable. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\01\06\story_6-1-2006_pg5_26

Subject: Re: I wish every day could be like christmas From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 16:34:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting article, but what should we do to protect against a decline in competitiveness as there is more imitation, or problems that finally appear because we are spending too much? What now?

Subject: Re: I wish every day could be like christmas From: Pancho Villa To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 16:50:48 (EST) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: 'The twentieth century will not see fixed exchange rates again among the G-3. But it is entirely possible that a new international monetary system will emerge in the twenty-first century.' Robert Mundell http://www.robertmundell.net/NobelLecture/nobel5.asp

Subject: Re: I wish every day could be like christmas From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 18:36:59 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The dollar needs to lose value given the domestic and trade deficits, yet I have trouble understanding how the dollar declines even 20% given the interest in maintaining trade stability from Europe to Asia. In any event, if ever there was need to have Euro assets this is the time.

Subject: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 07:50:50 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'There are those who truly believe in the idea that America is exceptional. Those true believers argue that America’s consumers can long pursue their spendthrift ways because their country’s economy is better than everyone else’s.' It's not very complicated. Look at our advantages exiting WW2 and our massive natural resources which have since eroded. We went from large trade surplus to large trade deficit somewhere in the middle. The accumulation of wealth made us big spenders and we still spend like crazy even though we no longer earn enough to cover it. We've forgotten the lessons that our grandparents gained from their school of 'hard knocks'. Our schooling is on its way.

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 09:12:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Still, when a trend has been in place for decades there is no telling how long the trend can persist. Also, as we quickly reversed debt characteristics during the Bill Clinton years, we can reverse course again with another Administration. For the time, I sense relative stability. The most significant economic problem by far seems the cost of the war in Iraq, but this is scarcely mentioned.

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 15:53:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I concur with Emma on this one. The statement of, 'we can't keep this up for ever...' yes but how long can we keep this up. If anyone is to act as a prophet of doom, please do me a favour... GIVE ME FORECAST DATES. To say this can't go on for ever is like stating the obvious. Now the original article asks the real question - is 2006 the beginning of the downfall? I agree with Emma in saying, 'No' or 'Not really'. Also is the USA so inherently super efficient that even when it is becoming in-efficient it is still leagues ahead of the nearest rivals (especially the Europeans) and that it can buy many, many years of downturn time. And so allow enough time for a new administration to turn the ongoing deficit problem around? If I look at the World Bank internet site on GDP to see where the US stands against the rest of the world in real terms, it is simply mind blowing how rich the USA really is. It appears the USA could buy up the rest of the world. I struggle to come to terms with the fact that so many US companies have a turnover greater than full countries. If Walmart was a country onto itself (as I'm sure they try to be) they would be richer than Australia. Bloody hell. As most of us here know Malthus predicted the end of the UK in the early 1900's using some very similar projections we use today to predict the end of the USA. Malthus could not have dreamt of the industrial age. I can well imagine politicians in the early 1900's complaining of the mass unemployment in the Agricultural sector due to these terrible new fangled machines. Yet no one would have dreamt of what was to come. In the same way I firmly believe we are already entering a new era. In the same way Farm and mining based economies gave way to industrial based economies' today industrial based economies are giving way to...errr... uhmmm... #### based economies (you fill in the missing part). The USA and even Canada appears to be in a rush to de-industrialise, and in a strange way this de-industrialization will ensure we keep ahead of the pack so to speak. I just wish I knew what that new age really is. I suppose when the industrial age kicked in - they didn't have a real label for it either, just a whole lot of new fangled machines that can replace people. I am sure there was a time when economist felt like they were in a state of flux, something was happening - but no one really knew at the time. This new age of ours is also seeing a whole lot of new uhmm ideas and concepts that some how make fortunes of money and employ less people. I believe we are in a state of flux but at the dawn of a new economic age. Uhhhmm if you figure out what this new age is really about... please let me know...

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Pete Weis To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 20:25:27 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'The statement of, 'we can't keep this up for ever...' yes but how long can we keep this up. If anyone is to act as a prophet of doom, please do me a favour... GIVE ME FORECAST DATES.' OK. It all happens on December 7, 2006. How's that! Seriously: If you are bearish you must come up with a 'specific date' or you have no credibility? If you are bullish you aren't required to set a date when everything is supposed to take off, because 'if we just hang on for the long run' (however long that is) you will 'always make pretty good gains'. If you are bearish you are a 'profit of doom'. If you are bullish you are simply optimistic and generally part of the consensus view. Obvious translation bear is bad (and out on a limb) and bull is good. And despite all the stuff about 'thinking outside the box', if being outside the box means being 'bearish' then most folks don't want to go near it. Terri complains that being bearish means you must have solutions and specific advice on how to invest. Yet if you are bullish you are simply part of the accepted club and few demands are made to qualify a bull's 'optimism' and since in the view of a bull everything is mostly just fine he/she generally doesn't believe any real solutions are needed. So any solutions (or investment advice) a bear might suggest are simply rejected. Mik. Your own words reveal so much. Richard Russell, who Barrons has called perhaps the most accurate long term market analyst in the business was a market bull in the late 70's when most were disallusioned and a bear in the late 90's when most were over-exuberant. Today he is very bearish and is no longer invited back on CNBC, because 'so many CNBC viewers sent such angry e-mails' regarding his bearish statements. The truth - if we listened to Richard Russell over the years and acted on his advice we would all be very well off indeed! So you can demand a specific 'date' from the 'prophets of doom' if you will, but you are selling yourself short. I, and other so called 'prophets of doom', are not saying the end of America is at hand. We're simply saying tougher times are soon coming are way. That's the reality of a record level of debt which has accumulated against both future personal earnings and future federal tax revenue. Those of us who are saying we are going to run into serious economic trouble are saying that the housing boom has had a much stronger impact on propping up a fundamently flawed economy than most realize. If that housing market is topping out at this time then I see nothing to replace it and consumption will have to take a substantial hit. Obviously, I would not put a specific date on a sudden collapse of the US economy. But I am willing to say that if the next few years (especially 2006-2007 with an end to the housing boom) do not show up significant weakness in US economic conditions, then most of what I've been posting is just a bunch of bologna. I don't care how big many US companies are - they still need 'enough' folks to buy 'enough' of their products or they will be reducing capital expenditure and laying-off the very people who form the basis of their sales. Just ask the management of GM, Ford, Chrysler, IBM, Toll Brothers, etc.

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Mik To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 19:12:33 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I don't know about your experiences but for me - the person who predicts change (whether bullish or bearish) should give a forecast date. I once lived in an economy that was consistently going South, high inflation and a negative growth rate. When I predicted a bullish upswing I was placed in the hot spot 'Give the dates'. Which I did and lucky for I wasn't too far off. You post raised two themes: 1. The problems with being spendthrift 2. lessons that our grandparents went through Well this is where I have an objection and even remember reading a clause from Paul Krugman to this very topic. I remember Paul Krugman making a statement that being thrifty and saving may seem to make sense especially to our grand parents, hence no one could ever imagine that doing the opposite would actually benefit the nation. Obviously we should remain within reason... but this is the whole emphasis to my post.... WHAT IS REASON??? I once remember people freaking out when Reagan took the US into a serious deficit. Electronic Bill Boards were put up with fast moving numbers showing how the deficit was spiralling out of control yet the deficit of today puts Reagan into amature category. During the 'oil crisis / oil shocks' era I once remember people predicting the end of the world as we know it. Movies were made showing battery operated cars and some sort of life after an economic collapse None of this happened. Hhhmm imagine in a couple of years, a new president comes to power and over an 8 year period, manages to turn things around. Then imagine in about 20 years time, a Republican comes to power and does a couple crazy things and takes the US into a deficit that makes the current deficit look amateur.... possible? I hope this puts my point across.

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Fri, Jan 20, 2006 at 06:08:14 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What matters is selecting a portfolio that will take us through bull or bear markets. I find the suggestions of bears generally impossible to follow. What then would a Vanguard bear market portfolio look like?

Subject: Re: We became exceptional post WW2 From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 17:07:01 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Splendid thoughtfilled comment, though not because we agree but for the ideas, especially the idea of a post-industrial America and Canada which is of course the ostensible direction.

Subject: Rumblings of a German Revival From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 09:18:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/business/worldbusiness/17comeback.html?ex=1295154000&en=0c9b1f3993d986bb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 Rumblings of a German Revival By MARK LANDLER HEIDELBERG, Germany - Germany, after four years of stagnation, is showing signs of reclaiming its role as the economic engine of Europe. And much of the credit goes to old-line German companies like the printing press manufacturer named for this ancient university town. Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, the world's largest maker of printing presses, was flat on its back two years ago, the victim of a downturn in the media industry and of Japanese rivals that undercut its prices. Now, after painful therapy that included 3,500 layoffs, the company is humming again. The rest of the country may soon join it. A variety of recent statistics suggests that Germany, the world's third-largest economy, is on the mend, with quickening growth, surging investor confidence, signs of a rebirth in consumer spending and even a modest decline in unemployment. A reinvigorated Germany would have far-reaching implications for Europe and even the global economy. It accounts for a fifth of the economic activity of the European Union, and is the world's largest exporter, a title it has managed to retain even during these lean years. 'The rumors of Germany's death have been exaggerated,' said Norbert Walter, the chief economist at Deutsche Bank. 'We've really made lots of progress, and we've gotten off to a good start in 2006.' Germany has seen false dawns before, of course. There was a burst of enthusiasm here last winter before the economy relapsed and an unpopular German government felt forced to call early elections. Germany grew barely 1 percent in 2005, and even the most bullish projections for this year put growth at just 2 percent - a pace that would qualify as a lull in the United States. For the first time since the tech bubble burst in late 2000, however, there is a real sense that Germany is on the move. For one, the Germans voted in a new government, under its first woman leader, which has helped lift the mood in this often-pessimistic country. [Chancellor Angela Merkel, who met with President Bush in Washington on Jan. 13, has gotten off to a sure-footed start, political analysts say, raising hopes that she can push through overdue economic changes.] For another, German industry has whipped itself into shape. By taking unpopular steps, like cutting jobs, extending work hours without extra pay and moving production to lower-cost countries, companies have pruned their costs and regained their competitive edge in global markets. Back in fighting trim, German industry has begun flexing its muscles overseas. The chemical giant BASF recently made a $4.9 billion hostile takeover bid for the Engelhard Corporation of New Jersey, while the steel maker ThyssenKrupp is locked in a battle for a Canadian steel giant. 'The strength of German companies has been hidden by a productivity and cost disadvantage,' said Alexander C. Dibelius, a partner at Goldman Sachs who runs its German office. 'When they increase their productivity, their products are pretty much unbeatable.' The reversal in fortunes is evident in a visit here to Heidelberg, where its namesake company looms large, with a shimmering glass tower opposite the train station and a sprawling factory outside town. Earlier in the decade, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen reflected Germany's industrial decline. Its sales tumbled 17 percent in 2003, as customers put off big-ticket purchases. The rise of the euro against the dollar and the Japanese yen had the effect of making Heidelberger's printing presses 30 percent more expensive than those of Japanese competitors. The company's unionized work force and rigorous apprenticeships seemed hopelessly ill suited to the realities of a global economy. In fiscal 2004, it lost $840 million, on sales of $4.5 billion. With Heidelberger's survival in question, it took drastic action, selling two divisions - Web presses, which print newspapers, and digital printing. It cut 3,500 jobs and extracted a deal from its union, IG Metall, to extend the workweek to 36.75 hours a week, from 35 hours, for the same pay. 'We went to the workers and said, 'Look guys, we've got to get more flexible,' ' Bernhard Schreier, the chief executive of Heidelberger, said. 'The times were very tough for the unions over the last two to three years, so they had to make a lot of concessions in company negotiations.' The same pattern was repeated throughout Germany: Siemens, Volkswagen and DaimlerChrysler forced their unions to accept wage freezes or modest raises, often under the threat of moving jobs abroad. Despite its reputation as a workers' paradise, wage increases in Germany have lagged those in other euro countries by an aggregate 10 percent since 1996, according to a report by Bank of America. That said, hourly wages in western Germany are still among the highest in Europe. 'Germany had priced itself out of the market by the late 1990's,' said Daniel Gros, the director of the Center for European Policy Studies in Brussels. 'It is basically pricing itself back into the market.' In Heidelberger's case, the agreement will cut its labor costs by $121 million, or 10 percent, a year by 2008. This, and a weaker-than-expected euro in 2005, helped close the price gap between Heidelberger and the Japanese. And a stronger global economy revived orders from the United States and Asia. The turnaround necessitated a painful dose of humility. Heidelberg opted to get out of the newspaper printing business. And while it once viewed digital printing as the future, it had to accept that it could not compete with giants like Kodak, to which it sold its digital operation. These days, Heidelberger is a smaller but fitter company, with a pretax profit margin of 5 percent to 10 percent. Its stock has risen 31 percent in the last 12 months, about the same as the broader German market, which was one of the world's top performers in 2005. 'I'm very confident we will continue to thrive from a German base,' said Mr. Schreier, a 51-year-old mechanical engineer and career employee, whose father and grandfather both worked for the company. 'The technology we are using today is a very lasting technology.' Printing presses involve the kind of precision engineering at which Germany has historically excelled, and on which it built its post-World War II economy. The question is whether Germany can hold on to these industries, at a time when China and India are joining other Asian exporters in moving up the industrial curve into more advanced technologies. The exodus of German companies is a perennial theme, with corporate icons like Volkswagen building plants in Slovakia. Dirk Schumacher, an economist at Goldman Sachs, argues that, measured by the net outflow of foreign direct investment, it is more a trickle than a flood. Mr. Schreier is cautiously optimistic, at least as far as his franchise is concerned. Unlike the automotive industry, which is relatively easy to transplant to lower-cost countries, printing presses are a low-volume, high-technology business, which requires skilled workers. For all that, Heidelberger is putting the finishing touches on a factory outside Shanghai, which will start building a rudimentary printing machine by the end of this year. It will employ 200 to 300 workers. Back home, Mr. Schreier's message to employees is that life will never be as comfortable as it once was. 'There will be now a permanent cost discipline,' he said, 'because it is clear that if you let all the ropes loose, it will develop in the same direction where we were before.' That means Heidelberg will hire only sparingly; its payroll was flat in 2005, after the earlier layoffs. The willingness of companies to hire is critical to solving one of Germany's other chronic problems, unemployment. The government reported in December that the number of jobless people declined by 110,000, on a seasonally adjusted basis. That was better than expected, but there are still 4.6 million people out of work, close to a record in the postwar period. 'What we still need is for the great success of German companies to translate into employment,' said Klaus L. Wübbenhorst, the chief executive of GfK, a market research firm in Nuremburg. Even so, the confidence of German consumers appears to be rebounding. GfK, which tracks the consumer climate, found that Germans were readier to make big purchases than at any time since late 2001. Their parsimony has been the biggest single drag on the country's growth. The German government is doing its part to encourage shoppers. It announced an increase in the value-added tax on just about all purchases, to 19 percent from 16 percent, but deferred it until 2007. Germany's merchants are pinning their hopes on a rush of people buying cars and refrigerators. The go-go atmosphere may be helped by the soccer World Cup here next summer. Once the tax increase takes effect, though, some experts fret that the economy will cool in 2007. The United States economy is another potential brake, since any slowdown there would hurt German exporters. The European Central Bank is confident enough in the growth of Germany and Europe that it lifted interest rates last month for the first time in five years, and signaled on Thursday that it might do so again. The German government has been among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders for a revival. It plans to revise its growth forecast for 2006 up from its original forecast of 1.2 percent. Chancellor Merkel has benefited from the good omens, winning high approval ratings. But the government's actions so far have been small-bore: a few fiscal initiatives like the higher value-added tax, and a $30 billion public stimulus package to help small and medium-size businesses. Mrs. Merkel, experts say, will have to be bolder in opening up the German labor market, as well as overhauling how Germany finances health care and pension funds. That will not be easy, given that she leads a balky coalition of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats. Analysts have been impressed with the early show of solidarity in Berlin. But as Mrs. Merkel's predecessor, Gerhard Schröder, can attest, there are risks to being tied too closely to Germany's economic fortunes. 'This talk of a Merkel factor is very dangerous,' said Elga Bartsch, an economist at Morgan Stanley. 'If you get credit for the recovery, there's no doubt that people will turn on you when things go bad again.'

Subject: With Glaciers Atop Volcanoes, Iceland From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 09:17:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17icel.html?ex=1295154000&en=079aae9720cf9376&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 With Glaciers Atop Volcanoes, Iceland Zooms In on Signs of Unrest By AMANDA LEIGH HAAG SKAFTAFELL, Iceland - The terrain in southern Iceland is as gritty as burned toast, pockmarked by glacial craters and sprinkled with boulders that can be as big as dump trucks. Keep driving, and you come upon fields of bumpy lava blanketed with moss. Hot air rises off the blackened plains like distant fumes. These flood plains, known as sandar, extend some 800 square miles. Parts of the southern coast were formed some 9,000 years ago, when meltwater spilled out from under Iceland's cloak of glacial ice and galloped forward in violent surges called jokulhlaups, or glacial outburst floods. But jokulhlaups (pronounced YOKE-uhl-howps) are no geologic remnant of the distant past. They occur with almost predictable regularity today, and they may pose great risks to life and property in Iceland. Glacial floods occur in many regions of the world where mountaintop glaciers sit on top of volcanic regions, as they do here. Fluids, gases and steam from active volcanoes continuously melt the overlying ice, creating pools of water sandwiched by glacial ice. Some of this water drains off at intervals, at times trickling out and other times leading to floods. But the most potent type of glacial flood is caused by an erupting volcano. Glacial ice cloaks 10 percent of Iceland, a country that straddles the mid-Atlantic ridge and is a simmering cauldron of geothermal and volcanic activity. Nearly 60 percent of volcanic eruptions in Iceland occur beneath glacial ice. That is what worries scientists. Katla, one of Iceland's most notorious volcanoes, has erupted five times since 1721, at intervals ranging from 34 to 78 years. The last one was in 1918, so an eruption may be overdue. 'Basically everything you see to the east of Reykjavik is a wall of mountains formed in eruptions under glaciers,' said Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson, a professor of geophysics at the University of Iceland, who added, 'Katla has been showing signs of unrest over the last few years.' To head off catastrophe, geologists and civil engineers here have developed an extensive, exquisitely sensitive monitoring system intended to provide early warnings of floods. It has issued 16 accurate forecasts since 2001, though it has yet to contend with a major eruption. When the birth pains of an eruption begin, pressurized magma oozes toward the surface of the volcano, leaving boiling groundwater in its path. Glacial ice acts as a lid on a giant pressure cooker: the thicker the ice, the more force with which it presses back against the erupting lava. When a volcano erupts, magma as hot as 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit meets ice and boiling water, sending vast plumes of steam and rock particles rocketing upward in what Matthew J. Roberts, a glaciologist with the Icelandic Meteorological Office, compares to a classic mushroom cloud. That is not all. Steam combines with tiny particles raining out of the eruption to create high static charges, causing lightning strikes several times a second. The 1918 eruption of Katla is said to have killed hundreds of heads of livestock grazing nearby - by electrocution. Then come the jokulhlaups. 'An eruption beneath a thick glacier often leads to a hazardous glacial flood that can begin within minutes to several hours after the eruption has started,' Dr. Roberts said. Floods after a volcanic eruption are a mixture of water, ash, mud and ice; they tend to leave the surrounding countryside covered in ash. Records from floods in the 1800's indicate that icebergs of Titanic proportions were seen drifting near farmhouses. And one flood is thought to have heaved ice blocks for miles. Geologists are still uncovering this ice, which was buried by so much insulating debris that it is still there more than 150 years later. In 1996, an eruption beneath the Vatnajokull ice cap, Europe's largest ice mass, led to a jokulhlaup that forced sediment, meltwater and ice out along the 12-mile stretch of the glacier's edge. The flow of water out of the glacier created a river to rival the Amazon in size, at least for a few minutes. It demolished a bridge and added almost three square miles to the area of Iceland. (The flood did not reach nearby settlements, and no one was killed or injured.) The seismic monitoring system developed in the past few years consists of a network of instruments strung along the countryside like Christmas lights. The devices are similar to those used for monitoring volcanoes like Mount St. Helens, in Washington, but because Iceland is relatively small, the network is densely concentrated. Unlike conventional seismometers, which detect tremors greater than a magnitude of 1, Iceland's have been fine-tuned to measure magnitudes of minus 1 or even lower. These micro-earthquakes are thought to result from fractures only 100 feet long or so; the fault lines of earthquakes felt by humans tend to be 10 times as long. 'But it's these very tiny cracks which are often the sign of something larger,' Dr. Roberts said. Once an eruption is under way - a process that takes place over days or weeks - meltwater spreads out like a sheet between the underlying rock and the base of the glacier. The pressure causes ice to fracture in an 'ice quake' within the glacier. Using the new seismometers to determine the quake's location, scientists can plot the movement of water. In addition to the threat from flooding, volcanic meltwater often contains a toxic chemical cocktail that can cause breathing difficulties when the water rises to the surface. Last July, such a flood originated from an ice caldron underneath the western flank of Vatnajokull. 'The floodwater was very rich in hydrogen sulfide, to the extent that a strange haze could be seen above the water surface on the river,' Dr. Roberts said. But this toxicity is also providing scientists with real-time monitoring of the likelihood of flooding; if the water has interacted with a geothermal system, it will carry an assortment of ions and give off a higher electrical conductivity. That, too, can be measured. From the air, scientists can monitor the ice surface to keep track of accumulating meltwater under the glaciers. Increased melting is visible from the air in the form of a 'melt pit,' or ice caldron; the caldron's growth indicates how much heat is being released from the volcano. Katla is situated precariously behind the village of Vik, roughly 16 miles away. In the last few years, the volcano grew more seismically active, began inflating in the magma chamber and showed increased geothermal activity. At the end of 2004, it became quieter again. But the authorities here are taking no chances. In May, the Icelandic Civil Protection Department plans to conduct a large-scale evacuation drill in a region to the west where a jokulhlaup might engulf inhabited areas. In the meantime, each new field season offers a natural laboratory of visible change for scientists like Andrew Russell, a glacial geologist from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in Britain, who headed out to the sandur last summer in a caravan of Land Rovers and cargo trailers with volunteers from the organization Earthwatch. On that expedition, Dr. Russell pointed to an area about halfway up Skaftafellsjokull ('jokull' means glacier) where a fresh scab of glacier had just broken off after a small ice avalanche, revealing virgin layers of ancient ice and sediment. At another field site, Dr. Russell pointed out a 'kettle hole' - a pit formed when buried ice melts away. This one was filled with dangerous quicksand. This year, his team may need to take inflatable rafts to cross a lake of meltwater where a glacier stood just a few years ago. Still, he is happy to get fresh access to river sediments that are deposited inside tunnels within the glacial ice. 'We can see some of these melting out beautifully at the moment,' he said. 'You get a real feel for the forces that are in operation.'

Subject: China, a Trade Superstar From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 09:14:57 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/business/worldbusiness/17yuan.html?ex=1295154000&en=1dcc1c79d34d66fd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 China, a Trade Superstar, Accumulates Foreign Currency (and Anxiety) By DAVID LAGUE - International Herald Tribune BEIJING - While some analysts view China's surge in foreign currency reserves as further evidence of the country's growing economic power, there are also fears that the growing hoard exposes the country to risks that could undermine future growth. Even the official media are beginning to question the wisdom of this policy after China's central bank announced on Sunday that currency reserves had increased almost $50 billion in the fourth quarter of 2005, to a record $819.9 billion. In a commentary distributed on Monday, the authoritative New China News Agency said the sharp increase was not entirely favorable because it could intensify disputes over China's trade surplus and lead to unwanted growth in the money supply. And James McCormack, a credit analyst with Fitch Ratings in Hong Kong, commented: 'The reserves are more than adequate. Maybe it is becoming excessive.' Only Japan, with $847 billion at the end of October, has greater holdings. But there are signs that the accumulation of foreign currency is beginning to slow. China's reserves rose by $25.7 billion last month, growing more modestly than they had in December 2004, when they climbed $36.1 billion. The flood of speculative investment that poured into China through 2003, 2004 and the first half of 2005 has abated in recent months as China held down its interest rates even as the Federal Reserve pushed American rates higher. Lower Chinese interest rates, together with a growing consensus in the market that officials in Beijing will not allow their currency, the yuan, to appreciate as fast as the Bush administration and the European Union want, have made it less attractive to invest in China. Currency reserves here usually rise faster in December than in any month, partly because foreign investment deals are often concluded before the end of the year and partly because the Chinese statisticians tend to make adjustments to many categories of data, including foreign reserves, each December. Still, some analysts argue that the reserves, which Beijing accumulates to maintain the yuan's link to the dollar, could lead to more trade friction with Washington because the Chinese trade surplus with the United States appears likely to exceed $200 billion in 2005. Some economists also worry that the central bank will find itself under pressure to contain inflation that arises from its purchases of foreign currency. Others say the government's policy of investing about 70 percent of reserves in dollar-denominated assets is selling China short. For example, these investments include some $247 billion in United States Treasury debt. The critics argue that these relatively low-yielding investments amount to a huge transfer of wealth from a relatively poor country to a rich one. They say the money can be invested more profitably in China's growing economy. Economists and others worry that the huge increase in China's foreign currency reserves is almost certain to antagonize the United States and other big trading partners. Since 2002, China's foreign exchange holdings have tripled, a measure of the scale of efforts here to hold down the value of the yuan and increase the competitiveness of Chinese exports. To keep the yuan's value steady, the central bank buys a big slice of the foreign currency flowing into China from exports, foreign investment and speculative capital. The growing reserves, said Chew Ping, a credit analyst with Standard & Poor's in Singapore, 'will definitely add to pressure, especially from lawmakers in the U.S., for further appreciation of the yuan.' In July, China responded, allowing the yuan to appreciate by 2.1 percent against the dollar. It also introduced a system in which the yuan was allowed to trade in a narrow band against a basket of other currencies. But this failed to silence critics of its trading policies, with some members of Congress threatening a 27.5 percent tariff on Chinese imports unless the government allowed further appreciation in the yuan's value. So far, analysts say, there appears to be little evidence that the accumulation of foreign currency will fuel inflation. Such inflation fears arise because the Chinese government prints local currency to pay for the foreign exchange it buys. But then, to contain the threat of rapid inflation from the growth in the money supply, the government sells debt to soak up the yuan it issues. This appears to be working, with economists generally satisfied that the growth in China's money supply is in line with the expansion of its economy. 'There is a question about how long you can do that,' Mr. McCormack of Fitch said, 'but it is not as if the money supply is growing too fast.' Some economists also dispute contentions that China is unwise to invest so heavily in dollar assets. They note that returns on investment in China are relatively modest compared with the potential earnings from the country's foreign reserves. 'If you look at what most other money going into China is earning,' Mr. Chew of S.& P. said, 'it is not that inefficient. If you don't invest in U.S. bonds, what do you invest in?' Yet there are signs that the government is becoming uncomfortable with the level of China's foreign-exchange accumulation. It has recently relaxed some currency controls so that businesses and individuals can take more money abroad. And on Jan. 5, Beijing, without giving details, said it would abolish limits on the amount that domestic companies could invest offshore.

Subject: Ignoring Science on Clean Air From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 05:57:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/opinion/17tue3.html?ex=1295154000&en=4c421c1cbfaebc30&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 Ignoring Science on Clean Air Every five years, the Clean Air Act requires the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency to revise federal air quality standards for smog and soot. It is a stressful moment. When Carol Browner, President Bill Clinton's administrator, tightened standards in 1997, industry and its friends in Congress erupted in protest, and a federal appeals court said the rules were unconstitutional. The regulations did not actually take effect until Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in 2001 that Ms. Browner had the right to issue them and had done so properly. Now it is the turn of Stephen Johnson at the E.P.A., only this time it is the scientists and environmentalists who are upset, and not without reason. Last month, Mr. Johnson proposed new rules governing fine particulate matter, known as soot. The most dangerous of these are microscopic specks that can cause significant inflammation and arterial damage in the bloodstream and the lungs. At best, Mr. Johnson's proposed rules represent only a modest tightening of the Browner rules - despite considerable additional research over the last few years, some 2,000 studies altogether, expanding the list of adverse health effects associated with fine particles (especially among children) and, collectively, pointing to the need for stronger standards. Industry has also complained. While the standards do not deliver cleaner air on their own, they set in motion the regulatory machinery and capital investments aimed at achieving cleaner air. Industry has a point when it says it is already spending money on cleaner fuels, engines and power plants. But more can be done. According to E.P.A. estimates, particle pollution kills about 20,000 people every year and hospitalizes many more. Mr. Johnson's critics complain that he either ignored or rejected the advice of not only his staff scientists but also the agency's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee. The chairwoman of that committee, Rogene Henderson, has said publicly that she was surprised and disappointed by Mr. Johnson's decisions, that the battle wasn't over, and that the panel would continue to press its case. Mr. Johnson has conceded that his proposal is based only on studies completed before 2002 and has said his agency will consider more recent studies before a final decision in September. This is the least he can do. Science marches on, and there is no excuse for an agency charged with protecting public health to be bringing up the rear of the parade.

Subject: Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 05:56:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/science/17synt.html?ex=1295154000&en=7cc9de2eab957aca&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 Custom-Made Microbes, at Your Service By ANDREW POLLACK There are bacteria that blink on and off like Christmas tree lights and bacteria that form multicolored patterns of concentric circles resembling an archery target. Yet others can reproduce photographic images. These are not strange-but-true specimens from nature, but rather the early tinkering of synthetic biologists, scientists who seek to create living machines and biological devices that can perform novel tasks. 'We want to do for biology what Intel does for electronics,' said George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard and a leader in the field. 'We want to design and manufacture complicated biological circuitry.' While much of the early work has consisted of eye-catching, if useless, stunts like the blinking bacteria, the emerging field could one day have a major impact on medicine and industry. For instance, Christina D. Smolke, an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, is trying to develop circuits of biological parts to sit in the body's cells and guard against cancer. If they detected a cancer-causing mechanism had been activated, they would switch on a gene to have the cell self-destruct. Jay D. Keasling at the University of California, Berkeley, with part of $42.6 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is trying to take up to 12 genes from the wormwood tree and yeast and get them to work together in E. coli bacteria to produce artemisinin, a malaria drug now extracted from the wormwood tree. J. Craig Venter, the maverick scientist who sequenced the human genome, wants to create microbes that produce hydrogen for use as fuel. To be sure, scientists have been putting genes into bacteria and other cells for three decades. The term 'synthetic biology' seems to include various activities, some of which are not altogether new. 'This has a catchy new name, but anybody over 40 will recognize it as good old genetic engineering applied to more complex problems,' said Frances H. Arnold, a professor of chemical engineering at Caltech. Some synthetic biologists say they will go beyond genetic engineering, which often involves putting a single foreign gene into a cell. The human insulin gene, for instance, is put into bacteria, which then make insulin for use as a drug. But there have been genetic engineering projects involving multiple genes, so the number of genes alone is not enough to define synthetic biology. Rather, the difference seems more about mind-set. 'We're talking about taking biology and building it for a specific purpose, rather than taking existing biology and adapting it,' Professor Keasling of Berkeley said. 'We don't have to rely on what nature's necessarily created.' Also new is an engineering approach - the desire to make the design of life forms more predictable, like the design of a bridge. That could be because many leaders of the field are not biologists by training. Ron Weiss of Princeton is a computer scientist. Michael Elowitz of Caltech trained as a physicist, and Drew Endy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a structural engineer. Mr. Endy and colleagues at M.I.T. have started a 'Registry of Standard Biological Parts.' The parts, called BioBricks, are strings of DNA that can perform certain functions like turning on a gene or causing a cell to light up. In theory at least, these components can be strung together to build more complex devices, just as an electronic engineer might put together transistors, resistors and oscillators to build a circuit. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Texas used some BioBricks to engineer bacteria so that a sheet of them could capture an image as photographic film does. The microbes were altered so that those kept in the dark produced a black pigment while those exposed to light did not. Some scientists envision that biological engineers will one day sit at computers writing programs for cells, like software developers. But the code would be written in sequences of DNA, rather than computer language. When finished, the programmer would press the 'print' button, as it were, and the DNA would be made to order. The field is also starting to attract some investment. In June, venture capitalists put $13 million into Codon Devices, a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., that is developing a way to synthesize long stretches of DNA far less expensively than existing methods. The founders include Professors Church, Endy and Keasling. Professor Keasling is also a co-founder of Amyris Biotechnologies, which is helping make the malaria drug. And Mr. Venter has started Synthetic Genomics to work on his energy-producing microbes. What make the engineering approach possible are the inner workings of a living cell. Genes, made of DNA, contain the instructions for producing proteins, which carry out most functions in cells. Some proteins can bind to DNA, turning particular genes on or off. This interplay, which is one way that cells regulate themselves, is not too different from how electronic circuits function, with one transistor turning another on or off. To make the blinking bacteria, for instance, Mr. Elowitz designed the biological equivalent of an electronic oscillator. It uses three genes that trump one another like the rock, scissors and paper in the children's game. Gene X makes a protein that turns off Gene Y. Gene Y makes a protein that turns off Gene Z. And Gene Z makes a protein that turns off Gene X. So if Gene X is on, it will turn off Gene Y. But the absence of Protein Y allows Gene Z to turn on. Protein Z then turns off Gene X, allowing Gene Y to turn on, turning Gene Z off, and so on. So the three genes turn on and off in an endless cycle. To make the bacteria blink, Mr. Elowitz programmed a gene for the production of a fluorescent protein to be turned on whenever Gene Z was off. Some newer efforts involve trying to manipulate entire colonies of microbes to cooperate with one another. They take advantage of something called quorum sensing, a natural communications system that bacteria use to determine whether there are enough of them present to mount an attack. The bacteria secrete a particular chemical into their environment that they and their brethren can detect. When many bacteria are present, the level of this chemical in the environment increases. The concentric circle bull's-eye pattern was made by engineering E. coli to respond to a quorum-sensing chemical from a different microbe. Some bacteria were programmed to produce a green fluorescent protein at high concentrations of the chemical. Others were programmed to produce a red protein if exposed to a somewhat lower concentration. The bacteria of both types were mixed together and spread on a surface. In the center were placed some microbes that emitted the chemical, which diffused away from the center. The bacteria closest to the center were exposed to a high concentration. Those programmed to respond to high concentrations turned green. Some of the bacteria further away turned red. The work, published in Nature in April, was led by Mr. Weiss of Princeton and Professor Arnold at Caltech. Mr. Weiss, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and molecular biology, is now trying to use similar principles to help control the differentiation of stem cells into different types of tissues in different locations. 'That's how the body develops its organs,' he said, 'by relying on cell-to-cell communication.' The two scientists also published a paper in Nature the same month in which they used quorum sensing to control bacterial populations artificially, by engineering the microbes to turn on a suicide gene if the concentration of the quorum-sensing chemical grew too high. As soon as the first cells started killing themselves, the concentration of the chemical would drop, so the remaining cells could recover. The demonstrations, however clever, also illustrate problems inherent in designing biological circuits, as opposed to silicon ones. One is that living things are always dividing and evolving. Indeed, the population-control system breaks down within days because some of the bacteria mutate so that the suicide gene is not switched on. Those bacteria, having a selective advantage, quickly take over the colony, said Lingchong You, lead researcher on the project at Caltech and now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Duke. Another challenge is that the genes of the circuit can interact with the native bacterial genes in unexpected ways. There is also great variability among living creatures. The blinking bacteria, for instance, do not light up in unison, but at greatly varying rates. Even a newly formed daughter cell will not blink in sync with its mother cell, despite being almost identical genetically. 'You write the same software and put it into different computers, and their behavior is quite different,' Mr. You said. 'If we think of a cell as a computer, it's much more complex than the computers we're used to.' For that reason, some scientists say, it might be difficult ever to make biological engineering as predictable as bridge construction. 'There is no such thing as a standard component, because even a standard component works differently depending on the environment,' Professor Arnold of Caltech said. 'The expectation that you can type in a sequence and can predict what a circuit will do is far from reality and always will be.' The unpredictability could lead to safety risks. What if the novel organisms were somehow to run amok? In addition, the same technology could be used to synthesize known pathogens based on their published DNA sequences. Scientists have already created a poliovirus from scratch and more recently recreated the 1918 pandemic flu virus. 'It's quite clear this technology could be dangerous' if misapplied, Mr. Endy of M.I.T. said. The field is starting to grapple with whether it should be regulated and, if so, how. Scientists set up a safety framework for research when genetic engineering was invented in the 1970's. Much of the concern centers on efforts to make entire microbes. Some scientists call this synthetic genomics as opposed to synthetic biology, though there is considerable overlap. A big concern is making pathogens by synthesizing their DNA based on published DNA sequences. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has given $570,000 to M.I.T., the Venter Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, an independent policy research organization, to study the societal implications of synthetic genomes. The group hopes to have a report by midyear, said Gerald L. Epstein, senior fellow for science and security at the strategic studies center. In March, the Health and Human Services Department set up the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity to give advice about research with potentially nefarious uses. That board in turn established a working group on synthetic genomics and synthetic biology that met for the first time in November. David A. Relman, chairman of the working group, said the challenge was to weigh the promise of the field against the perils. 'We fully recognize the inherent beneficial and very positive attributes of all of this work,' said Dr. Relman, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford, 'and don't want to stifle it or curtail it or constrain it for no substantive reason.'

Subject: Handling of Stroke Has Many Variables From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Jan 18, 2006 at 05:55:18 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/health/17docs.html?ex=1295154000&en=20261bb1b8e0b8ba&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 17, 2006 As in Sharon's Case, Handling of Stroke Has Many Variables By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN, M.D. The life-threatening stroke that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered early this month has focused attention on the treatment of strokes, in particular the use of anticoagulants and clot-dissolving drugs. The use of such drugs is among the most potentially dangerous therapies in medicine and one of the most controversial. The full story of Mr. Sharon's case is not known because his family and doctors have released limited information. But questions have been raised about whether the drugs he received for a less severe stroke in December, caused by a blood clot, may have contributed to his huge stroke on Jan. 4. The use of anticoagulants and clot dissolvers is controversial, in part because their benefits must be weighed against their risks. Drugs like tissue plasminogen activator, or T.P.A., for example, can be lifesaving if given within a few hours after the onset of an ischemic stroke but lethal if started only a few hours later. Though many people call T.P.A. an anticoagulant, it is a different type of drug that dissolves clots. T.P.A. can allow patients to survive the first few days after a stroke begins - a period during which many patients would almost surely die without such therapy. But the trade-off is that many of them are left paralyzed, unable to speak and suffering from severe intellectual impairments. Heparin, a short-acting anticoagulant, is given to prevent a recurrent stroke, not to dissolve the offending clot. But giving it can be dicey in the early stages of a stroke because it can help turn a mild ischemic stroke into a devastating bleeding one. 'It is hard to imagine that a single treatment can shift so radically from making you better and saving your life, to one that could kill you,' said Dr. Lee H. Schwamm, director of acute stroke care at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. In addition, clinical trials have not been able to determine for which types of strokes anticoagulant drugs are effective. And the drugs need to be closely monitored. The anticoagulant Coumadin was originally developed as a rat poison. Patients given Coumadin must be given frequent tests to ensure that the amounts they receive are safe and effective. One patient might need 1 milligram a day while others might need 7 milligrams for the same ailment, and in longterm care the dose may have to be changed after treatment has begun. Decisions about anticoagulation are difficult and often frightening for patients, who often have little understanding of the potential risks. They can also be frightening for doctors. But the need for such decisions has increased with the rapid improvement in imaging techniques like CT scans and M.R.I.'s. Researchers have developed newer drugs that block the action of platelets that help the blood clot, adding to old standbys like aspirin, heparin and Coumadin. (Anticoagulants are often called blood thinners, but this is a misnomer because the drugs do not change the thickness of blood. They alter the blood's ability to clot.) Deciding which anticoagulant to use and for how long is a highly complex process. The selection depends on the root cause of a stroke, which can vary from trauma to underlying heart and blood-system ailments. The decision often has to be made in the first hours after a stroke, before permanent damage has set in, which is why patients are urged to get to a hospital immediately. Ischemic strokes account for a vast majority of strokes. They occur because the brain is starved of oxygen and other vital nutrients from a clot that forms in a brain artery or that breaks off from a larger artery elsewhere in the body and travels to lodge in a brain artery. Also, a long-term buildup of fats in the walls of brain arteries can narrow the vessels and reduce flow to critically low levels, causing an ischemic stroke. Some 15 to 20 percent of strokes are from blood that leaks from an artery into the brain. This hemorrhagic type of stroke has a high death rate because it is the least treatable form. A genetically engineered form of a clotting substance in the blood known as Factor VII has shown promise in preventing further bleeding if it is given within the first four hours of a hemorrhagic stroke. The two categories make it imperative to use CT and M.R.I. imaging scans in the initial care. The distinction between ischemic and hemorrhagic strokes is critical because drugs like T.P.A. and urokinase can rapidly reverse the damage from an ischemic stroke, but giving them for a hemorrhagic stroke is like pouring gas on a fire. 'Often, it is forgotten that the goal of anticoagulation is not to treat a stroke that has just occurred, but to prevent a recurrent stroke' or a first stroke, said Dr. David S. Liebeskind, associate director of the University of California, Los Angeles, Stroke Center in California. In recent years, doctors have increasingly relied on clinical trials to decide whether to prescribe a particular drug or therapy. When clinical studies offer clear findings about the benefits and risks of a particular treatment, that can be a straightforward exercise. Among the few clear indications for long-term use of anticoagulant drugs are a heart rhythm abnormality known as atrial fibrillation, a prosthetic heart valve and inherited or acquired abnormalities of the blood clotting system, stroke experts said. But even the best clinical trials cannot solve all problems for all patients. A patient's age and prior condition often do not match those of the volunteers in the clinical trials. Doctors often treat patients with coexistent medical problems that for varying reasons researchers deliberately excluded from studies. In about 30 percent of strokes, the cause cannot be found, and many doctors believe that anticoagulants can be helpful for many of these patients. These are cases in which the art of medicine comes to bear. Doctors have to interpret data collected from a different set of patients and extrapolate it to their own patients. In many cases, it is simply a judgment call. In Mr. Sharon's case, his doctors have said without further explanation that they prescribed anticoagulants after his first stroke even though they knew he had cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a disorder that weakens artery walls, increasing the risk of a bleeding stroke. The way the risks and benefits are framed can have a huge influence on decisions that patients and their families make. Even when the characteristics of a patient match those of the study group, doctors have to explain to the patient that the therapy still may not work for that individual. Patients who fare badly may not have received improper care - they may just be unlucky. Entrenched dogma about certain uses of anticoagulation is one reason researchers say it has been hard to recruit patients for clinical trials that could settle controversial issues. A lack of such studies helps explain why anticoagulation practice varies widely around the country.

Subject: Leader Making Peace With Chile's Past From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 17, 2006 at 18:42:56 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/international/americas/16winner.html?ex=1295067600&en=cd5ee9cba5558e7e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 16, 2006 A Leader Making Peace With Chile's Past By LARRY ROHTER SANTIAGO, Chile - Michelle Bachelet, who was elected Sunday as president of this male-dominated, prosperous and deeply religious nation of 16 million, is a woman and an agnostic, a guitar-strumming child of the 60's, a former exile who spent part of her childhood in the United States, and a physician who has never before held elective office. Running as a Socialist on a platform that promised 'change with continuity' and showcased her warmth and affinity with ordinary people, Ms. Bachelet, a fair-haired, vibrant 54-year-old, won more than 53 percent of the vote, according to the official tally. She made few promises beyond 'social inclusion' - vowing to better meet the needs of women and the poor - and preserving Chile's economy, the most dynamic in Latin America, and the country's close ties with the United States. But Ms. Bachelet has other qualities that explain how, in barely a decade, she has gone from being a pediatrician at a humble, underfinanced clinic here to the first woman to be her country's chief of state, and one of only a handful of women elected to lead any country in the Americas. Some of those qualities are personal, while others stem from her real and symbolic connections to Chile's recent history. She is a toughened survivor of the Pinochet dictatorship, which was responsible for her father's death and her imprisonment, torture and exile, and she embodies for many Chile's painful reconciliation with those dark years. 'Violence ravaged my life,' Ms. Bachelet said Sunday night, in an impassioned victory speech to a jubilant crowd gathered on the main downtown avenue here. 'I was a victim of hatred, and I have dedicated my life to reversing that hatred.' Verónica Michelle Bachelet Jeria was born in Santiago on Sept. 29, 1951, the second child of an air force officer who rose to a general's rank and a housewife who became an archaeologist. Her early years were spent in the restrictive but sheltering environment of the Chilean Armed Forces, moving from one military base to another around the country. In 1962, her father, Alberto Bachelet Martínez, was assigned to the military mission at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. For almost two years, the family lived in Bethesda, a Maryland suburb, where Ms. Bachelet attended middle school, learned to speak English fluently and developed a lifelong love of pop and folk music. 'It was hard for her in the beginning,' Ms. Bachelet's mother, Ángela Jeria, recalled in an interview here last week. 'For the first three months, she cried when she came home from school, because she didn't understand any of what was being said. But after six months she was fully integrated, and so we were able to travel around and get to know the United States and Canada and visit places like Niagara Falls and Rehoboth Beach.' Friends and relatives recall that the pre-adolescent Ms. Bachelet was shocked by the racial segregation she saw in America and by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. She returned to Chile with her family at the end of 1963, and encountered many other influences that would mark the 60's generation, from the Beatles to the debate over the war in Vietnam and the May 1968 uprising of students in France. 'We were teenagers immersed in the political and social movements that were transforming Chile and the world,' said a cousin, Alicia Galdames, with whom Ms. Bachelet formed a folk duo whose repertoire included songs of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. 'The seeds of her ideals were planted in this period.' Ms. Bachelet's enrollment in college coincided with the start here of the left-wing Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. She studied medicine at her father's urging and joined the youth wing of the Socialist Party. Colleagues remember her as holding views that were moderate for an era that became the most polarized in Chilean history. 'She was really studious, very disciplined and responsible and sure of herself, but with a tremendous capacity for empathy,' said Gladys Cuevas, a fellow student and close friend. 'It was a time of black and white, but she managed to get along with everybody, no matter what their political persuasion. She wasn't one to look for fights; on the contrary, she was the one who was tolerant, always looking for consensus.' With food shortages growing in Chile and a black market developing, her father was lent by the air force to the Allende government and put in charge of food rationing and distribution, where he worked closely with the Socialists and other leftists. When Gen. Augusto Pinochet led the coup that overthrew the Allende government on Sept. 11, 1973, the military viewed General Bachelet with suspicion. Spurning a chance to go into exile, he was jailed, and in March 1974, after months of torture, died in prison of a heart attack. Months later, both Ms. Bachelet and her mother were detained and sent to Villa Grimaldi, one of the most notorious of the Pinochet dictatorship's secret prisons. While there, Ms. Bachelet was also subjected to physical and psychological torture - being hit during interrogations, blindfolded and tied to a chair for long periods, and told that her mother would be executed. She minimized those experiences in an interview in 2002, saying, 'There were others, even in my own cell, who had it much worse than I did.' 'I haven't forgotten,' she said. 'It left pain. But I have tried to channel that pain into a constructive realm. I insist on the idea that what we experienced here in Chile was so painful, so terrible, that I wouldn't wish for anyone to live through our situation again.' Ms. Bachelet and her mother were freed within months, thanks to the lobbying of an Air Force general who was a relative. They went into exile in 1975, first in Australia, where her older brother Alberto had moved, and then, after a few months, to East Germany, at the request of the Socialist Party directorate, which wanted them to take part in Chile solidarity campaigns in Europe. Initially, Ms. Bachelet worked as a hospital orderly and lived with her mother in Potsdam. But she resumed her medical studies at Humboldt University in East Berlin, after she became proficient in German. While in exile, Ms. Bachelet married Jorge Dávalos, an architect and fellow exile, and gave birth to the first of her three children, Jorge Sebastián Alberto, now 27. The marriage ended in the mid-1980's, after a second child, Francisca, 21, was born here. Ms. Bachelet has not married again, though she has a third child, Sofía, 13, from a now-lapsed relationship with a doctor. Upon her return to Chile in 1979, as the expulsion order against her mother was being lifted, Ms. Bachelet finished medical school, specializing in pediatrics and public health. Though she graduated near the top of her class, her family name and political affiliations made it difficult for her to find employment. She ended up working at a clinic financed by Sweden that treated children from families that had been victims of torture and political repression. She remained there through the rest of the Pinochet dictatorship, which ended in 1990 after elections put in power the center-left coalition that still governs Chile. In 1994, after having worked in AIDS and epidemiological programs, she became an adviser to the Ministry of Health. But she retained her familial fascination with military affairs, and in 1996 enrolled in a program in strategic studies at the national war college. Ms. Bachelet excelled there, and was invited to study at the Inter-American Defense College in Washington. She did so in 1997, and after her return, she went to work in the Defense Ministry and was also elected to the political commission of the Socialist Party, specializing in defense and military issues. Six years ago this month, Chile elected a Socialist president, Ricardo Lagos, for the first time since the fall of Mr. Allende. Mr. Lagos appointed Ms. Bachelet minister of health. In that capacity, she became identified with a partly successful campaign to reduce waiting time for patients and emerged as a familiar figure at hospitals and clinics all over Chile. After two years, Ms. Bachelet was shifted to lead the Defense Ministry, becoming the first woman to hold that post, and she became nationally known, photographed in an armored vehicle, inspecting troops and wearing army camouflage or an aviator's leather jacket on her official rounds. The symbolism of her leadership of the institution that had killed her father appealed greatly to Chileans trying to reconcile with their bitter past.

Subject: Strange Song From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Jan 17, 2006 at 18:40:17 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15wwln_consumed.html?ex=1294981200&en=0a77ed188cc29d5c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 15, 2006 Strange Song By ROB WALKER The premise of Breezy Singers is pretty straightforward: they are little objects that look like birds and sound like birds. There's a robin, a cardinal, a blue jay, a goldfinch, parakeets and so on. 'Professionally carved' and battery-powered, each one contains a motion sensor and a microchip loaded with appropriate chirps 'provided by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.' When you approach, they tilt their heads and make sounds (unless you turn them off; they have a switch). They cost about $15. At a glance, it's not immediately clear who would want a Breezy Singer. A child? A bird freak? A collector of tchotchkes? All of those may be right, but the most surprising fan base for the Breezy Singer is the Good Taste and Fine Design flock - people who shop at the Paul Smith store on Fifth Avenue, or the SoHo furniture boutique BDDW, not to mention the chain Design Within Reach, where the birds perch amid the sleek, minimalist furnishings. A spokeswoman for the Paul Smith shop confirmed that these items, which resemble something from a five-and-dime or maybe a cutesy tourist-town gift shop, are quite popular with the store's stylish and cosmopolitan customers. Why is that? The store's manager issued this statement in reply: 'They are drawn by the calming effect of the sound the birds make. It takes them away from N.Y.C.' That's a possible explanation, but it seems incomplete at best. The Breezy Singers are made by Takara, a Japanese company that dates to 1955 and makes things like voice-activated toy fish. The mechanical birds don't quite fit the stereotype of the supercool Japanese product; it may be that the appeal is closer to that of a karaoke machine - in other words, campiness. Jen Bekman, a New York gallery owner, received a Breezy Singer as a Christmas gift two years ago from an 'incredibly tasteful' couple she knows, and at first she was nonplused. The bird looked cheap and mass-produced, complete with hard-shell plastic packaging. It reminded her, in fact, of her grandmother's knickknack collection. 'It just looked weird - borderline hokey,' she recalls. But her opinion began to change when she pried the thing out of its package. Soon she was singing the birds' praises on a design blog. 'They're just surprising,' she says. Bekman ended up buying one for a friend, and the process she experienced repeated itself: a dubious, 'Uh, O.K.,' eventually followed by the object occupying a point of pride in her friend's tasteful apartment. Evidently, then, camp is not the appeal. While the birds pass many of the tests suggested in Susan Sontag's famous 1964 essay, 'Notes on Camp,' Item 23 on her list makes it plain that 'in naïve, or pure, Camp, the essential element is seriousness, a seriousness that fails.' The Breezy Singers are wholly earnest, but they don't fail. Moreover, it seems that the sense of 'duplicity' that Sontag identified in observation No. 17 is also absent - the divide between 'the 'straight' public sense in which something can be taken' and a 'private zany experience of the thing.' The Breezy Singers seem to be taken in precisely the spirit in which they were intended. Still, there's a difference between admiring the design and functionality of Breezy Singers and, say, that of the iPod. And it's hard to discount the idea of camp as long there is a hipster in a unicorn T-shirt somewhere. But maybe Breezy Singers somehow benefit from a new kind post-camp sensibility, or even a meta version of camp - an appreciation not simply of success, but of the sincere attempt that ought to fail yet doesn't. This past Christmas, Bekman gave the birds to more friends and kept the latest addition to the Breezy Singers family, an owl, for herself. (The songs tend to bother her dog, or she might keep more around.) It may be that the birds appeal to people who pay a great deal of attention to design because they feel a little burned out on modern, minimal, austere, sleek objects. Bekman also thinks they might appeal to men because of the gadgety, engineered quality. And although they've been around for a couple of years, they still offer a slightly 'underground' sense of discovery. 'It's a surprise in a kind of urban domestic environment,' Bekman says. 'And they sing.'

Subject: Paul Krugman: First, Do More Harm From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 09:18:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/ January 16, 2006 Paul Krugman continues his series on health care reform. This column focuses on diabetes to illustrate some of the bad incentives built into our current health care system and the administration's health care reform proposals. By Mark Thoma First, Do More Harm, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times: It's widely expected that President Bush will talk a lot about health care in his State of the Union address. He ... probably will tout proposals for so-called 'consumer driven' health care. So it's important to realize that the administration's idea of health care reform is to take what's wrong with our system and make it worse. Consider ... the rising tide of diabetes. Diabetes is a horrifying disease. It's also an important factor in soaring medical costs. ... And the problem of dealing with diabetes is a clear illustration of the real issues in health care. Here's what we should be doing: since the rise in diabetes is closely linked to the rise in obesity, we should be getting Americans to lose weight and exercise more. We should also support disease management: people with diabetes have a much better quality of life and place much less burden on society if they can be induced to monitor their blood sugar carefully and control their diet. But ... the U.S. system of paying for health care doesn't let medical professionals do the right thing. There's hardly any money for prevention... And even disease management gets severely shortchanged. ... insurance companies 'will often refuse to pay $150 for a diabetic to see a podiatrist, who can help prevent foot ailments associated with the disease. Nearly all of them, though, cover amputations, which typically cost more than $30,000.' ... The point is that we can't deal with the diabetes epidemic in part because insurance companies don't pay for preventive medicine or disease management... Which brings us to the Bush administration's notion of health care reform. The administration's principles ... were laid out in the 2004 Economic Report of the President. The first and most important of these principles is ... insurance policies - 'that focus on large expenditures that are truly the result of unforeseen circumstances,' as opposed to small or predictable costs. ... The ... administration is saying that we need to make sure that insurance companies pay only for things like $30,000 amputations, that they don't pay for $150 visits to podiatrists that might have averted the need for amputation. To encourage insurance companies not to pay for podiatrists, the administration has turned to its favorite tool: tax breaks. The 2003 Medicare bill ... allowed people who buy high-deductible health insurance policies - policies that cover only extreme expenses - to deposit money, tax-free, into health savings accounts that can be used to pay medical bills. Since then the administration has floated proposals to make the tax breaks bigger and wider... Critics of health savings accounts have mostly focused on two features of the accounts Mr. Bush won't mention. First, such accounts mainly benefit people with high incomes. Second, they encourage wealthy corporate employees to opt out of company health plans, further undermining the already fraying system of employment-based health insurance. But the case of diabetes and other evidence suggest ... a third problem with health savings accounts ... in practice, people who are forced to pay for medical care out of pocket don't have the ability to make good decisions about what care to purchase. ... The bottom line is that what the Bush administration calls reform is actually the opposite. Driven by an ideology at odds with reality, the administration wants to accentuate, not fix, what's wrong with America's health care system.

Subject: Globalizing King's Legacy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 06:23:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/16/opinion/16branch.html?ex=1295067600&en=7899cfbc2332a4f3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 16, 2006 Globalizing King's Legacy By TAYLOR BRANCH Baltimore OFFICIAL celebrations of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday turn 20 years old this week. Like that of Dr. King's late colleague Rosa Parks, the name behind our 10th national holiday carries more resonance than impact - noble, universal, yet bounded by race and time. The annual King event draws tributes to the end of legal segregation, reprises of landmark oratory and varied appraisals of problems for minorities. Yet despite our high-stakes national commitment to advance free government around the world, we consistently marginalize or ignore Dr. King's commitment to the core values of democracy. His own words present a vast and urgent landscape for freedom. 'No American is without responsibility,' Dr. King declared only hours after the 1965 'Bloody Sunday' repulse of voting rights marchers in Selma, Ala. 'All are involved in the sorrow that rises from Selma to contaminate every crevice of our national life,' he added. 'The struggle in Selma is for the survival of democracy everywhere in our land.' His public appeal gathered an overnight host from many states behind a blockaded vigil. When white supremacists beat one volunteer to death with impunity, Dr. King responded with prophetic witness against the grain of violence. 'Out of the wombs of a frail world,' he assured mourners, 'new systems of equality and justice are being born.' Selma released waves of political energy from the human nucleus of freedom. Ordinary citizens ventured across cultural barriers, aroused a transnational conscience and engaged all three branches of government. After the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, Dr. King claimed that the distinctive methods of sharecroppers and students had revived nothing less than the visionary heritage of the American Revolution. 'The stirring lesson of this age is that mass nonviolent direct action is not a peculiar device for Negro agitation,' he told the Synagogue Council of America. 'Rather it is a historically validated method for defending freedom and democracy, and for enlarging these values for the benefit of the whole society.' This effusive axiom went unnoticed, but the blessings of freedom did ripple far beyond the black victims of caste. As Dr. King predicted, the civil rights movement liberated segregationists themselves. The integrity of law enforcement rose with a stark decline in racial terror. The Atlanta Braves joined the first professional sports teams to spring up at integrated stadiums, and business radiated Sun Belt growth into a region of historic poverty. In elections, new black voters generated the 20th century's first two-party competition to displace the ossified regimes of white supremacy. The stigma of segregation no longer curtailed a Southerner's chances for high national office, and fresh candidates rose swiftly to leadership in both national parties. Parallel tides opened doors for the first female students at some universities and most private colleges, then the military academies. In 1972, civil rights agitation over doctrines of equal souls produced the first public ordination of a female rabbi in the United States, and the Episcopal Church soon introduced female clergy members in spite of schismatic revolts to preserve religious authority for men. Pauli Murray, a lawyer who was one of the pioneer priests, had pursued a legal appeal that in 1966 overturned several state laws flatly prohibiting jury service by women. 'The principle announced seems so obvious today,' Dr. Murray would write in a memoir, 'that it is difficult to remember the dramatic break the court was making.' Overseas, as an amalgam of forces suddenly dissolved the Soviet empire atop its mountain of nuclear weapons, Dr. King's message echoed in the strains of 'We Shall Overcome' heard along the Berlin Wall and the streets of Prague. Likewise, South African apartheid melted without the long-dreaded racial Armageddon, on miraculous healing words from a former prisoner, Nelson Mandela. Students shocked the world from Tiananmen Square with nonviolent demonstrations modeled on American sit-ins, planting seeds of democracy within the authoritarian shell of Chinese Communism. These and other sweeping trends from the civil rights era have transformed daily life in many countries, and now their benefit is scarcely contested. Yet the political discourse behind them is atrophied. Public service has fallen into sad disrepute. Spitballs pass for debate. Comedians write the best-selling books on civics. Dr. King's ideas are not so much rebutted as cordoned off or begrudged, and for two generations his voice of anguished hope has given way to a dominant slogan that government itself is bad. Above all, no one speaks for nonviolence. Indeed, the most powerful discipline from the freedom movement was the first to be ridiculed across the political spectrum. 'A hundred political commentators have interred nonviolence into a premature grave,' Dr. King complained after Selma. The concept seemed alien and unmanly. It came to embarrass many civil rights veterans themselves, even though nonviolence lies at the heart of democracy. Every ballot - the most basic element of free government - is by definition a piece of nonviolence, symbolizing hard-won or hopeful consent to raise politics above anarchy and war. The boldest principles of democratic character undergird the civil rights movement's nonviolent training. James Madison, arguing to ratify the Constitution in 1788, summoned 'every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government,' and he added that no form of government can secure liberty 'without virtue in the people.' By steeling themselves to endure blows without retaliation, and remaining steadfastly open to civil contact with their oppressors, civil rights demonstrators offered shining examples of the revolutionary balance that launched the American system: self-government and public trust. All the rest is careful adjustment. Like Madison, the marchers from Selma turned rulers and subjects into fellow citizens. A largely invisible people offered leadership in the role of modern founders. For an incandescent decade, from 1955 to 1965, the heirs of slavery lifted the whole world toward freedom. Weariness and war intruded. In the White House, President Lyndon Johnson wrestled the political subtleties of sending soldiers to guarantee liberty at home. 'Troops leave a bitter taste in the mouths of all the people,' cautioned Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. The president moaned simultaneously over predictions of bloody stalemate if he sent troops to Vietnam, saying the prospect 'makes the chills run up my back,' but he succumbed to schoolyard politics. The American people, he feared, 'will forgive you for everything except being weak.' Lamenting religious leaders who accommodated the war, Dr. King defended nonviolence on two fronts. 'Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them?' he asked. 'What then can I say to the Vietcong, or to Castro, or to Mao...? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?' In politics, Dr. King endorsed a strategic alternative to violence. 'We will stop communism by letting the world know that democracy is a better government than any other government,' he told his congregation, 'and by making justice a reality for all of God's children.' Pressures intensified within Dr. King's own movement. To battered young colleagues who wondered why nonviolence was consigned mostly to black people, while others admired James Bond, he could only commend the burden as a redemptive sacrifice. Change was slow, however, for a land still dotted with lynching, and frustration turned to rebellion as the war in Vietnam hardened the political climate. When offered incendiary but fleeting fame in 1966, the leaders of various black power movements repudiated nonviolence along with the vote itself, which they had given so much to win. Meanwhile, Lyndon Johnson steadily lost his presidency at home before he could forge any political order in Vietnam. Although casualty figures confirmed the heavy advantage of American arms, Johnson fell victim to a historical paradox evolving since the age of Napoleon: modern warfare destroys more but governs less - one reason military commanders seem, in my limited experience, more skeptical than civilians about the political use of lethal force. Dr. King grew ever more lonely in conviction about the gateway to constructive politics. 'I'm committed to nonviolence absolutely,' he wrote. 'I'm just not going to kill anybody, whether it's in Vietnam or here.' When bristling discouragement invaded his own staff, he exhorted them to rise above fear and hatred alike. 'We must not be intimidated by those who are laughing at nonviolence now,' he told them on his last birthday. His oratory fused the political promise of equal votes with the spiritual doctrine of equal souls. He planted one foot in American heritage, the other in scripture, and both in nonviolence. 'I say to you that our goal is freedom,' he said in his last Sunday sermon. 'And I believe we're going to get there because, however much she strays from it, the goal of America is freedom.' Only hours before his death, Dr. King startled an aide with a balmy aside from his unpopular movement to uplift the poor. 'In our next campaign,' he remarked, 'we have to institutionalize nonviolence and take it international.' The nation would do well to incorporate this goal into our mission abroad, reinforcing the place of nonviolence among the fundamentals of democracy, along with equal citizenship, self-government and accountable public trust. We could also restore Dr. King's role in the continuing story of freedom to its rightful prominence, emphasizing that the best way to safeguard democracy is to practice it. And we must recognize that the accepted tradeoff between freedom and security is misguided, because our values are the essence of our strength. If dungeons, brute force and arbitrary rule were the keys to real power, Saudi Arabia would be a model for the future instead of the past. Gunfire took Dr. King's life, but we determine his legacy. This holiday, let that inspiration remain our patriotic challenge.

Subject: Scarlet Tanager Feeding From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 07:07:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=3268&u=11570|10|... Scarlet Tanager Feeding New York City--Inwood Park.

Subject: Scarlet Tanager Eating an Insect From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 07:06:22 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.calvorn.com/gallery/photo.php?photo=4777&u=16714|3|... Scarlet Tanager Eating an Insect New York City--Central Park, Andrew Hasswell Green Bench.

Subject: Is Anybody Necessary? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:59:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/business/14pursuits.html?ex=1294894800&en=57745bb5a3209f6a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 14, 2006 Is Anybody Necessary? Dr. Ying and the Four Noble Truths By HARRY HURT III EVERY year I try to re-examine what is real and what is not, and the exercise just about always lands me into a deep heap of existential trouble. This year was - make that present tense, is - no exception. One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting a different result. But what do you call it if you do the same thing over and over, and keep achieving different results? Is that sanity? And what do you call it when cancer kills a close friend and that hits you a whole lot harder than the fact that tens of thousands of people you don't know were killed in wars? Is that tough luck? Or just more of the same old life and death? Those were the kinds of thoughts strangling my mind as I darted toward the Mahayana Buddhist Temple in Chinatown during a driving rainstorm. It was the Thursday before New Year's Eve. I was hoping to get a couple of days' jump on my annual reality re-examination ritual. After a series of expensive hedonistic executive pursuits, I was on a low-budget intellectual one. My official mission was to seek answers to a question inspired by the best-selling book 'Are Men Necessary?' by Maureen Dowd, a columnist for The New York Times. For me, that provocative question made me wonder, 'Are women necessary?' which in turn led to an even larger question, 'Is anybody necessary?' But the sight of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple threw me for an unexpected philosophical loop that taunted my basic ability to distinguish between real and unreal, who was necessary and who was not. The temple was housed in a red and yellow box-shaped building emblazoned with English and Chinese signs. It nestled between the colonnaded archway of the Manhattan Bridge and a booth that sold $15 bus tickets to Boston. A pair of faux gold lions that could have come straight from a Hollywood back lot guarded the front doors. I ducked under an overhang, shaking off my umbrella, and silently reviewed the steps that led to this strange rain-soaked juncture. A few days and several lifetimes earlier, I had tried to consult experts in Western thought. But when I telephoned a philosophy professor at Harvard, my alma mater, he informed me that he would have nothing to contribute. Perplexed, I contacted Shelly Kagan, the Clark professor of philosophy at the archrival Yale, who pointed out a logical flaw in my approach. 'You can ask, 'Are men necessary?' or 'Are women necessary?' but when you ask if anybody's necessary, you're shifting meaning,' Dr. Kagan said. 'Are people necessary to the happiness of other people? The answer has to be yes. If there are no people, then there are no people to be happy or unhappy.' Dr. Kagan said that my big question should properly be rephrased, 'How are we to live?' because it ultimately concerned the meaning of life. 'The truth is very complicated and doesn't easily boil down to one sentence,' he allowed. 'I don't have a short essay on the meaning of life.' Instead, Dr. Kagan referred me to the next best thing. It was a 262-page paperback by a Princeton professor, Peter Singer, titled, 'How Are We to Live?' After surveying the evolution of philosophical thought from Socrates to Betty Friedan, Dr. Singer concludes that people ought to 'take the point of view of the universe' when making moral judgments about how to live their lives. I'm no moral philosopher, but that sure seemed illogical to me. How could any person take 'the point of view of the universe' other than through an act of extraterrestrial projection, a mind-out-of-body flight from Planet Earth into outer space? Even Dr. Singer conceded: 'This is not a phrase to be taken literally, for unless we are pantheists, the universe itself cannot have a point of view at all.' My own point of view became further disoriented when I slipped between the lions in front of the Mahayana Buddhist Temple, and entered the lobby, inhaling the sweet-and-sour smell of incense. On the left, a gift shop counter displayed beaded jewelry and ceramic statues. On the right, a mud-splattered carpet led to a cavernous semi-darkened room humming with a piped-in mood-affirming chant. A giant Buddha, apparently made of welded metal painted the same faux gold as the lions out front, peered down from an altar bedecked with apples and oranges. Presently, a Chinese man strode into the lobby wearing that day a gray N.Y.P.D. sweatshirt, khaki pants and white jogging shoes. 'Hello, my name is Dr. Nelson Ying,' he said in perfectly enunciated English. 'Welcome.' Dr. Ying ushered me into a lounge separated from the giant Buddha by a glass partition. An assistant arrived with paper cups of green tea. I asked Dr. Ying if he was a lama, one of the terms designating a Buddhist holy man. 'I've been called an ass, but never a lama,' he replied, grinning, and then added, 'actually, I have a Ph.D. in nuclear physics, and I am an adjunct professor at the University of Central Florida in Orlando.' Dr. Ying told me that he and his parents had fled Shanghai in 1955, six years after the Communist takeover. Arriving in New York with only $600, his father, James Ying, opened a chain of gift shops that grew from Chinatown into the New York suburbs. His mother, Annie Ying, established the first storefront Buddhist temples on the East Coast, and a rural retreat in upstate New York. In 1995, she founded the Mahayana Buddhist Temple at 133 Canal Street. 'I was the first Buddhist preacher licensed in the state of New York to perform Buddhist weddings, but I am not a priest,' Dr. Ying informed me. 'Priests cannot kill animals, and therefore must remain vegetarians. Also, they are not allowed to marry.' Dr. Ying paused to take a sip of green tea. 'I was married to my first wife, Barbara, who died,' he confided. 'I am now married to my second wife, whose name is Patricia. I drink alcohol, but not to excess, and I try not to waste anything. I certainly do not waste the emotions of my wife by being unfaithful to her.' Not wanting to waste Dr. Ying's time, I quickly explained how my intellectual pursuit had taken some unexpected turns, leaving me dazed and confused by a metaphorical downpour of logical flaws and philosophical red herrings. 'Perhaps you have come to the right place,' Dr. Ying said, nodding sympathetically. 'I call Buddhism the Red Cross of religions. It is based on what we call the Four Noble Truths: that there are sufferings in the world; that the sufferings have a cause; that the sufferings can be ended; and that there is a methodology for ending them we call the Eightfold Path.' I pulled a dog-eared copy of Dr. Singer's book from my raincoat. Dr. Ying stared at the title, 'How Are We to Live?' for what seemed an eternity. 'My answer is a sample of one,' he said at last. 'What do I do? I find joy in helping others. But I am careful to take the middle path. If I ignore a person who is suffering, he may perish. But if I help them from cradle to grave, they merely have a crutch. I try to develop a master-student relationship in which the student becomes the master. As Lee Ann Womack says, 'Don't let some hell-bent heart leave you bitter.' ' I gulped down my green tea, and bowed to Dr. Ying, thanking him. Then I bowed to the giant Buddha, and staggered back out into the pouring rain. As I passed the lions in front of the temple, I asked myself one final philosophical question: What could be more real - or more necessary - than a lay preacher of an Eastern religion who had a Ph.D. in nuclear physics and the wisdom and humility to quote the lyrics of a female country singer?

Subject: Re: Is Anybody Necessary? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 15:25:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What ... that's it??!!! I read all that and still no answer? I think someone has just been conned.... I hope she didn't pay him for those words. I mean she arrived with a question, 'Is Anybody Necessary?' and instead got a Master-Student lecture. Hey I've seen those kung-fu movies, I know all about this. What I want to know is the hard facts... 'do I really need a woman in my life?'.... and if so... I need to know her contact phone numbers and address.

Subject: Re: Is Anybody Necessary? From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 17:57:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Perfect, you are completely right :) Hmmm.

Subject: Hard Decisions for New Orleans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:56:34 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/opinion/14sat1.html?ex=1294894800&en=fa9b0656a4263192&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 14, 2006 Hard Decisions for New Orleans It would be nice to believe that New Orleans could be made whole, exactly as it was before Hurricane Katrina devastated it. But that kind of wishful thinking, apparently prevalent among some New Orleanians and encouraged by some city leaders, will only stymie the reconstruction process. The nation cannot rebuild everywhere in New Orleans, nor should it. The city's rebuilding commission took an important step this week when it recommended that only the areas that could muster sufficient population should be rebuilt. Not surprisingly, that announcement drew the ire of residents of some neighborhoods where generations have lived on the same plots of land. While that is an ideal that should be protected wherever possible, it cannot define the rebuilding process. The lowest-lying, hardest-hit areas, like parts of New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and Lakeview, are also the most vulnerable to future hurricanes and flooding. Some of the blocks farthest below sea level should be turned into parks to allow better drainage, as recommended by the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit research group - even though that will be difficult to say to the residents of those areas. Even with a commitment from Washington to build optimal protection against the fiercest Category 5 storms - which hasn't happened yet - the work would take years to complete. Residents should not be encouraged to gamble with their insurance checks for political or emotional reasons. It is not a coincidence that many of those hard-hit, low-lying areas have had poor and predominantly African-American residents. That injustice needs to be corrected, not recreated. Whether owners or renters, the people from less-protected areas should be compensated so they have enough money to live somewhere else in town. The answer is not to thrust people back into harm's way, especially when it's unclear how much hurricane protection the city will really have in the coming years. Rosy predictions do not help the city's most vulnerable displaced residents. The city government has to be straight with its constituents. For the foreseeable future, New Orleans will be a smaller city with a smaller population and a smaller tax base. If local leaders proffer unrealistic solutions, they will only strengthen the hand of those opposed to a real rebuilding commitment for New Orleans. President Bush sounded out of touch as usual this week when he called the still-ravaged city 'a heck of a place to bring your family.' Rather than conjuring up memories of Michael Brown, the erstwhile head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Bush could better spend his time increasing the pressure on Congress to act on some version of Representative Richard Baker's federal buyout legislation. Lawmakers in Washington should take up the bill.

Subject: Re: Hard Decisions for New Orleans From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 15:12:21 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I have recently visited New Orleans and spoke with some people about the problems being faced. I can tell you - I wouldn't want to have the job of resolving some of those problems... New Orleans' population has dropped from 900,000 to 100,000 - in essence, the infrastructure is still built for a city of 1 million and yet it has a tenth of its population - so we are still going to see many, many problems with funding thise huge infrastructure maintenance with a serious deficit in tax funds. Most of those 800,000 people that left won't come back. Besides the emotional trauma of the storm, New Orleans also had the lowest wages in the USA at $3.75 per hour Most of those poor New Orleans people are finding better jobs in other states. Ironically enough restaurants and small stores in New Orleans are already paying between $8 and $10 per hour and still cannot attract employees which is further exaggerated by FEMA employing labour at $10 to $12 per hour. Ironically enough, the storm may well have raised the economic bar and future people may well earn a better salary, especially if the lack of labour remains. The rebuilding effort is going to be controversial. The Lower Ninth Ward is still a disaster area and is obviously very vulnerable to future Hurricanes. The real pity is that the 9th Ward has wonderful old houses. But I agree that entire suburb should be flattened... and dare I say it - they should construct highrise buildings in it place. Buildings that are more resistant to hurricanes, where the bottom couple of floors can be flooded and still survive. The problem is that high rise buildings are much more conducive to creating slum areas. I hope they look to Vancouver to learn lessons on how to build buildings and yet ensure that slum areas will not become entrenched. One thing is for sure - New Orleans is a fantastic city and it has been cleaned up and is back and running. Most Hotels are back in operation and you can get good deals on accommodation. There are cops literally on every street corner giving a firm presence and a feeling of security. The French Quarter barely has traces of any hurricane. I definately want to get back to this city ASAP and I highly recommend this city. Go there... go there now and enjoy one of Americas greatest bits of heritage.

Subject: Re: Hard Decisions for New Orleans From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 17:04:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I am thoroughly impressed by your impression, for I was more pessimistic about the outcome before. This is promising.

Subject: The Broken Promise of Nafta From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:54:42 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/opinion/06STIG.html?ex=1388725200&en=94b0ef3e8a6b73be&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND January 6, 2004 The Broken Promise of Nafta By JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ The celebrations of Nafta's 10th anniversary are far more muted than those involved in its creation might have hoped. In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement has failed to fulfill the most dire warnings of its opponents and the most fervent expectations of its supporters. In Mexico, however, the treaty remains controversial and even harmful — as do America's efforts to liberalize trade throughout the hemisphere. There is some good news. In America, the 'giant sucking sound of jobs being pulled out of this country' that Ross Perot predicted never quite materialized. The first six years of Nafta saw unemployment in the United States fall to new lows. (Of course, to most economists there was little basis for Mr. Perot's worries in the first place. Maintaining full employment is the concern of monetary and fiscal policy, not of trade policy.) Nafta has brought some benefits to Mexico as well; it was trade with America, fueled by Nafta — not the bailout of Wall Street lenders — that was responsible for Mexico's quick recovery after the financial crisis of December 1994. But while Mexico benefited in the early days, especially with exports from factories near the United States border, those benefits have waned, both with the weakening of the American economy and intense competition from China. Meanwhile, poor Mexican corn farmers face an uphill battle competing with highly subsidized American corn, while relatively better-off Mexican city dwellers benefit from lower corn prices. And as all but one of Mexico's major banks have been sold to foreign banks, local small- and medium-sized enterprises — particularly in nonexport sectors like small retail — worry about access to credit. Growth in Mexico over the past 10 years has been a bleak 1 percent on a per capita basis — better than in much of the rest of Latin America, but far poorer than earlier in the century. From 1948 to 1973, Mexico grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent per capita. (By contrast, in the 10 years of Nafta, even with the East Asian crisis, Korean growth averaged 4.3 percent and China's 7 percent in per capita terms.) And while the hope was that Nafta would reduce income disparities between the United States and its southern neighbor, in fact they have grown — by 10.6 percent in the last decade. Meanwhile, there has been disappointing progress in reducing poverty in Mexico, where real wages have been falling at the rate of 0.2 percent a year. These outcomes should not have come as a surprise. Nafta does give Mexico a slight advantage over other trading partners. But with its low tax base, low investment in education and technology, and high inequality, Mexico would have a hard time competing with a dynamic China. Nafta enhanced Mexico's ability to supply American manufacturing firms with low-cost parts, but it did not make Mexico into an independently productive economy. When President Bill Clinton first asked the Council of Economic Advisers about the economic importance of Nafta, early in his administration, our response was that potential geopolitical benefits were far more important than the economic benefits. (Similarly, the European Union, for all of the economic benefits that it has brought, is mainly a political project.) America perhaps stood more to gain economically than Mexico, but the concrete gains were likely to be small on both sides. Tariff rates on both sides were already very low, with Mexico's tariffs being slightly higher than America's, and Nafta would not eliminate important nontariff barriers. The disparity in income across the Mexican border is among the largest anywhere, and the resulting migration pressure was enormous. Doing what little America could do to enhance growth in Mexico would be good for Mexico, and good for America; and it was the right thing to do for our neighbor to the south. Unfortunately, much of the goodwill that the United States might have expected has been squandered. First, America attempted to use barriers to keep out Mexican products that began to make inroads in our markets — from tomatoes to avocados to trucks to brooms. Despite the impressive efforts of workers' rights groups, efforts to ease the life of immigrants have stalled. Recent moves in California to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving driver's licenses and medical care have been a depressing sign that conditions for Mexican immigrants in this country are getting worse. Of course, Nafta was a far more modest project than the European Union. It did not envision the free movement of labor, though that would have had a far larger effect on regional output than the free movement of capital, on which it focused. It did not envision a common set of economic regulations, or even a common currency. But hidden in Nafta was a new set of rights — for business — that potentially weakened democracy throughout North America. Under Nafta, if foreign investors believe they are being harmed by regulations (no matter how well justified), they may sue for damages in special tribunals without the transparency afforded by normal judicial proceedings. If successful, they receive direct compensation from the federal government. Environmental, health and safety regulations have been attacked and put into jeopardy. To date, suits with claims in excess of $13 billion have been filed. While many of the cases are still pending, it is clear that there was not a full and open debate of the consequences of Nafta before passage. Conservatives have long sought to receive compensation for regulations that hurt them, and American courts and Congress have usually rejected these attempts. Now businesses may have accomplished indirectly, through treaty, what they could not get more openly through the democratic political process. Meanwhile, those harmed by the actions of the foreign firms, for instance by what they do to the environment, do not have comparable protections of appealing to an international tribunal and receiving compensation. The concern is that Nafta will stifle regulation, no matter how important for the environment, health or safety. All of this has important implications for the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, and for countries thinking of signing onto bilateral trade agreements with the United States. Signing a free trade agreement is neither an easy nor an assured road to prosperity. The United States has said it does not want agriculture or nontariff barriers to be on the table in these talks. But while it refuses to give in on these points, it wants Latin American countries to compromise their national sovereignties and to agree to investor 'protections.' In fact, the United States has been demanding that countries fully liberalize their capital markets just as the International Monetary Fund has finally found that such liberalization promotes neither growth nor stability in developing countries. Unfortunately, many of the smaller and weaker countries will probably agree in the quixotic hope that by linking themselves to America, they will partake of America's prosperity. In the long run, while particular special-interest groups may benefit from such an unfair trade treaty, America's national interests — in having stable and prosperous neighbors — are not well served. Already, the manner in which the United States is bullying the weaker countries of Central and South America into accepting its terms is generating enormous resentment. If these trade agreements do no better for them than Nafta has done for Mexico, then both peace and prosperity in the hemisphere will be at risk. Joseph E. Stiglitz, professor of economics at Columbia University and author of 'The Roaring 90's,' was chief economist of the World Bank from 1997 to 2000. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2001.

Subject: Opens 389,000 Acres in Alaska From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:52:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/national/13alaska.html?ex=1294808400&en=e17801a3d7a971f0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 U.S. Reverses Accord and Opens 389,000 Acres in Alaska to Explore for Oil By FELICITY BARRINGER WASHINGTON - The Interior Department has decided to open 389,000 acres of Alaskan lakes, tundra and shoreline to oil exploration, reversing an eight-year-old compromise intended to protect the habitat of hundreds of thousands of migratory birds and the hunting grounds of Inupiat natives who live near the Beaufort Sea. Henri Bisson, the state director of the federal Bureau of Land Management in Alaska, said Thursday that the new plan would increase by as much as two billion barrels the oil that could be recovered from the northeastern section of the National Petroleum Reserve while providing protection for birds in the summer when they shed their flight feathers and hatch chicks. Critics, including Alaska Natives and groups like the Audubon Society and the Wilderness Society, said the protection would not prevent fragmenting the birds' habitat or the disturbance when pipelines were built. There will be airplane and helicopter traffic, the critics said, and industrial activity will be a fixture of the collection of lakes and damp tundra that is now empty 150 miles west of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The fight over the area where wild fowl from California, Japan, Mexico and Russia congregate every summer has been largely overshadowed by the controversy over the Arctic refuge, which remains closed to oil and gas exploration after a Democratic filibuster last month. The two disputes center on protecting caribou, wild fowl and Alaska Natives' interests, but it is generally agreed that the Teshekpuk Lake area has a particularly important role in the annual migration of tens of thousands of birds like geese and tundra swans, providing them with relative safety from predators and ample food for the flightless weeks of summer. 'We are not persuaded that this provides the protection needed,' said Stan Senner, the Audubon Society Alaska director. 'I think our answer, our view, is that waterfowl biologists who know the area have essentially all said that a core goose molting area needs to be protected without fragmentation.' Though 242,000 acres of the 389,000 can have no surface structures except pipelines, Mr. Senner said, the lines and the human monitoring they require will intrude in areas the birds have had to themselves. The final decision, which the Interior Department released on Wednesday, opens seven tracts, of 45,000 to 60,000 acres each, that were previously off limits to energy development. 'We believe that we have put forward the best environmentally sensitive approach we could take in terms of conducting a viable oil and gas leasing and development opportunity,' Mr. Bisson said in an interview. 'I can't think of anything else we could do to make it more environmentally protective than we have.' He added that for the areas north of Teshekpuk Lake, the department would not allow exceptions to its restrictions except for aircraft that have to deviate from agreed-on flight patterns for passengers' safety . Dora Nukapigak, one of 450 residents of Nuiqsut, an Inupiat village near the affected area, said she was certain that the policy reversal would have a significant impact. 'Where there's industry, there's going to be traffic, work and construction,' Ms. Nukapigak said, The 200 or so hunters in the village, she added, pursue whales and caribou, as well as fish, and she expressed concern that taking water from Teshekpuk and other lakes to build ice roads for winter construction could affect all the animals involved. Mr. Bisson said his estimates of the commercially retrievable oil and the 3.2 trillion cubic feet of retrievable natural gas were based on federal and company data. The estimates, he said, indicate that a compromise reached by Bruce Babbitt, interior secretary in the Clinton administration, that opened all but 13 percent of the reserve to energy production left as much as three-quarters of the recoverable oil in the reserve off limits to drilling. Mr. Bisson said there would be no more than 300 acres with improvements like roads, drilling pads or airstrips in each lease tract. Mr. Senner said the resulting spider web would be intrusive. 'We don't think the basic geometry of the areas makes sense,' Mr. Senner said, referring to the 242,000 acres where surface development other than pipelines is off limits. 'This will not result in fewer facilities or reduced disturbance.'

Subject: Water Buffalo? Swamps? This Is Japan? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:49:13 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/travel/04okinawa.html?ex=1283486400&en=add5e2ca81feae9d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 4, 2005 Water Buffalo? Swamps? This Is Japan? By NORIMITSU ONISHI SAY Okinawa, and the word conjures up one of the last major battles of World War II and the enduring presence of American troops in Japan. But Okinawa is so much more: a chain of hundreds of islands stretching some 600 miles southwest of mainland Japan into the East China Sea (also called the Ryuku Islands), home to a distinctive subtropical culture and nature that few foreigners - and not many Japanese for that matter - have ever seen. Farthest from mainland Japan, closer to China and Taiwan, are the Yaeyama islands of the Okinawa chain. This scattering of islands and islets, with no memory of wartime battles and no experience of being a base for United States Marines, is a world away from the sometimes politically tense atmosphere on Okinawa Island, some 250 miles away, where the Marines are based. Yaeyama is the corner of Okinawa where the laid-back Ryukyu culture - named after the independent kingdom that existed here before it was absorbed by Japan - is best preserved. The sense that Yaeyama is spiritually independent, separate from mainland Japan, survives to this day. Mainland Japanese who have moved here are referred to as immigrants by locals, and first-time tourists from the mainland often say that Yaeyama is more exotic than going abroad. On the mainland, a rising interest in Okinawan food and music has been luring more Japanese tourists to Yaeyama on island-hopping tours. Island hopping in Yaeyama begins in Ishigaki, one of the two big islands and the only one with an airport, about a three-hour direct flight from Tokyo. Ishigaki Island has several spots famous among snorkelers and divers, including Kabira Bay, in the northwest, whose emerald blue water with fish-filled coral reefs can also be viewed from glass-bottom boats. But as the only urbanized island in Yaeyama, Ishigaki is perhaps best to use as a springboard. On a four-day trip in May, a friend and I found that the Ishigaki port is the meeting place for all Yaeyama island hoppers. There, two companies operate high-speed ferries to the surrounding islands, and with only a few exceptions, getting from one small island to another requires going through this port. Taketomi Island, a 10-minute ride southwest of Ishigaki, is a flat, oval-shaped, 1,500-acre island, with a population of only 328. It is small enough to hike or cover on rented bicycles. Taketomi's main attraction, though, is the village of 160 houses in the middle of the island, which is laced with narrow, sand-covered streets. Traditional, one-story Ryukyu houses and gardens are surrounded by low stone walls. The houses are made of wood, stone or concrete, and their roofs are invariably made of red tiles and adorned with at least one shisa - a lion or dragon to protect the household. The Chinese influence was hard to miss. The Ryukyu kingdom, officially made part of Japan in 1879, had long paid tribute to China, so its present culture is a synthesis of Chinese, Japanese and indigenous traditions. Like those found elsewhere on Okinawa, but not on mainland Japan, the cemeteries were composed of only a few plots; they consisted of mausoleums made of large, gray slabs of stone with rounded roofs resembling a turtle's shell. The handful of restaurants on Taketomi offered simple Okinawan cuisine, which, heavy on vegetables and low on fat, is one reason that Okinawans historically enjoyed the longest life expectancy in Japan. The open-air Garden Asahi serves goya chanpuru, an Okinawa staple made of bitter gourd, meat and eggs. Breakfast at the Sapuna Ya, a guest house with three thatched-roof cottages, included passion fruit, papaya and pineapple grown on the island. As further proof that we were far from Tokyo, we didn't lock our cottage, because, well, it had no locks. There was the same carefree attitude on Iriomote, which is the other big island in Yaeyama but still has a population of only 2,200. Although many of Iriomote's inns provide shuttles, we rented a car, which we were told to return by simply leaving it at the port - doors unlocked, with the keys inside. On Iriomote, the natural setting is the draw. Covered by mountains, crisscrossed by rivers, the island still has the dense jungles and mangrove swamps that made malaria rampant until after the war and kept the population down. Through our hotel, the Niraina Resort, we booked a guided, half-day canoe trip up the Pinai River. The river, with clear water only a few feet deep, meandered through walls of verdant mangrove swamps. The mangrove trees rose 15 to 20 feet, as their branches sent down roots that were embedded, like claws, in the muddy riverbanks. At some points, the river narrowed so much that we could smell the mud and the trees on the banks; then it widened so that the silence seemed to amplify sounds, like the occasional cry of a bird or the slicing of our paddles through the still water. Then, as we had been dulled by the tranquillity, a three-foot brownish snake dangling from a tree dropped into the river, near our canoes, before it swam swiftly to the other side. Iriomote is surrounded by several islets, one of which has a population of one. With no invitation, it felt rude to go there unannounced. Instead, we went to Yubu, an island off Iriomote's east coast. The island, uninhabited since it was submerged during a typhoon in 1969, has been transformed into a garden featuring tropical plants, flowers and animals. The highlight of a trip to Yubu, though, is the actual crossing: carts pulled by water buffaloes ply the 400-yard-wide shallow channel. Our buffalo was Goro, a 15-year-old male who, as his master explained cheerfully, was the strongest of the bunch and could pull a 20-person cart. Some islands are trying to define their image to attract tourists. Kohama Island, with a population of 570, is struggling to define its strongest selling point, advertising itself as the land of sugar canes and the setting for 'Churasan,' a wildly successful television series about a local girl who moves to other parts of Okinawa and even Tokyo before returning to Kohama. It seems to have settled on becoming a resort island, however, with a new, not fully completed 58-room hotel. The hotel, the Villa Hapira Pana, even has an 18-hole golf course. But even those islands that are not trying to attract tourists are worth a visit. The residents of Hatoma, all 58 of them, found an unusual way to keep the island alive. Over the years, the young people have left Hatoma, just north of Iriomote, leaving only a graying population. To keep the school's elementary school open many of the islanders have become foster parents to children who were unable to fit into schools elsewhere and dropped out. And then there is the most remote of the Yaeyama islands, Yonaguni, about 80 miles west of Ishigaki and 75 miles east of Taiwan. Isolated from even the rest of Yaeyama, Yonaguni developed its own language and now has only about 1,726 people. About 11 square miles, the island has a coastline punctuated by caves and coral reefs, while the surrounding waters contain ruins that are several thousands of years old. It is surrounded by rough seas that the islanders scour for fish, including marlin. On a clear day in Yonaguni - guni' means country - it is possible to see Taiwan and easy to imagine that you are, indeed, in another country.

Subject: Even Law Firms Join the Trend From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:46:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/business/13law.html?ex=1294808400&en=42eb0c46fcb9bf7a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 Even Law Firms Join the Trend to Outsourcing By JONATHAN D. GLATER THERE is a joke told by corporate general counsels: Every year they do not set a budget for spending on outside law firms - and every year they exceed it. So perhaps it should be no surprise that some corporate clients are pushing their outside law firms to assign an outside provider to conduct legal research. The shifting of assignments from a law firm's junior associates, whose time costs hundreds of dollars a hour, to a company that charges a flat rate for each research project calls into question exactly what the law firm's role is. 'It's analogous to other aspects of corporate procurement in general,' said Joel F. Henning, a senior consultant in the Chicago office of Hildebrandt International, a subsidiary of Thomson. He said the development was just another form of outsourcing - paying the least expensive provider to perform a service. 'This is really just another aspect of the whole corporate effort to save bucks.' The development may be an ominous sign for the legal profession, whose members derive much of their otherwise mysterious prestige from mastery of arcane case law and dry-as-dirt statutory language. Partners at several firms declined to share their thoughts on the use of outside service providers for legal research. Here is how one such company, LRN, operates. (In the interest of disclosure, LRN has provided online ethics training for employees of The New York Times Company.) LRN has a Rolodex with the names of more than 1,000 specialists on various legal topics, often law professors, who can provide research to clients. When clients have a legal concern, LRN lawyers meet with them to draw up a research plan and agree on cost; the client never knows who the expert is. 'We do not practice law and we do not give legal advice,' said Dov L. Seidman, the chief executive of LRN. 'We're a service provider for law firms and corporate legal departments.' The distinction matters. Practicing law subjects the person doing the practicing to state rules of professional conduct. Peter M. Kreindler, general counsel at Honeywell, said he thought the company's spending on legal services had fallen by at least 25 percent as a result of using LRN. 'Their hourly rates are much lower than law firm rates,' he said. Using law professors to conduct research saves money because they can be more efficient, he added. 'The typical law firm associate is sort of a generalist and not an expert in anything, so it takes the law firm associate much more time to do the research.' Lawyers who have been ordered by clients to use LRN are more circumspect in their comments. 'I see them as a means to attempt to effectively control the cost of outside counsel, which is the job of every corporate counsel,' said Peter John Sacripanti, a partner at McDermott Will & Emery in New York. 'And we, as a firm, support our clients in achieving that goal.' Of course, Mr. Sacripanti continued, any time work that could be completed by his firm was done by someone else, it became 'a lost opportunity.' But Mr. Sacripanti and other lawyers noted a difference in what they called 'commodity research' - a survey of legal requirements in all 50 states, for example - and the more sophisticated advice they provide, the kind that can cost $500, $600 or more for an hour of a partner's time. 'It's going to be the very high-end research that goes into things like bet-the-company transactions and bet-the-company' litigation that will keep big law firms busy, said Mr. Henning, the consultant with Hildebrandt. The more specific a client's question is and the more detailed the knowledge of an area of law must be to answer it, the safer a big firm's lawyer is, said David B. Goodwin, a partner at Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe in San Francisco. LRN's business model is not a threat to such an experienced specialist, he said. 'A professor who teaches what I do for a living, which is insurance law, they don't know more about the subject than I do,' Mr. Goodwin said. 'I know more than they do, because what they do is teach generally. They have a casebook and they go through it every year. I spend 10 hours a day, 12 hours a day, 300 days a year, working on the subject.' For that reason, Mr. Goodwin said, big law firms did not need to worry about competition from companies that were not law firms. 'To the extent that it threatens the private firm,' he said, 'it would not be on the kind of research that's their bread and butter.' In other words, Mr. Goodwin seems to be saying, while anyone may be able to do legal research, only real lawyers can represent.

Subject: Nilsson in Person: The Glory From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:45:00 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/14/arts/music/14nils.html?ex=1294894800&en=563fe9c9e765fd3d&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 14, 2006 Nilsson in Person: The Glory of the Power By ANTHONY TOMMASINI When I started going to the Metropolitan Opera as a young adolescent, typically in the upper balconies or the standing-room sections, some opera goddess must have been looking out for me. I didn't really know what I was doing. Yet at my first 'Bohème' the Mimi was Renata Tebaldi. My first Aida was Leontyne Price. And my first Turandot was Birgit Nilsson. I did not know Puccini's 'Turandot' at all when I attended this performance in 1965. I had never heard Ms. Nilsson. Imagine having had no idea of what was about to happen when Birgit Nilsson, as Puccini's icy and exotic princess in ancient China, descended the staircase of the Met's old Cecil Beaton set and started to sing the dramatic soprano showstopper 'In questa reggia.' In retrospect, I'm glad that I had not been prepped or heard a recording in advance, or done much more than scan a synopsis of the opera's plot. I will never forget the overwhelming impact of hearing Ms. Nilsson's stupendous voice soaring over the full orchestra and chorus in the climax of that scene. Her sustained high C's must have shaken dust off the ceiling of the old Metropolitan Opera House, the year before it closed. Since the news this week that Ms. Nilsson had died at 87 in the Swedish farming village where she was born, commentators have been recalling her artistry and describing her singing. But it is almost impossible to convey what it was like to hear her in person. Even her recordings, many of them landmarks in the discography, do not do full justice to her singing. It was not just the sheer size of her voice that overwhelmed recording studio microphones. It was the almost physical presence of her shimmering sound that made it so distinctive. Her colleagues often remarked that when they stood next to Ms. Nilsson on stage her voice did not seem all that big. Because she thoroughly understood the technique of supporting the voice from the diaphragm, her sound projected outward into the hall. There was never any sense of effort in her singing. Volume and stamina seemed to come naturally. Therefore, she could bring lyricism and elegance to the most punishing roles, including Strauss's Elektra and Wagner's Brünnhilde. She would meltingly shape pianissimo phrases as Wagner's Isolde, confident that her voice would carry to every corner of the house. Though she was born with that voice, she had to learn to tame it, something she figured out for herself, she often said. Apparently, she got a more helpful education at the agricultural school that her father, disappointed his only child was a girl, sent her to than she did at the conservatory in Stockholm, where first one, then another voice teacher 'almost ruined me,' as she said in a 1999 interview. Ms. Nilsson once explained, after singing in 'Tristan und Isolde,' a five-hour evening at the opera house, that although she would be mentally and physically tired, and her feet might be sore from so much standing even if she had worn her requisite 'comfortable shoes,' vocally she usually felt as if she could start all over again. 'Actually, when I sing a performance, my voice gets higher and higher,' she said. 'When I finish Isolde, I could sing the Queen of the Night.' Of course, she never performed the coloratura role of the menacing queen in 'The Magic Flute.' She did, however, keep Donna Anna in her repertory. She knew she was not the most subtle Mozart singer. But she wanted to maintain some lightness and lyricism in her voice as she soldiered on with the weighty Wagner repertory that the international opera world depended upon her to sing. Explaining to James Levine why she continued to sing Donna Anna, Ms. Nilsson once said, 'Jimmy, I know I haven't been very good to Mozart, but Mozart has been very good to me.' For all her vocal charisma, there was something innately cool and Nordic about her sound. Ms. Nilsson could not abide Wagnerians, especially tenors, who sang with thick vibrato and, as she put it, such a 'big wobble' in their voice that 'you can't decide within four notes which one they are trying to hit.' Her sound was intensely focused, with a narrow vibrato yet plenty of radiance and color. When her pitch was true, this made her intonation seem uncannily accurate, the vocal equivalent of a laser beam zapping a brilliant high B. But this focused sound caused even slight imperfections of pitch to stand out. Ms. Nilsson occasionally sang slightly sharp, something she joked about during a master class with students from the Met's Young Artist Development Program in 1999. Working with a young tenor, she cautioned him about singing sharp, while adding that on balance, it was probably better to be a little sharp than a little flat. She, too, had that tendency, she said. 'Maybe singing sharp a bit is Swedish,' she said. 'Jussi Bjoerling, you know, was also sometimes sharp a little.' I think Ms. Nilsson was willing to poke fun at herself because she knew full well that her strengths were obvious, that in her repertory she was unrivaled in her time. Whatever the sources of her humor, she could be wickedly funny. There is the great story about working with Walter Taussig, who grew up watching Strauss conduct opera in Vienna and later became a close colleague of the conductor Karl Böhm. Ms. Nilsson went to Taussig, a vocal coach at the Met for more than 50 years, to learn the role of Elektra. Afterward she wrote an impish letter to Taussig's wife: 'Dear Mrs. Taussig. I have a confession to make. I have had a child with your husband. Her name is Elektra. I am quite sure she is his because nobody else could have given me this child.' In 1999, 40 years to the day after Ms. Nilsson's historic Met debut as Isolde, she attended a matinee performance of 'Tristan,' starring Jane Eaglen and Ben Heppner. After Act I she paid a courtesy call backstage to meet Ms. Eaglen. She congratulated Ms. Eaglen profusely but warned her not to 'let them talk you into singing the role too often,' while casting an accusatory glance at Joseph Volpe, the Met's general manager. 'What are you looking at me for?' Mr. Volpe said, a little sheepishly. Alas, I never heard Ms. Nilsson sing Isolde, though I did hear her as Brünnhilde in 'Die Walküre,' as Salome and, of course, as Turandot. I also heard her in a full recital at Symphony Hall in Boston, for which I had a student rush ticket, an excellent orchestra seat in the 14th row. Being that close to her, I was impressed all over again by the visceral impact of that voice. Standing before the piano, she would place her hand on its rim and take a deep breath, her hefty upper chest expanding. I would grab the arms of my seat in preparation, knowing what was about to hit me.

Subject: The New Megayachts From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:43:46 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/travel/escapes/13yacht.html?ex=1294808400&en=e2599ea9c055cf45&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 The New Megayachts: Too Much of a Good Thing? By MICHELLE HIGGINS WHETHER it's providing a helicopter pad or installing jade-inlaid marble in the master bedroom, William S. Smith III has grown accustomed to satisfying every request from his custom-yacht customers - except when it comes to finding places where they can park their outsized boats. Many megayachts have grown so big - sometimes as long as a football field - that their very size rules out docking at most marinas, which don't have large enough slips to accommodate them. To combat the crunch, Mr. Smith, vice president of Trinity Yachts in Gulfport, Miss., one of the top custom yacht builders in the world, has begun to design vessels based strictly on where the owners plan to take them. 'If an owner tells me he wants to be in St. Bart's on New Year's Eve, that means he can't build over 200 feet,' Mr. Smith said. 'If they tell us they want to do the Bahamas, which is relatively shallow, the boat can't have more than an eight-foot draft - no matter what size.' More and more, limitations like these are frustrating the growing megayacht crowd. In recent years, the production of these nautical behemoths, which range from 80 feet to more than 200 feet and can easily cost as much as $200 million, has been outpacing the availability of dockage long enough or deep enough to accommodate them. There are an estimated 7,000 motor yachts over 80 feet long in use, said Jill Bobrow, editor in chief of ShowBoats International, a yachting magazine. That's up from about 4,000 a decade ago. 'Boats are getting bigger and bigger,' Ms. Bobrow said. 'It used to be that 200 feet was big. Now the largest boats are 400 feet.' Contracts for motor yachts 150 feet and larger increased 15 percent, to 118 from 103, in 2005, according to ShowBoats International. Of those 118, 33 percent are more than 200 feet. By contrast, there are roughly 440 marinas with berths big enough and water deep enough to accommodate vessels 100 feet or bigger, according to Superports, a British magazine that publishes an annual list of megayacht marinas. It is a problem that has vexed Ira and Audrey Kaufman ever since they built their dream boat, Gray Mist III, a 150-foot yacht fashioned after their home in Highland Park, Ill. - complete with antique furniture, a working fireplace and a dining table that seats 12 - about five years ago. 'Many places that we go to, you can't get in the marina because our draft is too deep,' said Mr. Kaufman, 77, a senior managing director at Mesirow Financial. He ended up purchasing a dock slip at the Fisher Island Club, one of the few Miami-area marinas that can accommodate such a large boat. He estimates his dock slip would sell for about $7,000 a foot today. Most marinas have only a handful of slips for these large vessels. And because boating is seasonal - with owners typically heading to the Caribbean in the winter and the Mediterranean in the summer - megayachts are constantly competing for the same dock space. 'There's so few marinas now that you can get a boat in,' Mr. Kaufman said. 'There's not room.' Without a spot at the dock, megayacht owners and their passengers are relegated to dropping anchor off the coast and lowering a dinghy to get ashore. But after spending untold millions on a yacht and used to getting the V.I.P. treatment everywhere else they go, most owners prefer not to do so. 'A lot of times, it's first come, first served,' said Chris McChristian, who is working on his British captain's license and until recently worked as a pilot on a 107-foot yacht, the Anne-Marie, whose owner Mr. McChristian declined to identify. 'If you get there and it's too tight, you'll go to a facility that's not as good or be at anchor somewhere having to commute in by tender. With owners, that's a very awkward position to be in.' The megayachters, he added, 'like to step on and off the boat.' But all that is about to change. IN an effort to capitalize on the megadollars that megayachts can bring to a harbor area, coastal resorts around the globe are racing to build or retrofit their marinas to accommodate the colossal cruisers. Nowhere is the pursuit more pronounced than in the Caribbean, where there are still large chunks of undeveloped shores, and in Florida, where a real estate boom over the last few years has been fueling new waterfront developments. From Miami to St. Thomas, new marinas with names like Super Yacht Harbor and Yacht Haven are being developed with berths for boats as long as 450 feet, roughly half the length of a 2,000-passenger cruise ship. To keep megayacht owners busy - not to mention spending - while their boats are parked at the marina, developers are surrounding their ports with high-end restaurants and retail shops. To entice yacht owners and their entourages to stay longer, they are also building luxury condominiums and five-star hotels. As a result, a new real estate concept is beginning to emerge centered on the lifestyle of the boating elite. Island Capital Group in New York is transforming an existing port, Long Bay Harbor in St. Thomas, into a megayacht marina called Yacht Haven Grande with 48 slips averaging 120 feet in length. Twelve luxury condominiums, four waterfront restaurants, high-end shopping and a private yacht club around the 32-acre harbor are scheduled to open in the fall. In Miami, Flagstone Property Group is designing Island Gardens, a $480 million development to be built on Watson Island, between downtown Miami and South Beach. Island Gardens will include a 50-slip Super-Yacht Harbor for vessels up to 450 feet, a Westin hotel and a Shangri-La Hotel, to open in 2008, offering round-the-clock butler service. Shangri-La will also manage 105 fractional-ownership residences on the site and CHI, a 20,000-square-foot spa. Developers believe the megayachts will be an inherent attraction, drawing other visitors to the destination as well. 'It's not only a place to visit for the megayacht owners, but also a great opportunity for people to enjoy viewing the megayachts,' said Mehmet Bayraktar, chief executive of Flagstone Property Group. 'That's how places like Monaco and Portofino became famous. People want to get close to that lifestyle.' Bigwig boaters who pull into these new marinas can expect white-glove treatment. Uniformed dockhands will greet owners upon arrival, help bring boats in and assist crews in obtaining provisions. The owner will be able to step off the boat for fine dining or for a massage. A concierge office will be available to arrange car services or sightseeing excursions. Many port towns see these new developments as a way to increase the flow of high-end tourists and help their economies with new jobs and revenue from servicing the big boats that stop by - a 155-foot yacht can guzzle 16,000 gallons of gas at one fill up, for example - as well as pampering their owners. In 2002, the average expenditure of a megayacht visit to boatyards in Broward, Dade and Palm Beach Counties in Florida was $140,000, according to a report by Thomas J. Murray, a marine business specialist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at the College of William & Mary. The direct economic impact of megayacht repair and maintenance projects at local boatyards was an estimated $181.6 million. Already, yacht owners and real estate investors are showing interest in the houses and condominiums being designed around the harbors. The first phase of construction at Cupecoy Yacht Club, a new marina development being built on St. Martin by the real estate arm of Orient-Express Hotels, is not expected to be finished until fall 2007. But 20 percent of its 169 planned condominiums sold within two months of the project's announcement last year. Sales included condominium units with one to four bedrooms and a penthouse for $1.3 million; the sales generated $23 million in revenue. Chub Cay Marina & Resort, a private island in the Bahamas that is being redeveloped to expand a marina for megayachts, has sold roughly 75 percent of its new 57 colonial-style villas and has raised the prices to $1 million to $3 million, from the $850,000 to $2.5 million range it had been charging. On West Caicos, an 11-square-mile island in the Turks and Caicos where a new marina resembling an 18th-century seaside village is planned, 15 of 30 Ritz-Carlton-branded condominiums have been sold. For the most part, because the megayacht industry is still relatively new, developers are taking an 'if you build it, they will come' approach with the marinas. In a few cases, megayachts have already shown up at unfinished developments. At West Caicos Reserve, there are no fuel, no restaurants and no hotel rooms yet at the 12-acre harbor. But megayachts have already been stopping by. 'We don't know how they found us already,' said Alan Lisenby, managing director of Logwood Development Company, the developer of West Caicos Reserve. Because the marina is not yet officially open or providing services, Logwood is not charging the yachts for mooring in the harbor. 'Basically, we'll let them stay for free if we can take their picture,' Mr. Lisenby said.

Subject: Knack for Finding the Moment From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:41:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/movies/13cart.html?ex=1294808400&en=53a936601f61136a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 Photographer With a Knack for Finding the Moment By STEPHEN HOLDEN 'Taking pictures means holding your breath with all your faculties concentrated on capturing a fleeting reality,' declares the pioneering photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson near the end of Heinz Butler's austere documentary portrait, 'Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye.' In the small but stately film, completed a year before Cartier-Bresson's death at 95 in August 2004, he slowly leafs through volumes of his black-and-white photographs, shows some of his later drawings and muses on his art to the severe, prickly strains of Bach piano music. Even when viewed secondhand in a movie, these photographs are something to see. Their formal elegance is balanced by an intense, pulsing humanity. In all his photographs, Cartier-Bresson says, 'geometry is the foundation.' The documentary, which subscribes to the Great Man school of reverential portraiture, is not a biography but an interview (in French, simultaneously translated into English) conceived as a master class on art appreciation, with guest commentators augmenting Cartier-Bresson's own sparsely chosen words. A recurrent presence is the French actress Isabelle Huppert, who points to a portrait he took of her and says that it reveals a side of her personality she had never seen before. His pictures, she says, capture the 'deep, mysterious bond between people and the things around them.' But since the pictures speak so eloquently for themselves, her words are redundant. The keys to taking a good portrait, insists Cartier-Bresson, are making people forget they're in front of a camera and seizing the moment of truth as it passes. Portraits of Leonard Bernstein conducting, Isaac Stern playing the violin, Coco Chanel cracking a rare smile and Alexander Calder and Igor Stravinsky relaxing capture such unguarded moments. What sentimentality accrues to his famous subjects resides in the palpable aura of grandeur surrounding them. Arthur Miller shows off a picture of Marilyn Monroe, taken by Cartier-Bresson on the set of 'The Misfits' while she was lost in thought, and says that it reveals her as she really was. The playwright's and the photographer's simpatico went far beyond a connection to the actress. Some of Cartier-Bresson's most emotionally charged pictures were taken in the United States in the 1930's and 40's and evoke the same raw-boned social realism that surges through Miller's greatest plays. 'America is a place of great extremes, and if you choose to look at the extremes, it can be very tragic,' Miller says. An intrepid world traveler, Cartier-Bresson had the instinct to be present at many of the flashpoints of modern history. He was in India when Gandhi died and in China for the Communist takeover. He also expresses a special nostalgia for Mexico and its 'passion.' In his most vehement statement, he declares his revulsion to colonialism. But he still insists that he doesn't have a message and is not trying to prove anything. The pictures suggest otherwise. They show a complex and emotionally engaged observer who is innately, even fiercely political in his recognition of inequality and injustice.

Subject: How the Dream Was Born From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 06:34:09 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DE0DF1531F934A15752C1A96E948260 November 27, 1988 How the Dream Was Born By ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON PARTING THE WATERS America in the King Years, 1954-63. By Taylor Branch. THIS has been a year haunted by another. Nineteen eighty-eight has been a year of reflection in books and articles about 1968, the crescendo of a period marked by profound change. At its center was a nonviolent racial revolution that later met its match in violent street rebellions, burning cities and serial assassinations. In 1968, a decade characterized by a sense of determined mission and often chaotic change came prematurely to a cataclysmic close. It is fitting, then, that 1988 ends with a book that helps explain what happened to us during the formative years, 1954 to 1963, of that period whose shadow we seem unable to escape. We are still trying to understand why the 1960's stubbornly insist on marking the boundary between America before and America after. Rather than a work of interpretive history, ''Parting the Waters,'' the first volume of Taylor Branch's massive social history, is right out of the pages of our lives. It tells the story behind the uprooting of America's tragic racial traditions without which a definitive interpretation of post-World War II America cannot be made. Although it is subtitled ''America in the King Years,'' the book's scope is less grandiose. Its achievement lies not in a bold definition of the period, but in the success with which it captures the big and little stories of the zenith of the civil rights movement. The contribution of this book is not that it tells us why racial change occurred, but how. It is least successful when it attempts to be more than a history of the movement. Its references to major unrelated events of the period, such as the Hungarian revolt or the Suez crisis, are necessarily disconnected from the stories of the struggle for civil rights and become mere intermissions to the main attraction. Mr. Branch's burden - to cover and bring together the scattered impressions that convey a movement - is awesome enough. Adding to the mix the nuances of the nation's history proved impossible. What Mr. Branch, a former staff member of The Washington Monthly, Harper's and Esquire, has written is the story of Martin Luther King Jr. Here is the novice preacher promoted at 26 to leader of a mass movement by events, talent and temperament, the nonviolent general totally free of the hubris of leadership, the intellectual self-critical to the point of torturous self-doubt, the Christian saintly in his love and generosity to friends and enemies alike and in his adherence to his principles, and the man whose human frailties are noteworthy because he had so few. While King's life is the focus of this history, ''Parting the Waters'' is more the story of a movement than the biography of a man. King dominates the book as he did the period, and the details of his life pervade this volume. But Mr. Branch's work is not a replication of David J. Garrow's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, ''Bearing the Cross.'' Both books are arduously researched, with King at the center. But in Mr. Garrow's telling, the story of the movement must be sifted from the minutiae of King's life, while Mr. Branch's wide-ranging search into the details of King's life converges with the onrushing tide that swept up both King and country for a few years of concentrated time. Mr. Branch's fundamental insight is that King shared the movement with an extraordinary array of catalytic personalities. They are all here: the brilliant Ella Baker, whose sex and independence condemned her to a lifetime on the fringes of black leadership; the peripatetic Wyatt Tee Walker, King's officious and indispensable lieutenant; the multitalented Bayard Rustin, the movement's organizational genius. The whites also are all here. There is Stanley Levison, the outsider who became the quintessential insider - to King the gentle friend and sounding board, rather than the subversive menace he was in the obsessions of J. Edgar Hoover. From another world there was Harris Wofford, the Alabama Brahmin who was the closest thing to a movement ''mole'' in the Kennedy White House. Mr. Branch has been irresistibly drawn to the students who radicalized the movement. These young people brought their elders to an understanding that the only power the movement had was the risk of personal jeopardy and the commitment to go to jail and remain there and to recruit others to do the same. They taught this lesson to King, not he to them. It was their determined and nonviolent witness and urging that helped him marry his intellectual grasp of theology to the direct action that made the movement successful. A few of these student activists have since become recognized leaders. Of these, John Lewis stands out, not because he is now in Congress, but because no one submitted himself to greater physical punishment or risk or has traveled a greater distance to eminence. Within the movement, Mr. Lewis had peers whose stories also are told here. Among them are Bob Moses of Harlem and Harvard, the philosophy student at once taciturn and luminously warm, who opened up the terrorist Mississippi Delta to the movement. The selfless Mr. Moses acquired legendary status among young activists for his solitary efforts to register blacks to vote, a devotion as intense as King attracted from church congregations. Mr. Moses is portrayed in the book, accurately, as the only man in the movement as deep as King. Mr. Branch describes the rest of the motley group of less well-known characters in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as well - from the daring odd couple, the fearless, privileged Diane Nash and the worldly, eccentric James Bevel, to Cordell Reagon and the Freedom Singers, who discovered in Albany, Ga., the uses of spirituals to prepare church congregations for battle. There are a number of ways to tell the story of the years from 1954 to 1963. These are the years when America began to stir itself from the comfort it had found in the postwar period of economic growth free from major rivals, the years summed up by the differences between the Presidencies of a retired general and a young Senator. Yet nothing serves so well as a focal point for the period as the history of racial change and challenge. AT the same time, realizing that racial currents defined much that was important about the period is not enough to make us understand it. After all, black progress had proceeded only laboriously since the Civil War when compared with, for example, the extraordinary advancement of the descendants of European immigrants or the improved standard of living of American workers. The steadily rising fortunes of these, the majority of Americans, occurred with the turn of time. To move blacks from their subordinate status required a jolt of concentrated energy. The civil rights movement provided the energy. And after the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in 1955, as the movement gathered force, it gave a jolt to the nation, one that reverberates to this day. It is hard to overstate the difficulty of conveying the story of rapid change. It must be captured from vivid but quickly dissolving moments of accelerated time, and it must be done not with the camera, which has snatched from oblivion so many memorable moments or with documentaries of compelling scenes, such as public television's ''Eyes on the Prize,'' which was first broadcast in 1986. The storyteller whose subject is quick change must find ways to overcome the inert properties of words. By telling the story of the black struggle for equal rights under law from the Montgomery bus boycott to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Mr. Branch shows us how national complacency about race relations was forever broken. In eight short years the original bus boycott demands - which sought only to protect black passengers from surrendering their segregated seats to whites - had surged into the uncompromising March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom of 1963. Mr. Branch adroitly weaves the story of the major and minor figures who created the first mass movement since World War II into the larger story of how the country's leaders reacted to the challenge of civil rights activism. ''Parting the Waters'' pays heed to action on the main stage, such as King's first meeting with a President - Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 - but spends more time behind the scenes on the perhaps more significant events in the backwaters of the Deep South. Mr. Branch, with painstaking research, has reached into the crevices where much of the change occurred. There he has found human dramas of heroism and pettiness, of determination and bewilderment. For example, he records the reason given by a judge in Federal District Court (appointed by Kennedy) for issuing an injunction against a demonstration in Albany, Ga. The march, the judge declared, would deny whites equal protection by pulling police from their neighborhoods! Mr. Branch portrays the incredibly violent attacks by white mobs on the Freedom Riders, who tested the nascent Federal ban on segregation in interstate transportation and public facilities. Far from deterring such demonstrations, the bus-burnings and savage beatings created still more converts, who adopted nonviolence and joined the movement. He offers portraits of focused heroism, such as that of Bob Moses. Mr. Branch also reveals the aimlessness of the kind of personal rivalries that doomed the Montgomery movement once the crisis of the bus boycott no longer united black people and their leaders against a compelling target. From the beginning, the movement had to reinvent itself in new places with new campaigns, new symbols and new sacrifices, even as it tried to achieve a coherent purpose. Always the dialectic of ecstasy and depression within the movement threatened to curtail social change. The nonviolent war imitated the dynamic of the battlefield, with a cruel mixture of false starts, progress, regression, despair, joy and death. The campaigns were staged where battles had been fought in the Civil War 100 years before - in Montgomery and Birmingham in Alabama, in ''terrible'' Terrell County and Albany in Georgia, and in McComb and Greenwood in Mississippi. In the pages on Greenwood, I was pulled back to unforgettable Mississippi days. Mr. Branch had begun to describe my own life. For me, as for many who experienced these years - whether actively involved in the movement or vicariously - ''Parting the Waters'' often brilliantly evokes the familiar. I found many such road markers, but none like the description of the assassination of Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary in Mississippi. It all came rolling back: the summer day I spent in Jackson, Miss., when Evers took me on his ''rounds''; his case for why a law student like me was needed there, an appeal overridden by my promise to Bob Moses to work with him in the Delta; the drive to the bus station that evening, where Evers put me on a bus to Greenwood. I was alone the next morning in the kitchen of a farm couple who were off picking beans when I heard the knock of a child on the screen door. There, sitting naked in a tin washtub of bath water warmed on the stove, I learned that Evers had been shot to death that same night. Such unforgettable personal memories inevitably will be revived by the stories Mr. Branch tells, but for many they will compete with the book's revelations. Some will be drawn by the occasional stories of intrigue in high places - the Faustian pact between Robert Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover allowing wiretaps on King was bought in exchange for secrecy about President Kennedy's affair with an East German woman (hurriedly deported), among others. Yet these few pages pale in significance, and even adventure, to the stories about the movement. Above all, this is a work of special commitment. Mr. Branch's background is in journalism, not history. Yet even without the scholar's incentives, he has penetrated unusually difficult territory, where records are not kept and the story must be laboriously pieced together. He has done so with great skill and often with language literary in its quality. Much of the ambiance of the period would have been lost without a writer of his talent. THERE is much more in this bulky volume than some will want to know, even in a history that moves fast and that is about many people still on the scene and a period that is still unfolding. However, much of the story of a movement is oral history that will be lost unless documented in its own time. Perhaps understandably, Mr. Branch has been reluctant to exclude material he has spent years digging out that will be useful to historians. However, some of the principal actors are scarcely mentioned. Malcolm X, who came to public consciousness in this period, awakened blacks to their need for autonomy as King pressed their quest for freedom. Fannie Lou Hamer, the uneducated Mississippi sharecropper, had no rival except King himself as a speaker with a virtuoso combination of intelligence and power. Much of their public recognition occurred later in the 1960's. Perhaps Mr. Branch will do them justice in his next volume. Although Mr. Branch makes few harsh judgments, this is not a book about saints. It is a set of compelling portraits, placed in the excitement of a period when oppressed and powerless people moving together changed themselves and their country profoundly and permanently. Small steps by timid leaders had proved unavailing for a century. Finally, the people did it themselves with the brilliant combination of strategy and philosophy that became the Southern nonviolent civil rights movement. What has in other countries been changed through ruinous violence was transformed by the principled suffering of those who had already suffered most. Particularly, history is finally recognizing the anonymous cadre who gave everything to the movement and therefore to their country. Thank you, Septima Clark and Charles Sherrod. Thank you, James Lawson. Thank you, Ruby Doris Smith. CONVERTED BY BULL CONNOR Eleanor Holmes Norton, a professor of law at Georgetown University, was chairwoman of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1977 to 1981.

Subject: “They will fluctuate.” From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 19:02:09 (EST) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Semi-rational exuberance by J Bradford DeLong In 1996, Yale economist Robert Shiller looked around, considered the historical record, and concluded that the American stock market was overvalued. In the past, whenever price-earnings ratios were high, future long-run stock returns were low. But now prices on the broad index of the S&P 500 stood at 29 times the average of the past decade's earnings. On the basis of econometric regression analyses carried out by Shiller and Harvard’s John Campbell, Shiller predicted in 1996 that the S&P 500 would be a bad investment over the next decade. In the decade up to January 2006, he argued, the real value of the S&P 500 would fall. Even including dividends, his estimate of the likely inflation-adjusted returns to investors holding the S&P 500 was zero – far below the roughly 6% annual real return that we have come to think of as typical for the American stock market. Shiller’s arguments were compelling. They persuaded Alan Greenspan to give his famous “irrational exuberance” speech at the American Enterprise Institute in December 1996. They certainly convinced me, too. But Shiller was wrong. Unless the American stock market collapses before the end of January, the past decade will have seen it offer returns that are slightly higher than the historical averages – and much, much greater than zero. Those who invested and reinvested their money in America’s stock market over the past decade have nearly doubled it, even after taking account of inflation. Why was Shiller wrong? We can point to three factors, each of which can take roughly one-third of the credit for annual real returns of 6%, rather than zero, over the past decade: · The high-tech revolutions behind the very real “new economy,” which have accelerated American companies’ productivity growth. · Shifts in the distribution of income away from labor and toward capital, which have boosted corporate profits as a share of production. · Increasing risk tolerance on the part of stock market investors, which appears to have raised long-run price-earnings ratios by around 20%. None of these three factors was obvious in 1996 (although there were signs of the first and inklings of the third for those smart or lucky enough to read them). In 1996, betting on Shiller’s regression analyses was a reasonable and perhaps intelligent thing to do. But it was also an overwhelmingly risky thing to do, as anyone who followed the portfolio strategy implicit in Shiller’s analysis learned. This takes nothing away from the importance of the question that Shiller addressed. Just why is it that stock markets around the world are subject to fits of “irrational exuberance” and “excessive pessimism”? Why don’t rational and informed investors take more steps to bet heavily on fundamentals and against the enthusiasms of the uninformed crowd? The past decade offers us two reasons. First – if we grant that Shiller’s regression analyses correctly identified long-run fundamentals a decade ago – betting on fundamentals for the long term is overwhelmingly risky. Lots of good news can happen over a decade, enough to bankrupt an even slightly leveraged bear when stock prices look high; and lots of bad news can happen, enough to bankrupt an even slightly leveraged bull when stock prices look low. Thus, even in extreme situations – like the peak of the dot-com bubble in late 1999 and early 2000 – it is very difficult even for those who believe that they know what fundamental values are to make large long-run bets on them. It is even more difficult for those who claim to know this and who want to make large long-run contrarian bets to convince others to trust them with their money. If it were easy to pierce the veils of time and ignorance and to assess long-run fundamental values with a high degree of confidence, it would be simple and safe to make large contrarian long-run bets on fundamentals. In that case, the smart money would smooth out the enthusiasms – positive and negative – of the uninformed crowd. But, of course, we cannot overcome long-run uncertainty. As JP Morgan put it when asked to predict what stock prices would do, “They will fluctuate.” http://webdiary.com.au/cms/?q=node/1124

Subject: The three factors From: Pete Weis To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sun, Jan 15, 2006 at 11:42:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Generally I agree whith much of what Brad DeLong and Robert Shiller have to say, but I wonder about the 'three factors' leading to the better than expected market performance. And maybe it's just a problem with my being able to grasp the concepts. Let's take each of the 'factors': 'The high-tech revolutions behind the very real “new economy,” which have accelerated American companies’ productivity growth.' There's no argument with the fact that productivity growth decreases costs for business while increasing profits. Does the higher profits mean that we as shareholders should earn less per share with higher historical PE's? How does this validate historically high PE's unless investors correctly anticipate a linear, continued (forever) increase in a higher rate of productivity and their earnings per share will eventually improve. When we look back at the last 200 years we see spurts in productivity increases which were not sustained and reached a plateau. We've certainly heard this argument before when, in the late 1920's with a soaring stock market, both economists and Wall Street people were touting a 'new economy' with great advances in productivity which, they claimed, validated the high PE's. It was a seductive argument since electric power with its new machinery, communications and assembly line processes where giving huge boosts to productivity. The computer age has once again brought great increases in productivity but just as in the past they are likely to plateau until the next great break-through in technology occurs. So, in this respect at least, I don't see a 'very real new economy' nor do I see why this should validate permanently higher average PE's. 'Shifts in the distribution of income away from labor and toward capital, which have boosted corporate profits as a share of production.' OK. Where are these corporate profits going? If profits are shifting away from labor and after all it's labor (whether white collar or blue collar) who account for the lions share of consumption, where will the buyers for the products of many of these corporations? And, once again, why, as shareholders, should we expect to be happy with lower earnings per share because income is flowing 'away from labor and toward capital'. Is capital expenditure increasing and therefore we can expect higher levels of growth? It doesn't really seem to be happening presently and any expectations that business growth will take off in the near future is dubious at best. 'Increasing risk tolerance on the part of stock market investors, which appears to have raised long-run price-earnings ratios by around 20%.' This would seem to suggest we have a fundamental change in human behaviour which has occured in the last 20 years or so. IMO, 'risk tolerance' comes and goes with the wind. Has fear and greed suddenly taken a 20% shift to the downside? This assertion is the most dubious of all!

Subject: Investing From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Thurs, Jan 19, 2006 at 09:03:11 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Well answered, and the cheaper markets are the more comfortable investors ought to be but investors are built differently. Investors would be frightened and lamenting were the market selling at historical price earning levels at present. Bears generally seem to be bears no matter the market valuation. Reasons are found for bearishness. My sense is to play the bull bear game on paper but not for actual investing. The market is a little expensive now, but I am not going to leave and wait and wait and wait for the market. There is value about, and I look for it and invest accordingly.

Subject: Norway Ushers Women Into Boardroom From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 07:06:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/international/europe/12oslo.html?ex=1294722000&en=ddf8dc98fcdcb0cf&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 Men Chafe as Norway Ushers Women Into Boardroom By RICHARD BERNSTEIN OSLO - On the first day of this year - and in the teeth of strenuous opposition from many Norwegian businessmen - Norway's leftist government put into effect one of the more radical attempts to achieve sexual equality: requiring that in the next two years 40 percent of the board members of the nation's large, publicly traded private companies be women. 'The government's decision is to see to it that women will have a place where the power is, where leadership takes place in this society,' Karita Bekkemellem, Norway's minister of children and equality, said in an interview here. 'This is very forceful affirmative action, but it will set an example for other centers of society,' she said. Ms. Bekkemellem, and other supporters of the law are pleased with some of the early results. Already in Norway, for example, databases have emerged where thousands of women looking for board positions have listed their names and qualifications, and any of the 519 private corporations affected can search for prospective board members. Executive recruiting companies are said to be very busy meeting the demand for women with business experience. Already in the past couple of years, in anticipation of the law taking effect, the representation of women on corporate boards increased to 16 percent from roughly 8 percent. But the fact that Norway's government felt it necessary to set a quota for women in the top ranks of business and to enforce it as a matter of law - the penalty for noncompliance is the disbandment of the offending corporation - reflects a fact of European life that goes well beyond Norway. It is that the major countries of Europe are doing quite badly in promoting women to positions of power in business and, more generally, in achieving other sorts of diversity, especially racial and ethnic. 'Foreigners, women and minorities are almost completely excluded from the top of the business heap,' Marta Dassü and Daniel Franklin wrote in an article that appeared in The Financial Times late last year, summarizing a study of 450 European companies by the Aspen Institute Italia with the Economist Intelligence Unit. Not surprisingly, the study found that women and minorities 'are making slow inroads' in Britain and Scandinavia, but 'all the surveyed nations have a dismal number of nonwhite males in top executive roles, if any at all.' Only 2 of the 75 British organizations surveyed are led by women, the study found. In all of the 450 companies, only one, Vodafone of Britain, was led by a member of an ethnic minority. The situation seems paradoxical given other elements of the European picture. Half or more of university graduates are women in many countries, and women are increasingly visible in politics, the media and elsewhere in public life. The paradox seems especially sharp in Germany, which late last year for the first time elected a woman as chancellor, Angela Merkel. About half of university graduates are women in Germany, one-third of the members of Parliament are women; one-third of the doctorates awarded go to women. But among the top 30 companies of the German stock exchange, only one board member is a woman. She is Karin Dorrepaal, elected a year and a half ago to the board of Schering Group, the big drug company. 'Compared to other western European countries, Germany is in the rear guard of the emancipation,' Alice Schwarzer, perhaps Germany's most prominent feminist commentator, wrote via e-mail. Even in areas where women appear to have made progress, like politics, the advance is more a matter of appearances than real power, she said. 'The women's representation of one-third in Parliament and in the cabinet has led to a situation where powerful politicians withdrew from democratic bodies and made their politics in their separate back rooms,' she said, referring to the socialist-led coalition government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder that governed for seven years before Mrs. Merkel took office. 'That's why the mere existence of a female chancellor, no matter what she does, will shake up all the existing structures,' Ms. Schwarzer said. If women are at least numerically well represented in such other areas of life as academia, television and politics, why not in business? Some 40 percent of the students at Norway's business schools are women. Why are so few women on corporate boards? The Norwegian answer is clear: The men's club of corporate boards does not want to admit them. The law on sexual equality in business, adopted at the end of 2003 by the previous conservative government, was put into effect this year because voluntary measures to increase the representation of women in business failed, and some sort of legislative coercion was deemed necessary. 'Until recently, we didn't see any change,' Elizabeth Grieg, director of a family-run shipping company, said in an interview. 'It was all talk about women in business and very little movement.' But other European women deny that the problem for women is the glass ceiling or the men's club. In Germany, for example, Sonja Müller the managing director of Victress, an organization formed a year ago to help women get into business, argues that the business door is open but that women, looking for different, more balanced lives, have not been interested in entering. 'There's nothing that stops them except themselves,' Ms. Müller said in an interview in her office in Berlin, where, in addition to Victress, she runs a profit-making consulting company. She was asked if Germany's new chancellor should make a special effort to put women into important positions. 'What I like about Mrs. Merkel is that she doesn't make being a female a topic,' Ms. Müller said. 'It would be horrible if she put lots of women into posts because they are women. That would be the opposite of gender equality.' In Norway, Trygve Hegnar, editor and owner of a business daily and a business biweekly, Kapital, is a leading opponent of the new law, arguing that requiring absolute equality seems nice as an abstraction but does not work in the real world. Moreover, he says, it is contrary to the principles of a free society to tell private businessmen whom they must put on their corporate boards. 'Ninety percent of the businessmen are against it,' he said, 'and most of the people in favor are politicians.' Still, he said, businessmen will comply with the law, which means that about 700 board seats will go to women in the next two years, a large number for a country with a population of 4.5 million. 'They say it will be just as good,' Mr. Hegnar said. 'And maybe it's true. We haven't seen it yet.'

Subject: The Bread Is Famously Good From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 07:06:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/international/europe/12italy.html?ex=1294722000&en=6b2a9081c058caa5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 The Bread Is Famously Good, but It Killed McDonald's By IAN FISHER ALTAMURA, Italy - First, an inconvenient truth: This is not a new story. But somehow the tale of how the city with the best bread in Italy forced its McDonald's out of business never really got told, and is spilling out now. All the elements of a McDonald's morality play remain relevant today: perceived corporate arrogance; traditional food triumphing over food product; a David in the form of a humble and graying baker against an expansionist American Goliath. And, inevitably, it includes the French. It was the leftist and Amero-skeptic French newspaper Libération that last week wrote the fullest account of what happened in Altamura, in southern Italy, where the road signs rightly welcome visitors to 'The City of Bread.' 'The long red mat was taken away secretly during the night,' it reported, noting too that the 'enormous M' over Piazza Zanardelli was 'also packed up surreptitiously.' The windows were covered 'like a shroud on the victim of a culinary battlefield.' 'Today,' the newspaper said, 'there are no longer Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets or industrial fries in Altamura.' What Libération neglected to say, as have most of the other articles in an irresistible landslide of coverage in print and on the Web, is that the McDonald's closed in December 2002. The paper spoke vaguely of events a 'number' of months ago. But no matter. The protagonists here in Altamura as well as many others are thrilled with the belated attention, and the distinction as the city whose food was so good that it closed down a McDonald's without really trying. 'What took place was a small war between us and McDonald's,' said Onofrio Pepe, a retired journalist who founded an association here devoted to local delicacies. 'Our bullets were focaccia. And sausage. And bread. It was a peaceful war, without any spilling of blood.' Mr. Pepe and several like-minded citizens of Altamura, a city of 65,000 residents, made up one wing of the army. They say they fought largely for pride and for their food, which includes a local mushroom called the cardoncello, focaccia, mozzarella and, most of all, a coarse-grain bread famous for millennia around Italy. The bread is protected as unique in European Union regulations, which note that Horace called it, in 37 B.C., 'far the best bread to be had, so good that the wise traveler takes a supply of it for his onward journey.' When the McDonald's first opened in early 2001, Mr. Pepe said, he was not opposed to it, and even welcomed the 25 or so jobs it created. 'In the beginning,' he said, 'it seemed like modernization.' Then the modern seemed to take over: McDonald's erected the huge arches on a pole near the old town center, jarringly near the 13th century cathedral, beaming yellow neon 24 hours a day (and disturbing, Mr. Pepe said, little falcons that nested in nearby trees). 'It gave the sense of a city being occupied,' he said. 'It was considered a sort of challenge. Not a challenge to confront in anger but with a smile. They brought in their products, and we had ours.' So his group held low-key protests to highlight local food, as another front on the war opened, very much unplanned. A fourth-generation baker, Luca Digesu, now 35, opened Antica Casa Digesu, a small bakery right next to the McDonald's. He said he had had no intention of challenging it, but had merely hoped to shake free some customers attracted to the spot by the novelty. 'I was afraid of McDonald's,' he said in his bakery on Tuesday. 'I was afraid we would be completely glossed over. I was afraid no one would even notice us.' For a while, McDonald's drew in the customers of Altamura. 'In the beginning,' Mr. Digesu said, 'McDonald's was McDonald's.' But soon there was a migration of locals who preferred their own version of fast food: hunks of thick focaccia like the dozen that Mr. Digesu was tending in the oven as he spoke. Part of the reason seemed economic: Mr. Digesu said a big slice of focaccia cost the same as a single McDonald's hamburger. It was also, clearly, preference. McDonald's began fighting back, offering school trips to visit the kitchens, free rentals of the restaurant for children's birthday parties, coupons for children and a television for customers to watch soccer. Nothing seemed to work. 'They'd watch the game, and as soon as it was over go out and get focaccia,' Mr. Pepe said. Finally, in December 2002, after less than two years in operation, the McDonald's closed shop, according to the company, for lack of profitability. The huge space is now divided up into a jeans store and a bank. Mr. Digesu smiled broadly when asked how he felt that the Italian news media, which missed the story three years ago, are now hailing him as a modern-day David. 'I like it,' he said. 'McDonald's is big. I am small. Right now it is 1-0.' The company sees it differently, of course. 'In no way is this a defeat for McDonald's,' contended Mario Resca, president of McDonald's in Italy, saying he hoped to double the number of McDonald's here from the current 340. 'If anything, I am proud that the local culture is appreciating its local cuisine because this means that McDonald's has stimulated a healthy competition.' In the end, it seems there may simply be places in the world where McDonald's is out of its depth on every front. The landlord both for McDonald's and Mr. Digesu happened to be Mr. Digesu's brother-in-law. The brother-in-law gave Mr. Digesu a good deal on the rent. He did not do so for McDonald's. Then there is the local food - cheap and overwhelmingly good - and the people who have eaten it for centuries and consider it as much their tradition as their history. Odd as it might seem in a corporate boardroom, they put no value on a McDonald's in Altamura. 'The majority couldn't imagine McDonald's becoming an integral part of their lives,' said Patrick Girondi, 48, an entrepreneur from Chicago who has lived here for 15 years. 'McDonald's didn't get beat by a baker. McDonald's got beat by a culture.'

Subject: Einstein's Cosmological Constant From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:40:35 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/science/12cosmos.html?ex=1294722000&en=79506d2090c573b4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 New Doubts Are Cast on Einstein's Cosmological Constant By DENNIS OVERBYE Einstein was wrong. Einstein was right. He was wrong about being wrong. An astronomer from Louisiana State University said yesterday that a new analysis of cosmic history cast doubts on Einstein's cosmological constant, the leading explanation for the mysterious force that appears to be pushing apart the universe. But other astronomers said that conclusion itself was in doubt. The astronomer, Bradley E. Schaefer, said his analysis showed that the force, known as dark energy, was not constant, as Einstein would have predicted, but was growing more violent as cosmic time went on. 'The cosmological constant does not look good,' said Dr. Schaefer, who used the violent flashes called gamma ray bursts as cosmic mileage markers to describe the history of the expansion of the universe. In an interview Dr. Schaefer cautioned that it was just a preliminary result with years before a final answer came in. He presented his report at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington. Several astronomers said it was Dr. Schaefer, not Einstein, who was wrong. His conclusion, they said, was undermined by mathematical and statistical flaws. Moreover, some astronomers questioned whether the properties of gamma ray bursts were known precisely enough to serve as cosmological beacons. 'I flat out don't believe this result,' said Adam Riess, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore who was a discoverer of dark energy eight years ago. Einstein first proposed the constant in 1917, as a way of explaining how the universe could be static despite the force of gravity. It was a sort of universal antigravity embedded in space. He abandoned that theory as a blunder when the universe proved to be expanding. But in 1998, the cosmological constant gained new life. It was then that competing teams of astronomers, using exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovas as cosmic mileage markers, discovered that the expansion of the universe appeared to be accelerating, as if a dark antigravitational force were indeed at work. As Steven Weinberg of the University of Texas said, Einstein's biggest blunder was believing the cosmological constant was a blunder. Since the 1998 discovery, astronomers have been racing to chart the history of the expansion of the universe more precisely to pin down the properties of dark energy. Observations by Dr. Riess and his colleagues with the Hubble Space Telescope two years ago have determined that the universe hit the gas pedal about five billion years ago. Dr. Schaefer used as his mileage markers 52 gamma ray bursts, which are 100 to 1,000 times as powerful as Type 1a supernovas, and can thus be seen much farther away, or back in time. The bursts, which can be seen only from space, have been studied by satellites like the High Energy Transient Explorer, or HETE. The most distant burst, at 12.8 billion light-years, occurred when the universe was 6 percent of its present age, Dr. Schaefer said. His measurements put the dark energy in a controversial category named phantom energy, which if it continued unabated would rip apart the cosmos in a few billion years. But Donald Lamb, an astronomer at the University of Chicago, and others who were interviewed before Dr. Schaefer's talk but were made familiar with its conclusions, disagreed. They said Dr. Schaefer had been forced to his finding about the Einstein constant by his use of a mathematical parameter called w-prime, a measure of how fast the violence of the dark energy appears to be changing with distance in the universe. At large distances, Dr. Lamb said, the parameter becomes mathematically meaningless, and theorists have dropped it. Moreover, he said, if Dr. Schaefer's analysis is valid, his results agree with Einstein's constant, within the measurements' uncertainties. 'It's not a meaningful discrepancy,' Dr. Lamb said, adding that a statement like Dr. Schaefer's required stronger evidence. 'The bottom line is the result doesn't show Einstein was right. And it doesn't show he was wrong.' That was echoed by Robert R, Caldwell, a dark-energy theorist at Dartmouth, who added that if dark energy evolved as swiftly as Dr. Schaefer said, it would have interfered with the formation of galaxies. Another criticism is that most of Dr. Schaefer's data points are from the early universe, more than five billion years ago, before dark energy became a dominant force in the universe. The action, they say, is all at later times, when dark energy's effects are more easily seen, but his data is sparse there. In his presentation, Dr. Schaefer said it was too early to make claims about the usefulness and ultimate meaning of his proposal. 'The first results are pointing to the cosmological constant not being constant, a point I don't want to push too much,' he said. 'This is the first demonstration of cosmologically useful results from a new method. We can't be too confident in the results right now.' The dispute shines an awkward light on what some astronomers regard as a promising and powerful tool for cosmology, gamma ray bursts. Dr. Schaefer called his work a 'proof of purchase' for the use of the bursts, which can emit as much light in a second as our Sun does in a billion years, to investigate dark energy and other puzzles of the long night. George Ricker, a gamma ray astronomer at M.I.T., said of Dr. Schaefer's work: 'It's great that he's doing this. He's drawing attention to fact that this is possible.' Other astronomers said the use of gamma ray bursts for cosmology was in its infancy at best. Until recently, astronomers did not even know what they were. Lately, the bursts have been traced to the titanic implosions of very massive stars into black holes, and astronomers have begun to learn how to calibrate the flashes. Lorenzo Amati of the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics in Bologna, Italy, and his colleagues discovered a correlation between the total luminosity of a gamma ray burst and the wavelength at which it appears brightest. Using such techniques, astronomers can estimate the intrinsic luminosity of a gamma ray burst within 25 percent, Dr. Lamb said. That is only two or three times the uncertainty associated with the Type 1a supernova explosions, considered the gold standard for cosmological work. Dr. Lamb was the lead author of a report last summer outlining how a gamma ray burst mission could be used to investigate dark energy. Such a mission is unlikely soon, however, because NASA's science budget suffers overruns from the James Webb Space Telescope, and scientists are trying to find money to maintain the HETE satellite, which is scheduled to be turned off. Optical astronomers point out that it will take many more gamma ray bursts than supernovas to reach the same precision. Lacking a sound theoretical reason to believe that gamma ray bursts should be standard candles, they are reluctant to give them much credence. Dr. Riess said, 'The news is that we are really stumped about this dark energy puzzle and are being forced to be very creative to probe it.'

Subject: Lobbying to Sell Your House From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:25:03 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/business/12realtors.html?ex=1294722000&en=0d8307751a2522d0&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 Lobbying to Sell Your House By GLEN JUSTICE WASHINGTON - When the nation's largest banks decided at the start of the decade that they wanted to get into the real estate brokerage business, one major obstacle stood in their way: the National Association of Realtors. Lobbyists for the huge trade group stonewalled the banks by tying up new rules at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve. Then the big score came in 2002 when the Realtors persuaded Congress to adopt a one-year moratorium to stop the banks altogether. It was a card the Realtors would play again and again. Four years later, bankers still have not cracked the real estate market. 'They are known as very aggressive,' said Edward L. Yingling, president of the American Bankers Association. 'Not many trade associations are willing to be that tough on an issue.' But the ability of the National Association of Realtors to beat back competitors is being tested now as few times before. A broad range of critics say the organization and its state and local affiliates have worked to smother competition and protect the decades-old system that provides traditional brokers 5 percent to 6 percent commissions on most home sales. The Justice Department sued the association last year, asserting that the group's rules for online property listings discriminate against Internet-based brokers. Battles have also raged in the states as Realtor organizations pursued policies that opponents say would hurt discount brokers. The Consumer Federation of America is revving up to fight any such industry-sponsored legislation state by state in coming months. 'Because the industry functions as a cartel, it is able to overcharge consumers tens of billions of dollars a year,' said Stephen Brobeck, the federation's executive director. 'Consumers are increasingly wondering why they are often charged more to sell a home than to purchase a new car.' At the same time, traditional brokers are under assault from Web-based companies and discount brokerage firms, many offering rebates and 'à la carte' services that can drastically reduce costs. Many of these companies criticize the association as hostile to new business models. 'The industry is not as competitive as it could or should be,' said Representative Michael G. Oxley, the chairman of the House Committee on Financial Services and one of several lawmakers who opposed the organization's stand against the banks. Even some industry allies say the association may be too aggressive in protecting its interests. 'They might have small victories, but they are losing the battle,' said Representative Pat Tiberi, an Ohio Republican who worked in real estate before joining Congress. 'I think they should be relooking some of their tactics.' Officials at the National Association of Realtors are quick to defend the organization. Stephen Cook, the group's spokesman, said the organization and the industry were not under siege. Rather, Mr. Cook said, the current climate is the byproduct of a hot housing market that has focused much national attention on the industry. 'The system can always be improved, but we don't think it is broken,' Mr. Cook said. The association's power has swelled during the heady days of the real estate boom. Its ranks have grown by more than 500,000 in the last five years. With almost 1.3 million members, it is the largest trade association in the country. One out of every 203 adults is a dues-paying member, according to August statistics from the association and the United States Census. The boom has enriched many brokers. With the average cost of a home reaching historic highs, consumers paid roughly $61 billion in brokerage fees for residential real estate in 2004 as some 6.8 million homes changed hands. Last year, the industry was on track to sell almost 7.1 million homes, according to estimates in December. The Realtors association is also one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, spending nearly $94 million annually. It dates back almost 100 years. And it has an iron grip on its members. For access to property listings, individual agents and the brokers who employ them must belong to the national association and their state and local affiliates. Even the term 'Realtor' is trademarked for use by members only. The association spent some $13.5 million in 2004 to lobby Congress and the administration on issues like housing, lending, insurance, small-business legislation and anything that might affect agents, according to lobbying disclosures. Those who have opposed the Realtors speak of another asset as well: chutzpah. Over the years, the organization has gained a reputation as a fierce fighter in the nation's capital, often willing to go further than many other Washington groups to win its battles. One prime combatant in the antitrust case is Laurie Janik, the association's general counsel. Ms. Janik said her organization, rather than fighting, tried for months to accommodate Justice Department requests to change its rules for online property listings. Ultimately, she said, the requests went too far and would have eroded the control that Realtors have over the listings, which they consider proprietary. Ms. Janik said the department also wanted the association to sign a consent decree, raising the possibility of legal consequences if it violated the agreement. It was a step the Realtors were not willing to take. Her group held its ground, and the government filed suit in September. 'I think this is a big gamble for them,' she said. 'They are very likely going to lose this case.' When the suit was filed, J. Bruce McDonald, a deputy assistant attorney general, said, 'Our job is to ensure that one group of competitors doesn't tell some of its members they can't compete in a certain way and undercut the level playing field.' At the heart of the case are the roughly 850 multiple listing services through which brokers cooperate to list properties for sale. The system dates back decades. Once kept in large, heavy books, the lists are now maintained electronically and the data is used to market properties on the Internet. Almost all agents and brokers - even competitors - use the lists to showcase sellers' properties and obtain prospects for buyers. But the Realtors' control over these lists is a controversial subject in the industry. David Barry, a California lawyer and longtime critic of Realtor associations, is seeking to put an initiative on the California ballot that would open the state's multiple listing services to the public. The association's rules allow brokers to withhold their property listings from competing Internet sites, though that also means forfeiting the ability to show on their own sites houses listed by competitors. The Justice Department lawsuit contends that these rules give an unfair advantage to large, traditional brokers that supply the majority of listings. The suit points to internal industry documents that identify online brokers as a threat. Some discount brokers are elated. 'We celebrate the Department of Justice involvement,' said Eric A. Danziger, chief executive of ZipRealty, a full-service brokerage firm that offers discounts and makes heavy use of the Internet. 'What's happening now is many years overdue, a focus on the consumer. There's still huge resistance from the real estate industry.' Steve Murray, editor of Real Trends, an industry newsletter, said that even if Realtors won the Justice Department case, industry efforts to slow market forces and technology might yield few gains. 'Businesses that erect barriers and moats around their industry for protection end up getting slaughtered,' he said, adding that 'a rational person could say these guys are a cartel.' The Justice Department case is still in its early stages before a federal judge in Chicago, where the Realtors have asked for a dismissal and prosecutors will respond in coming weeks. Ms. Janik warns that major changes to the multiple listing services could cause large nationwide brokerages to pull out of the system and establish their own private listings. That, she said, would be a far greater threat to small firms. 'I'm scratching my head, saying 'what is the Justice Department thinking?' ' Ms. Janik said. With the housing market showing signs of cooling, market forces could change the landscape a lot sooner than any legal battle might. If home sales decline, either because owners are reluctant to sell at lower prices or rising interest rates keep buyers on the sidelines, Realtors could be in for major changes. Even industry heavyweights agree that change is imminent. Dave Liniger, chairman and co-founder of Re/Max, said he expected commissions to continue to drop and à la carte models, in which customers choose the services they want and pay accordingly, to continue to rise. But he said both would happen slowly over a period of years. 'It's the evolution of the industry, but not the end of the industry,' he said. At Cendant, which operates Century 21 and Coldwell Banker, Richard A. Smith, the chief executive of the real estate unit, said he expected traditional brokers to gain ground in a softer market. When the market tightens, he said, homeowners are often more interested in selling quickly than they are in saving money. Still, Mr. Smith said his company, which operates its own discount brokerage, was closely watching the pressure on prices and any action by regulators. And he said that while his organization did not always support the association's political positions, it agreed with the group in the Justice Department case. 'People shouldn't be forced to market their homes the way the government wants them to market their homes,' Mr. Smith said. 'What's next?' Realtors have also collided with the Justice Department in several state capitals, where the industry has pushed legal changes that some say will harm nontraditional brokers. Some of the new rules ban rebates to home buyers or sellers. Others, known as minimum-service bills, which require brokers to offer a broad range of services to obtain a real estate license, can hurt discounters who offer fewer services for lower fees. In Missouri, for example, the legislature unanimously passed a minimum-services bill that sent lobbyists on both sides scrambling to sway Gov. Matt Blunt. As they had done in other states, the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission urged Mr. Blunt to veto the measure. Ms. Janik had weighed in with a letter to state associations months earlier, saying the Justice Department was merely lobbying and could not apply federal antitrust laws to cases in which states have regulatory authority. 'Realtor associations have the right to lobby for legislative and regulatory action that they support - even if the effect of such action would be anticompetitive,' she wrote in a strongly worded memo. The Missouri Association of Realtors hired Gregg L. Hartley, chief operating officer of Cassidy & Associates, one of the largest lobbying firms in Washington. Mr. Hartley is a former chief of staff to Representative Roy Blunt, the governor's father and one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress. When Representative Tom DeLay was indicted earlier this year, Mr. Blunt took over his duties as majority leader. The Missouri association paid Mr. Hartley $50,000 for a single month of lobbying, according to state records, which listed his only task as working to enact the bill. Mr. Hartley did not return calls for comment. Ultimately, Governor Blunt signed the bill.

Subject: Brazil Is Awash in Energy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:22:49 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/business/worldbusiness/12petrobras.html?ex=1294722000&en=f06565d8b90ea9ff&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 Brazil Is Awash in Energy (Except for Natural Gas) By PAULO PRADA RIO DE JANEIRO - In these times of excruciating oil prices, Brazil is in a position many nations would envy. With 11.24 billion barrels in oil reserves, it produces 1.7 million barrels a day, 90 percent of its needs, a turnaround from once being almost entirely dependent on imports. In alternative fuels, it is a pioneer, turning one of its biggest crops, sugar, into ethanol. The fuel, either as pure ethanol or mixed with gasoline, now accounts for around a third of what goes into gas tanks in Brazil. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been crowing about Brazil's achievements in energy. In November, he inaugurated an oil platform in the bay of this verdant city, donning a hard hat and praising the rig for helping the country wean itself from imported oil. A week earlier in Brasília, he lauded Brazil's advances in renewable fuels, stating that in a few years 'the entire world will take notice.' But to Vito Joseph Mandilovich, vice president for operations at two power plants run by AES Eletropaulo, the boast rings a little hollow. Twice this year, one of AES's plants in southern Brazil sat idle for weeks when its supply of natural gas, imported from Argentina, disappeared. 'It brought us to a halt,' Mr. Mandilovich said. His company is partly owned by the AES Corporation of Arlington, Va. Despite major strides in oil production and trailblazing development of renewable fuels, Brazil's energy picture is marred by its inability to meet soaring demand for natural gas. There is no clear estimate of how much natural gas Brazil would consume if the gas were available, but plants occasionally go dark and gas distributors are turning away clients. Existing shortfalls limit new investment in gas-fueled plants and power generators. 'There's an imbalance,' said Rafael Schechtman, director of the Brazilian Infrastructure Center, a consulting firm here. 'Natural gas lags an otherwise healthy energy sector.' Indeed, as Brazil became a star in energy self-sufficiency, natural gas was something of an afterthought. Demand began in the 1990's, when the government decided to reinforce Brazil's hydroelectric power grid with plants fueled by natural gas. Industry, facing environmental pressures and higher oil prices, also sought gas to replace the fuel oil that fired engines and furnaces. Because Brazil at the time had discovered few reserves at home, it relied upon imports from gas-rich neighbors, like Argentina and Bolivia. A $1.8 billion 2,000-mile pipeline from Bolivia, financed mostly by Petróleo Brasileiro, or Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled energy company, feeds Brazil half its needs. But in 2003, Petrobras found huge gas deposits off the state of São Paulo in the Santos basin. Initially, Petrobras estimated that the new find tripled the country's gas reserves to more than 600 billion cubic meters total. While the fields will help Brazil reduce its reliance on foreign suppliers, Petrobras is reluctant to forecast exactly how much they could yield. At present, Brazil boasts proven reserves of 326 billion cubic meters. The fields, however, would help Brazil move toward self-sufficiency in gas. But the fields are still untapped. Petrobras said in 2005 that it would invest $15 billion through 2010 to develop them and double an existing 2,500-mile network of pipelines. The first gas would be produced in 2008. But the rising cost of steel, coupled with the sheer scale of Brazil's geography, makes a precise project timetable sketchy. Though Brazil is on its way to tapping the gas, it will no doubt come too late to address current need and pent-up demand. 'Existing supplies don't match the growth in demand,' said Sophie Aldebert, an associate director at Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who is based here. Critics blame Brazil's government for failing to spur investment in the pipelines and distribution networks that could bring more natural gas from Bolivia as well as from existing domestic fields to more parts of the country. Laws that could stimulate that investment are mired in Congress, leaving the onus on Petrobras, the country's dominant wholesale supplier, to set the development agenda. 'Petrobras controls supply and decides where and when to increase it,' said Luis Domenech, president of Companhia de Gás de São Paulo, or Comgás, the distributor in Brazil's most populous state. Until the investment rules are clearer, he said, 'companies remain reluctant to compete with Petrobras.' But Petrobras rejects the notion that Brazil's gas fortunes rest solely on its shoulders. Though it recognizes its position as a near monopoly - only a handful of other companies supply regional distributors - the company was partly privatized in 1997 and its obligations lie more with private investors than in public service. 'We're not obliged to meet any demand at any price,' Ildo Sauer, Petrobras's director for gas and energy, said recently. From a black leather armchair in his spacious office in the Petrobras tower in Rio, Mr. Sauer points to wall maps illustrating a web of possible gas ducts in Brazil and throughout South America. The problems in supply, he said, are just symptoms of the immaturity of Brazil's gas market: there are shortfalls precisely because nobody expected demand to grow so fast. 'Any sector would be envious to have this kind of growth and investment,' he said. Still, the shortfalls are hampering development. In the northeastern state of Bahia, factories and other industrial clients are pressing Bahiagás, the regional distributor, to supply more. While there is demand for at least 6.5 million cubic meters a day in Bahia, the company said, it is able to get only 3.5 million from Petrobras. Until a Petrobras-led consortium completes a new pipeline next year, the company is losing at least 1.56 million reais ($660,000) a day in potential revenue. 'I'm turning customers away,' complains Petrônio Lerche Vieira, president of Bahiagás. With demand nationwide projected to grow more than 15 percent annually in coming years, future supply is even shakier and could steer manufacturers away from natural gas. Besides industrial users, homeowners in Brazil's big cities are switching to natural gas. Also, growing numbers of heavily used vehicles are converting to the fuel. Instead of popping a gasoline cap at the rear of their taxis, cabbies in cities like Rio and São Paulo are increasingly lifting their hoods and pumping natural gas into their tanks. 'Demand is moving into a variety of other uses, but future growth remains dependent on supply,' said Carlos Senna Figueredo, an energy consultant in Rio for the National Confederation of Industry, a manufacturing trade group based in São Paulo. Doubts cloud the supplies Brazil is getting from its neighbors, too. Contracts from Argentina, facing an energy squeeze because investment has withered since a financial meltdown earlier this decade, are faltering. Also, Argentina is required by law to suspend exports if it needs its gas at home. And Evo Morales, Bolivia's nationalist president-elect, has vowed to renegotiate agreements with foreign investors, with Petrobras being the biggest of them. [On Wednesday, Mr. Morales said he would cancel any contracts giving foreign companies ownership rights to the country's gas, according to Bloomberg News. Petrobras currently has rights to 17.5 percent of Bolivia's gas. Petrobras had no comment on Wednesday.] Other leaders around the region have talked of a host of potential new sources, like a transcontinental pipeline to carry gas from Venezuela southward, but those projects could be slow getting off the ground. Energy projects and policy, after all, are political hot potatoes in a region where economic fortunes often rely on the price and demand for commodities. 'The need for more gas is clear, but the political landscape is not,' Francisco Bugallo, president of generation in Brazil for the Spanish power company Endesa. 'The balance between supply and demand for energy is always a sensitive issue.'

Subject: Edge in Putting Information to Work From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:21:24 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/business/12scene.html?ex=1294722000&en=7c3cfa4784251f7b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 American Companies Show an Edge in Putting Information to Work By HAL R. VARIAN PRODUCTIVITY just keeps humming along. Growth in output per hour in the third quarter of 2005 was a striking 5.4 percent. In fact, output per hour has grown at an average annual rate of nearly 3.5 percent over the last three years. These are large numbers by historical terms. From 1974 to 1995, productivity grew at around 1.4 percent a year. Productivity growth in the United States accelerated to about 2.5 percent a year from 1995 to 2000. Since then, productivity has grown at a bit over 3 percent a year, with the last few years looking particularly strong. Unlike the United States, European countries have not seen the same surge in productivity growth in the last 10 years. Why the difference? The answer, according to Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun and John Van Reenen, researchers at the Center for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, is that American companies make much more effective use of information technology than European companies. (A selection of their studies can be downloaded from http://cep.lse.ac.uk/research/innovation/ict.asp.) Nowadays, most economists agree that information technology is a significant part of the explanation for the post-1995 productivity surge in the United States. In fact, when you look at productivity statistics by industry, those industries that make and use information and communications technologies intensively in the United States have accounted for the bulk of the productivity growth, with other industries showing little change. The story is quite different in the European Union. In the late 1990's, when productivity growth in the United States was accelerating, productivity growth in Europe was static. But Europe has access to the same information technology that the United States does, at more or less the same prices. Why didn't those countries get the same increase in productivity? To answer the question, we have to move away from macroeconomics and look at the experience of individual companies. Work by the economist Erik Brynjolfsson and his colleagues at M.I.T. suggests that organizational factors are quite important. Just dropping a bunch of new personal computers on workers' desks is unlikely to contribute to productivity. A company has to rethink how business processes are handled to get significant cost savings. As the Stanford economic historian Paul A. David has pointed out, the productivity effects from the electric motor did not really show up until Henry Ford and other industrialists figured out how to use it effectively to create the assembly line. The same is true for computers: just as the early industrialists had to learn how to use manufacturing technology to optimize the flow of materials on the factory floor, companies today must learn how to use information technology to optimize the flow of information in their organizations. It appears that United States companies are much farther up the learning curve than European companies. Professors Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen looked at 7,500 establishments in Britain and found that in terms of value added per worker, American multinational corporations were 23 percent more productive than the average in Britain. Non-American multinationals were about 16 percent more productive than the average, while British companies were about 11 percent less productive than average. Furthermore, the authors suggest that information technology capital may be a big part of the productivity difference: American companies in Britain use a whopping 40 percent more information technology capital per worker than the average company. Not only did American companies use more information technology, they used it more effectively. According to the economists, 'U.S. firms appeared to simply get more productivity out of the same amount of I.T. (this was not true of non-I.T. capital).' There is an additional piece of evidence: the big returns to information technology use by American companies operating in Britain were in wholesale and retail trade - the same industries that have been so productive in the United States. Why the difference in effective use of information technology? This is still something of a mystery, but part of the answer seems to be managerial practices. According to the authors, American companies are more likely than European companies to adopt practices like merit-based promotion and pay, lean manufacturing techniques, performance management and employee autonomy. Personally, I have found that American managers are much more comfortable with computers than their European counterparts. Until a few years ago, a typical European manager could not even type. This is no longer true of the younger generation of European managers, and I would venture to guess that as they move up in their organizations, managerial comfort with information technology in European companies will broaden. As a business school professor, I sometimes worry whether we are giving our students the right skills in finance, accounting, marketing and leadership. But the one thing I never worry about is their skills in PowerPoint and Excel; in these areas, the students far surpass their professors. Perhaps the comfort of young American managers in using computers and other sorts of information technology contributes more than we realize to productivity growth. Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Subject: Vindication for the Maligned Fiber Diet From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:19:38 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D00E5D91E3AF930A15756C0A9669C8B63&fta=y May 23, 2000 Vindication for the Maligned Fiber Diet By JANE E. BRODY With high-carbohydrate foods getting such a bad rap, it is refreshing to hear about new findings that clearly demonstrate the health value of a carbohydrate-rich diet, as long as it contains the right carbohydrates, replete with soluble and insoluble fiber, the way nature made them. Fiber has also been knocked around a bit lately, after three disappointing studies failed to find that a high-fiber diet helped to prevent colon cancer. If preventing colon cancer was the only reason to eat fiber, I would say you could safely abandon bran muffins, whole-grain cereals, beans and peas and fiber-rich fruits and vegetables and return to a pristine diet of pasty white bread. But dietary fiber, as the new study so graphically showed, has myriad health benefits. The study also shows that people need not resort to a very low-fat diet to reap those benefits, as long as the fat in their diets is also the right kind. High-Fiber Reduces Risk The study, published this month in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved 13 patients with Type 2 diabetes, which typically starts in midlife and accounts for 90 percent of diabetes cases in this country. Each patient diligently followed one of two diets, each for six weeks, eating foods supplied by the Center for Human Nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and keeping careful dietary records. Both diets would on their face be considered healthful, meeting the guidelines established for Americans. But with one not-so-drastic change, the experimental diet was clearly superior. The standard diet supplied 24 grams of fiber daily (8 grams of soluble fiber and 16 grams of insoluble fiber), as recommended by the American Diabetes Association. The experimental diet supplied double the fiber -- 25 grams of soluble and 25 grams of insoluble fiber daily -- without supplements or foods artificially stoked with extra fiber. In other words, the participants consumed normal, unfortified, tasty foods found in any supermarket, foods like oranges and cantaloupe; oatmeal, granola and whole wheat bread; green peas, tomatoes and zucchini with foods like chicken breast, ham, eggs and pasta. Participants had no difficulty downing the high-fiber diet; it contained nothing weird or unpalatable. It was food as food, not as medicine. Still, the effect of the experimental diet mimicked improvements commonly associated with medications. There were fewer spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, meaning the diabetes was better controlled and less likely to damage blood vessels and nerves. Blood lipid levels -- or fat -- dropped too. In addition to lower total cholesterol, blood levels of heart-damaging triglycerides and very low-density lipoprotein cholesterol were reduced on the experimental diet by as much as typically results from lipid-lowering drugs. Since diabetes greatly increases a person's risk of developing heart disease and other disorders caused by fat-clogged arteries, the results of this study are highly significant to the 14 million Americans with Type 2 diabetes. In this study, participants did not lose weight, since their diets were designed to prevent weight loss from masking the benefits of fiber. But other studies have shown that a fiber-rich diet greatly helps someone trying to lose weight. Fiber enhances satiety. It fills people up before it fills them out. It slows the absorption of foods, as if someone was eating many mini-meals, and thus delays the time when the person feels hungry again. Cutting Fat Helps, Too Although the American Diabetes Association and other health groups recommend a diet containing no more than 30 percent fat, surveys have shown that most people with diabetes derive 34 percent to 40 percent of their calories from fat. And far too much of the fat is artery-damaging saturated fat from animal products instead of the more protective monounsaturates found in olive oil, canola oil, nut oils and avocados. In the Dallas study, the added fat used in both diets was olive oil, which not only benefits the heart and blood vessels but may also protect against some cancers. A second study of people with diabetes showed that reducing dietary fat by replacing five typical high-fat foods with versions made with less fat significantly lowered the participants' consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat. Again, the substitute foods were readily available. The researchers, from Florida International University in Miami, reported that eating the fat-modified foods ''did not cause people with diabetes to overconsume those foods or other foods.'' It also resulted in a decrease in caloric intake. Their study was published in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association. ''Use of low-fat or fat-free foods may allow people with diabetes to continue to eat their favorite foods, while considerably decreasing their intake of saturated fats, cholesterol and energy,'' the Florida team wrote. This approach would enable people with diabetes to consume more protective monounsaturates without increasing their caloric intake. Fitness Pays Off The surgeon general and the American Diabetes Association recommend that, at a minimum, people pursue 30 minutes of moderate physical activity almost daily. Among the many benefits to someone with diabetes are reductions in risk factors for heart and blood vessel diseases, including lowering blood lipid levels and blood pressure, a lessened tendency to form artery-blocking clots and a reduction in weight. In a striking demonstration of the benefits of exercise, published last month in The Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers at the Cooper Institute and Clinic in Dallas assessed fitness and activity levels and monitored death rates for 12 years among 1,263 men with Type 2 diabetes. After taking into account factors that could distort their findings, the researchers found that participants in the low-fitness group had double the death rate of men who were fit. Those who reported being physically inactive had a death rate 70 percent higher than those who said they were physically active. This and another study in Sweden ''suggest that the amount of exercise needed to achieve a cardioprotective benefit is modest,'' said Dr. Charles M. Clark Jr. of the Richard Roudebush Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Indianapolis. ''The data supporting the health benefits of physical activity are overwhelming,'' he said in an accompanying editorial.

Subject: Rules: Families, Money and Risk From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:17:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://privatizationofrisk.ssrc.org/Warren/ October 21, 2005 Rewriting the Rules: Families, Money and Risk By Elizabeth Warren - Social Science Research Council Over the past generation, an economic transformation has taken place in the heart of the middle class family. The once-secure family that could count on hard work and fair play to keep it safe has been transformed by current economic risk and realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can catapult a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months. The American family has been hit on every front. Rocked by rising prices for essentials and wages for men that have remained flat, middle class families have put both Mom and Dad into the workforce, a strategy that has left them working harder just to try to break even. Expenses for the basics have shot up, squeezing the family balance sheet so that even a small misstep can leave the family in crisis. The old financial rules have been rewritten by powerful corporate interests who see middle class families as the spoils of political influence. Income The changes in the basic economic structure of the American family are staggering. In just one generation, millions of mothers have gone to work, so that the typical middle class household in America is no longer a one-earner family, with one parent in the workforce and one at home full-time. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising at dawn to commute to jobs so that they can both pull in paychecks. Many have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at its economic impact. Today a fully employed male earns $41,670 per year. After adjusting for inflation, that is nearly $800 less than his counterpart of a generation ago. The only real increase in wages for a family has been the second paycheck added by a working mother. With both adults in the workforce full-time, the family's combined income is $73,770—a whopping 75 percent higher than the household income for the family in the early 1970s. But increasing family income by sending more people into the workforce has an overlooked side effect: family risk has risen as well. Today's families have budgeted to the limits of their new two-paycheck status. As a result, they have lost the parachute they once had in times of financial setback—a back-up earner who could go into the workforce if the primary earner (usually Dad) got laid off or was sick. This phenomenon, known as the added-worker effect, could buttress the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help families weather bad times. But today, with all workers already going—and spending—flat out, there is no one left in reserve to step in during the tough times. Any disruption to family fortunes can no longer be made up with extra income from an otherwise-stay-at-home partner. Income risk has shifted in other ways as well. As Jacob Hacker and Nigar Nargis have shown, incomes today are less dependable, with the odds of a significant interruption double that of a generation ago. Moreover, the shift from one-income to two-income status has doubled the family's risk of facing a period of unemployment. Of course, with two people in the workforce, the odds of income dropping to zero are less than for a one-income family. But for families where every penny of both paychecks is already fully committed to mortgage, health insurance, and other payments, then the loss of either paycheck can send them into a financial tailspin. With two workers, the odds that someone will be laid off so that the family can't meet its bills have doubled in a single generation. On the health front the family faces a host of new risks as well. Two jobs means either Mom or Dad could be out of work from illness or injury, losing a substantial chunk of the family income. The new everyone-in-the-workforce family faces another risk as well. When there was one stay-at-home parent, a child's serious illness or Grandma's fall down the stairs was certainly bad news, but the main economic ramifications were the medical bills. Now, with both parents in the workforce, someone has to take off work—or hire help—in order to provide family care. At a time when hospitals are sending people home quicker-and-sicker, more nursing care falls directly on the family—and someone has to be home to administer it. Even the economic risks of divorce have changed. A generation ago, divorce was an economic blow, but a non-working spouse usually took a job, bringing in new income to stay afloat. When today's two-income family divorces, there is no one to take on a new job and produce new income to cover the rent and buy the groceries. The only change for a divorcing couple is that what they earn now has to cover several new expenses. Evidence mounts that both post-divorce women and post-divorce men are struggling to make ends meet as they try to support two households on the same combined income. A divorced woman with children, for example, is about three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than a man or woman, single or married, without children. And men who owe child support are about three times more likely to file for bankruptcy than men who don't. For single parents, the news is even worse, as they face all the difficulties of dual-income families: All income is budgeted, there is no one at home who can work if the primary earner loses a job or gets sick, and no one is around to take over if a child gets sick or an elderly parent needs help. They face all the same risks, but the one-parent-one-earner family is trying to make it on a lot less money, competing for housing, daycare, health insurance, and all the other goods and services. As one divorced, working mother put it, 'With what my ex contributes and what I earn, I can just about match what a man can make, but I can't match what a man and woman both working can make.' The two-parent families are struggling to swallow the risk, but their single-parent counterparts are choking. Does this mean that middle-class women should return to the home in order to reduce their families' risk? Before jumping on that bandwagon, it is important to look at the expenses facing middle class families. Expenses Why are so many moms in the workforce? For some it is the lure of a great job, but for millions more, it is the need for a paycheck, plain and simple. Incomes for men are flat at a time when expenses are rising sharply. Fully 80% of working mothers report that their main reason for working was to support their families. In short, families now put two people in the workforce to do what one could accomplish alone just a generation ago. It would be convenient to blame the families and say that it is their lust for stuff that has gotten them into this mess. Indeed, there are those who do exactly that. Sociologist Robert Frank claims that America's newfound 'Luxury Fever' forces middle-class families 'to finance their consumption increases largely by reduced savings and increased debt.' Others echo the theme. A book titled Affluenza sums it up: 'The dogged pursuit for more' accounts for Americans' 'overload, debt, anxiety, and waste.' If Americans are out of money, it must be because they are over-consuming, buying junk they don't really need. Blaming the family supposes that we believe that families spend their money on things they don't really need. Over-consumption is not about medical care or basic housing; it is, in the words of Juliet Schor, about 'designer clothes, a microwave, restaurant meals, home and automobile air conditioning, and, of course, Michael Jordan's ubiquitous athletic shoes, about which children and adults both display near-obsession.' And it isn't about buying a few goodies with extra income; it is about going deep into debt to finance consumer purchases that sensible people could do without. But is it true? Intuitions and anecdotes are no substitute for hard data. If families really are blowing their paychecks on designer clothes and restaurant meals, then the expenditure data should show that today's families are spending more on these frivolous items than ever before. But the numbers don't back up the claim. A quick summary of the Consumer Expenditure Survey data paints a very different picture of family spending. Consider what a family of four spends on clothing. Designer toddler outfits and $200 sneakers are favorite media targets, but when it is all added up, including the Tommy Hilfiger sweatshirts and Ray-Ban sunglasses, the average family of four today spends 33 percent less on clothing than a similar family did in the early 1970s. Overseas manufacturing and discount shopping mean that today's family is spending almost $1200 a year less than their parents spent to dress themselves. Consider food, another big target as families eat out more and buy designer water and exotic fruit. Today's family of four is actually spending 23 percent less on food (at-home and restaurant eating combined) than its counterpart of a generation ago. Appliances tell the same picture. There is a lot of complaining about microwave ovens and espresso machines. Affluenza rails against appliances 'that were deemed luxuries as recently as 1970, but are now found in well over half of U.S. homes, and thought of by a majority of Americans as necessities: dishwashers, clothes dryers, central heating and air conditioning, color and cable TV.' But manufacturing costs are down, and durability is up. Today's families are spending 51 percent less on major appliances today than they were a generation ago. This is not to say that middle-class families never fritter away money. A generation ago no one had cable, big-screen televisions were a novelty reserved for the very rich, and DVD and TiVo were meaningless strings of letters. So how much more do families spend on 'home entertainment,' premium channels included? They spend 23 percent more—a whopping extra $180 annually. Computers add another $300 to the annual family budget. But even that increase looks a little different in the context of other spending. The extra money spent on cable, electronics, and computers is more than offset by families' savings on major appliances and household furnishings alone. The same balancing act holds true in other areas. The average family spends more on airline travel than it did a generation ago, but it spends less on dry cleaning. More on telephone services, but less on tobacco. More on pets, but less on carpets. And, when we add it all up, increases in one category are offset by decreases in another. So where did their money go? It went to the basics. The real increases in family spending are for the items that make a family middle class and keep them safe (housing, health insurance), and that let them earn a living (transportation, child care and taxes). The data can be summarized in a financial snapshot of two families, a typical one-earner family from the early 1970s compared with a typical two-earner family from the early 2000s. With an income of $42,450 (all 1970s numbers are inflation adjusted), the average family from the early 1970s covered their basic mortgage expenses of $5,820, health insurance costs of $1,130 and car payments, maintenance, gas, and repairs of $5,640. Taxes claimed about 24 percent of their income, leaving them with $19,560 in discretionary income. That means they had about $1,500 a month to cover food, clothing, utilities, and anything else they might need—just about half of their income. By 2004, the family budget looks very different. As noted earlier, while a man is making nearly $800 less than his counterpart a generation ago, his wife's paycheck brings the family to a combined income that is $73,770—a 75% increase. But their expenses quickly reverse that bit of good financial news. Their annual mortgage payments are more than $10,500. If they have a child in elementary school who goes to daycare after school and in the summers, the family will spend $5,660. If their second child is a pre-schooler, the cost is even higher, $6,920 a year. With both people in the workforce, the family spends more than $8,000 a year on its two vehicles. Health insurance costs the family $1,970, and taxes now take 30 percent of the family's money. The bottom line: today's median earning, median spending middle class family sends two people into the workforce, but at the end of the day they have about $1500 less for discretionary spending than their one-income counterparts of a generation ago. What happens to the family that tries to get by on a single income in today's economy? Their expenses would be a little lower because they can save on child care and taxes, and, if they are lucky enough to live close to shopping and other services, perhaps they can get by without a second car. But if they tried to live a normal, middle-class life in other ways—buy an average home, send their younger child to preschool, purchase health insurance, and so forth—they would be left with only $5,500 a year to cover all their other expenses. They would have to find a way to buy food, clothing, utilities, life insurance, furniture, appliances, and so on with less than $500 a month. The modern single-earner family trying to keep up an average lifestyle faces a 72 percent drop in discretionary income compared with its one-income counterpart of a generation ago. But the biggest change has been on the risk front. In the early 1970s, if any calamity came along, the family had nearly half its income in discretionary spending. Of course, people need to eat and turn on the lights, but the other expenses—clothing, furniture, appliances, restaurant meals, vacations, entertainment and pretty much everything else—can be drastically reduced or even cut out entirely. In other words, they didn't need as much money if something went wrong. If they could find a way through unemployment insurance, savings or putting their stay-at-home parent to work, they could cover the basics on just 50% of their previous earnings. Because of the option of a second paycheck, both could stay in the workforce for a few months once the crisis had passed, and pull out of their financial hole. But today's family is in a very different position. Fully 75 percent of their income is earmarked for recurrent monthly expenses. Even if they are able to trim around the edges, families are faced with a sobering truth: Every one of those expensive items we identified—mortgage, car payments, insurance, tuition—is a fixed cost. Families must pay them each and every month, through good times and bad times, no matter what. Unlike clothing or food, there is no way to cut back from one month to the next. Short of moving out of the house, withdrawing their children from preschool, or canceling the insurance policy altogether, they are stuck. Today's family has no margin for error. There is no leeway to cut back if one earner's hours are cut or if the other gets sick. There is no room in the budget if someone needs to take off work to care for a sick child or an elderly parent. The modern American family is walking a high wire without a net. Their basic situation is far riskier than that of their parents a generation earlier. If anything—anything at all—goes wrong, then today's two-income family is in big trouble. The Rules Have Changed The one-two punch of income vulnerability and rising costs have weakened the middle class, but the revision of the rules of financing is delivering a death blow to millions of families. Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of issuing credit to families. Congress has turned the credit industry loose to charge whatever they can get and to bury tricks and traps throughout their credit agreements. Credit card contracts that were less than a page long in the early 1980s now number 30 or more pages of small-print legalese. In the details, credit card companies lend money at one rate, but retain the right to change the interest rate whenever it suits them. They can even raise the rate after the money has been borrowed—a practice once considered too shady for even a back-alley loan shark. When they think they have been cheated, customers in one state are forced into arbitration in locations thousands of miles from home. Companies claim that they can repossess anything a customer buys with a credit card. Credit card issuers are not alone in their boldness. Home mortgage lenders are writing mortgages that are so one-sided that some of their products are known as 'loan-to-own' because it is the mortgage company—not the buyer—who will end up with the house. Payday lenders are ringing military bases and setting up shop in working class neighborhoods, offering instant cash that can eventually cost the customer more than a thousand percent interest. For those who can stay out of debt, the rules of lending may not matter. But the economic pressures on the middle class—stagnant wages, the need to pull down two salaries to support a family, and the rising costs of the basic expenses—are causing more families to turn to credit just to make ends meet. When something goes wrong—a job loss, an illness or accident, or a family break-up—the only place to turn is credit cards and mortgage refinancing. At that moment, the change in lending rules matters. The family that might manage $2,000 of debt at 9%, discovers that it cannot stay afloat when interest rates skyrocket to 29%. And the family that refinanced the home mortgage into a larger loan may be staring at foreclosure. Job losses or medical debts can put any family in a hole, but a credit industry that has rewritten the rules can keep that family from ever climbing back. What Happens to Our Middle Class? Family by family, the middle class now faces higher risks that a job loss or a medical problem will push them over the edge. They are working harder than ever just to maintain a tenuous grasp on a middle-class life. Plenty of families make it, but a growing number of those who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare. A once-secure middle class has disappeared. In its place are millions of families whose grip on the good life can be shaken loose in an instant. Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

Subject: Moral Consequences Of Material Progress From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:15:30 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/010678.html January, 2006 An Economist's Take On the Moral Consequences Of Material Progress By J. Bradfold Delong The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth By Benjamin M. Friedman Economists have always been very good at detailing the material consequences of modern economic growth. It makes us taller: we are perhaps seven inches taller than our preindustrial ancestors. It makes us healthier: babies today have life expectancies in the seventies, not the twenties (and more than half that improvement is not directly related to better medical technology, narrowly defined). It provides us with leisure: eight-hour workdays (rather than 'Man's work is from sun to sun, and woman's work is never done.') It provides us with enough clothing that we are not cold, enough shelter that we are not wet, and enough food that we are not hungry. It provides us with amusements and diversions, so that there is more to do in the evenings than huddle around the village campfire and listen yet again to that blind poet from the other side of the Aegean tell the only long story he knows—the one about Achilles and Agamemnon. As time passes, what were luxuries become, first, conveniences, and then necessities; what were utopian dreams become first luxuries and then conveniences; and what was unimagined even in wild fantasy becomes first utopian dreams and then luxuries. Economists have been less good at detailing the moral consequences of economic growth. There are occasional apothegms: John Maynard Keynes observed that it is better for a man to tyrannize over his bank balance than his fellows (a rich society has an upper class that focuses on its wealth as power-over-nature, rather than on its power as power-over-people). Adam Smith wrote about how wealth made it attractive for the British aristocracy to abandon their feudal armies and private wars and move to London to take up positions in society and at court. Voltaire (who not even I can claim was an economist) observed that people who in other circumstances would try to kill each other for worshipping the wrong god (or the right god in the wrong way) were perfectly polite and civil when they met each other as potential trading partners on the floor of the London Exchange. Albert Hirschman (who is an economist) wrote a brilliant little book, The Passions and the Interests, about the eighteenth-century idea that commercial society made humans 'sweet': polite, courteous, and civilized, viewing one another as potential partners in mutually beneficial market exchanges, rather than as clan members to be helped, clan enemies to be killed, or strangers to be robbed. But focus on the moral consequences of economic growth has—from the economists' side, at least—been rare. Benjamin M. Friedman '66, Jf '71, Ph.D. '71, Maier professor of political economy, now fills in this gap: he makes a powerful argument that—politically and sociologically—modern society is a bicycle, with economic growth being the forward momentum that keeps the wheels spinning. As long as the wheels of a bicycle are spinning rapidly, it is a very stable vehicle indeed. But, he argues, when the wheels stop—even as the result of economic stagnation, rather than a downturn or a depression—political democracy, individual liberty, and social tolerance are then greatly at risk even in countries where the absolute level of material prosperity remains high. Consider just one of his examples—a calculation he picks up from his colleague Alberto Alesina, Ropes professor of political economy, and others: in an average country in the late twentieth century, real per capita income is falling by 1.4 percent in the year in which a military coup occurs; it is rising by 1.4 percent in the year in which there is a legitimate constitutional transfer of political power; and it is rising by 2.7 percent in the year in which no major transfer of political power takes place. If you want all kinds of non-economic good things, Friedman says—like openness of opportunity, tolerance, economic and social mobility, fairness, and democracy—rapid economic growth makes it much, much easier to get them; and economic stagnation makes getting and maintaining them nearly impossible. The book is a delight to read, probing relatively deeply into individual topics and yet managing to hurry along from discussions of political order in Africa to economic growth and the environment, to growth and equality, to the Enlightenment thinkers of eighteenth-century Europe, to the twentieth-century histories of the major European countries, to a host of other subjects. Yet each topic's relationship to the central thesis of the book is clear: the subchapters show the virtuous circles (by which economic growth and sociopolitical progress and liberty reinforce each other) and the vicious circles (by which stagnation breeds violence and dictatorship) in action. Where growth is rapid, the movement toward democracy is easier and societies become freer and more tolerant. And societies that are free and more tolerant (albeit not necessarily democratic) find it easier to attain rapid economic growth. Friedman is not afraid to charge head-on at the major twentieth-century counterexample to his thesis: the Great Depression in the United States. Elsewhere in the world, that catastrophe offers no challenge to his point of view. Rising unemployment and declining incomes in Japan in the 1930s certainly played a role in the assassinations and silent coups by which that country went from a functioning constitutional monarchy with representative institutions in 1930 to a fascist military dictatorship in 1940—a dictatorship that, tied down in a quagmire of a land war in Asia as a result of its attack on China, thought it was a good idea to attack, and thus add to its enemies, the two superpowers of Britain and the United States. In western Europe the calculus is equally simple: no Great Depression, no Hitler. The saddest book on my shelf is a 1928 volume called Republican Germany: An Economic and Political Survey, the thesis of which is that after a decade of post-World War I political turmoil, Germany had finally become a stable, legitimate, democratic republic. And only the fact that the Great Depression came and offered Hitler his opportunity made it wrong. In the United States, however, things were different—and not favorable to Friedman's broad thesis. The 1930s were an extraordinarily painful economic shock to this country, but also a decade during which our nation strengthened its commitment to the liberal values that are its best nature. Admittedly, things might have gone otherwise: consider Huey Long in Louisiana, Father Coughlin over the airwaves, California's treatment of Depression-era migrants from other states that we read about today only in The Grapes of Wrath, and the white-hot hatred for Roosevelt as a class traitor that puts today's shrill, unbalanced critics of Bush and Clinton in the shade. (Up until his dying day six months ago, my 98-year-old grandfather would still say the country was lucky to have survived FDR.) All these examples show us signs of an America that could have gone the other way in the 1930s. Yet, as Friedman writes, 'America during the Great Depression strengthened its commitment to these positive values [of openness, tolerance, and democracy], and, moreover, did so in ways that proved lasting.' The New Deal was a: chaos of experimentation...to mobilize the effective energy of government to spread economic opportunity as widely as possible—to include those whom birth and the tide of events had left out of the distribution of America's economic dividends. Rather than seeking scapegoats to exclude...the route America took in the 1930s was deliberately pluralist and inclusive, seeking input and participation from a more diverse collection of constituencies than ever before. And the intent of all this political activism was not just restored economic prosperity but more equal economic opportunity. The line I use in my American economic-history lectures starts by suggesting that before the Great Depression, America's rural, small town, and urban (and overwhelmingly Protestant) middle classes—farmers, druggists, merchants, and so forth—did not really believe that they had interests in common with the non-white rural and the not-quite-white (and Jewish and Catholic) urban-immigrant working classes. The Great Depression impoverished enough people who thought they had it made to convince enough of the middle class that they had enough interests in common with the working class to make it worthwhile to push for equality of opportunity for everyone—or at least for some people who weren't white, northern-European Protestants. This is my best guess, but it is only a guess. Friedman does not really know why the Great Depression did not make America a less democratic, less tolerant, less free country. But he does not apologize: he concludes his chapter by quoting the noted Harvard economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron—'Historical hypotheses are not...universal....They cannot be falsified by a single exception.' Friedman has not written his version of economic history and moral philosophy just for the sake of antiquarians like me who like to read about the strange and faraway places that are our own past. He takes historical patterns and draws from them immediate and powerful lessons for the present. Consider China. There are those today in Washington, D.C., who look forward to a future in which China is America's enemy: they believe it will in some way increase our 'national greatness' to wage a new Cold War in Asia—albeit against an enemy weaker than Stalin's Soviet Union was. There are those in Vice President Cheney's office who think that trade with China is a bad idea: it creates a pro-China lobby that will stop any attempts by the United States to slow down China's growth and acquisition of technology. Better, they think, to try to keep China as poor and barefoot as possible for as long as possible. From Friedman's perspective—and from mine—this is simply insane. In all likelihood, China a century from now will be a full-fledged post-industrial superpower whatever the policies of the United States. Do you want to maximize the likelihood that that superpower will have a representative government presiding over an open, free society? Then work to maximize economic growth, says Friedman. (And I would add: Does it really improve the national security of the United States for schoolchildren in China to be taught that the United States sought to keep them as poor as possible for as long as possible?) In fact, the China policy of the Clinton administration was to do whatever we could to speed China's growth in the expectation that rapid economic growth will introduce the political cuckoo's egg of democracy into the nest. A rapidly growing, prosperous middle class will be interested in liberty and opportunity, and will be a much more powerful force for democratization and personal freedom in China than a battalion of lecturing neoconservative think-tanks or a host of remotely guided cruise missiles. Consider the developing world more broadly. Friedman is—as I am—a card-carrying neoliberal. We economists do not understand very much about how knowledge of modern technologies and effective organizations and institutions diffuses from region to region around the globe. We do know that it diffuses appallingly slowly: there are still three billion people throughout the world whose lives are largely preindustrial (even if theyare far above the Malthusian poverty in which most of our preindustrial ancestors lived). We suspect that maximizing contact—economic, social, and cultural—is a powerful way to transfer ideas and practices. Hence the neoliberal imperative: do whatever you can to maximize economic growth in the developing world, and hope that rapid growth generates in its train the strong local pressures for social, environmental, cultural, and political advance that are needed if non-economic forms of progress are to be stable and durable. There is a criticism of the neoliberal view that holds that higher material incomes cannot be the cure to poverty, for poverty is also a lack of voice in society, a lack of security in one's position, and a lack of respect. With all this Friedman agrees. But he adds that faster material progress is the best way to generate pressures to produce voice, security, and respect. Hence the neoliberal imperative: lower barriers to trade and contact; lower barriers of all kinds; lower barriers in the expectation that faster economic growth will itself generate countervailing pressures that will undo and cure the bad social and distributional side-effects of faster growth. Friedman's reading of the moral consequences of economic growth provides a powerful piece of support to this neoliberal imperative. (Support so powerful, in fact, that Joseph E. Stiglitz, our Nobel Prize-winning non-neoliberal friend, has an attack on The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth in the November-December 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs.) Consider the United States today. For a generation now, the benefits of economic growth have been concentrated in those slots in American society that are at or near the top. To the extent that any of America's working class is richer today in inflation-adjusted terms than the nation's workers were in the early 1970s, it is because today's households have fewer children and a greater proportion of their members out earning money. America's middle class today does live better than the middle class lived in 1970 (and a bunch of the children of the 1970s working class are in today's middle class). But today the gap between America's middle class and its upper class yawns extremely wide, at levels not seen since before the stock market crash of 1929. Friedman is very worried that unequally distributed prosperity is not really prosperity at all. During the past generation we have seen the U.S. government place its thumb on the scales on the side of making the distribution of income and wealth in America more unequal. Some of this has been for reasons of economic efficiency: withdrawing the regulatory umbrellas that allowed some unions to turn blue-collar jobs into occupations with middle-class salaries, or reducing tax rates while eliminating loopholes. Some has been for reasons of moral purity: the replacement of the idea that being a single mother raising children was an important social task that deserved support with the idea that single mothers ought to work. Some is simply a naked wealth grab by the politically powerful. What will the moral consequences of unequally distributed prosperity be? Friedman fears, and perhaps for good reason, that they will resemble the consequences of economic stagnation. People who feel that they are living no better, or not much better, than their parents will search for enemies: Hollywood writers, foreigners, people of 'loose' morals, and Harvard graduates. And America will become a less free and less democratic society. The argument follows the lines of the argument in Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? Those for whom the American market economy is not delivering increasing prosperity do not reach for the right answer: policies to strengthen the safety net, provide security through social insurance, and improve opportunity through better education. Instead, they reach for the wrong answers: closing down society and denouncing enemies—anti-Hollywoodism as the social democracy of fools, one might say. I find myself more optimistic. This is not to say that I disagree with the political program for America today that can be drawn out of Friedman's book: the pro-growth, pro-opportunity, pro-social-insurance policies of today's national Democratic Party are mother's milk to me. But I do not think we look forward to the generation of stagnation in the working and the middle classes that Friedman fears. Yes, the past generation has been a distributional disaster for America. Yes, at some point in the future the 'outsourcing' of jobs made possible by modern telecommunications and computer technologies will produce enormous structural change in the American economy. But the population of the United States is growing slowly. The desirability of the United States as a place in which to locate economic activity is growing rapidly: the underlying engine of technological progress is spinning faster than it has in at least a generation. I see rising working- and middle-class incomes in America during the next generation generating what is in Friedman's terms a virtuous, not a vicious, circle. J. Bradford DeLong '82, Ph.D. '87, is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Subject: The Need to Invest in Young Children From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:13:07 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/education/11child.html January 11, 2006 The Need to Invest in Young Children By TAMAR LEWIN This week's trip to New York could have been billed as a victory lap for Beverley Hughes, the British minister of state for children, young people and families. For while many American educators and policy experts have spent four decades in a slow push for universal prekindergarten programs and affordable child care, Britain's Labor government has leapt into the full agenda. American proponents of early childhood programs have long swooned over the support for families with young children offered in France, Belgium, Italy and the Scandinavian countries, but until recently, Britain had no place on their most-admired list. Just a decade ago, when America's Head Start preschool program for low-income families was already 30 years old, Britain had nothing of the kind. But now, Sure Start, its version of Head Start, is expanding rapidly, while the United States government is considering budget cuts for Head Start. Other British efforts have whooshed past anything the United States has planned: A free part-time universal preschool program for 3- and 4-year-olds is in place in Britain and it is genuinely universal, with virtually all 4-year-olds and about 95 percent of 3-year-olds enrolled. The British are creating a system of extended 8 a.m.-to-6 p.m. schools, offering affordable child care for children 3 to 14, plus homework clubs, music lessons, sports and more. And since 1997, when the Labor government came in, Britain has created more than 1.2 million new child care places and adopted national day care standards, something lacking in the United States. So despite her restrained tone, Minister Hughes was a sort of motivational speaker yesterday, talking up her government's approach in a keynote speech at a New York conference intended to build support for government funding of early childhood programs. The conference, 'Building the Economic Case for Investments in Preschool,' was sponsored by the Committee for Economic Development, a group of business executives and university presidents; the Pew Charitable Trust; and the PNC Financial Services Group. American advocacy groups, business executives and child care experts have for years been producing conferences, research papers and studies showing that investment in high-quality preschool programs more than pays its way - both during the school years, when it leads to fewer dropouts and special education referrals and more on-time high school graduations, and for years thereafter, when it leads to higher earnings, lower rates of teenage pregnancy and arrests. For the conference organizers, the intent yesterday was to reframe the warm, fuzzy image of early childhood programs, transforming them into a hardheaded, quantifiable matter of economics and work force efficiency. To that end, James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economics professor from the University of Chicago, discussed his findings that investments in preschool programs for disadvantaged children bring far higher returns than investments later in the life span, like reduced pupil-teacher ratios, job training, convict rehabilitation or tuition subsidies. And Isabel Sawhill, director of economic studies at the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit Washington-based policy organization, estimated that investment in universal preschool would increase the gross domestic product by $988 billion within 60 years. It is not an easy sell for politicians, she noted, because the initial investment is relatively high and it takes years to reap the benefits. 'We're a big country, bigger than England, so it takes a long time to penetrate the public consciousness,' said Charles E.M. Kolb, president of the Committee for Economic Development. 'The British get it. The French get it. We're the largest economy in the world and it's outrageous that we don't get it yet. But I'm optimistic.' At the state level, 14 states increased their preschool funding by $300 million in 2004, and last year there were increases in 26 states, totaling $600 million. And this year, the British government generated enthusiasm. 'We are thrilled, and awed, by our colleagues in the U.K.,' said Sara Watson of Pew. Indeed, when Ms. Hughes finished outlining her government's programs, Mr. Kolb asked the first question. 'It is rumored that your prime minister and our president sometimes talk to each other,' he said, pausing briefly before going on to ask whether she might be able to suggest to the prime minister that he bring up the issue with President Bush. But as a practical matter, in this country, government support for early childhood programs has been slow to catch on. 'Quite frankly, we're not making a lot of progress,' said Jim Rohr, the chief executive of PNC. 'Across the country, we're not getting the job done. This issue is not as high a priority as it should be.' About 700,000 American preschoolers are now in state-financed prekindergarten classes, and about 800,000 in Head Start, but that is only about 20 percent of the population. And while most states now offer some preschool programs for poor children, paying for effective programs remains problematic almost everywhere. New York, for example, instituted universal prekindergarten years ago but funded only a fraction of what it would take to actually provide it. To some extent, the history of the issue has continued to shape the debate. Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed legislation that would have underwritten preschool nationwide, but President Richard M. Nixon vetoed the legislation, refusing to encourage 'communal approaches to child rearing over the family-centered approach' ' I don't think we've ever recovered from that veto message,' said John Brademas, president emeritus of New York University, and, as a former Democratic congressman from Illinois, a sponsor of that legislation. At yesterday's conference, Zogby International presented the results of a new survey finding that more than four out of five American business leaders support publicly funded prekindergarten, stressing that parental choice is a core American value and that it is voluntary prekindergarten that the leaders want to see. The very fact that so many business leaders are getting involved in the issue is a big step forward, some advocates say. 'It's a long uphill battle, but we getting a some traction, from new constituents,' said Augusta Souza Kappner, president of the Bank Street College of Education. 'For a business-based group like the Committee for Economic Development to come close to saying we must raise taxes to support early childhood education in something important. They've signed on in a major way.' Ms. Hughes, meanwhile, said that in Britain she had no doubts that the Labor government's programs would live on no matter which party was in office. 'I think the ground has shifted in the U.K. to such an extent, with what's being provided already, that it would be very difficult to move back from what we have,' she said.

Subject: Global Warming Devastates Frogs From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:11:29 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/11/science/11cnd-frog.html?ex=1294635600&en=c7d220a995b7b341&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 11, 2006 Scientists Say Global Warming Devastates Frogs in Latin America By ANDREW C. REVKIN Scientists studying a fast-dwindling genus of colorful frogs in Central and South America say that recent global warming has combined with a spreading fungus to create a killing zone, driving many species restricted to misty mountainsides to extinction. The researchers said they had implicated widespread warming, as opposed to local variations in temperature or other conditions affecting the frogs, by finding that patterns of fungus outbreaks and species loss in widely dispersed patches of habitat were synchronized in a way that was statistically impossible to explain by chance. Climate scientists have already linked most of the recent rise in the earth's average temperature to the buildup of greenhouse emissions from smokestacks and tailpipes. Thus the new findings, according to the researchers and some independent experts on amphibians, imply that warming driven by human activity may have already fostered outbreaks of disease and imperiled species with restricted habitats. The study, led by J. Alan Pounds, the resident biologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve in Costa Rica, is to be published on Thursday in the journal Nature. In an accompanying commentary, two scientists not involved in the research, Andy Dobson, a Princeton University ecologist, and Andrew R. Blaustein, a zoologist at Oregon State University, said the research provided 'compelling evidence' that warming caused by human activity was already disrupting ecology. 'The frogs are sending an alarm call to all concerned about the future of biodiversity and the need to protect the greatest of all open-access resources -- the atmosphere,' they wrote. But other climate and amphibian experts criticized the paper, saying there were several layers of significant uncertainty that were not eliminated by the analysis. Among those, they said, it is still unclear whether the lethal fungus, which attacks amphibian skin, has long been in the affected areas and dormant or is a recent arrival. Some amphibian and climate experts who read the paper said it contained definitive statements - like 'our study sheds light on the amphibian-decline mystery by showing that large-scale warming is a key factor' - that were not supported by data. Over 110 species of brightly colored harlequin frogs, in the genus Atelopus, once lived near streams in the American tropics, but about two-thirds of them have vanished since the 1980's. Implicated in many of those vanishings, as well as amphibian die-offs around the world, is a chytrid fungus that grows on amphibian skin from deserts to lowland tropical forests to mountainsides. A paradox confronting biologists studying possible links to climate change is that the fungus thrives best in cooler conditions, challenging the theory that warming is contributing to the amphibian declines. But Dr. Pounds and his team, in studying trends in temperature and disease around the American tropics and, in particular detail, in the cloud-shrouded ridges of Costa Rica where he lives and works, found patterns that they say explain the situation. Rising cloudiness, a long-projected consequence as warming increases evaporation, can keep days cooler by blocking some sunlight and nights warmer by holding in some heat. At intermediate elevations on the mountain slopes of places like Costa Rica, that could have created a favorable zone for the spread of the chytrid fungus, Dr. Pounds said in an interview. He said that because the apparent harlequin frog extinctions have occurred in lockstep in widely dispersed field sites, they are hard to attribute to anything other than the broad warming trend linked by other scientists to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. While the fungus is the bullet, he said, the broader ongoing warming and resulting shifts in clouds are the trigger. Cynthia Carey, an expert in amphibian diseases who teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that while both climate and amphibian die-offs are serious problems, this particular paper failed to offer anything beyond circumstantial evidence of links between the fungal illness and warming. 'It is difficult to prove cause and effect on the ground where multiple factors interact in complex ways,' Dr. Carey said.

Subject: Toyota Shows Big Three How It's Done From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 06:03:05 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/automobiles/13auto.html?ex=1294808400&en=a5573ace86504978&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 Toyota Shows Big Three How It's Done By MICHELINE MAYNARD DETROIT - As General Motors and Ford struggle to remake themselves and rejoin the car wars, one company is proving what a successful American carmaker can look like: Toyota. Unlike G.M. and Ford, bogged down by dozens of models competing for the same buyers, Toyota has a well-chosen lineup of both bread-and-butter cars and trucks that sell in big volumes as well as luxury models for which it can command a higher price. As G.M. and Ford are closing plants, Toyota is opening new ones, at sharply lower labor costs - which still include health care and retirement plans - than its American rivals. And it is adding jobs at its existing plants, which produce 60 percent of the cars and trucks it sells here. While G.M. and Ford are trying to stop their declines and regain lost market share, Toyota is on an unimpeded roll. It held a record 13.3 percent of the American market in 2005, just short of third-place Chrysler, which it outsold during several months last year. 'They are what an American company should be,' said Jeffrey K. Liker, a professor of engineering at the University of Michigan and the author of 'The Toyota Way,' the best-selling book that examines Toyota's business methods. He went on, 'Do I think it's realistic for American car companies to be like Toyota? No. They would have had to have been different 20 years ago' and focus on the quality, efficiency and cost-cutting that have always been a Toyota hallmark. 'Now what they're trying to do is pull themselves together and survive,' Professor Liker said. But as the Detroit players try to come back, Toyota is now studying what it would take to get even bigger, even as it faces its own challenges. One is quality. Last year, Toyota's recalls soared to 2.2 million vehicles, double the number in 2004. Though that was half the level at G.M., and half the recalls were for trucks and S.U.V.'s built before 1995, the recalls also included Prius, a darling among hybrid-electric vehicles. And Toyota executives acknowledge that the company still does not have an attractive small car and - most important for the United States - enough big pickups to take on G.M. and Ford. Meanwhile, the excitement surrounding its hybrids could fade when new government fuel-economy estimates, expected to be lower than what is now on window stickers, are published next year. But Toyota is not sitting back. Three years ago, Toyota officials said they were aiming to take 15 percent of the global car market by 2010. But with that target in reach, now that Toyota has just over 13 percent of the market, Toyota managers are analyzing what they would require, in terms of more plants, products and employees, to reach 20 percent of markets both in the United States and around the world. Globally, 20 percent would give Toyota a solid lead over G.M, which remains in the top spot with just under 15 percent in worldwide sales, although Toyota could match G.M. in terms of worldwide production as early as this year. In the United States, a 20 percent share would make Toyota the No. 2 auto company, bigger than Ford is now, and put Toyota within overtaking distance of G.M., which held about 26 percent of the United States market in 2005. 'If we are clever in terms of the right products and we are genuine in terms of serving the customer, there is no reason we cannot achieve 20 percent,' Yukitoshi Funo, chief executive of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. said in an interview this week at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. But such growth would not be easy, Mr. Funo cautioned. And Toyota, always careful not to seem overconfident, does not yet consider it achievable, he said. 'Thirteen to 20 is a big step,' Mr. Funo said, 'and becoming the biggest U.S. seller is a long way out. It is not in our mindset. It is not in the business plans at Toyota.' Indeed, analysts said they were skeptical, saying no company, not even Toyota, could expect to grow that much given the brutal competition erupting in the United States market among Detroit, European, Japanese, Korean and soon, Chinese companies. 'There are going to be so many companies out there fighting like hell,' said Ron Pinelli, the president of Autodata, an industry research firm in Woodcliff Lake, N.J. But further growth is clearly within Toyota's sights. While its official forecast is for 5 percent to 6 percent growth in American sales this year, Mr. Funo said he would be disappointed if Toyota did not grow by 10 percent, as it did in 2005. Some of that growth was fueled this summer, when Toyota stepped up its incentives to combat the 'employee discount' plans offered by G.M., Ford and Chrysler. Its incentives, which had averaged less than $1,000 throughout 2004 and 2005, swelled to $1,100 in June, according to an estimate by Autodata. Officials at the Big Three automakers saw the heftier incentives as proof that Toyota could not escape the rebate fray. By year's end, Toyota still gave discounts of about $1,000 a vehicle, while the Detroit companies were offering an average of $3,500. For their part, Detroit companies are vowing to do everything they can this year to stop Toyota's growth. On Sunday, Ford's chief executive, William Clay Ford Jr., said that 2006 must be the year when Ford stops losing market share - and that it would do so, in part, by stressing its American heritage. Mark Fields, president of Ford's operations for the Americas, said: 'Americans want to buy American cars.' But Toyota officials argue that buyers are looking at more than a company's headquarters. James E. Press, president of Toyota Motor Sales, said any top American company must first have a lineup that meets its customers' needs. It also must produce vehicles in the United States that lead their category in quality, resale value, comfort and design, he said. A leading American player has to have a strong brand image, a dealer network that offers good service and most important, put buyers first, Mr. Press said. Asked if Toyota meets those criteria, he said, 'Not yet. We can improve on everything.' One major improvement will be Toyota's lineup. Next month, it will finally unveil its big pickup truck, set to be produced in San Antonio starting later this year. This week, Toyota had two of the most talked-about cars at the Detroit show - restyled versions of the midsize Camry, which has been the nation's best-selling car for the last four years, and the big Lexus LS sedan, which Toyota is aiming directly at the Mercedes flagship S-class sedan. Mr. Fields of Ford, in fact, was spotted looking over both the Lexus and the Camry, which also will be sold in a hybrid version. But to Toyota, the Camry is more than just a car. The latest model helped the company cut both development time and production costs. Acting on suggestions from workers in eight countries where the Camry will be produced, Toyota's engineers and designers cut its development time from 23 months to 17 months. Thanks to simplified production methods, devised so that factories around the world can build the car the same way, Toyota's plant in Georgetown, Ky., will reach full speed in a lightning-fast 15 days, versus the 45 days the plant needed to ramp up production of the previous Camry. The quicker pace will allow it to ship several thousand more cars to dealers once the Camry goes on sale, a time 'when they are dying to get new product,' said Gary L. Convis, president of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky and the first American to run a Toyota plant. Meanwhile, Toyota reconfigured the process it uses to produce plastic parts at the plant, allowing it to bring back work from a supplier and create 45 new jobs at the plant, which employs 7,000 people. Those jobs are at labor rates of about $44 an hour - roughly $23 less than those paid by Detroit automakers, because of vastly lower costs for health care and retirement. Even with the extra people, the reconfigured work is now so efficient that Toyota is saving $10 a car, Mr. Convis said. That adds up to annual savings of $30.2 million, based on the 302,000 Camrys Toyota sold last year. The Georgetown plant will begin building the first hybrid version of the Camry this summer, joining hybrid versions of the Toyota Highlander and Lexus RX crossover vehicles, as well as Toyota's best-known hybrid, the Prius. Competing carmakers like Nissan, G.M. and Ford promoted their own hybrids at this week's auto show, insisting that they would not let Toyota own the hybrid market. Yet, the excitement over hybrids may have been interrupted this week, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced new proposals on calculating fuel-economy ratings that would sharply reduce its estimates for hybrid cars in city driving. A Toyota spokeswoman, Martha Voss, said that even if estimates dropped for hybrids, they would still look attractive compared with many gasoline-powered vehicles. And Mr. Pinelli, of Autodata, said he did not expect interest in hybrids to die down. Nor did he expect Toyota to let up on its expansion push, despite the heated competition that is sweeping the market. Unless G.M. and Ford can recover quickly, he said, Toyota has the best chance to become the company that exemplifies the best American buyers can expect. Mr. Pinelli said: 'Toyota is the golden company.'

Subject: Weary After Scaling His Great Mountain From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:29:53 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/13/books/13book.html?ex=1294808400&en=ee5d4d1ba2b74aff&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 13, 2006 King, Weary After Scaling His Great Mountain By MICHIKO KAKUTANI Four decades ago, on March 7, 1965, Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies brutally attacked a group of civil rights demonstrators who were attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., setting upon them with clubs, bullwhips, cattle prods and tear gas. The violent clash, broadcast nationally on television, rocked the country, setting in motion a series of events that would change the political and social landscape of America and send out cultural shock waves that reverberate to this day. Two weeks later, with federal protection, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would lead a march from Selma to the state capital in Montgomery - an event that galvanized the nation and provided the momentum for the passage, later that year, of the Voting Rights Act. Selma, in many respects the high-water mark of the civil rights movement, stands as the narrative anchor of 'At Canaan's Edge,' the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's monumental history of the life and times of King. As familiar as the epochal Selma showdown may be to readers, it is recounted here with enormous dramatic verve - and a keen understanding of both its historic significance and the ways in which so much that occurred in America in the ensuing years 'would be a consequence of, or reaction to' it. Because the remainder of this bulky book tries to chronicle the post-Selma fragmentation of the civil rights movement, along with a host of other developments - from the riots in Watts to the rise of the black power movement and a growing white backlash - the volume is a sprawling and less cohesive production than the preceding installments of the author's trilogy. In aspiring to capture a myriad of momentous events that occurred during some of the most tumultuous years in recent American history, Mr. Branch has ranged far and wide across the political and social landscape, often resorting to newsreel-like summaries of developments, while pelting the reader with incidents and facts in the place of analysis and perspective. Many pages are devoted to President Lyndon B. Johnson's agonizing decisions to escalate the war in Vietnam - a subject dealt with more cogently in books like 'Flawed Giant,' the second volume of Robert Dallek's biography of L. B. J. And more pages still are devoted to the relationship between the civil rights movement and the growing antiwar movement, including both the fear among King's followers that the war would divert national attention and funds from Johnson's Great Society programs and the fear that King's public opposition to the war might undermine the civil rights alliance he had forged with the president. As in the second installment of this trilogy ('Pillar of Fire'), which covered the years 1963-65, King does not hold center stage in this volume. To be sure, there are some glimpses of the private King: we see him at odds with his wife, Coretta, over her desire to buy a house ('to him, even a modest house of $10,000 was a haunting luxury, unbecoming his commitment to the poor'), and we see him struggling with depression and the realization, in Mr. Branch's words, 'that Hoover's F.B.I. was blackmailing him toward suicide with surveillance tapes of his private life.' Such revealing personal scenes, however, are few and far between. King's search for a sustaining faith in the face of death threats, his efforts to find a preaching style that would blend the spiritual and intellectual, the evolution of his personal thinking about race and religion, his sexual profligacy and his worries that it endangered his moral authority - such matters, examined at length in David J. Garrow's 1986 biography, 'Bearing the Cross,' and touched upon in the preceding volumes of Mr. Branch's trilogy, are largely confined here to passing asides, save for a cluster of personal observations in the book's closing pages. Mr. Branch is less concerned in this volume with King's inner turmoil and sense of spiritual mission than with his day-to-day handling of political crises and internal movement disputes. And what 'Canaan's Edge' makes indelibly clear is the daunting burdens of leadership cast upon King's shoulders. Mr. Branch not only shows King's inspirational and managerial skills in dealing with the Selma crisis - walking a tightrope between maintaining the movement's momentum and maintaining hopes of an alliance with the federal government - but he also shows the continuing, day-by-day balancing act that King continually had to perform: trying to reconcile the demands of grass-roots groups with larger, national agendas; trying to mediate between more radical figures like Stokely Carmichael and more conservative ones like Roy Wilkins; trying to work with the federal government on the War on Poverty while protesting that same government's prosecution of the war in Vietnam; trying to continue to promote his faith in nonviolence in the face of growing militancy on the part of a younger generation. In the weeks and months before his death, King was weary and depressed. Depressed by the lackluster response to his antipoverty drive. Depressed about the war in Vietnam and its implications for the country. Depressed that violence was becoming 'a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments.' Depressed that the priorities of the civil rights movement were being dissipated by fatigue and infighting and a foreign war. In the famous speech he gave on the eve of his assassination, however, King put aside his own doubts and fatigue, cast off threats against his own life, and rallied the crowd to the cause he had taken up so many years before - a cause that would see the end of segregation in the South, secure the vote for black citizens and goad the country as a whole, both South and North, into a reconsideration of its prejudices and its past. 'Well, I don't know what will happen now,' he said. 'We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop and I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will, and He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land. So I'm happy, tonight; I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.'

Subject: America Gets a New Dream From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:28:47 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E6DD143AF933A05752C0A96E958260&fta=y January 30, 1998 Mid-60's America Gets a New Dream By RICHARD BERNSTEIN PILLAR OF FIRE America in the King Years, 1963-1965 By Taylor Branch With ''Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-1965'' Taylor Branch continues his vast historical tour de force on America during the era of the civil rights movement. The first of his projected three volumes, ''Parting the Waters,'' won the Pulitzer Prize for history when it appeared a decade ago. This second volume, like that first one, is thick history, richly layered, elegantly written, amply draped. By the time you have finished its 700-plus pages, you feel almost as if you have relived the era, not just read about it. It is tempting to say that this new volume deals with the most epochal of the events to take place in the United States since World War II. The three years of ''Pillar of Fire'' were those when, simultaneously, the bloody victories of the civil rights movement were won and the United States lurched unwisely into the Vietnam War. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was put into a Birmingham, Ala., jail, only to emerge later on the Mall in Washington with his ''I Have a Dream'' speech, probably the single most important piece of American oratory since Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon B. Johnson embarked on the Great Society as well as the war in Vietnam, meanwhile pushing through Congress two pieces of legislation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that dealt death blows to legal Southern segregation. But while these are epochal events, they are also familiar ones, amply studied in other books, from ''Bearing the Cross,'' David Garrow's excellent biography of Dr. King, to Juan Williams's ''Eyes on the Prize'' and the biographies of such figures as Kennedy, Johnson, J. Edgar Hoover and others. What makes Mr. Branch's work remarkable in this sense is not only its breadth and depth, its richness of detail and authoritative tone. It is also Mr. Branch's ability to weave a staggering array of people, actions, events and trends into a dense and opulent narrative strand. ''Pillar of Fire'' in this sense is unconventional history. Mr. Branch is less interested in full descriptions of the better-known events than in drawing the maze of interconnections among the lesser known or the nearly forgotten ones. His book does not lay out the familiar dioramas of protest marches in Birmingham or the throngs on the Mall in Washington. It dwells more on other matters -- what Hollywood calls the back story -- from Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s battles with numbers racketeers in New York to the spiritual and political friendship between Dr. King and the Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. An example of Mr. Branch's technique is the way he tells his story after what was no doubt the most cataclysmic occurrence of the period covered by his new volume, the assassination of Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. In a stunning series of tableaux, Mr. Branch traces several very disparate figures as they cope with that event. Johnson cajoles Senator Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia, to serve on the Warren Commission. The television journalist Paul Good attends a sermon by Dr. King at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, after which Good asks to be transferred from Mexico City to the American South. In Washington, seven top agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including the chief of internal security, meet to plan ways aimed at ''neutralizing King as an effective Negro leader.'' In the South in January, young Andrew Schwerner, later to be martyred during so-called Freedom Summer in Mississippi, opens up a community center in Meridian. A few weeks later, the Beatles arrive in New York for their historic appearance on ''The Ed Sullivan Show,'' the Beatles themselves, Mr. Branch says, representing ''a compounded crossover of race traveling back and forth over the Atlantic Ocean.'' In March, Malcolm X, having drawn controversy with his public comments after the Kennedy assassination (about the chickens coming home to roost) engineers the conversion to Islam of young Cassius Clay, henceforth to be known as Muhammad Ali. If there is a fault in this, it is that the narrative becomes overly dense in places, not always easy to follow. Mr. Branch, who makes no concessions to the vogue for novelistic dramatization, is a stylish writer, but he is also given to bursts of convolution. He speaks, for example, about the Rev. D. V. Jemison of the National Baptist Convention ''hanging onto power by tenacious entrenchment.'' Or he describes the work of the Commission on Religion and Race of the National Council of Churches as gathering ''stories of compressed awakening in 'Twenty Days Later,' its first, unabashedly transfixed report.'' But Mr. Branch is writing history to last in this ambitious trilogy, and the events he recounts are so intrinsically absorbing, so morally interesting, that the overall story picks up momentum as he progresses through the weeks and months. ''Pillar of Fire'' includes literally hundreds of electrifying moments, as the nation itself crawled in its complex, halting, atrocity-filled way toward de jure justice for black people. Among those brought to life in these pages are Hoover, whose hatred and suspicions of Dr. King sailed well over the border into the paranoid and psychotic. There is Dr. King's lawyer, Clarence Jones, pioneering civil rights figures like Fanny Lou Hamer, Bob Moses and Vernon Dahmer, and the murderers and thugs of the Ku Klux Klan, depicted with a kind of sarcastic empathy by Mr. Branch. Many others make their appearance in Mr. Branch's vivid tapestry, but two figures anchor the narrative: Dr. King and Malcolm X, the fiery Nation of Islam leader and renegade. Mr. Branch offers little in the way of explanation or interpretation for giving something close to equal treatment to Malcolm X. But certainly he and Dr. King, who seemed at first to represent alternative philosophies in the reawakening of black people in America, were moving toward each other when both of them were done in by assassins' bullets. Their murders, Dr. King's at the hands of a strange white racist, Malcolm's carried out by his foes in the Nation of Islam, are the climactic moments in Mr. Branch's thrilling narrative. They are twin emblems of the tragic and triumphal course of recent American history so brilliantly captured in this book.

Subject: Energy Transforms How India Operates From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:26:15 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/international/asia/05india.html?ex=1275624000&en=485bd0bb27ae566f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss June 5, 2005 Hunger for Energy Transforms How India Operates By SOMINI SENGUPTA NEW DELHI - Fed by a decade-long economic boom, India's ever-growing appetite for energy is quietly reshaping the way it operates in the world, changing relations with its neighbors, extending its reach to oil states as far flung as Sudan and Venezuela, and overcoming Washington's resistance to its nuclear ambitions. Hovering over India's energy quest is its biggest competitor: China, which is also scouring the globe to line up new energy sources. The combined appetite of the two Asian giants is raising oil prices and putting greater demands on world oil supplies. Already India's energy ambitions have led to developments unthinkable just a couple of years ago: a proposed pipeline to ferry natural gas from Iran across Pakistan; a new friendship with the military government in gas-rich Myanmar, formerly Burma; and budding talks with the United States to let India buy nuclear technology. Nuclear power is expected to top the agenda when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visits Washington to meet with President Bush in July. While India covets new equipment to strengthen its feeble nuclear energy program, the United States has prohibited the sale of nuclear technology to India since it tested a nuclear bomb in 1998. 'International cooperation, international understanding of India's nuclear ambition,' Mr. Singh told foreign journalists on Monday, in an allusion to what New Delhi wants from the United States, 'can help to ensure our nuclear energy program moves forward at a faster pace.' To understand India's dire need for energy, consider the fate of its commercial capital, Mumbai, formerly Bombay. It was enveloped in darkness in May because of a severe power shortage. These days, the prime minister is engaged in a politically explosive argument with left-wing parties after suggesting that the government curtail giving free electricity to farmers. As the world's fifth-largest consumer of energy, India used energy at the equivalent of 538 million tons of oil yearly in 2002, the most recent year for which figures were available from the International Energy Agency. That demand is expected to nearly double by 2030. Today, India imports about 70 percent of its oil; in another 20 years, the Indian government estimates, that will rise to an ominous 85 percent. India's demand for natural gas is also expected to grow, and most of it would have to be imported. 'Our dependence is rising,' Mani Shankar Aiyar, India's petroleum minister, said during a recent interview in his office. 'I welcome that, because it reflects India moving on.' Indeed, it is. 'Mutual dependencies' is the buzzword of the day, signaling the way oil and gas links among South Asian countries stand to rewrite the enmities of the past. 'The foreign policy of India will have a lot to do with energy,' said Ashutosh Varshney, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. 'That is a new imagination and one likely to stay.' That vision is not without its challenges. On the one hand, India seeks to cast itself as the model of democratic pluralism, as in its bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. On the other, its hunt for fuel is pushing it to reach out to authoritarian governments like those of Sudan and Myanmar, which the United States has sought to isolate. In both of those countries, China's weight is also keenly felt. But India is quickly making inroads. It has persuaded a wary Bangladesh to agree, at least in principle, to a pipeline that would ship gas from Myanmar to India. Mr. Aiyar, the petroleum minister, has been shuttling to Saudi Arabia, India's largest oil supplier, to persuade it to invest in Indian oil and gas projects, among other things. He has also sought to lure foreign investors to explore for reserves in the Bay of Bengal, off India's eastern coast - what he buoyantly calls 'the North Sea of South Asia.' By far, New Delhi's most ambitious proposal is a $4 billion, 1,600-mile pipeline that would ferry natural gas from Iran across Pakistan to India, though a final deal is nowhere near fruition. [Talks resumed on Saturday, when Mr. Aiyar visited Islamabad.] Pakistan stands to collect handsome transit fees from the pipeline. But how it would ensure its security across vast, restive Baluchistan Province, where disgruntled tribal armies routinely attack gas installations, remains a mystery. Among Mr. Aiyar's 'fanciful dreams,' as he calls them, is yet another pipeline that would dispatch gas from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, then into Pakistan and India. 'We now realize we have to get a large part of our energy from our extended neighborhood, and that means we have to engineer and structure new relationships,' said R. K. Pachauri, director general of Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi. The nonprofit institute estimates that India will need to invest $766 billion in the energy sector to meet the growing demand over the next 25 years. India's changing relationships regarding energy are inspiring a delicate diplomatic dance with the United States. Publicly, Bush administration officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on her visit here in March, have frowned on India's plans with Iran. India is pursuing nuclear technology as the United States and European nations are trying to get Iran to give up its own nuclear program. This week, a senior Indian official, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, was in Washington to meet with the secretary of energy, Samuel W. Bodman, to discuss, among other things, nuclear energy options. Whether the United States will turn a blind eye to the Iran pipeline or consider selling nuclear reactors to India remains uncertain. 'In some sense there's a delicate tightrope walk that's going on,' said Ashley J. Tellis of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. 'The Indians are trying to push the limits on what they can get away with, and the U.S. is trying to see how flexible India might be.' Mr. Aiyar did not miss an opportunity to remind the United States obliquely that India would not countenance interference in one of its foreign policy priorities - buying gas from Iran. 'We are sensitive to the concerns and interests of other nations,' he said, 'even as we expect other nations to be sensitive to our concerns and our requirements.' When it comes to molding and marketing India's energy needs, Mr. Aiyar - a leftist at heart, a diplomat by training and possibly the biggest extrovert in India's Congress Party-led government - likes to think grandly. He never tires of articulating a chief goal: to persuade China to cooperate rather than compete for oil and gas abroad. Some analysts greet the idea with skepticism. Sundeep Waslekar, an analyst with Strategic Foresight Group in Mumbai, notes that China can offer a much more comprehensive and lucrative package - including arms sales - to energy-supplying countries like Iran, Sudan, or the former Soviet republics of Central Asia. Unless India can offer something strategic to China - food, for instance - China would have little reason to join efforts. China-India energy cooperation in the oil and gas sector is 'a beautiful academic idea,' Mr. Waslekar said. 'I don't see how it could work politically.' Mr. Aiyar is unbowed. He offers the idea of an Asian gas grid that would stretch from former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan to the Persian Gulf all the way to China. Every chance he gets, he pushes the analogy of the European coal and gas community, the precursor to the European Union. He demands to know why China and India cannot create the Eastern equivalent. 'An Asian oil and gas community, which could eventually blossom as an Asian identity in the politics of the world,' he said. Of course, for now, a majority of Indians continue to live in the dark - that is to say, without electricity - and the most common fuels for Indian households remain among the worst for respiratory health: charcoal and animal dung.

Subject: Stop Making Most Cameras That Use Film From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:24:37 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/technology/12nikon.html?ex=1294722000&en=d6da3d4606317d8c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 Nikon Plans to Stop Making Most Cameras That Use Film By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO - The Nikon Corporation, the Japanese camera maker, said Thursday that it would stop making most of its film cameras and lenses in order to focus on digital cameras. The company, based in Tokyo, is the latest to join an industrywide shift toward digital photography, which has exploded in popularity. Rivals like Kodak and Canon have already shifted most of their camera production into digital products. Nikon said it would halt production of all but two of its seven film cameras and would also stop making most lenses for those cameras. The company will halt production of the film camera models 'one by one,' though it refused to specify when. A company spokesman said Nikon made the decision because sales of film cameras have plunged. In the most recent fiscal year ended March 2005, Nikon said that film camera bodies accounted for 3 percent of the 180 billion yen ($1.5 billion) in sales at the company's camera and imaging division. That is down from 16 percent the previous year. By contrast, sales of digital cameras have soared, the company said, jumping to 75 percent of total sales in the year ended March 2005, from 47 percent three years earlier. Scanners and other products account for the remainder of the division's sales. 'The market for film cameras has been shrinking dramatically,' the company spokesman, Akira Abe, said. 'Digital cameras have become the norm.' Mr. Abe said the announcement might trigger a brief revival in sales of film cameras, as film photography buffs rush to buy the cameras before production stops. The decision may also help make film cameras a popular nostalgia item in second-hand markets like eBay. Nikon made its first film camera in 1948, as Japan rose from the ashes of defeat in World War II. The quality and durability of Nikon's film cameras made them popular for decades among amateurs and professionals alike, turning Nikon into one of the industry's best-known brands. The first Nikon cameras arrived in the United States in the 1950's when American servicemen started bringing them home from tours of duty at American bases in Japan. But in recent years, all brands of film cameras have virtually disappeared from store shelves. Digital photography has won out because its images are visible immediately and are easily stored on tiny computer chips, eliminating the need to carry and develop clunky rolls of film.

Subject: The Capitalist Manifesto From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:22:54 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/books/review/27easterbrook.html November 27, 2005 The Capitalist Manifesto By GREGG EASTERBROOK ECONOMIC growth has gotten a bad name in recent decades - seen in many quarters as a cause of resource depletion, stress and sprawl, and as an excuse for pro-business policies that mainly benefit plutocrats. Some have described growth as a false god: after all, the spending caused by car crashes and lawsuits increases the gross domestic product. One nonprofit organization, Redefining Progress, proposes tossing out growth as the first economic yardstick and substituting a 'Genuine Progress Indicator' that, among other things, weighs volunteer work as well as the output of goods and services. By this group's measure, American society peaked in 1976 and has been declining ever since. Others think ending the fascination with economic growth would make Western life less materialistic and more fulfilling. Modern families 'work themselves to exhaustion to pay for stuff that sits around not being used,' Thomas Naylor, a professor emeritus of economics at Duke University, has written. If economic growth were no longer the goal, there would be less anxiety and more leisurely meals. But would there be more social justice? No, says Benjamin Friedman, a professor of economics at Harvard University, in 'The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.' Friedman argues that economic growth is essential to 'greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy.' During times of expansion, he writes, nations tend to liberalize - increasing rights, reducing restrictions, expanding benefits for the needy. During times of stagnation, they veer toward authoritarianism. Economic growth not only raises living standards and makes liberal social policies possible, it causes people to be optimistic about the future, which improves human happiness. 'It is simply not true that moral considerations argue wholly against economic growth,' Friedman contends. Instead, moral considerations argue that large-scale growth must continue at least for several generations, both in the West and the developing world. Each American, the World Wildlife Federation calculates, demands more than four times as much of the earth as the global average for all men and women, most of this demand being resource consumption. Some think such figures mean American resource consumption must go down; to Friedman's thinking, any reduction would only harm the rest of the world by slowing global growth. What the statistic actually tells you, he would say, is that overall global resource consumption must go up, up, up - to bring reasonable equality of living standards to the developing world and to encourage the liberalization and increased human rights that accompany economic expansion. If by the middle of the 21st century everyone on earth were to realize the living standard of present-day Portugal (taking into account expected population expansion), Friedman calculates, global economic output must quadruple. That's a lot of growth. 'The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth' is an impressive work: commanding, insistent and meticulously researched. Much of it is devoted to showing that in the last two centuries, periods of growth have in most nations coincided with progress toward fairness, social mobility, openness and other desirable goals, while periods of stagnation have coincided with retreat from progressive goals. These sections sometimes have a history-lesson quality, discoursing on period novels, music and other tangential matters. And sometimes the history lesson gets out of hand, as when the author pauses to inform readers that the Federal Republic of Germany was commonly known as West Germany. More important, Friedman's attempt to argue that there is something close to an inevitable link between economic growth and social advancement is not entirely successful, a troublesome point since such a link is essential to his thesis. For example, Friedman contends that economic growth aided American, French and English social reforms of the second half of the 19th century. Probably, but there was also a recession in the United States beginning in 1893, yet pressure for liberal reforms continued: the suffrage, good-government and social-gospel movements strengthened during that time. It was in the midst of a depression, in 1935, that Social Security, a huge progressive leap, was enacted. Economic growth has sometimes been weak in the United States for much of the last three decades, yet in this period American society has become significantly more open and tolerant - discrimination appears at an all-time low. On the flip side, the 20's were the heyday of the Klan in the United States, though the 'roaring' economy of the decade was growing briskly. None of this disproves Friedman's hypothesis, only clouds its horizon. Surely liberalization works better where there is growth, while growth works better where there is liberalization - as China is learning. But the relationship between the two forces may always be fuzzy; the modern era might have seen movement toward greater personal freedom and social fairness regardless of whether high-output industrial economies replaced low-growth agrarian systems. Repressive forces, from skinheads to Nazis and Maoists, may spring more from evil in the human psyche than from any economic indicator. Friedman's thesis is now being tested in China, home of the world's most impressive economic growth. If he's right, China will rapidly become more open, gentle and democratic. Let's hope he's right. Though 'The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth' may not quite succeed in showing an iron law of growth and liberalization, Friedman is surely correct when he contends that economic expansion must remain the world's goal, at least for the next few generations. Growth, he notes, has already placed mankind on a course toward the elimination of destitution. Despite the popular misconception of worsening developing-world misery, the fraction of people in poverty is in steady decline. Thirty years ago 20 percent of the planet lived on $1 or less a day; today, even adjusting for inflation, only 5 percent does, despite a much larger global population. Probably one reason democracy is taking hold is that living standards are rising, putting men and women in a position to demand liberty. And with democracy spreading and rising wages giving ever more people a stake in the global economic system, it could be expected that war would decline. It has. Even taking Iraq into account, a study by the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, at the University of Maryland, found that the extent and intensity of combat in the world is only about half what it was 15 years ago. Friedman concludes his book by turning to psychology, which shows that people's assumptions about whether their lives will improve are at least as important as whether their lives are good in the present. Right now, American living standards and household income are the highest they have ever been; but because middle-class income has been stagnant for more than two decades, while the wealthy hoard society's gains, many Americans have negative expectations. 'America's greatest need today is to restore the reality. . . that our people are moving ahead,' Friedman writes. How? He recommends lower government spending (freeing money for private investment), repealing upper-income tax cuts (to shrink the federal deficit), higher Social Security retirement ages, choice-based Medicare and big improvements in the educational system (educated workers are more productive, which accelerates growth). Friedman doesn't worry that we will run out of petroleum, trees or living space. What he does worry about is that we will run out of growth.

Subject: Birgit Nilsson From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Jan 14, 2006 at 05:17:23 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/12/arts/music/12nilsson.html?ex=1294722000&en=a0fac69fc85dc8ae&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss January 12, 2006 Birgit Nilsson, Soprano Legend Who Tamed Wagner By BERNARD HOLLAND Birgit Nilsson, the Swedish soprano with a voice of impeccable trueness and impregnable stamina, died on Dec. 25 in Vastra Karup, the village where she was born, the Stockholm newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported yesterday. She was 87. A funeral was held yesterday at a church in her town, the presiding vicar, Fredrik Westerlund, told The Associated Press. Ms. Nilsson made so strong an imprint on a number of roles that her name came to be identified with a repertory, the 'Nilsson repertory,' and it was a broad one. She sang the operas of Richard Strauss and made a specialty of Puccini's 'Turandot,' but it was Wagner who served her career and whom she served as no other soprano since the days of Kirsten Flagstad. A big, blunt woman with a wicked sense of humor, Ms. Nilsson brooked no interference from Wagner's powerful and eventful orchestra writing. When she sang Isolde or Brünnhilde, her voice pierced through and climbed above it. Her performances took on more pathos as the years went by, but one remembers her sound more for its muscularity, accuracy and sheer joy of singing under the most trying circumstances. Her long career at the Bayreuth Festival and her immersion in Wagner in general, began in the mid-1950's. No dramatic soprano truly approached her stature thereafter, and in the roles of Isolde, Brünnhilde and Sieglinde, she began her stately 30-year procession around the opera houses of the world. Her United States debut was in San Francisco in 1956. Three years later she made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Isolde under Karl Böhm, and some listeners treasure the memory of that performance as much as they do her live recording of the role from Bayreuth in 1966, also under Böhm. The exuberant review of her first Met performance appeared on the front page of The New York Times on Dec. 19, 1959, under the headline, 'Birgit Nilsson as Isolde Flashes Like New Star in 'Met' Heavens.' Playing opposite Karl Liebl as Tristan, Howard Taubman wrote, 'she dominated the stage and the performance.' When she appeared at the end of the first act to take a solo bow, he wrote, the audience 'roared like the Stadium fans when Conerly throws a winning touchdown pass.' Like so many distinctive artists, Ms. Nilsson considered herself self-taught. 'The best teacher is the stage,' she told an interviewer in 1981. 'You walk out onto it, and you have to learn to project.' She deplored her early instruction and attributed her survival to native talent. 'My first voice teacher almost killed me,' she said. 'The second was almost as bad.' Birgit Nilsson was born in 1918. Her mother, evidently a talented singer, began Ms. Nilsson's musical education at 3, buying her a toy piano. She began picking out melodies on it. She once told an interviewer that she could sing before she could walk. 'I even sang in my dreams,' she added. A choirmaster near her home heard her sing and advised her to study. She entered the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm in 1941. Ms. Nilsson made her debut at the Royal Opera in Stockholm in 1946, replacing the scheduled Agathe in Weber's 'Freischütz,' who was too ill to go on. The next year she claimed attention there as Verdi's Lady Macbeth under Fritz Busch. A wealth of parts followed, from Strauss and Verdi to Wagner, Puccini and Tchaikovsky. Her first splash abroad was 1951, as Elettra in Mozart's 'Idomeneo' at the Glyndebourne Festival in England. From there, it was a short hop to the Vienna State Opera and then to Bayreuth. She took the title role of 'Turandot,' which is brief but in need of an unusually big sound, to Milan in 1958 and then to the rest of Italy. Ms. Nilsson was suspicious of opera's recent youth culture and often remarked on the premature destruction of young voices brought on by overambitious career planning. 'Directors and managers don't care about their futures,' she once said. 'They will just get another young person when this one goes bad.' In today's opera culture, the best managed voices tend to mature in the singer's 40's and begin to deteriorate during the 50's. (Singers like Plácido Domingo, flourishing in his 60's, might dispute such generalizations.) Yet at 66, when most singers hang onto whatever career remains through less taxing recitals with piano and discreet downward transpositions of key, Ms. Nilsson sang a New York concert performance of Strauss and Wagner that met both composers head-on. 'Ms. Nilsson did not sound young,' Will Crutchfield wrote in The Times. 'Soft and low notes were often precarious; sustained tones were not always steady.' He continued: 'The wonderful thing is that she doesn't let this bother her. There was never a sense of distress or worry.' The conductor Erich Leinsdorf thought that her longevity, like Flagstad's, had something to do with her Scandinavian heritage, remarking that Wagner required 'thoughtful, patient and methodical people.' Ms. Nilsson attributed her long career to no particular lifestyle or regimen. 'I do nothing special,' she once said. 'I don't smoke. I drink a little wine and beer. I was born with the right set of parents.' In sheer power, Ms. Nilsson's high notes were sometimes compared to those of the Broadway belter Ethel Merman. One high C rendered in a 'Turandot' performance in the outdoor Arena di Verona in Italy led citizenry beyond the walls to think that a fire alarm had been set off. Once urged to follow Ms. Nilsson in the same role at the Met, the eminent soprano Leonie Rysanek refused. Ms. Nilsson was known for her one-liner humor. The secret to singing Isolde, she said, was 'comfortable shoes.' After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland's famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: 'I don't know. I haven't pulled it yet.' After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies. Ms. Nilsson was also a shrewd businesswoman and negotiated much of her own career. She never ranted or engaged in tantrums. She was also too proud to make outright demands. She would begin contract talks by refusing every offer and being evasive about her availability in general. This tack would continue until the impresario offered something she wanted. Ms. Nilsson's reply would be 'maybe.' Now in control, she would be begged to accept what she desired in the first place. She could stand up to intensely wired conductors like Georg Solti as well. When Solti, in 'Tristan und Isolde,' insisted on tempos too slow for her taste, she made the first performance even slower, inducing a conductorial change of heart. Partly because Ms. Nilsson was on the scene, Decca Records undertook the audacious and mammothly expensive project of making the first studio recording of Wagner's four-opera 'Ring' cycle conducted by Solti and produced by John Culshaw. The effort took seven years, from 1958 to 1965. A film of the proceedings made her a familiar image for arts-conscious television viewers. Ms. Nilsson's American career was derailed in the mid-70's by a squabble with the Internal Revenue Service, which had filed claims for back taxes. Several years later, cooler heads intervened: a schedule of payments was worked out, and Ms. Nilsson's ill-tempered hiatus from the United States ended. When she returned, Donal Henahan wrote in The Times, 'The famous shining trumpet of a voice is still far from sounding like a cornet.' Ms. Nilsson appeared at the Met 223 times in 16 roles. She sang two complete 'Ring' cycles in the 1961-62 season, and another in 1974-75. She was Isolde 33 times, and Turandot 52. The big soprano parts were all hers: Aida, Tosca, the Dyer's Wife in Strauss's 'Frau Ohne Schatten,' Salome, Elektra, Lady Macbeth, Leonore in Beethoven's 'Fidelio,' and both Venus and Elisabeth in Wagner's 'Tannhäuser.' For much of this time, the Met's general manager was Rudolf Bing. Ms. Nilsson, when signing a contract, was asked to name a dependent. She wrote in Bing's name. James Levine, who conducted her in Wagner and Strauss at the Met, said yesterday: 'Birgit was unique. Her voice, the dedication of her artistry, her wonderfully wicked sense of humor and her loyal friendship were in a class by themselves. I miss her already, as does the entire Met family.' At Mr. Levine's 25th-anniversary gala at the Met in 1996, she spoke briefly and wittily, throwing in a brief and wholly professional Valkyrie hoot at the end. Ms. Nilsson had by then retired to her childhood home in the Skane province of southern Sweden. Here her father had been a sixth-generation farmer, and here she had worked to grow beets and potatoes until she was 23. A decade ago an interviewer for The Times found her there: happy, serene and as unpretentious as ever. 'I've always tried to remember what my mother used to tell me,' she said. 'Stay close to the earth. Then when you fall down, it won't hurt so much.'

Subject: Strike Reflects Nationwide Pension Woes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Dec 25, 2005 at 03:42:36 (EST) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/nyregion/nyregionspecial3/24pensions.html?ex=1293080400&en=6ea96465eae9c999&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss December 24, 2005 Transit Strike Reflects Nationwide Pension Woes By STEVEN GREENHOUSE Fast-rising pension costs for government employees - the issue that helped set off this week's transit strike in New York City - are a problem confronting cities, counties and states nationwide, causing many budgetary experts to predict a wave of painful fights over efforts to scale back government retirement programs. Many officials and fiscal experts assert that across the nation government pension plans face a shortfall of hundreds of billions of dollars. From New Jersey to California, government officials say that attempts - either through contract fights, legislation or public referendums - to limit the amount of money that states and cities contribute to pensions are inevitable and overdue. Labor unions, for their part, say that the worries are overblown. 'Every level of government in New York City, New York State and in states across the country face large and growing pension obligations,' said E. J. McMahon, a budget expert at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group. 'If nothing is done to bring pensions under control, all the other headaches that state governments will be facing in the next 20 years on needs like education and health will be enormously worse.' The contract battle for New York's transit workers, which has yet to be fully resolved, underscores the anger and risks that await governments as they seek to win concessions to cut their pension costs. The strike, which lasted 60 hours and shut down the country's largest mass transit system, began when the union representing 33,700 bus and subway workers rejected efforts by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency, to increase either the retirement age for future employees or the amount they contribute to finance their pensions. But it is now possible - even after the strike ended - that the transit union may succeed in getting the authority to take all or some of its pension demands off the table as the two sides seek to put the final touches on an overall settlement. With New Jersey facing a $25 billion shortfall in its pension obligations, a state advisory commission recently urged that the retirement age for government employees, other than police, firefighters and judges, be raised to 60 from 55. And in California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger faced a storm of criticism after he proposed replacing the traditional pension plan for government employees with a far less generous plan resembling 401(k)s. He ultimately backed down even as budget watchdogs complained that many police officers retired with pensions equaling 90 percent of their annual earnings. Many government employees and their unions assert that the campaign to trim pensions threatens America's social contract for the middle class: a respectable pension. Saying that in recent contracts they had sacrificed wage increases or better health benefits for solid pensions, many public employees and their unions assert that governments are betraying their commitments by seeking to now cut pensions. Further, they argue that much of the shortfall in pension financing could be erased by a strong stock market in the next several years. 'A lot of people are exaggerating the size of the problem,' said Gerald McEntee of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 1.4 million government workers. 'Right-wing think tanks and conservative Republicans want to do away with traditional pension plans and replace them with much-cheaper 401(k)'s at the same time they want to give all these tax cuts to the rich.' The fight over public-sector pensions follows a movement to cut private sector pensions. In recent years, corporation after corporation has complained about what they assert are the onerous costs of pensions. Bethlehem Steel, United Airlines and other companies, saying they could no longer afford it, have stopped paying into their pension plans, forcing the government to step in and absorb billions of dollars in costs. And now Delphi, the giant auto parts company that filed for bankruptcy in October, is threatening to do the same thing. Meanwhile, some companies, Hewlett Packard among them, have replaced their traditional pension plans with 401(k) plans. Many courts have ruled that cutting the pensions of current public employees - as opposed to future ones - violates the Constitution, which prohibits governments from breaching contracts. As a result, taxpayers must pay for full pensions promised to government employees. When private companies go bankrupt and leave badly underfinanced plans, a federal agency, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, steps in to insure the workers' pensions, although many workers end up getting smaller pensions than their companies had promised. The agency is running a $23 billion deficit this year and many policy makers fear that its liabilities could mushroom if many more large corporations file for bankruptcy and dump their pension obligations on the government. In New York's transit dispute, the transportation authority, which runs the city's subways and buses, was alarmed that the pension costs for the transit workers had tripled since 2002, to $453 million this year. To control soaring pensions costs, the authority at first demanded raising the retirement age for future employees to 62. Workers can now retire at age 55, after 25 years on the job, and receive pensions equal to half their earnings. They average $55,000 a year, including overtime. After the union, Local 100 of the Transport Workers Union, resisted that demand, the authority made a new proposal, that future transit workers pay 6 percent of their wages toward their pensions, compared with 2 percent for current workers. The transportation authority is working closely with Gov. George E. Pataki and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who say it is vital to trim fast-rising pension outlays for state and city workers because they threaten the government's ability to provide education, policing and other basic services. New York City's annual pension outlays are expected to jump to nearly $5 billion in 2008, more than double the level in 2004. Mayor Bloomberg repeatedly called the strikers greedy. 'The public says, 'I don't want to pay more taxes and I don't get these kind of benefits,' ' he said yesterday. 'You have no idea how many e-mails I got, 'I don't make that kind of money. I don't have those kinds of pension benefits. Why are people striking?' ' But Roger Toussaint, the president of the transit workers' union, said the walkout was aimed at stopping an employer offensive nationwide to cut pensions and other benefits. He said the transportation authority was mimicking corporate America. 'What you have here is a scandalous attempt on the part of the M.T.A. to jump on the bandwagon,' he said. Nationwide, 90 percent of public-sector workers have traditional benefit plans - known as defined-benefit plans because retirees receive a defined amount each month- while just 20 percent of private-sector workers do. In 1960, 40 percent of private-sector workers were in traditional pension plans. One reason for the disparity: 36.4 percent of government employees belong to unions while just 7.9 percent of private-sector workers do. 'The transit strike will undoubtedly draw attention to the issue,' said Harry Katz, dean of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. 'The message is, 'Look, we have to worry about the long-run cost of pensions in the public sector as well as the private sector.' '