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 l