Subject: Forced Marsh From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:02:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/opinion/27young.html?ex=1285473600&en=65acea7096b85743&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Forced Marsh By ROBERT S. YOUNG and DAVID M. BUSH IN the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, there has been much talk of rebuilding Louisiana's coastal wetlands and barrier islands. This proposal, which could cost an estimated $15 billion, has been advocated by Louisiana scientists, engineers, politicians and environmentalists alike, who explain that the state is suffering the highest rate of land loss in the nation and imply that restoring this land would reduce the damage from future storms. As coastal scientists, we are excited to see the idea of wetlands restoration so widely discussed. Yet we think the Louisiana plan is ill conceived. When a major storm tears apart any coastal area, people tend to take on an attitude that we can win this 'war' with the weather if we spend enough money. Sadly, then, hurricanes often bequeath gigantic urban renewal projects. Destroyed houses are replaced by bigger ones that lack even the protection of dunes that were eroded by the storm. Within a few years, more property than ever stands at risk. Now we are being told that we should spend billions not just on rebuilding houses and roads but on re-engineering the environment as well. Louisiana's coastal scientists, engineers and politicians suggest that without this coastal restoration project, all other efforts will be endangered. But it's not that simple, for several reasons. First, many people - scientists and otherwise - have insinuated that if we had begun wetlands restoration in the Mississippi Delta years ago, it would have reduced the impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans and the coast. This is highly unlikely. Storm surge waters approached the coast from the east, pushed into Lake Pontchartrain by the counterclockwise flow of the hurricane's winds; the natural wetlands that used to exist downriver from the city would have done little to mitigate the damage. Second, some have suggested that rebuilding the Louisiana barrier islands would protect the delta region in future storms. But just look what happened elsewhere: Hurricane Katrina's storm surge quickly inundated the barrier islands of the Gulf Islands National Seashore off Mississippi, which are far more robust and vegetated than the Louisiana islands ever were, on its way to devastating the state's shoreline. Let's face it, even if reconstructed, the Louisiana islands would be little more than a speed bump to a storm the size of Hurricane Katrina. In addition, none of the restoration plans address the root causes of wetland loss: man-made alterations to the Mississippi River that reduce the amount of sediment flowing into the marshes, the saltwater allowed in by navigation canals cut through the delta, and a lowering of ground levels throughout the region brought on by natural and industrial activities. We are being sold a giant engineering project intended to fix problems caused by engineering projects elsewhere on the river and in the delta. We find it paradoxical that many of the people calling for wetland restoration are also calling for higher levees to protect populated areas, since the levees, which prevent flooding and thus the natural addition of sediment to the marshes, are a big reason the wetlands are disappearing. And even if we could rebuild these wetlands, maintaining them at a time of rising ocean levels is probably untenable. We would be creating our own little Holland, with a need for ever-more expensive construction and maintenance far into the future. Last, if the government is going to spend $15 billion on restoration, let's put all the country's wetlands on the table. We seriously doubt that any objective scientific cost-benefit review would find that spending all that money in Louisiana makes sense. We believe there are many concerned and honest advocates for the project to restore coastal Louisiana. But their effort should not be mislabeled as 'storm protection,' and we shouldn't allow our emotional response to a natural disaster to cloud our long-term thinking about the best way to spend our money on repairing America's coastal regions. Robert S. Young and David M. Bush are professors of geology at, respectively, Western Carolina University and the University of West Georgia.

Subject: Taste for Brazilian Frugality From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:00:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/business/worldbusiness/27beer.html?ex=1285473600&en=b0ce4b735cb523bd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Belgian Brewer Acquires a Taste for Brazilian Frugality By PAUL MELLER BRUSSELS - John F. Brock, the chief executive of InBev, the world's biggest producer of beer, has been brushing up on his Brazilian. 'Loosely translated, jinga means effortless flair,' he said last week in an interview in his office in Leuven, near Brussels. Holding up a bottle of Brahma, a beer brand that Interbrew acquired a year ago when it bought AmBev, Brazil's biggest brewer, he said he intended to sell Brahma around the world on the strength of its jinga. But AmBev's influence in last year's deal that created InBev is less about the effortless flair of Brazilian dance, style and soccer and more about the unglamorous task of cutting costs. The old Interbrew prided itself on its marketing savvy and its focus on local markets. It called itself the world's local brewer. AmBev, on the other hand, which still functions under its old name and has its shares listed on the Brazilian stock exchange, is known in the beer industry for being obsessive about efficiency. 'The sales force there all drive gray cars because it is the cheapest color,' said Concepción Moreno, an analyst at the Belgian stock broker Petercam who visited AmBev's headquarters in Brazil last week. 'The chief executive and the chief financial officer share the same desk, paper and phone calls are rationed. Cost-cutting is a way of life, not a one-off activity.' Although Interbrew has economic and voting control over AmBev, the deal was 'almost a merger of equals,' Mr. Brock said. A marketing man to the core, he added, 'Hopefully we can combine the best of both companies.' Some analysts go a step further and describe last year's deal of 9.2 billion euros, or $11.1 billion at the current conversion rate, as a reverse takeover. InBev is centralizing much of the power that Interbrew handed to local management teams around the world, Mr. Brock said. AmBev managers have been moved into major positions at InBev's headquarters in Leuven, including Felipe Dutra, AmBev's top financial manager, as InBev's chief financial officer, and Juan Vergara, AmBev's head of Latin American operations, as head of purchasing for InBev. 'It's being dubbed the 'AmBevization' of Interbrew,' Ms. Moreno said. 'When the deal was first announced, I thought the Europeans, with their reputation for being well organized, would teach the Latin Americans, but it is quite the opposite.' Mr. Brock played down the impression that the Brazilians were taking over. The reason there are more AmBev staff at InBev headquarters than Interbrew people moved to Brazil is because of language. 'English is the working language here at InBev,' Mr. Brock said, adding, 'It's easier to move into that environment than into a Portuguese-speaking one.' Nevertheless, zero-based budgeting, AmBev's term for ruthless cost-cutting, has already been applied in Canada - where InBev sells Budweiser in a licensing agreement with its maker, Anheuser-Busch, as well as brands including Labatt. Europe and Russia are next in line, followed by Korea and Ukraine. By the end of 2007 InBev aims to cut costs by 300 million euros, or $361 million, in addition to the 280 million euros, or $337 million, it hopes to save through the takeover. Like the United States, Europe poses a challenge to brewers because beer consumption here is in decline. Shrinking populations and shifting consumption to other drinks like wine and spirits have forced brewers to think creatively. Beck's, a quintessentially German beer, has been given two brand extensions in an attempt to reach younger drinkers: Beck's Gold - darker in color, less bitter taste - and Beck's Green, also less bitter with a lemony taste. Beer purists may frown, but Mr. Brock said he believed such moves were essential. 'Look at what is working in the spirits industry: Vodkas with flavors, new packaging. There is a consensus in the drinks industry that consumers are seeking more variety,' he said. Mature markets in the developed world represent a third of InBev's activities. Most business takes place in Russia, China, eastern Europe, and now, with AmBev on board, Latin America. Brazil is the fourth-largest beer market in the world, and AmBev controls more than 60 percent of sales there. Exposure to some of the fastest-growing markets in the world is a mixed blessing, though. Returns on investment are slow in coming and there is greater risk. 'Many Belgians who bought InBev stock at the beginning are disappointed because they are not seeing the benefits in the price of their shares yet,' Ms. Moreno said. But foreign investors are looking more closely at the stock, she said. Investors with shares in brewers like Heineken and Anheuser-Busch are taking a closer look at InBev now, because it is not so dependent on sales in these mature markets, she said. Mr. Brock said he was aiming to achieve the highest profit margin in the business. 'We looked at Anheuser-Busch, with their strong record of cost-efficiency in the United States, and calculated that they must have a profit margin of 29 percent, so we set our target at 30 percent by the end of 2007,' he said. The company will still look for acquisition targets in developing markets it already occupies, especially in Russia, where Mr. Brock said brewing capacity was having trouble keeping up with demand. But InBev is also looking at new markets, he said. The company has no presence in Mexico, Vietnam or Thailand, three of the biggest emerging beer markets. 'They are on our list of markets we will enter in time,' Mr. Brock said. Perhaps with the help of the superefficient Brazilians, those moves may come sooner rather than later.

Subject: David Swensen From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 13:18:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: September 6, 2005 Yale Manager Blasts Industry By TOM LAURICELLA - WALL STREET JOURNAL WSJ: You had hoped to give small investors a road map for beating the market based on Yale's approach to investing. What happened? Mr. Swensen: I found when I started down that path that individuals just don't have the same set of investment opportunities available to them that we do here at Yale. In fact, the evidence showed me that the mutual-fund industry has completely failed to provide reasonable active-management returns to individuals. WSJ: To say that it completely failed -- that's a pretty harsh statement to make. Mr. Swensen: I think the evidence is there. The crux of the failure is with the for-profit management of funds for individuals. Mutual-fund managers have a fiduciary responsibility to investors. Obviously, if they are operating in a for-profit mode, they have a profit motive. When you put the profit motive up against fiduciary responsibility, that fiduciary responsibility loses and profits win. WSJ: But the investment managers that Yale hires -- or any other institutional investor hires -- are out to make money. Mr. Swensen: But there it's a fair fight. In the context of Yale, you've got a sophisticated institutional investor on the one hand and a for-profit provider of investment services on the other hand. And we can go toe-to-toe and end up with a fair result. If you look at Yale's history over the last 20 years, we have excellent results in terms of active-management returns. The problem in the mutual-fund industry is that you've got a sophisticated provider of investment services on the one hand and, on the other, you have an unsophisticated consumer. That imbalance leads to behaviors that line the pockets of mutual-fund managers and at the expense of the individual investor. WSJ: What is some of the evidence that you believe shows that mutual funds have failed small investors? Mr. Swensen: The data I cite in the book was put together and analyzed by Rob Arnott (chairman of manager Research Affiliates LLC). He adjusts for survivorship bias, an incredibly important phenomenon. If you don't do that, you are going to get a false picture of what the world looks like. WSJ: So if you look at the regular data on fund performance, you're not seeing the whole story? Mr. Swensen: You're not seeing the losers that disappear. They could disappear because they go out of business or because cynical managers of mutual funds will take poorly performing funds and merge them into better-performing funds, and so the record of the poor performer disappears. The picture that you get if you just look at the survivors is dominated by the winners -- but of course investor dollars were invested with the losers that disappeared. And if you look at the aggregate results of the mutual-fund industry on an after-fee, after-tax basis and adjust it for survivorship bias, the probability that you are going to end up with market-beating returns is de minimus. According to (Mr. Arnott's data), the 10-year after-tax shortfall for mutual funds is 4.5% per year relative to what you would have gotten if you had put your money in an index fund. That doesn't even take into account the fees for advice ... which takes you from a de minimus probability to a virtual certainty that you will end up losing relative to the market. WSJ: What keeps funds from living up to their promise? Mr. Swensen: So many of the behaviors that lead to high-quality investment performance diminish (managers') profits. For example, size is the enemy of performance. If you limit assets under management, you have a much better chance of beating the market. But asset gathering improves profits. So what happens? Almost invariably, managers are out there gathering assets, trying to increase profits, and it comes at the expense of generating investment returns. Concentration is another important factor in generating high levels of incremental returns. We have managers in Yale's portfolio that will hold three or four or five stocks, or maybe eight or 10 stocks. You have to have an enormous amount of conviction, and you have to really believe that you have got an edge to make those kinds of concentrated bets. But it's not sensible for a mutual fund to do that from a business perspective because the volatility of the results relative to the market will be way too great, and the manager of the mutual fund will likely not be able to amass the same level of assets they would if they pursued a much more diversified strategy. It also doesn't scale. If you are trying to run a concentrated portfolio and have a huge amount of assets under management, you just can't do it. One of the best managers out there has had as few as three securities and never more than 10. If you're Fidelity Magellan, with $50 billion or $60 billion, there's no way you can just put three stocks in the portfolio. As we're going down the laundry list of reasons why mutual funds fail, you have to talk about the turnover in the portfolios. A very significant portion of assets in mutual funds are taxable, and the overwhelming majority of mutual-fund assets appear to be managed with complete indifference to the tax consequences. It's probably not criminal, but it should be. WSJ: But there are portfolio managers who practice a very low-turnover, high-conviction style of managing mutual funds. Mr. Swensen: Southeastern Asset Management (manager of Longleaf Partners Funds) is one, and there are probably a handful of others. But that brings us to the second set of problems, which has to do with the way that individuals behave. I looked at the results of three years before and three years after the technology-stock bubble. If you looked at the stated investment returns, they went up for three years and went down for three years. So the results over the six-year period were basically zero -- no harm, no foul. Then you look at the cash flows. Because people chased performance, the overwhelming fund flows occurred in '99 and 2000. So individuals bought in right at the top and ended up suffering in the downturn. There was massive wealth destruction. Even though Southeastern does a wonderful job of managing ... they suffered substantial withdrawals in '99 and 2000 because investors were disenchanted with the low turnover, concentrated, steady-as-she-goes strategy. WSJ: You have issue with fees charges by funds as well. Mr. Swensen: Not only the investment-management fees but the 12b-1 fees, which are completely at odds with investor interests. You are out there charging fees for marketing and distribution, and so you are charging the investor for adding assets under management -- which ultimately hurts the investor's prospective returns. It's a very sweet deal for the mutual-fund industry, and it's terrible for the investor. WSJ: The fund industry says without these fees, it couldn't attract investors. Mr. Swensen: That was the argument when the SEC allowed them quite a number of years ago. I thought it was a specious argument and viewed it without merit then, and it certainly doesn't have merit now. WSJ: Some of these fees go to compensate financial advisers. Those folks are providing a service, so don't they need to be paid? Mr. Swensen: The amount that people pay for financial advice relative to the quality of what they get is totally out of whack. WSJ: For individuals, given the way the fund industry operates, you argue that they should be focusing on the not-for-profit companies and index funds such as Vanguard Group and TIAA-CREF. (Mr. Swensen is on the board of TIAA, but isn't directly responsible for mutual funds, which fall under CREF.) What does that get you? Mr. Swensen: Well it doesn't give you much to talk about at cocktail parties! It gets you a well-diversified equity-oriented portfolio that ought to be good for all seasons. WSJ: When it comes to diversifying a portfolio, you have somewhat unconventional asset-allocation recommendations. Mr. Swensen: When I arrived here 20 years ago, we had a pretty typical institutional portfolio, maybe two-thirds in domestic stocks and another big chunk in domestic bonds and a smattering of alternatives. And if you apply the principle of diversification and the notion of the equity orientation to these portfolios...they fail the test of diversification because there is a huge chunk in domestic equities, and they generally fail the test of equity orientation because there is too much in fixed income and cash. Currently at Yale, we've got a half a dozen asset classes with weights ranging between 5% and 25%. And I identify a half dozen asset classes that individuals ought to have in their portfolio. Traditional bonds, inflation-indexed bonds, domestic equities, foreign-developed equities, emerging-market equities and real-estate securities. WSJ: You argue investors should have just 30% in domestic stocks. But most people think 'I'm a super-long-term investor, so I'm going to be loaded to the gills with domestic stocks or just stocks.' Mr. Swensen: There are lots of ways you can produce equity-like returns without exposure to domestic stocks. So the foreign equities and foreign emerging equities and the real-estate positions ought to produce returns that are not dissimilar from those of U.S. stocks over reasonably long periods of time. It's important to point out that one size doesn't fit all and individual circumstance could lead an individual to hold a portfolio that would differ from the one that we're talking about right here. WSJ: If you like index funds, where do exchange-traded funds fit in? Mr. Swensen: To the extent that ETFs are focused on index management -- with the provision that the indexes are well-structured indexes -- I think they are absolutely great. It's another low-cost, even more tax-sensitive investment that people can use to implement a sensible asset allocation. But as they have grown in popularity, the waters have been polluted by a variety of ETFs that have essentially active-management components and poor fee structures. So it's a circumstance where buyers need to beware. WSJ: Most average investors think an index is an index. What should they be on the lookout for? Mr. Swensen: The S&P 500 is a well-structured index because it has relative low turnover and the low turnover leads to reasonable tax characteristics. But the Russell 2000, which consists of stocks ranked by market capitalization...as defined once a year, has ridiculous characteristics. The turnover is extraordinarily high. In a market that you expect will rise over time, it will have very poor tax consequences. It's very widespread and used a lot but ridiculously, poorly constructed.

Subject: Time to Connect the Dots From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 13:11:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/opinion/28wed1.html September 28, 2005 Time to Connect the Dots Along with ruined homes and upended trees, the recent hurricanes left behind a revived debate about global warming. While some environmentalists point to the wreckage as a kind of retribution for America's failure to control greenhouse gas emissions, right-wing talk show hosts repeat, over and over, that even if global warming did exist, there is no proof it had anything to do with Rita and Katrina. In a way, they're all right. It is impossible to link Katrina or Rita, or any particular hurricane, specifically to global warming. This does not mean that President Bush and the rest of us should not be connecting the dots. These are natural disasters - but with human fingerprints. Hurricanes derive their strength from warm ocean waters. Ocean temperatures have been rising over the last 100 years, along with atmospheric temperatures. Hurricanes have therefore become bigger and more destructive and are likely to grow even more violent in the future. This cycle cannot be reversed any time soon. But one thing humans can do is to reduce their own contribution to global warming by controlling industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The alarm bells have been ringing for a long time, but Katrina and Rita should serve as yet another warning to an administration that has belittled the science of global warming. The emerging hurricane problem is size, not quantity. The scientists who have studied the issue have not detected any increase in the number of hurricanes. Yet these same scientists - in research reports appearing in reputable journals like Science, Nature and The Journal of Climate - have detected increases of up to 70 percent in hurricane intensity, a measure that combines the power of a hurricane and its duration. There has been a commensurate increase in damage, mainly because more and more people have stubbornly put themselves at risk by moving to low-lying coastal areas. But the hurricanes' added strength has clearly contributed to the ever-higher toll in lives and property damage. Being cautious folk, the scientists point out that cyclical lulls and surges in hurricane activity may also have something to do with stronger storms. But even if they are completely wrong in linking warming to intensity, which seems unlikely, global warming will have other undesirable consequences, including a significant rise in sea level. In the last century, sea level rose 4 to 8 inches around the world, and most scientists expect a further rise of 2 to 3 feet in this century. According to one government study, a 20-inch rise in sea level by 2100 could put 3,500 square miles of the southern coast of the United States underwater - rendering efforts to restore the Everglades and the Louisiana coastline essentially pointless. A large-scale breakup of the polar ice sheets would, of course, make matters much worse. Dikes could protect some regions, like Manhattan and the Netherlands, but most coastlines would be inundated. Humanity cannot avoid a warmer Earth and some rise in sea level, largely because of the gases we have already deposited in the atmosphere. But the worst outcomes may be avoided if the world takes concerted action to stabilize industrial emissions of greenhouse gases. This, of course, presupposes aggressive leadership from the United States, which produces more than a quarter of these emissions. But this is a role that Mr. Bush has shown no appetite for at all.

Subject: In Heeding Health Warnings From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:34:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/health/27cons.html?ex=1285473600&en=eba5e4d4fc481c0a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 In Heeding Health Warnings, Memory Can Be Tricky By DEBORAH FRANKLIN In briefing consumers on health risks, public health campaigns often rely on a catchy strategy: they list the myths about a behavior or product, then follow up those misconceptions with the truth. Check any Internet search engine and you will find 'myths and facts' on health topics like abortion, acne, vaccines and weight loss. But new research suggests that even the sharpest consumer can be tripped up by these warnings because of a flaw in the way we remember what we read or are told. As time passes, the studies show, people remember the health information they were given. But they forget which part was myth, and which was the truth. Experts say consumers and doctors need to be aware of this problem so they can make sure that quirks of memory do not harm anyone's health. 'Here's what happens,' said Ian Skurnik, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto, who worked with colleagues from the University of Michigan to study the phenomenon. 'You notice that your grandmother has been taking useless medical treatments, and you're worried,' he said. 'You tell her, 'You know, Granny, shark cartilage doesn't help your arthritis.' You tell her three times to make sure she understands, and she seems to.' He continued, 'But a few days later you talk to her again and find the warnings have had precisely the opposite effect of what you intended.' This common problem arises, Dr. Skurnik said, because in laying down a memory trace, the human brain seems to encode the memory of the claim separately from its context - who said it, when and other particulars, including the important fact that the claim is not true. The detailed memory of the experience of learning the information begins to fade almost immediately, and the contextual clues fade faster than the core claim. 'Long after you've forgotten the context, the claim will still seem vaguely familiar,' Dr. Skurnik said. That is when a well-documented effect that Dr. Skurnik calls 'the illusion of truth' kicks in. Numerous studies over the last few decades have shown that unless people have some countervailing context or information to grab hold of, they tend to regard information that seems familiar as true. To test the power of that effect related to health claims, Dr. Skurnik and colleagues gave 64 volunteers a few dozen bits of unrelated medical information that they were unlikely to have heard before, like 'Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips' and 'Aspirin destroys tooth enamel.' The researchers arbitrarily labeled half the statements false and half as true. Each item was read aloud and simultaneously presented on a computer screen at least once, but half the items appeared three times within the list. Half the volunteers were college students ages 18 to 25. The others were healthy adults, ages 71 to 86. Thirty minutes after the volunteers had seen the information, the researchers showed them another list of items that contained all the previous statements, with some new items mixed in. They were asked to identify which statements were false, which were true and which were new. The same kind of quiz was repeated three days later. The results, published in the March 2005 issue of The Journal of Consumer Research, showed that the older adults were much more likely than the younger ones to misremember the false statements as true, an effect that was exacerbated three days later. What's more, having seen a statement three times in the initial list helped the younger people remember it correctly, but made things worse for the older volunteers. 'Even quite elderly people remain good detectors of information that's new, versus something they have seen before,' Dr. Skurnik said. 'But in this case, that ability worked against them.' The repetition of a warning underscored its familiarity. The implications of the findings are not limited to older people, Dr. Skurnik said. In a follow-up study not yet published, he and his colleagues presented college-age volunteers with a health information pamphlet from the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called 'Is It a Flu Shot Fact or Myth?' In boldface type, the pamphlet contained eight statements about the flu vaccine - six labeled false, one true and one 'maybe.' Each statement was followed by a sentence or two of explanation in smaller type. 'Immediately after reading the flier, participants made few mistakes in recalling whether a particular statement from the flyer was described as a fact or myth, and there was no difference in the type of mistake,' the researchers reported. 'However,' the researchers continued, 'after a half an hour, participants were much more likely to misremember a fact as a myth.' 'I think the message to physicians from this study and others is that even if you have lots to tell your patient in an office visit, you have to tell them several ways and over time to make sure they understand,' said Dr. Joanne Schwartzberg, who oversees the health literacy program of the American Medical Association. Dr. Schwartzberg advises patients never to worry about saying to a doctor: ' 'Wait a minute, I need a little more time to see if I've got that right. When I go home, you want me to do this; is that right?' ' Putting complicated health instructions in your own words and repeating them aloud should help anchor the information accurately in your memory. But Dr. Skurnik said, 'Don't trust your memory.' Office visits are often time-pressured, anxiety-provoking, and packed with new and technical information - exactly the conditions most likely to jumble a memory of what was said. Whenever possible, get written information from the doctor, he said, and take a notebook to appointments to jot down instructions. It can also help to take along a friend or family member. Patients under the intense stress of a new diagnosis may be those most likely to scan headlines and sift through Web pages in search of information. Print out what you read online, Dr. Skurnik suggested, so that you can go back later and identify the source of the information, as well as the particulars. And doctors, he said, would do well to make sure that anything they hand out is written in simple, direct factual language. 'It's not enough to ensure that people get good information from credible sources,' Dr. Skurnik said. 'You also have to make sure that they'll be able to recall whether it's true or false later on.'

Subject: For Survivors of Cancer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 06:12:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/health/article-page.html?res=9406EFDB163BF935A35754C0A9629C8B63&fta=y July 6, 2004 For Survivors of Cancer, All Calories Are Not Equal By JANE E. BRODY After her third battle with cancer, Diana Dyer decided she needed something more than surgery and chemotherapy to keep the disease at bay. During treatment, she ate whatever she could tolerate to get the calories her body needed. But afterward, her goal was to use diet to minimize the risk of recurrence. She searched the scientific literature for guidance and developed a plan based, she recognized, on ''very little clinical science'' but on the best science available. She increased her exercise; reduced her alcohol intake; avoided saturated fats in animal foods and the trans and hydrogenated fats in processed foods; switched to olive and canola oils; gave up red meats and poultry but ate more soy foods, fatty fish and eggs, rich in omega-3 fatty acids; doubled her fiber intake through whole grains, legumes and nine or more servings a day of fruits and vegetables; replaced diet sodas with tomato and orange juice, and green tea; stuck to low-fat dairy products; and added nuts and flax seeds to her diet. She describes her plan, including what to do when eating out, in a book, ''A Dietitian's Cancer Story'' (Swan Press, $15.95), and offers two weeks of menus and recipes on her Web site, www.cancerrd.com. Part of the sales of the book benefit the American Institute for Cancer Research. The book can be ordered through the institute at (800)843-8114. Also helpful on the subject is the American Cancer Society's publication ''Nutrition for the Person With Cancer: A Guide for Patients and Families,'' available by calling (800)ACS-2345. Will Ms. Dyer's approach help keep her free of cancer? So far she has been healthy. And the diet will lower her risk of heart disease. A diagnosis of cancer is a wake-up call for many people. Hoping to maximize their chances of survival, however, many patients turn to strange diets, supplements and herbal remedies with little or no scientific evidence to establish their worth. Some may be harmful. To help health care providers and their patients make the best choices based on the best available evidence, three years ago the American Cancer Society published in the journal CA a guide on nutrition during and after cancer treatment. It was designed to help the more than 1.2 million people who each year receive cancer diagnoses and the more than nine million Americans who have thus far survived cancer. The article is online (caonline.amcancersoc.org) or can be found in the May/June 2001 issue. In addition to the nutritional advantages gained from the suggested dietary measures, making improvements in living habits has important psychological benefits by helping patients regain a sense of control over their lives. During Treatment Current approaches to cancer treatment -- surgery, radiation and chemotherapy -- may not only change a person's nutritional needs but also interfere with the ability to consume, digest, absorb and assimilate food. In most cases, cancer treatment increases a person's caloric needs while making it more challenging to meet them. Small, frequent meals and snacks and foods that are easy to chew, swallow, digest and absorb -- and that are appealing -- are recommended, even if they are high in calories or fat. This is not a time to try to lose weight or worry about how healthful foods might be. Meeting one's caloric needs is the primary goal; during treatment, it is often helpful to add beverages like Ensure or Boost as temporary aids. Cancer patients are also urged to engage in light, regular physical activity to counter fatigue; to stimulate appetite and digestion; to prevent constipation; to maintain energy and muscle mass; to provide relaxation; and to reduce stress. But the cancer society's experts warn against consuming high levels of certain supplements that may do more harm than good. Folic acid, for example, can interfere with the action of some chemotherapeutic drugs, like methotrexate, that act as folic acid antagonists. And high doses of antioxidants, like vitamins C and E, which patients sometimes take in hope of protecting normal cells, may reduce the effectiveness of therapies that work by causing oxidative damage to cancer cells. The experts recommend as a prudent approach during treatment ''not to exceed the upper limits of the Dietary Reference Intakes for vitamin supplements and to avoid other nutritional supplements that contain antioxidant compounds.'' Cancer treatment often suppresses immune responses, and so it is also important to pay particular attention to food safety. Do not eat raw fish or undercooked meats and poultry or drink unpasteurized juices; rinse all fruits and vegetables; and protect foods eaten uncooked from the drippings or utensils used on raw meats, poultry and seafood. Once active treatment ends, the goal is to rebuild muscle strength and correct problems like anemia that may have been caused by treatment. Again, this is not a time to diet; the emphasis should be on eating healthful foods. Although daily exercise may not prevent recurrence or slow the progression of cancer, the experts note that it can ''reduce anxiety and depression, improve mood, improve self-esteem and reduce symptoms of fatigue, nausea, pain and diarrhea.'' Eating for Good Health The cancer society experts say, ''There is no evidence to support fasting as a healthy practice during cancer treatment or beyond.'' Vegetarian diets and macrobiotic diets based on whole grains, fruits and vegetables, beans, fermented soy products, nuts, seeds and teas ''can be consistent with a healthy diet'' as long as consumers are careful to take in enough calories and essential nutrients. But the experts found ''no data to support the claim that a macrobiotic diet reduces cancer incidence or recurrence'' any more than the less restricted regimen the society recommends, which includes animal protein foods in moderation. Although a one-a-day type of multivitamin-mineral supplement can help compensate for nutrient shortfalls, the experts advise against doses above the recommended intake for any nutrient. ''There is no evidence that any nutritional supplement can reproduce the apparent benefits of a diet high in vegetables and fruits,'' the experts say. Alcohol is best avoided or consumed in moderation -- at most a drink a day for women, two for men -- since it is associated with an increased risk of breast, lung and digestive cancers. Purple grape juice helps protect against heart disease. Teas are all right for cancer survivors, as long as they are made from plants that are ordinarily used for foods or beverages. Caffeine is all right, too; it has no link to cancer. The jury is still out on the benefits and risks of estrogen-rich soy foods for survivors of breast and prostate cancers, though they are not believed to be hazardous when consumed in moderation, say, at one meal a day. But breast cancer survivors should avoid supplements of soy concentrates and isoflavones. High-fat diets, in general, are not advisable for cancer survivors, or for anyone. In place of animal-derived fats and polyunsaturates, some experts recommend monounsaturates like olive and canola oils and the fats in avocados, nuts and fish, which have been associated with protection against cancer and heart disease. Foods high in sugars may have no adverse effect on cancer, but they have limited nutrient value and often supplant more healthful foods. As Ms. Dyer discovered, until there is evidence to the contrary, eating lots of fruits and vegetables and whole grains rich in potentially protective fiber and phytochemicals should be the goal for all cancer survivors. In fact, for everyone.

Subject: Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 05:57:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/health/27canc.html?ex=1285473600&en=faa02f09bd83a2bc&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Which of These Foods Will Stop Cancer? (Not So Fast) By GINA KOLATA Leslie Michelson does not have prostate cancer, but as chief executive officer of the Prostate Cancer Foundation he knows all too well how bad the disease is. So Mr. Michelson, 54, changed his diet. He used to avoid cruciferous vegetables, like cauliflower and brussels sprouts, hating their taste. Now he has them three or four times a week. He rarely ate fish, but now has it three times a week. He eats tomato sauce at least twice a week. 'I'm persuaded that with prostate cancer, diet makes a difference,' he said. Mr. Michelson is one of a growing number of people worried about cancer - because it is in their families or because they have seen friends suffer with the disease - who are turning to diets for protection. Cancer patients, doctors say, almost always ask what to eat to reduce their chances of dying from the disease. The diet messages are everywhere: the National Cancer Institute has an 'Eat 5 to 9 a Day for Better Health' program, the numbers referring to servings of fruits and vegetables, and the Prostate Cancer Foundation has a detailed anticancer diet. Yet despite the often adamant advice, scientists say they really do not know whether dietary changes will make a difference. And there lies a quandary for today's medicine. It is turning out to be much more difficult than anyone expected to discover if diet affects cancer risk. Hypotheses abound, but convincing evidence remains elusive. Most of the proposed dietary changes are unlikely to be harmful - less meat, more fish, more fruits and vegetables and less fat. And these changes in diet may help protect against heart disease, even if they have no effect on cancer. So should people who are worried about cancer be told to follow these guidelines anyway, because they may work and will probably not hurt? Or should the people be told that the evidence just is not there, so they should not deceive themselves? Dr. Barnett Kramer, deputy director in the office of disease prevention at the National Institutes of Health, said: 'Over time, the messages on diet and cancer have been ratcheted up until they are almost co-equal with the smoking messages. I think a lot of the public is completely unaware that the strength of the message is not matched by the strength of the evidence.' But Dr. Arthur Schatzkin, chief of the nutritional epidemiology branch in the National Cancer Institute division of cancer epidemiology and genetics, said people wanted answers, even if they are not are not definitive. 'It is not enough to say that, well, this is complicated science and maybe in seven or eight years we will have new methods in place' that might resolve the issues, Dr. Schatzkin said. 'We have a responsibility to give the best advice we can while pointing out where the evidence is uncertain and how we're working to improve the science.' That, however, is little consolation to cancer patients and family members who are terrified that cancer might strike them next. And there are more and more. As the population ages, the number of cancer patients is soaring. From 1997 to 2004, the number of Americans with cancer jumped, to 9.6 million from 9.4 million. Cancer strikes one in two men and one in three women in their lifetimes. Most people want some sort of control, a way to prevent the disease from ever striking them or, if it does strike, to keep it from recurring. Many think of diet as a strategy. Cassindy Chao, 36, of Oakland, Calif., said cancer runs in her family. Her mother has ovarian cancer and her grandmother died of the disease. 'I am absolutely frantic about it,' she said. Ms. Chao has made substantial changes in her diet, for example, drinking carrot juice, loading up on green and leafy vegetables and switching to organic meats. 'Some people might want to wait for the evidence, but I've noticed it takes a while,' Ms. Chao said. 'I'm not going to wait.' Dr. Tim E. Byers, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, was convinced that up to 20 percent of cancers were being caused by diet and he wanted to be part of the exciting new research that would prove it. 'I felt we were really on the cusp of important new discoveries about food and how the right choice of foods would improve cancer risk,' Dr. Byers sad. That was 25 years ago, when the evidence was pointing to diet. For example, cross-country comparisons of cancer rates suggested a dietary influence. 'For prostate cancer, if you look around the world, there might be 50-fold or greater differences in rates; they're huge,' said Dr. Meier Stampfer, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. 'There are also big differences, many-fold differences, around the world for breast cancer and colon cancer.' And when people move from low risk countries to high risk countries, they or their children acquire the cancer rates of their new countries. At the same time, some cancers were inexplicably becoming more common or, just as inexplicably, fading away in the United States. In 1930, for instance, stomach cancer was the second leading cause of cancer death in women and the leading cause in men. Now, Dr. Stampfer says, stomach cancer is not even listed in the American Cancer Society's 10 leading cancers. 'So people think, 'What's happened in the past 70 years to make that change?' ' he said. 'Diet comes to mind.' There were also differences in diets in countries where cancer rates were high and in those with low rates. With breast cancer, for example, researchers could draw a straight line directly relating the amount of fat in the diet to the rate of breast cancer in the population. 'People looked at it and said, 'Here it is - fat causes breast cancer,' ' Dr. Stampfer said. Next came studies that compared the diets of people who developed cancer to the diets of those who did not. Those studies, Dr. Schatzkin said, tended to show that dietary fiber protected against colon cancer, that fruits and vegetables protected against colon and other cancers and that a low-fat diet protected against breast cancer. There were, of course, a few nagging questions. For example, people who had cancer might remember their diets differently. 'Whenever people get cancer, the first thing they ask is, 'Why me?' ' Dr. Stampfer said. 'And then they try to answer that question.' If colon cancer patients heard that fiber protected against colon cancer, for example, they might recall eating less fiber than people without cancer. Dr. Stampfer said evidence from one of his studies indicated that was occurring, at least with fat and breast cancer. But, he said, when he published a paper saying so, 'a lot of people didn't believe it.' The best studies are the hardest to conduct: prospective studies that that follow healthy people for years instead of looking backward and relying on memory. Even better - and harder and more expensive - are studies that randomly assign people to follow a particular diet or not. But those more difficult studies were well worth doing, researchers said. And as more studies started, scientists hoped for definitive evidence that diet affected cancer. The Fiber Theory But as the results from those studies have begun to roll in, many researchers say they are taken aback. The findings, they say, are not what they expected. Fat in the diet, the studies found, made no difference for breast cancer. 'For fat and breast cancer, almost all of the prospective studies were null,' Dr. Schatzkin said. Fiber, in the form of fruits and vegetables, seemed to have a weak effect or no effect on colon cancer. The more definitive randomized controlled trials were disappointing, too, with one exception. A study reported in May found that women with early stage breast cancer who followed a low-fat diet had a 20 percent lower risk of recurrence. Even so, the effects were just marginally statistically significant. The study's principal investigator, Dr. Rowan Chlebowski of the Harbor-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, said it needed to be repeated before scientists would be convinced. Nonetheless, the study contrasted sharply with those preceding it. Several involved beta carotene and antioxidant vitamins like C and E, substances that scientists thought were the protective agent in fruits and vegetables. The idea was that antioxidants could mop up free radicals in the body, which left unchecked could damage DNA, causing cancer. Beta carotene was of special interest. People who ate lots of fruits and vegetables had more beta carotene in their blood, and the more beta carotene in the blood, the lower the cancer risk. But a four-year study that asked whether beta carotene, with or without vitamins C and E, could protect against colon polyps, from which most colon cancers start, found no effect. People who took either beta carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E or all three had virtually identical rates of new polyps compared to participants taking dummy pills. Another study, of 22,000 doctors randomly assigned to take beta carotene or a placebo, looked for an effect on any and all cancers. It found nothing. Two more, involving current and former smokers, found that those taking beta carotene actually had slightly higher lung cancer rates than those taking placebos. Studies of fiber and colon cancer were similarly disappointing. The fiber hypothesis had enormous appeal. Carcinogens from food can end up in stool. But when people eat a lot of fiber, their stool is bulkier and so carcinogens would be diluted. Bulkier stool is also excreted faster, reducing the time that the colon is in contact with cancer-causing substances. Fiber also binds bile acids in the bowel, substances that can damage the colon and, possibly, result in cancer. And the intestines metabolize fiber into short-chain fatty acids that seemed protective against cancer. Adding to the case for fiber was the fact that when researchers fed rodents carcinogens, the animals were protected against colon cancer if they also ate a lot of fiber. Based on these indications, the cancer institute financed two studies on high-fiber diets and colon polyps. In one, 2,079 people were randomly assigned to eat low-fat high-fiber diets or to follow their usual diets. In the other, 1,429 people were assigned to eat high-fiber bran cereals or wheat bran fiber or to eat cereal and bars that looked and tasted the same but that were low on fiber. Fiber, the studies found, had no effect. 'We had high expectations and good rationale,' Dr. Schatzkin said. But, he said, 'we got absolutely null results.' Now, the largest randomized study ever of diet and cancer is nearing completion, involving 48,835 middle-age and elderly women. The women were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet with five servings a day of fruits and vegetables and two of grains or to follow their usual diet. The question was whether the experimental diet could prevent breast cancer. The study is part of the Women's Health Initiative, a large federal project. When it began, the dietary fat hypothesis was ascendant. But after it was under way, other, less definitive studies failed to find any association between dietary fat and breast cancer. The Women's Health Initiative diet study's results should be ready early next year, said its principle investigator, Ross L. Prentice, a biostatistics professor at Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. And if it fails to find an effect? Dr. Prentice said he would still wonder. Maybe what matters is diet earlier in life, he said, or maybe the women in the study did not stick to their diets. Others say they suspect they were simply na�ve about the cross-country comparisons that persuaded them in the first place. 'People drew inferences that were in retrospect overenthusiastic,' Dr. Stampfer said. 'You could plot G.N.P. against cancer and get a very similar graph, or telephone poles. Any marker of Western civilization gives you the same relationship.' Because of the striking differences in daily life between people in countries with high cancer rates and those in countries with low rates, diet may have nothing to do with the incidence of the disease, Dr. Schatzkin said. Or diet may play a large role but the questionnaires used to measure what people were eating might have been inadequate to find it. 'That's the problem.' Dr. Schatzkin said. 'We just don't know.' As for Dr. Byers, who once had such high hopes for the diet and cancer hypotheses, he says he is sadder now, but wiser. 'The progress has been different than I would have predicted,' Dr. Byers said. Specific food can affect general health, he added, but as for a major role in cancer, he doubts it. He now believes that it is the amount of food people eat, not specific foods or types of foods, that may make a difference. 'I think the truth may be that particular food choices are not as important as I thought they were,' Dr. Byers said. Individual Approaches Meanwhile, patients and those worried about cancer are adopting their own idiosyncratic dietary paths. Many know that the evidence is not solid, but they would rather take a chance that their diets will make a difference than wait helplessly for their fates to play out. That is the view of John Napolitano, a New York graphic designer and marketer. Three years ago, when he was 55, Mr. Napolitano found out that he had prostate cancer and that it had spread to his bones. Now, hoping to slow its progress, he avoids sugar and fat and almost never eats meat. He eats natural and organic foods. He drinks lots of water and green tea. He starts each day by whipping up a smoothie with a protein supplement and flaxseed. 'My diet is very different now than what it was three years ago,' Mr. Napolitano said, adding that thinks that his new diet helped. 'Until recently, I was totally symptom free,' he said. 'I can't endorse anything I'm doing, but I've never had nausea, never had constipation' from his treatments. Dr. Brad Efron, a professor of statistics at Stanford, has a different dietary approach. He does not have prostate cancer, but he had a couple of scares and he has friends who have it. So he is taking selenium, a trace mineral found in plants. A study that randomly assigned people to take selenium or not to see whether it protected against skin cancer found that it had no effect on that cancer, but that the men taking it had only a third as many prostate cancers. Now, the National Cancer Institute is conducting a study on whether selenium protects against prostate cancer. Dr. Efron chose not to wait. He even published a statistical analysis concluding that the prostate effect was likely to be real. 'One of my colleagues said, 'Why do you think something that people thought would work on skin cancer has anything to do with you?' ' he said. 'There's always a leap of faith. But I'm scared of prostate cancer and I wanted psychological reassurance.'

Subject: Implant Program for Heart Device From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 05:50:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/27/business/27heart.html?ex=1285473600&en=cdf55577e90d70d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 27, 2005 Implant Program for Heart Device Was a Sales Spur By BARRY MEIER By January, about 80 cardiologists nationwide completed an evaluation run by the Guidant Corporation of one of its products, an improved electrical component, known as a lead, that connects an implanted cardiac device to the heart. In exchange for implanting the lead in three patients and completing five survey forms, each physician received $1,000 from Guidant. 'The primary purpose of the study was to get feedback on how well the system worked,' said Dr. Wayne O. Adkisson, a cardiologist in Portsmouth, Va., who took part. The program did generate feedback. But internal Guidant documents and e-mail messages provided to The New York Times suggest that the initiative also had another apparent goal - increasing sales of the company's most sophisticated and expensive heart devices. Those devices are advanced pacemakers called cardiac resynchronization therapy devices, or C.R.T.'s. They cost about $29,000 each. The program proved so successful in increasing Guidant C.R.T. sales that when the survey ended in January, company executives sent around congratulatory e-mail messages, the records show. 'It generated 300 implants,' one January e-mail message stated. 'Let's say that just 25% were incremental ... that yields >$2 million in new sales with physicians who are not necessarily Guidant friendly. We paid each physician who completed all five surveys $1,000 so our total cost was $80,000.' In a statement, Guidant said that it ran surveys like the lead evaluation to generate data on how doctors use company products so that it could improve future models. Critics of the industry have long charged that some companies have used research studies to mask what are really marketing efforts that provide financial incentives to doctors to get them to use a new drug. Now, the Guidant documents and recent interviews suggest that the line between research and product promotion may also be blurring where heart devices are concerned. A C.R.T. regulates the beating of one side of the heart independently from the other. The Guidant lead was intended to be easier to use and to reduce the chronic hiccupping that some implant patients develop when a lead from a C.R.T. is placed too close to a nerve. The Guidant records indicate that many doctors approached by the company to take part in its lead study were not those who regularly implanted its heart devices, but rather those more apt to use the units of competitors. Though the agreement signed by doctors taking part in the lead evaluation did not explicitly require them to implant a Guidant C.R.T. along with the lead, they effectively had to do so because of software-related issues. One Guidant document is a chart that indicates that, on average, the monthly number of company C.R.T.'s implanted by physicians taking part nearly doubled during the survey period that began last September. A person professing to be a Guidant employee provided the documents to The Times. The Times provided Guidant either with copies or text from the documents. Guidant, while declining to confirm the records, did not dispute their authenticity. 'In order to respond best to the needs of patients and preferences of physicians, Guidant has sometimes utilized market research and evaluation programs of our F.D.A.-approved and -cleared products,' said Guidant. The disclosure of the records comes amid a growing controversy over how heart device manufacturers release data about product failures to doctors and patients. Since late May, Guidant has recalled tens of thousands of heart devices, and some units implanted during the survey were probably among the models affected. The two other major heart device companies, Medtronic Inc. and St. Jude Medical, also said they run product evaluation programs. All three companies said their payments to doctors for taking part in such surveys reflected reasonable compensation for a physician's time. 'Any payments made in connection with such surveys are in modest amounts,' Medtronic said in a statement. A number of physicians who participated in the Guidant evaluation said their involvement in such reviews did not influence which company's units they implanted. Still, the Guidant survey and ones like it raise questions about what doctors tell patients about any added payments they may be receiving in connection with a heart product's use, several experts said. Several doctors who took part in the Guidant survey said that they did not tell their patients about the payments they received. It is illegal under federal law in certain circumstances to provide financial benefits to doctors to induce them to use a product or service. In its statement, Guidant said that all of its research and evaluation programs 'are intended to comply with applicable laws.' Product evaluation surveys like the Guidant one are far less rigorous than a traditional clinical study of a drug or a medical device in their purpose, scientific rigor and oversight. But several heart specialists suggested in interviews that heart device makers may also be using formal post-marketing studies of devices that the Food and Drug Administration has already approved - to increase sales as they battle for market share. There is little question that many post-marketing studies of heart devices like defibrillators and pacemakers have yielded crucial data, including those that have shown patients implanted with defibrillators survive longer than patients who are treated only with drugs. A defibrillator sends out an electrical charge intended to interrupt a chaotic and often fatal type of heart rhythm. A pacemaker regulates a heart that is beating too fast or too slowly. But other post-marketing studies may yield far less data. Consider, for example, a study that St. Jude Medical is currently running. It began recruiting doctors and medical centers last October to participate in a study intended to follow for two years the health outcomes of 5,000 patients implanted with either a defibrillator or a C.R.T. with a defibrillator made by St. Jude Medical. A copy of the study's protocol shows that St. Jude Medical will pay $2,000 to doctors or medical centers for every patient. Of that amount, a doctor will get $500 when a device is implanted, with the remainder paid over a two-year period when a physician submits patient data. According to the protocol, the study, which is technically called an outcomes registry, will yield data on how different types of heart patients implanted with the St. Jude Medical devices fare over time. The Times asked four cardiologists not involved in the study to review the protocol. Two of the doctors said that the study might provide St. Jude Medical with some useful data about its device. But the other two doctors said they saw little value in it. One, Dr. Robert Rea, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic, said, 'The amount of information that can be gleaned from these kind of trials is relatively limited.' St. Jude Medical, which is based in St. Paul, said it believed that the study would produce valuable information. 'We also hope that some of the analyses from the registry will lead to additional product advancements and help us to define specific test hypotheses for future prospective, randomized clinical studies,' the company said in a statement. The company also said in its statement that study data would be given to Medicare and to the F.D.A., the latter to fulfill post-marketing study obligations imposed by the F.D.A. In order to get reimbursement, Medicare now requires doctors to submit data to a national registry it operates when they implant a defibrillator. There is nothing to suggest that doctors implanting heart devices, either in connection with clinical studies or product surveys, are doing so unnecessarily. And several doctors, including those not involved in the evaluation of the new Guidant lead, said that the component offered potential benefits. At issue is the way that electricity is conducted from an advanced pacemaker - a C.R.T. - into the heart. A C.R.T. has three leads. Each carries electrical impulses, which cycle at various rates, like, say, 60 beats a minute. But if the wire put on the heart's left ventricle is positioned too close to a nerve, the regular electrical impulse it emits can set off involuntary hiccupping. While relatively rare, the problem may require added surgery, which poses risks for the patient. The Guidant lead allows the pulsing position to be changed electronically. Dr. Marc J. Girsky, a cardiologist in Los Angeles who took part in the Guidant survey, said he believed that one purpose was to collect data on the various tests and methods that different doctors used to implant the new lead so that a uniform technique might be developed. 'It is not clear what the established technique would be,' Dr. Girsky said. Some physicians like Dr. Girsky who took part in the survey, which was known by the acronym MERITS, often used Guidant devices. But many other doctors involved did not, company records indicate. Along with the January e-mail message that refers to 'physicians who are not necessarily Guidant friendly' - an industry euphemism for doctors who are not regular customers - another Guidant e-mail message that month stated that the program was 'targeted at our 'B' customers.' A spreadsheet also shows that some doctors had implanted few, if any, Guidant C.R.T.'s before September of last year. Dr. Adkisson, the cardiologist in Virginia, was one of them. In a recent interview, he said that about 90 percent of the devices he used in recent years were Medtronic units, and that one of the two hospitals where he practiced had a contract with that company. Still, when approached by a Guidant sales representative last fall about becoming involved in the lead survey, he said he agreed because he liked doing research. 'I thought there was enough legitimacy to it to say it was O.K.,' Dr. Adkisson said. Doctors filled out one form when the survey started, one form after each of three implants and one form at the end of the survey. The questionnaires sought technical data about the lead's use as well as a doctor's subjective impressions. Dr. Adkisson said that it took him about 10 minutes to fill out each form. As technical data from the survey came into Guidant, company officials projected the impact of C.R.T.'s used by doctors in the survey on revenue, the documents indicate. C.R.T.'s are the fastest-growing and most profitable segment of the heart device industry. Both Ronald W. Dollens, the chief executive of Guidant, and J. Frederick McCoy Jr., the head of its cardiac implant unit, did not respond to written questions related to their awareness of the program In its statement, Guidant said that the data collected from the lead survey was already being put to good use. 'In an effort to be responsive to our physician customers, we take feedback from physicians regarding post-market products very seriously,' the company stated. 'Data collected were aggregated and provided to more than 30 Guidant product development engineers in June 2005.' Dr. Adkisson said last week that he had yet to see it.

Subject: Why I am Optimistic From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 15:23:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Precisely 15 of the 22 major international stock market are up over 18% in domestic currency. The strength of the dollar has been easily offset by gains in international stock prices, and there is no sign of stock market effect in countries in which real estate markets have cooled.

Subject: International Bull Market From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 15:22:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Again, while analysts fret there is a wide and deep international bull market in stocks. Every major international stock market is positive and almost all are up over 10% and many are up over 20% in domestic currencies for the year. The only markets below 10% are Ireland and Portugal, with large companies restructuring, and America, with large companies lagging.

Subject: NYT columnists From: Douglas To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:13:38 (EDT) Email Address: douglas.hinton@gmail.com Message: I afraid if we cave into the NYT payment demand other newspapers will follow, therefore I won't subscribe. Maybe there's another way to read Krugman's columns. There must be other newspapers we can access that carry NYT colunists. I know the International Hearld Tribune carries them, but they have the same payment scheme as the NYT. Does anyone know of other newspapers? Douglas

Subject: I posted part of PK's column From: Erica To: Douglas Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:34:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Uh, I just posted Krugman's latest a few posts down the thread. And I also heard that you might be able to get it from truthout.org. But I read it from Dailykos.

Subject: Re: NYT columnists From: Terri To: Douglas Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 13:45:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The way to access the New York Times is through your city or school library site. There should be access to the New York Times almost everywhere. I can gain complete access at any time though our city library.

Subject: What do you all think about this? From: Erica To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 08:05:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There are a lot of Brownies. As Time magazine puts it in its latest issue, ''Bush has gone further than most presidents to put political stalwarts in some of the most important government jobs you've never heard of.'' Time offers a couple of fresh examples, such as the former editor of a Wall Street medical-industry newsletter who now holds a crucial position at the Food and Drug Administration. A tipster urged me to look for Brownies among regional administrators for the General Services Administration, which oversees federal property and leases. There are several potential ways a position at G.S.A. could be abused. For example, an official might give a particular businessman an inside track in the purchase of government property -- the charge against David Safavian, who was recently arrested -- or give a particular landlord an inside track in renting space to federal agencies. Some of the regional administrators at G.S.A. are longtime professionals. But the regional administrator for the Northeast and Caribbean region, which includes New York, has no obvious qualifications other than being the daughter of the chairman of the Conservative Party of New York State. The regional administrator for the Southwest, appointed in 2002 after a failed bid for his father's Congressional seat, is Scott Armey, the son of Dick Armey, the former House majority leader. (Time has a five page article about Are there other Mike Browns? Anyone read it yet?) Jack Abramoff is a lobbyist who was paid huge sums by clients such as casino-owning Indian tribes and sweatshop operators on Saipan. Two Degrees of Jack Abramoff is inspired by the remarkable centrality of Mr. Abramoff, who was indicted last month on charges of fraud, in Washington's power structure. The goal isn't to find important political players who were chummy with Mr. Abramoff -- that's too easy. Instead, you have to find people linked by employment. One degree of Jack Abramoff is someone who actually worked for the lobbyist. Two degrees is a powerful Washington figure who hired someone who formerly worked for Mr. Abramoff, or who had one of his own former employees go to work for Mr. Abramoff. Grover Norquist, the powerful antitax lobbyist, is a one-degree man. Mr. Norquist was Mr. Abramoff's campaign manager when he ran for chairman of the College Republican National Committee, then became his executive director. And don't dismiss this as kid stuff: as Franklin Foer explains in The New Republic, the college Republican organization pays serious salaries and has been a steppingstone for the likes of Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Mr. Rove, by the way, is a two-degree man. He hired Susan Ralston, Mr. Abramoff's personal assistant, as his own personal assistant. For those unfamiliar with what that means, Ms. Ralston became Mr. Rove's gatekeeper -- the person who determined who got to see the great man. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is also a two-degree man. Tony Rudy, who worked for Mr. DeLay in several capacities, left to work for Mr. Abramoff. Finally, somebody should be considered a two-degree man on account of the recently arrested Mr. Safavian, who worked for both Mr. Abramoff and Mr. Norquist, then went first to the G.S.A. and on to the White House Office of Management and Budget, where he oversaw procurement policy. But I'm not sure who gets credit for hiring Mr. Safavian. Mr Krugman concludes: Something is rotten in the state of the U.S. government. And the lesson of Hurricane Katrina is that a culture of cronyism and corruption can have lethal consequences. I also heard that you may be able to link to Truthout.org for Paul's column. Anyone know if this is true?

Subject: I found this on another site From: Erica To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 08:09:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: They actually printed it in whole. I took out a couple of paragraphs. But I am posting it so it can be discussed.

Subject: Re: I found this on another site From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 14:07:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Now why don't we hear from Ron Shawger or Maureen on this article?

Subject: Re: I found this on another site From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:28:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Mik, who is Ron and Maureen?

Subject: Nevermind, Maureen and Ron are trolls From: Erica To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 16:58:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I read down the post and discovered the answer for myself. They are trolls, who for reasons of mental illness or known only to them, continue to post on a website dedicated to a man they so obviously hate. Is 'Krugman Hatred' a mental disease? I think that maybe much like 'conservatism' it is.

Subject: Suggestions From: RL To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:49:47 (EDT) Email Address: rafaelloring@yahoo.es Message: Hi bobby, I am afraid this forum will suffer greatly from NYT policy changes. Could I suggest some changes in the message board so this could still be a hot spot for comment & debate?. IMO the problem with the message board is that discussions go way down the board rapidly(specially due to Emma's prodigality of which I am very thankful by the way)and they get lost too soon. In other blogs I have seen boards working differently: as someone posts a message this goes all the way up to the beginning of the board. This ensures that debates can go on as long as they are alive, something that Haloscan board permitted here. It is possible to make changes in the message board so it works this way? thanks, RL

Subject: Re: Suggestions From: Dorian To: RL Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 02:10:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is a good idea. I second the motion. Dorian

Subject: krugman's columns From: byron To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 23:52:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns?

Subject: Re: krugman's columns From: jwood To: byron Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 10:40:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns? --- Ridiculous statements like this only give ammunition to the other side. The neocons had nothing to do with the Times finally deciding to charge for part of their newspaper's content. They are a business, it was a business decision, and their choice to make. If you don't understand that, you don't understand the democracy that you're trying to defend. There is more than enough to blame on the neocons without fabricating arguments and facts.

Subject: Re: krugman's columns From: Aniruddha G. Kulkarni To: byron Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 23:51:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess we can't read Pauls columns on this site now. The neo cons have managed to stop this also. What a bummer. Do we have to pay now to read his columns? --- Indeed. I wrote sometime ago on Delong's website that The Economist is jealous of Paul Krugman because his columns are free to read.....I retract it.....

Subject: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 18:17:23 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Costs rising on Bush's plans From Iraq to Katrina, the president's plans are putting strain on the federal budget. By Linda Feldmann WASHINGTON – Former President Clinton grumbles that he governed in 'small times.' The nation wasn't at war, and the economy roared ahead. President Bush has no such complaint. This weekend alone was all about 'big-time' events: the second massive storm in a month to hit the Gulf Coast, and the largest demonstration against the Iraq war since the US-led invasion 2-1/2 years ago. Mr. Bush missed seeing tens of thousands of protesters streaming past the White House because he was positioned at the US Northern Command headquarters in Colorado, from which he monitored the federal response to hurricane Rita. If nothing else, Bush's nearly five years in office have been marked by 'bigness.' A stream of historic events - some of the president's own making, some not - have resulted in massive federal spending. On top of that, add the agenda he brought to the table on that first Inauguration Day that seems to be growing only larger. Some items, like Social Security and tax reform, have been delayed, but nothing has been removed from the wish list altogether. Even immigration reform, controversial within Bush's own party, is still on the table. 'He is trying to have a very significant presidency at virtually any cost,' says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia. 'The cost includes the Republicans' reputation for fiscal conservatism. That's dead - and it may be dead for a generation.' When hurricane Katrina hit in late August, wreaking devastation along the Gulf Coast, Bush promised to do 'whatever it takes' to rebuild; Congress has obliged by approving all spending proposed thus far. The White House insists that this spending will be paid for by cuts elsewhere in the budget, but officials have yet to suggest specifics. Bush does not have the excuse of a Congress controlled by the opposing party, forcing his hand by passing big-spending legislation, analysts say. When the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive highway bill this summer that will cost $286 billion over six years - at many billions of dollars over Bush's stated limit - he signed the legislation anyway. Now suggestions that the bill's 'pork' - such as a $223 million bridge in Alaska connecting two isolated areas - be sliced out have been rejected by the Republican congressional leadership. The White House, too, has rejected a proposal to delay implementation of the extensive new prescription0drug plan for seniors that will take effect in January. Deficit hawks have begun filling the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal with Katrina-induced outrage over Bush and other elected Republicans' spending habits. 'George W. Bush is a big spender,' wrote Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's former speechwriter, on Sept. 22. 'He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?' Former Club for Growth head Stephen Moore, in a Sept. 19 column called 'Welcome to the GOP's New Deal,' complains that 'both parties are now willing and eager to spend tax dollars as if they were passing out goody-bags to grabby four-year-olds at a birthday party.' Mr. Moore also refers to an 'enraged' grass roots of the party over the ballooning deficit. But as long as the president's job approval rating hovers in the low 40s, his political advisers can argue that he has preserved the support of his base, at least. Historically, the image of Republicans as the party of small government has not tended to play out in practice. 'Republicans rhetorically oppose big spending, but have seldom opposed it in practice,' says Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College in California formerly involved in Republican politics. 'Ronald Reagan came to office hinting he might eliminate cabinet departments and ended up adding one: the Department of Veterans Affairs. Republicans are no strangers to big government.' Eventually, politicians will feel some pressure to address the deficit because the economic consequences will be painful, but in the short run there will be more pressure to spend on disaster relief, Professor Pitney adds. At heart, Bush's pledge to do 'whatever it takes' in the wake of Katrina may be linked to his party's broader goal of expanding outreach to minorities. In Louisiana, poor African-Americans who did not evacuate were particularly hard hit by the storm. Since becoming chairman of the Republican Party in February, Ken Mehlman had been traveling the country, addressing black and Hispanic audiences. This represents a continuation of a longstanding plan to boost the party's minority ranks, an effort that bore some fruit in the 2004 elections. Karl Rove, Bush's top political adviser, has also kept his eye on minority politics, even amid the latest crises. He has been bringing groups of lawmakers into the White House to promote the administration's proposal for a temporary guest worker program. The plan is controversial, because it would grant temporary legal status to illegal workers. But the White House reportedly argues that such a program could build support among Hispanics in this country, now the largest minority group. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0926/p01s01-usec.html

Subject: Re: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Pete Weis To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 08:59:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: ''George W. Bush is a big spender,' wrote Peggy Noonan, President Reagan's former speechwriter, on Sept. 22. 'He has never vetoed a spending bill. When Congress serves up a big slab of fat, crackling pork, Mr. Bush responds with one big question: Got any barbecue sauce?'' George W is merely carrying on the Reagan tradition - I believe the federal deficit increased something like 8 fold during the Reagan years. Even with the large payroll tax hikes under Reagan, much of which were spent on defense (the 600 ship Navy, etc.), the deficit soared!! Reagan had a love affair with Congress and gave them all their 'pork' as long as they gave him all of his defense spending. George W is a big spender without question, but to hear Reagan administration folks try to label him such is a bit ironic.

Subject: Re: La folie des grandeurs (Part e^X) From: Emma To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:39:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Agreed. We are in deficit trouble, but there is no reason the trouble will appear for years to come. We cannot know about timing.

Subject: CASINO GAMBLING : CLICK HERE From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 18:05:31 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: PHILIP VERLEGER America surfers as Bush's gamble fails to pay off After his 1964 landslide election, President Lyndon Johnson gambled that the US economy could support a war and his Great Society programme. He lost. The expenditures exceeded economic capacity. Shortages occurred, prices rose, and a 15-year inflationary spiral began. Within two years, the Federal Reserve had to intervene by raising interest rates. Economic growth stopped and harsh economic conditions brought an end to Johnson's dreams. Forty years later, another president from Texas made another wager: betting the US could fight a war, reduce taxes and avoid conserving energy. He also lost. Over the next two years, President George W. Bush will see inflation return and the Federal Reserve Board act to offset his profligate energy and fiscal policies. Johnson's hope that the US economy could sustain the Vietnam war and domestic economic expansion ended when US industry failed to meet military and civilian demands. Unfinished aeroplanes sat waiting for galleys and other gear needed to complete them. Homes stood unfinished as builders waited for lumber, plumbing and other finishings. Prices rose. The Federal Reserve took matters into its own hands when Congress refused to reduce the growing deficit. In 1969, as they made way for the incoming Nixon administration, Johnson's departing economic advisers noted ruefully: 'In the absence of a full measure of timely fiscal restraint, an undue share of the burden of dampening the excessive expansion fell on monetary policy.' Today, President Bush is in a similar situation. He and his advisers also gambled, although in a different game. Johnson tried to provide guns and butter without raising taxes. George Bush tried to serve up large tax cuts without reducing spending or addressing the nation's rapacious thirst for motor fuels, particularly gasoline. The Bush wager failed when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed a large part of the US Gulf coast. The storm put additional strain on an economy operating near capacity, while simultaneously closing part of the nation's petroleum refining and natural gas industries. The extensive damage has forced the government to enact large spending increases to rebuild communities and support displaced individuals. This is a classic Keynesian stimulus package. Given the state of the business cycle, inflation can be expected to rise even without offsetting reductions in government outlays. The huge rebuilding requirements will send prices up and create shortages for materials, capital equipment and critical labour resources. Home builders already report a wide scarcity of plywood. The loss of natural gas supplies adds to inflationary pressures. Katrina and Rita destroyed perhaps 5 per cent of the nation's natural gas supply, causing large price increases. Heating bills could double this winter. Furthermore, the cost of goods manufactured using natural gas, such as PVC pipe, will climb sharply even before rebuilding efforts boost demand. The economic stimulus will also put pressure on petroleum markets. The economic spur from reconstruction will heighten gasoline and diesel demand. But the increase cannot be met because of storm damage to US refineries. Thus, Katrina and Rita will leave a legacy of much higher gasoline and diesel prices in 2006. These price hikes could have been avoided had we pursued a programme to limit increases in motor fuel consumption. Here, too, George Bush made a bet. Efforts to tighten fuel economy standards for new vehicles were rejected when his energy programme was introduced and Congress refused to change it. The president declined to push a gasoline tax following 9/11. He wagered that an already stretched refining industry could meet mounting gasoline demand, which is largely linked to American affinity for large SUVs and trucks. The president and his advisers understood that the higher demand would require US refineries to operate at maximum capacity. They knew no new refineries were being built. They also knew no new offshore facilities capable of meeting EPA standards had been constructed. Not until this summer, after months of the industry operating flat out, did they realise new capacity was necessary. The president lost this gamble as well when the two hurricanes hit the Gulf coast, taking a severe toll on the refining industry. It may take a year or more to bring it back to its pre-Katrina state. Until then, supply will be lower and prices much higher. Although the calculations are hard to believe, econometric models suggest retail gasoline prices might need to double by next summer to maintain market balance. The price rise will add to inflation. There is only one end to this scenario: higher interest rates. A vigilant Federal Reserve Board will have to boost rates to suppress demand, just as during the Johnson administration. The pressure for higher rates will be even greater given the forthcoming retirement of Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman. His replacement will need to convince financial markets that the Board remains determined to keep inflation in check. The consequences will be a slowdown or worse. As the rebuilding effort slows, high interest rates and high gasoline prices may pull the economy into recession. Like President Johnson, President Bush took a chance and lost. The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics FT Monday September 26 2005

Subject: Celebrating Shaw, a Serious Optimist From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 14:24:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/theater/newsandfeatures/16shaw.html?ex=1284523200&en=4278b5a0c2b56bc7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 16, 2005 Celebrating Shaw, a Serious Optimist By BEN BRANTLEY THE old man is never going to shut up, so we might as well let him into the conversation once again. After all, it's not as if the subjects that raise middle-class hackles have changed so very much in the 55 years since George Bernard Shaw died, leaving mountains of plays (more than 50, and their prefaces and postscripts) and essays and pamphlets and treatises and letters and reviews to rumble on in an ardent and exasperated eternity. Consider intelligent design, the God-incorporating alternative to Darwinism that is such a hot-button topic among scientists, theologians, educators and anxious parents of schoolchildren these days. Now, the Irish-born Shaw - whose exceptionally long and fecund career as a center of London theatrical and political life is being celebrated beginning tomorrow in a festival of talks, readings and performances at the New York Public Library, titled 'Man or Superman?' - devoted rivers of ink to expounding his personal variation on the theory of natural selection. It was called creative evolution, a name that sounds a lot like intelligent design, don't you think? Still, proponents of that theory probably don't want to hitch their wagons to Shaw's venerable star. While he had some problems with the biological randomness of Darwin, Shaw also pretty much eliminated God from the equation of how human life develops. Creative evolution, put forth in jovial but dead serious dramatic terms in Shaw's play 'Man and Superman' (published in 1903; first performed in 1905), is based on an ever upwardly striving phenomenon called the life force, which propels us away from our inconvenient bodily impulses and toward a state of pure cerebration. The life force, by the way, is transmitted by rare, world-shaking men of genius, 'selected by Nature to carry on the work of building up an intellectual consciousness of her instinctive purpose.' In other words, men like Jesus, Julius Caesar, John Bunyan, Napoleon, Goethe, Wagner and - but, of course - George Bernard Shaw. Shakespeare, by the way, almost doesn't qualify by Shavian standards (too pessimistic), but for a while there it looked as if Hitler and Stalin might. Here is Shaw's alter ego in 'Man and Superman,' an asexual variation on that immortal rake Don Juan, on why he thinks religion is 'a mere excuse for laziness': 'It had set up a God who looked at the world and saw that it was good, against the instinct in me that looked through my eyes at the world and saw that it could be improved.' And improvement of the species - which involved setting fire to rotting, imprisoning conventions and throwing cold water on smug faces - was always the first purpose of Shaw's plays. 'It should be clear now that Shaw is a terrorist,' wrote Bertolt Brecht, who knew from guerrilla theater. The critic Kenneth Tynan described Shaw as 'the demolition expert.' New York City felt its first full blast of Shavian dynamite a century ago, when 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' opened on Oct. 30, 1905, at the Garrick Theater. (Its centenary is the occasion for the festival at the library, which features a reading of the play, starring Dana Ivey, on Oct. 24.) Up to that point, Shaw's plays, which had been seldom staged in London, had been enjoying cautious but intrigued acceptance in the United States. His 'Devil's Disciple' (1897), set during the American Revolution, had been a popular vehicle for the matinee idol Richard Mansfield, affording Shaw his first taste of commercial success. And 'Man and Superman,' which had opened earlier in 1905, aroused enough excitement to have its script placed on the restricted list by the New York Public Library, lest it infect young minds with its unorthodox views of God and matrimony. 'Illuminated Gangrene' But the slings and arrows of Superman were but feathers compared to the full-frontal assault of Mrs. Warren, whose profession was prostitution. Ladies of the evening had walked Broadway's stages before, but they had previously always paid for their trade with either their lives or orgies of Magdalenish repentance. Mrs. Warren made no apology for her métier, which she pragmatically saw as a product and necessity of her time and civilization. Even worse, one of her former clients turned out to be a clergyman, who didn't act very penitent, either, just muddled and embarrassed. And the play dared to flirt with the possibility of incest between Mrs. Warren's daughter and men who may or may not have been her father or brother. Having run for one night in New Haven, where it was immediately banned, 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' opened on Broadway to a sold-out audience (whose members had paid as much as $40 per scalped ticket), with 2,000 to 3,000 people turned away at the door. The police closed down the show, citing the entire cast for 'disorderly conduct.' 'Shaw's Play Unfit; The Critics Unanimous,' announced the headline of an article in The New York Times, which featured the subhead, 'A Performance About as Elevating as a Post-Mortem.' Another newspaper, The American, described the play as 'illuminated gangrene.' As Shaw, with the satisfaction of a man who always understood that no publicity was bad publicity, later wrote of the press coverage, 'They infected each other with their hysteria until they were for all practical purposes indecently mad.' Provocateur Par Excellence Within the sound and fury, though, cooler critical voices were leveling charges that, to an artist, were far more damning: 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' was a bore. 'Little more than a tract on the social evil,' wrote the critic in The New York Sun. When the play was restaged a year later (its producer and cast had been acquitted of disorderly conduct), it came and went quietly, and Theater Magazine dismissed it with a contemptuous yawn as 'a dull, uninteresting play.' This progression from titillated fascination to watch-checking ennui is not entirely atypical of first-time Shaw readers and theatergoers. Shaw was cutting a calculated, irresistibly dangerous figure as a firebrand critic, polemicist and soapbox orator long before his plays were first produced in London. It was a fire-breathing persona, stoked over seven decades, that expected, nay demanded, to be caricatured: 'the Celebrated G.B.S.,' as he put it, 'about as real as a pantomime ostrich.' So fierce and inventive a self-publicist that Donald Trump looks like a piker by comparison, Shaw guaranteed that this zoo creature of a reputation would always precede his actual works. And thus it has been, even to this day. However tame early scandal-making plays like 'Widowers' Houses' (1892), 'The Philanderer' (1893), 'Man and Superman' and 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' may seem today, they still give off a faint whiff of notoriety, like a cloud of dried powder from an ancient courtesan's face. No one expects to be shocked by Shaw anymore, but there's always the hope that he'll once again prove himself the provocateur par excellence, as well as a master practitioner of flashing wit. The opening minutes of any decent Shaw production confirm this promise. The dialogue is so fleet, so barbed, so sure of itself in its rippling musicality; the characters so brisk and ornery. You feel as if you've found yourself in a room with the greatest conversationalist of all time. But then the talk continues, and continues, and continues without cease, demonstrating Shaw's first rule to producers of his plays: 'There must never be a moment of silence from the rise of the curtain to its fall.' And suddenly the experience seems to have become less like having tea with a charming epigrammist than being locked in a padded cell with a mad lecturer. Man Versus His Environment But often, just as you're about to scream for deliverance, you're hooked again by a U-turn in sentiment or argument or character. An animated lecture becomes, if only temporarily, a breathing work of art. It's the exhilarating effect of a writer's own intelligence turning on itself, giving rise, as the Bloomsbury critic Desmond MacCarthy wrote, to the dizzying sensation of witnessing a conflict 'between two religions in one mind.' Shaw, in his preface to 'Mrs. Warren's Profession,' might have stated a bit tediously that drama is 'no mere setting up of the camera to nature,' but 'the presentation in parable of the conflict between Man's will and his environment.' But it's when something like spontaneous nature - dares one call it the life force? - creeps in under the barbed wire of parable that Shaw becomes exciting. That was certainly my impression when I saw 'Mrs. Warren's Profession' in London a few years ago. The director, Sir Peter Hall, had taken pains to remind the audience that this was once a work of scalding relevance, with Shavian quotes and historical notes projected on a drop curtain. Even with a vivacious Brenda Blethyn in the title role, what followed looked like a shooting gallery of corrupt societal archetypes. But in the midst of the painted cardboard was an unmistakably blooming presence, a vibrant, faintly outrageous character. Her name was Vivie Warren, the grown daughter of Mrs. Warren, who abruptly learns of her mother's past and goes through upheavals of moral reckoning. As played by Rebecca Hall, the daughter of Sir Peter, in her professional debut, Vivie pulsed with the sense of a mind discovering its own purpose. As Vivie recoiled from, accepted and finally rejected her mother and all she stood for, she came to seem like a cobweb-clearing breeze in a stale, close room. Embodied by Ms. Hall with both the first-blush freshness and judgmental absolutism of youth, Vivie became Shaw's iconoclastic spirit made formidable but definitely human flesh. Here was a cousin to one of Shaw's literary heroines, the Nora who slammed the door in Ibsen's 'Doll's House.' Woman, Hear Her Roar It is indeed often a woman who provides the oxygen in Shaw's hermetically sealed worlds of words. Shavian heroes tend to be passive prigs, but his Mephistophelean men have been incarnated with deliciously dry elegance by a cavalcade of notable actors: Charles Laughton, Robert Morley, Philip Bosco and David Warren as Andrew Undershaft, the Jesuitical arms merchant in 'Major Barbara'; Maurice Evans and Laurence Olivier as the blissfully cynical General Burgoyne in 'The Devil's Disciple'; and, of course, Leslie Howard, Rex Harrison and Peter O'Toole in 'Pygmalion' and its handsome musical offspring, 'My Fair Lady.' But it is the self-assertive, protofeminist, sexually predatory Woman, who earns her capital W, who is most responsible for wrenching Shaw's plays off the speaker's podium. 'No male writer born in the 19th century outside Norway and Sweden did more to knock Woman off her pedestal and plant her on the solid earth than I,' said Shaw, with a respectful nod to Ibsen and Strindberg. That solid earth, however, is usually on a mountaintop. Shaw regarded the sexual vitality of women - nature's vehicles, after all, for passing on the life force - with a mix of adoration and terror that made them monumental. Like his own Henry Higgins with Eliza Doolittle, Shaw couldn't quite control his female characters once he set them on their paths to glory. Played by the right performers, they vibrate, radiate and crush the mere men in their paths. Hence actresses have gravitated hungrily to Eliza, from Mrs. Patrick Campbell (for whom Shaw wrote the part) to Lynn Fontanne and Wendy Hiller. The serenely, sagely passive-aggressive title character of 'Candida' has been catnip for actresses of a certain age, including Peggy Wood, Katherine Cornell, Olivia de Havilland and Joanne Woodward. Then, of course, there is that paragon of theatrical incandescence, Saint Joan, who has been taken up by Sybil Thorndike, Cornell, Uta Hagen, Siobhan McKenna and Lynn Redgrave. Joan is not, to tell the truth, a favorite of mine. There's not much variety in her, since all she has to do is glow and speak bluntly. A luminous, transcendent rebuke to the worldly, short-sighted figures who debate her fate and condemn her, Joan embodies what G. K. Chesterton saw as Shaw's greatest attribute, 'a serious optimism - even a tragic optimism.' Art as Corrective That willed optimism, in a world that older offered little reason for hope as Shaw grew older, may be endearing. But its corollary was an insistence on art as corrective that limited Shaw even more than his compulsive chattiness. He was impatient with the man who he conceded was the greatest English playwright after himself. 'The truth is,' he wrote, 'the world was to Shakespeare a great 'stage of fools' on which he was utterly bewildered. He could see no sort of sense in living.' Shakespeare's pessimism, he concluded disapprovingly, 'is only his wounded humanity.' Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, a time of stunted optimism, the Shaw play that seems to speak most eloquently to audiences is the one he wrote when his faith in humanity was at its lowest. That's 'Heartbreak House' (published, 1919; first produced, 1920), Shaw's despairing account of a suicidal Europe on the brink of World War I. Intended as a homage to Chekhov, it turns into a strangely surreal portrait of a group of illusion-swapping, illusion-shattering aristocrats marking time in a country house on the eve of their own extinction. They do not so much live in their home, as one character says, as haunt it, and what they haunt is 'this soul's prison we call England.' When bombs fall at the play's end, in a ravishing spectacle of light, they are greeted with relief and exultation. The characters in 'Heartbreak House' are typically Shavian in their wit and jeweled speechifying. But for once, there is no redemption in words. And while Shaw wrote brilliantly articulate letters throughout his life, none, perhaps, are as moving as one in which he recognized that there were some subjects that language cannot accommodate. 'I can't be sympathetic; these things simply make me furious,' he wrote to Campbell, on hearing that her son had been killed in 1918 by the last shell from a German battery. 'Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN DAMN! And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!'

Subject: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Norman Bauman To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 13:26:43 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: If you're in New York City, you can easily read Krugman's columns on-line free. Go to the New York Public Library web site http://www.nypl.org/ Go to the Gale newspaper collection http://infotrac.galegroup.com/itweb/nysl_me_tnypl?db=SP02 Type in the barcode on your library card (you need a library card) Go to the Advanced Search tab (which I prefer) Select 'Krugman' for author and 'New York Times' for newspaper. This will list all of Krugman's columns, although a day or two late. Today (Monday), it listed the Friday column. Click on 'Full Text' and you get: Krugman, Paul. 'The Big Uneasy.(Editorial Desk).' The New York Times (Sept 23, 2005): A19(L). Custom Newspapers. Thomson Gale. New York Public Library. 26 September 2005 . Full Text : COPYRIGHT 2005 The New York Times Company Although Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, the damage to America's economic infrastructure actually fell short of early predictions. Of course, Rita may make up for that. But Katrina did more than physical damage; it was a blow to our self-image as a nation. Maybe people will quickly forget the horrible scenes from the Superdome, and the frustration of wondering why no help had arrived, once cable TV returns to nonstop coverage of missing white women. But my guess is that Katrina's shock to our sense of ourselves will persist for years. You should even be able to click on that long url and go directly to the column -- after you type in your NYPL library card bar code. http://find.galegroup.com/itx/infomark.do?&type=retrieve&tabID=T003&prodId=SPN.SP02&docId=A136529155&source=gale&srcprod=SP02&userGroupName=nysl_me_tnypl&version=1.0 Actually it's only 'free' in the sense that libraries are free. You're paying for it, with your tax money, the NYPL is paying for it, New York State is paying for it, and the NYT is getting paid for it, from Gale Thompson, so the NYT has no complaints. Take advantage of it. It's yours. This should also work for library cards from any other cities that subscribe to this standard library package. (The only problem is that I haven't been able to find the NYT Magazine articles in this database.) My apologies if those URLs have glitches. I'll leave it to you to philosophize about the benefits of government. Norman

Subject: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Dorian To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 02:06:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I have access to the Gale database but I cannot figure out how to use it. I've followed your instructions,i.e, put Krugman in the 'author' search and New York Times in the journal. I've even limited it by 'after August 1st'. But when I check 'full text' I get nothing. When I leave it unchecked, I get a million references but no Krugman columns. Any further advice? Apparently I have access to the same database as you, I just can't seem to get the same results. I suppose I could go to my library and ask the reference librarian to guide me through it. In fact, that's probably the best idea, now that I think of it. Thanks for the suggestion. Dorian PSMP0003844493

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Emma To: Dorian Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 09:36:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Once you have traced through the path to TimesSelect through the public library simply log on and all the New York Times and TimesSelect resources are there for us. Bookmark the path and there will be no problem from then.

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Jeff in China To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 11:44:55 (EDT) Email Address: harpedc@hotmail.com Message: I did a search to find you guys, this is my first post but I've been around all week. I live overseas and am not inclined to pay for the NYT Select. Why don't you guys discreetly collect email addresses of people interested in Paul's articles and quietly forward them? I certainly wouldn't mind getting certain spam from this site. I left mine.

Subject: Re: Re/ accessing Krugman's columns from library From: Terri To: Jeff in China Date Posted: Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 14:07:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Simply get a library card from your home city, and log on to the NYTimes site from the library access. Ask someone in your family to register you at the library.

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Mik To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:24:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Oh fudge... and there I was thinking I could get his articles.... uhmm anyone have a NY library card number they'd be prepared to share with a Torontonian?

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Norman Bauman To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 20:38:13 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: The Toronto Public Library has Thompson Gale publications for its patrons on its web site. See if they have the NYT. Ask your librarian. The Kansas City Star has Krugman's columns, but only one a week. I couldn't find any newspaper on Google News that carries every one of Krugman's columns and is free on line.

Subject: Re: Krugman NYT columns are free legally From: Mik To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 12:02:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I was just thinking about that. Very good idea. Thanks.

Subject: Loving Libraries From: Emma To: Norman Bauman Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 14:15:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thank you so much. Libraries are truly precious, and being able to access the library from home or office is wonderful. I have our library site bookmarked. NYTimes magazine articles should generally be readable directly from the NYTimes website.

Subject: Integrating Schools by Income From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:43:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/education/25raleigh.html?ex=1285300800&en=ffa874e3998a590a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 25, 2005 Integrating Schools by Income Is Cited as a Success in Raleigh By ALAN FINDER RALEIGH, N.C. - Over the last decade, black and Hispanic students here in Wake County have made such dramatic strides in standardized reading and math tests that it has caught the attention of education experts around the country. School officials in Wake County, which includes Raleigh and its sprawling suburbs, have tried many tactics to improve student performance. Teachers get state bonuses when their schools make significant progress in standardized tests, and the district uses sophisticated data gathering to identify, and respond to, students' weaknesses. But the prime reason for the students' dramatic improvement, officials and parents say, is that the district has made a concerted effort to integrate the schools economically. Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent. The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans. In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago. Some of the strategies used in Wake County could be replicated across the country, the experts said, but they also cautioned that unusual circumstances have helped make the politically delicate task of economic integration possible here. The school district is countywide, which makes it far easier to combine students from the city and suburbs. The county has a 30-year history of busing students for racial integration, and many parents and students are accustomed to long bus rides to distant schools. The local economy is robust, and the district is growing rapidly. And corporate leaders and newspaper editorial pages here have firmly supported economic diversity in the schools. Some experts said the academic results in Wake County were particularly significant because they bolstered research that showed low-income students did best when they attended middle-class schools. 'Low-income students who have an opportunity to go to middle-class schools are surrounded by peers who have bigger dreams and who are more academically engaged,' said Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation who has written about economic integration in schools. 'They are surrounded by parents who are more likely to be active in the school. And they are taught by teachers who more likely are highly qualified than the teachers in low-income schools.' To achieve a balance of low- and middle-income children in every school, the Wake County school district encourages and sometimes requires students to attend schools far from home. Suburban students are drawn to magnet schools in the city. Low-income children from the city are bused to middle-class schools in the suburbs. Some parents chafe at the length of their children's bus rides or at what they see as social engineering. But the test results are hard to dispute, proponents of economic integration say, as is the broad appeal of the school district, which has been growing by 5,000 students a year. 'What I say to parents is, 'Here is what you should hold me accountable for: at the end of that bus ride, are we providing a quality education for your child?' ' Bill McNeal, the school superintendent, said. Asked how parents respond, Mr. McNeal said, 'They are coming back, and they are bringing their friends.' Not everyone supports the strategy, of course. Some parents deeply oppose mandatory assignments to schools. Every winter, the district, using a complicated formula, develops a list of students who will be reassigned to new schools for the following academic year, and nearly every year some parents object vehemently. 'Kids are bused all over creation, and they say it's for economic diversity, but really it's a proxy for race,' said Cynthia Matson, who is white and middle class. She is the president and a founder of Assignment By Choice, an advocacy group promoting parental choice. The organization wants parents to be responsible for selecting schools, and it objects to restrictions that, in certain circumstances, make it difficult for some middle-class children to get into magnet schools. 'If a parent wants their kid bused, then let them make the choice,' Mrs. Matson said. 'But don't force parents to have their kids bused across town to go to a school that they don't want to go to.' Supporters of economic integration contend that the county offers parents many choices but that the school district needs the discretion to assign some children to schools to avoid large concentrations of poor children. 'I believe in choice as much as anyone,' Mr. McNeal said. 'However, I can't let choice erode our ability to provide quality programs and quality teaching.' The board of education had two motives when it decided to make economic integration a main element in the district's strategy: board members feared that the county's three-decade effort to integrate public schools racially would be found unconstitutional if challenged in the federal courts, and they took note of numerous studies that showed the academic benefits of economically diversifying schools. 'There is a lot of evidence that it's just sound educational policy, sound public policy, to try to avoid concentrations of low-achieving students,' said John H. Gilbert, a professor emeritus at North Carolina State University in Raleigh who served for 16 years on the county school board and voted for the plan. 'They do much better and advantaged students are not hurt by it if you follow policies that avoid concentrating low-achievement students.' One sign of the success of the Wake County plan, Mr. Gilbert said, is that residential property values in Raleigh have remained high, as have those in the suburbs. 'The economy is really saying something about the effort in the city,' he said. About 27 percent of the county's students are low-income, a proportion that has increased slightly in recent years. While many are black and Hispanic, about 15 percent of the low-income students are white. Moreover, more than 40 percent of the district's black students are working- and middle-class, and not poor. Wake County has used many strategies to limit the proportion of low-income students in schools to 40 percent. For example, magnet schools lure many suburban parents to the city. Betty Trevino lives in Fuquay-Varina, a town in southern Wake County. Ms. Trevino drives her son, Eric, 5, to and from the Joyner Elementary School, where he goes to kindergarten. Students are taught in English and Spanish, and global themes are emphasized at the school, which is north of downtown Raleigh, more than 20 miles from the Trevinos' home. With traffic, the trip takes 45 minutes each way. 'I think it works,' she said of her drive halfway across the county, 'because it's such a good school.' Many low-income children are bused to suburban schools. While some of their parents are unhappy with the length of the rides, some also said they were happy with their child's school. 'I think it's ridiculous,' LaToya Mangum said of the 55 minutes that her son Gabriel, 7, spends riding a bus to the northern reaches of Wake County, where he is in second grade. On the other hand, she said, 'So far, I do like the school.' The neighborhood school has been redefined, with complex logistics and attendance maps that can resemble madly gerrymandered Congressional districts. The Swift Creek Elementary School, in southwest Raleigh near the city line, draws most of its students from within two miles of the school, in both the city and suburbs. But students also come to Swift Creek from four widely scattered areas in low-income sections of south and southeastern Raleigh; some live 6 to 8 miles from the school, while others are as far as 12 miles away. Ela Browder lives in Cary, an affluent, sprawling suburb, but each morning she puts her 6-year-old son, Michael, on a bus for a short ride across the city line to Swift Creek. 'We're very happy with the school,' Ms. Browder said. 'The children are very enriched by it. I think it's the best of both worlds.' Of the county's 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district's data. Some are only a few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher. The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools. Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent - or about 3,000 children - are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district's growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones. Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said, mirroring the pattern of busing for racial integration in which black students were sent to white schools. A school board election will take place in October. While the board has continued to endorse economic integration, some supporters worry that that could change one day. 'It's not easy and it can be very contentious in the community,' said Walter C. Sherlin, who retired two years ago as an associate superintendent. 'Is it worth doing? Look at 91 percent at or above grade level. Look at 139 schools, all of them successful. I think the answer is obvious.'

Subject: At Google, Workers Are Placing Bets From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:34:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/26/business/26google.html?ex=1285387200&en=c171e8934faa7fc1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 26, 2005 At Google, the Workers Are Placing Their Bets By IAN AUSTEN Like all search engines, Google helps people sort through information from the past. But a new service, being used inside the company, tries to forecast the future. Google has created a predictive market system, basically a way for its employees to bet on the likelihood of possible events. Such markets have long been used to predict world events, like election results. Intrade, part of the Trade Exchange Network, allows people to bet on elections, stock market indexes and even the weather, for example. In Google's system, employees can bet on how the company will perform in the future, forecasting things like product introduction dates and new office openings. It was devised under a program that allows engineers to spend one day a week on a project of their choice. To help develop the system, Google consulted Hal R. Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Varian (who also writes the Economic Scene column for The New York Times) said that the final product was not entirely what he anticipated. 'I was a little surprised,' Professor Varian said. 'I expected this to be accurate because there's a lot of literature and experience with these systems. But this has been even better than I expected.' Google has not offered precise data on the system's accuracy, but a chart posted on the company's blog last week showed that, in the words of its accompanying entry, prices set for events through employees' wagering were a 'pretty close' indication of the probability of events. The market is based on the idea that a price established for an event will reflect bettors' consensus of the likelihood that it will happen. Thus, something priced at 20 cents should happen 20 percent of the time. The system accepts bets in 10-cent increments up to a dollar (no actual money is involved). On its blog, Google compares the market to its search engine software. 'Our search engine works well because it aggregates information dispersed across the Web, and our internal predictive markets are based on the same principle: Googlers from across the company contribute knowledge and opinions which are aggregated into a forecast by the market,' the blog said. Professor Varian, who has consulted with Google on other projects, attributes the higher-than-expected levels of accuracy to the large number of employees participating. In general, the higher the number of bettors in such systems, the better the predictions. There is one issue, however, for which Google's market offers no prediction. 'It's a fun thing,' said Professor Varian. 'Now one of the things we're thinking about is what to do with it.'

Subject: Times password From: Tina Eden To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:21:55 (EDT) Email Address: tinamh23@hotmail.com Message: Hi Bobby and thanks for doing all you can to keep this site going. Is it possible to simply cut and paste PK's columns in the usual place so we can continue reading and commenting as before? People cut and paste articles for one another all the time and send them via emails...is a website so much different? Tina Eden

Subject: Krugman From: C Selby To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 09:37:07 (EDT) Email Address: wolf10539@netscape.net Message: Well - I guess I'll get my Krugman articles from the newspaper from now on. Can't believe we are supposed to pay to read an article.

Subject: TimesSelect From: Emma To: C Selby Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:16:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Those who subscribe to the New York Times have free access to all of TimesSelect, otherwise a subscription may well be called for.

Subject: Re: Bobby, there may be another way From: Erica To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:30:55 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, Over at DKos, a diarist took excerts of PK's column (very large passages, almost the whole thing) and made comments on them between the passages. It was all done in the name of blogging. It would seem to me that in your column section, which you could change to blog section, you could almost do the same thing. I mean people use huge chunks of newspaper articles all the time in order to comment on them. So why can't you do the same thing? I mean, you could leave out say a paragraph or two, and technically you wouldn't be posting the whole article. But I would imagine that if you purchase the article, it's yours. And if you wish to blog on it and share it with your readers, who's to say that's wrong? I mean, how can you intelligently discuss something that your readers are unaware of????? If it worked over at Dailykos, why won't that work here?

Subject: Excerpts From: Emma To: Erica Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:37:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excerpts from the restricted sections of the Wall Street Journal and Economist and Financial Times and New Yorker and New York Review of Books... are readily used.

Subject: Re: Excerpts From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:22:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: When you copy from one source it is called plagiarism. When you copy from a few sources it is called research.... go figure. Now for people like me living in Canada... coming across his articles won't be as easy. And I'm not particularly prepared to pay for the entire NY Times just to read his article.

Subject: Re:It's not plagarism From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 07:52:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It's not plagarism unless you claim the work is yours. You can blog the column by excerpting huge chunks of it.

Subject: Re: Excerpts From: derek To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 17:23:07 (EDT) Email Address: zandor2020@yahoo.com Message: I do not have the money to read only krugman so this will be the end. any success with the library access for those who live far away from new york? Krugman has been an oasis of sanity during the last few years of moronic cognitive dissoance supporting the chimp in chief.

Subject: Is It Better to Buy or Rent? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 08:35:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25cov.html?ex=1285300800&en=64f665177066bc85&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 25, 2005 Is It Better to Buy or Rent? By DAVID LEONHARDT THE thought has occurred to just about everybody who owns a home in a hot housing market: maybe it's time to cash out. The hard part is figuring out how to do so. Only a few families can actually pick up their life in, say, California and move it to Nebraska. The other option - renting - has long been derided as the equivalent of throwing money away. But renting might deserve another look right now. After five years in which rents have barely budged while house prices in New York, Washington, Los Angeles and elsewhere have doubled, renting has become a surprisingly smart option for many people who never would have considered it before. Owning a home often ties up hundreds of thousands of dollars that might be invested more safely and more lucratively elsewhere over the next decade. And while real estate brokers may hate to acknowledge it, home ownership involves its own versions of throwing money away, like property taxes and the costs of borrowing. Add it all up - which The New York Times did, in an analysis of the major costs and benefits of owning and renting, including tax breaks - and owning a home today is more expensive than renting in much of the Northeast, Florida and California. Only if prices rise well above their already lofty levels will home ownership turn out to be the good deal that it is widely assumed to be. In the Bay Area of California, a typical family that buys a $1 million house - which is average in some towns - will spend about $5,000 a month to live there, according to the Times analysis. The family could rent a similar house for about $2,500, real estate records show, and could pay part of that bill with the interest earned by the money that was not used for a down payment. This gaping difference helped persuade Eloise Christensen to sell her century-old Victorian cottage in downtown Larkspur, Calif., for $1.05 million this year. Now she rents a two-story house in Stinson Beach for $2,400 a month. From her living room, she can sip tea and watch the waves from the Pacific Ocean. 'It just seems out of control,' said Ms. Christensen, 43, a massage therapist and graphic designer. 'It didn't seem to me that the market was going to be able to sustain these high prices.' There are obviously benefits to home ownership beyond the financial, like peace of mind and a feeling of stability. Owners cannot have their home yanked away by a landlord who has decided to move back in. Owners can also change the color of their living room walls or fix a draft seeping through their windows without asking permission. Surrounding her Larkspur cottage, Ms. Christensen had built a garden with rosemary, lavender and boxwood hedges to complement the pear and fig trees already there. She is not doing anything like that in Stinson Beach. Combine these benefits with the transaction costs of a house sale, and renting probably does not make sense for most people who already own their home and feel settled in it. But the calculation can look quite different for those who are considering a move anyway or who do not yet own a home. At the very least, renters in boom markets, who often lament that they are wasting money, should know that their choice has as powerful an economic rationale as buying does right now. 'I am a proponent of buying,' said Tchaka Owen, 37, a loan officer and licensed real-estate agent in Miami who is renting a two-bedroom apartment overlooking the bay there. 'But you can get so much more for your money, renting instead of buying. We're paying half the amount we would be paying if we owned this place.' In Manhattan, 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom apartments on the Upper East Side now rent for about $3,700 a month. Buying a similar apartment costs around $1.1 million, which can translate into monthly payments of $6,000 or so. To determine the cost of renting, the Times analysis added monthly rent and renters' insurance. For owning, the analysis included typical costs for home insurance, major repairs, property taxes and mortgage payments, as well as the tax deductions they create. Renters were given credit for a small return - about 4 percent, after taxes - on the money they could have invested in bonds or stocks instead of spending it on a down payment and closing costs. Buyers received credit for the portion of the mortgage they were paying off, as opposed to the interest costs. When the net costs of owning are less than those of renting, as is the case in Chicago, Dallas, St. Louis and much of the middle of the country, the argument for buying becomes overwhelming. So long as home prices do not fall sharply, home buyers in these places will do much better than renters. But when owning is more expensive every month, buyers are betting entirely on price appreciation. For new home buyers, prices in New York would need to rise roughly another 13 percent over the next five years for the average buyer to do better than the average renter over that span. In Northern California, where the gap between house prices and rents is largest, home values would need to go up about 19 percent by 2010. Over the next decade, the break-even increase is about 25 percent in New York and 40 percent in California. Such increases have been easily achieved in the recent past. But even economists who do not consider the real estate market to be in a bubble predict that price gains will slow. Other forecasters argue that values will fall, as they did on the coasts in the early 1990's, or be stuck near their current levels for years to come. No matter who is right, the buy-versus-rent debate is a closer call than it has been in years. 'If you believe you'll be moving in the next four or five years, I'd rent,' said Thomas Z. Lys, an accounting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University . 'If you're a long-termer, I still would buy.' The single biggest misconception about home ownership, some brokers and economists say, might revolve around tax deductions. Many people seem to believe that buying a home can actually save them money because the interest on their mortgage is tax deductible. But all that deduction does is reduce the cost of borrowing the money - a cost that would not exist if the family were not buying the home. Families spend about six years in a house, on average, according to the National Association of Realtors. In that time, the interest on a $600,000 mortgage would add up to about $120,000, even at today's low rates and even after the tax deduction, according to National City Corporation, a large lender. 'Don't be buying a house because you think you're saving on the taxes,' said Frank Borges LLosa, owner of FranklyRealty.com, a brokerage in Arlington, Va. 'You'll save even more by not buying and renting.' Mr. LLosa added: 'I'm not saying not to buy. I'm saying don't buy just for the tax reasons.' Many homeowners also do not receive the full deductions from home ownership. In the Northeast and California, homeowners now have so many deductions that some must pay the alternative minimum tax. This tax effectively wipes out part of their property-tax deduction, further cutting into the benefits of home ownership. Other homeowners do not itemize their deductions or, if they do so, end up with total deductions only a little larger than the standard deduction that the government offers to all taxpayers, even renters. 'A lot of people hugely overvalue the mortgage deduction,' said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal group in Washington, 'because they compare it to no deduction instead of comparing it to the standard deduction.' Mr. Baker is one of the avant garde renters. He and his wife sold their condominium in Washington last year for $445,000 and now rent a similar one nearby for $2,200 a month. The Times analysis made a number of assumptions favorable to buyers, like giving them full credit for the deductions for mortgage interest and property taxes, noted Mark Zandi, chief economist of Economy .com, a research company. Still, the monthly costs of buying were more expensive than those for renting in any market where the price of a typical house was more than 20 times larger than the annual rent to live in it. In the Bay Area, this 'rent ratio' exceeds 33. In New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Miami, it is just above 25. A typical four-bedroom house in Brookline, Mass., for example, costs about $1.2 million to buy and $4,500 a month to rent, according to Chobee Hoy Associates Real Estate, a brokerage there. At 20, Washington is right near the cutoff. But renters who live in apartment buildings, like Mr. Baker, often get an extra benefit: some portion of their utilities bill is typically covered by the building's owner. Mr. Owen, the loan officer in Miami, and his girlfriend, Polly Thompson, pay $1,700 a month for a top-floor apartment that has views of both the city's skyline and the Atlantic Ocean. After talking to brokers, he said he thought that the apartment would sell for close to $650,000, giving it a rent ratio of more than 30. 'It's obvious,' he said, 'that renting is such a better deal.' But to many people, the psychological benefits of buying are almost impossible to overcome. Owning makes them feel that they have achieved the American dream, or it gives them the secure sense that, if nothing else, they have a tangible asset where they can sleep at night. Those are nice feelings, indeed. The question is how much they are worth to you.

Subject: Re: Is It Better to Buy or Rent? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:41:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Fantastic article... thanks. Say uhmm.. you wouldn't by any slight chance be able to post Krugman's articles (from the NY libary) in the future?

Subject: Many More People Are House Poor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:42:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25sacrifice.html September 25, 2005 With Higher Prices, Many More People Are House Poor By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY BECAUSE of the nationwide surge in housing prices, many middle-income families just can't afford the average house price anymore. But they are buying anyway, and making due by cutting household budgets and tightening belts in myriad ways. They are forgoing that long-planned vacation to Europe. They are bypassing their favorite Thai restaurant and cooking dinner at home. People are clipping coupons, shopping at discount supermarkets and pulling their children out of private schools. 'It's stressful,' said David Gentry, a pharmaceutical salesman who recently obtained a loan to buy a $695,000 town house near San Francisco. 'I wonder, How do I qualify for this money? Are they stupid? It's not like I'm the president of Hewlett Packard. We're just trying to make ends meet.' The family had been renting an apartment from Mr. Gentry's father-in-law, paying a pittance in rent, before they bought. Now, Mr. Gentry said, housing costs eat up about half his take-home pay, meaning he and his wife can no longer afford a $600-a-month preschool for their 17-month-old and 4-year-old sons. The family moved into their town house condo overlooking the Pacific this May, and began paying a $4,100 monthly mortgage. To cover it, Mr. Gentry pared down contributions to his 401(k) account, and his wife, who now stays home with the children, is planning to return to work.'It's out of control,' Mr. Gentry said. 'We're penny-pinching things we would have normally not thought twice about. We're making it happen, but for how long?' Bankers suggest that families spend 25 to 30 percent of their gross income on housing, but many people, especially on the coasts, easily exceed that level. The burden of housing prices is the most pronounced in California, where 40 percent of homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income to cover their mortgage costs, according to 2003 census data, the most recent numbers available. About 30 percent of all Americans spend that much. In the 1970's, an average family spent half its income on its mortgage, health care, insurance, taxes and car payments, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who writes about consumer spending. Today, families spend about 75 percent of their incomes on those essentials, largely because of higher housing costs. One in 10 Americans spends more than half their income on housing costs, and those rates are higher in hot markets. Across the country, the median price of a single-family home has climbed 29 percent in two years, rising to $218,600 this year from $170,000 in 2003, according to the National Association of Realtors. At the same time, median family incomes rose 8 percent. The association's Housing Affordability Index dropped over the same time period, falling 15 percent in the last two years. Right now, it ranks the Midwest as the most affordable part of the country, and the West as the least. In the expensive markets, some people spend 50 to 75 percent of their monthly salaries on home payments. 'Most people out there would say they spent too much, across the board,' said Rick Harper, a credit counselor in San Francisco. For now, Americans seem to be staying aloft, spending less elsewhere and making the mortgage their first priority. Though foreclosures have jumped recently in areas like Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Chicago, a June survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the most recent available, found that foreclosure and delinquency rates had actually dropped 7 percentage points from 2004. But Ms. Warren, the Harvard author, said Americans have put themselves in a precarious spot. They have overspent and taken out adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages, gambling that housing values will rise while interest rates and the job market hold steady. 'People think homeownership is the ultimate stability,' Ms. Warren said. 'Today, it has become the cement life raft. The home itself is sinking the family.' The surge in prices is not limited to hot zones like California, where the median home price is $540,900, or New York City, where the median price is $700,000. It has struck people in Pasadena, Md. (median home value: about $170,000), where Julie Judy's family recently bought a $275,000 home. They now scrape by on a budget that leaves them $100 to spare each month. Ms. Judy and her husband, Michael, both in their early 30's, began looking for a new home big enough to give their 3-year-old son space to play and grow. They hoped for something in the $150,000 range, but quickly learned that even wrecks cost $200,000. 'When they said the payment's going to be $1,800, I said, 'Oh my God,' ' Ms. Judy said. 'It kills me. It kills me.' The family cut out some comforts, forgoing a pool table, big-screen television and new furniture for their basement. They opted not to install a telephone line, and only use cellphones. They traded their Ford Expedition for a Dodge Caravan for a net savings of eight miles per gallon and $120 in monthly gasoline costs. And they cut up their credit cards. 'If we can't pay cash for it,' Ms. Judy wrote in an e-mail message, 'we won't buy it.' In San Mateo, Calif., the burdens of first-time homeownership have plucked Chris Cavigioli right out of the sky. Last November, Mr. Cavigioli, 43, who markets semiconductors, and his new wife, Kari, began searching for a $600,000 house where they would have enough room to start a family. They found nothing that even came close. So the couple raised their price ceiling beyond San Mateo's median of $656,095, then raised it again, and settled on a home for around $875,000. In a standard 30-year mortgage, the $875,000 house would cost an additional $1,445 every month, or an extra $17,340 a year, when compared with what their payments would have been for a $600,000 house. For the Cavigiolis, the pricier house has meant more dinners at home, where Mr. Cavigioli exposes his carnivorous wife to his vegetarian cooking. There have been fewer trips to see relatives living in Asia and Boston. And Mr. Cavigioli, who flies Cessna Skyhawks in his free time, had to give up lessons and put off pursuing his pilot's license. 'That's something that's going to have to wait for a rainy day,' he said. For now, 'We're living on faith.' One hundred miles away, in a rough-edged Sacramento neighborhood, Yaseen Nazir and his wife are dealing with the consequences of waiting too long to join the parade. The couple, who are technology consultants, stayed in their $900 rental while prices soared, then this year decided to buy a home. 'I thought, realistically, it would have been nice to get something for around $100,000, but you can't even buy a trailer for $100,000,' Mr. Nazir said. 'We were hoping for around $300,000, but there's nothing to find. We tried everything. We just said, It's now or never. It just keeps going up.' Eventually, the couple bought a four-bedroom house for $445,000. Most mortgage experts recommend that people's homes cost no more than three times their annual salary. By that standard, the Nazirs were $100,000 over budget. They had signed up to spend more than half their monthly income on their home. So now, they are cutting costs everywhere they can. They endured the summer without air-conditioning. They eat at their parents' houses. They read books beneath Wal-Mart lamps and lounge on 'pleather' couches left over from Mr. Nazir's days as a computer-science major at the University of California, Davis. The couple have moved in, but they cannot afford to make the newly built house feel like their own. They have yet to put up a fence in their backyard or pour concrete for the patio. And they gave up their weekends skiing and jettisoned the overnight trips to Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles. They gave up going to their favorite $25-a-plate Persian and Moroccan restaurants. For lunch, Mr. Nazir forgoes trips out with co-workers and eats 'cans of tuna and microwaveable stuff' at his desk. 'We basically decided, How many days can we starve?' Mr. Nazir said. 'When can we go to the thrift store? It's tough times.' In markets where house prices have risen rapidly, they are not unusual. 'They're overbuying, and there are extreme choices that need to be made,' said Patricia Lynch, a credit counselor with ClearPoint Financial Solutions in Baltimore. 'People can get very creative.' A 58-year-old woman in Fresno, Calif., said she is dedicating more than half her teacher's salary to the mortgage on her $230,000 house, and is so financially strapped that she has cut back on tithes to her Catholic parish. Credit counselors say their clients are piling their day-to-day debts onto credit cards, draining their contributions to retirement accounts and selling their housewares at resale shops to make their mortgages. One of Ms. Lynch's clients cut her phone lines and Internet access. Another sold off $300,000 in antiques, rugs and crystal baubles. 'She's liquidating,' Ms. Lynch said. 'She's using that money to pay off debt.'

Subject: Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 06:40:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25miami.html September 25, 2005 Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads to Las Vegas and New York By ANNA BAHNEY MIAMI has long been known for models of the lean and leggy variety, but more recently, with the appearance of tall, slender buildings along Biscayne Bay, yet another model is emerging from the backdrop of pink sunsets and blue water. The so-called Miami Model describes the way some of these apartments are being sold, a method that is changing the way real estate development is done in Florida and beyond. It results in churning apartments more often and more quickly and giving more of the transaction fees to developers. With an in-house sales team that charges a fee, a developer sells a unit to an investor who in turn sells to a buyer who may or may not ultimately use the condo. This flip before closing has become an integral part of the condo market in places like South Florida and Las Vegas. Now developers and marketers in New York - who never like to think they follow any other city's lead - are flirting with the model. 'It is a market that is more evolved than our market here in the city,' said Christopher Mathieson, a managing partner at JC DeNiro and Associates, a real estate agency in Manhattan. 'They are selling like crazy in Miami. Las Vegas has taken the Miami Model and run with it.' Mr. Mathieson has three projects in Manhattan that are going to use this model; two will be coming to market in the spring and he will be doing some sales in the fall for the third. Many real estate professionals don't think this sales model can work in Manhattan because the price to invest in New York is so high, but Mr. Mathieson said he is convinced it can. In Miami, which has led the country in sales of preconstruction condos, 60,000 units are planned in the next five years and about 19,700 are under construction in Dade County right now. While 'flipping' has become a dirty word in Florida, developers find it appealing, and profitable, to control the flip, rather than to leave all those profits to others. For buyers - investors or users - it may help to protect the flow of properties to the market. One Miami, an 896-unit condominium developed by the Related Companies, is nearing the end of its resale program, in which about half of the buyers are reselling, through the developer, apartments that don't yet exist. 'The first person purchased two and half years ago,' said Valeria Lugo, a sales associate with Related Cervera Realty Services, who works at the building. 'Then eight months to a year later, we offer the option to sell their unit and they can assign the contract to another buyer.' The percentages vary depending on the developer, but at One Miami there is a 6 percent commission to the sales agent and a 0.25 percent fee for the transfer, which goes to the developer. Developer's fees can range from 0.25 to 10 percent. 'They don't have to do the resale through us,' Ms. Lugo said. 'But we do a lot of advertising and marketing.' Before developers decided to be the focus for resales, speculators would close on a condo and sell it immediately, or before closing, flip the contract with the help of an outside broker. Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, the president of Related Cervera Realty Services, said that she had been using this model for about seven years. 'In the old days it would take a couple of years to sell all the units,' Mrs. Cervera Lamadrid said. 'But now it can take a couple of weeks or a couple of months.' Jack Winston, an analyst with Goodkin Consulting, a real estate consulting firm in South Florida, said that the Miami Model works best when a developer has several parts to its organization, including a sales arm, and when there are multiple projects at various stages. 'Related is the best example in the country,' Mr. Winston said. 'With Related Cervera Realty there is an in-house sales office. They are constantly opening new projects, so they can move buyers to another project that is coming out of the ground. They also create a reputation and a following with buyers because each time they have done this - with the combination of Related and Related Cervera - the investors have made money.' Mr. Winston sees the long-term effect of this kind of sales strategy by developers as a bit of a Ponzi scheme, though. People coming in on the preconstruction phase are making money so long as other people are coming in. 'The scheme falls apart when you don't have enough people to get the money to pay to the last guy back,' Mr. Winston said. 'What happens when you don't get enough investors to come in and play? There certainly aren't enough real buyers.' Ms. Lugo said the resale apartments at One Miami are being sold at a 35 to 40 percent increase over the preconstruction price, with two-bedroom apartments now between $450,000 and $600,000 and three-bedrooms from $650,000 to $1.2 million. At another Related building, Plaza on Brickell, resales began on July 1 after it sold out in the summer of 2004, and about 200 of the 1,000 units are currently available again. Ms. Lugo said she expected another 10 percent of the units to come into the resale program before the sales are closed. 'There is no one taking a loss from doing resales,' said Carlo Gambino, a managing partner of Carson Realty Group in Miami. For the developers, Mr. Gambino said, instead of losing out on an opportunity to generate more revenue, they are taking part in it. The initial buyer is making a profit on the value of the full price of the property based on a 20 percent investment. Even the second buyer, he said, will get a better price than if the first buyer had to account for closing costs. 'I don't see any party that will suffer from it,' he said. He hasn't: Mr. Gambino made a 300 percent profit on his 20 percent down payment at One Miami through the resale program. A similar scenario is playing out in Las Vegas, where more than 90 condo projects with about 67,000 units are in the planning stages and at least 19 are under construction. At the Panorama Towers, developed by Sasson Hallier Properties, resales on the first of three towers will begin in December. Prices for that are not determined yet, but pre-construction condos in the third tower are $450,000 to $1.5 million. 'We went down to Miami and saw that this is a great way to protect the value of the building,' said Paul Scaringe, the vice president of sales for Panorama Towers. 'With this program you can control the amount of inventory that is out there at any given time, supply and demand will dictate the pricing.' Bradley F. Hunter, director of the South Florida region for Metrostudy, a residential real estate market research firm in West Palm Beach, said this model began when investors increased the price gain in new construction by paying any price, figuring it would go up. Developers began to restrict investors from flipping the contracts, only to find the day after closing that high numbers of units were on the market, with the investor rather than the developer making the profit. 'That pushed this resale activity,' Mr. Hunter said. 'Then developers said, why should we leave that money sitting on the table? And they started their own resale programs.' Developers in South Florida are typically expected to sell half the units in a development before receiving financing for the project. With preconstruction buyers putting 10 percent down to reserve a condo and another 10 percent down, which can be used for construction costs, about the time building starts, it might seem that the Florida market is insulated from froth because projects have buyers before they are built. Mr. Hunter disagreed. 'Those 50 percent who have bought preconstruction are investors,' he said. 'They are perpetuating the froth and in a way disguising it. The developer can say, 'I'm sold out.' Really? Are you sold out to people who are going to move in? Or people who are going to immediately put those on the market?' 'There is phantom supply,' Mr. Hunter added. 'It is not visible to the naked eye. That is why developers have to be very cautious.' In New York they often are. Real estate developers and marketers have their own established methods and ideas about the way real estate development is done in other parts of the country. 'In Miami you can do what you want,' said Michael Shvo, president of Shvo Marketing, a real estate firm in Manhattan. 'It's the Wild West. So is Las Vegas.' Elan Padeh, the chief executive and president of the Developers Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate firm, said that developers would love to move buyers' contracts with the fluidity of those in Miami. 'If they were doing this much development in New York, there would be even more if they could do that,' he said. Both marketers sang the praises of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer - whose office must examine all condo offering plans - as well as state regulations that keep buyers' down payments in escrow, rather than allowing developers to use them for construction costs. But with the distinctly Miami-influenced financing plan by Frank J. Sciame, the developer behind the Santiago Calatrava building planned at 80 South Street, in which he is taking down-payments starting at $7 million before securing financing for 10 town houses ranging from $29 million to $59 million each, there are indications that the approach to new development in New York may be changing. With regard to the Miami Model of controlled resales, Bruce D. Friedberg, a lawyer specializing in real estate, said he was surprised it was not done more often in New York, explaining that usually the opposite is the rule, with developers strongly restricting resales of the condos until as much as a year after closing. Mr. Friedberg saw the effects of a resale program when he had some 35 clients who were among the initial purchasers at the Chelsea Mercantile, a renovated warehouse condominium on the West Side of Manhattan developed by Rockrose Developments, in 1999. The initial offering plan, dated May 20, 1999, said that the 354 units would sell out at $251.45 million. By the time the 11th amendment was submitted to the attorney general's office that November, the sell-out price was $307.61 million. 'The demand was unbelievable,' Kevin P. Singleton, senior vice president at Rockrose Development, said of the Chelsea Mercantile project. In one of the amendments, the developer offered to take back the contract and split the market price with the initial buyer. For example, a buyer who had purchased for $1 million could, through this amendment, assign the contract to the developer and split the profit on the apartment, which was going for $1.5 million, leaving $250,000 each for the developer and the first buyer. By keeping an ear to the track, Mr. Singleton said, his firm knew even a year after initial sales that they would still have a line around the block if units were available. 'We could have sold 10 times the number of units we had,' he said. 'Filing an amendment is the only requirement. There is a limited downside for the developer.' Brad Maione, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said in an e-mail message that the office takes no official position on the merits of particular provisions in an offering plan. Assigning the contract can be beneficial, he said, because it allows buyers who are unable to close or no longer interested in buying to find a substitute purchaser and not loose their down payments. It is certainly not as easy to institute a resale program as in other cities, but with large-scale condo development planned for West Chelsea, and areas like the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn, investors moving from one preconstruction project to another could become more common in New York. It will if Mr. Mathieson has anything to do with it. 'You're inviting more people, including investors, to take on the risk until the end user gets to the building,' he said. 'The end user wants a product they can look at. The investor is there to take the risk.'

Subject: times select From: tom To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 04:22:33 (EDT) Email Address: tom@tom.com Message: it's possible to complain. write to the public editor at the times (public@nytimes.com), saying that it's short-sighted and narrow minded, at least in this country) to severely restrict the audience for well-informed left-wing voices. the paper has some public responsibility as well as one to its shareholders -

Subject: Hard Bigotry of No Expectations From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:58:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/opinion/25sun1.html September 25, 2005 Hard Bigotry of No Expectations Throughout his campaigns in 2000 and 2004, George W. Bush talked about 'the soft bigotry of low expectations': the mind-set that tolerates poor school performance and dead-end careers for minority students on the presumption that they are incapable of doing better. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said recently that this phrase attracted her to Mr. Bush more than anything else. It was, indeed, a brilliant encapsulation of so much of what is wrong with American education. But while Mr. Bush has been worrying about low expectations in schools, he's been ratcheting the bar downward himself on almost everything else. The president's recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he's doing a great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it's the current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine because the founding fathers didn't give women equal rights either. The lack of expectations is evident even in areas where the president is supposed to be deeply engaged. The Treasury Department's hollowed-out leadership structure suggests an administration that is happy to coast along with a gentleman's C for handling the nation's finances. But it has been most graphically, and tragically, on display in Iraq and in the response to Hurricane Katrina. Four years after 9/11, Katrina showed the world that performance standards for the Department of Homeland Security were so low that it was not required to create real plans to respond to real disasters. Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters. Only a president who does not expect the government to help provide decent housing for the truly needy in normal times could leave seven of the top jobs at the Department of Housing and Urban Development vacant and then, after disaster struck, offer small-bore solutions to enormous problems. Substandard wages, an easing of affirmative action regulation and a housing lottery that will help a tiny sliver of people apparently are considered good enough for poor families along the Gulf Coast left homeless by Katrina. In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law. It's true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But it's offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised since 1787. We don't agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough for Iraq. Since his failure to notice the Katrina disaster, Mr. Bush has stopped bragging that he doesn't read or watch the news. If he's paying attention now, he should get a message from the outrage over Katrina and shrinking support for his policies in Iraq: The American public has much higher expectations than he does for the president and his government.

Subject: Many More People Are House Poor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:04:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25sacrifice.html September 25, 2005 With Higher Prices, Many More People Are House Poor By PATRICK O'GILFOIL HEALY BECAUSE of the nationwide surge in housing prices, many middle-income families just can't afford the average house price anymore. But they are buying anyway, and making due by cutting household budgets and tightening belts in myriad ways. They are forgoing that long-planned vacation to Europe. They are bypassing their favorite Thai restaurant and cooking dinner at home. People are clipping coupons, shopping at discount supermarkets and pulling their children out of private schools. 'It's stressful,' said David Gentry, a pharmaceutical salesman who recently obtained a loan to buy a $695,000 town house near San Francisco. 'I wonder, How do I qualify for this money? Are they stupid? It's not like I'm the president of Hewlett Packard. We're just trying to make ends meet.' The family had been renting an apartment from Mr. Gentry's father-in-law, paying a pittance in rent, before they bought. Now, Mr. Gentry said, housing costs eat up about half his take-home pay, meaning he and his wife can no longer afford a $600-a-month preschool for their 17-month-old and 4-year-old sons. The family moved into their town house condo overlooking the Pacific this May, and began paying a $4,100 monthly mortgage. To cover it, Mr. Gentry pared down contributions to his 401(k) account, and his wife, who now stays home with the children, is planning to return to work.'It's out of control,' Mr. Gentry said. 'We're penny-pinching things we would have normally not thought twice about. We're making it happen, but for how long?' Bankers suggest that families spend 25 to 30 percent of their gross income on housing, but many people, especially on the coasts, easily exceed that level. The burden of housing prices is the most pronounced in California, where 40 percent of homeowners spend more than 30 percent of their income to cover their mortgage costs, according to 2003 census data, the most recent numbers available. About 30 percent of all Americans spend that much. In the 1970's, an average family spent half its income on its mortgage, health care, insurance, taxes and car payments, according to Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor who writes about consumer spending. Today, families spend about 75 percent of their incomes on those essentials, largely because of higher housing costs. One in 10 Americans spends more than half their income on housing costs, and those rates are higher in hot markets. Across the country, the median price of a single-family home has climbed 29 percent in two years, rising to $218,600 this year from $170,000 in 2003, according to the National Association of Realtors. At the same time, median family incomes rose 8 percent. The association's Housing Affordability Index dropped over the same time period, falling 15 percent in the last two years. Right now, it ranks the Midwest as the most affordable part of the country, and the West as the least. In the expensive markets, some people spend 50 to 75 percent of their monthly salaries on home payments. 'Most people out there would say they spent too much, across the board,' said Rick Harper, a credit counselor in San Francisco. For now, Americans seem to be staying aloft, spending less elsewhere and making the mortgage their first priority. Though foreclosures have jumped recently in areas like Massachusetts, Philadelphia and Chicago, a June survey by the Mortgage Bankers Association, the most recent available, found that foreclosure and delinquency rates had actually dropped 7 percentage points from 2004. But Ms. Warren, the Harvard author, said Americans have put themselves in a precarious spot. They have overspent and taken out adjustable-rate and interest-only mortgages, gambling that housing values will rise while interest rates and the job market hold steady. 'People think homeownership is the ultimate stability,' Ms. Warren said. 'Today, it has become the cement life raft. The home itself is sinking the family.' The surge in prices is not limited to hot zones like California, where the median home price is $540,900, or New York City, where the median price is $700,000. It has struck people in Pasadena, Md. (median home value: about $170,000), where Julie Judy's family recently bought a $275,000 home. They now scrape by on a budget that leaves them $100 to spare each month. Ms. Judy and her husband, Michael, both in their early 30's, began looking for a new home big enough to give their 3-year-old son space to play and grow. They hoped for something in the $150,000 range, but quickly learned that even wrecks cost $200,000. 'When they said the payment's going to be $1,800, I said, 'Oh my God,' ' Ms. Judy said. 'It kills me. It kills me.' The family cut out some comforts, forgoing a pool table, big-screen television and new furniture for their basement. They opted not to install a telephone line, and only use cellphones. They traded their Ford Expedition for a Dodge Caravan for a net savings of eight miles per gallon and $120 in monthly gasoline costs. And they cut up their credit cards. 'If we can't pay cash for it,' Ms. Judy wrote in an e-mail message, 'we won't buy it.' In San Mateo, Calif., the burdens of first-time homeownership have plucked Chris Cavigioli right out of the sky. Last November, Mr. Cavigioli, 43, who markets semiconductors, and his new wife, Kari, began searching for a $600,000 house where they would have enough room to start a family. They found nothing that even came close. So the couple raised their price ceiling beyond San Mateo's median of $656,095, then raised it again, and settled on a home for around $875,000. In a standard 30-year mortgage, the $875,000 house would cost an additional $1,445 every month, or an extra $17,340 a year, when compared with what their payments would have been for a $600,000 house. For the Cavigiolis, the pricier house has meant more dinners at home, where Mr. Cavigioli exposes his carnivorous wife to his vegetarian cooking. There have been fewer trips to see relatives living in Asia and Boston. And Mr. Cavigioli, who flies Cessna Skyhawks in his free time, had to give up lessons and put off pursuing his pilot's license. 'That's something that's going to have to wait for a rainy day,' he said. For now, 'We're living on faith.' One hundred miles away, in a rough-edged Sacramento neighborhood, Yaseen Nazir and his wife are dealing with the consequences of waiting too long to join the parade. The couple, who are technology consultants, stayed in their $900 rental while prices soared, then this year decided to buy a home. 'I thought, realistically, it would have been nice to get something for around $100,000, but you can't even buy a trailer for $100,000,' Mr. Nazir said. 'We were hoping for around $300,000, but there's nothing to find. We tried everything. We just said, It's now or never. It just keeps going up.' Eventually, the couple bought a four-bedroom house for $445,000. Most mortgage experts recommend that people's homes cost no more than three times their annual salary. By that standard, the Nazirs were $100,000 over budget. They had signed up to spend more than half their monthly income on their home. So now, they are cutting costs everywhere they can. They endured the summer without air-conditioning. They eat at their parents' houses. They read books beneath Wal-Mart lamps and lounge on 'pleather' couches left over from Mr. Nazir's days as a computer-science major at the University of California, Davis. The couple have moved in, but they cannot afford to make the newly built house feel like their own. They have yet to put up a fence in their backyard or pour concrete for the patio. And they gave up their weekends skiing and jettisoned the overnight trips to Lake Tahoe and Los Angeles. They gave up going to their favorite $25-a-plate Persian and Moroccan restaurants. For lunch, Mr. Nazir forgoes trips out with co-workers and eats 'cans of tuna and microwaveable stuff' at his desk. 'We basically decided, How many days can we starve?' Mr. Nazir said. 'When can we go to the thrift store? It's tough times.' In markets where house prices have risen rapidly, they are not unusual. 'They're overbuying, and there are extreme choices that need to be made,' said Patricia Lynch, a credit counselor with ClearPoint Financial Solutions in Baltimore. 'People can get very creative.' A 58-year-old woman in Fresno, Calif., said she is dedicating more than half her teacher's salary to the mortgage on her $230,000 house, and is so financially strapped that she has cut back on tithes to her Catholic parish. Credit counselors say their clients are piling their day-to-day debts onto credit cards, draining their contributions to retirement accounts and selling their housewares at resale shops to make their mortgages. One of Ms. Lynch's clients cut her phone lines and Internet access. Another sold off $300,000 in antiques, rugs and crystal baubles. 'She's liquidating,' Ms. Lynch said. 'She's using that money to pay off debt.'

Subject: Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 14:01:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/25/realestate/25miami.html September 25, 2005 Miami's Model for Condo Sales Spreads to Las Vegas and New York By ANNA BAHNEY MIAMI has long been known for models of the lean and leggy variety, but more recently, with the appearance of tall, slender buildings along Biscayne Bay, yet another model is emerging from the backdrop of pink sunsets and blue water. The so-called Miami Model describes the way some of these apartments are being sold, a method that is changing the way real estate development is done in Florida and beyond. It results in churning apartments more often and more quickly and giving more of the transaction fees to developers. With an in-house sales team that charges a fee, a developer sells a unit to an investor who in turn sells to a buyer who may or may not ultimately use the condo. This flip before closing has become an integral part of the condo market in places like South Florida and Las Vegas. Now developers and marketers in New York - who never like to think they follow any other city's lead - are flirting with the model. 'It is a market that is more evolved than our market here in the city,' said Christopher Mathieson, a managing partner at JC DeNiro and Associates, a real estate agency in Manhattan. 'They are selling like crazy in Miami. Las Vegas has taken the Miami Model and run with it.' Mr. Mathieson has three projects in Manhattan that are going to use this model; two will be coming to market in the spring and he will be doing some sales in the fall for the third. Many real estate professionals don't think this sales model can work in Manhattan because the price to invest in New York is so high, but Mr. Mathieson said he is convinced it can. In Miami, which has led the country in sales of preconstruction condos, 60,000 units are planned in the next five years and about 19,700 are under construction in Dade County right now. While 'flipping' has become a dirty word in Florida, developers find it appealing, and profitable, to control the flip, rather than to leave all those profits to others. For buyers - investors or users - it may help to protect the flow of properties to the market. One Miami, an 896-unit condominium developed by the Related Companies, is nearing the end of its resale program, in which about half of the buyers are reselling, through the developer, apartments that don't yet exist. 'The first person purchased two and half years ago,' said Valeria Lugo, a sales associate with Related Cervera Realty Services, who works at the building. 'Then eight months to a year later, we offer the option to sell their unit and they can assign the contract to another buyer.' The percentages vary depending on the developer, but at One Miami there is a 6 percent commission to the sales agent and a 0.25 percent fee for the transfer, which goes to the developer. Developer's fees can range from 0.25 to 10 percent. 'They don't have to do the resale through us,' Ms. Lugo said. 'But we do a lot of advertising and marketing.' Before developers decided to be the focus for resales, speculators would close on a condo and sell it immediately, or before closing, flip the contract with the help of an outside broker. Alicia Cervera Lamadrid, the president of Related Cervera Realty Services, said that she had been using this model for about seven years. 'In the old days it would take a couple of years to sell all the units,' Mrs. Cervera Lamadrid said. 'But now it can take a couple of weeks or a couple of months.' Jack Winston, an analyst with Goodkin Consulting, a real estate consulting firm in South Florida, said that the Miami Model works best when a developer has several parts to its organization, including a sales arm, and when there are multiple projects at various stages. 'Related is the best example in the country,' Mr. Winston said. 'With Related Cervera Realty there is an in-house sales office. They are constantly opening new projects, so they can move buyers to another project that is coming out of the ground. They also create a reputation and a following with buyers because each time they have done this - with the combination of Related and Related Cervera - the investors have made money.' Mr. Winston sees the long-term effect of this kind of sales strategy by developers as a bit of a Ponzi scheme, though. People coming in on the preconstruction phase are making money so long as other people are coming in. 'The scheme falls apart when you don't have enough people to get the money to pay to the last guy back,' Mr. Winston said. 'What happens when you don't get enough investors to come in and play? There certainly aren't enough real buyers.' Ms. Lugo said the resale apartments at One Miami are being sold at a 35 to 40 percent increase over the preconstruction price, with two-bedroom apartments now between $450,000 and $600,000 and three-bedrooms from $650,000 to $1.2 million. At another Related building, Plaza on Brickell, resales began on July 1 after it sold out in the summer of 2004, and about 200 of the 1,000 units are currently available again. Ms. Lugo said she expected another 10 percent of the units to come into the resale program before the sales are closed. 'There is no one taking a loss from doing resales,' said Carlo Gambino, a managing partner of Carson Realty Group in Miami. For the developers, Mr. Gambino said, instead of losing out on an opportunity to generate more revenue, they are taking part in it. The initial buyer is making a profit on the value of the full price of the property based on a 20 percent investment. Even the second buyer, he said, will get a better price than if the first buyer had to account for closing costs. 'I don't see any party that will suffer from it,' he said. He hasn't: Mr. Gambino made a 300 percent profit on his 20 percent down payment at One Miami through the resale program. A similar scenario is playing out in Las Vegas, where more than 90 condo projects with about 67,000 units are in the planning stages and at least 19 are under construction. At the Panorama Towers, developed by Sasson Hallier Properties, resales on the first of three towers will begin in December. Prices for that are not determined yet, but pre-construction condos in the third tower are $450,000 to $1.5 million. 'We went down to Miami and saw that this is a great way to protect the value of the building,' said Paul Scaringe, the vice president of sales for Panorama Towers. 'With this program you can control the amount of inventory that is out there at any given time, supply and demand will dictate the pricing.' Bradley F. Hunter, director of the South Florida region for Metrostudy, a residential real estate market research firm in West Palm Beach, said this model began when investors increased the price gain in new construction by paying any price, figuring it would go up. Developers began to restrict investors from flipping the contracts, only to find the day after closing that high numbers of units were on the market, with the investor rather than the developer making the profit. 'That pushed this resale activity,' Mr. Hunter said. 'Then developers said, why should we leave that money sitting on the table? And they started their own resale programs.' Developers in South Florida are typically expected to sell half the units in a development before receiving financing for the project. With preconstruction buyers putting 10 percent down to reserve a condo and another 10 percent down, which can be used for construction costs, about the time building starts, it might seem that the Florida market is insulated from froth because projects have buyers before they are built. Mr. Hunter disagreed. 'Those 50 percent who have bought preconstruction are investors,' he said. 'They are perpetuating the froth and in a way disguising it. The developer can say, 'I'm sold out.' Really? Are you sold out to people who are going to move in? Or people who are going to immediately put those on the market?' 'There is phantom supply,' Mr. Hunter added. 'It is not visible to the naked eye. That is why developers have to be very cautious.' In New York they often are. Real estate developers and marketers have their own established methods and ideas about the way real estate development is done in other parts of the country. 'In Miami you can do what you want,' said Michael Shvo, president of Shvo Marketing, a real estate firm in Manhattan. 'It's the Wild West. So is Las Vegas.' Elan Padeh, the chief executive and president of the Developers Group, a Brooklyn-based real estate firm, said that developers would love to move buyers' contracts with the fluidity of those in Miami. 'If they were doing this much development in New York, there would be even more if they could do that,' he said. Both marketers sang the praises of the New York State attorney general, Eliot Spitzer - whose office must examine all condo offering plans - as well as state regulations that keep buyers' down payments in escrow, rather than allowing developers to use them for construction costs. But with the distinctly Miami-influenced financing plan by Frank J. Sciame, the developer behind the Santiago Calatrava building planned at 80 South Street, in which he is taking down-payments starting at $7 million before securing financing for 10 town houses ranging from $29 million to $59 million each, there are indications that the approach to new development in New York may be changing. With regard to the Miami Model of controlled resales, Bruce D. Friedberg, a lawyer specializing in real estate, said he was surprised it was not done more often in New York, explaining that usually the opposite is the rule, with developers strongly restricting resales of the condos until as much as a year after closing. Mr. Friedberg saw the effects of a resale program when he had some 35 clients who were among the initial purchasers at the Chelsea Mercantile, a renovated warehouse condominium on the West Side of Manhattan developed by Rockrose Developments, in 1999. The initial offering plan, dated May 20, 1999, said that the 354 units would sell out at $251.45 million. By the time the 11th amendment was submitted to the attorney general's office that November, the sell-out price was $307.61 million. 'The demand was unbelievable,' Kevin P. Singleton, senior vice president at Rockrose Development, said of the Chelsea Mercantile project. In one of the amendments, the developer offered to take back the contract and split the market price with the initial buyer. For example, a buyer who had purchased for $1 million could, through this amendment, assign the contract to the developer and split the profit on the apartment, which was going for $1.5 million, leaving $250,000 each for the developer and the first buyer. By keeping an ear to the track, Mr. Singleton said, his firm knew even a year after initial sales that they would still have a line around the block if units were available. 'We could have sold 10 times the number of units we had,' he said. 'Filing an amendment is the only requirement. There is a limited downside for the developer.' Brad Maione, the spokesman for the attorney general's office, said in an e-mail message that the office takes no official position on the merits of particular provisions in an offering plan. Assigning the contract can be beneficial, he said, because it allows buyers who are unable to close or no longer interested in buying to find a substitute purchaser and not loose their down payments. It is certainly not as easy to institute a resale program as in other cities, but with large-scale condo development planned for West Chelsea, and areas like the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront in Brooklyn, investors moving from one preconstruction project to another could become more common in New York. It will if Mr. Mathieson has anything to do with it. 'You're inviting more people, including investors, to take on the risk until the end user gets to the building,' he said. 'The end user wants a product they can look at. The investor is there to take the risk.'

Subject: fees? From: Ron Shawger To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 10:29:37 (EDT) Email Address: RShawger@wi.rr.com Message: In recognizing that the NY Times is instituting a fee to read many of their columnists I only recently discovered that it was the reader who was to pay them, not they who would pay the reader. to read Krugman, the former Enron advisor and actually have to pay for it the 'raping' of Enron seems only to be repeated by the 'raping' of anyone foolish enough to pay fof the priveladge to read an author, supposed economics professor, who spends much of his articles just making things up. He has from time to time had to 'go on the record' correcting his many mistakes about literal numbers but much of the time he writes one set of thoughts only to later write another set of thoughts they totally contradict the former.

Subject: You're hilarious Ron From: Erica To: Ron Shawger Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:59:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I liked your post. What were you going for? An idiot? A moron? A troll? Anyway, good stuff. I liked the whole I'm pretending I don't like the fees but not for the reasons you think I don't like them. That was just quality posting. Keep them coming!

Subject: Re: You're hilarious Ron From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 12:02:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I love the part about him 'being an Enron advisor'. That's right associate him with the Enron scandal... hahahaha. Erica is right you are hilarious. Maureen you have a partner. And I suppose both you and Maureen still believe in the WMD theory too?

Subject: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Maureen D. To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 09:57:24 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Our Public Editor, Byron Calame, has called for enforcement of the NYTimes 'corrections policy' by Paul Krugman. Either Kruggy complies, or he's OUT: 'Meanwhile, in the opinion section of The Times, the corrections policy of Gail Collins, the editor of the editorial page, is not being fully enforced. As I have written on my Web journal, Paul Krugman has not been required to correct, in the paper, recent acknowledged factual errors in his column about the 2000 election in Florida. 'The Times has long been a trailblazer in its commitment to correcting errors [which might explain why Judith Miller is still in jail- ED.] . This is no time to let those standards slip – even when well-known critics and columnists are involved.'

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Anybody To: Maureen D. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 12:55:21 (EDT) Email Address: anywhere@nytimes.com Message: this message is obviously a fake.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Maureen To: Anybody Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 15:44:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Go read the Public Editor's column in Sunday's NYT, and you will see that the post is NOT a fake. The Time's own ombudsman basicaaly characterized Krugman as little more than a lying sack of crap.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Norman Bauman To: Maureen Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 21:28:36 (EDT) Email Address: nbauman@escape.com Message: Go read the Public Editor's column in Sunday's NYT, and you will see that the post is NOT a fake. The Time's own ombudsman basicaaly characterized Krugman as little more than a lying sack of crap. --- I do not believe that your name actually is Maureen D. liberties@nytimes.com. Furthermore, I do not believe that Krugman will be 'OUT' if he doesn't apologize. I have had several exchanges with the old Public Editor, Daniel Okrent, and the new Public Editor, Byron Calame. Okrent told me, and others, that the columnists in the New York Times, such as Thomas Friedman (and his fake T-shirt story), operate by different rules and could not be held accountable for getting their facts wrong because they were writing opinion. http://www.thismodernworld.com/weblog/mtarchives/week_2004_03_07.html#001384 Now Calame has decided to go after the NYT's most prominent liberal columnist, with what I think is simply his own personal and politically-influenced disagreement with Krugman's conclusions. I wrote to Okrent about a news story (not a column) that violated the NYT's personal attack rules much more clearly than the Geraldo story that Calame used in his last column. Okrent was on his famous long summer vacation, so his assistant handled my complaint. He forwarded it to the responsible editor, and they ignored him. I followed up and they continued to ignore him. That should give you an idea of the Public Editor's power in the NYT hierarchy. If he bugs them, they ignore him, and nothing happens. That's probably what will happen if Krugman continues to ignore Calame, which is probably the best thing for Krugman to do. I met Calame, and he seemed like a reasonable guy, and I thought he would be a great choice for the Public Editor (certainly compared to Okrent, which is a low bar), but apparently he fooled me and underneath he's just a right wing nut. His columns on Geraldo and Krugman were simply repeating the complaints of the well-organized right-wing media attack machine, which is usually picking on trivial objections the way the creationists pick on trivial objections to the theory of evolution. OTOH, I'm beginning to suspect that the NYT appointed a Public Editor not to uphold professional journalistic standards, but as a sop to the right-wing attack squads. There's precedent for that -- during the Vietnam War, the managing editor, A.M. Rosenthal, launched a camaign to get rid of liberal reporters who were reporting bad news (i.e. the truth) about Vietnam (as documented in Gay Talese's book about the NYT, The Kingdom and the Power). OTOH, Krugman is phenominally popular at the NYT, as you could tell from their 'Most-forwarded' list. (Why do you think I paid $50?) They can't get rid of Krugman the way Rosenthal got rid of their anonymous reporters. The NYT readers are quite liberal, and he represents their views, and even in business terms, the NYT is responsible to its readers, not the right-wing blogosphere nuts.

Subject: Re: Krugman Skating on Thin Ice From: Mik To: Maureen Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 16:19:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I'm confused. Here is Krugman's correction to that article. What are you refering to? SYNOPSIS: This is a correction from Paul Krugman, published in The New York Times. It is regarding parts of three columns: What They Did Last Fall (8.19.05), Don't Prettify Our History (8.22.05), and Summer of Our Discontent (8.26.05), which discuss the topic of the stolen 2000 election In describing the results of the ballot study by the group led by the Miami Herald, I relied on the Herald’s own report, which listed only three hypothetical statewide recounts, two of which went to Al Gore. There was, however, a fourth recount, which would have gone to George W. Bush. In this case, the two stricter-standard recounts went to Mr. Bush. The later study, by a group including the New York Times, used two methods to count ballots: relying on the judgment of a majority of those examining each ballot, or requiring unanimity. Mr. Gore “won” all six hypothetical recounts on the majority basis. He lost one – in this case, the one using the loosest standard – on the unanimity basis. None of this has any bearing on my original point, which was not that the outcome would have been different if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened - the Florida Supreme Court had not, in fact, called for a full statewide manual recount - but that the recorded vote was so close that, when you combine that fact with the effects of vote suppression and ballot design, it becomes reasonably clear that the voters of Florida, as well as those of the United States as a whole, tried to choose Mr. Gore. Originally published in The New York Times, 9.2.05

Subject: There is Much More to Come From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:02:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though we cannot use the text of the New York Times Select articles, we can use the rest of the New York Times for discussion as always. The loss is regretted, but there is much much more left.

Subject: Inflation From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 09:02:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: From 'A Nasty Whiff of Inflation' 9/22/05 in The Economist: 'Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, worked at the Fed in the 1970s under the then chairman, Arthur Burns. He remembers the dangers of core inflation. When oil prices surged in 1973-74, Burns asked the Fed's economists to strip out energy from the consumer-price index (CPI) to get a less distorted measure. When food prices then rose sharply, they stripped those out too—followed by used cars, children's toys, jewellery, housing and so on, until around half the CPI basket was excluded because it was supposedly “distorted” by exogenous forces. As a result, the Fed failed to spot the breadth of emerging inflationary pressures throughout the economy.'

Subject: Exclusions- From: d To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 11:57:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The biggest exclusion of all is the price of homes. I own TIPS, they are a partial defense against inflation, not a complete one. What a conundrum, how to protect against inflation.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: Terri To: d Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 14:55:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Should the need be to protect against inflation, and I can understand that it may be, then stocks will be the preferred protection. I would much prefer Vanguard's value stock index to any sort of bonds if significant inflation is to recur. There are several Vanguard stock fund as well that I much prefer and would prefer if inflation is to be an issue.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: David E.. To: Terri Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 01:41:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: But that is too easy. They protect against inflation, but don't protect during deflation. During deflation a bond is the thing to have. You have to decide how much of each you need.

Subject: Re: Exclusions- From: Pete Weis To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 08:47:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Deflation is possible if the US consumer really starts to fade. But with the flood of dollars worldwide and increasing fiscal deficits in the US can the dollar hold up? The current account would begin to disappear with the fading consumer, but the US government will become the borrower and spender of last resort even as tax revenues decline and the fiscal deficit gets larger. I like to view inflation as a declining dollar, so it's a matter of deciding what does well relative to a declining dollar. Stocks and bond funds (which trade bonds) do poorly, in general, during economic slowdowns and a declining dollar.

Subject: Down then up From: David E.. To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 11:53:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There could be a yo-yo effect. First big time inflation, dollar drops like a yo-yo. Then deflation, dollar pops back up. Get ready for the two step. Planning a portfolio to provide deflation and inflation insurance is tough. Especially if the insurance is only planned to cost less than 20% of returns. Luck is required.

Subject: Re: Down then up From: Pete Weis To: David E.. Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 11:17:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Could be a wild ride!!! These are definitely different times than almost any of us have experienced in our lifetimes!!!!

Subject: Re: Pete's whereabouts From: Dorian To: David E.. Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 05:43:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hi Pete, Nice to see you here. You should keep us posted occasionally on your whereabouts. Regards, Dorian

Subject: Re: Pete's whereabouts From: Pete Weis To: Dorian Date Posted: Tues, Sep 27, 2005 at 10:31:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: New England. Looking for a boat. While the housing market is still holding up, the boating market (atleast relatively large sailboats) seems to be slumping. I see the same boats on the market month after month and the prices dropping - the weird part of it - it makes me want to hold off to see how low they might go. If the housing market begins to slump will potential home buyers end up with the same buying hesitation? Then again maybe I'm just a weird contrarian. It probably has something to do with all the fascination with the housing markets and vacation homes as opposed to boats. Presently, I'm in a buyers market and boat brokers are calling me and telling me how frustrated their sellers are and asking what needs to be added or improved on their boat to get it sold. Anyway, when it comes to boats, I'm more of a 'Chevy' guy but my wife is more of a 'Mercedes' person and so I think we'll wait a little and see what happens.

Subject: Re: Inflation From: Terri To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 09:28:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting, but there is no evidence now that general inflation is becoming a problem. The Federal Reserve is tightening short term interest rates and labor costs are all too contained. The problem may be that some of the price increases that are present are effecting classes of households differently, but the bond market is telling us that general inflation is not a problem.

Subject: The Big Uneasy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 17:39:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/23/opinion/23krugman.html September 23, 2005 The Big Uneasy By PAUL KRUGMAN Although Hurricane Katrina drowned much of New Orleans, the damage to America's economic infrastructure actually fell short of early predictions. Of course, Rita may make up for that. But Katrina did more than physical damage; it was a blow to our self-image as a nation. Maybe people will quickly forget the horrible scenes from the Superdome, and the frustration of wondering why no help had arrived, once cable TV returns to nonstop coverage of missing white women. But my guess is that Katrina's shock to our sense of ourselves will persist for years. America's current state of mind reminds me of the demoralized mood of late 1979, when a confluence of events - double-digit inflation, gas lines and the Iranian hostage crisis - led to a national crisis of confidence. Start with economic confidence. The available measures say that consumer confidence, which was already declining before Katrina hit, has now fallen off a cliff. One well-respected survey, from the University of Michigan, says that consumer sentiment is at its lowest level since George Bush the elder was president and 'America: What Went Wrong?' was a national best seller. It's true that gasoline prices have receded from their post-Katrina peaks. But even if Rita spares the refineries, a full recovery of economic confidence seems unlikely. For one thing, it looks as if we're in for a long, cold winter: natural gas and fuel oil are still near their price peaks. And most families were already struggling even before Katrina. A few weeks ago, the Census Bureau reported that in 2004, while Washington and Wall Street were hailing a 'Bush boom,' poverty increased, and median family income failed to keep up with inflation. It's safe to assume that most families did even worse this year. Then there's the war in Iraq, which is rapidly becoming impossible to spin positively: the purple fingers have come and gone, and there are no more corners to turn. As a result, views that people like Howard Dean were once derided for are becoming the majority opinion. Most Americans say the war was a mistake; a majority say the administration deliberately misled the country into war; almost 4 in 10 say Iraq will turn into another Vietnam. And many people are outraged by the war's cost. The general public doesn't closely follow economists' arguments about the risks of budget deficits, or try to decide between competing budget projections. But people do know that there's a big deficit, that politicians keep calling for cuts in spending and that rebuilding after Katrina will cost a lot of money. They resent the idea that large sums are being spent in a faraway country, where we're waging a war whose purpose seems increasingly obscure. Finally, fragmentary evidence - like a sharp drop in the fraction of Americans who approve of President Bush's performance in handling terrorism and the failure of large crowds to show up for the Pentagon's 'America Supports You' march and country music concert - suggests that the confluence of Katrina and the fourth anniversary of 9/11 has caused something to snap in public perceptions about the 'war on terror.' In the early months after 9/11, America's self-confidence actually seemed to have been bolstered by the attack: the Taliban were quickly overthrown, and President Bush looked like an effective leader. The positive perception of what happened after 9/11 has, needless to say, been a mainstay of Mr. Bush's political stature. But now that more time has elapsed since 9/11 than the whole stretch from Pearl Harbor to V-J Day, people are losing faith. Osama, it turns out, could both run and hide. It's obvious from the evening news that Al Qaeda and violent Islamic extremism in general are flourishing. And the hapless response to Katrina, which should have been easier to deal with than a terrorist attack, has shown that our leaders have done virtually nothing to make us safer. And here's the important point: these blows to our national self-image are mutually reinforcing. The sense that we're caught in an unwinnable war reinforces the sense that the economy is getting worse, and vice versa. So we're having a crisis of confidence. It's the kind of crisis that opens the door for dramatic political changes - possibly, but not necessarily, in a good direction. But who will provide leadership, now that Mr. Bush is damaged goods?

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: Rich To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 12:42:36 (EDT) Email Address: rmynick@comcast.net Message: I'm glad this PK article was posted here. But does anyone know if the PKarchive will no longer be posting Mr. Krugman's articles regularly in the 'Columns' section (now that the NYT is forcing readers to cough up cash for 'Times Select')?

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: bill To: Rich Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 15:41:17 (EDT) Email Address: billcstosine@mchsi.com Message: PKarchive will no longer be posting Mr. Krugman's articles, but they are still easy enough to find elsewhere on the web for free. Just do a google groups search for the title of the latest column (put it in quotes) and the word Krugman (not in quots), i.e. 'The Big Easy' and Krugman - http://groups.google.com/grphp?hl=en&tab=wg&q= and you can come up with pages like this usually sometime during the first day they appear. Someone - usually a different person every time - is always going to be posting columns: http://snipurl.com/hx3v I don't know how The Times is going to force these pages to go away.

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: David E.. To: bill Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:42:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It will be easy. The Wall Street Journal does it all the time. Start lawsuits for violation of copyright. The WSJ doesn't sell its opinion columns, only the NYTimes does. The search for profit centers creates strange results. Maybe the library computer will have the columns.

Subject: Re: The Big Uneasy From: Emma To: David E.. Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 17:59:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: As long as the New York Times articles and editorials as left for us, all will be well.

Subject: The Desire to Draw From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 14:14:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/arts/design/16cott.html?ex=1284523200&en=88b956b56a278f8b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 16, 2005 The Desire to Draw, Sometimes a Compulsion By HOLLAND COTTER Every now and then contemporary art delivers a little surprise, which is why I love it. The American Folk Art Museum just opened an 'emerging talent' show, its first, titled 'Obsessive Drawing.' Frankly, the idea sounded like a sop thrown to a Babes-in-Chelsealand art moment. But 'emerging,' as it turns out, is relative. One of the five artists being introduced, Eugene Andolsek, is 83. A former railroad employee, he lives in a senior citizens' home in Crabtree, Pa., and stopped painting two years ago because of failing eyesight. He has never shown before. He doesn't even consider his sumptuously patterned, labor-intensive colored-ink drawings to be art, and seems to disapprove of anyone who does. The thing is, the work is really good, rich and solid, but also trippy and full of little elegancies, which makes it look very now. But why, if Mr. Andolsek wasn't thinking art, or audience, did he do what he did for so long, drawing thousands of pictures over 50 years? Because he wanted to, and because he had to, which in his case are more or less the same thing. The act of drawing and painting, he has said, helped to ease a debilitating anxiety that had dogged him all his life. Once he started a drawing, the anxiety lifted. Relief arrived as a state of entrancement. One minute he'd be sitting at his kitchen table with sheets of graph paper and a pen filled with ink. The next, he'd be aware that hours had passed, and he'd done a drawing. What was the mechanism responsible? He's not sure, but it worked for a creative half century. The other artists in the exhibition, which has been organized by Brooke Anderson, director and curator of the museum's Contemporary Center, are similarly, if differently, driven to art. So 'obsessive,' too, is relative. It can describe pathological behavior - art as a motor constantly running, a habit, a twitch - or therapy for such behavior. It can indicate an aesthetic style, a 'look,' defined by, say, repetition of forms or motifs, or by excruciatingly micromanaged details. By such standards, all sorts of artists, from the Boucicault Master to Picasso, fall into the obsessive camp. But the show is talking, directly or by implication, about something else: in a word, abnormality, art as a symptom of psychological disorder, the Outsider phenomenon. Debates about the ethics and efficacy of Outsider Art as a category, with an aura of exceptionalism and exoticism, are old by now. For many observers the matter boils down to whether the art in question is interesting to look at and think about even without the support of biographical data. For much of the historical work that now constitutes an Outsider canon, the answer is yes, as it is for the work in this spare, tidy show. The installation actually opens with the canon, or selections from it, in a salon-style hanging of work by figures from the past like Madge Gill, Consuelo González Amezcua, A. G. Rizzoli and Adolph Wolfi, with a few Pennsylvania German Fraktur pictures mixed in to distinguish obsessive from merely intricate or busy. The binding element, though, in old work and new, is drawing itself, expressive or notational. In Mr. Andolsek's abstract pictures, done on sheets of graph paper the size of placemats, lines are so meticulously executed that they look machine-tooled. Often thick and black, they define patterns - baroque swags, space-filling grids, jazzy zigzags - and enclose color. The overall impression of locked-in, airtight harmony brings work of the late Al Held to mind, though certain pictures with compositional asymmetries also resemble cut pieces of printed cloth, swatches from a grand continuous fabric. Abstract drawings by Hiroyuki Doi, a Japanese artist born in 1946, are also products of trancelike concentration, but their method is free-form and incremental. Each design is built up from countless small-to-tiny black ink circles drawn in dense, foamlike clusters, with the clusters coalescing into larger forms that suggest mountains, galactic clouds or fleshy mounds. Mr. Doi's drawings evoke a whole lineage of cumulative circle-intensive art, led by Yayoi Kusama and Atsuko Tanaka. And to this he adds a specific personal motivation. According to a wall text, he regards his pictures as exercises in cosmic and personal rejuvenation that he feels compelled to perform. The work of Martin Thompson, a street artist from Wellington, New Zealand, is based on mathematical calculation. He draws intricate, digital-looking patterns on graph paper by filling in individual squares with colored ink. He then hand-copies the design, square by square, onto a second sheet of paper, but in reverse, from positive to negative. This emphasis on the laborious performances of repetitive sequences is reminiscent of certain conceptual art of the 1960's and 70's. But Mr. Thompson's physical immersion in his work, which extends to making surgically precise cut-and-paste corrections, connects the realm of detached ideas to that of extreme handcrafting. Charles Benefiel, who was born in 1967, and lives in New York and New Mexico, is the only artist in the exhibition to have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which he controls in part through his art. His Minimalist-looking drawings are, like Mr. Thompson's, grounded in numerical calculation, but have a critical dimension. To Mr. Benefiel, numbers, by which people are routinely identified and tracked, add up to a dehumanizing force. And both to warm up his world view and symbolically dodge computational surveillance, he has invented a mathematically based private language of dots, circles and dashes that correspond to spoken sounds and musical notes. His art consists of strings of these forms written horizontally across sheets of paper, with results that look like Agnes Martin drawings made of fine beadwork. The British-born artist Chris Hipkiss is the show's only figurative artist and contributes its most spectacular work, a 35-foot-long pencil-drawn narrative titled 'Lonely Europe Arm Yourself.' The panorama seems to depict the aftermath of environmental destruction, which has left behind only fortress walls, factory smokestacks, grotesquely sexualized trees and squadrons of transgendered figures in dominatrix attire. The terrain is like a nuked version of Stanley Spencer's Cookham; the figures like Henry Darger's Vivian girls grown up to be avenging punk-Valkyries. And the work, dated 1994-95, is right in synch with a trend for fantasy narrative in the mainstream art world today. At the same time, though, it stands apart from that trend and that world, though in ways hard to define. Maybe it is just that in addition to formal brilliance and conceptual ambition, there is something unguarded about Mr. Hipkiss's art, and that of his 'emerging' colleagues. Much of their work conveys, through content or form, a sense of exposed privacy. This is art that can neither be expressively tempered, nor politically corrected, nor marketably slotted by that great vetting, veneering machine called the art industry. So it stays volatile, radioactive, problematically hot. Is this why our mainstream institutions are so reluctant to exhibit it? Because they're afraid of it, afraid of its unpredictablity, afraid of how its intense singularity will react with, clash with, even infect other art? I don't have an answer, but it is questions like this that keep my passion - crazy, I know - for contemporary art alight.

Subject: In Place Where Hungry Are Fed, Hunger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 13:48:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/international/africa/22niger.html?ex=1285041600&en=9be0fc0627db213f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 22, 2005 In Place Where the Hungry Are Fed, Farmers May Starve By NATASHA C. BURLEY NIAMEY, Niger - The images coming out of this impoverished, West African nation have been unrelentingly grim: hungry children with stick-thin arms and swollen bellies, mothers carrying babies hundreds of miles to look for food after a poor harvest and high prices put local staples out of reach. A few months ago, those images prompted a torrent of food aid from Western donors. But now, after a season of good rains, Niger's farmers are producing a bumper crop of millet, the national staple. This should be a cause for rejoicing, yet in one of the twists that mark life in the world's poorest countries, the aid that was intended to save lives could ruin the harvest for many of Niger's farmers by driving down prices. The newly harvested millet and the donated food will reach market stalls at the same time, and with prices depressed, poor farming families may be forced to sell crops normally set aside for their own use and use the money to pay off debts. The effect would be a new cycle of hunger and poverty. Dr. Edward Clay of the Overseas Development Institute, an independent research organization in London, said by e-mail that because the donated food was delayed, 'there is a real risk that late arrival will disrupt recovery in Niger and distort agricultural trade within West Africa.' Millet is grown by almost all of the nation's farmers, but the crop has become one of the factors that work against the people of Niger and in favor of malnutrition and hunger. A distant cousin of corn, it is a hardy crop but provides almost no protein or other nutrients essential for the diets of children, and requires hours of daily pounding to be made edible. Amadou Hassane, a millet farmer north of Niamey, has begun harvesting some of the millet in his fields for his family. 'It is wonderful to be able to give millet to my wife to pound,' he said, proudly fiddling with his tall stalks. 'This year promises to be plentiful, and we're grateful.' But he said he would sell much of his harvest to repay debts incurred to buy seedlings after last year's drought devastated his millet plants and left him with nothing to sell. 'I'll keep no more than half of my harvest as stock for myself, and sell the rest to pay back my debts,' he said. 'I badly need cash.' Since he, and most other farmers in the muddy village of Fala, borrowed money, he will have to sell a greater proportion of his harvest if prices are low. To survive the lean season - the period after household stocks are gone and before the new harvest - Mr. Hassane engaged in a sort of futures market, borrowing against his next harvest so he could buy seed. Sani Laoualy, a researcher with the government program that provides information about agricultural markets, said millet began arriving in markets in noticeable quantities in the first two weeks of September, and prices were beginning to fall. 'Over all, prices fell 14 percent between the 7th of September and the 14th of September,' he said, adding that in some areas in the east of the country, millet prices were nearly on par with normal years. But, he warned, 'prices will fall rapidly over the next six weeks.' The World Food Program in Niamey concluded its first round of food distributions on Thursday, according to Marcus Prior, the West Africa spokesman for the food program. Those areas, however, in the humid southeast of Niger, also have the most promising harvests, and hundreds of acres of millet fields are currently being harvested. Tensions are rising among donors as various officials and organizations have called for distributions to cease, for fear of depressing prices for local farmers. Thirty thousand tons of food, to be trucked up from neighboring Benin and from Togo, has yet to reach Niger, but Gian Carlo Cirri, the World Food Program representative in Niger, insisted that all distribution could be done by Oct. 15. 'Harvests do not happen in one day, and we have time,' he said. If the distribution network, likened by Mr. Cirri to a cruise ship on auto-pilot and difficult to stop, is unable to give out all the food by then, plans are being made by the government of Niger and the United Nations to replenish the national cereal stock. Most international aid organizations have been resisting the World Food Program's decision to continue distributions until mid-October because of the impact on local markets, although Doctors Without Borders wants them to continue because so many people have yet to be fed. 'People responsible for the distributions have a responsibility to monitor prices and be prepared to stop giving out food if prices fall too low,' insisted Jeremy Lester, a senior European Union official in Niger. 'This is an emergency response to a chronic problem,' Mr. Lester said, referring to the distribution of food aid. 'And as these responses go, they often create as many problems as they solve: the poorest will have to continue to sell cheap and buy dear.' Faster U.S. Aid Unlikely A Bush administration proposal that sought to deliver a portion of American food aid more quickly and at lower cost to starving people around the world appears headed for defeat in Congress, though there is still a narrow chance a scaled-down version will survive in the Senate. The administration asked for authority to use a quarter of the $1.2 billion food aid budget provided to the Agency for International Development to buy corn, wheat and other commodities in the developing countries facing hunger crises, or in neighboring countries, rather than from American producers. Now, the government must buy the food in American markets and send most of it on American-flagged ships. Officials at the Agency for International Development said that having the flexibility to buy the food for an African crisis in Africa would make it possible to respond in some cases in weeks instead of months, feed more people with the same amount of money and potentially save thousands of lives. Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the agency, said the government would be able to buy twice as much food for the same money in some situations because of the savings on transportation. 'You can't eat transportation,' he said. But the change was dropped from the Senate's version of the agriculture appropriations bill expected to be voted on this week, though there is a chance part of the proposal will be restored. The provision was not in the House version, passed in June. The measure ran into fierce opposition from an array of agricultural and shipping interests with stakes in the program. And an alliance of nonprofit groups that receive food aid money also opposed using the program's core financing to buy food in developing countries. Rather, they favored a $100 million pilot program that would only go forward if Congress appropriated extra money for food aid, which they say is indefensibly short of money. A range of agricultural and development economists have long said such a policy option is sensible, so long as it is used wisely. But it is not always the best course, especially where there is a widespread shortage of food and purchasing locally would drive up prices, making food even less affordable. But researchers and aid workers say it can be useful when there is a surplus in a different part of an afflicted nation or in a nearby country.

Subject: Little friday humour From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 12:08:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: seeing as its 1704(gmt) on a friday evening, i thought i'd inject a little humour to cheer everyone up for the weekend. for those of you unfortunate to be located 3000-6000 miles west of here, enjoy the next 5-8 hours of your working day! Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying: 'Yesterday, 3 Brazilian soldiers were killed in an accident' 'OH NO!' the President exclaims. 'That's terrible!' His staff sits stunned at this display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits, head in hands Finally, the President looks up and asks.......... 'How many is a Brazillion??!'

Subject: Censored... in the name of the Lord From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:39:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What are decent-minded, US Christian conservatives to do if they want to watch a film without upsetting their sensibilities? Now they can watch their favourite movie stripped of any sex and violence, says Andrew Gumbel A few years ago, it dawned on American food manufacturers there was an intriguing hole in the market to fill: vegetarians who wanted to eat hamburgers while remaining vegetarian, or vegans who had a craving for egg salad. Today, the supermarkets are filled with bean curd-based meatless burgers and eggless egg salads, and they are hot sellers. As with food, so it is with films. What are decent-minded middle-American Christian conservatives to do if they abhor sex, bad language, illicit drug use and gut-spilling violence but still have an urge to see Saving Private Ryan? Or Goodfellas? Or The Amityville Horror? The beginnings of an answer came a few years ago with the advent of CleanFlicks, a kitchen-sized Utah company that decided to offer videos and DVD for rental - after they had been edited to remove all content likely to be offensive to the local Mormon population. Today, that kitchen-sized enterprise has turned into a veritable industry, spanning numerous states and attracting the attention of both lawyers and politicians all the way to Washington. CleanFlicks is going from strength to strength, offering its services on a monthly subscription basis much like the wildly successful mainstream company Netflix. And a second, even more sophisticated, company called ClearPlay, also based in Utah, has sprung up. ClearPlay doesn't edit the films as such, but rather offers a series of filters so individual consumers can decide how much sex or violence they want to tolerate. Fancy seeing A Mighty Wind, the gentle Christopher Guest satire spoofing folk music, but without the 'revealing clothing'? No problem. Want to see a gritty urban drama like the recently released Crash, which examines racism in Los Angeles, but without the 'implied premarital sex'? Just press the appropriate button on your DVD menu and you can relax in the knowledge that all suggestions of illicit nookie have been purged ahead of time. The service has not only proved popular in conservative states such as Utah. There is some evidence it appeals to a much broader range of movie consumers, particularly families concerned about the content Hollywood is throwing at their children, even at a tender age. The sanitising companies have even set to work on Shrek and Shrek II, finding the animated smash hits replete with squirm-inducing sexual innuendo and language that may not be cursing as such but is still too salty for their puritan tastes. The film industry, as might be expected, has not reacted well. Starting three years ago, when CleanFlicks started making its first serious commercial inroads, the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild have been railing at what they see as a straightforward infringement of intellectual property. For while their work is modified and edited all the time - for broadcast on television or on commercial plane flights, for example - the difference is that these modifications are done with their permission, through formal licensing agreements. CleanFlicks and ClearPlay don't ask for permission from anyone, arguing instead that their adjustments and amendments fall under the category of 'fair use'. The two sides quickly fell into a predictable legal dispute, which dragged on until earlier this year when the Bush administration itself decided to get involved and passed the Family Movie Act, which sanctioned what the sanitisers were doing and was signed into law explicitly to make the legal challenge from the Hollywood bigwigs - among them Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and a host of other first-rank directors - vanish into the judicial ether. As far as the White House was concerned, the law was an easy way of appealing to the Republican Party's fundamentalist Christian base and bashing one of its favourite targets - Hollywood's free-speech liberals. Quite a few Democrats jumped on board as well, partly because of a perceived need to defer to the conservative 'family values' agenda and partly because the Bill also embraced a handful of anti-piracy provisions that the film industry was keen to see entered into law. From a cultural point of view, though, the debate has left several questions unanswered. One, if people really don't like watching films where characters behave badly, drink alcohol, have sex or slice each other with carving knives, why don't they simply avoid them altogether? Two, aren't they conflating the very different issues of protecting children from Hollywood inanity and mauling the work of genuine film artists who have a specific vision to express, and a specific way to express it? And three, if Christian fundamentalists are really so sensitive about entertainment products featuring distinctly non-Christian behaviour, how come the Bible Belt watches television shows like Desperate Housewives - about a group of bored, drug-addled, adulterous suburban women - more avidly than any other region in the country? The hypocrisies of excessive puritanism have been an irresistible spectator sport for centuries, not just in the United States, and the advent of the DVD profanity police is no exception. Part of the fun of visiting the ClearPlay website, over and above the intriguing categories available for censorship (what, one wonders, qualifies as a 'non-graphic injury/wound'?), is seeing where the content police were forced to give up. The site's listing for Crash, for example, includes this line: 'Filter settings not available: ethnic and social slurs'. In a film preoccupied to the point of obsession with racist attitudes and behaviour, one would think not. But surely someone somewhere will still take offence? The CleanFlicks site is even funnier when it delves into the technical minutiae of censorship. The list of profanities the company says it systematically excises includes 'the B-words, the H-word when not referring to the place, the D-word, the S-word, the F-word etc . . . ' It also includes references to deity (G-word and JC-words etc), only when these words are used in a 'non-religious context'. One could spend an afternoon figuring out what all these forbidden terms are. The criteria for violence are intriguing, not least because the puritan right wing in the US has clearly had much less of a problem over the years with blood and guts than it has, say, with teenage kissing. (Pain being a much less problematic category for them than pleasure.) Sure enough, CleanFlicks tells us it doesn't edit all violence - 'only the graphic depictions of decapitation, impalements, dismemberment, excessive blood, gore etc'. The founder of CleanFlicks, Ray Lines, first had the idea for his business in the late 1990s, when he prepared a sanitised version of Titanic for his Mormon neighbours minus the relatively brief moments of nudity and sex. Soon he was taking it upon himself to decide all kinds of sensitive cultural questions. He once told The New York Times about Schindler's List, the Oscar-winning Holocaust drama: 'Every teenager in America should see it. But I don't think my daughters should see naked old men running around in circles.' ClearPlay, meanwhile, is the brainchild of Lee and Matt Jarman, two brothers from the heavily Mormon town of Orem, who developed the software that enables them to place filters on commercial DVDs. Copyright lawyers and entertainment executives tend to have fewer problems with their operation, because the DVD that arrives in the consumer's hands is intact, and it is up to each individual viewer how to edit the content, much as they might on their own - albeit more crudely - with the fast-forward button on their remote. CleanFlicks, on the other hand, not only modifies the films without permission, but then makes money on the basis of those modifications. Without the Family Movie Act, it seems likely the company would have fallen foul of the law and lost its legal battle with the Directors Guild. Despite the passing of the Act, the judge indicated his displeasure at the video companies' behaviour by ordering them to meet their own costs even as he threw out the case against them. It's 'Kill Bill' without the killing TROY Brad Pitt has been summoned to kill his enemy. He raises his sword, runs towards him, and then . . . er, not much. CleanFlicks cuts away to another shot. 'The point we would make here is that you still see the guy dies, you still see that Brad Pitt killed him, and so you don't really take away from the story of what's going on,' explains company founder Ray Lines. GOSFORD PARK The refined world portrayed in Robert Altman's film is even more buttoned-up after ClearPlay has done its work on Julian Fellowes' screenplay. When one valet, describing his master, says: 'He thinks he's God almighty. They all do,' the first sentence is cut out, leaving: 'They all do.' The result? A rather cryptic comment which makes no sense. BRAVEHEART Foul language is muted rather than skipped in this stirring tale of Scottish nationalism, while close-ups of bodily contact and battle wounds are kept in. But the famous mooning scene, involving Mel Gibson's bottom and the English army, is skipped altogether and most of the battle is cut. William Wallace would be turning in his grave! SAVING PRIVATE RYAN The notorious 24-minute opening scene involving D-Day death and gore on the Normandy beaches is made far more palatable, as is the generally brutal depiction of battle throughout. Despite director Steven Spielberg's insistence that these images are critical in showing the sacrifice of troops and the true nature of warfare, CleanFlicks finds them too much to take. THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS For an action flick, the edited version of The Matrix Revolutions doesn't contain much action. Viewers expecting foul-mouthed threats and a cut-throat fight between good and evil are more likely to be entertained by such dastardly warnings as: 'The only way you're getting through this door is over my big dead (muted word)!' THE GODFATHER In the sanitised version of The Godfather, Sonny Corleone (played by James Caan) does not die in a hail of bullets pounding relentlessly into his car. He just . . . well, he's sort of there one minute and gone the next. And the notoriously gory horse's head bit? Eighteen seconds is cut from one of the most famous scenes in recent cinema history.

Subject: Rita is climate change's smoking gun From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 11:29:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: SUPER-POWERFUL hurricanes now hitting the United States are the 'smoking gun' of global warming, one of world's leading scientists believes. The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. 'The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming.' In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still deny the reality of climate change. Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: 'If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation.' As he spoke, more than a million people were fleeing north away from the coast of Texas as Rita, one of the most intense storms on record, roared through the Gulf of Mexico. It will probably make landfall tonight or early tomorrow near Houston, America's fourth largest city and the centre of its oil industry. Highways leading inland from Houston were clogged with traffic for up to 100 miles north. There are real fears that Houston could suffer as badly from Rita just as New Orleans suffered from Hurricane Katrina less than a month ago. Asked what conclusion the Bush administration should draw from two hurricanes of such high intensity hitting the US in quick succession, Sir John said: 'If what looks like is going to be a horrible mess causes the extreme sceptics about climate change in the US to reconsider their opinion, that would be an extremely valuable outcome.' Asked about characterising them as 'loonies,' he said: 'There are a group of people in various parts of the world . . . who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate.' 'I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer.' With his comments, Sir John becomes the third of the leaders of Britain's scientific establishment to attack the US over the Bush government's determination to cast doubt on global warming as a real phenomenon. There is a growing international campaign for the Bush administration to recognise the worsening climate change problems now being visited upon the earth. Sir John's comments follow and support recent research, much of it from America itself, showing that hurricanes are getting more violent and suggesting climate change is the cause. A paper by US researchers, last week in the US journal Science, showed that storms of the intensity of Hurricane Katrina have become almost twice as common in the past 35 years. Although the overall frequency of tropical storms worldwide has remained broadly level since 1970, the number of extreme category 4 and 5 events has sharply risen. In the 1970s, there was an average of about 10 category 4 and 5 hurricanes per year but, since 1990, they have nearly doubled to an average of about 18 a year. During the same period, sea surface temperatures, among the key drivers of hurricane intensity, have increased by an average of 0.5C (0.9F). Sir John said: 'Increasingly it looks like a smoking gun. It's a fair conclusion to draw that global warming, caused to a substantial extent by people, is driving increased sea surface temperatures and increasing the violence of hurricanes.' Earlier this year another scientist Sir David King cited the evidence of hurricane Catarina, the first and only hurricane recorded in the South Atlantic, which struck southern Brazil in March 2004, where the textbooks say they should not form as further evidence of climate change. Clearly the Bush administration believes politically these storms can wreak havoc on his second term in office. As a result they have opened the flood gates on Federal funding to head off criticism. When President Bush promised last week that the US would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to rebuild the Gulf Coast it was the latest step in the remarkable conversion of the Republican Party from the party of fiscal prudence into the progenitors of the next New Deal and Great Society combined. The rhetoric, it is true, has been all about the virtues of small government. But since 2000 the Republican controlled Congress and White House have been on a spending binge that would make any self-respecting banana republic blush. Stripping out the public spending that is mandated, such as on pensions, in the last four years, federal spending has increased by more than it did in the previous 17 years.

Subject: What is oligarchy? From: HJ To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 23, 2005 at 08:17:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: $200K check most certainly looks like a terrific opportunity for somebody who already has a healthy family, a house and a job. But what about stressed, sick, homeless and jobless refugees? What will happen if they will get such checks as a disaster relief? In fact, this is exactly what neoliberal enthusiast Lansdsburg suggests as an idea of 'small government' hurricane aid effort. The answer is, this approach will turn the refugees into an oligrachy. A tiny majority of well-connected thugs will find ways to pocket almost all the funds and 'globalize' them, export into foreign banks and investments. This will be a perfectly smart way to protect themselves against inflation, law enforcement and curiosity of those who are less lucky. As for the rest, they will remain where they are or worse. Sounds familiar? Yes, this is how poverty is reproduced in the 3rd world 'banana republics'. This is also how Katrina victims are likely to be robbed - although concrete implementation of the scam will be much more sophisticated. 1. Steven E.Landsburg. Hurricane Relief? Or a 200K Check? I'd take the check, and so would most of Katrina's victims: http://slate.msn.com/id/2126715/fr/rss http://inplainview.monitor.us.tt

Subject: Schröder and Germany From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:45:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/international/europe/21globalist.html September 21, 2005 Schröder and Germany - Can both prevail? By ROGER COHEN International Herald Tribune BERLIN In politics as in life, it is important to distinguish between a brilliant performance and a victory. But whether Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, is capable of that remains unclear. I'm inclined to indulge Schröder in his giddy swagger after an extraordinary come-from-behind rally in the German election that left his Social Democratic Party, or SPD, less than a percentage point behind Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, or CDU. After suffering the naysayers for months, he felt inclined to gloat. Fair enough. Still, Schröder's televised mocking of Merkel, who did after all stake a claim to succeed him by getting more votes, was something to behold. In a voice laced with contempt, the chancellor tormented his cornered-in-victory rival: 'Do you really, honestly, believe that in the current circumstances my party would accept an offer from Ms. Merkel to hold talks in which she says she wants to become chancellor?' he said, relishing each word as if it were a succulent truffle. 'Come on, we must not take leave of our senses.' If that was remarkable from a man whose party had just seen its vote share plunge to 34.3 percent from 38.5 percent in 2002, so was Merkel's reaction. Or rather, her nonreaction: All Merkel could offer to Germany and the world was the stunned, coy, awkward visage of an amateur politician taken aback by a pro's onslaught. So there you have it - the braggadocio of a chancellor who lost his gamble that an early election would consolidate his power and the bewilderment of an opponent undermined so completely in a Pyrrhic victory that she resembles an emptied vessel. The hanging chads of Palm Beach County are beginning to look quaint compared with Germany's electoral agony. But hold on a second. This is Germany, not Florida. This is the land where bad history dictates that stability, and particularly institutional stability, is prized above all. Is Schröder not playing with fire by insisting he has a mandate to remain chancellor even if his party has fewer seats than Merkel's in the Bundestag? I doubt that the chancellor is putting the Federal Republic at risk. We are a long way from Weimar. The Constitution demands that Schröder stay on until another chancellor is elected, and Merkel does not yet have the parliamentary votes to stake a claim. There's nothing illegal about Schröder's maneuver. What he is doing is playing hardball - and damn the consequences for a stagnant Germany and a Europe in a search of direction. The decent gesture is not part of Schröder's lexicon right now. If precedent suggests that the head of the largest party should form the government, damn precedent! He wants his resurgence to be recognized. With what? The head of Merkel, it seems. Joschka Fischer, the Green foreign minister, said Monday that Merkel 'will not become chancellor.' Fischer knows Schröder's thinking. The current Red-Green government seems to be saying the price of a grand SPD-CDU coalition is Merkel's departure. Fischer and Schröder have been around long enough to know that the young wolves of Merkel's party, not least the rising state premiers Christian Wulff and Roland Koch, would shed no tears if she exited as suddenly as she emerged from East Germany's ruins. But that is not about to happen. For the moment the CDU is rallying around its leader, who has said, quite accurately, that 'We have emerged as the strongest party' and, less accurately, that she has 'a clear mandate to govern.' Merkel, in fact, has no clear mandate, and certainly not for the center-right government of free-market, bureaucracy-slashing reformers she sought. The departure back to university life of Paul Kirchhof, the flat-tax proponent whom she had picked to be her finance minister, symbolized the death of this idea. He went with a whimper. Indeed, the truth is that Germany is leaning left. The SPD, the new Left Party and the Greens have over 50 percent of the vote between them. It is only because the ex-Communists and assorted gauchistes of the Left Party are considered unacceptable by the SPD that Germany is not about to go for a latter-day Popular Front. In short, heady days have descended on Berlin, the headiest since the government moved back here from Bonn six years ago. There is no fever on the capital's leafy streets, but there is anxiety. That anxiety is justified. The institutions of the republic are hardly functioning, and unclear majorities and inertia are the result. Before the election, the paralysis lay in the impasse produced by a lower house, the Bundestag, and an upper house, the Bundesrat, dominated by different parties. Now it lies in an electoral result so little conducive to governance that new elections may prove necessary. 'There is a whiff of the Fourth Republic about Germany today,' said Karl Kaiser, a political scientist. He was referring to the French republic that collapsed in 1958 when its ineffective governments were replaced by the strong presidency conceived by Charles de Gaulle for the Fifth Republic. Institutional reform may well prove necessary in Germany, too, but first the country needs a government. By Oct. 18, Parliament must assemble to pick a chancellor. Merkel is still the marginal favorite - she may be able to cajole Fischer's Greens into joining the Christian Democrats and Free Democrats after all - but Germany's political waters have not been so muddy since the Republic's foundation in 1949. Schröder needs to think hard about that. The country he leads is not Luxembourg, Belgium or even Spain. It's Germany, the continent's mother lode, the nation that still stirs some unease in the collective European subconscious. Prudence and statesmanship are therefore at a premium, the kind that recognize that even a brilliant comeback is still a defeat if more votes and more parliamentary seats go to your opponent. The Berlin Republic, of which Schröder is the first and so far the only chancellor, is not ready for some Germanic rerun of Florida 2000.

Subject: Faulty Levees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:31:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/22/opinion/22thur2.html?ex=1285041600&en=68ec75ddeb726e32&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 22, 2005 Faulty Levees The official explanation for the collapse of some of the flood walls protecting New Orleans has been that Hurricane Katrina simply overwhelmed the system. But reports yesterday in both The Washington Post and The New York Times suggested that Katrina might not have been as powerful as advertised and that the real culprit was the system itself - flood walls so poorly constructed that they were easily breached. This points a finger at either the Army Corps of Engineers, which oversaw the design and construction of the flood walls, or Congress, which appears to have underfinanced the projects, or both. Corps officials have said all along that the system was not designed to protect the city from hurricanes larger than Category 3, and corps spokesmen continue to insist that Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane when it hit the Gulf Coast. But federal meteorologists now say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, whose strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city. What's more, sustained winds over Lake Ponchartrain reached only 95 miles per hour, even less than the winds of 111 to 130 miles per hour in a Category 3 storm. Other research, meanwhile, has turned up serious weaknesses in the thinner and less stable flood walls built along the city's canal system beginning in the 1960's. The failure of these walls - particularly along 17th Street and London Avenue - led to much of the devastation. Here again the research seems to contradict the official version, which is that extraordinary surges reached the top of or even 'overtopped' the flood walls, causing some sections to collapse. Yet Louisiana State University researchers doubt the water ever got that high. Even if it had, they argue, it would have been contained by properly constructed flood walls - essentially concrete slabs that resemble the sound barriers found beside highways. A detailed analysis of the storm and of the city's defenses will take months. It is not clear, for instance, whether the flood walls' weaknesses were the result of faulty engineering and shoddy workmanship on the corps' part or whether they resulted from Congress's unwillingness over the years to provide enough money and leadership to do the job properly. What is clear is that whatever investigation Congress undertakes, either on its own or with outside counsel, it must meet high standards of diligence and spare no one, including those in Congress.

Subject: Re: Faulty Levees From: Aeneas To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 15:55:14 (EDT) Email Address: aeneas_50@yahoo.com Message: It isinteresting to write about engineering handbooks and standards. They are meaningless unless you review the actual design of the levies. The designer needed to know what category storm to build toward then the designer would have used the handbook and some sense to design the levies. If the design were 'good' which is a big 'if' and a degree of freedom which creates risk the levie would break then the design has to be build with sufficient materials and workmanship to achieve the design. Another degree of risk introduced and looking at the pork nature of the Corps of Engineers looms pretty large. Then the levies have to be 'maintained'. Another root cause of failure. But, if all the causes of engineering implementation were covered for a cat 3; a cat 4 would very likely over come the levies. The big issue is why were there no plans to react forcefully and quickly with materials on hand for a levie breech? If you design something with faiulure risk there must be a plan and assets to overcome the failure with minimum damage to the poor black neighborhood the levies were protecting. Massive failure of the Corps!

Subject: The World is Round From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:27:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18154 August 11, 2005 The World is Round By John Gray - New York Review of Books The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century By Thomas L. Friedman 1. The belief that a process of globalization is underway which is bringing about a fundamental change in human affairs is not new. Marx and Engels expressed it in 1848, when they wrote in a justly celebrated passage in The Communist Manifesto: All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with his sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.... It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. Marx and Engels had no doubt that they were witnessing the emergence of a global market—a worldwide system of production and consumption that disregarded national and cultural boundaries. They welcomed this development, not only for the increasing wealth it produced but also because they believed it enabled humanity to overcome the divisions of the past. In the global marketplace nationalism and religion were destined to be dwindling forces. There would be many convulsions—wars, revolutions, and counterrevolutions—before the Communist order was securely established; but when global capitalism had completed its work a new era in the life of humankind would begin. The centrally planned economies that were constructed to embody Marx's vision of communism have nearly all been swept away, and the mass political movements that Marxism once inspired are no more. Yet Marx's view of globalization lives on, and nowhere more vigorously than in the writings of Thomas Friedman. Like Marx, Friedman believes that globalization is in the end compatible with only one economic system; and like Marx he believes that this sys-tem enables humanity to leave war, tyranny, and poverty behind. To his credit Friedman recognizes the parallels between his view and that of Marx. He cites an illuminating conversation at Harvard in which the communitarian political theorist Michael Sandel alerted him to the fact that the process of global 'flattening' he examines in his new book was first identified by Marx, quoting at length from The Communist Manifesto—including the passage cited above—and praising Marx for his prescience. This acknowledgment of the parallels between his view of globalization and Marx's theory of history is welcome and useful. Friedman has emerged as the most powerful contemporary publicist of neoliberal ideas. Neoliberals have a wide variety of views on political and social matters, ranging from the highly conservative standpoint of Friedrich Hayek to the more rigorously libertarian position of Milton Friedman; but they are at one in seeing the free market as the fountainhead of human freedom. Though in some of his writings he shows a concern for the casualties of deregulated markets, Thomas Friedman is a passionate missionary for this neoliberal faith. In his view the free market brings with it most of the ingredients that make for a free and humanly fulfilling society, and he has propagated this creed indefatigably in his books and in columns in The New York Times. Friedman's views have been highly influential, shaping the thinking of presidents and informing American policy on a number of issues, and it may be instructive to note the matters in which he shares Marx's blind spots. Because they were on opposite sides of the cold war it is often assumed that neoliberalism and Marxism are fundamentally antagonistic systems of ideas. In fact they belong to the same style of thinking, and share many of the same disabling limitations. For Marxists and neoliberals alike it is technological advance that fuels economic development, and economic forces that shape society. Politics and culture are secondary phenomena, sometimes capable of retarding human progress; but in the last analysis they cannot prevail against advancing technology and growing productivity. Friedman is unequivocal in endorsing this reductive philosophy. He writes that he is often asked if he is a technological determinist, and with the innocent enthusiasm that is a redeeming feature of his prose style he declares resoundingly: 'This is a legitimate question, so let me try to answer it directly: I am a technological determinist! Guilty as charged.' (The italics are Friedman's.) Technological determinism may contain a kernel of truth but it suggests a misleadingly simple view of history. This is well illustrated in Friedman's account of the demise of the Soviet Union. Acknowledging that there 'was no single cause,' he goes on: To some degree the termites just ate away at the foundations of the Soviet Union, which were already weakened by the system's own internal contradictions and inefficiencies; to some degree the Reagan administration's military buildup in Europe forced the Kremlin to bankrupt itself paying for warheads; and to some degree Mikhail Gorbachev's hapless efforts to reform something that was unreformable brought communism to an end. But if I had to point to one factor as first among equals, it was the information revolution that began in the early- to mid-1980s. Totalitarian systems depend on a monopoly of information and force, and too much information started to slip through the Iron Curtain, thanks to the spread of fax machines, telephones, and other modern tools of communication. What is striking in this otherwise unexceptionable list is what it leaves out. There is no mention of the role of Solidarity and the Catholic Church in making Poland the first post-Communist country, or of the powerful independence movements that developed in the Baltic nations during the Eighties. Most strikingly, there is no mention of the war in Afghanistan. By any account strategic defeat at the hands of Western-armed Islamist forces in that country (including some that formed the organization which was later to become al-Qaeda) was a defining moment in the decline of Soviet power. If Friedman ignores these events, it may be because they attest to the persistent power of religion and nationalism— forces that in his simple, deterministic worldview should be withering away. It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the cold war. Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx's thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx's insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts. Over the past two hundred years, the spread of capitalism and industrialization has gone hand in hand with war and revolution. It is a fact that would not have surprised Marx. Why do Friedman and other neoliberals believe things will be any different in the twenty-first century? Part of the answer lies in an ambiguity in the idea of globalization. In current discussion two different notions are commonly conflated: the belief that we are living in a period of rapid and continuous technological innovation, which has the effect of linking up events and activities throughout the world more widely and quickly than before; and the belief that this process is leading to a single worldwide economic system. The first is an empirical proposition and plainly true, the second a groundless ideological assertion. Like Marx, Friedman elides the two. 2. In The World Is Flat, Friedman tells us that globalization has three phases: the first from 1492 to around 1800, in which countries and governments opened up trade with the New World and which was driven by military expansion and the amount of horse-power and wind power countries could employ; the second from 1800 to 2000, in which global integration was driven by multinational companies, steam engines, and railways; and the third, in which individuals are the driving force and the defining technology is a worldwide fiber-optic network. In each of these phases, he tells us, technology is the driving force: globalization is a byproduct of technologi-cal development. Here Friedman deviates from the standard view among contemporary economists, who see globalization largely as the result of policies of deregulation. Here he is closer to Marx—and to the realities of history. In any longer perspective what we are witnessing today is only the most recent phase of worldwide industrialization. In the nineteenth century the world was shrunk by the advent of the telegraph; today it is shrinking again as a consequence of the Internet. Contrary to Friedman, however, the increasing facility of communication does not signify a quantum shift in human affairs. The uses of petroleum and electricity changed human life more deeply than any of the new information technologies have done. Even so, they did not end war and tyranny and usher in a new era of peace and plenty. Like other technological innovations, they were used for a variety of purposes, and became part of the normal conflicts of history. It is necessary to distinguish between globalization—the ongoing process of worldwide industrialization—and the various economic systems in which this process has occurred. Globalization did not stop when Lenin came to power in Russia. It went on—actively accelerated by Stalin's policies of agricultural collectivization. Nor was globalization in any way slowed by the dirigiste regimes that developed in Asia —first in Japan in the Meiji era and later in the militarist period, then after World War II in Korea and Taiwan. All these regimes were vehicles through which globalization continued its advance. Worldwide industrialization continued when the liberal international economic order fell apart after World War I, and it will carry on if the global economic regime that was established after the fall of communism falls apart in its turn. There is no systematic connection between globalization and the free market. It is no more essentially friendly to liberal capitalism than to central planning or East Asian dirigisme. Driven by technological changes that occur in many regimes, the process of globalization is more powerful than any of them. This is a truth that Friedman—as an avowed technological determinist—should accept readily enough. If he does not, it is because it shows how baseless are the utopian hopes he attaches to a process that abounds in conflicts and contradictions. Globalization makes the world smaller. It may also make it—or sections of it—richer. It does not make it more peaceful, or more liberal. Least of all does it make it flat. Friedman's by now famous discovery of the world's flatness came to him when he was talking to Nandan Nilekani, CEO of one of India's leading new high-technology companies, Infosys Technologies, at its campus in Bangalore. The Indian entrepreneur remarked to Friedman: 'Tom, the playing field is being leveled.' The observation is commonplace, but it hit Friedman with the force of a revelation. 'What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened.... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!' Five hundred years ago, Columbus 'returned safely to prove definitively that the world was round.' As a matter of fact it was not Columbus who provided the proof but the Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan, whose ship circled the globe in a three-year voyage from 1519 to 1522. Regardless, Friedman sees himself as a latter-day Columbus who has discovered that the world is no longer round: 'I scribbled four words down in my notebook: 'The world is flat.'' The metaphor of a flat world is worked relentlessly throughout this overlong book, but it is not its incessant repetition that is most troublesome. It is Friedman's failure to recognize that in many ways, some of them not difficult to observe, the world is becoming distinctly less flat. While he acknowledges the existence of an 'unflat' world composed of people without access to the benefits of new technology, he never connects the growth of this netherworld of the relatively poor with the advance of globalization. At times his failure to connect is almost comic. Recalling his visit to the Infosys headquarters in Bangalore, Friedman writes: The Infosys campus is reached by a pockmarked road, with sacred cows, horse-drawn carts, and motorized rickshaws all jostling alongside our vans. Once you enter the gates of Infosys, though, you are in a different world. A massive resort-size swimming pool nests amid boulders and manicured lawns, adjacent to a huge putting green. There are multiple restaurants and a fabulous health club. Friedman notes in passing that the Infosys campus has its own power supply. He does not ask why this is necessary, or comment on the widening difference in standards of life in the region that it represents. Yet it is only by decoupling itself from its local environment that Infosys is able to compete effectively in global markets. Infosys demonstrates that globalization does have the effect of leveling some inequalities in world markets, but the success of the company has been achieved by using services and infrastructure that the society around it lacks. As it levels some inequalities, globalization raises others. Friedman tells us that he is in favor of what he calls 'compassionate flatism,' which seems to mean a range of centrist or social-democratic policies designed to enhance job mobility while preserving economic security, such as portable personal pensions. In an American setting these may be useful proposals, and it is strange that in the countries that have been most exposed to the disruptive effects of globalization Friedman appears to favor neoliberal policies of the most conventional kind. He describes the fall of the Berlin Wall as a 'world-flattening event,' and cites Russia as one of the countries that has most benefited from the new flat world. There can be no doubt that the Soviet collapse represented an advance for human freedom. Yet since then Russia has suffered rising levels of absolute poverty and large increases in inequality of wealth, and it seems clear that the economic 'shock therapy' administered on Western advice just after the Communist collapse contributed to these developments. Price decontrol wiped out small family savings, and by limiting the benefits of privatizing government industries to a small number of insiders produced a marked concentration of wealth. As a result, large parts of the Russian population have been excluded from the benefits of the global market. Other policies could likely have avoided or mitigated this outcome. In view of the Soviet inheritance, the process of transition was bound to be prolonged and difficult. Attempting it in the space of a few years was folly, and shock therapy resulted in the impoverishment of many millions of people. It also fueled a backlash against the West. Socioeconomic change on the scale that occurred in post-Communist Russia tends to produce a political aftershock, and the emergence of Vladimir Putin can be seen as an unintended consequence of Western-sponsored free market policies. In some contexts free market policies continue, but Putin has reasserted political control of the economy as a whole, reined in the political activities of the oligarchs, and demonstrated a degree of independence from Western influences. As a result his quasi-authoritarian regime seems to possess a popular legitimacy that Yeltsin's lacked, and there is no discernible prospect of Western-style 'democratic capitalism.' Globalization has no inherent tendency to promote the free market or liberal democracy. Neither does it augur an end to nationalism or great-power rivalries. Describing a long conversation with the CEO of a small Indian game company in Bangalore, Friedman recounts the entrepreneur concluding: 'India is going to be a superpower and we are going to rule.' Friedman replies: 'Rule whom?' Friedman's response suggests that the present phase of globalization is tending to make imbalances of power between states irrelevant. In fact what it is doing is creating new great powers, and this is one of the reasons it has been embraced in China and India. Neoliberals interpret globalization as being driven by a search for greater productivity, and view nationalism as a kind of cultural backwardness that acts mainly to slow this process. Yet the economic takeoff in both England and the US occurred against the background of a strong sense of nationality, and nationalist resistance to Western power was a powerful stimulus of economic development in Meiji Japan. Nationalism fueled the rapid growth of capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is doing the same in China and India at the present time. In both countries globalization is being embraced not only because of the prosperity it makes possible, but also for the opportunity it creates to challenge Western hegemony. As China and India become great powers they will demand recognition of their distinctive cultures and values, and international institutions will have to be reshaped to reflect the legitimacy of a variety of economic and political models. At that point the universal claims of the United States and other Western nations will be fundamentally challenged, and the global balance of power will shift. 3. In The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999), Friedman focused on the tension between the 'Lexus' forces of global economic integration and the 'Olive Tree' forces of cultural identity, and in The World Is Flat he tells us that after September 11 he spent much of his time traveling in the Arab and Muslim worlds and lost track of globalization. Actually it was not globalization he lost sight of but rather the forces of identity that shape it. Friedman writes that the nation-state is 'the biggest source of friction' in global markets. In fact nationalist resistance to globalization is more prominent in advanced countries such as France, Holland, and the US than in emerging economies. Friedman himself expresses concern about the impact of outsourcing on American employment, and there has been a steady drift toward greater protectionism in the Bush administration's trade policies. American nationalism may already be acting as a brake on globalization. In the fast-industrializing countries of Asia, nationalism is one of globalization's driving forces. Rising nationalism is part of the process of globalization, and so too are intensifying geopolitical rivalries. Just as it did when the Great Game was played out in the decades leading up to the First World War, ongoing industrialization is setting off a scramble for natural resources. The US, Russia, China, India, Japan, and the countries of the European Union are all of them involved in attempts to secure energy supplies, and their field of competition ranges from Central Asia through the Persian Gulf to Africa and parts of Latin America. The coming century could be marked by recurrent resource wars, as the great powers struggle for control of the planet's hydrocarbons. Moreover, worldwide industrialization appears to be coming up against serious environmental limits. An increasing number of expert observers believe global oil reserves may be peaking, and there is a consensus among climate scientists that the worldwide shift to an energy-intensive industrial lifestyle is contributing to global warming. If these fears are well founded the next phase of globalization could encompass upheavals as large as any in the twentieth century. It would be wrong to suggest that Friedman is oblivious of these risks. In an interesting aside, he writes: Islamo-Leninism, in many ways, emerged from the same historical context as the European radical ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fascism and Marxism-Leninism grew out of the rapid industrialization and modernization of Germany and Central Europe, where communities living in tightly bonded villages and extended families suddenly got shattered. Again, Friedman recognizes that many of the innovations of the current phase of globalization are reproduced in al-Qaeda. In the past two decades some of the most advanced global corporations have ceased to be top-heavy bureaucracies, and become streamlined networks of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. Al-Qaeda has emulated this change, operating as a network of autonomous cells rather than the highly centralized organizations of revolutionary parties in the past. Perhaps most interestingly, Friedman acknowledges that America's dependency on imported oil exposes it to attack, and urges American energy independence: If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell swoop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia on the path of reform—which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil—strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming. Friedman's advocacy of American energy independence illustrates the error of a unidirectional view of history. Energy autarchy may be a sensible policy, but it signifies a retreat from globalization. The Lexus and the Olive Tree trumpeted the arrival of a harmoniously integrated world. Since then the US has suffered terrorist attack and become mired in an intractable insurgency in Iraq. Against this background the prospect of severing one of the crucial supply chains that link the US with the world is beginning to look extremely tempting. As he has done in previous books Friedman has expressed a powerful larger mood, and in this respect The World Is Flat may prove a prescient guide to future American policy. Yet while greater energy independence may be an American national interest the notion that it would force recalcitrant countries onto a path of neoliberal reform is wishful thinking. A large drop in the oil price would surely destabilize the rentier economies of the Gulf and Central Asia, from Saudi Arabia to Turkmenistan, and in some countries could lead to the establishment of democratic rule. However, in a number of cases the chief beneficiary would likely be fundamentalism. Does Friedman really believe that democracy in Saudi Arabia would produce a liberal, pro-Western regime? In this and other countries, American energy independence could well further the advance of radical Islam. As it has done in the past, globalization is throwing up dilemmas that have no satisfactory solution. That does not mean they cannot be more or less intelligently managed, but what is needed is the opposite of the utopian imagination. In a curious twist, the utopian mind has migrated from left to right, and from the academy to the airport bookshop. In the nineteenth century it was political activists and radical social theorists such as Marx who held out the promise that new technology was creating a new world. Today some business gurus have a similar message. There are many books announcing a global economic transformation and suggesting that governments can be reengineered to adapt to it in much the same way as corporations. The World Is Flat is an outstanding example of this genre. Unfortunately the problems of globalization are more intractable than those of corporate life. States cannot be phased out like bankrupt firms, and large shifts in wealth and power tend to be fiercely contested. Globalization is a revolutionary change, but it is also a continuation of the conflicts of the past. In some important respects it is leveling the playing field, as Friedman's Indian interlocutor noted, and to that extent it is a force for human advance. At the same time it is inflaming nationalist and religious passions and triggering a struggle for natural resources. In Friedman's sub-Marxian, neoliberal worldview these conflicts are recognized only as forms of friction —grit in the workings of an unstoppable machine. In truth they are integral to the process itself, whose future course cannot be known. We would be better off accepting this fact, and doing what we can to cope with it.

Subject: Zadie Smith's Culture Warriors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:06:12 (EDT) 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: Mississippi River and Risks of Harvest From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 11:43:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/opinion/21wed4.html?ex=1284955200&en=003352221d242dfb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 21, 2005 Katrina, the Mississippi River and the Risks of the Coming Harvest By VERLYN KLINKENBORG In 1953, a young documentary filmmaker named Charles Dee Sharp traveled down the Mississippi River, shooting still photographs for a film he never made. One of Sharp's pictures - recently published by the Center for American Places in a book called 'The Mississippi River in 1953' - is a color shot of rows of new red cornpickers awaiting shipment in Moline, Ill. Behind them the surface of the river looks like a sheet of mercury. Those cornpickers, long since antiquated, could harvest only two rows of corn - in the cob - at a time. They were scaled to much smaller farms and lower yields than you find in the Midwest these days, where fields are now harvested by enormous combines that shell the corn as they pick it. Those old pickers - so bright and new in 1953 - are a visual reminder of the vital, complex connection between America's agricultural heartland and the Mississippi River. In a good year, like 2004, the Mississippi smoothly ferries some 60 percent of the corn and soybeans bound for export downriver to the Port of New Orleans. And in a year like 2005 - well, there has never been a year like 2005. There has been serious drought along the river's tributaries, the Missouri and the Ohio, and that has resulted in low water along the main stem of the river as well. Industrial traffic has been slowed considerably, and portions of the Ohio have been temporarily closed. And then came Katrina, which essentially disabled the Lower Mississippi for shipping, halting the southward movement of grain for export and other farm products and the northward movement of farm inputs like fertilizer and fuel. Last week, the Coast Guard began lifting some restrictions on navigation on the Mississippi well above New Orleans. But navigation aids have been torn out of the river further south, and power has not yet been fully restored to the grain-handling facilities along the river. What this means for farmers is yet another year of crisis, and possibly one of the worst in a long time. In an ordinary year, a drop in corn production - like the 12 percent slump forecast for Illinois this year - would mean better prices in commodity markets, but a real loss on the farm. But farmers in the Midwest, where the harvest is just beginning, are going to be looking at an unexpected glut of grain with nowhere to go. Each week some 35 million bushels of export corn moves through New Orleans. That has come to a complete stop. Americans tend to think of farmers as producers, but they are also enormous consumers of fuel and petroleum-based chemicals. They will be paying much higher prices for those products, like the rest of us, for some time to come. This fall is going to see a big drop in farm revenue and a big increase in farm expenses, at a time when the federal government is trying hard to curb farmers' appetite for subsidies. Once again, any movement toward limiting federal price supports will be overwhelmed by emergency funds needed to cover losses. Katrina has reminded all of us, all too vividly, that the Mississippi is a complex chain of dams, locks, cutoffs, ports, channels, levees and navigational markers, rather than a natural river. And when the river system comes to a halt, compromising the well-being of every farm or business that lies economically upstream of the actual water itself, the only real concern must be to get the system going again. Yet the system is so complex that it is easy to lose sight of the hidden hydraulic system of the river itself. We tend to think of the Mississippi as breadth and depth and flow, the qualities that float those long chains of grain barges downriver. Sometimes - only rarely - the surface traffic stops. But the river never does, and it carries with it, especially in spring, the outwash of all those fields along all those tributaries. The traffic in grain is carefully regulated and monitored. The traffic in topsoil and all the chemicals that have been applied to it on Midwestern farms is not. The result is an oxygen-deficient dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. This year that zone, which can grow to the size of New Jersey, began to appear in March instead of June. There has been some speculation that Katrina's turbulence may have stirred the gulf enough to help break up the dead zone. But in the long run it will make no difference. Beneath the surface economy of the Mississippi River, there is an agricultural economy that is steadily eating away at those same farm fields and steadily killing the gulf.

Subject: this retro site needs an RSS feed From: anon To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 08:00:33 (EDT) Email Address: none@yahoo.com Message: this retro site needs an RSS feed!!!!!!!!!!

Subject: Design Shortcomings Seen in New Orleans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 07:10:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/national/nationalspecial/21walls.html?ex=1284955200&en=d49930639f5dde06&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 21, 2005 Design Shortcomings Seen in New Orleans Flood Walls By CHRISTOPHER DREW and ANDREW C. REVKIN NEW ORLEANS - Along the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain, great earthen levees were ample to hold off much of the surging water propelled by Hurricane Katrina. But concrete flood walls installed over the last several decades along the drainage and barge canals cutting into New Orleans were built in a way that by Army Corps of Engineers standards left them potentially unstable in a flood, according to government documents and interviews. The walls collapsed in several places during the storm. A corps engineering manual cautions that such flood walls 'rarely exceed' seven feet because they can lose stability as waters rise. But some of the New Orleans canal walls rose as high as 11 feet above dirt berms in which they were anchored. As a result of federal budget constraints, the walls were never tested for their ability to withstand the cascades of lake water that rushed up to, or over, their tops as storm waves pulsed through the canals on Aug. 29, corps and local officials say. Hurricane Katrina was the first serious test of the flood walls, said Stevan Spencer, chief engineer for the Orleans Levee District, and it 'just overwhelmed the system.' Since the storm, corps officials have said that there is a simple explanation for the devastation: Hurricane Katrina was a Category 4 storm and Congress authorized a flood control system to handle only a Category 3 storm. 'Anything above that, all bets are off,' said Al Naomi, a senior project manager in the corps's New Orleans district. But federal meteorologists say that New Orleans did not get the full brunt of the storm, because its strongest winds passed dozens of miles east of the city. While a formal analysis of the storm's strength and surges will take months, the National Hurricane Center said the sustained winds over Lake Pontchartrain reached only 95 miles per hour, while Category 3 storms are defined by sustained winds of 111 to 130 m.p.h. This raises a series of questions about how the walls that failed were designed and constructed, as well as whether the soil in some spots was too weak to hold them. Investigations by federal engineers and outside experts are just now beginning. One factor could be height, said Robert G. Bea, a former corps engineer and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is part of a National Science Foundation inquiry into the flood controls failures. The higher the wall, Professor Bea said, the greater the risk it could tip under the ever greater pressure of rising waters. The 2000 edition of the Army Corps of Engineers manual 'Design and Construction of Levees' says that the height of flood walls built on levees is an important factor in their ability to withstand a flood. For that reason, the manual says walls like those used in New Orleans 'rarely exceed' seven feet. But on two of the three canals where breaks occurred - the 17th Street and London Avenue canals - the concrete sections rise 11 feet above the dirt berms. Each wall resembles a row of teeth set in a jaw. Individual slabs are anchored to a continuous steel sheet buried in the dirt, giving the wall its strength. Above a short foundation, the slabs are linked only by rubbery gaskets that allow the concrete to expand and contract without cracking. Hassan S. Mashriqui, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University and an expert on storm surges, said the segmented nature of the walls could be an additional problem, since any weak point could cause a catastrophic failure. 'Since they're not tied together you get a little bit of a gap and that's what water needs to make it fail,' Dr. Mashriqui said. Other questions surround the walls' design, known as an 'I-wall' for its slim cross section that fits easily into densely developed areas. The corps manual for flood control construction suggests a different design for walls higher than seven feet - walls shaped like an inverted T, with the horizontal section buried in the dirt for extra stability. But that option was never considered, corps engineers said, because 'T walls' were more expensive, required a broad base of dense soil for support and were not necessarily stronger. The corps and local levee authorities also never tested whether the chosen I-wall design could survive if water flowed over the top and cascaded onto dirt embankments below. Corps officials said they were proscribed from considering stronger wall designs for the canals both by the tight quarters and by federal law, which requires that they seek and study only the level of flood control authorized by Congress. 'Our hands are tied as to looking at higher-level events,' Mr. Naomi said. Mr. Naomi said that the recommendations in the flood control engineering manual were 'general guidance,' and that conditions at a particular site could justify deviations. He defended the walls, saying: 'The flood walls have functioned over the years very successfully and without incident. The design works. It has worked in other locales. And will likely continue to be used as long as you do not subject it to pressures that it was not designed to handle.' The broken walls, which were long seen as a second choice to earthen levees, are testament to 40 years of fiscal and political compromises made by elected officials, from local levee boards to Congress and several presidential administrations, as they balanced costs and environmental concerns with the need to protect a city that lies largely below sea level and is still subsiding. Ever since Hurricane Betsy flooded parts of New Orleans in 1965, the federal government has financed a hurricane defense system designed to guard against an equivalent storm. But as the threat of a more intense hurricane became better understood in recent years, government financing for flood prevention in New Orleans did not keep pace with a growing alarm among many local residents, scientists and even the corps's own engineers. Standing next to the shattered remains of one of the concrete walls last week, Cynthia Hedge-Morrell, a New Orleans councilwoman, said, 'In my opinion, they were playing Russian roulette with people's lives.' 'Do you realize that if those walls had held, we'd have just had a little cleaning job?' said Ms. Hedge-Morrell, whose district between downtown and the lakefront was covered with 10 feet of water from the breaks of flood walls. 'We would not have this massive loss of life and destruction.' On Tuesday, streams of dump trucks hurriedly dumped loads of gravel into the breaches in New Orleans's flood defenses, in case Hurricane Rita shifts toward here later this week. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, a surge from Lake Pontchartrain poured into the main parts of the city through breaks on the walls lining the 17th Street and London Avenue canals, which normally carry runoff pumped out of the city into the lake. A separate surge from the Gulf of Mexico overwhelmed the walls along the Industrial Canal, inundating the Lower Ninth Ward. Officials say that break may have been caused by a barge that broke loose from its moorings. When the hurricane hit, the only earthen levees that failed in a way that produced substantial flooding were on the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, a man-made ship canal east of the city. These levees, which were not as high as those on the river or Lake Pontchartrain, let in the floodwaters that ravaged eastern New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish. A surge from Lake Pontchartrain was the catastrophic situation that the corps had been guarding against since Hurricane Betsy 40 years ago. Initially, the corps wanted to build a giant barrier to keep water from the Gulf of Mexico from reaching Lake Pontchartrain and flooding the canals. That project was delayed by lawsuits from environmental groups that contended the corps had failed to study ecological effects. By the late 1970's, the corps abandoned that approach and began raising levees along the lake and the Mississippi and adding flood walls on the canals. In the mid-1990's, engineering professors at Louisiana State began publicizing computer models that showed how a Category 5 storm could kill tens of thousands of people and flood the French Quarter. Corps officials in Louisiana pushed local officials to help seek more money from Congress, both to finish existing upgrades and to start bolstering the city against bigger threats. Joseph Suhayda, who was one of the Louisiana State professors, said corps officials privately urged him to 'raise the consciousness' about the dire threats. But upgrading the flood control system never became a major priority for corps officials in Washington, local and federal officials say. Corps veterans said it was not surprising that federal engineers did not issue more vocal warnings. 'I don't think it was culturally in the system for the corps to say 'this is crazy,' ' said William F. Marcuson III, the former director of the Waterways Experiment Station for the corps in Vicksburg, Miss., and president-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers. 'The corps works for Congress,' Mr. Marcuson said, 'and when the boss says design for a Category 3 storm, culturally the corps is not going to go back and say this is wrong.' Investigations into how the walls failed are just now beginning. Col. Richard Wagenaar, commander of the corps district in New Orleans, said the soil behind the flood walls could have been weakened after they were topped by the storm surge, or the walls could have simply given way as the water - and the pressure - mounted against them. Indeed, as several engineers said, while a dirt levee of similar height might eventually be topped as well, and possibly eroded, only the walls were vulnerable to a sudden collapse. The determination of how the walls fell will bear on how officials decide to remake the flood control system. Max Hearn, executive director of the Orleans Levee District, said that if the federal government was now ready to pay for Category 5 protection, it seemed unlikely that the flood wall system could be upgraded to that level. But Mr. Hearn said the only answer might be the construction of flood gates designed to limit a hurricane surge in Lake Pontchartrain - the same idea that was considered and dropped in the 1970's.

Subject: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 11:46:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Considering that the US has been hit by a HUGE hurricane and another HUGE hurricane is on its way, isn't this the time to talk about global warming? We all know that hurricanes are generated by warm water and warm air. Shouldn't we be able to draw a direct line between global warming and the rapid frequency and verocity of the recent hurricanes to global warming? Perhaps not to global warming but at least a link to bubble of heat over the USA caused by the incredible increase in CO2 emmissions. This may be a good time to revisit the Kyoto agreement that the US refuses to acknowledge.

Subject: Re: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:36:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Time to start bulding infrastructure, as well as talking seriously about global warming.

Subject: Re: Time to start talking about Global Warming From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:56:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I read your original posting - ironically enough I do quite a bit of work on infrastructure including flood control. I recently worked on flood control in Jamaica and I worked on the Mozambique floods a few years back and I got a huge lesson on the engineering for freak storms. There is going to be a lot of discussion on whether the infrastructure was good enough to sustain the ravage of the Hurricane. Be careful what you read - some of it may well be true and most will not be accurate. Many engineers who are trying to push their own agendas will come out pointing to all the flaws (looking for more money to do bigger projects). Let me tell you now... ALL infrastructure in the USA and through out the world is not designed to withstand extreme storms which may have already passed over the area in their respective history. Whether is it roads in the mid-west, bridges in California or levees in Florida. All have been under-designed. The reason is simple - what exactly do we design them to withstand and what are the odds of that exact storm coming around? Normally when the odds are more than 1 in 100 years, we don't design to withstand those kinds of events. This is a norm only because it is so much more expensive to justify the cost. Sounds weird I know - especially when we are looking at figures of 200 Billion US$. I don't know all the logic and cost analysis behind the design decisions in the greater Mississippi area but I can well imagine that to really fortify and maintain the entire area would ring up a huge bill. When compared the economic development over a period of more than 100 years, we can see that 200 Billion US$ is a relatively small cost. Also from what I hear, they did already design above the 100 year threshold and it still wasn't good enough. The unfortunate part is that some engineers predicted this situation and are now pointing fingers. In fact many engineers have predicted many disasters all over the world - most of these disasters have not happened. So do we fund every engineers pet project just in case it may happen? Now having said this I chuckle and shake my head thinking 'I must be the fool' as Rita comes barreling in. Now what are the odds or two hurricanes coming around? Geez. Then I ask the next logical question, 'Global Warming?'

Subject: Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 06:31:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html September 20, 2005 Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore By NATALIE ANGIER Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air. By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day. Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television. Young children will memorize the illicit inventory long before they can grasp its sense, said John McWhorter, a scholar of linguistics at the Manhattan Institute and the author of 'The Power of Babel,' and literary giants have always constructed their art on its spine. 'The Jacobean dramatist Ben Jonson peppered his plays with fackings and 'peremptorie Asses,' and Shakespeare could hardly quill a stanza without inserting profanities of the day like 'zounds' or 'sblood' - offensive contractions of 'God's wounds' and 'God's blood' - or some wondrous sexual pun. The title 'Much Ado About Nothing,' Dr. McWhorter said, is a word play on 'Much Ado About an O Thing,' the O thing being a reference to female genitalia. Even the quintessential Good Book abounds in naughty passages like the men in II Kings 18:27 who, as the comparatively tame King James translation puts it, 'eat their own dung, and drink their own piss.' In fact, said Guy Deutscher, a linguist at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and the author of 'The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention,' the earliest writings, which date from 5,000 years ago, include their share of off-color descriptions of the human form and its ever-colorful functions. And the written record is merely a reflection of an oral tradition that Dr. Deutscher and many other psychologists and evolutionary linguists suspect dates from the rise of the human larynx, if not before. Some researchers are so impressed by the depth and power of strong language that they are using it as a peephole into the architecture of the brain, as a means of probing the tangled, cryptic bonds between the newer, 'higher' regions of the brain in charge of intellect, reason and planning, and the older, more 'bestial' neural neighborhoods that give birth to our emotions. Researchers point out that cursing is often an amalgam of raw, spontaneous feeling and targeted, gimlet-eyed cunning. When one person curses at another, they say, the curser rarely spews obscenities and insults at random, but rather will assess the object of his wrath, and adjust the content of the 'uncontrollable' outburst accordingly. Because cursing calls on the thinking and feeling pathways of the brain in roughly equal measure and with handily assessable fervor, scientists say that by studying the neural circuitry behind it they are gaining new insights into how the different domains of the brain communicate - and all for the sake of a well-venomed retort. Other investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people's arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal. Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow. Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or déclassé. 'People can feel very passionate about language,' she said, 'as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens.' Dr. Burridge and a colleague at Monash, Keith Allan, are the authors of 'Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language,' which will be published early next year by the Cambridge University Press. Researchers have also found that obscenities can get under one's goosebumped skin and then refuse to budge. In one study, scientists started with the familiar Stroop test, in which subjects are flashed a series of words written in different colors and are asked to react by calling out the colors of the words rather than the words themselves. If the subjects see the word 'chair' written in yellow letters, they are supposed to say 'yellow.' The researchers then inserted a number of obscenities and vulgarities in the standard lineup. Charting participants' immediate and delayed responses, the researchers found that, first of all, people needed significantly more time to trill out the colors of the curse words than they did for neutral terms like chair. The experience of seeing titillating text obviously distracted the participants from the color-coding task at hand. Yet those risqué interpolations left their mark. In subsequent memory quizzes, not only were participants much better at recalling the naughty words than they were the neutrals, but that superior recall also applied to the tints of the tainted words, as well as to their sense. Yes, it is tough to toil in the shadow of trash. When researchers in another study asked participants to quickly scan lists of words that included obscenities and then to recall as many of the words as possible, the subjects were, once again, best at rehashing the curses - and worst at summoning up whatever unobjectionable entries happened to precede or follow the bad bits. Yet as much as bad language can deliver a jolt, it can help wash away stress and anger. In some settings, the free flow of foul language may signal not hostility or social pathology, but harmony and tranquillity. 'Studies show that if you're with a group of close friends, the more relaxed you are, the more you swear,' Dr. Burridge said. 'It's a way of saying: 'I'm so comfortable here I can let off steam. I can say whatever I like.' ' Evidence also suggests that cursing can be an effective means of venting aggression and thereby forestalling physical violence. With the help of a small army of students and volunteers, Timothy B. Jay, a professor of psychology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams and the author of 'Cursing in America' and 'Why We Curse,' has explored the dynamics of cursing in great detail. The investigators have found, among other things, that men generally curse more than women, unless said women are in a sorority, and that university provosts swear more than librarians or the staff members of the university day care center. Regardless of who is cursing or what the provocation may be, Dr. Jay said, the rationale for the eruption is often the same. 'Time and again, people have told me that cursing is a coping mechanism for them, a way of reducing stress,' he said in a telephone interview. 'It's a form of anger management that is often underappreciated.' Indeed, chimpanzees engage in what appears to be a kind of cursing match as a means of venting aggression and avoiding a potentially dangerous physical clash. Frans de Waal, a professor of primate behavior at Emory University in Atlanta, said that when chimpanzees were angry 'they will grunt or spit or make an abrupt, upsweeping gesture that, if a human were to do it, you'd recognize it as aggressive.' Such behaviors are threat gestures, Professor de Waal said, and they are all a good sign. 'A chimpanzee who is really gearing up for a fight doesn't waste time with gestures, but just goes ahead and attacks,' he added. By the same token, he said, nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting. Researchers have also examined how words attain the status of forbidden speech and how the evolution of coarse language affects the smoother sheets of civil discourse stacked above it. They have found that what counts as taboo language in a given culture is often a mirror into that culture's fears and fixations. 'In some cultures, swear words are drawn mainly from sex and bodily functions, whereas in others, they're drawn mainly from the domain of religion,' Dr. Deutscher said. In societies where the purity and honor of women is of paramount importance, he said, 'it's not surprising that many swear words are variations on the 'son of a whore' theme or refer graphically to the genitalia of the person's mother or sisters.' The very concept of a swear word or an oath originates from the profound importance that ancient cultures placed on swearing by the name of a god or gods. In ancient Babylon, swearing by the name of a god was meant to give absolute certainty against lying, Dr. Deutscher said, 'and people believed that swearing falsely by a god would bring the terrible wrath of that god upon them.' A warning against any abuse of the sacred oath is reflected in the biblical commandment that one must not 'take the Lord's name in vain,' and even today courtroom witnesses swear on the Bible that they are telling the whole truth and nothing but. Among Christians, the stricture against taking the Lord's name in vain extended to casual allusions to God's son or the son's corporeal sufferings - no mention of the blood or the wounds or the body, and that goes for clever contractions, too. Nowadays, the phrase, 'Oh, golly!' may be considered almost comically wholesome, but it was not always so. 'Golly' is a compaction of 'God's body' and, thus, was once a profanity. Yet neither biblical commandment nor the most zealous Victorian censor can elide from the human mind its hand-wringing over the unruly human body, its chronic, embarrassing demands and its sad decay. Discomfort over body functions never sleeps, Dr. Burridge said, and the need for an ever-fresh selection of euphemisms about dirty subjects has long served as an impressive engine of linguistic invention. Once a word becomes too closely associated with a specific body function, she said, once it becomes too evocative of what should not be evoked, it starts to enter the realm of the taboo and must be replaced by a new, gauzier euphemism. For example, the word 'toilet' stems from the French word for 'little towel' and was originally a pleasantly indirect way of referring to the place where the chamber pot or its equivalent resides. But toilet has since come to mean the porcelain fixture itself, and so sounds too blunt to use in polite company. Instead, you ask your tuxedoed waiter for directions to the ladies' room or the restroom or, if you must, the bathroom. Similarly, the word 'coffin' originally meant an ordinary box, but once it became associated with death, that was it for a 'shoe coffin' or 'thinking outside the coffin.' The taboo sense of a word, Dr. Burridge said, 'always drives out any other senses it might have had.' Scientists have lately sought to map the neural topography of forbidden speech by studying Tourette's patients who suffer from coprolalia, the pathological and uncontrollable urge to curse. Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder of unknown origin characterized predominantly by chronic motor and vocal tics, a constant grimacing or pushing of one's glasses up the bridge of one's nose or emitting a stream of small yips or grunts. Just a small percentage of Tourette's patients have coprolalia - estimates range from 8 to 30 percent - and patient advocates are dismayed by popular portrayals of Tourette's as a humorous and invariably scatological condition. But for those who do have coprolalia, said Dr. Carlos Singer, director of the division of movement disorders at the University of Miami School of Medicine, the symptom is often the most devastating and humiliating aspect of their condition. Not only can it be shocking to people to hear a loud volley of expletives erupt for no apparent reason, sometimes from the mouth of a child or young teenager, but the curses can also be provocative and personal, florid slurs against the race, sexual identity or body size of a passer-by, for example, or deliberate and repeated lewd references to an old lover's name while in the arms of a current partner or spouse. Reporting in The Archives of General Psychiatry, Dr. David A. Silbersweig, a director of neuropsychiatry and neuroimaging at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, and his colleagues described their use of PET scans to measure cerebral blood flow and identify which regions of the brain are galvanized in Tourette's patients during episodes of tics and coprolalia. They found strong activation of the basal ganglia, a quartet of neuron clusters deep in the forebrain at roughly the level of the mid-forehead, that are known to help coordinate body movement along with activation of crucial regions of the left rear forebrain that participate in comprehending and generating speech, most notably Broca's area. The researchers also saw arousal of neural circuits that interact with the limbic system, the wishbone-shape throne of human emotions, and, significantly, of the 'executive' realms of the brain, where decisions to act or desist from acting may be carried out: the neural source, scientists said, of whatever conscience, civility or free will humans can claim. That the brain's executive overseer is ablaze in an outburst of coprolalia, Dr. Silbersweig said, demonstrates how complex an act the urge to speak the unspeakable may be, and not only in the case of Tourette's. The person is gripped by a desire to curse, to voice something wildly inappropriate. Higher-order linguistic circuits are tapped, to contrive the content of the curse. The brain's impulse control center struggles to short-circuit the collusion between limbic system urge and neocortical craft, and it may succeed for a time. Yet the urge mounts, until at last the speech pathways fire, the verboten is spoken, and archaic and refined brains alike must shoulder the blame.

Subject: Message: I Can't From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 05:55:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/opinion/21dowd.html September 21, 2005 Message: I Can't By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON The president won't be happy until he dons a yellow slicker and actually takes the place of Anderson Cooper, violently blown about by Rita as he talks into a camera lens lashed with water, hanging onto a mailbox as he's hit by a flying pig in a squall, sucked up by a waterspout in the eye of the storm over the Dry Tortugas. Then maybe he'll go back to the White House and do his job instead of running down to the Gulf Coast for silly disaster-ops every other day. There's nothing more pathetic than watching someone who's out of touch feign being in touch. On his fifth sodden pilgrimage of penitence to the devastation he took so long to comprehend, W. desperately tried to show concern. He said he had spent some 'quality time' at a Chevron plant in Pascagoula and nattered about trash removal, infrastructure assessment teams and the 'can-do spirit.' 'We look forward to hearing your vision so we can more better do our job,' he said at a briefing in Gulfport, Miss., urging local officials to 'think bold,' while they still need to think mold. Mr. Bush should stop posing in shirtsleeves and get back to the Oval Office. He has more hacks and cronies he's trying to put into important jobs, and he needs to ride herd on that. The announcement that a veterinarian, Norris Alderson, who has no experience on women's health issues, would head the F.D.A.'s Office of Women's Health ran into so much flak from appalled women that the F.D.A. may have already reneged on it. No morning-after pill, thanks to the antediluvian administration, but there may be hope for a morning-after horse pill. Mr. Bush made a frownie over Brownie, but didn't learn much. He's once more trying to appoint a nothingburger to a position of real consequence in homeland security. The choice of Julie Myers, a 36-year-old lawyer with virtually no immigration, customs or law enforcement experience, to head the roiling Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency with its $4 billion budget and 22,000 staffers, has caused some alarm, according to The Washington Post. Ms. Myers's main credentials seem to be that she worked briefly for the semidisgraced homeland security director, Michael Chertoff, when he was at the Justice Department. She just married Mr. Chertoff's chief of staff, John Wood, and she's the niece of Gen. Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As a former associate for Ken Starr, the young woman does have impeachment experience, in case the forensic war on terrorism requires the analysis of stains on dresses. Julie makes Brownie look like Giuliani. I'll sleep better tonight, knowing that when she gets back from her honeymoon, Julie will be patrolling the frontier. As if the Veterinarian and the Niece were not bad enough, there was also the Accused. David Safavian, the White House procurement official involved in Katrina relief efforts, was arrested on Monday, accused by the F.B.I. of lying and obstructing a criminal investigation into the seamy case of 'Casino Jack' Abramoff, the Republican operative who has broken new ground in giving lobbying a bad name. Democrats say the fact that Mr. Safavian's wife is a top lawyer for the Republican congressman who's leading the whitewash of the White House blundering on Katrina does not give them confidence. Just as he has stonewalled other inquiries, Mr. Bush is trying to paper over his Katrina mistakes by appointing his homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, to investigate how the feds fumbled the response. Mr. Bush's 'Who's Your Daddy?' bravura - blowing off the world on global warming and the allies on the Iraq invasion - has been slapped back by Mother Nature, which refuses to be fooled by spin. When Donald Rumsfeld came out yesterday to castigate the gloom-and-doomers and talk about the inroads American forces had made against terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq, he could not so easily recast reality. In Afghanistan, the U.S.'s handpicked puppet president is still battling warlords and a revivified Taliban, and the export of poppies for the heroin trade is once more thriving. Iraq is worse, with more than 1,900 American troops killed. Five more died yesterday, as well as four security men connected to the U.S. embassy office in Mosul, all to fashion a theocratic-leaning regime aligned with Iran. In Basra, two journalists who have done work for The Times have been killed in the last two months. The more the president echoes his dad's 'Message: I care,' the more the world hears 'Message: I can't.'

Subject: Thank you! From: xristim To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 19:15:14 (EDT) Email Address: xristim@pacbell.net Message: I'm 71, surviving in 'genteel poverty' on Social Security -- I'm an avid Krugman fan and was distraught to be reduced to choosing: Pay the Times and give up feeding the backyard squirrels, or pay up. I'm am SOOOOOOOO grateful to you! Gadflying gadflying.blog.com

Subject: Re: Thank you! From: Emma To: xristim Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 21:30:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: We are indeed fortunate to have this website! Paul Krugman's words will not be lost to any of us.

Subject: Decision Could Be Costly to Germany From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 15:39:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/iht/2005/09/19/international/IHT-19globalist.html September 19, 2005 Compromise Decision Could Prove to Be Costly to Germany By ROGER COHEN - International Herald Tribune Germany fudged. Torn between the evident need to revive an economy unable to create employment and a fierce attachment to the welfare system that makes job-creation so difficult, it may choose to give Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic leader, a limited mandate for reform. That seemed to be the cloudy message contained in an election result so close that both Merkel and Gerhard Schröder, the Social Democratic chancellor, claimed they had enough support to form a government. Just when it can least afford it, Germany has entered a period of muddled political maneuvering. Despite Schröder's claims, Merkel appeared to be the winner, albeit a weak one. She seemed to have edged out Schröder, but so narrowly that the reformist center-right coalition she had hoped for looks unattainable. Instead, her Christian Democratic Partyj, or CDU, may be forced into a 'grand coalition' with the Social Democrats, or SPD, an arrangement she has called a recipe for 'standstill.' With almost five million unemployed and close to zero growth, standstill is the last thing Europe's largest economy needs. But a bitter ideological dispute playing out across Europe, and between Europe and the United States, has taken on a particular virulence here. It pits free-market reformers, or so-called neo-Liberals, against the defenders of Europe's social welfare system. Images from New Orleans of an America divided by class and race have sharpened the debate. Merkel, raised in Communist East Germany, drawn to the United States and a more deregulated economy, campaigned on an explicit free-market platform. Strip away bureaucracy, she said. Lower non-wage labor costs. Make it easier for small companies to hire and fire. Change Germany's risk-shy mentality. 'I learned in the middle of my life that change can also be opportunity,' she said on the eve of the election, referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall and her sudden political emergence. 'Now I would like to give Germans faith in the idea that change can be stimulating and provide new chances.' Germans listened. They seemed intrigued. But when it came to the vote, they hesitated. Merkel seemed too cold, too remote, too extreme, to reassure them. The country was not ready for a woman cast by the left as a latter-day Margaret Thatcher flanked by a flat-tax loony as economic adviser. Nor was it enthused by Merkel's vision of a more Atlanticist Germany, its alliance with the United States invigorated once more. For Merkel, the approximately 35 percent of the vote won by the CDU amounts to a sharp personal setback. Whether she will be able to recover is an open question. Opinion polls had given the CDU over 40 percent. In the end, the party won less than the 38.5 percent it gained in the 2002 election. 'We have not achieved our goal of a conservative-liberal government,' she acknowledged, while insisting she has a mandate to form a coalition. That mandate exists: Hers is almost certainly the largest party, ahead of Schröder's SPD, whose vote share fell sharply to about 34 percent from 38.5 percent. The chancellor called an early election with the professed aim of demonstrating he had the support to govern with vigor. In this aim he was rebuked. But Merkel stumbled in her hour of opportunity. Her failure to garner a center-right majority will feel particularly bitter because the business-friendly Free Democrats, her favored partners, did well, advancing to over 10 percent of the vote, from 7.4 in 2002. The Free Democrats advanced to over 10 percent of the vote, from 7.4 in 2002, a result hailed by its leader, Guido Westerwelle, as the 'big victory of the election.' It was hard to argue with that assessment. The party's performance suggests that a strong reformist current exists in Germany, one that considers Schroder's seven-year failure to dent an unemployment rate of over 11 percent unacceptable. Almost equally strong, however, is the view that any dismantling of the so-called social market economy that has served Germany since World War II would be a disaster. For many Germans, the unemployment benefits that can make it as attractive not to work as to work amount to a constitutionally guaranteed birthright. The roughly 8 percent of the vote gained by the new Left Party, made up of disgruntled former Social Democrats and former East German communists, illustrates how powerful such thinking remains. The idea that the state has to look after people so that they can live decently without working remains entrenched,' said Wolfgang Stock, a political scientist close to the Christian Democrats. So what now? Merkel appears to head the strongest party, but it will be difficult for her to avoid a partnership with the SPD that she disdains. If a grand coalition is formed, any radical reform of the German economy can be safely ruled out. So, too, would any rapid rapprochement with Washington, of the kind Merkel had outlined. A more palatable alternative for Merkel might be to seek to lure the Greens into a coalition with the FDP. That would provide a majority, but the differences of view between the parties - on the environment and the eventual admission of Turkey into the European Union - are probably too large to bridge. Schröder, meanwhile, seems to believe he may yet survive. 'Nobody except me is able to govern this country,' he declared. That seems a far-fetched claim. In theory, a coalition with the Greens and Left Party would give him a majority, but Schröder would have to swallow awfully hard to ally with ex-Communists and Social Democrat renegades whose views he has denounced. The fact is Schröder can scarcely continue with any dignity. As for Merkel, she is a weakened figure within her party. Some of the men frustrated by her rise, like Roland Koch, the state premier of Hesse, may not hesitate to undermine her in the coming months. That she will be chancellor appears likely. But the prospects are remote that the first woman to sit where Bismarck once sat will be able to govern with the decisiveness Germany needs. The great German fudge of Sept. 18 could prove costly.

Subject: Bird and Bees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 15:36:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20obse.html September 20, 2005 Birds and Bees By HENRY FOUNTAIN The Great Chorale of the Avian World The typical songbird is a solo artist, content to warble alone in a tree or on a wire. Some species, however, do the George Jones-Tammy Wynette duet thing, and there are even a few that sing in groups. But nothing quite matches the performance of the plain-tailed wren of Ecuador and Peru, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir of the avian world. Biologists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland report that groups of the birds sing four-part songs, the males and females trading phrases with split-second timing for up to two minutes. 'I think this is the most complex song in a nonhuman animal,' said Peter J. Slater, a professor of natural history and, along with Nigel I. Mann and Kimberly A. Dingess, author of a paper about the bird published in the journal Biology Letters. The plain-tailed wren is one of 28 species of a genus that the researchers are studying as part of a project on the evolution of singing patterns. Some species sing duets, with overlapping parts. 'But we came across this really quite extraordinary one,' Dr. Slater said, on an Ecuadorean volcano. 'You get out of the car in the morning, and the whole hillside is ringing with these birds.' The researchers teased the wrens out of their bamboo thickets and watched and recorded. They sang in groups of up to seven, the songs following an A-B-C-D pattern, with males singing the A and C phrases and females the B and D. The phrases follow in rapid succession with no overlapping, so that in effect it sounds like a single song. (A sample, in wav format.) What makes the performance even more remarkable, Dr. Slater said, is that birds of each sex synchronize their parts. The males, for example, have 15 to 20 different A phrases they can sing. Yet two or more males in a group will sing the same phrase in almost perfect synchrony. Dr. Slater said several reasons were possible for this pattern. One involves reproduction. Since these are tropical birds, they do not use external factors like changing day length to know when to breed. So coordinating song like this may help synchronize reproduction, by stimulating hormones in the birds at the same time. But the birds also probably use their chorusing for defense. 'If you put a loudspeaker in the middle of these birds, they all gather around it and sing like mad,' Dr. Slater said. 'It must be very intimidating for an intruding wren.' All the Buzz Charles Darwin is best known for the theory of evolution, but he did much other scientific work as well. Through repeated observations of bees, for example, he proposed that bees outside the nest learn foraging tips by watching others. Since Darwin's time, scientists have learned that a great deal of information about foraging is communicated within the hive, through a 'waggle dance' in which a bee tells hive mates where to find a food source, and outside the hive through the use of scent marks. But what of Darwin's original hypothesis? Bradley D. Worden and Daniel R. Papaj of the University of Arizona decided to test it, but they took the idea a step further. They wanted to see whether bees could learn about foraging from bees that were not from the same hive. They tested their idea with bumblebees, which have an advantage of having small hives, often with fewer than 100 workers. With so few foraging bees, the scientists thought it might be more likely that the insects would go outside the hive for information and help. Bees that had never fed on flowers were allowed to watch as unrelated bees (and in other experiments, artificial ones) foraged among orange or green flowers. In most cases, they chose the same color flowers that had been picked by the bees they watched. The results were published in the journal Biology Letters. This kind of social learning, the researchers suggest, might be important to bees in one colony by providing them with information about food sources discovered by another.

Subject: Egyptian Comedy Promotes Peace From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:47:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/international/africa/20movie.html September 20, 2005 No Joke: Egyptian Comedy Promotes Peace With Israel By MICHAEL SLACKMAN CAIRO - Egyptian movie audiences are not accustomed to laughing about the Arab conflict with Israel, or to seeing Israeli diplomats portrayed as regular folks living next door. But in Egypt's box office hit, 'The Embassy Is in the Building,' the director, Amro Arafa, uses comedy to try to get Egyptian audiences to consider a most serious point: that peace with Israel is in Egypt's own interest. 'We have signed peace with this country,' a state security agent says during a pivotal scene in the movie. 'This is our country's policy, and it is for our interest. Do you want to be against the country's interests?' The security man, who spoke about the need for 'peaceful coexistence with them,' was talking to a character played by Adel Imam, Egypt's most famous comic actor, arguably one of the only actors in Egypt who could pull off such a movie and still keep the audience laughing. 'The Embassy Is in the Building,' which is still in theaters, was the second biggest hit at the box office this year among Egyptian-made movies, bringing in nearly $3 million. It is a wry look at Egyptian society with a main character who lives in Dubai and has a taste for beautiful married women. He gets fired after having an affair with his boss's wife, and returns home to Egypt only to find that the Israeli ambassador, David Cohen, has moved into his building. The movie pokes fun at leftists still clinging to pan-Arab nationalism and takes a swipe at a nationalist poet, Amal Donqol, who wrote a poem saying Egypt and Israel could never have normal relations. It spoofs Islamists as goofy men with beards and guns, and it lampoons the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera. But this is not just a movie aiming to make people laugh - according to critics, political observers and the director - but an effort, however ham-handed, to use the Egyptian cinema to make people at least entertain the notion that peace with Israel is good for Egypt, even while Israel may itself remain an object of hate. 'We do not have a problem with the Israelis or the Jews; we have a problem with the Israeli government,' said Mr. Arafa, the film's director, repeating a semantic distinction that was once popular among Egyptians but was dropped altogether after the second intifada heated up in 2000. 'This is the first time that a movie deals directly with this problem, 'Why we hate the Israeli government.' ' For an outsider, it might be difficult to walk away from this movie with the impression it is any kind of olive branch. Throughout the film, there is strong anti-Israeli language. And it ends with the death of a cute, heroic Palestinian boy at the hands of Israelis and an angry protest outside the Israeli Embassy in Egypt. The protesters are shouting: 'Down with the Israeli occupation! 'Down with murderers of children! 'Down to enemies of peace! 'Down with the settlements!' But consider how the movie is perceived by at least some people who have lived through the chaos and hatred that have consumed the region for so long. 'When I look at it after clearing the dust, I can see a few good things,' said Jacob Setti, press attaché of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. 'It is the first film I see that deals with the Israeli Embassy as an ordinary thing. It is in Cairo, functioning, working like any other place. Another point is that it deals with the Israeli ambassador as someone who is doing his work and speaking Arabic, as many of them do. The third issue is even the film admits that there is a good level of relationship between both governments, and I think that in the future we will see a development in this relationship.' Tarek el Shenawy, a leading film critic in two popular Egyptian weekly newspapers, said the last protest scene reflected a new perspective, because the protesters neither called for the embassy to leave Cairo nor demanded the end of relations with Israel. 'The film carries a message from the government: Do not hate Israel, do not love Israel, just forget about it,' he said. The two-hour film also stems from a broader change in a society that had long been frozen in economic, political and social terms, analysts said. About a year ago, Egyptians began to hold demonstrations in the street - not focused on Israel, but domestic issues. In the past the government did not allow any demonstrations critical of the president or his policies. The domestic-oriented protest marches may not have sparked a widespread opposition movement, but they have signaled a shift in focus for the minority that does speak out - from foreign affairs to domestic affairs. The first multicandidate campaign for president, which ended earlier this month, was criticized for being brief - only 19 days - but the opposition candidates traveled the country talking about domestic issues, with the topic of Israel rarely coming up during the race. 'The more democratic space we have, the more focused we would be on our domestic problems,' said Wahid Abdel Meguid, a political analyst and deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. 'Arab governments used the struggle with Israel as an excuse for political oppression, as an excuse for their failure to run the country.' Whether Mr. Imam can make people laugh is not in doubt. But on the question of whether his comedy can help promote a more moderate view toward relations with Israel, the jury is still out. 'I loved the movie,' said Reem Abdel Nasser, 19, as she left the theater last week. 'It deals with all the problems and issues we are concerned and confused about. And he presents a diplomatic solution for the Israeli-Arab problem which I agree with. We have to live with them. We do not have to be friends, but we do not have to be enemies. We should just live together.' But that is not what her father came away with. 'The movie is a reminder for people to wake up and understand Israel,' said her father, Gamal Abdel Nasser. 'It is a very difficult problem to solve, and the only way to solve it is by force. Whichever was taken by force should be restored only by force.'

Subject: Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi Hunter From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:42:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/international/europe/20cnd-wiesenthal.html September 20, 2005 Simon Wiesenthal, Nazi Hunter, Dies at 96 By RALPH BLUMENTHAL Simon Wiesenthal, the death camp survivor who dedicated the rest of his life to tracking down fugitive Nazi war criminals, died today at his home in Vienna. He was 96. His death was announced by Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. After hairbreadth escapes from death, two suicide attempts and his liberation by American forces in Austria in 1945, Mr. Wiesenthal abandoned his profession as an architectural engineer and took on a new calling: memorializing the six million of his fellow Jews and perhaps five million other noncombatants who were systematically murdered by the Nazis, and bringing their killers to justice. His results were checkered: claims that he flushed out nearly 1,100 war criminals were sometimes wrong or disputed. But his role as a stubborn sleuth on the trail of history's archfiends helped keep the spotlight on a hideous past that he said too much of the world was disposed to forget. 'To young people here, I am the last,' he told an interviewer in Vienna in 1993. 'I'm the one who can still speak. After me, it's history.' From the cramped three-room office of his Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna, Mr. Wiesenthal spent years collecting and disbursing tips on war criminals through a network of informers, government agents, journalists and even former Nazis. He recounted these efforts in a memoir published in 1967, 'The Murderers Among Us,' and a second volume, 'Justice, Not Vengeance,' in 1989. With a grave and tenacious manner, undercurrents of humor and a flair for gaining attention, he was lionized in 1989 in an HBO movie 'Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story,' based on his memoirs and starring Ben Kingsley. A character modeled on him was played by Sir Laurence Olivier in the 1978 film 'The Boys from Brazil' (though Mr. Wiesenthal was mortified by his depiction as a bumbler). And he served as a consultant for yet another thriller, 'The Odessa File.' Dozens of nations and institutions honored him: the list of his awards, typed single-space, takes up nearly an entire dense page. But one prize that eluded him, to his great disappointment, was the Nobel Peace Prize. Mr. Wiesenthal, a bulky figure with a clipped mustache who sometimes laughed that people mistakenly saw him as harmless, pressed his searches despite vilification and threats of death and kidnapping made against him, his wife, Cyla, and their daughter, Pauline. In 1982 his house in Vienna was damaged by a firebomb, but he escaped unharmed. (German and Austrian neo-Nazis were charged, and one went to jail.) Yet he rejected entreaties to move, insisting that there was a symbolic purpose in doing his work from a longtime redoubt of Nazism and anti-Semitism where, he once said, his efforts were 'unhappily tolerated.' Calling himself 'the bad conscience of the Nazis,' he vowed to continue his efforts 'until the day I die.' His goal, he said, was not vengeance but ensuring that Nazi crimes 'are brought to light so the new generation knows about them, so it should not happen again.' It was a matter of pride and satisfaction, he said in 1995, as he approached his 87th birthday, that old Nazis who get into quarrels threaten one another with a vow to go to Simon Wiesenthal. He wrote grippingly of the German killing industry, cataloging a list of property sent to Berlin from the Treblinka death camp between October 1942 and August 1943: 'Twenty-five freight cars of women's hair, 248 freight cars of clothing, 100 freight cars of shoes,' along with 400,000 gold watches, 145,000 kilograms of gold wedding rings and 4,000 karats of diamonds 'over 2 karats.' Of the 700,000 people known to have been taken to Treblinka, he wrote in the 1960's, 'about 40 are now alive.' He suggested that train stations in Europe should get plaques reading: 'Between 1942 and 1945 trains passed through here every day with the sole purpose of taking human beings to their annihilation.' In recent years he also spoke out in favor of war crimes trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia, and lent his name to a Holocaust study center and Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. 'Survivors should be like seismographs,' Mr. Wiesenthal wrote. 'They should sense danger before others do, identify its outlines and reveal them. They are not entitled to be wrong a second time or regard as harmless something that might lead to catastrophe.' Sometimes he taught his lessons with an acerbic wit. Failing to sway a Jewish lawyer who persisted in defending the right of neo-Nazis to march even through a Jewish neighborhood, Mr. Wiesenthal offered a final rebuke: 'A Jew may be stupid, but it's not obligatory.' Once, in West Germany, he related, he defused a harangue by a speaker who accused him of dining on Nazis for breakfast, lunch and dinner. 'You are mistaken,' he replied. 'I don't eat pork.' He became embroiled in Austrian politics, feuding bitterly with the Socialist chancellor, Bruno Kreisky. He was also assailed for siding with Kurt Waldheim, the former United Nations secretary general and Austrian president who concealed his wartime service with a German intelligence unit implicated in atrocities in the Balkans. Critics challenged Mr. Wiesenthal's claims to have played a role in the seizure of Adolf Eichmann, who directed the transport of European Jews to Hitler's death camps and was kidnapped by the Israelis from Argentina in 1960, then tried, convicted and hanged. He also promulgated many false sightings in the bungled hunt for Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz death camp doctor who fled to South America and drowned in Brazil in 1979. Serge Klarsfeld, a Paris lawyer who with his German-born wife, Beate, was instrumental in tracking down the Nazi Gestapo leader Klaus Barbie in Bolivia, called Mr. Wiesenthal an egomaniac and faulted him for not supporting their anti-Nazi demonstrations in South America and Europe. But Mr. Klarsfeld credited him with blazing the trail by his early and often lonely quest for justice after the war. Mr. Wiesenthal was credited with a crucial role in many other cases. His investigations in São Paulo led to the arrests of Franz Stangl, former commandant of the Treblinka and Sobibor death camps in Poland, who was extradited to West Germany in 1967 and died three years later while serving a life sentence, and Gustav Franz Wagner, a former deputy commandant at Sobibor, who died during extradition proceedings in 1980. He was instrumental in the arrest and extradition from Argentina of Josef Schwammberger, an SS officer convicted in the killings of prisoners and slave laborers at camps in Poland and sentenced to life in prison in Germany in 1992. Mr. Wiesenthal tracked down Karl Silberbauer, at the time a Vienna police officer, who had been the Gestapo aide responsible for arresting Anne Frank and her family in their secret annex in Amsterdam, a feat of sleuthing that buttressed the credibility of Anne's diary in the face of neo-Nazi claims that it was fabricated. He unmasked Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan, a whip-wielding guard at the Maidanek death camp who was living in Queens and who was sentenced to life in West Germany. And he put a reporter for The New York Times on the trail of Valerian D. Trifa, a leader of the fascist Iron Guard in Bucharest who fomented a massacre of the Jews, later found refuge in Michigan as archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate in the United States and was deported in 1984, to Portugal, where he died three years later. Mr. Wiesenthal penetrated veils of secrecy shrouding the Nazi euthanasia program and doctors who conspired in killing 'useless eaters.' He also traced the escape routes of SS criminals and other Nazis, documenting the underground network known from its German initials as Odessa. And as much as tracking down fugitive Nazis himself, he took it as his mission to goad governments around the world not to drop their pursuit and prosecution of war criminals. But his efforts in the hunt for Eichmann and Mengele, two of Nazi Germany's most heinous criminals, were disputed. He often claimed to have placed Eichmann in Buenos Aires as early as 1953, and later to have turned over crucial photos of Eichmann to Israeli agents. But Isser Harel, the Israeli Mossad chief who masterminded Eichmann's abduction, vehemently contradicted Mr. Wiesenthal, denying that any such meeting with agents took place and crediting the success to information supplied by a West German prosecutor, Fritz Bauer. Subsequent accounts lent credence to Mr. Harel's version. In the case of Mengele, wanted for grisly pseudomedical experiments on twins and other helpless subjects at Auschwitz, Mr. Wiesenthal had a shrewd insight in 1964. He urged West German authorities to monitor a close associate of the Mengele family, Hans Sedlmeier, in Günzburg, a Bavarian town where the Mengele family had its farm-machinery business. Mr. Sedlmeier had indeed been in regular contact with the fugitive in Paraguay and Brazil. But he also had friends on the local police force and, tipped off to a search, concealed letters and other evidence that would have led to Mengele. The crucial lead evaporated, not to be re-examined for more than 20 years, by which time Mengele was already dead. Over the years, Mr. Wiesenthal publicized a host of detailed and spurious 'sightings' of Mengele in Paraguay, Egypt, Spain and a tiny Greek island, Kythnos. Benjamin Varon, former Israeli ambassador to Paraguay, publicly suggested that Mr. Wiesenthal might have been embellishing to coax money from contributors. His comments, in a Jewish magazine, Midstream, in 1983, provoked a rebuke from Mr. Wiesenthal's supporters, who accused him of 'profaning' Mr. Wiesenthal's 'sacred mission.' Although he continued to voice suspicions of fakery for years after a body was authoritatively identified as Mengele's in 1985, Mr. Wiesenthal eventually acknowledged the truth of the scientific findings that Mengele had indeed drowned and was dead. But clearly Simon Wiesenthal haunted his quarry. One of Mengele's fanatical Nazi protectors in Brazil, Wolfgang Gerhard, told of dreams in which he hitched the Nazi-hunter to an automobile and dragged him to his death. One of the most rancorous episodes in Mr. Wiesenthal's postwar career pitted him against Chancellor Kreisky, who was also Jewish and whom Mr. Wiesenthal accused in the 1970's of pursuing a politically expedient alliance with former Nazis to strengthen his Socialist Party. Mr. Kreisky fired back with intimations that Mr. Wiesenthal had collaborated with the Gestapo, a charge that Mr. Wiesenthal labeled ludicrous, and that was never backed up. That fracas was followed a decade later by Mr. Wiesenthal's dispute with the World Jewish Congress over the Waldheim affair. In early 1986, when the former secretary general ran as the conservative party candidate for president, the Jewish Congress investigated his wartime record, uncovering evidence that he had not sat out most of the war, as he had always claimed. Instead he had apparently served as a lieutenant with a German Army intelligence and propaganda unit that had carried out deportations and atrocities in the Balkans, and had initialed reports of 'severe' measures to be taken against captives. From the outset Mr. Wiesenthal took issue with the accusations, but not for reasons of politics, he asserted. 'The truth was simpler,' he wrote in his book, 'Justice, Not Vengeance.' 'I was not prepared to attack Kurt Waldheim as a Nazi or a war criminal because from all I knew about him and from all that emerged from the documents, he had been neither a Nazi nor a war criminal.' In 1993 Eli M. Rosenbaum, former general counsel of the World Jewish Congress and later director of the Justice Department Office of Special Investigations, a Nazi-hunting task force, linked Mr. Wiesenthal to a Waldheim cover-up. In a book, 'Betrayal' (St. Martin's), Mr. Rosenbaum and a co-author, William Hoffer, wrote that Mr. Wiesenthal, acting on an Israeli request, had discovered Mr. Waldheim's secret in French-held war archives as far back as 1979 but for political or other reasons misled the Israelis. When evidence of Mr. Waldheim's true record began to emerge, according to the book, Mr. Wiesenthal allied himself with Mr. Waldheim to save his own reputation. For his part, Mr. Wiesenthal contended that he had correctly informed the Israelis that Mr. Waldheim had not been a member of the Nazi Party or the SS and that the World Jewish Congress was unfairly trying for its own purposes to brand Mr. Waldheim a war criminal. While he faulted Mr. Waldheim's credibility, Mr. Wiesenthal defended his own conduct. In a world where people believe in Jewish conspiracies, he told an interviewer, 'accusations from Jewish sources must be able to stand up to all tests of credibility.' Although a reviewer for The New York Times took issue with 'Betrayal' for appearing to equate Mr. Wiesenthal and Mr. Waldheim in villainy, its documentation was widely praised, winning a jacket endorsement from Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and writer. But Mr. Wiesenthal was never one for backing down. Castigated once as a meddler by an Austrian justice minister, he freely acknowledged that no one had appointed him 'the lawyer for six million dead people.' 'No such appointment exists,' he went on. 'But I've worked for over 20 years for the memory of these people, and I believe I've earned the right to speak for them.' Simon Wiesenthal was born on Dec. 31, 1908, in Buczacz, Galicia, which was then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later became part of Ukraine. His father, Hans, was a commodities wholesaler and Austrian Army officer who died in combat in 1915. In Buczacz, Jews endured murderous pogroms by the Cossacks, and in one such assault young Simon was slashed by a marauder's saber. In high school the boy fell in love with a classmate, Cyla Müller, a distant relation of Sigmund Freud; though teenagers, they were considered betrothed. Mr. Wiesenthal wanted to study at the Polytechnic Institute in Lvov but was denied admission because of a quota on Jewish students. Instead he attended the Technical University of Prague, where in 1932 he received a degree in architectural engineering. In 1936 he and Cyla married, and he took a job in an architectural office in Lvov. Three years later, when Germany and Russia partitioned Poland, the Red Army overran Lvov, purging Jews. Mr. Wiesenthal's stepfather was arrested and died in prison and his stepbrother was shot. Mr. Wiesenthal was reduced to working as a mechanic in a bedspring factory. Only by bribing a Soviet secret police commissar, he wrote, was he able to save himself, his wife and mother from deportation to Siberia. In July 1941, Mr. Wiesenthal recounted, after the invading Germans replaced the Russians, he and other Jews were lined up in a courtyard to be shot. After about half the group had been executed, the soldiers withdrew for a church service and he was spared. He was then held in the Janowska concentration camp outside Lvov before he and his wife were sent to a forced labor camp serving the repair shop for Lvov's Eastern Railroad. In 1942, as the Germans began to implement their 'final solution' by exterminating Jews, Mr. Wiesenthal's mother was transported to the Belzec death camp, where she was killed. In all, Mr. Wiesenthal and his wife lost 89 family members to the German liquidation. With false papers provided by the Polish underground in return for railroad charts that partisans needed for sabotage, Cyla Wiesenthal was spirited out of the labor camp in 1942 as a Pole. She hid in Warsaw, narrowly escaping incineration in a German flamethrower assault, and was sent to the Rhineland as a forced laborer making machine guns for the Germans. With the connivance of an official, Mr. Wiesenthal himself escaped the labor camp in October 1943. But the following June he was recaptured and sent back to the Janowska camp where, he related, he slit his wrists with a contraband razor blade. Revived by the Gestapo for interrogation, he tried to hang himself but was too weak. With the Red Army advancing on the retreating Germans, the SS guards moved their last remaining 34 prisoners westward, picking up new prisoners on the march. Few survived the trek, with stops at the camps in Plasgow, Gross-Rosen and Buchenwald and ending at Mauthausen in Austria. There Mr. Wiesenthal, weighing 97 pounds, was liberated by Americans on May 5, 1945. Almost as soon as he could stand, he began collecting evidence on the atrocities for the War Crimes Section of the United States Army. He also served the Office of Strategic Services and the Army's Counterintelligence Corps, and headed the Jewish Central Committee of the United States occupation zone in partitioned Austria. By the end of 1945 he and his wife had found each other, and the following year their daughter, Pauline, was born. The Wiesenthals were married for 67 years before Mrs. Wiesenthal died on Nov. 10, 2003. Also in 1946, after supplying evidence for war crimes trials in the American zone, Mr. Wiesenthal and 30 volunteers founded the Jewish Historical Documentation center in Linz, Austria, to collect evidence for future trials. But the developing cold war dulled interest in Nazi-hunting - both the Americans and the Russians were secretly recruiting Nazi scientists and spymasters. In 1954 the Linz office was closed and its files conveyed to the Holocaust archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. But after the successful seizure of Adolf Eichmann, for which Mr. Wiesenthal was quick to claim credit , he reopened his Jewish documentation center, this time in Vienna, and focused on an array of notorious Nazi fugitives. In November 1977, Mr. Wiesenthal lent his name to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Los Angeles-based institute for Holocaust remembrance. With an attached Museum of Tolerance and offices around the world, the center investigates and reports on anti-Semitism and bigotry worldwide. In 1981 the center produced a documentary, 'Genocide,' narrated by Elizabeth Taylor and Orson Welles. The next year the film won the Academy Award for best documentary. According to a biography distributed by the center, Mr. Wiesenthal and his wife lived in a modest house in Vienna where he spent his time 'answering letters, studying books and files and working on his stamp collection.' His books include 'Concentration Camp Mauthausen' (1946), 'I Hunted Eichmann' (1961), 'The Sunflower' (1970) and 'Sails of Hope: The Secret Mission of Christopher Columbus' (1973), in which he concluded that the voyage in 1492 was in part an effort to find a homeland for Europe's persecuted Jews. He was often asked why he had become a searcher of Nazi criminals instead of resuming a profitable career in architecture. He gave one questioner this response: 'You're a religious man. You believe in God and life after death. I also believe. When we come to the other world and meet the millions of Jews who died in the camps and they ask us, 'What have you done?' there will be many answers. You will say, 'I became a jeweler.' Another will say, 'I smuggled coffee and American cigarettes.' Still another will say, 'I built houses,' but I will say, 'I didn't forget you.' '

Subject: French Lesson: Taunts on Race From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:11:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/international/europe/21letter.html September 21, 2005 French Lesson: Taunts on Race Can Boomerang By JOHN TAGLIABUE PARIS - The French news media were captivated by Hurricane Katrina, pointing out how the American government's faltering response brought into plain view the sad lot of black Americans. But this time the French, who have long criticized America's racism, could not overlook the parallels at home. 'It is true that the devastations of Katrina have cruelly shed light on the wounds of America, ghettoization, poverty, criminality, racial and territorial tensions,' Le Figaro, the conservative daily, said in an editorial on Sept. 8. 'In France, those in disagreement ran to pelt the 'American model' and the neoconservative president. But have they just looked at the state of their own country?' Only four days before, a fire had swept an apartment in south Paris, killing 12 people, most of them black. And just days before that, 17 black people died in a single blaze. Since April, 48 people, most of them children and all of them black, have died in four separate fires in Paris. In neighborhoods like Château Rouge, filled with the hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants, some Arabs but mainly blacks, whom France has absorbed over the years from former colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, you feel the anger. 'It could be a coincidence,' said Sissouo Cheickh, bitterly, 'but one question the French have to answer is: of 48 people who died, why were 48 black?' Mr. Cheickh, 28, got a university degree in France, but rather than working for someone else and running into what he and other young blacks say is France's low glass ceiling, he decided to start his own business. Six months ago he scraped together some money and opened a store. 'You see these fabrics? All from Africa, from my family,' said Mr. Cheickh, who came from Mali, as he gestured toward colorful rolls of cloth. France has long boasted of itself as the cradle of human rights and a bulwark against racism. It regularly denounced racism in the United States, and the road from Harlem to Paris was wide, inviting talented American blacks like the dancer Josephine Baker, musicians like Sidney Bechet and writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin. But French insistence on the equality of man leaves them in a bind, their black critics say, perpetuating the fiction of a society without minorities. The census in France does not list people by race. Hence, while blacks are thought to number about 1.5 million, of a total population of 59 million, no one really knows the exact number, which is estimated to be far higher. There are virtually no black people in corporate France, and blacks have almost no political representation. No black person sits in the National Assembly or in a regional parliament, and only a smattering are found in city councils. The European Union finances programs for minorities but not in France, because of its refusal to recognize minorities. So, today, blacks are not much on the French agenda. After the recent fires, the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, proposed a program of affirmative action and a requirement that résumés conceal a person's ethnic or racial identity. But the rest of the cabinet, including the minister for equal opportunity, rejected the ideas, saying they offended the fundamental principle of equality. 'The French like to say, 'Blacks are a social problem, not racial,' ' said Gaston Kelman, 52, a native of Cameroon who has written widely on France's black population. 'So our institutions have no means to overcome it.' Until recently, virtually all blacks were on the lowest rung of the social ladder. Gradually, however, a younger generation is, like Mr. Cheickh, gaining education, starting businesses and gradually giving birth to a black middle class. They feel the discrimination they say is rampant in French society and are beginning to resist. After graduating with a degree in economics and data processing, Claude Vuaki tried his hand at several jobs before deciding to start his own business. Together with his wife, Kibé, he opened a beauty salon in central Paris. But Mr. Vuaki's search for start-up capital was typical of the black experience. 'They said right off, no loan, no money,' said Mr. Vuaki, 52. He and his wife managed to gather some family savings and self-financed their shop. Now the business is so successful that they plan a second shop, in Nice or Cannes. Mrs. Vuaki travels regularly to the United States to study African-American hairstyles. Still, Mr. Vuaki remains one of a relatively small minority. Most blacks are employed in menial jobs, in construction or transportation. What encourages people like Mr. Vuaki is that the glass ceiling often felt by young blacks who get an education is not discouraging them, but increasingly prompting them to strike out on their own. 'A lot of people I know want to create something of their own,' he said, often in landscaping, construction and delivery services. Still, Mr. Kelman said this slight opening is not inhibiting many young Africans with an education to strike off for Britain, Canada and the United States, where they think they will find greater opportunities. Asked whether the French people are racist, Mr. Kelman replied: 'It's a racism of nuance. Every Frenchman would immediately say, 'One of my closest friends is black.' ' Mr. Kelman said government housing and employment policies create an 'institutionalized ghetto-building.' He described with a laugh a typical job interview for a black candidate. When the boss realizes the candidate is black, he begins praising the sights and sounds of Africa he discovered on his last vacation there: the broad beaches, beautiful greenery, vast sky. Needless to say, the candidate doesn't get the job. In the schools, white pupils are typically encouraged to continue studying while black children are often steered toward vocational studies. The influence of African-Americans, through television, films and sports, is everywhere. Some young blacks turn to Afrocentrism, Mr. Kelman said, others to rappers and others to black Muslim groups. What they don't turn to is mainstream French society. 'We're at an impasse,' Mr. Kelman said.

Subject: Re: French Lesson: Taunts on Race From: Setanta To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 12:34:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'It could be a coincidence,' said Sissouo Cheickh, bitterly, 'but one question the French have to answer is: of 48 people who died, why were 48 black?' am i right in assuming that there were only 48 deaths from house/apartment fires in paris during the period, and all of them black? or is it that of the apartment fires that made the headlines due to the race of the victims all were black? racism/xenophobia exists in every nation. look at the irrational hatred between catholics and protestants in northern ireland. i think it is a throwback to our tribal days when outsiders were viewed with suspicion until they were assessed as posing no threat. it is pack behaviour at its simplest. i think its an uncomfortably embarrassing remnant of a survival mechanism, now as defunct as the appendix. education is the key to combatting this scourge of society.

Subject: World economy to maintain swift growth From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 10:21:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: World economy to maintain swift growth, says IMF Reuters WASHINGTON — The world economy is set to grow a swift 4,3% this year and next — above the 3,9% average of the past decade — despite higher oil prices and a battering from Hurricane Katrina, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said today. In its twice-annual World Economic Outlook, the IMF downgraded its forecast for global growth in 2006 from the 4,4% expected in April but retained this year’s projection. 'The world economy has proved tremendously resilient over the last few years,' IMF chief economist Raghuram Rajan said. 'Disease, natural disasters and soaring oil prices have only caused minor blips in an overall picture of healthy growth,' he added. Still, it warned that risks were rising, fueled by widening world current account imbalances, growth distortions across regions and lingering concerns about limited crude production capacity that kept oil prices high. Crude oil prices hit record levels above $70 a barrel last month, more than double the levels at the start of last year. The fund said global inflation had picked up slightly on the higher oil prices, but remained at moderate levels. Core inflation in industrialised nations appeared generally contained, the fund said, adding that price expectations were well-anchored, although the impact from higher oil prices would bear careful monitoring. The IMF said financial market conditions remained benign, amid low borrowing costs, high equity prices and strong corporate balance sheets. Emerging markets’ financing conditions were favorable, it said, reflecting strong economic fundamentals and an increased presence of long-term investors and search for yields. The IMF trimmed its 2005 forecast for the world’s largest economy, the United States, to 3,5% from the 3,6% it envisioned in April, and reduced its forecast for 2006 to 3,3% from 3,6%. It said the direct toll on US growth from Hurricane Katrina would be moderate and wouldn’t weigh long on growth. But the IMF was critical of Washington’s 'unambitious' plan to cut the US budget gap in half by the time President George W. Bush leaves office in early 2009. The US budget deficit hit a record $412bn last year. While recent tax receipt data suggests the shortfall has been narrowing, the potential cost of cleaning up Katrina’s devastation - which some lawmakers say could hit $200bn - has led analysts to raise their deficit forecasts. Japan’s economy looked poised for a good recovery with the IMF forecasting growth more than a percentage point faster in 2005 than forecast five months ago. However, it urged the Bank of Japan to retain its zero interest rate policy for now. The fund forecast Japanese gross domestic product would grow 2% this year and next. In April, it had projected growth of just 0,8%. The global lender said its outlook for the euro zone remained somber, blaming weak domestic demand, a lack of structural reform and rising fiscal deficits. It said growth will be lower than expected next year and the European Central Bank should be ready to cut interest rates if the economy falters again. It also cautioned China that it may need to tighten monetary policy if investment growth intensifies and fears are reignited about economic overheating. The fund said 2005 Chinese growth was now poised to reach 9%, up from 8,5% predicted in April. In 2006, Chinese growth was likely to reach 8,2%, up from the IMF’s April outlook of 8%. In Africa, the economic expansion continues to be underpinned by strong global demand, structural reform, better domestic macroeconomic policies and fewer wars, the fund said, but added that growth would slow to 4,8% this year from 5,4% in 2004.

Subject: Katrina is worse than Chernobyl From: Henry James To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 10:13:12 (EDT) Email Address: occuserpens@yahoo.com Message: This blog entry can be of interest inplainview.monitor.us.tt

Subject: Katrina is worse than Chernobyl From: HJ To: Henry James Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 10:20:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Here is the link, it did not show in the post for some reason: http://inplainview.monitor.us.tt In 1986, the Chernobyl disaster sent tectonic waves all over the world. Soviet authorities were rightly faulted for the inadequate disaster relief effort and secrecy that endangered health and well-being of people in the USSR and all over the world. Politically, Chernobyl hugely undermined the trust in Gorbachev's reforms (perestroika) and nuclear power industry. In fact, media hype over Chernobyl could have contributed the split of USSR in 1991! Also, looking backwards, we find certain little-known developments. For example, IAEA experts came to the conclusion that reactor design, not operational error was the main cause of the accident /1/. Most importantly, now negative impression of the Soviet disaster management appears to be largely the media creation (in fact, much blamed Soviet secretiveness over Chernobyl is nothing compared to what is going on around Iraq). In Chernobyl, pretty much everything that could go wrong, happened when the reactor exploded. Wiki does not mention any particular blunders after that. Actually, highly centralized planned Soviet system of the time most certainly helped rather than blocked the relief effort. In comparison to Chernobyl, Katrina is a larger scale disaster, it wiped out the whole New Orleans and other areas, it is more than 116K evacuated from the Chernobyl area. In addition, now it appears that Katrina disaster can be largely man-made /2/. Experts believe that the design of New Orleans levees was essentially wrong. The hurricane impact was not as bad as described initially and with proper design and construction, the consequences would be not nearly as serious as what happened. This makes Katrina a real systemic failure: -- Wrong infrastructure design. What is worse, it is not high tech like in Chernobyl, just low tech irrigation engineering. -- Underinvestment and corruption in infrastructure design, construction and maintenance. -- Slow and mismanaged disaster relief. -- Without racism and 3rd world poverty, hurricane impact would be much less serious. Poor and alienated cannot evacuate by themselves, they need heavy policing to prevent looting, crime, riots, etc. They are more likely to abuse the assistance they get. -- Corporate profiteering. We already have quite obvious gas prices manipulation related to Katrina. But one can only shudder at the prospective of what is going to happen to the huge reconstruction contracts. Remember the Iraqi situation? -- What will be the budget impact? Money-wise, the $200B price of Katrina is equivalent to another war. But GOP is still dreaming about absorbing these costs within their tax-cutting schemes. A few things are for sure. Katrina problems will not go away. Unfortunately, there are all grounds to believe that with time they will only get worse. Also, if Katrina does not prove that Republican 'small government' (aka everybody is by himself) ideology is a disaster, then nothing can.

Subject: Re: Katrina is worse than Chernobyl From: Mik To: HJ Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 16:57:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Spooky to think of the political nuances. Now you gona have me thinking about this one long and hard.....

Subject: Speaking of the A.E.I... From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 09:18:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Check this out: tax cuts paying for themselves? http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000039&sid=ai2iE.j8vxno&refer=columnist_hassett I have my own theory on this but would love to hear comments...

Subject: Re: Speaking of the A.E.I... From: Poyetas To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 05:17:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Kevin Hassett's observation that the tax revenues currently anticipated by Congressional Budget Office for 2006 are about the same as those it anticipated for 2006 back in 1999 -- even though tax rates have been slashed since then? - Luskin The question is....what were the growth rates predicted by the CBO in the 1999 report. Does anyone have any information that could shed some light on the issue?

Subject: Re: Speaking of the A.E.I... From: Terri To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:13:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sorry, this is absolute supply side rubbish as all comments by these particular folks are. Were it not for the tax cuts we would have a structural budget surplus or balance even with the added spending for defense and Gulf Coast reconstruction.

Subject: Re: Speaking of the A.E.I... From: Aeneas To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 17:05:31 (EDT) Email Address: aeneas_50@yahoo.com Message: Tax cuts along with demand side stimulus from massive deficit spending and monetary stimulus from negative real interest rates cause the issue to be muddy. Suppose the tax cuts went with fiscal and monetary restraint? Would you see growth? What we have is the dollar supported by the Japanese and Chinese who have no place to put all of theirs. What happens with consumer demand faltering? Growth comes from demand as Say's Law implies. Or, if we kept taxes high and someone like the Chinese keep selling below real long term (to their economic future) cost; would supply create demand and show as growth???

Subject: Re: Speaking of the A.E.I... From: Terri To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 16:32:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Possibly there might be enough growth for a tax cut to pay for itself because growth has increased income enough to raise more revenue than was lost in the cut. This has never happened, however, and such growth is almost certainly not going to happen in a developed economy. Tax cuts may be needed, but they will not pay for themselves.

Subject: Any ideas??? Would love to hear feadback! From: Poyetas To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 14:30:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: New Soaring Force in American Ballet From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 09:05:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/arts/dance/20ball.html September 20, 2005 The New Soaring Force in American Ballet: Hispanics By ERIKA KINETZ MIAMI BEACH - Hispanic dancers have long graced American stages, but their presence, which was once notable, is fast becoming the norm - a fact that was evident at the 10th annual International Ballet Festival here this weekend. It's hard not to think that today's crop of top Latin stars will eventually have an effect on American ballet. In some ways, they already have. Pedro Pablo Peña, the artistic director of the festival, emphasized that the event, which featured companies from 10 countries plus Puerto Rico, was devoted to dance, period, and not to Hispanic dance. Still, as with ballet itself these days, the festival had a decidedly Spanish accent. 'It used to be the Russians,' Kevin McKenzie, the artistic director of American Ballet Theater, said in a phone interview last week. 'Now it's the Latin community.' Nearly half of the principal dancers at Ballet Theater and at the Boston Ballet are from Latin America or Spain. Four of the 12 foreign dancers at the New York City Ballet are from Latin America or Spain; one is from Puerto Rico. Principal dancers from Latin America and Spain now outnumber those from former Soviet-bloc countries at the Boston Ballet and the Royal Ballet, and are neck and neck at the San Francisco Ballet. At the Washington Ballet almost 20 percent of the dancers are from Latin America or Puerto Rico. 'We jokingly call them the Latin mafia,' said Septime Webre, the artistic director, who is half Cuban. 'Rehearsals are frequently bilingual.' In part, the changing demographics of the nation's ballet companies are a reflection of the changing demographics of the nation. Hispanics are the largest minority in the United States, at 14 percent, and the Census Bureau predicts that by 2050, they will constitute 24 percent of the total population. There are efforts afoot to capitalize on these changes. American Ballet Theater advertised its April performances in Los Angeles on Spanish-language television for the first time, with spots featuring Paloma Herrera, Herman Cornejo and Angel Corella. The Boston Ballet is planning a program of dances intended for a Hispanic audience in 2007. The frisson that has long surrounded Russian stars may be starting to attach itself to Latin names. Victoria Morgan, the Cincinnati Ballet's artistic director, has signed a number of new arrivals from Cuba. 'I knew the training would be good,' she said. Adiarys Almeida, Cervilio Amador and Gema Díaz, who all defected in 2003, still dance in the company. Training, especially Cuban training, has been a key driver of the latinization of ballet. The Cuban school emerged from the Sociedad Pro Arte Musical, a concert society in Havana that started offering ballet classes in 1931 - largely as a money-making scheme, said Celida P. Villalon, who helped run Pro Arte's ballet school from 1941 to 1959. 'They did it mostly because they were in a fix because of the Depression,' she said. The three Alonsos who went on to form the Ballet Nacional de Cuba - Fernando, his wife, Alicia, and his brother Alberto - all studied there. After taking power, Fidel Castro underwrote a crackerjack network of state-sponsored ballet academies that is still going strong. Ballet schools were formed in Brazil and Argentina in the 1920's. Spanish ballet came later. The Spanish government didn't create a classical ballet company until 1979. Victor Ullate, an alumnus of Maurice Béjart's company, was its first director. Mr. Ullate, who trained Tamara Rojo of the Royal Ballet and Angel Corella of American Ballet Theater, among others, opened his own school in 1983, which has helped fuel the ascension of Spanish ballet dancers in the last 20 years. But there are other factors besides education, like the squishy question of culture. 'Columbians, Venezuelans, Brazilians, dance is really in their blood,' said Mikko Nissinen, the artistic director of the Boston Ballet. 'Maybe a little more than somewhere else, a little more than in Finland.' (He would know. He was born in Helsinki.) There were no Finns onstage in Miami this weekend, but the dancers from Latin America lived up to their bravura reputation, sometimes at the expense of good technique. Silvina Perillo, a principal with the Ballet Estable del Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, did a startling and quite precise series of triple fouettés that was a notable exception. Economics has also played a part in the diffusion of Latin American dancers around the globe. Dancers react to poverty and political instability the same way everyone else does: if they can, they leave. In the last few years, many have, especially from Cuba, but also from other Latin American countries. 'In the 60's, Argentine dancers stayed home,' Agustina Llumá, the editor of Balletin Dance, an Argentine dance magazine, said. 'Now, the opportunities - the companies and the money at home - are not so great.' This is not, of course, to suggest that the United States is all milk and honey. Take the festival, which was energetically attended but fraught with complication. The Cubans had it worst: Alihaydée Carreño, who recently left the Ballet Nacional de Cuba to dance in the Dominican Republic, did not get a visa to attend. Daniel Sarabia, a member of the corps at the Boston Ballet, had a fractured foot, and Ms. Almeida, a senior soloist with the Cincinnati Ballet, didn't show because of a swollen Achilles tendon. Then, on Saturday night, Rolando Sarabia, who defected in July and had knee surgery seven months ago, hurt his toe. At Sunday's closing matinee, he and Lia Cirio, a member of the corps at the Boston Ballet, gave an uninspired rendition of the Nutcracker pas de deux. The audience cheered anyway. They seemed happy to see Mr. Sarabia. This is not just art, after all; it's also politics.

Subject: Waterlogged Halo From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 08:43:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/09/21/opinion/21friedman.html September 21, 2005 Bush's Waterlogged Halo By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Following President Bush's speech in New Orleans, many U.S. papers carried the same basic headline: 'Bush Rules Out Raising Taxes for Gulf Relief.' The president is planning to rely on 'spending cuts' instead to pay for rebuilding New Orleans. Yeah, right - and if you believe that, I have some beachfront property in Biloxi I'd like to sell you. The underlying message of all these stories is that the Bush team sees no reason to change course in response to Katrina. I beg to differ. Katrina deprived the Bush team of the energy source that propelled it forward for the last four years: 9/11 and the halo over the presidency that came with it. The events of 9/11 created a deference in the U.S. public, and media, for the administration, which exploited it to the hilt to push an uncompassionate conservative agenda on tax cuts and runaway spending, on which it never could have gotten elected. That deference is over. If Mr. Bush wants to make anything of his second term, he'll have to do his own Nixon-to-China turnaround, reframe the debate and recast the priorities of his presidency. He seems to think that by offering to spend billions of dollars to rebuild one city, New Orleans, he'll get his leadership halo back. Wrong. Just throwing more borrowed money at New Orleans is not leadership. Mr. Bush needs to frame a new agenda for rebuilding all our cities and strengthening the nation as a whole. And what should be the centerpiece of a policy of American renewal is blindingly obvious: making a quest for energy independence the moon shot of our generation. The president should have done that on the morning of Sept. 12, 2001. The country was ready. But the president whiffed. Katrina - nature's 9/11 - has given him a rare do-over. Imagine - I know it is a stretch - that the president announced tomorrow that he wanted an immediate 50-cents-a-gallon gasoline tax - the 'American Renewal Tax,' to be used to rebuild New Orleans, pay down the deficit, fund tax breaks for Americans to convert their cars to hybrid technology or biofuels, fund a Manhattan Project to develop alternatives for energy independence, and subsidize mass transit systems for our major cities. And imagine if he tied this to an appeal to young people to go into science, math and engineering for the great national purpose of making us the greenest nation on the planet, to help liberate us from dependence on the worst regimes in the world for our oil and to help ease the global warming that is heating up the oceans, making our hurricanes more intense and our lowlands more vulnerable. America's kids are hungry to be challenged for some larger purpose, which has been utterly absent in this presidency. Americans will change their long-term energy habits, and companies will develop green products, only if they are certain the price of gasoline will not go back down. A gasoline tax (Americans have already shown they'll tolerate higher prices) and stronger regulation would force U.S. companies to innovate in what is going to be one of the most important global industries in the 21st century: green technologies. By coddling our auto and industrial companies when it comes to mileage standards and the environment, all the Bush team is doing is ensuring that they will be dinosaurs and that Chinese, Japanese and Indian companies will take the lead in green technologies - because they have to and ours don't. Look what Jeff Immelt, the C.E.O. of G.E., said: 'America should strive to make energy and environmental practices a national core competency and by doing so, create exports in jobs. ... America is the leading consumer of energy. However, we are not the technical leader. Europe today is the major force for environmental innovation. European governments have encouraged their companies to invest [in] and produce clean power technologies. The same is true for nuclear power. ... And government policy that encourages this with subsidies and other incentives is giving European companies a leg up. While Europe has been a driver for innovation, China promises to be its market.' Setting the goal of energy independence, along with a gasoline tax, could help to solve so many of our problems today - from the deficit to climate change and national security. And Americans would pay it if they thought the extra money was going to renew America, not Iran, and not just New Orleans. And if the Texas-oilman president became the energy-independence president - now, that would snap heads and make this a truly relevant presidency. No way, you say. Probably right. But either Mr. Bush does a Nixon-to-China or his next three years are going to be a Bush-to-Nowhere.

Subject: Friedmans 'The World is Flat' From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 05:55:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hi there, I just wanted to raise an interesting point mentioned in Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat', which is an excellent book, by the way. In it he mentions a 2004 report from the Heritage Foundation that states: 'American companies that produce at home and abroad, for both the American market and China's, generate more than 21% of US economic output, produce 56 percent of US exports, and employ three-fifths of all manufacturing employes, about 9 million workers...if GM builds a factory offshore in Shanghai, it also ends up creating jobs in America by exporting a lot of goods and services to its ownfactory in China and benefiting from lower parts costs in China for its factories in America'. So the manufacturing jobs that are lost to China is compensated for by the creation of jobs to service China. HUH??? Did I miss something here? Isn't China supposed to be a cheaper platform for EVERYTHING?? Is Friedman saying that globalisation actually INCREASES employment? How does the study then account for the massive current account deficits? Something doesn't seem to fit here....

Subject: Re: Friedmans 'The World is Flat' From: Yann To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 04:06:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: About the (maybe wrong) idea of a flat world, see below. A New Vocabulary for Trade by Jagdish N. Bhagwati Wall Street Journal - August 4, 2005 Metaphors matter. They define how one sees reality, as when the phenomenon of skilled emigration turns into the problem of 'brain drain,' evoking the image of a leaky faucet that few can regard with equanimity. The phenomenon of globalization has prompted competing metaphors. The prolific Thomas Friedman talks everywhere, and writes in his latest best seller, of globalization being marked by a 'flat world.' Writing almost a decade earlier in the New Republic, I advanced an alternative -- and less demotic -- metaphor, that globalization was characterized by 'kaleidoscopic comparative advantage.' Let me explain why the two metaphors diverge dramatically and carry startlingly different policy implications -- and why Mr. Friedman gets it wrong. 'Geography Is History' One cannot but be aware that countries face intensified competition in the world economy -- a phenomenon that forced itself on our attention long before China and India began to loom large in fevered imaginations. Interest rates are less far apart than earlier: A continual opening and global integration of financial markets has occurred. Multinationals now consider many alternative locations for final assembly and to manufacture components, so their know-how becomes available, in effect, to several likely locations. Access to knowledge is more diffused than ever before: Student enrollments in foreign countries have grown, better educational institutions have opened in some developing countries, and the need for skilled professionals has led to shifts in immigration policies to draw them in to countries that have excess demand for their skills. Producers in distant places can now access markets thanks to the Internet, to the point where many talk melodramatically of the 'death of distance,' and I say, with tongue partly in cheek, that 'geography is history.' Yet it is wrong to infer from this that the world has gone 'flat,' and that there is no comparative advantage left. The notion of a flat world is as wrong metaphorically now as it was when Copernicus showed it to be literally wrong. To be more precise than his metaphor, Mr. Friedman has on his mind not the world but a large fraction of it -- India and China. He believes that the gradient which the citizens of these countries had to climb to get to our shores and out-compete us has now disappeared, giving way to a level playing field that we ignore at our peril. But he takes too literally his friends in Bangalore. They flex their muscles on IT the way Popeye does on spinach, and tell him that some Indians can now do anything that the Americans can do. But it is a leap to translate this into the proposition that several Indians will now do everything that the Americans do. Then again, we have Intel Chairman Craig Barrett talking about 300 million Indians and Chinese professionals who will hurtle down the flat road. And Clyde Prestowitz, in his latest book, carries the argument to its logical conclusion with the American nightmare that there will be three billion Indians and Chinese capitalists soon down that road. In truth, the flat road is not flat at all. Take the supply of educated manpower in India. Of the numbers in the age cohort for college education, only about 6% make it to college. Of these, only two-thirds graduate, and just a small fraction can read English. Of these, a further fraction can speak it; and of these, a smaller fraction still can speak it in a way which you and I can understand. The truth of the matter, therefore, is that even for the call-answer and back-office services, the numbers who will compete are only a very small fraction of the numbers being thrown about. India's huge size and the dazzle of the few Institutes of Technology are totally misleading. The road is not flat; the gradient becomes steep as wages rise for those who can manage while others cannot qualify. Again, just think back on why China has not managed to break into IT the way it has on a range of manufactures, while India has. Surely, that has to do with the fact that India is democratic and hence IT can flourish. By contrast, the CP (the Communist Party) is not compatible with the PC: Authoritarian regimes are fearful of IT -- a gigantic pothole in the road! Such fears of a flat road were rampant when many thought that Japan would be a fearsome Godzilla, trampling over our activities all around. But then it turned out that the Japanese were real klutzes in the financial sector. They still are. And remember that while the Chinese and Indians have lower wages, we have better infrastructure, stronger venture capital markets, an ability to attract talent from around the world, and a culture of inventiveness. Comparative advantage persists; the road is simply not flat. The flat road metaphor is, therefore, both inapt and mistakenly alarming. The real problem in the increasingly globalized economy is rather that most producers in traded activities -- an expanding set because services have become steadily more tradeable -- face intensified competition. A specific producer here will find rival suppliers stealing up on him from somewhere, whether Portugal, Brazil or Malaysia, indeed from sources which may not include India and China. In consequence, almost no producer is truly relaxed. I was at a Parents' Day at my daughter's camp in 1991 in Vermont and talked to a father producing chips in Silicon Valley. He lamented, as did Bill Clinton soon after, that competition from Japan and South Korea was fierce (and wicked). So I turned to another dad listening in on us and asked him what he did. 'I grow mushrooms,' he said. 'Ah, you must be happier,' I remarked. He replied, tearing at his hair: 'Oh no, Taiwan is killing me!' * * * Gone are Adam Smith's days, when no one in Haifa lost sleep because Edinburgh could grow oranges in greenhouses: The cost differences would be substantial. Comparative advantage was 'thick,' shielded by big buffers. This is no longer so: not predictably from India and China, but almost certainly from somewhere. Hence I use the metaphor: 'kaleidoscopic comparative advantage.' Today, you have it; but in our state of knife-edge equilibrium, you may lose it tomorrow and regain it the day after. Boeing might win today, Airbus tomorrow, and then Boeing may be back in play again. It is as if the design of trade patterns that you see now gives way to another, as if a kaleidoscope had turned. In this situation of flux and change, we see the Friedman metaphor turned on its head. Faced with fierce competition, firms and unions often seek to iron out whatever differences they can so that the cost conditions for foreign rivals are brought closer to what they are for oneself. Producer interests, including labor, lobby to narrow (if not equalize) as far as politically possible the cost advantages that accrue to rivals from differences in all sorts of domestic policies and institutions. They try, through political agitation, to shield themselves. Hence the massive demand for 'fair trade,' a seductive phrase that has become a principal ally of protectionism. So you see demands for enhanced labor and environmental standards in trade treaties, not as altruism but as a way to reduce the competitiveness of rivals. This game cannot be played in the multilateral trade negotiations because countries like India and Brazil see through it. But it can be played when smaller fry are involved in bilateral Free Trade Agreements: A hegemonic power like the U.S., captured in turn by fearful lobbies seeking to flatten the world, can get the minnows to do almost anything that it wants. The real answer cannot be to seek to flatten the world, as this flies in the face of commonsense and good economic sense as well. Except for a few universal principles, diversity of labor and environmental standards is legitimate. Forcing convergence with our standards is simply an act of high-handedness by a 'selfish hegemon' pretending to be an 'altruistic hegemon.' But even if plans to flatten the world thus were to succeed, they cannot but leave out the vast numbers of bumps and gradients that cannot be steamrolled: The world cannot be flattened, frankly. And so the proper response to flux is to manage it. What does this imply? Evidently, we must strengthen the Adjustment Assistance Programs, which we have done from 1962 when they were introduced at the time of the Kennedy Round of Multilateral Trade Negotiations. They must be rapidly enlarged, especially to include service workers. A Facelift for Clint Eastwood? But that is not enough. We also need to ensure that when a radiologist in Boston loses his work to one in Bombay, he is able to retrain for the new skilled medical jobs that arise daily as new problems arrive: e.g. the obesity epidemic and the associated diabetes outbreak. In fact, new medical employment will multiply in cosmetic surgery with an aging population as nose jobs, silicon transplants and chin tucks capture the female half and spread to the male half as well. (I have a bet that even Clint Eastwood's wrinkles will be erased some day by a facelift!) The radiologist may be able to find for himself the training to get new jobs closest to his skills; but it is clear that more aged radiologists will need more assistance, and that professional societies such as the American Medical Association could assist in this task by defining optimal transition paths from the old to the new jobs. Yet it is not enough to say that we must educate our people to stay ahead of the curve. Yes, that is important: But it is also necessary to look at the content of the education. In a world of kaleidoscopic flux, an American aeronautical engineer at Boeing may well find that the industry has suddenly lost to Airbus, and that he must move into automobile engineering, where the Honda and Toyota transplants may be expanding. It is important that his training provide a larger share of general engineering skills and less of specialized ones. And thus, instead of succumbing to the panic of the 'flat world' metaphor, we need to embrace the kaleidoscopic metaphor of flux, and redefine our institutional and policy responses to make the best use of the opportunities today in the globalized world. Mr. Bhagwati, University Professor of Economics and Law at Columbia, and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of 'In Defense of Globalization' (Oxford, 2004).

Subject: Re: Friedmans 'The World is Flat' From: Terri To: Yann Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:23:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting article.

Subject: Re: Friedmans 'The World is Flat' From: Pete Weis To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 08:55:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Globalization may create more 'global' employment, but (in the short term) a loss in manufacturing jobs as well as some service jobs for nations with high wages to the countries with equal labor quality but lower wages. I suppose the idea is - eventually the US economy will 'naturally' shift its production focus to products and services which take advantage of a global employment boom and higher consumption from abroad (whenever that happens). But I agree with you that wage growth and employment in the US are presently being slowed by labor competition from overseas. As for the current account - it has multiple causes. A loss of our manufacturing base is one cause. Simply overspending and undersaving by US consumers is another - we have more cars than ever and bigger houses filled with more baubles than ever and we keep seeking more. Our dependency on imported oil is yet another factor in the growing current account.

Subject: Re: Friedmans 'The World is Flat' From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 08:48:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Never ever ever take anything from Heritage or American Enterprise foundations... too seriously, or seriously at all. Always question these groups. There is however a case for trade and there is a case for setting up a Coca Cola operation in another country and servicing the operation from America. This is done repeatedly.

Subject: Stiglitz and the 'Black Tsunami' From: Yann To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 02:45:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.project-syndicate.org/print_commentary/stiglitz62/English

Subject: Lessons From the Black Tsunami From: Emma To: Yann Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 06:36:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.project-syndicate.org/print_commentary/stiglitz62/English Lessons From the Black Tsunami Joseph E. Stiglitz The world has been horrified at America’s response to Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath in New Orleans. Four years after the terrorist attacks of September 2001, and with billions of dollars allegedly spent on “preparedness” for another emergency, America has shown the world that it was not prepared – even for an event that came with ample warning. The difference between the Tsunami in Asia last December and what is coming to be called the Black Tsunami in America – because it brought so much devastation to the poor, mostly black, people of Louisiana – is striking. The Asian disaster showed the ability of those affected to overcome long-standing rifts, as Aceh rebels put down their arms in common cause with the rest of Indonesia. By contrast, the disaster in New Orleans – and elsewhere along America’s Gulf Coast – exposed and aggravated such rifts. The Bush administration’s response to the hurricane confirmed the suspicion among blacks that, while they might send their boys to fight America’s wars, they had not only been left behind in America’s prosperity, but that there was neither understanding nor concern when they needed it most. An evacuation was ordered, but no means to do so were provided for the poor. When help came, it was, as one New York Times columnist noted, like the Titanic: the rich and powerful got out first. I was in Thailand right after the Tsunami, and I saw that country’s impressive response. The Thais flew consular and embassy officials to the affected areas, aware of the sense of helplessness among those stranded far from home. America kept foreign officials from coming to the aid of their nationals in New Orleans – embarrassed, perhaps, at what they would see. Even the richest country in the world has limited resources. If it gives tax cuts to the rich, it will have less to spend on repairing levees; if it deploys the National Guard and reserves to fight a hopeless war in Iraq, there will be fewer resources at home to cope with a domestic crisis. Choices must be made, and choices matter. Shortsighted politicians like Bush often skimp on long-term investments in favor of short-term advantage. He recently signed a lavish infrastructure bill that included, among other payoffs to political supporters, an infamous bridge to nowhere in Alaska. Money that could have been used to save thousands of lives was spent to win votes. Seldom do the “chickens come home to roost” as quickly as they have in recent years – an ill-conceived war, attempted on the cheap, has not brought peace to the Middle East. Now America has had to pay the price for ignoring loud warnings about the weakened levees of New Orleans. Clearly, nothing could have spared New Orleans completely from Katrina’s impact, but the devastation could certainly have been lessened. Markets, for all their virtues, often do not work well in a crisis. Indeed, the market mechanism is often revolting to behold in emergencies. The market did not respond to the need for evacuation by sending in huge convoys of buses to get people out; in some places, it did respond by tripling hotel prices in neighboring areas, which, while reflecting the marked change in supply and demand, is reviled as price gouging. Such behavior is so odious because it brings little allocative benefit – no significant increase in supply in the short run – and carries a huge distributive cost, as those with resources take advantage of those without. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has emphasized that most famines are associated not with a shortage of food, but the failure to get food to the people who need it, largely because they lack purchasing power. America, the richest country in the world, clearly had the resources to evacuate New Orleans. Bush simply forgot the poor – the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, who simply did not have the resources to pay for their own evacuation. When you’re poor, you don’t have a credit card, and most of the stranded were especially strapped for funds because it was the end of the month. But even if they had had the money, it is not obvious that markets would have responded quickly enough to provide the needed supply; in times of crisis, they often simply don’t. That’s one of the reasons why the military does not use a price system to allocate resources. Last January, after the tsunami, in response to widespread calls for an early warning system, I observed that the world had been given an early warning on global warming. The rest of the world has begun to take heed, but Bush, having ignored warnings about Al Qaeda’s plans prior to September 11, 2001, and having not only ignored the warnings about New Orleans levees, but actually gutted funding to shore them, has not led America to do likewise. Scientists increasingly believe that global warming will be accompanied by larger climatic disturbances. Recent evidence is at least consistent with that hypothesis. Perhaps Bush had hoped that the consequences of global warming would be felt long after he left office – and would be felt more by poor, low-lying, tropical countries like Bangladesh than by a rich country astride the temperate zones. Yet there is perhaps a silver lining in the clouds over New Orleans. Perhaps America, and especially Bush, will be persuaded to join the rest of the world in the fight against poverty and to protect our planet’s environment. In facing and planning for disasters, whether natural or man-made, we must do more than hope and pray for the best. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics, is Professor of Economics at Columbia University.

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 19:26:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/31/04 - 9/20/05 Australia 16.8 Canada 23.7 Denmark 18.4 France 9.3 Germany 5.2 Hong Kong 10.4 Japan 8.3 Netherlands 6.9 Norway 34.0 Sweden 6.5 Switzerland 9.2 UK 8.1

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 19:25:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/31/04 - 9/20/05 Australia 18.9 Canada 20.7 Denmark 32.6 France 22.1 Germany 17.5 Hong Kong 10.3 Japan 17.8 Netherlands 19.4 Norway 41.5 Sweden 22.9 Switzerland 22.6 UK 15.0

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 12:05:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/04 - 9/19/05 Energy 47.0 Financials -0.3 Health Care 7.7 Info Tech -0.3 Materials -4.4 REITs 9.9 Telecoms 0.4 Utilities 21.7

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:56:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship5.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Returns 12/31/04 to 9/19/05 S&P Index is 2.8 Large Cap Growth Index is 1.8 Large Cap Value Index is 5.8 Mid Cap Index is 9.5 Small Cap Index is 5.7 Small Cap Value Index is 5.5 Europe Index is 7.0 Pacific Index is 8.2 Energy is 49.1 Health Care is 12.0 Precious Metals 30.7 REIT Index is 9.8 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 1.9 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is 4.7

Subject: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 10:22:22 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message:

Subject: From France (in French!) From: Yann To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 04:04:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bon anniversaire, Bobby. Et MERCI pour le temps et l'énergie dépensés.

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Poyetas To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 05:26:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: And to join the bandwagon...HAPPY BDAY BOBBY!! You've given us all such a great gift with this message board, what could we possibly get you?

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:20:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Happy Birthday! We Love You Both :)

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Bobby To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:55:55 (EDT) Email Address: robert@pkarchive.org Message: Thank you, both!

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Mik To: Bobby Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 13:21:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Wow - you guys know each other? Bobby, happy birthday and thank you for such a cool board. cheers.

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Terri To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 15:28:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Happy birthday, Dear Bobby :) Lovely.

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Jennifer To: Terri Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 17:21:15 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hey, Bobby, happy birthday :)

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Setanta To: Jennifer Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 09:10:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Bobby, happy birthday, hope you got a nice cake with lots of candles! (keep up the good work!)

Subject: Re: Happy birthday Bobby! From: Ari To: Setanta Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 16:26:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Love all you do, and have the happiest of birthdays and unbirthdays.

Subject: Thank you for the happy birthday wishes, everyone! From: Bobby To: Ari Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 22, 2005 at 14:30:23 (EDT) Email Address: robert@pkarchive.org Message: Thank you for the happy birthday wishes, everyone!

Subject: why are you allowing this? From: David To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 20:42:40 (EDT) Email Address: DavidM1384'@aol.com Message: The Times is now charging 7 dollars a month to read your article online...that is too bad. I guess you are worth the revenue, but it smacks of commercialism at it's sleeziest.

Subject: Re: why are you allowing this? From: rlk To: David Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 15:31:06 (EDT) Email Address: nozdrev1@yahoo.com Message: come on; the ny times is out to make money and krugman, as a columnist is getting paid to help them make money. that is capitalism for good or bad.

Subject: Risk management & growth uncertainty From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 17:24:00 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: STEPHEN CECCHETTI Greenspan must be sensitive to growth uncertainty A month ago, the US economy looked to be on course. Inflation was edging up but still well within Federal Reserve policymakers' comfort range. With real growth steady at just above 3.5 per cent, output was near its target level as well. Then the storm hit. With Hurricane Katrina came not only loss of life and destruction of property but a significant increase in uncertainty. While the Federal Open Market Committee is poised to raise interest rates at its meeting tomorrow, it is now hard to say what the autumn will bring. What will be the impact of recent energy price increases on the national economy? Will consumer confidence hold up? And what about the property price bubble? In the past, these sorts of uncertainties have led Alan Greenspan and his colleagues to ease, not tighten policy. Today, that means pausing to wait for more information. Among Mr Greenspan's most significant accomplishments is his success in transforming central bankers into the risk managers of the economic and financial system. This means that, first and foremost, monetary policymakers make sure nothing really bad happens. For example, when faced with the very real possibility of deflation in June 2003, the FOMC reduced its target federal funds rate to 1 per cent and kept it there for a full year. The small risk of a severe economic collapse elicited a very forceful policy response. Another hallmark of Mr Greenspan's tenure at the Fed has been gradualism. The biggest interest rate move has been 0.5 percentage point and a more typical change has been half that. By moving in a series of small steps, policymakers keep their options open. Returning to the present circumstance, it now appears that Katrina's impact on the national US economy will be relatively small. Oil prices have returned to their pre-storm level and transport bottlenecks are disappearing. Nevertheless, there are significant risks left for the Fed to manage. First, it seems almost certain that the dramatic increase in energy prices over the past year will finally eat into non-energy household consumption. American petrol prices have risen from just over $2 a gallon in early July to $3 a gallon today. The rule of thumb is that a one cent increase takes about $1bn out of disposable income. With households saving a mere $25bn out of $10,300bn in income, it is impossible to see how Americans can absorb this $100bn increase in fuel costs without reducing consumption. Rising winter heating bills will make matters worse. This brings us to the second risk: that the recent decline in consumer confidence will be sustained. When people lose faith in the future strength of the economy, their pessimism can be self-fulfilling. Fearing calamity, they might increase their saving and drive down current consumption. While good in the longer term, in the short run such a move will slow aggregate economic activity. With housing, the Fed has been walking a tightrope for some time. It is no exaggeration to say that the past three years of American prosperity have been supported by the housing boom. While it is hard to predict what might trigger a correction, the consensus is that one will eventually come. The only hope is that when prices start to fall, the slide will be gradual. And when the boom ends, consumption growth will surely slow. The right policy response to all this is very tricky. Considering energy price increases in isolation would imply raising interest rates to combat incipient inflationary pressure. Adding the fiscal stimulus that the US Congress is enacting to rebuild Now Orleans and the Gulf coast provides a further case for tighter monetary policy. Before Hurricane Katrina, the risks were primarily on the inflation side. Now, the biggest question mark is growth, so a pause in the steady upward march of interest rates would make sense. In fact, the logic of Mr Greenspan's risk management approach demands it. After all, an increase in uncertainty means the odds of a bad growth outcome have gone up. Since inflation is not an immediate concern, that means keeping interest rates low. Not only are higher interest rates imprudent in the current economic environment but by raising them the Fed also runs the risk of appearing callous. So, while the pause is not coming this week, Mr Greenspan and his colleagues must strike an uncharacteristically conciliatory tone in their coming public statements. This will prepare everyone for the possibility that their interest rate target will not change when they meet on November 1. Good risk management demands it. The writer is professor of economics at Brandeis University's International Business School FT Monday September 19 2005

Subject: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 16:57:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Oyi... Krugman's latest article includes the statement, 'Under George W. Bush - who, like Mr. Reagan, isn't personally racist but relies on the support of racists - the anti-government right has reached a new pinnacle of power.' Ouch... that is very controversial. Who exactly are the 'racists' that Bush relies on. I think this kind of statement (whether true or not) is guaranteed to inflame way too many people. Krugman should be carefuly about his political remarks. He is after all an economics expert and I would prefer it if he stuck to economics issues and leave the political hot potatoes to others. This kind of statement will do little in building Krugman's economics credibility among some conservatives. Where we could have conservatives actually listen to the economic sense Krugman puts forward we may have them neglecting him altogether based on his political statements. This article is definately an article contributing to the divide among liberals and conservatives. Don't forget, conservatives (particularly voters) are in the majority in the USA. Shocking them with these kinds of statements won't get them to switch sides. I'm afraid it will do the opposite and we really need more liberal voters.

Subject: Ever hear of the Southern Strategy??? From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 09:54:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: PK was clearly referencing the Southern Strategy. In the 60's, Dems voted for Civil Rights. When that happened, Democrats in the South switched sides becoming Republicans. The whispers I am sure, and in some locales, they probably didn't even whisper it, was Democrats are nigger lovers. It's harsh, but true. Republicans used race to divide people and to get them to vote against their economic interest. Today, that still holds true. I have said to my Republican, Southern sister-in-law that she is voting based on race but not on common sense. As a person who has lived for 8 years in the south and the rest of my life in the midwest, I can attest to the fact that racism is alive and well in the South. Someone said that Bush is hardly a racist. Well we don't know that, we can't say for sure and unless you are black and living in this country, you have no idea what blacks experience. And my husband works with a Right wing Christian Republican who said and I quote, 'The niggers got what they deserved.' (In New Orleans) People need to wake up in this country. The Republican party is full of racist bigots. And who the hell are white people to tell black people what they should and shouldn't feel about racism. PK was right that Bush relied on racists to get him into office. Just because you all can't deal with it doesn't mean it's not true.

Subject: True or not - is not the issue From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 10:41:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Whether or not Bush relied on racists is not the issue. There are many Republican supporters (if not the majority) who are not racists but they are voting for a system that is getting progressively worse. The problem is that the Republicans are able to convince the majority of Americans that they are doing what is best. Floating words of racism only fuels more anger. What about those Republicans who are not racist and who firmly believe in the open principles of the Republican Party. They will resent a cloud of racism being placed over their actions and they will fight back. If you haven't noticed, the Republicans are better than the Democrats at throwing dirt. PK has just given them another huge lump of dirt to throw. If one is to throw accusations of racism, you better be prepared to be very specific (as to who is a racist) with very clear evidence of the racist actions. Talking about 'hear-say' statements of the 'Right wing Christian Republican' or about some 'hear-say' whispers will get you no where and only be thrown back in your face. I am a firm believer that the Republicans got the upper hand simply because the Democrats lack the discipline to stay on message and keep that message clear, concise and factual. In my opinion PK's latest statement only does harm to the liberal cause and gives more fuel to the right wing cause. And then you sit back and wonder, 'How come did the majority of Floridians (and Americans) vote for Bush? How did they get away with the fact that WMD was a lie, unemployment has increased, the rich have become significantly richer under the tax breaks, the country is in outrageous debt and there is no actual plan to get out of this situation.' Liberals need to start improving their discipline and working more as a team rather than a bunch of radical statements that give more and more fuel to the Republican cause. PK was doing incredible good with cutting through the economic crap of the right wing. That is is the part he should play if we are ever going to turn this tide.

Subject: I am beginning to wonder if you have one From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 11:17:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I guess I don't understand what you are saying Mik. You are saying that even if it's true, PK shouldn't say it. On one hand you say Dems don't stay on message on the other hand you are telling PK to shut up even if what he's saying is the truth. In case you haven't noticed, the truth is all Democrats have right now. And you say: What about those Republicans who are not racist and who firmly believe in the open principles of the Republican Party Yes, what about those Republicans who know that their party is filled with racists and sit back and do nothing about it? Actually, thank God for them. They are the reason 90 percent of black voters vote for Democrats. Also, you say Floridians voted for Bush. Well I am afraid you would have to go a long way to actually prove to me that Florida or Ohio voted for Bush. I happen to think the election was stolen, but that's a whole new topic. Even black leaders are now saying that we need to have an honest dialogue about race in this country. Parsing our words hardly seems honest. On one hand you say you think Republicans are better at getting out their message and on the other hand you are telling PK not to rock the boat. No wonder Democrats have a reputation of being pussies. We need to speak truth to power and censoring one of most prominent columnist, tying his hands behind his back so as not to upset the Republicans makes little sense. Republicans aren't going to vote Democrat, no matter what we do. But you know who will? Blacks. And we need to address issues that affect them and we need to do that often.

Subject: Re: I am beginning to wonder if you have one From: Mik To: Erica Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 16:46:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: No you missed the point. Go back to my original message. Making a blanket statement such as 'Bush is backed by racists' is not only a flawed statement but also lacks any form of solid proof. As I stated before, if Fox news has to ask PK, 'Be more specific, who exactly are you calling a racist? Dick Chenney? Condoleeza Rice? Donald Rumsfeld?...?' We have no proof that anyone specific is a racist. Hence the statement is flawed and PK looks like a fool, particularly in the eyes of the right wing. This kind of statement should not have been made even if there is an element of truth to it. It should not have been made by an economics specialist who's economic fundamentals can now be discredited by his political views. Especially when it is so important that those economic fundamentals prove such a big role in undermining the stupidity of the right-wing-supply-side economists. You made a statement that, 'Republicans aren't going to vote Democrat, no matter what we do.' Well I hate to break this to you - with or without the Black vote - so long as Republican supporters have faith in the Republican party - The Republican Party will continue to rule. The only way to break that faith is to present bold clear facts about mis-rule and get the swing vote to work. By presenting hear-say statements like, 'Bush is supported by racists' not only shows an in ability to remain disciplined, but worst of all is easy ammunition for the Republicans to ensure that the swing vote stay on their side.

Subject: Sorry Mik, but your premise has no merit From: Erica To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:50:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sorry Mik, your statement doesn't wash:so long as Republican supporters have faith in the Republican party - The Republican Party will continue to rule In fact, Dems have more registered voters than Rebublicans. And as I have said before, I doubt the validity of the 2000 and 2004 elections. And if Krugman was asked about the racists comment he would just say 'The southern strategy' And it is true because just recently the head of the RNC apologized publicly for that very strategy, even though they will continue to use it and we all know it. Your whole theory that Democrats shouldn't say controversial things because it doesn't help us win elections is completely debunked when you look at the horrible things Republicans say about Democrats. We have been demonized by them. Their horrible rhetoric actually managed to make Kerry, a war hero, look like a sissy, while Bush the deserter came out on top. So I am just not buying your theory. Also, here's some interesting things about the 2004 election: In order to believe that George Bush won the November 2, 2004 presidential election, you must also believe all of the following extremely improbable or outright impossible things.(1) 1) A big turnout and a highly energized and motivated electorate favored the GOP instead of the Democrats for the first time in history.(2) 2) Even though first-time voters, lapsed voters (those who didn’t vote in 2000), and undecideds went for John Kerry by big margins, and Bush lost people who voted for him in the cliffhanger 2000 election, Bush still received a 3.5 million vote surplus nationally.(3) 3) The fact that Bush far exceeded the 85% of registered Florida Republicans’ votes that he got in 2000, receiving in 2004 more than 100% of the registered Republican votes in 47 out of 67 Florida counties, 200% of registered Republicans in 15 counties, and over 300% of registered Republicans in 4 counties, merely shows Floridians’ enthusiasm for Bush. He managed to do this despite the fact that his share of the crossover votes by registered Democrats in Florida did not increase over 2000 and he lost ground among registered Independents, dropping 15 points.(4) 4) The fact that Bush got more votes than registered voters, and the fact that by stark contrast participation rates in many Democratic strongholds in Ohio and Florida fell to as low as 8%, do not indicate a rigged election.(5) 5) Bush won re-election despite approval ratings below 50% - the first time in history this has happened. Truman has been cited as having also done this, but Truman’s polling numbers were trailing so much behind his challenger, Thomas Dewey, pollsters stopped surveying two months before the 1948 elections, thus missing the late surge of support for Truman. Unlike Truman, Bush’s support was clearly eroding on the eve of the election.(6) 6) Harris' last-minute polling indicating a Kerry victory was wrong (even though Harris was exactly on the mark in their 2000 election final poll).(7) 7) The “challenger rule” - an incumbent’s final results won’t be better than his final polling - was wrong;(8) 8) On election day the early-day voters picked up by early exit polls (showing Kerry with a wide lead) were heavily Democratic instead of the traditional pattern of early voters being mainly Republican. 9) The fact that Bush “won” Ohio by 51-48%, but this was not matched by the court-supervised hand count of the 147,400 absentee and provisional ballots in which Kerry received 54.46% of the vote doesn’t cast any suspicion upon the official tally.(9) 10) Florida computer programmer Clinton Curtis (a life-long registered Republican) must be lying when he said in a sworn affidavit that his employers at Yang Enterprises, Inc. (YEI) and Tom Feeney (general counsel and lobbyist for YEI, GOP state legislator and Jeb Bush’s 1994 running mate for Florida Lt. Governor) asked him in 2000 to create a computer program to undetectably alter vote totals. Curtis, under the initial impression that he was creating this software in order to forestall possible fraud, handed over the program to his employer Mrs. Li Woan Yang, and was told: “You don’t understand, in order to get the contract we have to hide the manipulation in the source code. This program is needed to control the vote in south Florida.” (Boldface in original).(10) 11) Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell’s declaration in a August 14, 2003 letter to GOP fundraisers that he was 'committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year' and the fact that Diebold is one of the three major suppliers of the electronic voting machines in Ohio and nationally, didn’t result in any fraud by Diebold. 12) There was no fraud in Cuyahoga County Ohio where they admitted counting the votes in secret before bringing them out in public to count.. 13) CNN reported at 9 p.m. EST on election evening that Kerry was leading by 3 points in the national exit polls based on well over 13,000 respondents. Several hours later at 1:36 a.m. CNN reported that the exit polls, now based on a few hundred more - 13,531 respondents - were showing Bush leading by 2 points, a 5-point swing. In other words, a swing of 5 percentage points from a tiny increase in the number of respondents somehow occurred despite it being mathematically impossible.(11) 14) Exit polls in the November 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections, paid for in part by the Bush administration, were right, but exit polls in the U.S., where exit polling was invented, were very wrong.(12) 15) The National Election Pool’s exit polls (13) were so far off that since their inception twenty years ago, they have never been this wrong, more wrong than statistical probability indicates is possible. 16) In every single instance where exit polls were wrong the discrepancy favored Bush, even though statistical probability tells us that any survey errors should show up in both directions. Half a century of polling and centuries of mathematics must be wrong.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: rlk To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 15:28:55 (EDT) Email Address: nozdrev1@yahoo.com Message: I agree that it is hard to really say that Bush acts upon racism. The US has never had a serious labor party, unlike all of the advanced European countries. This exceptionalism has been noted for a long time, and I, for one am not sure that it is due to racism. God, Bush is not very competent; i hardly think that his response to the hurricane was anything out of the ordinary or should be associated with racism. and why is the us so conservative: perhaps heterogeniety has something to do with it; we do not feel that we should be supporting our neighbors; there is probably something to be said for krugman along those lines.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: RL To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 04:49:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: totally agree. It was unnecessarily inflammatory there but hey! also says Bush is not racist I think is the best compliment he ever said of him ;)

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: David E.. To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 17:42:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The republicans have a strategy that has worked. Why not point out how repugnant the strategy is? Why do republican candidates go to Bob Jones University? Why does Barbara Bush think that Katrina evacuees are better off in Houston? If it isn't racism, it's class distinctions. Why can't the democrats point out how radical the republicans are? There is a big difference between a democrat and republican then. But if we don't make those distinctions, the subtle remaining distinctions won't get anybody elected. The republicans will attack Paul on this one, but their attacks will not do any explaining why so Bob Jones University is so important. And their silence on why will speak loudly to those who do not hate negroes.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: Mik To: David E.. Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:38:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I agree, but don't go around calling anyone racist. I asked the distinct question, 'Who exactly is the racist supporting Bush?' Can you see the problem now? If Krugman was asked by Fox TV to be more specific, he would open himself up to being discrdited, no matter what his answer is. Rather focus purely on the Republican bad strategy using factual statements.

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: David E.. To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Sep 21, 2005 at 17:31:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I don't get your premise. Krugman never said Reagan or Bush was a racist. He said the republican party relies on racist support. Don't let Fox TV distort what he said, ask right back why do republican presidents start their campaigns with a visit to a racist college. There is no good answer to that question. Ask what does Barbara Bush mean by 'underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them'. Why should we help them cover up their pandering to the racists? Why can't we pin their hides to the wall? Do you think they cut us any slack?

Subject: Re: Paul Krugman's latest statement From: Erica To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 26, 2005 at 10:53:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Nicely said David.

Subject: How You Line Up for Mickey From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 15:41:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/weekinreview/18fountain.html September 18, 2005 The Ultimate Body Language: How You Line Up for Mickey By HENRY FOUNTAIN HONG KONG DISNEYLAND, the second Disney foray into Asia, is known to some in the theme park business as Disney Lite. At a little more than 300 acres, it's far smaller than Disney parks in the United States, Japan and France, with fewer of the elaborate signature rides. But in one area, at least, the Hong Kong park more than holds its own: the lines. In several weeks of trial runs leading up to the official opening last week, parkgoers complained of waits of over two hours for some attractions. One visitor said that in 12 hours at the park, he went on all of four rides. While many problems were no doubt attributable to the newness of the place and its employees - the first few weeks being the worst time to visit any theme park - the waits led some Hong Kong officials to urge Disney to reduce the planned number of daily customers, currently 30,000. And the delays sparked cultural complaints in Internet discussion groups, with some Hong Kong residents saying the problems were made worse by pushing and shoving by mainland Chinese visitors unaccustomed to orderly waiting. There are, in fact, cultural differences in how people behave while in line, according to social scientists and park designers. Those differences have even led to physical changes in so-called queuing areas at some parks. Rongrong Zhou, an assistant professor of marketing at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said the differences went beyond a Hong Kong-mainland split. Ms. Zhou, who has studied the psychology of queuing in Hong Kong, although not at theme parks, said there was a tendency among Asians and others in more collective cultures to compare their situation with those around them. This may make it more likely that they will remain in a line even if it is excessively long. Ms. Zhou said this finding was rooted in a somewhat paradoxical observation: that it is the people behind a person in line, rather than in front, that determines the person's behavior. 'The likelihood of people giving up and leaving the queue is lower when they see more people behind them,' Ms. Zhou said. 'You feel like you are in a better position than the others behind you.' By contrast, she said, Americans and others in more individualistic societies make fewer 'social comparisons' of this sort. They don't necessarily feel better that more people are behind them, but feel bad if too many people are in front of them. Lines in these cultures tend to be more self-limiting. In a place like Hong Kong, however, the lines may just grow and grow. 'The longer the line, people think the service is more worthwhile to get,' Ms. Zhou said. Jay Rasulo, chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, said that in the first few weeks of the Hong Kong park's operation, officials have noticed more specific differences between Hong Kong visitors and those from the mainland. About 25 percent of Hong Kong residents, Mr. Rasulo said, had already visited a Disney theme park. As a result, he said, they 'seem a little more respectful.' Visitors from mainland China, where only 1 percent have visited a Disney park, are still trying to figure out how lines work. 'They are not as impulsive' as some of their peers in Europe, he said, but they also are not as patient as the Japanese. Europeans, Mr. Rasulo added, 'have very different attitudes about how they wait for things.' At the Disneyland Resort Paris, while British visitors are orderly, French and Italians 'never saw a line they couldn't be in front of.' After the French park opened, Mr. Rasulo said, the company made the lines narrower by moving handrails closer together to try to prevent people from pushing ahead of others. He said the Peter Pan attraction at the Paris park was so popular that it is the only Peter Pan ride in all of Disney's parks to have Fastpass, which allows people to come back at a specific time and is an effective way to control pushy crowds. Peter Alexander, a former Disney and Universal Studios theme park designer who at one time was director of project management for Tokyo Disneyland, said that most cultures are tolerant of waiting, though some more than others. The Japanese, said Mr. Alexander, who is now president of Totally Fun Company, a park design firm in Tampa, Fla., are among the most patient. 'They are very Eastern mystical in their ignoring everybody else, and that's why they are able to deal with long lines,' he said. And forget cutting in line at Tokyo Disneyland, where people spread out large mats along the parade route to reserve their spot hours beforehand. No one, Mr. Rasulo said, steps on the mats, and children wait patiently there with their parents until the parade begins. 'The only place where I have been consistently advised that people can't stand to wait in line is the Middle East,' Mr. Alexander said. The solution at theme parks in that region, he said, is to increase ride capacity so that little or no waiting is necessary. The other parks where people don't have to wait in line are the ones that are failures, Mr. Alexander said. He described one, Walibi Schtroumpf, a Smurf-themed park in eastern France, that attracted less than half of its projected two million visitors a year. 'You don't wait in line at Walibi Schtroumpf,' Mr. Alexander said, 'because there's nobody there.'

Subject: A Congress, Buried in Turkey's Sand From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 15:37:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/19/international/europe/19patara.html September 19, 2005 A Congress, Buried in Turkey's Sand By RICHARD BERNSTEIN PATARA, Turkey - Alexander the Great was here, and so was Saint Paul, on his way to Ephesus. Centuries later, the drafters of the American Constitution took the ancient Lycian League, which was based here, as an early example - in fact, it was history's earliest example - of the form of republican government they envisaged as well. The Lycian League was mentioned twice in the Federalist Papers, once by Alexander Hamilton, once by James Madison, so it could safely be said that it entered into the history of the formation of the United States. Now, after literally centuries of neglect, teams of Turkish and German archaeologists have been working under the hot sun of this small Mediterranean seacoast town, uncovering some of its treasures. Among them, liberated from the many hundreds of truckloads of sand that covered it, is the actual parliament building where the elected representatives of the Lycian League met. It has rows of stone seats arranged in a semicircle, like the chambers of the American Congress. Its stone-vaulted main entrances are intact, and so is the thronelike perch where the elected Lyciarch, the effective president of the League, sat. The discovery has excited the archaeologists, and some others as well. 'It blew my mind to find out that the parliament building of the first federation in history, which served as an inspiration for the framers our own Constitution, was being excavated 15 minutes from my house on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey,' said Stephen J. Solarz, the former congressman from Brooklyn. Like a few hundred other foreigners who are attracted to this relatively undiscovered spot of turquoise waters, rocky coves and cerulean skies, Mr. Solarz and his wife, Nina, built a house in town nearby and spend a couple of months of the year there. They have become informal patrons of the archaeological project, and hope to persuade the United States Congress to sponsor a celebration here in 2007, the 220th anniversary of the framing of the American Constitution. But other things make Patara important besides the inadvertent role it played in the creation of the United States. It is often said of Turkey that it has more Greek ruins than Greece. But Patara is a Greek ruin, a Roman one and a Byzantine one as well, which is what makes the site, buried in sand for centuries, an important newcomer to the Turkish archaeological scene, likely to take its place alongside Troy, Pergamon or Ephesus as one of the most important ones. 'It's very exciting,' said Fahri Isik, a professor of archaeology from Akdeniz University in Antalya who is in charge of the dig. In fact, Mr. Isik is hopeful that further excavations will not only increase knowledge of the Lycian League but also help illuminate what are often referred to as the 'dark ages,' of early Mediterranean history, the 12th to the 8th centuries B.C., about which very little is known. 'It's nice to have beautiful buildings,' he said, drinking mint tea a few hundred yards from the ancient Patara parliament, 'but we hope that we'll be able to learn some new things as well.' Mentioned in the 'Iliad,' Patara was a port city that was used by the Persians in the fifth century B.C. during the Persian Wars, written about by Thucydides. One of the archaeological expedition's major findings so far is the impressive ruins of an ancient lighthouse, which guided ships crossing the wine-dark sea to its harbor two millennia ago. The Lycian League itself had some 23 known city-states as members, which sent one, two or three representatives, depending on the city's size, to the newly uncovered parliament, or Bouleuterion, as it was called. Inscriptions uncovered at the site provide the names of the various Lyciarchs who sat in special seats about midway up the semicircular chamber. Later, it was a province in the Roman Empire. An inscription uncovered by archaeologists at the ruins of an immense granary, which has also been dug out of the sand in recent times, indicates that the Emperor Hadrian and his wife, Sabine, visited Patara in the spring of 131 A.D. It ceased being a federation in the fourth century A.D., when it was taken over by the Byzantines. 'The whole of international life was here, both in the Roman times and in the time of the Lycian Federation,' said Joachim Ganzert, a professor of Architecture History from Hanover University who, with a team of German students, worked all summer in Patara. 'It will have a similar importance to Ephesus and Pergamon, but the work here has only been going on for 15 years,' he said. 'In Pergamon, they recently celebrated the 110th anniversary of the start of the excavation.' Though Patara has been visited by archaeologists for 200 or more years, a serious, painstaking excavation of the site started only recently, partly because it is an especially difficult place, afflicted with shifting sands, vegetation that runs riot in the fall rainy season and water that seeps in from the nearby Mediterranean. Money is also needed, most urgently to preserve the many stone inscriptions that, no longer buried by sand, face the danger of erosion. But now trucks go to and from Patara, carrying sand away - 5,000 truckloads from the lighthouse alone - and cranes lift immense carved stone blocks out of the ruins so they can be labeled, studied and eventually put back into place in reconstructions of the ancient buildings. 'You couldn't see anything here in the 1980's, only the tops of a few stones,' Gül Isin, an archaeologist from Akdeniz University who serves as a sort of aide-de-camp to Mr. Isik. The town itself, with just a few modest guesthouses, is largely isolated from the package-tour hustle-bustle of the nearby Turkish coast, even though it is home to a pristine white-sand beach, itself a protected nesting ground for sea turtles. 'But we've made a lot of progress,' Ms. Isin said. An impressive necropolis, a Roman bath, a large semicircular theater, a broad main avenue leading to the agora, or market square, a Byzantine basilica (one of 22 churches that were once in Patara) and a fortified wall have been largely rescued from the sand and scrub brush so far. Of course, there is also the parliament building, linking this dusty place to the United States, 7,000 miles and 1,800 years into the future.

Subject: Don’t blame the savers From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 05:49:59 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Don’t blame the savers Sep 16th 2005 From The Economist Global Agenda Some economists argue that the imbalances in the world economy can be blamed, in part, on a glut of savings from developing countries gushing into American assets. New reports from the IMF and the World Bank say the problem lies elsewhere AMERICAN conservatives are fond of prescribing personal responsibility as a cure for the financial ills of the poor. There is a certain amount of pleasure, therefore, in seeing America’s fiscal profligacy chided for contributing to the imbalances that currently threaten the health of the world economy. That is precisely the verdict of the newly released chapter on savings and investment in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook. The document highlights the danger posed by the world economy’s heavy dependence on ravenous American consumers to snap up exports from the rest of the world. To be sure, it is hard to be too gloomy. Though Europe has been sluggish and the global economy hasn’t quite lived up to last year’s lively pace of growth, world GDP is still growing at an above-average clip. Even Japan, stuck in an economic quagmire for the past decade, has begun looking perky. But dark clouds have been gathering on the horizon for some time. Emerging-market economies, particularly in Asia, are running high current-account surpluses, keeping their economic fires stoked with a steady stream of exports, especially to America. In mirror image, America’s current-account deficits have soared past 5% of GDP. Household savings have dwindled to negligible levels as Americans have run down assets and taken on debt to keep the spending binge going. Yet if the American consumer falters, as things stand now, the rest of the world will tumble too. Moreover, economists are increasingly worried that America’s economic health (and by extension the world’s) rests on a housing market that looks decidedly bubbly. When the bubble bursts, they fear, the whole thing could come crashing down. But if economists are agreed that America’s debt levels are dangerous, they cannot agree on whom to blame. Economists with little time for the Bush administration point the finger at the government’s profligate budget deficits—predicted to be roughly $330 billion in 2005—which run down national savings. The administration’s supporters prefer to point to spendthrift consumers and the frothy housing market, and argue that a “global savings glut” is pouring excess capital from abroad, particularly Asia, into America’s financial markets. This, they say, is why long-term interest rates have remained low even as the Federal Reserve has progressively tightened monetary policy. America is not the only country where savings have fallen. Worldwide savings began declining in the late 1990s, hitting bottom in 2002. They have recovered only modestly since then. The drop is mainly due to industrial countries, where savings and investment have been on a downward trend since the 1970s, thanks to a sharp decline in personal savings that an increase in corporate savings failed to offset. Savings in emerging markets and oil-producing countries have risen over that period, but not enough to reverse the trend. So why the sudden talk of a savings glut? And even if there is a surplus, why is it flowing the “wrong way”—from the developing world, where returns on capital should be higher, to more mature economies like America? The IMF report offers an explanation. What the world is suffering from is not so much a savings glut as an investment deficit, in both rich and poor countries. In emerging markets and oil-exporting nations, still feeling the lingering effects of the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, demand for capital has failed to keep up with supply. Scrimping consumers have instead sent their money to the West. The IMF’s figures suggest that this is not as irrational as it seems. Though in theory returns on capital should be much higher in the developing world, where economies remain labour-intensive, in practice the story is more complicated. Emerging markets saw a return on aggregate capital of 13.3% over the 1994-2003 period, compared with 7.8% in the G7 group of industrialised nations. But investments in emerging markets are riskier, because their economies tend to be more volatile and their institutions weaker. Moreover, the return on aggregate capital may not be a good guide to the returns that investors can actually expect. Growth could be concentrated in smaller firms that are harder to invest in, for instance, or the data could be unreliable. Indeed, the IMF’s analysis suggests that the internal rate of return on invested capital in publicly traded firms in emerging markets has been very poor over the past decade, even before currency risk is taken into account. But investment has fallen in the rich world too: the rivers of capital have flowed not directly into businesses but into markets for consumer and government credit, where they are presumably doing little to increase the recipient economy’s ability to repay the loans in the future. That means consumer retrenchment when interest rates rise or the bills come due, which will hurt emerging markets if they do not work harder to generate domestic demand, instead of relying on exports for growth. A better way to crunch the numbers So what is the cure? Lower savings rates in emerging markets? That would be a disaster, according to a new report from the World Bank, “Where is the Wealth of Nations?”. Many developing countries, says the Bank, are already saving too little, if you do the figures right. Traditionally, national saving is calculated as simply national income minus consumption. But this, the Bank argues, ignores important underlying changes in the productive capacity of the society. Should education, for example, be counted as consumption, or as an investment in human capital that will enable the nation to produce more in future years? On the flip side, every dollar earned by selling finite natural resources like oil or diamonds represents an incremental decrease in the country’s ability to generate wealth in coming years. If you account for things like this, says the Bank, a lot of developing countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East, are running down wealth at a fast pace—though in Asia, even with those adjustments, savings rates are still high. Like the World Bank, the IMF does not think lower savings rates in developing countries are the answer. It identifies several other things that could make a difference: higher national savings in the United States, an investment recovery in Asia, and an increase in real GDP growth in Japan and Europe. Easy to say, difficult to pull off. Raising interest rates would, the IMF concedes, have only a limited effect on America’s savings rate. Balancing the budget would do more, but there seems to be little political will to tell Americans they must pay for their government programmes. Across the Atlantic, European governments are finding it hard to make the kind of structural reforms that could boost their sluggish growth rates, and the European Central Bank has remained unwilling to provide monetary stimulus by cutting rates. Nor has Japan’s government, despite the signs of fledgling recovery, yet found a formula for boosting its long-term growth rate. It is easier to diagnose the illness than effect a cure. http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4400014

Subject: Re: Don’t blame the savers From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 12:00:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is an especially important essay asking us to reconsider how wealth is generated. Worth lots of thought.

Subject: Re: Don’t blame the savers From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 16:33:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is one topic the essay mentioned but did not explore further: The statement, 'That means consumer retrenchment when interest rates rise or the bills come due, which will hurt emerging markets if they do not work harder to generate domestic demand, instead of relying on exports for growth.' I believe there is tremendous room for improving the domestic demand for products in developing countries if only they apply good economic principles internally. I firmly believe that wealth is way too concentrated among too few in all developing countries. A re-distribution program needs to be implemented within all countries. Unfortunately the idea of wealth re-distribution raises concerns of Marxist or Che Gevara style economic ideas, and we all know those ideas are a disaster. South Africa is implementing what may in fact be the blue print for good economics and good wealth distribution. They implemented laws of affirmative action requiring companies to employ 'previously disadvantaged' or poor people. Companies of different sizes have certain quotas to fill or face tax penalties. The idea was at first received with much hatred. But as time went by, most companies have come to realise the benefits of employing 'cheaper' labour and training the labour. Within a period of about 7 years, the economically active population grew from 6 million to 10 million. This in turn has broadened the economic base of the country and creates a snow ball effect. In essence it is good sense to forcibly make poor people richer so that they can buy your products. Uhmmm if memory serves me, this is what Henry Ford once said, 'I want to pay my people enough so that they can afford my cars.' The trick is how do you generate domestic demand? Well... how creative are you? How much time and effort are you willing to put into studying a particular market to find all its problems and suggest solutions?... particularly when those solutions may become political hot-potatoes? The World Bank and the IMF have been actively working on this... and there has already been much success.... but still a long way to go.

Subject: Re: Don’t blame the savers From: Poyetas To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 04:55:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Wow, The IMF and World Bank are actually doing something POSITIVE for a change!! Very interesting report. I agree completely. The question is: will this increased domestic demand be a substitute for exports or just a compliment? If it just compliments existing exports, the USA is gonna lose out, big time.

Subject: Re: Don’t blame the savers From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 11:31:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is an organization called the Monitor Group. They undertook an economic study into a series of Developing Countries. They then made an interesting statement, 'Before a developing country can become internationally competitive it must become domestically competitive.' This is a profound statement. In other words the domestic economies must be put right, first. We need to get good economics working and proper supply and demand working in most developing countries. With the correct systems in place, the domestic demand will sore. If not in place, they will remaining processing batch plants for foreigners. In the long run it will hurt everyone.

Subject: NY Times From: Mike To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 23:56:25 (EDT) Email Address: arnold4@pacbell.net Message: NY Times to charge to get net access to op-ed columnists. There goes the neighborhood.

Subject: Re: NY Times From: Larry To: Mike Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 14:16:11 (EDT) Email Address: theorist1@hotmail.com Message: I was suprised, but not shocked, to find out that I can no longer read Paul Krugman, at the NY Times site, for free!! Is there any other site that posts his columns? I hope they gave Paul a raise, or at least a kick-back from the new subscribers. Sorry, but I won't be one of them.

Subject: Re: NY Times From: Ted Compton To: Mike Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 13:05:26 (EDT) Email Address: TedCompton@cox.net Message: What a stroke of genius! Not only will this raise revenue for The Times, it should reduce the spread of criticism of the administration in the Op/Ed columns but not the more controlled news articles. When other newspapers follow, I can get all the opinion I need from my local Knight Ridder paper.

Subject: Re: NY Times From: RL To: Ted Compton Date Posted: Tues, Sep 20, 2005 at 04:52:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: Re: NY Times From: Yann To: Mike Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 04:18:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Yes Mike, what a pity! Economists will reply: 'There is no free lunch'! Fortunately PK's columns are available on the site, for the moment...

Subject: 'Class Matters': Money Changes Things From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 13:33:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18wolfe.html September 18, 2005 'Class Matters': Money Changes Everything By ALAN WOLFE If Horatio Alger were writing today, his heroine would be a woman named Angela Whitiker. Whitiker first came to the attention of New York Times readers in 1993, when the reporter Isabel Wilkerson wrote about her son Nicholas, then 10, and his struggle to avoid the gangs of urban Chicago. Twelve years later, Wilkerson returned to the Whitiker family as part of the paper's series on class in America, now published in book form as 'Class Matters.' Nicholas, it turns out, failed to do much with his life. But his mother succeeded beyond almost anyone's dreams, including her own. Thirty-eight, with six kids and an additional stepchild, she left behind the notorious Robert Taylor Homes of her past to earn $83,000 a year as a registered nurse. Her income, impressive as it sounds, leaves little over for luxury, but she is confident that at least some of her children will have a head start in securing a position in the middle class. Jeff Martinelli's life went in the other direction. Bypassing college for a well-paying job at Kaiser Aluminum as a 20-year-old, Martinelli stayed with the company for nearly 30 years, until the Spokane, Wash., plant where he worked closed down in 2001. Without a college credential, he did not have much chance of finding comparable work, and ended up exterminating bugs in people's homes at half the $60,000 salary he earned at Kaiser. Although he feels lucky to have a job at all, he knows that his son, Caleb, is unlikely to taste the joys of middle-class status that his father once knew. Class (and with it, race) will always be with us; not even the most Candide-like economist could deny that your chances of surviving Hurricane Katrina depended on whether you had sufficient financial resources to own a car. True, some will always move up as others move down, although in recent years Americans, who pride themselves on their upward mobility, have experienced a considerable amount of the downward variety. 'Class Matters' aims to do what novelists like Dreiser and Fitzgerald and satirists like Veblen once did: to get us thinking about the ways in which money and social status influence who we are. So the stories told here bring the lives of actual people to bear on statistics and social science theorizing. Anthony DePalma recounts the intertwined tale of two immigrants, John Zannikos and Juan Manuel Peralta. They shared more than a first name; both arrived illegally in the United States, spoke little English and were determined to make a better life for themselves than they would have had in Greece or Mexico. But Zannikos came in 1953, at the start of the long postwar boom, while Peralta crossed the border in 1990 in a more difficult economy. Peralta worked in one of Zannikos's diners until his temper got the better of him. 'To him,' DePalma writes, 'jobs are interchangeable - just as he is to the jobs. If he cannot find work as a grillman, he will bus tables. Or wash dishes. If not at one diner, then at another.' Karl Marx told us that society would split into two classes; today we have as many as there are yogurts. Consider the many flavors of the rich. Only in America - more properly only on 'nature's ultimate gated community,' as Geraldine Fabrikant describes Nantucket - can old-money aristocrats become objects of sympathy. It may not be an American tragedy to witness a tycoon buying up the six-bedroom manse you inherited from your grandparents to make space for his wine cellar, but in such ways do the ultrarich differ from the merely rich. You cannot tell the richer class from the middle class by what its members wear, drive or eat. Godiva chocolates are available to the financially strapped secretary on her way to that naturally ungated community called Staten Island. The cruise ship, yesterday's supreme status symbol, features onboard climbing walls for children whose parents sign up to shop at the discount outlets in the Virgin Islands. The actual class markers are those you rarely see; there are 9,000 personal chefs in America these days, compared with 400 a decade ago. Some class mobility in America is neither up nor down but sideways. Peter T. Kilborn relates the travails of Kathy Link, whom he found in Alpharetta, Ga., about to move her family to Charlotte, N. C. Alpharetta cannot escape the realities of class; its $400,000 homes are too expensive for telephone repairmen and assistant supermarket managers. But it is also classless in a particularly exurban way. Kathy, an 'executive Gypsy,' sits in the same traffic jams as all the other wanderers from soccer matches to tennis lessons. The first substantive article featured in both the original New York Times series and in 'Class Matters' is the most poignant: Janny Scott's story of three heart attacks. Jean Miele, a well-to-do architect, survived his relatively successfully; 'time is muscle,' heart surgeons say, and Miele, rushed to a world-class hospital, saved the one and preserved the other. Will Wilson, an office worker for Consolidated Edison, received angioplasty and a stent, but only after originally being taken to a hospital that offered neither. Ewa Rynczak Gora, an immigrant from Poland working as a maid, was the unluckiest of the three; after neglecting her own health, she was not well served by visits to emergency rooms and treatments forgone because medical insurance would not cover them. Even before the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 offered stupendous breaks to the very rich, the United States was already transforming itself into a society in which merit counts - and in which merit is determined by what your parents earned and where your grandparents came from. Back when Americans still had a sense of shame, we called such morally arbitrary advantages unfair, sometimes even unjust. Now we ignore them in favor of debates about gay marriage or stem cells. 'Class Matters' seeks to change that and I, for one, hope it does. If its stories of unearned breaks and unwarranted misfortune do not make your blood boil, you probably left your social conscience on the ferry to Nantucket. Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

Subject: 'Class Matters': Series of Articles From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 16:27:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/books/review/18wolfe.html September 18, 2005 'Class Matters': Money Changes Everything • Day 1: Overview • Day 2: Health • Day 3: Marriage • Day 4: Religion • Day 5: Education • Day 6: Immigration • Day 7: New Status Markers • Day 8: The 'Relo' Class • Day 9: The Hyper-Rich • Day 10: Class and Culture • Day 11: Up From the Projects [Superb series....]

Subject: What Really Happened at Bayou From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 07:18:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/business/17bayou.html?ex=1284609600&en=3ed7f281e683b8f5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 17, 2005 What Really Happened at Bayou By GRETCHEN MORGENSON 'If there is a hell I will be there for eternity.' So reads a passage in the six-page 'suicide note and confession' written by Daniel E. Marino, chief financial officer of the Bayou Group, a hedge fund firm in Stamford, Conn., that was accused by federal prosecutors on Sept. 1 of conducting a $300 million fraud. The note, whose contents were confirmed by two officials who have seen it, answers in sometimes gripping detail the questions that have consumed Bayou's investors since the fund's problems exploded into view one month ago. Mr. Marino never followed through on his suicide threat, but the letter was recovered by local authorities last month. Of course, his account of years of deceit at Bayou is only one side of the story and some of the details remain unconfirmed, but prosecutors and law enforcement officials appear to be treating his letter as a crucial road map in their investigation. Indeed, the civil suit filed by the United States attorney against Bayou this month closely tracks the letter's details. Mr. Marino's narrative starts on the last trading day of December 1998, more than three years after Bayou was founded by Samuel Israel III, a scion of a commodity-trading family that is well known to Wall Street. On that final day of a tumultuous year in the markets - three months earlier, another hedge fund known as Long-Term Capital Management had nearly collapsed, causing widespread disruption in the financial world - Mr. Israel called two of his colleagues into a conference room. All three men knew the situation was dire at Bayou - the funds' losses had vastly overwhelmed their gains for more than two years. Something had to be done, and fast. The solution, devised by Mr. Israel and a lieutenant, James Marquez, was simple: produce a fake audit of the funds' performance and try to make up the losses next year. In the end, of course, the plan failed. The losses compounded and the results Bayou reported to its investors - several years of market-beating returns - were consistently false. So far, Bayou investors hoping to understand what happened to their money have been in the dark about what went on at the fund. But Mr. Marino's letter, along with an examination of Bayou's financial documents and interviews with many of Mr. Israel's friends and former colleagues fill in the missing pieces of the funds' startling collapse. Because almost everything that Bayou executives told investors over the years now appears to be false, it is perhaps not surprising that people who have known Mr. Israel for years say that the image he projected to his clients was more about what he hoped to be than what he actually was. For example, although he told his investors he was a third-generation trader, coming as he did from a family of successful commodities traders dating back to the 1890's, for much of his career on Wall Street he remained a low-level order taker who bounced from one obscure firm to another. And while Mr. Israel came off as a spirited, affable prankster to outsiders, to close associates he could be demeaning and threatening, even to the point of wielding a gun at Mr. Marino in 2002 when he refused to follow Mr. Israel's orders, according to Mr. Marino's letter. 'What is interesting about this is it was not just a lie, it was a very good and elaborate lie,' said John C. Siegesmund III, a Colorado investor who put $250,000 into one of the Bayou Funds in 2003. It is believed that Mr. Israel, 47, remains where he has been since the scandal broke: holed up in the 1920's-era stone mansion in Mount Kisco, N.Y., that he rents for $32,000 a month from Donald J. Trump. He has not returned numerous calls requesting interviews. His lawyer did not return phone calls. If Mr. Israel is indeed in Mount Kisco, he is not far from the elegant home on the grounds of the Westchester Country Club where he grew up. The house backed onto the third hole of the golf club's so-called south course, according to a friend of many years, who said, 'Sammy started out living large.' But if Mr. Israel hoped that his foray into hedge fund management would burnish his venerable family's reputation for savvy and successful securities trading, he appears to have failed spectacularly. In the slick and sometimes swashbuckling world of hedge funds, Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino, 46, were an odd but perfect pair. Mr. Israel, the product of Southern money and Tulane University merriment, boasted of his days among Wall Street's best while charming people as a wisecracker with a passion and edge for the markets. Mr. Marino, an accountant with a severe hearing problem and a lisp, bore neither pedigree nor power. In the mid-1980's, as he pursued his career in accounting, he lived with his mother in Staten Island, drove a leased maroon Maxima and worked for a second-tier accounting firm, according to one person who worked with him. Mr. Marino has not returned phone calls seeking comment. Andrew B. Bowman, a lawyer in Westport, Conn., who represents Mr. Marino, declined to comment about the letter or what took place at the fund. A lawyer for Mr. Marquez, Stan Twardy of Day Berry & Howard, said: 'Our communications on this topic are with the U.S. attorney's office only. To ensure the record is accurate, I will confirm that James Marquez has had no involvement in Bayou for years.' But for wealthy investors looking to dabble in the glamorous and promising world of hedge funds, Bayou's top two men offered an ideal balance: a big ego to make money and an accountant to keep it clean. 'If anyone got near anything, I would browbeat them away.' According to Mr. Marino's letter, none of Bayou's lower-level employees knew about the charade that began in 1998. Certainly both Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino knew that if Bayou's investors got wind of the funds' losses they would flee. And any hopes Mr. Israel may have had of adding his name to the list of savvy traders in his family would have been dashed. Mr. Israel knew only too well how quickly investors could turn on him. In the very early days of Bayou, investors had defected at the first sign of losses. A former hedge fund trader who spoke on the condition that he remain unidentified said that in mid-1996 he invested $150,000 in Bayou. But at the end of the year, he said he asked for his money back because the fund had fallen about 14 percent. Mr. Israel had a tendency not to communicate bad news, this person recalled. 'At first I got letters all the time, and the fund was up, and then I got no letters for a while and suddenly, the fund was down,' the former investor said. 'That was when I took the money out.' The 1998 attempt to recoup trading losses at Bayou was to involve two steps, according to the plan outlined in Mr. Marino's letter. First, Mr. Israel would raise fresh funds from investors and trade his way to outsized gains on that money. In addition, the commissions generated by the Bayou funds' trades - almost always executed by Bayou Securities, the brokerage firm owned by Mr. Israel - would be credited back to the funds to help offset the losses. Because Mr. Israel was known for his rapid-fire trading, the commissions would be high, Mr. Marino's letter said. But hiding a mountain of past losses from investors also meant that the fund's auditor had to be replaced. A new accounting firm - Richmond-Fairfield - was created to oversee the fake bookkeeping, prosecutors contend. Mr. Marino was the firm's principal. The plan, as described by Mr. Marino, certainly helps explain some of the unusual aspects of the Bayou Funds. For example, Mr. Israel did not charge his investors the traditional hedge fund management fees of 1 percent to 2 percent of assets. Instead he restricted his pay to 20 percent of the funds' gains. In addition, the minimum investment Mr. Israel required of his clients - $250,000 - was much smaller than is typical among hedge funds. Since Mr. Israel needed to attract more money to get out of the hole he was in, lower management fees and smaller minimum investments certainly could not hurt the funds' appeal to new investors. Indeed, some investors who bought into the funds in 2003 said that both were factors in their choice of Mr. Israel as a fund manager. With the plan in place, Bayou officials reported its 1998 performance to investors: a gain of 17.55 percent. December was an especially good month, fund officials said, showing a profit of 3.14 percent. Other aspects of Mr. Israel's career history and Bayou's operations were changed to enhance appearances or gloss over troubles. For example, while documents given to prospective investors in 2003 said that Mr. Israel started Bayou Funds in 1997, some early investors said the fund opened in 1996. It turned in a poor performance, however, possibly driving Mr. Israel to edit 1996 entirely from the Bayou record books. Clearly, Mr. Israel's claim to have been a 'born trader' was another fiction. According to Emanuel Gerard, for whom he worked briefly in 1990 at Gerard Klauer Mattison, Mr. Israel turned in better performances in down markets than up. Mr. Gerard said he invested a small amount of money in Bayou as a sort of hedge against a market fall, but that he redeemed his investment last year. As Mr. Israel set out to start Bayou in the mid-1990's, according to two of his former investors and longtime friends, he collaborated with Stanley P. Patrick, a quantitative stock trader, to develop a computerized trading strategy. In 1990, Mr. Patrick had been charged with trading on inside information provided by Eben P. Smith, a broker at Jeffer Management, an investment firm that was defunct by that time. The government asserted that Mr. Smith had received information from a former lawyer at Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom. Mr. Patrick pleaded guilty to the charges and was barred from the securities industry in 1994. After Mr. Israel and Mr. Patrick created the trading strategy, the two men went their separate ways. Mr. Patrick could not be reached for comment. Another early investor was Martin Payson, the former vice chairman at Time Warner, who recalled in an interview last week that he knew and admired the Israel family. Mr. Payson had been on the board of Tulane University for 13 years and knew Mr. Israel's father. He said that he took the younger Mr. Israel to dinner in Manhattan and liked him. 'I don't think we even talked much about the fund,' he said. Mr. Payson said that he viewed the fund as an offset to the market. He did not redeem his investment; he said he had no idea there were problems and felt betrayed. Tremont Capital Management, a well-respected funds manager, invested in Bayou around 2000, according to people briefed on the investment, although it redeemed its investments around two years later. With clients like these, Mr. Israel became better known. Bayou's assets really started to grow in 2001 and 2002 when consulting firms and funds started recommending Bayou to their clients. And in 2002, John Mauldin, president of Millennium Wave Investments, an investment adviser in Arlington, Tex., wrote an admiring profile of Mr. Israel and his trading technique. Another consultant that recommended Bayou to its clients was the Hennessee Group of New York. Investors liked Mr. Israel's constant communications, via e-mail, about the markets and the progress of their investments. He was down to earth, not arrogant. He spoke plainly and didn't seem to fall for Wall Street fads. 'As we've written so many times, the new age stocks continue to ascend,' Mr. Israel wrote to investors in January 2000, just before the Nasdaq peaked. 'It is our job to stand ever at the ready to identify any cracks in the armor and to act when this mania ends.' But one aspect of Mr. Israel's operations did raise some concern among investors: The fact that his brokerage firm, Bayou Securities, executed all the hedge fund's trades put him in a position to profit at the expense of his fund clients. Shrewdly, Bayou's marketing materials tackled the potential for conflicts in the arrangement head-on. Although the goal of the setup was to reduce trading costs, the materials acknowledge that it could lead to higher costs and greater profits for Mr. Israel. By confronting the potential problem directly, Mr. Israel disarmed many critics. And to some investors, any concern about the conflict was more than offset by the fact that the brokerage firm was registered with securities regulators, and subject to routine and surprise examinations. In any case, the money flowed in and both Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino began living well off the seeming success of the hedge fund. Gone was Mr. Marino's beat-up Maxima and Staten Island address. In October 2003, he bought a six-bedroom colonial-style home in Westport for $2.9 million, paying mostly cash. Soon he was driving a Bentley. That same year, in the midst of divorce proceedings, Mr. Israel moved into the Mount Kisco estate built for H. J. Heinz, the ketchup magnate. 'The end was near.' Although Bayou's falsified returns looked great - market-beating gains of 26 percent in 1999, almost 20 percent in 2000 and 7 percent in 2001 - some of the consultants who had recommended the funds to their clients were becoming wary about aspects of its operations. By 2002, for example, Tremont withdrew its funds after noticing a sizable gap between returns on Bayou's offshore funds and its domestic portfolio, according to several people briefed on the investment. When Tremont asked officials at Bayou about the discrepancy, these people said they were told that Bayou had shifted profitable trades made in its United States funds to the offshore portfolios, in an attempt to increase the offshore funds' performance and attract more assets. Mr. Mauldin said he advised his clients to exit the funds in the summer of 2004. He declined to say why he changed his mind on Mr. Israel. Some consultants, however, including the Hennessee Group, kept their clients in the Bayou Funds until the end. Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino could not have been pleased to see these redemptions roll in. After all, withdrawals were not part of the plan. The stress associated with the redemptions may be reflected in income statements and other financial documents filed by Bayou Securities. For a brokerage firm to conduct business with clients, securities regulators require that it have a certain amount of capital on hand. In March 2004, Bayou Securities had a net capital position of $5.9 million, and had borrowed 9 percent of that amount, its filings said. By December 2004, however, the firm's net capital had declined to $259,731 and at the end of March it had fallen to $164,237. At that point, Bayou Securities' borrowings represented 161 percent of its capital. The firm showed a loss of $325,912. Even as Bayou Securities' financial position was teetering, the documents show that it paid for limousine services ($5,000 a month), restaurant meals ($4,000 a month), the lease of a private jet ($100,000) and even the services of a counterespionage consultant ($20,000). Some of the largest amounts that were withdrawn from Bayou Securities paid for consulting and professional fees. Such payments had typically approached $60,000 a month. But in March they jumped to $431,000; by the end of June 2005, Bayou Securities had paid out $1.1 million in consulting fees. One investment firm that received a lot of money from Bayou was Eqyty Research and Management, a money management firm in Boston. From July 2003 to March 2005, Eqyty Research received $700,000 from Bayou Securities. Jeffrey D. Fotta, a co-founder of Eqyty Research, said that the payments were for research on stocks. He said that he was unaware of any wrongdoing at Bayou and that as recently as May, his firm was recommending trades to the fund. Legal fees, understandably, were also rising for Bayou. Over the course of three weeks in June of this year, a lawyer named Jan Morton Heger received $461,000 in payments from Bayou Securities, according to the financial statements. Mr. Heger had not shown up in documents from previous periods. He did not respond to an e-mail message requesting comment and a telephone number for him was out of service. 'I am sorry for the people I hurt.' One of the most compelling mysteries about the Bayou mess is why Mr. Israel decided to close the funds in July, effectively blowing the whistle on himself. Once again, Mr. Marino's letter provides a credible explanation. With so many investors fleeing Bayou, the situation had grown increasingly grave. On Dec. 4, 2004, the fund's board met and adopted a resolution to allow Bayou's president, Mr. Israel, to hold $100 million in his own name to invest. That board consisted of Mr. Israel and his No. 2, Mr. Marino. The move appears to have been the beginnings of a last-ditch effort to recoup years of Bayou's losses. In March, Mr. Israel entered into an agreement with Lewis Malouf, a managing director of Bayou as well as a principal of Charles Financial, according to court documents, to invest the $100 million in bank instruments that would supposedly yield $7.1 billion over 10 years. The money was given to Karl Johnson, who was going to invest the money for Mr. Malouf. Neither Mr. Malouf nor Mr. Johnson returned calls seeking comment. But Arizona regulators seized the funds in May, suspecting that the money was related to a different fraud; they knew nothing about Bayou or Mr. Israel. Then, Mr. Israel's lawyers, in cooperation with Mr. Johnson, sued to quash the seizure on the basis that Arizona had no right to the money. In the process, Mr. Israel's lawyers provided account documents proving the money was his. When Arizona kept the money, Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino must have known that the end was near. On July 27, Mr. Israel notified investors that he was closing the Bayou funds to spend more time with his family. Investors would receive their funds in mid-August, he said. They never did. Mr. Israel's communications stopped. According to prosecutors, that $100 million in Arizona is believed to be the last remaining property of Bayou investors.

Subject: Re: What Really Happened at Bayou From: John C To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 11:19:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: emma, ever think of just posting the links to 10 articles under one thread. You could even title it NY Time Articles. It would reduce the amount of times Bobby has to clean the board and lose discussions on current topics.

Subject: Summer of My Discontent From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 07:17:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/opinion/17ali.html?ex=1284609600&en=70e50422593131b8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 17, 2005 Summer of My Discontent By MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI ALL semester long I had thought about the approaching summer vacation with mixed feelings. On one hand I was elated at the prospect of seeing my seven siblings and ten half brothers and sisters, but on the other, I was apprehensive about being back in Africa. The year was 1990. I had left Ghana nearly two years earlier to attend high school at the Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan and I was nervous about facing my father whose dream of my becoming a lawyer or banker or a diplomat with the United Nations was being shattered by my desire to be a writer. At Interlochen, music was literally everywhere I turned and in addition to creative writing, my other two childhood talents - drumming and singing - had suddenly acquired a second life. But Father - who like his older brother and father before him, was the emir, or king, of the Hausa people in Kumasi, Ghana's second-largest city - didn't mince words in phone conversations reminding me that, although he had let me attend art school, music and dance were professions for praise singers and storytellers, not for people who had royal blood running through their veins. Father was out on the porch when I arrived home around 9:30 p.m. after the ride from the airport in Accra. In mid-June Kumasi is hot and sunny, the days punctuated by thunderstorms that seemed only to make the punishing humidity worse. After 20 months of living in the chill of northern Michigan, I felt as if I was in a furnace. Father sat on an easy chair, a long rosary in his hands, meditating. Though he was aware of my presence, his eyes remained fixed on the open skies, his brow ominous. From his profile I saw his lips move rapidly as he recited the Muslim incantations known as zikr. I stood at the door that led to the porch, with my back slightly crouched and head bowed in filial piety, as if to prove to Father that my sense of cultural appropriateness had not been tarnished by American culture. Father completed his zikr some 15 minutes later, and for the next hour or so I sat next to him, speaking only in answer to his questions about my life in the United States. Within a few days of my arrival a coldness seemed to settle between me and my old friends, who disliked my 'bookish manner.' It also became apparent that my friends and many in the family were disappointed by my simple, weather-appropriate clothes: leather slippers, light pants and white T-shirt. 'You have to stop wearing these rags and dress heavy and nice,' said an aunt, 'so people will know you are a true Yankee man.' What my aunt meant by 'heavy and nice' was the designer jackets and jeans or suits worn by students and workers returning home from abroad, mostly to show off. In the two years I had lived in the United States, I had grown into the opposite of what was expected of me, from the way I thought to what I wore. I had discovered the musical lamentations of Miles Davis, Mendelssohn, Skip James and Beethoven, and realized the meaning of irony, cynicism and tragedy, three factors one needs to understand deeply, to avoid bitterness. But most important, I had discovered individualism - the celebration of the self as the most important force of nature. This was in direct contradiction to the culture of the Ghanaian Muslim community, where the determination of an individual to excel was seen as an attempt to 'go beyond where God has placed you.' They were like the proverbial crabs that pull down the ones that seek to climb out of the box. My disheveled, un-Yankee appearance soon gave rise to rumors that I was a deportee: 'Why has he returned home with nothing to wear?,' was the question whispered behind my back. It was inconceivable that a person who had been blessed to escape the Ogyakrom or 'Land of Fire' as Ghanaians sometimes referred to their country, would return to it. The very cynical ones among our neighbors and family friends would ask, 'When are you going back to your country?,' to which I repeatedly replied 'two weeks,' though I ended up staying the whole summer. After this unpromising beginning, I kept mostly to myself for the rest of the visit and mingled with friends only when we gathered for World Cup matches. Cameroon was threatening to move into the semifinals of the World Cup; it would have been the first African team to do so and we watched eagerly, cheering them on. In the evenings, after Father had retired to his section of the bungalow, I moved my portable radio to the porch where I sat into the night and contemplated the things that still troubled me deeply - Mother's painful death five years earlier from complications in the birth of her eighth child; the lackadaisical, yet chaotic and backward manner of life in Ghana; fate. By the time I packed my bags and left Ghana in late August to complete my senior year at Interlochen, I felt as if I had accidentally taken a peek at the pages of God's master book, from which I read that I must stay as far away from Ghana as I could. For the next 10 years, I lived in a self-imposed exile, cutting all ties to my community in Ghana and the United States. At one point I didn't call or write anyone in my family for two years. Completely Americanized and utterly nervous, I returned to Ghana in January 2000. It was two months after Father had vowed not to speak with me again until he saw me 'face to face.' In the two weeks I spent in Ghana that January, not only did I make great strides in bridging the cultural and emotional gap that existed between me and my family, but I also married the woman whom my father had picked out for me some seven years before. Three weeks after the wedding and my return to America, Father fell ill. Two months later, he died. I often tell friends that had I not visited Africa that year to make amends with my family, I would probably have been the first West African Muslim ever to see a shrink; the guilt would have been so great and devastating. To this day, I believe that just as the writing in God's master book had cautioned me to stay away from Ghana, Father, too, had been advised by his augurs (for he had many who burned incense and prayed all night to protect him and his family) to let me be what I wanted to be, but by the same token to make sure that no matter what I did, I went home and married a woman from my tribe - the only means through which he could be assured that I would one day return to carry on the legacy of the Ali clan. Whether I would return to pick up the mantle or not and how my feelings and those of my wife played in this whole affair are topics for a different story. But looking back at the 17 years I have lived in the United States, it was that long summer in 1990 that everything - the past, the present and the future - became clear to me. It was the point from which my current life as a writer, father, musician and husband began. It was also the same summer that history was almost made when the striker Roger Milla came out of retirement to lead the Cameroon soccer team farther than any African team had ever gone before in the World Cup tournament, to make a statement that each individual spirit, when allowed to flourish, surprises even its own perceived destiny.

Subject: Poor Planning and Corruption Hobble Iraq From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 07:04:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/international/middleeast/18najaf.html September 18, 2005 Poor Planning and Corruption Hobble Reconstruction of Iraq By CRAIG S. SMITH NAJAF, Iraq - In April, Najaf's main maternity hospital received rare good news: an $8 million refurbishment program financed by the United States would begin immediately. But five months and millions of dollars later, the hospital administrators say they have little but frustration to show for it. 'They keep saying there's renovation but, frankly, we don't see it,' said Liqaa al-Yassin, director of the hospital, her exasperated face framed by a black hijab, or scarf. 'Each day I sign in 80 workers, and sometimes I see them, sometimes I don't.' She walks a visitor through the hospital's hot, dim halls, the peeling linoleum on the floors stained by the thousands of lighted cigarettes crushed underfoot. Anxious women, draped in black head-to-foot chadors, or veils, sit in the sultry rooms fanning their sick children. 'My child has heart problems, she can't take this heat,' pleaded one mother as Dr. Yassin walked past. The United States has poured more than $200 million into reconstruction projects in this city, part of the $10 billion it has spent to rebuild Iraq. Najaf is widely cited by the military as one of the success stories in that effort, but American officers involved in the rebuilding say that reconstruction projects here, as elsewhere in the country, are hobbled by poor planning, corrupt contractors and a lack of continuity among the rotating coalition officers charged with overseeing the spending. 'This country is filled with projects that were never completed or were completed and have never been used,' said a frustrated civil affairs officer who asked not to be identified because he had not been cleared to speak about the reconstruction. Najaf would seem to be one of Iraq's most promising places to rebuild. As a Shiite holy place, it has few Sunnis and, as a result, none of the insurgent attacks and sabotage that plague other parts of the country. Just a year after fighting between American forces and Shiite militias left much of the city in smoking ruins, a new police force is patrolling the streets and security in the city has been handed over to Iraqis. There are some successes. The Army Corps of Engineers has finished refurbishing several police and fire stations, one of which has shiny new fire engines donated by Japan. It is spending tens of thousands of dollars to refurbish crumbling schools and has replaced aging clay water pipes in the suburb of Kufa with more durable plastic ones. It is even spending half a million dollars to renovate the city's soccer stadium, putting in new lights and laying fresh sod. But in a series of interviews, American military officers and Iraqi officials involved in the reconstruction described a pattern of failures and frustrations that Army officers who have worked in other parts of Iraq say are routine. Residents complain that the many of the city's critical needs remain unfulfilled and the Army concedes that many projects it has financed are far behind schedule. Officers with the American military say that corruption and poor oversight are largely to blame. 'We were told to stimulate the economy any way we can, and a lot of money was wasted in the process,' said Capt. Kelly Mims, part of the Army liaison team that maintains an office in Najaf's local government building. 'Now we're focused on spending the money more wisely.' He said the Army was forming a committee with provincial authorities to create a master list of all current and future projects so that the money goes where it is most needed. Several agencies are charged with reconstruction in Iraq. In Najaf it is primarily the work of the Army Corps of Engineers and the United States Agency for International Development. They award some projects to foreign contractors, many of them American companies that hold master contracts for reconstruction work. Other projects are awarded directly to Iraqi companies, but even the American companies subcontract much of the work to Iraqis. A handful of Army reservists and civilian employees hand out cash to Iraqi contractors and try to keep track of the projects they underwrite. But American officers say there is almost no oversight after a contractor is given the job. The Army pays small Iraqi contractors in installments - 10 percent at the outset, 40 percent when the work is half done, 40 percent on completion and the final 10 percent after fixing problems identified in a final inspection. On larger projects, contractors are paid by the month, regardless of how much work is actually done. Penalty clauses for missing deadlines are rare, and some contractors drag out their projects for months, officers say, then demand more money and threaten to walk away if it is not forthcoming. Maj. William Smith, charged with overseeing most of the reconstruction work in the area, walks around the bright blue pipes and yellow tanks of an unfinished water treatment plant outside of town. A control panel with its array of monitoring lights sits baking in the sun beside broken bags of filtering sand. The plant was supposed to be finished in June, but the feed pipe from the river has not even been connected; it was buried unmarked and now has to be relocated. 'Sometimes, the only way to go is to pay off the contractor and put it out for new bids,' the major said with a weary chuckle. He said the water treatment plant was one of four that he was considering repossessing, even though he has paid out more than $200,000 on each one. Major Smith says that contractors can technically be blacklisted. But they simply change the names of their companies and submit bids for new projects, 'and we don't really have a choice but to use them' if they submit the winning bid, he said. That is because the United States blacklists only companies, not individuals, he said. Army engineers have to scrutinize tenders carefully because contractors sometimes leave out major pieces of equipment to lower their bids, he said. Once the contract is awarded and the omission is discovered, the Army is forced to pay more to complete the project. All bids must be submitted in English and the companies are required to have an English-speaking representative on site whenever the Americans visit, but they rarely do, many officers said. At a United States-financed health clinic going up on the outskirts of town, Major Smith resorts to pantomime as he tries to make himself understood to an eager foreman. In response, the foreman draws furiously in the sand, but all a bemused Major Smith can say is, 'O.K., O.K.' He promises to return with an interpreter in a few days, but even that message is lost. Driving through the city, Major Smith points out a new, $5.5 million sewage treatment plant, built by Bechtel with funds from the Agency for International Development. The plant was completed in February but was not commissioned until August because no one in Najaf had been trained on how to operate it. The agency said that it was now operating at full capacity, serving 141,000 people. But a similar plant has sat unused in the nearby town of Diwaniya since its completion last December, also for lack of trained personnel. An agency spokesman said it was expected to begin operating in September. Muhammad Yusef al-Yasiri, an engineer who sits on the project committee of Najaf's city council, grumbled that the Americans hired contractors and handed out projects without consulting the local institutions involved. 'Even the hospitals have no idea what kind of work is being done,' he said. As a result, he added, 'the money isn't going to the right places.' He cited the Al Sadr Teaching Hospital, which was caught in last year's crossfire between coalition forces and fighters loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, son of the grand ayatollah for whom the hospital is named. Mr. Sadr's fighters used the hospital's high floors to fire on a coalition base nearby before being driven out. After coalition troops pulled out in July last year, looters moved in, carting away almost anything of value. To refurbish the hospital, the Army hired the Parsons Corporation, a private engineering and construction company that has been awarded a master contract to build and renovate hospitals and health centers throughout the country. It was paid $2 million to lay new linoleum and hang new ceiling tiles in the hospital's ground floor, drain the flooded basement and fix the central air-conditioning. But the work has not assuaged angry doctors whose first priority is to replace the equipment lost in the looting, which they say the United States should have prevented in the first place. A resident doctor who gave his name as Ather led a visitor through the hospital, pointing out where the advanced equipment once stood. Looters damaged the magnetic resonance imaging machine and stole the control unit of the CT scanner. The large white doughnut of the scanner sits idle in a pristine room, untouched by the fighting. Only two of the hospital's four X-ray machines remain. In the emergency room, a family sat on a blanket eating a lunch of bread, grilled meat and cucumbers. 'This was Najaf's most advanced hospital,' he said with distress. 'A lot of money has been spent on the rehabilitation of this hospital, but not very much has changed.' Part of the problem is that much of the money is spent before any work is done. The International Monetary Fund reported recently that a third to half of the money paid to foreign contractors is spent on security and insurance. Importing equipment also eats up cash. Major Smith said the hospital's new boiler, for example, was being shipped from the United States. At the maternity hospital across town, Dr. Yassin could hardly disguise her mounting frustration. She said the contractor, the Parsons Corporation, had repaired the hospital's reverse osmosis water purification equipment, but that little else had been accomplished in the five months since the renovation began. Only one of the hospital's four elevators is working, and that is the one Parsons left in operation while the others were supposedly being repaired, she said, adding that no one is working on the elevators now. Major Smith said Parsons had completed the work but that it was so shoddy the Army would not certify the elevators for use. He said the company had since agreed to bring in elevator specialists to redo the job. Parsons was also supposed to fix the hospital's incinerators, but it completed the work without hooking up gas lines to fuel them, Dr. Yassin said. A Parsons spokesman in California said that all work on the hospital would be completed in November and blamed insurgent activity in the area for the delays. The hospital director, though, said that there had never been any fighting around the site, and that Najaf had been free of major violence for more than a year. Dr. Yassin said that, in any event, she would prefer that the money be spent on new facilities and had asked the Ministry of Health to finance an expansion. 'Were doing our best, despite this process of rehabilitation,' she said. 'I hope that they will work faster in the future.'

Subject: In the Amazon, Where A Sister Was Slain From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:51:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/18/opinion/l18amazon.html September 18, 2005 In the Amazon, Where Our Sister Was Slain To the Editor: The enormous fight to regain control of the Amazon from gunmen, illegal ranchers and loggers has just begun and is not as rosy as you state in 'A Healthier Amazon Jungle.' Our sister, Dorothy Stang, tried to halt this robbery, and for this she was murdered in February by those whose destructive practices your editorial stated the Brazilian government is addressing. Dorothy lived in Brazil for 39 years, challenging a system that robs the Brazilian landless of dignity, and the land of its sustainability. The rights-based land reform she championed provides the poor and landless with sustainable livelihoods and empowers them in their own development. It addresses the challenges the editorial mentions: deforestation; peasants pushed to the edge of survival; land grabbers; and murders of peasant leaders. While President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is making progress, these changes are unsustainable without a rights-based land reform. His promise to settle 430,000 landless families remains unrealized, and his gains can be easily erased without such a reform. Whom does the Amazon belong to - Brazil, or the thieving ranchers, loggers and gunmen? David Stang Marguerite Stang Hohm Palmer Lake, Colo., Sept. 14, 2005

Subject: A Healthier Amazon Jungle From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:50:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/opinion/13tue4.html September 13, 2005 A Healthier Amazon Jungle Last month, Brazil's environmental officials announced that the burning of the Amazon has slowed. Deforestation this year is half of what it was the year before. This news shows that when Brazil's government musters the political will to protect the Amazon, it can do it. Large swaths of the jungle are still disappearing, mainly set on fire by soybean farmers and ranchers looking for land to raise cattle. Last year was the worst for Amazon deforestation in a decade. The health of the Amazon is a global concern because the forest soaks up greenhouse gases, which lessens global warming. Deforestation means the Amazon could eventually become too small to produce the rain that it needs to survive. Deforestation is also deadly for millions of Amazon peasants trying to eke out a living growing small plots or collecting forest products. Land grabbers snatch up valuable property near planned paved roads, burning the villages to drive the inhabitants away. Hundreds of leaders who have tried to speak up for peasants have been murdered, and virtually none of the killers ever face jail. Unfortunately, part of the reason farmers and ranchers cleared less jungle this year is because the price of soybeans and beef have dropped, and Brazil's currency is stronger. So exports are less profitable. But the government's commitment to protecting the Amazon has also been important. Led by Marina Silva, the environment minister and once a poor Amazon rubber tapper herself, Brazil is starting to impose its authority in parts of the forest that have always been lawless. In the state of Pará in February, gunmen killed Dorothy Stang, an American nun who had worked with the rural poor for 30 years. After the murder, the government sent 2,000 federal troops to the zone and announced a logging ban on millions of acres of Amazon land. The government has also begun to enforce its laws. It is beginning to require real documentation of claims for land title. In June, police arrested dozens of members of an illegal clear-cutting ring. Finally, through new satellite imaging, Brazilian authorities can spot burning while it is happening and theoretically make arrests. Rule of law is still foreign to the Amazon. But it is becoming a little less so.

Subject: Premium for Basic Medicare Increasing From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:31:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/national/17medicare.html?ex=1284609600&en=afbca15d303ecb79&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 17, 2005 Premium for Basic Medicare Increasing 13% Next Year By ROBERT PEAR WASHINGTON - The Bush administration announced on Friday that the basic Medicare premium would shoot up next year 13 percent, to $88.50 a month, mainly because of the increased use of doctors' services. Many beneficiaries will pay an additional premium for the new prescription drug benefit, expected to average $32 a month. So the combined premiums for doctors' services, outpatient hospital care and prescription drugs will average slightly more than $120 a month. Medicare provides coverage for 42 million people who are 65 and older or disabled. In most cases, Medicare premiums are deducted from monthly Social Security checks. The average monthly Social Security benefit for retired workers is $955 this year. The amount for 2006 will be announced next month and will probably approach $1,000. Kirsten A. Sloan, a health policy analyst at AARP, the big lobby for older Americans, noted that the basic Medicare premium was increasing by nearly $30 a month, or 51 percent, from 2003 to 2006. Doctors are billing Medicare for longer, more intensive office visits, more laboratory tests and more frequent and complex imaging procedures. But doctors said that much of the increase in Medicare spending also resulted from research breakthroughs, new drugs and technology approved for coverage and cancer and diabetes screenings encouraged by the government. The 2006 premium will be $10.30 more than the current monthly premium. The premium, now $78.20 a month, is calculated according to a complex formula set by law. The premium was $66.60 in 2004 and $58.70 in 2003. Herb Kuhn, a senior official at the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, expressed concern about the growth in spending on doctors' services, laboratory tests and outpatient procedures. 'Medicare needs to move away from a system that pays simply for more services, regardless of their quality or impact on beneficiary health,' Mr. Kuhn said. 'The current system is not sustainable.' The Bush administration has endorsed the idea of 'pay for performance' and is searching for ways to measure doctors' performance in treating Medicare patients. Mr. Kuhn said he did not know how much of the increase in Medicare spending might be for unnecessary care. 'We're still trying to understand how much value we're getting for that,' he said. The chief Medicare actuary, Richard S. Foster, said the premiums paid by beneficiaries covered one-fourth of the cost of benefits under Part B of Medicare. Those benefits include the services of doctors and other health care professionals, X-rays, diagnostic tests, some home health services and drugs given to patients in doctors' offices. Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, a research center that advocates free-market health policies, predicted that the premium increase would 'create a political firestorm.' 'Some areas of the country are seriously overusing health care,' Mrs. Turner said. 'Everyone winds up paying the price for that. What do you do? Put more price controls into the Medicare program? That clearly has not worked. Consumers need more incentives and more power to manage the costs of their care.' Dr. J. James Rohack, a trustee of the American Medical Association, said doctors were saving money for Medicare by keeping patients out of the hospital. To do that, Dr. Rohack said, physicians have to see patients more frequently to manage aggressively chronic conditions like diabetes and congestive heart failure. Moreover, Dr. Rohack said, many beneficiaries will have lower out-of-pocket health costs next year because of the added drug coverage. 'Even though the premium for Part B of Medicare is going up, many patients will see net savings of hundreds of dollars a month,' said Dr. Rohack, a cardiologist in Temple, Tex., whose patients often spend $300 to $400 a month on medications. Ms. Sloan of AARP agreed that 'there will be savings from the drug benefit.' But she added, 'Those savings could be eroded by increases in premiums, deductibles and co-payments elsewhere in the Medicare program.' Under federal law, low-income people are eligible for extra help. 'About one-fourth of beneficiaries can receive assistance that pays for their entire Part B premium,' Mr. Kuhn said. Many people eligible for the help do not receive it, because they are unaware it exists, are reluctant to apply for it or find applying too difficult. Beneficiaries have to pay annual deductibles before Medicare pays for doctors' services. The deductible, $100 a year from 1991 to 2004, increased to $110 this year and will go to $124 in 2006. Higher Medicare payments to health maintenance organizations and other private plans are also contributing to the higher premiums. The government often spends more for a beneficiary in a private plan than it would for the same person in traditional fee-for-service Medicare. Federal officials expect that more people will enroll in private plans next year, in part because such plans offer extra benefits, including more generous drug coverage than the standard drug benefit. Many Democrats object to what they describe as overpayments to private plans. Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, recently introduced a bill that would cut Medicare payments to private plans and use the savings to reduce premiums for beneficiaries. 'With home heating prices expected to rise this winter, many seniors will find it very hard to absorb the higher premium' in 2006, Mr. Bingaman said Friday. 'Rather than charging higher premiums, I would like to see deep cuts in the overpayments to H.M.O.'s.' The new premium was computed on the assumption that current law continues unchanged. Because of a quirk in the law, doctors face a 4.4 percent cut in the Medicare payment next year for each service they provide. Doctors are lobbying Congress to block the cut and to allow a modest increase in the fees. If Congress does so, Medicare spending on doctors' services will rise more than expected, and that will, in turn, drive up premiums more than expected in future years.

Subject: Still Eating Our Lunch From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:28:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/opinion/16friedman.html?ex=1284523200&en=3ceedaa76f42f0d8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 16, 2005 Still Eating Our Lunch By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Singapore Singapore is a country that takes the Internet seriously. Last week its Ministry of Defense granted a deferment for the country's compulsory National Service to a Singaporean teenager so he could finish competing in the finals of the World Cyber Games - the Olympics of online war games. Being a tiny city-state of four million, Singapore is obsessed with nurturing every ounce of talent of every single citizen. That is why, although its fourth and eighth graders already score at the top of the Timss international math and science tests, Singapore has been introducing more innovations into schools. Its government understands that in a flattening world, where more and more jobs can go anywhere, it's not enough to just stay ahead of its neighbors. It has to stay ahead of everyone - including us. Message to America: They are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. As Low-Sim Ay Nar, principal of Xinmin Secondary School, explained to me, Singapore has got rote learning down cold. No one is going to outdrill her students. What it is now focusing on is how to develop more of America's strength: getting Singaporean students and teachers to be more innovative and creative. 'Numerical skills are very important,' she told me, but 'I am now also encouraging my students to be creative - and empowering my teachers. ... We have been loosening up and allowing people to grow their own ideas.' She added, 'We have shifted the emphasis from content alone to making use of the content' on the principle that 'knowledge can be created in the classroom and doesn't just have to come from the teacher.' Toward that end, some Singapore schools have adopted a math teaching program called HeyMath, which was started four years ago in Chennai, India, by two young Indian bankers, Nirmala Sankaran and Harsh Rajan, in partnership with the Millennium Mathematics Project at Cambridge University. With a team of Indian, British and Chinese math and education specialists, the HeyMath group basically said to itself: If you were a parent anywhere in the world and you noticed that Singapore kids, or Indian kids or Chinese kids, were doing really well in math, wouldn't you like to see the best textbooks, teaching and assessment tools, or the lesson plans that they were using to teach fractions to fourth graders or quadratic equations to 10th graders? And wouldn't it be nice if one company then put all these best practices together with animation tools, and delivered them through the Internet so any teacher in the world could adopt or adapt them to his or her classroom? That's HeyMath. 'No matter what kind of school their kids go to, parents all over the world are worried that their kids might be missing something,' Mrs. Sankaran said. 'For some it is the right rigor, for some it is creativity. There is no perfect system. ... What we have tried to do is create a platform for the continuous sharing of the best practices for teaching math concepts. So a teacher might say: 'I have a problem teaching congruence to 14-year-olds. What is the method they use in India or Shanghai?' ' Singaporean math textbooks are very good. My daughter's school already uses them in Maryland. But they are static and not illustrated or animated. 'Our lessons contain animated visuals that remove the abstraction underlying the concept, provide interactivity for students to understand concepts in a 'hands on' manner and make connections to real-life contexts so that learning becomes relevant,' Mrs. Sankaran said. HeyMath's mission is to be the math Google - to establish a Web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the 'best teacher in the world' for every math concept and to also be able to benchmark themselves against their peers globally. The HeyMath platform also includes an online repository of questions, indexed by concept and grade, so teachers can save time in devising homework and tests. Because HeyMath material is accompanied by animated lessons that students can do on their own online, it provides for a lot of self-learning. Indeed, HeyMath (see www.heymath.net), which has been adopted by 35 of Singapore's 165 schools, also provides an online tutor, based in India, to answer questions from students stuck on homework. Why am I writing about this? Because math and science are the keys to innovation and power in today's world, and American parents had better understand that the people who are eating their kids' lunch in math are not resting on their laurels.

Subject: Mixed Messages in Soweto From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:27:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/travel/07bpsoweto.html?ex=1127534400&en=fe3ad74079086d11&ei=5070&emc=eta1 November 7, 2004 Mixed Messages in Soweto By ALAN COWELL IT had always seemed to me voyeuristic, or, at least, patronizing, to embark on a sightseeing tour of Soweto, the great sprawl of cramped homes designed by apartheid as the black labor pool for white Johannesburg. But, one day in July, I had an excuse, or, at least, a rationale. Nineteen years earlier, in 1985, at the start of a state of emergency that became the unintended harbinger of democracy, I was based in South Africa as a journalist covering the years of protest that led to the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. Almost on a whim, I joined one of the organized tours that continued despite the violent protests that were spreading across the land. This time, as a vacationer, I wondered how much had changed, not just in Soweto but also in the tours themselves. In 1985, I recalled, a nattily clad white guide with a microphone offered a running commentary on Soweto and its two million people as if the whole place had grown up organically rather than as a result of racial segregation and social engineering. Now, 10 years after South Africa's first democratic elections, what landmarks would be offered by newer tour guides to explain this tangled and complex place, as much a symbol of struggle as a place of residence? And how would I see them, through the eyes of an optimistic traveler or a skeptical reporter? Obviously, some things had simply disappeared along with the end of apartheid. As a white person, I no longer needed a permit to enter Soweto. A generation of young South Africans had arisen with no direct experience of the schools boycotts, the rock-throwing defiance, the arrests and brutality that had been the price of their freedom. But what else would be different? Zakhele Mahlangu, our 26-year-old guide, picked up my wife, Sue, daughter Rebecca and me from a guesthouse in Johannesburg's Melville suburb in his father's Volkswagen Kombi minibus and off we went in search of answers. First of all, I was surprised that even though Soweto's population had, according to Mr. Mahlangu, doubled to four million in the last 20 years, it seemed to look and feel the same, bereft of a defined center. The riches of Johannesburg still appear as a crenelation of high-rises on the skyline. As before, though, it offered a microcosm of the land. The booming funeral parlors testified to the AIDS epidemic ravaging South Africa and much of the continent. The hardscrabble squatter shacks hard by older, neater homes recalled the economic distinctions of the post-apartheid era. True, the segregation of residential areas has come to an end, but few whites live in Soweto, and some middle-class blacks have migrated to former whites-only suburbs. The post-apartheid economy has created a handful of black billionaires, but many black South Africans, drawn here from far-flung villages, struggle to find jobs and cannot afford the high price of new housing. In fact, speaking later to another guide, Thulisile Khumalo, over dinner back in Johannesburg, that particular Sowetan love-hate mix of pride and doubt seemed to have survived. None of the fancier store chains has set up shop there, she said, and white investors have stayed away. 'People still think that if they buy goods made in Soweto they are inferior,' she said. But there were discernible changes. In the 1980's, the tour seemed a propaganda exercise to prove to foreigners that the white authorities were firmly in control: After all, how could tourists trundle through the place in buses if a revolution was under way? Now, Soweto's icons were public, not hidden. Its heroes and martyrs were honored, not outlawed. Memory was there to be celebrated - or mourned - not denied. Mr. Mahlangu, our guide, pointed out the classic tour sights - the homes of Nelson Mandela (now a museum) and Archbishop Desmond Tutu (still his residence when he is in Soweto.) But we stopped, too, at a newer shrine - the memorial commemorating the death on June 16, 1976, of Hector Peterson, a 13-year-old schoolboy killed in the youthful protests against the use of Afrikaans as a teaching language. Those protests, barely mentioned in 1985, were now the font of Soweto's modern history: Black schoolchildren in their early teens came here to be told of the uprisings and riots that created their heritage. Nineteen years earlier, children of their age boycotted classes, engaged police armored trucks in deadly duels and forfeited whatever small promise their youth held out for them. It was on the way to the home of another, more ambiguous icon of 'the struggle,' Winnie Mandela, the former wife of Nelson Mandela, that our tour took a turn that transformed us briefly from visitors to participants in Soweto's daily reality. As Mr. Mahlangu turned to head for Mrs. Mandela's home, one of Soweto's ubiquitous minibus taxis, jammed full of passengers, hurtled into the side of our Volkswagen, spun off and mounted the roadside border, rocking on its springs. For a long moment, there was a silence. Would we face hostility as outsiders? And if so what form would it take? But anger never came. Instead, people who had seen the accident approached us and inquired about our well-being. The fact that we were whites, tourists, aliens, had nothing to do with a response that was all about courtesy. We pressed on to another epiphany, which was not part of the tour but far more instructive of the changes since July 1985 than any guide could have pointed out. On open ground just outside Regina Mundi church, once the focus of much antigovernment protest, the Johannesburg Metropolitan Police was holding a graduation parade for newly trained motorcycle patrol officers, all women and most of them black. To mark the moment, an assembly of dignitaries sang South Africa's national hymn, which begins with the African anthem 'Nkosi Sikelele Afrika' ('God Bless Africa') - and ends with an English version of the apartheid-era 'Die Stem' ('The Voice') In the 80's, the African anthem usually heralded a violent clash with the police rather than a parade. On our way back to Johannesburg, we visited the two-year-old Apartheid Museum between Soweto and central Johannesburg. The museum is a remarkable edifice, built deliberately to resemble a prison, packed with the icons of the past - the passes that black people were forced by law to carry at all times, the huge armored police trucks that terrorized neighborhoods, video footage of the violent protests that ended apartheid. Groups of schoolchildren - black and white - struck me as slightly uneasy in the contemplation of events that had molded their nation. It seemed hopelessly optimistic to assume that the immediate past could be redefined so soon as history. Indeed, our brief glimpse into Soweto's unfinished and uncertain battle to claim a new future had reminded us that this is a history that is still being written.

Subject: Re: Mixed Messages in Soweto From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 17:10:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: wow... 1985.. a very troubled time. My dad was put in jail by the government for political reasons. We took on a whole lot of stress. The ANC had started up a terrorist campaigne of blowing up restaurants, and public places. My favourite burger house was blown up the day my dad decided I could not go downtown (I would most certainly have been killed). On the one hand we faced consistent terrorist attacks, on the other hand we faced consistent manipulation by the government. Those terrible days are over. Interestingly, today the ANC is in government and they cannot come to terms with their evil past. The world is not black and white... there is a tremendous amount of grey in between.

Subject: The 6 Percent Solution: Real Estate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:25:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/business/17realtor.ready.html?ex=1284609600&en=bfaf86319ba60238&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 17, 2005 The 6 Percent Solution: Skip Real Estate Agents By DAMON DARLIN Stan and Gloria Wakefield are no fools. They built their three-bedroom house 12 years ago in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla., an oceanside resort community dotted with golf courses and picturesque inland waterways. The real estate market in the area, near Jacksonville, took off and the house, overlooking lagoons, rose in value to nearly $1 million. 'This house has appreciated almost obscenely, ' said Mr. Wakefield, a retired naval intelligence officer. What the Wakefields did next should scare real estate agents everywhere. They decided to put their house on the market this year, and concluded that the house would sell itself. So why pay a real estate agent a 6 percent commission? They tried negotiating a lower commission with prospective agents, who stood to make about $60,000, but the best they could get was 4.5 percent - and 5.5 percent if the agent had to share the commission with a buyer's agent. They chose instead to list their property with one of the many real estate services that are challenging conventional brokerage firms, in this case, Assist2sell.com, an agency that charges a flat fee instead of a commission. The Wakefields had an offer within six days and sold their home for $985,000, paying a $10,000 fee to Assist2sell and $14,775 to the agent who brought in the buyer, for a savings of about $30,000 over a conventional broker. 'Enough to pay off the boat,' a 26-foot pocket cruiser, Mr. Wakefield said. This is subversive stuff. Homeowners across the United States are figuring out that they do not need to pay what agents demand and they may not need an agent at all. At the same time, technology is giving consumers tools to nearly circumvent the agent. If enough people try it, agents are at risk of losing a good portion of their commissions - $100 billion last year. So, agents are doing whatever they can to keep home sellers from paying less. Anyone who wants to know how to outfox them first has to understand where they derive their power: information. They know the market - or presume to know it - and help set the price of your house. They serve as the go-between and, again presumably, know how far you can push the other side. (Note, however, that agents don't always push for the best price. Steven D. Levitt, co-author of 'Freakonomics,' and Chad Syverson, both University of Chicago economists, found that real estate agents have an incentive to persuade their clients to sell their houses too cheaply and too quickly because a few thousand dollars more in price won't yield them a significantly higher commission.) But more than anything else, agents control access to the Multiple Listing Service, where all the houses for sale in a community are listed. The M.L.S. is the most powerful tool in real estate because it informs the widest pool of buyers that a home is for sale. Not open houses, not fliers, not big ads in the newspaper. 'The M.L.S. is king,' says Brett Weinstein, an Oakland, Calif., discount broker who prefers to be called 'a full-service reduced-fee agent.' The M.L.S. is also a tool that agents use to protect their commissions. The problem for agents is that some of their colleagues are offering to list houses for a small flat fee, sometimes for less than $500. You sell it yourself, though you would be obligated to pay a 3 percent commission to any agent who brought you a buyer - in essence paying that agent for all the Sundays spent showing other houses to clients who never bought anything. That half-price deal is dangerous enough for a full-commission firm. But it gets worse. In every community there are agents who open the M.L.S. to the public on the Internet (erealty.com has a fairly comprehensive list, or you can go directly to realtor.com, the Web site of the National Association of Realtors). They do it as a service to clients who want to buy a house - 70 percent of homebuyers now peruse listings on the Internet, the association's most recent survey says - as well as to cut their costs of showing clients the paper listings. Some even rebate part of their commission to buyers who do their own research on prospective homes. But some buyers just freeload. (The Internet has a way of encouraging this behavior.) They can search the M.L.S. for a house with no brokerage firm listed, meaning it's being sold by the owner, and then work out a no-commission deal directly with that owner. So you can see where this is headed. If agents want to protect their commissions, they have to restrict access to the M.L.S. to sellers who are working with them, not going it alone. Local realty groups have tried suing agents or brokerage firms that put 'for sale by owner' listings in the M.L.S., accusing them of copyright infringement. Those agents have countersued, charging restraint of trade. Then two years ago, the Realtors association found what it thought was a better solution. It passed rules that essentially allowed a local M.L.S. service to block access to the listing service to any brokerage firm who discounted commissions or who posted listings for homeowners who intended to sell their own houses. The antitrust division of the Justice Department cried foul. This month it sued the Realtors' trade group, asserting that the rules stifled competition and hurt consumers. The Realtors changed the rules just as the federal case was filed. But J. Bruce McDonald, deputy assistant attorney general, said that the group's policies continued to discriminate against innovative brokers and 'stifle competition at the expense of home buyers and sellers.' In a news release, the Realtors association said it was 'at a loss to understand' the Justice Department's legal action. 'Many of the changes incorporated in the new policy are in direct response to concerns they have raised over the course of the two-year investigation,' it said. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have successfully fought state real estate boards that tried to limit consumer choices by imposing service requirements or forbidding commission rebates, but the fight goes on. Realtors have lobbied for and won state laws that prohibit commission rebates to buyers and require minimum levels of service, like requiring that an agent handle all negotiations or house showings. Federal regulators can't fight that. Aaron Farmer, a discount real estate broker in Austin, Tex., has battled local and state realty boards to offer cheaper services. The Justice Department and the F.T.C. intervened to help him. Nevertheless, he has had to raise his fees to $700 from $600 because of the minimum service levels required by a law recently passed by the Texas Legislature. (Eight states have enacted such laws, accepting the real estate industry's argument that they are needed to protect consumers.) 'All of these fights are over the M.L.S.,' he said. 'They don't want price wars.' But price wars are coming. No doubt about that. Here are a few suggestions on how to take advantage of the changing environment to sell your home with minimum services from - and fees to - a broker: Set the price Being a nosy neighbor is still the best way to know the market. Walk though every open house and find out later what the house sold for. For the shy or decorous, technology offers an alternative. Homesmartreports.com will give you a sales analysis of your home based on prices for comparable homes in the immediate neighborhood. The $25 report is far more useful than cheaper versions from Domania.com (free) or Equifax.com ($7) because it gives you greater confidence that its high and low estimates are accurate by indicating the strength of your local market and by noting anomalies like a high number of foreclosures or house-flippings, where homes are bought with the idea of fixing them up and quickly reselling them. Homesmartreports plans to offer a service for home buyers, too, that would provide an unlimited number of reports over a 30-day or 90-day period so you can get a better idea of how much to offer for a house. Get listed Some of the new sales services try to sidestep the M.L.S. As listings proliferate openly on the Web, the M.L.S. may one day be less important. But for now, in all but the hottest markets, it pays to get into the M.L.S. Almost every community has a discount broker who will charge $300 to $800 just to type the information about your house into the local M.L.S. (Some will also take pictures of the house to run with the listing.) There is one caveat: If you list there, you may be obligated to pay a commission to the buyer's agent, which is usually set at 3 percent. You can, however, build that commission into the price of the home, so the buyer actually pays it. Or, if the housing market is particularly hot in your area, you may be able to write into the contract that the buyer is responsible for paying his agent's commission. Hand off the annoying stuff For many sellers, the hardest part is all the details: staging the home for showings, holding the showings and handling all the paperwork and the negotiations. Many discount brokers offer an à la carte menu of services, which can quickly add up to more than a set commission. Paperwork is not that hard to do if your discount broker gives you all the preprinted forms. (You can probably foist some of that work on the buyer's agent, who is really working for you anyway.) Alternatively, go with a sales service that for a higher fee of about 1 percent of the selling price will handle everything. But these services often don't include an M.L.S. listing. As for stagings and showings, watch a few shows on the cable channel HGTV, like 'Sell This House,' to learn how decluttering or putting on a fresh coat of paint will raise the value of your home.

Subject: Bright Spot in Germany's Economy? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 06:21:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/17/business/17chart.html?ex=1284609600&en=aa965cbebd3687ed&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 17, 2005 A Bright Spot in Germany's Economy Seems to Be Fading By FLOYD NORRIS THREE years ago, as Gerhard Schröder sought a second term as German chancellor, he had to defend a record that included economic growth that had been slower than in most other European countries, not to mention the United States. But there was one area in which German performance was extraordinary: foreign trade. Not only was the country running a trade surplus over all, but its surplus with China was large and growing. While the United States fretted about its growing deficit with China and protectionist pressures grew, Germany was selling ever more to the Chinese. This weekend, as German voters decide whether to confound the pollsters and keep Mr. Schröder in office, that bright spot is no longer shining so clearly. Germany's trade surplus with China peaked in the summer of 2004, when the 12-month total was $8.1 billion. The last figure, through this July, showed a surplus of just $377 million. China has run a trade surplus with Germany in five of the seven months reported so far in 2005. The change may say more about China's economic changes than it does about Germany's. China's rapid growth in recent years was partly fueled by imports of machinery and other equipment to expand production of various products, and Germany is a leading provider of such equipment. More recently, Chinese expansion has slowed, while production from its newer factories has come online, producing more products for export, with some of them going to Germany. In the most recently reported 12 months, China's exports to Germany rose 40 percent from the previous 12 months, while its imports rose only 2 percent. That trend may be contributing to worries in much of Europe that the Continent's economic competitiveness is slipping. Many Germans save rather than spend. The latest figures reflect a savings rate of 10.6 percent of income, a little higher than it was at the last election. (That compares with a savings rate of around zero in the United States.) That savings has helped to hold down German economic growth. During Mr. Schröder's second term, German gross domestic product has grown at an average annual rate of just 0.5 percent a year, among the slowest in the industrial world. But domestic demand has risen at the anemic rate of only 0.2 percent a year. The rest of the growth reflects exports. Unemployment has remained stubbornly high. Europe publishes 'harmonized' unemployment rates, which are comparable across countries, and by that measure Germany's latest unemployment rate was 9.3 percent, lower than it was a few months ago. But it is higher than it was when Mr. Schröder was first elected in 1998, on a platform that criticized his Christian Democratic predecessor, Helmut Kohl, for not creating enough jobs. If the polls prove to be correct, that lack of jobs under Mr. Schröder will be a big factor in his losing his own.

Subject: Greenspan's dilemma From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 05:04:22 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Sun Sep 18,12:11 AM ET WASHINGTON, (AFP) - The Federal Reserve faces a tough decision on interest rates as it mulls another interest rate hike after what may be a major blow to the US economy from Hurricane Katrina. Most economists and market analysts see the Federal Open Market Committee maintaining its stand with an 11th consecutive quarter-point rate hike, taking the federal funds rate to 3.75 percent, although a few experts are doubting the wisdom of such a move. 'All the bets are on a Fed rate hike,' said David Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch. 'Futures are priced 86 percent of the way for a Fed rate hike this Tuesday.' But Rosenberg argues that a rate hike in the midst of what he called a 'deep slowdown' in the US economy could be a mistake and said this 'would be the first time the Greenspan Fed raised rates in the immediate aftermath of natural disaster.' Fed chief Alan Greenspan and his colleagues have had little time to analyze the economic impact of the storm and the floods that devastated New Orleans. But many observers say that the economic impact of Katrina should be temporary and that any hesitancy in the fight against inflation might backfire. 'It will be very difficult to use economic data to justify a pause in rate hikes,' said Brian Wesbury at Claymore Research. 'In fact, if the Fed were to pause, the market would take it as a sign that something was terribly wrong with the economy. By hiking rates, the Fed will signal confidence in the post-Katrina economy. We believe this will be taken by the markets as a sign of economic strength.' Ethan Harris and Joseph Abate of Lehman Brothers agreed that there were 'compelling' reasons to keep raising rates. 'A pause would set a precedent of the Fed responding to regional events rather than focusing on the national growth and inflation picture,' they said in a research note, adding that 'bowing to political pressure compromises the Fed's anti-inflation credibility.' Timothy Rogers at Briefing.com said the Fed needs to keep lifting rates to stay ahead of inflation. 'Underlying inflation pressures continue to mount,' he said. 'The unemployment rate is now below 5.0 percent -- the rate many associate with rising labor-based inflation.' While economists continue to debate what rate would be 'neutral' for the economy, Rogers said the Fed may have to go even higher than that: 'A policy rate higher than 'neutral' may be needed to slow an economy spoiled by low and steady long-term interest rates,' he said. But Joseph Balestrino, bond market analyst at Federated Investments, said the doubts about the economic impact of Katrina 'could be enough to warrant playing it safe' and delaying a rate cut. Balestrino said many economic questions remain unanswered over the storm, including the full impact on oil and gas production and the huge port of New Orleans. 'While we may be optimistic, we don't really know how the hurricane will impact the economy,' he said. 'Uncertainties like these make a Fed hike now riskier than the alternative of simply standing pat. A no-action decision by the central bank next week would buy time. Economic data released between now and the next scheduled meeting in November would provide a better picture of Katrina's impact.' Deutsche Bank economists Peter Hooper and Joseph LaVorgna wrote in a note to clients that the Fed 'faces a difficult decision next Tuesday, but we think it will come down on the side of continuing with its measured pace of rate hikes.' 'The Fed has a special responsibility to attend to the goal of price stability, and the reduction of productive capacity caused by Katrina poses some clear inflation risks,' they wrote. Additionally, they said, 'The market is pricing in a rate hike at this point, and even households are reconciled to an environment of rising rates over the year ahead. Failure to move at this point might well feed budding inflation fears, pushing long-term rates up more.' http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20050918/bs_afp/useconomybankrates

Subject: We need anwers! From: Dory To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 12:40:03 (EDT) Email Address: boyzone400@yahoo.co.kr Message: I'm studying international economics (7th edition) and also solving all problems the book has. But I do not know whether my answers are right or wrong. Where can I get answers?? Please let me know ASAP!

Subject: The Market McDonald's Missed From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 08:05:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/16/international/europe/16halal.html September 16, 2005 The Market McDonald's Missed: The Muslim Burger By CRAIG S. SMITH CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Faiza Guenineche huddled with two friends in the booth of a fast-food restaurant across from her high school here on a recent day eating two-all-beef-patties-special-sauce-lettuce-cheese-pickles-onions-on-a-sesame-seed-bun. But this is not the McDonald's where she and her friends used to eat. This is Beurger King Muslim, a fast-food clone with an important difference: it is halal, serving hamburgers and fries that conform to Muslim dietary laws. 'I used to go to McDonald's once a week, but all I could eat was the Filet-O-Fish sandwich,' said Ms. Guenineche, a fashionable French-Algerian girl in low-slung jeans and a tight top who, despite wearing her long hair loose, eats only halal. 'Now I come here.' American fast-food restaurant chains have long tailored their menus to local tastes and habits around the world, but one market they have largely missed is the growing Muslim population in Europe, five million strong in France alone. Europe's observant Muslims have had to thread their way through a world laden with pork-filled wursts and bloody beefsteaks, taking meals outside their homes at the occasional kebab shop instead. Now there is Beurger King Muslim, whose name is a play on that of the famous American hamburger chain and the French slang word 'beur,' which means 'Arab.' The restaurant's logo is a globe with a burgundy ring around it and the Arab world covered by the letters BKM, which are also the initials of the restaurant's three founders, Morad Benhamida, Abdelmalik Khiter and Majib Mokkedem. It is the latest sign that France's Muslim population, largely French-born second-generation immigrants, is coming into its own. 'En Faim!' declares the cover of the restaurant's menu, a pun that means 'Hungry!' but sounds like 'At Last!' There have been other efforts to serve up Western-style halal fast-food. A restaurant called MkHalal has been serving halal burgers for years outside the southern French city of Lyon, and a British man from Pakistan has opened a string of halal chicken-sandwich stands in Britain and France. But Beurger King Muslim has the look and feel of the big multinational chains that it wants to give a run for their money. 'We're playing in the big leagues,' said Hakim Badaoui, 37, manager of the Clichy-sous-Bois restaurant, adding that the company already has 30 would-be franchisees waiting in line, mostly in France. The owners are working on a second outlet that will be double the size of the first and feature a drive-through window. Behind the counter at what Mr. Badaoui hopes will be the flagship of a fleet, several veiled women in yellow-collared burgundy shirts with the logo on their backs shuffle fries into paper containers and pack steaming hamburgers into boxes while a movie about the life of the Prophet Muhammad plays on a flat screen television over their heads. 'What does your religion demand of us, emir?' a bearded man asks a band of desert Arabs on the screen. 'It demands that you believe in one God,' one of them replies. The cash register lights up with 'Salamalekum,' Arabic for 'Peace Be With You,' after each sale. Sabah Kilijanski, her round face framed in a beige veil, sat down with her two children. She was having a Double Koull Cheeseburger (Koull, is a play on the American slang 'cool,' and the Arabic word 'to eat'). 'I feel at ease here, because I'm wearing a veil myself,' she said as her toddler, Adam, peeked into his colorful children's meal box decorated with a cartoon clown. The meals come with brightly colored plastic toys, just like at McDonald's. She said it also made her happy to see veiled women working. Muslim head scarves are banned in French public schools, and women working for the government are not allowed to wear them to work on the theory that such overt religious symbols are divisive. Many private employers also avoid hiring veiled women, making it hard for strictly observant Muslim women to find jobs. The restaurant has other details to make French Arabs feel at home, from the Arabic-style font on the menu to toilets fitted with hoses for people unaccustomed to using paper. The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., daily except Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, when it starts business at 4 in the afternoon and closes at midnight. Most important, the restaurant adheres strictly to Muslim dietary laws, which prohibit consumption of alcohol or blood, as well as, of course, pork. The bacon on the restaurant's bacon cheeseburgers is made from smoked turkey. All of the meat used in the restaurant comes from animals slaughtered according to Islamic rituals and hung upside down to drain before butchering. The various sauces and seasonings used by the restaurant are also scrutinized to ensure that they do not contain traces of alcohol or fat from animals not slaughtered according to Muslim rules. Representatives from an independent certification service visit the restaurant three times a day to make sure that all is halal. Mr. Badaoui, who once ran halal pizza shops, said the restaurant had hired a halal company to make a secret sauce for its signature burger, a Big Mac look-alike called a BKM. He said a lot of people wanted to put a political spin on the place, but added that - unlike the creator of France's Mecca Cola, who wanted to give people angry at the United States an alternative to Coke - Beurger King Muslim's owners did not have politics in mind. 'It's business,' he said. 'We're here to make money.' It seems to be working. So far, the restaurant is averaging 800 transactions a day. The only thing on the horizon that looks like it could derail the expansion is Burger King, which Mr. Badaoui said had been in touch. 'We've heard from them, but I don't want to say more,' he said. 'Right now it's between the attorneys.'

Subject: 2 Fast 2 Furious (part II) From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 20:23:47 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: From Shock Therapy to Sleep Therapy If the 1990s were the era of economic shock therapy, the present decade may be remembered for economic reform paralysis. Although the reasons for gridlock differ across countries, the bottom line is that few politicians anywhere are having much success in limbering up their economies. The problem is not just in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, where an ascendant left has failed to find a viable alternative to the much reviled ``Washington Consensus'' of economic liberalisation. One sees the same phenomenon across many rich countries as well. In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder called for early elections _ Japan voted yesterday _ in the hope of energising reform. In Germany, the most urgent needs are for tax and labour-market reform. In Japan, the Koizumi government is staking its future on privatising the behemoth postal service, whose giant financial arm is wrapped like a python around the banking system. Even in the United States, one of the few places where economic liberalisation is not a dirty word, President George W. Bush has his own frustrations. Despite a huge investment of time and energy, he has failed to marshal even his own troops in support of a relatively modest proposal to stave off collapse of the nation's old-age insurance programme. Indeed, Mr Bush's popularity has taken a beating over pension reform. Some people ascribe the global collapse of reform efforts to a peculiarly ineffective collection of leaders. This view is nonsense, and besides, if the public is so unhappy with its leaders' performances, why does it keep electing and re-electing them? No, the problems run deeper. The fact is that people everywhere are having trouble coming to terms with the rapid changes resulting from technology and globalisation. Although globalisation spins off a lot more winners than losers, many people are worried, and worried people press their leaders to slow things down. You can tell Americans and Europeans that they should rejoice over the boundless cheap goods and cheap credit that trade with Asia has supplied. But all their politicians seem to worry about is how some farmer or textile worker may lose his job. You can tell Latin Americans or Africans that Asia's unquenchable thirst for natural resources will keep pushing up the prices of their commodity and agricultural exports in perpetuity, turning wheat fields into gold mines. But all their politicians seem to want to worry about is protecting doomed domestic manufacturers against low-wage Asian competition. Outgoing US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan preaches flexibility as a way of dealing with globalisation. At some level, of course, he is right. Today's world is one of fast-changing currents, where a region flourishes one day, and the next its factories collapse economically, as if hit by Hurricane Katrina. If change is inevitable, we must make our economies more flexible and prepare to live with the consequences. There is no other way. So why doesn't the public accept this need for flexibility, which, in the end, is what market-based economic liberalisation is all about? The problem is that most people are not thrilled to live in a world of blindingly fast change. Most people are creatures of habit; they crave predictability. German workers who make high-end machine tools are proud of their craft, and they don't want to be told that the same work can be done for much less in Poland or Slovakia. Clothing makers in Italy have long been the envy of the world. These craftsmen don't want to be told that they should start retraining as tour guides to service the inevitable horde of middle-income Chinese tourists, as that country takes over high-end light manufacturing like tailoring. With such resistance to change, it's no wonder that so many political leaders try to lull their subjects to sleep, hoping that when everyone wakes up, it will all have proven a dream. Asia, of course, is different. China is developing at a dizzying pace. Cities are rising out of desert sands overnight. China is building more roads, airports, and bridges every five years than Europe and the US combined build in 20. With a long history of cataclysmic, often violent change, Chinese society is perhaps more adaptable than most. In India, which is said to have a strong consensus for weak reform, things are moving far more slowly but always forward. Whereas India is not yet nearly the factor in global trade that China has become, its 1.2 billion people are pushing inexorably onto the scene. Will today's reform paralysis outside Asia continue? Will the political winds shift to reinvigorate economic liberalisation, with politicians reminiscent of Margaret Thatcher or Ronald Reagan coming to the fore, breathing the fire of change? Will politicians finally tell their citizens that if their economies continue to sleep, they may not wake up? I believe that in most countries, the era of sleep therapy will come to an early end. But I fear that change might cause a global economic crisis resulting from, say, an ugly unwinding of extravagant US borrowing trends. Only then may people start waking up and voting for politicians who insist on re-energising economic reform. Kenneth Rogoff is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the IMF. Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2005. www.project-syndicate.org http://www.bangkokpost.net/Business/12Sep2005_biz40.php

Subject: Mik why don't they answer? From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 01:53:46 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Mik why do some people here avoid direct questions? You directly questioned me - I tried to show you some courtesty - please no longer do so because I will not from now own - I will avoid any future questions from you since that seems to be the status quo here. ...so Emma please answer me and tell me where are you personally trying to put your wealth to avoid losses from the SHAKEOUT?

Subject: Sorry I was away From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Mon, Sep 19, 2005 at 12:51:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny, Sorry I was away for 5 days. I really enjoy actual discussions on this site. I was not trying to avoid your questions, and unfortunately I think that your questions may have slipped off the board over the time I was away. Please repost and I will answer. Mik

Subject: A conservative portfolio From: David E... To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 00:34:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny C You might be interested because I have implemented some ideas about how to prepare a portfolio for either a 1929 type fall in prices or a 1970's inflation portfolio. These ideas have not been examined or reviewed by others so comments are welcomed. First, to understand my portfolio, you must know what risk feels like to me. My portfolio is modest, my social security is robust, my pension is very modest(accruals stopped in 1994) so I am recieving 1/4th of the projected pension). I am retired, so the money I make on my portfolio is the only money I will make in the future. In other words if my nestegg shrinks, my standard of living will also shrink. If inflation or depression effects are larger than has occurred in the 20th century, I will be surprised and my losses will be larger than I have planned for. This portfolio is very conservative and is bought at the cost of foregone gains in the stock market. I am happy with this prospect because the anticipated pleasure of the gains is not worth the anticipated pain of suffering cuts in my modest standard of living. The portfolio is right now 68% bonds 32% stock. The bonds are split 40% Short term bonds - 60% TIPS. The stocks are split VEURX 25% Vanguard Europe SWZ 10% Swiss CEF SP500 34% Vanguard VFINX ASN 10% REIT GCH 7% Chinese CEF VPACX 7% Vanguard Pacific (Austrailia & Japan) KF 7% Korean CEF SWZ is Swiss CEF invested in equity, GCH is a CEF invested in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan equity, KF is a CEF invested in Korean equity. The way the portfolio is designed to work is that if a stock prices fall 50%, the portfolio will only fall 16%. (34 X .5 plus 68 =84 and 100-84=16) If 70's style inflation hits, this portfolio has three snow fences. I call them snow fences, because inflation can hit hard and all you can do is try to control inflation losses. The largest snow fence is my TIPS holding, the second is my Short Term Bonds, the third is a diversified equity position. TIPS with annual adjustments to the interest rate will closely cover inflation losses. Short Term Bonds are both a source of current income and inflation protection. Short term bonds will suffer minor losses as interest rates are adjusted up because of inflation. With inflation high, short term interest rates may be high. Maybe, is as good as most inflation fighting investments can be. The third fence is the equity position. Sometimes inflation losses will be offset by increases in equity prices. So I have an equity portfolio that is 44% US, 56% foreign. My US equity is 34% SP500 and 10% ASN which is an apartment real estate stock. I invested in ASN because ASN only invests in cities where entry to markets is difficult(Lack of land and other building restrictions) and upscale. I expect in an inflationary and deflationary markets ASN will hold value better than othr REITS. In other words ASN is hopefully like a 'hard money' asset. My foreign investments provide me diversification from dollar denominated assets. Additionally I view the Swiss investment as another 'hard money' asset. The swiss reputation depends on maintaining a stable value of their franc, and they have been very successful keeping their inflation at about 2%. South America and East European Emerging markets are not covered so this portfolio does not have world wide-diversification. Maybe I will add them in the future. This portfolio's standard deviation was calculated using the last 10 year's performance. The SD is about 6%. Expected performance is about 6%. And 6.4% is the performance over the last 9 months.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: Jennifer To: David E... Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 17:31:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thank you for the specificity. The approach and portfolio are interesting, and I am thinking how I might respond. I prefer to have the bond and stock percentages reversed, but I can easily live off interest on bonds and dividends. Also, I use no inflation protected bonds. I hold the Vanguard long term investment grade and high yield tax free bond fund. I think at times of moving to the intermediate term funds, but the bond market is still too sound to move and I do not worry about minor changes in bond fund prices and do not expect major changes. I prefer the Vanguard Morgan Stanley indexes to the S&P, and use the value index and middle cap index and Europe index. I use health care and energy funds, and the REIT index. There is more to describe. The ratio of stocks to bonds I prefer is about 75 to 25. Now, for some more thinking. I think I know how to weather either a bear market or inflation. We have recently weathered a bear market, but not inflation.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: John C To: Jennifer Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 19:02:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Jennifer, why not list specific funds and % invested. Its hard to discuss portfolios if you don't lay your cards on the table.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: John C To: David E... Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 10:13:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: dave, thanks for the detailed review and analysis of your investments, if only others could be as generous in sharing information. I have one question though regarding your expected performance. What are your capital market assumptions that get you to a 6% annual return. I would think a portfolio of ~70% fixed income and 30% stocks would be more about 5%, but obviously it all comes down to what you expect fixed income and stocks to return in the future.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: David E.. To: John C Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 13:21:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Well, revealing your financial plan is like revealing your bookcase. It reveals a lot, maybe too much. But I have seen an interest here in defending against hard times. Maybe fresh eyes will see more opportunities for this type of investing. The hardest balance to achieve was the balance between equity and bonds. 10 months ago, my intention was to let equity grow to 40%. This because equity is a strong defense against inflation. But, as I made withdrawals, and equity grew, I discovered that I was uncomfortable. So, I just last week rebalanced my portfolio, took my equity profits and bought more bonds. 70% bonds - 30% equity works for me. The expected performance is based on the previous 10 years - which has been very kind to bond holders. As we move from low rates to higher rates the immediate future will not be so kind to bond holders. I am insulated from this effect as much as possible using ST Bonds and TIPS. I can be sanguine about my TIPS because I bought them at a real rate of 3% plus. So my expected ride down for TIPS is preceded by a joyful ride up. Also, the expected return is nominal, just as the 10 months return is. And the 10 year performance. So 6.4 expected return - 3% inflation gives an expected real return of 3%.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: John C To: David E.. Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 19:01:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dave, thanks for the info, but i am still left to wonder what you expect the fixed income portion of your portfolio to return, along with what you expect the equity portion of your portfolio to return. Basically what I am looking for is the numbers you would plug into a finanical software program (ignoring correlation at this time) to come up with a efficient frontier or monte carlo simulation. Given that you have a short duration portfolio, I can't see you coming up with a 6% return unless you have high return expectations for equities. The 10 Yr treasury closed at 4.26% on friday, so I would think a market duration portfolio's return would be about 50 bp higher if you include a risk premium for mortage and credit securities (like the LB Agg). Given that you are in a short term portfolio, I would knock off at least 100 bp in expected return. I'm not trying to knock your portfolio, as a defensive play it seems appropriate, I just don't see how you could get a 6% return over the long term given its current structure.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: David E.. To: John C Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 22:55:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Well 6.4% portfolio return is the result when I pumped in 10 years of performance for each asset class. I pumped the performance into a MVO optimizer. My MVO optimizer allows me to control the asset allocation. I elected to do the allocation because I wanted to make sure I had diversification. Allowing the optimizer to do the selection would have meant I would have had little diversification. I treated all of my assets as separate asset classes. Maybe I should have grouped the EM market stuff together but I didnt. The EM-China Fund stuff was wild with SD in excess of 50%, but I selected the China fund anyway because I wanted diversification. I haven't been interested in forecasts of bond or equity returns because those numbers don't make much sense in times of extreme pressure like depression or '70's style' inflation. What is most important for me is maintaining asset value. My plan though, is not wild eyed bear behavior with 100% of my assets in gold. My plan resembles a conventional stock portfolio for my level of risk. And I think my plan will return what most portfolios with my levels of risk return. My return forecast has been based on 10 years of history - so I came up with 6.4%. I am a tidal creature, I want to survive whether the tides are big or small by preserving my capital. If I was an institutional financial planner I would have to come up with the numbers you want. And what I would do then is say the same thing that Warren Buffet and many others are saying. Returns for both bonds and equity are going to be lower, substantially lower, in the future. Institutional planners would get fired for saying what I would say, so they will say things like the 'expected rate of return is 8.5%'. Their customers want to hear a high return rate so they can say, Wow, that means our pensions are fully funded. (I live in San Diego and everyone takes great faith in 8.5% returns, because with 8.5% returns the city only has a $1.5 billion deficit) Monte Carlo simulations don't mean anything. They are just averages and everybody who knows statistics knows that you can drown in 4' of water. Somewhere with a 4' average there could be a 10 foot deep pool of water. For me, at this point in my life, I worry about the deep pool of water. I am planning for events that only took place once in a century. Most folks would say, and probably rightfully so, I don't worry about that. So I have developed a portfolio that might give me a flexibility to defend against inflation or depression. And the cost of that flexibility is minor because I think there is little difference between my portfolio and most portfolios with my level of risk.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: John C To: David E.. Date Posted: Sun, Sep 18, 2005 at 11:16:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'I haven't been interested in forecasts of bond or equity returns because those numbers don't make much sense in times of extreme pressure like depression or '70's style' inflation' I find this comment interesting because you use the past 10 years performance when using a MVO model. I would think you would come up with your own forecasts as they would be more relevant than the past 10 years, right? At the same time, project returns are supposed to be an average annualized return, not a 1 year number. 'If I was an institutional financial planner I would have to come up with the numbers you want.' Actually, regardless if its instiutional or retail, the numbers should be the same. You said it yourself that you expect bond returns to be lower, so why use a 10 year return history? I work for an investment management company and our forecasts for each asset class we manage have been coming down the past few years. Even the consultants 'projected' returns that I've seen have been coming down. If they haven't been, you wouldn't have seen such a rise in Hedge Funds and Private Equity investments. One of the main reason these asset classes are booming is that the funds are trying to meet their actuarial rates. Can't just do that with stocks and bonds now. 'Monte Carlo simulations don't mean anything' Interesting comment given the use of how many fixed income and hedge fund managers use these models to evaluate their portfolios. Yes, they are sensitive to their inputs, but when used correctly they tend to be significantly more accurate of future behavior (at least in terms of probability) than a MVO model or other comparable model. 'I live in San Diego and everyone takes great faith in 8.5% returns, because with 8.5% returns the city only has a $1.5 billion deficit)' Great city, messed up retirement system though. I was at a conference once and had a consultant tell me they wouldn't touch that system with a 10 ft pole due to all the lawsuits going on there. Although I have to say 8.5% isn't that high of an assumed rate of return, from what I've seen its slightly above median.

Subject: Re: A conservative portfolio From: David E... To: John C Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 13:14:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: Re: Mik why don't they answer? From: Emma To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 14:15:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: PKarchive was evidently troubled and could not be opened for a while. Since, foolishly or not, I do not worry about extreme investment problems, I do not know how to respond to questions about extreme possibilities. I save considerably, and invest simply and conservatively and with diversification. Vanguard is enough for me, and I seldom pay attention to alternatives beyond Vanguard. I lean to value, and use bond funds for a moderate cushion and cash. Were I to become increasingly worried however, I might turn a little more to bond funds. I am not now worried.

Subject: Re: Mik why don't they answer? From: John C. To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Sep 16, 2005 at 14:32:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I think Johnny is looking for the exact funds you are invest in, and percentage of your allocation, not a general answer of asset classes and mutual fund companies. To be more specific, can you list the mutual funds you have investments in and the percentage of the portfolio they make up as of 9/15/05. I think that would address the question he is asking.

Subject: Boom, shake the room From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 18:22:27 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: JAGADEESH GOKHALE Only leadership can defuse America's fiscal time-bomb Alan Greenspan recently expressed concern about the US fiscal position, warning that monetary policy 'cannot ignore the potential inflationary risks inherent in our current fiscal outlook ...' He also said: 'I assume that [fiscal] imbalances will be resolved before stark choices again confront us and, if they are not, the Fed will resist any temptation to monetise fiscal deficits.' That was a curious remark because the reigning economic theory of who 'wins' when monetary and fiscal authorities square off is called 'fiscal dominance'. America's public economic institutions are structured to afford maximum, but not full, independence to the Federal Reserve. Exchanging Treasury bills for cash is how the Fed controls the amount of bank reserves in circulation, thereby manipulating the interest rate on interbank loans - the 'Federal funds' rate. Changes in that rate influence interest rates on all sorts of debt securities, including those with considerably longer maturities. Using this mechanism, the Fed regulates the amount of liquid assets in circulation and the pace of overall economic activity to deliver on two goals maintaining price stability and achieving maximum sustainable economic growth. The disastrous bout of inflation in the 1970s prompted most Fed officials to focus more on the goal of price stability. In the late 1990s, when large projected budget surpluses threatened to drain Treasuries from financial markets, Fed officials scrambled to devise alternative operating procedures involving private securities. Those procedures were never required because subsequent tax cuts ensured the projected surpluses never materialised. Soon, however, the Fed could face the opposite problem: a surfeit of Treasuries from a failure to resolve the existing federal fiscal imbalance. That imbalance primarily arises from maintaining generous but unfunded retirement and health benefits. The longer it remains unresolved, the larger it will grow. Kent Smetters of Wharton and I estimated it to be $44,000bn a couple of years ago; today it stands at $63,OOObn (€51,333bn). Unfortunately, the 'stark choices' fiscal policymakers would face if they fail to resolve the growing fiscal imbalance will eventually confront the Fed. Why? Because continued high deficits and growing debt will drain the economy of investible resources. It will also reduce foreign lenders' confidence in US ability to resist the temptation to inflate away the real value of growing federal debt much of which is held abroad. That may lead them to divert 'their savings from US shores, further draining domestic investment. If that happens, US productivity will erode, domestic unemployment will increase and political pressure on the Fed to stimulate economic activity will grow. Direct monetary stimulus entails purchasing more Treasury debt for cash to keep interest rates lower than would be consistent with an 'inflation neutral' level precisely the action Mr Greenspan abjures. So the question remains: how long can his successor continue serving the price-stability goal and ignore calls for direct action? Economic history is replete with episodes in which huge fiscal deficits eroded the capital stock and generated expectations of rampant inflation. And central banks often engaged in accommodative action, putting more dollar bills into circulation by purchasing the growing stock of Treasuries. Managing the public's inflation expectations has been Mr Greenspan's quintessential skill. That is the motivation for his brave words: to manage inflation expectations among holders of US Treasury debt. Without those words and, before long, without another Fed chairman willing to feed financial markets with the rhetoric required to hold line on inflation the growing fiscal time-bomb could explode earlier. However, and here is the really hard question, does performing such a superb job of managing inflation expectations while maintaining price stability exacerbate the problem by allowing the nation's fiscal imbalance to grow? If so, how? By allowing fiscal policymakers to prolong their 'no tax-hikes' versus 'no-spending-cuts' logjam. Greater confidence in the ability of monetary policy to mop up problems created by fiscal profligacy may be enabling the very irresponsible fiscal policies the Fed chairman feels constrained to caution against. Skilled conduct of monetary policy can extend the inevitable day of reckoning, but perhaps at the cost of making the final adjustments more wrenching. Ultimately, defusing the fiscal time-bomb will require sustained leadership directly in federal fiscal management. The writer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former senior economic advisor to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland FT, Thursday September 15 2005

Subject: Re: Boom, shake the room From: Jennifer To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 20:14:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Cato wishes to destroy the legacy of the New Deal, so deficits are an excuse to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits. I am decidedly unimpressed. Where was Cato when we had a budget surplus? Advocating tax cuts on tax cuts. So, we muddle along for the time being but no cuts in Medicare or Social Security. Cuts in defense are not going to be made, and the Gulf Coast must be aided. Deficits will continue :)

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars 10 year] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 11:50:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 8/31/95 - 8/31/05 Australia 10.9 Canada 13.9 Denmark 14.0 Finland 13.2 France 10.8 Germany 7.4 Hong Kong 6.4 Japan -1.5 Netherlands 8.2 Norway 12.3 Sweden 13.1 Switzerland 9.9 UK 9.0

Subject: Returns [Domestic Currency 10 year] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 11:50:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 8/31/95 - 8/31/05 Australia 10.9 Canada 12.6 Denmark 14.7 Finland 14.3 France 11.4 Germany 8.3 Hong Kong 6.4 Japan -0.3 Netherlands 9.1 Norway 12.2 Sweden 13.6 Switzerland 10.4 UK 7.3

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars 5 year] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 10:40:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 8/31/00 - 8/31/05 Australia 16.4 Canada 3.8 Denmark 9.0 France 0.9 Germany 0.1 Hong Kong 2.6 Japan -3.8 Netherlands 0.9 Norway 12.3 Sweden -1.7 Switzerland 4.9 UK 3.6

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency 5 year] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 10:40:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 8/31/00 - 8/31/05 Australia 10.4 Canada 0.6 Denmark 2.2 France -5.4 Germany -6.3 Hong Kong 2.6 Japan -3.0 Netherlands -7.1 Norway 10.8 Sweden -5.9 Switzerland -1.7 UK -0.7

Subject: A Modern, Multicultural Makeover From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:55:18 (EDT) 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: How Curious George Escaped the Nazis From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:53:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/books/13geor.html?ex=1284264000&en=8f3b6aa8193a3b0f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 13, 2005 How Curious George Escaped the Nazis By DINITIA SMITH Curious George is every 2-year-old sticking his finger into the light socket, pouring milk onto the floor to watch it pool, creating chaos everywhere. One reason the mischievous monkey is such a popular children's book character is that he makes 4- to 6-year-olds feel superior: fond memories, but we've given all that up now. In the years since the first book was published in the United States in 1941, 'George' has become an industry. The books have sold more than 27 million copies. There have been several 'Curious George' films, including an animated one featuring the voice of Will Ferrell that is scheduled for release this February, and theater productions, not to mention the ubiquitous toy figure. Next year, PBS will begin a Curious George series for pre-schoolers. But in truth, 'Curious George' almost didn't make it onto the page. A new book, 'The Journey That Saved Curious George: The True Wartime Escape of Margret and H. A. Rey' (Houghton Mifflin), tells of how George's creators, both German-born Jews, fled from Paris by bicycle in June 1940, carrying the manuscript of what would become 'Curious George' as Nazis prepared to invade. The book's author, Louise Borden, said in a telephone interview from Terrace Park, Ohio, that she first spotted a mention of the Reys' escape in Publishers Weekly. 'But no one knew where they had gone from Paris, the roads they took, the dates of where they were, the details,' she said. Her account, intended for older children, is illustrated in whimsical European style by Allan Drummond, and includes photographs of the Reys and wartime Europe, as well as H. A. Rey's pocket diaries and transit documents. For her research, Ms. Borden combed the Rey archives of the de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi, interviewed people who knew them and traced their journey through letters and postmarks. Hans Reyersbach was born in Hamburg in 1898 into an educated family, and lived near the Hagenbeck Zoo, where he learned to imitate animal sounds, as well as to draw and paint. During World War I, Mr. Reyersbach served in the German Army; afterward, he painted circus posters for a living. After studying at two German universities, he went to Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1920's, looking for a job. He wound up selling bathtubs on the Amazon. Margarete Waldstein, who was born in 1906, also in Hamburg, had a more fiery personality. After Hitler began his rise, she left Hamburg to become a photographer in London. In 1935, she too went to Rio. Mr. Reyersbach had first seen her as a little girl sliding down the banister of her family's Hamburg home, and now they met again. They eventually married, and founded an advertising agency. Margarete changed her name to 'Margret' and Hans changed his surname to 'Rey,' reasoning that Reyersbach was difficult for Brazilians to pronounce. Crucially, the two became Brazilian citizens. For their honeymoon, they sailed to Europe, accompanied by their two pet marmoset monkeys. Margret knitted tiny sweaters for them to keep them warm, but the monkeys died en route. The Reys ended up in the Parisian neighborhood of Montmartre, where they began writing and illustrating children's books. In 1939, they published 'Raffy and the 9 Monkeys.' Mr. Rey drew the illustrations, and his wife helped to write the stories. Hans initially had sole credit for the books, but eventually Margret's name was added. 'We worked very closely together and it was hard to pull the thing apart,' she later said. Hans was a fanatical record keeper, listing expenses and details about their work in tiny pocket calendars. In 1939, he began a story about the youngest monkey in 'Raffy,' who was forever getting into trouble but finding his way out. It was called 'The Adventures of Fifi.' That September, war broke out. The Reys had signed a contract with the French publisher Gallimard for 'Fifi' and other stories, and in a stroke of luck received a cash advance that would later finance their escape. By the time the Germans marched into Holland and Belgium in May 1940, the Reys had begun a book of nursery songs in both French and English. 'Songs English very slowly because of the events,' Hans wrote in his diary. With refugees pouring into Paris from the north, Mr. Rey built two bicycles from spare parts, while Margret gathered up their artwork and manuscripts. They then joined the millions of refugees heading south, while German planes flew overhead. The Reys found shelter in a farmhouse, then a stable, working their way by rail to Bayonne, and then to Biarritz by bicycle again. They were Jews, but because they were Brazilian citizens, it was easier to get visas. One official, perhaps thinking that because of their German accents they were spies, searched Mr. Rey's satchel. Finding 'Fifi,' and, seeing it was only a children's story, he released them. They journeyed to Spain, then to Portugal, eventually finding their way back to Rio. 'Have had a very narrow escape,' Mr. Rey wrote in a telegram to his bank. 'Baggage all lost have not sufficient money in hand.' The couple sailed to New York in October 1940, and 'Curious George,' as Fifi was renamed - the publisher thought 'Fifi' was an odd name for a male monkey - made his first appearance the following year. The Reys wrote a total of eight 'Curious George' books; Hans died in 1977, Margret in 1996. The ensuing 'George' books were created by writers and illustrators imitating the Reys' style and art. 'Like Hans Reyersback and Margarete Waldstein,' Ms. Borden concludes, 'the little French monkey Fifi would change his name, and it would become one to remember. '

Subject: Does Organic Imply Grazing? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:35:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/dining/14milk.html?ex=1284350400&en=cb0a3418a005e9f8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 14, 2005 Does Organic Imply Grazing? By MARIAN BURROS JOHN MACKEY, chairman of Whole Foods Market, with the buying power of his 173 stores across the country behind him, said in a telephone interview yesterday that he wants the Department of Agriculture to strengthen its standards for organic milk. 'I'm worried that it is getting bogged down in some kind of political process,' said Mr. Mackey, who wields great power in the organic food industry. For at least four years, the National Organic Standards Board, which advises the department's National Organic Program, has sought a regulation to make the standards more rigorous so that milk labeled organic comes from cows that spend a certain amount of time grazing in pastures. Currently dairy farms that keep cows confined most or all of the time can legally claim their milk is organic if they use organic feed and do not use antibiotics or growth hormones. The current organic standards, which took effect in 2000, require that cows have 'access to pasture,' but do not require cows to be put in the pasture. 'We think the average customer believes organic dairy cows are grazing full time,' Mr. Mackey said, 'and we would like organic standards to be more rigorous so the perception meets the reality.' Mr. Mackey first discussed his company's position in an interview with Jim Slama in Conscious Choice, a monthly magazine. The organic standards board has proposed that dairy cows be allowed to graze during the growing season and that a lactating cow should not be confined in a barn. Farmers who confine cows can give them high-energy feed that helps them produce more milk than cows on pasture, reducing the cost. In public comments, two companies opposed the proposal: Aurora Dairy and Wild Oats, the 111-store chain of natural food supermarkets. Aurora Dairy does not allow its lactating cows in pastures. In its comments Wild Oats said the system was working well because it 'facilitates the expansion of the organic milk supply.' Ed Loyd, press secretary to the Secretary of Agriculture, said that the labeling of milk as organic has been an issue since 1993. 'We don't know whether there is need for additional rule making or for guidance to the industry,' he said. Within the next 12 months Whole Foods will announce what it calls 'compassionate' standards for treatment of dairy cows. Mr. Mackey said he was almost certain the company would go beyond the standards the National Organic Standards Board is seeking. 'We will clearly label products that are not animal compassionate so our customers can be fully informed about their practices,' he said. Those who meet the company's standards will be so designated. 'We don't want to see organic standards diluted down to where they don't mean what consumers think it means,' he said.

Subject: Blacks Hit Hardest by Costlier Mortgages From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:29:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/business/14lend.html?ex=1284350400&en=8a63d70db58adbe3&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 14, 2005 Blacks Hit Hardest by Costlier Mortgages By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON - Regardless of income levels, blacks were about three times as likely as whites to borrow through more expensive 'subprime' mortgages last year, according to a nationwide lending survey released Tuesday by the Federal Reserve. The new report, based on data collected from 8,853 lenders, is the Fed's first attempt to look for evidence of racial and ethnic discrimination in the booming business in exotic mortgages and subprime lending. Among low-income homebuyers, about 39.2 percent of blacks but only 12.9 percent of whites took out high-priced mortgages, which the Fed defined as loans with interest rates about 2 percentage points higher than those for 'prime' customers with good credit. For buyers of a $200,000 house last year, that would have meant about $3,000 extra in annual interest payments. In its report, the Fed cautioned that its study included no data on the credit ratings of individual borrowers, which greatly affects the rates they must pay. The Fed also said that part of the gap could be explained by differences in the kinds of mortgages that people used and by differences among lenders. But even after adjusting for those differences, blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites at every income level to take out expensive mortgages. Douglas Duncan, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington, said the Fed's report showed little evidence of racial or ethnic discrimination. 'To us, it seemed they were saying you could explain the majority of differences,' Mr. Duncan said. 'You would expect to see higher-priced loans in higher-priced categories.' But Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, said this merely pointed to a larger issue: 'The discrimination is about why you end up going to a subprime lender in the first place,' Mr. Baker said. 'It is striking to see such a difference' between members of minority groups and whites, Mr. Baker said. 'What it shows is that blacks and Hispanics are paying a lot more for mortgages than whites who appear to be comparably situated.' Under a longstanding mandate from Congress, the Federal Reserve has for years analyzed the rates at which people in different ethnic groups were being denied mortgage loans. But that measure had become increasingly dated as banks and other mortgage lenders developed a kaleidoscope of high-cost subprime mortgages for people who would have simply been rejected outright in the past on the basis of poor credit or insufficient income. Subprime mortgages, almost nonexistent 10 years ago, accounted for more than 10 percent of all new home mortgages last year; analysts say they are a major reason that homeownership rates have climbed sharply among African-Americans and Hispanics. The new study raised but did not answer the question of why blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, have been induced to pay higher rates. Even among high-income borrowers, which the Fed defined as people who earned more than 120 percent of the median income in their area, blacks and Hispanics were far more likely to take out high-cost mortgages. Among higher-income borrowers, 23.9 percent of blacks took out high-cost mortgages, compared to 17.4 percent of high-income Hispanics and 5.8 percent of whites. Asian-Americans, by contrast, were less likely on average than whites to take out high-cost loans. In its study, the Fed said that a large part of the contrast between mortgages to blacks and whites could be attributed to differences in lending institutions. Put another way, the gap between blacks and whites who borrowed from the same lenders was much smaller that the overall gap between blacks and whites. According to the Fed's data, the vast bulk of high-priced subprime lending was handled by a small number of institutions. Of the 8,800 mortgage lenders that provided data, only 500 said they had made more than 100 subprime loans last year. Ten lenders accounted for 38 percent of all the loans that were made. The Fed study could provide new ammunition to critics of subprime lenders who accuse such institutions of predatory lending practices. In addition to paying much higher interest rates than 'prime' borrowers with strong credit, subprime customers are often locked into their mortgages for three to five years and forced to pay big penalties if they try to refinance with a cheaper mortgage. In an attempt to shed more light on the issue of discrimination, Fed researchers delved into data from eight major subprime mortgage lenders that was collected by Georgetown University's Credit Research Center.

Subject: You See Office Tower. Investors a Condo. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:26:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/business/14office.html?ex=1284350400&en=dcb138a38356ad32&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 14, 2005 You See an Office Tower. Investors See a Condo. By JOHN HOLUSHA Despite all the talk of a real estate bubble, investors are pouring a stream of capital into the New York City market, and as a result prices of commercial properties in Manhattan continue to rise. While some investors are content to collect the income from office space, others are converting office buildings and hotels into condominiums. This trend is one factor that makes the sale of office buildings the strongest sector of the commercial real estate business. On the leasing side, meanwhile, demand for office space has been brisk in Midtown, brokers said. But demand for space downtown has remained slow, despite financial incentives and sharply lower rental rates. 'Residential conversion has become the dominant factor in the market,' said Warren M. Heller, executive managing director of capital transactions at Studley, the real estate brokerage company. 'Residential values are up so much that anything that can be converted will be.' At the old Mayflower Hotel at 61st Street and Central Park West, Mr. Heller said, the developers paid about $700 a square foot for the site and the building, which was demolished. It will cost $700 to $800 a square foot to build 19-story and 35-story towers at the site, he added. 'That puts Zeckendorf in at about $1,500 a square foot,' Mr. Heller said, referring to Zeckendorf Development, the owners of the project. 'In today's market, they can sell for $2,500 a square foot. That is 60 percent costs and 40 percent profit.' Earlier entrants to the conversion business have had loftier returns, even in neighborhoods just beginning to turn residential, Mr. Heller said. An office building at 15 Broad Street in the financial district was bought in 2003 for $100 a square foot for conversion to condominiums at a time when there were no residential condominiums in the area. 'They expected to sell for about $400 a square foot, but by the time the sales office opened it was up to $700 a square foot and now it is $900 to $1,000,' Mr. Heller said. Mary Ann Tighe, chief executive of the New York area operations of CB Richard Ellis, a prominent brokerage and services company, said, 'In downtown and Midtown South, for the first time, sites are worth more for residential development than commercial.' But Ms. Tighe added that office rents in Midtown were high enough to prevent much conversion. She said office leasing had been active this year, although below the level of 2004. 'Year to date to the end of August, 15.99 million square feet has been leased, which is below the 19 million we did in the same period last year,' she said. 'But 16 million square feet is a brisk pace.' As usual, Midtown dominated the leasing market, with about 10 million square feet of space leased, compared with about 3 million square feet each in Midtown South and downtown. Rents in Midtown may increase because, although millions of square feet are available, much of it is not suitable for tenants seeking large blocks in the most modern buildings, said Tara Stacom, an executive vice president of Cushman & Wakefield. 'The vacancy rate for large blocks of space in Class A buildings is under 7 percent, and the 500,000-to-1-million-square-foot customer has fewer options,' Ms. Stacom said. 'I know of an insurance company that wants to move to Midtown from downtown, but we can't find the space.' Adding to upward pressure on rents in Midtown are small financial companies - usually described by real estate agents as hedge funds - that want certain locations and amenities and do not need much space, typically 5,000 to 10,000 square feet. 'Hedge funds can afford $100 a square foot at places like 9 West 57th Street,' a premier building near Central Park, Ms. Stacom said. In addition, Ms. Tighe said some 50 million square feet of commercial property had changed hands since January 2002, and the buyers projected rent increases to justify the prices paid. 'Many of them projected rents of $50 a square foot by September of 2005, and they will not rent for anything less,' she said. In addition, real estate executives said, landlords are under pressure from rising costs for insurance, security and taxes. Energy prices are expected to increase this winter, too. 'Operating costs have gone up faster than rents,' said Anthony E. Malkin, the president of W&M Properties. While rents in Midtown have been rising, rents downtown have been stagnant, about 35 percent lower than the average in Midtown. Although a financial firm, Goldman Sachs, has agreed to build a headquarters downtown with heavy government incentives, only 20,000 square feet of space has been leased at 7 World Trade Center, the 1.7-million-square-foot tower that was built to replace a building destroyed in the attack of Sept. 11, 2001. Some real estate executives said that commuting to downtown was inconvenient for people living in the northern and eastern suburbs. 'When we talk to clients about downtown, it is a short conversation - most are not interested,' said Marisa Manley, president of Commercial Tenant Real Estate Representation. Ms. Manley added that some companies said their workers did not want to be downtown because of the Sept. 11 factor. 'There is fear that there will be a bottleneck getting out of there if there is another incident,' she said. 'And for people coming into Grand Central, the subway ride downtown constitutes a second commute.' Even though downtown has become a popular place to live - five million square feet of office space has been transformed into housing - its attractions for most employers are less clear. 'The real question is, Why be there?' Mr. Malkin said. 'Downtown may work eventually, but it does not now. Why sign a 5- or 10-year lease and wait for it to get better?' But in established markets, prices paid for properties have continued to increase, fueled by money from pension funds looking for a haven in real estate. 'The market is awash in cash, which is what happens when pension funds increase their allocation to real estate from 4 to 8 percent,' said Peter Hauspurg, chairman of Eastern Consolidated, a sales brokerage firm. High prices are prompting what are being called generational sales by family companies like Rudin, Rose and Resnik, which are known for building and holding real estate. William Rudin, president of Rudin Management, said his company was seeking to sell some properties for reasons that 'are tied to long-term estate planning.' But Mr. Malkin, who represents the fourth generation of a family company, said such sales illustrated the difference between money managers paid to invest other people's money and executives whose own wealth is at stake and who demand higher returns. 'Family companies have family memories about real estate as a component of wealth,' he said. 'Professional money managers are being paid to deploy capital, so they are willing to invest at low returns and hope for a rent spike in three to five years.'

Subject: Best Nation for Business From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 08:19:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/politics/13rankings.html September 13, 2005 New Zealand Named Best Nation for Business By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON - The World Bank has concluded that New Zealand is the most business-friendly nation in the world and that Serbia and Montenegro made the biggest pro-business changes last year. In a study to be released on Tuesday, the World Bank said that New Zealand and Singapore were the easiest countries to do business in. The United States came in third, followed by Canada. In its report, the World Bank ranked 155 countries based on classic American assumptions about economic success, like the idea that less red tape is better than more. The study looked at factors like the number of days it takes to get approval for starting a business, the ease or difficulty of hiring and firing workers, the ability of creditors to recoup their money when a company goes bankrupt, and the ability to enforce contracts in court. As in the past, most of those at the top of the list are wealthy and technologically advanced, like Australia, Britain, Denmark, Hong Kong and Norway. Hong Kong, a semiautonomous region of China, placed seventh, while China itself placed only 91st out of 155. But the World Bank said the formerly communist nations of Central Europe had made some of the biggest advances in supporting private business. Two former Soviet republics - Lithuania, in 14th place, and Estonia, in 15th - ranked ahead of Switzerland, Belgium and Germany. Among the countries that made the biggest changes in 2004 were Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Latvia and Romania. Countries that rank at the very top in terms of friendliness to business were not necessarily easy places to be a worker. The United States and New Zealand, for example, were the only two countries in the rankings that imposed no requirement at all to give severance pay to workers who had been laid off. Many countries, particularly in Western Europe, maintain an elaborate array of laws regulating the pay and hours of workers as well as restrictions that make it expensive and difficult to fire them. Supporters of such laws say they provide workers with a social safety net. A growing number of economists in the United States note that American workers have been exposed to steadily higher uncertainty about job security and are increasingly forced to work as self-employed contractors who can be laid off without notice and do not receive health insurance or retirement benefits. But the World Bank report contends that countries with more rigid labor laws also tended to have higher unemployment. On average, the bank said, unemployment was lowest in countries with the easiest rules for doing business and highest in countries with the most difficult rules. Countries with rigid workplace rules also tended to have greater rates of youth unemployment and a smaller share of women in the work force. But being friendly to business was not the same as having no rules at all. Afghanistan has almost no barriers to starting a business and to firing workers. But it also offers almost no protection for investor rights and almost no ability to enforce contracts in court. At 122nd, it ranked among the most difficult countries in the world to do business in.

Subject: Why the Little Guy Just Can't Win From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 06:36:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/business/13nocera.html?ex=1281585600&en=847635ec4020fe1b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 13, 2005 Pro Tells Why the Little Guy Just Can't Win By Joseph Nocera WHEN I started out on this new book,' David F. Swensen was saying the other day, 'I thought I was going to take what we do at Yale and make it accessible to the individual investor.' Oh, lucky day! Mr. Swensen, the chief investment officer of the Yale endowment - and to my mind, the best manager of institutional money in the United States - was going to show you and me how to invest the way he does. To his surprise, however, the book Mr. Swensen eventually wrote, 'Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment,' published this last Tuesday, turned out to be the opposite of what he intended. Its title notwithstanding, it doesn't show the little guy how to invest like Yale. Instead, it shows why the little guy will never be able to invest the way Yale does. For all the 'democratization' that has taken place in the world of personal investing the deck is still stacked against the individual. That was Mr. Swensen's fundamental discovery. And his willingness to change course and turn 'Unconventional Success' into a polemic aimed primarily at mutual fund companies, but also at other Wall Street types who fleece the little guy, is to his everlasting credit. After all, he could have told us to buy stocks in companies whose products we buy at the supermarket, like a certain investment genius of a previous era. Any regrets about that advice, Peter Lynch? A YALE graduate and a protégé of the Nobel laureate James Tobin, David Swensen took over the Yale endowment in 1985, at the tender age of 31, after a brief stint on Wall Street. Within a few years, he had turned it into the best-run, most influential institutional fund in the country - the fund that every other institution wants to emulate. His track record is astounding: over the last two decades, Yale has generated average annual returns of 16.1 percent, a number no one else can touch. The fund itself has grown in that time to over $15 billion from $1.3 billion, even though it now spends over $550 million a year to help cover Yale's operating budget. Even more impressive, though, is the way Mr. Swensen and his Yale colleagues have gone about generating those returns. When Mr. Swensen first took over, Yale's portfolio held stocks and bonds, period. Like most institutional portfolios of that time, 'it was neither diversified nor particularly equity-oriented,' Mr. Swensen recalled. Today, the endowment has barely 5 percent in bond holdings. 'The other 95 percent,' he said, 'are in places that we think will provide 'equity like' returns.' Which is not to say it is all in equities. On the contrary, the Yale portfolio is extraordinarily diversified, which both lifts returns and protects against disaster. At the end of the 2004 fiscal year, Yale had a mere 15 percent of its assets in domestic equities, and another 15 percent in foreign stocks. It had 15 percent in private equity, and 18 percent in 'real assets,' which includes investments in timber and energy. But its biggest percentage, 26 percent, was in something called 'absolute return.' That is a category invented by Mr. Swensen in 1990. It means hedge funds. Before Mr. Swensen arrived on the scene, hedge fund investors were almost exclusively rich people. But he quickly realized that the best hedge fund managers were extremely skilled, and he began putting Yale's money in a variety of hedge funds. Eventually, other institutions realized that Yale was making money in good markets and bad ones, and they raced to copy Mr. Swensen's model. If you want to understand why hedge funds are exploding these days, a big reason is that every big institutional investor in the country is trying to do what Yale does. His new book has given Mr. Swensen a greater appreciation of the enormous advantages he has as an institutional money manager, starting with the obvious fact that he has a staff that spends full-time researching investment possibilities. Thus, he takes it as a given that individuals shouldn't pick stocks themselves. 'I see every day how competitive the markets are, and how tough. So the idea that you can do this yourself, that's out the window.' But as he looked around at the alternatives for individuals, he found himself horrified by what he saw - especially at the $8 trillion mutual fund industry, which is the primary means through which individuals invest in the market. Although his prose tends to be on the academic side, his sense of outrage comes through on every page of 'Unconventional Success.' What is it about mutual funds Mr. Swensen finds offensive? Just about everything. He hates the way the loads and all the hidden fees mean that the investor is always behind the eight ball. (When I asked him about hedge fund fees, which are much higher, Mr. Swensen replied: 'I don't mind paying a lot for actual performance. Besides, when we negotiate fees, it's sophisticated investor versus fund manager. It's a fair fight.') He thinks that it is criminal for fund companies to allow popular funds to balloon in size, making it nearly impossible for the manager to beat the market. He hates the way the industry pushes exactly the wrong fund at the wrong time - Internet-oriented funds at the height of the bubble, for instance. (He has one example of a Schwab advertisement during the bubble that is simply devastating.) He notes, as others have before, that the vast majority of actively managed funds underperform. He uses 'invidious,' 'investor-damaging' and 'dirty scheme' to describe the general behavior of the industry. Even the mutual fund monitoring companies don't help even the odds. Mr. Swensen absolutely skewers Morningstar, the company that has built its reputation rating mutual funds. His data shows that, like Moody's belatedly downgrading a corporate bond, Morningstar downgrades this or that poorly performing mutual fund only after the damage has been done. His core point, though, is that the for-profit fund industry has a fundamental conflict between its desire for corporate profits and its fiduciary duty to its investors. And the profit motive wins out every time. So does Mr. Swensen offer any hope at all? Some. He thinks we'd all be better off sticking with index funds, instead of trying to beat the market. He thinks we should get our index funds from Vanguard, with its rock-bottom fees. (As a not-for-profit company, Vanguard also doesn't have the central conflict of interest.) We should have a diversified portfolio of index funds, for the same reason Yale does. We should be disciplined in our approach, especially in rebalancing our portfolio to stick to our diversification targets. Of course, this invariably means paring back on winners and increasing our investment in laggards. But as sensible, and, in truth, not particularly unconventional, as this advice is, how many of us will actually follow it? Human beings simply aren't hard-wired to be good investors. Think about it: how many of us, really, have the fortitude to pare back our winners and buy more of our losers? Most of us do just the opposite. Heck, so do most mutual fund managers, which is why they can't beat the market either. There is a reason we as a culture have accorded hero-like status to great investors like Warren E. Buffett and Peter Lynch. For all the cultural reinforcement we get that investing is something anybody ought to be able to master, we know in our bones it's not true. Mr. Buffett and Mr. Lynch are like great athletes, who have the skill and the emotional makeup to do something well that the rest of us can only dream about. That describes David Swensen, too. What he has to say is worth listening to. But will we ever truly hear it?

Subject: Is a Hedge Fund Shakeout Coming Soon? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 06:35:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04view.html?ex=1283486400&en=f49918982c6c2f95&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 4, 2005 Is a Hedge Fund Shakeout Coming Soon? This Insider Thinks So By MARK GIMEIN OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars. The downside, unfortunately, is that occasionally the industry may be subject to catastrophic and unexpected losses. In 1998, many top hedge fund managers lost their shirts. Long Term Capital Management came close to collapse. Just last month, investors were reminded of exactly this kind of possibility with the apparent failure of a $400 million Connecticut hedge fund managed by the Bayou Group. Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories. Mr. Lo has been working on the economics of hedge funds since the mid-1990's, but he started thinking seriously about how to measure risk across the industry in 1999, when he was first approached by backers to start his own hedge fund; it opened in 2003. He knew that sophisticated investors would want lots of data about his fund's returns and about the risk level he would assume, so he started looking carefully at the return data provided by other funds. Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments. Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.) That doesn't necessarily hold true for every individual fund, but as Mr. Lo shows in his paper, measuring the smoothness of returns gives economists a good way to estimate the level of relatively illiquid investments in the hedge fund world. The approach lets economists measure industrywide liquidity risks without knowing the details of the investments - information that hedge funds just don't give out. By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash. But that's not the only reason for worry. He says that crises like that of 1998 may be more predictable than was previously thought - and that another crisis is likely. The 1998 panic is generally thought to have been set off by the Russian government's default on its debt. But Mr. Lo points out that only a minuscule proportion of the world's hedge fund investments were in Russian government bonds. In his paper, he shows that the catastrophic losses of 1998 were preceded by a noticeable series of months of mediocre performance. Mr. Lo argues that while a hedge fund crisis appears to be sudden and to be caused by unforeseen events, the breakdown is only the late stage of the problem. As more hedge funds compete for the same slice of the pie, he says, their managers feel that they have no choice but to 'leverage up,' juicing their returns by borrowing more money to make bigger investments. That, in turn, makes the investments more prone to a sudden credit crisis. Hedge funds that are highly leveraged are vulnerable to having their lenders - banks and big brokerage firms - cut off credit when they think that their money may be at risk. And Mr. Lo thinks that lenders would do exactly that in an industrywide downturn. That would force hedge funds to close out their positions at the worst possible time - the kind of cycle that brought down Long Term Capital Management. Here again, his data suggests that the current situation is serious. His research indicates that the industry may have already entered a period of lower returns that signal a prelude to crisis. He points to a downturn in April that hit virtually every category of hedge fund pursuing every kind of strategy. 'The concern that I and others have is that we're approaching the perfect financial storm where all the arrows line up in one direction,' Mr. Lo said. The more money that is invested in hedge funds, he said, 'the bigger the storm will be.' What might set off a crash is a matter of guesswork. Mr. Lo thinks that an oil-price increase to $100 a barrel, a level predicted by one Goldman Sachs analyst, could do it. Or , he said, a tightening of lending rules at Fannie Mae, the mortgage giant, could set off a 'humongous unwinding' in credit markets. But Mr. Lo, who refers to some of his research as 'measuring how strong the camel's back is and how much straw is already on it,' thinks that the spark could be something much smaller. ALREADY, his work has prompted hedge fund managers and investors to pay more attention to the hidden risks of funds that seem to be performing quite well. Clifford S. Asness, managing principal at AQR Capital Management, a large and successful hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn., says Mr. Lo's work forces fund managers in general to confront the risks: 'He demonstrates simple models that generally show a winning payoff but occasionally really die.' So what should be done? Mr. Lo sees no way to eliminate the cyclical nature of hedge fund investing, but he says we can learn from the mistakes of funds that fail. He advocates the creation of a financial equivalent of the teams at the National Transportation Safety Board that swoop in to investigate airplane crashes. The nightmare script for Mr. Lo would be a series of collapses of highly leveraged hedge funds that bring down the major banks or brokerage firms that lend to them. That's a possibility that the entire hedge fund industry - secretive and fractious though it is - has a huge interest in avoiding.

Subject: Where will you flee? From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:26:02 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Also remember this story - so Emma please answer me and tell me where are you personally trying to put your wealth to avoid losses from the SHAKEOUT? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/02/AR2005060202084.html Cox Would Make SEC Corporate America's Sponsor By Steven Pearlstein Friday, June 3, 2005; Page D01 It's been a very good week for the Corpocracy. First, there was the Supreme Court decision overturning the conviction of Arthur Andersen for destruction of incriminating Enron documents, which is likely to make it harder to prosecute executives for corporate fraud. SEC Chairman William H. Donaldson will step down officially on June 30, bad news for investors who value protection. (By Joe Raedle -- Getty Images) Even under the old standards, convictions were anything but a slam-dunk. That again became clear as the week wore on with the jury still deadlocked on charges that Richard Scrushy presented a misleading picture about HealthSouth, which by any common-sense standard he surely did. But the week's big news was the resignation of William Donaldson as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the nomination of Rep. Christopher Cox to succeed him. In the wake of a series of corporate scandals that undermined faith in the integrity of American business and the fundamental fairness of American markets, Donaldson revived a once-elite regulatory agency that had become politicized, demoralized, starved for funding and embarrassed by more aggressive state regulators. But he cut his tenure short because of waning support from the White House and escalating friction with the commission's two Republican members, who not only were able to block key initiatives but had begun to quibble about the wording of every order and regularly oppose enforcement actions recommended by the professional staff. It is the Cox nomination, however, that signals the return to pliant directors, misleading financial statements, disenfranchised shareholders and runaway executive salaries. Cox's philosophy of corporate governance is that investors who don't like how a company is run should simply sell their shares and put their money somewhere else. Look for Cox to make it easier and cheaper for companies to issue new shares of stock, even when they have no business doing so, while soft-peddling enforcement against big brokerage and insurance firms that merely aid and abet corporate fraud but don't actually do it themselves. The proposed new chairman of the SEC is a leading proponent of the idea that accounting rules are simply too important to be left to the professionals but ought to be subject to the discipline of the political marketplace. A decade ago, when the Financial Accounting Standards Board was first considering requiring companies to treat grants of employee stock options as an operating expense, our man Cox helped lead the congressional effort to block FASB's initiative. Around the same time, FASB was preparing to shut down an accounting gimmick popular with high-tech firms that used stock rather than cash to buy other firms. Experts had long complained that the 'pooling of interests' accounting hid the true costs of mergers and acquisitions. But threats by Cox and other members of Congress to pass legislation blocking the change forced FASB to weaken the new rule and delay it until the stock market bubble had already burst. Cox was also part of the congressional cabal that thwarted SEC chairman Arthur Levitt when he tried to push through a rule preventing accounting firms from doing lucrative consulting work for companies whose books they audited. After the story of the Andersen-Enron debacle came out, several members of the cabal stepped forward to acknowledge they were wrong about that one. But Cox, who relied heavily on political contributions from the accounting industry, was not among them. Cox was also the author of legislation that would have made it virtually impossible for shareholders to bring suit against companies that misled or deceived them. With the increase in frivolous lawsuits brought by unscrupulous lawyers, some sort of reform was clearly warranted. But Cox's proposal would have shielded executives and directors who fed happy talk to investors and analysts without checking to see whether it was true. Happily, the Cox 'hear-no-evil, see-no-evil' defense was largely written out of the final bill. Cox has repeatedly demonstrated a preference for sacrificing investor protection to the larger cause of promoting economic growth. He is more ideologue than pragmatist, and an unabashed partisan to boot. Those hardly seem like the necessary qualifications to succeed Bill Donaldson, a champion of the investor, a paragon of independence and a general all-around pro.

Subject: Singapore and Katrina From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 06:18:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14friedman.html September 14, 2005 Singapore and Katrina By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Singapore There is something troublingly self-indulgent and slothful about America today - something that Katrina highlighted and that people who live in countries where the laws of gravity still apply really noticed. It has rattled them - like watching a parent melt down. That is certainly the sense I got after observing the Katrina debacle from half a world away here in Singapore - a city-state that, if it believes in anything, believes in good governance. It may roll up the sidewalks pretty early here, and it may even fine you if you spit out your gum, but if you had to choose anywhere in Asia you would want to be caught in a typhoon, it would be Singapore. Trust me, the head of Civil Defense here is not simply someone's college roommate. Indeed, Singapore believes so strongly that you have to get the best-qualified and least-corruptible people you can into senior positions in the government, judiciary and civil service that its pays its prime minister a salary of $1.1 million a year. It pays its cabinet ministers and Supreme Court justices just under $1 million a year, and pays judges and senior civil servants handsomely down the line. From Singapore's early years, good governance mattered because the ruling party was in a struggle for the people's hearts and minds with the Communists, who were perceived to be both noncorrupt and caring - so the state had to be the same and more. Even after the Communists faded, Singapore maintained a tradition of good governance because as a country of only four million people with no natural resources, it had to live by its wits. It needed to run its economy and schools in a way that would extract the maximum from each citizen, which is how four million people built reserves of $100 billion. 'In the areas that are critical to our survival, like Defense, Finance and the Ministry of Home Affairs, we look for the best talent,' said Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. 'You lose New Orleans, and you have 100 other cities just like it. But we're a city-state. We lose Singapore and there is nothing else. ... [So] the standards of discipline are very high. There is a very high degree of accountability in Singapore.' When a subway tunnel under construction collapsed here in April 2004 and four workers were killed, a government inquiry concluded that top executives of the contracting company should be either fined or jailed. The discipline that the cold war imposed on America, by contrast, seems to have faded. Last year, we cut the National Science Foundation budget, while indulging absurd creationist theories in our schools and passing pork-laden energy and transportation bills in the middle of an energy crisis. We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill. Speaking of Katrina, Sumiko Tan, a columnist for the Sunday edition of The Straits Times in Singapore, wrote: 'We were shocked at what we saw. Death and destruction from natural disaster is par for the course. But the pictures of dead people left uncollected on the streets, armed looters ransacking shops, survivors desperate to be rescued, racial divisions - these were truly out of sync with what we'd imagined the land of the free to be, even if we had encountered homelessness and violence on visits there. ... If America becomes so unglued when bad things happen in its own backyard, how can it fulfill its role as leader of the world?' Janadas Devan, a Straits Times columnist, tried to explain to his Asian readers how the U.S. is changing. 'Today's conservatives,' he wrote, 'differ in one crucial aspect from yesterday's conservatives: the latter believed in small government, but believed, too, that a country ought to pay for all the government that it needed. 'The former believe in no government, and therefore conclude that there is no need for a country to pay for even the government that it does have. ... [But] it is not only government that doesn't show up when government is starved of resources and leached of all its meaning. Community doesn't show up either, sacrifice doesn't show up, pulling together doesn't show up, 'we're all in this together' doesn't show up.'

Subject: The Lost U.N. Summit Meeting From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 06:10:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14wed1.html September 14, 2005 The Lost U.N. Summit Meeting A once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform and revive the United Nations has been squandered even before the opening gavel comes down this morning for the largest assemblage of world leaders ever brought together in a single location. The responsibility for this failure is widely shared. But the United States, as the host nation and the U.N.'s most indispensable and influential member, bears a disproportionate share. There are several casualties of this failure of leadership, including the need to reform the United Nations and to strengthen its role as a monitor of human rights. But the most tragic loss is a genuine opportunity to help the one billion people around the world who each live on less than $1 a day. Last month, President Bush used a recess appointment to send his notoriously undiplomatic, and Congressionally unacceptable, choice for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, to New York. He contended that contrary to all appearances and to common sense, Mr. Bolton was just the man to achieve the reforms the United Nations needed. Almost immediately, Mr. Bolton began proving Mr. Bush wrong by insisting on a very long list of unilateral demands. The predictable effect was to transform what had been a painful and difficult search for workable diplomatic compromises into a competitive exercise in political posturing. With Washington jealously protecting the prerogatives of the Security Council, where it holds a veto, others chose to be equally jealous in protecting the prerogatives of the General Assembly, where the influence of poorer and weaker countries is greatest. And when Washington challenged the right of the secretary general to set specific development goals, others then contested his right to set standards for management or human rights. And so on. That extinguished the idea that international security issues and international development issues are vitally linked, and can be most effectively tackled in tandem. By the time Washington retreated to a more realistic position, it was too late to retrieve much of the bold original agenda, as set out in earlier United Nations summit meetings on development, in the thoughtful recommendations of several high-level panels and in the constructive proposals of Secretary General Kofi Annan. The failure is even more poignant because the United States is clearly on the right side of some important arguments. Washington, for example, strongly supported the idea of replacing the discredited United Nations Commission on Human Rights, on which nations like Sudan, Libya and Cuba regularly sit, with a new, reformed body that would exclude such notorious rights violators. The final document dilutes this crucial provision to the point of meaninglessness. On this and other issues, the document offers little more than a fudge of feel-good phrases and pious wishes for future action that leave everyone off the hook from taking entirely practical actions that are needed right now. This week's summit meeting should have strengthened international commitments to reach broadly accepted development benchmarks over the next decade that could avert tens of thousands of needless deaths from extreme poverty. It should have given the secretary general the power to bypass patronage and rely on merit in choosing and retaining senior officials, creating a crucial institutional safeguard against a replay of the oil-for-food fiasco. It should have reinforced vital international commitments and understandings on nuclear nonproliferation, including those that Mr. Bolton, in his previous job, did so much to undercut. Although the ceremonial speeches by national leaders are just beginning, the serious negotiations over this summit meeting's outcome are now over. Every one of the more than 170 national leaders attending, starting with President Bush, should be embarrassed about letting this rare opportunity slip away.

Subject: Congress Finesses the Storm From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 05:53:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/opinion/14wed2.html September 14, 2005 Congress Finesses the Storm President Bush's vow to speed welfare assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina overlooks the gruesome determination of many Republican Congressional leaders to make $13 billion in cuts for Medicaid and food stamps. They quietly plan this even as they throw short-term emergency money at the crisis. Sustaining their health and income is vital to the storm's impoverished survivors now and well into the future. But the most basic cuts in antipoverty programs are planned for enactment later this month by the same Republican majorities that approved the president's upper-bracket tax cuts and created deficits for a generation to come. Congress's budget hawks are clearly hoping that the cacophony of sympathetic speechifying about the storm victims will distract the public from these cuts and from the fact that they will land heavily on the three states most devastated by the hurricane, where roughly one out of three children were already dependent on Medicaid. Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, the former Republican national chairman, personifies his party leaders' contradiction in begging for emergency aid now after having championed painful cuts in the social safety net. Until recently, Mr. Barbour has been in the spotlight as his state's unapologetic Medicaid antagonist. Rejecting the alternative of a tax increase, he severely cut drug benefits. And before the courts intervened, he had sought to drop 65,000 poor, elderly and disabled people from the program. Mr. Barbour remains one of Washington's most powerful emeritus lobbyists. He can spare his president and party a shameful episode by urging that the pending cuts for some of the storm's neediest be deep-sixed.

Subject: Chinese vow to cut trade surplus From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 05:54:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/4244028.stm Chinese goods pouring into the US may be countered by more exports going the opposite way after China's leader promised to take action. President Hu Jintao promised to reduce the trade surplus as he went into talks with George W Bush in New York, where the two are to attend the World Summit. Concern has grown among US producers at the scale of Chinese imports. At their talks, which touched on North Korea and Iran, Mr Bush accepted an invitation to visit China in November. He was scheduled to visit Washington earlier this month, but this was cancelled because Mr Bush had to deal with the fallout of Hurricane Katrina. Mr Hu extended sympathy to the US over the disaster. 'May the American people overcome the disaster and rebuild their beautiful homes at an early date,' he said. 'Frictions inevitable' China's leader insisted his country was not pursuing a huge trade surplus with the US. 'We're willing to work with the [US] to take effective measures to increase China's imports from the United States,' he said. 'There's no denial that our bilateral trade has developed so fast... it is inevitable that we may have some frictions.' Some US firms say Chinese competition is wiping out their business, the BBC's Duncan Bartlett reports. American shops are full of Chinese clothes, shoes and toys while the trade gap is expected to reach $200bn this year. Our business reporter notes that when China previously said it wanted to purchase more US products, it meant hi-tech goods which the US may be wary of exporting. On the value of China's currency, Mr Bush said he thought Beijing had taken a good first step, but more should be done to let the yuan trade openly on the financial markets. Such a move, our reporter says, would almost certainly cause it to rise sharply in value and push up the cost of Chinese exports. No specifics A senior White House official, Michael Green, said the two presidents also discussed nuclear concerns regarding North Korea and Iran. According to Mr Green, a White House National Security Council expert on Asia, they restated a commitment to persuading North Korea to give up nuclear weapons. China is currently taking part in six-party talks on the issue, along with the US, in Beijing. On Iran, he said, Mr Hu supported using diplomatic means to persuade Tehran to give up uranium conversion work. However, the Chinese leader gave no specific commitment to back a move to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions. 'The tone was the right tone but the specifics and the specific commitments, that's for the follow-up,' said the White House official. He added that a list of US human rights concerns was passed to the Chinese guest by an aide to Mr Bush, but no details were given to the media.

Subject: EU governments take fuel action From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 05:51:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The EU's response to the gouging of customers in Katriona's aftermath. Notice the different countries reactions are solutions (The austrians school may have to be renamed!). Governments across Europe are taking action to curb fuel costs amid sporadic protests about rising petrol prices. France is to offer fuel tax rebates to farmers while President Jacques Chirac has called on petrol retailers to make meaningful cuts to pump prices. Retailers have cut prices in Austria after the government threatened a one-off tax on their profits. Belgium, Poland and Hungary have also announced measures to cushion the impact of rising prices on consumers. Help needed EU countries have come under pressure to control fuel costs amid a clamour for action from hauliers, farmers and motoring groups. The French government announced a package of measures on Tuesday designed to ease the situation for farmers. They will be offered tax breaks and refunds on fuel worth about 30m euros ($36.6m; £20.2m). 'The rise in fuel prices penalises farms, which cannot always pass the cost on,' Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin told a meeting of farmers in Rennes. 'We must help them.' Similar financial assistance was announced for hauliers on Monday. Farmers unions have said that they would study any government proposals before deciding whether to step up direct action. French President Jacques Chirac urged ministers on Tuesday to put pressure on petrol retailers to cut pump prices further. BP and Total announced price cuts last week but consumer and motoring groups said they have not gone far enough. A spokesman for President Chirac said that he had asked finance minister Thierry Breton to urge 'companies to commit themselves rapidly and wholeheartedly to invest in non-polluting energy and step up the pace of price cuts at the pump'. Tax threat Petrol prices are to come down in Austria with BP and Austrian retailer OEMV announcing cuts of 3 cents and 2 cents per litre respectively. Vienna had threatened to impose a windfall tax on the profits of leading petrol companies although the firms concerned said their decision was unconnected to the proposed measure. A BP spokesman in Austria said it had been able to cut prices because wholesale gasoline prices had fallen. The Polish and Hungarian governments have pledged to reduce excise and VAT duties on petrol while the Belgian government says it will reimburse VAT payments on home heating fuel. Speaking at the Frankfurt motor show, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said rising fuel prices were 'certainly worrying'. The British government has ruled out any direct action over fuel costs. Chancellor Gordon Brown ruled out cuts to fuel duties, instead urging Opec members to boost production and invest in new refineries.

Subject: Surprise decline in US trade gap From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 05:45:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4241992.stm The US trade deficit fell slightly in July, despite a record oil import bill, the US Commerce Department reported. The monthly trade gap narrowed by 2.6% to $57.9bn (£31.8bn), surprising analysts. It fell from a revised June figure of $59.5bn. The $18.5bn shortfall in oil trade was offset by high exports, particularly of cotton and steelmaking products. Imports of capital goods such as computers, civilian aircraft and oilfield equipment were sharply down. Average crude oil import prices in July hit new heights, reaching $49.03 a barrel. Overall, US exports were $106.2bn in July, while imports declined to $154.1bn, the Commerce Department said. Analysts said the improvement in the trade deficit was likely to be brief, since oil prices had continued to soar in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. They pointed out that the impact of the storm on US trade through Gulf of Mexico ports would not become apparent until September trade figures were issued in mid-November.

Subject: Japan's Growth Rate Up Sharply From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 10:18:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/business/13yen.html September 13, 2005 Japan's Growth Rate Up Sharply From Early Estimate By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO - The Japanese economy grew faster in the last quarter than previously thought amid long-awaited signs that a recovery is spreading to industries beyond the nation's export-driven manufacturers. The Cabinet Office released revised figures Monday that showed gross domestic product expanded at an annualized 3.3 percent in the quarter ended June 30, well above the initial 1.1 percent estimate announced last month. The biggest factor in the revision was spending by businesses. The news, coming on the heels of a landslide election victory on Sunday by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's ruling coalition, pushed up the country's stock markets. The benchmark Nikkei 225-stock average jumped 1.6 percent, to 12,896.43, its highest close since June 2001. The new data followed a robust first quarter of 5.3 percent annualized growth, and economists said Monday's figures provided strong evidence that Japan's economy has rounded a corner after a slump of almost 15 years and is on course for self-sustaining growth. Japan's ability to escape its dependence on exports and find internal sources of growth has been one of the most difficult questions hanging over the economy, the world's second largest. The main driver of growth in the last quarter was robust spending by consumers and companies, which increased investments in new factories and other equipment, as well as a gain in exports. The figures also showed that inventories at companies were slightly larger than previously thought, a sign that businesses are betting they will be able to sell more goods. Monday's figures showed consumer spending rose at an annual rate of 2.4 percent, down slightly from the earlier estimate of 2.8 percent. Just two years ago, when Japan's economy appeared unable to escape its long funk, personal consumption was routinely stagnant around zero, or even negative. 'The recovery is expanding across the economy,' said Atsushi Nakajima, chief economist at the research arm of the Mizuho Financial Group. 'It's not just exports driving the economy anymore.' The biggest factor in revising the growth figure upward was more corporate spending than previously thought on new factories and equipment, the government said. According to the revised figures, companies increased their capital investments at an annualized 15.4 percent during the quarter, up from a previous estimate of about 9 percent. New investments by auto and electronics makers have accounted for most of whatever economic growth Japan has been able to muster in recent years. But economists said new data showed a rise in capital spending by nonmanufacturing companies.

Subject: Big Push From Small Colleges From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 09:45:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/sports/11recruit.html?ex=1126756800&en=d14203da57ab6cab&ei=5070 September 11, 2005 In Recruiting, a Big Push From Small Colleges, Too By BILL PENNINGTON The players, a jumpy group of 16- and 17-year-old boys from around the country, arrived at the Headfirst baseball camp last month in Ruther Glen, Va., with statistics that stood out. It was not just their batting averages. These were players who scored, on average, 1,300 out of a possible 1,600 on the two-part College Board exam. Most of the 165 players were A-minus students, and all wore identical white T-shirts, with only numbers stenciled on their backs to tell them apart. The campers tolerated the cattle-call atmosphere at the Virginia Sports Complex just north of Richmond because of the potential payoff: 30 college coaches, many representing elite liberal arts colleges and Ivy League universities, were scouting players. Among them was Dave Beccaria of Haverford College, a small liberal arts college outside Philadelphia that is one of the most selective in the country and which has agreed to give The New York Times access to its recruiting process through the academic year. Beccaria has been in touch with more than 1,000 high school players since the beginning of the year, most of them juniors when the process started. He initiated contact with many, but others sent e-mail messages to him, some sent professionally made videos showing them in action and a few hired recruiting services to promote them. Almost all joined the summer-long tour of showcase camps like the one in Virginia. By the time the recruiting cycle is complete, Beccaria figures six to eight of those players will join his team at Haverford, a college that competes in Division III, requires Ivy League-caliber academic scores and does not offer athletic scholarships. As the competition for admission to highly rated colleges like Haverford continues to escalate, the playing fields of America are becoming an ever bigger part of that process. High school students and their parents are looking for any edge, and an athletic résumé is seen as the extra ingredient that can get a student's name on the precious list that the athletic department gives to its admissions office each year. That list can include as few as a dozen names in one sport, with perhaps half expected to be admitted, although there are no guarantees. Still, with select institutions routinely rejecting 7 of 10 applicants over all, parents and their children relish the odds given 'listed' athletes. For coaches, the key is deciding whose names to write on the list. Haverford is typical of the top-tier liberal arts colleges, academically and athletically. The college ranked eighth in the liberal arts category of the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings; nearly 40 percent of students play a varsity sport; and its athletic director, Greg Kannerstein, said that athletics played some role in the admission of about 15 percent of each recent incoming class. 'Years ago, I would go to lunch with someone from admissions with a bunch of names on the back of an envelope,' said Kannerstein, who has been at Haverford for 30 years and served as acting dean of admissions last year. 'We would look at a few applicants' folders and pretty soon we'd have a team. It's a different world now.' That is true for all Haverford varsity sports, for men and women, from soccer to softball. The volleyball coach, Amy Bergin, like Beccaria, is pragmatic about her approach to recruiting. 'Of 1,000 I've contacted, about half will reply,' Bergin said. 'About half that reply will be academically qualified. About half of them will be truly interested in Haverford. About half of them will be actually good enough to play volleyball for us. About half of that group will apply for admission. About half of them will get accepted. And about half of them will decide to come here. 'If that happens, that's a really good year. That's almost eight girls.' Prospecting Via E-Mail Flipping through a binder prepared for coaches at the Headfirst camp - the 18th recruiting event Beccaria visited this summer - he examined the grades and test scores of each player. He immediately crossed off about 120 players, or 70 percent, saying that their test scores or grades were too low. For the next two days, with a roster that matched names to T-shirt numbers, Beccaria followed the progress of the other 45 players, paying careful attention to the 8 to 10 he had seen at previous showcases. Some of these players Beccaria had known of for more than a year because they had sent e-mail messages to him as juniors in high school. It is a common practice that many coaches appreciate. 'You want someone to show the initiative,' Beccaria said. Or, as Georgetown University's baseball coach, Pete Wilk, said in an address to parents and campers at the close of the Headfirst camp: 'Parents, I'm pretty sure your college eligibility is over. So let me hear from your son; he's the one who might play for me.' Beccaria's e-mail messages from potential applicants often included a schedule of the showcases the player planned to attend. This is important information because Beccaria and his coaching colleagues rarely scout individual high school games. The image of a weary, grizzled coach driving from one dusty high school ballpark to another is a nostalgic artifact. At the dozens of highly orchestrated showcases around the country, coaches can see 150 to 200 players in a day and analyze them in an environment that resembles a professional audition. The players perform hours of skill drills: fielding dozens of ground balls, throwing to every base, catching, hitting, running and playing simulated games. Another relic of college recruiting's past is the significance of a high school player's senior season. Beccaria and the other Haverford teams' coaches complete their serious evaluations by the summer after a player's junior season. This year, most of the Haverford coaches had identified their top 20 players by Aug. 15. With the push to get applications in for early decision on Nov. 15, or by the regular decision deadline of Jan. 15, an athlete's senior season can be almost irrelevant. When Beccaria, who led Haverford to 25 victories last season and to its first victory in the postseason, watched prospects this summer, he was continually winnowing his list. But he knew he did not need to make it too short. Coaches from other colleges would do that for him. Even at the small-college level, it is hard to hide a prospect, and the most promising are often looking at Ivy League universities and other elite colleges that offer grants as enticements. At the Headfirst camp, there was a moment in a simulated game when one of the players Beccaria was interested in, the sidearm pitcher Clay Bartlett of Washington, was facing another Beccaria prospect, outfielder Ben Sestanovich, also of Washington. It figured to be a good matchup because Sestanovich laced a crisp single in an earlier at-bat against another pitcher. Beccaria leaned forward in his chair as the at-bat began, aiming a radar gun in his left hand. Aligned in rows of chairs alongside Beccaria, seated like jurors, were 11 other coaches. When Bartlett struck out Sestanovich with a hard, tailing slider on the outside corner to finish two scoreless innings of relief pitching, Beccaria was impressed, though he made sure he did nothing to show it. Without looking, he also knew that the coaches to his left and right, including those from Columbia and Cornell of the Division I Ivy League, were busy taking notes on Bartlett's unusual delivery and commanding presence. Beccaria stood and, with a wry smile, walked to another field to watch another player. He would keep Bartlett and Sestanovich on his list. 'There's a long way to go,' he said. Keeping Score of the Videos While Beccaria was visiting showcases, Bergin, the volleyball coach, spent her summer nights caring for her 1-year-old daughter and calling potential recruits on the phone. She rarely goes anywhere without a printed database of prospects filling two four-inch-thick ring binders. Every time she contacts a player - some she has called five times - she notes the date of the conversation and what was discussed on the player's file. That way she will not repeat herself - not make the same pitch about the benefits of Haverford's proximity to Philadelphia twice, for example. And Bergin listens carefully to the athletes, trying to gather clues. 'There are the girls who say, 'Well, I'm a Division I talent,' ' Bergin said. 'And I think, 'Forget it.' I don't need the attitude. I've got to spend four years with these girls. I cross girls off my list all the time because I think they'll be high maintenance.' Bergin, whose three-year record at Haverford is 59-33, cautiously considers the 15 to 20 e-mail messages or mailings she receives from recruiting services every week. Recruiting services are private enterprises that charge a fee to mass-market a high school athlete to various colleges. They have become increasingly popular, even in the more obscure sports. Bergin finds the services useful, but she thinks parents are spending too much money on them. 'You just laugh at some of the professional videos I get with their Hollywood special effects,' she said. 'It's so unnecessary. Just give me a few skills highlights, and then I want to see a simple game tape. I've seen enough girls hitting balls as 'Eye of the Tiger' plays in the background to last a lifetime.' Giving an Honest Appraisal On an overcast day in early August, Haverford's men's lacrosse coach, Mike Murphy, stood near the lush, tree-lined center of campus awaiting his first potential recruit of the day. Seven months from Haverford's next lacrosse game, this was potentially a pivotal day for Murphy's program. He had stacked appointments to escort four quality prospects, and their parents, around campus. Three days earlier, meeting with another prospect, Murphy had courteously encouraged the player to focus on other colleges or universities because his high school grade point average (3.1 on a scale of 1 to 4) and his SAT score (1,120) would make him a long shot to be admitted to Haverford. 'Despite the fact that I like him as a player, I have to be honest,' Murphy said. 'There should be more dialogue like that. Kids should ask: What are my chances of getting in? What are my chances of playing?' Two years ago, Murphy discouraged a top high school goalie from coming to Haverford because Murphy had a young, promising goalie who was only one year older. 'I told him, 'You can come here, but you'll probably sit for three years,' ' Murphy said. The goalie went to Swarthmore, Haverford's chief rival 10 miles to the southwest. 'And of course, he starts in goal as a freshman for Swarthmore and when we play them, on the first sequence of the game, he stuffs one of our guys on a point-blank shot,' Murphy said, rolling his eyes. 'I'm thinking, 'What did I do?' 'But our guys played pretty good. So did our goalie. We won, 11-7.' Now, on this day, Murphy's top recruiting priority is finding a goalie so that he is prepared when his current starter graduates. He has identified 12 high school and prep school goalies after spending eight weeks traveling from Texas to Massachusetts attending camps akin to the baseball showcase events. For Murphy, who has resurrected Haverford lacrosse with consecutive winning seasons, recruiting is a meticulous business. He does not do mass mailings trolling for recruits. A three-year starter at Duke and a former assistant coach at Brown, Virginia and Penn, Murphy relies on his contacts and his own eye. In June, at a camp at the Brunswick School in Greenwich, Conn., Murphy surveyed 150 players over six hours of play. He wrote down the name of one player. The high school goalie Murphy is welcoming to the Haverford campus is Kevin Friedenberg of Needham, Mass. Murphy has scouted Friedenberg twice. Seconds after shaking Murphy's hand at the student center, Friedenberg hands over his transcript, which Murphy scans in seconds and offers immediate advice. He wants Friedenberg to take as many Advanced Placement courses as he can in his senior year. 'You're a good student, but that's the first thing that admissions will ask about,' Murphy said. Murphy takes Friedenberg and his parents on a tour of the campus and athletic facilities, answering questions as he walks, but he makes sure to come back to the Advanced Placement courses and how important it is for Friedenberg to take all that are offered. 'When recruiting at this level, if you don't take your cues from the people at admissions and use it to guide the prospects on their academic record, you're just crazy,' Murphy said. 'That's probably as important as identifying athletic talent.' In parting, Murphy persuaded Friedenberg to come for a weekend visit in October, when the Haverford campus welcomes its prized recruits in every sport. Murphy's other visits went similarly, although on one of his campus tours, a player from Maryland asked Murphy where he might rank among the defensemen Murphy was recruiting. 'You're not in the top five,' Murphy said. 'You might be in the top 15. But academically you're more qualified than 80 percent. Some of those defensemen ahead of you are going to be good enough to go play Division I. Some will go elsewhere in Division III. So you can move up. You can also improve. I'd like to come watch you play again.' Later, asked if it was hard to be so blunt, Murphy said: 'I have to have that conversation with him sooner or later. There are coaches, even in Division III, who tell every recruit, 'You're my top guy.' They just stockpile. I don't want to mislead anyone.' At the end of the day, Murphy was back at the campus center, awaiting his last visitor. 'You start this process knowing of hundreds of kids you think you might want to play for you,' he said. 'But you know that only a few will actually be on the field at your first practice. And none of them will be on scholarship and all of them can walk away at any time. They can just quit. 'So you better have made your choices carefully, and they better have come for the right reasons.'

Subject: 'Matisse the Master' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:58:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/chapters/0904-1st-spurl.html September 4, 2005 'Matisse the Master' By HILARY SPURLING 1909: Paris, Cassis and Cavalière Returning from Berlin to Paris in January 1909, Henri Matisse got off the train partway to visit one of his few German supporters. He had just said good-bye to his majestic Harmony in Red, leaving it behind in a gallery in Berlin, where people said his latest paintings were senseless, shameless, infantile monstrosities or sick and dangerous messages from a madhouse. The French felt much the same. Harmony-the goal Matisse desired more passionately than any other-was the last thing his art conveyed to his contemporaries. His host at Hagen, a few miles along the Ruhr from Essen, was the collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who had already bought five works from Matisse and was about to commission a sixth. Osthaus insisted on showing off his latest acquisition, a mosaic design installed in a modern crematorium newly built on an industrial waste site. When they entered the building on a cold, grey, rainy Sunday afternoon they found an organ playing softly in the gloom and a coffin sinking into the ground in front of them. Tired, depressed and deeply shaken by what had happened in Berlin, Matisse lost his usual composure and let out a scream: 'My God, a dead body!' Osthaus explained that the body was a fake, part of a public relations exercise put on to counter the local workers' instinctive mistrust of cremation. But Matisse could not forget it, and often marvelled afterwards at the strange way Germans chose to amuse them on a Sunday afternoon. He had a second shock when he got home and received a parcel from Germany containing what looked like a gigantic funeral wreath. In fact, it was a wreath of bays posted by a young American admirer, Thomas Whittemore of Tufts College, to console Matisse for the failure of his Berlin show. Trying to lighten her husband's nervous tension, Mme Matisse tasted a bay leaf ('Think how good it will be in soup'), and said brightly that the wreath's red bow would make a hair ribbon for their fourteen-year-old daughter, Marguerite. 'But I'm not dead yet,' Matisse said grimly. The work Matisse stopped off to see in Hagen was his own Nymph and Satyr. It was a relatively conventional set of three ceramic panels showing a stocky muscular nymph doing a stamping dance, then falling asleep and being tentatively approached by a hairy, hopeful satyr enclosed in a frieze of grapes and vine leaves. In January 1909, Matisse had recently completed an oil painting of the same subject (colour fig. 1). This time the satyr (who had been more of a tame faun on Osthaus's glazed tiles) started out with a little beard and pointy ears, but turned into something far more violent and raw. Matisse's final version is unequivocally human: a clumsy, graceless, lustful male advancing purposefully on a naked female huddled with her back turned at his feet. The man's pink, thinly painted flesh is outlined in red, the colour of arousal. So is the woman's, but every line of her expressive body-bent head, drooping breasts, collapsing limbs-suggests exhaustion, helpless weakness and enforced surrender. This is the mood of Paul Cézanne's The Abduction (or The Rape), where another masterful naked man carries off another pale, limp, fleshy female. The fierce erotic charge in both paintings is reinforced by harsh colour and rough handling. In Matisse's case, the texture of the paint was itself an outrage. The choppy stabbing brushstrokes, the landscape's crude contours filled with flat scrubby green, the blurry patches round the man's head, crotch, left hand and right knee, all convey extreme disturbance. His picture, like Cézanne's, is both personal and symbolic. Both suggest an image spurting up from some deep, probably unconscious level of the imagination on a tide of bitterness and rage. Matisse's satyr looks as if he means to strangle his victim with his outsize red hands. Matisse himself said that this was how he always felt before he began a painting. For him each painting was a rape. 'Whose rape?' he asked, startling his questioner (perhaps also himself) with the brutal image that surfaced in his mind during an interview that took place more than three decades after he painted Nymph and Satyr: 'A rape of myself, of a certain tenderness or weakening in face of a sympathetic object.' He seems to have meant that he relied on his female models to arouse feelings that he could convert to fuel the work in hand. He confronted whatever underlay that process head on in Nymph and Satyr. The displaced emotion here is at least in part aesthetic. The last time Matisse put classical nymphs into a picture was in 1904 in Luxe, calme ET volupté, an uneasy experimental composition that led directly to the explosive canvases dismissed by most people the year after as the work of a wild beast, or Fauve. In the winter of 1908-9, Matisse was once again grappling with, and violating, the ancient canons of a debased classical tradition in a canvas that commits pictorial and depicts sexual rape. This coarse, powerful, primitive painting was earmarked for the Russian collector Sergei Ivanovich Shchukin, a man in process of committing himself as unreservedly as Matisse to liberating painting from the academic tyranny of Beaux-Arts aesthetics. Shchukin was an inordinately successful textile manufacturer with a patchy education and no academic training. People dismissed him, in both Paris and Moscow, as gullible and uncouth, an ignorant boyar who made no attempt to cultivate the refinement that enabled other Moscow merchants to build up more serious art collections. It was Shchukin who had commissioned the Harmony in Red currently hanging in Paul Cassirer's gallery in Berlin. Shchukin came to see it there and, unlike the German art world, was powerfully impressed. On 9 January he followed Matisse to Paris to inspect work in hand in the studio, including the Nymph and Satyr. Shchukin took delivery of six Matisse paintings in the month after he got back to Moscow. The painter said that in some ways he came to dread the visits of this particular collector because of his unerring knack for picking out the latest breakthrough canvas and carrying it off, sometimes with the paint still wet. Shchukin grasped at once that Nymph and Satyr was an affront to decency and morals, which only increased his impatience to possess it. This new canvas could not easily be displayed in mixed company, let alone in public. It was quite different from the sexy pictures other men kept behind locked doors in their private rooms and cabinets. Its secret kick for a subversive like Shchukin was precisely that it violated every sacred Beaux-Arts precept enshrined in the flawless public nudes that filled the Paris salons. The contemporary French incarnation of those precepts in the eyes of fashionable Moscow was Maurice Denis. Shchukin himself owned several pictures by Denis, who had once embodied the last word in sophistication for him, too. In January 1909, Denis was making waves in Moscow. He had come to install his latest work in the home of another Moscow merchant, Ivan Abramovich Morozov (who had also made a fortune out of textiles). Morozov, who was Shchukin's close friend and only Russian rival in the field of modern art, had ordered seven huge painted panels telling the story of Cupid and Psyche for his music room. Denis pictured Cupid as a plump, life-size, naked youth wearing wings to match his predominant colour scheme of pink, green and blue. His Psyche is a solid girl with cushiony breasts, buttocks and hips. The couple's sturdy build adds to the absurdity of their chaste embrace as they dangle cheek to cheek in midair with nothing touching below the waist. The décor of Cupid's palace with its garden ornaments, mauve silk drapes and floral sprays is more reminiscent of an expensive modern florist than of ancient Greece. This is seduction with any hint of desire or danger airbrushed out. It went down well on its first showing at the Paris Autumn Salon, and it made an even bigger splash in Moscow. So much so that Morozov, who was thinking of hiring Matisse to decorate his dining room, dropped the idea in favour of commissioning six more panels from Denis. It was Shchukin instead who commissioned wall paintings from Matisse. The painter never forgot the lunch at the Restaurant Larue in Paris where the pair of them together hatched a plan to end all blue-pink-and-green decorative schemes peopled with dancing nymphs and piping fauns. Matisse's Dance and Music grew from their conversation at this lunch. 'I hope that when they see your decorations, the tumult of admiring cries to be heard at present will die down a little,' Shchukin wrote in May, describing the fuss over Denis's Psyche. 'At present they talk of it as a great masterpiece. They laugh at me a little, but I always say, 'He who laughs last, laughs best.' I trust you always.' Nymph and Satyr, one of the starting points for the new scheme, was finished, crated up and posted off to Moscow in early February. By this time, Matisse had left Paris for the Mediterranean coast. He planned to spend a month at the little Hotel Cendrillon in Cassis, replenishing the stocks of energy depleted by the gloom and strain of a Parisian winter. Walking along the steeply shelving shore at Cassis and in the chestnut woods on the cliff top, he studied air, water, light, sun glinting on spray, waves pounding on rocks as he had done further along the coast at Collioure four years earlier. 'There is ... a cove near Cassis,' wrote Marcel Sembat, who spent a day with Matisse in early March, 'where the green of the open sea on the horizon brings out the deep blues and foamy whites of the tide trapped between cliffs, which you can see jostling and throwing up little blade-like crests in the full sun.' Movement preoccupied the painter in the run-up to the Dance. Sembat was struck by the intensity and accuracy of Matisse's response to the violent swirling currents, 'the clash of creative contrasts we talked about together.' Sembat, seven years older than Matisse, married to a painter and himself a passionate art enthusiast, was an exceptionally acute and attentive witness. By his own account he was living out a dream that day in Cassis, having brought with him one of his lifelong heroes, the great reforming architect of the Third Republic, Jean Jaurès. The Socialist leader and his two companions walked and talked beside the sea, delighted with one another, with the brilliant spring sunshine, and with the infectious visual excitement emanating from Matisse at the end of his month in the country. They rounded off their morning over lunch at the hospitable little village inn. Sembat wrote the day up in his diary and returned to it again a decade later, leaving no doubt that, for him at least, there was something magical about this unlikely encounter between two great French stars, one rising fast, the other soon due to set forever. Sembat's writings provide some of the sharpest and most lucid testimony to Matisse's progress in the decade leading up to the First World War. The two first met, probably, through Georgette Agutte, Sembat's wife, who had belonged loosely to the same little knot of painters as Matisse in their student days. But they had an even earlier point of contact through Matisse's wife, Amélie, whose father, Armand Parayre, knew Sembat from the start of his career. As a newly elected Socialist deputy writing leaders for Parayre's radical campaigning newspaper, Sembat had belonged to the generation of up-and-coming Republican politicians who, unlike many of their elders, managed to leap clear of the sensational Humbert scandal which all but destroyed Matisse's in-laws in 1902. Parayre himself survived public ignominy, imprisonment and a dramatic trial with the help of his young son-in-law (this was the first if not the last time Matisse had reason to be thankful for the brief training as a lawyer forced on him by his own father). Amélie Matisse emerged, like her father, apparently unscathed from her family's terrifying ordeal. (Her mother, who never got over it, died prematurely in 1908.) But the affair left Amélie with a deep-seated horror of any kind of exposure, and a lasting suspicion of the outside world. It reinforced her self-reliance, her stubborn pride and her almost reckless indifference to what other people thought. Beneath the demure and unassertive manner that was all she showed to those who didn't know her, Amélie was, by the standards of her class and age, profoundly unconventional. Her marriage had been a gamble in which money, security, and social advantage played no part. She became her husband's eager partner in a high-risk enterprise neither ever truly doubted would one day succeed. She had recognised what was in him at sight, and backed her instinct unreservedly ever after. At times, when Matisse found himself disowned not only by the professional art world but by most of his fellow artists too, his wife remained virtually his only backer. Mutual trust was the core of their relationship. 'The basis of our happiness ... was that we built up this confidence quite naturally from the first day,' Amélie wrote long afterwards to Marguerite. 'It has been for us the greatest good and the envy of all our friends, it meant we could get through the worst of times.' The two did everything together. Almost from the day they met, they were known as the Inseparables. The four weeks Henri spent in Cassis was probably the longest time they had been parted since their marriage eleven years before. The studio was the centre of their world, and it was her province as much as his. Henri and his painting gave Amélie's life its shape and meaning. Hardship and privation hardly mattered by comparison; nor did the rising tide of mockery and abuse that accompanied Matisse's growing fame. Even the arrival of their children hadn't greatly changed their way of life. When it came to a choice, work took precedence over child care. Their elder son, Jean, grew up as much at home with his Matisse grandparents in the north of France as with his parents in Paris. The younger boy, Pierre, spent so much time in the south with his Parayre grandfather and Amélie's only sister, Berthe, that his aunt became his second mother. Amélie herself was closer to the boys' older half sister, Marguerite (or Margot), who was Henri's child by an earlier liaison, and who became in some ways a second self to her adoptive mother. It was Marguerite who stayed at home, sharing the life of the studio that meant life itself to the Matisses. The family dynamics began to shift a little when they finally moved out of Henri's cramped bachelor flat in a block opposite Notre Dame into a disused convent at 33 boulevard des Invalides on the far side of Montparnasse. Money was still tight. . . .

Subject: 'Henry Adams and the Making of America' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:45:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/books/review/11lingeman.html September 11, 2005 'Henry Adams and the Making of America': Misunderstood By RICHARD LINGEMAN According to Garry Wills, Henry Adams's ''History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson'' and ''History of the United States of America During the Administrations of James Madison'' stand today ''little read, appreciated or studied.'' Wills maintains that Adams's sweeping nine-volume chronicle -- ''the nonfiction prose masterpiece of the 19th century in America'' -- has suffered not only neglect but also the humiliation of being misread by professional historians. Richard Hofstadter, for example, accused Adams of caricaturing America as a ''slack and derivative culture, of fumbling and small-minded statecraft, terrible parochial wrangling and treasonous schemes, climaxed by a ludicrous and unnecessary war.'' Hofstadter's view, Wills counters, is largely derived from his misinterpretation of the first six chapters of the ''History,'' in which Adams produces a sociological portrait of American society and culture in 1800, on the eve of Thomas Jefferson's first administration. These chapters indeed portray America as an uncultured backwater. But Wills argues that Adams intended the opening chapters as a prelude to his historical narrative, and that they foreshadow the optimistic summing up in the final four chapters of the work. Those preliminary chapters, in addition to being greatly informative on many aspects of American society -- to me they read like a cross between Tocqueville and John Gunther's ''Inside'' books -- are also charged with the ironic wit and egalitarian democratic faith that animate the remaining volumes. In one passage Adams proclaims that if Americans ''were right in thinking that the next necessity of human progress was to lift the average man upon an intellectual and social level with the most favored, they stood at least three generations nearer than Europe to their common goal.'' Wills shows that Adams saw Jefferson as the early Republic's champion of democracy, unlike Alexander Hamilton, who ''considered democracy a fatal curse.'' Jefferson is thus the (flawed and sometimes accidental) hero of Adams's epic. Wills devotes his first six chapters to a learned summary of the state of historiography in Henry Adams's day. He discusses the shaping experiences that prepared this descendant of America's first First Family for the task of writing an innovative, comprehensive history (and one in which the two Presidents Adams receive no favoritism). Adams's maiden historical work, a revisionist study of John Smith and Pocahontas, which he researched while in London serving as secretary to his father, the minister to Britain, Charles Francis Adams, impressed on him the importance of working with archival documents and private correspondence. When he started working on the ''History'' in 1879, he traveled to London, Paris, Madrid and other capitals to winnow fresh material from government files. Charles Francis Adams's trying negotiations with the British government during our Civil War also gave the son a firsthand insight into the importance of seeing America vis-a-vis other players on the world stage. In the ''History,'' Wills notes, Adams devotes several chapters to the machinations of Napoleon, whom he considers Jefferson's great rival, seeking relentlessly to maneuver America into a war with England. In 1812 Madison finally launched a war against Britain. Adams supports the war but judges Jefferson and Madison woefully lax in preparing for it. Both men had on misguided principle opposed any prewar naval buildup and allowed the Army to go to seed. Jefferson persisted in a misconceived embargo of Britain long after it had failed to win its objective. Madison, the intellectual, was a poor administrator who appointed incompetents to lead the Army. Carrying forward Jefferson's policies, he dragged an unwilling, unready nation into a war that started out with one disaster after another. Eventually, the Navy's crack frigates won some improbable victories, boosting home-front morale. The Army finally became a fighting force in 1814 after the feckless state militias (whose ''yeoman virtue'' Jefferson predicted would make the conquest of Canada ''a mere matter of marching'') had straggled home with their muskets. The nation's merchant ships had been brutally harried on the high seas by both the British and the French. Yet the United States grandiosely demanded Canada and Florida -- and could have ended up losing Maine to Canada and the Northwest Territory to the Indians. One begins to wonder if Hofstadter's characterization of the war as ''ludicrous and unnecessary'' doesn't contain some truth. (I would have also welcomed more discussion by Wills of the economic interests in the conflict.) Adams, however, praised the war as a necessary exercise in nationalism, enabling America to shed its inferiority complex to England. Madison left office in 1817 with America indeed more united, and more soundly and centrally governed and financed, than in 1800. Wills holds that Adams's belief in Jefferson's democratic faith was justified, despite his misguided tolerance of Jefferson's support of slavery. By entrusting himself to the will of the people and their hopes for a better future, Jefferson became a ''transmitter of forces that would make the outcome glorious.'' To his rereading of Adams's ''History'' Garry Wills brings a lucid style, imaginative analysis and the talent for historical elucidation that won him a Pulitzer Prize for ''Lincoln at Gettysburg.'' He has cogently made the case for Adams as a masterly diplomatic, military and financial historian, and I unreservedly recommend this book -- and, of course, Adams's books as well.

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:38:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/31/04 - 9/12/05 Australia 10.4 Canada 20.0 Denmark 15.8 France 6.8 Germany 4.0 Hong Kong 8.4 Japan 5.7 Netherlands 3.2 Norway 25.9 Sweden 4.2 Switzerland 7.1 UK 5.4

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars-Dividends] From: Terri To: Terri Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 10:03:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Returns including dividends: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/31/04 - 9/12/05 Australia 14.1 Canada 21.4 Denmark 18.4 France 9.3 Germany 6.7 Hong Kong 11.1 Japan 6.5 Netherlands 7.0 Norway 31.6 Sweden 7.3 Switzerland 9.2 UK 8.4

Subject: Index Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:34:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/31/04 - 9/12/05 Australia 12.1 Canada 18.8 Denmark 28.4 France 18.2 Germany 15.1 Hong Kong 8.2 Japan 13.3 Netherlands 14.1 Norway 32.2 Sweden 18.6 Switzerland 18.4 UK 11.0

Subject: Returns [Domestic Currency-Dividends] From: Terri To: Terri Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 10:04:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Returns including dividends: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/31/04 - 9/12/05 Australia 15.8 Canada 20.2 Denmark 31.3 France 20.9 Germany 18.1 Hong Kong 10.9 Japan 14.1 Netherlands 18.4 Norway 38.2 Sweden 22.1 Switzerland 20.7 UK 14.2

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:26:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship5.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/04 to 9/12/05 S&P Index is 3.6 Large Cap Growth Index is 3.2 Large Cap Value Index is 5.9 Mid Cap Index is 10.7 Small Cap Index is 7.4 Small Cap Value Index is 7.3 Europe Index is 7.7 Pacific Index is 8.0 Energy is 44.3 Health Care is 13.3 Precious Metals 25.2 REIT Index is 11.3 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 2.2 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is 5.8

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:25:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Stock Indexes 12/31/04 - 8/12/05 Energy 41.5 Financials 0.0 Health Care 9.4 Info Tech 1.1 Materials -3.0 REITs 11.4 Telecoms 1.3 Utilities 20.6

Subject: Language and economic development From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 07:01:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This time of year reminds me of the trauma of first love. The last weekend in August signalled the final days of Irish college, with tears, hugs and promises to write. I have vivid memories of packed trains pulling out of stations full of bawling, hysterical teenagers shrieking as if they were about to be fed to the Khmer Rouge. For hundreds of thousand of Irish teenagers, Irish college was the first time away from home, time on their own, in all that hormonal splendour. It was, and still is, a central plank of the language revival movement, and, for the most part, is a pretty successful and hugely enjoyable way to learn Irish. Our attachment to Irish, however cosmetic, is still strong. Despite the fact that English is our lingua franca, 80 per cent of us, when surveyed, respond that the Irish language is central to Irishness. On the other hand, English is central to our economic wellbeing. So, while the linguistic part of our nationalist narrative has always lamented the passing of Irish and the foisting of the English language on us, English - particularly in recent years - has been crucial to our economy. In fact, the importance of language to our economic fortunes is one of the great overlooked issues in modern Irish economics. Language is central to commerce, and the economic performance of English-speaking countries in the developed world has been remarkable in recent years. Western Europe is still stagnating, but maybe not as dramatically as Eurosceptics would have us believe. Eastern Europe, which should be catching up quickly, is not doing so at any great pace. Latin America, which was thought to have put its problems behind it in the late 1990s, has had a miserable few years. Japan is mired in its post-bubble torpor. In contrast, English-speaking countries have been growing at amazing rates. Ireland, America, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada have all been growing strongly. More interestingly, our business cycles are very closely correlated, which at first blush makes no sense. For example, we and the British are geographically and politically European, and we both trade with Europe, yet our business cycles are much more closely correlated to the US. That could be explained by America's leadership and dominance, but how do we explain the fact that Ireland's recent business cycle is more closely correlated with far-off Australia than nearby Germany? The question is, why – and more interestingly, why now? Why should language give some countries an advantage over others and bind economic performances together? Traditionally, economics is a great way of rounding up the usual tangible suspects when it comes to explaining events. On the intangibles, it is often less enlightening. Language is a great intangible. You will not find chapters devoted to language in economics textbooks. Irrespective of this oversight, let's have a look at the reasons why English speaking might be a positive economic resource. First, there is the right-wing ideological school, which contends that English-speaking countries drink from the same philosophical waters. This school contends that we share similar economic outlooks and have a fondness for tax-cutting, smallish governments, light regulation and the promotion of the entrepreneur. This view contends that, by the late 1980s, we had all enacted more or less similar Thatcherite policies, where the government pulled in its horns. The right-wingers contend that this put us in a good position to reap profits in the 1990s and the 2000s.This view looks plausible, and it makes neat, uncomplicated academic sense - the type of clarity beloved of right-wing ideologues – until we realise that there is an elephant in the corner. That elephant is the US which, since 2000, has been a textbook model of old-fashioned 1950sKeynesianism - the type of economics beloved of European social democrats. In the past five years, the US has borrowed to get out of recession. The federal government has spent money like a drunken sailor. This owes more to the economics of Roosevelt than to those of Reagan, and refutes the neat, all-encompassing right-wing view. Second is the idea that the internet has Anglicised the world rapidly in the past few years. Some argue that e-mail and the internet put people who use different alphabets, such as the Japanese, at a particular disadvantage. In terms of the economics of language, it is far too early to conclude definitively but there might be something in this internet theory. By far the most compelling theory is the globalisation one. English is the language of the global economy - business must use some common language, and no other tongue has the necessary critical mass. This means that people who have grown up speaking English have an automatic head start. It also means that for countries, like Ireland, that have played host to American capital, speaking English has been crucial. Forget the blarney about the educated workforce - we are no better educated than the Belgians, French or Germans - but we are English-speaking, and that was the clincher for many American multinational companies which wanted to send their unadventurous middle managers to countries where they could order a beer after work. The result of globalisation has been to synchronise the economic cycles of English-speaking countries. This suggests that language is a far more important economic resource than we think. It also reiterates the economic inappropriateness of our EMU membership, because, by tying ourselves financially to a bunch of countries that have a different economic cycle to ourselves, we guarantee that the ups and downs of our own business cycle will be profoundly exaggerated. When we are booming, we have low interest rates priced for a German recession, and when we slow down we could have high interest rates if there were a German recovery - even though we have more in common with English-speaking Australia! The connection between economic success and English in recent years has also led to something rather counter-intuitive for the fortunes of Irish. Gael-Linn, Gaelscoileanna and language courses have never been in such demand. Irish people are now exploring Irish as never before. When I was a teenager, for many of us suburban kids, Irish was associated with economic backwardness. When you are poor you don't have time to concern yourself with culture, but now that the economy has benefited enormously from English, we are re-examining the Irish language, and the prospects for the Irish haven't looked this good for over 100 years. Wouldn't it be ironic if the main cultural beneficiary of English economic hegemony was a revival in Irish?

Subject: We need to go nuclear From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 06:59:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What will happen to our civilisation if we have no power? Could we survive? How would you behave if the lights flickered, dimmed and then went out for good? These questions are no longer the stuff of science fiction. In our lifetimes, possibly as early as the next decade, the world will begin to run out of oil. In the interim, oil prices are likely to rise, governments and regimes will come and go and petrol is likely to be rationed. We will look for alternatives. We will start to burn other stuff - other fossil fuels - to feed our insatiable desire for energy. What impact will turning the world into a giant pyre have on global warming? Environmental concerns apart, these other fuels, like oil, are a finite resource – so what happens when we run out of things to burn? What will we do then? This week, we had a number of reports, both domestic and international, focusing on how we might deal with the end of oil, and at the same time reduce carbon emissions to prevent global warming. The reports focused on a combination of changing our behaviour (shorthand for consuming less) and using alternative, more environmentally-efficient energy sources. One report cited elephant grass as a viable alternative for Ireland. This is doubtless part of the solution, but the missing link in this discussion is the real elephant in the corner, which nobody is prepared to talk about for fear of eternal damnation. In Ireland, we are all afraid of the N word. This word cannot be used in polite conversation. It is a word so vile, foul and degrading, it automatically puts you outside the pale. The N word breaks all the rules. So let's just whisper it. Shush, quietly now. . . nuclear. That wasn't so bad, was it? Say it again, nuclear. Yes, nuclear power. Is it time to revisit nuclear power? Given the depletion of the world's resources and the fact that carbon emissions are unsustainable, nuclear power is a logical alternative. The very word ‘nuclear' scares us. Its lexicon is contaminated. It is associated with Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the Cold War. As bread goes with butter, nuclear goes with warhead. In most of our minds, nuclear signifies death and destruction on a monumental scale. If not warheads, missiles and bombs, the word nuclear conjures up images of accidents, leaks, fallout and horrendously deformed babies. But this is only half the story, and while we shouldn't dismiss concerns about safety, we should also open our minds to the possibility that nuclear power is part of the energy solution, not part of the problem. For example, countries with the highest environmental standards in Europe, such as Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, France and Germany rely significantly - and in France's case overwhelmingly - on nuclear power. These are not irresponsible countries that would willingly put their citizens at risk. Indeed, there has never been an accident in any of these countries. There has also, despite all the hype, never been a nuclear accident in Britain. In fact, according to Professor Robert Winston, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science that had its annual bash in Dublin last week, 'more deaths resulted from Markham Main [a Yorkshire colliery] than all the accidents and power stations put together, including Chernobyl'. Most scientists agree with Winston. Nuclear power is safe and, when reactors are well maintained and standards are high, nuclear power has proved itself to be one of the safest ways to generate energy. Another argument in support of nuclear power is that it is environmentally much sounder than burning stuff. If we are to achieve significant reduction in carbon emissions and maintain our lifestyles, nuclear power is an obvious candidate. It is considerably cleaner than fossil fuel and much less damaging to the environment. We harm our environment more from burning peat in Ireland than we would if we had a nuclear power station heating every home in the country. Internationally, the planet would be a much cleaner place if large countries like China, India and Iran used nuclear power exclusively, rather than burning coal. With respect to global warming and environmental degradation, others have made the argument that, even in the worst case scenario, the impact of a nuclear accident is localised, whereas the impact of global warming and air pollution from burning fossil fuels affects the whole planet. This seems harsh, but it is true. Even figures from Chernobyl bear this out. In the 19 years since the accident, 4,000 people have died. In contrast, each year respiratory disease that results directly from coal-based air pollution kills many more. In terms of nuclear waste and decommissioning older nuclear plants, Finland and Sweden are introducing technical solutions that satisfy most of the domestic opposition to nuclear power. It is fair to say, given their environmental records, that, if it is good enough for the Scandinavians, it should be good enough for us. The points above could be termed the ‘it's not as bad as you think' arguments in support of putting nuclear power back on the table. While they may not persuade everyone, they are at least an antidote to the blanket hysteria that surrounds the N word. The other arguments are simply the ‘we have no alternative' position. Oil is running out. The regimes that control oil are becoming increasingly unstable and might not last the shock of running out of black gold. So supplies might be unstable even before it runs out. Also the price of oil will rise prohibitively, so some other form of energy must be found. The other ‘no alternative' argument is the simple contention that nuclear power, counterintuitive as it may sound, is environmentally friendly. Either we go nuclear or we risk climate change on a devastating scale. To reduce carbon emissions, either we switch to nuclear power in some form or we change our entire consumer-driven society and its growth-based economic benchmarks. Maybe, in an environmentally compromised future, a contracting economy will be regarded as the objective of government policy, but, for the moment, the obsession with growth reigns, and with it, the compulsive desire for energy. While there is no doubt that concerns about nuclear energy are real, they will not be made clearer by regarding nuclear power as heresy. In Ireland, we need to explore every avenue and close the door to none. In 2020, there is every possibility that we will be a nuclear state and, if not, we will definitely be importing nuclear energy from elsewhere. We might as well start discussing this eventuality now.

Subject: Mankind on a collision course From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 06:56:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: During the 18th century when Louisiana and Mississippi were home to French-speaking Arcadians or Cajuns, their black slaves also spoke French. Many of the slaves worked on the New Orleans dock, which at the time was the commercial centre of the cotton industry. When a ship docked safely, the stevedores shouted “au quai'‘ to indicate that all was fine. Over time, this expression mutated into common parlance and eventually became along with Marlboro, Levis and Disney part of the lexicon of America. Back in the 18th century, New Orleans was one of the great mercantile cities of the western trading world. Black slaves out numbered white masters by about five to one. Its white population the French speaking Cajuns were themselves victims of British ethnic cleansing of the French Arcadian populations of Nova Scotia in 1755 when the entire French speaking population was expelled. Many of them resettled in Louisiana. Here they swelled the numbers of French speakers and the city formed one of the crucial points of a trading triangle which sawguns and steel being sold from France to African chiefs in French West Africa in return for slaves. These petrified misfortunates were then shipped out to the Caribbean and the French American colony of Louisiana named after the Sun King Louis the 14th. In return for slaves, cotton was shipped back to France for the great garment cities on the Atlantic coast. This trading triangle, which was in no way exclusive to France the British, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese were up to their necks in it too lasted for over 150 years and was central to the wealth of Europe and the rise of the US. The beginning of the 20th century saw a huge migration of recently-freed black slaves from Louisiana and Mississippi to the northern industrial cities of the US. There they could escape the segregationist South and could work in a less racist environment. Thus the southern states around the Gulf of Mexico, such as Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, experienced significant population declines relative to the rest of the US. Recently this demographic story has changed dramatically, but so too has the weather. Up until 1990, Louisiana and Mississippi had the least mobile populations in the US, with locals staying put and outsiders staying out. But this is rapidly changing and they are now experiencing net immigration for the first time since the da and Alabama, the migration flows from north to south are unambiguous. As property prices in Florida get out of hand, many migrants are choosing to move to areas where the sun shines but property is cheaper. However, this mass migration is occurring just as the weather is getting more erratic. In the southern US states, mankind and the elements are on a collision course. This implies that the devastation of Hurricane Katrina will be repeated. Global warming is the problem and the US is not part of the solution. Millions of Americans moving south in their gas guzzling SUVs are directly contributing to global warming. In this regard, as the world's biggest polluter, America is the delinquent on the bloc. Global warming is a man-made reality and America with its ferocious demand for fossil fuels is the world's worst culprit. Global warming has enormous implications for weather patterns in the future. It is therefore bizarre that President Bush appears shocked at the ferocity of this week's hurricane; his antediluvian environmental policies, which contend that global warming is not happening, are increasing the likelihood of hurricanes, tornadoes and the like. (Obviously even the most die-hard Democrat would be hard pressed to blame Bush for the plight of New Orleans, but a bit of joined up thinking in Washington would be welcome. Put simply, the warmer the globe becomes, the more unstable the weather. This is evident in recent weather patterns. You will have noticed the increased frequency of hurricane coverage from places like Florida over the past three years. This is not just a function of the dumbing down of news coverage, it is actually happening. Data has shown that Florida and southern Florida in particular is experiencing a change in wind patterns, hurricanes and devastating high winds that are becoming more frequent. The other area where weather conditions have changed dramatically is the stretch between New Orleans and Mobil precisely where Katrina hit. Yet these are exactly the parts of the US southern coast that are set to experience the greatest population growth in the next decade. And it is not just Americans. Irish investors have piled into Florida, buying condos, villas and apartments. This interaction of large increases in populations and rapidly-changing weather conditions is a disaster for the global insurance industry. A senior global player in the industry told me that the industry could survive anything but natural disasters. He went on to say that if three hurricanes struck the US east coast with the severity of Katrina, the industry would be bankrupt. If the risk of natural disasters is increasing, then the cost of underwriting will increase. But if the risk of natural disasters is increasing in areas where populations, possessions and property are also increasing in density, then the expected payouts will be enormous. As it was, Hurricane Charley did $42 billion worth of damage to the insurance industry last year alone. The final bill for Katrina will be much greater. Quite apart from the impact on the personal finances of Irish investors and the plight of the insurance industry, which will affect all our insurance premiums in future, the hurricane is keeping the demand for fuel high, pushing oil prices back towards $70 a barrel. Against this sort of background, on the economic as well as the climatic front, the short-term forecast is most certainly not au quai.

Subject: Internet Entrepreneurs Draw in China From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 06:33:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/business/worldbusiness/12search.html?ex=1284177600&en=4a0325e0ebf28e1b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 12, 2005 Internet Entrepreneurs Draw a Crowd in China By DAVID BARBOZA HANGZHOU, China - Even before China's annual 'Internet summit' got under way here, Charles Zhang, the stylish founder of the Web portal Sohu.com, was holding court in the lobby of the Hyatt Hotel, standing before a crush of reporters and television cameras. Soon after, two other Chinese Internet superstars, William Ding, the 34-year-old chief executive of Netease.com, and Ma Huateng, also 34, the founder of Tencent.com, made their way toward the hotel's grand ballroom, pursued like a pair of rock stars. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba.com and the host of this one-day conference, said that the night before he had turned 40. His dinner guests that evening were Jerry Yang, the co-founder of Yahoo, and Bill Clinton, who was scheduled to address the Internet forum. In a country where Internet use is exploding and another Bill - Bill Gates - is widely admired, about 600 people packed a Hyatt ballroom on a Saturday afternoon to listen to some of the nation's young Internet millionaires talk about the future. 'These are the Internet legends of China,' said Ho Ben, 28, a participant at the conference and the general manager of a toy company that sources online goods through Alibaba.com, China's largest business-to-business Web site. 'I'm a great admirer of these guys, not only because they've made our lives different but because they've made our business much easier.' Mr. Ma - the architect of China's biggest Internet deal this year, a partnership with Yahoo - convened this annual gathering of some of China's largest Internet companies to discuss the state of the business. This year, it seems, China's small cadre of Internet moguls has many reasons to celebrate. America's largest Internet companies and venture capital firms are now flocking to invest here. The biggest deal came early last month, when Yahoo agreed to invest $1 billion in the six-year-old Alibaba.com. As part of the deal, Yahoo even agreed to hand over its Yahoo China operations to Mr. Ma, who is considered one of China's Internet pioneers. Last month also brought the spectacular Nasdaq debut of Baidu.com, China's biggest search engine company. Its shares soared on their first day of trading in one of the most successful initial public stock offerings since the end of the Internet bubble in 2000 and 2001. EBay has also made big moves, acquiring China's biggest online auction company, Eachnet.com, and promising to invest $100 million in China this year. Much of the excitement has been ignited by reports that there are now more than 100 million Internet users here, ranking China second only to the United States. And with Internet use growing at a phenomenal pace, up from about two million users in 1998, venture capital firms are descending upon China, hoping to find the next Yahoo, Google or eBay. This year's summit, however, was partly overshadowed by reports last week that Yahoo had provided information that helped authorities in China sentence a Chinese journalist to 10 years in prison for leaking 'state secrets' to a foreign Web site. Mr. Yang, Yahoo's co-founder, declined to discuss details of the case, in which the 37-year-old journalist sent anonymous e-mail messages to a Web site based in America, according to court documents. But Mr. Yang said that Yahoo had no alternative other than to comply with Chinese law. 'I don't like the outcomes of what happens with these things, but we have to comply with the law,' he said during the conference. Concerns persist about whether the major Western Internet companies help Chinese authorities monitor and censor content on their Web sites, and even whether they help the authorities crack down on dissent or imprison political opponents. But the conference did little to shed light on that issue. Attendees were more interested in talking about new profit strategies and even some social issues, like whether Chinese youths were becoming addicted to online games. Several participants, including Mr. Ding, once listed as China's richest man, said they were cooperating with the government to combat online game addiction. In the spirit of a conference that had questioners often referring to the speakers as 'Internet heroes,' one woman also had a more personal question for Mr. Ding: 'When are you going to get married?' While most of the big Internet players in China showed up for the summit, including Wang Yan, the head of Sina.com, one of the major portals, the absence of executives from eBay and Baidu was conspicuous but hardly surprising. EBay is facing stiff competition in China from Taobao.com, a subsidiary of Alibaba. Baidu, in which Google has a small stake, is considered a strong challenger to the new Alibaba-Yahoo partnership. And Microsoft is now battling Google in a Washington court, accusing one of its former Chinese executives of violating a noncompete clause by joining rival Google earlier this year. Still, Mr. Ma said all the major players had been invited to attend his summit in the spirit of 'peaceful' discussion. The flamboyant Mr. Ma, who stands just over 5 feet, is one of China's oldest Internet moguls. He is also one of the richest. After his deal with Yahoo, privately held Alibaba.com is now valued at about $4.2 billion, making it China's most valuable Internet company. Mr. Ma, a former English teacher, is also skilled at attracting publicity for Alibaba, which is based in Hangzhou. The event, held in the beautiful West Lake area, attracted widespread press coverage in China, besides scores of bankers, deal makers, movie producers and Internet bandwagon followers. During the intermission, cameramen and eager fans raced after speakers, several of whom chose to scamper into the bathroom for cover. But onstage, China's Internet entrepreneurs acknowledged that they were facing plenty of hurdles in making their companies profitable and successful. They said that competition was intense and that online payments systems were problematic. But they also said their companies had matured during the last few years, when fierce rivalries had evolved into heated accusations and even legal battles over intellectual property. 'Four years ago, we were naïve. There was fierce fighting,' said Mr. Ma of Alibaba. 'Now all of us are survivors. We are more calm-minded.'

Subject: Synchronizing the Present and Past From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 06:24:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/international/europe/12versailles.html?ex=1284177600&en=3b7e67f0b0f1f3f5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 12, 2005 Synchronizing the Present and Past in a Timeless Place By MARLISE SIMONS VERSAILLES, France - Once a week, Bernard Draux, a discreet Frenchman, joins the secret life of Versailles, a palace where even without its long-gone kings much still happens away from the public eye. Mr. Draux is the chateau's official clockmaker and timekeeper. His task is to wind and repair close to 100 antique clocks that once served Europe's most glittering court. Every Monday, when the monumental palace is closed, he sets out on his solitary mission with a small set of precision tools and a heavy bundle of keys, opening up contraptions that are often as baroque as the chateau itself. There are gilded clock faces, fixed onto bronze camels or marble elephants. Some have music boxes hidden inside. Grand 18th-century pieces, which remarkably have survived theft and revolution, record not just the hour, date and month but also the movements of the planets. None of this seems to faze Mr. Draux, 49, a man with a mournful face and a heavy mustache, whose own modest wristwatch runs on a battery. There he was, on a recent round, cantering through the chateau's labyrinth of back stairs, slipping in and out of salons and alcoves as if this were a visit to an old family home. He made frequent stops, tugging deftly at a weight here, nudging a pendulum there. Why, he was asked, was such an effort being made to record the time in such a timeless place? 'Eh bien, the clocks belong here,' he said with an irrefutable air. 'They have two functions. They must preserve their beauty and they must work properly. It doesn't look good when clocks are not accurate.' But it is not quite punctuality - the French like a little leeway here - that perpetuates the task of the official timekeeper. France gives much weight to traditional skills, even as it adopts its share of American-style mass-produced consumer goods. Mr. Draux's task may be one of a kind, but it offers a glimpse of the enormous energy and cost the country puts into preserving its heirlooms, its great museums and, with those, many here believe, the national cultural identity. Arguably, the tradition of cherishing traditional workmanship and heritage is as much part of Europe as it is of France. But the French articulate more loudly their need to preserve distinction and often warn that globalized manufacture and trade, if left unfettered, may end up covering the world with a blanket of sameness. The government employs a legion of men and women - their numbers vary according to the projects under way - adept at carving antique wood or stone, repairing stucco or wrought iron, or rehabilitating yards of ancient frames and weavings. Such trades, and the unfashionable patience they require, may gain little public applause elsewhere, but here they rank as high as patriotism. Investing in history has its rewards. As one of the world's main tourist destinations, France received 75 million visitors in 2004. Versailles is seen by 10 million people a year. Curators say the palace, with its 700 rooms and thousands of windows, statues, chandeliers and curlicues, has been high maintenance ever since the 1660's when the Sun King, Louis XIV, first moved in. Today a staff of 900 looks after it, although hundreds more are now involved in the museum's most ambitious renovation project. The grand overhaul began in 2003 and is expected to take 17 years and more than $450 million in government and private money. Mr. Draux hopes the restoration will include some of the exceptional clocks that are in storage, awaiting repair. Clocks may not loom large in the lore about the extravagance of the royalty here, but by many accounts there was little free time. 'Clocks were very important here, even in the 17th century, because life at the court was full of rigor and rituals,' said Mathieu da Vinha, a historian at the Versailles Research Center. 'There were fixed times for the rising of the king, for prayers, for government meetings, for meals, for walks, for the hunt, for the concerts and so on. Everyone had to be on their toes.' Louis XIV had not one, but four clockmakers working for him, he said. 'When he traveled, the clockmakers, and many clocks, went with him.' That accounts for the legacy of the timepieces here, and for the work of Mr. Draux, who learned his craft from his father and grandfather. 'Each clock here is unique because they were made like a work of art, before the age of mass production,' he said. He stopped at the oldest clock, marked 1706, shining his flashlight on a complex array of weights, toothed wheels, bolts and pivots. 'Each one is so different, I don't really know a clock until I have taken it apart,' he murmured. 'And of course there are no instructions.' He activated the clock's music box and a mechanical show that usually is blocked 'because it causes traffic jams in this room.' As the small hammers sounded midday, a pair of eagles flapped their wings and a miniature king on a throne popped out. 'Hear that sound,' he said. 'It's still in great form.' Mr. Draux showed his awe before the clock of Passement, named after its maker, an engineer and astronomer. It was crowned with a glass sphere. Inside it, golden rings registered the movements of the planets. 'This is a perpetual calendar, it can show the date until the year 9999,' he said. Did he know how to repair it? No, he said, 'fortunately, there's been no need.' He moved along, sidestepping the staff applying beeswax to the interminable palace floors. It seemed easy to forget the time here. But Mr. Draux was pressing on, because he still had to fix a few laggards. As if to show he was not living in the past, Mr. Draux said he also looked after two giant electric clocks in the Stade de France, Paris's main sports stadium. But he does draw the line against modernity somewhere. 'I will not use a cellphone,' he said. 'That's too stressful. In my job, I have to concentrate.'

Subject: 'Theatre of Fish': The Codless Seas From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 06:12:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/books/review/11royte.html September 11, 2005 'Theatre of Fish': The Codless Seas By ELIZABETH ROYTE If Newfoundland's once vast bounty of cod was God's gift to European colonizers, then Newfoundlanders themselves must be God's gift to travel writers. In John Gimlette's frothy treatment, the island is absolutely teeming with impossibly colorful characters spouting nonstop entertainment. Essentially an exploration of the provincial psyche, ''Theatre of Fish: Travels Through Newfoundland and Labrador'' starts out in the capital, St. John's, where Gimlette develops the conceit that the province is a theater overrun by its audience. ''Everybody had a speech or a song or a little act,'' he writes. ''Dramas simply tumbled out of people, complete with prologues, heckling, applause and curtain calls.'' This explains why the book is organized into acts and scenes, and ends with both an epilogue and an afterword, as if Gimlette, who probably wouldn't be out of place on the boards himself, couldn't quite let his audience go. Around Newfoundland, north to Labrador and back again, Gimlette is a magnet for the cracked and the contagious, who tell us, in ways obvious and subtle, that the provincial character has been shaped by hardships without end: brutal weather, grinding poverty, bloody politics, clueless leaders and, most recently, codless seas. Newfoundlanders had ''little sense of destiny, just relief that they'd survived this far.'' Between 1954 and 1975 more than 250 outports, or fishing villages, were abandoned, and 50,000 people deserted Newfoundland in the decade after the cod fishery closed in 1992. Lawlessness is a persistent theme, along with anger at the government and a pervasive sense of failure. And yet this isn't a dark or depressing book: it's a little bit nutty, always beautifully written, and brimming with Gimlette's appreciation for the landscape and those who inhabit it. As in his acclaimed first book, ''At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay,'' Gimlette leads us, in fits and starts to match his journey, through the provinces' convoluted history. The narrative isn't always easy to follow, both because it's intrinsically confusing and because of the author's Briticisms (Gimlette works as a lawyer in London when he isn't poking around the world's forgotten corners). Every act contains some heated conflict, between Catholics and Protestants, English and French, liberals and tories, Indians and missionaries, confederates and patriots, merchants and fishermen. What is everyone fighting over? Everything from turf and fishing grounds to schools, religion, the right to perform mummery and whales. Traveling in the footsteps of his great-grandfather, a medical missionary who set out in 1893 expecting ''a little light teeth-pulling and evangelism,'' Gimlette travels by rental car, bus and ferry. He would have tried hitchhiking but the agent at the tourist office warned him against it. '' 'You might do something, sexually assault someone. . . . ' ''I must have looked surprised. '' 'Or they might sexually assault you.' '' These gifts to the writer are constant, and Gimlette is laugh-out-loud funny. His nature is to be thrilled, not put off, by the unruly and the odd. He's delighted by an ancient fisherman who cohabits with sheep and subsists on seaweed. And he understands the narrative value, if not always the pleasures, of a stormy evening spent cabinbound with two dimwitted drunks (''babies with red whiskers, perhaps, or experiments thrown up by the sea''), of appalling weather, dogs so hungry they'll devour hymnbooks, moose that crash into his tent, and the interior's dense and featureless forests, in which children are constantly getting lost (and found). A freak magnet, all Gimlette need do is arrive, and the schemers and dreamers appear from the molly fodge (lichen) and mish (heath) to spill their tales. Is it all for real? ''Believing the stories wasn't half as important as the way they were told.'' (Then again, Gimlette might have misunderstood half of what he heard. Newfoundlanders speak 66 dialects, he reports. Some voices were reminiscent of sea gulls. One old crab-man sounded ''like Irish rinsed in shingle,'' mummers jabbered ''in Dorset and walrus'' and the conversation of poachers sounded like ''West Country strained through a gale.'') In the outports, Gimlette finds a way of life barely changed for 400 years: bare-boned houses built by hand, residents happily surviving off caribou and sea birds. Many villages, with ''schools for three and bars for one,'' have no police presence or doctor, and depend on a weekly supply boat. When even that lifeline is canceled, outporters stoically float their saltboxes to another cove, ''dodging the feuds and finding the sun.'' Gimlette evokes much in few words. The Minister of Fish ''wafted me into a slug of leather.'' A bungalow ''glowed like a cheese.'' At a party, there were ''little trails of grand-children and turkey over every surface.'' On a bus, he meets a passenger with ''an ear so loathingly pierced that it could probably be unzipped in times of trouble and stashed away until things improved.'' In a few places the author gets carried away with these descriptions, and his frippery undermines comprehension. (For example: A cathedral looks like a cave, but ''instead of bats, it was decorated with local politicians, all spouting rainwater in times of civic urgency.'') He has a habit of starting scenes with a cryptic, apparently foreshadowing, sentence. It's meant to be dramatic, but sometimes it's a little confusing. Most of ''Theatre of Fish'' is larkily lighthearted, as if Gimlette were whistling in the province's eternal dark. But one act, sad beyond measure, defies even his optimism. In Labrador, the author finds the native people living in smashed towns defined by alcoholism, murder and suicide. Having lost their old customs -- hunting and migration -- and rituals, they despise the new ways, in which they're utterly dependent on the government. Gimlette doesn't know what to make of the situation. ''It was easy enough to ascertain the different parts but I could never assemble the whole.'' He's fine with that, but fears he's become impervious to the place's horror. ''Perhaps the voyager is no more than the voyeur, seeking pain and beauty that's always someone else's?'' Gimlette isn't one for summing up. His great-grandfather trekked through the region to enact reform; Gimlette, a hapless audience member, came merely to observe. Whether the drama of Newfoundland and Labrador is comedy or tragedy, he wisely refuses to say.

Subject: Where Poverty Drove Zapatistas From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 05:51:15 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/international/americas/11chiapas.html September 11, 2005 Where Poverty Drove Zapatistas, the Living Is No Easier By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. PATIHUITZ, Mexico - The shooting war between the Mexican government and Zapatista rebels in these fertile hills ended long ago, but the struggle for the hearts and minds of ordinary people like Rigoberto Álvarez goes on, with no clear winner in sight. Mr. Álvarez spent 15 years in the Zapatista rebel army, training in the mountains of southeastern Mexico, but quit four years ago, at the age of 46. Why? He had eight children he could not afford to educate. The government was offering cash incentives for each one in school. 'If I don't find a way to put them through school, my children won't learn to read and write any more than I do,' he said as he waited for hours recently under a broiling sun for the chance to enroll his son in a new secondary school. 'The struggle is too long. I am already old.' In recent years, the government has poured more money into roads, health clinics, schools and electrification projects in the mountainous backcountry where the Mayans live. Patihuitz, for instance, has electricity, running water and the new secondary school (the classes are to be held in a borrowed house). Officials have handed out cash scholarships and roofing materials. The Zapatistas, who long ago ceased to be a military threat, have set up communities that reject government aid and organize community projects. In some places, they have also set up farming cooperatives and small factories. But the grinding poverty that provoked the first rebel uprising in 1994 continues to trap the Indians. Neither the rebels' attempts at self-government nor the government's antipoverty programs have done much to change the odds against indigenous children in these rugged, jungle-covered mountains, according to Mayan farmers inside and outside the Zapatistas. 'It's the same as it ever was,' said Manuel Marín, a 46-year-old farmer in Patihuitz, as he gathered beans from one of his fields. 'There is no way to change this life.' Many adults are barely literate and speak little or no Spanish. Most of the schools the government has built are too small. Secondary schools are scarce and charge enrollment fees. The new clinics are often short of medicine. And while the cash grants for children in school buy food and clothes, they are not large enough to make saving possible, many parents say. 'Chiapas continues to be the poorest state in the country, as it was in 1990,' said Julio Boltvinik, a professor at the College of Mexico who studies poverty. 'The indigenous people really don't have anything that we would call a humane, dignified, modern developed life. They are living in an abysmally precarious state.' Nearly everyone works hard, but there is little profit for most. The 1994 free-trade agreement with the United States has driven prices for corn and beans brutally low. Government crop subsidies and supports have disappeared, erasing any gain from new welfare programs. As a result, farmers here must spend more to grow crops like corn than they can make selling them. So most now farm only a small section of their land, growing just enough corn and beans to survive and leaving the rest fallow. They look for other ways to earn cash, either hiring themselves out as labor for better-off farmers in the region or migrating to northern Mexico or the southern United States to pick fruit, several said. 'Things are going down the tubes faster and faster,' said Peter Rosset, an American professor who runs a center for agricultural policy in Oaxaca. 'You can't spend your whole life selling things for below the cost of production. That leads you to move to L.A.' Complicating matters has been the protracted conflict with the rebels, who, in January 1994, marched out of the Lacadona jungle and took over seven towns and dozens of large ranches, dividing the land among poor farmers who used to work on them for about 70 cents a day. A year later, the army drove the guerrillas, led by Subcommander Marcos, back into the mountains. Since then, an uneasy cease-fire has reigned while peace talks have dragged on without resolution. The rebels have declared they will not cooperate with the government until it fulfills promises it made in a 1996 accord to allow Indians to govern themselves to a large extent in regions where they are the majority. In 2003, frustrated with the inaction of Congress, the Zapatistas pushed ahead on their own, setting up five governmental centers with clinics and schools to oversee dozens of what they call 'autonomous municipalities.' The region, as a result, is a patchwork of rebel-run villages, military bases established by the Mexican government and villages where pro-government Indians are a majority. Army trucks with troops rumble up and down the roads. Rebel centers are closed to most outsiders and reporters. Subcommander Marcos, meanwhile, seems more intent on pushing mainstream politicians to the left than on trying to consolidate rebel territory or improve the rebels' agricultural output. In the last month, he has held a series of meetings with unionists, left-wing politicians and community groups, calling on them to carry out 'a national leftist, anticapitalist program' with the goal of 'a new constitution, which is another way of saying a new agreement for a new society.' The rebel leader has also attacked the most popular leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, suggesting that he and his party will sell out ordinary working people once in power. Mr. Marcos's anticapitalist talk seems out of touch with the daily life of many Indians here. A new constitution is the farthest thing from the mind of Pepe Luna López, for instance, who lives in San José del Carmen, a Zapatista autonomous community right next to the government-run village of Nuevo Morelia. Mr. López, who is 35, has seven children ages 4 to 16. They all sleep in a leaky one-room shack with dirt floors and walls of slender poles. None of the children are in school; he refuses to send them to the government school a quarter-mile away and the Zapatista government has sent no teacher. He farms only two acres of his five, and has no source of cash. His clothes are rags. He does not go to the health clinic down the road in Nuevo Morelia. 'We are resisting,' he said. 'We cannot accept anything from the government because they have not kept their word.' Another Zapatista farmer, Silvio López González, lives across the street from Nuevo Morelia's government school and health clinic. He, too, will not send his two children to either. But he acknowledges he is not much better off than he was before the 1994 uprising. 'We have 20 years in the struggle, and we are not even halfway there,' he said. For 30 years, Mr. Álvarez has lived in a small village called Tierra Blanca, once solidly in the rebel camp, above the main road about three miles away from the Zapatista center known as La Garrucha. He has 10 acres and a wood shack with a thatched roof. His eight children and his wife sleep on boards above the dirt floor. Two years ago, however, the government took electricity to Tierra Blanca. And when it started offering scholarships for children in school, Mr. Álvarez gave up the rebel cause and accepted the cash - about $30 a month. His only other source of hard currency was a few coffee trees on his land, which he said brought in about $400 in a good year, $200 in a bad one. He has also accepted the government's roofing and is building a new house next to the old one. His eldest son, Rigoberto, completed the sixth grade, then migrated to Baja California to pick tomatoes for $800 a month. He turned 15 in May, far away from home. Mr. Álvarez's eyes filled with tears when he explained that he could not afford to send Rigoberto to a secondary school; the nearest one then was two hours away. It is his second son, Alfonse, 12, who will go to the school in Patihuitz, a 45-minute walk away. Education, he says, is the only way to break the chain that binds his children to his mountainous plot of earth. 'Otherwise we die, and the children stay here suffering,' he said. 'That's the end of it. There is no other step.'

Subject: The Real Inventory From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 13, 2005 at 05:48:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/opinion/11sun4.html?ex=1284091200&en=cdeccf4f1d229a2c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 11, 2005 The Real Inventory By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Earlier this summer, I e-mailed my brother a list of the animals we're raising on this farm. I called it an inventory, but it was really a way of acknowledging that perhaps my wife and I have gone too far. There are now five pigs in various stages of growth, and a large, comic parade of ducks and geese that settle onto the lawn like so many ships in a green sea. There are chicks in the basement and chickens in the mulch. And there are the longtime partners in this enterprise, the horses, dogs and cats. My brother - who has three pigs and four goats himself - wrote back and said, 'Wouldn't it be great to know the real inventory?' That phrase has stuck in my head for the past few weeks. What I had sent my brother was a list of the animals that Lindy and I are responsible for - the ones we need to feed and water every day. But I hadn't even begun to count the creatures here that are responsible for themselves. Even among those, the animals I think of first are the ones that, from my perspective at least, have a direct relationship with us: the phoebes that nest above the kitchen door, the fox that steals hens from our coop from time to time, the wild turkeys that troop down out of the woods and into the pasture in winter, the red-tailed hawks that screech overhead, driving the poultry to cover. There are others, of course: hummingbirds in the bee balm and hollyhocks, pileated woodpeckers in the deep woods, catbirds in the elderberry. But these too belong to a circle of animals that seem scaled to human powers of observation. What makes the real inventory interesting is all the rest of the organisms that live on this place, whether I notice them or they notice me. There are times when I get a vague sense of how vast that inventory might be - nights when the crickets sound like a ringing in my ears, evenings when the low sun is refracted in the wings of the thousands of insects in flight over the pasture. But it is still only a vague sense, a catalog of life forms whose numbers I have to guess at. Somehow I instinctively imagine the abundance of life here in the shape of a pyramid - the kind of illustration that might appear in a schoolbook - with a pair of humans at the peak and the legions of soil bacteria at the base. But one of the things I've learned from living in the country is that life is not a pyramid with humans at the peak. It's an interrelationship that is far too complex to diagram so anthropocentrically and so simply. There is a map of need here that I cannot read but that governs me as well. I go about the endless tasks, the chores, the feeding and grooming of animals, and I pretend that somehow I'm separate and in charge, though the pigs and geese remind me that that is not exactly true. I have to remember that if I wrote up the real inventory, it would include myself as well.

Subject: Plunge Protection Teams From: David E.. To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 21:44:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Have you heard about plunge protection teams, George Stephanopholus has. Plunge protection teams are large scale efforts to stop declining markets. Markets that suddenly turn backup up late in the day are possible spoor of a PP team. I commented about them earlier. People have wondered who would and could bankroll such a scheme. Some think banks, but banks don't control lots of stocks. Some think government contractors are using private pension assets to bank the PPTeams. I dont know if PPTeams exist, but some apparently knowledgeable people do. Here is a link to some current rumblings. ive=true¶m=archive&garden=&minisite=

Subject: What is the Meaning For Us? From: Jesse To: David E.. Date Posted: Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 16:39:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dear David, How would this be relevant to personal investing if true? Actually I doubt this is more than just large scale trading by institutions that can occur at any time. But, even if true can smoothing a market be a problem for us?

Subject: Re: What is the Meaning For Us? From: David E.. To: Jesse Date Posted: Sat, Sep 17, 2005 at 13:37:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: If true, PPTeams are a worry (I am sorry for the metaphor- Katrina is on my mind) because they are like dikes. They protect against the pressure of declining prices - at some point the pressure can be so tremendous the dikes will fail. The resulting flood in falling prices could be much more drastic than a normal flood.

Subject: Gideons Knot From: Johnny5 To: Jesse Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 15, 2005 at 06:23:21 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: David needs to reply to this question. Terri also has dodged 2 of my recent questions - I don't understand why they do this Jesse. I thought we are all here trying to help each other. As Emma posts above about hedge funds, when things get so smooth - perhaps liquidity dries up - and if you want to sell a lot of your XOM stock Jesse and there are no buyers what shall you do? Your daughter wants those new 600 dollar jeans and no one will buy your MSFT stock so that you can fund the purchase. Its like this I think, its a little better to let all your kids get sick when young - then to have your adult population cut in a third when a massive outbreak occurs no? The government not allowing the smaller less catastrophic falls happen in the market may be pushing it so high up the cliff that the eventual fall will be too horrendous. Can you afford a 50% portfolio loss at 20? What about an 80% at 55? Between PIMCO, account 990N, hedge fund OPAQUE obscurities, regulation SHO naked shorting - I don't know why you want to believe there is NOT manipulation - the evidence is all around you friend. Please tell me why you choose to be positive like terri and not negative like Pete? Warren Buffet and Pete Weis have warned you about the DERIVATIVES - the financial weapons of mass destruction - do you think perhaps warren does not know what he is talking about? The SEC has its resources tied up in so much corruption - unbelievable - here look at thier recent list http://www.sec.gov/news/press.shtml According to this guy - it does not take a lot of crooks to do a lot of damage you see. http://bobosrevenge.blogspot.com/ First and foremost, what is obvious in reading the book is that a very small nucleus of very bad apples successfully raped and pillaged the thrift industry of many hundreds of billions of dollars. This was not a widespread series of isolated individuals who all happened to have the same larcenous idea at the same time – rather it was a group of predators who all were intertwined in a Gideon’s knot of complex flim-flams that wound up costing the nation more than the then national debt. What is shocking is that so few individuals could so dramatically destroy so much wealth, and leave the taxpayers footing the bill. Follow along and you will see why I believe that there are such strong similarities between that financial scandal, and the hedge fund/manipulation/naked short selling scandal that is unfolding even as we speak.

Subject: The Missing Link From: David E.. To: David E.. Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 21:45:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Link

Subject: What really cripples Africa From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 16:35:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: We have seen many articles and stories on how Africa is poor and in need of aid. Contrast these many stories with the recent Hurricane in the USA and how the US messed up the initial emergency reaction simply because Bush employed Mike Brown a highly incompetent idiot who was recommended as a friend-of-a-friend. We are well aware of incompetent idiots being employed - it is by no means new in any country. But what happens when a country is struggling to get ahead and the government employs a string of incompetent idiots who mess everything up at the lowest levels of government? the levels where practical intervention is needed. The following article gives a very clear indication of this very issue. http://free.financialmail.co.za/05/0909/cover/coverstory.htm No matter how much aid you give Africa - so long as we have Africa being lead by a series of small George Bushs we have a never ending problem on our hands. Any form of aid should be directly coupled with responsible governance. This is a tricky issue as we may have a situation where we are interfering with a country's sovereignty. Having said that, aid is already coupled with good governance in one form or other. I believe we should have a system of “positive interference”. Countries should be given ratings for good governance. Countries such as Niger who neglected the famine problem should receive a very low rating or Uganda who were recently caught for corrupting their health system, should also receive a low rating. Every time one or other scandal comes up – they should lose a couple of points on their good governance ratings. Then the aid agencies should tacitly compare their funding support to the rating system. In essence by stating if you run you country well, you get bonus points and access to more assistance.

Subject: Disney Takes Exception to China's Rules From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 12:14:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/business/worldbusiness/12disney.html Septmeber 12, 2005 Disney Takes Exception to China's Media Rules By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG - As Hong Kong Disneyland prepares to open on Monday, the Walt Disney Company will hold off building a similar theme park in mainland China until assured that it will be able to broadcast Disney shows on Chinese television, the company's president said here. The company's firm stance underlines the unhappiness of many Western media companies at the Chinese government's issuance on Aug. 1 of a new and stricter interpretation of the country's media ownership regulations. Presented by China's culture and propaganda officials as a way to preserve Chinese culture and limit foreign influence, the rules essentially bar foreign television channels like the Disney Channel. They also make it harder for foreign companies to produce movies and television shows in China even if they find local partners. Shanghai has been actively seeking a Disney theme park for several years, with strong support from Beijing's leaders. Discussions among Disney executives and Shanghai officials have caused considerable alarm in Hong Kong, which has invested $2.9 billion of taxpayers' money in helping to build a park here, mainly to reclaim land from the sea and to build roads and a subway line for the park. Hong Kong Disneyland would face strong competition if a similar theme park opened in Shanghai. But Robert A. Iger, who is Disney's president and chief operating officer and will succeed Michael D. Eisner as chief executive on Oct. 1, said before building another park in Shanghai, the company needed assurances that it would be able to use television to teach Chinese audiences about Disney characters. 'In order for us to even consider a park there, we need to be sure we have access to television,' Mr. Iger said in an interview at the new, oceanfront Hong Kong Disneyland Hotel here. Disney's ABC television division, which Mr. Iger used to run, recently sold its 'Desperate Housewives' show to Chinese television companies. But Mr. Iger said on Friday that Disney's goal was to introduce the Disney Channel to at least some Chinese cities, including Shanghai. 'The restrictions in general do thwart our efforts to grow television in that marketplace,' he said, while adding he remained confident that, 'over time, we'll gain access to the market.' Mr. Iger said other countries that have allowed the Disney channel had demanded that some local productions be included, and said this was a possibility for the Chinese market. He voiced confidence that the company would not run into censorship problems, saying that, 'it's rare that there are content issues for our product.' Disney does not necessarily need a majority stake in local productions in China either, Mr. Iger said, pointing out that Disney has a minority stake in the new theme park here. The Hong Kong government owns 57 percent and Disney owns the rest. 'We're more than willing to have a partner' for television productions in China, he said, adding that it would be 'safe to conclude we are in discussions' to set up television deals in China. Copyright violations and other thefts of intellectual property have been a chronic problem for many companies in China. But Mr. Iger said that he did not believe taking on local partners would make matters worse in this regard. 'If we don't do anything, Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse are going to end up there anyway, and we're not going to get anything,' he said. Mr. Iger said that after the Hong Kong Disneyland opening ceremony on Monday, he planned to fly on to Beijing 'to discuss Disney business initiatives in China in general.' But the trip is not intended primarily as a lobbying effort for the lifting of the restrictions, he added. If Mr. Iger wants to lobby, however, he could have an opportunity much sooner. Vice President Zeng Qinghong of China, a Politburo member with particular responsibility for propaganda, culture and Hong Kong issues, is scheduled to join Mr. Iger and Mr. Eisner for the ceremony. The new media rules on the mainland and the possibility of a delay in setting up a Disney theme park in Shanghai are likely to cement Hong Kong's role as a media hub for China in particular and for Asia over all. Tighter restrictions on the mainland also make the success or failure of Hong Kong Disneyland even more important to Disney's long-term performance in Asia. Some visitors have complained of crowding during 17 rehearsal days at Hong Kong Disney, when thousands of local residents were invited. The criticisms prompted questions about whether visitors, fearing overcrowding, might shun the park at first. Dick Yang, the manager of the Guangdong Nanhu International Travel Agency in Guangzhou, 100 miles up the Pearl River from here, said that the agency had expected to sell 1,200 tickets to Hong Kong Disneyland for September, but had only sold 400. Potential customers are leery of braving crowds when the park opens, and are unhappy that many Hong Kong hotels have raised prices by 20 percent in anticipation of an influx of park visitors, he said. But Mr. Yang noted that demand was brisk for the 'golden week' in early October, a weeklong national holiday. 'All the sales are concentrated in the peak seasons now,' he said. Instead of letting most people choose when to take vacations, the Chinese government schedules three golden weeks each year, national holidays during which most economic activity shuts down. That heavy concentration of tourism into three short spasms of travel poses a problem for Disney, which needs to keep the park fairly full all year long to cover investment costs. Hong Kong Disney is charging lower prices here on weekdays, the first time it has done so at any of its theme parks. The company is confident that through various techniques, like promoting the park at various times of year in different Asian countries, it will even out the number of visitors coming to the park each day, said Jay Rasulo, the chairman of Disney's theme parks and resorts division. 'There's nothing that we've learned in our rehearsal days,' he said, 'that has fundamentally changed how we do business here.'

Subject: The Master of the Golden Halo From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:47:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/arts/design/11kimm.html September 11, 2005 Fra Angelico, the Master of the Golden Halo By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN IN 1984 Pope John Paul II beatified Fra Angelico. He was already the people's choice. His tomb at Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome had long been a shrine. While Botticelli was still an acquired taste, Angelico was the most sought-after early Italian Renaissance painter for collectors, the darling of savvy 19th-century guidebook writers, who bestowed four stars on any site that displayed his golden-haloed gems. The Florentine convent of San Marco, where he was a Dominican friar, became the ultimate Fra Angelico pilgrimage destination: his fresco of an 'Annunciation' in one of the tiny, square whitewashed monk's cells epitomizes his austere, light-filled style, with Mary gravely kneeling on a simple low wood bench, hands across her chest, pink-cheeked and so exquisitely slight that she looks immaterial. The Fra Angelico show opening on Oct. 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is being advertised as the first comprehensive overview in years. It won't really be comprehensive. The frescoes and big altarpieces don't travel. But it should be memorable. The 550th anniversary of Angelico's death is its arcane and unnecessary excuse. Capitalizing on fresh scholarship, the discovery of new works and the reconstruction of altarpieces that have not been put together for who knows how long, the show may raise some eyebrows among scholars for its early dating of pictures and, in the process, challenge the popular view that he was not an innovator. Giorgio Vasari described Angelico as 'the most humble and modest' of painters, a naif , working directly from divine inspiration, refusing even 'to retouch or improve any of his pictures, but to leave them in the state to which he had first brought them, believing that this was the will of God.' After that he came to be perceived as a sweet, saintly innocent, behind his times. But research over the last half-century or so has altered that wishful image. Picking up on these new findings, Laurence Kanter, the curator of the Met's show, will present him as an intellectual, preceding Masaccio and others at the cutting edge. Born Guido di Pietro in the countryside north of Florence, an established artist when he joined the Dominican order sometime around 1420, so the show argues, he dominated Tuscan art for three decades, running the biggest, most prestigious workshop in Florence before becoming the leading painter in Rome, where he worked for the pope. It may just turn out that because he has been so beloved for so long, people stopped looking at him. His work was taken for granted. A fresh survey is an excuse to revisit Fra Angelico's heavenly pictures. And it may burnish his reputation in ways that even beatification can't.

Subject: For Mali Villagers, France Is Workplace From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:26:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/international/africa/11mali.html September 11, 2005 For Mali Villagers, France Is a Workplace and Lifeline By MICHAEL KAMBER and MARC LACEY SOMANKIDI, Mali - This remote village in northwestern Mali does not have the art museums, cafes and trendy shopping of Paris. But it does have a half-dozen public wells, a health clinic and birthing clinic, stately mosques and scores of concrete houses with electricity. 'You see the condition of this village today?' Hamed Diabira asked proudly. 'This is all due to our children living in France.' Somankidi and villages like it in Mali's Kaye region send their young to Paris in a tradition that goes back nearly six decades, to when Mali was a French colony and Malians were welcomed in France as laborers. The long ties between France and its former colonies in Africa are shakier these days, and the mood here is fraught after several fires in crowded Paris apartment buildings and hotels in the last few months killed nearly 50 African immigrants. A majority of the dead were children, and many had come from Mali. After the fires, the French authorities began evicting Africans from substandard housing units, a move that did not sit well in Somankidi. 'We can't prove it, but everyone here knows the fires were criminal acts,' Fodie Tounkara, a village elder, said in early September. 'They are putting pressure on us to leave.' In this country of nearly 12.3 million people where more than 70 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, many Somankidi residents are better off than the norm. Every extended family, elders say, has at least one relative sending earnings home from France. Those remittances, estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars, exceed the total amount that the French government gives Mali in aid, Malian officials say. More than 120,000 Malians are estimated to be in France, most of them illegally. When President Jacques Chirac visited Mali in 2003, it was no surprise that Malians lining the road for a peek at his motorcade cried, 'Visa! Visa!' And it was also no surprise that Mr. Chirac's call during the visit for a crackdown on illegal immigration to France was not joined by his Malian counterpart, President Amadou Toumani Touré. In France, illegal immigrants are widely seen as taking the jobs of French citizens and adding to the crime rate. In Mali, there is a distinctly different view. 'Our countrymen contribute decisively to the development of their country,' Mr. Touré said during Mr. Chirac's visit. Somankidi's elders say that contribution is not appreciated and reciprocated in France. They say they may soon call for an end to immigration there and urge the 600 or so villagers already in France to return home. The elders cite mistreatment their people have faced in France, including police harassment and the constant threat of deportation. Already, immigration to other countries, like Spain and Britain, from Somankidi has begun. Before the first wave of immigration in the early 1950's, villagers say, Somankidi was agricultural, and people lived and died based on the vagaries of the rains. The French government and, after independence in 1960, the Malian government gave Somankidi little support. Before the improvements financed by the migrants, villagers lived in mud houses and used kerosene lamps, residents said. They had no schools and no hospital. Relatively few in Somankidi get French visas. Most migrants head off by foot to the north, then riding on trucks and buses when they can, go through Mauritania or Algeria to Morocco, across the Mediterranean Sea to Spain and then France. At least three people from Somankidi have died in recent years on the journey. Warzanka Drame lost her 30-year-old son, Sambala Kebe, in April. 'I don't know exactly how he died,' she said. He left three daughters and a year-old son, who survive on money sent home by Mr. Kebe's brothers in France. Somankidi's migration is organized. Village leaders collect money so the most promising young people, mostly men, can go and send their earnings home. In Paris, they are expected to join a village association that helps keep people from Somankidi together there. Divided families are the norm in Somankidi. 'He left right after our wedding,' Assa Cisse said of her husband, Checkna Tounkara, who headed for France four years ago. News of the fires in Paris hit close to home here and across Mali. 'I immediately thought of my relatives in Paris,' said Macki Tall, a restaurateur in Bamako who has spent time in Paris. Habib Sissoko, the president of Mali's Olympic committee who frequently travels to Paris, said he was saddened by the grim conditions in which Malians there live. But he said he understood their wanderlust. 'Those who go abroad are the brave ones,' he said. 'They are like the pioneers in America who headed west. We Malians want to meet the unknown.' But the unknown is often disappointing. Fetching water with a bucket. Living packed in tight. No electricity. Such conditions are not uncommon in Mali, but are far from the romanticized notions of Paris the migrants have before they set out. In early September, Hamara Cisse, 24, spoke of his time as a migrant. His father had been a laborer in France for 20 years. In 2001, after marrying, Mr. Cisse replicated his father's journey. He lived in a crowded guesthouse in Aubervilliers, a rundown immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris. 'Nothing was easy there,' said Mr. Cisse, who described sleeping in a room with 12 other men. Looking for work was complicated by frequent spot checks by the French police, who arrested him three times because he did not have the proper documents, always releasing him a few days later after he claimed to be someone else, he said. After looking for many months, Mr. Cisse found a job with a Chinese building contractor, who paid him 40 euros, almost $50, for a 10-hour day. In January, the police raided his work site and took him to jail. He was later deported to Mali. 'In France, without documents, you're considered less than a human being,' Mr. Cisse said. In a moment, though, he said he would return soon.

Subject: The Chinese, Too, May Be Worth Copying From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:24:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/business/worldbusiness/11advi.html September 11, 2005 The Chinese, Too, May Be Worth Copying By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN THE American economy is more open than Western Europe's, and may be better able to respond to challenges from China and elsewhere, says Gerard Kleisterlee, chief executive of Royal Philips Electronics, the multinational company based in Amsterdam. Here are excerpts from a conversation: Q. Many Americans think that Western Europe is growing very slowly and faces stagnation. Is that right? A. That's also the popular image among European executives and policy makers. In a number of countries, initiatives are being taken to reform the economy and reform labor policies, and to deregulate, because we have excessive regulation. But the pace of change is simply too slow. Q. Is the economic emergence of China and other countries going to change the world order as we know it? A. It is going to have an impact on the world order. But I don't see it as a one-sided debate where the Europeans or Americans see the emergence of China and India just as a competitive threat. It's also an opportunity, because every day more people are joining the economy and becoming consumers. They need products. China has a balanced import-export situation with the rest of the world. A lot of textile and consumer electronics are being exported out of China. But on the other hand, things like airplanes and sophisticated equipment and tools are being imported into China. As long as the Western world continues to invest in the education of our children and in the quality of universities and research institutes, they can stay ahead of the game in terms of technological development. Q. But we're seeing entire industries moving offshore. Is that cause for alarm? A. Yes, we will see some industries migrate, but we will also see new opportunities on the high-tech side and the services side. When Europeans ask me, 'What is the future of European manufacturing?' I say, 'Apparently we are good in complex systems, whether it is Airbus or high-end cars.' Both the Americans and Europeans are good at this. We have the infrastructures, we have the know-how, we have the technology. We can put it together. China is focused on mass manufacturing. Q. One of the debates Americans have is about whether the Chinese can innovate. They can copy, but can they develop new products that reach the market? A. I see no reason why they couldn't. I would not stereotype them as copiers. They're working hard to develop their own indigenous technologies and their own standards. Q. What do you make in China? A. We manufacture some percentage of all the things we sell in China. We have a fully integrated medical systems business, but we also import high-end equipment from the United States and Europe into China. We have our semiconductor operations, but no wafer fabrication plants there. Those are in the United States, Europe and Singapore. We are the largest multinational in China measured by total activity level, which was $9 billion last year, and measured by exports volume. Of that $9 billion, $3 billion was sold in China and $6 billion was exported. We are not the largest by total dollars invested or total employment, but on the basis of these other two measures, we are. Q. How do you think American companies are faring in the new world order? A. I think they are responding fairly well. Take the top 100 companies in market capitalization and you see that American companies are well represented in that league. Neither the emergence of the Japanese, nor the Koreans, nor the Chinese and after them the Indians, fundamentally changes the picture. Yes, it brings new companies into the game. You will have some shakeout, but, by and large, this is the strongest economy in the world. The American economy works because of its openness and its market-focused competitiveness. There is a high degree of adaptability. You may have U.S. companies that go under, but you will have more that survive and prosper. Q. Which American companies do you respect the most? A. General Electric is a formidable competitor. It commands a lot of respect because of its processes. On a different front, in I.B.M., people are pioneers in new breakthroughs. We also learn from them and adapt. If I see something good, I take it. Q. So you're learning from American multinationals? A. Of course, but I'm also learning from Chinese start-ups. To me, the whole essence of prospering as a business is to know that every day, everywhere, there is something you can learn. You learn from successes, but you also learn from failures. You need to have that mind-set. Q. What have you learned from Chinese start-ups? A. How to be extremely pragmatic in getting yourself into the market. I have taken my board to China a few times, not only to have internal discussions, but also to go out into the marketplace. We talk with Lenovo and TCL and you see how their young management teams have built their businesses with very low overhead and are very focused. Sometimes we make things too complex. We can be overly focused on process, but the Chinese are very focused on results. They are learning faster than you can imagine.

Subject: Georgia's New Poll Tax From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:07:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/12/opinion/12mon1.html September 12, 2005 Georgia's New Poll Tax In 1966, the Supreme Court held that the poll tax was unconstitutional. Nearly 40 years later, Georgia is still charging people to vote, this time with a new voter ID law that requires many people without driver's licenses - a group that is disproportionately poor, black and elderly - to pay $20 or more for a state ID card. Georgia went ahead with this even though there is not a single place in the entire city of Atlanta where the cards are sold. The law is a national disgrace. Until recently, Georgia, like most states, accepted many forms of identification at the polls. But starting this month, it is accepting only government-issued photo ID's. People with driver's licenses are fine. But many people without them have to buy a state ID card to vote, at a cost of $20 for a five-year card or $35 for 10 years. The cards are sold in 58 locations, in a state with 159 counties. It is outrageous that Atlanta does not have a single location. (The state says it plans to open one soon.) But the burden is also great on people in rural parts of the state. The Republicans who pushed the law through, and Gov. Sonny Perdue, also a Republican, who signed it, say that it is intended to prevent fraud. But it seems clear that it is about keeping certain people away from the polls, for political advantage. The vast majority of fraud complaints in Georgia, according to its secretary of state, Cathy Cox, involve absentee ballots, which are unaffected by the new law. Ms. Cox says she is unaware of a single documented case in recent years of fraud through impersonation of a voter at the polls. Citizens who swear they are indigent are exempt from the fee. But since the law does not define who is indigent, many people may be reluctant to swear and risk a criminal penalty. More important, the 24th Amendment, which outlawed poll taxes in federal elections, and the Supreme Court's decision striking down state poll taxes applied to all Americans, not just to the indigent. A Georgian who votes only in presidential elections, and buys a five-year card to do so, would be paying $10 per election. That is no doubt more than many people on fixed incomes, who struggle to get by but are not legally indigent, are willing to pay to vote. If Georgia's law remains in place, other states are likely to follow. There is also growing concern among voting-rights advocates that a self-appointed election reform commission, led by James Baker, the former secretary of state who played a troubling role in the disputed 2000 election, and former President Jimmy Carter, may be about to propose national voter ID standards that would similarly make it harder for poor people and blacks to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union is planning to challenge Georgia's law. It will have several strong legal claims, starting with the 24th Amendment. The Supreme Court said in 1966, in striking down the poll tax, that 'the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened.' It still is.

Subject: Does the Truth Lie Within? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 05:24:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/magazine/11FREAK.html September 11, 2005 Does the Truth Lie Within? By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT The Accidental Diet Seth Roberts is a 52-year-old psychology professor at the University of California at Berkeley. If you knew Roberts 25 years ago, you might remember him as a man with problems. He had acne, and most days he woke up too early, which left him exhausted. He wasn't depressed, but he wasn't always in the best of moods. Most troubling to Roberts, he was overweight: at 5-foot-11, he weighed 200 pounds. When you encounter Seth Roberts today, he is a clear-skinned, well-rested, entirely affable man who weighs about 160 pounds and looks 10 years younger than his age. How did this happen? It began when Roberts was a graduate student. First he had the clever idea of turning his personal problems into research subjects. Then he decided that he would use his own body as a laboratory. Thus did Roberts embark on one of the longest bouts of scientific self-experimentation known to man - not only poking, prodding and measuring himself more than might be wise but also rigorously recording every data point along the way. Self-experimentation, though hardly a new idea in the sciences, remains rare. Many modern scientists dismiss it as being not nearly scientific enough: there is no obvious control group, and you can hardly run a double-blind experiment when the researcher and subject are the same person. But might the not-quite-scientific nature of self-experimentation also be a good thing? A great many laboratory-based scientific experiments, especially those in the medical field, are later revealed to have been marred by poor methodology or blatant self-interest. In the case of Roberts, his self-interest is extreme, but at least it is obvious. His methodology is so simple - trying a million solutions until he finds one that works - that it creates the utmost transparency. In some ways, self-experimentation has more in common with economics than with the hard sciences. Without the ability to run randomized experiments, economists are often left to exploit whatever data they can get hold of. Let's say you're an economist trying to measure the effect of imprisonment on crime rates. What you would ideally like to do is have a few randomly chosen states suddenly release 10,000 prisoners, while another few random states lock up an extra 10,000 people. In the absence of such a perfect experiment, you are forced to rely on creative proxies - like lawsuits that charge various states with prison overcrowding, which down the road lead to essentially random releases of large numbers of prisoners. (And yes, crime in those states does rise sharply after the prisoners are released.) What could be a more opportunistic means of generating data than exploiting your own body? Roberts started small, with his acne, then moved on to his early waking. It took him more than 10 years of experimenting, but he found that his morning insomnia could be cured if, on the previous day, he got lots of morning light, skipped breakfast and spent at least eight hours standing. Stranger yet was the fix he discovered for lifting his mood: at least one hour each morning of TV viewing, specifically life-size talking heads - but never such TV at night. Once he stumbled upon this solution, Roberts, like many scientists, looked back to the Stone Age for explication. Anthropological research suggests that early humans had lots of face-to-face contact every morning but precious little after dark, a pattern that Roberts's TV viewing now mimicked. It was also the Stone Age that informed his system of weight control. Over the years, he had tried a sushi diet, a tubular-pasta diet, a five-liters-of-water-a-day diet and various others. They all proved ineffective or too hard or too boring to sustain. He had by now come to embrace the theory that our bodies are regulated by a 'set point,' a sort of Stone Age thermostat that sets an optimal weight for each person. This thermostat, however, works the opposite of the one in your home. When your home gets cold, the thermostat turns on the furnace. But according to Roberts's interpretation of the set-point theory, when food is scarcer, you become less hungry; and you get hungrier when there's a lot of food around. This may sound backward, like telling your home's furnace to run only in the summer. But there is a key difference between home heat and calories: while there is no good way to store the warm air in your home for the next winter, there is a way to store today's calories for future use. It's called fat. In this regard, fat is like money: you can earn it today, put it in the bank and withdraw it later when needed. During an era of scarcity - an era when the next meal depended on a successful hunt, not a successful phone call to Hunan Garden - this set-point system was vital. It allowed you to spend down your fat savings when food was scarce and make deposits when food was plentiful. Roberts was convinced that this system was accompanied by a powerful signaling mechanism: whenever you ate a food that was flavorful (which correlated with a time of abundance) and familiar (which indicated that you had eaten this food before and benefited from it), your body demanded that you bank as many of those calories as possible. Roberts understood that these signals were learned associations - as dependable as Pavlov's bell - that once upon a time served humankind well. Today, however, at least in places with constant opportunities to eat, these signals can lead to a big, fat problem: rampant overeating. So Roberts tried to game this Stone Age system. What if he could keep his thermostat low by sending fewer flavor signals? One obvious solution was a bland diet, but that didn't interest Roberts. (He is, in fact, a serious foodie.) After a great deal of experimenting, he discovered two agents capable of tricking the set-point system. A few tablespoons of unflavored oil (he used canola or extra light olive oil), swallowed a few times a day between mealtimes, gave his body some calories but didn't trip the signal to stock up on more. Several ounces of sugar water (he used granulated fructose, which has a lower glycemic index than table sugar) produced the same effect. (Sweetness does not seem to act as a 'flavor' in the body's caloric-signaling system.) The results were astounding. Roberts lost 40 pounds and never gained it back. He could eat pretty much whenever and whatever he wanted, but he was far less hungry than he had ever been. Friends and colleagues tried his diet, usually with similar results. His regimen seems to satisfy a set of requirements that many commercial diets do not: it was easy, built on a scientific theory and, most important, it did not leave Roberts hungry. In the academic community, Roberts's self-experimentation has found critics but also serious admirers. Among the latter are the esteemed psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who has praised Roberts for 'approaching data in an exploratory spirit more than, or at least in addition to, a confirmatory spirit' and for seeing data analysis 'as the opportunity to confront a surprise.' Rosenthal went so far as to envision 'a time in the future when 'self-experimenter' became a new part-time (or full-time) profession.' But will Seth Roberts's strange weight-control solution - he calls it the Shangri-La Diet - really work for the millions of people who need it? We may soon find out. With the Atkins diet company filing for bankruptcy, America is eager for its next diet craze. And a few spoonfuls of sugar may be just the kind of sacrifice that Americans can handle. Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the authors of 'Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.' More information on the academic research behind this column is at www.freakonomics.com.

Subject: A Shameful Proclamation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 17:32:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/opinion/10sat2.html September 10, 2005 A Shameful Proclamation On Thursday, President Bush issued a proclamation suspending the law that requires employers to pay the locally prevailing wage to construction workers on federally financed projects. The suspension applies to parts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. By any standard of human decency, condemning many already poor and now bereft people to subpar wages - thus perpetuating their poverty - is unacceptable. It is also bad for the economy. Without the law, called the Davis-Bacon Act, contractors will be able to pay less, but they'll also get less, as lower wages invariably mean lower productivity. The ostensible rationale for suspending the law is to reduce taxpayers' costs. Does Mr. Bush really believe it is the will of the American people to deny the prevailing wage to construction workers in New Orleans, Biloxi and other hard-hit areas? Besides, the proclamation doesn't require contractors to pass on the savings they will get by cutting wages from current low levels. Around New Orleans, the prevailing hourly wage for a truck driver working on a levee is $9.04; for an electrician, it's $14.30. Republicans have long been trying to repeal the prevailing wage law on the grounds that the regulations are expensive and bureaucratic; weakening it was even part of the Republican Party platform in 1996 and 2000. Now, in a time of searing need, the party wants to achieve by fiat what it couldn't achieve through the normal democratic process. In a letter this week to Mr. Bush urging him to suspend the law, 35 Republican representatives noted approvingly that Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and the elder George Bush had all suspended the law during 'emergencies.' For the record, Mr. Roosevelt suspended it for two weeks in 1934, to make time to clear up contradictions between it and another law. Mr. Nixon suspended it for six weeks in 1971 as part of his misbegotten attempt to control spiraling inflation. And Mr. Bush did so after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, two weeks before he was defeated by Bill Clinton, who quickly reinstated it after assuming the presidency. If Mr. Bush does not rescind his proclamation voluntarily, Congress should pass a law forcing him to do so.

Subject: On Oil Supply, Opinions Aren't Scarce From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 13:35:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10nocera.html September 10, 2005 On Oil Supply, Opinions Aren't Scarce By Joseph Nocera We're halfway through the hydrocarbon era,' my old friend T. Boone Pickens has been saying for the last couple of years. You may remember Mr. Pickens as the most famous corporate raider of the 1980's, but he has spent his life in the oil patch. A geologist by training, Mr. Pickens founded Mesa Petroleum at the age of 26 and ran it for the next 40 years. Now, at 77, he works the oil patch in a different way, running a pair of energy-oriented hedge funds in Dallas. A folksy line like Mr. Pickens's - it sticks with you. But I hadn't realized until recently that it also meant Mr. Pickens had taken sides in a surprisingly heated debate. He subscribes to what is being called the peak oil hypothesis, which holds that there simply isn't very much new oil left to be found in the world. As a result, we are currently in the gradual process of draining the more than a trillion barrels of proven reserves that are still in the ground. And when it's gone, it's gone. The best-known 'peakist' these days is Matthew R. Simmons, who runs Simmons & Company, an investment bank and consulting firm in Houston specializing in energy companies. Mr. Simmons's essential belief, he told me recently, is that energy demand is about to exceed supply significantly. And that was pre-Hurricane Katrina - before the storm damaged refineries, pipelines and offshore rigs all along the Gulf Coast. 'I would argue that we are in a serious energy crisis,' Mr. Simmons added. He forecasts increasing oil prices. There is a second group of forecasters, though, who argue with equal vehemence that the world is not in an energy crisis and it probably won't face one for a very long time. The best-known proponent of this view is Daniel Yergin, author of 'The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power,' a history of oil that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize, and the founder of a rather sizable consulting firm, Cambridge Energy Research Associates. 'This is the fifth time that we're supposedly running out of oil,' Mr. Yergin said. But, he added, each time new technologies made it possible for oil companies to find new sources of oil and extract new oil from old sources. His firm released a survey a few months ago that says from 2004 to 2010, world oil supplies will have increased by as much as 16 million barrels a day, 'outstripping the likely demand increase.' Most of those who hold this view say that oil prices will eventually drift down. DOES it surprise you to learn that when it comes to one of most vital resources known to man, there could be such an incredible divergence of opinion? It sure surprised me. Even some of the oil majors are on opposites sides, with Chevron taking the peakist view, and Exxon Mobil more aligned with the Yergin camp. There are three reasons for this lack of consensus. First, because oil is buried underground, it is hard to measure. So basic 'facts' - like how much oil remains, and how much can be ultimately extracted - are as much the product of guesswork as science. Second, the world of oil can be shrouded in secrecy. As an article in The New York Times Magazine recently pointed out, Saudi Arabia, the biggest producer of them all, won't even allow its reserve and production data to be audited. Finally, though, the fact that this enormous divergence has developed speaks volumes about the very different way each camp views the world. 'It's the geologists on one side and the economists on the other side,' was the way the energy analyst Seth Kleinman of PFC Energy in Washington put it recently. That's an overgeneralization, of course, but one that contains plenty of truth. The two sides do agree on one thing: the recent run-up in oil prices, which began well before Hurricane Katrina, has come about because demand for oil has caught up with supply. The enormous burst of economic activity in China, the generally good economic conditions in the United States and the rest of the West - these and other factors have led to a surge in oil demand. 'The world produces about 85 million barrels a day,' Mr. Pickens said. 'That's where demand is now, too. And I've seen forecasts that demand is going to be higher than that by the end of the year.' What's more, Mr. Pickens added, pre-Hurricane Katrina refining capacity was already at the breaking point, which is another point that is pretty unarguable. 'Refineries were operating at 96 percent,' he said. 'You can't operate anything at 96 percent. It'll start breaking down.' That last paragraph, though, encapsulates the world view of the peakists: all the easy deals have been done. One reason refineries are operating at such high capacity is that no new refineries have been built in the United States for some 30 years, which Mr. Simmons believes can be attributed to the shortsightedness of the industry. 'My theory was that if the industry didn't expand like crazy the U.S. would find itself running short of energy.' It didn't, and we are. Even more troubling, the pessimists believe that it is going to be increasingly difficult to replace the oil that we're now using up. 'Let me give you a number that is pretty shocking when you hear it,' Mr. Pickens said. 'The world uses 30 billion barrels of oil a year. There is no way we're replacing 30 billion barrels of oil. Just a million barrels a day is 1,000 wells producing 1,000 barrels. That's big.' How do the economists counter the geologists' arguments? They don't deny that it is hard to find new oil. But they believe that whenever tight supplies push up the price of oil, the rising price itself becomes our salvation. For one thing, higher prices temper demand as people begin to change their energy habits. (Mr. Pickens believes this as well.) Surprisingly, this has not yet happened even as gasoline at the pump has more than doubled in the last year or so. But inevitably, there will come a point when it will change behaviors. Secondly, they believe higher prices spur innovation. Oil that couldn't be extracted profitably at, say, $15 a barrel, can be enormously profitable at $60 a barrel. In the view of Mr. Yergin and his allies, in fact, this is exactly what has been happening. They point to new oil that is coming out of the Caspian Sea, deepwater drilling in Brazil and the oil sands in northern Alberta as examples. The 16 million barrels a day of new oil Mr. Yergin expects to see by 2010, he told me, 'is predicated on $25-to-$30 oil.' If oil stays higher than that, then there will be even more investment, and not just in ways to extract oil, but in new refineries and pipelines and other infrastructure. If you mention this theory to a hard-core peakist like Mr. Simmons, you'd better be ready for an earful. 'These economists are so smug,' he said derisively. 'All they talk about is the magic of the free market. They don't seem to understand that this is incredibly capital intensive.' He pointed to those Canadian oil sands - where, he said, Shell Canada recently announced it was going to raise its investment to $7.3 billion from $4 billion to produce an additional 100,000 barrels a day. 'Just think about that; $3.3 billion for just 100,000 barrels,' he said. 'Doesn't that tell you something?' Of course the economists can be just as dismissive of the peakists. 'I've gone from disagreeing with them to debunking them,' scoffed the energy consultant Michael C. Lynch. 'I believe the world will expand the reserve base. If you put a road in the middle of the jungle, that can wind up expanding the resource base.' 'By most estimates,' he added, 'total global resources is eight trillion barrels of oil. They are saying only a small percentage of that is recoverable, and you can't do anything about it. We are saying the amount that is recoverable expands over time.' I wish I had the confidence to make my own forecast, but in this case, I don't. What I do know - what we all know - is that oil is a finite resource. Surely, the peakists are right about that. What I also know is historically, the economists have generally been right about how the price of oil has wound up fixing the problem. As Gary N. Ross, the chief executive of the PIRA Energy Group, puts it: 'Price is the only thing that matters. The new threshold of price will do its magic on the supply-and-demand side.' After all, it always has before. And it will again. Until it doesn't.

Subject: The New Prize: Alternative Fuels From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 13:27:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/10/business/10alternative.html September 10, 2005 The New Prize: Alternative Fuels By DANNY HAKIM DETROIT - A week ago, Benjamin Kleber was spending $3.39 a gallon at a gasoline station in Maryland when he noticed an obscure decal on his minivan. 'It's this sticker about the size of a business card that's stuck on the side of the gas flap that I never really paid attention to,' said Mr. Kleber, a 25-year-old electrical engineer for a government contractor. The decal said he could be using E85, a fuel cocktail that consists mostly of grain alcohol, or corn-based ethanol, with a splash of gasoline. Production of ethanol fuel, much of it blended in small doses with regular gasoline, has doubled to more than three billion gallons in the last half decade. This year, propelled by rising gasoline prices, E85 is finding new life as an alternative fuel. It remains hard to find, to say the least, in part because many oil companies have no desire to put a competing product in stations that carry their banner. But the number of stations offering E85 has nearly doubled since January, to more than 460, mostly in corn-growing states like Minnesota. And because of incentives included in recently passed energy legislation, and the fact that E85 is now about 40 to 50 cents cheaper than a gallon of regular gasoline, E85 backers are expecting the surge to accelerate. Being an engineer, Mr. Kleber had heard of E85. And after spending $58 to fill his 1998 Plymouth Voyager with regular unleaded last Sunday - 'staggering,' he said - he went home and began to do some research. He discovered that a station nearby sold the fuel for $2.67 a gallon. At current prices that could save him more than $14 a fillup. So he decided he would switch to a fuel from the Midwest instead of the Mideast. 'I think we go through fossil fuel like a kid in a candy store without any concern about what happens when it runs out,' he said. In a nation that has shrugged at conservation for two decades, the impact of Hurricane Katrina on gasoline prices has been a bracing reality check. All year long, as prices have ticked up, a movement has been afoot away from jumbo sport utility vehicles and toward more fuel-efficient vehicles. That said, it would take a radical change to wean the country off foreign oil. Still, more than ever before, the nation's roads are a moving laboratory with all manner of alternatives to gasoline combustion engines, often being driven by average Americans, if in small numbers. There are cars powered by natural gas, by hydrogen fuel cells and by French fry grease. There are electric cars and hybrid electric cars that can be plugged into the power grid. What separates E85 is that more than four million American cars and trucks have the ability to run on it right now, even though the majority of people who own these so-called flex-fuel vehicles are not even aware of the ability. Already, Brazil has turned to ethanol en masse, though the fuel there is derived from the more prevalent local crop, sugarcane. Gregory J. Cobb recently replaced premium gasoline pumps at two of his five Indiana stations with E85. At one station near South Bend, he said, he was selling 24,000 gallons of E85 a month compared with the 1,700 gallons of premium gas he had been selling. 'One of the customers drove about 30 miles to the station; she said: 'I'm putting my dad's corn in the car. I'd rather do that than pay OPEC,' ' Mr. Cobb said. 'That's why we did it, too. If we're going to get diverse, away from dependency on foreign oil, we have to do this. And to be honest, our premium sales weren't doing much.' In Madison, Wis., Rebecca Bell and her husband, Kevin, started using E85 in the last couple of weeks to fuel their Ford Explorer and their Chevy minivan. They have also started carpooling with neighbors. 'I feel better that it's coming from the United States,' said Ms. Bell, 34, a vice president of a veterinary drug company and a mother of three. 'If we continue to use foreign oil, we're always going to be in somebody's hip pocket.' Adrian Moses, a 55-year-old computer consultant in a suburb of St. Paul, said he had for several years used E85 to fuel his Ford Ranger pickup. 'I do it because it's the right thing, not because of economics,' he said, adding that it was 'cleaner for the environment' and 'made here in the Midwest, not in the Middle East.' Now, here are some of the catches. For starters, it's hard to find the stuff. There are roughly 180,000 gasoline stations nationwide and fewer than 500 with E85. And ethanol can take us only so far. Huge tracts of farmland would have to be converted to corn production to provide enough fuel for significant portions of the American automobile fleet. A recent study published in the journal BioScience forecast that for all cars and trucks to run on ethanol by 2048, 'virtually the entire country, with the exception of cities, would be covered with corn plantations.' Using more farmland to produce ethanol would also drive up food prices. And E85 cannot be transported through gasoline pipelines, because it sucks up grime and water. E85 is also less energy-dense than gasoline, so a driver goes a bit less far on a gallon. Its current cost advantage is dependent on a 43-cents-a-gallon subsidy, versus a roughly 40-cent tax on a gallon of gasoline. Environmentalists have generally viewed the rise of flex-fuel vehicles as a boondoggle for automakers, because they are afforded fuel economy credits for making them. The credits have had the effect of driving up oil consumption. Many consumers who buy flex-fuel vehicles are not even made aware of the capability. On the upside, ethanol is a domestic resource and most studies indicate that it reduces emissions of both smog-forming pollutants and global warming gases, the amount depending on how it is produced. An emerging process of creating ethanol from agricultural waste like cereal straw has the potential for far greater emissions reductions and more efficient land use. This so-called cellulose ethanol has much greater potential than current ethanol, said Michael Wang, a researcher at the Center for Transportation Research at the Argonne National Laboratory, but, he added, 'the technology has not arrived.' David Friedman, a senior analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group, said, 'ethanol has great potential to help the U.S. kick our oil habit, but that's 20 or 30 years away.' 'Corn ethanol can help in the short term, but it has serious limitations, and none of this is going to work if we don't dramatically improve the efficiency of our cars and trucks.' Certainly, ethanol has its friends, like corn growers, and its enemies. In July, Corn Cob Bob, an ethanol industry mascot, was banished from Canada Day celebrations in Ottawa. Shell, a sponsor of the festivities, had expressed discomfort at the mascot's participation. 'Good old Corn Cob represents an industry association of ethanol producers, which includes some of our competitors in the retail fuel category,' said Jan Rowley, a spokeswoman for Shell of Canada, adding that Shell had not intended to have Bob actually banned. Royal Dutch Shell has a stake in Iogen, a leader in developing cellulose ethanol. The banning of Corn Cob Bob, who looks like a farmer with a corncob head, inspired a recent segment on the 'Daily Show' on Comedy Central, culminating with the mock execution of the mascot by the comedian Rob Corddry. 'This world was never going to treat Corn Cob Bob fairly,' explained Mr. Corddry, as soft piano music trilled in the background. 'I wanted to show him a better place.'

Subject: Rail Line to Tibet Is a Marvel From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 13:26:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/international/asia/09golmud.html?ex=1283918400&en=e5f1b99197ef5d3e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 9, 2005 Rail Line to Tibet Is a Marvel, but China Is Mum By HOWARD W. FRENCH GOLMUD, China - By the time the great railroad reaches this town from the east, it will already have traversed more than half of China, past the high desert of Qinghai, around one of the world's great salt lakes, through the arid fastness of Gansu and over and around mountain ranges arrayed like endless sets of waves all the way to Beijing. The biggest challenges, however, lie in another direction altogether, when the line heads south for a 685-mile run to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, over what is often called the roof of the world. For long stretches the railway, which is fast nearing completion, will operate at altitudes higher than many small planes can fly, huffing and puffing far above the fragrant mists that roll down the Himalayan slopes. Indeed, the train, whose engines will need turbochargers just to get enough oxygen to run, will often soar above the clouds. One day soon, perhaps as early as next year, the train, equipped with cars pressurized like jet planes, will make its maiden voyage on its final southward route, chugging across permanently frozen terrain and making stops along the way at stations like Tangula Shankou, which at 16,640 feet will be the world's highest. For those bored with the scenery, or perhaps just dizzy, there will be other diversions: first-class accommodations include health spas and fancy restaurants. When China's central government embarked on the $3.1 billion project in 2001, it set aside $240 million for environmental protection. When objections arose about plans to build a station within the Gulu Wetlands, in Tibet, a pristine breeding ground for black-necked cranes and yellow ducks, 20 acres of wetlands were created around the perimeter of the original preserve to make up for land lost to bridges. Yang Xin, a prominent environmentalist in Qinghai Province, called the project one of the 'most caring' he had ever seen. 'We proposed detailed measures on protecting migrating Tibetan antelopes in the morning, and to our surprise we got the government's answer back that very afternoon, less than three hours, later,' Mr. Yang said. 'This reflects the government's attitude toward this issue.' One might expect a country that is pulling off one of the world's great engineering feats to be eager to show off its handiwork. If so, no one has told the Railway Ministry, which for a full year refused to answer a reporter's queries by telephone and fax to visit the new line and witness its construction. From the evidence, no one told the local police in Golmud, either. Normally eager taxi drivers in this poky frontier town, not far removed from the dusty backdrops of American westerns, except for its 9,100-foot altitude, waved off a foreigner, saying they would be arrested if they took him down the highway south that shadows the new railway line. The local police, too, were apparently left out of the loop. 'I'm sorry, but there's nothing I can do to help you,' said a supervisor at the city's Public Security Bureau, when an outsider asked for a pass so he could drive into the Kunlun Mountains, toward Tibet. Another officer hinted darkly that the foreigner was breaking the law just by being in Golmud. What could explain such a reluctance to show off this marvel of railway building? As was underscored by events in Lhasa - where Beijing was celebrating the 40th anniversary of what it calls the Tibet Autonomous Region - it had much to do with Tibetan aspirations for independence. China's state-controlled press hailed the anniversary with editorials that said things like, 'Tibetans bask in the joy of a bright tomorrow.' A Foreign Ministry spokesman praised what he called Tibet's 'democratic reforms,' saying that in the past the people of the province had labored under a 'dark serf system.' The man leading the celebrations, Jia Qinglin, the third-ranked figure in the Chinese Communist Party, hailed China's army for having crushed an uprising in Tibet in 1959 and rioting in 1989 by Tibetans hoping for independence for the province, which was seized by China in 1951. By some estimates, the new train will carry as many as 900,000 people to Tibet each year, with the newcomers overwhelmingly consisting of members of China's Han majority, many of whom will opt to stay, further dampening demands for independence and diluting Tibet's spiritual culture. 'The Han population is rising and the Tibetan language, our mother language, is losing its position among our people,' said a Tibetan teacher who fled to India in January after being arrested several times for his views. 'The road building jobs and the construction jobs are not open to Tibetans, and young Tibetan girls are turning to prostitution.' If the Chinese wish to help Tibet, said the teacher, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals against his family back home, 'they should stop the immigration and give the opportunities to local people so they can improve their lives, and we can protect our culture.'

Subject: Soweto Sees Signs of Prosperity From: E,mma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 13:24:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/international/africa/09soweto.html?ex=1283918400&en=00877e4b9e75e945&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 9, 2005 A Bleak Symbol of Apartheid, Soweto Sees Signs of Prosperity By MICHAEL WINES SOWETO, South Africa - They held a wine-tasting festival here this past weekend, the social event of the month in this sprawling township of a million-plus people just west of downtown Johannesburg. Among the 1,500 who showed up, Maureen Makhathini of Diepkloof needed a lift to get there. 'My car's in the shop,' she explained. 'The BMW, I mean.' If something seems wrong with that picture, well, something is. Soweto, after all, is famous as the hotbed of rebellion in apartheid's dying days - a place of endless poverty, seething anger and, too often, mindless violence by oppressors and oppressed alike. Say 'Soweto,' and educated palates and Bavarian roadsters do not jump quickly to mind. That, Mrs. Makhathini says, is what is wrong. 'It used to be very, very, very rough,' she said. 'Now you can see that it's exactly the opposite.' It is possible to gloss over Soweto's - and South Africa's - many problems. The rich-poor divide in this nation remains among the widest on earth, and Soweto, the oldest and biggest township, remains deeply rooted on the poor side of that gap. The racial divide persists, too, and ordinary Sowetans may not have so much made peace with their old white oppressors, as they have rendered them irrelevant to daily life. But something else is going on here as well. From the ashes of apartheid, Soweto is emerging as a springboard into the black middle and upper classes, an economic hub in its own right and, its proponents say, an example to which other townships can aspire. 'Ten years ago, there was no excitement like there is now,' said Mnikelo Mangciphu, a grocery and dry-goods distributor who has sprung into Soweto's burgeoning wine market. 'There is a drive by the government and by the people to invest in Soweto. Roads are being tarred, all the infrastructure is being upgraded, and that on its own encourages more investment.' In fact, Soweto no longer looks like an archetypal township, with its ragtag collection of concrete block huts and waterless, powerless shacks, but instead resembles a typical if modest suburb. So-called informal settlements of shanties account for fewer than one in 10 dwellings; most homes now are made of brick, and utilities are a given. Some neighborhoods, Diepkloof and Pimville among them, are now comparatively high-income areas, with homes and real-estate markets to match. A recent market study pegged the average household's income at about $4,900 a year - above the average for black South Africans, and high by African standards in general, though such statistics can be unreliable. And while the nation's latest census, from 2001, concluded that the great majority of Sowetans made less than $12,000 a year, it also found that nearly 20,000 of the 300,000 households made more - some of them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, in fact. Since then the region has embarked on what looks very much like a development boom. A $16 million complex that includes offices, shops and a tourist center commemorating South Africa's Freedom Charter opened in June in Kliptown, Soweto's historic heart. Richard Maponya, a self-made millionaire in retailing, broke ground in July on a 650,000-square-foot shopping mall in central Soweto that he says will be aimed squarely at up-market consumers. Another consortium announced plans last month for an 18-hole golf course near Pimville that is being designed by Gary Player, the legendary South African pro, and will be surrounded by housing. Coincidentally, the announcement follows a warning by President Thabo Mbeki that such golf estates are gobbling up prime land, marginalizing the poor and worsening racial divisions. Caxton Newspapers, a big South African chain, is rolling out 11 free-distribution weeklies in Soweto neighborhoods, written and published by local residents, to complement the 90 it hands out in white communities. 'They've opened a very large shopping mall in Protea, there's a large mall in Dobsonville, and one opening in the future in Pimville,' Kevin Keogh, the chief executive of Caxton's urban newspapers division, said, ticking off Soweto neighborhoods. 'That all adds up to advertising dollars.' Local merchants claim to see the changes as well. The Backroom Restaurant in Pimville, open just four months, does a brisk business serving food, blues and jazz to upscale patrons, not just from Soweto, where surveys say 4 in 10 workers are white-collar employees or professionals, but from blacks who have moved out of Soweto to wealthier suburbs north of the city. 'Our target market is middle class to top end,' said the owner, Patrick Mrasi (pronounced m-GHA-si). 'I wanted to create a networking place, one where guys can come and have their business meetings. A lot of these guys are successful and live in the suburbs, but they still have families in the township, and even in the week, after work, they come here. Soweto's where they spend most of their time.' As a draw, the Backroom has begun offering an extensive list of South African wines, served by stewards trained by the Cape Wine Academy. 'Since I opened, there's been a nice, steady growth,' Mr. Mrasi said. 'Nobody would have thought I could reach these levels.' Some did, actually. Last weekend's wine festival, which showcased the wines of 10 black-owned wineries among the 86 exhibitors, was conceived by Mr. Mangciphu, the distributor, and the Cape Wine Academy's local manager, Lyn Woodward, over a cookout at Mr. Mangciphu's Pretoria home. 'I was drinking beer out of a glass from the Soweto Beer Festival' last November, he said, 'and so she said, 'Guys, why don't we have a wine festival?' ' Ten months later, the festival was successful enough that some late arrivals on Sunday were turned away and the promoters have decided to make it an annual event. Mr. Mangciphu and Ms. Woodward, with two others, have formed a company to market and distribute fine wine in Soweto and, later, other townships. Their target is people like Mrs. Makhathini, a 52-year-old entrepreneur who seems to have the fingers of each hand in different pies. A dental nurse at a local hospital, she also runs a dressmaking business from a backyard office, rents still more space to a hair salon and - in her spare time - run a small charity for 100 local orphans. Her latest plan is to add a second story to a house she owns in Pimville, using the proceeds from rentals to reopen a computer school and begin a videoconferencing center for Sowetans who want to communicate with friends and business contacts abroad. As for wine, Mrs. Makhathini does not often partake. But the festival may change her mind. 'I really had a good time,' she said. 'Unexpectedly.'

Subject: Re: Soweto Sees Signs of Prosperity From: Mik To: E,mma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 14:03:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thanks Emma

Subject: The Chinese, Too, May Be Worth Copying From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 07:37:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/11/business/worldbusiness/11advi.html September 11, 2005 The Chinese, Too, May Be Worth Copying By WILLIAM J. HOLSTEIN THE American economy is more open than Western Europe's, and may be better able to respond to challenges from China and elsewhere, says Gerard Kleisterlee, chief executive of Royal Philips Electronics, the multinational company based in Amsterdam. Here are excerpts from a conversation: Q. Many Americans think that Western Europe is growing very slowly and faces stagnation. Is that right? A. That's also the popular image among European executives and policy makers. In a number of countries, initiatives are being taken to reform the economy and reform labor policies, and to deregulate, because we have excessive regulation. But the pace of change is simply too slow. Q. Is the economic emergence of China and other countries going to change the world order as we know it? A. It is going to have an impact on the world order. But I don't see it as a one-sided debate where the Europeans or Americans see the emergence of China and India just as a competitive threat. It's also an opportunity, because every day more people are joining the economy and becoming consumers. They need products. China has a balanced import-export situation with the rest of the world. A lot of textile and consumer electronics are being exported out of China. But on the other hand, things like airplanes and sophisticated equipment and tools are being imported into China. As long as the Western world continues to invest in the education of our children and in the quality of universities and research institutes, they can stay ahead of the game in terms of technological development. Q. But we're seeing entire industries moving offshore. Is that cause for alarm? A. Yes, we will see some industries migrate, but we will also see new opportunities on the high-tech side and the services side. When Europeans ask me, 'What is the future of European manufacturing?' I say, 'Apparently we are good in complex systems, whether it is Airbus or high-end cars.' Both the Americans and Europeans are good at this. We have the infrastructures, we have the know-how, we have the technology. We can put it together. China is focused on mass manufacturing. Q. One of the debates Americans have is about whether the Chinese can innovate. They can copy, but can they develop new products that reach the market? A. I see no reason why they couldn't. I would not stereotype them as copiers. They're working hard to develop their own indigenous technologies and their own standards. Q. What do you make in China? A. We manufacture some percentage of all the things we sell in China. We have a fully integrated medical systems business, but we also import high-end equipment from the United States and Europe into China. We have our semiconductor operations, but no wafer fabrication plants there. Those are in the United States, Europe and Singapore. We are the largest multinational in China measured by total activity level, which was $9 billion last year, and measured by exports volume. Of that $9 billion, $3 billion was sold in China and $6 billion was exported. We are not the largest by total dollars invested or total employment, but on the basis of these other two measures, we are. Q. How do you think American companies are faring in the new world order? A. I think they are responding fairly well. Take the top 100 companies in market capitalization and you see that American companies are well represented in that league. Neither the emergence of the Japanese, nor the Koreans, nor the Chinese and after them the Indians, fundamentally changes the picture. Yes, it brings new companies into the game. You will have some shakeout, but, by and large, this is the strongest economy in the world. The American economy works because of its openness and its market-focused competitiveness. There is a high degree of adaptability. You may have U.S. companies that go under, but you will have more that survive and prosper. Q. Which American companies do you respect the most? A. General Electric is a formidable competitor. It commands a lot of respect because of its processes. On a different front, in I.B.M., people are pioneers in new breakthroughs. We also learn from them and adapt. If I see something good, I take it. Q. So you're learning from American multinationals? A. Of course, but I'm also learning from Chinese start-ups. To me, the whole essence of prospering as a business is to know that every day, everywhere, there is something you can learn. You learn from successes, but you also learn from failures. You need to have that mind-set. Q. What have you learned from Chinese start-ups? A. How to be extremely pragmatic in getting yourself into the market. I have taken my board to China a few times, not only to have internal discussions, but also to go out into the marketplace. We talk with Lenovo and TCL and you see how their young management teams have built their businesses with very low overhead and are very focused. Sometimes we make things too complex. We can be overly focused on process, but the Chinese are very focused on results. They are learning faster than you can imagine.

Subject: Hope When Illness Seems Hopeless From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 06:22:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/health/psychology/06brod.html?ex=1127102400&en=e714ef14ec4d54f8&ei=5070&emc=eta1 September 6, 2005 Nourishing Hope When Illness Seems Hopeless By JANE E. BRODY How can you find hope when your chances of survival seem hopeless? How can you find joy while undergoing treatments that make you miserable and barely able to function? How can you be happy when there seems to be nothing to be happy about? These are the challenges faced by millions of people whose illnesses are diagnosed as cancer or other life-threatening diseases. Among them, for nearly a decade, was Dr. Wendy Schlessel Harpham, a Dallas physician. When recurring lymphoma forced her to relinquish her medical practice, she began writing books - including 'Diagnosis: Cancer,' 'After Cancer' and 'When a Parent Has Cancer' - to help other patients and their families. Dr. Harpham's new book, 'Happiness in a Storm,' (W. W. Norton, $26.95) is written for anyone facing a progressive or potentially fatal illness like cancer, heart failure or Parkinson's disease. The subtitle sums up its message: 'Facing Illness and Embracing Life as a Healthy Survivor.' After a diagnosis of Stage 3 lymphoma in 1990, Dr. Harpham had eight rounds of treatment, mostly experimental, for her initial disease and six recurrences. Did she worry about dying? Of course she did. She mourned the loss of her medical practice and feared that her three young children would have to grow up without their mother. Each recurrence brought her closer to the brink. But a seeming miracle occurred in 1998 after a fourth treatment with a newly licensed monoclonal antibody called rituximab, and she has been out of treatment now for six years. Between the often-debilitating rounds of treatment that left her plagued with fatigue, Dr. Harpham lived as fully as possible, writing, attending her children's sporting events and school plays, planning their bat and bar mitzvahs, enjoying each precious day and finding hope under every rock. As Dr. Harpham defines it, healthy survivorship does not necessarily mean the patient has been cured of cancer. Patients become survivors from the moment their illness is diagnosed and they remain survivors during treatment and afterward. They can be 'healthy survivors' even if they are living with terminal illness. Healthy survivorship, Dr. Harpham writes, means 'that while getting good medical care you are living your life as fully as possible today, tomorrow and every single day.' Critical Steps Dr. Harpham maintains that healthy survivorship is based on obtaining sound knowledge, finding and nourishing hope and acting effectively. While it is perfectly natural for every patient to want to be cured, she points out that for many people these days cancer has become a chronic disease. They are not cured, but they continue to live. Cure is not the only route to physical healing. For most patients, the path to the best scientifically established treatment starts with learning all you can about your condition, the available therapies and their likely consequences, then deciding on a treatment plan and choosing a medical team well-equipped to carry it out. Ideally, you'd want a doctor who is empathetic, returns phone calls and provides emotional support as well as good treatment, admittedly a rare combination. Failing that, choose good treatment and seek other sources of emotional support. Take into account the doctor's knowledge and experience in treating your disease and his or her availability to see you, whether you can understand the doctor's explanations and advice and whether you are treated with respect and understanding and provided with realistic hope. Though it may be tempting to want to stay as close to home as possible, the best treatments may be available elsewhere. Dr. Harpham had to travel several times to California for experimental therapy available nowhere else. Patients have many resources for learning about their disease and finding the best treatments. The Internet is awash with reliable sites describing ailments and established remedies. The National Cancer Institute maintains an up-to-date information service (1-800-4-CANCER). There are also reputable Web sites listing clinical trials that are testing new therapies. Also important to physical healing is to adopt health measures like good nutrition, exercise, sleep, relaxation techniques and healing relationships that can help you feel better as well as improve your condition. Humor helped Dr. Harpham over many rough spots. When her second recurrence was diagnosed on the same day as the first but a year later, she quipped, 'I've consolidated my recurrences so that I won't have too many bad-news anniversaries.' Fear is natural when facing a life-threatening illness or injury. But when fear is front and center, joy is impossible. To help tame fear, Dr. Harpham suggests focusing on factors you can control, like diet and exercise; distracting yourself with activities you enjoy; practicing relaxation or self-hypnosis; participating in a support group; and, if needed, getting professional counseling. Among other groups, the Wellness Community, with headquarters in Washington, sponsors free, professionally run support groups, live and online, for people with cancer and their families (call 1-888-793-WELL or check www.wellnesscommunity.org). Acknowledging Sadness It is also natural to grieve. Sadness about having a potentially fatal disease should not be played down or discouraged but acknowledged. Dr. Harpham said she found it helpful to think, 'Today is a bad day' and to allow herself downtime, as long as the time was limited. It is also important to find ways to nourish hope, which can improve the quality of your life no matter what the circumstances. Thinking that recurrent disease is necessarily the beginning of the end or that losing a body part or function makes one undesirable can dampen hope. She urges patients to ignore people who express pessimism and hopelessness or who recount tales of others who died of the same disease. 'When illness strikes, hope takes on new meaning,' Dr. Harpham says. 'Healthy hope is the belief that you can help improve your situation and feel happier. You can cultivate genuine hope even when you are acutely aware that things are not going well and the likelihood of a good outcome is small. Hope is an ongoing choice.' Dr. Harpham makes it clear that that choice is yours. Squander the life you have left in misery, self-pity and recriminations, or milk the days, weeks or years ahead for every little thing that can give you peace and joy, however fleeting. As she put it, 'Cancer gave me today, every day, in a way I'd never known before. Since I no longer take much of anything for granted, everything has an added element of happy surprise - I made it to see this, do that, stay here and go there! The ordinary has become marvelous. Even unpleasant times are less painful, for they are proof that I am still here.' I am intensely grateful that modern medicine gave Dr. Harpham the opportunity to write a book that will help me, and many millions of current and future cancer survivors, look differently at life's setbacks, aches and pains, and inevitable losses. It is a book I expect to read many times as a guide to the meaning of joy and satisfaction, and the many routes to them, regardless of the turns my life and health may take.

Subject: Workers but With the Wrong Job Skills From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 11:40:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/business/09jobs.html September 9, 2005 Willing Workers but With the Wrong Job Skills By DAVID LEONHARDT and LOUIS UCHITELLE With some one million people from New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast suddenly tossed out of their jobs by Hurricane Katrina, the newly unemployed are now fanning out across the South and the rest of the country, getting help from friends, family, employers or government agencies. In many ways, the potpourri of relief efforts is serving as a testament to the economy's flexibility. But the makeup of the Gulf Coast work force - heavy on warehouse employees and blackjack dealers, light on bankers and factory workers - has already complicated relief efforts and appears likely to add to Hurricane Katrina's economic damage. With a population less educated than the nation as a whole, New Orleans and coastal Mississippi employed many people without the kind of skills that would help them quickly find new jobs. The Gulf Coast economy also has more than its fair share of workers who made their living waiting tables, fixing houses or otherwise serving a local economy that, for now, does not exist. 'I want to go back and help rebuild New Orleans,' said Gregory Woods, 48, a master plumber who spent last weekend in Galveston, Tex., where he and his wife talked to social workers about how they could collect food stamps. 'But for the time being, our life is here.' The Congressional Budget Office estimated this week that 400,000 jobs, out of the roughly one million in the area pummeled by the storm, would remain unfilled through the end of the year. School districts around Louisiana are hiring teachers from New Orleans to teach children from that city who are now pouring into their schools. Manpower, the staffing company, has placed 400 refugees in temporary jobs paying roughly $8 to $12 an hour. Martin D. Claiborne, a dermatologist whose New Orleans home was flooded, spent yesterday driving to Houston and calling other doctors there to see if they could use his help. His wife's brother, a dentist, had already found work in the Florida Panhandle. In Long Beach, Miss., not far from the coast, Diane Sheehan said her employer, the Grand Casino in Gulfport, had agreed to give her 90 days' worth of pay, allowing her not to worry about the next few weeks. 'They're paying us to get our lives back together,' said Ms. Sheehan, a V.I.P. service representative at the casino. But the enormous scale of the dislocation has still left thousands of people to reconstruct both their lives and their livelihoods. The residents of many other regions - places where software designers, machine technicians and business consultants are not so rare - would probably have an easier time doing so than the people of the Gulf Coast will, economists said. 'Many of these households are low-income, and they're going to rely more heavily on government aid and charity,' said Mark Zandi, the chief economist of Economy.com, a research company. 'Worrying about their basic needs will be predominant. They're not going to be working again quickly.' Private economists and the Congressional Budget Office predict that by early next year the economy will recover the 400,000 lost jobs, as the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast picks up speed. Across the economy, in fact, the storm's early impact has been tamer than many people feared it might be. In a sign that households outside of New Orleans remain willing to spend money, the number of people applying for new mortgages and for mortgage refinancing both rose last week, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. The economy is also creating jobs at a faster pace than it was a year ago, allowing it to more easily absorb the surge in unemployment from the storm. The jobs rebuilding the Gulf Coast are likely to go to construction workers who might come from other parts of the country. As for people in the region, they will be forced onto a job market that values education more highly than it once did. Fewer than 43 percent of adults in the hardest-hit counties and parishes have attended college at some point in their lives, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge, a professor at Queens College. In the rest of the country, an average of 52 percent of adults have some college education. Partly as a result, New Orleans and the nearby coastal areas have a disproportionate share of laundry-service workers, waiters and other lower-income workers. New Orleans also suffers from high unemployment, and 23 percent of residents live below the poverty level, the Census Bureau reported last week. For now, many large companies are paying idled workers for at least a few weeks. United Parcel Service, after initially stopping payment to drivers and other employees in the area, reversed its decision this week and has paid them retroactive to Aug. 29, when the storm hit, said Norman Black, a spokesman. Like Harrah's, which owns the Grand Casino, Hilton is giving its employees 90 days' pay. But many workers will be without their jobs for longer than their paychecks will keep arriving. Northrop Grumman, the military contractor, is paying its 19,000 workers on the coast through the end of this week, said Dan McClain, a company spokesman. Ms. Sheehan said that she would consider returning to Chicago, her former home, if she could not get her old job back. Other people, like many of those at small businesses, are already going without paychecks. The Gulf Coast has a larger share of people working in offices of fewer than 50 employees than most parts of the country do, according to Economy.com. Although government agencies are trying to help people apply for benefits while they remain homeless, many early efforts remain plagued with logistical problems. Mississippi, for example, has waived the usual one-week waiting period to apply for unemployment benefits, according to the Labor Department in Washington. But only about 10,000 of the one million displaced workers appeared to have applied for benefits, the department said yesterday. Professionals like Dr. Claiborne, the dermatologist on his way to Houston, are also struggling to rebuild their lives, but many of them left the region before the hurricane hit land and have had more than a week to make some progress. Dr. Claiborne found out yesterday that his youngest son could attend high school in Houston, and the family began driving to Texas from Florida, where they had been since last week. The doctor still must figure out whether his medical license will allow him to practice in Texas. 'Ten days ago, I was thinking I was ahead of the game,' said Dr. Claiborne, 55, whose vacation house in Mississippi was destroyed and whose New Orleans house still has four feet of water in it. 'Now I'm not so far ahead.' In Jackson, Miss., Maurice Rieffel, a policy specialist for Entergy, the electric power supplier to the region, was working on storm-related issues for his employer after having fled his house and job in New Orleans. His wife and his son are crammed into a student apartment at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge with 14 other family members. 'Working takes my mind off of what's happened,' Mr. Rieffel said. But 'my wife is facing a lot of challenges I can't help with.' The first broad attempt to measure the storm's impact on the job market will come with next month's Labor Department employment report, to be released Oct. 7. Even in normal times, the jobs report often affects the stock market and Federal Reserve interest rate policy. But surveying people around the Gulf Coast is likely to be so difficult that the numbers could be deficient, said Thomas J. Nardone, who oversees the survey. 'I cannot remember a situation like this in my tenure here,' Mr. Nardone, who has worked at the Bureau of Labor Statistics since the mid-1980's.

Subject: Harlem School Introduces Swiss Chard From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:25:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/nyregion/09promise.html September 9, 2005 Harlem School Introduces Children to Swiss Chard By KIM SEVERSON Ebony Richards, a confirmed hamburger and Tater Tots girl, knows the rules of the lunch line at her school, the Promise Academy in Harlem. When confronted with whole-wheat penne covered with sautéed peppers and local squash, she does not blurt out 'That's nasty.' If she does, she goes to the end of the line. Although seconds on main courses are not allowed - someone has to show children what a reasonable portion is - Ebony can fill her tray with a dozen helpings of vegetables or bowls of Romaine lettuce from the salad bar. Any time in the school day, she can wander into the cafeteria for a New York apple. Ebony, 12, had never seen Swiss chard until a month ago. She ate three helpings. 'I was like, 'I don't want to eat that,' ' she said of her first few months of meals at the Promise Academy. 'But I had to, because there was nothing else. Then it was like, 'This is good.' ' Now she demands that her father, Darryl Richards, pick up chard at the makeshift farmers' market held once a month in the school cafeteria. They may even take one of the school's cooking classes together. As this school year begins, it is a rare administrator who is not reconsidering at least some aspect of lunch, as a way to confront increasing obesity and poor eating habits. Some steps are as simple as shutting off soda machines. Others involve writing new, comprehensive nutrition policies. But perhaps no school is taking a more wide-ranging approach in a more hard-pressed area than the Promise Academy, a charter school at 125th Street and Madison Avenue where food is as important as homework. Last year, officials took control of the students' diets, dictating a regimen of unprocessed, regionally grown food both at school and, as much as possible, at home. Experts see the program as a Petri dish in which the effects of good food and exercise on students' health and school performance can be measured and, perhaps, eventually replicated. 'The Promise Academy model is probably the most intensive anybody is working with,' said Janet Poppendieck, a professor of sociology at Hunter College who is working on a book about school food for the University of California Press. Almost 90 percent of the students at the school come from families poor enough to qualify for free government lunches, and 44 percent are overweight. Most had never tasted a fresh raspberry or eaten a peach that wasn't canned in sugar syrup before they picked up a cafeteria tray at the school. 'Our challenge is to create an environment where young people actually eat healthy and learn to do it for the rest of their lives,' said Geoffrey Canada, the teacher and author from the South Bronx who developed the Promise Academy. Mr. Canada created his school kitchen as part of the larger Harlem Children's Zone, an assault on poverty being watched by social service experts and policy makers across the country. Promise was one of nine charter schools opened in the city last year. The Bloomberg administration has pledged to open 50 such schools, including 15 that are opening for this school year. Mr. Canada, who has a master's in education from Harvard, drew a circle around a 60-block area in central Harlem to create the children's zone, a tight web of social, health and educational programs that start with a 'baby college' for new parents and will end, he hopes, with the well-fed collegebound graduates of the Promise Academy. The school has longer hours than most public schools and runs through most of the summer because the founders believe that its students need help catching up with those born into better circumstances. School officials regularly measure the children's weight and fitness along with their academic progress. Mr. Canada and his staff hope that the Promise Academy will prove the importance of a serious school food program, much as data from the national Head Start program was used to prove the effectiveness of early education and support for children. That will take time. When the Promise Academy opened last year, kindergartners and sixth graders were the only students. This year they are moving up a grade, and another batch of kindergartners and sixth graders is starting. In five years, when every grade level is filled, 1,300 students will be eating two meals and two snacks a day from the Promise Academy kitchen. 'We want the children to get to a point where they're looking forward to that apple, and the parents provide it for them,' Mr. Canada said. 'Now we say, 'Eat fruits and vegetables,' and we have kids who come back and say, 'My moms ain't buying that.' ' The team at the school uses strict guidelines, education and a little psychology to change young palates. One key is to teach resistance to marketing come-ons from fast-food and candy manufacturers. 'They've got to hear they're being conned,' Mr. Canada said, 'or they're not going to be open to this.' Eating at the Promise Academy is about more than just the food. Children learn to respect where it comes from and who serves it, as well as whom they eat with. They must use tongs to pick up their morning bagels. They may not bang their trays down on the cloth-covered cafeteria tables. No one is allowed to toss out whole peaches or to cut in line. To make it all work, Mr. Canada relies on Andrew Benson, a young chef with a culinary degree from Johnson and Wales University. Mr. Benson, a veteran of three public school cafeterias in Harlem, said he was defeated by the city's school food bureaucracy. (Actual cooking from scratch is done in less than half of the city's 1,356 schools.) The new kitchen at the academy rivals many in good New York restaurants. Mr. Benson does not use foods like processed cheese and peanut butter from the commodities program, choosing to spend part of his budget on fresher food. He feeds the children breakfast, lunch and an array of after-school and Saturday snacks at a daily cost of about $5.87 per student. The amount, almost twice what some public schools spend, comes from a mix of government reimbursements and a school budget pumped up by grants and other private donations. To get things rolling, Mr. Canada first turned to Ann Cooper, the chef who gained a national platform reworking the lunch program at the private Ross School in East Hampton. She helped stock the kitchen, find food purveyors and plan menus. But the Promise Academy program is much less fancy than Ross's, in both food and financing. The Promise menu and the per-pupil budget are the envy of Jorge Leon Collazo, who was hired last year as the first executive chef of the New York City public schools, in one of several efforts to improve the 860,000 meals that are pumped out each day in the school system. 'I can't put turkey lasagna with fresh zucchini on the menu for all the schools in the city,' Mr. Collazo said. 'I'd get killed. No one would eat it. If I did something esoteric like that - esoteric for a public school - you'd also have to have something like pizza.' Even at the Promise Academy, getting students to embrace healthy eating has been a struggle. At first, they went home complaining that they had not had enough to eat or that the food was terrible, so Mr. Benson brought parents in for a meal. The food impressed Jacqueline Warner, whose son, Chuck Cherry, 11, used to come home from school complaining that he was hungry. 'It's just that he wasn't used to eating healthy portions,' she said. Ms. Warner, 40, has diabetes. She grew up in Harlem, eating what her mother could afford and knew how to cook. Often that meant fried foods, macaroni and cheese and lots of rice and potatoes. She loved it, but attributes her disease, in part, to that diet. 'I'm just glad he has a chance now to know the difference between the food we grew up on,' she said, 'and the healthy kind of food they serve in this school.'

Subject: How Does Their Garden Grow? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:23:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/education/22education.html?ex=1126411200&en=87ba73f5b1d14bd3&ei=5070 June 22, 2005 How Does Their Garden Grow? Very Well, Say Junior Farmers at Bronx Science By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN WHEN Maya Divack got down to choosing a college earlier this spring, she called her admissions officer at Beloit. She had been admitted by three liberal-arts schools, and now it was time to split the proverbial hairs. On the other end of the telephone in Wisconsin, Ari Hurwitz was accustomed to the drill. There were always lingering questions about study abroad or internships or double majors or, of course, financial aid. Maya, however, wanted to know about opportunities to farm. Mr. Hurwitz had to admit it wasn't exactly the topic he'd been expecting, not from a senior at the Bronx High School of Science, a city girl who had spent all 17 years of her life in an apartment on Riverside Drive and for most of that time thought of the 'back 40' as the produce section of Fairway. Heck, her application said she was planning to major in dance. Disguising his surprise, Mr. Hurwitz nimbly mentioned that an English professor ran an organic farm with her husband, and they usually took on student helpers. Beloit was even offering a freshman seminar in the Slow Food Movement. Thus reassured, Maya committed to Beloit. Dina Brewster has that kind of effect on people. Ms. Brewster had taught Maya and 30 other classmates horticulture over the past year at Bronx Science, and in so doing she had changed the direction of more than one student's life. Kate Barut was bound for the University of Michigan with the ambition of designing a major in sustainable agriculture and community development. Cherry Qiuxia Chen was going to Unity College in Maine, a school specializing in environmental science, to take up landscape horticulture. And the rest, setting aside microscope and calculator at least temporarily, had learned how to make things grow. Now let us be clear here. We are talking about Bronx Science, not Bronx A & M, a school renowned for having produced six Nobel laureates, all in physics, and 200 national winners in the Westinghouse and Intel science competitions. The mosaic in the center hall celebrates Archimedes, Galileo, Curie, that crew. Ms. Brewster's students have spiked hair, nose rings, peroxide streaks, black nail polish, capri pants, Converse high-tops and eyebrows pierced with safety pins, ever so Sid Vicious. In other words: not exactly the 4-H Club. 'I couldn't imagine it would work out,' Maya admitted. 'I was skeptical that we could actually get vegetables to pluck off a vine. I figured, maybe we'll get vines but no peas. Or the lettuce would be inedible.' She was not the only doubter. Cherry's mother grew up on a farm in southern China and immigrated to New York precisely so her children would never know such toil. 'She lectures me all the time: 'You're going to college four years to be a farmer?' ' Cherry said. 'My sister is always trying to explain to her that you can be very successful in landscape horticulture.' Ms. Brewster knows better than most the allure of the soil. The daughter of a college president, a product of Exeter and Yale, she discovered it 13 years ago, when her family moved onto her grandparents' farm in Ridgefield, Conn., which had lain fallow for more than a decade. Dina and her father, Carroll Brewster, newly retired from the presidency of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York, together cleared the land, and set about burning off 15 acres of brush. The resulting blaze required several fire companies to quell and put the neophytes on the front page of the hometown newspaper. 'It was like, 'Yuppies burn down farm,' ' Ms. Brewster recalled with chagrin. 'We were the local joke.' The fiasco, though, captured the attention of an experienced farmer, Otto Gravesen, who called up the Brewsters to say: 'Thanks for the ash. I'll see you in the summer.' That summer of 1992, Mr. Gravesen began transforming the scorched land into fields of eggplants, potatoes, corn, tomatoes and blueberries. In the process, he became perhaps the most influential teacher in Dina Brewster's life. 'I saw the kinds of intelligence that aren't so valued in our society - handiness, the ability to fix things - and I was awed by it,' said Ms. Brewster, who is 29. 'People like Otto know how to read the world in the way people in the other circles of my life don't. They could read the water and read the grass the way other people read books. 'I never had a sense of accomplishment in school the way I did on the farm,' she continued. 'It's not just the harvest; it's looking at a perfectly harrowed field and knowing all the work that stands behind it.' AFTER graduating from Yale with a degree in English literature, earning a master's from Teachers College and spending two years in the Philippines as a Peace Corps volunteer, Ms. Brewster landed at Bronx Science in early 2002, ostensibly as a substitute. She quickly demonstrated acumen outside the usual areas. She took eggs from her farm to the school secretaries, and when students set loose a few chickens in the halls for an end-of-year prank, she was the one staff member who knew the correct way to snag the birds, sneaking up from behind. While Ms. Brewster's certification was in English, she was permitted to teach one class in a different subject, and last spring she decided to make it horticulture. Bronx Science actually had two greenhouses that had been used for such a course in the past, but they had gone to dishevelment since the last horticulture teacher had retired five years earlier. One was used for storing stage sets from school plays. Ms. Brewster persuaded the principal to let her conscript students serving detention to help clear it on the pretext of 'community service.' In that revived greenhouse, amid the steam pipes and air vents of the Bronx Science roof, Ms. Brewster led this year's class in sowing and growing aloe, peas, basil, radishes and tomatoes. She taught the plant science of cell structure, fertilization and photosynthesis. She addressed the political issues of agriculture, like organic farming and genetically modified organisms. When it came time last week to administer the final exam, Ms. Brewster asked each student to devise a plan to 'save the planet and feed its population,' a brain-stretcher worthy of Bronx Science. Then, on the last day of class, she came with her parting present, or maybe it was more of a legacy: seeds for mesclun greens, sugar snap peas, nasturtium flowers. As the bell rang and her protégés dispersed, she was still calling out, 'If there's anyone who needs more seeds...'

Subject: How to Assure the Very Rich From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:15:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/business/09norris.html September 9, 2005 How to Assure the Very Rich Stay That Way By Floyd Norris HURRICANE KATRINA may have cost very wealthy people a lot of money. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it may have cost their heirs a lot of money. The cost came not from the direct effects of the disaster. It came because the hurricane's impact on the poor people who remained in New Orleans made it politically unattractive for the Senate to vote on repealing the estate tax this week. Such a vote is still possible later in the Congressional session, however, and if it does not pass, there is some speculation that a compromise to cut estate tax rates by two-thirds might be approved. The estate tax affects a surprisingly small number of people. In 2003, the most recent year with numbers available, just 1.25 percent of all deaths resulted in taxable estates, with most of them paying relatively little. But 505 estates, each worth more than $20 million, paid $5.2 billion, a quarter of the money raised by the estate tax - and just 17 percent of the value of the estates. An odd element of estate tax repeal is that while it will have great benefit for the superrich, it will hurt some of the merely rich, who may have to pay capital gains taxes when they sell inherited stocks and homes. Repeal will have no impact at all on the vast majority of people, but you wouldn't know that if you lived in a state with a wavering senator. There, advertising campaigns claim that small-business owners and family farms suffer from the estate tax. In fact, there are provisions in the law to ease the effect on both groups and an estate has to be large to face any tax at all. As a result of the 2001 tax act, which gradually phased out the estate tax, estates of those who die in 2005 will not be taxed on the first $1.5 million of assets, a figure that rises to $2 million next year and to $3.5 million in 2009. Under current law, the estates of the wealthy who die in 2010 will not have to pay any tax at all. But in 2011, the estate tax will come back, a provision that was needed four years ago to make numbers add up. IF Congress does not act first, one can imagine children of very wealthy people suggesting, as 2010 nears an end, that their parents consider the advantage of dying soon. Paging Dr. Kevorkian. While the vast majority of families do not pay estate taxes when a loved one dies, many more benefit from the provision of current law that wipes out capital gain taxes on inherited property. If Dad leaves you millions in Microsoft stock for which he paid very little, your tax basis when you sell is the value of the stock when he died, not when he bought it. In 2010, however, that will change. Up to $1.3 million in assets left to children or others will be exempt from capital gains taxes, as will up to $3 million left to a spouse. But any additional assets will face capital gains taxes when the heirs sell them, taxes that could be quite substantial. To opponents, the estate tax discourages entrepreneurs and taxes money that was already taxed when it was earned. To its supporters, it takes money from those most able to afford it and may limit the expansion of an idle rich class composed of those who inherited wealth rather than created it. But it is also a revenue raiser, and that is important now, with deficits already large before the disaster. Repealing the estate tax would reduce government revenues by about $280 billion from 2011 to 2015 - with much of that money staying in the 500 wealthiest estates each year. It is to be hoped that when the Senate does take up the bill, advocates will explain why it is a good idea to cut taxes on the very wealthy at a time of great need for many. That may not be as attractive politically, but it would be more accurate than to say estate tax repeal is intended to help family farmers.

Subject: Japan's Banks Try Something New From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:13:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/business/worldbusiness/09yen.ready.html September 8, 2005 Japan's Banks Try Something New: Lending By MARTIN FACKLER TOKYO -­ Japan crossed a milestone in its slow economic recovery Thursday when the government said lending by banks increased in August for the first time since it started tracking lending activity seven years ago. The Bank of Japan said the value of all outstanding loans by Japanese banks rose 0.2 percent from August of last year, to 387 trillion yen, or about $3.5 trillion. August's gain snapped a streak in which bank lending had fallen 56 straight months since the central bank first reported the figure in October 1998. The rebound has been widely awaited by economists here as proof that Japan, the world's second-largest economy after the United States, is finally escaping an economic slump more than a decade old. While small, the increase shows that Japanese banks are feeling healthy enough to extend new loans to companies and individuals, economists said. This means that money is once again starting to flow into new businesses and investments, restarting a cycle of wealth creation that had been stalled here for years. 'This is the seal of approval of the return to health of the banking system,' said Richard Jerram, an economist for Macquaries Securities in Tokyo. 'It's also a sign of the normalization of the economy.' Mr. Jerram and other economists say they expect lending to keep rising. The new lending could also help raise consumption, something Japan needs to escape a corrosive downward spiral in prices. Deflation has moderated recently, and the Bank of Japan said Thursday that it expected prices to be flat or to rise slightly by the end of this year. For most of the last decade, banks were cutting back on new loans as they struggled to rid themselves of soured debt that had piled up after the early 1990's collapse of Japan's stock and real estate bubbles. According to economists' estimates, banks have spent more than 140 trillion yen, or $1.3 trillion, ridding themselves of bad loans. That diversion of cash essentially paralyzed the financial system, which economists say was one of the biggest reasons Japan's $5 trillion economy remained mired in a slump for so long. The rebound in lending is also evidence of another positive trend, economists say: businesses are borrowing again. Just as banks had cut back on lending, many companies had stopped spending. In the last decade, companies cleared out excessive debt and the glut of production capacity built up in the 1980's boom. Renewed borrowing shows companies are investing and growing again, economists say.

Subject: Wheat Rust Appears in Africa From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 09:02:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/international/africa/09wheat.html September 9, 2005 New Strain of Wheat Rust Appears in Africa By MARC LACEY NAIROBI, Kenya - Biologists warned Thursday that a virulent new strain of a previously controlled plant disease had emerged in East Africa and could wipe out 10 percent of the world's wheat production if its spread is not halted. The disease, wheat rust, caused huge grain losses and even famines in the first half of the 20th century. The new strain was discovered in Uganda in 1999 and has since spread to Kenya and Ethiopia, damaging wheat crops there. The fungus that causes wheat rust, Puccinia graminis, produces a rusty color on the stem of wheat and slowly destroys the plant. It was controlled in the late 1950's and 1960's through the groundbreaking work of Norman Borlaug, an American who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for developing high-yield grains that led to the green revolution. Dr. Borlaug, now 91, spoke at a news conference on Thursday in Nairobi and called to draw attention to the new threat. 'Nobody's seen an epidemic for 50 years, nobody in this room except myself,' he said. 'Maybe we got too complacent.' After the new strain of fungus emerged - and was named Ug99, for Uganda 1999 - it seemed to disappear for a couple of years. It re-emerged in Kenya in 2001 and in Ethiopia two years later, said Ravi Singh, a plant pathologist with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, a nonprofit research group that convened an expert panel to study the resurgent disease. The panel's report, to which Dr. Borlaug contributed, was released at the news conference. 'It's spreading and that's why we're sounding the alarm now,' Dr. Singh said. The fungus is spread by spores carried by the wind or on the clothing of travelers. The panel's report warns that urgent action is needed if the world's wheat producers are to be spared. A 10 percent reduction in global wheat yield would mean a crop loss of 60 million tons, worth $9 billion, said Ronnie Coffman, chairman of the panel and a professor of plant breeding and genetics at Cornell University. 'It is only a matter of time before Ug99 reaches across the Saudi Arabian peninsula and into the Middle East, South Asia and, eventually, East Asia and the Americas,' the report said. A Global Rust Initiative has been set up in Nairobi to monitor the progress of the disease and begin the process of breeding and disseminating new resistant wheat varieties. In the 1950's, wheat rust devastated crops in North America, affecting three-quarters of some varieties. Since then, scientists have worked to develop high-yielding varieties that resist ever-emerging diseases. Wheat grown in East Africa had been resistant to the disease for the last 40 years. But the new strain has decimated local varieties. Industrial farmers grow most of Kenya's wheat, and they have been spraying their crops several times a year to control the fungus. But wheat rust could have a devastating effect in countries like Ethiopia and India, where local farmers grow the bulk of the wheat, and chemicals might prove too costly. Dr. Masa Iwanaga, the director general of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, said his organization had compiled 165,000 different genetic varieties of wheat over the years, giving scientists a head start in searching for strains resistant to the new variety.

Subject: Hong Kong Disneyland From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 08:59:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/business/media/08disney.html September 8, 2005 A Trial Run Finds Hong Kong Disneyland Much Too Popular for Its Modest Size By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG - When the Walt Disney Company opened a European theme park on the outskirts of Paris in 1992, the park struggled to attract enough visitors, and the ones who came spent less than expected. The new Hong Kong Disneyland, scheduled to open to the public on Monday, faces a quite different problem: too many guests, too many of whom clog restaurants while ordering long, expensive meals. A charity day on Sunday that was supposed to test the park's ability to run at near-capacity of 30,000 people turned into a fiasco of hourlong lines for rides, food shortages, inadequate parking and even the temporary closing of an area of the park because of overcrowding. The English and Chinese-language media here have been full of unfavorable coverage of the park's modest size, and the financial secretary of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, has suggested that Disney reconsider how many people the park can really hold. 'Of course we do not want to spoil the fun of the visitors by making them queue for a long time,' Mr. Tang said the other day, 'or they may not be used to queuing for so long. That's why we are discussing with Disney to see if we could have flexible arrangements, like during certain days when the number of people entering the park reaches a certain figure, they should not let the park become too crowded.' The criticism has evidently irked Disney. Stopped during a park tour on Wednesday, a group of Disney executives interrupted each other repeatedly in expressing indignation. 'To take one day where there were 30,000 people and say, 'Oh my gosh' would be inappropriate,' said Michael Mendenhall, executive vice president for global marketing in Disney's parks and resorts division, saying that on most days the park would have fewer visitors. And Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for corporate communications, said with some energy, 'The press has made it about size - it has never been about size.' The park here is considerably smaller than the original Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif., or Disneyland Paris. The more modest scale is part of a recent company strategy to open theme parks in phases instead of trying to build an extensive park all at once, as was done in Paris and at Orlando, Fla., with Disney World. A second phase of construction is under discussion between the Hong Kong government, which owns 57 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, and Walt Disney, which owns the rest. The park, which will charge $45 for adults on weekends and $38 on weekdays, was open again Wednesday afternoon for another rehearsal day, the latest of 17 test days before the planned public opening on Monday. Its modest size meant that it was possible to stroll at a leisurely pace from the end of Main Street past all the rides in Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and back to Main Street in 10 minutes without stopping along the way. Hong Kong Disneyland has only one roller coaster, Space Mountain, and it is so tame that any child taller than 3 feet 4 inches is allowed to ride it. Most rides are gentle, like the spinning Mad Hatter's Tea Cups or the Cinderella Carousel. That may have reflected Disney research showing that tourists from mainland China in particular wanted a fairly tame experience. Visitors on Wednesday seemed to have varying reactions, with those from the mainland voicing greater enthusiasm than impatient Hong Kong residents. The mainland, with 1.3 billion people, is Disney's real target, and people's expectations there may be lower, especially as the fading vestiges of central planning have left many Chinese accustomed to long lines. Wu He-yan - a 26-year-old woman who said she grew up on a farm in Guangdong Province nearby and recently used the family's savings to open a small Internet cafe in the provincial capital, Guangzhou - toured the park on Wednesday after winning a free visit from the pull tab of a Coca-Cola can. Clutching a Minnie Mouse purse that she said had been her companion for a year, Ms. Wu waited in line for 15 minutes for the Jungle Cruise and said that she did not even consider Space Mountain because it might be too scary. 'Compared with Guangzhou, the lines here are very short,' she said after watching the robotic zebras, elephants, gorillas, giraffes and other mechanical animals along the banks during the cruise. The number of mainland Chinese visiting Hong Kong has quintupled since the park was designed in 1999, as officials in Beijing have eased exit-visa requirements for their citizens. But Louie Kwan, a 30-year-old worker at a Hong Kong soy sauce factory, was less enthusiastic than Ms. Wu, as he fanned himself with a park map and waited in a long line with his wife, Wang Wei, to be photographed with Goofy and Pluto. Mr. Kwan said that Disneyland was less interesting than Ocean Park, the local amusement park. The cars inside Space Mountain 'just keep turning round and round but not going up and down, so it's not exciting,' he said. Rae Ho, 18, a student and Hong Kong resident, said that she had been to Tokyo Disneyland and found it roomier, but still liked the park here. 'This one in Hong Kong is quite small,' she said. 'It is smaller than in Tokyo, but it is quite comfortable.' David Camp, director of the London office of Economics Research Associates, an entertainment consulting firm, said that building theme parks in stages was an effective way to control investment costs. But such parks sometimes suffered by comparison with bigger parks elsewhere, he warned. The crowds here could certainly prove profitable for Disney. Mr. Mendenhall said that visitors were staying twice as long in restaurants as visitors to the company's American theme parks, because they savored their food longer and ordered more of it. Mr. Tang said that in the last three weeks the park had added 20 mobile food carts and 600 more seats in dining areas to try to meet demand. Disney made a point of trying to address local sensibilities here, laying out the park along lines suggested by a feng shui master. But the company kept a heavily American tone to most of it, starting with the Main Street area, and this decision seems to have been popular: the Main Street Corner Cafe had a 45-minute wait for a table at 2:15 on Wednesday afternoon, while the Plaza Inn Restaurant, serving Chinese food across the street, had a few empty tables. Addressing the local inclination to take myriad photos from every possible angle has been harder. One step has been to install another, stationary teacup next to the line for the Mad Hatter's Tea Cups so that visitors can take pictures while waiting, and not slow the loading and unloading process.

Subject: Things that make you go 'Hmmm' From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 20:16:25 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: 'The shaming of AMERica' http://www.economist.com/printedition/

Subject: Chinese University Topic From Closet From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 13:45:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/international/asia/08china.html September 8, 2005 A Chinese University Removes a Topic From the Closet By HOWARD W. FRENCH SHANGHAI - As the class got under way, the diminutive teacher standing before an overcrowded lecture hall in this city's most exclusive university handed out a survey. The first of several multiple-choice questions asked students what their feelings would be if they encountered two male lovers: total acceptance, reluctant acceptance, rejection or disgust? As a way of breaking the ice, the teacher, Sun Zhongxin, 35, with a Ph.D. in sociology and a fondness for PowerPoint presentations, read aloud some of the answers anonymously. In her survey, most of the 120 or so students said they would reluctantly accept gay lovers in their midst. The Fudan University class, Introduction to Gay and Lesbian Studies, is the first of its kind ever offered to Chinese undergraduates, and Ms. Sun briefly wondered why it was so well attended, before providing her own answer. 'The attitude toward homosexuality in China is changing,' she said. 'It is a good process, but it also makes us feel heavy-hearted. What's unfortunate about such heavy attendance is that it indicates that many people have never discussed the topic before.' 'Not only are people hiding in the closet,' she concluded, 'but the topic itself has been hiding in the closet.' A class like this would be unremarkable on most American university campuses, where many students are quite open about their homosexuality and the curriculum has long included offerings reflecting their interests. But among China's gay and lesbian population, which may be as large as 48 million by some estimates though it remains largely invisible, the new course is being portrayed as a major advance. Less than a decade ago, homosexuality was still included under the heading of hooliganism in China's criminal code, and it was only in 2001 that the Chinese Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses. 'This is definitely a big breakthrough in the contemporary society, because for so many years, homosexuals, as a community, have lived at the edge of society and have been treated like dissidents,' said Zhou Shengjian, director of a gay advocacy group in Chongqing, an inland city far from Shanghai's cosmopolitanism. 'For such a university to have a specific course like this, with so many participants and experts involved, will have a very positive impact on the social situation of gay people, and on the fight against AIDS.' However much they welcomed the academic breakthrough, which is likely to spur similar courses on other campuses and perhaps eventually give rise to a gay and lesbian studies movement, many of today's gay and lesbian activists say they are no longer willing simply to wait patiently for the society to accept them. In particular, gay activists have been able to leverage the rising alarm over the spread of AIDS to win more maneuvering space, including more acceptance from the government. Today, for example, by some estimates there are as many as 300 Web sites in China that cater to the concerns of gay men and lesbians. Some of the sites focus strictly on health issues. Others tread into the delicate area of discrimination and human rights, and these are occasionally blocked temporarily or shut down by the government. Others feature downloadable fiction by gay writers, who deal candidly with matters of sexuality in ways that few publishers in China's tightly controlled book industry would allow. One of the most popular sites (www.gztz.org) includes detailed maps of gay entertainment areas, from saunas to nightclubs, in China and overseas. 'In each provincial capital there is at least one gay working group that is active on H.I.V.-AIDS prevention,' said Zhen Li, 40, a volunteer for a gay hot line based in Beijing. 'AIDS is not the main focus of our lives, though. We use the discussion of AIDS as a way of coming together on other issues, from getting coverage of gay life in the media to starting a discussion with the society.' For the most part, activists say, the government's attitude has been pragmatic. Groups that say they want to work on AIDS get official support. Those that focus on equal rights for gay people generally do not. In almost the same breath, though, many also acknowledge that their strategy of using AIDS to create greater freedom carries a risk that they will be blamed for the spread of the disease. 'This is a very sensitive issue among homosexuals, thinking that outsiders are equating them with AIDS,' said Gao Yanning, a professor in the school of public health at Fudan University, whose course on homosexual life for the medical school was a precursor of the new undergraduate class. 'But we, the professors, have been very careful about this. When I was first thinking of a course called the theory and practice of homosexuality, I was approached by another professor who told me I should call the class 'Homosexuality and AIDS.' ' Mr. Gao said he would have refused to teach the class if he had been forced to use such a name. Many gay and lesbian Chinese say that it is social conservatism more than the government, whose policies during the Communist era have veered from repressive to prudish, that has discouraged gay people from publicly acknowledging their sexual orientation. Chinese are hard pressed to name a single celebrity or notable person from their country who has lived an openly gay life, meaning that except for foreigners, young gay men and lesbians have no prominent role models. Explicitly gay literature or cinema and television roles are equally scarce. A 52-year-old lesbian in the northeastern city of Dalian, who gave her name as Yang, said she had discovered her sexual identity only at age 36, after marriage, when she had her first relationship with another woman, a factory co-worker. 'When we were together, people would talk about our relationship behind our backs or sometimes ask outright whether we were gay people,' Ms. Yang said. 'I was just ashamed and didn't know what to say, so I avoided my girlfriend in public occasions. The young gay people in Dalian today, though, seem to live in a very comfortable time.' 'They're not forced to get married,' she said, 'and they take new partners one after another.' Many others, however, said the issue of marriage continued to weigh heavily. 'If you tell your parents you have a boyfriend, that may be O.K., but you've still got to get married,' said Wang Xieyu, a junior at Fudan University. 'The parents have their own concerns, their friends and their reputations. China today is like the U.S. in the 1960's, but we are changing faster. What took 40 years in the States may only take 10 years in China.'

Subject: An Outsider, Out of the Shadows From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 09:05:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/movies/MoviesFeatures/07hint.html September 7, 2005 An Outsider, Out of the Shadows By DINITIA SMITH TULSA, Okla. - The mystery of S. E. Hinton begins with her genderless name. Her most famous book, 'The Outsiders,' about teenage gangs and alienated youth in Tulsa during the 1960's, transformed young-adult fiction from a genre mostly about prom queens, football players and high school crushes to one that portrayed a darker, truer adolescent world. Since it was published in 1967, the novel has sold 14 million copies, 400,000 of them last year alone. Yet the jacket covers of all her novels over the years, including 'That Was Then, This Is Now' (1971), 'Rumble Fish' (1975) and 'Tex' (1979), have never included author photographs, and she has rarely spoken publicly or in interviews. In fact, some readers don't know that S. E. is a woman, Susan Eloise. Those who do, know mostly the basic facts: that she published 'The Outsiders' when she was 17, that she lives in Tulsa and has shown horses. That's pretty much it. Now Ms. Hinton has allowed her carefully preserved secrecy to be penetrated for the release of a recut version of Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 film of 'The Outsiders' on DVD, on Sept. 20 by Warner Home Video. The film will have a limited theatrical run nationally and is opening in New York on Sept. 9. It's as if Ms. Hinton's image, of a teenage girl who is somehow an authority on teenage life, has been caught in a time warp. But in reality, she's now a sturdy homemaker, either 54 or 56, though she won't give her exact age. She speaks in a gritty Oklahoman accent, and has lived almost all her life in Tulsa, where she is married to David Inhofe, a software engineer. They have a son, Nick, 22, at college back East. Ms. Hinton won't show a reporter her house, which she described as a red brick ranch, with a pool - in an affluent neighborhood. And she won't show the home where she grew up, either, in a poorer section. 'I don't want to revisit it,' she said curtly. But she did acknowledge that she grew up in a working-class neighborhood of worn houses on Tulsa's North Side. She attended Will Rogers High School, where students were divided into groups, including Greasers from blue-collar families or Socs (pronounced SO-shes, from social), rich kids whose families benefited from Tulsa's oil money and wore wheat jeans and madras and drove Mustangs. Along with Anita Bryant, she is one of the school's most famous graduates. 'The Outsiders' is steeped in that world. Ponyboy, an orphaned Greaser (played in the film by C. Thomas Howell), lives with his two brothers, Sodapop (Rob Lowe) and Darry, the oldest (Patrick Swayze). 'There's layers after layers after layers' of memories, Ms. Hinton said, as she drove past the Admiral Twin drive-in on East Easton Street, where the Greasers flirt with the Soc Girl, Cherry (Diane Lane), to the fury of her Soc boyfriend, Bob. 'It just freaks me out.' And here is the park, on Jasper Street, where in the film Bob nearly drowns Ponyboy, and Johnny (Ralph Macchio) stabs Bob to death. Ms. Hinton's, father, Grady, was a door-to-door salesman, her mother, Lillian, an assembly-line worker. 'My mother was physically and emotionally abusive,' Ms. Hinton said. 'My father was an extremely cold man.' It's clearly a difficult admission to make, and one she has almost never made. The family attended a 'fundamentalist, hellfire and brimstone' church, she said. 'It turned me off religion.' Ms. Hinton said she was a tomboy, happiest at her grandmother's farm, where her aunt had a horse. She longed for her own horse, and escaped into reading and writing books. (She wrote two unpublished books before 'The Outsiders.') 'When I was writing she'd come into my room, grab my hair and throw me in front of the TV,' Ms. Hinton said of her mother. 'She'd say, 'You're part of this family - now act like it.' I hate TV now.' Once her mother threw her manuscripts in the trash burner, but allowed her to rescue them. 'I would tell myself, 'It'll get better,' ' Ms. Hinton said. ' 'Hang on.' ' When she was 15, her father developed a brain tumor. As he was dying, she wrote 'The Outsiders,' inspired, she said, by injustices perpetrated against her Greaser friends by the Socs. A friend knew someone whose mother was a children's book writer, and Ms. Hinton sent her manuscript to her agent. It was bought by Viking for $1,000. She gradually made money and bought her first horse. Then came writer's block and an intense depression. She met Mr. Inhofe in her freshman biology class at the University of Tulsa, and she said he helped her to write again. With each succeeding novel, her fame grew, fueled by movie adaptations, though she insisted on protecting her privacy. 'The Outsiders' featured young actors on the brink of fame, among them Matt Dillon, Tom Cruise and Emilio Estevez. Mr. Dillon also starred in the movies of 'Tex,' directed by Tim Hunter, and 'Rumble Fish,' also directed by Mr. Coppola. In a telephone interview, Mr. Coppola said he recut 'The Outsiders' to be truer to the book, and retitled the new version 'The Outsiders: The Complete Novel.' In the original film, Mr. Coppola went quickly to the main action at the drive-in, but he has restored an early scene in which the Greaser characters are introduced one by one as they are set upon by Socs. 'Very often the solution is to get to the second reel fast,' he said. Mr. Coppola also restored a scene in which Sodapop comforts his brother, Ponyboy, in bed. It was cut because, though innocent, early audiences snickered. He replaced some of the symphonic music composed by his father, Carmine Coppola, who died in 1991, with songs by Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Van Morrison and others. 'I realized the Hollywood score was holding back the film,' Mr. Coppola said. 'I had my father's feelings to consider.' He did keep 'Stay Gold,' the theme song inspired by Robert Frost's poem 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' and written by Carmine Coppola and Stevie Wonder - and sung by Mr. Wonder. Still, 'The Outsiders' has an anachronistic feel, an all-white story about teenagers reflecting the segregated Tulsa of the time. Ms. Hinton said that it hasn't hurt the book's continuing popularity because 'today black and minority kids identify with the Greasers' as outsiders. There is, she suggested, a universality in being an adolescent outsider. 'My goal from being a child was to have a happy home life,' she said. 'My husband and I get along great.' Their families are in Tulsa, old friends. 'We're both introverts and it's hard to make new friends.' She has her weekly writing group, and says she rereads Jane Austen annually. For years, she showed hunters. Now she rides trails on her registered paint horse, Sage. Last year, tired of teenage fiction, Ms. Hinton published her first adult novel, 'Hawkes Harbor,' about an orphan raised by nuns who encounters pirates, gun runners and sharks while at sea, and is protected by a vampire. Publishers Weekly praised it as 'funny, scary, suspenseful.' But The Washington Post called it 'a rambling episodic mess.' Ms. Hinton attributed the bad reviews to the fact that readers were not expecting a vampire book. Ms. Hinton said she was fascinated by the paranormal. Her new novel, in progress, is a comedic suspense story about a man who escapes from Oklahoma. He goes to Los Angeles, makes 'a ton of money' and 'returns to his hometown to see his family,' she said. 'As soon as he gets there, weird things happen.' There are strange lights. A black panther is sighted. 'I just make it up as it happens,' Ms. Hinton said in her flinty voice.

Subject: Menu Keeps Chef's Health in Mind From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 07:14:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/dining/07wong.html September 7, 2005 New Menu Keeps Chef's Health in Mind By KIM SEVERSON THE chest pains came early in the day, but Simpson Wong dismissed them as heartburn. Besides, he was busy. He had to get to the farmers' market and create a tasting menu for the V.I.P.'s who would be dining that night at Jefferson, his West Village restaurant. At 41, Mr. Wong seemed too young for a heart attack. He had a little cigarette habit, but other than that he was in good shape. He kept his slight 5-foot-7 frame in shape by running. He ate his duck without the skin and had recently gotten his cholesterol level down. But on that May afternoon, barely able to stand, Mr. Wong decided he had better make his way to the hospital. There, the truth was apparent. Three arteries were blocked. The chef had had a heart attack. 'I said, what? This is no good,' Mr. Wong recounted. 'I have to go back to work.' After a month of recuperation, Mr. Wong reluctantly decided to shut the doors on his stylish fusion restaurant, which served dishes like scallops crusted in rice shavings and dressed with a white miso tangerine sauce. It was an agonizing decision. Mr. Wong had two dozen staff members who relied on him for jobs. And more than anything, he loved to make people happy with his food. He and Dr. Henry Wu, Mr. Wong's life partner and a cardiologist, went to the south of France, and then to St. Martin. He watched tropical storms, read, and listened to opera. He rarely thought about food. When he got back to New York, he knew he could not continue to cook in a style that involved the strict pace of amuse-bouche, appetizer, entree and dessert. Recipes heavy with cream, butter and veal stock had to go. Although he never ate much, Mr. Wong realized that he tasted a lot during service, so much so that in the course of preparing 150 dinners he might consume 30 teaspoons of butter and countless grams of saturated fat. If he wanted to keep cooking and stay healthy, he knew he would have to cook in an entirely different way. So he threw on a pair of flip-flops and spent the rest of his summer walking the streets of New York, taking in the tastes and smells of places like Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn and Koreatown, the cluster of Korean restaurants and other shops on and around West 32nd Street in Manhattan. He imagined new combinations of flavors and styles of cooking. 'I decided I wanted to make a fun place, a happy place that wasn't too fussy but didn't compromise ingredients,' he said. The result is the Jefferson Grill, which will open on Monday, barely four months after his heart attack. The room will have the cool, clean lines of his previous place, but the tablecloths and the round tables will be gone, replaced by rectangular Corian tables. Handmade plates from Thailand will offer color. The lounge will be built around vintage Eames chairs in bright red, orange and blue. The menu, too, will be stripped down. The flavors will still be complex, but the food will be simpler to cook and to eat. At its center is a series of inexpensive skewers accented with an array of aromatics. Shrimp marries with orange zest, salmon with fennel seed and beef tongue with pepper. Small plates, none over $10, will offer Korean-style baby short ribs with yogurt cucumber ribbons, coriander crusted scallops with celeriac root purée and chicken liver croquette with fried egg, balsamic vinegar and walnut oil. The only dish made with cream is the salmon with wilted spinach and sunchokes. All of the dishes were designed so most of the work could be done before diners arrived. That will make life a lot calmer in Mr. Wong's kitchen, where his misfortune was turned into inspiration. 'I was so happy this summer,' Mr. Wong said. 'When I took this menu into the kitchen to test, my happiness transformed my food.'

Subject: A Tutor Half a World Away From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 06:00:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/education/07tutor.html September 7, 2005 A Tutor Half a World Away, but as Close as a Keyboard By SARITHA RAI COCHIN, India - A few minutes before 7 on a recent morning, Greeshma Salin swiveled her chair to face the computer, slipped on her headset and said in faintly accented English, 'Hello, Daniela.' Seconds later she heard the response, 'Hello, Greeshma.' The two chatted excitedly before Ms. Salin said, 'We'll work on pronouns today.' Then she typed in, 'Daniela thinks that Daniela should give Daniela's horse Scarlett to Daniela's sister.' 'Is this an awkward sentence?' she asked. 'How can you make it better?' Nothing unusual about this exchange except that Ms. Salin, 22, was in Cochin, a city in coastal southern India, and her student, Daniela Marinaro, 13, was at her home in Malibu, Calif. Ms. Salin is part of a new wave of outsourcing to India: the tutoring of American students. Twice a week for a month now, Ms. Salin, who grew up speaking the Indian language Malayalam at home, has been tutoring Daniela in English grammar, comprehension and writing. Using a simulated whiteboard on their computers, connected by the Internet, and a copy of Daniela's textbook in front of her, she guides the teenager through the intricacies of nouns, adjectives and verbs. Daniela, an eighth grader at Malibu Middle School, said, 'I get C's in English and I want to score A's,' and added that she had given no thought to her tutor being 20,000 miles away, other than the situation feeling 'a bit strange in the beginning.' She and her sister, Serena, 10, a fourth grader at Malibu Elementary, are just 2 of the 350 Americans enrolled in Growing Stars, an online tutoring service that is based in Fremont, Calif., but whose 38 teachers are all in Cochin. They offer tutoring in mathematics and science, and recently in English, to students in grades 3 to 12. Five days each week, at 4:30 a.m. in Cochin, the teachers log on to their computers just as students in the United States settle down to their books and homework in the early evening. Growing Stars is one of at least a half-dozen companies across India that are helping American children complete their homework and prepare for tests. As in other types of outsourcing, the driving factor in 'homework outsourcing,' as the practice is known, is the cost. Companies like Growing Stars and Career Launcher India in New Delhi charge American students $20 an hour for personal tutoring, compared with $50 or more charged by their American counterparts. Growing Stars pays its teachers a monthly salary of 10,000 rupees ($230), twice what they would earn in entry-level jobs at local schools. Critics have raised concern about the quality of the instruction. 'Online tutoring is not closely regulated or monitored; there are few industry standards,' said Rob Weil, deputy director at the educational issues department at the American Federation of Teachers. Quality becomes a trickier issue with overseas tutoring because monitoring is harder, said Boria Sax, director of research, development and training for the online offerings of Mercy College, based in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. Growing Stars is rapidly expanding to accommodate students from the East Coast, Canada, Great Britain and Australia. Its recruits, mostly with recent postgraduate and teaching degrees, already have deep subject knowledge. They must go through two weeks of technical, accent and cultural training that includes familiarization with the differences between British English, widely used in India, and American English. 'They learn to use 'eraser' instead of its Indian equivalent, 'rubber,' and understand that 'I need a pit stop' could mean 'I need to go to the loo,' ' said Saji Philip, a software entrepreneur of Indian origin and the company's chairman and co-founder who works in New Jersey. Still, the cultural divide is real. In Cochin, Leela Bai Nair, 48, a former teacher who has 23 years of experience and is an academic trainer for Growing Stars, said she was 'floored at first when 10-year old American students addressed me as Leela. All my teaching life in India, my students addressed me as Ma'am,' she said. That same morning in Cochin, an English teacher, Anya Tharakan, 24, directed her student away from the subject of video games to concentrate on a passage from 'Alice in Wonderland,' enlivening the lessons with puzzles and picture games. Ms. Tharakan, who tutors Serena Marinaro among others, said a bit of the cultural gulf was being bridged when students asked her 'How big is your home?' or 'Do you have friends at work?' or 'Can you send me your photo?' For her part, Ms. Tharakan is learning about soccer and rap music from her students. Thomas Marinaro, a chiropractor in Los Angeles and the father of Daniela and Serena, had been unhappy with the face-to-face tutoring he had previously arranged for his daughters at home. After three months with Growing Stars, however, Dr. Marinaro said the girls' math skills were already much improved. As a bonus, it cost a third of what he paid the home tutor. Dr. Marinaro said that he had misgivings when he first considered enrolling his daughters for English tutoring. 'I thought, how could somebody from India teach them English?' But after a few weeks of monitoring, he said he relaxed. 'I want my girls to develop a good vocabulary and write better, and I believe they are learning to do that.' Biju Mathew, an Indian-born software engineer, set up Growing Stars after moving to the Silicon Valley five years ago to work for a technology start-up company. In India, he had been paying $10 a month for twice-a-week tutoring sessions for his children. In the United States, he found, a similar service could cost $50 or more per hour. The idea of homework outsourcing was born, and the company began offering its services in January 2004. Growing Stars has been cautious, offering its students a choice of United States- or India-based tutors for English. It charges a $10 premium above its normal $20 rate for students who choose a tutor in the United States. When parents have expressed concern over a tutor's accent, the firm has offered a change of instructor. Other online tutoring firms in the United States adopt varied approaches. Tutor.com, for instance, uses only tutors based in North America. SmarThinking of Washington, D.C., has tutors in the United States but also has instructors in South Africa, the Philippines, India and Chile. However, only those in the United States provide English lessons. 'We haven't found any cultural divide,' said SmarThinking's chief executive and co-founder, Burck Smith. Eliminating factors such as skin color, appearance, gender and accent made the Internet 'more egalitarian than most classrooms,' he said. The demand for online tutoring is reflected in the firm's 50 percent growth rate in the last few years. Twenty new clients - including high schools and colleges - have signed on for tutoring beginning this fall. Firms like Growing Stars are aggressively looking to expand their online tutoring under federal programs. This summer, for instance, Growing Stars' tutors ran a successful pilot for the Upward Bound program at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. The program, financed by the federal Department of Education, helps children of high school age get into college. With the start of the academic year this fall, Growing Stars expects to provide online tutoring in math to 80 students from Marist's Upward Bound program. Also, the firm has just been approved as a licensed tutoring provider in California under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Currently, Growing Stars is trying to find a way for its teachers to be fingerprinted by the Department of Justice to meet legal requirements of the program. Mr. Philip, the chairman, said his company's work would help make Americans more competitive. 'Offshore tutoring,' he said, 'is a step toward ensuring that we are not always beaten in competition against Japanese carmakers, Indian software firms and Chinese manufacturers.'

Subject: Tiptoeing Across the Border From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:57:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/realestate/07canada.html September 7, 2005 Tiptoeing Across the Border By TERRY PRISTIN VAUGHAN, Ontario - The new Vaughan Mills mall in this fast-growing Toronto suburb - the first enclosed mall to open in Canada since 1990 - houses many familiar American retail names. Several of them are brands that have ventured north of the border only in the last five years, including the Children's Place, Tommy Bahama, Build-a-Bear Workshop, Linens 'n Things and Old Navy. The enormous Bass Pro Shops Outdoor World, where Kodiak bears stand guard and customers can choose among hundreds of fishing poles, is the first store in Canada for the sporting goods chain, which is based in Springfield, Mo. American retailers have been entering the Canadian market in increasing numbers in recent years, a trend fueled by pressure to expand, the growing saturation of markets in the United States and easing trade restrictions after adoption of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Still, retailers like Ann Taylor and Bed, Bath & Beyond, which are staples of other shopping and entertainment malls owned by the Mills Corporation in places like Sunrise, Fla., and Ontario, Calif., are nowhere to be found at Vaughan Mills, or at any other Canadian mall, for that matter. About 200 American brands are now available in Canada, about one-fourth of them newcomers since 2000, according to Robert J. Boyle, the director of market research for Ivanhoe Cambridge of Montreal, co-owner of Vaughan Mills. (Ivanhoe Cambridge is the real estate arm of Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, the country's biggest pension fund manager.) European brands like H.& M., Sephora and Zara are also rapidly making inroads here, just as they are in the United States. But Mr. Boyle estimates that only about a third of the top 100 American brands have made the trip north. Even though Toronto is a mere hour away from New York by air, its leading malls - Yorkdale Shopping Center, on the outskirts of the city, and Eaton Centre, in the heart of downtown - have retained a Canadian flavor, with mostly home-grown chains. Some American retailers do very well at the big-box outdoor shopping centers that began popping up in Canadian suburbs in the late 1990's. At RioCan, a real estate investment trust based in Toronto, which owns 196 strip malls and big-box shopping properties across Canada (30 of them built in a joint venture with the Kimco Realty Corporation, a REIT based in New Hyde Park, N.Y.), the leading revenue-producer is Wal-Mart. Three other American companies are among the top 10, including A.& P. (which has been in Canada since the 1920's); the TJX Companies, the parent of the off-price retailer T. J. Maxx (whose Canadian divisions are Winners and Home Sense); and Staples. But Target does not operate in Canada, and Kmart had stores in Canada but closed them. Loblaws, the dominant supermarket chain, has been able so far to keep Wal-Mart from opening its superstores in Canada by creating a new model known as Loblaws Real Canadian Superstore, said Jean Lambert, a Quebecer who manages global research for the International Council of Shopping Centers in New York. Because of its proximity and its economic prosperity, Canada might seem to be a natural market for American retailers. But real estate specialists say many have chosen to stay away for reasons both geographical and cultural. With most of Canada's 32.8 million people concentrated in a few urban areas that are far from one another - about a third of the country's population lives in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver - distribution can be a real headache. 'The biggest issue for U.S. retailers,' said Blair Hodgson, a retail real estate broker at a Toronto company, Oberfeld Snowcap, 'is, Why stretch so much geographically to have five stores, when I could put five stores in a much smaller area in California?' Canada also has much less shopping center space than its neighbor to the south - about 12.5 square feet per capita, compared with about 20 square feet in the United States, retail specialists say. The pace of new construction is slower in Canada because it is more difficult to get property rezoned for commercial use, financing is less widely available and the pool of potential tenants is smaller, said Edward Sonshine, the president and chief executive of RioCan. In addition, he said, 'the opposition to urban sprawl is more advanced here.' Other retail specialists say there is less chance of overbuilding because pension funds, the leading mall developers in Canada, tend to be more cautious than the publicly traded companies that own most malls in the United States. Cultural differences between the two countries go far beyond the language requirements that apply to Quebec, where the staff must be bilingual and labels must be printed in French as well as English. In part because they are so heavily taxed, Canadians have less disposable income than Americans. 'We're much more middle-income earners,' Mr. Boyle said. 'We're very price conscious, very value conscious.' Canadians also dine out less frequently, so mall operators have not attracted the restaurant chains like P. F. Chang's or the Cheesecake Factory that in the United States are increasingly replacing department stores as anchor tenants, said Tony Grossi, an executive vice president of Cadillac Fairview, a prominent mall operator owned by the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board. Laurence C. Siegel, the president and chief executive of Mills, points out that many Canadians do their shopping downtown rather than at suburban malls. 'You have more vibrant center cities in Canada than you do here,' he said. For Mills, a company that likes to mix full-price and outlet retailers, opening in Canada has posed some challenges. Operating costs, including taxes, are higher at Vaughan than at other Mills properties, which has served to deter some off-price retailers, said Ross Nussbaum, a REIT analyst at Banc of America Securities. Mr. Siegel said that Mills and Ivanhoe Cambridge hope eventually to open additional malls in Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver. Having a bigger presence in the country may make it easier for the company to attract discount retailers like Burlington Coat Factory, which backed out of plans to open its first Canadian store at Vaughan Mills. Do Canadians prefer to buy Canadian? Developers and brokers who are aggressively pursuing American chains point out that American Eagle Outfitters does very well in Canada. But they say that Canada, in an effort to preserve its cultural heritage, is not likely to allow a Barnes & Noble to compete with its own Indigo Books and Music chain, whose stores have a section called 'Why the World Needs More Canada.' And when Best Buy bought a well-established electronics retailer called Future Shock - a typical way for United States chains to enter the Canadian market - it did not change the name of the stores. Mr. Sonshine recalled the outcry last year when it was rumored that Target would buy Canada's venerable Hudson Bay Company, the owner of the Bay, a department store. But he said the public did not show its loyalty by rushing to the stores. 'The Bay is as Canadian as you can get,' he said, 'but their sales went down, anyway.'

Subject: Toyota Hopes to Push Its Hybrids From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:55:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/business/worldbusiness/07hybrid.html September 7, 2005 Toyota Hopes to Push Its Hybrids Beyond the Niche By JAMES BROOKE TOKYO - With Hurricane Katrina pushing American gas prices above $3 a gallon at the pump, Toyota Motor may find itself in the right place at the right time, with a new, half-mile assembly line capable of producing gasoline-electric hybrid Prius cars at the rate of one a minute. The line, in a factory in Toyota City, is part of a strategy by Japan's largest company to expand hybrids from a niche in the marketplace (just 5 percent of its American sales now) to mainstream (25 percent of its sales by 2010). With oil prices in the range of $70 a barrel, Toyota's investment in energy-saving technology may seem an easy bet. But the gamble by Toyota, the pioneer in producing hybrids, still faces a variety of major challenges, among them increased competition, new tax rules that favor its American competitors and a spreading realization among car buyers that not all hybrids offer big savings on gas. The increasingly competitive marketplace for hybrids may prove to be the biggest challenge for Toyota, whose goal for early in the next decade is to sell a million hybrids worldwide, including 600,000 to Americans. By 2008, Americans can expect to see 10 hybrid models from Toyota, but also a dozen from such brands as Mercury, Dodge, Chevrolet, Nissan and Porsche, as those automakers realize that fuel efficiency may become an important marketing tool. 'I would like to get more hybrids out of our system because I do think it's something that is here to stay,' William Clay Ford Jr., chairman and chief executive of Ford Motor, told reporters in Detroit on Aug. 23. Last fall, Ford introduced a hybrid version of its Escape sport utility vehicle, the first of several hybrids planned. At the same time, the energy bill signed by President Bush on Aug. 8 effectively gave a break to American manufacturers by extending what could be a tax credit of as much as $3,400 per car to purchasers of the first 60,000 hybrids sold by a company. The credit phases out after that. Toyota sold more than 60,000 hybrids in the first six months of this year, so the tax law seems intended to help General Motors and Ford. Last year, Ford, the only American carmaker currently offering a hybrid comparable to a Prius, sold 2,566, for a 3 percent share of the United States hybrid market. Toyota's hybrid sales, consisting almost exclusively of the Prius, accounted for 64 percent of the 83,153 new hybrids registered in the United States, according to R. L. Polk & Company, a market research firm. Honda was second, with sales of its Civic taking 31 percent of the market. The new tax law 'seems to benefit those who haven't done anything in the area of hybrids until now,' Christopher Richter, a CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets auto analyst, said in Tokyo. 'And it seems to penalize those who have been pioneers.' Although hybrids are to be a pillar of Toyota's strategy, Paul Nolasco, a Toyota spokesman, said the company had 'so far been fortunate not to have to depend on government subsidies or tax breaks to encourage sales.' At the same time, some American drivers are wary of paying as much as $5,000 more for a hybrid that may not be a great fuel saver. As a result, Toyota is fine-tuning its use of the word hybrid. 'We are not marketing them only as highly fuel-efficient vehicles; that is a natural association people have with the word hybrid,' Mr. Nolasco said, referring largely to the Highlander and the Lexus. 'We are marketing hybrid synergy drive - great environmental performance and, at the same time, great driving performance.' In early August, California regulators started to distinguish between fuel-efficient hybrids and 'muscle' hybrids, the high-powered versions that save little gasoline. Of the seven hybrid models now on sale in the United States, owners of the Honda Civic, Honda Insight and Toyota Prius can qualify for decals allowing them to drive alone, rather than with two or more passengers, in highway commuter lanes. That reward is not extended to four hybrids not rated as exceptional energy savers: Honda Accord, Ford Escape, Toyota Highlander and Lexus RX 400h. But with Americans paying $40 or more for a tank of gasoline, hybrid is a label that carmakers believe will draw buyers into their showrooms. Earlier this year, American demand was so strong that a used 2004 Prius sometimes sold for as much as the window sticker price on a new one. In July and August, in fact, the Prius was the model with the biggest jump - 68 percent - in Internet information searches on Cars.com, according to the Web site's Consumer Search Index, released last week. 'The challenge is how to expand hybrid technology to more models and more lines,' Masatami Takimoto, Toyota's executive vice president in charge of advanced power train and engine technology, said at the company's new steel and glass global headquarters. 'My personal desire is to put the hybrid to all the models. But it cannot be done overnight, only step by step.' Some drivers have said that the actual mileage of the Prius, Toyota's third-most -popular car in the United States after the Camry and Corolla, often falls short of its federal economy rating. But Mr. Takimoto, responding to that criticism, said, 'The majority of customers say that their second-generation Prius gets much better mileage than their old car.' He said Toyota was meeting with officials at the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States to review their gas mileage measurement system. Hybrids get their best mileage in the stop-and-go traffic of cities and suburbs, when they largely run on their electric motors. 'A lot depends on how you drive them,' Kurt Sanger, Japan automotive analyst for Macquarie Securities, said in Tokyo. 'If you gun them at every red light, you are not going to get 44 miles to the gallon.' He said Toyota needed to 'redouble its educational effort in that regard.' With Toyota determined to sell a million hybrid vehicles worldwide, or about 10 percent of its forecast sales for 2010, it is clear that the company is methodically making hybrid vehicles a core of its plans for growth. In late June, Katsuaki Watanabe, the president of Toyota, expanded his team of executive vice presidents in charge of high technology to three, from one. Mr. Takimoto, a veteran of 35 years of hybrid research at Toyota, will oversee the hybrid program. Flush with $10.5 billion in profits from last year, a record, Toyota is expanding its research and development budget this year by 10 percent, to $6.9 billion, although it would not disclose how much of that was for hybrids. Nor would Japan's second- and third-largest car companies, Nissan Motor and Honda Motor, which are also increasing their research budgets by similar percentages. Honda's will go to $4.65 billion and Nissan's to $4.1 billion. Toyota has about 650 patents on its hybrid technology, the fruits of $800 million reportedly spent to develop the Prius. Toyota licenses its hybrid technology to Nissan and Ford. The company says it has reached the break-even point on its hybrid technology, but Kunihiko Shiohara, chief automotive analyst for Goldman Sachs Japan, said it was impossible to confirm that assertion without knowing how much was spent on research and development. Mr. Sanger, of Macquarie Securities, said, 'The benefit of being Toyota is that you are making so much money in so many areas you can take a long-term strategy.' He added that Toyota could afford to lose money with hybrids while gaining market share and consumer acceptance. Nissan is expected to produce a hybrid version of its Altima in 2006. General Motors, the largest carmaker in the world, and DaimlerChrysler, the fifth-largest carmaker, have signed a deal to develop hybrid vehicle technology jointly. Honda, too, is trying to increase sales of its hybrids, although it is not staking out lofty goals for expansion. Sales figures indicate that Honda, the second-biggest Japanese carmaker in the American market, will sell about 42,000 hybrids in the United States this year, largely Civics. Although this will be a 55 percent jump over last year, the total will be small compared with Toyota's forecast hybrid sales in the United States of 140,000. Hybrids account for about 3 percent of Honda's sales in the United States. 'We believe the market for hybrid cars will expand in North America,' Kenzo Suzuki, the executive chief engineer of Honda. 'We want to be ready to expand. Our thinking is the gasoline price will continue to go up. With that in mind, we have to develop hybrid cars.' Japan's three leading car companies see hybrid cars as a halfway step toward an ultimate goal of selling gasoline-free hydrogen-cell cars. The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in Japan predicts that 50,000 hydrogen-powered vehicles will be on Japan's roads in 2010, and as many as 5 million by 2020. Initially, all of Toyota's hybrids were made in Japan. But this fall, Prius production is to start in China, marking the first overseas production of the hybrid. Those cars are for the Chinese market. Next year, Toyota is to start making a hybrid Camry at the company's Kentucky plant. And a Toyota pickup truck plant is to open next year in San Antonio, with some of the trucks produced there expected to be hybrids. 'To us, it's not a passing phase but a vital technology for the 21st century,' Jim Press, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., told a recent auto industry conference in Michigan.

Subject: In Economic Growth, Lots of Company From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:51:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/09/07/news/edpower.php September 8, 2005 In Economic Growth, Lots of Company Jonathan Power - International Herald Tribune ANKARA While Europeans debate their economic sclerosis and Americans their growing deficits, most of the rest of the world is moving forward and upward, especially so if we are talking about numbers of people, not countries. Every time I come to Turkey I have to blink. Not that long ago, the big cities were overridden with shantytowns, and poverty stalked every village. Now, if not truly European as the Turks so earnestly want, the country makes a good attempt at emulating European standards- few shantytowns, fast roads, handsome bridges, well-dressed children, rising growth, a highly successful manufacturing export sector, rapidly improving health and educational services and a remarkably obvious presence of educated women in responsible positions. But Turkey, while an exception in the Middle Eastern Muslim world in that it both lacks oil and distributes its wealth reasonably fairly, is not atypical of much of the third world. Over the last three decades, developing countries have recorded more rapid average real income growth than the developed, already industrialized, countries. In the last five years or so, average real income growth has been more than double that in the developed world. One need only reread the great classics of the 1960s, John Gunther's 'Inside Asia' and Gunnar Myrdal's 'Asian Drama,' to be reminded that it wasn't so long ago that the prevailing wisdom was that this part of the world was a basket case, weighted down by millenniums of tradition - 'the Hindu growth rate' and 'Confucian somnolence' were common catchwords. Even today, despite the example of Turkey, Malaysia, Pakistan and Indonesia, we often hear argued the bizarre notion that Islamic culture is simply not conducive to capitalist development. Admittedly, most of this remarkable surge has been concentrated in China, India and South East Asia. But they account for two-fifths of the world's population, which is why I say don't count countries, or one falls into the trap of much UN reporting that sees its statistics always skewed by its need to respect its scores of small member countries. Even with that caveat, the fact is the good news is spreading. After suffering what was called 'the lost decade' in the 1980s, followed by an indifferent decade in the 90s, most of Latin America is now doing rather well. Africa, whose images of starvation can still overwhelm us, is doing better than ever over all, and many countries there, not so long ago languishing in the trough of despond, have growth rates approaching or even exceeding 6 percent. A graph of developing countries' exports of 'technology-intensive manufactures' to developed countries, just published by the UN's Conference on Trade and Development, shows what can fairly be described as a line rising steadily since 1985 and becoming almost, if not quite, vertical from 1997 onward. This is one of the core reasons for the remarkable growth of the developing countries. Not textiles and not agriculture. It is humdrum manufactured products, followed by electronics. Of course, liberalizing agriculture and controlling the Chinese textile flood is important for the likes of Africa and Central America, but this is another case of a couple of problems crowding out many examples of good news. There is also one other important reason for this success - it is the remarkable takeoff in South-South trade, among the poorer countries themselves. They are not just taking in one another's dirty washing. These exports have become an important part of their strategies for growth, as with Brazil's large-scale sales of soy to China and Turkey's exports of engineering products around the Middle East. Poverty, the scourge of centuries, could be effectively abolished this century. Totalitarian China may be going backward on this, particularly in its rural areas and among new urban migrants, despite its tremendous growth. But democratic India and Turkey are showing what economic growth should be all about. India, even though millions are still unspeakably poor, now has a better distribution of income than the United States. And so does Turkey.

Subject: Parental Supervision Required From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:49:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07sittenfeld.html September 7, 2005 Parental Supervision Required By CURTIS SITTENFELD Philadelphia IN 1989, when I was 13 and living in Cincinnati, I waged a one-girl campaign to persuade my mother and father to let me attend Groton School in Massachusetts. Despite my parents' ambivalence about boarding school, they ultimately acquiesced, I went, and I received a very good education - not all of it academic. More than a decade later, I couldn't resist setting my first novel at a boarding school. Now at readings, I'm asked if I'd send my own child away to school, and I say no. My naked hypocrisy isn't the only reason I feel apologetic in these moments. It's also because the person who asks the question usually is middle-aged and gives off a certain preppy whiff - perhaps he's wearing seersucker pants, or maybe her voice has that assured, WASP-y thickness - and it seems highly likely that my questioner already is or soon will be a boarding-school parent. But it turns out I'm not alone: an increasing number of parents are deciding against boarding school. Enrollment at private day schools has grown 15 percent in the past decade, while enrollment at boarding schools has grown only 2.7 percent. Overall boarding school enrollment dropped from about 42,000 in the late 1960's to 39,000 in the last school year - even though, according to the Census Bureau, the population of 14- to 17-year-olds was more than 1.5 million higher in 2004 than in 1968. Reporting on this, The Wall Street Journal attributed the shift away from boarding school to a trend of greater parental involvement, which translates into parents reluctant to be apart from their children. This is, evidently, the same reason some parents are now accompanying their teenagers to boarding school; these mothers and fathers literally move, sometimes cross-country, to be close to the campuses of the boarding schools their children attend. While the new breed of super-involved parent strikes me as slightly creepy (having worked as a private-school teacher, I've also seen parents whose idea of 'involvement' is doing their children's homework for them), I don't think the conclusion they've come to is the wrong one. Among the reasons I wouldn't send my own child to boarding school is that being around one's adolescent peers 24 hours a day doesn't seem particularly healthy. It makes the things that already loom large in high school - grades, clothes, sports, heartache, acne - loom even larger. Going home at night provides physical distance from the relentlessness of all teenagers, all the time, and, ideally, parents provide perspective. Although they might be dorky, parents know an important lesson about everything from serious hazing to the embarrassment of dropping a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria: This, too, shall pass. Certainly teachers provide an adult perspective at boarding schools, but it's a very unusual teacher who influences an adolescent as much as the average parent does. Furthermore, while many boarding school teachers knock themselves out on students' behalf not just by teaching but also by coaching and running dorms, they're undermined by lesser teachers who, rather than guiding students out of teenage pettiness, seem themselves to get sucked down into it. There is on every boarding school campus some variation on the doofus teacher who, if he's not actually buying beer to ingratiate himself with the popular senior guys, sure seems to wish he could. The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message. It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find. FOR me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000? Besides, then there's no risk of college feeling anticlimactic, as it can for boarding school graduates. Of course, none of this is what I thought when I was 13. I thought then, and I still think, that boarding school seemed interesting. It's a place where bright, talented adolescents rub up against each other figuratively and literally. Our culture is fascinated by the rich and the young, and elite boarding schools are a place where the two intersect. That doesn't mean you'll automatically be better off if you attend one, but it does make it unsurprising that they've retained a hold in the popular imagination. It's not that I see boarding schools as evil. I just don't see them as necessary, and despite their often self-congratulatory rhetoric, I don't see them as noble - certainly no more so than public schools. At the same time, I recognize the hubris in declaring how I'll raise my as-yet-nonexistent children, and probably nothing makes it likelier that I will send them to boarding school than publicly vowing I won't. I'm not planning on it, but life is hard to predict and perhaps at a parents' weekend 20 years from now, standing on the sidelines of a verdant lacrosse field, I'll be the one wearing seersucker.

Subject: Houses in the Air From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 18:21:00 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Houses in the Air J. Bradford DeLong Over the past six months, attention and worry have shifted from America’s enormous trade deficit to its surging property markets and real-estate bubble. At least two of the reasons for high — and rising — home prices in the United States are well understood. What remains highly uncertain, however, is whether an obviously overheating market can be cooled without sending America, and its main trading partners around the world, into an economic tailspin. The US housing boom is due, first, to low interest rates, which means that large amounts of money can be borrowed for mortgages with moderate monthly payments. Low interest rates strengthen the ability to pay, and thus boost demand. And, with demand high and housing supply fixed — at least in the short run — prices go up. Second, the 70-year-period that began with the widespread diffusion of the automobile — during which one could get nearly anywhere in a typical metropolitan area in half an hour or less — is over. Before there was widespread automobile ownership, land prices depended on location, and proximity to the central city or to the local railroad station carried a premium. Now, with serious congestion slowing traffic in major cities to a crawl, the land gradient in housing prices is steep once again. Perhaps this steepening of the location gradient could be delayed for a decade if we were willing to shift to denser residential patterns. These two factors — low mortgage rates, and the fact that the country has filled up so much that our cars no longer marginalise location costs — go a long way toward explaining the surge in housing prices over the past decade or so. But they don’t go all the way. On top of these two powerful fundamental factors sits a bubble. The bubble is filled by people with money who are buying extra houses because they think home prices will continue to rise, and by people without money who are buying $400,000 houses in less-fashionable neighbourhoods with 0% down and floating interest rates. Both groups’ demand is inherently ephemeral. When the first group discovers that housing prices don’t always go up, they will try to dump their properties. And when the second group discovers that interest rates don’t always stay low, many of them will be unable to meet their higher mortgage payments and will likewise try to dump their properties. The end of the American housing bubble might not turn out badly. But if it does, it will probably be due to a sharp rise in interest rates. This could happen for two reasons. First, investors, recognising that the dollar is overvalued and that they are likely to suffer large losses when it returns to its fundamental value, could start selling their Treasury bonds, corporate bonds, and mortgage-backed securities. As the prices of these assets fall, their yields will rise. At some point, the yields on bonds and mortgages will be high enough that investors’ appetite for yield will balance their fear of exchange-rate depreciation. The second factor that could push US interest rates sharply upward is not fear of a decline in the future value of the dollar, but the fact of a past decline in its value. The US imports the equivalent of 16% of its GDP. A 40% fall in the value of the dollar — of which half passes through to increased dollar prices of imports — thus implies a 3.2% rise in the overall price level. A Federal Reserve committed to effective price stability will likely raise interest rates rather than allow any year’s inflation rate to jump from 3% to 6%. If there is a sharp spike in interest rates — caused either by capital flight in anticipation of a dollar decline or by tight monetary policy in reaction to a dollar decline comes to pass — we will see how good the Federal Reserve really is. If interest rates rise too far, then the collapse in housing values will lead to large-scale foreclosures and a collapse in consumption spending as well. This would mean a depression not just for the US, but for Asia and probably Europe as well, for the US can remain the world’s importer of last resort and guarantor of effective demand only as long as its domestic consumption is strong. But if interest rates don’t rise far enough, the value of the dollar will spiral downward and US inflation will spiral upward like in the 1970s, setting the stage for the type of extremely painful measures imposed by then Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. In these circumstances, straight is the gait and narrow is the path that the Federal Reserve will have to walk — hardly an enviable position. And yet journalists ask me who is likely to get the “plum job” of Fed Chair next year. (The author is professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley) http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-1211829,curpg-1.cms

Subject: Re: Houses in the Air From: Pete Weis To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sun, Sep 11, 2005 at 17:50:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: While I agree with the main premise of Brad DeLong in this piece - the housing bubble threatens the global economy - the main reason for this 'bubble' is tremendously relaxed lending standards - not low interest rates or the automobile. Sure low interest rates have contributed, but not to the extent that - no money down - no income requirements - interest only, reverse mortgages - 'we screen the buyers, award the mortgages and pass along the risk' mentality! Brad DeLong briefly mentions poor borrowing habits by 'irrationally exuberant' housing purchasers in the following line, but what about the government agency entrusted with safeguarding lending standards(?): 'The bubble is filled by people with money who are buying extra houses because they think home prices will continue to rise, and by people without money who are buying $400,000 houses in less-fashionable neighbourhoods with 0% down and floating interest rates.' What happens when mortgage defaults increase over the coming years? Someone will end up taking on the losses. This, by itself, will push rates higher to account for the higher risk and eventually lending standards will tighten also. It will be the tougher lending standards which will reduce qualified buyers for a given house the most - rather than higher rates. It is also the rather prolonged loosening of lending standards which threaten our financial institutions the most.

Subject: Re: Houses in the Air From: Jennifer To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 19:49:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Pancho, how can we date these fine articles? The Daily Times always gives the current date for any article. Nice posts in any and every event. Hmmm.

Subject: 'Guns, Germs and Steel' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 15:13:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0706_050706_diamond.html July 6, 2005 'Guns, Germs and Steel': Jared Diamond on Geography as Power By Stefan Lovgren - National Geographic Why over the past 10,000 years has the development of different societies proceeded at such different rates? I say the answer is location, location, location. It's overwhelmingly due to the difference in the wild plant and animal species suitable to domestication that the continents made available. All the interesting stuff like technology, writing, and empires requires a productive economy that is producing enough food to feed technological experts, bureaucrats, kings, and scribes. Hunter-gatherer societies don't produce enough food surpluses to support those extra people. Agriculture does. Where did the first farming societies appear? The first farming, as far as we know, appeared in [the Middle East region known as] the Fertile Crescent some 11,500 years ago, and shortly thereafter in China. These places had the greatest variety of wild plants and animals suitable for domestication. Only a tiny fraction of wild plants and animals were both useful and possible to domesticate. Those few species were concentrated in a few areas, of which the two with the greatest variety were the Fertile Crescent and China. What were the benefits of the agricultural lifestyle compared to the hunter-gatherer existence? Farming lets you feed far more people than hunting and gathering. In a one-acre [0.4-hectare] wheat field there's more to eat than in a one-acre forest. In a one-acre sheep pasture, there are more animals to eat than in a one-acre forest. Also, farming lets you settle down in villages next to your wheat fields and pastures, whereas hunter-gatherers have to move around. You point out that knowledge and new technology spread east and west much easier than north and south. The reason is easy to understand if one understands geography. Climate, temperature, seasons, and habitat all depend strongly on latitude. Above 85 degrees north, you don't have tropical rainforest, you have Arctic ice fields. Certainly plants and animals tend to be adapted to particular habitats and climates. The same is also true of people. The practices of the farming societies in the Fertile Crescent are easily transferred west [to Europe]. What is the link between agriculture and war? Farming makes possible the development of technology, including military technology. Wars are not something new invented by those nasty Europeans. Everyone about whom we have enough knowledge has been involved with wars. Groups of people are competing with neighbor groups, and any group that develops some advantage is likely to be able to fight off, conquer, drive out, or exterminate their rivals. Throughout human history there's been this reward for developing more potent technology, including military technology. The Spaniards certainly used weapons technology to their advantage in defeating the Incas. In the battle of Cajamarca [in 1532, in what is now Peru], 169 Spaniards faced an army of 80,000 Inca soldiers. In the first ten minutes, there were 7,000 Incas dead. When the dust settled, not a single Spaniard was dead. [Spanish conquistador] Francisco Pizarro got a slight wound. That's because the Spaniards have the steel sword and the Incas have wooden clubs. It really showed the power of military technology. In a way, the Spaniards also unwittingly deployed powerful biological weapons, including smallpox. It is estimated that 95 percent of Native American casualties throughout North and South America were due to disease rather than military conquest. Smallpox killed about 50 percent of the Incas in the first epidemic. Why did the Spaniards pass this disease on to the Incas and not the other way around? It turns out that most of the nasty, infectious diseases of human history came to us from domestic animals. Thirteen of the fourteen herd domestic animals were Eurasian species. The only herd domestic animal of the New World was the llama, but the llama didn't live in really big herds. So we didn't get diseases from llamas, but we did get diseases from pigs and sheep. And Eurasian people in general got exposed to these diseases at childhood and therefore developed an immune system. In the New World, smallpox arrives and nobody is exposed to it, so it's hitting everybody, including adults. When the European settlers arrived in southern Africa, it was the same story at first. But as the settlers went north, they soon began to encounter problems. People of the north were farmers themselves, and it's possible that they had been exposed to smallpox. What we're sure of is that Africans had tropical diseases [such as malaria] to which they had some resistance. But Europeans did not have resistance. In tropical Africa, the disease advantages were reversed. Instead of Europeans carrying diseases that wipe out the locals, the locals carry diseases that wipe out the Europeans. That's why the Europeans never settled in large numbers in Africa outside of the temperate zone of southern Africa and the highlands of Kenya. Africans developed complex farming societies, and they were able to stave off the European intruders. Yet ultimately the Europeans conquered Africa through colonialism. Is that why much of modern Africa is mired in poverty? Africa today, paradoxically, is the poorest continent. I say paradoxically because this is where humans evolved, so [humans] had a huge head start in Africa. Tropical diseases kept the Europeans out at first, but those tropical diseases nonetheless pose a big public health and economic burden on Africa today. That is linked with colonialism. Europeans could not settle in large numbers, but what they still could do was to extract wealth from Africans, initially slaves, then rubber, diamonds, and copper. Basically that means robbing Africans and setting up legalized institutions for corruption. Colonialism also changed the Africans' traditional way of life. They moved to cities next to the mines where their immunities no longer provided protection against tropical diseases. There is a scene in the film where you react very strongly to seeing some children dying of malaria in a Zambian hospital. Is there a disconnect between thinking about these huge issues as a prominent academic and seeing them in action up close? There is a difference between understanding something intellectually and having something in your face. When I wrote Guns, Germs and Steel, I had a whole chapter on Africa and a chapter on diseases in Africa. I was perfectly aware of the statistics on malaria and so forth, but that is impersonal and sanitized. It's different from standing there in a hospital and seeing kids who were then the age that my kids had been and having flashbacks to one of my own kids in a hospital. That's just an emotional experience and very different from the sanitized statistics. Do you worry that audiences may sense an inevitability in your argument—as if we're destined to be either poor or wealthy depending on where we are born, and that there is not much we can do about it? If you make a complex argument, there will be people out there who will simplify and misuse it. I recognize that there are people who will say geography deals out these immutable cards and there's nothing we can do about it. But one can show the evidence and say there is something we can do about it. Look at Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan. They recognized that their biggest disadvantage was public health. They didn't say, We got these tropical diseases—it's inevitable. Instead they said, We have these tropical diseases and they are curable and all it takes is money so let's invest in curing the diseases. Today they are rich, virtually First World countries. That shows that poverty is something you can do something about. People have a misunderstanding that geography means environmental determinism, and that poor countries are doomed to be poor and they should just shut up and lie down and play dead. But in fact, knowledge is power. Once you know what it is that's making you poor, you can use that knowledge to make you rich.

Subject: An Off-Kilter Expansion From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 14:47:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/bp164 September 2, 2005 An off-kilter expansion: Slack job market continues to hurt wage growth By Jared Bernstein and Lee Price - Economic Policy Institute Recent wage growth is compared to three benchmarks: trends since mid-1995, inflation, and productivity. In every case, wages are performing worse now than a few years ago. Wages for most workers are falling slightly behind inflation and well behind productivity growth, implying lower living standards and greater inequality. The main factor behind the weak wage performance is the fact that considerable slack remains in the U.S. job market, with an estimated employment deficit of 3.2 million. The earnings and employment of African Americans are particularly sensitive to job market slack, and African American employment rates and real earnings have recently fallen faster than the average. Employment and labor force participation rates remain depressed, even for groups with very high levels of labor market attachment, such as prime-aged married men with children and the college educated. Because the overall labor market was not in a bubble in the 1998-2000 period, it should be able to return to the conditions of the late 1990s without problems, particularly in light of the intervening five years of strong productivity gains.

Subject: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 14:17:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I recently came across the National Geogrpahic dedicated to Africa. I bought it and found to my shock that the title story is written by Jared Diamond. Again putting forward his exact same topic of why Africa has not developed as fast as others. This time I found whole new flaws where I sat shaking my head. But interestingly enough Jared makes a remark in passing that has me thinking - has he stumbled on the real reason and didn't even realise it? Jared makes the remark that over the period of time of civilisation, Africa appears to have had a relatively peaceful existance. Very little in the way of serious conflicts and people lived quite happily at peace. Only in the recent 100 or so years where there has been a rapid rise in population that we see people fighting over limited resources and fighting against the wealth of one group at the expense of another. Jared did not explore this topice. Instead he appears to point to the fact that the relatively little development in Africa (due to inability to move plants, to domesticate animals and all that other crap) resulted in a peaceful existance. Could it not be the other way around? The relatively peaceful existance is what has resulted in little development. Jared once gave an intriguing example of how the tribes of Tasmania gave up their technology and became less developed (but lived fine) cut off from any threat, until the white man finally discovered them. In the same way is it not possible that an entire continent had a relatively low stress level? Food was abundant and threats from other tribes was virtually non existant? Why develop new fortresses, weapons, why develop calendars to predict winter storage? Why bring crops from one place to another? Simply - why not spend your days with your children and socialising instead of inventing the wheel?

Subject: Re: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 15:24:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Nice critique for me to think about, however I think it fits Jared Diamond's framework easily thought not in the least setting aside your argument.

Subject: Re: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 17:03:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The point is to set your observations in Jared Diamond's framework, for I have no doubt at all Diamond is largely correct in terms of broad framework. Geography first, culture second, and do not idealize existence at any time simply respect cultures.

Subject: Re: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 17:42:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Ahh, okay I see where I would see it different. Although you forgot to include the presence of 'domesticatable' animals in your list. Jared appears to show the Geography as having boundaries - I disagree. I see it as Geography having no boundaries but rather having a perfect environment for easy living and no need to develop. (this is the case for Africa and later Tasmania) Also - I totally don't buy the 'domesticatable' animals concept. I even picked out that Jared stated there was only one breed of cattle in Africa - where in actual fact there are a whole series of breeds. Jared also spoke about how Africa only has one river (the Nile) as a navigatable river leading to the sea and hence no real natural transport and trade routes. That is simply not true. Just look at a map of Africa - there are a whole lot of navigatable rivers - also the Africans to this day have never fully utilised their nagigatable lakes like other parts of the world. So in summary, I see it as: culture first, geographic-ease second, climate third and geographic boundaries some where far down the list. And no domestic animals issue. I totally agree with the concept of not idealising existance. We are after all - ALL HUMAN. But to me - by understanding the past we have a key to the future. So I firmly believe that much of the same hinderances preventing African development exists to this day. I don't believe Jared is giving a correct account that will help solve today's problems. Well I don't think he is giving a correct account at all - but that is besides the point. I want you to consider something: People have often been amazed by stone age calendars. Rock features used to tell the Summer Solstice and Winter Equinox. Unlike that stupid book called 'Finger Prints of the Gods' this wasn't some sort of higher intelligence that developed these calendars. These came from a necessity to figure out when to start stockpiling food, when to start planting seeds and when to brace yourself as you were about to have your butt frozen off. These ancient calendars were probably the product of many seasons and perhaps many generations of starvation or bad preparation. But they were necessary for survival. These probably laid the foundation for understanding and manipulating nature. They were probably also the foundation of our thought process. Africans never had this - simply because they never needed it. Only in the times of King Solomon did Africans actually have any sort of organised function to build stone fortresses. And Ethiopia has some amazing examples that temples were in deed built in Africa. So too we find the temple of the 'Great Zimbabwe' in Zimbabwe. It shows that Africans can and did build architectural/engineering fetes. But it was very limited only because they didn't need it. Central Asia is really the cradle of civilisation (according to Stephen Wells) and from Central Asia people moved South to India, West to Europe and East to Asia and the Americas. It is from Central Asia that I believe we have serious cold weather and feudal history that resulted in much intellectual development that was carried on to other parts of the world. Well that's my theory - and I feeling a little arrogant that I can argue my theory better than Jared.... hhhmm and Jared is a specialist in this field - I am not.... now how is that for arrogance ;-) Where's Johnny... I need him to come over here and put me in my place.

Subject: Re: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Jennifer To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 19:53:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Slowly, I am learning to think in Jared Diamond's framework and I too find it most useful. We are used to thinking in terms of culture to begin with, and I am now convinced that is the wrong approach historically. Geography then culture.

Subject: Re: Jared Diamond and National Geographic From: Mik To: Jennifer Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 14:05:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Jennifer, the only problem is that Jared Diamonds geographic reasons are flawed. So far I haven't found a single Geographic reason that he has put forward on Africa that I cannot argue.

Subject: Through Shakespeare, Lessons From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:34:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/arts/television/06gate.html September 6, 2005 Through Shakespeare, Lessons of Life and Devotion By ANITA GATES In a fifth-grade classroom in a poor and dangerous part of Los Angeles, Hobart Boulevard Elementary School pupils (mostly Latino and Asian) are doing 'Hamlet.' They are so good at it that at one point Sir Ian McKellen, who has played Hamlet, Macbeth, Iago, Richard II and Richard III, drops in to watch, to do a little recitation of his own and to praise them. 'The best thing about the Hobart Shakespeareans is that they know what they're saying,' Sir Ian tells them, adding that this cannot be said of every adult who has ever appeared in a Shakespearean play. In Mel Stuart's fine and passionate documentary 'The Hobart Shakespeareans,' which has its premiere tonight on the PBS series 'P.O.V.,' several things are clear. The 49-year-old teacher, Rafe Esquith, is a genius and saint. The American education system would do well to imitate him. These children's lives have been changed by their year with this man. And it is not all about Elizabethan drama. Mr. Esquith's pupils play guitar. They name the six states that border Idaho. They discuss whether Huckleberry Finn would be doing the right thing to turn in his friend Jim, a runaway slave. They visit the Lincoln Memorial on a class trip. Their classroom world operates like the real one: with money. In this case the currency is play money, in which they are paid salaries. It costs more to sit at the front of the class than in the back. Not doing your homework brings a $50 fine. At Christmas, Mr. Esquith gives them real Barnes & Noble gift certificates. But it is the yearlong study of a single Shakespearean play that symbolizes Mr. Esquith's methods and his success. It is thrilling to hear Brenda De Leon read a speech of Ophelia's beautifully, to watch Lidia Medina express Gertrude's pain and to see Alan Avila, who was considered a problem student by a previous teacher, tackle the title role of the melancholy Danish prince. At the outset, Mr. Esquith explains what 'Hamlet' is about: death. 'They're throwing skulls all over the graveyard,' he says. During Christmas vacation, the children in the play come in every day to work on it. Mr. Esquith tells the camera that this is teaching them discipline, teamwork and sacrifice. He is a man fond of mottoes: 'Be nice and work hard.' 'There are no shortcuts.' As Hamlet says: 'Words. Words. Words.' But words have impact. This is clearest, on a class visit to the campus of U.C.L.A., Mr. Esquith's alma mater, when he tells the children: 'This is the life you're working for. You can do this.' He has Ivy League pennants on his classroom wall, gifts from former students who have gone on to those schools, to prove it.

Subject: Bring Out Your Pork From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 09:04:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/08/opinion/08thu1.html September 8, 2005 Bring Out Your Pork Fair warning to the suffering Gulf Coast masses: Congress is already talking of concocting 'economic stimulus' and 'job creation' packages as hurricane recovery tools. That sounds useful, but unfortunately those terms usually signal that the House and the Senate are about to use the crisis of the moment to roll out wasteful tax cuts for the well-off and pork barrel outlays for hometown voters. The overwhelming need of the victims of Hurricane Katrina, coupled with the nation's shock at government ineptitude, should inspire members of Congress to sober up and become something approaching responsible policy makers. If they do decide to reform, there's an easy way to prove it. They could turn in their pork. This summer, when Congress had to ignore only a war in Iraq, it passed the annual highway bill, repackaged as a job-creation measure. The legislation set a record of $24 billion in 6,371 'earmark amendments' - the route individual lawmakers take to lock in prized projects for their home districts, regardless of proven need. The bipartisan boondoggles that made it under the wire included vanity highways, tourist sidewalks, snowmobile trails, a 'deer avoidance' plan and a graffiti elimination program for New York. Those wishing to look for still more unnecessary spending can consider the White House's $130-billion-and-counting missile defense system, which remains thoroughly inoperable. Hurricane Katrina cries out to Congress for something other than business as usual. Imagine what would happen if each member of Congress announced that he or she would give up a prize slab of bacon so the government would be able to use the money to shelter hurricane victims and rebuild New Orleans. The public would - for once - have proof that politicians are capable of setting priorities and showing respect for the concept of a budget. Surely Representative Don Young, the Alaska Republican who is chairman of the transportation committee, might put off that $223 million 'bridge to nowhere' in his state's outback. It's redundant now - Louisiana suddenly has several bridges to nowhere. Likewise, Speaker Dennis Hastert could defer his prized Prairie Parkway, a $200-million-plus project dismissed as a behemoth Sprawlway by hometown critics, and use the money to repair the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway. The Democratic minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, could afford to donate back some multimillion-dollar plums - just one bike and pedestrian overpass, perhaps, or a ferry terminal. Another Democratic standout, James Oberstar of Minnesota, would have a hard time choosing from his cornucopia, but that $2.7 million for what is already described as the nation's longest paved recreational trail looks ripe. The list is long. Such a gesture by the Capitol's patronage first responders would encourage a sense of shared sacrifice in the nation. Members might actually be surprised to see how many of their own constituents are prepared to think of other people's needs before themselves. This page has been a longtime supporter of a freight tunnel between New Jersey and New York - which, we should point out, is actually a tunnel to somewhere. But we'd applaud a delay in the $100 million for freight-tunnel design studies that was included in the highway bill if it was part of a larger reordering of priorities. It's time to put New Orleans first.

Subject: Where does innovation come from?? From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 08:38:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The true 'free' market is independent of concerns for profit. The two biggest things that made wide spread use of the internet possible: browsers and webservers, were open source projects, never designed to make returns and kept out of the hands of Microsoft for the sake of all of us here at this chatroom. From now on, nobody, yes you LUSKIN, who uses the internet or has a website is allowed to make the claim that tax cuts forge R&D.

Subject: Re: Where does innovation come from?? From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 08:56:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Well said, out of Microsift and to public domain :) To me Google is the finest of private-public enterprises.

Subject: Re: Where does innovation come from?? From: Poyetas To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 13:11:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I'm still counting down the days 'till people wake up and realize that Microsoft is one big bag of s --- . Their products are garbage compared to most open source alternatives (eg. linux) and they charge money for it!! Just another example of 'need' marketing. The psychological influence that companies exert on the population today is horrible. Its like mind control. People are conditioned to this market system that rapes them of independant thought. Fox News, GOP, McDonalds, Microsoft, Volkswagen, Nike etc. How do we educate our children to see through this b.s. and find the real values in life? How do we curb the MTV and 'sex in the city' culture of materialism and power? It exists everywhere, not just in America. The world has entered a stage of extreme superficiality.

Subject: Re: Where does innovation come from?? From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 13:52:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Let me recommend you read the book called the Silent Takeover by Noreena Hertz. Noreena Worked for the World Bank in Russia (setting up their stock exchange) and today she is one of the youngest professors specialising in the very topic you have raised. What Noreena points out which we all should have learnt in Economics that it is all about a balance. As things lean one way, they will slowly recoil and lean the opposite direction. In the same way that you see people's values swing so much towards pop or material culture so in the future it will swing back. This has happened before. Noreena's book spends much time pointing out so many evils, but she then points out how we are already seeing the recoil. Never in our history have we as a society been this concerned with the environment, womens rights and even gay rights. The move towards organic foods or fair trade products is greater than ever. So on the one hand some are being lured by those brand names, while others are showing concern for their buying habbits by choosing to pay more for more fair products. On my own note - as much as I don't like Microsoft, I do want to point something out: I clearly remember a time when computers were just getting started and there operating systems were all unique and very undeveloped. The Windows concpet was invented by Xerox and wasn't going to go anywhere (if it wasn't for Apple of Microsoft). Bill Gates saw the potential of making computers accessible to the masses and not just the nerds. His genious in getting just about all computer manufacturers to take on his product is simply amazing. Microsoft succeeded in in creating a form of uniformity that allowed others a common base to develop their respective softwares further and faster. So in giving a platform for quick development I must give credit to Bill Gates and his remarkable vision (but those days are gone). On the topic of branding - in a world where there are just so many products and where it is so easy to copy a product - branding is what makes the difference. The Chinese have finally succeeded in copying full motor cars which is an incredible threat to western manufacturers. Specifically when the west have spent so much money on research and development, only to have their final product ripped off. But then again - this is nothing new. The Russian Lada is a copy of the old FIAT and there are many more such examples. What FIAT did to distinguish themselves is concentrate on their name brand. By doing this people would support FIAT and their product development instead of a rip-off brand. By the way this story dates back to the 1970's. So my question is: has the world really entered a stage of extreme superficiality or has it always been there but only gotten bigger as our economies got bigger?

Subject: Re: Where does innovation come from?? From: Poyetas To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 05:19:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hmmmmm, Good point mik, perhaps everything (good and bad) has just gotten larger with scale. I think you're right in saying that this superficiality has always been there, it just feels that today, the forces of superficial ideology are relatively stronger. I always like to look at MTV as a good reflection of what is going on. When I was younger (at the beginning of the 1990's) I had no internet. Most of my music education came through MTV. Now the thing is, the mentality of the people running MTV has not changed in the last 15 years but the content of what they show has. I use to watch MTV so that I could see bands like Rage Against the Machine, Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins etc. They were the voice of a frustrated generation with a social message, a real message that we could identify with. As artists they were uncompromising, innovative, raw and unique. Their music had real value. Today, MTV is showing Limp Bizkit, Nelly, 50 Cent, Incubus and Brittney Spears, NON STOP!! There is NO COMPARISON! Mind you, there is plenty of innovative new music out there, but it gets no airplay or recognition. This is a reflection of where society's demands have gone. Maybe things will shift back. Like Marx said, the thesis and the antithesis, but the powers that be have never had such a stranglehold on society as today. How do we shift it back?

Subject: Re: Where does innovation come from?? From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:55:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: To add to your point, I have a simple question to ask: What is special about Paris Hilton? What does she do that makes her famous? What talent does she have that makes us awe? She has received iconic status for simply being the spoilt child of a very rich family. Huh? Sorry - this makes you famous? John Stewart of the daily show was presented with a similar question (by a conservative), 'We have to do something about our children being swallowed up by the MTV culture.' John had an interesting response, 'Those kinds of issues are like background noise to me.' I don't know how right John Stewart was to make that kind of statement. I think he made the statement in relation to the more important issues facing us today. I have a very good friend who is a criminal lawyer. She's normally a defence lawyer but often plays both sides of the fence. She has raised (what is in her mind) a very serious problem with our youth. We have a dramatic increase in teen crime. She sees a few reasons for this: 1. The new age of parenting that tends to give the kids an attitude that they can do no wrong and are simply not responsible for their actions. This gets out of hand and the child lands up commiting a crime. 2. Children who have been so spoilt and so taken by materials goods, that when they cannot get their way - they steel or sell drugs to get it. How do we respond to this issue? 1. Well for starters, we need to focus on active parenting. And this will become a prominent issue into the future because of the next response. 2. There seems to be a growing reaction where children are indeed being sued or charge with criminal activities for some really frivilous actions. For example, some really naughty kid has been stressing out a teacher in class. The teacher then applies for legal council and this kid who used to give verbal insults in class is suddenly faced with legal action. House arrest and perhaps being transferred to a correctional school. I hope to actually see more of this, to the point that parents start giving stern warnings to their children - if you don't behave you will have the police come over and we are all in trouble. I think you get the idea.

Subject: It's Not a 'Blame Game' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 06:09:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07wed1.html September 7, 2005 It's Not a 'Blame Game' With the size and difficulty of the task of rescuing and rebuilding New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas still unfolding, it seemed early to talk about investigating how this predicted cataclysm had been allowed to occur and why the government's response was so slow and inept. Until yesterday, that is, when President Bush blithely announced at a photo-op cabinet meeting that he, personally, was going to 'find out what went right and what went wrong.' We can't imagine a worse idea. No administration could credibly investigate such an immense failure on its own watch. And we have learned through bitter experience - the Abu Ghraib nightmare is just one example - that when this administration begins an internal investigation, it means a whitewash in which no one important is held accountable and no real change occurs. Mr. Bush signaled yesterday that we are in for more of the same when he sneered and said, 'One of the things that people want us to do here is to play a blame game.' This is not a game. It is critical to know what 'things went wrong,' as Mr. Bush put it. But we also need to know which officials failed - not to humiliate them, but to replace them with competent people. It's obvious, for instance, that Michael Brown has met the expectations of those who warned that he would be a terrible director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This is no time to be engaging in a wholesale change of leadership, but in Mr. Brown's case there seems to be precious little leadership to lose. He should be replaced with someone who can do the huge job that remains to be done. But the questions go way beyond Mr. Brown - starting with why federal officials ignored predictions of a disastrous flood in New Orleans - and the answers can come only from an independent commission. We agree with the Senate minority leader, Harry Reid, Senator Hillary Clinton and others who say that such a panel should follow the successful formula of the 9/11 commission: bipartisan leadership and members chosen by the White House and both parties in Congress on the basis of real expertise. It should have subpoena power and a staff expert enough to find answers and offer remedies. Mrs. Clinton has also proposed pulling FEMA out of the Homeland Security Department and restoring its cabinet-level status. That is premature. The current setup makes sense, at least in theory. The nation should not have to support two different bureaucracies for dealing with sudden disasters. Before throwing the system into chaos again, an investigation should determine whether the problem lies in the structure or in execution. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal showed how the Bush administration had systematically stripped power and money from FEMA, which had been painfully rebuilt under President Bill Clinton but had long been a target of Republican 'small government' ideologues. The Journal said state officials had been warning Washington - as recently as July 27 - that the homeland secretary, Michael Chertoff, was planning further disastrous cuts. This page supported the creation of Mr. Chertoff's department. But it was poorly run by the first secretary, Tom Ridge, with his maddening color-wheel alerts. It is clearly in need of a hard look and perhaps serious reorganization. Senators Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, have plans for hearings, which is fine. But they created the department in the first place and may have more of a stake in the outcome than a panel of impartial experts. The panel should also look at the shortcomings of local officials and governments. It was chilling, to put it mildly, to read Mayor Ray Nagin's comment in The Journal that New Orleans's hurricane plan was 'get people to higher ground and have the feds and the state airlift supplies to them.' But disasters like this are not a city or a state issue. They concern the entire nation and demand a national response - certainly a better one than the White House comments that 'tremendous progress' had been made in Louisiana. We're used to that dismissive formula when questions are raised about Iraq. Americans deserve better about a disaster of this magnitude in their own country.

Subject: In Asia, Low Fuel Prices and Subsidies? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 06:02:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/business/worldbusiness/07asiaoil.html September 7, 2005 In Asia, Low Fuel Prices and Subsidies Lose Ground By KEITH BRADSHER TAIPEI, Taiwan - Governments across Asia are overhauling energy policies in response to high world prices for gasoline and diesel, cutting subsidies and raising local prices in moves that could curb demand and help bring down global prices in the months ahead. India announced late Tuesday that it would cut subsidies by allowing state-owned oil companies to raise retail gasoline and diesel prices by 7 percent immediately. Thai officials are putting the finishing touches this week on what Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has promised will be a broad policy of mandatory energy conservation. China, Taiwan and Indonesia are all studying plans to cut subsidies and raise domestic prices for gasoline and diesel, while Pakistan went ahead and raised domestic prices last Thursday. Energy subsidies were politically sacrosanct and little debated in Indonesia until world oil prices surged further this year. But Indonesia raised retail prices last Thursday by more than 20 percent for all but the cheapest grade of gasoline, which is still priced at just $1.57 a gallon. Indonesia's central bank also cited the burden of energy subsidies in announcing on Tuesday that it was raising interest rates by half a percent. The step was taken to stem a slump in the value of the Indonesian rupiah in currency markets as energy subsidies have approached a third of government spending this summer. With the conspicuous exceptions of South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong, most Asian governments have long subsidized energy consumption, shielding their nations from occasional spikes in world oil prices. The result has been startling inefficiency: China and India each consume up to five times the energy Japan does to produce each dollar of economic output, according to the Asian Development Bank. 'In Asia, for a long time we have been in denial about the sustainability of high oil prices,' said Ifzal Ali, the bank's chief economist. 'There is tremendous potential for Asia to improve efficiency.' Energy consumption has soared across Asia in the last decade as gas-guzzling economies, especially China's and India's, have expanded rapidly while holding domestic energy prices down. As Asian energy users now start paying much higher prices, they may reduce consumption, freeing oil to be used elsewhere and allowing prices to drop, energy experts said. Several big changes are making Asian governments more willing to review subsidies this year than in the past. One change is a spreading perception that this year's price increases may prove more enduring than previous ones. But another change is the growing influence of publicly traded companies that are much less willing than state-owned enterprises to accept losses on their refining businesses. Huge government-owned businesses like Sinopec in China have been partly privatized and have issued stock, making them more sensitive to investors' needs and less concerned about helping national governments hold down inflation by limiting increases in gasoline prices. At the same time, publicly traded companies like Reliance in India and Formosa Petrochemical in Taiwan have jumped into markets previously monopolized by government-run businesses. Media coverage of high gasoline prices in the United States after Hurricane Katrina has helped draw public attention in Asia to relatively low gasoline prices in countries like China, where it now sells for around $1.70 a gallon. But the hurricane actually had little effect on wholesale prices in Asia. Most Asian refineries use high-sulfur Dubai crude oil, which has not moved up and down in price since the hurricane as much as the lower-sulfur crude oil mainly used by European and American refineries. The Asian debate over government's role in insulating populations from high world energy prices has been particularly clear and visible in the last week in Taiwan. The state-owned Chinese Petroleum Corporation lost its monopoly on gasoline sales in 2000. Formosa Petrochemical, a publicly traded company controlled by the sprawling Formosa Plastics Group, jumped into the market then and captured nearly a third of it, with Chinese Petroleum still holding the rest. Until last week, both companies always moved on the same day in giving 10 days' notice to franchised dealers of any change in the wholesale price they charged for gasoline and diesel. But last Wednesday, Formosa Petrochemical notified dealers of a 9.7 percent increase, to take effect on Friday, and Chinese Petroleum did not follow suit. Formosa Petrochemical is standing fast despite strong criticism. Lin Keh-yen, the director of the president's office at Formosa Petrochemical, said that retail sales by the company's franchisees had already dropped by 20 to 30 percent as consumers shunned them in protest even though local gas dealers have not yet raised prices at the pump. But Mr. Lin said that Formosa Petrochemical was prepared to export fuel that buyers in Taiwan do not purchase. 'We are a listed company, we have to face our investors,' he said. Most economists are strongly critical of energy subsidies, describing them as an inefficient use of government tax revenue and frequently rife with corruption. Economists tend to favor direct payments as income supplements to impoverished families. Yet subsidies still have their defenders. Politicians across the political spectrum in Taiwan, including the opposition Nationalist Party, have supported the government's decision not to raise the wholesale prices charged by Chinese Petroleum. 'The oil price going up is not a long-term trend,' said Lai Shyh-bao, a Nationalist Party lawmaker who is a member of the legislature's economic and energy committee. Chinese Petroleum itself shows no willingness to bend. That could result in its having to supply the entire Taiwan market at a loss if Formosa Petrochemical goes ahead and prices itself out of the market on Friday, exporting its gasoline instead. 'For a state-owned enterprise like C.P.C., there is something of higher concern than the short-term loss reflected in its financial report,' said Kuo Ching-tsai, the company's chairman. 'C.P.C. is obligated to take more care of people's need and the overall national economic development.'

Subject: Why Japan Seems Content From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 05:56:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/international/asia/07letter.html September 7, 2005 Why Japan Seems Content to Be Run by One Party By NORIMITSU ONISHI TOKYO - The Liberal Democratic Party, which has governed Japan nearly continuously for half a century, appears headed for another victory in the general election on Sunday - a big one, if polls are correct. And this will delay, again, the start of a new political era in which power is transferred regularly from one party to another, as it is in other democracies. Japan's democracy is East Asia's oldest, but its ruling party has held power almost as long as the Communist parties in China and North Korea. Younger democracies in South Korea and Taiwan have already experienced changes in ruling parties, and the underpinnings of democracies, from vibrant civil societies to strong, independent news media, appear to be flourishing there more than they are here. Since calling an early election last month, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has shrewdly refashioned the image of the Liberal Democrats into the party of reform by fielding telegenic women as candidates and portraying opponents of his signature postal privatization bill as reactionaries. The main opposition Democratic Party, whose gains in recent years now face erosion, has looked on helplessly. In the past, when issues were rarely raised in campaigns, politicians ran simply by promising favors to supporters, said Masayasu Kitagawa, a former Liberal Democratic lawmaker, independent governor of Mie Prefecture and now a professor at Waseda University. 'The relationship was that of patron and client,' Mr. Kitagawa said. 'This was not actually democracy, but rather the opposite of democracy.' To encourage political accountability and voter awareness, Mr. Kitagawa has been the leading proponent of election 'manifestoes' detailing parties' agendas. The word and concept was little understood in the general election two years ago, but it has taken root this time, with both main parties proffering their manifestoes. 'I'd be satisfied if the introduction of manifestoes made Japanese realize that what they had believed to be democracy was an illusion,' he said. The illusion was formed in 1955 with the foundation of the Liberal Democratic Party, which focused single-mindedly on turning Japan into an economic power. With strong support from the United States and the powerful bureaucracy, as well as effective pork-barrel politics, the party's grip on power went unshaken for decades. Internal factions vied for power, but decisions were made and some prime ministers even chosen in backroom deals. Because of the cold war and Japan's military dependence on the United States, the longtime opposition, the Socialists, were never taken seriously. Voters feared that 'the friendly Japan-U.S. relationship would be destroyed and Japan would become poor once more if the L.D.P. government collapsed and the Socialists came to power,' said Eiji Oguma, an associate professor of policy management at Keio University. A split inside the party led to a 10-month ouster from power in 1993. During that brief period, however, a coalition of minor parties pushed through far-reaching reforms, including changing multiseat districts into single-seat ones, that would eventually weaken the dominance of the Liberal Democrats. The present main opposition Democratic Party, which was formed in 1998, has been gaining voters in recent years, especially in urban areas. But the half-century rule by a single party has stunted the growth of Japanese democracy, experts say, and its effects are still being felt today. Civil society remains weak. Although private organizations focusing on welfare and international aid have mushroomed in recent years, those delving into delicate issues, like human rights, freedom of information and the workings of government, wield little influence. Japanese feel little personal connection with their country's democracy, said Yukiko Miki, executive director of Information Clearinghouse Japan, a private group that fights to gain access to government-held information. 'Japanese citizens are ultimate free riders,' Ms. Miki said. 'Support from citizens is necessary to form a base for democracy, but Japanese people don't seem to feel they are the ones who should support civil society.' The Liberal Democrats' grip on power has also limited the dissemination of information. For instance, the Internet has raised interest in elections elsewhere and was widely credited with helping propel South Korea's president, Roh Moo Hyun, to power in 2003. But here in one of the world's most wired countries, election law bars Web sites from promoting candidates for a specific election and candidates from renewing their home pages during the 12-day campaign period. The Liberal Democrats have maintained the restrictions because their core supporters tend to be older and are not likely to be heavy Internet users. Yoshito Hori, an entrepreneur, recently created the YES! Project, a Web site that encourages young Japanese to vote and discuss politics. 'By using the Internet, you can reach people in their 20's to their early 40's, people who were uninterested in politics,' Mr. Hori said. With no history of power alternation, the mass media tend to stick to the Liberal Democratic Party's line. In this election, the press has ignored issues like Mr. Koizumi's policy toward Asian countries or his deployment of troops to Iraq that would likely hurt the party at the ballot box. (The opposition Democratic Party has said it would withdraw Japanese troops from Iraq and repair relations with its Asian neighbors.) Since April 2004, no major Japanese news organization has sent a journalist to cover the Japanese troops in Samawa, in southern Iraq. Just as these pillars of Japanese democracy tend to be tenuous, experts doubt the soundness of the main Democratic Party opposition. The party, made up of former Liberal Democrats, Socialists and other groups, famously lacks unity and could disintegrate if it loses badly. But Park Cheol Hee, an expert in Japanese politics at Seoul National University, said a more mature democracy was set to emerge here. 'This is the last stage of one-party rule,' Mr. Park said. 'I don't think the L.D.P. will rule for another 50 years - possibly another 5 or 10. The Democratic Party might fail this time, but they will try again. This will eventually produce a competitive, two-party system and lead Japan to a true democracy.'

Subject: In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 05:54:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/science/06tech.html?ex=1283659200&en=f2cbac7c075230ad&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 6, 2005 In Europe, High-Tech Flood Control, With Nature's Help By WILLIAM J. BROAD On a cold winter night in 1953, the Netherlands suffered a terrifying blow as old dikes and seawalls gave way during a violent storm. Flooding killed nearly 2,000 people and forced the evacuation of 70,000 others. Icy waters turned villages and farm districts into lakes dotted with dead cows. Ultimately, the waters destroyed more than 4,000 buildings. Afterward, the Dutch - realizing that the disaster could have been much worse, since half the country, including Amsterdam and Rotterdam, lies below sea level - vowed never again. After all, as Tjalle de Haan, a Dutch public works official, put it in an interview last week, 'Here, if something goes wrong, 10 million people can be threatened.' So at a cost of some $8 billion over a quarter century, the nation erected a futuristic system of coastal defenses that is admired around the world today as one of the best barriers against the sea's fury - one that could withstand the kind of storm that happens only once in 10,000 years. The Dutch case is one of many in which low-lying cities and countries with long histories of flooding have turned science, technology and raw determination into ways of forestalling disaster. London has built floodgates on the Thames River. Venice is doing the same on the Adriatic. Japan is erecting superlevees. Even Bangladesh has built concrete shelters on stilts as emergency havens for flood victims. Experts in the United States say the foreign projects are worth studying for inspiration about how to rebuild New Orleans once the deadly waters of Hurricane Katrina recede into history. 'They have something to teach us,' said George Z. Voyiadjis, head of civil and environmental engineering at Louisiana State University. 'We should capitalize on them for building the future here.' Innovations are happening in the United States as well. California is experimenting with 'smart' levees wired with nervous systems of electronic sensors that sound alarms if a weakening levee threatens to open a breach, giving crews time to make emergency repairs. 'It's catching on,' said William F. Kane, president of Kane GeoTech Inc., a company in Stockton, Calif., that wires levees and other large structures with failure sensors. 'There's a lot of potential for this kind of thing.' While scientists hail the power of technology to thwart destructive forces, they note that flood control is a job for nature at least as much as for engineers. Long before anyone built levees and floodgates, barrier islands were serving to block dangerous storm surges. Of course, those islands often fall victim to coastal development. 'You'll never be able to control nature,' said Rafael L. Bras, an environmental engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who consults on the Venetian project. 'The best way is to understand how nature works and make it work in our favor.' In humanity's long struggle against the sea, the Dutch experience in 1953 was a grim milestone. The North Sea flood produced the kind of havoc that became all too familiar on the Gulf Coast last week. When a crippled dike threatened to give way and let floodwaters spill into Rotterdam, a boat captain - like the brave little Dutch boy with the quick finger - steered his vessel into the breach, sinking his ship and saving the city. 'We were all called upon to collect clothes and food for the disaster victims,' recalled Jelle de Boer, a Dutch high school student at the time who is now an emeritus professor of geology at Wesleyan University. 'Cows were swimming around. They'd stand when they could, shivering and dying. It was a terrible mess.' The reaction was intense and manifold. Linking offshore islands with dams, seawalls and other structures, the Dutch erected a kind of forward defensive shield, drastically reducing the amount of vulnerable coastline. Mr. de Haan, director of the water branch of the Road and Hydraulic Engineering Institute of the Dutch Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management, said the project had the effect of shortening the coast by more than 400 miles. For New Orleans, experts say, a similar forward defense would seal off Lake Pontchartrain from the Gulf of Mexico. That step would eliminate a major conduit by which hurricanes drive storm surges to the city's edge - or, as in the case of Katrina, through the barriers. The Dutch also increased the height of their dikes, which now loom as much as 40 feet above the churning sea. (In New Orleans, the tallest flood walls are about half that size.) The government also erected vast complexes of floodgates that close when the weather turns violent but remain open at other times, so saltwater can flow into estuaries, preserving their ecosystems and the livelihoods that depend on them. The Netherlands maintains large teams of inspectors and maintenance crews that safeguard the sprawling complex, which is known as Delta Works. The annual maintenance bill is about $500 million. 'It's not cheap,' Mr. de Haan said. 'But it's not so much in relation to the gross national product. So it's a kind of insurance.' The 1953 storm also pounded Britain. Along the Thames, flooding killed more than 300 people, ruined farmland and frightened Londoners, whose central city narrowly escaped disaster. The British responded with a plan to better regulate tidal surges sweeping up the Thames from the North Sea. Engineers designed an attractive barrier meant to minimize interference with the river's natural flow. It went into service in 1982 at Woolwich, about 10 miles east of central London. Normally, its semicircular gates lie flush to the riverbed in concrete supporting sills, creating no obstacle to river traffic. When the need arises, the gates pivot up, rising as high as a five-story building to block rising waters. The authorities have raised the Thames barrier more than 80 times. In Venice, the precipitating event was a 1966 flood that caused wide damage and economic loss. The upshot was an ambitious plan known as the Moses Project, named after the biblical parting of the Red Sea. Its 78 gargantuan gates would rest on the floor of the Adriatic Sea and rise when needed to block dangerous tidal surges. Long debate over the project's merits repeatedly delayed the start of construction until May 2003. Opponents claim that the $4.5 billion effort will prove ineffective while threatening to kill the fragile lagoon in which Venice sits. In theory, the gates are to be completed by 2010. 'People fight doing things like this,' said Dr. Bras, of M.I.T. 'But when disaster strikes you realize how important it is to think ahead.' Planners did just that in Bangladesh after a 1991 hurricane created huge storm surges that killed more than 130,000 people. World charities helped build hundreds of concrete shelters on stilts, which in recent storms have saved thousands of lives. In Japan, a continuous battle against flooding in dense urban areas has produced an effort to develop superlevees. Unlike the customary mounds of earth, sand and rock that hold back threatening waters, they are broad expanses of raised land meant to resist breaks and withstand overflows. The approach being tried in California relies on a technology known as time-domain reflectometry. It works on the same principle as radar: a pulse of energy fired down a coaxial cable bounces back when it reaches the end or a distortion, like a bend or crimp. Careful measurement of the echoes traveling back along the cable can disclose serious distortions and danger. Dr. Kane, of Kane GeoTech, has installed such a system in the Sacramento River delta, along a levee that is threatening to fail. Could such a system have saved New Orleans? 'It would have given them more information,' said Charles H. Dowding, a top expert on the technology at Northwestern University. 'The failure of a levee would have been detected.' But experts say it is still unclear whether such a warning would have been enough to prevent the catastrophic breaches. Dr. Bras says sensor technologies for detecting levee failure hold much promise. But he adds that less glamorous approaches, like regular maintenance, may be even more valuable, since prevention is always the best cure. 'We have to learn that things have to be reviewed, revised, maintained and repaired as needed,' he said. 'To see a city like New Orleans suffer such devastation - some of that was preventable.' He added that no matter how ambitious the coastal engineering, no matter how innovative and well maintained, the systems of levees, seawalls and floodgates were likely to suffer sporadic failures. 'Nature will throw big things at us once in a while,' he said. 'There's always the possibility that nature will trump us.'

Subject: Force of Time and an Inconstant Earth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 05:52:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/science/06lost.html September 6, 2005 Vanished, Under Force of Time and an Inconstant Earth By DENNIS OVERBYE Nothing lasts forever. Just ask Ozymandias, or Nate Fisher. Only the wind inhabits the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde in Colorado, birds and vines the pyramids of the Maya. Sand and silence have swallowed the clamors of frankincense traders and camels in the old desert center of Ubar. Troy was buried for centuries before it was uncovered. Parts of the Great Library of Alexandria, center of learning in the ancient world, might be sleeping with the fishes, off Egypt's coast in the Mediterranean. 'Cities rise and fall depending on what made them go in the first place,' said Peirce Lewis, an expert on the history of New Orleans and an emeritus professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University. Changes in climate can make a friendly place less welcoming. Catastrophes like volcanoes or giant earthquakes can kill a city quickly. Political or economic shifts can strand what was once a thriving metropolis in a slow death of irrelevance. After the Mississippi River flood of 1993, the residents of Valmeyer, Ill., voted to move their entire town two miles east to higher ground. What will happen to New Orleans now, in the wake of floods and death and violence, is hard to know. But watching the city fill up like a bathtub, with half a million people forced to leave, it has been hard not to think of other places that have fallen to time and the inconstant earth. Some of them have grown larger in death than they ever were in life. Take the library in Alexandria. If anyplace might have had justifiable pretensions of permanence it would have been the library, founded sometime around 300 B.C. It grew under the early Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt into an enduring symbol of culture and knowledge before disappearing into the sand and sea less than 1,000 years later. 'This was the library,' said Roger Bagnall, a historian at Columbia. 'It influenced everybody who ever thought about building a library.' Nobody, Dr. Bagnall complains, knows how large it was - estimates range from 40,000 to 400,000 scrolls - or what was actually in it. The library's demise is equally shrouded in myth. One legend says the books burned during Caesar's conquest of Alexandria in 47 B.C., but the library was still around in the fourth century, according to historical accounts. Dr. Bagnall thinks that simple neglect killed the library. 'Books rot,' even acid-free papyruses, he said, noting that there are no records of any investment in maintaining the library after the early Ptolemies. By the time Christian mobs sacked the library and museum at the end of the century as a pagan institution, there was probably little left to destroy. 'The palace quarter was pretty well wrecked by that point. Whatever had survived the rotting didn't make it past that,' Dr. Bagnall said. Later, in 642, the Arabs moved Egypt's capital to the Cairo region and Alexandria shrank into obscurity. On the other side of the globe, in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia, a stony silence relieved only by the lapping of waves envelops the empty city of Nan Madol. It consists of almost 100 islands, built by humans and constructed of columns of basalt 15 feet long and weighing 5 tons, stacked log cabin style to make walls 25 feet high. Local legend says that you will die if you spend the night there. But once this was home to the nobles and priests of the Saudeleur dynasty, which ruled Pohnpei's 30,000 inhabitants up until about 500 years ago, according to William S. Ayres, an archaeologist at the University of Oregon. Dr. Ayres said that Nan Madol was constructed out on the reef, starting about 1,500 years ago, partly because people had been living out there for hundreds of years to have easy access to the sea, and, perhaps more important, to better commune with ocean deities. The columns for the walls were quarried on Pohnpei, he said, and floated out to the reef on rafts, about 500,000 tons in all over the 1,000 years of construction, Dr. Ayres has estimated. While most of the islands were living quarters for priests, others were given over to special purposes like making canoes, preparing coconut oil or, most grandly, burying royalty in tombs with courtyards surrounded by 25-foot walls. Nan Madol's end was simple. When the last of the Saudeleurs was overthrown, the island was divided into smaller chiefdoms, 'which exist up to the present day,' Dr. Ayres said. The city was abandoned to its sleeping kings and its cold stone logs. The dry, desert silence in Mesa Verde tells a more complex tale. Archaeologists say that in the middle of the 12th century, some 20,000 people were living in the picturesque cliff dwellings and surrounding areas in southwestern Colorado, growing maize, squash and beans, raising turkeys, and apparently fighting with their enemies (thus the cliff houses, which were easier to defend than mesa-top villages). By 1300, these Anasazi, or 'ancient ones,' were all gone. That crash was due to a combination of climatic, political and environmental factors, according to Tim Kohler, an anthropologist at Washington State University, who along with Mark Varien of the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colo., has been studying the history of pueblo populations. One culprit was climate change. According to classic tree-ring studies by Andrew Ellicott Douglas of the University of Arizona, the years 1275 to 1295 were abnormally dry. Recent work using bristlecone pine tree rings has established that it got cold, as well, during that period, lowering the maize production even more, Dr. Kohler said. At the same time, the deer population seems to have declined significantly. As a result they needed the turkeys for protein. And what were they feeding the turkeys? Corn. 'If something happens to the maize, the system collapses,' Dr. Kohler said. And so it did. Adding to the pressure, apparently, was war, which meant that the people of Mesa Verde were penned in. They didn't or couldn't spread out to less protected areas. Instead they simply left. The green table had turned brown, and perhaps red. The most famous lost city of all is one that probably never really existed, Atlantis, the fabulous island civilization swallowed by the sea, which was referred to by Plato. Some scholars think he might have been inspired by one or more real events. Among them is the destruction of Helike, a city on the Corinthian coast, which was swallowed by an earthquake and a tsunami one winter night in 373 B.C., during Plato's lifetime. 'For the sea was raised by an earthquake,' wrote the Greek geographer Strabo, 'and it submerged Helike and the Helikonian Poseidon.' The city went down like the Titanic with its entire population on board. An expeditionary force sent from a nearby town the next day found no survivors and no bodies to recover. Though not the seat of empire like fabled Atlantis, Helike was a significant and prosperous city. It was the head of a confederacy of 12 Greek city states, the First Achaean League, whose successor, the Second Achaean League, was recommended as a model of federalism by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in their Federalist Papers. It minted its own coins. Lured by the prospect of an underwater time capsule, archaeologists have long sought the remains of the sunken city. Five years ago, after a dozen years of searching, a team of archaeologists led by Dora Katsonopoulou of the Ancient Helike Society in Aigion, Greece, and Steven Soter, a geophysicist with New York University's Center for Ancient Studies, said they had found the lost city - not in the sea but on the coastal plain next to it, near Aigion, about 45 miles northwest of Corinth. It may have been gradually raised by seismic activity, said Dr. Soter. Moreover, he said, three rivers feeding the coastal plain deposit sediment that helps build it up. In expeditions every summer, Dr. Soter and his colleagues have uncovered more and more of the city, including a road that goes almost a mile across the plain, walls, buildings, coins, pottery and a cemetery, although they have not found the center of the city yet. Recently they have found a whole new and unknown city, dating from 2200 B.C., the early Bronze Age, near Helike. The sediments of this ruin contain marine and lagoonal microfauna, Dr. Soter said, suggesting that it too, may have been swallowed by an earthquake and a tidal wave like Helike, but 2,000 years earlier, only to rise again. It may be, he said, that there have been recurrent floods and abandonments on the plain, the land rising and sinking, cities blooming out of the reborn mud. 'Good agricultural land tends to be reoccupied after catastrophes,' Dr. Soter said, echoing Dr. Lewis's statement. 'People will live there and take their chances.' There is in the picture a kind of immortality for the dead, as well as for the perennials blooming on the flood plain. If Helike can give rise to the vision of an Atlantis, a collection of scrolls can forever change our concept of learning and memory and empty stones can inspire us to reveries, what can we expect from jazz, gumbo and soft air at one of the trading crossroads of the world, so blessed and cursed with water? New Orleans will never die. It is already larger than life.

Subject: Invasion of the Isolationists From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 16:32:19 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: INVASION OF THE ISOLATIONISTS By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA The NEW YORK TIMES August 31, 2005 Washington As we mark four years since Sept. 11, 2001, one way to organize a review of what has happened in American foreign policy since that terrible day is with a question: To what extent has that policy flowed from the wellspring of American politics and culture, and to what extent has it flowed from the particularities of this president and this administration? It is tempting to see continuity with the American character and foreign policy tradition in the Bush administration's response to 9/11, and many have done so. We have tended toward the forcefully unilateral when we have felt ourselves under duress; and we have spoken in highly idealistic cadences in such times, as well. Nevertheless, neither American political culture nor any underlying domestic pressures or constraints have determined the key decisions in American foreign policy since Sept. 11. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans would have allowed President Bush to lead them in any of several directions, and the nation was prepared to accept substantial risks and sacrifices. The Bush administration asked for no sacrifices from the average American, but after the quick fall of the Taliban it rolled the dice in a big way by moving to solve a longstanding problem only tangentially related to the threat from Al Qaeda - Iraq. In the process, it squandered the overwhelming public mandate it had received after Sept. 11. At the same time, it alienated most of its close allies, many of whom have since engaged in 'soft balancing' against American influence, and stirred up anti-Americanism in the Middle East. The Bush administration could instead have chosen to create a true alliance of democracies to fight the illiberal currents coming out of the Middle East. It could also have tightened economic sanctions and secured the return of arms inspectors to Iraq without going to war. It could have made a go at a new international regime to battle proliferation. All of these paths would have been in keeping with American foreign policy traditions. But Mr. Bush and his administration freely chose to do otherwise. The administration's policy choices have not been restrained by domestic political concerns any more than by American foreign policy culture. Much has been made of the emergence of 'red state' America, which supposedly constitutes the political base for President Bush's unilateralist foreign policy, and of the increased number of conservative Christians who supposedly shape the president's international agenda. But the extent and significance of these phenomena have been much exaggerated. So much attention has been paid to these false determinants of administration policy that a different political dynamic has been underappreciated. Within the Republican Party, the Bush administration got support for the Iraq war from the neoconservatives (who lack a political base of their own but who provide considerable intellectual firepower) and from what Walter Russell Mead calls 'Jacksonian America' - American nationalists whose instincts lead them toward a pugnacious isolationism. Happenstance then magnified this unlikely alliance. Failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the inability to prove relevant connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda left the president, by the time of his second inaugural address, justifying the war exclusively in neoconservative terms: that is, as part of an idealistic policy of political transformation of the broader Middle East. The president's Jacksonian base, which provides the bulk of the troops serving and dying in Iraq, has no natural affinity for such a policy but would not abandon the commander in chief in the middle of a war, particularly if there is clear hope of success. This war coalition is fragile, however, and vulnerable to mishap. If Jacksonians begin to perceive the war as unwinnable or a failure, there will be little future support for an expansive foreign policy that focuses on promoting democracy. That in turn could drive the 2008 Republican presidential primaries in ways likely to affect the future of American foreign policy as a whole. Are we failing in Iraq? That's still unclear. The United States can control the situation militarily as long as it chooses to remain there in force, but our willingness to maintain the personnel levels necessary to stay the course is limited. The all-volunteer Army was never intended to fight a prolonged insurgency, and both the Army and Marine Corps face manpower and morale problems. While public support for staying in Iraq remains stable, powerful operational reasons are likely to drive the administration to lower force levels within the next year. With the failure to secure Sunni support for the constitution and splits within the Shiite community, it seems increasingly unlikely that a strong and cohesive Iraqi government will be in place anytime soon. Indeed, the problem now will be to prevent Iraq's constituent groups from looking to their own militias rather than to the government for protection. If the United States withdraws prematurely, Iraq will slide into greater chaos. That would set off a chain of unfortunate events that will further damage American credibility around the world and ensure that the United States remains preoccupied with the Middle East to the detriment of other important regions - Asia, for example - for years to come. We do not know what outcome we will face in Iraq. We do know that four years after 9/11, our whole foreign policy seems destined to rise or fall on the outcome of a war only marginally related to the source of what befell us on that day. There was nothing inevitable about this. There is everything to be regretted about it. --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is editorial board chairman of a new magazine, The American Interest. http://crawfordpeace.nfshost.com/node/1714

Subject: Winfrey Calls for Apology From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 13:52:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/arts/television/07opra.html September 7, 2005 In Hurricane's Aftermath, Winfrey Calls for Apology By EDWARD WYATT In the first of two shows devoted to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Oprah Winfrey said yesterday that the nation owed an apology to the people who died in the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere, and to the survivors whose misery was compounded by a relief effort whose inadequacy 'makes me so mad.' Ms. Winfrey, of course, was far from the only celebrity who gained access to restricted sites in New Orleans, or whose ministrations to survivors at the Astrodome in Houston were captured by a phalanx of reporters and cameras. But unlike the politicians, musicians and movie stars who toured relief facilities and the news networks whose reporters were bound to let officials defend their relief efforts, Ms. Winfrey was able to turn her own cameras on the suffering, to have a celebrity physician tour medical facilities and diagnose injuries, to orchestrate family reunions and to feature aid efforts headed by celebrities like Jamie Foxx and Faith Hill. 'I was sitting at home feeling frustrated and useless, like so many other people, so I came down to personally assess how I could best be of service,' Ms. Winfrey said yesterday in a statement relayed by a spokeswoman. What she found, she said, surprised her: 'Nothing I saw on television prepared me for what I experienced on the ground,' she said on the show. While she stopped short of overt criticism of the relief efforts, she said later: 'This makes me so mad. This should not have happened.' And after hearing descriptions of people dying unattended in the streets, she said, 'I think we all - this country owes these people an apology.' Yesterday's installment of Ms. Winfrey's one-hour syndicated television show featured her at the Astrodome, where she also took her characteristic optimism to survivors, vowing that 'I'll get the country to pray' for them and telling one mother of seven, 'I believe you can come up out of that storm and you can have a better life.' 'Yes, ma'am,' the woman responded. With the recent departure of the network news anchors Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings, Ms. Winfrey's has been perhaps the most familiar television face to greet survivors and to try to explain to viewers what happened. Tuesday's show featured tape of Ms. Winfrey's visit to New Orleans on Sunday, when she was escorted inside the Superdome to see the conditions after the evacuation of the stadium earlier in the weekend. She interviewed New Orleans's mayor, C. Ray Nagin, who described 'hundreds of armed gang members running the show' inside the stadium, and the city's police superintendent, P. Edwin Compass III, who told of rapes inside the Superdome and an attempt by gang members to take him hostage as he toured the building. Dr. Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon and a regular contributor to Ms. Winfrey's show, toured medical facilities at New Orleans International Airport and described the removal of critically ill patients to a makeshift morgue 'just so they can pass away in peace.' Mr. Foxx and the actor Mathew McConaughey participated in relief efforts in Texas and Louisiana, and Ms. Hill fulfilled one survivor's request at a shelter in Gulfport, Miss., that she sing 'Amazing Grace.' Ms. Winfrey did not make a specific appeal for contributions. But her Angel Network organization donated $1 million to America's Second Harvest, a food bank, and on her Web site, www.oprah.com, she lists organizations where donations can be made. Wednesday's show is to include Ms. Winfrey in Mississippi and other celebrities involved with relief efforts, among them Chris Rock, Julia Roberts and Lisa Marie Presley.

Subject: Light on a Secret of the Olive Tree From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 12:53:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/health/nutrition/06nutr.html September 6, 2005 Heart Health: Scientists Shed Light on a Secret of the Olive Tree By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Researchers may have pinned down one important reason for the positive effect olive oil appears to have on cardiovascular health: it contains a naturally occurring anti-inflammatory chemical. The substance, which the researchers call oleocanthal, has the same anti-inflammatory effect as drugs like ibuprofen and aspirin, which can inhibit the sometimes harmful effects of enzymes called cox-1 and cox-2. The report appears in the Sept. 1 issue of Nature. Scientists have long known that low-doses of the cox inhibitors confer various benefits on the people who use them. Now, the researchers are speculating that the health benefits that are widely linked to the Mediterranean diet, which is rich in olive oil in various forms, may stem at least in part from the same mechanism. 'There is ample evidence that chronic low-dose anti-inflammatories have multiple health benefits that may range from reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke and certain cancers - breast, lung, colon - to reducing the risk of terminal dementias such as Alzheimer's,' said Paul A. S. Breslin, who is a co-author of the report and a researcher at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. 'Olive oil contains an ibuprofen-like anti-inflammatory that may turn out to convey similar benefits,' he continued. The extra-virgin olive oil, according to Dr. Breslin, has the most benefit, but consumers do not necessarily need to buy the most expensive brands. 'What matters is that it is an extra-virgin olive oil that has a good throat sting indicating it has high levels of oleocanthal,' he said. Dr. Breslin suggested that the Mediterranean diet - with extra-virgin olive oil used liberally on bread and vegetables and in salad dressing - may be the best way to consume it. 'If used this way,' he said, 'I think it will be good for you, particularly if it substitutes for butter, margarine and creamy dressings.'

Subject: Vanguard Fund Returns From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 12:35:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship5.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsByName Vanguard Fund Returns 12/31/04 to 9/6/05 S&P Index is 3.0 Large Cap Growth Index is 2.6 Large Cap Value Index is 5.1 Mid Cap Index is 9.8 Small Cap Index is 6.5 Small Cap Value Index is 6.7 Europe Index is 8.6 Pacific Index is 6.9 Energy is 43.9 Health Care is 12.8 Precious Metals 23.5 REIT Index is 12.2 High Yield Corporate Bond Fund is 2.1 Long Term Corporate Bond Fund is 6.9

Subject: Deceit of the Raven From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 11:56:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04IDEA.html?ex=1283486400&en=aea6c2878d03671c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 4, 2005 Deceit of the Raven By DAVID BERREBY It began with apes. In the 1960's and 70's, scientists taught captive chimps to use words and documented wild ones using tools and planning hunting expeditions. Then other smart mammals -- monkeys, elephants and porpoises among them -- also proved to have surprisingly ''human'' mental powers. And in the last few years, the circle has expanded to still other mammals and beyond. Last year, in the journal Animal Cognition, the behavioral biologist Thomas Bugnyar described a twist in an experiment he was conducting with laboratory ravens. The birds' job was to find bits of cheese hidden in film canisters, then pry open the lids to get the food out. One raven, Hugin, was best at this, but a dominant bird, Munin, would rush over and steal his reward. So Hugin changed his strategy: when the other bird came over, he went to empty canisters, pried them open and pretended to eat. While the dominant bird poked around in the wrong place, Hugin zipped back to where the food really was. He was deceiving Munin. To do that, Hugin had to grasp that ''what I know'' and ''what he knows'' are different. He had to understand, on some level, that other ravens have their own individual perceptions, feelings and plans, just as he does. It was big news when scientists found evidence that apes could grasp this. That some birds can as well is even more remarkable. Bugnyar and his colleague Bernd Heinrich have uncovered still more evidence for avian ''mind reading.'' In another experiment, described in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, they had ravens watch as a scientist gazed fixedly at a spot on the other side of a barrier. All the birds, apparently understanding that the big featherless biped knew something they did not, hopped off their perches to get a look. Ravens aren't the only animals getting an upgrade. Earlier this year, Brian Hare of Harvard, Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and their colleagues showed that ordinary domestic dogs understand what is meant when a human being points at something (as in ''the food's under this one!''). Even apes don't understand pointing, which suggests that selective breeding has left dogs especially attuned to reading human minds. People, of course, are expert at that -- knowing that another person's winks, nods, sighs and shrugs are not just random twitches but the signs of a mind inside that other person's body. We have an apparently effortless understanding that the person across from us has her own thoughts and feelings. That sense comes to toddlers, the theory goes, much as language does: because the capacity to learn it is ''built in'' to normal brains. Not being able to learn it is one of the defining features of autism (and the reason autistic people have such trouble getting on with the rest of us). This ''theory of mind,'' cognitive scientists say, is what makes life with other people so rich and productive. We don't need to be scared to know that our children are scared. We don't need to know any tsunami victims to imagine their grief and wish to help them. And if we're working together and you point to the tool you need, I'll look at the tool, not your finger, because I know your movements aren't about your arm and hand but about the mind that drives them. Of course, this awareness (that what you know is not the same as what I know) also gives me the ability to cheat you blind. It once sounded, depressingly perhaps, like a trait only people have. The significance of research like Hare's and Bugnyar's is that it adds mind reading to the long list of skills we can't claim for our own kind only. When it comes to mental abilities, animals aren't on the other side of a chasm: birds and dogs, as well as apes and sheep, stand with us on a continuum. And even as biology establishes that animals aren't automatons, another challenge to our sense of uniqueness arises in the field of artificial intelligence. Even automatons aren't acting like automatons anymore. They're increasingly apt and lively -- less like machines and more like living minds. The robot soldiers on the drawing boards at the Pentagon will be able to understand orders and make decisions (including decisions about whether to kill). Tiny computer sensors are designed to be flung as ''smart dust'' over wide areas and to configure themselves with no human guidance. Earlier this year, researchers at Cornell described a robot that could make robots, a working example of machine reproduction. Machine-based intelligences can also read minds -- at least at one remove, after those minds express themselves in writing. Last spring a British software firm released Sentiment, an application that sums up the tone of press clippings with a handy graphic indicator (red frowny face for negative, yellow blah face for neutral, green smiley for positive). It's not perfect, but then, as the company notes, neither are human readers, and ''human analysts are only able to process about 10 articles per hour'' while ''Sentiment is able to accurately assess the sentiment of 10 articles per second!'' So science is chipping away at the case for human uniqueness from two different angles. Not only is it showing that animals are more like us than we believed but it is also making machines that are more like us than we believed possible. What happens, as these trends continue, to the familiar guideposts for deciding what is human? How will people decide, without a checklist of yes-no criteria for human standing, who, or what, is entitled to privileges and rights? The history of human groupishness -- our tendency to divide ourselves up by color, language, religion, sex, ideology and many other criteria -- hints at a possible answer. For millennia, humans have been capable of sending help to total strangers because they're perceived to be like us -- fellow Americans, fellow Muslims or fellow men. We're also capable, of course, of declaring that Those People, over there, act and talk and smell so strange that they need not be considered human. As machines get smarter and animals are shown to be more mindful, perhaps the same rhetoric will be applied to them. In a few years you may be reading an article that sympathizes with a plucky little robot, working hard to do a tough job -- just like me! Or asked, on the other hand, to revile the depraved, barbaric monster robots of the enemy. And people who want to sell you lobster dinners will tell you that lobsters are alien ''bugs'' that don't feel pain. While people who want lobsters to be left alone. . . . Well, actually, they're already at it. In 1995, Mary Tyler Moore wrote an appeal for lobsters, saying they're ''fascinating beings with complex social interactions, long childhoods and awkward adolescences. Like humans, they flirt with one another and have even been seen walking 'claw in claw'! And like humans, lobsters feel pain.'' In other words, even as the clear list of differences between human and nonhuman gets shorter, the ancient rhetoric of Us and Them remains. People will never have any trouble dividing the human from the nonhuman. We've been doing it to one another for thousands of years.

Subject: Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 11:55:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/01/science/01bird.html?ex=1265000400&en=41907199e02c090f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland February 1, 2005 Minds of Their Own: Birds Gain Respect By SANDRA BLAKESLEE Birdbrain has long been a colloquial term of ridicule. The common notion is that birds' brains are simple, or so scientists thought and taught for many years. But that notion has increasingly been called into question as crows and parrots, among other birds, have shown what appears to be behavior as intelligent as that of chimpanzees. The clash of simple brain and complex behavior has led some neuroscientists to create a new map of the avian brain. Today, in the journal Nature Neuroscience Reviews, an international group of avian experts is issuing what amounts to a manifesto. Nearly everything written in anatomy textbooks about the brains of birds is wrong, they say. The avian brain is as complex, flexible and inventive as any mammalian brain, they argue, and it is time to adopt a more accurate nomenclature that reflects a new understanding of the anatomies of bird and mammal brains. 'Names have a powerful influence on the experiments we do and the way we think,' said Dr. Erich D. Jarvis, a neuroscientist at Duke University and a leader of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium. 'Old terminology has hindered scientific progress.' The consortium of 29 scientists from six countries met for seven years to develop new, more accurate names for structures in both avian and mammalian brains. For example, the bird's seat of intelligence or its higher brain is now termed the pallium. 'The correction of terms is a great advance,' said Dr. Jon Kaas, a leading expert in neuroanatomy at Vanderbilt University in Nashville who did not participate in the consortium. 'It's hard to get scientists to agree about anything.' Scientists have come to agree that birds are indeed smart, but those who study avian intelligence differ on how birds got that way. Experts, including those in the consortium, are split into two warring camps. One holds that birds' brains make the same kinds of internal connections as do mammalian brains and that intelligence in both groups arises from these connections. The other holds that bird intelligence evolved through expanding an old part of the mammal brain and using it in new ways, and it questions how developed that intelligence is. 'There are still puzzles to be solved,' said Dr. Peter Marler, a leading authority on bird behavior at the University of California, Davis, who is not part of the consortium. But the realization that one can study mammal brains by using bird brains, he said, 'is a revolution.' 'I think that birds are going to replace the white rat as the favored subject for studying functional neuroanatomy,' he added. The reanalysis of avian brains gives new credibility to many behaviors that seem odd coming from presumably dumb birds. Crows not only make hooks and spears of small sticks to carry on foraging expeditions, some have learned to put walnuts on roads for cars to crack. African gray parrots not only talk, they have a sense of humor and make up new words. Baby songbirds babble like human infants, using the left sides of their brains. Avian brains got their bad reputation a century ago from the German neurobiologist Ludwig Edinger, known as the father of comparative anatomy. Edinger believed that evolution was linear, Dr. Jarvis said. Brains evolved like geologic strata. Layer upon layer, the brains evolved from old to new, from fish to amphibians to reptiles to birds to mammals. By Edinger's standards, fish were the least intelligent. Humans, created in God's image, were the most intelligent. Edinger cut up all kinds of vertebrate brains, noting similarities and differences, Dr. Jarvis said. In mammals, the bottom third of the brain contained neurons organized in clusters. The top two-thirds of the brain, called the neocortex, consisted of a flat sheet of cells with six layers. This new brain, the seat of higher intelligence, lay over the old brain, the seat of instinctual behaviors. In humans, the neocortex grew so immense that it was forced to assume folds and fissures, so as to fit inside the skull. Birds' brains, in contrast, were composed entirely of clusters. Edinger concluded that without a six-layered cortex, birds could not possibly be intelligent. Rather, their brains were fully dedicated to instinctual behaviors. This view persisted through the 20th century and is still found in most biology textbooks, said Dr. Harvey Karten, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego, and a member of the consortium, whose research has long challenged the classic view. There is a bird way and a mammal way to create intelligence, Dr. Karten said. One uses clusters. One uses flat sheet cells in six layers. Each exploits the basic design of having a lower brain and a higher brain with mutual connections. In the 1960's, Dr. Karten carried out experiments using new techniques to trace brain wiring and identify the paths taken by various brain chemicals. In humans, a chemical called dopamine is found mostly in lower brain areas, called basal ganglia, which consist of clusters. Using the same tracing techniques in birds, Dr. Karten found that dopamine also projected primarily to lower clusters and no higher. Later studies show numerous similarities between clusters in the mammalian brain and lower clusters in the avian brain. Experts now agree that the two regions are evolutionarily older structures that lie underneath a newer mantle. Where the experts divide is on the question of the upper clusters in a bird's brain. Agreed, they are not primitive basal ganglia. But where did they come from? How did they evolve? What is their function? Dr. Karten and others in the consortium think these clusters are directly analogous to layers in the mammalian brain. They migrate from similar embryonic precursors and perform the same functions. For example, in mammals, sensory information - sights, sounds, touch - flows through a lower brain region called the thalamus and enters the cortex at the fourth layer in the six-layered cortex. In birds, sensory information flows through the thalamus and enters specific clusters that are functionally equivalent to the fourth layer. In this view, other clusters perform functions done by different layers in the mammal brain. A second group, including Dr. Georg Striedter of the University of California, Irvine, a consortium member, believes that upper clusters in the avian brain are an elaboration of two mammalian structures - the claustrum and the amygdala. In this view, these structures look alike in bird and mammal embryos. But in birds they grow to enormous proportions and have evolved entirely new ways to support intelligence. In mammals, the amygdala is involved in emotional systems, Dr. Striedter said. 'But birds use it for integrating information,' he said. 'It's not emotional anymore.' Meanwhile, examples of brilliance in birds continue to flow from fields and laboratories worldwide. Dr. Nathan Emery and Dr. Nicola Clayton at the University of Cambridge in England study comparisons between apes and corvids - crows, jays, ravens and jackdaws. Relative to its body size, the crow brain is the same size as the chimpanzee brain. Everyone knows apes use simple tools like twigs, Dr. Emery said, selecting different ones for different purposes. But New Caledonian crows create more complex tools with their beaks and feet. They trim and sculpture twigs to fashion hooks for fetching food. They make spears out of barbed leaves, probing under leaf detritus for prey. In a laboratory, when a crow named Betty was given metal wires of various lengths and a four-inch vertical pipe with food at the bottom, she chose a four-inch wire, made a hook and retrieved the food. Apes and corvids are highly social. One explanation for intelligence is that it evolved to process and use social information - who is allied with whom, who is related to whom and how to use this information for deception. They also remember. Clark nutcrackers can hide up to 30,000 seeds and recover them up to six months later. Nutcrackers also hide and steal. If they see another bird watching them as they cache food, they return later, alone, to hide the food again. Some scientists believe this shows a rudimentary theory of mind - understanding that another bird has intentions and beliefs. Magpies, at an earlier age than any other creature tested, develop an understanding of the fact that when an object disappears behind a curtain, it has not vanished. At a university campus in Japan, carrion crows line up patiently at the curb waiting for a traffic light to turn red. When cars stop, they hop into the crosswalk, place walnuts from nearby trees onto the road and hop back to the curb. After the light changes and cars run over the nuts, the crows wait until it is safe and hop back out for the food. Pigeons can memorize up to 725 different visual patterns, and are capable of what looks like deception. Pigeons will pretend to have found a food source, lead other birds to it and then sneak back to the true source. Parrots, some researchers report, can converse with humans, invent syntax and teach other parrots what they know. Researchers have claimed that Alex, an African gray, can grasp important aspects of number, color concepts, the difference between presence and absence, and physical properties of objects like their shapes and materials. He can sound out letters the same way a child does. Like mammals, some birds are naturally smarter than others, Dr. Jarvis said. But given their range of behaviors, birds are extraordinarily flexible in their intelligence quotients. 'They're right up there with hominids,' he said.

Subject: Haunted by Hesitation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 09:45:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07dowd.html September 7, 2005 Haunted by Hesitation By MAUREEN DOWD WASHINGTON It took a while, but the president finally figured out a response to the destruction of New Orleans. Later this week (no point rushing things) W. is dispatching Dick Cheney to the rancid lake that was a romantic city. The vice president has at long last lumbered back from a Wyoming vacation, and, reportedly, from shopping for a $2.9 million waterfront estate in St. Michael's, a retreat in the Chesapeake Bay where Rummy has a weekend home, where 'Wedding Crashers' was filmed and where rich lobbyists hunt. Maybe Mr. Cheney is going down to New Orleans to hunt looters. Or to make sure that Halliburton's lucrative contract to rebuild the city is watertight. Or maybe, since former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana described the shattered parish as 'Baghdad under water,' the vice president plans to take his pal Ahmad Chalabi along for a consultation on destroying minority rights. The water that breached the New Orleans levees and left a million people homeless and jobless has also breached the White House defenses. Reality has come flooding in. Since 9/11, the Bush administration has been remarkably successful at blowing off 'the reality-based community,' as it derisively calls the press. But now, when W., Mr. Cheney, Laura, Rummy, Gen. Richard Myers, Michael Chertoff and the rest of the gang tell us everything's under control, our cities are safe, stay the course - who believes them? This time we can actually see the bodies. As the water recedes, more and more decaying bodies will testify to the callous and stumblebum administration response to Katrina's rout of 90,000 square miles of the South. The Bush administration bungled the Iraq occupation, arrogantly throwing away State Department occupation plans and C.I.A. insurgency warnings. But the human toll of those mistakes has not been as viscerally evident because the White House pulled a curtain over the bodies: the president has avoided the funerals of soldiers, and the Pentagon has censored the coffins of the dead coming home and never acknowledges the number of Iraqi civilians killed. But this time, the bodies of those who might have been saved between Monday and Friday, when the president failed to rush the necessary resources to a disaster that his own general describes as 'biblical,' or even send in the 82nd Airborne, are floating up in front of our eyes. New Orleans's literary lore and tourist lure was its fascination with the dead and undead, its lavish annual Halloween party, its famous above-ground cemeteries, its love of vampires and voodoo and zombies. But now that the city is decimated, reeking with unnecessary death and destruction, the restless spirits of New Orleans will haunt the White House. The administration's foreign policy is entirely constructed around American self-love - the idea that the U.S. is superior, that we are the model everyone looks up to, that everyone in the world wants what we have. But when people around the world look at Iraq, they don't see freedom. They see chaos and sectarian hatred. And when they look at New Orleans, they see glaring incompetence and racial injustice, where the rich white people were saved and the poor black people were left to die hideous deaths. They see some conservatives blaming the poor for not saving themselves. So much for W.'s 'culture of life.' The president won re-election because he said that the war in Iraq and the Homeland Security Department would make us safer. Hogwash. W.'s 2004 convention was staged like 'The Magnificent Seven' with the Republicans' swaggering tough guys - from Rudy Giuliani to Arnold Schwarzenegger to John McCain - riding in to save an embattled town. These were the steely-eyed gunslingers we needed to protect us, they said, not those sissified girlie-men Democrats. But now it turns out that W. can't save the town, not even from hurricane damage that everyone has been predicting for years, much less from unpredictable terrorists. His campaigns presented the arc of his life story as that of a man who stumbled around until he was 40, then found himself and developed a laserlike focus. But now that the people of New Orleans need an ark, we have to question the president's arc. He's stumbling in Iraq and he's stumbling on Katrina. Let's play the blame game: the man who benefited more than anyone in history from safety nets set up by family did not bother to provide one for those who lost their families.

Subject: Abroad and Home From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 09:43:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07friedman.html September 7, 2005 Osama and Katrina By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN On the day after 9/11, I was in Jerusalem and was interviewed by Israeli TV. The reporter asked me, 'Do you think the Bush administration is up to responding to this attack?' As best I can recall, I answered: 'Absolutely. One thing I can assure you about these guys is that they know how to pull the trigger.' It was just a gut reaction that George Bush and Dick Cheney were the right guys to deal with Osama. I was not alone in that feeling, and as a result, Mr. Bush got a mandate, almost a blank check, to rule from 9/11 that he never really earned at the polls. Unfortunately, he used that mandate not simply to confront the terrorists but to take a radically uncompassionate conservative agenda - on taxes, stem cells, the environment and foreign treaties - that was going nowhere before 9/11, and drive it into a post-9/11 world. In that sense, 9/11 distorted our politics and society. Well, if 9/11 is one bookend of the Bush administration, Katrina may be the other. If 9/11 put the wind at President Bush's back, Katrina's put the wind in his face. If the Bush-Cheney team seemed to be the right guys to deal with Osama, they seem exactly the wrong guys to deal with Katrina - and all the rot and misplaced priorities it's exposed here at home. These are people so much better at inflicting pain than feeling it, so much better at taking things apart than putting them together, so much better at defending 'intelligent design' as a theology than practicing it as a policy. For instance, it's unavoidably obvious that we need a real policy of energy conservation. But President Bush can barely choke out the word 'conservation.' And can you imagine Mr. Cheney, who has already denounced conservation as a 'personal virtue' irrelevant to national policy, now leading such a campaign or confronting oil companies for price gouging? And then there are the president's standard lines: 'It's not the government's money; it's your money,' and, 'One of the last things that we need to do to this economy is to take money out of your pocket and fuel government.' Maybe Mr. Bush will now also tell us: 'It's not the government's hurricane - it's your hurricane.' An administration whose tax policy has been dominated by the toweringly selfish Grover Norquist - who has been quoted as saying: 'I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub' - doesn't have the instincts for this moment. Mr. Norquist is the only person about whom I would say this: I hope he owns property around the New Orleans levee that was never properly finished because of a lack of tax dollars. I hope his basement got flooded. And I hope that he was busy drowning government in his bathtub when the levee broke and that he had to wait for a U.S. Army helicopter to get out of town. The Bush team has engaged in a tax giveaway since 9/11 that has had one underlying assumption: There will never be another rainy day. Just spend money. You knew that sooner or later there would be a rainy day, but Karl Rove has assumed it wouldn't happen on Mr. Bush's watch - that someone else would have to clean it up. Well, it did happen on his watch. Besides ripping away the roofs of New Orleans, Katrina ripped away the argument that we can cut taxes, properly educate our kids, compete with India and China, succeed in Iraq, keep improving the U.S. infrastructure, and take care of a catastrophic emergency - without putting ourselves totally into the debt of Beijing. So many of the things the Bush team has ignored or distorted under the guise of fighting Osama were exposed by Katrina: its refusal to impose a gasoline tax after 9/11, which would have begun to shift our economy much sooner to more fuel-efficient cars, helped raise money for a rainy day and eased our dependence on the world's worst regimes for energy; its refusal to develop some form of national health care to cover the 40 million uninsured; and its insistence on cutting more taxes, even when that has contributed to incomplete levees and too small an Army to deal with Katrina, Osama and Saddam at the same time. As my Democratic entrepreneur friend Joel Hyatt once remarked, the Bush team's philosophy since 9/11 has been: 'We're at war. Let's party.' Well, the party is over. If Mr. Bush learns the lessons of Katrina, he has a chance to replace his 9/11 mandate with something new and relevant. If that happens, Katrina will have destroyed New Orleans, but helped to restore America. If Mr. Bush goes back to his politics as usual, he'll be thwarted at every turn. Katrina will have destroyed a city and a presidency.

Subject: Stuff Happens From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 06:51:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03dowd.html?ex=1283400000&en=b85336e93384f8b1&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 3, 2005 United States of Shame By MAUREEN DOWD Stuff happens. And when you combine limited government with incompetent government, lethal stuff happens. America is once more plunged into a snake pit of anarchy, death, looting, raping, marauding thugs, suffering innocents, a shattered infrastructure, a gutted police force, insufficient troop levels and criminally negligent government planning. But this time it's happening in America. W. drove his budget-cutting Chevy to the levee, and it wasn't dry. Bye, bye, American lives. 'I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees,' he told Diane Sawyer. Shirt-sleeves rolled up, W. finally landed in Hell yesterday and chuckled about his wild boozing days in 'the great city' of N'Awlins. He was clearly moved. 'You know, I'm going to fly out of here in a minute,' he said on the runway at the New Orleans International Airport, 'but I want you to know that I'm not going to forget what I've seen.' Out of the cameras' range, and avoided by W., was a convoy of thousands of sick and dying people, some sprawled on the floor or dumped on baggage carousels at a makeshift M*A*S*H unit inside the terminal. Why does this self-styled 'can do' president always lapse into such lame 'who could have known?' excuses. Who on earth could have known that Osama bin Laden wanted to attack us by flying planes into buildings? Any official who bothered to read the trellis of pre-9/11 intelligence briefs. Who on earth could have known that an American invasion of Iraq would spawn a brutal insurgency, terrorist recruiting boom and possible civil war? Any official who bothered to read the C.I.A.'s prewar reports. Who on earth could have known that New Orleans's sinking levees were at risk from a strong hurricane? Anybody who bothered to read the endless warnings over the years about the Big Easy's uneasy fishbowl. In June 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, fretted to The Times-Picayune in New Orleans: 'It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can't be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.' Not only was the money depleted by the Bush folly in Iraq; 30 percent of the National Guard and about half its equipment are in Iraq. Ron Fournier of The Associated Press reported that the Army Corps of Engineers asked for $105 million for hurricane and flood programs in New Orleans last year. The White House carved it to about $40 million. But President Bush and Congress agreed to a $286.4 billion pork-filled highway bill with 6,000 pet projects, including a $231 million bridge for a small, uninhabited Alaskan island. Just last year, Federal Emergency Management Agency officials practiced how they would respond to a fake hurricane that caused floods and stranded New Orleans residents. Imagine the feeble FEMA's response to Katrina if they had not prepared. Michael Brown, the blithering idiot in charge of FEMA - a job he trained for by running something called the International Arabian Horse Association - admitted he didn't know until Thursday that there were 15,000 desperate, dehydrated, hungry, angry, dying victims of Katrina in the New Orleans Convention Center. Was he sacked instantly? No, our tone-deaf president hailed him in Mobile, Ala., yesterday: 'Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job.' It would be one thing if President Bush and his inner circle - Dick Cheney was vacationing in Wyoming; Condi Rice was shoe shopping at Ferragamo's on Fifth Avenue and attended 'Spamalot' before bloggers chased her back to Washington; and Andy Card was off in Maine - lacked empathy but could get the job done. But it is a chilling lack of empathy combined with a stunning lack of efficiency that could make this administration implode. When the president and vice president rashly shook off our allies and our respect for international law to pursue a war built on lies, when they sanctioned torture, they shook the faith of the world in American ideals. When they were deaf for so long to the horrific misery and cries for help of the victims in New Orleans - most of them poor and black, like those stuck at the back of the evacuation line yesterday while 700 guests and employees of the Hyatt Hotel were bused out first - they shook the faith of all Americans in American ideals. And made us ashamed. Who are we if we can't take care of our own?

Subject: Redemption in the Bayou From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 06:06:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05mon3.html September 5, 2005 Redemption in the Bayou People keep making bets against nature, and in the end nature usually wins. This is as true in the rainforests of Central America, where clear-cutting has led to disastrous floods, as it is in the steep California canyons, where people have no business building houses. It is no less true of the Mississippi Delta and its biggest city, New Orleans, whose heart-rending tragedy is partly traceable to years of federal efforts to manage the Mississippi River in ways that it did not intend to be managed, keeping it from going where it wanted to go and thus weakening the natural defenses that might have spared the city the worst. Amends can be made. Before Congress is a $14 billion plan to restore the vanishing wetlands and barrier islands off the Louisiana coast that in times past would have served as a buffer against the storm. The House has approved a modest $1.9 billion down payment on this plan, but it needs a push from President Bush and the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, to ensure Senate approval. The plan would involve some delicate re-engineering of the natural system and is not without risk. Still, it could provide a measure of redemption for years of environmental carelessness for which Congress itself is largely responsible. The problem, in a nutshell, is this: the Louisiana coast, its protective fringe of barrier islands and coastal marshlands, is disappearing. Over the last 75 years, 1.9 million acres have vanished. Every year, another 25 square miles, an area roughly the size of Manhattan, sinks quietly beneath the waves. In some places, the coastline has receded 15 miles from where it was in the 1920's. The soil in the delta compacts and sinks naturally. Historically, however, the Mississippi replenished the loss with sediment gathered from its many tributaries and then deposited like clockwork in the delta with the spring floods. Or so it did until 1927, when Congress ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to find ways to control the floods so as to make the river safe for farming, homes and commerce. As it would later do in the Everglades (with equally disastrous results for the Florida ecosystem), the corps then proceeded to construct a network of dams, levees and canals throughout the river basin. The upstream dams reduced the river's sediment load well below historical levels; the sediment that remained, while considerable, was then routed away from the Louisiana coast by a system of levees and navigation channels. The effect of all these engineering changes was to hurry the river along and, at its mouth, propel its contents deep into the Gulf of Mexico, as if shot from a cannon, bypassing the coastal marshes and barrier islands that most needed its nourishment. Add to all this the demands of a growing population, plus thousands of miles of pipes and canals dug through the marsh for a booming oil and gas industry, and the result was inevitable: a shrunken, degraded and essentially defenseless landscape. More is at stake, of course, than the landscape. These may be the hardest-working wetlands in America. They support one of the country's largest fisheries; almost every fish caught in the Gulf of Mexico spends part of its life in the Louisiana marsh. They are the wintering ground or refueling stop for most of the migratory waterfowl that travel the Mississippi flyway. And as everyone who has bought gasoline in the last few days knows by now, they are vital to the production, refining and transportation of much of the nation's oil. Indeed, the oil and gas industry has as much incentive as anyone to protect the marshes from further erosion. Most of its equipment cannot survive in open water. The conditions are thus ripe for a major effort to restore the Louisiana coast. The program before Congress was hatched by the state's politicians and in its universities and drafted by the Army Corps of Engineers. It is supported by both industry and advocacy groups like the National Audubon Society and Environmental Defense, which helped with its design. It would start small, with three or four carefully calibrated pilot programs to divert water flow to the marshes, then go from there. What it has always required is the enthusiastic support of Washington's political leaders. It is hard to believe that the events of the last week haven't caught their attention.

Subject: A Failure of Leadership From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 06:03:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05herbert.html?ex=1283572800&en=a8bed4004ac0f93e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 5, 2005 A Failure of Leadership By BOB HERBERT 'Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead' Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world. The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see. Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble. The president didn't seem to notice. Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces. Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice. Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping. Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn't seem to notice. He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible. After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration.) Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with 'a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch.' Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration. And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities. Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.

Subject: The Larger Shame From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 06:01:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html September 6, 2005 The Larger Shame By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families. It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens. But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush. If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing. Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India. The national infant mortality rate has risen under Mr. Bush for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year. So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The U.S. ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio. One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery. 'No, you misunderstand,' he said firmly. 'These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners.' The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent. It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children. None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, 'We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.' But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books every written on American poverty, 'American Dream,' by my Times colleague Jason DeParle. So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: 'a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending.' That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina. Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

Subject: Getting too much of a good thing? From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 20:04:23 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Is China’s economy overheating? By Robert J. Shiller The Chinese economy has been growing at such a breathtaking annual pace – 9.5% in the year ending in the second quarter of 2005 – that it is the toast of the world, an apparent inspiration for developing countries everywhere. But is China getting too much of a good thing? Since he became president in 2003, Hu Jintao has repeatedly warned that China’s economy is overheating, and his government has recently acted accordingly, raising interest rates last October, imposing a new tax on home sales in June, and revaluing the Yuan in July. But claims that China is overheating don’t seem to be based on observations of inflation. While China’s consumer price index rose 5.3% in the year ending in July 2004, this was due primarily to a spike in food prices; both before and since, inflation has been negligible. Nor are these claims based on the Chinese stock market, which has generally followed a downward path over the past few years. Instead, those who argue that the Chinese economy is overheating cite the high rate of investment in plant and equipment and real estate, which reached 43% of GDP in 2004. On this view, China has been investing too much, building too many factories, importing too many machines, and constructing too many new homes. But can an emerging economy invest too much? Doesn’t investment mean improving people’s lives? The more factories and machines a country has, and the more it replaces older factories and machines with more up-to-date models, the more productive its labor force is. The more houses it builds, the better the private lives of its citizens. A number of studies show that economic growth is linked to investment in machines and factories. In 1992, Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Summers, now President of Harvard University, showed in a famous paper that countries with higher investment, especially in equipment, historically have had higher economic growth. One of their examples showed that Japan’s GDP per worker more than tripled relative to Argentina’s from 1960 to 1985, because Japan, unlike Argentina, invested heavily in new machinery and equipment. In short, the more equipment and infrastructure a country is installing, the more its people have to work with. Moreover, the more a country invests in equipment, the more it learns about the latest technology – and it learns about it in a very effective, “hands-on” way. It would thus appear that there is nothing wrong with China continuing to buy new equipment, build new factories, and construct new roads and bridges as fast as its can. The faster, the better, so that the billion or so people there who have not yet reached prosperity by world standards can get there within their lifetimes. And yet any government has to watch that the investment is being made effectively. In China, the widespread euphoria about the economy is reason for concern. Some universal human weaknesses can result in irrational behavior during an economic boom. Simply put, China’s problem is that its economic growth has been so spectacular that it risks firing people’s imaginations a bit too intensely. At times like these, people can easily imagine that an apartment in Shanghai will be worth some enormous amount in 10 or 20 years, when China is vastly more prosperous than it is today. And if it will be worth an enormous amount in 10 or 20 years, then it should be worth a lot today, too, since real interest rates – used to discount future values to today’s values – are still low in China. People are excited, and they are lining up to buy. To be sure, their reasoning is basically correct. But when the ultimate determinants of values today become so dependent on a distant future that we cannot see clearly, we may not be able to think clearly, either. Since the true value of long-term assets is so hard to estimate, it is human nature to focus on the rate of increase in their observed prices, and to allow one’s attention to become fixated on these assets just as their value is increasing very fast. This can lead people to make serious mistakes, paying more for long-term assets than they should, even assuming that the economy will perform spectacularly well in the future. They can overextend their finances, fall victim to promotions, invest carelessly in the wrong assets, and direct production into regions and activities on the basis of momentary excitement rather than calculation of economic fundamentals. So, maybe the word “overheated” is misleading. It might be more accurate to say that public attention is over-focused on some recent price changes, or over-accepting of some high market values. Whatever one calls it, it is a problem. Fortunately, people also tend to trust their national leaders. For this reason, it is all the more important that the leaders not remain silent when a climate of speculation develops. Silence can be presumed to be tacit acceptance that rapid increases in long-term asset price are warranted. National leaders must speak out, and they must match their words with concrete actions, to help signal to the public that the speculative bubble cannot be expected to continue. That is what the Chinese government has begun to do. The real-estate boom appears to be cooling. If the government continues to pursue this policy, the salutary effects in terms of public trust in the country’s businesses and institutions will help ensure stable, sustainable economic growth for years to come. Robert J. Shiller is Professor of Economics at Yale University, Director at Macro Securities Research LLC, and author of Irrational Exuberance and The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_25-8-2005_pg5_20

Subject: Re: Getting too much of a good thing? From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 05:54:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excellent series of essays. Thank you :)

Subject: Re: Getting too much of a good thing? From: Jennifer To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 16:30:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: We should be impressed that Pakistan's Daily Times continually picks up essays by leading economists. Between China and India there is an economic revolution in Asia, the likes of which rival the revolution in america after the Civil War, but involving far more people and spreading so I consider from Mongolia to Pakistan.

Subject: Re: Getting too much of a good thing? From: Jennifer To: Jennifer Date Posted: Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 16:32:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thank you for looking to the Asian press, Pancho.

Subject: An answer from Brad From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 19:38:44 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Brad DeLong Katrina reveals the presidential flaws What is more unbelievable? Aaron Broussard, president of Jefferson parish, reporting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was still blocking relief supplies to this Louisiana district: “We had Wal-Mart deliver three trailer trucks of water. Fema turned them back. They said we didn’t need them. This was a week ago. We had 1,000 gallons of diesel fuel on a Coast Guard vessel docked in my parish. The Coast Guard said: ‘Come get the fuel right away.’ When we got there with our trucks, they got a word: ‘Fema says don’t give you the fuel.’ Yesterday, Fema comes in and cuts all of our emergency communication lines”? Or Fema’s decision to keep the Red Cross from sending supplies and medical personnel into New Orleans. The Red Cross reports: “We simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders . . . [They say] our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city”? Or the fact that neither the city of New Orleans, the state of Louisiana or Fema rolled a single busload of refugees out of the city before Hurricane Katrina hit? Or that when Richard Daley, Chicago’s mayor, offered Fema help before Hurricane Katrina hit, Fema said “no”? Or the claim by Michael Chertoff, the Department of Homeland Security head, that Katrina “exceeded the foresight of the planners and maybe anybody’s foresight” coupled with the comments of his deputy, Fema head Michael Brown, that Katrina was a Category 4 hurricane that “caused the same kind of damage that we anticipated. So we planned for it two years ago”? Or George W. Bush’s claim that he was “satisfied with the response” his administration had made to Hurricane Katrina, although he agreed that the results were not acceptable? Or Mr Brown’s claim that on the Saturday before the hurricane struck “it was my belief . . . any hurricane is bad – but we had the standard hurricane coming in here, that we could move in immediately on Monday and start doing our kind of response-recovery effort” while, at that moment, Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of Louisiana State University’s hurricane centre, was saying that all indications are that “this is absolutely worst-case scenario”, that “we’re talking about . . . a refugee camp of 1m people” and that his computer simulations indicated that New Orleans could be flooded by 30 feet of water? Or these remarks by James Lee Witt, who was Fema director under President Bill Clinton: “In the 1990s, in planning for a New Orleans nightmare scenario, the federal government figured it would pre-deploy nearby ships with pumps to remove water from the below-sea-level city and have hospital ships nearby. These things need to be planned and prepared for; it just doesn’t look like it was” ? Which of these is worst? I do not know. Let us ask another question: should we be surprised at this? After all, this is the administration that staffed our reconstruction effort in Iraq with young conservative activists with résumés on file at rightwing think-tanks, that refused to recognise that what we faced in Iraq was an insurgency rather than “dead-enders”; that found it extraordinarily difficult to get personal and vehicle armour to US soldiers in Iraq, that advanced a Medicare drugs bill that seems destined to generate huge profits for pharmaceutical companies – for Medicare is forbidden to bargain on price – for mediocre improvements in drug coverage, that turned America’s hard-won fiscal surpluses into deficits that threaten the health of the economy. We could go on. Yes, we should be surprised. Fema is a bureaucracy. A bureaucracy is designed to keep functioning even when it is headed by a man who was suddenly told by his private-sector bosses to find a new job and whose only qualification is that he is the friend of a friend of the president. When faced with a situation, you pull out the plans and you follow the standard operating procedures. When hurricanes threaten the Gulf coast, you pre-position hospital and rescue ships offshore. You have a meeting beforehand and ask: “if this truly goes south – much worse than we are expecting – what things will we wish a month from now that we had done today?” In the case of New Orleans, you know that there will be floods so you prepare to drop support from the air. But here the plans were not pulled out of the filing cabinets, the standard operating procedures were not followed, and the “what will we wish we had done?” meetings were apparently not held. In any other form of government besides that of the US – where the president has the formal legal powers of the 18th-century British monarch, and where each party’s presidential candidate emerges from an undignified struggle among party activists – Mr Bush would have been eased out by now. The barons of his party would have told him that he had to step aside. It would be better for the country--and for the Republican party--if some way were found to ensure its future presidential candidates have some skill in public administration. The writer is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley

Subject: It's a question of obsession From: Pancho Villa alias Kylie To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 19:26:47 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Michael Lind The tragic costs of Bush's Iraq obsession Samuel Huntington has called it the Lippmann Gap, echoing the American journalist Walter Lippmann in 1943: 'Foreign policy consists in bringing into balance, with a comfortable surplus of power in reserve, the nation's commitments and the nation's power.' The historian Paul Kennedy has another name for it: 'Imperial overextension'. Whatever you call this dangerous disease, the symptoms are clear in the US. In early 2001, shortly after President George W. Bush was inaugurated and before 9/11, the Federal Emergency Management Agency warned of the three most devastating disasters that could strike the US: a terrorist attack on New York City, a hurricane flooding New Orleans and a San Francisco earthquake. The Bush administration was focused on its priority: Iraq. The first foreseen disaster took place on September 11 2001, when al-Qaeda flew hijacked jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The federal government was taken by surprise. New York City's first responders were hampered by communications problems and poor planning for this long predicted event. The Bush administration's response to the mass murder committed by al-Qaeda was warped by the focus on Iraq. Many in Washington believe that the administration failed to send sufficient troops to Afghanistan because it was with-holding forces for the invasion of Iraq. Day after day, the levees of Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans and the wetlands that protected the city were eroding. Mr Bush and his allies in the Republican-majority Congress have slashed federal spending for flood control in south-east Louisiana by half and funds for work at Lake Pontchartrain by almost two-thirds. From 2003, funds authorised for the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project were diverted to pay for the war in Iraq. Earlier this year, the US Army Corps of Engineers requested $27m (€21.6m) to repair the levees to protect them from hurricanes. Mr Bush sought to cut the amount to $3.9m and also proposed reducing spending to prevent flooding from $78m to $30m (the Republican Congress ultimately passed $5.7m and $36.5m, respectively). The New Orleans Times-Picayune published numerous articles warning that the war in Iraq was taking money away from hurricane protection on the Gulf coast. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the insurgency metastasised. With US forces divided between the necessary war in Afghanistan and the war of choice in Iraq, and army recruitment numbers plunging, the Bush administration, in addition to hiring private contractors, was forced to mobilise National Guard reserves overseas. When Katrina struck, tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers were in Iraq, along with much of the equipment needed for disaster relief. At the same time, America's long border with Mexico has gone largely unprotected. Around a million illegal immigrants are apprehended each year, in addition to the estimated half a million who join the roughly 10m living in the US. A growing number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border are from Middle Eastern countries including Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. President Bush's justice department claims that suspected American terrorist Jose Padilla and an accomplice planned to enter the US through Mexico and blow up buildings in New York and other cities. Mohammed Jun-aid Babar, an alleged al-Qaeda agent linked with plots against London, has told US investigators of a plan to bring terrorists into the US from Mexico. On December 17 2004, Mr Bush signed the National Intelligence Reform Act, which required the addition of 10,000 border patrol agents beginning in 2006. In his February 2005 budget, however, Mr Bush authorised funds for only 210 new border agents. Last month, the Democratic governors of Arizona and New Mexico asked for federal disaster relief to help deal with border chaos. The horror in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, and the chaos along the US-Mexican border, join anarchy in Afghanistan and Iraq as proof of the bankruptcy of the Bush doctrine. Mr Bush's neoconservative strategists wanted a crusade for US hegemony in the Middle East and the world; as 'national greatness conservatives,' some might have been willing to pay for it with higher taxes. But Mr Bush's political base consists of conservatives and libertarians united by a crusade to cut taxes. The attempt to establish American global hegemony without paying for it was a disaster - actually, several disasters - waiting to happen. If, early in 2001, the Bush administration had focused on al-Qaeda instead of Iraq, it might have responded to FEMA's call to prepare New York for a big terrorist incident. If it had not divided US forces to fight two wars at once, Afghanistan might have been pacified while Saddam remained in power but contained. If Bush had not sacrificed border security to pay for the war in Iraq, the Mexican border might be under control. If Bush had not diverted so many National Guard units to Iraq, disaster relief following Hurricane Katrina would have been swifter and more effective. And if the war in Iraq had not caused the Bush administration to raid money for the New Orleans levees, this big port city might not be a corpse-filled cesspool. Supporters of the war in Iraq predicted that the dominos would fall in the Middle East. Instead, the dominos are falling across America. The writer is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation FT, Tuesday September 6 2005

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 19:03:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Indexes 12/31/04 - 8/6/05 Energy 40.2 Financials -0.2 Health Care 8.8 Info Tech 0.1 Materials -4.4 REITs 12.3 Telecoms 1.4 Utilities 20.3

Subject: Request for Bobby From: Request for Bobby To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 16:18:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please notice we have a horrid poster called 'Maureen.' The poster has been using offensive language and imagery to slander Paul Krugman and to attempt to harm this excellent website. Please ban this horrid troll.

Subject: Re: Request for Bobby From: Maureen To: Request for Bobby Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 16:30:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Anonymous twit defender of P.K....Have you no shame? Can you not say more than cry like a little baby about the wrongdoings of your great unrequitted love? Kindly get a life!

Subject: Op-Ed article a while ago From: Zev To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 14:06:45 (EDT) Email Address: thezevster@yahoo.com Message: Does anyone remember Krugman refrencing an article written by Harcard professors regarding healthcare reform? If so, which article did he make this refrence? Thanks.

Subject: Re: Op-Ed article a while ago From: Terri To: Zev Date Posted: Fri, Sep 09, 2005 at 14:12:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Search and read the set of articles dealing with health care that Paul Krugman wrote in the last year. There are 5 such articles that I count, but I cannot spot the reference to an essay by Harvard professors you are asking about. The PK archive search is excellent.

Subject: The Great Fulminator From: Maureen To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 13:34:53 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Watching associate columnist Paul Krugman plumb the depths of depraved Bush bashing is getting close to becoming something of a guilty pleasure; sort of like viewing pornography but without the edifying inclusion of the undraped model’s vital statistics to offset the charge of prurient behavior. After all if, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said of it, pornography is something I recognize when I see it, then certainly the former Enron consultant Krugman’s scribblings will be immediately identifiable as the product of a smutty and lascivious mind, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Marquis de Sade was writing his paeans to the grotesque and unnatural. Krugman is the best fulminator in the business. No other columnist seethes with as much irrational spite. No other liberal commentator can work himself into such hysterical paroxysms of revulsion over his ideological opponents. He has accused conservatives of wanting to kill liberals. He has just recently been taken to task for blatantly lying about the results of the 2000 Presidential recount by a consortium of media outlets, saying falsely that the study – in which his own paper participated – showed Al Gore winning the election.

Subject: Re: The Great Fulminator From: Mik To: Maureen Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 14:20:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I admit that Krugman holds nothing back in throwing his remarks about Bush. I also admit that sometimes it is somewhat difficult to read Krugman's angry words relating to pure politics when his expertise is in Economics. I am not sure about the accusation about of conservatives wanting to kill liberals. I believe I have read all his articles and don't remember any such statement. But what I find most interesting about your posting is your choice of words: Slip in the statement about how 'Krugman was an Enron consultant' as though it will tarnish his reputation and somehow link him to the Enron scandal. Hey I once worked with Enron - about 5 years ago - am I a bad person too? Then making some attempt at a philosophical comparison to pornography that holds about as much water as a sieve. Yes, Krugman has been taken to task about the Al Gore issue - but just recently he responded with stature (look at the columns posting). Although I personally do like your statement, 'Krugman is the best 'fulminator' in the business' But how about attacking his content? I don't see any attempt to attack his actual articles. Heck I have even argued some of the points Krugman has put forward. But just because you don't like what Krugman puts forward, don't fall into the old school bully strategy of name calling with a hope to ruin his character. That is primary school stuff. Stick to his facts and argue his facts - then we will give you respect.

Subject: You evil devil! From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 17:34:30 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Hey I once worked with Enron - about 5 years ago - am I a bad person too? HAHA! Yes you are a terrible evil horrible corruptable crony!! My mother watched a commercial about enron too - off with her head! I used to think the world of you Mik - but after hearing your name mentioned with Enron, I can no longer love you like my brother - you must be exiled - vile devil you! HAHA! Damned be the baby - throw out the bathwater, the kitchen, bulldoze the whole damn house and send in a few nuclear bombs for good measure. HAHA! Isnt that what they did with arthur anderson? How could you work for such an evil corrupted company!!?!? Maureen is not here to argue facts, Maureen is here to entertain and make you laugh - enjoy it - cramer can only throw a chair so many times - hehe.

Subject: Re: The Great Fulminator From: Maureen To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 16:05:41 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Mik, I have been using Paul as my example. Characteristically, Krugman avoids facts whenever possible. His columns consist almost entirely of invective; he grudgingly throws in a fact only when it can't be helped. And as the New York Times Public Editor has commented, Krugman is more likely than not to be WRONG on those relatively few occasions when he does throw out a 'fact.'

Subject: Re: The Great Fulminator From: Maureen To: Maureen Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:03:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I hate to argue, but Krugman throws in more facts that any writer I have seen. He goes to great effort to present solid statistics. Where I was once even taken back is when Krugman took an article about supply side economics and reviewed the facts presented justifying the concept of Supply Side Economics. He then asked that we refer to our Economics text books and he even made reference to the section in the text book. I was really surprised to see that I still had the very text book on my shelf. I dusted off my old university text book and turned to the page to read a clear statement of how some people believe a certain concept to be true, but on close analysis it is actually incorrect. The text book devoted an entire chapter to the analysis. I sat back saying, 'Oh yeah, I remember this.' But what was bluntley clear is that Krugman has fully mastered economics and knows crap when he sees it. He is even able to make a clear indicator on where we can do our research on his statments, whether it is through other newspaper articles or through a specific statistics internet site. To date, I have yet to see anyone argue him (solidly) on his facts that he presents. Hey some people in this board have seen me argue some of the facts that Krugman presents. But what is undeniable is that Krugman is right about 99.9% of the time. What is so lethal about him is that he is so outspoken about it and has full confidence in what he says. As you have correctly stated he is a Fulminator. But this Fulminator can take on anyone from Greenspan to Laffer. Put these right wings economists at a table and you would see (it has happened before) that Krugman will show them that they should go back to studying economics. In fact, during the Asian crisis, Krugman gave very controversial advice to the government of Malaysia. The government ended up following Krugman's advice (they fixed the currency exchange rate) and suddenly the IMF was extremely upset with Malaysia and came out screaming. Later it was found that Krugman and the Malaysian govenrment were indeed very correct in what they did and the IMF had the respect to turn around and appologise for their stance. Ever since then - it has been clear that Krugman knows his stuff better than the top economists at the IMF. He is not about US politics (or he would not have gotten involved in Malaysia), he is about showing the pundits how wrong they can be (no matter if they are from the US or else where).

Subject: Sorry above post is from me not Maureen From: Mik To: Maureen Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 08, 2005 at 11:04:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message:

Subject: International Growth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 10:59:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: China seems to be growing in as robust a fashion as ever, no matter the pessimists; India, a little more slowly and tentatively, is still growing robustly. Stock markets abroad are highly positive almost everywhere, so there is a fair amount of optimism on growth but growth abroad in the developed countries is not fast enough for central bankers to worry.

Subject: Re: International Growth From: Random Desi To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 16:14:11 (EDT) Email Address: total_bakwas@yahoo.com Message: True, however I do'nt think this economic growth, or the growth in lifestyles, is sustainable in the long term. Third world countries are making industrial strides by screwing their natural environment. Under World Bank and ITO pressure, Governments in these countries are rapidly selling public assets to private corporations in the name of privatisation. To hide the ugliness of all the accompanying layoffs, and cessation of essential government services, from the people they have to show results in industrial growth, and tell the poor masses that eventually their share of the growth will trickle down to them. Short-term/sighted industrial growth in turn is being achieved by throwing all environmental regulations out of the window. Factories pinch pennies by merrily discharging their untreated sewage into rivers, and governments look the other way because anything that hurts 'growth' is taboo. Most water bodies in India and China are so black with industrial sludge that even buffaloes refuse to enter the water for cooling off in the hot summer months. This kind of growth simply cannot last. Eventually, when the water supply runs out, forget about economic growth even human survival will become uncertain. We are already entering the age of wars over basic natural resources. China is planning to dam and divert the mighty Brahmaputra river, which starts in Tibet but flows mainly through India and Bangladesh, for itself. Who knows, India might be thinking of doing something similar to Pakistan. All the countries involved are nuclear states. Anyone want to guess what the worst case scenario might be?

Subject: Real Estate Investment Trusts From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:49:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Watch the Vanguard REIT [Real Estate Investment Trust] Index from here for signs of a continued strength or weakening in the real estate market.

Subject: Eyes wide open From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 17:49:25 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: I am going to keep my eyes open on them Terri, I hear some people say that Katrina will make real estate go up, and others say it will go down. I never bought into the vangaurd REIT - just vtrix and XOM and recently vdc - I must keep my eyes open for the vangard reits! Thanks! I hope the reits go up, if they go down pete has me worried things will get very bad.

Subject: Federal Reserve Policy From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:48:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The Federal Reserve will be gauging a muting of economic growth from rising energy costs against a belief the material losses from the Gulf Coast tragedy will be quickly compensated for overall. [Losses to individuals, especially poorer individuals, are another matter that must be considered.]

Subject: Housing and Economic Growth From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:36:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Revisiting Alan Greenspan's observation that the developed economies appear to have become more flexible and resilient from 1980 on, I am impressed at how Britain, the Netherlands and Australia have been little effected by faltering housing markets. Also, the American housing market may well be bolstered significantly be the sadness along the Gulf Coast. There will shortly be a coastal construction boom.

Subject: International Bull Market From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:28:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The Europe Stock Index is up 16.0% in domestic currency terms and 8.4% in dollars. Value stocks are leading growth. There is quietly a powerful global bull stock market that is almost 3 years old. Notice that in countries where the housing market has faltered, stocks have remained fairly robust. There is no reason to expect an end to the bull market abroad with stable to declining interest rates in order.

Subject: National Returns [Domestic Currency] From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 09:06:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Domestic Currency] 12/31/04 - 9/5/05 Australia 15.4 Canada 19.0 Denmark 30.6 France 19.2 Germany 16.1 Hong Kong 10..7 Japan 12.2 Netherlands 16.5 Norway 37.2 Sweden 19.8 Switzerland 17.3 UK 13.2

Subject: National Index Returns [Dollars] From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 08:57:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.msci.com/equity/index2.html National Index Returns [Dollars] 12/31/04 - 9/5/05 Australia 13.0 Canada 19.9 Denmark 20.0 France 9.8 Germany 6.9 Hong Kong 10.8 Japan 5.4 Netherlands 7.3 Norway 32.8 Sweden 7.1 Switzerland 8.1 UK 8.7

Subject: Back to School, Thinking Globally From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 08:37:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06tue3.html September 6, 2005 Back to School, Thinking Globally The nearly 50 million children who are returning to the nation's public schools are incrementally better off than they would have been five years ago. That's partly because of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which requires the states to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor students and generally improve student performance in exchange for federal dollars. The great achievement of No Child Left Behind is that it has forced the states to focus at last on educational inequality, the nation's most corrosive social problem. But it has been less successful at getting educators and politicians to see the education problem in a global context, and to understand that this country is rapidly losing ground to the nations we compete with for high-skilled jobs that require a strong basis in math and science. American taxpayers have heard a fair amount about the fact that their children lag behind the children of Britain, France, Germany and Japan. But American students are also bested by nations like Poland, Ireland and the Czech Republic. Worst of all, they fall further and further behind their peers abroad the longer they stay in school. The United States can still prosper in a world where its labor costs are higher than the competition's, but it cannot do that if the cheaper workers abroad are also better educated. Business leaders who have firsthand experience with this problem warn that this country could become a third-rate economic power unless it radically remakes its schools. But the education community is in deep denial. American educators typically respond with yawns - and a series of myths. The most common is that Europeans educate only the elite, while this nation educates everybody. That hasn't been true since the early 20th century. Comparisons show that the rest of the developed world does a better job educating students of all economic backgrounds. A second myth - that America's white elite children compare favorably with those abroad - is also false. In the most recent international data, comparing students in the top 5 percent in terms of achievement, the United States ranks 23rd out of 29. The third and most common myth - that the nations who do better than us are 'homogenous' societies - is also not true. Immigration has transformed much of Europe, as it has the United States. The nations that have left us behind educationally have a few things in common. They decide at the national level what children should learn and when they should learn it. They appear to have higher and more uniform standards for teacher training and performance as well as better compensation. Government education officials monitor schools closely to ensure a uniform quality of education. The United States, in contrast, has an almost random system. We leave curriculum issues to localities and to textbook companies, which run the educational system by default. The United States needs to develop a coherent policy that makes schools better everywhere. That means strengthening teaching and curriculum in poor communities, and it also means improving education for the best American students, who look like geniuses in math and science until they are stacked up against better-prepared foreign youngsters. Unless this country acts, our economy will wind up occupying the same low-performing spot on the global charts that our schools occupy now.

Subject: Katrina and the Gas Pump From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 06:12:55 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06tue2.html September 6, 2005 Katrina and the Gas Pump In Katrina's wake, gasoline prices are rising faster than oil prices - an odd, but explicable, phenomenon. Enough crude oil is being produced to meet global demand, but the ability of the Gulf Coast's many refineries to turn the oil into gasoline has been devastated, as has the ability to transport the gasoline that does become available. Those supply bottlenecks are chiefly responsible for this past week's higher prices at the pump. President Bush's immediate response is to lend oil from the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to refineries and to streamline the refining process by temporarily relaxing environmental standards - sound stopgap measures to help ensure a steady supply of gasoline. The International Energy Agency, whose members are 26 rich nations, has also made a big contribution, pledging on Friday to supply world markets with an additional 60 million barrels of oil and gasoline over the next 30 days, half of which would come from the United States' emergency stockpiles. But it would be wrong to think - and act - as if this crisis is fundamentally a supply shock. Rather, it is a supply shock on top of blatantly excessive demand. The near-term responses from Mr. Bush and the international agency, welcome as they are, will not solve the larger problems laid bare by Katrina. Worse, Mr. Bush's record on energy issues does not suggest that he is up to that task. Gasoline prices seem destined to stay elevated until at least next spring. Even if the damage in the Gulf Coast is repaired soon - a big if - oil producers and refiners will require a premium to compensate for the risk that another killer storm could further disrupt operations in this hurricane season. Moreover, Katrina is causing refineries to draw down oil stockpiles that would have been used to produce home heating fuel for use this winter. That makes for a very thin supply cushion in the months ahead - not to mention high home-heating bills on top of high gasoline prices. But even before the hurricane hit, oil producers were pumping all-out to meet demand. Driven mainly by gasoline consumption in the United States and industrialization in China and India, the world's consumption of oil is 85 million barrels a day. That is just short of the maximum that can be pumped, and leaves only about 1 million barrels a day in spare capacity, the lowest level in three decades. As with gasoline, the thinner the cushion, the higher the price. Mr. Bush, who has a wildly overconfident view of how much oil could be pumped if American drillers were given a freer rein, refuses to see the overarching problem as one of excessive demand. Americans' gas-guzzling ways keep prices up, threatening the nation's economic well-being and creating windfall profits for foreign oil producers, some of which are used to finance terrorism. So it is up to Congress to grapple with the big picture - now, before another disaster strikes. The Senate energy committee is scheduled to meet today, and much of the attention will naturally be devoted to the current problems in the refining process. Those issues must obviously be addressed, including ways to help municipalities overcome the 'not in my backyard' obstacles to building state-of-the-art refineries. But the focus must be - finally - on reducing oil consumption. The lawmakers should call for a rapid, mandatory increase in automobile mileage standards. And they must resist measures that would encourage only more consumption, like temporarily suspending gasoline taxes. This is the moment to gather the political will to do what should have already been done. If the lawmakers don't act, they are courting problems that may be even harder to solve later on.

Subject: The Larger Shame From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:56:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/06kristof.html September 6, 2005 The Larger Shame By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF The wretchedness coming across our television screens from Louisiana has illuminated the way children sometimes pay with their lives, even in America, for being born to poor families. It has also underscored the Bush administration's ongoing reluctance or ineptitude in helping the poorest Americans. The scenes in New Orleans reminded me of the suffering I saw after a similar storm killed 130,000 people in Bangladesh in 1991 - except that Bangladesh's government showed more urgency in trying to save its most vulnerable citizens. But Hurricane Katrina also underscores a much larger problem: the growing number of Americans trapped in a never-ending cyclone of poverty. And while it may be too early to apportion blame definitively for the mishandling of the hurricane, even President Bush's own administration acknowledges that America's poverty is worsening on his watch. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a few days ago that the poverty rate rose again last year, with 1.1 million more Americans living in poverty in 2004 than a year earlier. After declining sharply under Bill Clinton, the number of poor people has now risen 17 percent under Mr. Bush. If it's shameful that we have bloated corpses on New Orleans streets, it's even more disgraceful that the infant mortality rate in America's capital is twice as high as in China's capital. That's right - the number of babies who died before their first birthdays amounted to 11.5 per thousand live births in 2002 in Washington, compared with 4.6 in Beijing. Indeed, according to the United Nations Development Program, an African-American baby in Washington has less chance of surviving its first year than a baby born in urban parts of the state of Kerala in India. The national infant mortality rate has risen under Mr. Bush for the first time since 1958. The U.S. ranks 43rd in the world in infant mortality, according to the C.I.A.'s World Factbook; if we could reach the level of Singapore, ranked No. 1, we would save 18,900 children's lives each year. So in some ways the poor children evacuated from New Orleans are the lucky ones because they may now get checkups and vaccinations. But nationally, 29 percent of children had no health insurance at some point in the last 12 months, and many get neither checkups nor vaccinations. The U.S. ranks 84th in the world for measles immunizations and 89th for polio. One of the most dispiriting elements of the catastrophe in New Orleans was the looting. I covered the 1995 earthquake that leveled much of Kobe, Japan, killing 5,500, and for days I searched there for any sign of criminal behavior. Finally I found a resident who had seen three men steal food. I asked him whether he was embarrassed that Japanese would engage in such thuggery. 'No, you misunderstand,' he said firmly. 'These looters weren't Japanese. They were foreigners.' The reasons for this are complex and partly cultural, but one reason is that Japan has tried hard to stitch all Japanese together into the nation's social fabric. In contrast, the U.S. - particularly under the Bush administration - has systematically cut people out of the social fabric by redistributing wealth from the most vulnerable Americans to the most affluent. It's not just that funds may have gone to Iraq rather than to the levees in New Orleans; it's also that money went to tax cuts for the wealthiest rather than vaccinations for children. None of this is to suggest that there are easy solutions for American poverty. As Ronald Reagan once said, 'We fought a war on poverty, and poverty won.' But we don't need to be that pessimistic - in the late 1990's, we made real headway. A ray of hope is beautifully presented in one of the best books every written on American poverty, 'American Dream,' by my Times colleague Jason DeParle. So the best monument to the catastrophe in New Orleans would be a serious national effort to address the poverty that afflicts the entire country. And in our shock and guilt, that might be politically feasible. Rich Lowry of The National Review, in defending Mr. Bush, offered an excellent suggestion: 'a grand right-left bargain that includes greater attention to out-of-wedlock births from the Left in exchange for the Right's support for more urban spending.' That would be the best legacy possible for Katrina. Otherwise, long after the horrors have left TV screens, about 50 of the 77 babies who die each day, on average, will die needlessly, because of poverty. That's the larger hurricane of poverty that shames our land.

Subject: Poverty Increases, Again From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:55:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/06/opinion/l06poverty.html September 6, 2005 Poverty Increases, Again To the Editor: The news is stark and unadorned by political spin: the number of Americans who live below the poverty line has risen for the fourth consecutive year ('Poverty in U.S. Grew in 2004, While Income Failed to Rise for 5th Straight Year'). We pride ourselves on being the richest nation in the world, yet 37 million of our citizens struggle every day to find adequate food, shelter and clothing. Never mind about such extravagances as hope or dreams. As a civilized society, do we measure economic success by how well the top 12 percent of our population is doing, or the bottom 12 percent? David Alexander Powell, Ohio, Aug. 31, 2005

Subject: Build a Country, Build a Schoolhouse From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 14:15:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: May 27, 2002 To Build a Country, Build a Schoolhouse By AMARTYA SEN - New York Times CAMBRIDGE, England Isaiah Berlin has argued: 'Men do not live only by fighting evils. They live by positive goals.' The advice was not aimed at the leaders of the war on terror: Berlin was speaking more than 40 years ago. But his idea is worth the attention of current world leaders. And one of the most important positive goals has already been identified by the United Nations: universal primary education by 2015. I am aware that when I argue that basic education for all can transform the miserable world in which we live, I sound a little like a Victorian gentlewoman delivering her favorite recipe for progress. As it happens, however, extensive empirical studies have demonstrated the critical role of basic education in economic and social development in Europe and North America as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America. When Japan set out in the 19th century to catch up with the Western nations, its Fundamental Code of Education, issued in 1872, expressed the public commitment to make sure that there must be 'no community with an illiterate family, nor a family with an illiterate person.' Kido Takayoshi, one of the leaders of Japanese reform, explained the basic idea: 'Our people are no different from the Americans or Europeans of today; it is all a matter of education or lack of education.' By 1910 Japan was almost fully literate, at least for the young, and by 1913, though still very much poorer than Britain or America, Japan was publishing more books than Britain and more than twice as many as the United States. The concentration on education was responsible, to a large extent, for the nature and speed of Japan's economic and social progress. Later on, China, Taiwan, South Korea and other economies in East Asia followed similar routes. Explanations of their rapid economic progress often cite their willingness to make good use of the global market economy, and rightly so. But that process was greatly helped by the emphasis all of these countries placed on basic education. Widespread participation in a global economy would have been hard to accomplish if people could not read or write — or produce according to specifications or instructions. The contribution of basic education to development is not, however, confined to economic progress. Education has intrinsic importance; the capability to read and write can deeply influence one's quality of life. Also, an educated population can make better use of democratic opportunities than an illiterate one. Further, an ability to read documents and legal provisions can help subjugated women and other oppressed groups make use of their rights and demand more fairness. And female literacy can enhance women's voices in family affairs and reduce gender inequality in other fields, a benefit to men as well as women, since women's empowerment through literacy tends to reduce child mortality and very significantly decrease fertility rates. The lives that are most burdened and impoverished by over-frequent bearing and rearing of children are those of young women. A greater voice of young women in family decisions tends, therefore, to cut down birth rates sharply. For example, the fertility rates in the different districts that make up India vary extremely widely, from almost 5 (roughly, five children per couple) in some districts to less than 1.7 in some others. Empirical investigations by Mamta Murthi and Jean Drèze indicate that only two general variables significantly help to explain these differences: female literacy and female economic participation. In sub-Saharan Africa, 40 percent of primary-age children have no opportunity for schooling. Around the world, there are currently 125 million children who have never, at any time, seen the inside of a classroom. A well coordinated global initiative on basic education is crucial. To be sure, it is also important that the priority of basic education be fully accepted and pursued by the developing countries themselves. But a global approach to schooling can inspire initiatives and bring ongoing efforts together, as well as help with resources. The need for a new kind of partnership — a global alliance — on schooling is hard to exaggerate. The time to live by positive goals has certainly come — not least for the leaders of G-8 countries who meet at a summit next month in Canada. Amartya Sen, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, is honorary president of Oxfam. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 1998.

Subject: If You Can Make It Here ... From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 11:47:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04manu.html September 4, 2005 If You Can Make It Here ... By LOUIS UCHITELLE MILWAUKEE MATTHEW S. LEVATICH hovers intently over the shiny red-and-chrome Harley-Davidson motorcycle parked near his office. He is annoyed. A reporter has questioned the American purity of Harley cycles and Mr. Levatich, as the vice president in charge of procurement, is defending the faith. He is slowly circling an employee's bike, identifying the source of each visible part. True, the silvery, cylindrical shock absorbers, which rise like a 'V' from the front-wheel axle, are from abroad. So are the aluminum wheels and spokes. That is because such things are not manufactured in the United States, or not as well here as they are in other countries. Various dashboard gauges are also imported. Once made in the United States, they are not anymore - feeding the perception that American manufacturing is in decline. But the leather seat and saddle bags are from a supplier here in Milwaukee, Mr. Levatich said, tapping them emphatically as if they were items on a checklist. So are the metal brackets that attach the bags to the bike. The fenders, the gas tank, the brake system, the headlight assembly, the engine, the transmission, the muffler and the exhaust - all these were also Made in America, and the entire motorcycle was assembled here, too. 'We have more domestic content than we had 15 years ago,' Mr. Levatich said, 'but it is a very fluid situation, very dynamic right now.' The United States may not be the industrial dynamo it was a half-century ago, but reports of the death of American manufacturing are greatly exaggerated. The country has not even been toppled from first place among nations. Measured as value added, the United States accounted for 23.8 percent of the world's manufacturing output in 2004, according to the World Bank. And despite more than two decades of globalization, the country's share has barely dipped. The annual average since 1982 has been 24.6 percent. 'Value added' is the Cadillac measure of manufacturing performance. It calculates the dollar value created within each country when materials and labor are melded into finished products. (The whole is worth more than the sum of its parts.) Japan was second, at 20.9 percent - a perennial also-ran, narrowing the gap in some years since 1982 and falling back in others. China, however, although still a distant third at not quite 9 percent, has marched steadily upward, overtaking Germany in 2003. South Korea, in sixth place at 4.1 percent, has also gained ground, passing Italy just last year. 'When you go to conferences of manufacturers,' said L. Josh Bivens, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, 'it is really surprising the number of companies still manufacturing in this country.' More than 100,000 have at least 20 employees, the Census Bureau reports. Some are foreign, like Toyota or Honda or BMW. But the great majority of manufacturers that stay put in the country, resisting globalization, are American-owned and share certain characteristics that help to keep them at home. More often than not, they are the nation's small and midsize manufacturers - those employing fewer than 1,000 people - but together they account for nearly 80 percent of the country's value added, according to Census Bureau data. Whatever the corporate size, many of the chief executives grew up with their companies, gaining considerable expertise along the way and an unusual attachment to the products they make. James L. Ziemer, 54, Harley's chief executive, started at the company as a freight elevator operator while he was still in high school, drawn by Harley factory workers who lived in his blue-collar neighborhood here and who raced Harleys on weekends. 'I'd say to myself, wow, these guys are being paid to ride motorcycles and burn rubber and everything else,' Mr. Ziemer said, 'so I said, one day I'm going to be paid to ride a motorcycle.' He owns three Harleys now and rides one regularly to work, parking it in a lot reserved for employees' cycles. GENE F. HAAS, 52, the founder, owner and president of Haas Automation Inc. in Oxnard, Calif., worked as a machinist while he was in high school and college, and he stuck to that trade, although he graduated with an accounting degree. From his experience and ingenuity - and that of a high school classmate, Kurt Zierhut, now the director of electrical engineering - came a line of computerized machine tools that makes Haas Automation a powerful presence in an industry otherwise all but lost to the Japanese and the Europeans. The similarities continue. Innovation is often compulsively pursued at the manufacturing companies that stay in America. The engineers and designers at Harley and Haas - they constitute more than 10 percent of each work force - are constantly altering the companies' products in ways that are not easily imitated by lower-priced foreign competitors. The resulting cachet helps to sustain demand. 'There are tweaks to the product that we do regularly,' said Rod Copes, general manager of Harley's main engine and transmission plant in Milwaukee. 'It could be just the relocation of a hole in a casting. Having production here, we can make that happen.' Mr. Ziemer and Mr. Haas eschew layoffs, but in exchange for job security they require their workers to help squeeze out labor costs through automation and other efficiencies. More to the point, the manufacturers that stay put in America cannot add workers, in the opinion of Mr. Ziemer and Mr. Haas. Labor must be less than 20 percent of the manufacturing cost to withstand foreign competitors who employ more labor at very low wages, these executives argue. 'If the government expects manufacturers to employ more people over the next decade,' Mr. Haas said, 'it isn't going to happen.' The nation's manufacturing employment fell rapidly during the 2001 recession and the slow recovery that followed, but as output has rebounded, employment has not. One reason, apart from automation, is the migration of production abroad, not only by big multinationals but by some of their suppliers as well, companies like Hiwasse Manufacturing in Jacksonville, Ark., which makes steel strips for the control panels of appliances and is considering a plant in northern Mexico to be near a big customer, General Electric. Timely government regulation has played a role in sustaining domestic production. Without tariffs and import quotas in the 1980's, for example, Harley and Haas Automation might not be here today. Quotas gave Haas a protected market for midsize computer-controlled machine tools just when Mr. Haas was starting up, and tariffs on 'heavyweight motorcycles' - defined as those having engines with a total displacement of more than 700 cubic centimeters - discouraged the Japanese from exporting to the United States the muscular, ornate, throaty-engined bikes that are Harley's specialty. That gave Harley breathing room just when it was close to going under. The pressure for intervention that existed in the 1980's and that prompted President Ronald Reagan to act is less evident today. With the birth of the World Trade Organization and the entry of China into that group, free trade is more established now than it was then. That makes it easier for American manufacturers, particularly big multinationals, to shift production abroad and to export back to the United States. Companies like Harley and Haas that keep their factories in America are also under pressure to globalize, but in a different way. Materials and parts that go into their products come incessantly from abroad. Mr. Levatich, Harley's procurement chief, says he tries to buck the flow. He argues that working with nearby suppliers enhances quality. In addition, he says, Harley calls on parts makers to make frequent changes in the components they supply, and having suppliers in this country makes that practice easier. 'We are not buying off-the-shelf components just on price - not even a fastener,' Mr. Levatich said, adding that before Harley looks for parts abroad, 'we have to be certain that we can't get what we need in the United States.' Robert Whaley, the procurement chief at Haas Automation, is more philosophical. Some things that Haas needs for its machine tools, like high-grade electric motors, flat-screened computer panels and some specialty steels, are no longer made in America, so Mr. Whaley must buy them overseas, and the value added to make those components goes to the foreign suppliers. Other parts are off-the-shelf commodities, and Haas buys them from the lowest bidder that is qualified. Machine tools shape metal into finished parts, using dozens of tools to cut, drill, grind and bend. Some of those tools - drill bits, for example - do not change from one year to the next, so it makes sense to buy them from suppliers, some located overseas. And that is what Haas does. The cast metal housing for a water pump falls into the same category, and these come from Asia. 'There has been a gradual increase in overseas content,' Mr. Whaley said, 'and further down the line, my suppliers in America are buying more offshore than they did 10 years ago.' Harley-Davidson Patriotism, Yes, And Union Pacts Ask Mr. Ziemer or any of his executives - or the leaders of Harley's unions, which work hand-in-hand with the company - why they keep production in the United States, and the answer comes back almost as a chorus: the Harley motorcycle is an American icon, a way of life, the vehicle of choice for open-road individualism. Its customers would not tolerate production abroad. 'People are even aware of the parts, where they might come from,' Mr. Ziemer said. 'Not every single person, but a lot of our customers. And there are a lot of motorcycle magazines that write on this theme - hey, we're metal, we're not plastic; we're American made, we're not foreign made.' But put aside the American-centric explanation and more fundamental reasons emerge. Harley nearly failed 25 years ago, when it was caught up in a disastrous merger, endless labor strife and shoddily made motorcycles. A leveraged buyout in 1981 featured a group of Harley executives who wanted to save the company and eventually did. Mr. Ziemer, who still sometimes comes to work in the factory-worker clothing of his early days, rose in this milieu, becoming chief financial officer in 1991 and chief executive last April. The company now has more than $5 billion in annual revenue. What he and the others did along the way was not always pretty. For openers, to survive, they axed 40 percent of the work force. But as motorcycle sales gradually revived - thanks in part to four years of tariff protection starting in 1983 - Harley's managers made an unusual deal with their unions, the International Association of Machinists and the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers. A partnership arrangement was written into the union contracts, requiring labor and management to agree on decisions affecting workers. The unions, for example, had a say in the selection of a new assembly plant site in the mid-1990's. Two of the three members of the site selection committee were from the unions, and Kansas City, Mo., got the nod, rather than a lower-wage state with a right-to-work law (which wouldn't require workers to join or support a union). Assembly is done at the Kansas City plant and at an older facility in York, Pa., while engines and transmissions are made in Milwaukee, the headquarters city. The pay for all this is $17 to $33 an hour and rising at 2.5 percent a year. Still, with the partnership as a framework, labor costs are continuously whittled down as a condition for keeping production in America. Management recently proposed going to Germany to buy the gears for a new transmission, rather than making them at the main plant here. The union wanted the work in-house and got it, but only after agreeing, as an offset, that future retirees would pay health insurance premiums beyond a certain cap. The company now pays the premiums without a cap. 'The unions have been forced to negotiate things we would have preferred not to negotiate,' said Richard Krause, president of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical and Energy Workers local here, who was laid off himself for nearly five years in the early 1980's. 'We've changed work rules, and we've reduced job classifications considerably. But we are involved in running the business, and that means accepting changes that keep the company competitive.' Management, on the other hand, cannot transfer 'core production' overseas without union consent. Nor can it lay off workers unilaterally. Adhering to this restriction, the company retrained and reassigned more than 60 workers who were displaced when Harley went to robotic welding of motorcycle frames at the Kansas City plant. 'Most companies would have put those people out,' said Harold A. Scott, vice president for human resources. But maintaining job security while shaving labor content keeps Harley on a difficult treadmill. Production has to rise continuously - and sales, too, of course - as automation reduces the labor required to make each motorcycle. Enough additional motorcycles must be manufactured to absorb workers who are idled by the automation, thus keeping the number of workers constant. Production and sales have indeed risen every year for more than a decade, and the work force, now at just over 9,700, even grew by 80 last year. Production will rise again this year, Mr. Ziemer said, although not quite to the original target of 339,000 motorcycles. Two-thirds of the customers are Americans ages 35 to 54, and perhaps because the baby boomers are aging, this demographic group is no longer buying at quite the old pace. That means selling more Harleys abroad, particularly in China, where the company has yet to sell its first motorcycle. While other companies often set up production in China, Harley will export motorcycles there, Mr. Ziemer says, once it has a distribution network in place. 'Folks are driving BMW's and Lexuses and Lamborghinis and everything else, and they are exported to China,' he said, 'so why not a Harley, which is a $20,000 product compared to those others that are much greater than that? There's just no pressure to make Harleys there.' Haas Automation How Labor Costs Are Kept in Check For all its anonymity, Haas Automation is a significant player in a very important industry. Without machine tools, manufacturing would be primitive. Every piece of merchandise with metal in it requires a machine tool to shape that metal, and to accomplish this task, American manufacturers channel 70 percent of their spending on machine tools to the Japanese and the Europeans. What makes Haas stand out in this relentlessly competitive field is the niche that the company dominates. Nine hundred machine tools a month are shipped from a vast, still-expanding off-white factory set among strawberry fields and new industrial parks about 60 miles up the coast from Los Angeles. Haas machine tools are smaller than most foreign models; when Mr. Haas was getting started in the 1980's, quotas discouraged the Japanese from entering the smaller machine-tool market. 'The Japanese elected to sell the big, expensive stuff, which is what they still do today,' he said. His own factory floor uses Japanese machine tools costing $2 million or $3 million each, which is five times as much as the most expensive Haas product. The Japanese machines are large enough to run unattended overnight, cutting and grinding one chunk of metal after another into the pieces that become the framework of a Haas machine tool. That sort of automation has reduced labor to about 10 percent of production costs, Mr. Haas said, perhaps low enough to stave off the Chinese when they finally get into the midsize machine tool market as a direct competitor. 'We basically produce one machine tool a month per person,' he explained. 'If you were to go over to China, their labor cost is probably 50 people per machine tool per month.' Even at $1 or $2 an hour, that adds up to considerably more than Haas's labor cost, given its wage scale of $10 to $25 an hour. Haas cites other tactics that keep it competitive while rooted in America. Breaking with the practice of most machine tool manufacturers, Haas maintains at its own expense an inventory of parts at each of its distributors. Because machine tools are complex mechanisms, they can break down, no matter who makes them. And a new part, specially ordered, can take weeks to arrive. In Haas's case, a distributor delivers one quickly out of inventory. 'It's a way to stay in business,' Mr. Zierhut said. Haas makes most of its machine-tool components in-house, giving the company an edge in quality, its executives say. And the cost is not that much more, Mr. Zierhut said. His department, for example, makes the computer system that controls the machine tools, assigning 45 people to the task. Others buy computer controls from suppliers, mainly the Japanese. 'When we looked at a company doing that,' Mr. Zierhut said, 'they still had 30 people whose job it was to adopt the purchased controls to their product.' STILL, the pressure to go abroad for components does not let up. Each month, Haas buys 300 tons of iron castings that it grinds and shapes to build its machine tools. Until recently, all of these castings came from foundries in the United States, but as those foundries have gone out of business, Haas has started to buy castings in Canada. 'We talked about, actually, having our own foundry, maybe in Mexico,' Mr. Haas said. Haas Automation sells its machine tools mostly within the United States, to small and midsize manufacturers engaged not in mass production of standardized products, which are vulnerable to offshoring, but in the making of specialty products that low-cost foreign competitors cannot easily match. But the mix is changing. Forty percent of the $550 million that the company expects in revenue this year is from exports, mostly to Europe, and Mr. Haas says he wants to raise that figure to 60 percent very soon. He expects much of the growth to come from building up exports to Asia - particularly to China, already the company's fastest-growing market. Like Harley's executives, those at Haas count on rising sales to absorb workers idled by automation. Shrinking the work force, they say, would be a last resort. 'I did one mass layoff in '98-'99 and it really harmed the culture,' said Robert Murray, general manager of the Oxnard factory. All Haas machine tools share a basic design, and that commonality helps to hold down production costs. More than 200 engineers and software experts, out of a total work force of nearly 1,100, configure the basic design into 100 models and variants to suit specific customers' needs. So much tinkering could not happen if production was shifted to China, Mr. Murray said. Keeping the whole process in the United States still leaves a profit margin of more than 5 percent of revenue, according to Haas executives. Mr. Haas himself is not specific. As the sole owner of a company free of debt, he does not have to answer to Wall Street - a constraint that contributes to the pressure on other manufacturers to move production offshore in search of lower cost. He marches to a different tune. 'One of the secrets to manufacturing in the United States is that you have a lot of alternatives,' he said. 'If something gets to be too costly, there's always a way of substituting something else. If your labor costs get to be too expensive, then automate.' Hiwasse Manufacturing A Reluctant Step Into Mexico J. Richard Derickson, chief executive of Hiwasse Manufacturing, a family-owned concern started by his father, feels the pressure to go overseas in a different way. Mr. Derickson and his 70 employees in Jacksonville, Ark., manufacture steel strips used in control panels for stoves, refrigerators and other appliances. General Electric, Whirlpool, Maytag, Electrolux and other appliance makers buy thousands of them for $5 to $10 apiece; Hiwasse had revenue of $8.5 million last year and will have more this year, Mr. Derickson said. G.E. is a big customer, and Hiwasse ships not only to its plants in this country but also to those in northern Mexico. No company in Mexico makes the panels, and now G.E. wants Mr. Derickson to put a factory near its Mexican operations. Mr. Derickson says he is setting up shop in Mexico, but reluctantly. Given the efficiencies of his Arkansas plant, he says, he cannot make the control panels less expensively in Mexico, even allowing for shipping costs and lower-wage Mexican labor. 'The happiest scenario,' he said, 'is a sister plant that allows us to work back and forth - maybe do part of the finishing in Arkansas and send the panels to Mexico for the rest of the work.' Given his druthers, Mr. Derickson would probably dispense with the sister plant and stay in America.

Subject: A Chinese Painter's New Triumph From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 11:40:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/arts/design/31zhan.html August 31, 2005 A Chinese Painter's New Struggle: To Meet Demand By DAVID BARBOZA BEIJING - In a large warehouse studio on the outskirts of China's capital, Zhang Xiaogang was trying to explain how he goes about painting each day. He said he liked to work deep into the night, smoking Chinese Honghe cigarettes, drinking herbal tea and listening to the music of 'Buddha Cafe' or Air's 'Talkie Walkie.' Much of the time, he said, he simply locks himself up in his studio every afternoon about 2 o'clock, trying to concentrate. 'When I start painting I can't stop,' he said gesturing to a large portrait of a boy soldier, one of about a dozen paintings that line his 3,000-square-foot studio. 'I've got to get this side down before it dries. When I painted this piece I got distracted. The color changed a little. You probably can't notice it, but I can.' Mr. Zhang, 47, is one of China's best-known artists. For years, his works - like those of other avant-garde artists of his generation - could not be exhibited in China, often because they were deemed too modern or politically questionable. But now his paintings are not only collected by wealthy Westerners and leading foreign museums, but they are also increasingly fashionable among well-to-do Chinese and are being exhibited in China's state-run museums and galleries. Early next year, one of Mr. Zhang's largest works - a mural 39 feet long by 9 feet high - is to be unveiled in the subway system being built in the bustling southern city of Shenzhen, alongside works of two other leading contemporary artists, Wang Guangyi and Fang Lijun. Much of Mr. Zhang's acclaim over the last decade stems from a series, called 'Bloodline: Big Family,' of largely black-and-white oil paintings inspired by formal family photographs of the 1960's and 70's. Mr. Zhang's rendering of these portraits - the figures often devoid of emotion, seemingly trapped in a time that still defies explanation - has become his trademark. Few other Chinese artists' works are so easily identifiable here, or so popular. At a time when China's contemporary-art scene is sizzling, with dozens of galleries opening in Beijing and other cities and works being auctioned for record prices, few artists are as celebrated as Mr. Zhang, whose paintings can now fetch as much as $200,000 each. 'You can't even get his works right now,' said Weng Ling, director of the Shanghai Gallery of Art. 'He's that popular. There is a long waiting list even to show his works.' But for such a highly sought-after artist, Mr. Zhang has an unassuming manner. He dismisses talk of his fame. 'I'm just a simple painter,' he said. 'I just paint what appeals to me.' But he is hardly simple. It has been a long journey for this artist whose early years were marked by depression and whose first paintings were filled with skulls and dismembered bodies. Mr. Zhang was born in 1958 and grew up in western China's Sichuan Province, the third of four sons born to government officials. So he was 8 in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution touched off a decade of political and social upheaval in China - one in which students assaulted their teachers, children denounced their parents and party elders paraded through the streets wearing dunce caps. Almost every night at the beginning, Mr. Zhang said, 'people came to our house and asked my parents to make confessions about what they did wrong.' His parents were later sent to work in the countryside, leaving him and his three brothers in the care of an aunt for several years. He spent much of his childhood drawing. 'My mother was afraid I'd go out and get in trouble so she taught me how to draw,' he explained. 'And that's what I did.' He spent long hours sketching at home, he said, imitating comic strips and drawing heroic battle scenes of Chinese fighting against Japanese. In early 1976, like so many youngsters in China, he was sent to farm in the countryside. But after Mao died later that year and the Cultural Revolution drew to a close, colleges around the country began reopening and Mr. Zhang enrolled at the Sichuan Academy of Art. He studied Soviet-style realism but says he gravitated toward Western art, particularly the works of van Gogh, Gauguin and Dalí. After college, he worked briefly designing sets and costumes for a dance troupe. Then he taught art in Sichuan and began searching for his own style. He became part of a group of avant-garde painters who came to prominence in the 1980's. But after the 1989 military crackdown on the demonstrations in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, many of these artists went underground or abroad. Mr. Zhang's works were not the most controversial then, but like others they were seen as breaking sharply with tradition. As a result they were often barred from being shown in Chinese galleries and were mostly acquired by foreigners. He now says it took him 10 years to find his own style, and that along the way he battled depression and alcoholism. For six years, he says, he painted almost exclusively about death. 'I didn't feel any hope,' he said of this period. 'I couldn't find my place in society.' The turning point came in 1992, he said, as China was beginning to open up again. He began to feel that his surrealistic, symbolic works were too derivative of Western art. That year, he traveled to Germany, he said, where he saw and admired the photographlike paintings of Gerhard Richter. But when he returned home, Mr. Zhang said, he decided to do something that would more faithfully express what he calls 'the Chinese emotion.' Then he came across some old family photographs. 'I thought, 'This is good,' ' he said. 'I want to show the family, the connections between people.' But in his portraits, Mr. Zhang has written, he seeks 'to create false photographs,' to hint at the turbulence and suppressed emotion below the surface of formal studio portraits. In addition to studying his parents' old photographs, he said, he also paged through old books and magazines, and visited antiques shops. Even some friends began offering him old photographs. In 1993, his first family portraits - black-and-white oils with occasional flashes of color - became the beginning of his 'Bloodline' series. It is a series that over the years has evolved from slightly surreal portraits of family members, often dressed in the Mao jackets that were standard in the 1960's and 70's, to softer-toned, almost ethereal figures. Over time, the faces have become increasingly alike, and now all the people in a particular family portrait - male and female - have the same features. They are a single person, he says, a composite drawn from images of his mother and his own imagination. 'I want everyone to be the same,' he says. 'During one period in China, all families were considered virtually the same family.' His parents are still unaware of their roles in his paintings, he said. 'I rarely talk to them about art,' he said. 'They don't really understand this. They don't ask anything about it. They care more about my health. My mother will ask, 'How are you feeling?' ' Until 1997, Mr. Zhang said, exhibition spaces in China always told him that they could not get government approval to show his works. That's no longer a problem. State-controlled galleries are eager to show his works, which have won critical acclaim here and abroad. 'He's now one of the most important figures from the post-89 group,' said Vinci Chan, a specialist in Asian contemporary art at Christie's auction house in Taiwan. 'This is an important transition group. Most of these guys broke the rules. Before them, there was really only traditional work.' In 1999, Mr. Zhang moved from Kunming, in the south, to Beijing because, he said, this is the country's cultural center. And he now lives here with his longtime girlfriend. He likes to talk about his daughter, now 11, from a marriage that ended in divorce, and says she has also taken to painting. Photographs of her, of friends and his works crowd his studio walls, along with announcements of gallery openings, pencil sketches and, of course, the old family portraits that have guided his painting. Today, Mr. Zhang's studio looks like an assembly line of large-scale black-and-white portraits. He does all the painting himself, he said, without an assistant. But he admits to feeling pressure to produce to meet the demand. 'See that one over there,' he said, pointing to a charcoal drawing on canvas of a group of young boys. 'I sketched that over a year ago and I still haven't started painting it yet.' That demand is evident in visits to local galleries, where reproductions of Mr. Zhang's images show up on posters, postcards, book jackets, bookmarks and other objects. And he has agents in Hong Kong, Paris and New York. Still, he denies that success has spoiled him. 'I'm lucky,' he said. 'The things I like to draw the market has accepted. But I won't just follow the market. If I paint something and the market doesn't like it now, maybe it'll like it some other time.'

Subject: The Fortress of Monoglot Nation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 10:30:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950CEEDA173EF935A15753C1A9659C8B63 October 26, 2003 The Fortress of Monoglot Nation By Margo Jefferson ''There is no Frigate like a book / To take us Lands away,'' wrote Emily Dickinson. But the ship most American readers sail remains strictly within national borders. According to a recent Publishers Weekly article, of all the books translated worldwide, only 6 percent (maybe less) are translated from other languages into English. By contrast, almost 50 percent are translated from English into those other languages. We all know that events of global importance take place outside our linguistic borders every day. And since our educational system is famous for how poorly it teaches foreign languages, it might try to compensate by offering students a lot more books in translation. What sets off one's desire to read a foreign writer? Some odd personal urge: a country that has always intrigued you; a piece of history that starts to. Intense political change can have a trickle-down effect on our reading, though it doesn't always. A Greek journalist friend still recalls his shock at coming to New York the year Germany decided to reunite. He went through several large bookstores in search of books on German history and was nonplused to find just one. Had he wished to write about Richard M. Nixon, he would have had his pick of 20. In a 1957 essay, Doris Lessing wrote: ''We are all of us made kin with each other and with everything in the world because of the kinship of possible destruction.'' Now, thanks to technology, we have the visual kinship of watching wars break out all over the world. How do these places become more than masses of facts and photographs, nations that are designated allies or threats, objects of our pity or disdain? Reading the literature of these countries is a good way to start. Last spring I spent eight days in Russia and Finland. I prepared by doing some reading. I've done even more since I came back. ''Not Before Sundown'' (translated by Herbert Lomas) is a wily thriller-fantasy by a Finnish novelist and comic strip artist, Johanna Sinisalo. Her narrators are young Helsinki residents, chief among them Angel, an insouciant gay photographer, and Palomita, a frightened mail order bride from the Philippines. When eros and violence threaten to erupt, the chief suspect is a troll Angel found in his alley and took in. Trolls do exist outside of ''Peer Gynt.'' According to the book, anyway, biologists declared them a species in 1907. Not long after, several Finnish ''Satan sects'' declared them demons come back to earth. Sinisalo frames her tale with Angel's frantic Web researches into troll lore. Each discovery sounds like the voice of a storyteller reminding us of how the gods play with our fates. Russia led me to the much-admired Yugoslav writer Danilo Kis. His brilliance (and that of his translator, Duska Mikic-Mitchell) did the rest. I'd been meaning to read Kis for years; he first came to the attention of American critics and scholars in the 1970's along with Milan Kundera and other Eastern Europeans. (He is published by Dalkey Archive, one of the small independent presses foreign writers depend on.) ''A Tomb for Boris Davidovich'' is a novel -- or a group of linked stories -- stitching fiction to history with uncanny precision. Kis's people are students, journalists, doctors, gangsters, peasants, poets, revolutionaries and political functionaries, traveling the ''dark continent'' of Europe in the early 20th century. (The phrase is the historian Mark Mazower's.) There are czarist rebellions, world wars, Communism and Fascism; every kind of ideal and betrayal. Kis uses facts and documents, both real and invented. Fictional characters live through real events set in motion by historical figures. The brutalities of a Stalinist prison interrogator, Kis writes, were ''not the whim of a neurotic or a cocaine addict, as some believe, but a struggle for his convictions which, like his victims', he considered to be altruistic, inviolable and sacred. . . . To sign a confession for the sake of duty was not only a logical but also a moral act, and therefore worthy of respect.'' What is more chilling than that intimate chronicler's voice? And here is Kis on the early work of a poet he has invented and placed with the great innovators Mayakovsky and Akhmatova: ''the still life of a cup of tea, a silver spoon, and a drowned wasp; the violet eyes of the harnessed horse; the optimistic grinding of turbine engines; the head of the commander Frunze on an operating table amid the intoxicating smell of chloroform; the bare trees in Lubyanka's yard; the hoarse howling of village dogs; the wondrous balance of cement piles; the stalking of a cat following the trail of a winter bird in the snow; grainfields under a barrage of artillery fire; the lovers' parting in the valley of the Kama; the military cemetery near Sevastopol. . . . '' Sometimes literature itself puts a country on our internal map. At about the same time the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize, Oprah's Book Club announced that its next selection would be another South African novel, Alan Paton's 1948 book, ''Cry, the Beloved Country.'' To learn more about South Africa, I turned to the Feminist Press's rich new anthology ''Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region.'' It's an amazing resource, close to 600 pages, and it's a true collaboration, the work of seven editors from four countries. The 20 or so original languages include English, Afrikaans, isiXhosa and siNdebele. The traditions are oral and written: there are poems and folktales, stories, diaries and political documents starting from the 1830's. An anonymous widow's chant from Lesotho (first collected in 1836) has the ring of Greek choral poetry. Would that I had wings to fly up to the sky! Why does not a strong cord come down from the sky? I would tie it to me, I would mount, I would go there to live. And here's the black South African journalist Marian Morel describing, with sardonic brilliance, a 1959 Capetown beauty contest: ''The girls -- colored, Indian and African -- had to provide their own dresses. Factory workers, domestic workers, waitresses by day. Now with a dab of powder, a secret twist of their dresses, they were trying to become the Princess for the Night. '' 'Gonna, I feel like a baggage of nerves,' one girl told me. 'I wish I wasn't competing. I wish I was just spectating like you.' . . . ''The band swung into 'Anchors Aweigh' and the girls sailed in. . . . A fellow in an orange shirt posted himself behind No. 19, and every now and then licked her left ear. She didn't blink an eyelash. I gave her 10 out of 10 for poise.''

Subject: A Dollar for You, and $431 for Me From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 09:56:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04count.html September 4, 2005 Boss to Workers: A Dollar for You, and $431 for Me By HUBERT B. HERRING Ben Cohen's dusty vow that no Ben & Jerry's executive would make more than seven times the lowliest worker's wage seems a surreal joke now. Across corporate America today, bosses might be more likely to intone magnanimously, 'I will never earn more than 400 times as much.' Farfetched? Not really. Again last year, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the ratio of the average chief executive's pay to that of production workers at 367 top corporations smashed through the 400-to-1 barrier, last breached in the wild late 90's. To be exact, for every dollar bill in a worker's pocket, the boss gets $431. And here's a nugget of perspective: If the minimum wage had kept pace with bosses' pay since 1990, it would be $23.03 an hour. Which bosses are really raking it in? Some of the big money is in war. At companies with at least 10 percent of revenue from military contracts, chief executives' pay tripled from 2001 to 2004.

Subject: Working Hard at Nothing All Day From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 08:14:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05maier.html September 5, 2005 Working Hard at Nothing All Day By CORINNE MAIER Paris — Thoreau deplored the supremacy of work in this way: 'It would be glorious to see mankind at leisure for once. It is nothing but work, work, work.' Fortunately, there is one day a year in which one celebrates work without going there: Labor Day. And it's you Americans who have invented it. We French thank you for that, even if few of us realize that this paradoxical day comes from across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, it was in America, a decidedly pioneering land, where the idea of a shorter workweek, a notion dear to French hearts, was born. All that began on May 1, 1886. On that historic day, American workers went on strike to demand an eight-hour day; at that time it was habitual to work 10 to 12 hours - quelle horreur! Alas, the strike resulted in the Haymarket tragedy, and European Socialists, shocked, decided to fix May 1 as the day for demanding better working conditions. Even though the impetus for the May 1 Fête du Travail comes from America, your Labor Day is not celebrated then, but in September. And this difference in date changes everything. For in France, May 1 announces summer, and we also have a saying, 'En mai, fais ce qu'il te plaît' - that is, in May, do as you please. The day is also the prelude to a series of warm-weather events that the French dote on: the Cannes film festival, the French Open tennis tournament and especially the Tour de France, even when it's always Lance Armstrong who wins. Thus, in France, Labor Day is the beginning of a season of pleasures, while for you in America, it is the official end. You don't work that day, but vacation is over and it's time to roll up your sleeves and buckle down. You have one consolation: your Labor Day is always on a Monday, so you are sure of enjoying what we French call with delight a 'week-end prolongé.' May 1, however, capriciously moves around. This year was especially disappointing: May 1 was a Sunday, so no break from work. Next year, though, yippee: it's a Monday! Aside from the date, the French and Americans simply celebrate Labor Day differently. Americans have picnics and family gatherings; we have the lily of the valley, brought into the city by rural folk who've gathered it in the woods, and protests. Every year, the famous May 1 protest gathers together union members, militants and leftists. This march, though closely covered by the news media, doesn't usually get a lot of attention from the public. There are exceptions, as in 2002, when the threat of the extreme right's coming to power drove a million Parisians into the streets. I was there too: engulfed in an enormous crowd, I found myself shoulder to shoulder with ... a colleague from the office. Here indeed is proof that May 1 is the Fête du Travail.... Still, it is the day when the Americans, like the French, should reflect on the meaning of their jobs. Everybody knows that the two nationalities don't have the same attitude toward work. Americans think the French are lazy, and the French think Americans are interested only in money. Of course, these are stereotypes, as are many other perceptions we have about each other (after all, some Frenchwomen do get fat). But because the French work 35 hours a week, Americans sneer, forgetting that in many years French workers have a higher productivity rate than their American counterparts - proof that you can work better by working less. Americans also forget that going to work every day is often more a chore than a pleasure. You seem more and more disillusioned about work: only a third of you say that you love your jobs. In such conditions, it's not surprising that you spend on average two hours of your workday ... not working. Answering personal e-mail messages, shopping online, playing computer games or chatting with co-workers ... it's so much more pleasant than working, really. My American friends, there you are caught, red-handed, being lazy. Is that enough to reconcile the Americans and the French? United in indolence, a foundation of sloth in which Labor Day is the cornerstone. Will Laziness Unlimited be the future of work?

Subject: Exploiting the Gender Gap From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 06:58:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/opinion/05farrell.html September 5, 2005 Exploiting the Gender Gap By WARREN FARRELL Carlsbad, Calif. — Nothing disturbs working women more than the statistics often mentioned on Labor Day showing that they are paid only 76 cents to men's dollar for the same work. If that were the whole story, it should disturb all of us; like many men, I have two daughters and a wife in the work force. When I was on the board of the National Organization for Women in New York City, I blamed discrimination for that gap. Then I asked myself, 'If an employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman would do for 76 cents, why would anyone hire a man?' Perhaps, I thought, male bosses undervalue women. But I discovered that in 2000, women without bosses - who own their own businesses - earned only 49 percent of male business owners. Why? When the Rochester Institute of Technology surveyed business owners with M.B.A.'s from one top business school, they found that money was the primary motivator for only 29 percent of the women, versus 76 percent of the men. Women put a premium on autonomy, flexibility (25- to 35-hour weeks and proximity to home), fulfillment and safety. After years of research, I discovered 25 differences in the work-life choices of men and women. All 25 lead to men earning more money, but to women having better lives. High pay, as it turns out, is about tradeoffs. Men's tradeoffs include working more hours (women work more around the home); taking more dangerous, dirtier and outdoor jobs (garbage collecting, construction, trucking); relocating and traveling; and training for technical jobs with less people contact (like engineering). Is the pay gap, then, about the different choices of men and women? Not quite. It's about parents' choices. Women who have never been married and are childless earn 117 percent of their childless male counterparts. (This comparison controls for education, hours worked and age.) Their decisions are more like married men's, and never-married men's decisions are more like women's in general (careers in arts, no weekend work, etc.) Does this imply that mothers sacrifice careers? Not really. Surveys of men and women in their 20's find that both sexes (70 percent of men, and 63 percent of women) would sacrifice pay for more family time. The next generation's discussion will be about who gets to be the primary parent. Don't women, though, earn less than men in the same job? Yes and no. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics lumps together all medical doctors. Men are more likely to be surgeons (versus general practitioners) and work in private practice for hours that are longer and less predictable, and for more years. In brief, the same job is not the same. Are these women's choices? When I taught at a medical school, I saw that even my first-year female students eyed specialties with fewer and more predictable hours. But don't female executives also make less than male executives? Yes. Discrimination? Let's look. The men are more frequently executives of national and international firms with more personnel and revenues, and responsible for bottom-line sales, marketing and finances, not human resources or public relations. They have more experience, relocate and travel overseas more, and so on. Comparing men and women with the 'same jobs,' then, is to compare apples and oranges. However, when all 25 choices are the same, the great news for women is that then the women make more than the men. Is there discrimination against women? Yes, like the old boys' network. And sometimes discrimination against women becomes discrimination against men: in hazardous fields, women suffer fewer hazards. For example, more than 500 marines have died in the war in Iraq. All but two were men. In other fields, men are virtually excluded - try getting hired as a male dental hygienist, nursery school teacher, cocktail waiter. There are 80 jobs in which women earn more than men - positions like financial analyst, speech-language pathologist, radiation therapist, library worker, biological technician, motion picture projectionist. Female sales engineers make 143 percent of their male counterparts; female statisticians earn 135 percent. I want my daughters to know that people who work 44 hours a week make, on average, more than twice the pay of someone working 34 hours a week. And that pharmacists now earn almost as much as doctors. But only by abandoning our focus on discrimination against women can we discover these opportunities for women.

Subject: Poor Make 2¢ for Each Dollar to Rich From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 06:36:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/nyregion/04income.html September 4, 2005 In Manhattan, Poor Make 2¢ for Each Dollar to the Rich By SAM ROBERTS Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue is only about 60 blocks from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, but they might as well be light years apart. They epitomize the highest- and lowest-earning census tracts in Manhattan, where the disparity between rich and poor is now greater than in any other county in the country. That finding, in an analysis conducted for The New York Times, dovetails with other new regional economic research, which identifies the Bronx as the poorest urban county in the country and suggests that the middle class in New York State is being depleted. The top fifth of earners in Manhattan now make 52 times what the lowest fifth make - $365,826 compared with $7,047 - which is roughly comparable to the income disparity in Namibia, according to the Times analysis of 2000 census data. Put another way, for every dollar made by households in the top fifth of Manhattan earners, households in the bottom fifth made about 2 cents. That represents a substantial widening of the income gap from previous years. In 1980, the top fifth of earners made 21 times what the bottom fifth made in Manhattan, which ranked 17th among the nation's counties in income disparity. By 1990, Manhattan ranked second behind Kalawao County, Hawaii, a former leper colony with which it had little in common except for that signature grove of palm trees at the World Financial Center. The rich in Manhattan made 32 times the average of the poor then, or $174,486 versus $5,435. The analysis was conducted for The Times by Dr. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College of the City University of New York. The growing disparity in Manhattan helped drive New York from 11th among cities with the biggest income disparities in 1980 to fifth in 1990 and fourth in 2000, behind Atlanta; Berkeley, Calif.; and Washington, according to the analysis. 'The gains are all going to the top,' Dr. Beveridge said. 'It's a massive class disparity.' Last week, the Census Bureau reported that even as the economy grew around the nation, incomes stagnated and poverty rates rose. The Bronx, with a poverty rate of 30.6 percent, was outranked only by three border counties in Texas where living costs are lower. Swollen, in part, by the earnings of commuters who work in New York City, median household income among the states was highest in New Jersey ($61,359) and Connecticut ($60,528). It was $47,349 in New York State, also above the national median. A separate analysis, being released this weekend by the Fiscal Policy Institute in Albany, warns that the middle class is being depleted while the rich are getting richer and the poor are growing in number and barely getting by - more so in New York State and particularly upstate. The loss of good-paying jobs, especially in manufacturing, 'has meant that the 'hollowing out' of the middle of the income distribution continued at a rapid pace,' the institute, a union-backed research group, concluded. It said the number of families earning between $35,000 and $150,000 declined by 50,000 from 2000 to 2003 while the number that earned above $150,000 and below $35,000 increased. Dr. Mark Levitan, senior policy analyst for the Community Service Society, a liberal research and advocacy group, said he did not believe the city's economy was 'uniquely weak,' but said an increase in the poverty rate from 19 percent to 20.3 percent, as measured by the census's new American Community Survey, 'is fundamentally a story about stagnant wages.' Edward Wolff, a New York University economist, attributed the growing disparity to ballooning Wall Street incomes and declining wages for lower skilled workers. 'Though these forces are at work across the country,' he said, 'the heavy preponderance of corporate headquarters, the financial sector and the legal sector in New York City has made the increase in the ratio of income between the top and bottom quintile more extreme than in other parts of the country.' Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said the income gap, which in Manhattan has historically been large, can endure indefinitely. 'The elites, the top sliver of the income scale, can drive consumption and investment forward while the bottom half slogs along,' he said. 'If inequality had embedded within it its own seeds of destruction, it would implode sooner than later. But that doesn't appear to be the case. Many who have fallen behind have a skewed notion of their prospects for upward mobility.' Manhattan, he said, is 'an amplified microcosm' of conditions elsewhere in the country. The income gap in Manhattan was far wider than in any other county. In tiny Clay County, Georgia, which has only 1,355 households and ranked second, the rich, on average, made about 38 times what the poor made. Compared with the poorest Manhattanites, those in the top fifth are disproportionately male, non-Hispanic white and married. Roughly equal proportions among rich and poor are immigrants, are employed by private profit-making companies and work in sales. The lowest-income census tract in the city is a triangular patch of East Harlem east of First Avenue and north of East 119th Street, where, despite a hint of gentrification in a renovated brownstone or two, the neighborhood is dominated by the mammoth though generally well-tended public housing project called the Wagner Houses. The median household income there is $9,320, most of the residents are black or Hispanic and do not have high school degrees, 56 percent live below the poverty level and about one in 10 are foreign born. Darryl Powell, a 43-year-old automobile mechanic, said that most were struggling just to get by. 'They're trying to keep a roof over their head,' he said. 'People are trying to hold onto what they've got.' Sheila Estep said she was facing eviction because she was working as a full-time mother raising three sons rather than returning to her earlier jobs as an electrician, plumber and cosmetologist. 'If I fail at my job, they'll fail at theirs,' she said. Sharon Hammond, who sells cosmetics, said she and other tenants wished their neighborhood were better and that she had a working stove instead of a temporary hotplate in her apartment, but added: 'Everybody can't be rich.' Manhattan's highest-income census tract is a six-square-block rectangle bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 56th and 59th Streets. The median household income in this mostly commercial section of East Midtown is $188,697 (average family income is $875,267); none of the residents identified themselves as black; nearly one-third have advanced degrees and more than one in three are foreign born. Even there, though, the poverty rate is 16 percent. 'The income gap, while supposedly increasing, seems to be a natural phenomenon,' said the developer Donald J. Trump, who lives in Trump Tower. 'Times have been good, but times have been good for many people and many classes of people. I think there is a very large middle class - but not in this section, by the way.'

Subject: The greatest evil From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Sep 06, 2005 at 12:06:55 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This very article highlights the greatest evil of our times and of 'our system'. It is by no means unique to Manhattan or the USA. It is intriguing that that gap is so wide in the US though. This is the major problem with developing countries as their economies rise, we are actually misguided in looking at GDP figures instead of looking to the main issue: the richer are getting richer and the poor are only growing in number. The difference between rich and poor is a relative concept. I am sure that the poor in Manhattan are doing whole lot better than the poor in an African country. But that is not the point - the point is that we cannot have a society where the rich become so outrageously wealthy right within visual distance of a growing population of poor. We only need to look at the ever repeating history of where this has all happened before: Cuba, Shanghai, Argentina, Angola and just so many more countries. When are we going to wake up and realise that all the past revolutions happened when the poor rose up. The poor end up voting in (or we have a coup) a dictator who makes matters worse. Go back a little more in history and the same thing happened in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece... a little further back in history, France, Russia, etc. It doesn't matter if you are in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, South America - this has happened so many times before. We cannot hide behind the perception that life is about survival of the fittest and only the brightest and most talented will get ahead. If that were true then Paris Hilton would be poor. It is our responsibility to go out to the poor and make them richer... for if we don't the poor will come unto us. This is not about welfare - this is about good economics. By making the masses richer, they can afford to buy more and so thrust the economy forward. This is probably the biggest lesson America taught the world just after the great depression (when the US rose out of poverty, making its large population richer and became the economic supper power of modern times - why has it forgotten what makes it more special than say Brazil?) It is simple good socio-economics to forcibly go unto the poor, invest in making them richer in order to ensure all of our own economic well being.

Subject: The Prologue, and Maybe the Coda From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 09:55:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/weekinreview/04barry.html September 4, 2005 The Prologue, and Maybe the Coda By JOHN M. BARRY I CALLED my home in New Orleans Wednesday to listen to the phone ring. I didn't call for messages, knowing that without power the answering machine had not taken any. I called to connect to my home. No neighbors remained to talk to. The few who had remained through the storm and through the first part of the week had finally gone. Listening to the ring, imagining it echoing through the silent house, its sound waves caressing so much that I loved and so much of my life, I was reluctant to hang up. It seemed as if hanging up meant abandoning my home and my city, as if I were holding onto it, and hanging up meant letting it all ... go. What we are seeing is well beyond the worst natural disaster in American history. We will never know the exact death toll, the direct monetary loss will easily exceed that of any other disaster, and the entire population of the New Orleans metropolitan area and much of the Gulf Coast will soon be scattered across much of the country. We may also be seeing the virtual destruction of one of the world's great cities as well. In a way, though, that seems the least of the thing, and less important each day. The initial inability of local or national government to respond, our own impotence and rage over events, and the worst of it, the rapid descent into chaos - more like Baghdad or Mogadishu than an American city - each one of these things may be more disturbing than the heart-song of the loss. How did it come to this, and where does it go? Geology and economics answer part of the first question. All the land in the Mississippi River's flood plain from Cape Girardeau, Mo., to the Gulf of Mexico - more land than Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont combined - was created by the deposit of sediment by the river. New Orleans itself was located at a point particularly conducive to commerce, and the first areas settled were relatively high ground (and remain dry today). Levees, which go back to the Tigris and Euphrates, had long been in use to control floods, and also helped guarantee a shipping channel; until 1928 virtually all federal money for levees was justified by the river's role in interstate commerce. This effort was, in effect, to channel the river, and it has largely succeeded. Levees have contained all floods on the lower Mississippi - which routinely carries triple the amount of water in the river at St. Louis - since 1927. Then canals and pipelines were cut through the marsh below New Orleans to make shipping and energy production more efficient. New Orleans benefited from all this, but not as much as Midwest agriculture exporters or steel importers, which enjoyed cheaper freight, or the entire nation, which enjoyed the oil and gas pumped out of the gulf. But only south Louisiana has suffered from the trade-offs. No floods meant that the river no longer replenished the land each year with silt, so south Louisiana parishes began to sink. And the canals cutting through the marsh accelerated erosion. The result: the equivalent of the island of Manhattan disappears every 10 months. That explains the physical vulnerability of south Louisiana today. It does not answer the most disturbing question: How has New Orleans come so close to collapse? For what we are witnessing bears no resemblance to what has happened in the past. Before this, the flood on the Mississippi River in 1927 was doubtless the most terrible American disaster. In one obvious way, it eerily foreshadowed today's. For one thing, New Orleans officials loudly warned that a disaster was waiting to happen, and condemned Washington for ignoring them, just as last week's devastation was widely predicted. The scope of the 1927 devastation also resembled today's. No one knows the death toll. The official government figures said 500, but one disaster expert said more than 1,000 in Mississippi alone. The homes of roughly one million people, nearly 1 percent of the entire population of the country, were flooded. The Red Cross fed 667,000 people for months, some for a year; 325,000 lived in tents, some sharing an eight-foot-wide levee crown with cattle, hogs and mules, with the river on one side and the flood on the other. Even amid that horror, as in other natural disasters, people responded by bonding together. Goodness emerged. The fault lines of race and class melted away with the levees, and the commonality of the burden that victims shared created a sense of common humanity. But as days dragged into weeks, honor and money collided, white and black collided, regional and national power structures collided. The collisions cracked open the fault lines and caused America to stagger and shift as well. As a result, Americans rethought the responsibility the federal government had toward individual citizens. The government had felt little such responsibility. In 1905, a yellow fever epidemic struck New Orleans. Scientists knew how to fight yellow fever, and the Army had completely eliminated the disease from Havana. Yet, before the Public Health Service would come to New Orleans to save the lives of Americans, the city had to raise $250,000, in advance, to cover the expenses. Americans accepted this. But in 1927, even after the expansion of government during the Progressive Era and World War I, not a single federal dollar went to feed, clothe or shelter any of the 667,000 being fed by the Red Cross. (Indeed, the Army even demanded reimbursement from the Red Cross for use of its field kitchens and tents.) Americans did not accept this. Overwhelmingly they expressed a new belief that the government should help the flood victims and, by implication, other individuals in distress through no fault of their own. This represented an enormous shift in public attitudes. The flood left other legacies almost as significant. It sent hundreds of thousands of blacks out of the flooded territory to Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles. Enormous positive publicity created the presidential candidacy and guaranteed the election of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who had been in charge of the rescue effort. Yet his subsequent betrayal of the national African-American leadership and African-American refugees snapped the emotional bond black voters felt for the G.O.P., the party that freed the slaves, beginning the shift to the Democratic Party. The flood also left a legacy directly relevant to today. It led to the passage of the 1928 Flood Control Act, which was the most expensive bill Congress had ever passed, exceeded only by the cost of the Civil War and World War I. That same bill set a precedent redefining the relationship between the federal and state governments, and for the first time gave the federal government full responsibility for flood control along the lower Mississippi and many tributaries.Today we face a disaster even greater than the one in 1927, and for all the similarities a single difference between now and not only 1927 but the other natural disasters is most striking. That sense of common humanity, of a shared burden, did not dominate the immediate aftermath of Katrina. Why not? It is understandable that when no market or restaurant is open to sell food and water, people break into them to survive. As things escalate, some people go the next step and become looters. Once order begins to break down it is difficult to redraw the line. But how to comprehend the hell, the breakdown of society, the snipers shooting at hospitals, shooting at helicopters trying to evacuate people? Yet perhaps this explains it: This disaster was not a common burden. Many people who stayed in New Orleans chose to. But many, and probably most, of those who remained either paid too little attention to the warnings or would have gotten out if they could. Once the levee gave way things deteriorated instantly. Communications between rescue personnel, between government officials became almost impossible. Things soon became so bad a senior aide to the mayor broke into an Office Depot to commandeer communication and computer equipment to rebuild a command post when water knocked out the original one. The population, without power, had no information from television or radio. Troops are finally taking control of what may never again be called the Big Easy. Midwest farm exports still need cheap freight to compete in the world market, and the nation still needs the oil and gas from the gulf; moving that infrastructure and building new refineries would cost billions and take years. If - a major if - the existing plan to reverse the coastal erosion will work, then it and the cost of protecting the city against hurricanes may well pass even a cost-benefit test. But past the question of rebuilding this city, my home, will this disaster leave an imprint like the 1927 flood? Will it cause the world to change the way it engages the environment? Will it cause Americans to think about the role of government and this newly seething underclass? I don't know. On Thursday, I tried to call my house once again, to listen to the phone ring. I could not. The phone no longer works. John M. Barry of the Center for Bioenvironmental Research at Tulane and Xavier Universities is the author of 'Rising Tide,' about the 1927 Mississippi flood, and 'The Great Influenza.'

Subject: Connect The Dots. Find the Fees. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 08:07:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/yourmoney/04gret.html September 4, 2005 Connect The Dots. Find the Fees. By Gretchen Morgenson TO many investors, the collapse of the Bayou Group - a hedge fund company and brokerage firm run by Samuel Israel III - may seem like just another financial mishap, and a calamity only for those who had the bad luck to invest with Mr. Israel or to be steered his way by advisers they were wrong to trust. But actually, the mess at Bayou, which federal prosecutors are now calling a $300 million fraud, should be a clarion call for caution among the many investors who have been throwing money at hedge funds recently. This is especially true for institutions - endowments and public pension plans - that have flocked to hedge funds with the hope of increasing their returns. Because many of these institutions are having financial difficulties - low interest rates are cutting deeply into their returns - they are too often captivated by investments that seem to promise outsized gains with little risk. 'Our unique multifactor risk model acts as a road map for navigating risk and provides investors with alternative routes to reach their investment summit,' Steve Henderlite, a co-founder and principal of Trail Ridge Capital L.L.C., said in a press release from October 2003. Trail Ridge Capital is a hedge fund and fund-of-funds company that had clients in Bayou. Mr. Henderlite did not return a phone call seeking comment. Trail Ridge is also an adviser to a new investment fund, the Undiscovered Managers Spinnaker Fund, offered to wealthy individuals by the investment unit of J. P. Morgan Chase. The fund, which started last November and had $7.3 million in assets as of March 31, held $662,602 in Bayou. J. P. Morgan says it has written that investment down to zero. Central to the Bayou story, and to almost every other financial disaster of recent years, are conflicts of interest. At Bayou, these conflicts began in its brokerage unit, which executed trades for the hedge funds. Because the brokerage unit, Bayou Securities, was wholly owned by Mr. Israel, he was able to profit personally from the rapid-fire trading conducted by the funds he oversaw. But some Bayou investors who got into the funds on the recommendation of investment consultants were confronted with another layer of conflicts. That is, the consultants who recommended the hedge funds to their clients and the funds of funds that bought Bayou shares for their investors often received compensation from Bayou for sending assets its way. While some investors may not find fault with such an arrangement, institutional investors who have a fiduciary duty to their beneficiaries should definitely steer clear of the deals. 'In my view, if a hedge fund manager wants to pay a particular level of fees to a marketing agent, that's their business,' said Orin Kramer, chairman of the New Jersey Investment Council, the oversight board for the state's pension system. 'But as a fiduciary, I would be very uncomfortable dealing with a gatekeeper who is being paid on both sides of the trade.' Unfortunately, not all fiduciaries know where these conflicts lie. They are often well hidden. 'Pension consultants frequently have undisclosed financial arrangements with hedge fund managers that create a conflict of interest,' said Edward A. H. Siedle, president of Benchmark Financial Services, in Ocean Ridge, Fla., a company that works for pension funds to investigate possible wrongdoing among outside money managers. Mr. Siedle says the nature of these deals varies. Sometimes the payments come in the form of commissions on trades steered by a hedge fund to a brokerage firm that is affiliated with the consultant; in other cases the payments are fees paid by the fund based on the assets the consultant brings in. In one case, Mr. Siedle said, he found that a pension consultant received a partnership interest in the hedge fund to which it was steering clients. SUCH payments were a part of the picture at Bayou. According to materials provided by the fund to a prospective investor in 2003, Bayou had several outside marketers that it paid either as a percentage of assets raised or through commissions to the promoters' 'designated broker/dealer.' One of the firms that Bayou listed as an external promoter at that time was the Consulting Services Group of Memphis. Bayou also gave prospective investors the name of E. Lee Giovannetti, chief executive of Consulting Services, as a reference and as an institutional investor in Bayou. Joe Meals, a spokesman for Consulting Services, said that the firm did act as a reference for Bayou in 2003 and that it had recommended Bayou funds to clients. But, he said, 'We became uncomfortable with the operations at Bayou and made recommendations to all our clients that they redeem their accounts, and they did so long before any of these issues came to light.' He added that Bayou 'may have executed commissions through our affiliated broker dealer at one time, but not recently.' Consulting Services did the right thing in advising its clients to exit Bayou before the debacle. Others weren't so lucky. In coming weeks, federal and state investigators will try to sort out what happened to the money that investors entrusted to Bayou. Because Bayou's minimum-investment requirement of $250,000 was smaller than that of most hedge funds, the firm unfortunately attracted a lot of individual investors. The United States attorney in New York is seeking the forfeiture of all of Bayou's assets, including $100 million seized by authorities in Arizona last May. How much Bayou's investors ultimately get back is anybody's guess. Larger investors, especially those who are fiduciaries, should take a lesson from the losses at Bayou. Conflicts of interest in the financial world are often hard to uncover. But refusing to do the necessary digging is downright irresponsible.

Subject: Is a Hedge Fund Shakeout Coming Soon? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 07:47:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04view.html?ex=1283486400&en=f49918982c6c2f95&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 4, 2005 Is a Hedge Fund Shakeout Coming Soon? This Insider Thinks So By MARK GIMEIN OF all the sectors of the financial universe, the hedge fund world is probably the most secretive and almost certainly the most alluring. Open only to institutions and the wealthy, hedge funds offer sophisticated models of risk, access to the best financial minds and the chance for outsized returns. According to Van Hedge Advisors, hedge fund assets have topped a trillion dollars. The downside, unfortunately, is that occasionally the industry may be subject to catastrophic and unexpected losses. In 1998, many top hedge fund managers lost their shirts. Long Term Capital Management came close to collapse. Just last month, investors were reminded of exactly this kind of possibility with the apparent failure of a $400 million Connecticut hedge fund managed by the Bayou Group. Andrew W. Lo, a finance professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been studying hedge fund failures and risks, and he says that another hedge fund industry shakeout is likely in the near future. Mr. Lo runs a company, AlphaSimplex, that manages a $400 million hedge fund - so he is not looking for a reason to say hedge funds are in trouble. But that is exactly what he's saying, backing it up with powerful data and a couple of unexpected theories. Mr. Lo has been working on the economics of hedge funds since the mid-1990's, but he started thinking seriously about how to measure risk across the industry in 1999, when he was first approached by backers to start his own hedge fund; it opened in 2003. He knew that sophisticated investors would want lots of data about his fund's returns and about the risk level he would assume, so he started looking carefully at the return data provided by other funds. Traditionally, economists have thought that big up-and-down fluctuations in returns indicated risky investments, so many hedge fund investors have hoped to see a pattern of smooth and even returns. But Mr. Lo quickly saw that lots of hedge funds were posting returns that were just too smooth to be realistic. Digging deeper, he found that funds with hard-to-appraise, illiquid investments - like real estate or esoteric interest rate swaps - showed returns that were particularly even. In those cases, he concluded, managers had no way to measure their fluctuations, and simply assumed that their value was going up steadily. The problem, unfortunately, is that those are exactly the kinds of investments that can be subject to big losses in a crisis. In 1998, investors retreated en masse from such investments. Now, in a paper to be published by the University of Chicago, Mr. Lo, working with his graduate students, has come to a disturbing conclusion: that smooth returns, far from proving that hedge funds are safe, may be a warning sign for the industry. (The paper is at http://web.mit.edu/alo/www/Papers/systemic2.pdf.) That doesn't necessarily hold true for every individual fund, but as Mr. Lo shows in his paper, measuring the smoothness of returns gives economists a good way to estimate the level of relatively illiquid investments in the hedge fund world. The approach lets economists measure industrywide liquidity risks without knowing the details of the investments - information that hedge funds just don't give out. By Mr. Lo's measures, hedge fund investments are less liquid now than they have been in 20 years. His work shows that the same pattern of investing preceded the 1998 global hedge fund meltdown and the 1987 stock market crash. But that's not the only reason for worry. He says that crises like that of 1998 may be more predictable than was previously thought - and that another crisis is likely. The 1998 panic is generally thought to have been set off by the Russian government's default on its debt. But Mr. Lo points out that only a minuscule proportion of the world's hedge fund investments were in Russian government bonds. In his paper, he shows that the catastrophic losses of 1998 were preceded by a noticeable series of months of mediocre performance. Mr. Lo argues that while a hedge fund crisis appears to be sudden and to be caused by unforeseen events, the breakdown is only the late stage of the problem. As more hedge funds compete for the same slice of the pie, he says, their managers feel that they have no choice but to 'leverage up,' juicing their returns by borrowing more money to make bigger investments. That, in turn, makes the investments more prone to a sudden credit crisis. Hedge funds that are highly leveraged are vulnerable to having their lenders - banks and big brokerage firms - cut off credit when they think that their money may be at risk. And Mr. Lo thinks that lenders would do exactly that in an industrywide downturn. That would force hedge funds to close out their positions at the worst possible time - the kind of cycle that brought down Long Term Capital Management. Here again, his data suggests that the current situation is serious. His research indicates that the industry may have already entered a period of lower returns that signal a prelude to crisis. He points to a downturn in April that hit virtually every category of hedge fund pursuing every kind of strategy. 'The concern that I and others have is that we're approaching the perfect financial storm where all the arrows line up in one direction,' Mr. Lo said. The more money that is invested in hedge funds, he said, 'the bigger the storm will be.' What might set off a crash is a matter of guesswork. Mr. Lo thinks that an oil-price increase to $100 a barrel, a level predicted by one Goldman Sachs analyst, could do it. Or , he said, a tightening of lending rules at Fannie Mae, the mortgage giant, could set off a 'humongous unwinding' in credit markets. But Mr. Lo, who refers to some of his research as 'measuring how strong the camel's back is and how much straw is already on it,' thinks that the spark could be something much smaller. ALREADY, his work has prompted hedge fund managers and investors to pay more attention to the hidden risks of funds that seem to be performing quite well. Clifford S. Asness, managing principal at AQR Capital Management, a large and successful hedge fund based in Greenwich, Conn., says Mr. Lo's work forces fund managers in general to confront the risks: 'He demonstrates simple models that generally show a winning payoff but occasionally really die.' So what should be done? Mr. Lo sees no way to eliminate the cyclical nature of hedge fund investing, but he says we can learn from the mistakes of funds that fail. He advocates the creation of a financial equivalent of the teams at the National Transportation Safety Board that swoop in to investigate airplane crashes. The nightmare script for Mr. Lo would be a series of collapses of highly leveraged hedge funds that bring down the major banks or brokerage firms that lend to them. That's a possibility that the entire hedge fund industry - secretive and fractious though it is - has a huge interest in avoiding.

Subject: Matisse Filled Age With Vibrant Colors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 07:17:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/05/21/arts/design/21mati.html?ex=1125892800&en=d9c2ac2f9d5091af&ei=5070&n=Top/Features/Travel/Destinations/Europe/France/Paris May 21, 2005 With No Time for Twilight, Matisse Filled Old Age With Vibrant Colors By ALAN RIDING PARIS - Henri Matisse had good reason to feel morose in early 1941. France was under German occupation; his wife, Amélie, had left him; and he was suffering from cancer. Before undergoing a risky operation in Lyon, he wrote an anxious letter to his son, Pierre, insisting, 'I love my family, truly, dearly and profoundly.' He left another letter, to be delivered in the event of his death, making peace with Amélie. But when the surgery was successful, Matisse quickly bounced back, declaring that he had won 'a second life' and, at 71, led his art in remarkable new directions. He had a beautiful Russian-born assistant, Lydia Delectorskaya, to keep him company. And while ill health later returned to slow him down, he remained optimistic until his death in Nice on Nov. 3, 1954, just a few weeks short of his 85th birthday. 'I haven't much to complain about,' he wrote to his old friend André Rouveyre on Sept. 19 of that year. 'When I find something is not going well, I look in some satisfying corner and I find I have no reason to complain.' And he added: 'We have good friends - can one ask for more? I am still working a bit and I observe that its quality has not fallen, thanks to good discipline. But one must remain modest.' The 13 fruitful years that he unexpectedly gained after his cancer operation are the focus of 'Matisse: A Second Life,' an invigorating new exhibition at the Musée de Luxembourg here through July 17. It shows him drawing incessantly, painting sporadically, rediscovering the medium of paper cutouts and preparing what he would consider his masterpiece, the paintings and stained-glass windows of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, near Nice. It also offers fresh evidence of how aged creators can remain energized by their art. Titian and Monet were also painting in their 80's, Picasso and Chagall even into their 90's. Verdi composed 'Falstaff' when he was 80; Richard Strauss wrote his 'Four Last Songs' at 84. John Huston was 80 when he directed his last movie, 'The Dead.' And many writers keep going: Saul Bellow, who died last month at 89, published his last novel only five years ago. Still, this is the first time that Matisse's late years have been examined in France. The show's Danish curator, Hanne Finsen, writes in the catalog that she has long been fascinated by how, once great artists reach an advanced age, they often forget commercial considerations and display 'extraordinary freedom.' This autumnal flowering is what she explores in 'Matisse: A Second Life,' which travels to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark this summer. She is helped enormously by Matisse's own words, presented here through his intense correspondence with Rouveyre, a bohemian artist and novelist whom he first met at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1892 and who became an intimate friend after 1941. Matisse's letters to Rouveyre, which number more than 1,200 and were donated to the Royal Library in Denmark, serve as a first-person running commentary on his work, health and state of mind. His letters and their envelopes are themselves small works of art: the letters often include drawings and poems, while most envelopes are decorated with flowers, stars and baroque handwriting. There is also humor. The fact that Rouveyre lived for some of the time at a boarding house called 'La Joie de Vivre' encouraged Matisse to play word games with the address. On one envelope, he simply wrote: 'Monseiur Rouveyre, Somewhere in France.' Rouveyre himself is present in the show through several sketched portraits, as well as a Cartier-Bresson photograph of him sitting for Matisse. But Rouveyre also serves as the artist's sounding board: after Matisse sent him 21 pen-and-ink drawings of trees, an accompanying letter explained the experiment. 'I am told that Chinese teachers taught their students that when you want to draw a tree, feel as if you were climbing it when you start at the bottom,' he wrote. Matisse's art evidently helped him keep the war at bay, not least in 1944, when Amélie was arrested, and his daughter, Marguerite, was sent to a concentration camp for Resistance activities. While both survived, Matisse had no word of their whereabouts for months on end. Nonetheless, he found solace in the bright colors that had always distinguished his painting. And along with some still lifes, he painted and sketched sensual nudes and couples. In response to remarks that he was too old to be engaged in erotic art, he wrote to Rouveyre, 'Why, if my feeling of freshness, of beauty, of youth remains the same as it was 30 years ago in front of flowers, a fine sky or an elegant tree, why should it be different with a young girl?' Among his first adventures with paper cutouts was a cheerful book called 'Jazz,' which Matisse prepared during the war but which was only published in 1947. The lively multicolor forms, both abstract and figurative, seem to echo the voice of a man stubbornly refusing to be cowed by the times. But he was also enchanted by the technique. 'The walls of my bedroom are covered with cutouts,' he wrote to Rouveyre in 1948. 'I still don't know what I'll do with them.' Soon afterward, though, it was by using cutouts that he designed the stained-glass windows for the Chapel of the Rosary, a project he took on as a gesture to a young woman who had nursed him in Lyon in 1941 and later became a Dominican nun. The small modern building on the grounds of the Dominican nuns' residence in Vence took almost four years to complete. It was, Matisse said, the production of 'an entire life of work.' Two of the three windows show large yellow and blue leaves against a green background, but the window behind the altar - the study for it is on loan here from the Vatican Museums - is more ambitious: it represents 'The Tree of Life,' with flowering cactuses and blue leaves scattered across a green curtain hanging over a yellow window. Still more testing for this octogenarian artist were the chapel's paintings: three large figures, including 'Virgin and Child,' as well as 14 Stations of the Cross painted on white ceramic tiles. Studies for these works, which are included in this exhibition, illustrate how Matisse began with detailed drawings and gradually reduced them to a handful of black brush strokes. The chapel exhausted Matisse, who by then was unable to stand for long periods and had to attach his paint brush to a long pole. But in his home, sitting on his bed or in a wheelchair, he continued to make gouache cutouts. After Rouveyre teased him for embracing religion, Matisse urged his friend to look at his cutout of a naked woman, 'Zulma,' at the May Salon in Paris in 1950: 'You will see the awakening of the converted,' was his retort. The final cutout in this exhibition, 'La Gerbe,' multicolored leaves that resemble a spray of flowers, was completed a few months before his death, but it explodes with life. The artist who almost reinvented color in painting had by now found freedom in the simplicity of decoration. 'I have the mastery of it,' he told Rouveyre in a letter. 'I am sure of it.'

Subject: 'Matisse the Master' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 07:14:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/books/review/04HOWARDL.html September 4, 2005 'Matisse the Master': The Colored Museum By RICHARD HOWARD This concluding volume of the first biography of the greatest French painter of the 20th century, by Hilary Spurling (the ''Early Years, 1869-1908,'' were covered, or uncovered, in the first volume, ''The Unknown Matisse,'' published in this country seven years ago), is a continuing revelation of the demonic quest pursued by this apparently tame bourgeois artist to a triumphant and radical fulfillment. Matisse said of his ultimate works that even if he could have done as a boy what he was doing as an old man -- ''and it is what I dreamed of then'' -- he would not have dared. Spurling's enormous, careful study has certainly confirmed her fiercely partisan intent: she has settled scores, righted wrongs and revealed realms of experience unsuspected by those for whom Matisse, these days, is merely ''beloved'' (always the sign, as in the case of van Gogh, of a need for a closer look and more accurate accounting). I am certain, after following her intricate lead through Matisse's trials, errors and triumphs, that no artistic enterprise, and certainly no pictorial ambition, in the 20th century can escape being measured against what Matisse achieved. The story through Volume 1: The family of weavers into which Henri Matisse was born on the eve of the Franco-Prussian war, and Bohain, a textile manufacturing town in northeastern France where he grew up, could scarcely be expected to produce an artist; nor during Matisse's early years did they appear to have done so. Poor health kept him from sitting for examinations at a nearby lycée and from performing military service; recovery from a physical collapse at 20 coincided with his mother's gift of a box of paints: ''The moment I held the box of colors in my hand I knew this was my life. I threw myself into it like a beast that plunges toward the thing it loves.'' Unsuccessful, nonetheless, at academic art studies while working as a lawyer's clerk, Matisse eventually managed to get to Paris, where the Académie Julian disappointed his hopes; taken on as an unofficial pupil by Gustave Moreau, he engaged in intensive self-education at the Louvre. When he was 24, he and his mistress, Camille Joblaud, had a child, Marguerite, who was to become her father's lifetime mainstay; and in 1898 Matisse married a young woman from higher provincial social circles, Amélie Parayre, a fervently loyal, patient and resourceful ''heroine,'' to whose memory Spurling dedicates this tremendous work. Apparently Spurling does not regard as a hint of disloyalty the separation of this couple, after decades of a marriage which, Matisse had warned his wife at the outset, would always be secondary to his artistic vocation. She treats Amélie's absence from Matisse's final years, when the ailing artist's life was managed by his last model, as another instance of wifely ''resourcefulness,'' although it is well known that the papers of their son, Pierre, who was a prominent art dealer in New York for many years, give a very different account of Amélie's conduct at the separation. Pierre, his brother, Jean, and Marguerite remained close to their father through every vicissitude, and Matisse, in his last invalid years, was devoted to his several grandchildren. Matisse's discovery of Impressionism (Pissarro, Monet) coincided with that of the South (the French fishing town of Collioure on the Mediterranean, not far from the Spanish border, and, farther south, Seville), precipitating an explosion of color on his hitherto dim canvases. The lure of the sun was always tonic; repeatedly Matisse would head for Nice, Morocco, Tahiti after periods of great emotional exertion. During his first seven years of marriage the struggling artist managed to start his career with his wife's resolute collaboration as a frequent model, to buy a painting by Cézanne, and to exhibit work at the Salon des Independants. He also stoically weathered a financial scandal involving Amélie's parents (they were treated as scapegoats by the national press and Matisse's studio was raided by the police). Two years later, he had his first one-man show with Ambroise Vollard, and in 1905 exhibited his first Fauvist works at the Salon d'Automne. Spurling reached the end of Volume 1 with a transcendent insight: his ''paintings of light and color . . . seemed at the time, both to their perpetrator and to his public, an assault that threatened to undermine civilization as they knew it. But Matisse was not simply discarding perspective, abolishing shadows, repudiating the academic distinction between line and color. He was attempting to overturn a way of seeing evolved and accepted by the Western world for centuries. . . . He was substituting for their illusion of objectivity a conscious subjectivity, a 20th-century art that would draw its vitality essentially from the painter's own visual and emotional responses.'' Volume 2, ''Matisse the Master,'' is the punctilious exploration of a Painter's Progress in terms of stoic resolve, an ecstatic sense of what Spurling calls ''the conquest of color,'' and of Matisse's failure to win a public in France, with wrenching consequences for someone enslaved to his vision, for his wife and children, and indeed for his reputation. Matisse was often harshly derided (though as often acknowledged as the leader of other Fauve painters like Vlaminck, Derain and Dufy), and it was not until 1910 that he gained the enthusiastic patronage of the Russian art collectors Ivan Morosov and Serge Shchukin. (''Soon your pictures won't ever be seen again except in Moscow,'' the wife of a painter friend wrote.) But that same year Matisse had his first Paris retrospective and appeared in Roger Fry's first Post-Impressionist exhibit in London. Deeply impressed by a major exhibition of Islamic art (especially a hall containing 230 carpets) in Munich, he also visited the Alhambra in Granada, securing from that decorative splendor an essential element of all his future art. From this point on -- as Spurling relates with at once the widest scope and the narrowest focus -- Matisse's life story is a matter of his fanatical responsibility to his art and art making, an enterprise carefully scrutinized and eloquently analyzed by his biographer for its creative identity rather than for the pathos of personal relationships, though these are set forth and discussed (often for the first time) with great frankness and inveterate sympathy. Matisse's quest for mastery was bedeviled by his consciousness of a late start and an obsessive lack of facility. For all his long-lasting friendships with other artists, famous and obscure, his days and nights were wholly absorbed by solitary labor at an intractable art. Playing the violin seemed a more intimate consolation for decades of abuse than the affections of his wife and children. As Spurling tells it, even his relation to his many models, though humane and productive, was notably ''separate'': by 1927, after designing sets and costumes for Diaghilev's production of Stravinsky's ''Nightingale,'' he found in Henriette Darricarrère a principal model for the series of odalisque paintings based initially on Bakst's costumes for the ballet ''Schéhérazade,'' but he never became intimate with her, or with any of these often remarkable young women, not even with his final ''muse,'' Lydia Delectorskaya, the gifted Russian exile who replaced Amélie Matisse as the capable factotum of his existence from 1939 to his death. ''The popular image,'' as Spurling says, ''of the painter indulging himself in the fleshpots of Nice in wartime will not stand up to even cursory inspection.'' It is the testimony of artists like Signac, Maillol, Renoir, Gris, Bonnard and, of course, Picasso -- the wondering interlocutions of his peers -- that afford us the only productive image of the painter's intimate life, and the defining arguments for his ruling status in French art of the 20th century. Spurling is generous with these glimpses -- as she is with any moments that yield insights into his life in art. Thus: '' 'I'm going to try to isolate myself as if I were still absent,' '' Matisse announced on his first return to Paris since the official separation from his wife, ''rarely leaving his apartment except for visits to the cinema (his first color film, starring Danny Kaye, was a revelation).'' World War II ushered in an utter collapse of Matisse's life structures: his health, his marriage and the unknown fate of his pictures in Russia as well as in occupied France. An emergency colostomy performed on him at 71 left him a permanent invalid; in 1944, Mme. Matisse and their daughter were arrested by the Gestapo for Resistance activities. And, while they were later released, after the liberation Matisse discovered that Marguerite had survived interrogation and torture. Yet this was the period of his most spectacular and original triumphs: unable to wield brushes, the old, terribly sick painter devised brilliant paper cutout structures, starting in 1943 with the album ''Jazz.'' And just after the war the irreligious Matisse completed the only decorative commission ever offered him in France (there were already murals in the Barnes collection in Pennsylvania and in Shchukin's dining room in Moscow): the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, for which he not only designed magnificent stained-glass windows and ceremonial vestments, but, through insistent discussions of how he wanted the light and color to work, in a sense dictated the architecture of the chapel itself, as the architect Michel Picard has observed. For another 10 years, virtually imprisoned in his hilltop hotel in Nice, he worked on in his last illness, still unconvinced of his place in art, sure only of his unremitting effort to achieve it, a place in the sun if there ever was one. Spurling's enthusiastically detailed biography is a complete expression of the life of Matisse, and necessarily a splendid account of his art, though not a complete one. She rarely discusses his sculptures -- powerful, even tormented contributions to his vision -- and so deep is her concentration on his ''conquest of color,'' which subjugates all the claims of light and space to the self-generating demands of picture construction, that she almost never mentions Matisse's drawings, an entire library made over a lifetime which must serve a kind of dialectical function with the ''zones of expansion'' of chromatic bliss. In terms of her chosen project she doesn't need to, for she is aware that Matisse has had great critics -- she offers admiring salutes to Alfred Barr and Pierre Schneider -- but that what he has not had is the accurate biography against which their claims and cautions must be measured. In the vast structure she has patiently assembled, she leads us through the astonishing and revolutionary late works, in which control and spontaneity are conjugated to such euphoric effect, to the old master's death in 1954 on an appropriate (and disturbing) note, citing Matisse's anxiety about the future as he showed catalogs of Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell to his visitor, Picasso: ''And in a generation or two, who among the painters will still carry a part of us in his heart, as we do Manet and Cézanne?'' In Spurling's two big volumes Matisse the man is revealed, and Matisse the artist is the man we come to know. ''After such knowledge'' there is not only ''forgiveness,'' as T. S. Eliot has sought, but a moving identification of and with this great creating nature.

Subject: What Happens to a Race Deferred From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 06:28:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/weekinreview/04depa.html September 4, 2005 What Happens to a Race Deferred By JASON DePARLE WASHINGTON THE white people got out. Most of them, anyway. If television and newspaper images can be deemed a statistical sample, it was mostly black people who were left behind. Poor black people, growing more hungry, sick and frightened by the hour as faraway officials counseled patience and warned that rescues take time. What a shocked world saw exposed in New Orleans last week wasn't just a broken levee. It was a cleavage of race and class, at once familiar and startlingly new, laid bare in a setting where they suddenly amounted to matters of life and death. Hydrology joined sociology throughout the story line, from the settling of the flood-prone city, where well-to-do white people lived on the high ground, to its frantic abandonment. The pictures of the suffering vied with reports of marauding, of gunshots fired at rescue vehicles and armed bands taking over the streets. The city of quaint eccentricity - of King Cakes, Mardi Gras beads and nice neighbors named Tookie - had taken a Conradian turn. In the middle of the delayed rescue, the New Orleans mayor, C.Ray Nagin, a local boy made good from a poor, black ward, burst into tears of frustration as he denounced slow moving federal officials and called for martial law. Even people who had spent a lifetime studying race and class found themselves slack-jawed. 'This is a pretty graphic illustration of who gets left behind in this society - in a literal way,' said Christopher Jencks, a sociologist glued to the televised images from his office at Harvard. Surprised to have found himself surprised, Mr. Jencks took to thinking out loud. 'Maybe it's just an in-the-face version of something I already knew,' he said. 'All the people who don't get out, or don't have the resources, or don't believe the warning are African-American.' 'It's not that it's at odds with the way I see American society,' Mr. Jencks said. 'But it's at odds with the way I want to see American society.' Last week it was how others saw American society, too, in images beamed across the globe. Were it not for the distinctive outlines of the Superdome, the pictures of hovering rescue helicopters might have carried a Somalian dateline. The Sri Lankan ambassador offered to help raise foreign aid. Anyone who knew New Orleans knew that danger lurked behind the festive front. Let the good times roll, the tourists on Bourbon Street were told. Yet in every season, someone who rolled a few blocks in the wrong direction wound up in the city morgue. Unusually poor ( 27.4 percent below the poverty line in 2000), disproportionately black (over two-thirds), the Big Easy is also disproportionately murderous - with a rate that was for years among the country's highest. Once one of the most mixed societies, in recent decades, the city has become unusually segregated, and the white middle class is all but gone, moved north across Lake Pontchartrain or west to Jefferson Parish - home of David Duke, the one-time Klansman who ran for governor in 1991 and won more than half of the state's white vote. Shortly after I arrived in town two decades ago as a fledgling reporter, I was dispatched to cover a cheerleading tryout, and I asked a grinning, half-drunk accountant where he was from, city or suburb. 'White people don't live in New Orleans,' he answered with a where-have-you-been disdain. For those who loved it, its glories as well as its flaws, last week brought only heartbreak. So much of New Orleans, from its music and its food to its architecture, had shown a rainbow society at its best, even as everyone knew it was more complicated than that. 'New Orleans, first of all, is both in reality and in rhetoric an extraordinarily successful multicultural society,' said Philip Carter, a developer and retired journalist whose roots in the city extend back more at least four generations. 'But is also a multicultural society riven by race and class, and all this has been exposed by these stormy days. The people of our community are pitted against each other across the barricades of race and class that six months from now may be last remaining levees in New Orleans.' No one was immune, of course. With 80 percent of the city under water, tragedy swallowed the privilege and poor, and traveled spread across racial lines. But the divides in the city were evident in things as simple as access to a car. The 35 percent of black households that didn't have one, compared with just 15 percent among whites. 'The evacuation plan was really based on people driving out,' said Craig E. Colten, a geologist at Louisiana State University and an expert on the city's vulnerable topography. 'They didn't have buses. They didn't have trains.' As if to punctuate the divide, the water especially devastated the Ninth Ward, among city's poorest and lowest lying. 'Out West, there is a saying that water flows to money,' Mr. Colten said. 'But in New Orleans, water flows away from money. Those with resources who control where the drainage goes have always chosen to live on the high ground. So the people in the low areas were hardest hit.' Outrage grew as the week wore on, among black politicians who saw the tragedy as a reflection of a broader neglect of American cities, and in the blogosphere. 'The real reason no one is helping is because of the color of these people!' wrote 'myfan88' on the Flickr blog. 'This is Hotel Rwanda all over again.' 'Is this what the pioneers of the civil rights movement fought to achieve, a society where many black people are as trapped and isolated by their poverty as they were by legal segregation laws?' wrote Mark Naison, director of the urban studies program at Fordham, on another blog. One question that could not be answered last week was whether, put to a similar test, other cities would fracture along the same lines. AT one level, everything about New Orleans appears sui generis, not least its location below sea level. Many New Orleanians don't just accept the jokes about living in a Banana Republic. They spread them. But in a quieter catastrophe, the 1995 heat wave that killed hundreds of Chicagoans, blacks in comparable age groups as whites died at higher rates - in part because they tended to live in greater social isolation, in depopulated parts of town. As in New Orleans, space intertwined with race. And the violence? Similarly shocking scenes had erupted in Los Angeles in 1992, after the acquittal of white police officers charged with beating a black man, Rodney King. Newark, Detroit, Washington -all burned in the race riots of the 1960's. It was for residents of any major city, watching the mayhem, to feel certain their community would be immune. With months still to go just to pump out the water that covers the city, no one can be sure how the social fault lines will rearrange. But with white flight a defining element of New Orleans in the recent past, there was already the fear in the air this week that the breached levee would leave a separated society further apart. ``Maybe we can build the levees back,' said Mr. Carter. ``But that sense of extreme division by class and race is going to long survive the physical reconstruction of New Orleans.'

Subject: What It Means to Lose New Orleans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 06:25:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/opinion/04rice.html September 4, 2005 Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? By ANNE RICE La Jolla, Calif. WHAT do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land? The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month. This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all 'have or have not' in this strange and beautiful city. Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm. Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day. The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city 'the Big Easy' because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed. Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs. And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs. Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what 'modern life' with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii. • I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. 'Why didn't they leave?' people asked both on and off camera. 'Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?' One reporter even asked me, 'Why do people live in such a place?' Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds. Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture. What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another? Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn. What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled. And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees. And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long? That's my question. I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance. They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago. But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us 'Sin City,' and turned your backs. Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.

Subject: Re: What It Means to Lose New Orleans From: Setanta To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 05:59:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: i mentioned a few short weeks ago that New Orleans would slide into the Gulf due to global warming. this was dismissed as false dire predictions by Remo Williams. imagine my horror to see the devastating effects of katriona on New Orleans. it may be premature to say it has slipped into the gulf but the US received an ominous warning of what nature has in store for it if the world continues on its gas guzzling merry way. sorry for my absense, i was bedridden for 2 weeks. still feeling the effects so may be missing for the rest of the week.

Subject: Re: What It Means to Lose New Orleans From: Emma To: Setanta Date Posted: Mon, Sep 05, 2005 at 06:09:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma, please be well and remember to get a flu shot. I am so sorry you have been ill.

Subject: Southern Populism From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 17:38:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/l03hurricane.html To the Editor: Some people wonder why those in New Orleans stayed when they knew a hurricane was coming. It is important to understand that most of those who stayed behind are the poorest of the poor. They stayed because they didn't have a car to drive them to safety. And if they had had one, where would they have gone? Many have never been out of their community. Even if they had been able to get out, they don't have credit cards to pay for a hotel. They barely have enough on which to live when things are going well. These are people who don't know if their kids will have presents for Christmas. These are families that probably never had a Thanksgiving dinner with turkey. The poor in this country have too long been ignored and demonized. Simply put, those people we see suffering in New Orleans are there because they are dirt poor and have no means to leave and nowhere to go. It is time we stop giving tax cuts to the rich and tax breaks to companies that move factories overseas, and it is time to increase our investment in education and jobs here. We need to do this for the poor children we see suffering in New Orleans. Eric B. Maron Lafayette, La., Sept. 2, 2005

Subject: Hedge Funds - Manager talks about risks From: David E.. To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 11:47:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Lo- A hedge fund manager has come up with a surprising way to estimate fund risks. Surprising, because he knows low volatility may be a sign that a sharp decline is imminent. Volatility could be low because the hdedge funds assets are illiquid. Fund managers don't have market data, so they continue to use stale data. Here is a link - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/business/04view.html

Subject: Re: Hedge Funds - Manager talks about risks From: Emma To: David E.. Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 07:48:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thank you much, and posted above.

Subject: Much of the Netherlands From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 11:12:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/l03hurricane.html?pagewanted=print September 3, 2005 To the Editor: Much of the Netherlands, like much of New Orleans, lies below sea level. On Feb. 1, 1953, a similar disaster happened here. Close to 2,000 people lost their lives. This was not long after World War II, and many of our dikes had been neglected. Even so, some portions had been brought up to date. It was there that death was kept at bay. The whole country vowed that nothing like that should ever happen again, and the politicians followed suit. In the next 25 years, the government spent tens of billions of dollars building the most magnificent sea-defense system to be found anywhere in the world. Some may find it ridiculous to see those structures against a backdrop of a calm and peaceful sea. They are meant to protect us against something that happens maybe once in a century. I suggest that a group of United States politicians visit the Netherlands and look at what has been done here in the way of prevention from disasters like the one that befell New Orleans. I am sure that our minister of public works and her technical people will be glad to show them around. It will be amazing what they will see in a country that is the size of Connecticut and Massachusetts put together and has fewer inhabitants than New York State and yet had the foresight and sheer will to spend those tens of billions of dollars. Let the responsible politicians in your country vow, as we did in 1953, that this may never happen again. Meanwhile our hearts go out to those bewildered people who roam the flooded streets of what was once a happy city. Henk Kuiken Veldhoven, the Netherlands Sept. 2, 2005

Subject: Re: Much of the Netherlands From: Pancho Villa To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 05:37:11 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuiderzee_Works

Subject: In Every Stroke, Life's Fierce Pageant From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:57:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/arts/design/26kimm.html?ex=1282708800&en=997e56e355096109&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 26, 2005 In Every Stroke, Life's Fierce Pageant By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN THE Joan Snyder survey at the Jewish Museum, a helping of serious fare during the doldrums of the late summer season, is exasperating and invigorating in the proportions you might expect if you've followed Ms. Snyder's career. For nearly 40 years, she has been the kind of artist whose strength has frequently been her weakness and vice versa - that is, her operatic, restless, almost shameless need to pile everything, emotionally, autobiographically, even physically speaking, into her paintings. More is more, she is fond of saying. And sometimes it is. Of course, sometimes it isn't. Such is life, or anyway, such is how Ms. Snyder evidently approaches her life and work. You can take it or leave it, she seems to dare us, with a mix of honesty and theatricality that can provoke the paradoxical response I mentioned. The chutzpah is admirable even when her art grates. Which it can. But then, as this compact retrospective demonstrates, there are appealing works like 'And Always Searching for Beauty' (2001), a throbbing field of dense foliage, thick paint and shimmery light, nodding to Joan Mitchell and Monet, declining to resolve itself into elegant form but indulging in a kind of tactile and coloristic hedonism whose vehemence is a virtue. As the art critic Jed Perl, a longtime admirer of Ms. Snyder, has put it, the unpredictability of her work 'is an aspect of its richness.' Born in 1940, Ms. Snyder emerged during the 1960's into a climate of macho Minimalism, to which, like Eva Hesse, Mary Heilmann, Elizabeth Murray and others, she responded by adopting the grid as a loose armature for a newly expressive, deeply personal and materially extravagant art. Some of her earliest works are still her best, conveying a basic rethinking of the strategies of mark-making, allowing for drips, stains and splashes, using the grid to organize suites of spontaneous, discrete gestures. Works like her radiant 'Lines and Strokes' (1969) or the skittery 'Woman-Child' (1972) disperse a viewer's attention across the picture plane, treating each brush stroke almost as a separate visual proposition. How much meaning, Ms. Snyder seems to be asking, can any single mark bear? That question comes to dominate and expand her work. By the 1970's, marks become loaded with autobiographical and political messages. The grid becomes an exploded checkerboard containing words, bits of fabric and other stuck-on collage elements, semi-abstract images and sculptural accretions, all jostling for attention. Mutated into slashes and eruptions, the earlier painted marks are now sometimes cut straight into the canvas, filled with colored pigment, frankly vaginal or oozing like wounds ('Flesh/Art,' from 1973, is the title of one such work), and typically eliding nature and the body. 'It Wasn't Neo to Us' is a contrarian essay she wrote in 1992 on behalf of herself and other feminist painters who had pioneered forms of frank and personal narrative before Neo-Expressionists like Julian Schnabel and David Salle came on the scene. 'The strokes in my paintings speak of my life and experiences,' she had already written 20 years earlier. 'They bleed and cry and struggle to tell my story with marks and colors and lines and shapes. I speak of love and anguish, of fear and mostly of hope.' Coinciding with this show, a new monograph indulges this earnest but self-dramatizing aspect of Ms. Snyder, recounting her broken marriage, a love affair with her psychiatrist, a bout of Lyme disease, all of it as if it were grave public news, rather than occasionally a bit too much information. The art may be incomprehensible to her absent the minutiae of her life, but it ought not be for those who simply come upon her pictures and expect them, like any paintings, to speak for themselves. They can speak for themselves - well enough by the end of this show to tilt the scales in her favor. The beauty of her work has partly to do with her aspirations for painting, which sometimes are beyond her, but which are more impressive because they assume the risk of failure. Art being a gamble on posterity, the higher the stakes, the grander the potential reward. And Ms. Snyder is one of those artists who provide us with an eloquent model for working at our creative limits, which we can't know, after all, until we try to reach them. The exhibition compresses her career, and its messy energy, into about 30 pictures filling one room. It may distort her uncontainable nature, but it's enough and fortunately not too much. You can, in a glance, see the enduring themes - the dense, high-flying, discordant colors, the organizing grid, the physical rapture and obsession with big themes like death and hope - that unify early and late work. Wincingly maudlin pictures like 'Women in Camps' (1988), a darkly scumbled little collage of Holocaust photographs, texts and wooden sticks, like mini-spikes, can try your patience, as can 'Journey of the Souls' (1993), about AIDS, an unintentionally distasteful but heartfelt painting, with its ghostly cartoon faces linked as on a genealogical chart to a large abyss of black velvet. But somehow the take-away impression is joyful. 'Oratorio' (1997), with its gridded cacophony of a house, a bleeding heart, a giant sunflower and a ghoulish mask against a leopard-skin backdrop, is a vast painted collage incorporating nails, herbs, mud, feathers and plastic grapes: a high-low celebration of abundance. So is 'Perpetuo' (2004), with its leaking breasts and ripe colors, an ecstatic image of life overflowing. Only a brave artist lets it all hang out like that, which in itself is reason to admire Ms. Snyder.

Subject: Wal-Mart Workers Are Finding a Voice From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:43:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/national/03walmart.html September 3, 2005 Wal-Mart Workers Are Finding a Voice Without a Union By STEVEN GREENHOUSE TAMPA, Fla. - Having failed to unionize any Wal-Marts, American labor unions have helped form a new and unusual type of workers' association to press Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to improve its wages and working conditions. With its first beachhead in Central Florida, the two-month-old group is already battling Wal-Mart, the nation's largest corporation, over what it says is the company's practice of reducing the hours that many employees work, often from 40 a week to 34, 30 or even fewer, jeopardizing some workers' health benefits. Belva Whitt, a cashier who earns $7.40 an hour, said she had joined the new group, the Wal-Mart Workers Association, largely because she was unhappy with her wages and because her hours were reduced to part time from full time many weeks. 'I'm a single mother trying to raise my son, so not having that money makes it hard,' said Ms. Whitt, 30. 'Sometimes I have to decide, am I paying the rent or will I have food on the table?' The association says it has nearly 200 current and former Wal-Mart workers and is growing by 30 workers a week. Members pay dues of $5 a month. In Florida, its membership includes workers from 30 stores in the Tampa, Orlando and St. Petersburg areas, and it is also seeking to enlist Wal-Mart employees in Texas. The group's sponsors include the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, the Service Employees International Union, and Acorn, an advocacy group for low-income people. It has also received support from the Marguerite Casey Foundation, which helps low-income families, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, which promotes social justice. 'We are building something that's never been seen; it's neither fish nor fowl,' said Wade Rathke, a top Acorn official who is the chief organizer for the association. 'We're focusing on Wal-Mart because it is the largest employer in the area - and in the whole nation - and is setting standards that affect communities and employment relations across the nation.' The association's workers, Mr. Rathke said, would seek to 'aggressively engage the company on their rights and how they are treated.' The group is urging the State of Florida to grant unemployment benefits to workers whose hours have been cut back by Wal-Mart. It is arguing that workers who quit Wal-Mart because the reduced hours meant they were not earning enough to live on deserve jobless benefits. It also wants supplemental jobless benefits for workers with reduced hours who remain at Wal-Mart. Dan Fogleman, a Wal-Mart spokesman, defended the company. 'Our wages are competitive within the retail workplace,' Mr. Fogleman said. 'We work hard to make health care premiums affordable.' He said the company's associates, as Wal-Mart calls its workers, were free to form such an organization. But he said that Wal-Mart hoped employees would feel free to bring any concerns to upper management through what the company calls its open-door policy. As for the reduction of hours, Mr. Fogleman said, 'For years we have had a scheduling system in place that is designed to match associates' work schedules to projected customer flow to our stores.' Warren May, a spokesman for the Florida agency in charge of unemployment benefits, said Wal-Mart workers who remained on the job might qualify for unemployment compensation if their hours were cut sharply. Mr. May said those who quit their jobs because of a reduction in hours might have a harder time winning benefits. Carl Jones, one of the leaders of the new group, said Wal-Mart's pay was too low, pointing to the $9.40 an hour he earns after five years as the lead shopping cart pusher at a Wal-Mart in Apopka, outside Orlando. 'It's really hard for me and my wife to make ends meet,' Mr. Jones said. 'They treat workers like we're just something there to be used and to get as much out of us as they can.' The association says Wal-Mart is betraying the desire of its founder, Sam Walton, to maintain a family-friendly company. Ms. Whitt and several other members of the association say that Wal-Mart's health plan has such high premiums and deductibles that they cannot afford to join it. As a result, Ms. Whitt and thousands of other Wal-Mart workers receive health coverage through Medicaid. The Marguerite Casey Foundation has granted $250,000 to an Acorn-backed project that is in turn giving much of that money to the new association. 'We want to broadly support economic justice,' said Chantel L. Walker, the foundation's director of programs. 'We believe that Wal-Mart could really make a difference because of the size of their work force and because of the leadership role they play.' The association is the latest attempt by labor and community groups to squeeze at Wal-Mart's pressure points. In the past month, the food and commercial workers have led an effort, joined by the nation's two big teachers unions, urging consumers not to purchase school supplies at Wal-Mart. Another group, Wal-Mart Watch, plans to announce a week of demonstrations and meetings nationwide in November to criticize Wal-Mart's wages and benefits. Labor leaders say they support the nonunion Wal-Mart Workers Association because with the company fighting aggressively against unionization, they recognize that it will be extremely hard to unionize any Wal-Marts. 'This dovetails nicely with what we're doing,' said William McDonough, organizing director of the food and commercial workers, which has sought unsuccessfully to unionize several Wal-Marts. 'Our role is to help Wal-Mart workers get a voice on the job.' Mr. McDonough said his union hoped that Wal-Mart workers would grow so emboldened and that community support would grow so strong that unions could succeed at organizing some Wal-Marts in a few years. The new association is not urging shoppers to boycott Wal-Mart. 'I like Wal-Mart, I enjoy working for them,' Ms. Whitt said. 'But what they're doing is wrong. They need to fix it.'

Subject: James Maynard Galbraith From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 09:44:34 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Economics focus: George Maynard Bush The Economist September 3rd 2005 Most American liberals are now fiscal conservatives. But not all LIKE all the fiercest debates in American politics, the fight over the budget deficit has its hawks and its doves. But on fiscal matters, it is now the American left that brandishes talons and the right that carries an olive branch in its beak. One exception is James K. Galbraith, of the University of Texas, Austin. 'A card-carrying member of the Texas left', he is also the whitest of fiscal doves. That makes him a rare bird indeed these days. He shares not only his famous father's initials, but also his sharp pen and his passion for the economics of John Maynard Keynes. In a recent pamphlet* on the budget deficit, Mr Galbraith argues that members of the present Republican administration are unwitting disciples of the Cambridge master. That administration ran a deficit of $412 billion, or 3.6% of GDP, in the most recent fiscal year. The deficit this year will narrow to $331 billion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. But under some plausible assumptions about congressional budget-making, America's deficits will average about 3.5% of GDP over the next decade, estimate William Gale and Peter Orszag of the Brookings Institution. By 2014, they project, America's public debt will amount to 55% of its GDP. By 2030, on present trends, debt could reach 139% of GDP. How much will this matter? Messrs Gale and Orszag think that chronic deficits will eat away at the pillars of American prosperity like 'termites in the woodwork', as Charles Schultze, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, once put it. The coming decade of big deficits will reduce national saving by 2-3% of GDP. As a result, American households will accumulate fewer assets, yielding $1,500-3,000 less income a year. The deficits serve only to divert resources from investment to consumption, they argue. When taxes are cut, households spend up to 80% of the proceeds, they find. But this extra consumer demand must compete with other claims on a fully employed economy. In their view, extra household spending crowds out investment, dollar for dollar. Ah, a Keynesian might ask, but what if the economy is not fully employed? Then, says Mr Galbraith, a budget deficit adds to demand in the economy, bringing into play labour and capital that might otherwise have lain idle. These resources might not be put to their best use, to be sure; but what matters is that they are put to some use. The economy is bigger as a result, so even if the deficit reduces investment's share of GDP, it might (at least in principle) raise the actual amount of investment that takes place. Few could disagree with this logic: it is the basic case for a counter-cyclical fiscal expansion. Even the administration's critics concede that its 2001 tax cuts were impeccably timed (if fortuitously so), boosting consumer demand at a time when many workers were at risk of forced idleness. But as the economy nears full employment, those same critics believe, budget deficits become more damaging. Doom or Verdoorn? Mr Galbraith thinks otherwise. America's sustained deficits will help it outgrow the liabilities they leave in their wake, he believes. And if that fails, they will help inflate those liabilities away. As an economy approaches full employment, any fiscal stimulus is dissipated by higher prices. In this case, the stimulus may add nothing to real GDP. But, Mr Galbraith points out, it still adds something to nominal GDP. This will ease the government's debt burden, since it is out of nominal GDP that the government must repay the nominal claims held by its creditors. Inflation, like devaluation, is a tried and tested way for an indebted government to escape its obligations ('Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. . . . Lenin was certainly right.' ~ John Maynard Keynes). It is because it is so tempting that macroeconomic stability is so hard-won and so easily lost. It may be true, as Mr Galbraith suggests, that America would rather let its inflation rate multiply than its debt-to-GDP ratio explode. But why would anyone want either? In fact, Mr Galbraith is confident that a sustained fiscal stimulus will yield more than just inflation. When demand is strong, innovation quickens, he argues. He cites Verdoorn's law, named after the Dutch economist Petrus Verdoorn, which holds that the pace of productivity growth picks up as the economy nears full capacity. If a government deficit adds to the demands on an economy at full stretch, the economy may find ways to stretch a little further. There may be a grain of truth to this observation. But Mr Galbraith presumably does not believe in a world without any supply-side constraints, in which the only check on the ingenuity of the American economy is the timidity of its fiscal authorities. In so far as there is any truth in Verdoorn's law, its practical implications are more modest. It suggests that America's policymakers must test the economy's limits before they can know precisely where they lie. The American economy might, for example, learn to cope surprisingly well with a tight labour market, as it did in the late 19905. At that time, the Federal Reserve seemed to take the view that faster productivity growth had allowed the unemployment rate consistent with stable inflation to be temporarily reduced. More generally, the Fed knows that it cannot be quite sure exactly where America's natural rate of unemployment and its neutral rate of interest lie. But if the Fed can be trusted to explore the economy's limits and respect them, Congress cannot. Fiscal policy is made in a spirit of political point-scoring, not macroeconomic inquiry. Given too much licence to roam, Congress would soon reach the economy's outer frontiers-and carry right on over the edge. * 'Breaking Out of the Deficit Trap: The Case against the Fiscal Hawks'. The Levy Economics Institute. June 2005 'Budget Deficits, National Saving, and Interest Rates'. Available at www.brook.edu/views/papers/20040910orszaggale.htm

Subject: Re: James Maynard Galbraith From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sun, Sep 04, 2005 at 09:31:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting and important essay. Thanks.

Subject: and from the NRO From: David E.. To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 12:00:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Has the polarity of the earth changed? I think I will have a drink. Keynes is mentioned favorably here - http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_bartlett/bartlett200401190849.asp

Subject: The wound Katrina reopened From: Pete Weis To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 08:49:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: FEMA has long known about the special threat to New Orleans and the danger to its citizens living within its 'bowl'. Days before Katrina reached New Orleans, when Katrina crossed Florida, weather analysts predicted Katrina would grow to a category 3 or higher over the gulf waters and was headed for New Orleans. Yet my nation, which claimed Iraq was an immediate threat to its people because of its 'weapons of mass destruction' and was able to send an army to the other side of the globe and conquer Iraq in a matter of days, took atleast 5 days after Katrina was gone to get any significant help to thousands of mostly poor Americans trapped in New Orleans.

Subject: Bury them before they bury us From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:20:29 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Kill off the proletariat before they revolt eh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_will_bury_you Speaking some years later in Yugoslavia, Khrushchev himself remarked, 'I once said, 'We will bury you,' and I got into trouble with it. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel. Your own working class will bury you.' [3], a nod to the popular Marxist saying, 'The proletariat is the undertaker of capitalism'.

Subject: An Economy Raised on Pork From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 07:21:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03Reich.html September 3, 2005 An Economy Raised on Pork By ROBERT B. REICH Cambridge, Mass. THE old work-force compact is in shreds. Paychecks that rose with productivity gains through the middle decades of the 20th century no longer do so. Since the early 1970's, national product per person has grown more than 75 percent, but the median wage of male workers has risen barely two cents, adjusted for inflation, from $15.24 in 1973 to just $15.26 last year. Family incomes are up only because wives have gone into paid work and everyone's putting in more hours. Job loss often means loss of health insurance and a tax-advantaged pension. Oil shocks, hurricanes and housing bubbles aside, consumers who are worried about their jobs and wages will be reluctant to buy goods and services, thereby dampening any recovery. But the new insecurity is undermining our national interest in other, less predictable ways by setting off political resistance to economic change, with negative repercussions that ripple beyond the economy. Forty years ago, free-trade agreements passed Congress with broad backing because legislators recognized that they helped American consumers and promoted global stability. But as job and wage insecurity have grown, public support for free trade has declined. The North American Free Trade Agreement, which passed by 34 votes in 1993, was a hard sale for the Clinton administration. But the recent Central American Free Trade Agreement, embracing a far smaller and less populous area, was an even harder sale for President Bush. Despite Republican control of Congress, the trade deal cleared the House in July by just two votes, and then only after heavy White House pressure. The increasing insecurity of ordinary workers also imperils our national defense by handcuffing the Pentagon. It can't shift the defense budget to fighting terrorism because of local fears that well-paying jobs will be lost. Contrast this with the comparative ease by which the Pentagon downshifted from fighting World War II to the cold war, more than 50 years ago. Its recent base-closing recommendations ignited a political firestorm, causing even the apolitical Base Closure and Realignment Commission to retreat. The commission's chairman justified its decision to save the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station, for example, by noting that the base 'is the second-largest employer in western New York.' Consider, finally, the pork that's been larded into the federal budget. Republicans may collectively oppose wasteful spending, but as individual legislators they've created more pork than any Congress in history. The new $286 billion transportation act is bloated with 6,371 'special projects' with a price tag some $30 billion more than the White House wanted. The president reassured the nation that it would, at the least, 'give hundreds of thousands of Americans good-paying jobs.' The new $12.3 billion energy bill cost twice what the White House sought because it's laden with what Senator Pete Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who ushered it through Congress, defends as measures to create 'hundreds of thousands of jobs.' According to the conservative watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste, pork programs have risen from fewer than 2,000 a year in the mid-1990's to almost 14,000 this year. Don't blame the politicians, though. Whatever the policy at stake - trade, defense, transportation, energy - it's likely to morph into a jobs issue because that's what's most on people's minds. So politicians concerned about re-election will do what they can to protect jobs against free trade, base closings, or whatever else might threaten them; and to create jobs by getting as much pork as possible. And don't blame corporate chief executives for causing the insecurity in the first place. Their predecessors reigned over a stable mass-production system where a few major companies in each industry grew through economies of scale and didn't have to compete very hard. Wage and benefit increases could be easily absorbed or passed on to their consumers, and jobs preserved. But today's profits depend on innovation and low costs. As a result, corporations are doing everything they can to cut hourly payrolls and benefits. But if the insecurity keeps growing, and government keeps responding to it by trying to preserve jobs and spend pork, the economy will sink of its own dead weight. Future free-trade agreements will be impossible to pull off. The Pentagon and other agencies will be hamstrung. And our fiscal imbalances will swell to more grotesque levels. Yet what's the alternative? There's no returning to the stable jobs and steady wages of the mid-20th century. The answer is a new compact that gives Americans enough security to accept economic change. Suppose, for example, lower and moderate-income workers got a larger share of today's productivity gains through a much bigger Earned Income Tax Credit starting at, say, $6,000 for those who earned the least and gradually tapering off well into the middle class. This would go a long way toward easing the pocketbook concerns of Americans who are working harder but getting nowhere. To cushion the pain of job loss, unemployment insurance should be turned into re-employment insurance, helping people to get new jobs instead of keeping them waiting for old ones to return. Community colleges would do the retraining, in league with area businesses that identified skill shortages. Wage insurance would cover part of the difference between their old salary and their new starting wage. The new compact would also decouple health and pension benefits from unemployment, further reducing the negative impact of job loss. Employer-provided health insurance would be replaced with no-frills universal health under an expanded Medicare program, which could use its huge bargaining leverage to extract lower costs from providers and drug companies. Lower-income workers would be encouraged to save for their retirement (over and above Social Security) by receiving several dollars from the government for every dollar they put away. The price tag for the new compact won't be cheap. My back-of-the-envelope calculation is several hundred billion dollars a year. But given the high cost of our current doomed effort to turn back the global economic tides, it would more than pay for itself. By reducing the job insecurity felt by so many, a new compact would allow Americans to focus on embracing change instead of worrying about forever falling behind. Robert B. Reich, a professor of social and economic policy at Brandeis University, was the secretary of labor from 1993 to 1997.

Subject: Katrina's Assault on Washington From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 07:04:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03sat1.html September 3, 2005 Katrina's Assault on Washington Do not be misled by Congress's approval of $10.5 billion in relief for the Hurricane Katrina victims. That's prompted by the graphic shock of the news coverage from New Orleans and the region, where the devastation catapults daily, in heartbreaking contrast with the slo-mo bumblings of government. There are dozens of questions Americans will demand to have answered once this emergency has passed. If the Homeland Security Department was so ill prepared for a natural disaster that everyone knew was coming, how is it equipped to handle other kinds of crises? Has the war in Iraq drained the nation of resources that it needs for things like flood prevention? Is the National Guard ready to handle a disaster that might be even worse, like a biological or nuclear attack? One thing is certain: if President Bush and his Republican Congressional leaders want to deal responsibly with a historic disaster of this scale, they must finally try the path of honestly shared national sacrifice. If they respond by passing a few emergency measures and then falling back on their plans to enact more tax cuts, America will have to confront the fact that it is stuck with leaders who neither know, nor care, how to lead. The pre-Katrina plan for this Congressional season was to enact more upper-bracket tax cuts for the least needy, while cutting into the safety-net programs for sick and impoverished Americans. These are the very entitlement programs most needed by the sudden underclass of hundreds of thousands of hurricane refugees cast adrift like Dustbowl Okies. Will Congress dare to go forward with these retrogressive plans in the face of the suffering from Katrina? Its woeful track record suggests that, shockingly, the answer may be yes. G.O.P. leaders are set to mandate billions in Medicaid and antipoverty cuts this month, while the Senate is poised to try again to repeal the estate tax, a monumental folly that will deprive the deficit-ridden government of an estimated $750 billion in vital revenue in the first decade. The theory is that over the long run, the missing money will 'starve the beast' and force Washington to make huge cuts in federal programs. The public has never bought this, but as long as the economy held up, it was willing to ignore the long-term implications. That can't be the case now, when those implications are sitting in filthy refugee centers, when the streets of New Orleans are under water and when the nation must take care of hundreds of thousands of homeless people. Yet President Bush has still managed to repeat his no-taxes mantra. Senator Mary Landrieu, the Louisiana Democrat, is now fighting for every available dollar to restore her state. Republicans had been wooing Ms. Landrieu as a possible supporter of the estate tax repeal. Now, we presume, she has higher priorities. Washington's inspiration must now be the individual rescuers in New Orleans, who have labored so bravely and selflessly, as well as the charitable deeds of local and state governments. Houston's offer of shelter at the Astrodome has put self-regarding national politicians to shame. Congress and the president had better get the message: an extraordinary time is upon the nation. The annihilation in New Orleans is an irrefutable sign that the national tax-cut party is over. So is the idea that American voters cannot be required to accept sacrifice or inconvenience, no matter how great the crisis. This country is better than that.

Subject: Law Professor Is a Donkey From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 06:56:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/weekinreview/28liptak.html August 28, 2005 If the Law Is an Ass, the Law Professor Is a Donkey By ADAM LIPTAK PROFESSORS at the best law schools are generally assumed to be overwhelmingly liberal, and now a new study lends proof. But whether the ideological imbalance matters - to the academic environment students encounter, to the kinds of lawyers the schools produce and to the stock of ideas the professors generate - depends on whom you ask. The study, to be published this fall in The Georgetown Law Journal, analyzes 11 years of records reflecting federal campaign contributions by professors at the top 21 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. Almost a third of these law professors contribute to campaigns, but of them, the study finds, 81 percent who contributed $200 or more gave wholly or mostly to Democrats; 15 percent gave wholly or mostly to Republicans. The percentages of professors contributing to Democrats were even more lopsided at some of the most prestigious schools: 91 percent at Harvard, 92 at Yale, 94 at Stanford. At the University of Virginia, on the other hand, contributions were about evenly divided between the parties. The sample sizes at some schools may be too small to allow for comparisons, though it bears noting that by this measure the University of Chicago is slightly more liberal than Berkeley. If the liberal law professors mean to indoctrinate students, though, they have failed spectacularly in some notable cases. The United States Supreme Court's two most conservative members, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, are products of Harvard and Yale, respectively. And if John G. Roberts Jr., another conservative, is confirmed this fall, another conservative graduate of Harvard Law will be added to the court. Whatever may be said about particular schools and students, professors and deans of all political persuasions agreed that the study's general findings are undeniable. 'Academics tend to be more to the left side of the continuum,' said David E. Van Zandt, dean of Northwestern's law school, where the contribution rate to Democrats was 71 percent. 'It's a little worse in law school. In other disciplines, there are more objective standards for quality of work. Law schools are sort of organized in a club structure, where current members of the club pick future members of the club.' That can do a disservice to academic values, said Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor and the author of 'Diversity in America: Keeping Government at a Safe Distance.' 'We have a higher responsibility to our students, ourselves and our disciplines,' he said, 'that our preference for ideological homogeneity and faculty-lounge echo chambers betrays.' Law professors' politics may be similar to those of other academics, but they are not representative of people with similar credentials and incomes. In the 2000 election cycle, according to data from the National Election Study produced at the University of Michigan, 34 percent of people with advanced degrees and 44 percent of those earning $95,000 to $200,000 gave exclusively to Democratic candidates. For law professors, the new study finds, it was 78 percent. The figures suggest that liberal law professors do not always produce liberal lawyers. 'I don't think the liberal bias of law school faculties has much impact on the students,' said Richard A. Posner, a federal appeals court judge who teaches at the University of Chicago. 'Law students are careerists, and for them law school is career preparation, not Sunday chapel.' The profession itself, said Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, may moderate the influence of the academy. 'Insofar as an elite law school might push students to the left,' Professor Persily said, 'corporate law firms might bring them back to the center.' John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern who prepared the study along with two New York lawyers, Matthew A. Schwartz and Benjamin Tisdell, said it was meant for the most part to present data rather than draw conclusions. But the study does note an arguable inconsistency in the way law schools approach student admissions and faculty hiring. When the United States Supreme Court endorsed race-conscious admissions policies in 2003, it based its decision on the importance of ensuring the representation of diverse viewpoints in the classroom. Law schools that take race into account in admissions decisions, the study says, 'open themselves to charges of intellectual inconsistency' if they do not also address the ideological imbalances on their faculties. The most serious problem pointed to by the study, Professor McGinnis said, is that the ideas generated by the law schools are both uniform and untested. 'It may be,' he added, 'that the rise of conservative think tanks counterbalances this effect to a degree. As one who believes in markets, I think that alternative institutions in the long run will arise to supply ideas.' Even so, he said, 'liberal ideas might well be strengthened and made more effective if liberals had to run a more conservative gantlet among their own colleagues when developing them.'

Subject: The Money Quote From: David E.. To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 12:06:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: from this article is - 'liberal ideas might well be strengthened and made more effective if liberals had to run a more conservative gantlet among their own colleagues when developing them'

Subject: Re: Law Professor Is a Donkey From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 09:32:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What is the standard for being a liberal or a conservative? How many Americans could actually define what the term liberal or conservative means? Are we talking only about an American standard? How do we compare to the rest of the world or just other English speaking countries for that matter?

Subject: Walter Mosley - forget the labels From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:23:56 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: On cspan this afternoon. http://inside.c-spanarchives.org:8080/cspan/cspan.csp?command=dprogram&record=545206760 Interview BookExpo America Interview BookExpo America New York, New York (United States) ID: 187052 - 9 - 06/05/2005 - 0:04 - $29.95 Mosley, Walter, Author Walter Mosley was interviewed about his upcoming book Life Out of Context, published by Nation Books. He talked about the problem of using catch phrases for political positions and the complexity of political movements today. He postulates joining 'interest groups' rather than the current political parties.

Subject: Pondering From: Pete Weis To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 22:56:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I suspect those in America who view themselves as 'conservative' are, in fact, conservative relative to the broader world in which they live - whether or not they understand the term 'conservative' or not. I wonder how today's 'conservatives' view the liberal causes of the early 20th century such as child labor laws, the creation of a national park system and the right of women to vote. Was it good to be 'liberal' then and bad to be 'liberal' now? If we manage to get some form of universal health insurance (a 'liberal' cause) in the coming years despite opposition by conservatives, how will future conservatives look back on that 50 years from now? Do today's conservatives own up to their predecessor's opposition of early 20th century liberal causes or do they simply disavow early conservatives? Will future conservatives disavow today's conservatives? Something to ponder.

Subject: A Light Saber to Tired Old Teaching From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 06:53:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/education/31education.html August 31, 2005 Taking a Light Saber to Tired Old Teaching By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN SAN RAFAEL, Calif. IN a spare bathroom next to the garage, George Lucas set up his darkroom. He had gotten a 35-millimeter camera about the same time he started high school, and had begun shooting everything from posed portraits of his niece and nephew to trick photos of the family cat, lured into midair by a dangling piece of meat. Before long, he was making backyard war movies on an 8-millimeter handed down by his grandfather. Anybody who lived near the Lucas place, 14 miles outside of Modesto in California's Central Valley, recognized these ventures as the latest expressions of a quiet boy's creativity. George had already written a weekly newspaper, designed landscapes around his Lionel train set and built a dollhouse for a neighbor girl, scaled right down to a lamp made of a lipstick tube. Little of this precocity, though, revealed itself in school. A bored, dreamy student, George had struggled with spelling and needed to repeat math the summer after eighth grade. His high school art teacher, looking over George's drawings of space soldiers, admonished him, 'Get serious.' George's father refused to pay for him to study illustration in college, hoping instead he would take over the family's office-furniture store. The filmgoing world knows how this particular story ends. George Lucas, the underachieving teenager, grew up to become George Lucas, the phenomenally successful director, auteur of the 'Star Wars' series, 'Indiana Jones' and 'American Graffiti.' Maybe his experience tricking the cat into jumping was an early lesson in how to treat actors. Except that the story has another prong, far less known, and tied to public policy rather than popular culture. Out of his own uninspiring education, the conviction that his abilities were ignored and throttled by conventional schooling, Mr. Lucas, 61, has assiduously yet quietly built a foundation devoted to education reform over the past dozen years. This is no exercise in designer charity. The George Lucas Educational Foundation has 30 full-time employees, a $4 million annual budget and a headquarters on the founder's Skywalker Ranch here in the Marin County hills. It publishes a magazine, produces documentaries, supports projects in both public and private schools, distributes an e-mail newsletter and maintains an extensive Web site, glef.org. All these enterprises espouse a consistent message firmly in the progressive camp, emphasizing the virtues of hands-on field work, practical experience and the use of film, video and digital materials in preference to the usual textbooks and standardized tests. To hear Mr. Lucas tell it, though, his preferred innovations are in many ways throwbacks. 'Our platform is to say that there are time-tested ways of learning,' he said in an interview earlier this summer. 'Aristotle taught four or five people; he didn't have huge classes. Or you have the mentoring system - the cobbler teaching his assistants. Whether it's Aristotle or learning how to make shoes, you had a reason to learn. Education didn't happen in isolation. Maybe for the very elite, you can learn for the sake of learning. But for millions of students to learn, you need to know why you're learning.' To make those general precepts concrete, the Lucas foundation identifies and illustrates examples from the real world - a teacher in California who uses hip-hop lyrics as a route for his students to understand poets like Dylan Thomas; a school in Washington that makes the field study of rare lizards a way of teaching such fundamental subjects as reading, writing and math. The fierce passion the Lucas foundation brings to its program has much to do with geography. From his base in the Bay Area, Mr. Lucas had early and deep involvement with the innovators of the Silicon Valley. His staff at the foundation includes veterans of Wired and Red Herring magazines, the public radio station KQED-FM and the Web zine Salon, all of which both chronicled and participated in the digital revolution, and these people's certitude echoes the high-tech industry's mantra of evolve or die. 'We grew up or worked in an area where change is encouraged, where innovation is encouraged, where entrepreneurship is nurtured,' said James Daly, the editor in chief of Edutopia, the Lucas foundation's magazine. 'And that's not the way it's been in education. If you feel like you're a hamster on the wheel all day, it's easy to stay that way. But when you get to the change agents, the rock does begin to roll uphill.' Largely female, married and middle-aged, not necessarily a recipe for the cutting edge, Edutopia's 85,000 subscribers actually use technology - e-mail, bulletin boards, listservs - more avidly than teenagers, according to a survey by Grunwald Associates. They perceive themselves as influential on educational issues, even if only in their own classrooms or communities. And by an overwhelming margin, they assail the reliance on standardized tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind law. To its credit, the Lucas foundation stops short of being tendentious, the captive of its own doctrine. Its agenda reflects not only Mr. Lucas's frustrations with his own education (at least until he entered film school at the University of Southern California) but a very deep family commitment to the field. His parents, both denied college by the Great Depression, presided over a household awash in National Geographics, World Almanac volumes, Landmark histories and biographies, crossword puzzles, all those elements of recreational self-education. MR. LUCAS's older sister, Kate Nyegaard, has served since 1992 on the school board in Modesto, which has a heavily Latino, bilingual student body. His younger sister, Wendy Lucas, has taught reading in various California schools, some public and some Christian, for 22 years. They are reality checks for the foundation, Mrs. Nyegaard in a formal way as a member of its board. While Edutopia publishes articles that can only send a chill through a devotee of the written word - 'No Books, No Problem,' read the headline of an article about a chemistry teacher who devises a curriculum without a text - it has also trumpeted the advantages of a longer school year. One of its finest articles profiled a class in St. Johnsbury, Vt., whose teacher had been deployed to Iraq; another trenchantly explored the plight of biology instructors under pressure to add 'intelligent design' to their courses. Even as an exponent of progressive education, Mr. Lucas himself has not escaped the long arm of standardized testing. There is a short essay about him written for fourth graders called 'A Talented Young Man.' It appears in a Steck-Vaughn test-prep book.

Subject: The Bra Wars From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 06:48:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/03/opinion/03sat3.html September 3, 2005 The Bra Wars The Bush administration, ignoring the lesson offered by a similarly ill-advised move across the Atlantic, has announced more restrictions on imports of bras and some fabrics made in China. The European Union has shown quite ably just how ridiculous this strategy is. Some 80 million garments have been held up in European ports because of complaints by European textile manufacturers about the flood of cheaper Chinese-made goods since the World Trade Organization abolished the quota system on Jan. 1. Most of those shipments have already been paid for, but arrived after E.U. quotas went into effect. The E.U.'s trade chief, Peter Mandelson, has asked the group's member nations to let the bras and other items in. He recently warned that not doing so could lead to 'severe economic pain for many smaller retailers and medium-sized businesses.' European officials and China are still negotiating over the quota issue. The real indication of how bankrupt the restrictions are can be seen in the emptying shelves at stores catering to low-income people. No European products can fill the breach; European manufacturers make high-end lingerie, not the cheap stuff. This isn't the way free trade is supposed to work. For all the talk on both sides of the Atlantic about the benefits of a global market unfettered by protectionism, the wealthy developed countries seem to want free trade only when it benefits their chosen big corporations. Meanwhile, poor consumers suffer the most. The Progressive Policy Institute, a research group in Washington, estimates that shoes and clothing - particularly cheap shoes and cheap clothes - have far higher import duties, relatively speaking, than most other products. None of this politically expedient protectionism will change a single thing about the way the future is shaping up. Trade experts are unanimous in their belief that China, with its huge modern factories and inexhaustible pool of cheap labor, will continue to dominate the world market for mass-market textiles and apparel. Instead of trying to fight the inevitable, policy leaders in America and Europe should be focusing on developing industries in which their countries can remain competitive and on retraining the textile workers whose jobs migrate. Punishing lower-income consumers in the name of protecting jobs in a dying industry is not the way to go.

Subject: Gazing at Breached Levees From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 13:00:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/national/nationalspecial/02levee.html September 2, 2005 Gazing at Breached Levees, Critics See Years of Missed Opportunities By ANDREW C. REVKIN As federal flood-control officials directed efforts to block the 17th Street Canal, the source of most of the water swamping New Orleans, they faced growing criticism yesterday over decades of missed opportunities to prevent precisely this type of disaster. In interviews and a telephone conference call with reporters, senior officials and engineers from up and down the ranks of the Army Corps of Engineers conceded that they had no ability to detect quickly small breaches in the matrix of 350 miles of levees around New Orleans. Unless such holes can be blocked early, the water will almost invariably rip away at the edges, widening the breach. The officials and engineers said that after they had found the widening gap in the concrete wall on the eastern side of the canal, they had no quick-response plan to repair it. Even as they tried to improvise a solution while water continued to pour into neighborhood after neighborhood, their efforts were hampered by a lack of heavy helicopters, most of which had been dispatched by federal emergency officials to rescue stranded residents. 'The first priority of the rotary-winged aircraft was to rescue people,' Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the corps, said in the conference call. 'Plugging the gap was a lower priority.' The accumulation of 40 years of compromises of that sort resulted in a mixture of grief, frustration and defensiveness from the corps, which has long been given a mission far broader than its budget. Ultimately, the corps is directed, along with 15 other agencies, by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 'It is FEMA who is really calling the shots and setting priorities here,' General Strock said. He defended the Bush administration against the charge that spending on the war in Iraq had diminished the capacity to deal with domestic threats like the hurricane. 'I do not see that to be the case,' General Strock said. 'We deeply regret the loss of life associated with this. We are committed to doing whatever we can right now to stop the flow of waters and get the city on the road to recovery.' Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager in the New Orleans district of the corps, said the New Orleans protection system was a vexing mix. It met the standards that were agreed on long ago, but was known to be inadequate. 'This storm was much greater than protection we were authorized to provide,' Mr. Naomi said. Current and former local officials expressed anger at the lack of preparedness. 'I'm just shocked,' said Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality in the late 1980's and is now a consultant in strategic planning in Washington and New Orleans. The Corps of Engineers, Ms. Madden said, should have arranged access to supplies like sandbags and concrete barriers, the way environmental planners reserve access to materials for oil spills. 'You'd have all that on contract,' she said. 'You have contractors with all those potential needs in place.' Since 1965, when the first large federal project was started to bolster New Orleans's levees and other defenses, there has been a tug of war over how sturdy, and expensive, to make a system that might, or might not, be needed. Most aspects of the $732 million Lake Pontchartrain project have been completed, but the project remains behind schedule and underfinanced. Although Congress appropriated more than $4.7 billion for the Corps of Engineers this year, the spending on New Orleans levees was relatively small. The Pontchartrain project drew about $5.7 million, almost $2 million more than what was earmarked for it in President Bush's budget. For five years, Congress has repeatedly increased the sum for New Orleans levees over Mr. Bush's requests, Senate Republicans' figures show. The White House on Thursday referred budget questions to the Office of Management and Budget, where officials did not return calls for comment. From the project's early days, there were vivid reasons to push for the greatest level of protection. One was Hurricane Betsy, a midgrade storm that swamped much of New Orleans in 1965. In 1969, Hurricane Camille, the second-most-powerful Atlantic storm recorded, passed within 60 miles and demolished the Mississippi coast. The initial plan was deemed robust, yet affordable, General Strock said. Government engineers and budget officials settled on designing for what meteorologists calculated would be a once-in-200-year event, he said. That would mean a storm like Hurricane Betsy, a Category 3 storm on the five-step intensity scale. General Strock said tradeoffs between costs and protection levels were a result of a 'complex process involving the intersection of a lot of people from the local, state and national level.' Adam Hughes, an analyst at OMB Watch, said such tradeoffs erred far too often on the side of serving short-term needs and discounting long-term risks. Now, Mr. Hughes said, the devastation in New Orleans made an earlier investment in bigger berms and other protections all part of that gray universe of what bureaucrats call infrastructure look like a bargain. 'This is a classic example of what underfunding infrastructure can do,' Mr. Hughes said. Not all of the problems leading to such a calamity lay at the federal level, said Bob Sheets, a meteorologist who directed the National Hurricane Center until retiring in 1995. Dr. Sheets said that even as a firmer understanding of the danger for New Orleans became evident in the late 70's, some local officials tended to discount the risks. At the time, Dr. Sheets and other federal forecasters ran the first computer simulations, using a program that simulated how Lake Pontchartrain and surrounding waters might behave under strikes by big storms. Much of the lake is a shallow pan where huge amounts of water can quickly pile up on a lee shore, like that facing New Orleans. The computer simulations made clear that certain storms could swamp the platterlike city, wedged between a great river and a broad lake, Dr. Sheets said, adding, 'The risk obviously in New Orleans was greater than in any other community.' He and other federal forecasters gave hundreds of talks about storm risks, and New Orleans was always the case study for catastrophe. Dr. Sheets had many tabletop exercises with the city's emergency officials, and when a storm loomed, they always started an evacuation, in the thought experiment. But in 1992, he said, when Hurricane Andrew, just behind Hurricane Camille on the all-time intensity list, headed to the Gulf Coast, and the National Hurricane Center advised New Orleans to start evacuations, he said of the city officials: 'Essentially they did nothing. The conventions and other business went on.' Dr. Sheets said a 20-year lull in Atlantic storm activity from 1970 until the early 90's could have contributed to communities' sense of ease. 'The longer you go without something like this, the less you think it will happen,' he said. 'The risk was there,' he said. 'And now, obviously, it has come to pass to a great degree.' Mr. Naomi noted that since 2000, Congress had financed the corps request for a study to increase New Orleans's protections for the strongest hurricanes. But he acknowledged that the sum was a fraction of the request and that the study would take years to complete. 'To effectuate what would have made any difference in this storm,' he said, such a study would have had to have started 20 or 25 years ago.

Subject: Banished Whistle-Blowers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 09:48:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01thu3.html September 1, 2005 Banished Whistle-Blowers The Bush administration is making no secret of its determination to punish whistle-blowers and other federal workers who object to the doctoring of facts that clash with policy and spin. The blatant retaliation includes the Army general sidelined for questioning the administration's projections about needed troop strength in Iraq, the Medicare expert muted when he tried to inform Congress about the true cost of the new prescription subsidies and the White House specialist on climate change who was booted after complaining that global warming statistics were being massaged by political tacticians. We agree with critics like Congressman Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois Democrat, who has tracked a long list of abused federal workers who should be applauded, not penalized, for their dedication. The latest victims include Bunnatine Greenhouse, a career civilian manager at the Pentagon. She was demoted from her job as the top contract overseer of the Army Corps of Engineers after she complained of irregularities in the awarding of a multibillion-dollar no-bid Iraq contract to a subsidiary of Halliburton, the Texas-based oil services company run by Dick Cheney before he became vice president. Ms. Greenhouse made complaints internally, then publicly, describing the contract as 'the most blatant and improper contract abuse I have witnessed.' Recently, Ms. Greenhouse was ordered removed for 'poor performance,' just as unfairly as the administration forced out Lawrence Greenfeld as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Mr. Greenfeld's sin was to stand fast against senior political appointees intent on watering down a study's finding that blacks and Hispanics were subject to more searches and force in police traffic stops. Damage control is a political hallmark of any administration. But the Bush team is taking it to the most destructive extreme.

Subject: Bad Science and Bush From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 14:58:27 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: A long list of scientists being ignored, fired, or lied on by current gubbment - very very very scary!!! http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/science/default.asp

Subject: Re: Bad Science and Bush From: Emma To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 15:13:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Very scary, very sad, and I am terribly angry. There is a sneering at truth, especially biological truth, when not perfectly convenient but truth is ofter otherwise.

Subject: Life in the Bottom 80 Percent From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 09:22:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01thu2.html September 1, 2005 Life in the Bottom 80 Percent Economic growth isn't what it used to be. In 2004, the economy grew a solid 3.8 percent. But for the fifth straight year, median household income was basically flat, at $44,389 in 2004, the Census Bureau said Tuesday. That's the longest stretch of income stagnation on record. Economic growth was also no elixir for the 800,000 additional workers who found themselves without health insurance in 2004. Were it not for increased coverage by military insurance and Medicaid, the ranks of the uninsured - now 45.8 million - would be even larger. And 1.1 million more people fell into poverty in 2004, bringing the ranks of poor Americans to 37 million. When President Bush talks about the economy, he invariably boasts about good economic growth. But he doesn't acknowledge what is apparent from the census figures: as the very rich get even richer, their gains can mask the stagnation and deterioration at less lofty income levels. This week's census report showed that income inequality was near all-time highs in 2004, with 50.1 percent of income going to the top 20 percent of households. And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling. Income inequality is an economic and social ill, but the administration and the Congressional majority don't seem to recognize that. When Congress returns from its monthlong summer vacation next week, two of the leadership's top priorities include renewing the push to repeal the estate tax, which affects only the wealthiest of families, and extending the tax cuts for investment income, which flow largely to the richest Americans. At the other end of the spectrum, lawmakers have stubbornly refused to raise the minimum wage: $5.15 an hour since 1997. They will also be taking up proposals for deep budget cuts in programs that ameliorate income inequality, like Medicaid, food stamps and federal student loans. They should be ashamed of themselves.

Subject: title s/b 'life in the bottom 95%' From: David E.. To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 18:17:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I read this article and couldn't understand the title. The article says that everybody but the top 5% has lost or stayed the same. Why can't we jump all over the Times for printing 80% instead of 95%? The Times makes Paul Krugman admit to minor errors that don't change the thrust of his columns. If they are going to be so precise - why can't we have precision in the headings over the rest of the times. There is a big difference between 80% and 95%. Here is the 95% quote from the article - 'And additional census data obtained by the Economic Policy Institute show that only the top 5 percent of households experienced real income gains in 2004. Incomes for the other 95 percent of households were flat or falling.'

Subject: The Man-Made Disaster From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 09:10:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fri1.html September 2, 2005 The Man-Made Disaster The situation in New Orleans, which had seemed as bad as it could get, became considerably worse yesterday with reports of what seemed like a total breakdown of organized society. Americans who had been humbled by failures in Iraq saw that the authorities could not quickly cope with a natural disaster at home. People died for lack of water, medical care or timely rescues - particularly the old and the young - and victims were almost invariably poor and black. The city's police chief spoke of rapes, beatings and marauding mobs. The pictures were equally heartbreaking and maddening. Disaster planners were well aware that New Orleans could be flooded by the combined effects of a hurricane and broken levees, yet somehow the government was unable to immediately rise to the occasion. Watching helplessly from afar, many citizens wondered whether rescue operations were hampered because almost one-third of the men and women of the Louisiana National Guard, and an even higher percentage of the Mississippi National Guard, were 7,000 miles away, fighting in Iraq. That's an even bigger loss than the raw numbers suggest because many of these part-time soldiers had to leave behind their full-time jobs in police and fire departments or their jobs as paramedics. Regardless of whether they wear public safety uniforms in civilian life, the guardsmen in Iraq are a crucial resource sorely missed during these early days, when hours have literally meant the difference between evacuation and inundation, between civic order and chaos, between life and death. The gap is now belatedly being filled by units from other states, though without the local knowledge and training those Mississippi and Louisiana units could supply. The Pentagon is sending thousands of active-duty sailors and soldiers, including a fully staffed aircraft carrier, a hospital ship and some 3,000 Army troops for security and crowd control (even though federal law bars regular Army forces from domestic law enforcement, normally the province of the National Guard). But it's already a very costly game of catch-up. The situation might have been considerably less dire if all of Louisiana's and Mississippi's National Guard had been mobilized before the storm so they could organize, enforce and aid in the evacuation of vulnerable low-lying areas. Plans should have been drawn up for doing so, with sufficient trained forces available to carry them out. It's too late for that now. But the hard lessons of this week must be learned and incorporated into the nation's plans for future emergencies, whether these come in the form of natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Every state must now update its plans for quick emergency responses and must be assured by the Pentagon that it will be able to keep enough National Guard soldiers on hand to carry out these plans on very short notice. Things would have been even worse if a comparable domestic disaster had struck last year, when an even greater percentage of National Guard units were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some states had more than two-thirds of their Guard forces overseas. After several governors protested, the Pentagon agreed to adjust its force rotations so no state would be stripped of more than half of its guardsmen at any one time. That promise has been kept so far. But honoring it in the months ahead will be extremely difficult with active-duty forces so badly overstretched in Iraq, and prospects for any significant early withdrawals looking bleak. One lasting lesson that has to be drawn from the Gulf Coast's misery is that from now on, the National Guard must be treated as America's most essential homeland security force, not as some kind of military piggy bank for the Pentagon to raid for long-term overseas missions. America clearly needs a larger active-duty Army. It just as clearly needs a homeland-based National Guard that's fully prepared and ready for any domestic emergency.

Subject: Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 09:04:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/science/30profile.html August 30, 2005 Scientific Savvy? In U.S., Not Much By CORNELIA DEAN CHICAGO - When Jon D. Miller looks out across America, which he can almost do from his 18th-floor office at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, he sees a landscape of haves and have-nots - in terms not of money, but of knowledge. Dr. Miller, 63, a political scientist who directs the Center for Biomedical Communications at the medical school, studies how much Americans know about science and what they think about it. His findings are not encouraging. While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are 'scientifically savvy and alert,' he said in an interview. Most of the rest 'don't have a clue.' At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process. Over the last three decades, Dr. Miller has regularly surveyed his fellow citizens for clients as diverse as the National Science Foundation, European government agencies and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. People who track Americans' attitudes toward science routinely cite his deep knowledge and long track record. 'I think we should pay attention to him,' said Eugenie Scott, director of the National Center for Science Education, who cites Dr. Miller's work in her efforts to advance the cause of evolution in the classroom. 'We ignore public understanding of science at our peril.' Rolf F. Lehming, who directs the science foundation's surveys on understanding of science, calls him 'absolutely authoritative.' Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century. At one time, this kind of ignorance may not have meant much for the nation's public life. Dr. Miller, who has delved into 18th-century records of New England town meetings, said that back then, it was enough 'if you knew where the bridge should be built, if you knew where the fence should be built.' 'Even if you could not read and write, and most New England residents could not read or write,' he went on, 'you could still be a pretty effective citizen.' No more. 'Acid rain, nuclear power, infectious diseases - the world is a little different,' he said. It was the nuclear power issue that first got him interested in public knowledge of science, when he was a graduate student in the 1960's. 'The issue then was nuclear power,' he said. 'I used to play tennis with some engineers who were very pro-nuclear, and I was dating a person who was very anti-nuclear. I started doing some reading and discovered that if you don't know a little science it was hard to follow these debates. A lot of journalism would not make sense to you.' Devising good tests to measure scientific knowledge is not simple. Questions about values and attitudes can be asked again and again over the years because they will be understood the same way by everyone who hears them; for example, Dr. Miller's surveys regularly ask people whether they agree that science and technology make life change too fast (for years, about half of Americans have answered yes) or whether Americans depend too much on science and not enough on faith (ditto). But assessing actual knowledge, over time, 'is something of an art,' he said. He varies his questions, as topics come and go in the news, but devises the surveys so overall results can be compared from survey to survey, just as SAT scores can be compared even though questions on the test change. For example, he said, in the era of nuclear tests he asked people whether they knew about strontium 90, a component of fallout. Today, he asks about topics like the workings of DNA in the cell because 'if you don't know what a cell is, you can't make sense of stem cell research.' Dr. Miller, who was raised in Portsmouth, Ohio, when it was a dying steel town, attributes much of the nation's collective scientific ignorance to poor education, particularly in high schools. Many colleges require every student to take some science, but most Americans do not graduate from college. And science education in high school can be spotty, he said. 'Our best university graduates are world-class by any definition,' he said. 'But the second half of our high school population - it's an embarrassment. We have left behind a lot of people.' He had firsthand experience with local school issues in the 1980's, when he was a young father living in DeKalb, Ill., and teaching at Northern Illinois University. The local school board was considering closing his children's school, and he attended some board meetings to get an idea of members' reasoning. It turned out they were spending far more time on issues like the cost of football tickets than they were on the budget and other classroom matters. 'It was shocking,' he said. So he and some like-minded people ran successfully for the board and, once in office, tried to raise taxes to provide more money for the classroom. They initiated three referendums; all failed. Eventually, he gave up, and his family moved away. 'This country cannot finance good school systems on property taxes,' he said. 'We don't get the best people for teaching because we pay so little. For people in the sciences particularly, if you have some skill, the job market is so good that teaching is not competitive.' Dr. Miller was recruited to Northwestern Medical School in 1999 by administrators who knew of his work and wanted him to study attitudes and knowledge of science in light of the huge changes expected from the genomic revolution. He also has financing - and wears a yellow plastic bracelet - from the Lance Armstrong Foundation, for a project to research people's knowledge of clinical trials. Many research organizations want to know what encourages people to participate in a trial and what discourages them. But Dr. Miller said, 'It's more interesting to ask if they know what a clinical trial is, do they know what a placebo is.' The National Science Foundation is recasting its survey operations, so Dr. Miller is continuing surveys for other clients. One involves following people over time, tracing their knowledge and beliefs about science from childhood to adulthood, to track the way advantages and disadvantages in education are compounded over time and to test his theory that people don't wait until they are adults to start forming opinions about the world. Lately, people who advocate the teaching of evolution have been citing Dr. Miller's ideas on what factors are correlated with adherence to creationism and rejection of Darwinian theories. In general, he says, these fundamentalist views are most common among people who are not well educated and who 'work in jobs that are evaporating fast with competition around the world.' But not everyone is happy when he says things like that. Every time he goes on the radio to talk about his findings, he said, 'I get people sending me cards saying they will pray for me a lot.'

Subject: Conservation? It's Such a 70's Idea From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 08:54:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/business/02norris.html September 2, 2005 Conservation? It's Such a 70's Idea By FLOYD NORRIS WHERE are the plans for energy conservation? They are needed now. The markets think that the United States will not have enough refined petroleum products to meet demand for at least a few months. The response of the government has been to relax environmental rules, which will allow more production, and to release crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which will do nothing to deal with inadequate refining capacity. Left to its own devices, of course, the market will allocate scarce resources. If there is a shortage of gasoline or home heating oil, prices will rise until demand falls off. Refiners will do very well financially, and gas station operators may find that their margins are also great, albeit with the added irritation of angry customers yelling about profiteering. But the nature of energy demand is that it is slow to react to price changes. In the short term, a person cannot stop driving to work. Longer term, that person can get a car with better fuel efficiency or move closer to the job - both happened after past oil spikes. But to the extent this is a short-term problem, it needs short-term solutions. Oil was tight long before Hurricane Katrina, largely because of rising demand from China and the failure of American oil companies to invest in new refinery capacity. Katrina's damage to oil fields and refineries turned a problem into a crisis. Oil futures prices are up only 4 or 5 percent this week, but futures prices for gasoline, home heating oil and natural gas have soared. Gasoline for delivery in October is up 30 percent. The December contract has risen 13 percent, but the March gain is just 8 percent. In the near term, the hurricane and its aftermath may seem to spur economic growth, as some sectors are stimulated by all the spending to first salvage New Orleans and then rebuild it and the equipment that has been damaged or destroyed. The way the statisticians measure gross domestic product, there is no subtraction for destruction, but there is addition for replacement of what was destroyed. Some will prosper. Shares in Halliburton, the oil services company, sold for $8.60 in early 2002, when the oil economy was depressed. Yesterday, they hit $63.44, setting a record for the first time since 1997. THERE was no mention of conservation when President Bush spoke Wednesday. By yesterday, he was talking of the need to conserve, but only in a general manner. Perhaps the politicians are paralyzed by memories of the way Jimmy Carter was mocked for wearing a sweater as he urged us to adjust our thermostats during another energy crisis. The 55 miles per hour speed limit somehow seems to be a violation of the fundamental rights of American drivers. Sacrifice speed to help avert soaring prices? Surely you must be kidding. There are other possible effects of Katrina that could hurt the economy. If the Port of New Orleans cannot get back to full capacity soon, a lot of Midwestern grain may have trouble finding a way to market. Railroad capacity is limited, making it hard to get that grain to other ports. But the most immediate impact is on energy prices. A major question is whether they will rise enough to choke off demand for other things, and thus damage those parts of the economy not benefiting from the reconstruction spending. The prudent course now would be for a national effort to reduce demand. Urge drivers to slow down and tell the police to enforce speed limits. A campaign to raise home thermostats now, and lower them this winter, might reduce demand enough to limit the price increases that the market will have to bear.

Subject: The Mississippi River Delta From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 06:53:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.pbs.org/now/science/delta.html September 6, 2002 The Mississippi River delta is disappearing. One of America's most vibrant and productive ecological regions is slipping into the Gulf of Mexico at an alarming rate. Every year, a chunk of land nearly as big as Manhattan crumbles and washes away. As it erodes, it not only threatens one of the country's most abundant fisheries and a vital home for wildlife, but it imperils the nation's energy supply. And, as the coast of Louisiana continues to slip away, tens of thousands of lives are at risk from devastating hurricanes. The crisis in the delta could reach catastrophic levels in the next few decades, with far-reaching environmental, human, and economic consequences.

Subject: They Saw It Coming From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 06:44:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/02/opinion/02fischetti.html September 2, 2005 They Saw It Coming By MARK FISCHETTI Lenox, Mass. THE deaths caused by Hurricane Katrina are heart-rending. The suffering of survivors is wrenching. Property destruction is shocking. But perhaps the most agonizing part is that much of what happened in New Orleans this week might have been avoided. Watching the TV images of the storm approaching the Mississippi Delta on Sunday, I was sick to my stomach. Not only because I knew the hell it could unleash (I wrote an article for Scientific American in 2001 that described the very situation that was unfolding) but because I knew that a large-scale engineering plan called Coast 2050 - developed in 1998 by scientists, Army engineers, metropolitan planners and Louisiana officials - might have helped save the city, but had gone unrealized. The debate over New Orleans's vulnerability to hurricanes has raged for a century. By the late 1990's, scientists at Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans had perfected computer models showing exactly how a sea surge would overwhelm the levee system, and had recommended a set of solutions. The Army Corps of Engineers, which built the levees, had proposed different projects. Yet some scientists reflexively disregarded practical considerations pointed out by the Army engineers; more often, the engineers scoffed at scientific studies indicating that the basic facts of geology and hydrology meant that significant design changes were needed. Meanwhile, local politicians lobbied Congress for financing for myriad special interest groups, from oil companies to oyster farmers. Congress did not hear a unified voice, making it easier to turn a deaf ear. Fed up with the splintered efforts, Len Bahr, then the head of the Louisiana Governor's Office of Coastal Activities, somehow dragged all the parties to one table in 1998 and got them to agree on a coordinated solution: Coast 2050. Completing every recommended project over a decade or more would have cost an estimated $14 billion, so Louisiana turned to the federal government. While this may seem an astronomical sum, it isn't in terms of large public works; in 2000 Congress began a $7 billion engineering program to refresh the dying Florida Everglades. But Congress had other priorities, Louisiana politicians had other priorities, and the magic moment of consensus was lost. Thus, in true American fashion, we ignored an inevitable problem until disaster focused our attention. Fortunately, as we rebuild New Orleans, we can protect it - by engineering solutions that work with nature, not against it. The conceit that we can control the natural world is what made New Orleans vulnerable. For more than a century the Army Corps, with Congress's blessing, leveed the Mississippi River to prevent its annual floods, so that farms and industries could expand along its banks. Those same floods, however, had dumped huge amounts of sediment and freshwater across the Mississippi Delta, rebuilding each year what gulf tides and storms had worn away and holding back infusions of saltwater that kill marsh vegetation. These vast delta wetlands created a lush, hardy buffer that could absorb sea surges and weaken high winds. The flooding at the river's mouth also sent great volumes of sediment west and east into the Gulf of Mexico, to a string of barrier islands that cut down surges and waves, compensating for regular ocean erosion. Stopping the Mississippi's floods starved the wetlands and the islands; both are rapidly disintegrating, leaving the city naked against the sea. What can we do to restore these natural protections? Although the parties that devised Coast 2050, and other independent scientists and engineers who have floated rival plans, may disagree on details, they do concur on several major initiatives that would shield New Orleans, reconstitute the delta and, as a side benefit, improve ports and shipping lanes for the oil and natural gas industries in the Gulf of Mexico. Cut several channels in the levees on the Mississippi River's southern bank (the side that doesn't abut the city) and secure them with powerful floodgates that could be opened at certain times of the year to allow sediment and freshwater to flow down into the delta, re-establishing it. Build a new navigation channel from the Gulf into the Mississippi, about 40 miles south of New Orleans, so ships don't have to enter the river at its three southernmost tips 30 miles further away. For decades the corps has dredged shipping channels along those final miles to keep them navigable, creating underwater chutes that propel river sediment out into the deep ocean. The dredging could then be stopped, the river mouth would fill in naturally, and sediment would again spill to the barrier islands, lengthening and widening them. Some planners also propose a modern port at the new access point that would replace those along the river that are too shallow to handle the huge new ships now being built worldwide. Erect huge seagates across the pair of narrow straits that connect the eastern edge of Lake Pontchartrain, which lies north of the city, to the gulf. Now, any hurricane that blows in from the south will push a wall of water through these straits into the huge lake, which in turn will threaten to overflow into the city. That is what has filled the bowl that is New Orleans this week. But seagates at the straits can stop the wall of water from flowing in. The Netherlands has built similar gates to hold back the turbulent North Sea and they work splendidly. Finally, and most obviously, raise, extend and strengthen the city's existing but aging levees, canal walls and pumping systems that worked so poorly in recent days. It's hard to say how much of this work could have been completed by today had Coast 2050 become a reality. Certainly, the delta wetlands and barrier islands would not have rebounded substantially yet. But undoubtedly progress would have been made that would have spared someone's life, someone's home, some jazz club or gumbo joint, some city district, some part of the region's unique culture that the entire country revels in. And we would have been well on our way to a long-term solution. For there is one thing we know for sure: hurricanes will howl through the Mississippi Delta again.

Subject: ..and did nothing From: Dorian To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 07:23:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Read and weep.... September 1, 2005 CHRONOLOGY....Here's a timeline that outlines the fate of both FEMA and flood control projects in New Orleans under the Bush administration. Read it and weep: * January 2001: Bush appoints Joe Allbaugh, a crony from Texas, as head of FEMA. Allbaugh has no previous experience in disaster management. * April 2001: Budget Director Mitch Daniels announces the Bush administration's goal of privatizing much of FEMA's work. In May, Allbaugh confirms that FEMA will be downsized: 'Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program....' he said. 'Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level.' * 2001: FEMA designates a major hurricane hitting New Orleans as one of the three 'likeliest, most catastrophic disasters facing this country.' * December 2002: After less than two years at FEMA, Allbaugh announces he is leaving to start up a consulting firm that advises companies seeking to do business in Iraq. He is succeeded by his deputy, Michael Brown, who, like Allbaugh, has no previous experience in disaster management. * March 2003: FEMA is downgraded from a cabinet level position and folded into the Department of Homeland Security. Its mission is refocused on fighting acts of terrorism. * 2003: Under its new organization chart within DHS, FEMA's preparation and planning functions are reassigned to a new Office of Preparedness and Response. FEMA will henceforth focus only on response and recovery. * Summer 2004: FEMA denies Louisiana's pre-disaster mitigation funding requests. Says Jefferson Parish flood zone manager Tom Rodrigue: 'You would think we would get maximum consideration....This is what the grant program called for. We were more than qualified for it.' * June 2004: The Army Corps of Engineers budget for levee construction in New Orleans is slashed. Jefferson Parish emergency management chiefs Walter Maestri comments: 'It appears that the money has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that's the price we pay.' * June 2005: Funding for the New Orleans district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is cut by a record $71.2 million. One of the hardest-hit areas is the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, which was created after the May 1995 flood to improve drainage in Jefferson, Orleans and St. Tammany parishes. * August 2005: While New Orleans is undergoing a slow motion catastrophe, Bush mugs for the cameras, cuts a cake for John McCain, plays the guitar for Mark Wills, delivers an address about V-J day, and continues with his vacation. When he finally gets around to acknowledging the scope of the unfolding disaster, he delivers only a photo op on Air Force One and a flat, defensive, laundry list speech in the Rose Garden. After DHS was created, FEMA's preparation and planning functions were taken away. No one could predict that a hurricane the size of Katrina would hit this year, but the slow federal response when it did happen was no accident. It was the result of four years of deliberate Republican policy and budget choices that favor ideology and partisan loyalty at the expense of operational competence. It's the Bush administration in a nutshell. -Kevin Drum http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007023.php

Subject: Intricate Flood Protection Disputed From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 17:00:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/national/nationalspecial/01levee.html September 1, 2005 Intricate Flood Protection Long a Focus of Dispute By ANDREW C. REVKIN and CHRISTOPHER DREW The 17th Street levee that gave way and led to the flooding of New Orleans was part of an intricate, aging system of barriers and pumps that was so chronically underfinanced that senior regional officials of the Army Corps of Engineers complained about it publicly for years. Often leading the chorus was Alfred C. Naomi, a senior project manager for the corps and a 30-year veteran of efforts to waterproof a city built on slowly sinking mud, surrounded by water and periodically a target of great storms. Mr. Naomi grew particularly frustrated this year as the Gulf Coast braced for what forecasters said would be an intense hurricane season and a nearly simultaneous $71 million cut was announced in the New Orleans district budget to guard against such storms. He called the cut drastic in an article in New Orleans CityBusiness. In an interview last night, Mr. Naomi said the cuts had made it impossible to complete contracts for vital upgrades that were part of the long-term plan to renovate the system. This week, amid news of the widening breach in the 17th Street Canal, he realized that the decadeslong string of near misses had ended. 'A breach under these conditions was ultimately not surprising,' he said last night. 'I had hoped that we had overdesigned it to a point that it would not fail. But you can overdesign only so much, and then a failure has to come.' No one expected that weak spot to be on a canal that, if anything, had received more attention and shoring up than many other spots in the region. It did not have broad berms, but it did have strong concrete walls. Shea Penland, director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said that was particularly surprising because the break was 'along a section that was just upgraded.' 'It did not have an earthen levee,' Dr. Penland said. 'It had a vertical concrete wall several feel thick.' Now the corps is scrambling. After failing to close a 300-foot break in the canal through which most of the floodwater entered the city, federal engineers decided last night to take the battle with Lake Pontchartrain to the lakefront. Starting today, they will prepare to drive corrugated vertical steel plates, called sheet pile, into the mud near where the narrow canal meets the lake, sealing it off so that the big breach farther in can be more methodically attacked, Mr. Naomi said. The decision was made after a day of fruitless efforts to figure how to drop concrete highway barriers or huge sandbags into the torrent. For the most part, the water between the lake and the filled bowl of the city leveled off as of last night, officials said. Weaknesses in the levee system were foreshadowed in a report in May on the hurricane protection plan for the region and the budget gap. The district headquarters said, 'The current funding shortfalls in fiscal year 2005 and fiscal year 2006 will prevent the Corps from addressing these pressing needs.' They also meant that there was far too little money to study thoroughly an upgrade of the protections from the existing standard, enough to hold back a hurricane at Category 3 on the five-step intensity scale, to a level to withstand floods and winds from a Category 5 storm. Hurricane Katrina was on the high end of Category 4 and, despite the extreme flooding, is still seen by many hurricane experts as a near miss for New Orleans. Since 2001, the Louisiana Congressional delegation had pushed for far more money for storm protection than the Bush administration has accepted. Now, Mr. Naomi said, all the quibbling over the storm budget, or even over full Category 5 protection, which would cost several billion dollars, seemed tragically absurd. 'It would take $2.5 billion to build a Category 5 protection system, and we're talking about tens of billions in losses, all that lost productivity, and so many lost lives and injuries and personal trauma you'll never get over,' Mr. Naomi said. 'People will be scarred for life by this event.' He said there were still no clear hints why the main breach in the flood barriers occurred along the 17th Street Canal, normally a conduit for vast streams of water pumped out of the perpetually waterlogged city each day and which did not take the main force of the waves roiling the lake. He said that a low spot marked on survey charts of the levees near the spot that ruptured was unrelated and that the depression was where a new bridge crossed the narrow canal near the lakefront. Some experts studying flood prevention with the corps and other agencies speculated that any dip in the retaining levee or walls there might have allowed water to slop over and start the collapse. Mr. Naomi said that as the power of the hurricane grew clear over the weekend, he and others who had worked to make the system as strong as it could be, given the design limits, could only hope that it would hold. But, he said, he knew that the chances were high that the rising waters and crashing waves would find a fatal weak spot in the 350 miles of levees and walls. As often occurs after a storm, Lake Pontchartrain is sloshing back and forth, sending pulses of water into the city and potentially complicating repairs, Dr. Penland said. 'It's like you have a bowl of water and you shake it, and it sloshes back and forth,' he said, describing a phenomenon that geologists call a seiche (pronounced sesh). 'Mississippi Sound and Pontchartrain are real prone to seiches when big storms come through. We are seeing the slosh. Water is being flushed through the gaps in the levees.' He said scientists at the United States Geological Survey estimated that the sloshing would gradually diminish in a few days. Until then, the city will be subject not just to normal variation in the lake, where water levels change about a foot between high and low tide, but also to the variations of the seiche. 'You have not just the one-foot tide, you probably have three to four feet of water,' Dr. Penland said. 'Once we get to an ordinary tidal regime, when it plays out, that will be our opportunity to close those breaks in the levees and start pumping.'

Subject: Curing Health Costs: Let the Sick Suffer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 13:56:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/opinion/01herbert.html?ex=1283227200&en=e13d15a08d83079f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss September 1, 2005 Curing Health Costs: Let the Sick Suffer By BOB HERBERT The word in Tennessee is that Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, has presidential aspirations. I find that interesting. Perhaps he can run on the success he's had throwing sick people off of Medicaid. Thanks to Mr. Bredesen's leadership, Tennessee is dumping nearly 200,000 residents, some of them desperately ill, from TennCare, the state's Medicaid program. Cindy Mann, a research professor and executive director of the Center for Children and Families at Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute, concisely characterized the governor's efforts: 'What he's decided to do is save health care costs simply by not giving people health care.' How's that for a solution to a tough public policy issue? What is happening in Tennessee is profoundly cruel. The people being removed from the rolls - some of them disabled, some suffering from such serious illnesses as cancer and heart disease - are mostly working-poor individuals who cannot afford private insurance. They are being left with no coverage and in many instances are in a state of absolute panic. 'People are going to die because of this,' said Carolyn Cagle, a widow from Paris, Tenn., whose 34-year-old son, Lloyd, is a diabetic who has already lost part of his right foot. He is being dropped from the program. Phil Dedrich, a resident of Waynesboro, has also been notified that his coverage is ending. 'I am very sick,' he said in a statement distributed by opponents of the cuts. 'I have severe coronary artery disease, including a 70 percent blockage of my aorta, lung disease, thyroid disease, diabetes, painful neuropathy from the diabetes and high blood pressure.' In addition to the people being dropped from the rolls, benefits are being cut for hundreds of thousands of TennCare participants, and there is a chance that 100,000 more people will lose their coverage next year. 'I'm scared,' said Terilyn Gotlieb, a TennCare enrollee whose prescription coverage was reduced sharply. Kidney disease has all but destroyed Ms. Gotlieb's family. She told me her mother, her grandfather, a brother and a sister all died from the disease. Ms. Gotlieb herself underwent a kidney transplant in 2000. She's in constant pain from a broken back she suffered in an auto accident last year, and she's severely depressed. In a normal month Ms. Gotlieb takes 12 medications, but now TennCare will pay for only 5 and she can't afford the other 7. 'I'm scared that if I don't get the right medication, I'm going to end up back on dialysis and lose my kidney I fought so hard to keep,' she said. 'I could die.' Medicaid was established to provide health coverage for the poor. In the 1990's the TennCare program extended Medicaid benefits to low-income working people who could not otherwise secure health insurance. Among those hailing the program at its inception was Bill Frist, a Tennessee Republican who is now the Senate majority leader. At the time he was the surgical director of the Transplant Center at Vanderbilt University. Mr. Frist called the program a 'bold experiment' and wrote in a newspaper article that 'the extension of coverage to working Tennesseans without health insurance is necessary to reduce the need for hospitals to shift these costs to patients who have insurance.' TennCare reduced the number of uninsured residents in the state by one-third and indisputably saved many lives. But the program ran into problems. Parts of it were mismanaged by state officials and by managed care organizations that performed so poorly they either had to be taken over by the state or their contracts were terminated. More insidious is the fact that residents of Tennessee (which limits its state income tax to dividends and interest income) are even less willing than their counterparts in most other states to pay for crucial public services. So rather than do the heavy lifting necessary to shore up an important and admirable program, Governor Bredesen resorted to the draconian, life-threatening expedient of severing the health coverage of people who have nowhere else to turn. Perhaps that's what one should expect from a former managed care executive. Governor Bredesen's Web site notes that before entering public service, he 'was a successful health care entrepreneur.'

Subject: Make Phone Calls Without a Telephone From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 12:32:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/01/technology/circuits/01basics.html September 1, 2005 How to Make Phone Calls Without a Telephone By THOMAS J. FITZGERALD Internet telephone service is well on its way into the mainstream. Companies like Vonage, using a technology called voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, offer cheap long-distance rates and features not found with conventional phone service. Cable giants, too, are taking Internet phones to the masses. Now a subset of VoIP services, called PC-to-phone service, is gaining momentum. With these services, users can make calls to and receive calls from regular phones on their PC's as long they have a broadband connection, VoIP software downloaded from the Web and a headset. One advantage of such services is the ability to make calls through an Internet-connected laptop when cellular service is unreliable. Many people also prefer the convenience of talking while working on a PC; the services can operate while you are doing other tasks on the computer. Another advantage is price. PC-to-phone VoIP rates are less expensive than conventional phone calls and in many cases cheaper than phone-to-phone VoIP services, which route calls through broadband modems to regular phones. Early versions of these services have been around since the late 1990's, but the rise of Skype, a mostly free VoIP service using file-sharing technology, has increased competition in the field. Yahoo, America Online and Microsoft have each announced plans to add new phone services to future versions of their instant messaging programs. And last week, Google introduced Google Talk, a free service that enables users to talk through their computers and could be a first step toward a PC-to-phone service. PC-to-phone services available today from companies like Skype, SIPphone, i2Telecom and Dialpad Communications offer many features like free PC-to-PC calling, conference calls, voice mail, choice of phone numbers, call forwarding and reduced long-distance rates, especially for international calls. But as with phone-to-phone VoIP services, call quality is not always perfect. Skype (www.skype.com), a popular VoIP network based in Luxembourg, has had 51 million users register worldwide since its inception, with five million in the United States and an average of three million users logged on at any one time. To make free calls to other PC's, users simply download the Skype software from the Web site; the PC receiving the Skype call also has to be connected to the Skype network. For PC-to-phone calling, the company has added SkypeOut and SkypeIn. With SkypeOut, introduced last year and now having more than two million users, PC's with the Skype software are able to call conventional phones. Minutes are purchased in advance, and the price depends on the destination. Calls within the continental United States, for example, are 2.1 cents a minute; calls to New Delhi are 15.4 cents; São Paulo, Brazil, 2.5 cents; and Beijing, 2.1 cents. Those international rates are below what Vonage charges for VoIP calls from the United States to those cities, at 17 cents, 6 cents and 6 cents, respectively. With SkypeIn, introduced in March and still in the test stage, a phone number can be attached to a Skype account, enabling callers using regular phones to call you at your computer or leave messages in your Skype voice mail. You can choose a phone number from many area codes in the United States and also from several other countries. The service costs $12 for three months or $38 for a year. Another new option, Skype Zones, allows access to Skype from Wi-Fi hotspots operated by Boingo (www.boingo.com), which has 20,000 locations; the Skype Zones unlimited access plan costs $7.95 a month. A competing PC-to-phone service, called Gizmo Project (www.gizmoproject.com) from SIPphone, was introduced in July. Like Skype, Gizmo Project offers free PC-to-PC calls. It also offers Call Out, a service that allows calls to regular phones from your PC, and Call In, which enables a PC to receive calls from regular phones. Call Out costs 1.8 cents a minute for calls in the United States; the Call In plan costs $15 for three months or $30 for six months. A PC-to-phone service from i2Telecom, called VoiceStick (www.voicestick.com), was introduced in March. Outbound and inbound calling can be controlled using VoiceStick's downloadable software or with an optional U.S.B. flash drive for portable access to the service. The drive, which costs an additional $34.99 and includes a mobile headset, comes with the VoiceStick software installed; it plugs into available U.S.B. ports on Windows-based computers, and a menu asks if you would like to begin using the service from the drive. The company offers several calling plans, including an unlimited global option, for $24.99 a month, which includes your own phone number and unlimited calling to points in the United States, Canada and hundreds of cities in 38 other countries and territories. Another feature, called i2Bridge, enables you to make calls to any destination, including international locations, from your cellphone or home phone at VoiceStick rates. Dialpad (www.dialpad.com), another PC-to-phone service, offers monthly calling plans as well as prepaid minutes for outgoing calls. Subscribers can get 300 minutes a month for $7.50, 500 minutes for $9.99 and an unlimited option for $11.99, covering calls in the United States and Canada, with international calls costing extra. Prepaid or pay-as-you-go plans can be purchased for $15 and $25. Dialpad does not offer a service that allows PC's to accept incoming calls from regular phones. Dialpad was acquired by Yahoo in June, and its PC-to-phone abilities are expected to be added to a new version of Yahoo Messenger in the coming months, a Yahoo spokeswoman said. The Yahoo Messenger program was recently updated to include free PC-to-PC calling and free voice mail, and is now called Yahoo Messenger With Voice. Microsoft announced this week that it had acquired Teleo (www.teleo.com), a PC-to-phone service with features that work with Internet Explorer and Microsoft Outlook, and plans to start adding components of Teleo's technology to MSN Messenger later this year. And AOL, using a partnership with Net2Phone (www.net2phone.com), introduced a PC-to-phone service in 1999 called AIM Phone. The company has plans to supplant that service with a more full-featured VoIP service in a new version of its instant messaging program, which is likely to be available by the end of the year, according to an AOL spokeswoman. Net2Phone, the first company to offer PC-to-phone service in 1996, has expanded its services. With its software, downloadable from the Web, users can call regular phones worldwide. Most calls within the United States are 2 cents a minute, for example, and the service lets you fax documents from your computer. Several other PC-to-phone services are available, including iConnectHere (www.iconnecthere.com), operated by Deltathree, which has a pay-as-you-go option in addition to monthly calling plans ($5.95 a month for 400 minutes within the United States and Canada, and $14.95 a month with 1,000 minutes in the United States and Canada and 250 minutes to selected countries overseas). With the number of PC-to-phone services growing quickly, the features and choices available to consumers are certain to expand.

Subject: Japan's Post Offices From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 10:54:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/international/asia/30japan.html August 30, 2005 Japan's Post Offices: Full-Service Political Battlefields By NORIMITSU ONISHI JOETSU, Japan - Koichi Nakashima is the fourth generation of his family to own and run the post office in Maki, a village deep in the mountains near here on Japan's rural west coast and a battleground in the general election in September. As his forefathers did, Mr. Nakashima, 59, handles the villagers' mail and savings. His workers will even collect money and packages if villagers are too busy to visit the post office. 'We know each other and they trust us,' Mr. Nakashima said. Japan's post offices, which have deep roots throughout the country, have grown into the world's largest financial institution, Japan Post, with $3 trillion in assets. But they have also played another, little understood role here, serving as the bedrock of Japan's postwar political structure and the long-governing Liberal Democratic Party's machine. Another indicator of that role played itself out early in August when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi abruptly dissolved Parliament after rebellious members of his own party rejected his bill to privatize the postal services. Calling an election for Sept. 11, a year ahead of schedule, Mr. Koizumi compared opponents of privatization to reactionaries who insist that the Earth revolves around the Sun. 'Even after Galileo was found guilty of heresy, he still said, 'The Earth moves,' ' Mr. Koizumi said. Whether Mr. Koizumi will be remembered as the Galileo of Japanese politics remains to be seen. But what is clear is that the election in September - as much a referendum on the future of the 134-year-old postal system as on Mr. Koizumi's leadership - will present voters with two different visions of government in Japan. Mr. Koizumi said the 'privatization of the post office is the first step toward the reconstruction of Japan's politics and economy.' It is also an attempt to wean his party from its core support in rural areas, which have declined in population and are less politically significant than before, and make it relevant to urban voters who have been gravitating to the main opposition Democratic Party. But to opponents, the postal system has sustained Japan's cherished egalitarianism over an American-style, market-driven economy. The approaching election has already set off a feud in the Liberal Democratic Party, which has held a grip on power for all but 10 months in the last half-century. Rebellious party members have felt the wrath of Mr. Koizumi, who has been sending high-profile challengers - called 'assassins' - into their constituencies to unseat them. Under Mr. Koizumi's privatization plan, Japan Post would be split into four companies in 2007, and its savings and life insurance services would be privatized in 2017. Mr. Koizumi has often cited Japan Post as an example of bloat, pointing out that it has more employees, 262,000, than Japan's military, which has 239,000. Of the nation's 24,700 post offices, 19,000 are owned and operated by so-called special postmasters, often as family businesses handed down from father to son. 'If I have to run this office based on market principles, I'd have to close it down,' said Toshio Hinode, 55, a special postmaster who owns the Tanihama branch in Joetsu, in Niigata Prefecture. 'It wouldn't be viable.' In the Maki branch, which was owned by the Kondo family for four generations before the Nakashimas took it over, the 10 employees provide more than just postal services. The workers respond to villagers' requests to break a 10,000-yen bill, about $90. They deliver pensions in cash and may even drop by with loan money, though such transactions usually have to be carried out at the post office. 'If the depositor is bedridden,' Mr. Nakashima said, 'we'd do that for the person and make sure everything is all right.' With those and other services, Japan Post is actually providing a form of welfare, especially in rural areas with aging populations. In Itakura, in Niigata, Makie Miyakoshi, 75, who works a small plot of farmland, tells of a housebound neighbor living far from the local post office. 'Since her legs are weak,' Mrs. Miyakoshi said, 'the post office workers come to her house and pack up the stuff she wants to send.' Postal savings accounts have also earned the trust of Japanese, with 85 percent of households holding such deposits. The assets allowed Japan's leaders to finance national projects, from the war effort before 1945 to the country's postwar high growth. It was Kakuei Tanaka, postwar Japan's most powerful prime minister and a native of Niigata, who put the money held by the post office to use as a huge slush fund for the Liberal Democrats, said Kent Calder, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. First as postal minister in the 1950's and then as prime minister in the 1970's, Mr. Calder said, Mr. Tanaka protected postal services from oversight from other ministries, so the Liberal Democrats could freely use the assets to reward their backers. Small businesses that pledged to back the Liberal Democrats were given loans with no collateral and low interest rates from postal services - as long as they had the endorsement of their member of Parliament. Japanese could also take loans up to 90 percent of their deposits at low rates. Special postmasters, as influential members of their communities, played a crucial role by acting as vote-gatherers for the Liberal Democrats. Hirokuni Tanaka, 76, chairman of the national Retired Special Postmasters Association, said each branch of the association had a formal relationship, including financial support, with the local chapter of the Liberal Democratic Party. His association recently announced that it would no longer support the Liberal Democrats, though it would give local chapters the freedom to decide. Mr. Calder said of the former prime minister, Mr. Tanaka: 'This was Tanaka's heritage. It is akin to Socialism. Japan is the only Socialist country that worked, it's sometimes said. But Koizumi says it's no longer working and that's why he's serious about privatizing it.' The defenders of the system say it fostered egalitarianism by giving small businesses and individuals in areas like this one access to capital. To them, Mr. Koizumi's reforms and implicit vision of a new Japan are unsettling. 'American efficiency has its merits,' said Mr. Hinode, the special postmaster. 'But I wonder if it is necessary to introduce it to such an extent that we'll end up losing our Japanese culture.''

Subject: Antibiotics Aren't Always the Answer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 10:53:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/health/policy/30cons.html August 30, 2005 Antibiotics Aren't Always the Answer By DEBORAH FRANKLIN It's hard not to wheedle. Your throat feels as if you've swallowed broken glass, your sinuses have been clogged for a couple of days, you're coughing up green stuff and you're slated to fly in a week. Never mind that your doctor thinks you're suffering from a viral infection that antibiotics won't touch. Why not start a prescription of some powerful bacteria-busting drug immediately, just in case? Dr. Alastair D. Hay, who teaches medical students at the University of Bristol in England and also treats patients, says that until recently, even he may occasionally have succumbed to the pressure to hand over a prescription. 'As a personal policy, I don't get into heated arguments with my patients,' Dr. Hay said. And giving the standard lecture about how antibiotics will not stop a virus but may contribute to the growing, worldwide problem of drug resistance rarely convinces sick people that they don't need the drugs. 'Unless you can tell them that there's an immediate downside for them personally,' Dr. Hay said, 'the message just doesn't sink in.' Now, though, Dr. Hay can quote direct evidence of a downside. An increasing number of studies, including his own work, suggest that even a properly prescribed antibiotic can foster the growth of one or more strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria for at least two to six months inside the person taking the pills. 'Carrying' a microbe inside you that is resistant to drugs also means that, during that time, you're likely to 'share' the resistant bug with family, co-workers and others in your path. That particular strain may not make you sick. But if you find yourself one day immune-suppressed after chemotherapy, cut open by a car accident or surgery or especially vulnerable to bacterial pneumonia after a bad flu, those resistant strains of bacteria living inside you increase the odds that any infection will be hard - or even impossible - to beat. In a study published in the July 2005 issue of The Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, Dr. Hay and nine colleagues solicited urine samples from a broad cross-section of generally healthy people throughout southwest England. They then checked the samples for E. coli, a common intestinal bacterium that can invade the urethra. Published surveys estimate that roughly 25 to 35 percent of women ages 20 to 40 in the United States have had a urinary tract infection, and E. coli is the most frequent cause. Of the 618 men and women from whom Dr. Hay and his colleagues were able to isolate E. coli and also get extensive medical records, 39 percent carried a bacterial strain that was resistant to one or more of the first-line antibiotics commonly used to treat urinary infections. More significantly, Dr. Hay said, a patient's likelihood of carrying a resistant organism was doubled if the patient had taken 'any antibiotic for any reason within the previous two months, when compared with those who had not taken an antibiotic.' The findings dovetail with results from other studies that found a strong, though temporary, link between drug-resistant urinary tract infections and antibiotics taken in the previous six months. 'A lot of women have had the experience of having a urinary infection that doesn't seem to be treatable, or of going through more than one drug,' said Abigail A. Salyers, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois and a co-author with Dixie D. Whitt of the new book 'Revenge of the Microbes: How Bacterial Resistance Is Undermining the Antibiotic Miracle.' 'Having to go through a number of drugs magnifies the time that you're miserable,' she said. But the implication of the research goes beyond urinary infections. Doctors are beginning to realize that any oral or injected antibiotic they prescribe to fight a particular infection also cuts a wide swath in bacterial neighborhoods throughout the body, mowing down microbes that are susceptible and leaving room, temporarily at least, for resistant bugs to colonize the empty real estate and thrive. Bacteria differ in their ability to fend off antibiotics, and in the methods they use. The most worrisome are those that quickly and easily trade genetic material across species. A bacterium that was once vulnerable to any one of several drugs can overnight become impervious to all of them. It does this by picking up an extra loop of DNA - essentially a highly portable genetic suitcase containing several different resistance genes - from a passing microbe. Public health officials used to assume that these sorts of superbugs arose mostly in hospitals, where a variety of conditions - including a concentration of seriously ill patients, open wounds, hands-on care and the wide use of powerful antibiotics - made the buildings incubators of drug resistance. But just because hospitals are incubators doesn't mean that's where the problems start or stay. 'Many hospital infections walk in the front door, on the patient, or the patient's family, the doctors, or the guy in the next bed,' Dr. Salyers says. 'It's the opportunistic bacteria that we all carry around with us that are causing the trouble in hospitals.' Which brings us back to you, with your nasty sore throat, throbbing sinuses and cough, waiting in the exam room, hoping for a prescription from your doctor. Dr. Ralph Gonzales, an internist at the University of California, San Francisco, is one of a growing cadre of researchers dedicated to improving the way antibiotics are prescribed and taken in community clinics. Dr. Gonzales hopes to preserve the drugs' powerful benefits while minimizing resistance. Several years ago, he worked with medical associations and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to devise evidence-based guidelines for doctors to use in telling which patients need antibiotics for their respiratory infections and which patients do not. But increasingly, Dr. Gonzales thinks it is the patients - particularly the 30- or 40-year-old professionals with bad colds and overwhelming deadlines - who need to be persuaded, as much as other doctors. Studies have shown that when patients come into the clinic expecting a drug, Dr. Gonzales said, doctors are more likely to prescribe one. 'Very few ask directly for an antibiotic,' he said. 'Instead you'll hear, 'I have a wedding coming up - my wedding - and my cold won't go away.' ' To nip patients' expectations of receiving antibiotics before they see the doctor, Dr. Gonzales is putting up posters in exam rooms that, for example, help explain which symptoms suggest a bacterial infection and which indicate a viral source. And at what looks like an automated teller machine in the lobby of the hospital's acute care clinic, patients waiting to see a doctor can now view video clips and answer questions aimed at guiding them to a better understanding of why antibiotics aren't always the answer. Will such measures help? It's too soon to tell. But the last bit of advice that the modified A.T.M. dishes out on its touch screen will certainly reduce infections. Immediately find the nearest restroom, the machine advises, so you can wash your hands.

Subject: Guns Yield to Words, Lots of Words From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 09:16:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/international/americas/31mexico_.html August 31, 2005 At a 60's Style Be-In, Guns Yield to Words, Lots of Words By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. SAN MIGUEL, Mexico - After four years of hiding, the charismatic leader of the Zapatista rebel movement in southern Mexico has been holding 'town hall' meetings with leftists, labor leaders, students, Indian rights advocates and other supporters in an effort to forge a national campaign to rewrite Mexico's Constitution along socialist lines. The rebel, who calls himself Subcommander Marcos, emerged from the woods on Sunday morning surrounded by 24 armed rebels for a second day of listening to the leaders of dozens of charities devoted to social work and human rights. All the rebels wore the movement's trademark black balaclava helmets, including Marcos, who may be the only man in history to make a ski mask and pipe look sexy. The weekend gathering looked like a cross between the Woodstock concert, a Grange Hall meeting and a convention of Che Guevara fans. At times it looked as if a public hearing in the East Village had been transported to a horse pasture in the rugged green mountains here. More than 280 small nongovernmental organizations, artists, punk rockers, students, rappers and social workers attended - a panoply of left-leaning folks on the fringe of Mexican politics who have rallied to the Zapatista banner. Many of the charities have been formed since 1994 just to aid the Zapatistas. The attendees included an organization representing lesbian anarchists, a collective of witches, advocates fighting the privatization of waterworks, gay-rights promoters who call themselves polysexuals and well-respected human rights monitors in Chiapas. This was the fourth meeting of six that the rebel leaders have planned as part of what Marcos has dubbed 'the other campaign,' a drive to galvanize the left wing of Mexican politics before the election for president in July 2006. In speeches at the meetings and in open letters, Marcos has labeled mainstream politicians corrupt, suggesting that it matters little for the poor and indigenous people who wins the next election. Opening the meeting on Saturday, he called for 'a national leftist, anticapitalist program' and 'a new constitution, which is another way of saying a new agreement for a new society.' Mr. Marcos has even tried to undermine the most popular leftist candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor, suggesting that he and his Democratic Revolutionary Party are not true leftists and would sell out working people once in power. He has accused Mr. López Obrador, the front-runner in most polls, of being a closet authoritarian who betrayed his leftist supporters when he was mayor. 'We are going up against the whole political class,' Marcos said after a contentious meeting with left-wing political organizations on Aug. 6, 'for all they have done to us.' He declined requests for interviews. Precisely what Marcos hopes to accomplish with the meetings and with a planned national tour by a group of Zapatista representatives remains murky. He has not defined how he would change the Constitution. He has denied that he wants to enter politics himself or to convert the 11-year-old rebellion into a political party, even though the administration of President Vicente Fox has said it will make that transition possible if the rebels disarm. The Zapatistas have not mounted a major military offensive since they were pushed back into the mountains by the military in 1995. After Congress failed to pass an Indian rights bill the rebels had advocated, they set up 'autonomous municipalities' that reject government aid. The rebels who appeared with Marcos did not look like a formidable fighting force. Several were teen-agers. One woman carried a crippled chicken that Marcos had adopted as a mascot and dubbed Penguin, because he waddles like one. Of the 24 armed rebels, only a handful carried automatic rifles. Some cynical political analysts have said Marcos wants to distance his movement and other hard-line leftists from Mr. López Obrador to help the former mayor with moderate voters. Others have said Marcos's true aim is to restore to power the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the authoritarian machine that ruled Mexico for seven decades, to revive his fading rebellion by reviving its nemesis. (On Saturday, Marcos called the idea 'a story to fool idiots.') Still others say Marcos's call for a broad movement reflects a widespread disappointment with left-leaning politicians throughout Latin America, who have become enmeshed in the sort of corruption scandals they once criticized. 'What they are saying represents a trend in Latin America, which is that people have lost faith in political parties,' said Peter M. Rosset, an expert in agricultural policy who attended the meeting on Sunday. 'The basic feeling is that the political class is all the same.' That sentiment was expressed over and over here in San Miguel, a former 15,000-acre ranch that the Zapatistas seized in 1994 and divided among former Indian ranch hands. 'This movement, for me, its historic,' said Arturo Guzmán González, a 29-year-old singer who did a version a cappella of his protest song, 'Manifestarse.' 'It has a moral base, this movement. They seek the words of everyone.' Words there were aplenty. Rebellion was celebrated. Violence against homosexuals was decried. The mainstream media was derided as untrustworthy. The evils of capitalism were roundly criticized, while the virtues of socialism, communal farming, organic foods, same-sex marriage and human rights were expounded at length. Some participants grew tired of waiting to speak and left early. A few questioned how they were to change the Constitution without forming a political party. Several despaired at all the high-sounding speeches. 'We need more concrete proposals,' said Claudia Ledesma, of the Society of Popular Organized Alternatives, who had gently suggested the formation of committees to study issues. 'If not, we run the risk of losing ourselves in the words, or in an illusion.'

Subject: Kick-Back Cuisine in a Stylish City From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 07:04:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/dining/31sant.html August 31, 2005 Kick-Back Cuisine in a Stylish City By R. W. APPLE Jr. SANTA BARBARA, Calif. NO one would dream of describing this resolutely easygoing seaside community, which likes to call itself the American Riviera, as one of the nation's (or even California's) cutting-edge restaurant towns. It has nothing even half as glam as Thomas Keller's French Laundry, up the coast in the Napa Valley, or Wolfgang Puck's Spago, down the coast in Beverly Hills. There are plenty of celebrities underfoot, but they make their living in the movies and on television, not pounding pots and pans. So don't come to Santa Barbara in search of foie gras or caviar. Don't come looking for swagged and spangled dining rooms. But you can have a dandy time eating and drinking here. The fabulous fish and shellfish of the Pacific, the abundance of California's farms and ranches and the fine wines produced in the Santa Ynez Valley and the Santa Rita Hills are all close at hand. They make their way to backyard cookouts, into beachfront picnics and onto the menus of the comfortable, California-casual restaurants Santa Barbara favors. The real local specialty, however, is hangouts. Santa Barbara has them by the dozens, and everyone in town, children as well as adults, has a favorite. Julia Child, who spent her final years in the lush, carefully manicured enclave of Montecito, at the eastern end of Santa Barbara, was no exception. Through her frequent patronage, she made a tiny taqueria called La Super-Rica locally famous, and deservedly so. When my wife, Betsey, and I came to call on her shortly before her death, she took us to Lucky's, a Montecito roadhouse whose sign actually says 'Steaks/Chops/Seafood.' The food there was nothing extraordinary, but it was plenty good enough for the grande dame of American cuisine, as long as she could have one of her beloved turtle sundaes, with a great molten crown of hot fudge, caramel and nuts. This time, we popped into several of our friends' haunts, and none disappointed us. Not the Shoreline Beach Café, where you eat pancakes made from batter laced with orange juice, or roast ahi tuna tacos, with the sand between your toes, or D'Angelo bakery, whose huevos rancheros are as good as its baguettes, or Freebirds, with gloriously gooey burritos, approximately the size and heft of artillery shells, which were described by my 10-year-old pal Jack Ross as 'absolutely the best fast food in California.' Cheers for the Tupelo Junction Cafe, whose andouille and chicken hash, smoky bacon and crunchy cinnamon apple beignets bring a hint of Dixie to the Pacific. Run by a former competitive surfer, Amy Jeschke, it must lead the local clean-plate derby. And for Mi Fiesta, a tiny Mexican grocery in nearby Carpinteria, where Ruthie Hunter, an ebullient Californian of our acquaintance, used to buy candy as a schoolgirl. Now it makes tacos filled with amazingly moist and tender spiced chicken, spiked with tomatoes, onions and cilantro. 'Oh my God,' Ms. Hunter exclaimed, flinging her arms into the air as we ate at a plastic table on the sidewalk outside. 'I love this so!' We'll return whenever we get the chance to McConnell's, which sells butterfat-rich Island Coconut, Turkish Coffee and Russian Nesselrode ice creams and proudly displays a fan letter from a onetime Santa Barbara resident named Ronald Reagan. And to La Super-Rica, a humble turquoise-painted shack where people line up all day long, every day of the year. The tortillas there are filled with crisp-edged pork or tri-tip steak or melted cheese while still hot from the iron. The tamales are stuffed with corn, onions, chayote and pasilla peppers. This is Mex-Mex food, not Tex-Mex. La Super-Rica serves no chips and dips, and it is not a place where the same four ingredients are combined in 40 ways. Each item has its own texture and spices, and all taste of care and pride. Poised prettily on a narrow, south-facing strip of land between the Santa Ynez Mountains and the sea, with a mild climate all year long, Santa Barbara grew up around a mission church, rebuilt in 1820 after an earthquake. It still stands, with two stumpy, dome-topped bell towers and a classic-style facade divided by six pink Ionic pilasters. This is really three towns in one: an old-style California beach resort of funky motels and train whistles and pockets of ramshackle housing; an affluent community of splendid and sometimes baronial houses; and a downtown of faux-Spanish stucco buildings with red-tile roofs, largely built after a devastating earthquake in 1925. Many of the latter are filled today with discreetly identified outlets of retail chains like Starbucks and Borders, in addition to local businesses. Downtown also boasts an excellent small art museum that recently featured a show of Greta Garbo's favorite photographs of herself, and a magnificent county courthouse (1929) lavishly decorated with stenciled beams, colorful tiles and murals. Santa Barbara owes much of its character to laws restricting its growth and limiting the height of its buildings to four stories. More than 400 species of trees grow here, including palms from five continents, along with a multitude of flowers - jasmine, hibiscus, bougainvillea, magnolias, agapanthus and exotic, pendulous daturas. Spending an hour or so at the exemplary Saturday morning farmers' market downtown, you find yourself surrounded by food-savvy folk. The aroma of blackish-red Camarosa strawberries intoxicated us, but Mary Wellington, an organic-farming advocate who showed us around, advised that we wait to buy until we spotted another variety called Chandler. 'Much better flavor,' she said, and she had a point. Eying piles of ripe peaches, another customer asked, 'When will the O'Henrys come in?' On one stand we found tiny purple artichokes of the kind the Romans fry whole. On another we found purslane, which the French mix into salads, as well as Mexican epazote and shahi - peppery Persian cress - all raised by a young farmer named B. D. Dautch. Another grower, Jacob Grant, offered edamame beans in the pod, a sugarloaf-shape green radicchio and a show-stopping Roman Candle tomato. But nothing quite matched Shu Takikawa's brunia and deer tongue lettuces, so flawless they could have come from a Flemish still-life. 'You use them for centerpieces,' the woman standing next to me said, not wholly in jest. 'You don't eat them.' What you don't find at the farmers' market, you'll probably find at Lazy Acres, a locally owned, environmentally correct supermarket that stocks hundreds of cheeses, a dozen butters and pampered, good-looking produce, 70 percent of it from Santa Barbara County. If it's the fruit of the sea you crave, instead of the fruit of local orchards, you might want to call on Don Disraeli at Kanaloa Seafood. In addition to many items imported from the Atlantic, and tuna from as far afield as Indonesia, Fiji and the Marshall Islands, he sells rock crab, spiny lobster, swordfish, Pacific halibut, wild salmon, white bass, sand dabs and petrale sole from the Left Coast. But no Santa Barbara spot prawns, which are featured on fish-house menus up and down California. Why not? I asked. A Ph.D. in biology with an intense interest in sustainable fisheries, Mr. Disraeli explained that a change in fishing regulations several years ago had made the Santa Barbara spot prawn a misnomer. Spot prawns there are, he added, 'but these days they come from someplace else, maybe Monterey or Alaska.' Among the city's leading restaurants is the bistro-esque Bouchon (no kin to Thomas Keller's Napa Valley spot), where Betsey and I ate a couple of well-made dishes based on farmers' market produce - a chowder incorporating potatoes, corn, mushrooms and lobster, and a blackberry and nectarine cobbler - and tasted several of Santa Barbara County's best wines, including an apricot-inflected 2004 Kunin viognier and a firm, wonderfully balanced 2003 Brewer-Clifton Cargasacchi pinot noir. Pity only 3,120 bottles of the latter were made. Citronelle, the oceanfront sibling of Michel Richard's Citronelle in Washington; Downey's, a rather more formal place than most in Santa Barbara; and the Wine Cask, an outgrowth of the city's best wine shop, also have distinguished lists of Santa Barbara County wines that are seldom available elsewhere, even in California. Another contender will no doubt be the Stonehouse Restaurant at San Ysidro Ranch in the hills above the city, where Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were married in 1940, and John and Jacqueline Kennedy spent a week's honeymoon in 1953. The restaurant is now closed for a multimillion-dollar renovation ordered by its owner, Ty Warner, the Beanie Baby tycoon. For the moment, the hot dining spots in these parts are L'Ombretta, a Venetian-style wine-bar-cum-restaurant, a block off the main drag, and the Hitching Post II, a steakhouse in Buellton, an hour north, which played a supporting role in 'Sideways.' In Venice, people meet at taverns like Ca' d'Oro for an ombra or ombretta - a 'shadow,' or glass of wine - and sometimes a few cicchetti - small plates of food. Hence the name of Andrea Gros's cozy place here, which is decorated with the striped jerseys traditionally worn by gondoliers, including Mr. Gros's father. He offers 250 wines, 150 of them by the glass, mostly from northeast Italy. Try something from Jermann or Kante while you nibble boar prosciutto, anchovies marinated in vinegar, sweet-and-sour sardines, crab, superbly roasted peppers, eggplant and cipollini (the farmers' market again), tiramisù and a grandmotherly pear tart. All first-rate. Up the road at the Hitching Post, in wine country, the warmly welcoming Frank Ostini grills prime Iowa or Nebraska beef over red oak logs aged for six months, including a bone-in beef chop almost as succulent as the côte de boeuf served in Paris bistros. His thrice-cooked French fries were picked by The Los Angeles Times as the best in Southern California. Since 'Sideways,' you can hardly get into the joint, and Mr. Ostini sells a lot more local pinot noir - his own excellent Hartley Ostini bottlings as well as others'. He indulged us with a rare tasting of his 1989, 2001, 2002 and 2003 vintages. Good wine is nothing new in Santa Barbara County. Jim Clendenen, based in the Santa Maria Valley, has been turning out premium pinot noir and other varieties for a couple of decades under the Au Bon Climat label. Robert N. Lindquist, with whom he shares production and storage facilities, has been making classy Qupé Rhone-style wine for much of the same time. But attention has focused since 2001 on Santa Rita Hills, a new appellation at the western extremity of the Santa Ynez Valley. Because the valley runs east and west, fog and sea breezes waft in from the Pacific, providing a cool microclimate ideal for pinot noir and chardonnay. Similar conditions prevail in other West Coast zones that produce outstanding pinot, like the Willamette Valley in Oregon; the Russian River, Anderson Valley and Carneros areas north of San Francisco; and the Santa Maria Valley. Richard Sanford, a traumatized Vietnam veteran looking, as he told me, 'for a way to reconnect with reality,' pioneered winemaking in the Santa Rita Hills, putting his Berkeley training in geography to work in choosing the sites for Sanford & Benedict Vineyard, planted in 1970, and Sanford Winery, founded in 1981. Many of today's leading Santa Barbara County producers, including Mr. Ostini and Mr. Clendenen, buy some of their grapes from Sanford & Benedict. So does Jenne Lee Bonaccorsi, who has added further luster to the brand started by her late husband, Michael, the widely respected sommelier at Spago before his sudden death early last year at 43. Other important small producers are Fiddlehead, Babcock, Sea Smoke and Brewer-Clifton. Many make their wines in rented space in a warehouse behind a big Home Depot outlet in Lompoc, known in the trade as 'the ghetto.' Styles vary, but all the Santa Rita pinot noirs share the family traits of dark color and earthy flavors. Kathy Joseph of Fiddlehead, who started in Santa Rita back in 1989, said, 'Our cool little pocket enables us to make consistent and concentrated wines that age well and develop considerable finesse.' Pinot fans are beginning to discover them, and plantings are increasing rapidly. The question, as Mr. Clendenen asked, is whether things are evolving too rapidly, and whether some of the newly cultivated land lies 'in windswept areas that will prove to be a little too cold for wine grapes, even pinot noir grapes.'

Subject: A Turnaround Specialist From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 05:54:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/business/worldbusiness/31place.html August 31, 2005 A Turnaround Specialist With an Unusual Strategy By HEATHER TIMMONS LONDON - A former chairman of Allied Domecq is shaking up the London market's summer doldrums with an unorthodox buyout attempt. The executive, Sir Gerry Robinson, who is known as a turnaround specialist, said Tuesday that his new firm, Raphoe Management, was speaking to investors and management at Rentokil Initial, a poorly performing office services company, about an unsolicited takeover. Private equity firms have been making the bulk of the takeovers in Britain over the last few years, and then selling those companies back to institutional investors at prices that are 'significantly higher,' Sir Gerry said in an interview. Sir Gerry plans to use Raphoe to take over companies but says he intends to keep them public. He says he will oust some of the top management and turn the company around himself. Investors will benefit when the stock price rises, and they may receive some cash when Raphoe takes control of the company. Institutional investors are 'getting fed up,' he said, because they do not benefit from a traditional turnaround. They are balking at buying the higher-priced companies back from private equity sellers, he said. Raphoe plans to make 'changes happen in companies that the shareholders own, in a way that will be exciting to them and obviously rewarding for me,' Sir Gerry said. Sir Gerry looked at Rentokil after he was approached by shareholders looking for a change, he said last week when Raphoe announced plans to consider a bid. The term hostile has 'dreadful connotations,' he said, but should not. 'In truth, it is just a straightforward offer to a group of people who own something, which says, 'Look, wouldn't it be better if you did this?' ' Sir Gerry earned his turnaround reputation by restoring Coca-Cola's British division and the television company Granada, among others, to profitability, but he sealed his notoriety by starring in 'I'll Show Them Who's Boss,' a BBC television program that ran in 2003 and 2004. On the show, he doled out advice to small, sometimes family-run, businesses, that often involved kicking out the chief and installing one of the company's other employees to run the shop. His suggestions were not always followed or appreciated by the recipients, but his approach proved popular with audiences. 'I'd like to see Robinson let loose on the Royal Family,' Nancy Banks-Smith, a television critic at The Guardian, wrote in 2004. Sir Gerry, who was born in the Irish village Donegal, is the ninth of 10 children. He sums up his management style in simple homilies, like stressing clarity. 'It's amazing how often people don't actually know what they are trying to achieve,' he said. 'It is very important to lay out very clearly what it is you are trying to do and what means success and what means failure.' He is dismissive of other executives' reliance on consultants. 'If you are in the business, and you don't know what your key issues are, then what the devil are you doing there?' he asks. Rentokil, which has more than 90,000 employees and provides businesses with a variety of things, like office cleaning and security, toilet paper and pest control, could probably use some advice. The company ousted its longtime chief, Sir Clive Thompson, in May 2004, after a nearly two-decade run of double-digit profit growth stalled. Rentokil's new management has failed to stem the downturn. Rentokil announced a 44 percent decline in profit last week, citing increased competition in the industry. The company's chief executive, Doug Flynn, a former manager at the News Corporation, said at that time that he had no plans to break the company up to defend it against Sir Gerry's possible bid, and asked shareholders to be patient. Under Sir Clive, Rentokil was 'run to very short-term goals,' Mr. Flynn said. 'The necessary action has commenced' to fix the company's problems, Mr. Flynn told investors. Actions include focusing on its washroom and pest control businesses and bringing in new people. 'It will take some time,' he said. Investors are divided about whether Sir Gerry is the medicine Rentokil needs, or even if he can make a deal. The company's stock price jumped when he said he might try a hostile takeover, but it drifted back down during the week. Several analysts in London downgraded the company's stock after the earnings report on Aug. 25. The brokerage house Panmure Gordon told institutional investors on Aug. 25 that the market was assuming Sir Gerry's bid had a one in three chance of success. But, the brokerage house said, 'his odds were probably higher.' If Rentokil asks the British Takeover Panel, a regulatory body that governs mergers, to intervene, the panel may give Sir Gerry as little as six weeks to make an offer. Sir Gerry says obtaining the cash to make a bid for the company, which has a market capitalization of $5 billion, will not be a problem. 'The truth is that when something makes sense, I have never ever discovered the money to be the issue,' he said.

Subject: A Quest to Save a Tree From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 05:42:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/international/americas/30rosewood.html?ex=1283054400&en=9cdab997cdbeb516&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 30, 2005 A Quest to Save a Tree, and Make the World Smell Sweet By LARRY ROHTER SILVES, Brazil - Until the perfume Chanel No. 5 went on the market in 1921, pau rosa, or Brazilian rosewood, was just another tree that grew in abundance in the Amazon. But the enduring popularity of that fragrance, which includes rosewood oil as a main ingredient, began a process that has led to a black-market trade in the oil, and the tree itself being designated an endangered species. Worldwide, the demand for perfumes, soaps, balms and scented candles has skyrocketed in recent years, helped by rising incomes among women and New Age trends like aromatherapy. Because of rosewood's cachet, demand for the oil far outstrips the legal supply, and some fragrance manufacturers will pay just about anything to get their hands on it. 'That bouquet is unmatchable, and it makes people act strangely,' said Paulo Tarso de Sampaio, co-author of the book 'Bio-Diversity in the Amazon' and a scientist at the National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus. 'Intense exploitation means that all the areas where there was easy access to rosewood have just about been leveled, but still the demand continues to grow.' The European companies, mainly French, that dominate the fragrance industry originally obtained their stocks of rosewood oil from French Guiana, 500 miles northeast of here. But when the exploitation there grew so intense that the tree was virtually wiped out, they turned next to the Brazilian Amazon. But by the late 1980's, the rosewood population in Brazil's eastern Amazon had also been eradicated. Alarmed, Brazil's environmental protection agency responded by putting rosewood on its list of endangered species. The measure was meant to stop the plunder. But with the agency unable to enforce its prohibition, much of the rosewood trade went underground, pushing prices up and forcing companies like Phebo, Brazil's oldest soap manufacturer, to look for lower-cost synthetic substitutes, which are imported from places like China. 'Rosewood soap continues to account for half our sales, but we had to stop using the real thing around 1990,' said Roberto Lima, manager of the company's plant in Belém, at the mouth of the Amazon. 'We sell nearly four times as much soap as we did back then, but the scarcity of the natural extract has pushed the price to a level that only the big companies overseas can afford.' What happens after drums of the fragrant oil leave mills in the Amazon for export is not always clear. Environmental groups say much of the oil is routed through a handful of brokers, many based in the New York area. But those intermediaries are reluctant to talk about how they obtain the product and how they manage to comply with the Brazilian government's strict regulations. According to academic and industry studies, legal rosewood oil production in Brazil today is barely one-tenth of its peak in the late 1960's, when annual output was 300 tons. The number of registered mills, which turn rosewood tree trunks into oil through an inefficient process that seems to devour trees, has also fallen drastically, from more than 50 in the 1940's to fewer than 8 now. About six years ago, though, a community group in this small island town in the middle of the Amazon River began an effort to try to revive the industry, this time on a sustainable basis. Rather than simply cut down trees and haul away their trunks, the group, Avive, decided to prune branches and leaves every five years or so, thereby extending the usefulness of individual rosewood trees for decades. Today the project's members, most of them peasant women, have planted and are tending more than 3,000 rosewood saplings in the heart of the jungle. They also distill rosewood oil and manufacture about 1,000 bars of soap a month at a small plant here. 'My husband used to work at one of the mills, and there they take out the tree and leave nothing in its place,' said Anete de Souza Canto, a leader of the group. 'Not us. I'm 47 years old and have five daughters, so I'm thinking of the future.' The group has also begun harvesting other exotic fragrances from trees for soaps and salves, always taking care to replace what they take. 'Everything that smells good, we're planting,' Márcio João Neves da Batista, a 25-year-old who operates the distillery that boils leaves and branches into oil, said proudly. But Avive's task has not proved easy. Jungle lots the government has placed under the group's care have been razed, with invaders simply cutting down and hauling away trunks from mature trees standing as tall as 100 feet. According to Mr. Sampaio, the concentration of oil in rosewood leaves can be twice as much as that in the trunk. But larger volumes of branches and leaves are needed to produce the same amount of oil, and since that requires extra labor, it is more convenient and profitable for scofflaw lumberjacks and mill operators alike to stick to the old, predatory system. Higher labor and operating costs also mean a higher price for the finished product. Middlemen have balked at paying that premium so long as illegal supplies are still available, but some users say they would gladly buy the environmentally friendly rosewood oil if only it were made available to them. 'The ideal thing would be to use the natural oil obtained from branches and leaves, because it's good for nature and good for the consumer,' said Mr. Lima, the soap plant manager. 'Besides the marketing appeal of having a product that is ecologically correct, if we could get a steady supply of the natural oil, we wouldn't have to import the essence from abroad, which only adds to our costs and brings no benefits to our region.'

Subject: Question for Johnny5 From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 13:35:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny, You raised an interesting concept in Maureen's posting. I don't agree with Maureen but I do want to raise a topic of discussion with you on this concept you have raised. I believe there are two theoretical concepts here: 1. The concept that money isn't everything and that in our pursuit of money we have neglected social issues such as decent holiday, or medical insurance, etc, etc 2. The concept that the ever growing costs of social issues will someday swamp our limited resources and drown our economies (as may have happened in some European countries). By focusing on ensuring improved wealth, we will have enough money in the future to solve any growing social costs as they arrive. Which way should we follow? I don't know the answer to this question and would appreciate your comments and a discussion point.

Subject: David Hume From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 03:14:20 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: <<1. The concept that money isn't everything and that in our pursuit of money we have neglected social issues such as decent holiday, or medical insurance, etc, etc>> You are not a capitalist Mik? I know many people that frame the world in terms of US dollars - it is what Ms. Dowd has just done. Indians used to frame transactions in terms of BEADS - but that was a mistake later on for them as they traded away thier resources for beads. I know computer folks who frame number systems in base 8, base 2, and base 10. Framing the world only in dollars is dangerous - greenspan recently told a congressmen who asked why greenspan couldn't print more money to fix the problems that he could print massive amounts of money - but could not gaurantee thier purchasing power - see even our leaders in the USA only think in terms of US MONEY - dangerous. These folks have not acquired basic economic fundamentals - the congressman who made that mistake needed to be exiled from congress until he took some basic economic courses. Greenspan just said that many professional economists get so tied down to thier models - and the real world and the models are perhaps not in the best of agreement. They frame things in easy to understand macro concepts - but the devil is always in the details no? I meet many kids in college who have been sold the memes that they must make lots of US dollars or they will not be happy. Our media and corporate advertisers have sold the children and thier parents the ideas of more and more consumerism - bigger houses, 600 dollar jeans, bigger cars, IMAGE is everything type marketing - they feel like total failures if they cannot keep up with the joneses - read this link for more. http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21611347&srchtxt=PRESSURE PARENTS These are the folks that may accumulate many dollars and possessions that build IMAGE - things that may not be worth very much in the future - read here: http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=21464045 People need to think in terms of wants and needs and global supplies and demands. I need tea time with friends and a 2 hour nap in the middle of the day. I need time to build community and long lasting friendships - a society that pushes me to work 80 hours a week does not really allow for me to do this. <<2. The concept that the ever growing costs of social issues will someday swamp our limited resources and drown our economies (as may have happened in some European countries). By focusing on ensuring improved wealth, we will have enough money in the future to solve any growing social costs as they arrive. >> Look, I grew up on a farm, and if you have a lot of land, and many farm kids working your land, then when you get old you can sit down, and each of your kids can give you a spare bit of corn at the end of the work week and you can eat and not be a producer and maybe your kids will give you some food for helping them as children - in the past in America there were like 25 workers to every non worker, in the future there will only be like 2 to every non worker I read - there just wont be enough - so you say AHA johnny5 - but now we have machines and they can do the work of the 25 - that is true - but how much productivity can we attribute to machines in the future? Are new nano technologies and bioscience going to fundamentally alter things? I read in history that as things got bad in old Russia the farmers ate plentiful while the city folk starved to death clutching thier gold coins wondering why they were starving to death with all these gold coins in thier pocket. They framed the world in terms of gold coins - not food and water. I just watched special on Cspan - they are touting ethanol as an alternative energy source - now maybe I am wrong, but if you think in terms of inputs and outputs - aren't most of the food crops in america possible because of abundances of oil? And without plentiful oil you can't grow the levels of food crops we have in the world today? Phosphates and nitrogen - is there an abundance? It is like emma posted about Jared Diamond, we have to set the baseline of our society to what is sustainable. <> Whatever way you follow, don't be like the dumb US congressman and think only in terms of MONEY or currencies - think in terms of inputs and outputs - peoples wants and needs - what will people want in 20 years, what will they need - will technology and innovation and productivity be able to provide it for the numbers of people projected? I want slow relaxing days, to NOT have to work 80 hour weeks til I am 80, time enough to ENJOY all the great wonders of the world and our technology. A society where I can TURN OFF the cell phone for weeks if I want too and just sit on the beach and catch a fish. I decided to let other people work 80 hour work weeks to have big house, big new car, 600 dollar jeans, heroin addictions - etc etc - I dont need any of that. However my neighbor next door - wants new cars, new 600 dollar jeans, wants to go to the casino every weekend and blow lots of money - this is his fun - he does not like going to the library and reading free books. He needs ACTION to stay happy - hehe. Our friend Pete Weis, he is talking about getting on a boat and living on the ocean, he really wants to get away from it all - hehe. All these different wants and needs. What should governments do? Bush shows you he takes long holidays to relax, our workers should also do the same no? Of course this whole perspective comes from my experiences - what do the poor in africa care for these ideas - they just want to know they can get a nice meal tomorrow no? What do you think Mik? Is making a lot of dollars in the future and working many hours every week something we should aim for as a society? Are high prices in oil going to make the proper adjustments in a good amount of time - adjustments that a central authority perhaps could have made earlier? I read about parents in China who move to polluted cities from nice pollution free villages so thier children can get education and jobs - and they say to the parents, yes, but your child will die young from lung cancer and have much higher levels of stress - the parents so OH WELL - at least the child will have an education and a job - so what is more important - living 90 years on a clean farm or 50 years in a dirty city? Some people think 80 hour work weeks and lots of green paper in your bank is happiness - I just don't agree.

Subject: You missed one big issue - Health From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 11:08:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Yep you missed one big issue - Health. Yes, yes living on a farm has some wonderful health perspectives, relatively low stress, good clean air, etc, etc... yet 80 to 90% of the developed world's population live in cities and live longer and perhaps happier lives than our farming ancestors. In fact if we all went back to the farms, there would be no room for everyone to have a plot of land. Forever growing societies, cities are the most efficient place to live. Hhhmm but what if we decided not to have as many children, you know keep the population low. Well we can't exactly turn back the clock. Where was I? Oh yes, health. In the early 1900's there was a Great Canadian who invented a cure for diabetes (insulin as we know it today). He literally saved millions of lives and improved the quality for millions more. What was really impressive is that he decided not to allow big business to capitalise on his invention simply because poor people would not be able to afford insulin. Again, pretty impressive, but those days of cheap cures are gone. In fact we have a very interesting world now. New and very expensive cures are being found for diseases I didn't even know existed. (Put Bush's special deal with the drug companies aside for a moment). In Canada we have some very modest communities who don't splurge on much. They don't buy those expensive jeans, they don't want to keep up with the 'Joneses' but they do ask that their health care be covered. And Canada has a super health care system... that it can't afford. Yep the tax money from those small communities would never cover their health care costs. For all the bulk buying and special discount deals, they still can't afford the exotic expensive treatments. People with odd diseases are demanding government assistance and it is a very Canadian tradition to provide that medical assistance. Luckily Canada is a relatively rich country and can afford far more than most countries in the world. Now let's go to Ethiopia for a short while. 80% of the population live the simple life in rural areas. The have a very low density of roads and there are communities that live literally cut off from the rest of the world. Perhaps your ideal environment, but definitely not mine… give me that pollution to fill my lungs, he he. Ethiopia is moving up in this world. They are growing economically at an impressive pace. They have not reached a level where they will be obsessed with name brands, just yet. But they are obsessed with ensuring the health of their country is above a base level. You know - low infant mortality, improved life expectancy to say 60 years of age. But they can't afford that. Nope they have to rely on the help of countries like Canada for medical assistance. Hhhmm Canada is having problems with its own medical assistance and yet Ethiopia must also rely on Canadian aid? We definitely have a problem here. So put aside the costly material things in life. Put aside the Starbucks coffee and concentrate alone on the medical issue. An issue that is growing well beyond our means of affordability. Especially in an aging society (Canada) or a dirt poor society (Ethiopia). Economics is by definition, the study of how people best use their resources. Well when you have one facet of life that is dragging the resource allocation - what do you do? We come back to the topic of 'money'. Yes that topic you don't like. Ever since the days of Jesus Christ we have had a problem with money. But again - what allows Canada to be 10 steps ahead of Ethiopia in looking after the health of its people. Money. What may some day drown Canada as its society grows older and the demand for new cures grows.... lack of money. What should we so about it? I can't answer the question but it appears to come back to the two topics of conversation, and with all due respect your response may have sort of answered the questions. But it appears to fall short of the health issue. So let me ask again in a different way. What position should a country take: 1. Neglect the potential of health costs sky rocketing as we progress and become older and try find cures for things such as “Lupos”, after all this is only scare mongering and we should concentrate on those important things such as going back to basics. 2. Focus on our economic position anticipating the ever looming cost increases. Now I know what one can say here: The richer we make ourselves the more expensive the health costs will become (supply and demand). However, look at Ethiopia – there are so many medications they simply cannot afford. They have a population of approx. 100 million people. We can’t even begin to imagine how many of their population suffer from “Lupos” (as an example). Yet in Canada with a population of 30 million we are going out of our way with expensive research to find a cure for that tiny portion of the population that suffers from Lupos. So let me put the question to you again, but in a different light: Which path should we follow: 1. The concept that money isn't everything and that in our pursuit of money we have neglected social issues such as ensuring MEDICAL cover for everyone even for unique-little-known-diseases (such as Lupos) 2. The concept that the ever growing costs of social issues will someday swamp our limited resources and drown our economies (as may have happened in some European countries AND may happen in Canada). By focusing on ensuring improved wealth, we will have enough money in the future to solve any growing social costs as they arrive. Comments?

Subject: Culture of Life From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 23:07:08 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Yes my grandfather lived to his upper 90's working on his farm, he had freshly grown fruits and vegetables he grew himself - strong body and brain til just a couple years before he died. I meet people in the cities, from my personal experience they do not seem as happy as I remember my farmer grandfather - much more stressed. < In fact if we all went back to the farms, there would be no room for everyone to have a plot of land.> Mik the laws of nature dictate there is only so much matter and energy close by to sustain a certain number of people - we can either plan for this with central gubbments or let the self correcting parts of nature do the work for us - one may involve much loss and suffering. Studies were published years ago by scientists that New Orleans was going to be a catastrophe because it was beneath sea level and in hurricane alley - well looks like lots of people have to die before anyone will start listening to the scientists. Market forces failed those citizens if you view thier lives as something that should have been saved, a central gubbment perhaps could have saved them. I do not agree, very large cities stress me to the point I am so wound up I cannot function or even think straight. As I said before the russian city slickers with gold died while the farmers with crops lived. < Hhhmm but what if we decided not to have as many children, you know keep the population low. Well we can't exactly turn back the clock. > Either we will control our growth or nature will control it for us. One way involved gnashing of teeth - one way does not. One way listens to scientists saying there will be rivers of blood in new orleans unless we do something - the other way I have to watch babies starve to death because someone said we can't reset the clock and build new orleans somewhere else above sea level. Funny, being a diabetic myself, I don't feel like it is a cheap part of my life. I ate too many twinkies and didn't work the farm enough - city living really hurt my health - all my cousins still on the farm don't have it - imagine that? I will probably die much younger than them - probably related to diabetic complications - hehe. I am still stuck on diabetes - something my farm working cousins do not have. < (Put Bush's special deal with the drug companies aside for a moment). In Canada we have some very modest communities who don't splurge on much. They don't buy those expensive jeans, they don't want to keep up with the 'Joneses' but they do ask that their health care be covered. And Canada has a super health care system... that it can't afford. Yep the tax money from those small communities would never cover their health care costs. For all the bulk buying and special discount deals, they still can't afford the exotic expensive treatments. People with odd diseases are demanding government assistance and it is a very Canadian tradition to provide that medical assistance. Luckily Canada is a relatively rich country and can afford far more than most countries in the world. > I watched a movie called the barbarian invasions about cananda and healthcare - the guy in the end pumped heroin into his veins - why did he leave such a great country in such a way? The internet and satellite can fix this without having to make them turkeys in a turkey farm like a metro city does to people. Pete weis can talk to you from his boat where he catches fish from and not be cut off from you just because he is not in a big turkey farm city. < Perhaps your ideal environment, but definitely not mine… give me that pollution to fill my lungs, he he. > You can have it, all those MBTE's and such floating around in the cities with all thier machines and factories and pollution that kill people - no thanks - Pete Weis has decided to get away from it all - what does he know he isn't telling the rest of us? hehe I just read this article - check it out - it adresses some things you talk about Mik http://allafrica.com/stories/200508310274.html A culture of FOOD - they even mention those USSR folks I have talked about. Too good to eat quaker oats - HAHA - BWAHAHA - stop me - I cant stop laughing - what a funny article. Either we use our scientists to make good central planning or nature will bring much gnashing of teeth - one way seems smart to me - the other really fuggn dumb. Most assuredly. Will we eat our cattle down to thier hooves like Emma posted about? They can let prices decide to tell them how to use them, or they can listen at scientists and use them a different way - I like the scientist option myself - sometimes dumb market participants and prices are not necessarily the best way - but don't tell Kudlow that - hehe. Listen at the scientists and smartie types and have the gubbment implement thier recommendations before much gnashing of teeth?? Capitalists that believe in the market being the one true god may not like this idea though. To think a few scientists can out-think the market and all its agents is just not possible to them. I read tipping point, I understand that sometimes markets are very efficient, but I look around me and wonder if sometimes they aren't? Money is great, it serves a useful purpose to help direct where we need to invest time and energy - but there are people who only think in MONEY like that congressmen - and then he says dumb things to alan greenspan like - 'cant you just print more money to fix the problems?' < Ever since the days of Jesus Christ we have had a problem with money. > In my bible jesus went into the temple and overturned the tables of the money changers didn't he? I saw a special on Animal Planet - this male monkey went and got a banana and gave it to a female monkey for sex - this monkey society had basic barter systems in it - the male monkeys would trade bananas for sex - what is the oldest profession in the world? HAHA. If the demand for new cures grows, maybe someone will meet it - I know in star trek Dr. mccoy's father was dying - so he discovered the cure to help his father live more - not out of money - but love for his dad. I see your point though, I know lots of doctors that go into the profession not to help thier mom and dad live longer better lives, but to have a new porsche. <1. Neglect the potential of health costs sky rocketing as we progress and become older and try find cures for things such as “Lupos”, after all this is only scare mongering and we should concentrate on those important things such as going back to basics. > Dont think in terms of money, think in terms of human suffering, people dont want to die, they dont want to hurt either, seems to me the guy in Barbarian Invasion found the solution - OD on Heroin - seems like a painless way to go out happy. http://www.ogrish.com/archives/fatal_shot_of_heroin_in_boston_Aug_30_2005.html Cost is irrelevant to you when you are facing death - it just no longer has meaning from what I see. <2. Focus on our economic position anticipating the ever looming cost increases.> Economic position? More resources to help with your meeting with the grim reaper? How do I help MIK face his meeting with the grim reaper - give him lots of MONEY? nope - cant buy off the grim reaper - but maybe more science, more research, no matter the cost, maybe then I can delay Miks meeting with the grim reaper. Notice how overvalued our drug companies are as a sector - there is a reason for this I think - and as we get more old people - they will trade in GM and Ford for merck and pfizer. Terri has told you look at healthcare. Richer? In what way? more MONEY, print more dollars? Or richer in knowledge and research? Health COSTS have no meaning to me, when I am about to die I will do ANYTHING if I could get more life - watch the movie BLADE RUNNER for more introspection on this issue. Remember what Roy Batty says in that movie at the end - he is not talking about MONEY with the god of BIO SCIENCE - he is talking about knowledge and research and cell deaths and life extensions - it has transcended mere MONEY. Money is just some economists means to an end. < However, look at Ethiopia – there are so many medications they simply cannot afford.> They could not develop them themselves, but now that the knowledge is out there, what is to stop them from robbing the technology? If we give them that knowledge, then maybe they can help research other new knowledge we have not discovered. Protection of property rights make many economists happy, but what if one guy is so smart he gets all the stocks and bonds in the world and all the patents - then the rest of us do not want to protect property rights anymore do we? hehe < They have a population of approx. 100 million people. We can’t even begin to imagine how many of their population suffer from “Lupos” (as an example). Yet in Canada with a population of 30 million we are going out of our way with expensive research to find a cure for that tiny portion of the population that suffers from Lupos. > The knowledge is more important than the money no? When you say EXPENSIVE - you are thinking in terms of MONEY I think - that is not the right way to think about it. You will die someday MIK if you dont figure out how to stop cell death - so why are you studying economics and not bio science? You are committing suicide in a sense no? Ok but I am already getting confused. <1. The concept that money isn't everything and that in our pursuit of money we have neglected social issues such as ensuring MEDICAL cover for everyone even for unique-little-known-diseases (such as Lupos) > I thought I had made this clear many times, all the episodes of star trek I watch I never saw kirk pay spock for doing some research on the next problem the enterprise had, I never saw Dr. Mccoy stress that he didn't have more time to play Holo Deck Golf because he was always researching new cures for his people. The federation didn't do things for MONEY - that wasn't until later and the Ferengi came along. Latinum - hehe. Mik I worked at IBM as long as it was fun and exciting and I thought I was doing something useful, when it was not fun to me anymore and I felt no use and the corporate bullshit started stressing me I quit, leaving lots of money. Now no ferengi in his right mind would leave all that money I left, I am a fool eh? <2. The concept that the ever growing costs of social issues will someday swamp our limited resources and drown our economies (as may have happened in some European countries AND may happen in Canada). By focusing on ensuring improved wealth, we will have enough money in the future to solve any growing social costs as they arrive. > NO NO NO MIK, you still thinking in terms of MONEY, STOP THAT - go watch blade runner, go watch some star trek, STOP thinking in MONEY, start thinking in resources, culture of food, knowledge, research. All the money in the world aint gonna save you if you are in your attic in new orleans and the water is rising is it?

Subject: Re: Culture of Life From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 11:18:35 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny, I don't mean to start an argument but let me try a different angle. People have lived in Africa since the dawn of humanity - 50,000 years. Yep the oldest civilisation is in Africa. And they lived in balance with nature. The average family had 7 children 2 of which would probably die as infants, 2 of which would die in their teens from basic diseases such measels, 2 of which would make it to the 20's and one into their 30's. Now if I were to follow your analysis - then that is the absolute best way to be. That is the most natural way to live - in balance with nature. We would survive, population rates wouldn't increase, enough children to work the fields, etc. Living beyond your 40's was rare. Living to your 90s was just unimaginable (and un-natural). Then came a gentleman by the name of Dr Livingstone. He traversed Africa innoculating babies against basic diseases and all of a sudden all 7 children lived to the 40s and 50s. The population of Africa ballooned. The balance was gone forever. Interestingly enough no one was angry with him. In fact of all the wrong doings Europeans have done in Africa, this one man is still seen as a hero to Africans. They have named towns after him in a few different countries (Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi)... his legacy of goodwill is part of the history books in just so many more African countries. Now we can argue about what is best - an aging population that remains small (as in Holland) or an ever growing young productive population (as in Viet Nam). But one thing is for sure - our days of truly living in balance with nature are gone. Our shear existance on earth has a negative environmental impact. The same minds that invented the medicine that innoculated those babies can also be used to mitigate the negative environmental impacts and enhance the positive impacts. Our shear genius (where it exists) can make good (and yes it can make bad too). Without a doubt, we as humans have totally changed what nature first intended for us. We live far longer than our 'natural' environment. We have mastered some amazing inventions that are in essence invisible to us... electricity. And as our communities grow we have mastered engineering the growth of these communities. We are still trying to master the politics of growing communities (but that is another issue). One this is undeniable.... we cannot go back. For the last 2,000 years we have started a ball rolling and we simply cannot go back. The question is how do we go forward? Do we go forward by attempting to return to nature? That appears to be what you are advocating. Johnny, you quit your job and have made it clear how money is all evil. Let me then make this suggestion: move to Africa. You can still have the opportunity to live in true nature. Here is a site of a place where I really suggest you should go see: http://www.galenfrysinger.com/lalibela_ethiopia.htm I'm not trying to be mean. I am being serious. It was in this place that I found my soul. But at the same time I came to understand alot about humanity. I want to travel the world (I have seen much of it already). I want to experience the different cultures of the amazing world. I want to be able to sail the Gulf Islands off Western Canada (I have already sailed a small section). I want the joy and freedom of flying my own plane (I have bean a recreational pilot for 10 years). AND most importantly I want to contribute to making this world a better place where I can (I work in the development field). But in order to do all I want to do I need two things:.... to be able to live longer and healthier... and yep I need money. From what you have read, tell do I have a misguided understanding of the world I live in? Again - I don't want to argue, but you have made references to two movies as ideals (Blade Runner and Star Trek) and as irony would have it those are my favourites. But with all due respect, they are science fiction.

Subject: More human than human From: Johnny5 To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 14:12:19 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: 'Now if I were to follow your analysis - then that is the absolute best way to be.' To me, I want star trek society - they live on the star ship Mik - MONEY not the reason they do things, they do not OVERBURDEN the star ship with more people than the star ship can hold given current technology - there was one episode where people willingly take Kirks viruses so they will DIE and it will be a random lottery cause no LEADERS have the guts to do anything - another episode of star trek - leader had the GUTS to kill like 13K colonists before riots broke out and then he is hunted down as a murderer. All these memes have been explored all throughout history - the thinking has already been done - now we just need implementation - that takes leadership - something krugman thinks we probably lacking - I sometimes agree - hehe. ' That is the most natural way to live - in balance with nature. We ' Personally i want to live like the BORG - with all thier technology - but not having to be crushed in like turkeys in a turkey farm like they were - heheh. Remeber data's brother - LOR - he had lots of technology - but was free from being like a rat in a cage with millions of other rats - that is what I like. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/2348239&tid=191&tid=14 Check this out - Frankenstien science to some, but cure my diabetes - HAHA - slashdot also talk about new Mice that can regenerate all your body parts - this great news to Shades - he no longer worry about loreena bobbit - now he regrow his nuts if she cut them off - that is the world shades shooting for - I think you are saying I have to live like turkey farm in a big city to achieve these breakthroughs, no I do not agree, you can live other ways and still have breakthroughs. 'would survive, population rates wouldn't increase, enough children to work the fields,' I dont need children to work fields, machines can do much work as I said in original post - I dont agree with your assessment that I and all the other humans of planet earth need to live like turkeys in turkey farms and mass metro cities to have progress - I disagree. 'But one thing is for sure - our days of truly living in balance with nature are gone. ' No I completely disagree with you, Kirk lived in balance with nature, the BORG lived in balance with Nature - it is not possible to sustain things and NOT BE in balance - that whole idea makes no sense. I dont see where I have to live like a turkey in a turkey farm in a metro city to have the benefits of other borg type technology though - regenerating limbs, satellite internet to connect to all the other borg online - etc etc - I can live way out in the country for that. I do not have to live on crowded polluted city for that. AS emma say, you will live in balance with nature according to jared diamond, long term you cant sustain society unless you are in balance with nature and her natural laws of the universe. 'Our shear existance on earth has a negative environmental impact.' Depends completely on perspective. 'Without a doubt, we as humans have totally changed what nature first intended for us. We live far longer than our 'natural' environment.' I see the future as humans living for hundreds of thousands of years, or longer - and this will be in alignment with the natural universe we exist. I do not think those humans or borg or whatever they are will require living like turkeys in a big city to get there - but I think this is what you are arguing and I just disagree. ' We have mastered some amazing inventions that are in essence invisible to us... electricity. And as our communities grow we have mastered engineering the growth of these communities. We are still trying to master the politics of growing communities (but that is another issue). ' Read more slashdot MIK - read the story of john henry and the mining machine he beat right before he died - the future is not going to be a bunch of humans packed tight in cities to have to make progress - already much advances require massive computer brains - humans cant make the new discoveries sometimes. I do not say I have to go back to using plow in the field - you are not understanding, I will use machines - but I dont want to be stuck in 4 hour traffic everyday and I dont need to be to make progress - why do you think I do need to be? 'One this is undeniable.... we cannot go back. For the last 2,000 years we have started a ball rolling and we simply cannot go back. ' I am not talking about going back - I am talking about living free and not like a turkey in a turkey farm - have your cities and its pollution and its stress - I can connect to you from my little backroads trailer in the middle of nowhere and not have to deal with all the stress and pollution of your big cities. I can have TIME to enjoy the wine my grape picking machine picked for me, not stuck in traffic for four hours like you in the big city breathing in pollution. 'Do we go forward by attempting to return to nature? That appears to be what you are advocating. ' We are always long term going to be in line with nature - your whole set of memes thinking we are OUT of alignment with it makes no sense to me - I do not understand MIK - Roy Batty was in alignment with NATURE - but to uneducated entities - it looks like MAGIC. Star Ship enterprise was in LINE with nature - they couldn't last long term any other way. 'Johnny, you quit your job and have made it clear how money is all evil.' Now you put words in my mouth, I did not say money is all EVIL - the bible even says LOVE of money is what is evil so do not misqoute - I said capitalists serve a puprose and that they can do good things allocating capital - but also command and control gubbments can do good things to listening at the scientists and not the capitalists - new orleans proves this - capitalism did not save those people - so its like yin and yang MIK - maybe the best system is a little of both. ' Let me then make this suggestion: move to Africa.' I think I am going to do like Pete Weis, move somewhere away from all the big city and its pollution, I was thinking a small village in the phillipines, one where I know the community is into buddhism and the scientists can work on frankenstien science and not worry that Bush is going to be mad and arrest them becase he is on holy mission from Jehovah to stop us tinkering in such matters. ' You can still have the opportunity to live in true nature. Here is a site of a place where I really suggest you should go see:' WHen I have magic wireless chip in my brain that lets me connect to the virtual net and share memes with you I will still live in TRUE NATURE - I think you have grossly misunderstood what I am trying to get across so we will keep debating it until we can clear things up for each other - I do not believe living in a city like a rat in a cage with millions of other rats is required or even desirable, I do not believe capitalism is the end all be all of progress either. I believe currently for me if it is a choice of a polluted city or a clean farming village - I will live in the clean farming village - I have even been to coober pedy - its not NATURE that is the problem for me MIK - it is fighting TRAFFIC and congestion and too many people in too little space that I abhor. I dont want it for me, or anyone else, some people like Ms. Dowd may love 80 hour work weeks, big checking accounts, 600 dollar jeans at macy's and big malls and 4 hour waits in traffic to get there - that is not happiness to me. I don't want the world to get so crowded with people advocating MORE AND MORE cities and MORE AND MORE turkey farms for people that me and pete wies cant get away from it all when it stresses us too much. http://www.galenfrysinger.com/lalibela_ethiopia.htm 'I'm not trying to be mean. I am being serious. It was in this place that I found my soul. ' If I could not access the net from there I would not want to live there, because I want to access the net and read on new science - otherwise it looks like great place - not because it is nature or not, but because in those pictures doesn look like there are tons of people packed in like rats in a cage. 'But in order to do all I want to do I need two things:.... to be able to live longer and healthier... and yep I need money. ' Well go make you lots, I travel on greyhound for 99 bucks - I worked at farms just for food while on my travels, sometimes I got free hand outs at food shelters - I didnt need a lot of money to travel - but then I wasn't flying first class in a private plane either - hehe. Used to in the USA you didnt even need greyhound, people would pick you up and give you ride for FREE - but crime scares many people now and they will not pick you up. 'From what you have read, tell do I have a misguided understanding of the world I live in?' If it makes you happy, I think when you say we must live packed like rats in a cage in the modern city to PROGRESS - I do not agree with that. We can live very high tech way out on our little star ship enterprise - we do not have to be packed in 50000 per square mile to have progress. 'Again - I don't want to argue, but you have made references to two movies as ideals (Blade Runner and Star Trek) and as irony would have it those are my favourites. But with all due respect, they are science fiction.' But you see - I fly with Peter Pan - cause I know science fiction give the dreams that sometimes lead to science fact. Remember underlying theme of BLADE RUNNER - too many people - pollute the planet FOR people - had to go OFF WORLD with colonists - not because they WANTED to go - they were FORCED to go because we did not have global population controls. Now one day I may CHOOSE to go off world in the future, but to force me and my family off world because MIKS all over the globe were saying we need more cities and more people - I just don't agree and hope it does not come to that. Right now we got people in africa starving to death because they won't eat Quaker Oats - I don't get it - but then I see on the news last night some New Orleans people starve because they say they too good to eat a military MRE - I eat many MRE's - very thankful for them too - never too good to eat Quaker Oats or MRE - some people dont make sense to me. Some people tell me living in a polluted city working 80 hours a week and having lots of green paper to buy macy 600 dollar jeans and 4 hour traffic is happiness - I do not agree. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams ... glitter in the dark near Tanhauser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost ... in time, like tears ... in rain. Time ... to die.

Subject: Missing text From: Johnny5 To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 23:10:00 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Well i tried to quote your message and then post my replies - but it looks like some of the text did not make it in the quotes - so some of it may not make sense - oh well.

Subject: Re: You missed one big issue - Health From: Poyetas To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 13:37:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Ah Mik!!! Sooooo nice to have a fellow Canadian!!! There's not many of us around. Especially in other countries!! Nevertheless, I disagree with your assessment on several points. First off, I don't think our health care system is all that great. The system needs a serious makeover. It may work in rural areas, but in the big cities there is a serious shortage of doctors and medical assistance. I'm from Toronto and I remember I had to wait 7 hours in the E.R. with a concussion until a doctor could see me because there was only one guy on duty!!! The reason? The system is bankrupt! And it trickles down the whole supply chain too. Because there is not enough money, med schools accept a ridiculously low amount of applicants. My housemate at Queen's University had mid to high 80's and had to go to Ireland to finish his med school because there were not enough spots in Canada. Secondly, I think we are losing ourself with the whole perception of money. Money is just a medium for trade. Its value is relative to the quantity of trade that goes on in a society. It does not have anything to do with the productive capacity of a country. Canada is a wealthy nation because its citizens are well educated, have a strong work ethic and are open minded. We are also endowed with loads of natural resources. Eventually we will have machines doing diagnosis instead of doctors and computers that control production. I would go so far as to say that we are already half way there. All that matters is human creativity and kindness. Fortunately in Canada, we have a mix between socialism and capitalism, allowing for a unique mix that makes it one of the best countries in the world. Trust me, I have lived in North America, South America and Europe. There is no society that combines flexibility with social awarness like we have done. Is the system perfect? Far from it, but compared to places like Florida (where my parents live), Mexico (where my sister lives) and Germany (where I live), I feel proud to be Canadian.

Subject: Re: You missed one big issue - Health From: Mik To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 11:32:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Poyetas, Hey I too am in TO. but originally from Vancouver and I will return to Vancouver.... some day. I want to point something out in your statement, 'I don't think our health care system is all that great.' Yes Canada does not have a perfect system BUT it is a whole lot better than many other countries and it is free. In fact that is the main difference between Canada and the US. Probably the biggest problem with the health care system of Canada is simply put - the fact that Canada is next door the the US and that the US pays more. Canadian doctors will not accept their $80,000 a year salaries and prefer to go South for more money. This is our environment... what can we do? Well we import South African doctors and pass the problem onto South Africa. (but that is besides the issue). I have no argument with whether money has anything to do with the productive capacity of the country. The question I asked was simple: 1. do we focus on making ourselves richer to afford ever increasing social costs and place ourselve in a better economic position in the future (at the expense of important social interaction such as spending less time with our children and more time at work) or, 2. do we focus on the social interactions at the expense of allowing us to become weaker in providing for future growing needs of social welfare? Now so far no one has been able to answer the question. It only seems like option 2 has implied by Johnny.

Subject: Re: David Hume From: Poyetas To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 05:57:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Beautifully put Johnny5!!! If I may, To quote Viktor Frankl: ' At the beginning of Human History, man lost some of the basic animal instincts in which an animal's behaviour is embedded and by which it is secured. Such security, like paradise, is closed to man forever; man has to make choices. In addition to this, however, man has sufered another loss in his more recent development. The traditions that had buttressed his behaviour are now rapidly diminishing. No instinct tells him what he has to do and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conform) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism).'

Subject: Re: David Hume From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 14:03:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: America is dreadfully lacking in fundamental infrastructure, as we are finding so painfully, among the lacks is health care insurance. We should all be pained by this.

Subject: Damage to Economy Is Deep and Wide From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 10:25:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/business/31econ.html August 31, 2005 Damage to Economy Is Deep and Wide By EDUARDO PORTER As Hurricane Katrina plowed through the Mississippi River basin, shutting down ports, flooding cities and cutting power lines, economists warned that it was likely to leave a deeper mark on the national economy than previous hurricanes because of its profound disruption to the Gulf of Mexico's complex energy supply network. 'The typical pattern with a natural disaster like this is that the regional economy gets clobbered but you can barely see it in the national statistics,' said Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. 'This time it is very different because of the impact on the energy infrastructure.' Already, it is clear that much of the economic activity in the gulf region has indeed been clobbered. New Orleans, home to nearly a million people, is under water. By yesterday morning an estimated 2.7 million residents in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi had reported power failures, with many expected to be without electricity for weeks. Conventional and mobile telephone service along the Gulf Coast suffered from severe disruptions from flooded call-routing equipment and damaged cellular towers. Businesses across the Southern interior ground to a halt as then storm affected the region's transportation network and power grid. Since last Thursday, AirTran, a low-fare airline, has canceled 195 flights because of Katrina, including 18 cancellations yesterday. Casinos were destroyed in Mississippi and New Orleans; tourism is not expected to revive for months. Grain shipments face serious delay: Bunge, the world's largest oil-seed processor, evacuated a huge soybean operation in Destrehan, La., its main export terminal in the United States. Food exports and imports that normally flow in huge quantities through regional ports, roads and rail lines are likely to face major disruptions for weeks, if not longer. Economic activity is expected to resume in the next few days and weeks in all but the worst-hit locations. But what worries most economists is Katrina's ripple effect on energy prices. A spike in the price of gasoline just ahead of Labor Day will force consumers to dig deeper into their wallets on one of the busiest driving weekends of the year, providing both a real and psychological blow to spending on other goods and services. And a sustained rise in the cost of energy could substantially slow economic growth. Across the storm's path, it has been difficult to come to grips with the extent of devastation. Ed Preau, assistant secretary for intermodal transport at Louisiana's transportation and development department in Baton Rouge, said he assumed that ports east of New Orleans remain closed because they are under water. But he said he could not be sure because 'I have no contact with anybody in the 504 area code.' Yesterday, the Coast Guard barred all traffic except barges and tugs from the Mississippi delta to the Arkansas state line, a spokesman said. While all estimates at this stage are just guesses, privately insured losses could reach $15 billion or more, according to Robert P. Hartwig, chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute in New York, making Katrina the most expensive hurricane for the insurance industry since Andrew hit Florida in 1992. Other analysts estimated insured losses up to $25 billion. Damage from flooding, which private insurers do not cover, could easily double the figure. But economists point out that although Katrina has destroyed a lot of accumulated wealth, it ultimately will probably have a positive effect on measured growth over the next few months as vast resources from around the country are channeled to rebuilding. Even as shuttered businesses will temporarily add to joblessness, the huge reconstruction effort is expected to create jobs in construction and a host of related sectors. Insurance companies and the federal government will pick up a significant portion of the cost. 'Longer term, in the wake of a number of hurricanes there is actually an increase in measured output that even shows up at the national level, because there is a whole bunch of rebuilding activity,' said Stephen P. A. Brown, director of energy economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. 'Though in some sense it would be easy to argue that we have been made worse by the hurricane, the process of rebuilding of property contributes to an increase in output.' But it will take a while to get to that stage. With buildings damaged, roads closed, power lines down and telephone service severely crimped, restoring basic services is the first order of business. Even cellphone service in the New Orleans 504 area code, for example, may not come back easily. Still, at the national level, the already stressed energy supply system is considered the most critical sector to watch. 'The economic impact of delays in getting exports of grain out is not as large as the impact of delays in getting oil in,' said John Robertson, an economist at the Atlanta Fed. According to Mr. Behravesh at Global Insight, in a best case outlook, with oil and natural gas supplies falling by 2 percent or less, oil prices are likely to stay at $65 to $70 a barrel for the next couple of weeks while gasoline prices climb to $3 a gallon for a couple of months. He estimated that course of events would shave no more than half a percentage point from output growth in the fourth quarter. But Mr. Behravesh noted that if the disruption of supplies is deeper, oil prices could spike to $100 a barrel and gas at the pump could soar to $3.50 a gallon for four months to six months. That kind of price shock could sharply curtail consumer spending elsewhere, possibly bringing economic growth for the October-December quarter to a halt from the 3 percent gains most analysts have been expecting. As news trickles in of the storm's damage, economic prospects are looking bleaker. The storm crippled oil and gas operations in the gulf and shut down most of the output from the region, which accounts for nearly a third of domestic oil production and a fifth of natural gas output. It also forced the closing of nearly 10 percent of the nation's refining capacity, concentrated in Mississippi and Louisiana. The hurricane also shut a major oil-import terminal in Louisiana with a daily capacity of one million barrels, about a 10th of the nation's overall imports. Pipelines to markets in the Northeast and the Midwest also closed. Power will have to be restored to them before they can resume supplying markets outside the area. Analysts said it would probably take weeks before the full extent of the damage is revealed and months before production is restored to its pre-storm levels. The supply squeeze is already rippling through the economy. The Air Transport Association estimated that jet fuel production was cut by 13 percent. 'We're working extremely hard to avoid any operational impact,' said John Heimlich, chief economist for the association. Mr. Heimlich said fuel was being transported by tanker plane to airports in the South, including Charlotte, N.C., and West Palm Beach and Fort Myers in Florida. The string of hurricanes that tore through Florida last year provide a useful precedent for understanding Katrina's potential economic impact. Last year hiring in Florida froze in August and September as the hurricanes hit, holding average job gains to just 2,000 a month. By October, however, job growth bounced back to almost 33,000. Ultimately, the four hurricanes in 2004 made only a small dent in the nation's growth. Most of the impact came from Hurricane Ivan, which ripped through underwater oil pipelines, cutting output from refineries and helping push gasoline prices back above $2 a gallon. Those prices already seem like a long-lost dream.

Subject: Europeans Are Seeking Safety in Bonds From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:57:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/iht/2005/08/23/business/IHT-23gfcolumn.html August 23, 2005 Europeans Are Seeking Safety in Bonds By BARBARA WALL - International Herald Tribune Despite a sizzling performance from European markets in June and July, individual investors have continued to shun equities and pour money into products that are perceived as less risky: bond funds and products with a guaranteed return. European bond funds recorded sales of 11 billion, or $13.4 billion, for the month of June, compared with a measly 730 million in equity fund sales, according to Feri Fund Market Information. Although the equity sector recovered some ground in July, equity fund sales still stood at less than one-third of fixed-income fund sales. Feri's research indicated that Italian investors were the least likely to buy equities during the past three months, followed by the Spanish, Greeks and Germans. Italian investors redeemed around 1 billion from the equity sector in June and 5.5 billion in the seven months to the end of July. Large fund providers, like Banca Intesa and Sanpaolo IMI, were hit hardest, according to Mauro Baratta, director of European research for Feri in Milan. Pioneer Investments was one of the few Italian fund groups to do well, though Baratta suggested that equity sales were probably driven by the asset management company's international division. 'Italy is officially in recession, which is not the best economic backdrop to attract equity flows,' Baratta said. 'There is no doubt the vast majority of Italians have missed out on the equity rally, but to some extent they are being paid to play safe. Italian banks offer some of the best savings rates in Europe. Deposit rates in excess of 3 percent are common in Italy. Elsewhere in Europe, investors would be hard pressed to get 2 percent.' Spain and Greece recorded equity fund redemptions in June of 148 million and 49 million, respectively. Both countries also had net equity fund sales in the first half of the year. Data from Morningstar indicate that around 80 percent of assets under management in Spain were in guaranteed funds, money market accounts and fixed-income products, with a miserly 10 percent of assets in equities. The most popular products are dynamic cash funds, which aim to offer a higher return than money market accounts. The main providers of these products are Banco Santander Central Hispano and UBS. Fernando Luque, a funds analyst at Morningstar in Milan, suggested that Spanish banks stood to make so much money from index-linked guaranteed products that there was little incentive to market actively managed equity funds. One of the few equity funds that have attracted new money in recent months is a European high-dividend fund managed by Banco Santander, according to Luque. Bella Ferreira, a research analyst for Feri in London, said that Germany would also have recorded net redemption had it not been for some anonymous institutional fund flows in June. So far this year, German equity funds have bled an astonishing 3.4 billion. According to Heiko Nitzsche, a Frankfurt-based funds analyst with Standard & Poor's, the average German saves around 13 percent of annual salary. No prizes for guessing that fixed-income products attracted most of the fund flows: a whopping 16 billion, twice the amount invested in bonds by Italian investors. Most of this money has found its way into short-term government bond funds. Bonds are not to everyone's taste. Fanny Noisetti, a funds analyst at FundMarket in Luxembourg, said that she would not recommend bond funds in the current market, as she finds them too expensive. 'If pushed, I would recommend a high-yielding convertible bond fund - though given the choice I would rather steer investors toward high-dividend funds,' Noisetti said. She suggested that equity novices could do worse than invest in the ING Europe High Dividend fund. HSBC and DWS also have good high-dividend equity funds, she added. Of course, not all German investors disdain equities. Nitzsche said that international funds, like Fidelity European Growth and Templeton European Growth, were still recording sales in Germany. Noisetti said that she had been asked by several German financial advisers to find a German equity fund that they could recommend to clients. Her pick? DWS Aktien Strategic Deutschland. Of the countries that have kept the equity faith this year, Sweden topped Feri's leader board with more than 2 billion invested in equity funds in the first seven months of the year. Swiss investors pumped in 1.5 billion, while those in Britain and Denmark invested 1 billion. Austria, Belgium and Finland also recorded net equity investment this year. Ferreira said that she expected to see more interest in equity funds once the dormant summer season was over. 'The next two months could see some positive flows into Japan funds,' she said. 'Interest is also picking up in the small and midcap sector.'

Subject: In Bangalore, India, a Cuddle With Baby From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:36:35 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/international/asia/30bangalore.html?ex=1283054400&en=84892a8147e037c6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 30, 2005 In Bangalore, India, a Cuddle With Your Baby Requires a Bribe By CELIA W. DUGGER BANGALORE, India - Just as the painful ordeal of childbirth finally ended and Nesam Velankanni waited for a nurse to lay her squalling newborn on her chest, the maternity hospital's ritual of extortion began. Before she even glimpsed her baby, she said, a nurse whisked the infant away and an attendant demanded a bribe. If you want to see your child, families are told, the price is $12 for a boy and $7 for a girl, a lot of money for slum dwellers scraping by on a dollar a day. The practice is common here in the city, surveys confirm. Mrs. Velankanni was penniless, and her mother-in-law had to pawn gold earrings that had been a precious marriage gift so she could give the money to the attendant, or ayah. Mrs. Velankanni, a migrant to Bangalore who had been unprepared for the demand, wept in frustration. 'The ayah told my mother-in-law to pay up fast because the night duty doctor was leaving at 8 a.m. and wanted a share,' she recalled. The grand thefts of rulers may be more infamous, but the bitter experience of petty corruption, less apparent but no less invidious, is an everyday trial for millions of poor people across Asia, Africa and Latin America. Increasingly, it is being recognized as a major obstacle to economic development, robbing the impoverished of already measly incomes and corroding the public services they desperately need. The bribes vary from place to place and in the services affected, but stretch from cradle to grave, according to surveys and anticorruption investigators. People pay to give birth, and to collect their loved ones' bodies from mortuaries, and for everything in between: garbage collection, clean water, medicines, admission to public schools. Even policemen double as shakedown artists. Such petty bribery acts as a hidden regressive tax, according to research financed by the World Bank Institute, the bank's educational and research arm. In Zambia, for example, poor people paid 17 percent of their incomes in bribes for medical care, while the middle class paid only 3 percent. The comparable figures for Paraguay were 7 percent for the poor and only 1 percent for the middle class. 'The poor not only are paying much more of their incomes to get the same medical services as the middle and richer classes, but they are also discouraged from seeking basic medical care because they can't afford it,' said Daniel Kaufmann, director of global programs at the institute. When low-level officials pick the pockets of the poor, it is also often a reliable indicator of greater corruption higher up the bureaucratic and political hierarchy. Here in Bangalore, a city of 6.5 million known for its booming high-technology industry, pleasant climate and good private schools, local health managers commonly pay bribes to senior bureaucrats or elected officials to get good jobs, say investigators, civic leaders and senior civil servants. The health professionals then exact payments from subordinates and patients, emulating their bosses. 'Most of the district health officers have to pay bribes to get promotions and postings, and they in turn collect bribes from their staff and patients,' said Hanumappa Sudarshan, the vigilance director for health and education in Karnataka State's anticorruption agency. 'It's a vicious cycle.' Mr. Sudarshan's boss, Nanjegowda Venkatachala, a retired Indian Supreme Court justice who heads the agency, put it even more bluntly: 'The greed of politicians is ruining the country. There's nothing to mince in this regard.' No matter where the corruption starts, it moves down through the ranks and finally to the poor, for whom it is an inescapable burden. Though Bangalore has made progress in fighting corruption, it persists in the hospitals. In the narrow lanes of the slums and working-class neighborhoods around the 30-bed Austin Town maternity hospital, families with babies and toddlers described their personal experiences of bribery. Shobha Rani, the doctor in charge, emphatically disputed such accounts in an interview earlier this year. 'I've not come across even one patient who's come here and said I've been charged for anything,' she said. 'So many times, I've spoken to patients without the knowledge of my staff. I say: 'Tell me the truth. What did you face?' They always give me a good report.' But people who have used the hospital tell a different story. Nagaratna Hanumanthu, 23, and her husband, Hanumanthu, 28, a sugar-cane-juice vendor with a single name, lost their first baby to a raging fever just two days after he was born. Their anxieties were high last November when their daughter was born at Austin Town. The moment the baby emerged, the nurses took her away and demanded $7, the parents said. But Mr. Hanumanthu, a tall, imposing man, said he pretended he knew important people and threatened to complain. The nurses backed down, he said. But then his fears grew that the staff might hurt the baby. 'We had already lost one child, and we were worried we would lose this child, too,' he said. Mr. Hanumanthu, who earns about $1 a day, turned to his mother, who makes $11 a month sweeping floors and washing dishes. She gave him money for the bribe. As he described his ordeal, his glowering presence seemed to fill a dark, cramped room of their home in the slums, where his wife rocked the sleeping baby, Sujata, in a cradle. It was far from the first bribe he had paid, he said, and certainly not the last. Every month, he said, he must pay off city workers who threaten to confiscate his pushcart. He has no choice, he said. How else would he make a living? Last summer, he saw what happened to a vendor who refused to move when the city workers told him to. They overturned the man's cart, cracking the motor. He was out of work for three months. 'I've studied up to 10th grade and passed,' he said bitterly. 'I try to earn a decent living, but because of all the demands, I'm tempted to rob and steal to make money fast. I'm fed up with life.' A growing number of surveys of poor households, commissioned by nonprofit groups like the Public Affairs Center here in India, are documenting the problems of corruption and poor public services, arming advocates who are fighting corruption with useful information and providing voters with data that helps them hold elected officials accountable. The center pioneered the use of consumer surveys here in Bangalore to measure the extent and effects of bribery and to give citizens a collective, credible voice about their experience of public services. The approach was the brainstorm of Samuel Paul, who formerly led one of India's premier business schools. During the past decade, the center has released report cards that that have generated splashy coverage in local newspapers. 'There was power in the information,' Mr. Paul said. The idea has been widely copied. Today report cards are used in Ethiopia, Uganda and Zanzibar, in Ukraine, Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam. Bangalore's success in fighting corruption, under the leadership of a reform-minded government that took office in 1999, has enhanced the appeal of report cards. The center's latest survey, done in 2003, found that bribery had fallen sharply since 1999 and satisfaction with public services had risen, though bribes persisted at shockingly high levels in maternity hospitals. One necessary step was removing bureaucratic middlemen. Bangalore substantially reduced corruption in property tax assessments by setting simple rules so citizens could estimate their own property values, cutting out inspectors who had demanded payoffs. Property tax collections rose sharply. Cleaning up the city's 30 maternity homes, which mainly serve the poor, has proved tougher, however. A 1999 survey by the center found that 9 of 10 families whose relatives gave birth in the hospitals reported paying a bribe, usually to see the baby. The average amount paid has since dropped to $7 from about $16. But 8 in 10 women still reported paying bribes in 2003 - to have their baby delivered, to see the child after birth, to get their newborn immunized or to obtain medicines that were supposed to be free. K. Jairaj, who became city commissioner in 1999, said he was appalled when Mr. Paul handed him the original maternity hospital findings six years ago. 'It was the trigger to move the politicians and bureaucrats forward,' he said. At the center's urging, the city set up boards of volunteers to monitor hospitals. It also posted citizens' charters in maternity hospitals stating that bribery was prohibited and listing phone numbers for complaints. But the boards were often toothless, and many patients already knew bribes were illegal. The city's current commissioner, Karuppiah Jothiramalingam, who took office last year with a new government, said he would retrain hospital workers and punish those who solicited bribes. He added, 'This type of action can only be taken on specific complaints.' But the ingrained habits of bribery persist in part because the poor, powerless in so many aspects of their lives, are afraid to object. They worry that their newborns will get bad medical care from angry health workers. They dread retribution when they return for subsequent births. Shireen Taj, a car mechanic's wife, had her first baby at Austin Town on Jan. 21. The family said they paid the going rate - $12 - to see the boy. Razia Begum, Mrs. Taj's mother, said that even when Shireen was born at Austin Town 18 years ago, the family paid a bribe to see her, though the price then was the same for boys and girls. 'Now boys cost more, girls less,' she said, describing the devaluing of females in a society where the male child is often more desired. Sometimes the very poorest people are charged less, she and others said. 'It's a practice there,' she said. 'My older daughter also paid. So I brought money.' The nurses and attendants are the ones who ask for the money, while the doctor is never present, families say. As Razia Begum spoke, an elderly neighbor came to the door. 'If you write about it,' she said to a reporter, 'they will chase us out of the hospital. Where will we go?' Several women who had just given birth and their families, interviewed on an open ward at the hospital and shortly after the mothers were discharged, also said they had been asked to pay bribes. Margaret, a 50-year-old grandmother who uses only one name, said she paid to see her 19-year-old daughter's baby the day he was born, Feb. 16. She earns only $10 a month as a maid and said that she was determined to pay no more than $7 - and that she did not. 'Though I felt bad and a little angry, a private hospital would have cost at least 2,500 rupees,' or about $60, she said. The bribe was still costly but, by the calculus of poverty, a relative bargain.

Subject: Pervasive Corruption in Russia From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:31:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/international/europe/13russia.html?ex=1281585600&en=b9bb03d998d649cd&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 13, 2005 Pervasive Corruption in Russia Is 'Just Called Business' By STEVEN LEE MYERS MOSCOW - A businessman here recently formed a company to supply equipment used in new office and apartment buildings. Despite the country's construction boom, it nearly foundered. That is, until this summer, when two 'intermediaries' arranged to fix the bidding for contracts from a regional government. He has since received four new contracts, he said, and expects more. Success has its cost, though. He had paid bribes, he said, amounting to 5 to 10 percent of each contract. The largest, so far, totaled $90,000. The amount of each bribe was punched out on a desktop calculator to avoid any paper trail. He expressed disgust but said the bribes were an unavoidable cost of doing business in Russia today. 'If you want to be competitive you have to play the game,' he said, agreeing to speak in a lengthy interview only if he, his company and the regional government were not identified. He said he feared legal difficulties and being harmed or even killed. 'It used to be called bribery,' he added. 'Now it is just called business.' Bribery is certainly not new to Russia, but according to several recent surveys and interviews with dozens of Russians, it has surged in scale and scope in recent years under the presidency of Vladimir V. Putin, so that today it touches just about every aspect of life. With greater urgency than ever, anticorruption campaigners and even some government officials warn that the government has become so ensnared by corruption that it threatens to undo Russia's progress since the dismantling of the Soviet Union 14 years ago. The Indem Foundation, a research group in Moscow that has conducted the most extensive efforts to measure bribery here, estimated last month that Russians paid more than $3 billion in bribes annually and that businesses paid $316 billion - nearly 10 times the estimate of its first survey just four years ago. The total is more than two and a half times what the government collects in budget revenues, the survey found. That means that vast amounts of Russia's wealth flow in a shadowy netherworld of corrupted officials - unreported as income, untaxed by the government and unavailable for social or economic investments. 'The weakness, inefficiency and corruption of all branches of government are the most important obstacles to further progress in reforming Russia,' the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., said in June in a report commissioned by the Russian government. Other surveys also rank Russia among the world's most corrupt nations, placing the former superpower on a par with developing countries. Transparency International, the worldwide corruption watchdog, said in its latest report that Russia was now following the path of countries like Nigeria, Azerbaijan and Libya - rich in oil but soaked by graft. Grigory A. Satarov, the president of Indem, said in an interview that the new growth of bribery fed off the inefficiencies of Russia's still sclerotic state structures, inherited from the Communist past. But he also blamed Putin policies that have weakened the rule of law. Fighting corruption, he argued, requires three conditions: free news media, a vibrant political opposition and a truly independent judiciary. Under Mr. Putin, he said, the Kremlin has undercut all three. 'The main thing,' Mr. Satarov said, 'is that all this time, Putin has not done anything to change the situation.' For businesses especially, bribery is ballooning, along with the amounts solicited, which Indem estimated to average $135,000 - a 13-fold jump from 2001. Mr. Satarov said the increasing pressure on businesses reflected the expanding role of the state in the economy during Mr. Putin's presidency. For Mr. Satarov and others, high-profile cases like the legal assault on the Yukos oil company highlighted less the government's determination to root out corruption than its desire to assert its control over valuable economic assets. In fact, the conviction of Yukos's former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, on tax evasion charges that he and his supporters called politically motivated may have had an opposite effect. According to a very wealthy and prominent Moscow businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of prosecution or political retaliation, as well as others interviewed, bribes have increasingly become a necessity, either to win contracts or to keep inspectors and prosecutors at bay. The magnitude and scope of this kind corruption make Russia different today from even the recent past, the Moscow businessman said. In the early years of Russia's post-Soviet transition, lingering fear of Soviet control and a romantic optimism for a normal democracy limited corruption to some extent. 'There are no romantics now,' he said, 'and the old fear is not there anymore.' A recent survey by the World Bank reported that 78 percent of businesses in Russia reported having to pay bribes. Another survey, by the Foreign Investment Advisory Council, created in 1994 by the Russian government and prominent foreign corporations, found that 71 percent considered corruption the biggest barrier to foreign investment. Mr. Satarov said one major businessman had told him of having to pay monthly bribes to five federal ministries. Fully half of the businessman's profits went to bribes, Mr. Satarov recounted. 'He said, 'When it reaches 70 percent I'm going to close the business.' ' A business consultant who until recently worked with the European Union on economic development projects in Kaliningrad and Moscow said he had endured repeated encounters with bribe-seeking officials, who demanded cash, gifts or the hiring of unqualified relatives. In an interview, the consultant, who agreed to discuss the issue only if not identified because of fears of retribution, said it was necessary to understand bribery in the context of the Russian government. 'Corruption is not a virus infecting the system,' he explained, saying that was how bribery was viewed in Europe or the United States: as an aberration that must be isolated and cut out. 'It is the system itself that is corrupt.' Indeed, Russia has evolved from its Soviet past in such a way that for many, paying 'a little something' is not even considered bribery anymore. Rather, bribes are seen more as a fee for resolving seemingly intractable problems or overcoming bureaucratic delays, one that supplements the meager incomes of otherwise honest civil servants. 'It's not their fault, but the government's inability to provide a decent living,' Yaroslav D. Lissovolik, the chief economist at United Financial Group, said. He last paid a bribe - 'a couple of dollars,' he said - to receive the results of lab tests at a state clinic, where state health care is free only in theory. The O.E.C.D. report concluded that government officials actually complicated legislation or regulations deliberately to increase opportunities for bribery. Or as the businessman in construction put it: 'The law is like the Bible. They interpret it any way they like.' An American businessman married to a Russian woman recounted his own example. He said he had to pay nearly $1,000 in bribes to resolve a Catch-22 involving his infant daughter. She could not receive a Russian passport unless she was registered with the local police. She could not be registered, though, unless she had a passport. 'That perfect problem was solved with a larger sum than I want to remember,' he said, agreeing to tell the story only if not identified, because of American laws against bribery. As a result of its necessity, bribery has become accepted practice. Bribes have become almost obligatory, for instance, for admission to Russia's universities, even those supposedly available at no cost to those who qualify. The Indem study estimated that $583 million was spent annually in bribes to deans, professors and others involved in securing admission. The foundation, along with the Moscow Higher School of Economics, estimated that students paid bribes as high as $30,000 to $40,000 to enter the most prestigious universities. Young men of draft age also routinely pay to receive a deferment, either on medical or other grounds, to avoid service in a military roiled by the war in Chechnya and a particularly gruesome form of hazing for new recruits. One young man in Yekaterinburg said in an interview that the going rate in central Russia was $1,500, and that he and several peers had paid it gladly. In Moscow it is said to be $5,000. According to the Defense Ministry, fewer than 10 percent of eligible men are drafted. The police have the reputation of being the most notoriously corrupt. Sergei S., a lawyer with a prominent law firm, recalled the time recently when his girlfriend was at the wheel in Moscow and, without question, absolutely drunk when an officer waved the car over. She avoided arrest after Sergei went to an automatic bank machine, escorted by the officer, and withdrew $300. 'The most horrible thing,' he said, agreeing to discuss the experience only if neither his last name nor his law firm was identified, 'is it is absolutely normal.' Indem's survey uncovered one positive trend: the number of Russians willing to pay bribes has fallen since 2001, suggesting a growing popular frustration with the solicitations. Still, 53 percent of those surveyed said they would pay a bribe. Mr. Putin's critics and even some supporters charge that the government has done little to combat corruption seriously because it extends to the upper tiers of government, something the president himself has acknowledged, sometimes bluntly. 'The state as a whole and the law enforcement bodies, unfortunately, are still afflicted with corruption and inefficiency,' Mr. Putin said in an interview on state television last year. The corruption, he added, reaches to the 'highest level, where we are talking about hundreds, tens of thousands, perhaps millions' of dollars. Aleksandr Y. Lebedev, a wealthy financier and a member of the lower house of Parliament in the pro-Putin party, United Russia, said in an interview that corruption would flourish until drastic measures were taken, like the seizure of assets at home and abroad. 'You find deputy ministers who have houses and yachts,' he said. 'I know ministers who are millionaires.' At the same time, Mr. Putin's government has not completely ignored the problem. It has announced a series of modest anticorruption measures, increasing salaries for law enforcement and other security officials and toughening penalties for seemingly petty crimes, like issuing a false passport. The latter was a consequence of the deadly wave of terrorist attacks in August and September of last year. Two passenger airliners exploded in flight on Aug. 24, killing 90 people, after a bribe of roughly $34 enabled at least one of two suicide bombers to board at a Moscow airport. 'The people on those planes were not only the victims of terrorism,' Yelena A. Panfilova, director of the Moscow branch of Transparency International, said. 'They were victims of corruption.' Yet as shocking as it was at the time, she said, the disclosure hardly surprised her. When Transparency International applied to register its branch in 2000, an official in the Justice Ministry solicited a $300 'fee' to correct supposed problems in the application that Ms. Panfilova said did not exist. 'I said, 'Do you know who we are?' ' she recalled.

Subject: 'The First Poets' From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 09:08:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/28PAGLIA.html August 28, 2005 'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus By CAMILLE PAGLIA Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice. Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, the founder and director of Carcanet Press and the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. His widely praised book ''Lives of the Poets'' (1998) was a 900-page meditation on English poetry in which his forceful, witty, sometimes partisan sketches revealed a mind deeply in love with literature. In ''The First Poets,'' however, Schmidt seems less confident of his opinions. He is excessively deferential to authorities, even when gently rejecting their views. It is always a pleasure to encounter the lucid, astute prose of the late Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (Schmidt's don at Oxford), but this book is clogged with too many pedestrian quotations from academics past and present. Whenever he is front and center, Schmidt himself is a fascinating guide who wins the reader's trust. ''The First Poets'' covers about a half-millennium of writing up to the third century B.C. Its chronological organization is ideally suited for those seeking an introduction to Greek poetry, although the book needs better maps of the Mediterranean world. Drawing on translators from John Dryden to Guy Davenport, Schmidt deftly explains the problems in translating ''vowel-rich'' ancient Greek into English, which cannot capture Greek's falling rhythms and vocal pitch. A constant theme is the tragically fragmentary nature of the Greek poetry that we have. Only a fraction has survived, much of it by chance -- perhaps because it was quoted in an ancient letter or essay. Because of the fragility of papyrus and parchment, Greek literature was decaying by the Roman era. Schmidt stresses what we owe to the Egyptian desert, where papyrus discoveries are still being made in mummy wrappings and trash heaps. Ancient Greek poems today are often merely tentative scholarly reconstructions. Schmidt has a sharp eye for material culture: he notes, for example, how the fine grain of papyrus (made from Nile reeds) promoted the development of writing because it gave ''the ability to vary letter-forms.'' Many modern words for books descend from antiquity, when papyrus scrolls -- some up to 100 yards long -- were used for storage. A ''volume'' (from the Latin volumen) literally means ''a thing rolled up.'' The book's profiles begin with Orpheus, the legendary father of poetry and music, whom Schmidt boldly treats as a real person: ''I take Orpheus to have been an actual man with an actual harp in his hand.'' After his wife, Eurydice, was lost in Hades, Orpheus turned to boy-love and was reputedly the first to practice it in his native Thrace. His death was gruesome: he was torn to bits by bacchants, and his severed head floated to the island of Lesbos, which was thereby impregnated with poetic genius. Schmidt's chapters on Homer, while rich, seem too long for a survey book -- and we're still at the start of the ''Odyssey'' on the next-to-last page. Far more interesting than the excessive plot summary is Schmidt's treatment of Homeric diction as ''a composite of different dialect strands . . . as though a poet wrote in Scots, South African, Texan and Jamaican, all in a single poem.'' Much attention is devoted to controversies over the authorship of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'': Was Homer a myth? Did one man (or even a woman) compose both poems? Was Homer merely a collator of inherited material? Schmidt makes Homer concrete by taking us on a lively fictionalized odyssey through his hypothetical life and experiences. As for those who allege there were two poets, Schmidt rightly scoffs, it's ''as though Shakespeare could not have written 'The Comedy of Errors' and 'Othello.' '' To deny Homer's existence, Schmidt argues, ''impoverishes our reading.'' Regrettably, he doesn't joust with the notorious ''death of the author'' dogma of literary poststructuralism. He oddly fails to describe the classicist Milman Parry's pioneering use of recording technology to document survivals of the epic oral tradition in rural Yugoslavia in the 1930's. And he hurries past an influential 19th-century theory that a single bard, long after the Trojan War, wove heroic lays of military adventure into two integrated poems -- a process that would be repeated in medieval romances. In his chapter on Hesiod, whose ''Works and Days'' and ''Theogony'' rivaled Homer's epics for near-biblical status in Greek culture, Schmidt gives glimmers of the more reader-friendly book that might have been -- an alluring, dreamlike travelogue of the Greek sites where ancient poets lived and created. ''Even today it is no easy matter, getting to where Hesiod's farm used to be,'' he says. Hiking through a parched landscape up Mount Helicon, he sees ''old olive trees clenched among the rock'' and is surprised by ''tiny gusts of exquisite scent'' from the ''wild, almost leafless cyclamen, pale dots of purple.'' With Archilochus, Schmidt hits his stride. ''The only Greek soldier-poet we have,'' Archilochus was born on wind-swept Paros, famed for its translucent marble. As a young man, he was leading a cow to market when the Muses appeared, stole the cow, and left a lyre in its place. Archilochus became a brazen sensualist, caustically irreverent. Schmidt calls him a ''cad,'' a cruel exploiter of women and ''an early defining figure of patriarchy''; his imagery has ''a reptilian eroticism.'' Alcman, who labored for Sparta, provides an eloquent contrast to cynical Archilochus. The ''I'' of Alcman's ''civic'' choral poetry was collective. Schmidt compares Alcman's work to masques like Milton's ''Comus,'' where poetry and music are interwoven. Alcman's poems were ''sung not in the intimacy of the symposium,'' a male dinner party, he writes, ''but in the open, public air.'' Schmidt also laments Sparta's cultural decline. Famous in the seventh century B.C. for its ''music, pottery and poetry,'' it became an imperial power so besotted by militarism that ''three centuries later, the adjective 'Spartan' had become synonymous with 'Philistine.' '' Next we meet Mimnermus, whom Schmidt calls ''an elegist of pleasure,'' and the misogynous Semonides, who sees woman as sow, vixen and bitch. Then come the great poets of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho, both aristocrats born during the politically unstable early seventh century. Schmidt calls Alcaeus ''a brilliant poet of wine'' and ''debauchery'' but also ''a survival poet, enduring exile and hardships.'' Ancient writers assumed he ''preferred the company of his own sex.'' In a substantial but uneven chapter on Sappho, Schmidt intriguingly speculates on where she was born and raised on Lesbos (a large island near the coast of Asia Minor): was it in the western village of Eressus in rough, barren country, or in the cosmopolitan eastern seaport of Mytilene? He subtly evokes her poetic style: ''Sappho's art is to dovetail, smooth and rub down, to avoid the over-emphatic.'' And he aptly compares the relationship between voice and musical accompaniment in Sappho's performance of her poems to the recitative in opera. But although he acknowledges the way Sappho has ''appealed to the sexual prurience or moral severity of centuries of scholars and readers,'' Schmidt doesn't adequately summarize the passionate arguments over Sappho's character, public life and sexual orientation. He omits altogether the role played by the medieval church in burning her manuscripts. While Swinburne's darker rewriting of Sappho is quoted (with minimal comment), Catullus' far more important version receives only a passing mention. As for Sappho's two brilliantly original major poems, ''He Seems to Me a God'' receives less than a page of attention, and ''Ode to Aphrodite'' is barely glanced at. Instead, Schmidt wastes space with long, dreary quotes from a feminist classicist stuck on the usual dated ideology of male oppression. The lawgiver Solon was the first poet of Athens. His was ''a language of distilled moral truth'' that had what Schmidt calls ''a humorless pithiness.'' Solon's maxims, ''Moderation in all things'' and ''Know thyself,'' were carved on Apollo's temple at Delphi. There were two poets named Anacreon. The ''false'' one inspired the carpe diem (''seize the day'') tradition of ''creature pleasures'' of sex and appetite that would so enchant European literature. The real Anacreon was ''drawn to boys'' and died from inhaling a grape pip. He was honored in a robust nude statue on the Athenian Acropolis. The poet Hipponax, Schmidt writes, shows ''the human body at its most gross''; he is ''obsessed with food, sex, excretion'' and ''a cruising lust.'' His poetry, with its ''smells'' and ''obscene diction,'' has ''the repulsive fascination of toilet-wall graffiti.'' Hipponax influenced Aristophanes' farcical comedies and possibly Petronius' decadent ''Satyricon.'' Simonides, a shrewd operator, was the first poet to get rich from selling his work. Corinna's narrative poetry was so admired that she was said to have been Pindar's teacher and rival (though she lived long afterward). Pindar's ornate, visionary odes are untranslatable. Commissioned to praise athletic victors or memorialize gifts, they are, Schimdt says, ''the extremity of art,'' moving ''towards timelessness or abstraction.'' He calls them ''a texture of cross-referencing'' and ''an almost continuous string of metaphors.'' The odes of Pindar's rival, Bacchylides, were lost until a smashed papyrus scroll of his work was discovered in Egypt in the 1890's and reassembled at the British Museum. After Pindar, Schmidt writes, lyric poetry lost vitality, and ''verse thrived primarily in the drama.'' In the new Hellenistic world inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great, ''cultural authority'' shifted from Athens to Alexandria in Egypt, where poetry now ''lived in libraries'': ''What had been language responding to nature, history, the social world, began to become language responding to prior language.'' The poet Callimachus, for example, was a librarian, ''the father of bibliography.'' His cataloging lists, or canones, became our ''tyrannical canonical texts.'' Schmidt paints a vivid portrait of bustling Alexandria with its ''racial mix'' and ''mess of languages and dialects.'' There Theocritus invented the pastoral idyll, a sentimental fantasy of happy, singing shepherds that would remain chic until the era of Marie Antoinette. Themes of boy-love and ''open-air buggery'' are also part of Theocritus' legacy. For Schmidt, Theocritus was emblematic of radical changes in Greek literature. His poetry was no longer sung for a live audience. Now written down, it addressed ''a creature who hardly existed in Homer's day, the reader.'' Camille Paglia is the university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Subject: Geography Complicates Levee Repair From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 07:07:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/nationalspecial/31levee.html August 31, 2005 Geography Complicates Levee Repair By CORNELIA DEAN and ANDREW C. REVKIN Until engineers can repair breaks in the huge levees that separate New Orleans from Lake Pontchartrain, the city will essentially be an arm of the Gulf of Mexico, subject to the ebb and flow of the tides. And because the tidal pull widens the breaks, experts said yesterday, that will make it all the harder to repair them - the first step in restoring the inundated city to normal. Last night, even as engineers scrambled to figure out ways to plug a levee breach on the 17th Street Canal, Mayor Ray Nagin, in an interview on WWL-TV, said the waters in neighborhoods east of the breach were rising so fast they might cause the nearby pumping station to fail. 'We've been living in this bowl,' said Shea Penland, a coastal geologist who has studied storm threats to Louisiana for years. 'And then Katrina broke channels into the bowl and the bowl filled. And now the bowl is connected to the Gulf of Mexico. We are going to have to close those inlets and then pump it dry.' John Hall, a spokesman for the Army Corps of Engineers, said last night that the corps and other agencies were 'in a great frenzy' to figure out how to plug the 300-foot gap along the 17th Street Canal. The narrow canal, which is used to drain water pumped out of the eternally soggy city, is not accessible by barge, in part because a newly built low bridge and hurricane barrier sits 700 feet down the canal toward the lake end. 'We can't get at it,' Mr. Hall said. Mr. Hall said that the levee failed as the surge from the storm swept in through Lake Pontchartrain, actually a broad inlet off the gulf, and began sloshing over the vertical steel and concrete wall and the earthen berm behind it. 'Once it got over, it began to scour down at the base of that flood wall on the protected side,' he said. The rising waters in the canal pushed in on the high part of the retaining wall while water cascading over the top ate away at the base, Mr. Hall said, adding: 'The effect is like a high-low tackle in football. You hit the head and feet at the same time from opposite directions, and it goes down.' Another problem is that whatever is done to block the breach must not also block the canal itself, because that would impede the pumping of the floodwaters. Federal officials are seeking help from agencies and private contractors that might be able to supply heavy cranes and other equipment. The levees, which provide a tenuous barrier between the city and the waters that surround most of it, have long had weak spots and were not designed to withstand the full force of a storm like Hurricane Katrina. The other failure occurred along the Industrial Canal, an 80-year-old channel that had been identified as a weak spot in computer simulations of storm surges from hypothetical hurricanes. S. Jeffress Williams, a United States Geological Survey scientist with long experience in Louisiana, said repairing the levees would require 'a large volume of as dense, as heavy material as you can get, applied quickly.' 'Where you get the material and how you get the equipment up there is going to be a real problem,' he went on. 'If you don't keep it going, it is just going to erode away. You have to have a persistent and constant feed until it is done.' Dr. Penland, the director of the Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of New Orleans, said it was impossible to say how long it would take to repair the levees and pump the city dry. New Orleans has 22 pumping stations that need to work nearly continuously to discharge normal storm runoff and seepage. But they are notoriously fickle. Efforts to add backup power generators to keep them all running during blackouts have been delayed by a lack of federal money. 'Pumping the water out - that's a lot of water,' Dr. Penland said. 'When the pumping systems are in good shape, it can rain an inch an hour for about four to six hours and the pumps can keep pace. More than that, the city floods.'

Subject: New Orleans in Peril From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 05:48:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/opinion/31wed1.html August 31, 2005 New Orleans in Peril On the day after Hurricane Katrina was declared to be not as bad as originally feared, it became clear that the effects of the storm had been, after all, beyond devastation. Homeowners in Biloxi, Miss., staggered through wrecked neighborhoods looking for their loved ones. In New Orleans, the mayor reported that rescue boats had begun pushing past dead bodies to look for the stranded living. Gas leaks began erupting into flames, and looking at the city, now at least 80 percent under water, it was hard not to think of last year's tsunami, or even ancient Pompeii. Disaster has, as it almost always does, called up American generosity and instances of heroism. Young people helped the old onto rafts in flooded New Orleans streets, and exhausted rescue workers refused all offers of rest, while people as far away as Kansas and Arizona went online to offer shelter in their homes to the refugees. It was also a reminder of how much we rely on government to imagine the unimaginable and plan for the worst. As the levees of Lake Pontchartrain gave way, flooding New Orleans, it seemed pretty clear that in this case, government did not live up to the job. But this seems like the wrong moment to dwell on fault-finding, or even to point out that it took what may become the worst natural disaster in American history to pry President Bush out of his vacation. All the focus now must be on rescuing the survivors. Beyond that lies a long and painful recovery, which must begin with a national vow to help all the storm victims and to save and repair New Orleans. People who think of that graceful city and the rest of the Mississippi Delta as tourist destinations must have been reminded, watching the rescue operations, that the real residents of this area are in the main poor and black. The only resources most of them will have to fall back on will need to come from the federal government. Those of us in New York watch the dire pictures from Louisiana with keen memories of the time after Sept. 11, when the rest of the nation made it clear that our city was their city, and that everyone was part of the battle to restore it. New Orleans, too, is one of the places that belongs to every American's heart - even for people who have never been there. Right now it looks as if rescuing New Orleans will be a task much more daunting than any city has faced since the San Francisco fire of 1906. It must be a mission for all of us.

Subject: U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 05:36:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/31/national/31census.html August 31, 2005 U.S. Poverty Rate Was Up Last Year By DAVID LEONHARDT WASHINGTON - Even as the economy was growing, income stagnated last year and the poverty rate rose, the Census Bureau reported today. This is the first time on record that household income has failed to increase for five straight years. The portion of Americans without health insurance remained roughly steady at 16 percent, according to the bureau. A smaller percentage of people were covered by their employers, but two big government programs, Medicaid and military insurance, grew. The Census Bureau's annual report card on the nation's economic well-being showed that the economic expansion of the last few years had still not done much to benefit many households. Median pretax household income, at $44,389 last year, was at its lowest point since 1997, after accounting for inflation. Though the reasons are not wholly clear, economists say that technology and global trade appear to be holding down pay for many workers. The rising cost of health care benefits has also eaten into pay increases. After the report's release, Bush administration officials noted that the job market had continued to improve since the end of 2004 and that they hoped incomes were now rising and poverty was falling. The poverty rate 'is the last, lonely trailing indicator of the business cycle,' said Elizabeth Anderson, chief of staff in Commerce Department's economics and statistics administration. The Census numbers also do not reflect the tax cuts passed during President Bush's first term, which have lifted the take-home pay of most families. But the biggest tax cuts went to high-income families already getting raises, Democrats said today. The report, they added, showed that the tax cuts had failed to stimulate the economy as the White House had promised. 'The growth in the economy is not going to families,' Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said. 'It's in stark contrast to what happened during the Clinton Administration.' The main theme of the Census report seemed to be the surprising weakness in the labor market for people with jobs, even as the ranks of the unemployed have dwindled. Fewer people are getting health insurance from their employer or from a family member's employer, while pay raises have generally trailed inflation. Last year, households kept their income from falling by working more hours than they had in 2003, the Census data showed. The median pay of full-time male workers declined more than 2 percent, to $40,800; for women, the median dropped 1 percent, to $31,200. When some people switch from part-time work to full-time, they can keep household incomes from dropping even when the pay of individual workers is declining. 'It looks like the gains from the recovery haven't really filtered down,' said Phillip L. Swagel, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. 'The gains have gone to owners of capital and not to workers.' There has always been a lag between an the end of a recession and the resumption of pay raises, Mr. Swagel added, but the length of this lag has been confounding. In addition, the poverty rate rose last year for working-age people, those between 18 and 64. The portion of elderly people in poverty fell, while child poverty was essentially flat. Over all, the poverty rate increased to 12.7 percent, from 12.5 percent in 2003. Poverty levels have changed only modestly during the last three decades rising in the 1980's and falling in 1990's after having dropped sharply in the 1960's. They reached a low of 11.1 percent in 1973, from more than 22 percent in 1960. The poverty rate in New York rose last year to 20.3 percent, from 19 percent, making it the only city of more than one million with a significant change. Among large counties, the Bronx had the fourth-highest poverty rate, trailing three counties on the Texas-Mexico border. Many economists say the government's statistics undercount poverty in New York and other big cities because the numbers are not adjusted for cost of living. A family of two parents and two children is considered poor if it earns s less than $19,157 a year, regardless of whether that family lives in a city where $500,000 buys a small apartment or a mansion. Later this year, the Census will release a number of broader poverty measures, but all have the same thresholds for different regions. The decline in employer-provided health benefits has come after four years of rapidly rising health costs. Some of the increase comes from inefficiencies in the health care system; others are a result of new treatments that improve health and prolong life but are often expensive. Either way, though, the bill for health care has risen and a growing number of companies are deciding not to pay it for some workers. The percentage of people getting health insurance from an employer fell to 59.8 percent last year, from 63.6 percent in 2000.

Subject: For Bobby From: Yann To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 03:06:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Chapters 12 (and its appendix), 13 and 18 from the macro textbook by Krugman and Wells are available...

Subject: Re: For Bobby From: Bobby To: Yann Date Posted: Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 14:21:44 (EDT) Email Address: robert@pkarchive.org Message: Thanks, Yann. I posted it in the theory section. I'm in Europe now. Sorry it took so long.

Subject: Growth and Interest Rates From: Jennifer To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 16:54:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This hurricane may have changed the economic outlook for the coming several months. There is going to be a massive recovery and building effort in the effected Southern states, so large that it should act as a national growth stimulus. I would expect then higher growth in months to come and higher interest rates as the Federal Reserve keeps trying to insure that we are not growing fast enough for inflation to pick up.

Subject: Feeding Europe, Starving at Home From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 15:33:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/movies/03darw.html Feeding Europe, Starving at Home By A. O. SCOTT 'Darwin's Nightmare,' Hubert Sauper's harrowing, indispensable documentary, is framed by the arrival and departure of an enormous Soviet-made cargo plane at an airstrip outside Mwanza, Tanzania. The plane, with its crew of burly Russians and Ukrainians, will leave Mwanza for Europe carrying 55 tons of processed fish caught by Lake Victoria fisherman and filleted at a local factory. Though Mr. Sauper's investigation of the economy and ecology around the lake ranges far and wide - he talks to preachers and prostitutes, to street children and former soldiers - he keeps coming back to a simple question. What do the planes bring to Africa? The answers vary. The factory managers say the planes' cavernous holds are empty when they land. One of the Russians, made uncomfortable by the question, mutters something vague about 'equipment.' Some of his colleagues, and several ordinary Mwanzans, are more forthright: the planes, while they occasionally bring humanitarian food and medical aid, more often bring the weapons that fuel the continent's endless and destructive wars. In any case, they leave behind a scene of misery and devastation that 'Darwin's Nightmare' presents as the agonized human face of globalization. While the flesh of millions of Nile perch is stripped, cleaned and flash-frozen for export to wealthy countries, millions of people in the Tanzanian interior live on the brink of famine. Some of them will eat fried fish heads, which are processed in vast open-air pits infested with maggots and scavenging birds. Along the shores of the lake, homeless children fight over scraps of food and get high from the fumes of melting plastic-foam containers used to pack the fish. In the encampments where the fishermen live, AIDS is rampant and the afflicted walk back to their villages to die. The Nile perch itself haunts the film's infernal landscape like a monstrous metaphor. An alien species introduced into Lake Victoria sometime in the 1960's, it has devoured every other kind of fish in the lake, even feeding on its own young as it grows to almost grotesque dimensions, and destroying an ancient and diverse ecosystem. To some, its prevalence is a boon, since the perch provides an exportable resource that has brought development money from the World Bank and the European Union. The survival of nearly everyone in the film is connected to the fish: the prostitutes who keep company with the pilots in the hotel bars; the displaced farmers who handle the rotting carcasses; the night watchman, armed with a bow and a few poison-tipped arrows, who guards a fish-related research institute. He is paid $1 a day and found the job after his predecessor was murdered. Filming with a skeleton crew - basically himself and another camera operator - Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time. Rather than use voice-over or talking-head expert interviews, he allows the dimensions of the story to emerge through one-on-one conversation and acutely observed visual detail. But 'Darwin's Nightmare' is also a work of art. Given the gravity of Mr. Sauper's subject, and the rigorous pessimism of his inquiry, it may seem a bit silly to compliment him for his eye. There are images here that have the terrifying sublimity of a painting by El Greco or Hieronymus Bosch: rows of huge, rotting fish heads sticking out of the ground; children turning garbage into makeshift toys. At other moments, you are struck by the natural loveliness of the lake and its surrounding hills, or by the handsome, high-cheekboned faces of many of the Tanzanians. The beauty, though, is not really beside the point; it is an integral part of the movie's ethical vision, which in its tenderness and its angry sense of apocalypse seems to owe less to modern ideologies than to the prophetic rage of William Blake, who glimpsed heaven and hell at an earlier phase of capitalist development. Mr. Sauper's movie is clearly aimed at the political conscience of Western audiences, and its implicit critique of some of our assumptions about the shape and direction of the global economy deserves to be taken seriously. But its reach extends far beyond questions of policy and political economy, and it turns the fugitive, mundane facts that are any documentary's raw materials into the stuff of tragedy and prophecy.

Subject: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 19:14:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/sports/othersports/28outdoors.html August 28, 2005 More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch By PETER KAMINSKY LAKE VICTORIA, Tanzania - I thought I had seen every possible way to catch a fish, but on a recent two-day outing on Lake Victoria in the northwest corner of Tanzania, I discovered otherwise. I had definitively seen neither the methods nor the means by which a 90-pound Nile perch and two fine tilapia found their way to our dinner plates. My partner on the trip was Brian Harris, a mild-mannered man whose quiet ways belie the fierce combativeness that landed him at the head of the antipoaching effort at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In his new position as the wildlife manager for the Grumeti Reserves in the long-isolated (and therefore vulnerable) Western Corridor of the Serengeti, Harris and his associates have, rather than fight the poachers, hired them and trained them as game rangers. They also provide schools and dig wells for their villages. The result has been a steady rise in wildlife populations. Lake Victoria has not had such luck. I had read of the decimation of native fish populations in the freshwater chasm formed by the rift between tectonic plates. In an effort to create a spawning haven for resident fish, Rubondo Island has been set aside as a national park, closed to all commercial fishing. The peril to the fish population has increased exponentially with the airlifting of tons of processed fish each day to Russia. The main catch, the highly prized Nile perch, is an exotic fish originally found in the waters downstream of Victoria Falls, at the end of the lake. Exotic, but here to stay. As Brian and I approached the grassy airstrip on Rubondo, we saw a sandy necklace of beach encircling the heavily forested island. Its green canopy was interrupted by grassy patches created by elephants, which knock over many trees in the course of a day's work. A short jeep ride through the forest - where we looked for but did not see any of the resident chimpanzees - deposited us at a pleasant tent camp run by Tanzania National Parks, known as Tanapa. Our guide, Luciano, counseled that a strong northeast wind and a heavy chop on the lake did not bode well for fishing, but we didn't care. We just wanted to fish. The air was sweet, the water was full of bait. Despite the good signs, though, all we succeeded in hooking were some highly illegal long lines and nets. We gave up after two hours of trolling deep diving rapalas. 'The tilapia will be coming in to shore,' Luciano said. We landed, and clambered up a jetty. Luciano's tackle consisted of the branch of a sapling he had tied some fishing line to, with a hook at the end. I noted Luciano's bait: a ball of mossy weed scraped from the lakeside rocks. Luciano took a half-dozen nice fish. Using up-to-date fly rods and spinning tackle, Brian and I didn't catch anything. Our guide consoled us with a nice plump fish that the camp chef broiled, salted and served with lemon. The next morning, the wind was down and we trolled at a place called the Point. It was said to be the best fishing spot on the island. 'Just around the corner there is a place where the crocodiles live, hundreds of them,' Luciano said in the manner adopted by guides everywhere to fill in the fishing lulls. He added: 'But they don't live on this side. You can even swim here.' I was unconvinced. On the shore, a large group of marabou stork crowded around something. 'Poachers,' Brian said. Sure enough, as we eased up on the scavenging storks, we saw the prow and stern of a small boat that the poachers had sunk while they fished (they would raise the boat when it was time to paddle out). The poachers themselves bobbed in the surf, trying to stay out of sight. Brian, armed with nothing and wearing only a bathing suit, went after them. They loped into the forest. Brian followed but did not find them. Apparently there was a poacher's camp just inland. Brian and Luciano returned lugging a huge perch. 'Let's tell the Tanapa rangers,' Brian said as we loaded up the poachers' fish and headed to the next cove, where the rangers lived. 'They won't find them,' Brian said. 'They probably went to hook up with another group. If they can get away with a camp a stone's throw from the rangers, you know the island must be full of poachers.' As far as I know, the rangers were unsuccessful in finding the poachers, but at least Brian and I had an adventure and about 20 pounds of Nile perch filet we took back to the Grumeti Reserves and shared with the rest of our party. 'Poached perch,' my brother Don said, deadpan.

Subject: Re: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 10:20:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hhhmm this posting seems somewhat different from the last time. This posting talks a lot more about the actual fidhing. The last one gave the impression they were 'poaching' Nile Perch. It also gave the impression that Nile Perch came from 'down stream' at Victoria Falls (which is no where near Lake Victoria). None the less can I recommend you go out and try watch the movie 'Darwin's Nightmare'. The discussions with the locals also gives us an opportunity to see the world through their eyes. And there is a lot of ignorance or misconceptions which add more fuel to this downward spiral. The movie does have a positive side. Among the positive stories, one individual who is employed through the fish industry views himself as 'a citizen of the world.' A truly deep statement for a group that don't see themselves as marginalised from the world.

Subject: Am I splitting hairs? From: Mik To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 14:34:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I just read the article again. Although I see the articles are the same I can see how the same article can be read differently. Now I question the writing skills of the author. Am I splitting hairs? Hmmm maybe I'm being overly cynical again. The article has one paragraph that starts with, 'Lake Victoria has not had such luck....' The very next paragraph reads, 'The peril to the fish population... the highly prized Nile perch, is an exotic fish originally found in the waters downstream of Victoria Falls, at the end of the lake.' At the end of the lake? But I know the Victoria Falls and Lake Victoria may have a similar name, Victoria Falls is not at the end of the lake. Take a look at this site: http://www.sitesatlas.com/Maps/Maps/Africa.htm Beteen Kenya and Tanzania you can see Lake Victoria. Between Zimbabwe and Zambia near the town of Livingstone you will find the Victoria falls. That one line making reference to 'the end of the lake' threw me off. Then there is a discussion of a fish refuge? Is it a refuge against the Nile Perch(the highly prized exotic fish)? What were the poachers trying to catch? And if the stern of the boat is below water why didn't the boat sink. Again, am I reading this wrong? Sorry I don't mean to harp on the issue, but I often read things that make me stop an say, 'Huh?'

Subject: Re: Am I splitting hairs? From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 17:43:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: No, I somehow would have not related the articles had you not commented and I am sure the NYTimes fishing columnist was not aware of the film or the review or the PBS documentary on the problems caused by the Nile perch. These articles are important to be viewed together; an important lesson indeed. What you have done is excellent.

Subject: Re: Am I splitting hairs? From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 18:38:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Why not send along a copy of the review by Scott to Kaminsky? That is what I will do.

Subject: A little humour to break the ice From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 13:53:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: For those of you who have been watching the US 'Amber Alert' or 'Green Alert' etc, etc, we would like to point out that it is not only the USA that has this type of alert system. In fact Europe has had this type of system for many years and recently have put it back into action. The British are feeling the pinch after the recent bombings: the security level has just been raised from 'miffed' to 'peeved'. Soon, though, the level may be raised yet again to 'irritated' or even 'a bit cross'! Londoners have not been a 'bit cross' since the blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out. Terrorists have been recategorised from 'tiresome' to 'a bloody nuisance'. The last time 'a bloody nuisance' warning level was issued was during the Great Fire of London in 1666. Be aware that the French government announced yesterday that it had raised its terror alert level from 'run' to 'hide'. The only two higher levels in France are 'surrender' and 'collaborate'. The rise was precipitated by a recent fire that destroyed France's white flag factory, effectively paralysing its military capability. The Germans also increased their state of alert from 'disdainful arrogance' to 'dress in uniform and sing marching songs'. They have two higher levels, 'invade a neighbour' and 'lose'. Seeing this reaction in Europe, the Americans have gone from 'isolationism' to 'find another oil-rich nation in the Middle East ripe for regime change'. Their remaining higher alert states are 'attack the world' and 'beg the British for help'.

Subject: Nature's Revenge From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 09:28:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/30/opinion/30tue1.html?ex=1126065600&en=5c2de4ad2db1030f&ei=5070 August 30, 2005 Nature's Revenge The damage caused by a hurricane like Katrina is almost always called a natural disaster. But it is also unnatural, in the sense that much of it is self-inflicted. New Orleans is no exception, and while the city has been spared a direct hit from the storm, its politicians and planners must rethink the bad policies that contributed to the city's vulnerability. An immediate priority is for the Senate to restore some $70 million that the House, in a singular act of poor timing, slashed from the Army Corps of Engineers' budget for the New Orleans district. The cuts could hurt the corps' ability to rebuild levees protecting the city. Meanwhile, the city itself must attend to a pumping system that is much in need of upgrading. At the same time, there must also be an honest recognition of the fact that no amount of engineering - levees, sea walls, pumping systems, satellite tracking systems - can fully bring nature to heel. Indeed, the evidence is indisputable that systematic levee-building along the Mississippi upstream of New Orleans has blocked much of the natural flow of silt into the delta. That, in turn, has caused the delta to subside and made the city and its environs even more vulnerable to the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, which itself has been rising. Upstream levee-building has also had the effect of turning a sluggish river into a fire hose, helping to destroy marshes and barrier islands that once provided some protection. The steady destruction of coastal wetlands by residential development and years of oil and gas drilling hasn't helped much either. The combination of subsiding land and rising seas has put the Mississippi Delta about three feet lower than it was 100 years ago. All this, in turn, lends urgency to plans proposed by Louisiana politicians to restore natural hurricane protections by diverting water and silt from the river to coastal marshes and wetlands, and by rebuilding barrier islands. The effort is expected to take more than 40 years and cost an estimated $14 billion, substantially more than the $8 billion Everglades restoration project. The administration budgeted $20 million for the project this year, mainly for the necessary planning studies. A lot more than that is going to be needed. New Orleans must learn to take care of nature if it hopes to survive it.

Subject: Left Behind, Way Behind From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 08:57:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29herbert.html August 29, 2005 Left Behind, Way Behind By BOB HERBERT First the bad news: Only about two-thirds of American teenagers (and just half of all black, Latino and Native American teens) graduate with a regular diploma four years after they enter high school. Now the worse news: Of those who graduate, only about half read well enough to succeed in college. Don't even bother to ask how many are proficient enough in math and science to handle college-level work. It's not pretty. Of all the factors combining to shape the future of the U.S., this is one of the most important. Millions of American kids are not even making it through high school in an era in which a four-year college degree is becoming a prerequisite for achieving (or maintaining) a middle-class lifestyle. The Program for International Assessment, which compiles reports on the reading and math skills of 15-year-olds, found that the U.S. ranked 24th out of 29 nations surveyed in math literacy. The same result for the U.S. - 24th out of 29 - was found when the problem-solving abilities of 15-year-olds were tested. If academic performance were an international athletic event, spectators would be watching American kids falling embarrassingly behind in a number of crucial categories. A new report from a pair of Washington think tanks - the Center for American Progress and the Institute for America's Future - says an urgent new commitment to public education, much stronger than the No Child Left Behind law, must be made if that slide is to be reversed. This would not be a minor task. In much of the nation the public education system is in shambles. And the kids who need the most help - poor children from inner cities and rural areas - often attend the worst schools. An education task force established by the center and the institute noted the following: 'Young low-income and minority children are more likely to start school without having gained important school readiness skills, such as recognizing letters and counting. ... By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind nonpoor students. Across the nation, only 15 percent of low-income fourth graders achieved proficiency in reading in 2003, compared to 41 percent of nonpoor students.' How's that for a disturbing passage? Not only is the picture horribly bleak for low-income and minority kids, but we find that only 41 percent of nonpoor fourth graders can read proficiently. I respectfully suggest that we may be looking at a crisis here. The report, titled 'Getting Smarter, Becoming Fairer,' restates a point that by now should be clear to most thoughtful Americans: too many American kids are ill equipped educationally to compete successfully in an ever-more competitive global environment. Cartoonish characters like Snoop Dogg and Paris Hilton may be good for a laugh, but they're useless as role models. It's the kids who are logging long hours in the college labs, libraries and lecture halls who will most easily remain afloat in the tremendous waves of competition that have already engulfed large segments of the American work force. The report makes several recommendations. It says the amount of time that children spend in school should be substantially increased by lengthening the school day and, in some cases, the school year. It calls for the development of voluntary, rigorous national curriculum standards in core subject areas and a consensus on what students should know and be able to do by the time they graduate from high school. The report also urges, as many have before, that the nation take seriously the daunting (and expensive) task of getting highly qualified teachers into all classrooms. And it suggests that an effort be made to connect schools in low-income areas more closely with the surrounding communities. (Where necessary, the missions of such schools would be extended to provide additional services for children whose schooling is affected by such problems as inadequate health care, poor housing, or a lack of parental support.) The task force's recommendations are points of departure that can be discussed, argued about and improved upon by people who sincerely want to ramp up the quality of public education in the U.S. What is most important about the report is the fact that it sounds an alarm about a critical problem that is not getting nearly enough serious attention.

Subject: Destroying the National Parks From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 08:47:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29mon1.html August 29, 2005 Destroying the National Parks Most of us think of America's national parks as everlasting places, parts of the bedrock of how we know our own country. But they are shaped and protected by an underlying body of legislation, which is distilled into a basic policy document that governs their operation. Over time, that document has slowly evolved, but it has always stayed true to the fundamental principle of leaving the parks unimpaired for future generations. That has meant, in part, sacrificing some of the ways we might use the parks today in order to protect them for tomorrow. Recently, a secret draft revision of the national park system's basic management policy document has been circulating within the Interior Department. It was prepared, without consultation within the National Park Service, by Paul Hoffman, a deputy assistant secretary at Interior who once ran the Chamber of Commerce in Cody, Wyo., was a Congressional aide to Dick Cheney and has no park service experience. Within national park circles, this rewrite of park rules has been met with profound dismay, for it essentially undermines the protected status of the national parks. The document makes it perfectly clear that this rewrite was not prompted by a compelling change in the park system's circumstances. It was prompted by a change in political circumstances - the opportunity to craft a vision of the national parks that suits the Bush administration. Some of Mr. Hoffman's changes are trivial, although even apparently subtle changes in wording - from 'protect' to 'conserve,' for instance - soften the standard used to judge the environmental effects of park policy. But there is nothing subtle about the main thrust of this rewrite. It is a frontal attack on the idea of 'impairment.' According to the act that established the national parks, preventing impairment of park resources - including the landscape, wildlife and such intangibles as the soundscape of Yellowstone, for instance - is the 'fundamental purpose.' In Mr. Hoffman's world, it is now merely one of the purposes. Mr. Hoffman's rewrite would open up nearly every park in the nation to off-road vehicles, snowmobiles and Jet Skis. According to his revision, the use of such vehicles would become one of the parks' purposes. To accommodate such activities, he redefines impairment to mean an irreversible impact. To prove that an activity is impairing the parks, under Mr. Hoffman's rules, you would have to prove that it is doing so irreversibly - a very high standard of proof. This would have a genuinely erosive effect on the standards used to protect the national parks. The pattern prevails throughout this 194-page document - easing the rules that limit how visitors use the parks and toughening the standard of proof needed to block those uses. Behind this pattern, too, there is a fundamental shift in how the parks are regarded. If the laws establishing the national park system were fundamentally forward-looking - if their mission, first and foremost, was protecting the parks for the future - Mr. Hoffman's revisions place a new, unwelcome and unnecessary emphasis on the present, on what he calls 'opportunities for visitors to use and enjoy their parks.' There is no question that we go to national parks to use and enjoy them. But part of the enjoyment of being in a place like Yosemite or the Grand Canyon is knowing that no matter how much it changes in the natural processes of time, it will continue to exist substantially unchanged. There are other issues too. Mr. Hoffman would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, and he removes from the policy document any reference to evolution or evolutionary processes. He does everything possible to strip away a scientific basis for park management. His rules would essentially require park superintendents to subordinate the management of their parks to local and state agendas. He also envisions a much wider range of commercial activity within the parks. In short, this is not a policy for protecting the parks. It is a policy for destroying them. The Interior Department has already begun to distance itself from this rewrite, which it kept hidden from park service employees. But what Mr. Hoffman has given us is a road map of what could happen to the parks if Mr. Bush's political appointees are allowed to have their way. It is clear by now that Mr. Bush has no real intention of living up to his campaign promise to fully finance the national parks. This document offers a vivid picture of the divide between the National Park Service, whose career employees remain committed to the fundamental purpose of leaving the parks unimpaired, and an Interior Department whose political appointees seem willing to alter them beyond recognition, partly in the service of commercial objectives. Suddenly, many things - like the administration's efforts to force snowmobiles back into Yellowstone - seem very easy to explain.

Subject: A Haitian Slum's Anger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 07:08:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/international/americas/29haiti.html August 29, 2005 A Haitian Slum's Anger Imperils Election Hopes By WALT BOGDANICH and JENNY NORDBERG PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Sitting at the gateway of the nation's capital, Cité Soleil is a broiling slum of shacks, dust and ditches filled with human waste. It is home to several hundred thousand people who now live with virtually no government services, no police and only an occasional helping hand from international aid groups. Yet, with the first round of national elections now scheduled for Nov. 13, what happens in Cité Soleil is increasingly important to the world beyond its squalor. Not only does it have one of the biggest blocs of potential voters - many of whom back Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the ousted president - but it also can generate the kind of violence that could disrupt those elections. For United Nations peacekeeping forces, bringing some semblance of order to Cité Soleil and giving its residents a chance to vote in the elections are seen as important steps in establishing a new, credible government in Haiti. But while United Nations troops have managed to set up command posts in sections of other poor, violent neighborhoods like Bel Air, large parts of Cité Soleil - the country's biggest slum - remain all but impenetrable. Cité Soleil is now so foreboding that the international peacekeepers, who wear flak jackets and drive armored personnel carriers, conduct no regular patrols in its densely populated neighborhoods. In their last operation, about 400 United Nations troops entered the slum on July 6 and ended up in a five-hour gun battle with gangs who control the area. Numerous residents were wounded in the cross-fire, and the incident has further embittered many Aristide supporters as elections near. 'Cité Soleil is symbolic of Haiti's potential of creating a new society that is inclusive rather than exclusive,' said Robert Maguire, director of international affairs programs at Trinity University in Washington, D.C., and an expert on Haiti. He added that if Cité Soleil is not part of the voting, 'I think the elections will be far less than credible.' Gangs regularly monitor who comes and goes on the only two roads leading into the slum, according to relief workers. [On Aug. 24, a Peruvian soldier stationed on the edge of Cité Soleil was shot by a sniper, according to a spokesman for the United Nations force.] On a recent mid-August day, local political leaders escorted reporters for The New York Times into Cité Soleil, a largely treeless tract of tin huts and crumbling cinderblock. With no running water, drainage ditches are a rancid mix of human waste and garbage that must be crossed by walking on stones or on a narrow bridge with missing planks. The neighborhood leaders, all members of Fanmi Lavalas, the political party founded by Mr. Aristide, wanted reporters to see what they say is evidence of indiscriminate killings by peacekeeping troops during the July 6 raid. These leaders blame the international community, particularly the United States, for Mr. Aristide's departure and for setting up an interim government that is now supported by the United Nations. According to the United Nations account of the raid, soldiers responded to months of violence in Cité Soleil - much of it directed at its own residents - by staging a predawn assault with armored vehicles and helicopters. Their prime target: Emmanuel Wilmer, a gang leader also known as Dread Wilmé. Mr. Wilmer and other gang members were killed in the ensuing battle. In a cinderblock hut, baking in Cité Soleil's midday heat, 13 residents of the neighborhood, brought together by the political leaders, squeezed around a small wooden bench to tell a different story. There, they laid out seven pictures of people, including women and children, who they said had been killed by United Nations troops. 'Here are the ones we had a chance to photograph before the dogs ate them,' said René Momplaisir, a local Fanmi Lavalas leader. Many victims appeared to have been shot in the head, though who fired the bullets - United Nations troops or gang members - could not be independently verified. 'Why do people die like that?' Mr. Momplaisir said. 'It's because there's no justice in Haiti.' John Joël Joseph, a Fanmi Lavalas leader, said dozens of residents were killed or wounded during the raid. 'This is an extremely sad day,' he said. United Nations officials said in a statement that an undetermined number of innocent bystanders 'may have been injured or even killed.' They also cited 'unconfirmed but numerous reports' that gangs killed residents after the troops left. During the recent visit, several residents, including three children, showed reporters what they said were wounds inflicted by peacekeeping troops. Adeline Pierre, 28, said she had been pregnant and lost her unborn baby after being shot. 'They're on the ground and they're in the air, coming after us,' she said. 'I was standing in front of my house and I felt all of a sudden something hit my stomach,' Ms. Pierre said. Olivia Gayraud, the administrator of a free hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, about a 20-minute drive from Cité Soleil, said doctors there treated 27 gunshot victims from the raid, but that the number of wounded was very likely to have been higher. Most were children and women, Ms. Gayraud said, including a woman in her 28th week of pregnancy who lost her baby. The hospital declined to identify the woman because of privacy concerns. Dr. Christophe Fournier, at Doctors Without Borders in New York, said the clinic in Haiti had treated 1,132 gunshot victims since it opened in December. Most appear to be victims of gang violence. But according to Ms. Gayraud, most patients wounded July 6 said they had been shot by international peacekeepers. Juan Gabriel Valdes, who oversees United Nations operation in Haiti, acknowledged in an interview that some bystanders were shot during the raid, but he also accused gang members of using women and children as shields. The attack was necessary, Mr. Valdes explained, 'because this gang was threatening the whole city and was attacking innocent people.' He said the operation took weeks to plan, and that it was changed three times to try to minimize non-gang casualties. United Nations officials said they are investigating the events of July 6, but declined to provide further details. Mr. Valdes said Cité Soleil has been particularly difficult to penetrate because it is so big, the gangs so strong and living conditions so wretched. He also said he lacks commando troops trained and equipped for urban warfare. The Fanmi Lavalas leaders who showed reporters around said they do not believe in violence and they portrayed Mr. Wilmer as someone who tried to protect neighborhood residents from a gang that threatened them. Human rights workers say that some gangs - and there are a variety in Cité Soleil - are terrorizing residents, and that rapes are a particular problem. According to a report released this year by the University of Miami School of Law, some violence in Cité Soleil had been stoked by Haitian business interests who backed an anti-Aristide gang. The leader of that gang was later killed. Mr. Valdes said the country was awash in guns, some distributed by political parties and even by 'some members of the higher social sectors in this country.' He added, 'The abundance of weapons in this country is a sickness of the whole Haitian society.' When reporters from The Times walked through Cité Soleil, no weapons were seen nor gunfire heard, which was very unusual, according to a human rights worker who regularly visits the community. The worker speculated that political leaders had helped to ensure that guns were not visible during the visit. [United Nations troops stationed on the outskirts of Cité Soleil say they are fired on daily from inside the neighborhood, which has kept them from conducting regular operations inside, Col. El Ouafi Boulbars, a spokesman for the United Nations military force in Haiti, said in an interview in late August. 'We can do them but the problem is the collateral damage,' he said.] That violence is also hampering election preparations in Cité Soleil. [Gérard Le Chevallier, the United Nations chief electoral officer in Haiti, said in late August that a voter registration center has been open for several weeks in an industrial area on the edge of Cité Soleil, but that is not where most people live. Mr. Le Chevallier said a second center opened Aug. 25, in a more populated area of the slum, and workers in one factory have also been registered.] Registration ends Sept. 15 for national elections this fall. Political leaders in Cité Soleil are deeply skeptical of elections, having watched as Mr. Aristide, who twice took office in elections, was twice removed - by a coup in 1991 and again in 2004, when, after widespread protests and an armed rebellion, the United States flew him out of the country. He is now in exile in South Africa. In addition, members of his political party, Fanmi Lavalas, have been jailed under the interim government, sometimes without due process, according to the United Nations. The most prominent of these prisoners is Yvon Neptune, Mr. Aristide's former prime minister. 'Fanmi Lavalas has always said that there's only one way to get power in this country and that's the way of elections,' said Mr. Joseph, the party official. 'But how can we talk about elections when all of our party officials are in prison?' Other members of Mr. Aristide's party - who call themselves simply Lavalas - support the elections and are running for government posts. As the international community tries to assert its authority in Cité Soleil, doctors and human rights groups said in interviews that summary executions with machetes were being carried out in other slums around Port-au-Prince. 'We have reports of executions that are supposedly performed by the Haitian police,' said Mr. Valdes, who added that an inquiry is under way. Mr. Joseph, the Lavalas leader in Cité Soleil, said his community needs help, not bullets. 'What we don't understand,' he said, 'is why those of us who are living here, who don't have money to send our children to school, who don't have money to eat, who can't sleep who don't have anything at all - why is it that the international community doesn't come here to help us?' Little money has reached Cité Soleil, international observers say, because of the violence there and the desperate need for aid programs elsewhere in Haiti. Mr. Valdes, the United Nations official in Haiti, said the international community must respond to concerns like those of Mr. Joseph. 'Force is not a solution for the security problems in Haiti,' he said. 'You have to provide water, food, support in health, in education. We have not been able to do that.' Only last month, he said, did the United Nations in Haiti get money to begin providing some of that assistance in Cité Soleil.

Subject: As France Shops for Bears From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 06:15:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/international/europe/29bears.html August 29, 2005 As France Shops for Bears, Shepherds Feel Threatened By JOHN TAGLIABUE ARBAS, France - Alain Reynes planned a late August trip to Slovenia to shop for bears. Some of the farmers up around this Pyrenean hamlet probably wish he would stay there. Mr. Reynes is president of an organization whose aim is to restore the population of bears, now near extinction, in the Pyrenees mountains, which separate Spain and France. The French delegation to Slovenia is seeking five female bears to be let free in the mountains above Arbas next spring. Mr. Reynes's adversaries are local people who raise sheep in the high mountain passes, where the rich vegetation and steep slopes provide the nourishment and exercise necessary to produce particularly delectable lamb. It is especially delectable, the farmers point out, to bears. The mountain sheep are 'smaller in size, but their meat has more flavor,' said Jean Pierre Mirouz, 39, a fireplug of a man and the fourth generation of his family in this business. He lost 180 sheep in June after an attack by a bear stampeded his herd. More bears, he said in the kitchen of his mountain farmhouse, would be 'a catastrophe.' The dispute over the bears injects one more note of tension into a region already fraught with problems. Mr. Mirouz's lamb faces competition from cheaper lamb from New Zealand. Local industry is often inefficient and costly. A big aluminum plant of the Pechiney group that once provided jobs is being closed now that the company has been taken over by Alcan of Canada. The drive to return bears to the Pyrenees goes back a decade or so. By the mid-1990's, the number of native brown bears, diminished by human population growth and hunting, had dwindled to about a dozen. Then in 1996, two Slovenian bears, Mellba and Ziva, were transported to France and let free to roam the Pyrenees. The program suffered a setback in September 1997 when a teen-age hunter shot and killed Mellba. To hear Mr. Reynes, 38, tell it, the survival of bears in the Pyrenees is tantamount to a litmus test of the region's overall environmental health. 'Ecologically, the bear is not indispensable,' he said. But the region requires, he added, 'an equilibrium of man and nature.' The bears don't come cheap. The average price, depending on age and size, is about 7,500 euros, or about $9,200. The French government will foot the bill, though in some cases bears are given as presents, as a diplomatic gesture, from state to state. Mr. Reynes points to a regional survey earlier this year in which 68 percent replied that they favored more bears as an economic asset. The resistance, he says, is a 'psychological problem, a cultural problem.' The movement to bring back the bears gained momentum last November, when a hunter shot and killed one of the few remaining native bears, a female named Cannelle, or Cinnamon. Cannelle's death shook not only the pro-bear faction in the mountains, but the entire nation. President Jacques Chirac, in a statement, called it a 'great loss for biodiversity in France and in Europe.' The imported bears do not necessarily have to be from Slovenia, though that tiny Balkan country has, for Europe, become to bears what Japan once was to transistor radios. Countries that have taken in Slovenian bears in recent years include Italy, Switzerland and Austria, in addition to France. The pro-bear momentum, however, was of short duration. The attack on Mr. Mirouz's sheep, which were grazing on high mountain slopes, came in June. Details are disputed, but Mr. Mirouz said his father and brother had earlier spotted the bear in a pasture. The bear attacked while his father looked on helplessly through binoculars, killing some of the sheep and stampeding the others. In the end, Mr. Mirouz counted 180 or so dead sheep. The government was quick to pay an indemnity for the dead sheep, amounting to more than the income he could have expected by selling them. Still, soon after the attack, 150 farmers - most of them sheep herders like Mr. Mirouz - demonstrated along the route of the Tour de France bicycle race, holding banners aloft with the words, 'The endangered species is us.' The government, made uncertain, postponed the release of the other bears while it studied the attack and its implications. With 580,000 sheep in the Pyrenees, almost as many as there are people, the government is treading lightly. Mr. Reynes, surrounded in his office by a life-size stuffed bear and brochures promoting the merits of a healthy bear population, contends that accidents like the death of Mr. Mirouz's sheep could be avoided if the farmers made better use of government subsidies to pay for shepherds and sheep dogs. Bears, he says, are timid by nature, and dogs or shepherds usually suffice to keep the bears at bay. 'The heart of the question for the sheep farmers,' he said, 'is to teach them to protect their flocks. And the bear is a tiny part of the problem.' Most of the political leaders in the region are against the bears, he conceded. Their argument, as Mr. Reynes sums it up, is: 'It's tough enough to be a farmer in these mountains. Let's not add any difficulties.' Now some in the environmental movement have begun talking about reintroducing the wolf, which has all but disappeared from the Pyrenees, with the exception of their western reaches. When asked about wolves, Mr. Mirouz threw up his hands. 'That would be the end,' he said.

Subject: Media Executives Court China From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 06:12:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/business/worldbusiness/29china.html August 29, 2005 Media Executives Court China, but Still Run Into Obstacles By GERALDINE FABRIKANT In June, Yu Youjun, the executive deputy governor of Hunan Province, came to lunch accompanied by 16 dignitaries at the home in Beverly Hills of Sumner M. Redstone, the Viacom chairman. Viacom, like many other American media companies, is already active in China. Its MTV network is carried in 10 million homes in Guangdong Province. Two-hour blocks of Nickelodeon programming like 'CatDog' and 'Wild Thornberries' are beamed on the government-run CCTV to more than 120 million homes. Over a meal prepared by Wolfgang Puck, Mr. Redstone and Mr. Yu, who had requested the meeting, discussed co-productions by MTV International and Chinese companies, Mr. Redstone recalled. 'He talked about comedy and dramatic mini-series for Chinese audiences and even brought up the possibility of a theme park,' Mr. Redstone said. But the long-held optimism of Western media companies about venturing into the Chinese market has suffered several setbacks recently. At the beginning of the month, as part of an effort to tighten control over cultural products, China's Propaganda Department, the Ministry of Culture and four other regulators published new rules that further restricted what foreign filmmakers and television companies can do in China. Last week, the News Corporation's plan for a new television channel to be co-owned with a Chinese company was quashed by the government. Yesterday, Time magazine reported on its Web site that the News Corporation had circumvented Chinese rules by distributing programming, including the National Geographic Channel and an MTV-style music channel, to local cable companies without getting government permission. The report, which quotes a former News Corporation employee named Jiang Hua, said the company received money from several Chinese cable operators through a shell company, Beijing Hotkey Internet. It is not known whether those accusations have anything to do with the breakdown of the programming deal. A News Corporation spokesman declined to comment on the matter yesterday. A larger question facing Western media companies is how long the newly tightened restrictions will hold. Pessimists in media organizations worry whether the latest crackdown reflects a longer-term shift under a more cautious Chinese president, Hu Jintao. Optimists suggest that the recent moves are just the latest in a long series of episodic, sometimes short-lived efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to preserve social control. Over the longer term, access to the China media is crucial to American companies like Time Warner and Walt Disney, in addition to Viacom and the News Corporation. Growth at these giant conglomerates has slowed and their stock prices have been under pressure. If they can export their feature films, cable and TV programs, or even co-produce new shows with Chinese companies, the returns could be substantial. 'I don't think China will become a significant part of our growth for three to five years,' a top-level media executive said. 'But the positioning we do now will be important for the future.' Mr. Redstone, who is still awaiting final approval for a deal to make children's programs with a Chinese production company in which Viacom would have an equity stake, expressed cautious optimism that over all, United States companies could continue to make progress in China. 'The Chinese government is more skeptical about American media companies,' he said, 'but I have been going to China for eight years and I don't think it will affect Viacom. In China, it is always two steps forward and one step back.' Mr. Redstone is not alone in making visits to China to solidify relationships. Time Warner's chairman, Richard D. Parsons, was recently in China, as was Disney's president, Robert A. Iger. Rupert Murdoch, head of the News Corporation, has long courted Chinese government officials and is now married to a Chinese woman, Wendi Deng, who has played a role in negotiations there on the company's behalf. Several media executives pointed out that China is preparing for a notable event for its media market - the 2008 Olympics in Beijing - and for that reason cannot go backward for long. Among other benefits it may produce, the Olympics will generate a tremendous amount of advertising, and any cable networks that are already up and running could benefit substantially, according to several media experts. For now, the focus of the recent restrictions has been on equity ownership of media properties in China, and less on the availability of American programs, although there are also restrictions on the number of American movies. That may also explain why the Chinese put a stop to the News Corporation's plan to develop a television channel where it held a 50 percent stake, although the programming would have been locally produced. A spokesman said that 'the company's Chinese presence is continuing to grow.' Currently, News Corporation holdings include a Mandarin-language entertainment channel, Xing Kong Wei Shi, and a minority stake in Phoenix Satellite Television Holdings, a publicly traded satellite TV company. Even as government rules toughen, it would be difficult to slow the influx of American cultural influences. Cartoon characters owned by Disney are already popular in China. About 1,100 stores have Disney counters that sell merchandise based on notable Disney toys. Disney's Mickey Mouse Magazine has strong sales in China and ABC, a Disney unit, has sold 'Desperate Housewives' to Chinese television companies. A handful of American feature films are distributed each year in China, where the appetite for films is growing. United States companies are exploring a wide variety of strategies for entering the Chinese market, including ventures with Chinese directors in which American stories are adapted to Chinese themes. For a company like Viacom, the Chinese market is particularly attractive because it includes a growing middle class and a very young population. Viacom has said that so far, MTV International, the parent company of MTV, Nickelodeon and other networks, is making a profit in China, although it did not disclose how much. The profit comes mostly from advertising sales, but also includes some affiliate fees. Viacom also distributes programming that appears on Chinese-owned networks. As for its Paramount Pictures unit, the company said that it did make some money from the sale of television programming in China, but that the amount was not material. For its part, Time Warner continues to invest in China's movie theaters. It has completed 8 multiplexes, and has 12 more scheduled for completion by the end of next year. Time Warner also has a minority stake in CETV, a 24-hour Chinese entertainment TV channel that is distributed over cable and satellite. It reaches 23 million homes across China. The majority stake is owned by the Tom Group, which is associated with Hutchinson Whampoa, the Hong Kong company controlled by the entrepreneur Li Ka-shing. Perhaps the company with the biggest capital investment and the biggest opportunity for near-term results is Disney. Hu Jintao's early days as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party fostered a perception among some analysts that he might be more tolerant of a diversity of political views than his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, and that an early beneficiary could be Disney. When pro-democracy protests shook Hong Kong in 2003 and 2004, Mr. Hu responded with a series of moves that made it much easier for Chinese citizens to obtain visas for Hong Kong, and by eliminating a requirement that most Chinese visitors to the territory travel in supervised groups. That could send throngs of tourists to Hong Kong Disneyland when it opens on Sept. 12. And there is another factor that helps as well as hurts Western media companies in China: the thriving market in pirated television shows and movies. Another media executive, who did not want to be identified because of the delicate state of the company's negotiations in China, said that 'even if the Chinese tried to keep foreign cultural icons out, piracy would make them available.'

Subject: Re: Media Executives Court China From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 13:31:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Considering that the US TV companies can't get into China, why don't they simply broadcast from satelite into China on a free to air basis. Then make their money purely out of advertising? In this way they will get advertising money that they would not have received in the first place, and they will circumvent this stupidity of communism control over the media. This could be the biggest break in re-adjusting world order by giving Chinese free foreign TV. Heck I am sure there are many companies who 'happpen' to sell their products in China and would be glad to pay serious money to advertise to such a huge market that will be glad to watch the channel for free.

Subject: China to Tax Large Engine Vehicles From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 05:53:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/worldbusiness/26yuan.html August 26, 2005 China Preparing to Tax Vehicles With Large Engines By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG - Alarmed by high world oil prices and sporadic shortages of gasoline and diesel fuel in big cities this summer, China's leaders are drafting plans to impose steep taxes on cars and sport utility vehicles with gas-guzzling engines. The taxes would add as much as 27 percent to the price of vehicles with big engines, notably sports cars and S.U.V.'s, auto industry officials and people advising the government on the plan said. At the same time, taxes may be cut slightly for models with the smallest, most efficient engines, though the details of these cuts are still under discussion, they said. The taxes follow China's adoption on July 1 of fuel economy standards that are more stringent than those in force in the United States. The Bush administration announced plans on Tuesday to phase in tougher fuel economy rules for light-duty trucks in the 2008-11 model years, but the Chinese have already imposed stiffer standards to take effect in 2008-9. Since the 1970's, the United States has had a so-called gas-guzzler tax up to $7,700 on cars that get very low gasoline mileage. The tax falls mainly on sports cars with huge engines, like Ferraris, because S.U.V.'s, pickup trucks and minivans are exempt from the tax - an exception that has contributed to a shift away from cars and toward these trucklike vehicles in the American market. The planned taxes in China are part of a much broader effort to improve the nation's energy security. Efforts by state-controlled oil companies to buy foreign businesses have drawn the most attention, particularly Cnooc's unsuccessful $18.5 billion bid this summer for Unocal, and China National Petroleum's $4.18 billion deal on Monday to buy PetroKazakhstan. But China has also been focusing on energy efficiency. Zhang Guobao, vice minister of the State Development and Reform Commission, said last week that China's next five-year plan, for 2006 through 2010, would put energy conservation ahead of expanding supplies, the official New China News Agency said. The State Council, or cabinet, is in the final stages of drafting the new automobile taxes, a complex process involving many government agencies, said He Dongquan, the transportation program official in the Beijing office of the Energy Foundation, a nonprofit group that has worked with the government on the issue. 'I'm quite sure it will be adopted in the next one or two months,' he said. Feng Fei, director of the industry department at the State Council's Development and Research Center, said in June that his agency had submitted a plan calling for steep increases in excise taxes from automakers on vehicles with big engines that burn more gasoline, The China Daily reported then. 'The taxation change is mainly aimed at encouraging car owners to consume less oil and at cushioning environmental pressures,' Mr. Feng said in June. A call to his office on Thursday was not answered. With rising gasoline prices already pushing consumers toward more fuel-efficient models, auto manufacturers appear to be offering little resistance to the planned new tax. 'The move is consistent with energy conservation plans, and we believe it is the right way to go in achieving energy efficiency in society,' said Li Fengzhen, chief financial controller of Great Wall Automobile Holding, a manufacturer of medium-size S.U.V.'s that would face slightly higher taxes under the plan. China currently imposes an excise tax of 3 percent, 5 percent or 8 percent on cars - those with larger engines pay higher rates - while taxes on S.U.V.'s and minivans are 3 percent or 5 percent. Under the new rules nearing completion, the taxes would range from 1 or 2 percent for vehicles with the smallest engines to 20 percent for vehicles with engines of four liters or more, said An Feng, director of the Auto Project on Energy and Climate Change. That group is a nongovernmental organization in Beijing that has advised officials on fuel economy policy, though it has not been directly involved in drafting the new tax regulations. (While a four-liter engine is considered quite large in most of the world, it is typical for an American sport utility vehicle. For example, the standard six-cylinder engine of the Ford Explorer, the best-selling S.U.V. in the United States, displaces 4 liters, though a larger 8-cylinder, 4.6-liter engine is available.) In addition, the Chinese government has been working on a gas-guzzler tax similar to the American tax but covering S.U.V.'s and minivans in addition to cars, Mr. An said. Mr. He of the Energy Foundation said that the tax would vary from 5 percent to 15 percent, depending on engine size, and would apply to vehicles that fell short of the fuel economy standards imposed on July 1. Chinese vehicle taxes largely exclude pickup trucks, which are separately regulated and sell in tiny numbers. Minivans in China tend to have medium or small engines and may not face much of a tax increase. The track record of gas-guzzler taxes on vehicles in promoting energy efficiency has been mixed in other countries, said Paul Blokland, director of Segment Y, a consulting firm in Bangalore, India, that tracks automakers in Asia. Very affluent consumers who can afford big vehicles with large engines tend not to be discouraged by extra taxes on the initial price of the vehicle, he said. Yale Zhang, an analyst in the Shanghai office of CSM Worldwide, a global automotive consulting firm, said that most Chinese buyers, unlike Americans, already chose vehicles with smaller engines. So increased taxes will fall on just a small share of the market. The multinational company that may face the biggest burden from the taxes is likely to be DaimlerChrysler, which sells Jeeps and big Mercedes sedans in China. Grand Cherokees with 4-liter and 4.7-liter engines, not especially large by American standards, would fall in the highest category of excise taxes. Trevor Hale, a DaimlerChrysler spokesman in Beijing, said the automaker had not seen the details but supported the government's general desire to improve fuel economy. Chinese officials had talked earlier this year of imposing a fuel tax once world oil prices started to decline, so as to hold domestic gasoline and diesel fuel prices at whatever peak they might reach. High prices would then encourage long-term attention to efficiency, the officials reasoned. But they have lately been silent on the matter of a fuel tax, having had to cope with dissatisfaction from taxi drivers in particular over fuel price increases that have already occurred. The government-regulated retail price for gasoline in China has risen to $1.73 a gallon this month from $1.29 a gallon two years ago, an increase that has lagged behind the steep climb in global crude oil prices. Many service stations in southeastern China ran out of gasoline and diesel fuel a week ago, shortages the government attributed to shipping disruptions resulting from a passing typhoon and a tropical storm. But shipping executives said that the storms had no effect on deliveries by tankers. China's main refiner, Sinopec, has blamed hoarding for the shortages, as businesses and drivers keep an eye on oil prices and top up tanks now in anticipation that Chinese retail prices, adjusted only once a month, will rise next month.

Subject: Europe has had this for a long while From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 13:22:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting, Europe has had a tax on vehicles based on the engine size for a long while now. This is the primary reason why Europeans drive smaller sized engine cars that North Americans.

Subject: The Health Factory From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 05:51:35 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/29/opinion/29spear.html August 29, 2005 The Health Factory By STEVEN J. SPEAR Cambridge, Mass. — Today, going to an American hospital seems about as safe as parachuting off a bridge. An estimated 98,000 Americans die each year as a result of medical error, and a nearly equal number succumb to infections they acquire in hospitals. Those rates are unacceptable in the world's most medically advanced country. This month, President Bush signed a bill intended to reduce the rate of medical errors. The legislation authorizes the creation of 'patient safety organizations' to which health care providers can report errors and near misses. On the basis of these reports, the organizations will recommend ways to avoid such mistakes. And to reduce disincentives to reporting, the bill prevents information disclosed to these organizations from being used in malpractice lawsuits. The new legislation is a step in the right direction. It will allow hospitals to study their errors without fear that acknowledging mistakes will lead to reprisals. But within the hospitals themselves lies a far bigger opportunity to reduce the rate of catastrophic medical error, if the hospitals would just follow the example of the world's most successful industrial organizations. Companies like Toyota, Alcoa and Vanguard differ from one another in the products they produce and the technologies they employ, but they share a management approach that has resulted in a combination of safety, quality, efficiency and responsiveness unmatched by their competitors. It may seem a stretch to compare a carmaker's, aluminum refiner's, or mutual fund company's operations with a hospital's. But all these companies manage complex processes that require a great deal of problem solving - and they have something important to teach health care. Typically, health care workers, like employees in many other industries, tend to work around problems when they encounter them, meeting patients' immediate needs but not resolving the problems' root causes. Therefore, people confront 'the same problem, every day, for years,' as one nurse phrased it to me. These persistent difficulties manifest themselves as regular inefficiencies within the system, and they occasionally lead to catastrophic mistakes. What sets the non-health care leaders apart is that as they do their work, they are constantly learning how to do it better. Work is designed to reveal even little problems as they occur- well before they cause errors or near misses worthy of being reported. Managers respond to these problems immediately, with rapid experiments aimed at generating sustainable fixes, rather than with workarounds that are constantly repeated. The knowledge that results from this process is then shared through collaborative experimentation in which all employees take part. A number of American hospitals have tried this approach, with promising results. For example, hospitals in the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative addressed a recurring predicament in intensive care. Catheters placed directly into veins or arteries, called central lines, are used to deliver medication swiftly to critically ill patients. But a quarter-million patients nationwide who receive this treatment each year suffer bloodstream infections as a result, and of those, 15 percent die. At one Pittsburgh area hospital, mortality was a staggering 40 percent of those infected, and the cost for each infected patient was $25,000 to $80,000. To eliminate these infections, the hospitals taught themselves to find problems and institute small process enhancements at a rate far faster than a national reporting program will most likely allow. Together, these small fixes added up to a significant improvement. For periods of days or weeks, the Pittsburgh hospitals observed the placement and maintenance of every central line, looking for minor breaks in routine that could create opportunities for infection. Along the way, they found dozens of factors that were potentially suspect. One hospital realized that in its line-maintenance kits, gloves were stored on the bottom, causing nurses to fish through sterile material with bare hands. Other kits had drapes - sheets that isolate the area on which a nurse or doctor is working - that were either too small to be effective or so large that patients knocked them out of the way. Other hospitals discovered that only on certain shifts were there doctors expert in placing the more difficult but least infection-prone type of line. And the shifts that lacked such expertise also lacked simple, reliable ways to signal the experts on other shifts to move lines from high-risk to low-risk locations or to remove them entirely when they returned to work. By quickly identifying and resolving these small procedural problems, the Pittsburgh hospitals as a group cut their central line infection rates in half, and some hospitals were able to cut their individual infection rates nearly to zero. These hospitals and others used a similar approach to solve other problems, like patient falls and faulty medication administration. To go from working around problems to identifying and solving them required hospital workers to change the way they worked, from the front lines to the senior levels. But the effects were profound. If the rest of the country's hospitals follow that example, the national savings would be measured in tens of thousands of lives and billions of dollars every year.

Subject: Real Economists and Good News From: Maureen To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 22:22:31 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: This article by Jacques-Henri David, head of the Deutsche Bank Group in France, appeared in Figaro on Thursday. It elaborates on a study of the global economy in the year 2020 that was recently completed by the Deutsche Bank Group: In 2020, the United States will remain the world superpower, with a total GNP of approximately $17 trillion to $18 trillion. Thanks to its dynamic demographics (1% annual population growth), a productivity and a competitiveness amongst the best in the world (currently second in the world and far out in front of Germany (13th) or France (26th) according to statistics from the World Economic Forum), and thanks also to its constant drive to create and innovate, and with flexibility due to the mobility of its labor force, the United States will maintain a clear advantage over China and India and will widen the gap with Europe. With average per capita salaries of approximately $55,000, the income of the average American in 2020 will be 1.5 to 2 times greater than that of a European; five times higher than that of a Chinese and nine times more than that of an Indian (approximately $6,000 per capita). In Europe, Germany, France, along with Italy and the United Kingdom, should lose ground in the world competition with a GNP per country of about $2 to 2.5 trillion. While European countries will remain rich in terms of per capita income (about $32,500), their relative weight will decline with their demographics and weaker growth (on average, almost half as much as the United States). Countries like Spain or Ireland will experience a higher level of development than the European average, thanks to a wider opening of their economies to the outside, the dynamism of their investments, good population growth forecasts and effective immigration policies. There are still many in the Democratic Party whose goal is to reshape America's economy to make it look more like Western Europe's. As the United States pulls farther and farther ahead of Europe economically, this idea appears more and more perverse. With socialism defunct and the 'Third Way' being left in the economic rear, it is hard to see what remains, ideologically speaking, for the American Left.

Subject: Re: Real Economists and Good News From: Poyetas To: Maureen Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 10:43:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Maureen!! You remind me of all the journalists that Krugman talks about! Johnny5 was 100% correct. Those are just numbers you are throwing out and are meaningless unless you put them in perspective. First off, let me tell everyone that economists in Europe have always been optimistic about the US economy. The point is that they are rarely privy to the information that is discussed on this board every day! 'With average per capita salaries of approximately $55,000, the income of the average American in 2020 will be 1.5 to 2 times greater than that of a European; five times higher than that of a Chinese and nine times more than that of an Indian (approximately $6,000 per capita)' - Oh really?? And what else is new? Let me ask you this Maureen, does the report say what the mode income per capita is? Or simply put, what percentage of the US population earns 55,000 USD/yr? 'The United States will maintain a clear advantage over China and India and will widen the gap with Europe.' - Speaking of 'gaps', what about the massive gaps existing in the current and fiscal accounts? 'With socialism defunct and the 'Third Way' being left in the economic rear, it is hard to see what remains, ideologically speaking, for the American Left.' - Ummmmm, let me see. How about that 40 million number listed above. How about unjustified wars. How about social security? How about higher wages? How about income disparity? How about public education and health care? How about....you get the picture. Ignorance is bliss Maureen, thats why Republican's are always so optimistic. The second question - what is different in this report from what's been going on in the last 50 years??!!!! Macroeconomic statistics are just that. Statistics. Do they mention whether in 50 years there will still be 40 million uninsured americans? Or how about

Subject: Re: Real Economists and Good News From: Maureen To: Poyetas Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 14:01:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Poyetsa writes: ' Oh really?? And what else is new? Let me ask you this Maureen, does the report say what the mode income per capita is? Or simply put, what percentage of the US population earns 55,000 USD/yr?' Apparently Poyetsa can't read as the article clearly states that the AVERAGE is expected to be some $55,000/year! That's $55,000 per average citizen in the US.

Subject: No flames - nice and cool From: Johnny5 To: Maureen Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 08:07:38 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Bravo Ms. Dowd - see it's easy to make posts that don't have to insult people. Having lived in both places - america and europe - making higher income is just one piece of the puzzle of life - having no time for friends or family constantly working to make that higher income is not mentioned in your article it seems. I enjoyed the tea time and relaxing days with european friends that I just can't find in America. What is it to gain all the money in the world, if you lose your soul? Working mothers, 2 job fathers, the poor children raised by the state and MTV - but what does that matter - we will make the most money. Certainly you can see the forest and not just the income tree?

Subject: Re: No flames - nice and cool From: Mik To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 13:19:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Johnny, I don't agree with Maureen but I do want to raise a topic of discussion with you on this concept you have raised. I believe there are two theoretical concepts here: 1. The concept that money isn't everything and that in our pursuit of money we have neglected social issues such as decent holiday, or medical insurance, etc, etc 2. The concept that the ever growing costs of social issues will someday swamp our limited resources and drown our economies (as may have happened in some European countries). By focusing on ensuring improved wealth, we will have enough money in the future to solve any growing social costs as they arrive. Which way should we follow? I don't know the answer to this question and would appreciate your comments and a discussion point.

Subject: In the year 2525... From: Pancho Villa To: Maureen Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 03:46:46 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Fortune-telling is the practice of predicting the future, usually of an individual, through mystical or supernatural means. It often conflates with the religious practice known as divination. Common methods used of fortune telling include astrology, tarot card reading (cartomancy), crystallomancy (reading of a crystal sphere), and palmistry (cheiromancy). The latter three have traditional associations in the popular mind with the Roma and Sinti people (often called 'gypsies'). Various forms of fortune-telling appear throughout the world. Typical topics that fortune-tellers make predictions on include future romantic, financial, and childbearing prospects. In contemporary Western culture, it appears that women consult fortune-tellers more than men: some indication of this comes from the profusion of advertisements for commercial fortune-telling services in magazines aimed at women, whilst such advertisements appear virtually unknown in magazines aimed specifically at men. Telephone consultations with psychics (charged to the caller's telephone account at very high rates) grew in popularity through the 1990s.

Subject: Re: In the year 2525... From: Dorian To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 17:48:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: It just goes to show you that you can't trust 'pundits', some are fools just as some in the political world are. You must use your own judgement after reviewing the facts and your own understanding of the world. No one can predict the future, but one can choose between ideas and theories and predictions. For example, despite the cheer-leading in the papers, my common sense tells me that Bush is an idiot and his administration the most dangerous to everything America stands in history. Reading the papers one would not easily come to that conclusion. As far as economics, I feel most in sympathy with Pete's arguments. One could argue in other ways, but this article seems to overlook too much to arrive at a rosy scenario for America. The facts - all the facts, not only the few debatable ones she cites don't jibe with her conclusion.

Subject: Re: In the year 2525...Ooops From: Dorian To: Dorian Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 17:51:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I just noticed that her prediction was for the year 2525, which renders her entire argument an absurdity. No one can even begin to predict what life will be like in 2525, for the US or for anywhere. As someone else wrote, this is in the realm of fortune-telling, not economic theory. Absurd!

Subject: Re: In the year 2525...Ooops From: Mik To: Dorian Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 13:33:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I don't want to start an argument... but, part of my job is making predictions forcasting 20 to 30 years into the future. Which would be the 2025 prediction. There is alot you can do using the economic theory of 'ceteris paribus' (all things remaining equal). In essence you look at the current trends and project them into the future. That is the preconcept of the article. It is a very common practice, especially (in my case) where you are trying to work out how long it will take to pay off an asset investment in a foreign country and you want to know what are all the major variables at play: currency devaluation, inflation, etc, etc. Granted it is by no means perfect, but based on current trends..... the USA looks a whole lot better than Europe, economically speaking. We can then look at the subjective issues: will that deficit be sorted out? will the housing market implode and bring down the economy with it, etc, etc. Keep in mind that there are many similar problems in Europe too.

Subject: Re: In the year 2525...Ooops From: Bobby To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 31, 2005 at 19:52:01 (EDT) Email Address: robert@pkarchive.org Message: 2525? Is that a reference from Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Ghost of Christmas Past from the Future)? Or maybe it's 2929. . . .

Subject: Re: In the year 2525...Ooops From: Pancho Villa To: Bobby Date Posted: Thurs, Sep 01, 2005 at 15:03:56 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: My dearest Bobby, (in this case replying to) 'Maureen': 'Anything too stupid to be said is sung.': http://www.metrolyrics.com/lyrics/29388/Zager_and_Evans/In_the_Year_2525/

Subject: KPMG settles tax case with $456 mln fine From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 17:46:24 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: KPMG settles tax case with $456 mln fine Monday August 29, 3:56 PM EDT By Arindam Nag and Christine Kearney NEW YORK (Reuters) - Accounting firm KPMG on Monday agreed to pay $456 million to settle accusations it sold fraudulent tax shelters, as it sealed a deal with the government to avoid a criminal indictment that might have crippled the firm. While KPMG, the smallest of the major U.S. accounting houses, itself escaped an indictment of the kind that destroyed Arthur Andersen when it was convicted of destroying documents, eight former partners, including its former deputy chairman, and a KPMG lawyer, were indicted for selling the tax shelters to wealthy clients. An outside monitor, Richard Breeden, a former Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chairman, was appointed to oversee the firm's compliance with the settlement, which includes an agreement to shut down its tax practice for high net worth individuals within six months. [0] 'That is a big blow, it was one of their flagship businesses that was quite profitable,' said Robert Willens, accounting and taxation analyst with Lehman Brothers. Those charged include the firm's former deputy chairman, Jeffrey Stein and others who were involved in its tax practice. Andersen's indictment, stemming from the Enron Corp. scandal, caused clients to flee and the firm to collapse, throwing thousands of people out of work. Federal agents for more than three years have been investigating tax shelters that were sold by KPMG mostly to wealthy individuals between 1996 and 2002. 'KPMG is pleased to have reached a resolution with the Department of Justice. We regret the past tax practices that were the subject of the investigation. KPMG is a better and stronger firm today, having learned much from this experience,' said the firm's Chairman and CEO Timothy P. Flynn. KPMG said publicly in mid-June that it accepted 'full responsibility for the unlawful conduct by former KPMG partners during that period, and we deeply regret that it occurred.' The shelters at issue are no longer sold by KPMG. The accounting industry generally has scaled back its shelter business amid a surge of official probes and bad publicity. Separately, the SEC said that it was pleased with the agreement between the audit firm and the DOJ. It said it was not considering any action against KPMG as the tax shelters did not violate any securities laws. 'Commission staff will of course monitor the situation in view of the Commission's responsibilities to investors and markets,' said SEC Chief Accountant Donald Nicolaisen. According to federal government documents on the probe, KPMG sold three 'abusive' tax products from 1997 to 2001 which were used to claim losses on tax returns totaling several billions of dollars. They were Bond-Linked Issue Premium Structure, or BLIPS, Foreign Leveraged Investment Program (FLIP) and Offshore Portfolio Investment Strategy (OPIS). A lawyer for Richard Smith, one of the indicted former partners, criticized the Monday's settlement saying it was an attempt to 'criminalize' the type of tax planning that tax professionals engage in on a daily basis. 'There is nothing hidden, fraudulent or criminal about the BLIPS transaction. It was fully and openly reviewed and approved by many KPMG professionals and independent law firms who believed that BLIPS complied with the tax law. No court has ever held that the BLIPS transaction does not work,' said Robert Fink of law firm Kostelantez & Fink, LLP. 'If the government wants to put an end to these types of transactions, the proper response is for Congress to change the law, not to scare professionals away with indictments. It is a misuse of prosecutorial discretion to use criminal prosecutions to change accepted and legitimate standards of conduct,' Fink added. (Additional reporting by Peter Kaplan in Washington) ©2005 Reuters Limited.

Subject: Pay Attention to Canada From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 13:19:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/business/27nocera.ready.html?ex=1282795200&en=18a1d929ad75a77a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 27, 2005 Memo to U.S.: Pay Attention to Canada By Joseph Nocera I'M a lucky guy. Every summer I get to spend a month or more at a house my wife and I own on a wonderful lake in the Laurentian mountains of Quebec. For more than 25 years, I've been coming up here to this little slice of paradise, and in that time, I've come to know a lot of the people around the lake, many of whom, of course, are businesspeople. I've become friends with a Toronto hedge fund manager, a Montreal chemical company executive, an Ottawa lobbyist and a general counsel for a Canadian multinational, among many others. Naturally, whenever we get together, the subject turns to business - Canadian business. We invariably hash over the latest trade frictions with the United States, which always garner front-page play in the Canadian papers and no play at all in the American papers. Although you probably haven't heard about it, there is an unusually nasty dispute going on now over softwood lumber, a major Canadian export that the United States believes is unfairly subsidized by the Canadian government. Unfortunately for our side, the North American Free Trade Agreement arbitrators have consistently ruled in Canada's favor. After the latest - and supposedly final - such ruling a few weeks ago, the United States trade representative, Rob Portman, announced that the United States would ignore it and refuse to refund $5 billion in tariffs it has collected in the last five years. (The American position is that the ruling is pre-empted by a parallel proceeding at the World Trade Organization.) THE stance has made our friendly neighbors to the north a lot less friendly - in fact, the country is absolutely up in arms. Canada's trade minister even walked out of softwood lumber negotiations recently, to the universal applause of his countrymen. 'What is there to talk about?' asked Senator Pat Carney, a former trade minister who now represents British Columbia. 'We won. The Americans won't abide by the rule of law.' That pretty much sums up the sentiment of the entire country. Senator Carney doesn't want to slap duties on goods imported from America. 'That would hurt our consumers,' she correctly noted. She has another form of retaliation in mind. She wants the Canadian government to begin 'scrutinizing' American investment in Canada. She pointed in particular to a pending $6.9 billion acquisition of Terasen, a Canadian natural gas pipeline company, by Kinder Morgan, based in Houston. Memo to American business: Pay attention to this. It could cause trouble. That goes double for you, Richard Kinder. As a Texan, and president of Enron in the mid-1990's, you are on friendly terms with President Bush. You should whisper in his ear to settle this thing fast. It's in everyone's best interest. Here are a few other Canadian business topics that my friends and I have been discussing this summer: A TALE OF TWO BANKS Did you know that a handful of Canadian banks were up to their necks in the Enron fraud? Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, known as C.I.B.C., was one of Enron's 'Tier 1' banks, which meant it was pretty much willing to do anything Andrew S. Fastow asked it to, including violate the law. (According to prosecutors, an unnamed C.I.B.C. banker once remarked that Mr. Fastow, Enron's former chief financial officer, would someday be 'led away in handcuffs.' Good prediction.) And Toronto Dominion also did plenty of deals with Enron. Now, both banks are paying the piper. This month, C.I.B.C. settled its involvement in the big Enron shareholder suit for an absolutely crushing amount: $2.4 billion, which is more than either J. P. Morgan or Citigroup, even though C.I.B.C. is a much smaller institution. Thanks to the settlement, C.I.B.C. recently reported a loss of nearly $2 billion in its latest quarter. Then came Toronto Dominion, which last week announced that it was paying $130 million to settle claims with Enron itself and was also putting aside $300 million to $400 million as it girded for coming negotiations with William S. Lerach, the lead lawyer in the shareholder suit. During a brief conference call with analysts, however, Toronto Dominion's chief executive, W. Edmund Clark, made it clear that he felt the whole thing was terribly unfair. 'No one at T.D. did anything wrong,' he insisted, 'but we have been swept up in a system which is causing even innocent participants to pay. This is a real economic cost to the bank, and for that I am truly sorry.' Not so fast, Mr. Clark. As the Enron bankruptcy examiner pointed out, your bank did six transactions, called prepays, that generated about $2 billion for Enron. Prepays may have been legal, but they were incredibly sleazy, their primary purpose being to fool investors. What appeared to be complex commodities swaps were actually disguised loans to Enron. The Toronto Dominion prepays also helped create the illusion of $1.5 billion in cash flow, which was critical for Enron to maintain its high credit rating. Did the Toronto Dominion bankers working with the company know how Enron was using these transactions? 'The swap transaction is effectively a two-month loan to Enron,' reads one of the Toronto Dominion e-mail messages reprinted by the bankruptcy examiner. He had a dozen e-mail messages making similar remarks. Memo to Mr. Clark: When you finally do settle with Mr. Lerach, you ought to apologize to a different group of beleaguered shareholders - Enron's. AIR CANADA, MODEL AIRLINE What's this? Air Canada, that perennially troubled airline, is making money? It's true. Last summer, ACE Aviation Holdings, Air Canada's parent company, reported a second-quarter loss of 510 million Canadian dollars ($427 million at current rates). This summer, ACE reported second-quarter profits of 168 million Canadian dollars. Michael J. Linenberg of Merrill Lynch calls it 'among the most profitable of all North American carriers.' What happened? In a word, bankruptcy. ACE Aviation filed for bankruptcy in April 2003. When it emerged 18 months later, it had eliminated $12 billion in debt and lowered its labor costs by $1.2 billion. It also shifted some of its less profitable routes to its low-cost regional carrier, Jazz. (ACE is now planning to spin off Jazz to shareholders.) Recently, I flew on Air Canada, and mentioned to one of the attendants that the company finally seemed to be doing well. 'Ah, yes,' she replied. 'That's because they cut our pay and benefits in half.' She smiled as she said it. (Hey, she's Canadian.) Memo to Delta: What in the world are you waiting for? Bankruptcy is a pain, but it's your only way out. WHO NEEDS THE SAUDIS? Did you read that article last Sunday in The New York Times Magazine about how Saudi Arabia might not have the oil reserves we think they have? And how, as a result, a full-blown energy crisis might be a lot closer than most people now think? Pretty scary. But my Canadian friends keep telling me not to worry. Why? Because of the oil sands in Northern Alberta, which, they say, now have proven recoverable reserves of around 175 billion barrels - second only to the Saudis - and may in fact wind up having more reserves than any other spot on earth, especially as the technology to extract it improves. This oil is not pumped from the ground, however. It's mined, and the oil is then extracted from the sands in an enormously expensive process. At $10 a barrel, this extraction process is uneconomical, but at $60 a barrel, it is a highly profitable enterprise. (Break even is around $20 a barrel.) Many of the major oil companies have made multibillion-dollar investments in the oil sands, which are now producing about one million barrels a day, most of that going straight to the United States. Neil Camarta, who heads up Shell Canada's efforts, told me that he expected production to rise to three million barrels a day by 2010. Not having heard much about this before, I was a tad skeptical, so I called T. Boone Pickens, the 77-year-old former raider who knows more about oil markets than just about anyone I know. Mr. Pickens turned out to be quite excited about the oil sands. 'That oil is the jewel of North America,' he said. He says he thinks that production will never approach the 10 million barrels a day the Saudis currently export - 'it's just too expensive to develop' - but that it could eventually get as high as 6 million barrels a day, which would cover more than half of America's oil import needs. He also said that it would be a very long time before the oil sands would face the 'declining yield curve' that the Saudis will soon have to deal with. And although the Chinese have made some small investments in Northern Alberta, it is logistically impossible to ship the oil to China. So the United States is the logical market. Mr. Camarta told me that Vice President Dick Cheney would visit the oil sands next month. Memo to Mr. Cheney: Can you settle the softwood lumber dispute while you're there? With all that oil, do we really want Canada mad at us?

Subject: Canadians mad with the US? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 14:38:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: How can Canadians be mad with the US? It is our nature not to be mad with anyone. Granted we stand firm on our principles (such as not getting involved in Iraq) but we are way too nice to get mad. Hey even George Bush was surprised when Canadians were waiving to him and in his words, 'They were waiving with all 5 fingers)...

Subject: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 11:38:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/sports/othersports/28outdoors.html August 28, 2005 More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch By PETER KAMINSKY LAKE VICTORIA, Tanzania - I thought I had seen every possible way to catch a fish, but on a recent two-day outing on Lake Victoria in the northwest corner of Tanzania, I discovered otherwise. I had definitively seen neither the methods nor the means by which a 90-pound Nile perch and two fine tilapia found their way to our dinner plates. My partner on the trip was Brian Harris, a mild-mannered man whose quiet ways belie the fierce combativeness that landed him at the head of the antipoaching effort at Kruger National Park in South Africa. In his new position as the wildlife manager for the Grumeti Reserves in the long-isolated (and therefore vulnerable) Western Corridor of the Serengeti, Harris and his associates have, rather than fight the poachers, hired them and trained them as game rangers. They also provide schools and dig wells for their villages. The result has been a steady rise in wildlife populations. Lake Victoria has not had such luck. I had read of the decimation of native fish populations in the freshwater chasm formed by the rift between tectonic plates. In an effort to create a spawning haven for resident fish, Rubondo Island has been set aside as a national park, closed to all commercial fishing. The peril to the fish population has increased exponentially with the airlifting of tons of processed fish each day to Russia. The main catch, the highly prized Nile perch, is an exotic fish originally found in the waters downstream of Victoria Falls, at the end of the lake. Exotic, but here to stay. As Brian and I approached the grassy airstrip on Rubondo, we saw a sandy necklace of beach encircling the heavily forested island. Its green canopy was interrupted by grassy patches created by elephants, which knock over many trees in the course of a day's work. A short jeep ride through the forest - where we looked for but did not see any of the resident chimpanzees - deposited us at a pleasant tent camp run by Tanzania National Parks, known as Tanapa. Our guide, Luciano, counseled that a strong northeast wind and a heavy chop on the lake did not bode well for fishing, but we didn't care. We just wanted to fish. The air was sweet, the water was full of bait. Despite the good signs, though, all we succeeded in hooking were some highly illegal long lines and nets. We gave up after two hours of trolling deep diving rapalas. 'The tilapia will be coming in to shore,' Luciano said. We landed, and clambered up a jetty. Luciano's tackle consisted of the branch of a sapling he had tied some fishing line to, with a hook at the end. I noted Luciano's bait: a ball of mossy weed scraped from the lakeside rocks. Luciano took a half-dozen nice fish. Using up-to-date fly rods and spinning tackle, Brian and I didn't catch anything. Our guide consoled us with a nice plump fish that the camp chef broiled, salted and served with lemon. The next morning, the wind was down and we trolled at a place called the Point. It was said to be the best fishing spot on the island. 'Just around the corner there is a place where the crocodiles live, hundreds of them,' Luciano said in the manner adopted by guides everywhere to fill in the fishing lulls. He added: 'But they don't live on this side. You can even swim here.' I was unconvinced. On the shore, a large group of marabou stork crowded around something. 'Poachers,' Brian said. Sure enough, as we eased up on the scavenging storks, we saw the prow and stern of a small boat that the poachers had sunk while they fished (they would raise the boat when it was time to paddle out). The poachers themselves bobbed in the surf, trying to stay out of sight. Brian, armed with nothing and wearing only a bathing suit, went after them. They loped into the forest. Brian followed but did not find them. Apparently there was a poacher's camp just inland. Brian and Luciano returned lugging a huge perch. 'Let's tell the Tanapa rangers,' Brian said as we loaded up the poachers' fish and headed to the next cove, where the rangers lived. 'They won't find them,' Brian said. 'They probably went to hook up with another group. If they can get away with a camp a stone's throw from the rangers, you know the island must be full of poachers.' As far as I know, the rangers were unsuccessful in finding the poachers, but at least Brian and I had an adventure and about 20 pounds of Nile perch filet we took back to the Grumeti Reserves and shared with the rest of our party. 'Poached perch,' my brother Don said, deadpan.

Subject: Re: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 14:16:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Huh I'm confused by this article. The Nile Perch is a type of fish that is not indigenous to Lake Victoria or Tanzania. It was introduced as part of some experiment. In fact it is a menace to Lake Victoria and is quickly eating up all the true indigenous fish. In fact the article talk about how the fish comes from down stream by Victoria Falls? Huh. Victoria Falls is in the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia - no where near Tanzania and to the best of my knowledge there is no river link Victoria falls to any lake in Tanzania. Peter Kaminsky has his facts so mixed up that this article looks like a serious case of fiction. The over fishing of the Nile Perch (in Tanzania) is in essence a good thing and will someday restore balance to the echo system of the Nile. In fact if they don't remove that fish soon the oxygen level of the lake will drop and everything will be ruined. So I am confused how we can have 'illegal' poachers of Nile Perch fish. Can I recommend you watch a movie called 'Darwin's Nightmare' Actively look for this movie. It will give you tremendous insight into this fish and its affects on the lake, the people and the economy.

Subject: Re: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 14:45:36 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The article is, I am sure, accurate as far as the writer understands. I will find the film, for there have been reports of the problem on PBS that agree with your comments.

Subject: Re: More Than One Way to Catch Nile Perch From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 15:00:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://movies2.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/movies/03darw.html Ah, here is the review of 'Darwin's Nightmare' which I already posted and forgot about for whatever strange reason. Yes, I well know the story.

Subject: Health Grants to Uganda Halted From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 09:46:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25uganda.html?ex=1282622400&en=bf3d324f28eb29a7&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 25, 2005 Health Grants to Uganda Halted Over Allegations By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN A global health organization said yesterday that it had suspended more than $150 million in grants to Uganda because of serious mismanagement. Officials of the agency, the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said they had taken the action to warn Uganda and other countries that they needed to manage the fund's grants properly. The fund had awarded Uganda $201 million in five grants and had already paid out $45.4 million of that. Two grants were made to help fight AIDS and two for malaria. The fifth grant was for tuberculosis control. Some started in 2003, and some this year. Payment will resume 'as soon as Uganda comes up with a proper plan to rectify the issues of mismanagement,' said Jon Liden, a spokesman for the fund. It has given Uganda until Oct. 24 to improve management of the grants. 'The Global Fund will make every effort to avoid any adverse effect' on Uganda's fight against the three diseases, Mr. Liden said in an interview. But Uganda's health minister, Jim Muhwezi, told the United Nations news agency, IRIN, that the suspension would hamper the government's effort to respond to the AIDS crisis. 'It is a disruption of the anti-AIDS program, but we hope that we can be able to sort out what they want in a short time,' Mr. Muhwezi said. Mr. Liden said that 'we hope there will be a thorough shake-up to get better grant management' and that 'in the long run the suspension will benefit Uganda substantially.' The Global Fund, a public-private partnership based in Geneva, is the largest single financing agency in the world to combat the three diseases. Uganda's grants from the fund are unusual in that they are managed by the finance minister, not the health minister as in most other recipient countries, Mr. Liden said. In Uganda the Finance Ministry transfers authority to the Health Ministry, which relies on a project management unit to oversee the grants. The Global Fund learned of the mismanagement charges about six weeks ago and sent a team to investigate. The validity of the charges 'ranged from solid to mere allegations,' Mr. Liden said. The suspension was based on a review of one of the grants by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Disbanding of the project management unit is a condition for renewing payment of all of the grants. One issue involved 'messy bookkeeping,' in which the unit lacked expertise in daily transactions, Mr. Liden said. One example, he said, was that currency exchange rates charged to grants differed from bank rates quoted for the dates of transactions, amounting to a loss of $280,000. Although that amount was a small part of the $45.4 million spent, 'it was a reason for concern on our part,' Mr. Liden said. Other issues involved problems in selecting recipients of grantmoney. 'The evidence was sufficient for us,' Mr. Liden said. 'We no longer have confidence in the Ugandan program management unit.' He added, though, that the Global Fund would arrange to make any acutely needed payments during the suspension. Uganda has been cited as a model for reducing the transmission rates of H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS. Mr. Liden said people 'should not confuse Uganda's record in fighting AIDS with the mismanagement of funds by a small group of individuals.' The one other suspension came last year when the Global Fund withheld payments from Ukraine for alleged mismanagement. Financing for the grants was restored within a few weeks, Mr. Liden said. The Global Fund said it had allocated $3.7 billion to 316 programs in 127 countries. Of the money committed, 56 percent goes to fighting H.I.V. and AIDS, 13 percent to fighting tuberculosis and 31 percent to combating malaria. Sixty percent is spent in sub-Saharan Africa. A total of $ 1.4 billion has been disbursed to programs so far.

Subject: Re: Health Grants to Uganda Halted From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 10:03:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: How ironic, when we consider our previous conversation on this topic. Instead of giving medical equipment or medical supplies, they chose to give money in US Dollars. The Ugandans tried to pocket some of that money through exchange rate variances and thought they'd get away with it. In essence by following the concept of providing money (instead of finsihed goods) the whole program has come to a halt. This should be a lesson to any organization wanting to bring in cash instead of finished goods. The irony is that I am currently working on a privatisation project in Uganda with the sole aim of curbing corruption and improving safety. Many government officials in Uganda have been actively fighting corruption and there are more than 3 government departments dedicated to investigating and preventing corruption. Uganda is probably one of the cleaner African countries putting in some valued effort to get things done right. Yet there are many government officials dedicated to their own personal wealth. This is obviously not unique to developing countries. I'm sure that the Haliburton deal with Dick Chenney doesn't come out being crystal clear. After all Dick Chenney still owns shares in Haliburton. However, the drastic affect of stopping health grants to Uganda is far more socially devastating than Haliburton being unfairly awarded contracts.

Subject: Re: Health Grants to Uganda Halted From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 10:42:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Fine observations, and there are more to come.

Subject: Hedge Fund Falls Off Face of Earth From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 09:33:15 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/business/yourmoney/28gret.html August 28, 2005 A Hedge Fund Falls Off the Face of the Earth By Gretchen Morgenson HELLO, this is Dan Marino,' says a weary, raspy voice on an answering machine. Mr. Marino, the chief financial officer of the Bayou Group, a $400 million hedge-fund and brokerage firm that is under investigation by state and federal authorities in Connecticut, sounds beleaguered. 'Please leave me a message,' he goes on. 'I am receiving lots of phone calls. I am unable to pick up every call, so if you do call, leave a message and a number. I will get back to you.' Bayou investors are dying to know why their money has not been returned as the firm promised last month. But if they're hoping for a return call, they are out of luck. 'Sorry,' says a chipper female voice on the tape. 'You cannot leave a message now. This mailbox is full.' Those few, unsettling words are just about all that investors in the four Bayou funds have to go on right now. Money that was supposed to be wired to their accounts in mid-August after the funds wound down has not appeared. The funds' principals, its accountants and its lawyer are not talking. The funds' offices in Stamford stand empty. All that Bayou's investors can do is wait, fret and wonder what went wrong at the funds, run by Samuel Israel III, a folksy Wall Street veteran who seemed to turn in a steady, if unspectacular, performance. 'What panicked me, when I sat back and thought about it, was I know practically nothing about these people,' said John C. Siegesmund III, an investor in Denver who had never put money in a hedge fund before he sank $250,000 into Bayou in February 2003. 'They had good returns, they seemed reputable, there's nothing sort of fly-by-night about them. But when the chips are down, you don't know what you're getting into.' The Federal Bureau of Investigation has joined Connecticut banking officials and federal prosecutors who are trying to plumb the Bayou mess. It is unclear what they will discover, but investors are hoping, of course, that their money will be found and returned. Whether or not it is, the Bayou situation is a cautionary tale for investors rushing to participate in the hedge fund boom of recent years. Calls to Mr. Israel and Mr. Marino, who is not the football player, were not returned. Neither were calls to Steven D. Oppenheim, the Bayou Funds' lawyer at Faust, Rabbach & Oppenheim, and its accounting firm, Richmond-Fairfield Associates of New York. Investors who spoke about their involvement in the funds said they were surprised by recent events and that Bayou had none of the earmarks of a Ponzi scheme. For example, while Mr. Israel's returns were impressive - they almost always beat the returns in the broad stock market indexes by a few percentage points - they were not too good to be true. Last year, Bayou was up 12.8 percent, versus the 9 percent gain by its benchmark, the Standard & Poor's 500-stock average. For the first six months of this year, Bayou documents show gains of 4.56 percent, versus a decline of 1.7 percent in the S.& P. Bayou also allowed investors to leave the fund at any time - by contrast, many hedge funds have lockup arrangements that keep investors' money tied up. Bayou documents said that any investor looking to redeem his Bayou interest could receive it in 15 days. Unlike most hedge funds, Bayou did not charge a management fee; its management simply took the standard incentive fee of 20 percent of profits. According to financial statements, that came to $10.8 million in 2004. The funds paid almost $8 million in commissions to the Bayou brokerage firm last year. At year-end, Bayou executives had $18.6 million invested in the funds, the statements indicated. Investors said they also liked the fact that Mr. Israel was in regular communication. Every week, he sent a detailed e-mail message with updated returns, noting what issues Bayou was long and short, its sector exposure and the average number of positions traded. The messages also included brief market commentaries from Mr. Israel. Once a year, he would also conduct a conference call with investors, inviting their questions and discussing his views on the economy, world events and financial markets. Bayou's investment strategy was also understandable: it was composed of stocks and exchange-traded funds. No murky derivatives, risky commodities or currencies. And the only leverage he used was garden variety: buying on margin. Marketing materials for Bayou describe Mr. Israel, 47, as a 'third-generation trader' who has been trading since 1978. His was a short-term strategy in which he would rarely keep positions for more than three days. He was satisfied eking out small gains rather than making big, directional bets on sectors or industry groups. What Bayou does best, a recent investor note said, 'is hit singles on a regular basis.' Perhaps most appealing, Bayou's funds had lower minimum investments - $250,000 - than are typical at other hedge funds. As is true of most hedge funds, Bayou hired outside marketers to bring investors into the fold. According to one investor, its assets under management really ballooned in 2003 and 2004, rising to more than $400 million from $100 million. Problems started emerging, investors said, in late 2004, when Mr. Israel wrote a letter trying to quell rumors about his funds that he said were circulating around Wall Street. 'This is not the sort of letter I am used to writing and hope never to have to again,' he wrote. In the letter, Mr. Israel described a lawsuit that had been filed by Paul T. Westervelt Jr., a trader he had hired in 2002 and fired a bit more than a year later. Mr. Israel said Mr. Westervelt failed to follow the firm's trading discipline and methods, investing 'based on Wall Street information which my investors know I do not believe in.' In disclosing details about the lawsuit to his investors, Mr. Israel said, he hoped to put the matter to rest. One investor, who was granted anonymity because he hopes to keep his involvement in Bayou a private matter, said he was impressed with the forthright nature of the letter. AFTER Mr. Westervelt was fired, he sued Mr. Israel. Included in his suit were allegations of activities he said he had seen at Bayou that may have violated securities regulations. The case was moved from federal court to arbitration. Lawyers on both sides did not return phone calls seeking comment. The Bayou investor who declined to be identified, a certified public accountant with a background in forensic accounting, said he had conducted extensive due diligence on the fund in 2002, before he invested in it. He called Bayou's lawyer, its accounting firm, as well as Wall Street veterans he knew, to check out Mr. Israel. Everything came up clean. He invested about $725,000 in 2003. As of June 30, his account was worth almost $1 million. He has not received any of his investment back. Mr. Siegesmund said that he began to become nervous last spring, when he talked with a hedge fund marketer who told him that his firm was telling its clients to exit Bayou Funds. 'He said: 'There's not enough transparency there. They use their own brokerage, and we can't figure out how they do their internal accounting,' ' the investor recalled. A short time later, Mr. Siegesmund said, a Bayou marketing executive told him that he was leaving the firm for other opportunities. Mr. Siegesmund said these events did not exactly worry him, but he did begin to wonder. Interestingly, Mr. Israel seemed to start turning down new investors earlier this year. 'I talked to a money guy,' said the investor who declined to be identified, 'and he said, strangely enough, that he had people with another $30 to $50 million to invest in March, but Sam said he didn't think he could handle it.' In mid-June, the weekly updates from Mr. Israel stopped. Mysteriously, the funds' returns stopped changing week to week. Investors started to ask questions. In July, investors received a letter from Mr. Israel advising them that he was going to close the funds and return their money after an audit was completed. He said that personal problems were preventing him from running the funds effectively. The investors said they were told that they would receive their money on Aug. 15. They are still waiting. As they do, no one from Bayou is talking. The only people the investors can reach are federal and state authorities who are investigating. The investor who declined to be identified said that, in hindsight, he should have recognized one red flag in the fact that Bayou had two accounting firms - one to oversee the brokerage unit's books and another to vet the hedge funds' financials. 'We've seen fraud in stocks, bonds and commodities,' said Ross B. Intelisano, a lawyer at Rich & Intelisano in New York who represents many Bayou investors. Referring to the hedge fund industry, he said: 'What we're now seeing is an increase in what could be called hedge fund fraud. It just shows that even sophisticated investors who do their due diligence can be defrauded.' The investor who declined to be identified said that he was surprised to reach Mr. Israel on his cellphone last Tuesday. He said he told Mr. Israel that his e-mail messages were not being answered and asked why his money was not being returned. 'I said, 'We're in the dark, Sam,' ' the investor recalled. 'He said, 'I really can't say much right now; we're having a meeting with our attorney.' I said, 'You have a duty to your investors, and I want to continue our conversation.' He hung up on me.'

Subject: A mug's game: Nafta(-lina) From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 07:13:25 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Trade War May Hit Billions in U.S. Imports, 24 Aug 2005, Canadian Press Canadians could be faced with soaring prices for their favourite Napa Valley merlot, Florida orange juice or fresh vegetables from southern California if a trade war with the United States overheats. Such a scenario could unfold on grocery shelves and kitchen tables if the federal government follows through on threats to retaliate against Washington for snubbing a major NAFTA ruling that favoured Canada in the softwood lumber dispute. Several Liberal cabinet ministers say they're prepared to fight back with trade sanctions to force Washington to recognize Canada's victory and end the long running dispute that has so far cost this country's lumber industry more than $5 billion in penalties. At national Liberal caucus meetings this week in Regina, ministers suggested Canadians are outraged at the idea the U.S. isn't following trade rules and want tough action to bring it into line. But some trade experts warn that Ottawa could be biting off more than it can chew if it follows through on threats against the country's biggest customer. “Retaliation is a mug's game,” warns Ottawa-based trade lawyer Peter Clark. “It's going to be very difficult to find things that we could do to them that are not going to hurt us.” Slapping duties on U.S. exports to make them more expensive and therefore hurt producers south of the border could drive up Canadians' grocery bills or hurt domestic businesses that use American materials in their products. Besides, added Clark, it's a long, complicated process that could take the federal Trade department as long as two years to finalize a list of target products. And it's expensive - Ottawa has already asked the World Trade Organization for permission to retaliate in the same amount as Washington's duties on softwood - $5 billion and rising daily. That would means either targeting a lot of Florida fruit or California wine - or an export tax on energy sales south of border, said Clark. “That would certainly get their attention.” But sideswiping Canada's oilpatch would also be playing with fire at home, putting a major industry at risk, warned Nancy Hughes Anthony, president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce. “We have to be very careful not to make a bad situation worse.” Federal officials have quickly ruled out any limits on energy exports, suggesting it would hurt the domestic oilpatch. But as preliminary lists of possible targets are being drafted, some other consumers items are definitely on the table. Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew suggested earlier this week that California wines could be a possible target. “I do believe that we should do it in a way that will not go to the detriment of other Canadian interests,” said Pettigrew, a former trade minister who dealt with the softwood dispute. “We have to do it in a way that some U.S. interests will ring their senators and congressmen in Washington.” Trade lawyer Barry Appleton says Ottawa should fight the powerful American lumber industry on its home turf by challenging its softwood case in U.S. courts - the only arbiter the Americans will heed, he says. “When you retaliate, who does that really help? You're just making goods more expensive at home,” said the Toronto lawyer. “They're holding our softwood industry ransom so we've got to think creatively.” The potential cost of retaliation to Canadian consumers is part of the reason Ottawa so rarely takes that step - especially against the mighty United States. It took a small but similar step earlier this year, however, after the World Trade Organization authorized Ottawa to slap duties worth about $14 million on a handful of U.S. products including live swine, oysters and specialty fish. That was part of a multination protest against a U.S. trade law. Clark suggested much of the Liberal government's noise is mere posturing in the hopes of convincing the U.S. to resume negotiating a better softwood trade arrangement. “The (Liberal cabinet) ministers hope it's possible to use the fuss and the pressure to do a deal.” Source - Canadian Association of Importers and Exporters http://www.carson.ca/NewsCanada.html

Subject: Beijing's Power is Less Than it Seems From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 07:06:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/08/24/news/edpfaff.php August 24, 2005 Why Beijing's Power is Less Than it Seems By William Pfaff - International Herald Tribune PARIS Much is written about China as a soaring power that will one day rival the United States. But nearly all of it is based on the notion that sheer economic activity makes a superpower, ignoring other factors that threaten to undermine China's rise. China is very busy processing goods designed abroad or manufacturing basic goods for sophisticated finishing elsewhere. But the high technology is not China's; China is the subcontractor, the role played by economies on the road to modernization. Quantity does not automatically translate into quality in industrial performance, any more than in other realms, and China overall remains a poor and backward country, dependent on imported technology. Demographic trends, internal migration and uncontrolled urban development, plus megalomaniac, environmentally disastrous infrastructure projects, all threaten sound development. The scenario of China as future superpower also assumes continuing political stability, which is questionable in the light of popular unrest and the rivalries at work inside an ideologically dead and morally crippled Communist Party, whose brutal apparatus runs the country. The increasing number of violent protests against social injustices greatly disturbs the leadership. The public security minister, Zhou Yong-kang, is reported to have told a closed official meeting recently that the number of 'mass incidents' has significantly increased, last year involving several million people. These events, though, are perhaps ultimately less threatening than a popular perception that the Communist government no longer possesses political legitimacy as China's ruler, or the moral legitimacy that radiates from an elite sure of its values. This government is intellectually exhausted. The West conventionally sees the challenge to China's leadership as democracy. In its rulers' eyes the moral challenge to their legitimacy is perhaps more disquieting. Another moral challenge, more significant in the context of China's civilization, is the desire for cultural authenticity. The new search for values from China's past is exploited by Falun Gong, a movement ordinarily seen in the West as a sect linked to rather mysterious traditional practices involving physical exercises as a source of well-being. The Chinese government in recent years has paid more attention to Falun Gong than any other organized challenge to its power, cruelly repressing its followers, who nonetheless have been able to come out in tens of thousands in silent demonstrations against the government. Even though it is not a peasant movement, and frames its claims in intellectual terms, Falun Gong resembles popular movements that emerged during the final decades of the decadent Manchu empire. In the mid-19th century, the Taiping, a visionary peasant protest movement influenced by missionary Christianity, mobilized millions in a revolt that lasted from 1850 to 1864 and nearly overturned the imperial government. The Boxer movement at the end of the century also meant to expel corrupt foreigners and restore true values to China. The Boxers occupied Beijing and were finally overcome only by troops from the European colonial powers, America and Japan. Falun Gong reproaches the Party for having attacked China's 5,000-year-old traditional culture, attempting to destroy its three ancient religious traditions, Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist. It accuses the Communists of being the only regime in China's history to have attempted to eradicate all three ethical systems, in the past considered the source of legitimate government in China, providing 'the mandate of heaven.' This is a powerful and damaging attack on a Communist Party that has presented itself as the vehicle of modernity in China, first in its revolutionary stage, destroying the corrupt past in the name of a utopian vision of spontaneous popular democracy, which ended disastrously; and now as the sponsor of Western-style globalization of the economy, in the name of everyone 'getting rich.' Since everyone is not getting rich, and the goal and slogan are themselves sterile and dehumanizing, Falun Gong's attack is potentially deadly, going to the moral core of the regime. Like its 19th-century predecessors, Falun Gong demands a return to the sources of the millennial greatness of Chinese civilization, to which the Communists - who would like to abolish the past - have no real answer.

Subject: Re: Beijing's Power is Less Than it Seems From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 10:59:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Great story. I have often wondered about this topic. There is one argument I have to the statement, 'China overall remains a poor and backward country, dependent on imported technology.' I don't believe that. For a country that put a man in space, even with the help of the Russians, they are learning very fast. Today the best bridge engineers in the world are in China. Just that alone is an idicator that for where ever they are short of technical expertise - they can acquire it and are not relient on imported technology. We should avoid using the term 'backward' to describe China.

Subject: Re: Beijing's Power is Less Than it Seems From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 14:39:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Agreed completely. The Chinese have a tradition of building wonderful bridges that extends more than a thousand years. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/lostempires/china/ 'China Bridge' is one of the truly great PBS documentaries. Not for a moment do I underestimate China.

Subject: 'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 06:09:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/books/review/28PAGLIA.html August 28, 2005 'The First Poets': Starting With Orpheus By CAMILLE PAGLIA Ancient Greece is the fountainhead of Western culture and politics. As Michael Schmidt demonstrates in ''The First Poets,'' the evolution from aristocratic rule to democracy in Greece was accompanied by the emergence of a strongly individualistic lyric poetry. While the Hebrew Bible, the other major source of Western literature, expresses a God-centered view of the universe, Greek literature gradually freed itself from the sacred to focus on the uniquely human voice. Schmidt is the editor of PN Review, the founder and director of Carcanet Press and the director of the Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University in England. His widely praised book ''Lives of the Poets'' (1998) was a 900-page meditation on English poetry in which his forceful, witty, sometimes partisan sketches revealed a mind deeply in love with literature. In ''The First Poets,'' however, Schmidt seems less confident of his opinions. He is excessively deferential to authorities, even when gently rejecting their views. It is always a pleasure to encounter the lucid, astute prose of the late Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra (Schmidt's don at Oxford), but this book is clogged with too many pedestrian quotations from academics past and present. Whenever he is front and center, Schmidt himself is a fascinating guide who wins the reader's trust. ''The First Poets'' covers about a half-millennium of writing up to the third century B.C. Its chronological organization is ideally suited for those seeking an introduction to Greek poetry, although the book needs better maps of the Mediterranean world. Drawing on translators from John Dryden to Guy Davenport, Schmidt deftly explains the problems in translating ''vowel-rich'' ancient Greek into English, which cannot capture Greek's falling rhythms and vocal pitch. A constant theme is the tragically fragmentary nature of the Greek poetry that we have. Only a fraction has survived, much of it by chance -- perhaps because it was quoted in an ancient letter or essay. Because of the fragility of papyrus and parchment, Greek literature was decaying by the Roman era. Schmidt stresses what we owe to the Egyptian desert, where papyrus discoveries are still being made in mummy wrappings and trash heaps. Ancient Greek poems today are often merely tentative scholarly reconstructions. Schmidt has a sharp eye for material culture: he notes, for example, how the fine grain of papyrus (made from Nile reeds) promoted the development of writing because it gave ''the ability to vary letter-forms.'' Many modern words for books descend from antiquity, when papyrus scrolls -- some up to 100 yards long -- were used for storage. A ''volume'' (from the Latin volumen) literally means ''a thing rolled up.'' The book's profiles begin with Orpheus, the legendary father of poetry and music, whom Schmidt boldly treats as a real person: ''I take Orpheus to have been an actual man with an actual harp in his hand.'' After his wife, Eurydice, was lost in Hades, Orpheus turned to boy-love and was reputedly the first to practice it in his native Thrace. His death was gruesome: he was torn to bits by bacchants, and his severed head floated to the island of Lesbos, which was thereby impregnated with poetic genius. Schmidt's chapters on Homer, while rich, seem too long for a survey book -- and we're still at the start of the ''Odyssey'' on the next-to-last page. Far more interesting than the excessive plot summary is Schmidt's treatment of Homeric diction as ''a composite of different dialect strands . . . as though a poet wrote in Scots, South African, Texan and Jamaican, all in a single poem.'' Much attention is devoted to controversies over the authorship of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'': Was Homer a myth? Did one man (or even a woman) compose both poems? Was Homer merely a collator of inherited material? Schmidt makes Homer concrete by taking us on a lively fictionalized odyssey through his hypothetical life and experiences. As for those who allege there were two poets, Schmidt rightly scoffs, it's ''as though Shakespeare could not have written 'The Comedy of Errors' and 'Othello.' '' To deny Homer's existence, Schmidt argues, ''impoverishes our reading.'' Regrettably, he doesn't joust with the notorious ''death of the author'' dogma of literary poststructuralism. He oddly fails to describe the classicist Milman Parry's pioneering use of recording technology to document survivals of the epic oral tradition in rural Yugoslavia in the 1930's. And he hurries past an influential 19th-century theory that a single bard, long after the Trojan War, wove heroic lays of military adventure into two integrated poems -- a process that would be repeated in medieval romances. In his chapter on Hesiod, whose ''Works and Days'' and ''Theogony'' rivaled Homer's epics for near-biblical status in Greek culture, Schmidt gives glimmers of the more reader-friendly book that might have been -- an alluring, dreamlike travelogue of the Greek sites where ancient poets lived and created. ''Even today it is no easy matter, getting to where Hesiod's farm used to be,'' he says. Hiking through a parched landscape up Mount Helicon, he sees ''old olive trees clenched among the rock'' and is surprised by ''tiny gusts of exquisite scent'' from the ''wild, almost leafless cyclamen, pale dots of purple.'' With Archilochus, Schmidt hits his stride. ''The only Greek soldier-poet we have,'' Archilochus was born on wind-swept Paros, famed for its translucent marble. As a young man, he was leading a cow to market when the Muses appeared, stole the cow, and left a lyre in its place. Archilochus became a brazen sensualist, caustically irreverent. Schmidt calls him a ''cad,'' a cruel exploiter of women and ''an early defining figure of patriarchy''; his imagery has ''a reptilian eroticism.'' Alcman, who labored for Sparta, provides an eloquent contrast to cynical Archilochus. The ''I'' of Alcman's ''civic'' choral poetry was collective. Schmidt compares Alcman's work to masques like Milton's ''Comus,'' where poetry and music are interwoven. Alcman's poems were ''sung not in the intimacy of the symposium,'' a male dinner party, he writes, ''but in the open, public air.'' Schmidt also laments Sparta's cultural decline. Famous in the seventh century B.C. for its ''music, pottery and poetry,'' it became an imperial power so besotted by militarism that ''three centuries later, the adjective 'Spartan' had become synonymous with 'Philistine.' '' Next we meet Mimnermus, whom Schmidt calls ''an elegist of pleasure,'' and the misogynous Semonides, who sees woman as sow, vixen and bitch. Then come the great poets of Lesbos, Alcaeus and Sappho, both aristocrats born during the politically unstable early seventh century. Schmidt calls Alcaeus ''a brilliant poet of wine'' and ''debauchery'' but also ''a survival poet, enduring exile and hardships.'' Ancient writers assumed he ''preferred the company of his own sex.'' In a substantial but uneven chapter on Sappho, Schmidt intriguingly speculates on where she was born and raised on Lesbos (a large island near the coast of Asia Minor): was it in the western village of Eressus in rough, barren country, or in the cosmopolitan eastern seaport of Mytilene? He subtly evokes her poetic style: ''Sappho's art is to dovetail, smooth and rub down, to avoid the over-emphatic.'' And he aptly compares the relationship between voice and musical accompaniment in Sappho's performance of her poems to the recitative in opera. But although he acknowledges the way Sappho has ''appealed to the sexual prurience or moral severity of centuries of scholars and readers,'' Schmidt doesn't adequately summarize the passionate arguments over Sappho's character, public life and sexual orientation. He omits altogether the role played by the medieval church in burning her manuscripts. While Swinburne's darker rewriting of Sappho is quoted (with minimal comment), Catullus' far more important version receives only a passing mention. As for Sappho's two brilliantly original major poems, ''He Seems to Me a God'' receives less than a page of attention, and ''Ode to Aphrodite'' is barely glanced at. Instead, Schmidt wastes space with long, dreary quotes from a feminist classicist stuck on the usual dated ideology of male oppression. The lawgiver Solon was the first poet of Athens. His was ''a language of distilled moral truth'' that had what Schmidt calls ''a humorless pithiness.'' Solon's maxims, ''Moderation in all things'' and ''Know thyself,'' were carved on Apollo's temple at Delphi. There were two poets named Anacreon. The ''false'' one inspired the carpe diem (''seize the day'') tradition of ''creature pleasures'' of sex and appetite that would so enchant European literature. The real Anacreon was ''drawn to boys'' and died from inhaling a grape pip. He was honored in a robust nude statue on the Athenian Acropolis. The poet Hipponax, Schmidt writes, shows ''the human body at its most gross''; he is ''obsessed with food, sex, excretion'' and ''a cruising lust.'' His poetry, with its ''smells'' and ''obscene diction,'' has ''the repulsive fascination of toilet-wall graffiti.'' Hipponax influenced Aristophanes' farcical comedies and possibly Petronius' decadent ''Satyricon.'' Simonides, a shrewd operator, was the first poet to get rich from selling his work. Corinna's narrative poetry was so admired that she was said to have been Pindar's teacher and rival (though she lived long afterward). Pindar's ornate, visionary odes are untranslatable. Commissioned to praise athletic victors or memorialize gifts, they are, Schimdt says, ''the extremity of art,'' moving ''towards timelessness or abstraction.'' He calls them ''a texture of cross-referencing'' and ''an almost continuous string of metaphors.'' The odes of Pindar's rival, Bacchylides, were lost until a smashed papyrus scroll of his work was discovered in Egypt in the 1890's and reassembled at the British Museum. After Pindar, Schmidt writes, lyric poetry lost vitality, and ''verse thrived primarily in the drama.'' In the new Hellenistic world inaugurated by the conquests of Alexander the Great, ''cultural authority'' shifted from Athens to Alexandria in Egypt, where poetry now ''lived in libraries'': ''What had been language responding to nature, history, the social world, began to become language responding to prior language.'' The poet Callimachus, for example, was a librarian, ''the father of bibliography.'' His cataloging lists, or canones, became our ''tyrannical canonical texts.'' Schmidt paints a vivid portrait of bustling Alexandria with its ''racial mix'' and ''mess of languages and dialects.'' There Theocritus invented the pastoral idyll, a sentimental fantasy of happy, singing shepherds that would remain chic until the era of Marie Antoinette. Themes of boy-love and ''open-air buggery'' are also part of Theocritus' legacy. For Schmidt, Theocritus was emblematic of radical changes in Greek literature. His poetry was no longer sung for a live audience. Now written down, it addressed ''a creature who hardly existed in Homer's day, the reader.'' Camille Paglia is the university professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Subject: Poor in Africa Make Their Safety Nets From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:49:49 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/international/africa/28senegal.html?ex=1282881600&en=447274419ba626d2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 28, 2005 Neglected Poor in Africa Make Their Own Safety Nets By MARC LACEY DAKAR, Senegal - Nogaye Sow is a humble street vendor in a rough patch of urban Africa, but hidden in her flowing robe is a weathered piece of cardboard that helps put her on equal footing with those who work in air-conditioned offices instead of at the curb. It is a makeshift health insurance card, with photographs of her, her seven children, her granddaughter and two other relatives pasted inside. When they get sick, they receive free consultations at the clinic down the road, cut-rate medicine and peace of mind. The chances are lower now that a bout of illness will bring the family to total ruin. In most of Africa, there is no such help for informal workers like Ms. Sow, who sells ndambe, a hearty bean paste that she mixes with tomatoes and onions and slathers on bread. Across the continent, fewer than 10 percent of working people have health insurance, pension coverage or other forms of social security, according to the International Labor Organization, the United Nations' oldest specialized agency. But that is slowly changing, and not just because some African governments are expanding their ailing social security systems, vestiges of the colonial days and geared mostly to the vast number of people on the government payroll. The bigger push is coming from everyday Africans who are tired of waiting for politicians to address their needs and have begun spinning their own safety nets. Plans in which neighbors come together and create their own makeshift health coverage are the rage in Africa, particularly in the continent's west. Here, the plans now have a significant presence in 11 countries and membership has grown beyond 200,000 people. Some of these mutual health organizations, as they are known, include fewer than 100 beneficiaries. The tiny group negotiates with a local clinic and forges a better price for care. Others have linked dozens of community groups to produce sophisticated plans that cover 10,000 or more people and offer an array of services. 'Every day there's a new group,' said Olivier Louis Dit Guerin, who helps set up these microinsurance plans as part of a program run by the Labor Organization. 'They're growing and growing to fill the big gap.' Not all African governments are sitting on the sidelines. Nigeria, Africa's most populous country, started a national health insurance plan in June that aims to extend coverage to some of the four of five workers who labor informally. But many Nigerians still fear it will end up enriching politicians instead of helping the poor. And those African workers lucky enough to be part of a social security plan are not guaranteed comfort. The AIDS epidemic has left many national plans on shaky financial footing because there are more payouts for medical care and death benefits but not as many contributions. Simply prying the benefits from bureaucrats can be a job in itself. Charles Owala, 56, a retired Kenyan civil servant, has spent nearly two years trying to get his pension money. 'First when I came here at the beginning of 2004, the officers told me to wait because my membership card number was nowhere to be seen,' he said, camped outside the National Social Security Fund offices in Nairobi. 'It took a lot of time for it to be traced. Now I'm being told there are some other contributions that my employer has failed to remit. What can I do? Wait again.' Those without an employer to contribute to a formal plan - those who, to make ends meet, sell food from the curb, iron clothing, dig ditches, harvest crops or perform any number of the other small-scale tasks that keep Africa going - have long been left out completely. They are particularly vulnerable to illness because of poverty and exposure, but often put off doctor visits as long as possible. They try traditional medicine because of its lower cost. And they often end up flat on their backs as the price of staying alive soars out of reach. The fact that many manage to get by is largely because those who have little share with those who have even less. The community insurance initiatives build on this poor-helping-poor philosophy. They differ from private insurance companies in that they are run by the beneficiaries and not intended to make a single franc. Their target population is people like Ms. Sow, a 40-year-old grandmother who struggles day to day. For her, a good day of selling ndambe might earn enough to feed her family breakfast. She also runs her own phone booth where her neighbors can place calls, which can bring in enough to cover dinner. And she works at a play group for children; that pay barely covers school fees and other incidentals. Her absentee husband helps, sending money from time to time from Italy, where he lives illegally. None of this gives her health benefits. But her community plan takes anyone from the neighborhood who can pay the modest fees. Ms. Sow struggles to pay the 200 francs a month - less than half a dollar - that she must come up for herself and for each of the other 10 beneficiaries on her card. With little cash coming into such plans, keeping the books balanced is always a challenge. In some cases, shady bookkeeping has also whittled down the funds. But the funds tend to regulate themselves. One requires members to visit fellow members who are hospitalized, in both a measure of solidarity and a double check that the person in the hospital bed is the one on the insurance card. Collecting premiums is not easy, those who run the plans say. But with no rules to follow, the plans can be innovative. In some rural communities in Mali, the health insurance fees are due once a year around cotton harvest time, when most farm families have spending money. Still, in the three years since it was created, Ms. Sow's plan has had to drop several hundred people who did not pay. Before the plan, when her children became sick with malaria - as common as a cold in the mosquito-filled single room she shares with her parents and other relatives - she had to wait to take them for treatment until she could raise the money, a delay that allowed the parasites to sap the children's strength and endanger their lives. Now, her insurance card means she can head straight for the doctor. She can also more easily afford the drugs she needs. Like so many other newly insured Africans, she rarely finds herself forced to decide between health care and food. But there is much that these microinsurance programs do not cover. Ms. Sow's plan offers no reimbursement for ultrasound examinations or X-rays. One novelty of community insurance plans, though, is that the beneficiaries can come together and make changes. So soon Ms. Sow's premium will increase 50 francs, which is about 10 cents, but she will be able to choose from more than the two health clinics now available and will be covered for more specialized procedures. But even those changes will not make the pain in her mouth go away. She visited the dentist recently and he told her that her teeth were rotting away and that she needed 10 of them extracted. The fee, together with dentures, is far more than she can afford, and none of that will be covered by her neighborhood insurance plan. 'Maybe we ought to include dentists as well,' she said, rubbing her sore jaw.

Subject: Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 05:48:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/international/africa/25africa.html?ex=1282622400&en=32b49363eac57aae&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 25, 2005 Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa to 21st Century By SHARON LaFRANIERE YANGUYE, South Africa - On this dry mountaintop, 36-year-old Bekowe Skhakhane does even the simplest tasks the hard way. Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook, she gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles. But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works in a steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she does what many in more developed regions do: she takes out her mobile phone. People like Ms. Skhakhane have made Africa the world's fastest-growing cellphone market. From 1999 through 2004, the number of mobile subscribers in Africa jumped to 76.8 million, from 7.5 million, an average annual increase of 58 percent. South Africa, the continent's richest nation, accounted for one-fifth of that growth. Asia, the next fastest-expanding market, grew by an annual average of just 34 percent in that period. 'It is a necessity,' said Ms. Skhakhane, pausing from washing laundry in a plastic bucket on the dirt ground to fish her blue Nokia out of the pocket of her flowered apron. 'Buying air time is part of my regular grocery list.' She spends the equivalent of $1.90 a month for five minutes of telephone time. Africa's cellphone boom has taken the industry by surprise. Africans have never been rabid telephone users; even Mongolians have twice as many land lines per person. And with most Africans living on $2 a day or less, they were supposed to be too poor to justify corporate investments in cellular networks far outside the more prosperous cities and towns. But when African nations began to privatize their telephone monopolies in the mid-1990's, and fiercely competitive operators began to sell air time in smaller, cheaper units, cellphone use exploded. Used handsets are available for $50 or less in South Africa, an amount even Ms. Skhakhane's husband was able to finance with the little he saves from his factory job. It turned out that Africans had never been big phone users because nobody had given them the chance. One in 11 Africans is now a mobile subscriber. Demand for air time was so strong in Nigeria that from late 2002 to early 2003 operators there were forced to suspend the sale of subscriber identity module cards, or SIM cards, which activate handsets, while they strengthened their networks. Villagers in the two jungle provinces of Congo are so eager for service that they have built 50-foot-high treehouses to catch signals from distant cellphone towers. 'One man uses it as a public pay phone,' said Gilbert Nkuli, deputy managing director of Congo operations for Vodacom Group, one of Africa's biggest mobile operators. Those who want to climb to his platform and use his phone pay him for the privilege. On a continent where some remote villages still communicate by beating drums, cellphones are a technological revolution akin to television in the 1940's in the United States. Africa has an average of just one land line for every 33 people, but cellphones are enabling millions of people to skip a technological generation and bound straight from letter-writing to instant messaging. Although only about 60 percent of Africans are within reach of a signal, the lowest level of penetration in the world, the technology is for many a social and economic godsend. One pilot program allows about 100 farmers in South Africa's northeast to learn the prevailing prices for produce in major markets, crucial information in negotiations with middlemen. Health-care workers in the rural southeast summon ambulances to distant clinics via cellphone. One woman living on the Congo River, unable even to write her last name, tells customers to call her cellphone if they want to buy the fresh fish she sells. 'She doesn't have electricity, she can't put the fish in the freezer,' said Mr. Nkuli of Vodacom. 'So she keeps them in the river,' tethered live on a string, until a call comes in. Then she retrieves them and readies them for sale. William Pedro, 51, who deals in farm and garden plants, said he tried for eight years to lure customers to his nursery in a ragtag township near George, a resort town on South Africa's southern coast. Only when he got a cellphone two years ago, he said, did his business take off. 'White people are afraid to come here to my place in the township to buy plants,' Mr. Pedro, who is of mixed race, said as he stood outside his makeshift greenhouses. 'So now they can phone me for orders and I can deliver them the same day.' Hamadoun Touré, development director for the International Telecommunication Union, said the economic blessings of cellphones were magnified in the developing world. 'What is the alternative?' asked Mr. Touré, whose agency was founded in the days of the telegraph and is now part of the United Nations. 'Somebody may have to leave work, travel for days, spending much more money' just to pass on a message. Initially, he said, mobile operators based their predictions of cellphone use on the typical land-line user, someone with a bank account, a job and a fixed address. 'The woman selling vegetables in the market, with the baby and the umbrella, they weren't in the profile of the normal subscriber,' Mr. Touré said. 'But they use them.' Mobile operators cannot put up towers fast enough, not just in established markets like South Africa, which is already home to about one in four African mobile subscribers, but also in nations that barely have electricity, much less existing cellular networks ready for expansion. Five years ago, for example, sub-Saharan Africa (excluding South Africa) accounted for one of every five mobile subscribers on the continent. That ratio has now doubled. Executives of the MTN Group, another major African mobile operator, say the company's Nigerian network cost two and a half times as much as its South African network because of lack of infrastructure. But demand is so intense that MTN is adding hundreds of new base stations. Congo was in the midst of a civil war when Alieu Conteh, a telecommunications entrepreneur, began building a cellular network there in the 1990's. No foreign manufacturer would ship a cellphone tower to the airport with rebels nearby, so Mr. Conteh hired local men to collect scrap and weld a tower together. Now Vodacom, which formed a joint venture with him in 2001, is grappling with other problems. Its trucks get stuck in the mud. A crane is out of the question; it takes 15 to 20 men to haul each satellite dish into place with ropes. Base stations must be powered by generators. Each morning, executives send instant messages to employees containing the latest rate for the plunging local currency. Despite all that, Vodacom Congo has 1.1 million subscribers and is adding more than 1,000 daily. There are no current plans to extend land-line service to the surrounding steep mountains where Ms. Skhakhane lives, government officials here say. But that may not matter: six months ago, Vodacom erected a cellular tower whose signal can be picked up in the hills. Now it logs 10,000 calls a day. Before the tower went up, Ms. Skhakhane communicated with her husband by letter. She waited weeks for a response. The nearest public telephone, outside a little shop more than 10 miles away, has been broken since March. Ms. Skhakhane said she considered the $1.90 a month for a phone card to be money well spent. 'I don't use the phone very often,' she said, 'but whenever there is something I really need to discuss, I do.' One problem remains even in the age of cutting-edge cellular technology: How does an African family in a hut lighted by candles charge a mobile phone? A bicycle-driven charger is said to be on the horizon. But that would require a bicycle, a rare possession in much of rural Africa. In Yanguye, as in other regions, the solution is often a car battery owned by someone who does not have a prayer of acquiring a car. Ntombenhle Nsele keeps one in her home a few miles down the road from Ms. Skhakhane's. She takes it by bus 20 miles to the nearest town to recharge it in a gas station. For 80 cents each, Ms. Nsele, 25, lets neighbors charge their mobiles from the battery. She gets at least five customers a week. 'Oooh, a lot of people,' she said, smiling. 'Too many.'

Subject: Re: Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 10:22:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What this article doesn't say - the invention that turned the cell phone industry on its head is 'Pay as You Go'. The system of 'Pay as You Go' is even available here in North America and in Europe. But it was first invented by MTN in Africa. It is a simple pay phone card that can be used on cell phones. People pay in advance for an alotment of minutes. By doing this, there is no need to set up cell phone accounts, they bypass any credit application problems and MTN gets their money in advance. A perfect win win system. MTN even has a program where they licence small vendors to sell phone cards in rural areas. It is probably one of the most amazing sites to walk in an African market, find one person selling fruit from a rickety table top and the next vendor selling cell phones and cell phone minutes as an offical vendor from the next rickety table top. Also there is a serious market for second hand (used) cell phones offering dirt cheap cell phones. This is truly modern technology being made available to the poor masses. And from what I last remember the minutes being charged are far lower than $1.90 for 5 minutes as quoted in the story. More like 30c for 5 minutes. Cell phones in Africa are now being used to pay for parking meters, vending machines, security systems in logging into internet sites and they already have the G3 technology giving live web access (and we don't have that yet). Their cell phone systems also tell you where you are at any given moment (on the cell phone scree). Excellent when you are new to the area and are trying to get around. It is weird that you can travel through Africa and be almost guaranteed a cell phone signal no matter where you go. Who need satellite phones now? Check out their sites: www.mtn.co.ug (uganda) www.mtn.co.za (South Africa) www.vodacom.co.za (South Africa)

Subject: Re: Cellphones Catapult Rural Africa From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 13:43:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting comments, but my African friends are highly surprisingly cautious about cellphone connections and claim they are quite costly. We will learn more.

Subject: Ah the beauty of the internet From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 17:21:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Here is the site giving the cell phone charges: http://www.mtn.co.za/?pid=242519 They charge rate is per minute but you are billed for every portion of that minute in billing per secon ie: if you speak for 30 seconds, you are charged half the minute rate. Here is the info: SMS means 'Short Message Sending' or Text Messages as we know it. MMS I think is picture messaging a service we do not have here... (arrgh they have it in Africa but not in North America??!!) Please divide the R amount by 6.42 to get US$ amounts. You will see that their rates vary from 56c per minute to 15c per minute (US cents). That's pretty impressive. here are the rates: Call Rates MTN to MTN MTN to Telkom MTN to Other Peak R3.30 R3.30 R3.60 wow wow time R1.65 R1.65 R2.28 Off-Peak R1.00 R1.00 R1.30 Messaging Rates MTN to MTN MTN to Other MMS R0.75 R0.95 SMS R0.45 R0.65 International SMS R1.60 R1.60

Subject: Honda Civic GX: Clean, Green From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 16:23:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/automobiles/28AUTO.html August 28, 2005 Honda Civic GX: Clean, Green and Seen in the Car-Pool Lanes By CHRIS DIXON LAGUNA BEACH, Calif. IT looks as bland as mashed bananas and it won't run circles around a Prius. Yet the Honda Civic GX may be the most provocative car to ply California's polluted, congested freeways this year. Neither a sophisticated hybrid nor a fuel cell vehicle designed for hydrogen highways of the future, the Civic GX doesn't run on canola oil, turkey renderings, subatomic particles or even electricity. Instead, it makes its idosyncratic way on cheap, clean-burning, abundant natural gas. You may never have heard of the GX, though it wasn't born yesterday. Honda has sold about 7,000 natural gas Civics since 1997, the vast majority to fleet operators like utilities and municipal governments. Others have dabbled with natural gas cars; Ford has abandoned its American program, though Chrysler and General Motors continue to offer a few trucks to fleet customers. Honda, however, demonstrated its expanded commitment last spring by quietly offering 310 Civic GX's to Californians. Honda is also providing a device that fuels the cars at home by tapping into the natural gas line that feeds the furnace or kitchen stove. The device, called the Phill, permits overnight refueling in one's own garage, offering an alternative to the natural gas pumps sprinkled around many urban areas. Why would anyone want a Civic GX? For starters, it is the cleanest internal-combustion car ever tested by the Environmental Protection Agency. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, an environmental advocacy group, calls it the greenest car in America. About 95 percent of natural gas is methane, a simple molecule consisting of one carbon atom and four hydrogen atoms. When burned, natural gas produces little more than carbon dioxide and water vapor. Aside from emitting less smog-causing compounds than a gasoline Civic, Honda says the GX produces 20 to 25 percent less of emissions linked to global warming, like carbon dioxide. Only a few highly efficient hybrid cars, like the Civic Hybrid, the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight, have greenhouse gas numbers on par with the GX's. Also, with gasoline selling for $3 and up in some areas, natural gas is a relative bargain despite price rises to residential customers in recent years. It still costs less than $2 at the pump for the equivalent of a gallon of gas, and $1.27 per equivalent gallon when filled at home here in Orange County. Part of the savings is tax-related; currently, neither federal nor state highway taxes are collected on natural gas pumped at home. (The taxes are included in the pump price.) There are more advantages. Compared with gasoline, natural gas is far cleaner and cheaper to refine and transport. Nor are supplies controlled by Middle Eastern sheiks: although imports are rising, about 98 percent of American consumption comes from North America. Here in freeway-laced Southern California, stickers on the dowdy sedan confer a V.I.P. privilege: access to a network of high-occupancy-vehicle lanes - intended to encourage car-pooling - even if the driver is alone. The benefits quickly became clear: as traffic crawled on regular lanes of the 405 freeway, my 100-horsepower Honda was one of the fastest cars on the road. While sales to individuals are quite limited, Honda plans to bring the GX to the East Coast - it hasn't announced which states - next year. At $22,310, the GX is more expensive than the outwardly identical $17,210 Civic LX, though buyers qualify for a $2,000 federal tax deduction and often for state incentives as well. The new federal energy bill sweetens the deal next year by offering a tax credit equal to 80 percent of the additional cost of the natural gas powertrain, or about $3,600 for the GX. Honda plans to continue offering a natural gas GX when its redesigned line of Civics goes on sale for 2006. The GX is built alongside other Civics in Marysville, Ohio, and is similarly equipped. My test car had four-wheel antilock brakes, front and side air bags, air-conditioning, remote locking, power windows, cruise control and an entirely adequate CD player (though it lacked a jack for an iPod or MP3 player). Even under the hood, the GX appears similar to its gasoline counterpart. The four-cylinder engine displaces 1.7 liters and generates 100 horsepower and 98 pound-feet of torque, compared with 115 and 110 for the gasoline Civic LX. The GX carries a federal gas-equivalency estimate of 30 m.p.g. in town and 34 on the highway, compared with 29/38 for the gasoline Civic LX. But with a smaller tank, the GX can go no more than 250 miles between refuelings. The clean-air Honda makes good use of its limited power with the help of a nifty continuously variable transmission. This belt-and-pulley wonder constantly adjusts for needed power somewhat like a bicycle derailleur; with no gears, it never downshifts. Wailing up the long grade of the San Joaquin Toll Road in Orange County, the GX maintained 80 m.p.h. while remaining below the redline of the tachometer. In terms of emissions, the GX is classified as an AT-PZEV, shorthand for 'advanced technology-partial zero emissions vehicle.' In practical terms, the same attributes that make natural gas safe to burn in your home mean the GX emits 87 percent less carbon monoxide and 25 percent less greenhouse-gas emissions than a gasoline Civic. In an effort to encourage purchases of natural gas vehicles, and to expand the infrastructure that supports them, Los Angeles and several other California cities provide free parking. By allowing access to the car-pool lanes, at least through 2007, the state has conferred a privilege that until now was denied even to hybrid cars without at least one passenger, though a limited number of high-mileage hybrids will gain access under a new state rule. I put the lane exemption to the test after filling the GX at a Clean Energy station in Irvine, nine miles from my home. The station, at the city's fleet maintanence yard, has a 24-hour pump that accepts credit cards. After gassing up, I headed down Interstate 5 during the afternoon rush. To drive solo in the carpool lane is like sampling forbidden fruit - and it gets you where you are going much faster. Outside Irvine, a Prius passed in the fast lane to my right. A couple miles south, as regular traffic backed up, I passed the Prius doing 60. Assuming a station is nearby, filling a natural gas car is simple: you insert a credit card and follow the instructions on a video screen. After acknowledging that you understand how to turn a knob and attach the nozzle, you're given a two-digit identification number that lets you skip the video. Under the filler door, instead of the familiar receptacle for a gasoline nozzle, there is a small self-sealing fitting for natural gas. When the natural gas starts flowing, it's noisier than a gasoline pump, but fills the tank to 3,000 or 3,600 pounds per square inch (depending on the pump) in roughly the time it takes to fill a tank with gasoline. The GX's trunk is smaller than you expect, because its eight-gallon fuel tank - wrapped in carbon fiber - is situated between the back seat and the trunk. Honda says the tank is much stronger and safer than a gasoline tank, as demonstrated by testing and several real-world accidents. While I was filling the GX, two City of Irvine vehicles made use of the pump, and a pair of Civic GX's pulled up as well. The first was a white 2001 model driven by Darrin McClure, a 40-year-old software programmer and surfer who commutes 20 miles from San Clemente to Irvine every day. Mr. McClure says he flies past cars idling on Interstate 5. 'The car's awesome,' he said. 'It's so clean that you could park it idling in your living room overnight.' An early adopter of Phill was Jeff Church, a 49-year-old United Airlines pilot who uses a 2003 GX for his 50-mile commute to the airport from his home in San Dimas. Mr. Church, who said he had eagerly volunteered to test the system, offered to let me try fueling my Civic in his garage. The unit turned out to be a three-foot-high appliance hung from a wall. Fueling the GX was a simple matter of extending the coiled hose, snapping the nozzle onto the fuel input and pushing a start button. I reluctantly returned my GX after 270 enlightening miles. Honda estimates that fuel for a gasoline Civic costs 8.8 cents a mile. I figured the GX's expense at 5.8 cents a mile when fueling at a Clean Energy station, but only about 3 cents a mile if I were filling up at home, not including the lease or installation costs. With those numbers, anyone would breathe easier.

Subject: Turning Supermarkets Into Restaurants From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 09:34:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/realestate/28sqft.html August 28, 2005 Turning Supermarkets Into Restaurants, Too By TERI KARUSH ROGERS AS anyone who has walked into a Whole Foods Market lately knows, high-end grocery stores are increasingly designed to appeal to those who like to eat but rarely cook. Food stores are now aiming to satisfy immediate cravings, through ready-to-eat cuisine ranging from arugula salad with croutons to duck legs braised in red wine. It is becoming harder to tell where the store stops and the restaurant begins. Are supermarket designers coming up with food stores - or restaurants? 'Virtually any major-sized new stores and a lot of remodels will have some sort of space set aside for in-store eating of ready-to-eat foods,' said Stephen Dowdell, editor in chief of Progressive Grocer magazine. Adding what amounts to a restaurant to a supermarket requires some big changes in the standard designs. Instead of being relegated to the meat department, prepared foods are moving to the front. A look at food stores that have begun to offer a large selection of prepared foods, and places to eat them, shows some common design precepts at work: EASY IN, EASY OUT Recognizing that convenience is crucial - and that the lunchtime crowd, for instance, isn't willing or able to stock up on household staples - stores cannot prompt impulse buys by putting prepared foods in remote locations. 'Making the prepared foods easily accessible from the front door, making it easy for people to get to it and pay and get out without going through the whole store, is a big deal,' said Bill R. Bishop, the president of Willard Bishop Consulting in Barrington, Ill. APPEAL TO THE SENSES At Agata & Valentina, the independent gourmet market in Manhattan, 'as soon as you walk in, you know you want to eat,' said Emily Balducci, the director of public relations, because the aromas of regional Sicilian cooking permeate the store. 'What we did is create an on-floor kitchen cooking all day so you can watch and smell the food being prepared, which is very key.' Mr. Bishop agrees with the importance of making the preparation visible. 'Having people see the food being prepared,' he said, 'is very important because it communicates the product is fresh.' Whole Foods has made much of the open-kitchen concept. Each prepared-food station is designed to be as exposed as possible, with nearly as much attention paid to the beautiful stainless steel utensils as to high-quality ingredients. The appearance of accessibility is intended to encourage communication on the level, say, of a Disneyfied European marketplace: Whole Foods' workers, for instance, are trained to converse with customers. LET THE FOOD SPEAK FOR ITSELF When asked about their design tricks, retailers say they favor an unadorned, often industrial, palette (waxed concrete floors, stainless steel cases, slate walls) that serves as a canvas for the food. 'It's not about decoration,' said Jack Ceglic, a founder of Dean & DeLuca and an architect whose firm, Ceglic Design, plans the stores' visual identity. 'The color palette is as simple as can be -white and gray and touches of black. There's never been any color added, only the food.' In Manhattan, the progression of restaurant food into supermarkets has been most vivid at Whole Foods, which has been raising the ante in its three hugely successful stores. The first, a 40,000-square-foot store that opened in the Chelsea neighborhood in 2001, offered no place where customers could sit down and snack on ready-to-eat foods. Three years later, the 59,000-square-foot store at the Time Warner Center introduced a sleek 300-seat dining area for eating store-bought food, and incorporated a juice bar. This year, at its new 50,000-square-foot store at Union Square, it offered a somewhat smaller 180-seat dining section on the upper level, but unlike the Time Warner store, it allowed shoppers to bypass the rest of the store altogether and order from the juice and coffee bars or graze among an abbreviated selection of prepared foods. But according to Whole Foods' northeast regional president, Christina Minardi, these are mere baby steps. Executives at the company have been emboldened by the success of 'minirestaurants' scattered throughout the chain's recently opened 80,000-square-foot concept store in Austin, Tex. 'It was the first time we had a sit-down food venue, where you order your food and get a glass of wine,' Ms. Minardi said of the Texas store. 'There's a raw bar, a barbecue station, a trattoria, a cheese venue with cheese and wine, and the food comes on real plates. It revolutionizes and changes the whole company.' Whole Foods intends to borrow those ideas liberally for the sweeping bilevel 76,000-square-foot store under construction in a luxury apartment building at Bowery and Houston Street in Manhattan. 'We're doing a bunch of food venues,' Ms. Minardi said of the store's mezzanine. 'We're doing a sit-down sushi and noodle bowl station; we're doing a trattoria where pastas will be cooked to order, a coffee bar, a raw juice bar.' (Other innovations borrowed from the concept store will include a cooking school, a bookstore and a Whole Home store, consisting of a mock New York City apartment furnished with organic sheets, towels and other accessories.) Elsewhere in Manhattan, Balducci's plans to endow its new store at Eighth Avenue and 14th Street with a 60-seat dining area, where customers can eat foods from the 'enormous' prepared-food section under the chef Katy Sparks, according to Mark S. Ordan, Balducci's president and chief executive. The store is to open this fall. Agata & Valentina, on First Avenue at 79th Street, doubled its prepared-foods section during a renovation seven years ago, but lacked the space for extensive in-store dining. Instead, next month it is to open a 'semi self serve' restaurant across First Avenue. Called the Agata & Valentina Food Bar, it is to be open from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. The transformation of parts of supermarkets into quick-serve restaurants has everything to do with the runaway success of prepared foods. The category is expanding almost twice as fast as food sold to be prepared at home, Mr. Bishop said. Sales of regular food are growing about 2 to 2.5 percent a year, he said, compared with 4 to 4.5 percent for prepared food. Though the labor costs can be higher, gross profits average around 60 to 65 percent for prepared foods, versus 30 to 35 percent for traditional supermarket purchases. Even stores that forgo on-site dining 'can't just sell traditional groceries anymore and develop the same traffic and loyalty and following as a store that's done a great job with prepared foods,' Mr. Bishop said. The shift began in the 1980's, when two-career families needed to simplify dinner. In those days, prepared foods in supermarkets were not sophisticated. 'It was mostly fried chicken and other fried foods born out of the deli part of the meat department at the back of stores,' said Todd A. Hultquist, a spokesman for the Food Marketing Institute in Washington. Retailers worked hard to improve their marketing of prepared-food offerings. 'If you go to stores with beautifully presented, high-quality ingredients and a personality behind the counter that can help you navigate, it's a home run,' said Phil Lempert, the food trend editor for NBC's 'Today' show and the editor of Supermarketguru.com. He predicted that in 10 years, prepared foods would constitute 50 percent of supermarket offerings.

Subject: It's Just More Fun Being a Growth Stock From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 09:27:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/business/yourmoney/28micro.html August 28, 2005 It's Just More Fun Being a Growth Stock By ROBERT D. HERSHEY Jr. SOME very savvy people may be badly misjudging the prospects for Microsoft's common stock. When Steven A. Ballmer, the company's chief executive, polled a group of his fellow Microsoft executives recently about whether they were buying the company's shares, he said, nobody raised a hand. On Wall Street, however, a recent tally by Thomson Financial showed that of 34 security analysts following the company, 30 recommended that Microsoft be bought. Only one advised selling. One of these groups - either the Microsoft executives or the Wall Street analysts - must be wrong. But which one? As the thousands of stockholders of the world's biggest software maker are acutely aware, Microsoft shares have languished for more than five years. Adjusted for stock splits, at $26.97, they now fetch less than half their peak value, in 1999. At that point, an investment of $10,000 made at the company's initial public offering in 1986 would have been worth more than $7 million. Is this a case of a mature giant whose very size means that it can no longer be considered a growth company, and whose days of commanding premium valuation are behind it? Many people, predicting a fresh growth spurt, say no. But even if the answer is yes, could the current price still be a bargain? Various other companies, after all, have proved to be good investments well after their best years. Among them, analysts said, are the NCR Corporation (formerly National Cash Register) and I.B.M. Still, there are plausible reasons for investor reluctance to embrace Microsoft: decelerating revenue growth, the competitive threat of so-called open-source software, delays in introducing new products and longstanding complaints by some customers of heavy-handed practices and lack of design attention to what users say they want. There is also concern that Microsoft's core personal computer business has reached maturity. And even after booking $768 million in March for antitrust claims, the company may face lingering antitrust costs, including possible fines from the European Commission, which is requiring that Microsoft give its competitors information to make it easier for them to write programs that operate with Microsoft's products. 'There's a lot of factors that you can attribute to the underperformance,' said Robert K. Becker, senior analyst at Argus Research, also noting the mathematical truism that 'it becomes harder and harder to show top-line revenue growth as your customer base gets bigger and bigger.' But he and other analysts, along with Mr. Ballmer and Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, contend that the bullish case for Microsoft stock is compelling. 'We expect Microsoft to grow 50 percent faster than the Standard & Poor's 500 next year,' said David Hilal, a managing director at Friedman Billings Ramsey in Arlington, Va. 'So on a growth-adjusted basis, Microsoft would be actually less expensive than the market multiple. That would probably be the first time that's ever happened.' The optimism derives from the new-product pipeline, the basis for what Mr. Ballmer, at the company's annual session with financial analysts last month, called 'phenomenal' growth opportunities. Jamie Friedman of Fulcrum Global Partners, a research company in New York, said, 'The growth of the company oscillates between product cycles, and it has a lot of new product coming to market in the next 18 months.' He cited important entries in three of the four major Microsoft business lines. First comes Xbox 360, the home entertainment game unit that is due in time for the holiday shopping season this year and will compete with a new version of the PlayStation from Sony. After that, the company will offer a new version of its data and analysis platform, SQL Server 2005, formally called Yukon. Finally, probably in late 2006, Microsoft will deliver the new version of Windows, called Windows Vista, also known as Longhorn, with a potential market that includes nearly all of the world's millions of desktops. 'We are now at an inflection point where I think growth is going to start accelerating,' Mr. Hilal said. He estimated that revenue would jump 11 percent in the fiscal year ending in June, compared with 8 percent growth in fiscal 2005. NCR offers one example of a suddenly revived growth company. 'They were thought to be dried up and then they came up with the automated cash register, which is the A.T.M. machine,' Mr. Friedman said. 'And then they found a growth vehicle in online payments.' The stock has soared nearly fivefold from a low point in 2003. And I.B.M., which initially relied on huge mainframe computers, suffered acutely from the introduction of personal computers in the 1980's and 90's but has revived since the late 1990's on soaring revenue from consulting and other services. But some people have serious reservations about Microsoft. Adam B. Rains, a data analyst and programmer at the University of Rochester Medical Center who uses Microsoft products extensively in his work as an epidemiologist, has concerns about Windows Vista, which, he said, seemed overengineered. 'Microsoft is putting a really hard sell on Vista,' he said, 'but as more details materialize, I think that people are going to react much less favorably to it.' And Mr. Friedman of Fulcrum questioned the acceptance and ultimate profitability of Xbox. Another reason for restraint, he said, is the company's 'awkward' cash management stance and the low dividend - now 32 cents a year - it started paying only in 2003. 'This company is classically overcapitalized' with a cash hoard of $37 billion, Mr. Friedman said, even after it paid a $3 special dividend in December and spent $44 billion during fiscal 2005 on dividends and buying back shares. He estimated that institutional money managers held a trillion dollars or more of assets on which they needed a solid dividend yield and therefore largely avoided Microsoft shares. The best way for Microsoft to raise its stock price, Mr. Friedman said, 'is for them to double their common dividend.' 'At 64 cents on a $27 stock,' he added, 'that would be 2.4 percent.' The S.& P. 500 now yields 1.8 percent. The only flat-out bear on Microsoft stock among analysts reporting to Thomson Financial is Richard T. Williams, senior software analyst at Garban Institutional Equities in Jersey City. He maintains a 'strong sell,' with a 12-month target price of $20. 'We don't think Microsoft is growing fast enough to justify its valuation,' he said, noting that he gauges growth by actual recent performance rather than by projections. He also contends that the introduction of a dividend put the company into a new investment category, one in which its low dividend rate compares unfavorably. As for the new products, Mr. Williams said that those like Vista that were not absolutely essential to customers often took considerable time for adoption. Over the longer term, however, he sees spectacular potential in a product still under development, informally called Web channel, which, he said, would provide companies with a streamlined method of conducting various facets of e-business in collaboration with partners, suppliers, credit card companies and others. 'The closer we get to Web channel, the more bullish we get,' he added. Mr. Becker, at Argus Research, shares the belief that the growth of the company will accelerate. He has established a 12-month price target of $32 a share. Speaking broadly about the prospects of Microsoft and its competitors, he said: 'Some people are concerned that there isn't a killer application out there in the software world. Well, there is. It's the Internet. The growth of the Internet helps a lot of different industries - software, hardware, telecommunications, you name it.' But Microsoft faces formidable competition - from Google, for one - on the expanding playing field of the Internet. Still, even if many of Microsoft's own executives are apparently not sanguine about the prospects for their company's stock, the dominant sentiment on Wall Street is upbeat, Mr. Friedman said. 'The word people are using with Microsoft right now,' he said, 'is 'renaissance.' '

Subject: Holy mackerel! From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 02:25:54 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: When Steven A. Ballmer, the company's chief executive, polled a group of his fellow Microsoft executives recently about whether they were buying the company's shares, he said, nobody raised a hand. BWAHAHA! HAHA! That was the best laugh I had all day - thanks Emma. HAHA! That ballmer - what a funny guy!

Subject: An Uneven Fight Against Inflation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 08:16:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/business/yourmoney/28view.html August 28, 2005 An Uneven Fight Against Inflation By DANIEL ALTMAN INFLATION is rising in virtually all of the world's big economies, but not all central banks are fighting it actively. Local economic conditions supply the obvious excuse for this behavior. Yet, looking at history, one can make a strong argument that controlling inflation should trump those concerns. To track inflation, governments usually release two sets of figures: the overall change in prices, and a rate of change that excludes volatile food and energy prices. Lately, the second figure has often been quite a bit lower than the first, because of sharp upsurges in the prices of oil and a few other commodities. That second figure, however, provides only false comfort. Economists worry about inflation because of the cycle it sets in motion. People have to pay more for the goods and services they buy, so they demand higher wages. Businesses see their labor costs rise, so they raise the prices of their products. Then workers demand higher wages again, and so on. This cycle has some nasty side effects. The local currency loses value in world markets, so consumers can no longer afford imports. Companies have to redo their pricing schedules, so long-term contracts become difficult to impossible. Credit markets suffer under the weight of high interest rates, which lenders require to offset the dwindling value of the currency. The fact that part of the current inflation comes from oil and food doesn't change this process. That's not to say prices are already in an inescapable skyward spiral. The most recent inflation figures for the United States, Britain and the euro area are all less than 4 percent for the last 12 months. With a target of about 2 percent broadly accepted among central bankers - the Bank of England and the European Central Bank set it explicitly - that's probably within an acceptable margin. But there are grounds for caution. Just because you have a 2 percent target doesn't mean that you expect inflation to be above and below that target for equal periods of time, as some analysts have suggested. Simply put, the causes and costs of being on either side of the target are not the same. An economy may sustain lower-than-target inflation for years as a result of rapid improvements in workers' productivity, which allow the same products to be made for less money. While zero or negative inflation can be a persistent problem, as it has been in Japan until recently, such readings have historically been a transitory phenomenon. The same can't be said for inflation of about 3.5 percent or higher, which tends to persist or even float upward. Moreover, price increases are accelerating when considered on a monthly basis. Part of the movement may be seasonal, at least in the United States, but these rates show a definite upward tilt. Though they have all experienced similar upturns in prices, three major central banks have responded in different ways. In the euro area, there has been essentially no reaction; handcuffed by worries about two of its biggest member economies, Germany and Italy, the European Central Bank has kept short-term interest rates steady. In Britain, concerns that a 12-year spell of uninterrupted growth may soon end have led the Bank of England to lower rates. And in the United States, the Federal Reserve has sent short-term rates steadily higher, though without much effect on the long-term rates faced by most consumers. The Fed has been lucky, in a sense, because it has been able to put itself in a better inflation-fighting position without damaging the economy. But inflation of 5 percent in the first half of the year, or 4 percent when adjusted for seasonal changes, offers a powerful reason for the Fed to grab the private sector's attention. To do that, it may have to raise short-term interest rates by more than a quarter of a percentage point at a time. The European Central Bank has less excuse for reticence. Its main mission is to keep prices stable and, as such, it is licensed to prop up economic growth only when there is a danger of falling prices. Undoubtedly, the weak conditions in the euro area have created pressure on the bank to keep rates steady or even to cut them. The bank's independence, however, is intended to make it immune from such pressure. The Bank of England's posture looks to be the most perilous of the three. Despite sagging retail sales, the British economy has been growing at an annual rate of 1.7 percent, adjusted for inflation - a rate that Germans and Italians may envy. Unemployment is still very low, at about 5 percent. By cutting rates, the central bank seems to be acting pre-emptively - and that's putting it kindly - to head off economic weakness. By contrast, the threat of inflation is already present in all three economic regions. True, unemployment could join with inflation to form the deadly combination known as stagflation, which dogged the United States and other wealthy countries during the oil shocks of the 1970's and has ruined many developing economies since then. But the historically proven solution to stagflation is not to cut interest rates and hope for growth and jobs; it is to raise rates and wait for prices to even out. Monetary policy has moved on quite a bit since the 1970's. One wouldn't expect any of the three banks to allow inflation to hit the double digits, as it did as recently as the early 1990's in some euro area countries. Still, caution never goes out of style.

Subject: Re: An Uneven Fight Against Inflation From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 13:51:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hhhmm to my understanding it is clear that the Bank of England wants a little inflation to kick in. Lower their currency value and make overall wages relatively low in comparison to their European neighbours. Right now the UK is just way too expensive. A little inflation could be what the Economics doctor recommends. Even Krugman states that a little inflation is sometimes good. There is one fundamental flaw in this article. The USA uses hedonics to calculate inflation, where to the best of my knowledge the Euro Banks don't. So it is grosly unfair to make any of the comparisons between the Fed's position and that of the Euro Banks. Heck not even Canada applies Hedonics. Also the two forms of calculation as stated in the article are to the best of my knowledge not applied in Europe. They only apply CPI and CPIX. One that includes mortgage rates and one that excludes mortgage rates. When inflation picks up, they tend to point to higher oil and energy prices. Meaning that they don't have an inflation calculation that excludes oil prices. That was my two cents worth.... uhmmm can I have some change please.

Subject: Re: An Uneven Fight Against Inflation From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 30, 2005 at 14:36:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though I do not know where quality improvements are counted in inflation data, where they are not included as in the Euro countries simply take the stated rate of inflation down in you mind when comparing. Europe, I suspect, has too little inflation for sufficient growth. I have long believed this.

Subject: The Past Lingers in Changing Vietnam From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 07:48:56 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/travel/28vietnam.html August 28, 2005 The Past Lingers in Changing Vietnam By AMANDA HESSER BREAKFAST at the Morin Hotel in Hue was a game of Russian roulette. As my husband, Tad, and I sat sipping Vietnamese coffee in the courtyard, nuts from the bang trees above us dropped like bombs onto the stone patio. I asked our waiter, Dinh, a slender young man, if they ever hit people. 'Yes,' he said, pointing to his forearm and shoulder with a shrug. 'One broke a table.' If you're not left unconscious, the Morin's terrace can be quite pleasant, a refuge from the choking summer heat and the buzz of motor scooters in central Hue. Small birds with bright yellow beaks - called chim sao - hop around, scavenging food from your table. 'They follow the farmers,' Dinh told us. 'We used to have 10. Now there are only four or five.' 'Maybe they went to another hotel,' Tad said. 'No,' Dinh replied, taking him seriously, 'no better place than here.' At the moment, that's true. But the Morin, a landmark since 1901, is a four-star hotel, and the tourism boom here has led to the construction of five-star hotels all around the city. A 12-story one was rising next door to the Morin. I asked Dinh if he was concerned about the impending competition. 'No,' he said, puzzled. 'Why would you want to stay up high like that?' For nearly two decades, Vietnam's two big metropolises, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), have embraced capitalism and the modern world. But here in the center of the country, a belt of land only 40 or so miles wide that acts as a divider between the north and the south - and that consequently saw some of the Vietnam War's fiercest battles - the mood is often less aggressive. As we saw in Hue when we went there last summer, and later when we drove down Route 1 through Da Nang to the old fishing town of Hoi An, change is met with a mixture of desire and reluctance. Small vendors continue to sell bunches of temple incense gathered like colored brooms. Grooming is still done right on the street, with sidewalk salons for ear cleaning and facials that are conducted by running a thread over a customer's face in tiny strokes. And although motor scooters have taken over even in the villages, water buffaloes are never far from view. But for every contented Dinh, we discovered, there is an entrepreneur who won't rest until you buy his wares. The night we arrived, we dined at Lac Thanh, a restaurant that we had heard good things about. The moment our pedicabs - cyclos, as they are called - pulled up out front, we were surrounded by waiters from Lac Thanh, as well as two neighboring restaurants, all of them tugging at our arms and imploring us, 'Here! Here!' We stuck to our original plan and were whisked upstairs to a balcony with three tables. The walls were painted a swimming pool green and cluttered with the scribblings of bygone diners. A very short man approached our table holding out a handful of coins. 'Hello, where are you from?' he said. His voice was quick and boyish and he looked remarkably like Linda Hunt in 'The Year of Living Dangerously.' 'I have nice coins from Vietnam,' he continued, adding that his name was Mr. Coin. 'This is Miss Scarlet, and I am Colonel Mustard,' Tad said. Sensing that there would be no sale, he shuffled off. Next came our waiter, who took our order and then returned - not with the beers we had ordered but with a water buffalo painting he wanted us to buy. Vietnam thrives on this sort of jack-in-the-box capitalism. The Morin's lobby doubled as a cluttered knick-knack shop where you could buy paintings, T-shirts and jewelry. And in downtown Hue, what appeared to be a women's hair salon turned out to provide full-service massages on the side. (I discovered this when I stepped inside to ask directions and found myself interrupting a male client's special moment. But he very politely gave us a great restaurant recommendation: Chi Teo on Hai Ba Trung street.) Once we finally got our beers at Lac Thanh, we began to enjoy the circus. When a large table of Australians arrived, Mr. Lac, the owner, swung into action. He arranged five beers in a small semi-circle on their table, and attached one of his homemade bottle openers - a slat of wood with a screw protruding from one end - to each. He clapped to command the diners' attention, and then with a karate chop, he whacked the line of bottle openers. All the bottle caps popped off in unison. The Australians whooped and applauded, and Mr. Lac handed everyone a free bottle opener. Our guide for several days was Do Ba Dat, a reticent man with dark still eyes and cheekbones like hamburger buns. On our first morning together, we headed toward the Perfume River - some say its name, Huong Giang, should translate as Fragrant River - to board a narrow old wooden motorboat. Bamboo fishing boats crowded the riverbank across from us. Children were jumping into the water from a nearby island. Gia Long, the first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, ordered the planting of fragrant trees along the river in the early 1800's, and much of the riverfront remains grassy and untouched. As we headed west, Dat said little, except to point out an imposing modern tower on the riverbank. 'This is a water purification tower,' he said, proudly. (Meanwhile, the first mate pulled out her buffalo woodcarvings and offered them for sale.) Just as the temperature reached 103, we docked upriver and walked into the old Thien Mu pagoda and monastery. In 1963, an elderly monk from Thien Mu, Thich Quang Duc, set himself on fire to protest President Ngo Dinh Diem's policies of discrimination against Buddhists. The baby blue Austin in which the monk made his fatal trip to Saigon is kept in an open building, where it rusts slowly in the room next to where the monks eat their meals. Atop the car is a grim photo of Quang Duc sitting in the lotus position, his body consumed by flames. A fire extinguisher sits nearby. 'The Green Berets were stationed 45 miles from here,' Dat said, in one of his many sudden, oblique references to the Vietnam War (which the Vietnamese refer to as 'the American War'). Dat had the manner of a schoolteacher with a love of facts and figures, and he spoke English well, with a command of odd words like 'magnolia' and 'ornamentation.' But he was guarded, almost defiantly so, and deaf to humor. He grew up in Hue. When he was 15, he saw Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, pass through the city in a motorcade. Recalling the moment, he said: 'People always wondered whether or not he can shoot. Because he's dressed very civilian. He comes from Ford, so we don't know if he can be any good. The Vietnamese think someone from West Point is maybe better.' The war was never far from view (at the Citadel, which once contained the royal palace - a small-scale version of Beijing's Forbidden City - the walls are still peppered with bullet holes from the Tet offensive, and some of Hue's nightclubs have names like 'Apocalypse New'). But while no one expressed resentment about our involvement in their country's affairs, no one wanted to talk about it much, either. Surrounding Hue are a number of emperors' tombs, many built as summer retreats and eventual burial sights. We arrived at the tomb of Tu Duc, the 19th-century emperor who had the longest reign - 35 years- of the Nguyen dynasty, at noon, when the temperature had soared to a level that I never wish to repeat. Tu Duc spent summers in Hue and the pondside pavilion where he would write poetry and relax with his concubines - 'a boring job,' Dat said - still stands among frangipani trees. Tu Duc is one of the few emperors who left a postmortem of his job performance. On a large stone table near his tomb, Tu Duc criticizes himself for losing to the French and for lacking a direction. He did build a lovely tomb, though. Afterward, we stopped at one of the outdoor cafes along the Dong Ba canal; they are packed together so tightly it's hard to know which one you're in. We drank Huda beer served over giant ice cubes and ordered a bowl of chao, a rice porridge with shrimp, and watched as the cooks washed their dishes in buckets, dumping the water into the canal. After three days in Hue, we left early for a daylong drive through Da Nang to Hoi An, following Route 1 - sometimes referred to as the 'route of the mandarins' - which runs like a vein through Vietnam from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The route took us on a high-speed trip through the tiny theaters of Vietnamese daily life. As our car weaved around motor scooters and bicycles, we passed a woman on her haunches wearing a non (the conical peasant hat) and splitting wood; women carrying babies; computer stores and coffin shops; rice fields; haystacks for cooking fuel; bungalows and new McMansions trapped behind iron fences. The villages are small and pass by in a breath. After about two hours on the road, we began climbing Cloudy Pass, a harrowing 13-mile stretch that marks the country's climate divide, separating the wet north from the dry, hot south. At the top, Dat pointed out Red Beach 1 and Red Beach 2, where the first regular American ground troops landed in March 1965. To the east was Monkey Mountain, a spit of land, and to the south, Da Nang, nestled by mountains, hung under a band of haze. During the war, Da Nang was called 'shelled city,' because the Communist forces attacked it from all angles. We stopped in Da Nang for the only reason anyone stops in Da Nang: to see the Cham Museum, at the south end of town (2 Tieu La; phone 84-511 821-951). The open-air galleries are jammed with Cham sculpture, mostly from the 9th to the 11th centuries, which was a great moment for free expression. Stone apsaras bend seductively. Breasts wrap around pedestals. Lions strike burlesque poses, and giants shake their fists. Many of the works were gathered in the early 20th century by a Frenchman, Henri Parmentier, and they are kept, trustingly, behind a fence that could be scaled by a child. As we returned to our car, a man crossing the street was nearly hit by a man on a motor scooter. Dat shook his head. 'People who cross the street without thinking or looking, we call them 'poets,' ' he said. ONE of the treats of Vietnam is fresh-pressed sugar cane juice. In the late afternoon in Hoi An, about 17 miles south of Da Nang, the cafes along the Thu Bon River fill with people drinking beer, eating rice cakes and drinking gallons of the cane juice, called nuoc mia. It comes out of the press pale green and cloudy with a fluff of foam on top. It's sweet, zesty - due to being pressed with tiny limes - and pleasantly faint. As we drank with all the others, we watched boats at the dock loading up with commuters. More than 60 people and 40 bicycles crammed into a rickety 30-foot-long boat before it lurched into the open water. A man with an ice cart pulled up nearby. He began chiseling ice from a large block, then pounded the ice with a stick until it was crushed. Then he hauled the crushed ice from vendor to vendor, filling their coolers. Hoi An, which means 'peaceful life union,' is a sleepy place easily traversed on foot. Down an alley off of Phan Boi Chau, we saw a man who stood in the center of the road, tossing bricks up to the second floor where another man caught them. A house was being built, one brick at a time. When we strolled through the central market one afternoon, nearly all the vendors were napping, some lying on bags of rice, others with feet propped up on piles of dried beans, heaps of cucumber. But the inevitable reorientation to tourists has begun, and it is hard to escape the town's many energetic tailors. More than one woman grabbed me by the arm and tried to drag me to her store. I was more charmed by Xuan, a tailor on Hoang Dieu, who simply posted a sign in English, which read: 'Stop looking, you've found the most honest, friendly, non-pressuring accurate craftswoman in Hoi An. Surpassed all expectations with her creative flair. Gucci move aside!!!' Hoi An's charm is its historic buildings, whose architecture was heavily influenced by immigrants from Japan and China. At Fujian Assembly Hall, a Chinese-style community center, a wooden model of a junk stood near sculptures of the man of the sun and the woman of the moon, two magical Chinese gods. At the back of the hall were altars to deities for beauty, wealth and social position. A group of young men wearing T-shirts that said 'Netnam' - the Microsoft of Vietnam - crowded in behind us. They were there to pray to Tan Tai Cong, the tycoon deity who determines people's financial future. If an entrepreneur's prayers are granted, he is supposed to return to thank the deity. If he fails to, it is certain death - or, at the very least, social ostracism. The Netnam group reminded me of Phan Thuan An, an elderly scholar and relic of a vanishing Vietnam, whom we had met earlier in Hue. He would have been pleased to know that these techies were keeping up old traditions, although he would have been scandalized to see T-shirts in the temple. Thuan An is a member of the former royal family, and his painstaking documentation of the palace helped the Imperial City in Hue win status as a World Heritage Site. When we visited him at his traditional house in Hue, he was wearing an ao trong, the white two-piece tunic and pants, with a pair of wooden clogs. He took us for a tour of the grounds of his home, designed in a feng shui style with a koi pond in the center and a screen of bamboo at the back. Inside, he showed us the altar in his home dedicated to his ancestors. It was piled with mangoes and cake and his grandmother's ivory chopsticks - a time capsule in a time capsule. Like many people in a country undergoing so much change, Thuan An is worried about Hue's future. 'If more people come here, the atmosphere in the city is not good,' he said. 'The number of foreign visitors, they destroy the cultural atmosphere in our city. When they go to the pagoda, and to the Imperial City, they wear shorts. I don't know what to say.' In Hoi An, Dat finally told us his own story, over beers and fried wontons at a small, forgettable restaurant, Wan Lu. He had been a high school teacher until 1975 when the North Vietnamese government took over. 'People who taught literature and history were replaced,' he said. For seven years, he farmed peanuts - 'like Jimmy Carter,' he said, brightening - then began teaching English to people emigrating to America. He wants to visit America himself one day. I pointed out how handsome the restaurant's lanterns - made of loosely draped rings - were. 'They were designed after grenade rings,' Dat said, 'the kind that soldiers used to hang on their helmets.' That night a steady rain fell on the town. I was sure it would soften the mood, but the energy only shifted. The Internet cafes filled up, the motor scooters sped up and two weaving factories I passed were in high gear, the looms clacking relentlessly, echoing through the streets of Hoi An - feeding the tourists, driving the economy, shuttling into the modern world.

Subject: Beijing's Quest for 2008: Become Livable From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 06:24:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/international/asia/28beijing.html August 28, 2005 Beijing's Quest for 2008: To Become Simply Livable By JIM YARDLEY BEIJING - There is a placard beside Tiananmen Square that counts the days until the 2008 Summer Olympics, and every one of them would seem precious: Beijing must build or renovate 72 sports stadiums and training facilities, lay asphalt for 59 new roads and complete three new bridges by the opening ceremony. It is a task that would overwhelm most cities, but Beijing is so efficient at pouring concrete that the International Olympic Committee has asked it to slow down rather than finish construction too soon. Far more difficult will be fulfilling Beijing's promise of playing host to a 'green' Olympics as well as meeting a new goal in the city's revised master plan - to become 'a city suitable for living.' 'It's kind of a new concept for us,' said Huang Yan, the well-regarded deputy director of the planning commission, when she announced the master plan in April. 'We've never thought about this before.' For Beijing's 15.2 million inhabitants, that comment does not amount to much of a revelation. Beijing is clotted with gridlocked traffic as the number of cars has more than doubled in just six years. Air quality, after years of steady improvement, has leveled off recently in some categories and even worsened in others as Beijing continues to rank among the worst cities in the world for clean air. The city's water supply is so stressed that some experts have called for rationing. Even with the daunting task of Olympic construction under way in the northern tier of the city, Beijing's troubleshooting mayor, Wang Qishan, has said his time is often dominated by non-Olympic concerns. In a speech early this year, Mr. Wang said he was besieged with public complaints, and 'the hot topics are always rubbish, sewage, public toilets and traffic.' The city has thousands of old and fetid public toilets that it is hurriedly trying to replace. 'Wherever I look,' he said, according to the government's official English-language newspaper, China Daily, 'there seem to be problems.' He said the only person who did not complain to him was his wife. It is uncertain whether Beijing's theoretical embrace of 'livability' can be translated into real improvements in quality of life in a city that often feels like one enormous construction zone. (The city has roughly 8,000 construction sites.) Critics are skeptical. They attribute Beijing's current predicament to previous failed planning policies and blame the government for the rampant development that has destroyed much of the historic old city while making a mess of the emerging new one. 'Bad planning over the past decades has already become a point of embarrassment for the city,' said Wang Jun, whose best-selling book, 'The Story of a City,' documented the demolition of many of the city's old 'hutong' neighborhoods, the ancient, densely populated enclaves of narrow, winding streets and crumbling courtyard homes. Mr. Wang said Beijing never recovered from the 1950's, when Liang Sicheng, the country's pre-eminent architectural historian, warned that destroying the hutongs would lead to traffic and pollution and urged Mao to preserve Beijing's ancient city walls. Instead, Mao demolished them as a symbol of Chinese feudalism. More recently, the hutongs have been steadily demolished, dislocating untold thousands of people, to make room for the thousands of development projects swallowing the city. 'Now, his predictions have come true,' Mr. Wang said of the pollution and traffic. The unrelenting pressure bearing down on Beijing and other Chinese cities is the influx of people. China is in the midst of one of the fastest periods of urbanization in history, with 300 million people expected to migrate to cities in the next 15 years. The population of Beijing alone could surpass 21 million by 2020 if its growth continues at today's rate. Ms. Huang said planners had been forced to rethink their priorities. Beijing actually encompasses a vast geographic area, much of it mountainous and dotted with rural villages. The new master plan calls for creating suburban satellite towns to ease the population pressures on the city's center. Manufacturing, for example, would be clustered in the east, while high technology would be in the west. Ms. Huang said the city's limited access to water and the nationwide shortage of energy meant that smarter planning was now essential. 'In the past, we never thought of the capacity of resources,' she said. 'We only focused on development.' The ruling Communist Party considers the Olympics to be modern China's coming-out party to the rest of the world, and all of Beijing is looking toward 2008. The government has stipulated that major construction projects in the city be completed several months before the opening ceremony. The Olympic venues will be finished by the end of 2007. But it is not clear whether Beijing will be able to meet the goals attached to its 'green' Olympics promise. Already officials have committed to moving out some factories and closing others. Thousands of heavy polluting trucks and taxis have been replaced with vehicles that meet tougher fuel restrictions. Last year, city officials rejoiced when Beijing met, albeit barely, its goal of 227 so-called Blue Sky days based on levels of three primary pollutants in the air. But some residents were so skeptical that they accused officials of manipulating data. A recent report by the environmental office of the United States Embassy in Beijing acknowledged the increase in Blue Sky days but noted that the standard used is less stringent than in the United States. The report found that the number of days with 'extremely unhealthy pollution levels' had jumped to 17 from 5 and that the overall pollution index had risen for the year. The report also found that levels of particulate matter in the air were several times that of major American cities and cautioned that Beijing might not meet its goal of complying with World Health Organization air quality standards by 2008. The spike in private automobiles - the number is now approaching three million - detracts from gains made by reining in polluting trucks and taxis. Private cars increasingly seem to be overwhelming the city, and officials are responding with a flurry of road building, even as subway lines and light rail are also being expanded. 'It's basically using the Los Angeles model to solve the problems of New York,' said Wang Jun, the author. Los Angeles, of course, might provide a bit of inspiration for Beijing, having markedly reduced its air pollution levels. Even now, there are moments when the pollution abates and Beijing is revealed for what it could be. In August, after a stretch of heavy rain, the sky was blue by any measure and the jagged mountains circling the city were on clear display. But those days are rare. Not far from Tiananmen Square, the city's planning department offers a glimpse of what it hopes Beijing will look like by 2008, with a dazzling scale model: the business district is a sleek cluster of futuristic towers; the Olympic complex rises elegantly in the north, surrounded by green space; the ancient Forbidden City lies at the center. It all seems orderly, even manageable, but perhaps that is because of a notable omission: the model has almost no people or cars.

Subject: Replacements for oil From: Dorian To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 05:58:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though no one knows for sure, I am increasingly persuaded that the end of affordable oil is a growing possibility in the next several years. The substitutes which are eagerly profered as 'solutions' to this eventual problem are hardly comforting. Solar power is great, but it isn't going to sustain the level of industrial activity that the modern world is accommodated to; nuclear power - well, they still don't know what to do with nuclear waste and I think the most reasonable view on it is that they never will; 'oil shale' 'tar sands' - there is a lot of it, true, but extracting it is barely worth the energy required to do it, and it is hugely destructive to the environment (a fact which isn't very well publicized); nuclear fusion - if it is possible, it is a far off dream; 'hydrogen' - it's not a fuel at all, it's a means of storing energy which has been generated by some other means, and so on. But coal conversion into liquid hydrocarbons is truely a possibility. It is environmentally damaging, no question, but less so than all of the above proposals. And, apparently, it is feasible (which a lot of the others aren't), and there is quite a bit of coal remaining. Here is a recent article: Montana's governor eyes coal to solve U.S. fuel costs By Adam Tanner Thu Aug 25, HELENA, Montana (Reuters) - Montana's governor wants to solve America's rising energy costs using a technology discovered in Germany 80 years ago that converts coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. The Fischer-Tropsch technology, discovered by German researchers in 1923 and later used by the Nazis to convert coal into wartime fuels, was not economical as long as oil cost less than $30 a barrel. But with U.S. crude oil now hitting more than double that price, Gov. Brian Schweitzer's plan is getting more attention across the country and some analysts are taking him very seriously. Montana is 'sitting on more energy than they have in the Middle East,' Schweitzer told Reuters in an interview this week. 'I am leading this country in this desire and demand to convert coal into gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel. We can do it in Montana for $1 per gallon,' he said. 'We can do it cheaper than importing oil from the sheiks, dictators, rats and crooks that we're bringing it from right now.' The governor estimated the cost of producing a barrel of oil through the Fischer-Tropsch method at $32, and said that with its 120 billion tons of coal -- a little less than a third of the U.S total -- Montana could supply the entire United States with its aviation, gas and diesel fuel for 40 years without creating environmental damage. An entry level Fischer-Tropsch plant producing 22,000 barrels a day would cost about $1.5 billion, he said. The Democratic governor of this Republican state said he had met with Shell president John Hofmeister, General Electric's CEO Jeff Immelt, as well as officials from the Department of Defense Department of Defense, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad to discuss his proposals. Schweitzer added that the recently passed federal energy bill includes an 80 percent loan guarantee for a Fischer- Tropsch plant. A former cattle rancher who lived for seven years in Saudi Arabia working on irrigation projects, Schweitzer is also seeking energy deals with other states, especially California. California 'says they need 25,000 megawatts of electricity during the next ten years,' he said. 'We'll give you a delivered price and we'll forward contract that for the next 20 years. 'Transmission companies from England, from Canada, from all over America are coming to my office and saying 'we'll build these transmission lines as soon as you have the contracts to build the generation.''

Subject: Power Plays From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 05:10:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/business/27five.ready.html August 27, 2005 Power Plays By MICKEY MEECE Power Play I: To Westerners, China's move for energy assets this week may seem nothing more than a consolation prize after Cnooc's unsuccessful $18.5 billion bid this summer for Unocal. On Monday, China National Petroleum, the country's biggest state-owned oil company, agreed to pay $4.2 billion for PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian company. To India, however, the play signaled the most direct competition yet for energy between Asia's most populous countries. India's state-owned company, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, came up short as the asking price for PetroKazakhstan escalated beyond the $3.6 billion it was said to be willing to pay. PetroKazakhstan has a complicated history. It is based in Calgary, Alberta, but managed from London with substantial reserves in Kazakhstan. Its shares are traded in New York. Six years ago, the company, then called Hurricane Hydrocarbons, was in bankruptcy protection. Now it stands to benefit from a deal that offers a rich premium. It is unclear whether Oil and Natural Gas will try to outbid its Chinese rival or if Kazakhstan will approve the deal. Kazakhstan has the right to pre-empt the sale of any oil property in the country. Even so, the company's chief executive, Bernard F. Isautier, says the law of the land cannot block the sale of the company itself. Power Play II: While the Bush administration was unveiling a modest overhaul of fuel economy regulations for light-duty trucks, China drafted plans to impose steep taxes on cars and gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles. Already this summer, China has adopted tougher fuel economy standards than those in the United States. Washington this week proposed increasing the average mileage of light trucks, including S.U.V.'s, pickup trucks and minivans sold nationwide, to 24 miles a gallon for 2011 models, up from 21.2 miles a gallon in today's models. The rules would cost automakers an estimated $6 billion, officials said, but would save consumers $7 billion to $7.5 billion, based on prices of $1.51 to $1.58 a gallon. The administration will submit a final rule by April. The three-month comment period is certain to include discussion about the government's assumptions about gasoline mileage. Administration officials announced the proposal at a Los Angeles gas station, where regular gasoline was selling for $2.80 a gallon. In China, where the government-regulated retail price for gasoline averaged $1.73 a gallon this month, the planned taxes are expected to be adopted in the next couple of months.

Subject: Apple, Digital Music's Angel? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 18:52:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/technology/27apple.html August 27, 2005 Apple, Digital Music's Angel, Earns Record Industry's Scorn By JEFF LEEDS Two and a half years after the music business lined up behind the chief executive of Apple, Steven P. Jobs, and hailed him and his iTunes music service for breathing life into music sales, the industry's allegiance to Mr. Jobs has eroded sharply. Mr. Jobs is now girding for a showdown with at least two of the four major record companies over the price of songs on the iTunes service. If he loses, the one-price model that iTunes has adopted - 99 cents to download any song - could be replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents. Music executives who support Mr. Jobs say the higher prices could backfire, sending iTunes' customers in search of songs on free, unauthorized file-swapping networks. Signs of conflict over pricing issues are increasingly apparent. This month, Apple started its iTunes service in Japan without songs from the two major companies - Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group - leaving artists like Avril Lavigne, Beyoncé and Rob Thomas out of the catalog because the companies refused to license their music to iTunes, executives involved in the talks said. That gap in the Japanese music market, the world's second biggest, is considered a harbinger of what may await American consumers as the contracts that record companies have with Apple in the United States come up for renewal early next year. Mr. Jobs in the past has cast himself as an innovator battling established media giants like Disney and Microsoft. But these days, allies and adversaries both agree, he has more power online than Wal-Mart has in the bricks-and-mortar world. Apple commands an estimated 75 percent of digital music sales, and roughly 80 percent of sales of MP3 players, with its market-leading iPod. While many still admire Mr. Jobs's touch - iTunes quickly established a market for paid downloads after the industry wasted years on misfires - he also inspires enmity or jealousy from others in the industry, which is back in a slump after a modest rebound last year. Mr. Jobs' vision of simple, uniform pricing for songs and a policy of limiting Apple's music to Apple's devices are increasingly under attack. 'He'd like to continue to define the rules of the game,' said Paul Vidich, a special adviser to America Online and former executive vice president of the Warner Music Group. Mr. Vidich said the digital music market, while growing, was still a fraction of the music business, but added, 'I just think the music companies are now at a point where there's too much money on the table not to insist' that Apple accept variable prices. 'The question is,' Mr. Vidich said, 'what do they want the profile of the business to look like going forward?' A sore point for some music executives is the fact that Apple generates much more money selling iPod players than it does as a digital music retailer, leading to complaints that Mr. Jobs is profiting more from tracks downloaded to fill the 21 million iPods sold so far than are the labels that produced the recordings. Andrew Lack, the chief executive of Sony BMG, discussed the state of the overall digital market at a media and technology conference three months ago and said that Mr. Jobs 'has got two revenue streams: one from our music and one from the sale of his iPods.' 'I've got one revenue stream,' Mr. Lack said, joking that it would require a medical professional to locate. 'It's not pretty.' In a more conciliatory statement yesterday, Mr. Lack said: 'I look forward to sitting down with Steve in the fall when we are scheduled to discuss Apple and Sony BMG's relations going forward. I think Steve has done a great job on behalf of the industry and in the months ahead we have lots of challenges to conquer together.' Apple has long allowed different prices for full albums sold on the service, though it believes that maintaining the 99-cent price for each song on an album acts as a natural cap. The service, which is available to consumers who download iTunes software to their computers, allows users to choose from roughly 1.5 million songs from major and independent labels. The songs, once paid for and downloaded, can be transferred to an iPod device, burned to blank discs, or played on the computer. At the price of 99 cents a song, the share of the major labels is about 70 cents. Some analysts suggest that the willingness of the music companies to gamble on a new pricing structure reflects a short memory. 'As I recall, three years ago these guys were wandering around with their hands out looking for someone to save them,' said Mike McGuire, an analyst at Gartner G2. 'It'd be rather silly to try to destabilize him because iTunes is one of the few bright spots in the industry right now. He's got something that's working.' The push for variable pricing is not uniform across the business. The Universal Music Group, a unit of Vivendi Universal and the industry's biggest company, appears to support Mr. Jobs's desire to maintain the price of 99 cents a track for the time being. The EMI Group, the British music giant, has expressed a desire for more variation in prices but does not appear interested in a protracted fight. The divide among the four record companies reflects a broader philosophical argument about whether the fast-expanding digital market is stable enough to bear a mix of prices, particularly a higher top end, while millions of consumers still trade music free on unauthorized file-swapping networks. 'I don't think it's time yet,' said Jimmy Iovine, the chairman of Interscope Records, Universal's biggest division. 'We need to convert a lot more people to the habit of buying music online. I don't think a way to convert more people is to raise the price. 'I believe that he really feels that everybody isn't hooked yet into the whole concept,' Mr. Iovine said, referring to Mr. Jobs. 'You make it affordable, at a reasonable price, so they can learn about it. It's not an unreasonable position.' The other main battleground in Apple's coming confrontation with the industry has to do with 'interoperability' of services and devices. Mr. Jobs has so far refused to make the iTunes software compatible with music players from other manufacturers, and he has prevented the iPod from accepting music sold from competing services that use a Microsoft-designed music format. As a result, songs purchased from Napster, for example, will not play on an iPod. Apple's critics say the strategy echoes the company's decision, in the early years of personal computers, not to license its Mac operating system software. Many computer industry analysts say that approach allowed the rival Windows system to establish itself, and consigned Apple to a far smaller share of the computer market. Apple has said that it will benefit more from improving iTunes than from devoting resources to make it compatible with other, smaller systems. Still, to some executives, that practice makes Mr. Jobs appear more concerned with maintaining market dominance for his high-margin iPods than with allowing a more open digital market. All of the music companies, to one degree or another, have been urging Mr. Jobs to abandon the strategy, according to executives involved in the talks. Hilary Rosen, the former chairwoman of the Recording Industry Association of America, agrees on that point. 'If Apple opened up their standards, they would sell more, not less,' she said. 'If they open it up to having more flexibility with the iPod, I think they'd sell more iPods. On the other hand, I don't think it's their fault that nobody else has come up with something great' to compete. Sony BMG in particular has taken steps that may apply pressure to Mr. Jobs to make Apple's software compatible with that of other companies. The company has issued dozens of new titles - including high-profile CD's from the Dave Matthews Band and the Foo Fighters - with software to limit the number of copies that can be made from the disc. The software is compatible with Microsoft's music software, but not Apple's, and as a result music from those Sony BMG albums cannot be transferred to iPods that are hooked up to Windows-based PC's. EMI has been test-marketing similar software with a handful of titles. Even some music executives who favor altering the iTunes service doubt that they will be able to force Mr. Jobs' hand by withholding their music. Instead, they are counting the months until the major wireless phone carriers enter the business of selling songs to mobile phone customers. Since there are many more mobile phones in use than there are iPods, the industry thinking goes, the arrival of a broad mobile music market will erode the leverage Mr. Jobs now holds. But Apple has also been working with Motorola to develop a phone that can import songs from an iTunes-equipped computer. Mr. McGuire said Apple was not likely to quietly surrender its position in the market. 'I think if they're throwing down for a street fight,' he said, 'they may have picked somebody who's as good or better at it than they are.'

Subject: For Bobby From: To the Editor To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 14:15:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dear Bobby, We have picked up a troll who is trying to ruin the message board. Please note the vicious posts below by 'Maureen Dowd.'

Subject: Peter Principle From: Johnny5 To: To the Editor Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 17:34:03 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Censorship is NOT the way - let these people have thier say - then all the world can see the emporer has no clothes - Ms Dowd does make a point - I am tired of hers and most other newspapers bilines - O believe the economist is one of the few publications left that are not tainted - when did america need thought control folks telling them how to think? Ms. Dowd - let the news be the news again - quit trying to control the memes of citizens - let them have thier own journey - don't force the destination on them. Tonight on Cspan Our Culture, What's Left of It Manhattan Institute for Policy Research New York, New York (United States) ID: 187361 - 06/02/2005 - 0:44 - $29.95 Dalrymple, Theodore M.D., Contributing Editor, [City Journal] Theodore Dalrymple talked about his book Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, published by Ivan R. Dee, in an event sponsored by the Manhattan Institute at the Harvard Club in New York City. It is a collection of essays consisting of cultural, political and literary comment all relating to what the author sees as a cultural decline. After his presentation he answered audience questions. One Nation Under Therapy American Enterprise Institute Washington, District of Columbia (United States) ID: 186357 - 04/16/2005 - 1:10 - $29.95 Sommers, Christina Hoff, Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute Satel, Sally M.D., Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute, Health Policy Sally Satel and Christina Hoff Sommers talked about their book One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance, published by St. Martin's Press. They talked about the modern ethos of 'therapism'-the attitude that human beings are weak, dependent, and never altogether responsible for what they do. They cited as examples the idea that Americans needed grief counselors, traumatologists, emotional intelligence coaches, and other experts to guide them through the trials of life and that children at risk of psychic harm from strict teachers and competitive games such as tag and dodge ball. The authors refuted these claims and offer what they consider a more realistic picture of the national psyche. They also answered questions from the audience.

Subject: Re: Peter Principle From: Maureen Dowd To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 18:54:09 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Johnny makes a good point...censorship is never a good idea. And would someone tell Emma to get a life; we are all capable of reading the newspaper on our own.

Subject: Re: Peter Principle From: Poyetas To: Maureen Dowd Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 04:16:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Geez Maureen, You definetely have something wedged up you know where! By the way, how can YOU know if Krugman is lying?? How do YOU know what research Krugman has or has not done?? It seems to me that you are better meant posting your poison on Luskin's website. For the time being, this is a social economic forum, not a 'news' forum. I couldn't give a rats a-- what policies the NYT's uses, or what hyperlinks exist. If you make an accusation, PROVE IT!!! Very unprofessional. How did you get a job as a journalist anyway with such narrow minded comments??

Subject: Lowest common denomination From: Johnny5 To: Poyetas Date Posted: Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 04:55:01 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: She inflames the folks - infuriates thier passions - gives a voice to thier anger and puts herself in the middle of it for media attention. She polarizes people and profits from breaking them up. This has served her well since she was a pimply faced teenager that couldn't get attention any other way. There was an episode in star trek about entities like her - the creature that made kirk and the klingons keep killing each other day after day - feeding off the mutual hate. She does to societies like Gecko did when he busted up the airlines - break them up for profit and be the middle man making the dough. I saw a movie on George Wallace once - and the governor before him told george wallace - you got to be more than a reflection of your people George - you got to be a LEADER - dont give in to the hate or fads of the day - try to steer them to do good things and unite - dont divide them - george crapped all over that advice - gave in to the hate and fads of the current times - in the end it all blew up in his face just as it will do with Ms. Dowd - leading people to do good and reflecting them and thier polarizations are very different - she saddens me. She would burn the library of alexandria if it would get her on the front page of the daily times. pathetic. Censoring the trolls makes them martyrs - let them have their say - the folks that live beyond the next hate filled emotion will see her for the monster she is. Those that don't - they will go over the side of the cliff with her.

Subject: Serial liar From: Maureen Dowd To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 11:22:46 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: Why is my employer, the New York Times, still employing a serial liar like Paul Krugman in its op ed pages? There are only a few answers, and none of them bodes well for the shareholders of the New York Times Company, the newspaper industry (which is virtually ignoring the scandal), or Krugman’s reputation. The New York Times has seen its reputation and credibility erode seriously under the leadership of 'Pinch' Sulzberger, its hereditary publisher. The continuous rise of the internet has enabled critics to hyperlink source material proving Krugman’s lack of integrity. Krugman simply could not get away with his lies if he were required to post hyperlinks. So Krugman and his backers at the Times hierarchy are in essence flaunting the inadequacies of their publishing format in a manner which will provide ample grist for the critics to demonstrate their obsolescence.

Subject: California Accuses Drug Companies From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 10:38:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/national/26drug.html August 26, 2005 California Accuses Drug Companies of Fraud By JOHN M. BRODER LOS ANGELES - The attorney general of California sued 39 drug companies on Thursday, accusing them of bilking the state of hundreds of millions of dollars by overcharging for medicines. Attorney General Bill Lockyer charged that the drug makers, including some of the world's leading pharmaceutical concerns, defrauded the state's Medi-Cal system for at least the past decade. Mr. Lockyer said the drug manufacturers charged Medi-Cal as much as 10 times the price for some drugs as they charged others, like private pharmacies and hospitals. Medi-Cal is the state's version of the federal Medicaid program for the poor, which is jointly financed by the states and the federal government. Drug costs account for about $4 billion of Medi-Cal's $34 billion annual budget. 'We're dragging these drug companies into the court of law because they're gouging the public on basic life necessities,' Mr. Lockyer said at a news conference here. 'This scheme has cost California taxpayers potentially hundreds of millions of dollars and is jeopardizing the public health by diverting money away from patient care.' Mr. Lockyer said that each of the companies made as much as $40 million a year in illegal profits. He said he hoped to recover that amount plus the triple damages allowed under the state's false claims act. Thursday's legal filing amends a 2003 suit against two drug companies, Abbott Laboratories and Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, to add about three dozen new defendants, including Amgen, Baxter Healthcare, Bristol-Myers Squibb, GlaxoSmithKline, Mylan Laboratories, Novartis and Schering-Plough. It was immediately consolidated in federal court in Boston with similar litigation filed by more than 10 other states and localities, including New York, Texas, Florida and Illinois. Officials at several drug companies declined to comment. Mary Anne Rhyne, a spokeswoman for the American subsidiary of GlaxoSmithKline, Europe's largest pharmaceutical company, said that the prices Medi-Cal and other state Medicaid operations pay were standardized and approved by the government. Ms. Rhyne did not deny that different end-users pay widely varying prices for medicines, but said the prices were negotiated with the government and other buyers. 'We follow the law, and we follow government guidelines,' she said. 'They are fully aware that the government bases payment on the average wholesale price, which represents one of several starting points for negotiation of a reimbursement.' The suit originally arose from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed in 1998 by a Florida pharmacist, who noticed wide discrepancies in prices charged by drug manufacturers. California joined that suit in 2003 and expanded it on Thursday after more investigation. The pharmacist, John Lockwood of Ven-A-Care, a home health care company in Key West, Fla., appeared at the news conference with Mr. Lockyer. 'These drugs are far too important to everyone in this country to allow this kind of fraud scheme to continue,' Mr. Lockwood said. California officials cited as an example a pint bag of saline solution used as an intravenous drip manufactured by Abbott Laboratories. The lowest price available to health care providers was 95 cents, the officials said. Medi-Cal was charged $9.78 for the same item. 'We have an ocean of it,' Mr. Lockyer said. 'It's called saltwater.' Mr. Lockyer held up a bottle of 50-milligram tablets of Atenolol, a generic high blood pressure treatment manufactured by Mylan Laboratories, for which the state paid $804.70. A pharmacy chain pays $33.85 for the same bottle, he said. Mr. Lockyer acknowledged that the Medi-Cal system might not always be the most prudent buyer of pharmaceuticals and other medical services. But he said that did not let the drug companies off the hook for what he called an elaborate scheme of fixing prices. 'I wish there had been more aggressive negotiations along the way,' Mr. Lockyer said. 'Now we have to clean up after the elephant.'

Subject: A Touch of 'Indian-ness' Amid the Glass From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 08:51:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/arts/design/22indi.html?ex=1282363200&en=528419b3bda42081&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 22, 2005 A Touch of 'Indian-ness' Amid the Glass and Steel By SARITHA RAI BANGALORE, India - Driving from the airport into this city that has become India's technology hub, visitors are struck by the gleam of steel-and-glass high-rise office and apartment buildings with names like Golden Enclave and Diamond District. Farther along, dozens of box-shaped, glass-encased buildings carry signboards of the biggest Western high-tech companies. In contrast to these unabashed clones of buildings in Palo Alto or San Jose is a 37-acre campus in the heart of the city whose granite- and terra cotta-adorned buildings are set among decades-old trees and painted in vibrant Indian shades of brick red and deep green. The buildings have names from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit, while the rooms within are named after the ancient books of learning, the Vedas. Every morning the Indian flag is ceremonially hoisted on a central flagpole, an unusual practice for businesses here. At lunchtime, the chirping of birds mixes with the chatter of workers in the open spaces . Young men in jeans and polo shirts and women in colorful salwar kameez (an Indian tunic and trouser suit) linger along the stone-paved avenues. The campus, with its distinctive architecture, is the headquarters of a four-year-old outsourcing company called ITC Infotech. With 4,000 employees and $55 million in revenues, the company's professed philosophy is not to let its workplace be an imitation of countless modern buildings. Flouting the local fashion for buildings with names like Hi-Tech Tower or Software Techcity, the company calls its campus simply the ITC Infotech Park. As its managing director, Sanjay Verma said, 'This campus reflects our Indian-ness.' The tranquil expanse that blends the old and the new provides relief amid the concrete and glass structures in Bangalore, a city that the World Bank lists as among the fastest growing in the world. The country's biggest domestic outsourcing companies like Infosys Technologies and Wipro are headquartered here, as are the Indian branches of multinationals like Intel and Texas Instruments. In the last decade, the boom in the outsourcing of services from Western countries has brought about a construction explosion in the once quiet and orderly Bangalore. Call center and software services companies have grabbed whatever high-rise buildings that have sprouted up, as if overnight, with scant regard to urban planning or design. 'Companies say, 'We need a million square feet of space,' then go to their laptops and slap aluminum and glass over the million square feet,' said Bob Hoekstra, head of the software division at Philips Electronics India. Mr. Hoekstra, who is campaigning for the local government to improve facilities like roads, traffic systems and public transport, said multinationals like Intel and SAP AG had given little thought to aesthetics. 'Intel's campus looks like a parking lot with a building in the middle; SAP's resembles the Frankfurt airport,' he said. In the new buildings of Bangalore, and other outsourcing centers like nearby Chennai or Gurgaon in the suburbs of New Delhi, academics see an eagerness to conform to what is perceived here as the Western taste. 'Companies psychologically feel that their Western clients want to come here and see something that looks familiar and efficient,' said Aparna Narasimhan, an architect at the Bangalore-based firm Venkataramanan Associates, which has designed buildings for Infosys and General Electric. When ITC Infotech set out three years ago to plan its campus, it bucked such trends. Opportunely, its parent, ITC Ltd., a 100-year-old cigarette maker with interests in hotels, apparel and food products, offered its defunct tobacco manufacturing complex in central Bangalore. But one architect after another suggested the same plan: bulldoze the 36 tobacco warehouses and replace them with glass-and-steel high-rises. Mr. Verma, ITC Infotech's top executive, who first joined the parent company as a young shift engineer at this tobacco complex in 1981, found this idea repugnant. Finally, the company came to the Bangalore-based architect Krishnarao Jaisim, who agreed with Mr. Verma that the old structures and environment were worth preserving. Mr. Jaisim, whose firm is named Jaisim Fountainhead, in reference to the Ayn Rand novel, said his work had always been defined by the book's central character, the architect Howard Roark. 'I read the book in the 1960's; it has been my moral guideline ever since,' he said. The book influenced him to work on his own terms and abhor commercialism, he said. For ITC Infotech, Mr. Jaisim said he wanted to come up with a plan that would retain the character of the old warehouses while upgrading them. 'When I started, the warehouses stank of tobacco and every road was covered with asphalt,' he said. Three years later, two dozen of the warehouses have been modified to seat hundreds of workers each, and most of the streets have been paved with local stone. The architect retained the shell of the old high-ceilinged warehouses. Besides the strikingly minimal use of glass and steel, these buildings have unusual new touches: walls made of hollow terra-cotta blocks, flat stone tables and acoustic-friendly ceilings that are fashioned out of earthen pots. The giant century-old chimney, ancient trees and even an old fire station have been left standing. One jarring note is the unusual number of smokers on the campus. Unlike other outsourcing firms, where smoking is frowned upon, at this subsidiary of India's biggest cigarette maker the practice is not discouraged. The distinctive marks of the company's ideas have paid off for ITC Infotech in unexpected ways. 'Many employees feel a strong sense of pride in their unique campus,' said Anirvan Mukherjee, a systems analyst who joined ITC Infotech nearly three years ago. 'One of the high points of working here is the campus,' said Mr. Mukherjee, adding that his workplace was the envy of all his friends. Mr. Verma said that in Bangalore, where competition for skilled talent is intense, 'Our campus is a great differentiator.' It is a refreshing change from the 'clipped, almost Californian, presentation of the typical campus' said Simon P. Bentley, vice president for application development at DHL, one of ITC Infotech's customers. Mr. Bentley said it is a 'beautiful oasis in the midst of the daily noise and difficulty' of life in Bangalore. It was as comfortable and efficient as his own offices in Scottsdale, Ariz., he said, but with a 'more enviable' natural environment. Aesthetic examples such as ITC Infotech are rare, said Kamal Sagar, a Bangalore architect whose firm, Total Environment, prides itself on creating structures that incorporate greenery and local building materials. 'Every company wants to outdo the other,' said Mr. Sagar, citing the spaceship- and Sydney Opera House-inspired food courts at Infosys's headquarters and its plans to build origami-shaped buildings in nearby Mysore. 'Companies like Infosys and Wipro have the power to shape Bangalore's skyline,' he said, 'and so they should.'

Subject: Technology Levels the Playing Field From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 06:02:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/business/25scene.html?ex=1282622400&en=b0656cad3154b990&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 25, 2005 Technology Levels the Business Playing Field By HAL R. VARIAN ACCORDING to the Small Business Administration, 'small businesses represent 99.7 percent of all firms, they create more than half of the private nonfarm gross domestic product, and they create 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs.' When we think about the economic impact of information technology, the first companies to spring to mind are the industry giants like Amazon, eBay, Google and Yahoo. But the biggest impact on the economy may well show up in small and medium-size enterprises. The reason is that information technology is a great leveler. As computers get cheaper, more powerful and more connected, technologies that were only available to the Wal-Marts of the world become available to the small fry. Think about the lowly cash register. There was a big innovation in the 1880's, when manufacturers added a bell that sounded when the money drawer opened, so owners would know when someone had access to the cash. But after that, the technology barely changed for almost a century. The big chains like Wal-Mart could use satellite networks and mainframe computers to track purchases, manage inventory and record customer behavior. But the little retailer had to do with the old mechanical registers, scrolling through the paper tape in the evening by hand and punching numbers into an adding machine to balance his books. Then along came the personal computer. By the late 1980's cash registers had become just another computer application. They could add up receipts, compare sales with inventory, create order lists - in short, they could do just about everything that the big chains could do. In the 1990's, cash registers became networked, allowing the small stores to download records in a form suitable for spreadsheet analysis and accounting software. These intelligent cash registers allowed small companies to adopt business models that had previously been available only to large enterprises. Equipped with a scanner, a cash register could be used to verify the sale of each item, allowing companies to share data on revenue with the supplier. Some ice cream manufacturers effectively contract for space for a freezer in a store and share the revenue from purchases each time a sale is made. Even the success of the big Internet companies rests, in large part, on the fact that they provide advertising and sales platforms for small enterprises. EBay, Amazon, Google and Yahoo all make it possible for small businesses to reach national, and even global, markets, that were previously inaccessible. The Internet has not just affected the selling side of small businesses; it is also having a big impact on the production side. I met recently with two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. One, Rashmi Sinha, told me her software company had six employees: two in the United States and four in New Delhi. The other, Cosimo Spera, started a company to develop applications and services for mobile phones; his company has five employees in the United States, eight in Spain and two in Italy. Both of these micro-multinational companies work pretty much the same way, using e-mail, Web pages, voice-over-Internet phone services and other Internet technology to coordinate their far-flung operations. 'Just think,' said Ms. Sinha, 'my little six-person operation is now a global business.' American workers complain about big businesses sending jobs offshore to India and China. Economists say that the benefits from international trade outweigh the costs, which is great as long as you are not one of the costs. But offshore work means something quite different to the micro-multinationals. These companies simply would not exist without access to foreign labor. If they succeed, they will certainly hire more American workers as they grow. The internationalization of small and medium-size enterprises has got to be a big plus for the American economy. It allows the small players to have access to labor markets that only the big boys could afford a few years ago. It is no surprise that many of these small, high-tech, international entrepreneurs are foreign-born. They have the contacts, the connections and that most critical ingredient, the ambition, to assemble the pieces needed to start a business. It is almost impossible for an entrepreneur to put a foreign development team together without some strong connections on the ground. Even large multinationals have found out that outsourcing is not the panacea it was proclaimed to be. Paradoxically, it is easier for the micro-multinationals to deal with the inconvenience of outsourcing than it is for the big international corporations. Entrepreneurs are willing to do things that big international corporations will not do - like staying up until 11 p.m. and using cheap voice-over-Internet technology rather than expensive international telephone service. Constant supervision, constant communication and constant coordination are necessary to make small business grow. But it is just these things - the ability to supervise, communicate, and coordinate at a distance - that have become so much cheaper in the last 20 years. Big enterprises were the first to reap the benefits of this technological progress. But the impact of information technology on small and medium-size enterprises may yet turn out to have the most impact on the economy. Hal R. Varian is a professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley.

Subject: Easy Credit in Mortgages May Backfire From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 05:21:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/26norris.html August 26, 2005 Easy Credit in Mortgages May Backfire By FLOYD NORRIS IF housing prices fall, will mortgages cushion the decline, or make it worse? Put another way, will more overstretched homeowners be forced to sell? At issue is whether financial innovations that have made it easier for Americans to buy homes have also made the system less stable and more subject to shocks that could drive many from their homes. Traditionally, home mortgages, unlike loans to buy stock, have had a calming influence during tough times. If you buy stock with borrowed money, a decline in prices can bring on margin calls, and you must either put up cash or sell. But homeowners have been able to hold on because mortgage loans - unlike margin loans on stocks - do not become due just because the value of the property declines. Your mortgage will not be foreclosed so long as you meet the monthly payments, even if the house is now worth less than you owe. In the old days, the mortgage in question was probably a 30-year fixed-rate loan, and the monthly payment stayed the same for the life of the mortgage. Someone who lost a job might be unable to make the payments, but most homeowners could keep doing so. Now, however, mortgages that were unknown in years past have become common in some areas. They feature variable interest rates that can leap if market rates do, and some allow payments of only the interest owed, or even less, for several years. Such loans made it possible for people to buy houses they otherwise could not afford, and helped to propel the housing boom that continued through the 2001-2 recession even as the stock market plunged. But those mortgages are designed to allow monthly payments to rise rapidly. Rising interest rates, or the end of five-year teaser periods, can cause such increases, which would leave some homeowners unable to meet the payments. They expect to refinance, but that is impossible if the house is not worth the amount owed. The result could be forced sales into a weak market. For now, all the talk about bubbles may be just talk. In the late 1990's stock market, those who warned that prices were too high were discredited by the final huge rise in 1999 and early 2000. Only after most bears were silenced did they become right. THE housing bears now are anything but silent, and there is little sign of the economic news - soaring interest rates or recession or both - that would bring down home prices. But if and when a fall comes, watch the volume of home sales, particularly of existing homes. In the early 1980's recession, annual sales of existing homes fell 50 percent, to two million homes. This week there was talk of a weakening housing market because sales of existing homes seemed to slip in July. But that was more a matter of seasonal adjustments than reality. Over the last 12 months, 6.1 million single-family homes were sold along with nearly 1.3 million new homes. Both figures are records. Housing is, of course, a collection of regional markets, with widely varying prices. The most expensive areas, and the ones that have risen the most in the last five years, are concentrated on the coasts, and are presumably the most vulnerable if prices do start to fall. When that does happen, watch the volume of sales of existing homes. If it falls rapidly, that will be an indication that not much has changed, and the damage is likely to be limited. But if sales volume stays high, that could indicate that the mortgage innovations are hurting. Then we could see rising numbers of foreclosures as homeowners discover they cannot sell their homes for what they owe but also cannot pay their suddenly higher monthly mortgage bills.

Subject: Yes, He's Swiss, but Not Neutral From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 05:20:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/worldbusiness/26banker.html August 26, 2005 Yes, He's Swiss, but Not Neutral By MARK LANDLER FRANKFURT - Growing up in Switzerland, Josef Ackermann once dreamed of a career in politics. Now the chairman of Deutsche Bank, Mr. Ackermann has gotten his wish - though hardly in the way a budding Swiss politico could have imagined. As the leader of Germany's flagship financial institution, Mr. Ackermann, 57, has found himself, and his bank, at the heart of a searing debate over the country's economic future. More often than not, Deutsche Bank is held up as an example of all that has gone wrong here. But these days, three weeks before Germans go to the polls to elect a new government, Mr. Ackermann detects a change in the political wind. His weathervane is the mail he receives: many of the letters, he says, have shifted from hostile to favorable in the last few weeks. 'Maybe we are in a grace period,' Mr. Ackermann said in an interview here this week, reflecting on a turbulent year in which he has been lambasted for everything from his paycheck ($12 million in 2004) to his plans to lay off 6,400 employees at a time of rising joblessness. While Mr. Ackermann knows he is likely to remain a target for criticism of Anglo-American-style capitalism, he believes that there is growing support here for his drive to transform Deutsche Bank from a hidebound German institution into a globally competitive financial player. In many ways, he says, Deutsche Bank's struggle to remake itself mirrors that of Germany as a whole. 'People are more open to reforms now because they know things have to change,' he said. 'They feel that if we don't change, we're going to lose, and no one likes to lose. Germans like to win.' Mr. Ackermann's sense that his views are becoming more mainstream also stems from polls that show voters appear ready to push out the Social Democratic government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in favor of his conservative challenger, Angela Merkel. On Thursday, a German court affirmed Mr. Schröder's plan to hold elections on Sept. 18, a year ahead of schedule. A change in government could open the door to a radical overhaul of the economy, edging it toward more business-friendly policies, like lower taxes and less regulation of the labor market, which would make it easier for employers like Deutsche Bank to hire and fire. The bank has not waited for Berlin to act. Since Mr. Ackermann took over in 2002, it has shrunk its payroll to 63,000 from 90,000. The latest layoffs, which affect 1,900 jobs in Germany, were announced early this year, not long after Deutsche Bank's profits jumped 87 percent and the number of jobless people in Germany rose above five million. That prompted a firestorm of criticism, with some politicians calling on Germans to close their accounts at the bank. Franz Müntefering, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, described the layoffs as 'asocial.' Party officials put Deutsche Bank's name on a list of locusts - investors that it claimed were plundering the economy. To Mr. Ackermann, however, the cutbacks were necessary to make Deutsche Bank competitive with Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other peers. He is not shy about saying that Germany's leaders should borrow from his playbook in preparing their country for the global economy. 'I hope that Deutsche Bank can prove that if you do certain things the way that modern companies are doing them, it could be a little bit of a role model for what can be done macroeconomically,' he said. Already, there is evidence that German business is on the mend. Corporate profits are up as companies reap the benefit of relatively lower labor costs. The broader economy is recovering more slowly, though unemployment - the bane of Mr. Schröder 's government - may have peaked. Mr. Ackermann is not backing a party in the election; as a Swiss citizen, he notes, he is ineligible to vote. He also goes out of his way to praise Mr. Schröder for trying to shake up Germany's calcified labor market. The two speak regularly, he said, sometimes over a glass of Bordeaux. Still, his preference for a change is clear. Mr. Schröder, he said, is too hampered by the unions and other interest groups in his party to force through the kinds of changes that he believes Germany needs. 'Whatever the coalition will be, I hope it will be one which has the power to implement what is needed,' he said. 'Unfortunately, within the existing coalition, he didn't have enough support.' Though there is debate about just how much of a reformer Mrs. Merkel would be, Mr. Ackermann likes the early signs. She recently named Paul Kirchhof, an academic known for his advocacy of a 25 percent flat tax, as her economic adviser and potential future finance minister. Mr. Ackermann is clearly comfortable with the choice: Mr. Kirchhof sits on Deutsche Bank's supervisory board. Beyond the to-and-fro of party politics, Mr. Ackermann said Germany needed to rethink its concept of the social market economy. A credo of the post-World War II era, the social market economy seeks to balance the forces of the market with a commitment to social justice. In recent decades, Mr. Ackermann contends, that balance has tilted in favor of social protections over the market. This has strangled the country's competitiveness, he said, leaving it with high costs, an inflexible, immobile labor market, and a chronic high unemployment rate. With China and India emerging as economic rivals, and with the United States continuing to outpace Europe in growth, Mr. Ackermann said Germany had reached a point of reckoning. 'We have to turn the clock a little bit back, not giving up social elements, but putting more emphasis again on market forces,' he said. 'The question is, How do you achieve that without losing the support of your people?' One might equally ask, What qualifies a Swiss investment banker to opine about the future of Germany? The answer is that the chief of Deutsche Bank has always wielded great political influence in Germany, owing to the bank's role as the primary lender to German industry. Deutsche Bank still owns sizable stakes in some of the nation's major companies, among them DaimlerChrysler, though the bank is now selling those positions. Moreover, far from shunning the spotlight, Mr. Ackermann has embraced his role as a kind of industrial statesman. Last June, he appeared before a studio audience in Berlin for a one-on-one interview with one of Germany's most prominent television journalists, Maybrit Illner. When Ms. Illner asked Mr. Ackermann, half in jest, whether it mattered to him who served as chancellor under him, he scarcely blinked, saying he got along well with both Mr. Schröder and Mrs. Merkel. Recalling the exchange, Mr. Ackermann said he relished the public stature that came with his position. 'I'm a little bit of a politician,' he said with a smile as dazzling as Mr. Schröder 's. 'I always liked that.' There have been times, however, when the scrutiny has been merciless. Last year, Mr. Ackermann was put on trial on charges of defrauding shareholders of the telecommunications giant Mannesmann, when, as a board member, he awarded a lucrative severance package to its outgoing managers. On the opening day of the trial, he was roundly rebuked in the press for flashing a V-for-victory sign - a gesture he says was an inside joke rather than a thumb in the eye of the legal system. Though he was acquitted last summer, he remains bitter at what he views as the 'strong political element' in the prosecution. A German appeals court may yet order a new trial on the charges. For all this influence in Germany, Mr. Ackermann remains an outsider. He views that as a double-edged sword. 'I have benefited from a cultural background,' he said, 'which has shown me the strengths and weaknesses of the German situation clearer than probably someone who has grown up in the German context.' On the other hand, he added, 'you can be used as a scapegoat.'

Subject: The Doctrine Was Not to Have One From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 05:19:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/26fed.html August 26, 2005 The Doctrine Was Not to Have One By EDMUND L. ANDREWS JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. - Alan Greenspan was at the height of his success as chairman of the Federal Reserve in November 1999: the economy was booming, inflation was negligible and people at all levels were becoming wealthier. But even as Mr. Greenspan was being celebrated as the economy's 'maestro,' he sounded far less omniscient behind closed doors. 'We really do not know how this system works,' he told members of the Fed's policy-making committee in Washington, according to transcripts released earlier this year. 'It's clearly new. The old models just are not working.' Now, as he nears the end of his 18-year tenure in the job, Mr. Greenspan is leaving a brilliant record but a murky legacy. Despite numerous economic shocks and financial excesses, unemployment and inflation are both lower now than many economists considered possible when Mr. Greenspan took office in 1987. But whoever moves into his spacious office on Constitution Avenue early next year faces a near-impossible task in replicating Mr. Greenspan's success in managing monetary policy. That is because Mr. Greenspan abhorred rules, was skeptical about economic models and jettisoned practices that were enshrined by the likes of Paul A. Volcker, his predecessor, and Milton Friedman, a winner of the Nobel in economic science. If Mr. Greenspan stood for anything, it was flexibility and the freedom from dogma. 'The Greenspan standard has for the most part meant what Greenspan wanted to do,' said Alan S. Blinder, a professor of economics at Princeton and a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve. Mr. Blinder will be one of many economists at a Federal Reserve symposium beginning here Friday that will be devoted to discussions about the 'post-Greenspan era.' Before that, however, the gathering will open with what is expected to be Mr. Greenspan's swan song speech as chairman of the Fed. Mr. Greenspan, whose term as a Fed governor expires in January and cannot be renewed, is thought likely to devote his speech to the lessons he learned running the central bank longer than all but one of his predecessors, William McChesney Martin Jr. Expected to be listening particularly closely at the conference are three of the leading candidates to succeed him: Ben S. Bernanke, President Bush's chief economic adviser; Martin S. Feldstein, an economist at Harvard; and R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University. But for all his triumphs, Mr. Greenspan also presided over a stock market bubble that burst and, in helping minimize the damage from that fiasco, laid the groundwork for the housing boom - and potential bust - that followed. Moreover, the United States has run up heavy foreign debt partly because the Federal Reserve drove interest rates so low that Americans borrowed more and saved less. Mr. Greenspan's approach to such challenges was to roll with the punches, basing his management of the economy on a refusal to believe in firm rules, doctrines or models. 'A surprising problem is that a number of economists are not able to distinguish between the economic models we construct and the real world,' he remarked back in 1984, when he was still head of a private consulting firm. As Fed chairman, Mr. Greenspan has celebrated the hunt for 'anomalies' or trends that seemed to defy what the models predict. He had little faith in widely accepted concepts like the 'natural rate' of unemployment, which many economists long believed to be about 6 percent. He jettisoned the practice of basing policy on growth in the money supply, a concept enshrined by Mr. Friedman as the best way to prevent inflation. And though he has cultivated the reputation of a hard-liner on reducing inflation, Mr. Greenspan has often put more emphasis on driving up employment. At 78, his hair is thinning and his gait is becoming stiffer. But he may be as famous as any pop star; he is certainly a larger-than-life figure for political leaders and economists. At a hearing in July before the House Financial Services Committee, lawmakers from both parties showered him with so much praise that they began running out of accolades. 'All the adjectives have been used up,' complained Representative Steve Pearce, Republican of New Mexico, who then declared that Mr. Greenspan was a 'handsome man.' By almost all accounts, Mr. Greenspan has been an exceptionally successful steward for the economy. In the last 18 years, the nation has endured only two recessions, one of them quite mild. There were four downturns in the previous 18 years. The core rate of inflation has edged down to about 2 percent from 4 percent when he took office. Unemployment has averaged 5.5 percent over the last 18 years, compared with nearly 7 percent in the previous 18 years, and it is now down to about 5 percent. Mr. Blinder, a Democrat who battled with Mr. Greenspan over the Fed's communication policy, said his former boss might well be the best central banker who ever lived. Allen Sinai, chief global economist at Decision Economics, pointed to one reason Mr. Greenspan was so willing to rely on his gut instincts. 'He didn't go to one of the top schools: Harvard or M.I.T. or Stanford or Northwestern,' Mr. Sinai said. 'I think that was an advantage. He didn't get brainwashed into one of the doctrines.' A devout believer in free markets and at one time a disciple of Ayn Rand, the libertarian philosopher, Mr. Greenspan - who studied at New York University - served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Gerald R. Ford. As head of Townsend-Greenspan, the forecasting firm he ran both before and after his White House years, Mr. Greenspan made his reputation by poring through vast amounts of industry data to tease out economic trends. Named by President Ronald Reagan to succeed Mr. Volcker as Fed chairman in 1987, Mr. Greenspan brought both his passion for detail and a cool head for crises. The first crisis arrived barely two months after he arrived when the stock market crashed more than 500 points on Oct. 19, 1987. Mr. Greenspan, initially mistrusted as a weak successor to the iron-willed Mr. Volcker, quickly soothed the economy by assuring banks that the Fed would provide enough money to keep financial markets functioning. With the Fed offering money to all takers, interest rates edged down, markets recovered and the crash turned out to be little more than a pause in the bull market. Years later, Mr. Greenspan said one of his proudest achievements was the fact that he had been able to sleep the night after Black Monday. But Mr. Greenspan gradually ushered in a host of more enduring changes at the Fed. With memories of the 1970's era of soaring prices still strong, he initiated 'pre-emptive' changes in interest rates to head off inflation before it actually arrived, calling the practice 'leaning against the wind.' By relentlessly raising interest rates in 1989, the Fed contributed to an unexpectedly sharp economic downturn that played a major role in the election defeat of the first President Bush in 1992. The second attempt, a sharp rise in rates in 1994 and 1995, went more smoothly: inflation remained low, the economy cooled briefly and then began its biggest growth spurt in decades. Many economists say Mr. Greenspan's signal triumph was being among the first to recognize that starting in the mid-1990's, the United States had entered a sustained period of faster productivity growth. The increase had profound implications, because it meant that the economy could grow faster and unemployment could fall lower than had ever seemed possible without fueling inflation. The productivity shift was not apparent in official government statistics, and Mr. Greenspan found himself bucking his own staff economists as well as Fed governors like Janet Yellen and Laurence H. Meyer. At the time, most economists assumed inflation would heat up once unemployment dipped below 5.5 percent. But Mr. Greenspan, convinced that investments in computers and information technology were finally paying off in faster productivity, was content to let unemployment sink to less than 4 percent. 'He was confident in his judgment and he was right,' Mr. Blinder said. 'The lesson is that sometimes you can't wait for the data to be definitive.' Some economists point to an even broader legacy for future Fed policy. Before Mr. Greenspan took over, they note, policy makers focused almost entirely on changes in demand as the determinant of inflation. The surge in productivity showed that changes on the economy's supply side could be equally, if not more, important. Critics of Mr. Greenspan contend that he has relied too heavily on his own judgment and not enough on consistent principles. 'We've moved further away from a rules-based system,' said Brian S. Wesbury, chief investment strategist at Claymore Advisers. 'We have a Greenspan standard, but we don't have any kind of a Fed standard.' If the Fed had adopted an explicit numerical inflation target - something that many other central banks use but that Mr. Greenspan has rejected as too restrictive - Mr. Wesbury contended that the Fed might have avoided much of the volatility since 2000. With little inflation in sight, the Fed might have raised interest rates less than it did in 1999, which might have softened the downturn that followed. That in turn might have made the Fed less eager to drive down rates when the stock market fell sharply in 2000, causing less of a potential bubble in housing prices today. Other analysts contend that Mr. Greenspan's judgment has generally been correct, but that the Fed cannot afford to rely on the individual judgment of future chairmen. 'If you are Alan Greenspan, it's hard to make a rule that would do any better,' said Allen H. Meltzer, professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and author of a history of the Fed. 'On the other hand, we have had 12 chairmen at the Federal Reserve since 1913, and some of them have made massive blunders.' Mr. Greenspan remains convinced that the economy is simply too complex and fast moving to be subject to a single policy rule or predictable with any single economic model. If he has one consistent message, it is that nothing is permanent. While many economists warn that the United States has become dangerously loaded up with foreign debt, Mr. Greenspan has argued that the globalization of finance and other changes may have created a global 'savings glut' that allows the United States to borrow much more than would have been possible 20 years ago. His alternative to firm rules is 'risk management,' a strategy of making policy based on a range of possible outcomes. The clearest example came in 2003, when the Fed worried about the slim possibility of a broad deflation, a downward spiral in consumer prices. Though Fed officials viewed deflation as highly unlikely, they figured the damage would be heavy if it did occur. Mr. Greenspan cut short-term rates to 1 percent in 2003, then promised to keep them at that level for a 'considerable period' that turned out to be a year. The biggest risk for his successor could turn out to be a collapse in housing prices after the frenetic run-up that has resulted in part from the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates so low. But another key principle of the Greenspan Fed, which most experts have come to accept, is that the central bank should focus on economic fundamentals and not try to prematurely pop a market bubble in stock prices or real estate prices. After the stock market bubble burst in 2000, Mr. Greenspan argued that the Fed would have made a mistake if it had tried to curb speculation by raising interest rates or making it harder for investors to buy stock with borrowed money. It was better, he argued, to fix things afterward by cutting interest rates. With evidence of speculative excess in many housing markets, Mr. Greenspan is now warning that investors may be overconfident that interest rates will stay low and that housing prices will continue to soar. But if housing prices do turn out to be a bubble that bursts, trapping homeowners who used exotic new mortgages to borrow far more than was once allowed, Mr. Greenspan will no longer be around to take the blame - or clean up the mess.

Subject: Energy Prices Vex Americans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 05:18:15 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/26energy.html August 26, 2005 Energy Prices Vex Americans On All Fronts By JAD MOUAWAD It might still be 80 degrees outside, but, four months before the first days of winter, many Americans are already facing the prospect of keeping warm while having to stay within their budgets. Instead of the short spike in energy prices that most expected, it now appears that a variety of high energy bills - for heating oil, propane, natural gas and electricity, as well as gasoline - will be around for a long while. Near Chicago, a health care administrator expects her natural gas bill to double and has cut back on her cable TV subscription. A school district in Maine will lower the thermostats in classrooms. And the treasurer of the Union Church of Proctor, a small community near Rutland, Vt., faces a $10,000 shortage this winter because of soaring fuel oil costs. 'You can turn the heat down a little and wear an extra sweater,' said Gary Fay, the church treasurer, 'but in the end you really need to heat yourself.' With energy costs rising substantially for a second year, and reaching another record on oil markets yesterday, how consumers and businesses respond this winter - whether they curb their energy consumption or not, whether they keep spending on other goods or not - will be critical as higher energy prices slowly ripple through the $11.7 trillion American economy. 'This is going to hit on every side,' said Davis Bookhart, a researcher at the Consumer Energy Council of America. 'On just about everything that is energy-intensive, you're going to feel higher costs. People are more concerned about their bills, and realize that this winter will be more expensive.' Economists generally seem convinced that the higher energy prices will not derail the economy. But they may cause it to wobble a bit: Americans will spend $600 billion this year on oil purchases - everything from gasoline and diesel to jet fuel and heating oil. In two years, the national oil bill has jumped by $210 billion, or 54 percent, according to Larry Goldstein, the president of the Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. In addition, the nation spent $120 billion on natural gas in 2004, according to the American Gas Association. That is expected to increase to about $167 billion this year. 'High energy prices act like a consumption tax and consumption taxes eventually hurt the economy,' Mr. Goldstein said. That extra burden has already shaved three-quarters of a percentage point off American growth, he estimated, but has not put much of a dent in the expanding economy. The cost of oil is stirring larger waves in the economy now. As a direct share of the gross domestic product, oil accounted for 8.5 percent of the economy in 1980. As energy conservation measures took hold, and as Americans grew wealthier, that fell to a low of 3.1 percent in the mid-1990's. Last year, it was up to 4.2 percent. This year, oil is expected to account for 4.8 percent of the economy, according to Mr. Goldstein. 'We've insulated ourselves from higher oil prices, but we're not immune to them,' Mr. Goldstein said. Americans are not completely helpless, Mr. Bookhart said. 'Most homes are very energy-inefficient. There are many small things that can be done that will lead to pretty significant cost savings.' Sheryl Andersen, who lives in Crete, Ill., has followed that advice. She has been weatherproofing her new house in expectation of paying higher heating bills: fixing leaks, putting weather stripping around doors, tuck-pointing the chimney and fixing cracks in the fireplace. Last year, she paid $150 a month on her heating bill. This year, she expects to spend twice that. Ms. Andersen, 57, a senior administrative assistant for a health care provider, said she and her husband had cut back on television channels and now subscribe only to basic cable service. They have not taken out their 18-foot fishing boat this summer because of the higher fuel costs. She does not know yet what other expenses may have to be eliminated or reduced. 'We don't know how bad it's going to be this winter,' Ms. Andersen said. The most visible signs of higher energy costs have been gasoline prices, which have touched $3 a gallon in some parts of the country - and have led to a spate of fuel thefts at service stations. On Wednesday, Hawaii, with the highest prices in the nation, said it would limit wholesale prices of gasoline in an effort to restrict further increases. Critics say the measure may backfire because it fails to address a cause of higher prices: higher demand. Crude oil prices, lifted by strong growth in the United States and in China, have risen 54 percent on the New York Mercantile Exchange over the last year. Yesterday, the next-month futures contract settled at $67.49 a barrel, up 17 cents, after touching $67.70 midway in the trading session. These highs are causing concern around the world. The International Monetary Fund said that Asia's rapid economic growth was at risk from the energy prices. Still, according to the I.M.F.'s managing director, Rodrigo Rato: 'There is very strong demand, and we don't see that demand receding. Prices are not going back to the levels seen at the beginning of 2004.' This may be little comfort for people like Stan Sawyer, a school district superintendent in Westbrook, Me. Mr. Sawyer said that the district had rerouted its buses over the last months, condensed runs, and is now considering curbing field trips for the year and extending the walking distance to and from school. In addition to trying to curb gasoline consumption, Mr. Sawyer faces another problem: His district budgeted heating oil purchases at only $1.60 a gallon - well below even the current commodity market price for delivery next month, which is above $1.80 and climbing. 'There isn't any wiggle room,' Mr. Sawyer said. 'Something like this, we're going to try to do cost estimates about how much it will cost and make it up somewhere else in the budget. It's not only a hardship in Westbrook. It's a hardship in schools throughout the country.' One thing the school will probably do is turn the thermostat down a couple of degrees. 'We were around 67 or 68 last year,' he said, 'and we'll probably turn it down two more degrees and encourage students to wear sweatshirts and sweaters.' The Energy Information Administration, a branch of the Energy Department, projected that retail heating oil prices would be, on average, 17 percent higher this winter than last year, at about $2.20 a gallon. Natural gas, used by more than half of all households for heating, is expected to rise 16.5 percent, to $12.97 for each thousand cubic feet, while the price of propane, a liquid gas, is forecast to jump by 16 percent, according to Dave Costello, an analyst at the energy administration. And these estimates may prove low. Last year, heating oil and natural gas prices increased by about a third over the winter. This year, heating oil contracts are up 51 percent while natural gas has risen 55 percent. 'We are going to have to look into more creative solutions,' said H. E. Broadbent, vice president for institutional advancement at Dowling College, in Oakdale, N.Y., which mainly uses natural gas for its heating. 'We might be looking at alternative energies, or solar energy. But this year is going to be very hard on our budget. We might have to postpone renovations, or buying new equipment. The whole process of deciding what to give up is going to be very, very difficult.' Many analysts predict more increases in prices through the end of the year, as well as into 2006. 'Heating is a visceral necessity; you've got to heat your home,' said John Felmy, senior economist at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry's main trade group. 'This is when we might expect more of a sticker-shock reaction than with gasoline prices. I'm holding my breath for when I have to fill up my own propane tank.' So far, American consumers have proved surprisingly resilient to the higher energy prices. Despite the rise in gasoline costs, in recent weeks they have still been buying Detroit's gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles, in large part because of deep discounts offered by American automakers. Consumers have not visibly reduced spending, the housing boom has slowed only somewhat and interest rates, while rising, are still relatively low. According to Goldman Sachs commodity analysts, there is little chance that crude oil prices will drop quickly. The firm now expects oil to average $68 a barrel and does not see it dropping below $60 a barrel for years. Many others on Wall Street are looking for oil around $50 a barrel in 2006. There is also little relief to expect on natural gas markets. While the use of fuel oil is mostly concentrated in the Northeast, natural gas is the heating source of choice for some 61 million households across the country. While much of the attention has been focused on crude oil and gasoline, natural gas markets have boomed as well in recent years. Through the 1990's, prices remained fairly stable, averaging about $2 a thousand cubic feet for the benchmark spot price in the United States. But in early 2000, prices began to rise, averaging $5 a thousand cubic feet from 2000 to 2005. Yesterday, natural gas futures settled at $9.77 in New York after briefly trading above $10 on Wednesday. 'A lot will depend on consumer behavior and whether they will be overwhelmed by the higher prices and cut on their consumption,' said David N. Parker, president of the American Gas Association. 'We don't see any reduction in the heating costs in the next two to three years. Beyond that, there will be a flow of additional supplies. But we will never go back to $2 gas. We might settle between $5 and $5.50.' Higher costs have also translated into higher electricity prices. In Miami, Juan Pablo Constain, a 26-year-old business administration major at Florida International University, said his last electric bill was $216, up 45 percent from the previous month. He rides his bike to school more often to save on gasoline, has stopped attending soccer games, and has cut back on social activities. 'I don't get together with my friends for happy hour at the bar,' Mr. Constain said. 'I'm trying to save as much as I can on everything.'

Subject: hmmmm From: Leeson To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 13:52:27 (EDT) Email Address: rafiq1010@hotmail.com Message: America's controversial new ambassador to the United Nations is seeking to shred an agreement on strengthening the world body and fighting poverty intended to be the highlight of a 60th anniversary summit next month. In the extraordinary intervention, John Bolton has sought to roll back proposed UN commitments on aid to developing countries, combating global warming and nuclear disarmament. Mr Bolton has demanded no fewer than 750 amendments to the blueprint restating the ideals of the international body, which was originally drafted by the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan. The amendments are spelt out in a 32-page US version, first reported by the Washington Post and acquired yesterday by The Independent. The document is littered with deletions and exclusions. Most strikingly, the changes eliminate all specific reference to the so-called Millennium Development Goals, accepted by all countries at the last major UN summit in 2000, including the United States. The Americans are also seeking virtually to remove all references to the Kyoto treaty and the battle against global warming. They are striking out mention of the disputed International Criminal Court and drawing a red line through any suggestion that the nuclear powers should dismantle their arsenals. Instead, the US is seeking to add emphasis to passages on fighting terrorism and spreading democracy. Very quickly, Mr Bolton has given the answer to anyone still wondering whether his long and difficult journey to New York - President George Bush confirmed him to the post after the US Senate was unable to - would render him coy or cautious. Far from that, he seems intent on taking the UN by the collar and plainly saying to its face what America expects - and does not expect - from it. To the dismay of many other delegations, the US has even scored out pledges that would have asked nations to 'achieve the target of 0.7 per cent of gross national product for official development assistance by no later than 2015'. All references to the date or the percentage level are gone in the Bolton version. Passages that look forward to a larger role for the General Assembly are gone. Rejected also is a promise to create a standing military capacity for UN peacekeeping. This show of contempt from Washington and its new envoy comes at a time when Mr Annan has been severely weakened by allegations of widespread corruption, fraud and nepotism. The White House is aware, for example, that Mr Annan himself could be further undermined when investigators into corruption in the oil-for-food programme in Iraq issue their final report, probably just days before the summit itself, due to be held from 14 to 16 September. The move by MrBolton has thrown preparations for the summit into turmoil, prompting some to question whether there will be anything for the leaders to put their pens to in New York. 'We can't be entirely sure there will be an agreement,' one senior United Nations aide admitted last night. Failure to reach an agreement could embarrass Tony Blair, who is believed to have given broad backing to Mr Annan's original draft. 'It is not great news,' said one Western diplomat of the American paper, which had been distributed only to a select group of UN ambassadors by yesterday. 'What they are proposing is quite radical. If we start negotiating now the way the Americans want, it is going to make for a very difficult process.' Some UN insiders concede that at 29 pages the proposed text was probably far too long for many of the world's presidents and prime ministers to accept. They all also see that in its present form it would ask the US to promise to uphold treaties and conventions it has already rejected, including the Kyoto pact. The president of the General Assembly, Jean Ping of Gambia, must now try to save the summit from disaster. He will bring together a core group of 20 to 30 countries in the days ahead, with Britain and the US included, to see what, if anything, can be found to overcome so many American objections. There is no doubt in the corridors of New York that something must be stitched together before the summit, even if it ends up being very short. 'The purpose of the summit,' said Shashi Tharoor, a senior aide to Mr Annan, 'is to rekindle the idealism with which the UN was created 60 years ago and to use the birthday to renew the organisation for the purposes of the 21st century. The rest is process and details.' The problem is that the summit is less than three weeks away. 'Time is short,' Mr Bolton warned in a letter to other UN envoys earlier this week. 'In order to maximise our chances of success, I suggest we begin the negotiations immediately.' David Usborne, The Independent 26th August 2005

Subject: Bernard Goldberg and Paul Krugman From: Linda Hirshman To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 12:54:13 (EDT) Email Address: LRHirshman@att.net Message: I am 77 on Bernard Goldberg's list. Inspired by his hilariously misinformed description of me, I have started a blog to post the real bio of each of his hundred, starting, of course, with myself. Today's entry: #8 Paul Krugman. By their enemies shall you know them. http://screwingamerica.blogspot.com Goldberg Screwup 77 screwingamerica.blogspot.com

Subject: Re: Bernard Goldberg and Paul Krugman From: Maureen Dowd To: Linda Hirshman Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 16:31:12 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: The wife of our Managing Editor doesn't share your somewhat sanguine views of Professor Krugman. At last year's Holiday party, I heard her refer to him as 'that sack of crap from Princeton.'

Subject: Ma Do Truth Squad From: Johnny5 To: Maureen Dowd Date Posted: Sun, Aug 28, 2005 at 16:42:39 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://www.yoders.net/nr/?ffid=5 You are a second act copy cat to all the trolls to troll here before - go be a clone somewhere else - why are you always late to the trashing party? pathetic - HAHA! http://www.lyinginponds.com/archives/2003/07/23/krugman-truth-squad/ Can't ever be first can you? 2005 Most Partisan Columnists 1 Mark Steyn 77 2 Paul Krugman 74 3 Molly Ivins 74 4 Joe Conason 68 5 Frank Rich 64 6 Ann Coulter 60 7 Maureen Dowd 58 8 E. J. Dionne Jr. 40 9 Michael Kinsley 39 10 Richard Cohen 36 http://slate.msn.com/id/1002593 Chatterbox's problem with Dowd's column isn't its whimsy. It isn't even that Dowd's column is nothing but whimsy (though that does limit its scope). The problem is the weight Dowd attaches to her whimsy. The spitballs she tosses from the back of the classroom are meant to be taken as serious opinions. No doubt some of the column's faux gravitas derives from its placement on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times , which arguably is not her fault. But some of it is clearly intentional, stemming from Dowd's apparent conviction that the surface realities she traffics in are more important than whatever tedious substance might lie beneath. Dowd herself grew up in a blue-collar family, as she points out from time to time in her column; but that doesn't give her license to sneer at white trash. POOR MS DOWD - ALWAYS FINISHING SECOND or second class. http://americandigest.org/sidelines/archives/2005/02/times_media_who.html TIMES MEDIA WHORE #1 ADMITS SHE CAN'T STAND COMPETITION: Maureen Dowd on 'Meet the Press' reveals enduring internal meltdown with 'We are torturing people, we're outsourcing torture, the administration is trying to throw journalist in jail and basically trying to replace the whole press corps with ringers, including male escorts.' -- Watch her in action @ Jackson's Junction: Video: Maureen Dowd-Moonbat Charge Of The Day http://www.doctor-horsefeathers.com/archives/000081.php This first annual Horsefeathers prize is named after the New York Times pundit in recognition of her unique combination of fatuous self-regard, shallowness of knowledge, condescension towards her betters and her grotesquely polemical misuse of psychological terms and ideas. A finer example of what Dr. Johnson called “articulate ignorance” could not be found. We're certain the many competitors who fell a little short of our winner will continue to strive towards the standard she has set. This year’s award winner captured the prize for comments he made just before his untimely demise so the award is, regrettably, a posthumous one. http://www.fourmilab.ch/annoyance-filter/ That's when von Mises' words on advertising came back to me. Advertising is advertising--perforce, it speaks with a different vocabulary than the sports page, letters to the editor, police blotter, national and international news, and commentary (aside, perhaps, from Maureen Dowd's columns in The New York Times). Given a sufficiently large collection of known editorial copy and advertising, might it not be possible to extract a signature, in the sense of radar signatures to discriminate warheads from decoys in ballistic missile defence, with which a sufficiently clever program could identify advertising and remove it, with a high level of confidence, before the reader ever saw it? Lowell Bergmen should be ashamed of someone like you in his profession. You cause flame fests to sell print - pathetic. My respect for NEWS has gone way down with the likes of you - you have hollowed out the decency that used to be middle class america. http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030522.html Why fan the flames of hate - to sell more papers - you are pathetic. http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_luskin/truthsquad200311051325.asp More hate - you vile ball of twisted emotion. http://polipundit.com/wp-comments-popup.php?p=6797&c=1 Even other women bloggers are sick of your emotionally uncontrolled outbursts. I have read that MoDo is the only liberal in her family and that all the rest of her family are strong supporters of Bush. She has written that she hates going to family gatherings because they are all talking about all the good that Bush and the Repubs are doing. She even went so far as to write that after this past Christmas, she would simply refuse to attend further family gatherings. Maureen Dowd once made a very lame reference to the “extra chromosome Republicans', a heartless and stupid reference to people w/ Down’s Syndrome…the Down’s Syndrome Association wrote her about it, and she ignored their request to stop nor did she apologize….she almost imediately mentioned it again in another interview or column, I forget which…she is a deeply flawed human, probably lonely and definately mean. http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/111504F.shtml In closing I will leave you with your own question - whatever happened to just being a nice person who loves they nieghbor and not trying to incite flame fests to increase her own inflated self ego - it must have been hard as a kid when the only way you could get attention was to be a drama queer. You make public reference to your own co-worker being called a sack of crap - what a hypocrite - the hate you spread will turn back on you one day - be ready.

Subject: For Bobby From: To the Editor To: Maureen Dowd Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 14:17:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dear Bobby, Here again is our vicious troll.

Subject: The Great British Investment Puzzle From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 11:54:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/financialtimes/business/FT20050825_21670_254842.html August 25, 2005 The Great British Investment Puzzle By FT.COM Why is UK Plc not investing more? It is time policymakers focused greater attention on this puzzle, rather than being obsessed with consumption alone. During the first half of this year, business investment fell to a record low of 9.3 per cent of cash gross domestic product. In real terms the picture is much brighter: business investment is running at 10 per cent of GDP, high by historic standards, though down from a peak of 11.3 per cent in late 2000. The difference arises because the price of investment goods has fallen faster than the price of other goods and services. Real investment is what determines the future productive capacity of the economy. Net real investment, though, is not as strong as gross investment figures imply. Many investment goods with falling prices, such as computers, also need replacing frequently. As Geoffrey Dicks and Ross Walker of Royal Bank of Scotland argue in a recent research note*, we need to answer two related questions. Why has corporate Britain not responded to continued falls in the relative price of investment goods by purchasing relatively more of them? In the long run it has. But, from 1998, the rise in business investment as a share of real GDP slowed, falling back after 2000, even though the relative price of capital goods continued to fall. And why does investment remain so weak? According to revised national statistics, real business investment grew only 3.4 per cent in 2004, when the world economy grew at its fastest rate in 30 years. Last quarter it grew at an annualised 1.9 per cent, much lower than usual at this stage in the cycle, in spite of very favourable financial conditions. Both the Bank of England and the Treasury need to examine why investment has been weak, in order to assess how far they can rely on it rebounding in the months ahead. One set of explanations emphasises factors that should prove transient in their effects. Heavy investment up to the peak in 2000, followed by a shallow downturn, meant that the upturn in investment was more gradual than in past cycles, or than in the US, which had a brief recession in 2001. Partly because there was no massive shedding of labour to begin with, and partly because of the squeeze from higher oil prices, corporate profits for UK non-oil companies are lower relative to GDP than they would normally be at this point in the cycle. While the corporate profit share in the US is unusually high, in Britain it is closer to its long-term average. However, past over-investment cannot explain low investment growth today, when capacity utilisation rates are high. Moreover, profits have increased since 2002 without a corresponding increase in investment. Another factor that may have restrained investment in the past but is less likely to do so in the future is the state of corporate balance sheets. From 1997 to 2001, non-financial businesses increased net borrowing by £51bn. Since then they have been paying money back, reducing net borrowing by £41bn by the end of 2004. Thisprocess ought by now to be largely over, though pension fund deficits might induce continued net saving. Certainly it is not possible to blame low investment spending on excess distributions to shareholders: far from being short of cash, companies have been hoarding it. The effects of past over-investment, slower past profits growth and balance sheet repair should gradually fade. But another set of explanations emphasises structural changes, which would not. A more stable macroeconomic environment may have reduced cyclical variance in investment and made investment a less significant driver of changes in GDP. Yet it should also produce higher investment overall. One possibility is that the microeconomic climate in the UK has deteriorated due to higher taxes and red tape under Labour, off-setting gains from greater macroeconomic stability. But that fails to explain why investment is weakin other developed economies too.This may be due to the shift of manufacturing production to Asia. Investment in UK manufacturing has fallen by more than a third in cash terms since peaking in the first quarter of 1998. However, that adjustment was largely complete by mid-2002. Manufacturing now accounts for only 12 per cent of business investment. The increasingly service-sector dominated UK economy needs less physical capital investment to grow. But global production shifts cannot explain why non-manufacturing investment grew only 2.5 per cent in cash terms from the second quarter of 2002 to the second quarter of 2005. In all likelihood there is some truth in both the temporary and structural explanations. But there is also another factor in the mix: extra uncertainty resulting from the war in Iraq, terrorism, oil and the perceived unsustainability of consumer demand in Britain and the US based on housing wealth and current account deficits. While it is therefore plausible that, unless oil keeps rising, investment will pick up, it would be unwise to assume that it will do so with any great vigour until these issues are resolved. That could take years.

Subject: Yes, He's Swiss, but Not Neutral From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 11:19:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/worldbusiness/26banker.html August 26, 2005 Yes, He's Swiss, but Not Neutral By MARK LANDLER FRANKFURT - Growing up in Switzerland, Josef Ackermann once dreamed of a career in politics. Now the chairman of Deutsche Bank, Mr. Ackermann has gotten his wish - though hardly in the way a budding Swiss politico could have imagined. As the leader of Germany's flagship financial institution, Mr. Ackermann, 57, has found himself, and his bank, at the heart of a searing debate over the country's economic future. More often than not, Deutsche Bank is held up as an example of all that has gone wrong here. But these days, three weeks before Germans go to the polls to elect a new government, Mr. Ackermann detects a change in the political wind. His weathervane is the mail he receives: many of the letters, he says, have shifted from hostile to favorable in the last few weeks. 'Maybe we are in a grace period,' Mr. Ackermann said in an interview here this week, reflecting on a turbulent year in which he has been lambasted for everything from his paycheck ($12 million in 2004) to his plans to lay off 6,400 employees at a time of rising joblessness. While Mr. Ackermann knows he is likely to remain a target for criticism of Anglo-American-style capitalism, he believes that there is growing support here for his drive to transform Deutsche Bank from a hidebound German institution into a globally competitive financial player. In many ways, he says, Deutsche Bank's struggle to remake itself mirrors that of Germany as a whole. 'People are more open to reforms now because they know things have to change,' he said. 'They feel that if we don't change, we're going to lose, and no one likes to lose. Germans like to win.' Mr. Ackermann's sense that his views are becoming more mainstream also stems from polls that show voters appear ready to push out the Social Democratic government of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in favor of his conservative challenger, Angela Merkel. On Thursday, a German court affirmed Mr. Schröder's plan to hold elections on Sept. 18, a year ahead of schedule. A change in government could open the door to a radical overhaul of the economy, edging it toward more business-friendly policies, like lower taxes and less regulation of the labor market, which would make it easier for employers like Deutsche Bank to hire and fire. The bank has not waited for Berlin to act. Since Mr. Ackermann took over in 2002, it has shrunk its payroll to 63,000 from 90,000. The latest layoffs, which affect 1,900 jobs in Germany, were announced early this year, not long after Deutsche Bank's profits jumped 87 percent and the number of jobless people in Germany rose above five million. That prompted a firestorm of criticism, with some politicians calling on Germans to close their accounts at the bank. Franz Müntefering, the chairman of the Social Democratic Party, described the layoffs as 'asocial.' Party officials put Deutsche Bank's name on a list of locusts - investors that it claimed were plundering the economy. To Mr. Ackermann, however, the cutbacks were necessary to make Deutsche Bank competitive with Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and other peers. He is not shy about saying that Germany's leaders should borrow from his playbook in preparing their country for the global economy. 'I hope that Deutsche Bank can prove that if you do certain things the way that modern companies are doing them, it could be a little bit of a role model for what can be done macroeconomically,' he said. Already, there is evidence that German business is on the mend. Corporate profits are up as companies reap the benefit of relatively lower labor costs. The broader economy is recovering more slowly, though unemployment - the bane of Mr. Schröder 's government - may have peaked. Mr. Ackermann is not backing a party in the election; as a Swiss citizen, he notes, he is ineligible to vote. He also goes out of his way to praise Mr. Schröder for trying to shake up Germany's calcified labor market. The two speak regularly, he said, sometimes over a glass of Bordeaux. Still, his preference for a change is clear. Mr. Schröder, he said, is too hampered by the unions and other interest groups in his party to force through the kinds of changes that he believes Germany needs. 'Whatever the coalition will be, I hope it will be one which has the power to implement what is needed,' he said. 'Unfortunately, within the existing coalition, he didn't have enough support.' Though there is debate about just how much of a reformer Mrs. Merkel would be, Mr. Ackermann likes the early signs. She recently named Paul Kirchhof, an academic known for his advocacy of a 25 percent flat tax, as her economic adviser and potential future finance minister. Mr. Ackermann is clearly comfortable with the choice: Mr. Kirchhof sits on Deutsche Bank's supervisory board. Beyond the to-and-fro of party politics, Mr. Ackermann said Germany needed to rethink its concept of the social market economy. A credo of the post-World War II era, the social market economy seeks to balance the forces of the market with a commitment to social justice. In recent decades, Mr. Ackermann contends, that balance has tilted in favor of social protections over the market. This has strangled the country's competitiveness, he said, leaving it with high costs, an inflexible, immobile labor market, and a chronic high unemployment rate. With China and India emerging as economic rivals, and with the United States continuing to outpace Europe in growth, Mr. Ackermann said Germany had reached a point of reckoning. 'We have to turn the clock a little bit back, not giving up social elements, but putting more emphasis again on market forces,' he said. 'The question is, How do you achieve that without losing the support of your people?' One might equally ask, What qualifies a Swiss investment banker to opine about the future of Germany? The answer is that the chief of Deutsche Bank has always wielded great political influence in Germany, owing to the bank's role as the primary lender to German industry. Deutsche Bank still owns sizable stakes in some of the nation's major companies, among them DaimlerChrysler, though the bank is now selling those positions. Moreover, far from shunning the spotlight, Mr. Ackermann has embraced his role as a kind of industrial statesman. Last June, he appeared before a studio audience in Berlin for a one-on-one interview with one of Germany's most prominent television journalists, Maybrit Illner. When Ms. Illner asked Mr. Ackermann, half in jest, whether it mattered to him who served as chancellor under him, he scarcely blinked, saying he got along well with both Mr. Schröder and Mrs. Merkel. Recalling the exchange, Mr. Ackermann said he relished the public stature that came with his position. 'I'm a little bit of a politician,' he said with a smile as dazzling as Mr. Schröder 's. 'I always liked that.' There have been times, however, when the scrutiny has been merciless. Last year, Mr. Ackermann was put on trial on charges of defrauding shareholders of the telecommunications giant Mannesmann, when, as a board member, he awarded a lucrative severance package to its outgoing managers. On the opening day of the trial, he was roundly rebuked in the press for flashing a V-for-victory sign - a gesture he says was an inside joke rather than a thumb in the eye of the legal system. Though he was acquitted last summer, he remains bitter at what he views as the 'strong political element' in the prosecution. A German appeals court may yet order a new trial on the charges. For all this influence in Germany, Mr. Ackermann remains an outsider. He views that as a double-edged sword. 'I have benefited from a cultural background,' he said, 'which has shown me the strengths and weaknesses of the German situation clearer than probably someone who has grown up in the German context.' On the other hand, he added, 'you can be used as a scapegoat.'

Subject: Easy Credit in Mortgages May Backfire From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 10:11:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/business/26norris.html August 26, 2005 Easy Credit in Mortgages May Backfire By Floyd Norris IF housing prices fall, will mortgages cushion the decline, or make it worse? Put another way, will more overstretched homeowners be forced to sell? At issue is whether financial innovations that have made it easier for Americans to buy homes have also made the system less stable and more subject to shocks that could drive many from their homes. Traditionally, home mortgages, unlike loans to buy stock, have had a calming influence during tough times. If you buy stock with borrowed money, a decline in prices can bring on margin calls, and you must either put up cash or sell. But homeowners have been able to hold on because mortgage loans - unlike margin loans on stocks - do not become due just because the value of the property declines. Your mortgage will not be foreclosed so long as you meet the monthly payments, even if the house is now worth less than you owe. In the old days, the mortgage in question was probably a 30-year fixed-rate loan, and the monthly payment stayed the same for the life of the mortgage. Someone who lost a job might be unable to make the payments, but most homeowners could keep doing so. Now, however, mortgages that were unknown in years past have become common in some areas. They feature variable interest rates that can leap if market rates do, and some allow payments of only the interest owed, or even less, for several years. Such loans made it possible for people to buy houses they otherwise could not afford, and helped to propel the housing boom that continued through the 2001-2 recession even as the stock market plunged. But those mortgages are designed to allow monthly payments to rise rapidly. Rising interest rates, or the end of five-year teaser periods, can cause such increases, which would leave some homeowners unable to meet the payments. They expect to refinance, but that is impossible if the house is not worth the amount owed. The result could be forced sales into a weak market. For now, all the talk about bubbles may be just talk. In the late 1990's stock market, those who warned that prices were too high were discredited by the final huge rise in 1999 and early 2000. Only after most bears were silenced did they become right. THE housing bears now are anything but silent, and there is little sign of the economic news - soaring interest rates or recession or both - that would bring down home prices. But if and when a fall comes, watch the volume of home sales, particularly of existing homes. In the early 1980's recession, annual sales of existing homes fell 50 percent, to two million homes. This week there was talk of a weakening housing market because sales of existing homes seemed to slip in July. But that was more a matter of seasonal adjustments than reality. Over the last 12 months, 6.1 million single-family homes were sold along with nearly 1.3 million new homes. Both figures are records. Housing is, of course, a collection of regional markets, with widely varying prices. The most expensive areas, and the ones that have risen the most in the last five years, are concentrated on the coasts, and are presumably the most vulnerable if prices do start to fall. When that does happen, watch the volume of sales of existing homes. If it falls rapidly, that will be an indication that not much has changed, and the damage is likely to be limited. But if sales volume stays high, that could indicate that the mortgage innovations are hurting. Then we could see rising numbers of foreclosures as homeowners discover they cannot sell their homes for what they owe but also cannot pay their suddenly higher monthly mortgage bills.

Subject: Grass Stays Greener at Boise State From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 09:45:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/sports/ncaafootball/26hawkins.html August 26, 2005 Grass Stays Greener on Boise State Coach's Side of Fence By PETE THAMEL BOISE, Idaho - By the time Dan Hawkins became a college head coach at Willamette University in 1993, he had started to figure things out. He had learned that a life dedicated to football wasn't much of a life, and that a coach focused on three-technique linemen, zone blitzes and punt protection could not quite engage a team as well as one who mixed the minutiae with egg tosses, human pyramids and water-balloon fights. He realized a team that fosters democracy and trust is better than one that relies on fear and bullying. What Hawkins did not realize when he began devising his new-age coaching tactics at Willamette, a liberal-arts university in Salem, Ore., is that they would provide the philosophical base for his becoming one of the most sought-after coaches in college football at age 44. With a 44-7 record in his current job as the coach at Boise State, Hawkins has posted more victories in his first four seasons than any other coach in major college football in the last century. Dan Hawkins will be seen in his underdog glory on Sept. 3, when Boise State, ranked No. 18 in the Associated Press preseason poll, opens at No. 13 Georgia in the premier matchup of the season's opening weekend. He will use enough motion and offensive formations to make spectators dizzy. He will run trick plays to compensate for Georgia's athletic advantage. 'Football was intended to be fun,' said Bill Trenbeath, the former Willamette athletic director, who hired Hawkins. 'And Dan makes it fun.' Hawkins's appetite for football began early. Norman Hawkins has a picture of his son Dan asleep at age 8, clutching a football under his arm the way most youngsters hold teddy bears. He remembers Dan writing letters to Dick Butkus to ask for advice on training techniques to become a professional player. Up at 3 a.m. six days a week for his job felling timber in northwestern California, Norman Hawkins always refused when his three sons asked to work with him during the summer. 'You're going to get a job working with your head, not your hands,' he would tell them. Dan Hawkins disdained working two summers at a local lumber mill, a job he described as 'one percent brainpower, 99 percent sweating my fanny off.' Hawkins was so passionate about football that he stopped by the house of Joe Blevins, his new high school football coach, a few times a week during the summer before his senior year. Eventually, Hawkins persuaded Blevins to switch him from offensive lineman to fullback. He ended up leading the team in rushing and in touchdowns. But the most enduring experience Hawkins had that year was perhaps the most humbling. After he chucked a ball at a freshman teammate who had grabbed his face mask, Steve Main - the junior varsity coach and Hawkins's speech teacher - offered a stern lecture. Main concluded that Hawkins's ego had gotten too big, that he had been misusing his size and status. 'He really ripped into me, and it shook me a lot,' Hawkins said. 'It changed my perception of trying to make people feel good instead of intimidating them. It was kind of a life-changing deal.' After two years at College of the Siskiyous in Northern California, Hawkins played at U.C.-Davis. There, Hawkins clicked with coaches who prided themselves on being teachers more than screamers: an on-field mistake prompted a tutorial, not a dressing-down. Hawkins then worked as a graduate assistant there, spending time around coaches who valued their tenure and success more than the opportunity to move up. One day while coaching the linebackers, Hawkins complained to Bob Foster, the defensive coordinator, about a thick-headed player who could not master a technique. Then Foster raised his voice, one of the few times Hawkins ever heard a Davis coach do so. 'If a player makes a mental error, it's not the player's fault, it's the coach's fault,' Foster said. 'I believe that, and I know Dan believes that.' Hawkins carried with him the work ethic of his father, whom he remembers working odd jobs in the logging off-season. And the philosophies of his football mentors began to mesh. Hawkins never lost the personal touch he learned from Main. He incorporated it with what he absorbed from the free-thinking Davis crew, which once included progressive coaches like Mike Bellotti (now at Oregon) and Gary Patterson (Texas Christian). But developing the Hawkins style took some tinkering. At 25, he fancied himself a young Lombardi after he went 10-4 at Christian Brothers High School in Sacramento in 1986, his first season as a head coach. Reality set in three years later when he returned to Siskiyous as the offensive coordinator. The team went 1-9, and the sprinklers even popped up occasionally during practice. Hawkins helped turn Siskiyous into a conference champion in 1991, then left to become the defensive coordinator at Sonoma State. Soon after arriving with his wife, Misti, and four children, Hawkins found out that his salary had been cut drastically, to less than $3,000. So Misti, a nurse, worked the night shift at two hospitals to support the family. Hawkins and his wife knew sacrifice. They had paid their way though college and spent their honeymoon at Bodega Bay in Northern California, sleeping outdoors on a three-inch foam mattress until they bumped into Foster, who lent them a pup tent. That year at Sonoma brought everything together for Hawkins, as he played Mr. Mom, coached the defense and looked for another job. 'It was a real test of our faith, and fortitudinous,' Misti said. 'That was one of the biggest turning points.' Hawkins had decided to seek a job at a small private college when a friend from Oregon State called to say that Willamette had fired its coach. Hawkins was one of five finalists for the position, but he was considered a dark horse because he was the youngest candidate. Then Trenbeath's phone started ringing. Unsolicited calls came from Hawkins's former players and colleagues. They gushed about his personality and his philosophy and how he actually made the game fun. 'More people called on his behalf than any job I'd ever dealt with,' Trenbeath said. 'Even guys who were on his teams and didn't play called.' Hawkins pulled Foster out of retirement to help coach the defense and immediately produced a winning team. Foster remembers that Hawkins called a team meeting to have the players write letters to their parents. He was innovative on the field, too, installing a 'fly' offense that used motion and deception to compensate for their lack of speed. He took a team with 40 players that went 1-8 the previous year and went 5-4. Willamette rolled from there, finishing four years later with a 110-man team that finished as the national runner-up in Division III. Bob Gregory, a Willamette assistant at the time who is now the defensive coordinator at California, remembers a quintessential Hawkins moment during the fourth quarter of an intense game. He asked a player: 'Isn't this great? Is there any place that you'd rather be?' Since arriving at Boise as an assistant to Dirk Koetter in 1997, Hawkins has shown that there is really nowhere else he would rather be. He even bought a home five minutes from campus to be near his family. Hawkins still treats his players like peers, as his mentors did, and most of the players call him 'Hawk' instead of 'Coach.' His quirks mesh well with a team that plays on blue turf. Hawkins will sometimes dress the equipment man in full uniform and allow the players to whack golf balls at him with 9-irons. But he treats his assistants like family, making sure they are well compensated and comfortable in their jobs. And Hawkins stays true to the Davis principle that players and coaches should not be afraid to make mistakes. Chris Petersen, the offensive coordinator at Boise State, said Hawkins rarely meddles with his play calling, except when he becomes conservative to protect a lead. 'He'll say, 'Don't run so much; let's launch it,' ' Petersen said with a laugh. By now, Hawkins could have launched his career to a Bowl Championship Series conference and his tax bracket to another stratosphere. Instead, he resisted chances to talk with Stanford, Washington and Notre Dame last year and signed a five-year contract worth a total of $2.6 million, plus incentives. Boise State is building a $10 million practice facility as part of an upgrade to entice him to stay and to develop the program. But the bigger lure may be the chance for Hawkins to coach his son, Cody, a highly regarded high school quarterback. Hawkins will not commit to staying for Cody's whole career, as he has never liked to be boxed in. (Cody, in true blue-collar Hawkins fashion, will walk on the team to prove himself, despite having scholarship offers from places like Oregon.) But for Hawkins, the situation would have to be perfect, as he abides by the saying, 'Bigger isn't better, better is better.' And when Boise State plays between Georgia's fabled hedges, don't be surprised if Hawkins asks with a smile, 'Is there any place that you'd rather be?'

Subject: Strong Demand for Midrange Rentals From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 07:14:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/realestate/21wczo.html August 21, 2005 Strong Demand for Midrange Rentals By ELSA BRENNER LIKE Gladys and Brian Ferrara, who have lived in the same garden apartment complex in New Rochelle for 25 years, many working families in Westchester continue to be priced out of home ownership. With the median cost of a single-family home soaring to a record $700,000 at the end of June, and the prices of condominiums and co-ops also reaching new highs, many middle-income earners have had to defer the dream of home ownership. For the Ferraras - he is a union painter and she is a teacher's assistant in the New Rochelle public schools - the high prices have meant raising their two daughters in Shore Road Gardens, a tidy, well-kept complex of three-story brick buildings near Long Island Sound. 'We've never bought a house because we never had the money for one in Westchester, where real estate is so expensive,' said Mrs. Ferrara, whose daughters are 16 and 21 and share one of the two bedrooms in the apartment. For the Ferraras and other working-class residents, the stock of midrange apartments available in the county is limited, and brokers say that demand for such properties by renters is intense. 'We're talking about apartments that are affordable for people who are not rich, who are making decent salaries but not minimum wages, and who are therefore not candidates for luxury rental units,' said P. Gilbert Mercurio, executive vice president of the Westchester County Board of Realtors. Many housing organizations, including Westchester Residential Opportunities in White Plains, use a formula recommending that a household spend no more than one-third of its gross income on housing. For example, a family renting an apartment for $1,500 a month, a moderate rent in Westchester, should have an annual income of not less than $60,000, said Toni Downes, the executive director of Westchester Residential Opportunities. In Westchester, 31,373 households - 9 percent of all households in the county - earned $60,000 to $75,000 a year, according to the 2000 census. Last year, there were fewer than 32,000 rental units in buildings built in 1974 or before that have six or more units and fall under rent guidelines established by the Westchester County Rent Guidelines Board, said Peter Moses, a spokesman for the state Division of Housing and Community Renewal. The county rent board annually sets the rate of rent increase that can be imposed by landlords in such projects. There used to be many more rentals in this category, but some 35,700 units were converted to co-op or condos during the early and mid-1980's, according to figures from Westchester's Department of Planning. In addition, Mr. Mercurio noted, there has been relatively little construction of new midrange units since then. The prospect for many middle-income families of saving enough money to buy homes seems to be fading as the prices of houses, condos and co-ops continue to move steadily upward, even though the average interest rate on a 30-year conventional mortgage remains near 6 percent. Like the prices on freestanding homes, the median for condominiums and co-ops in Westchester reached new highs in June. The median for a condo was $359,000 at the end of the second quarter, up 6 percent from a year earlier, the same rate of increase as was recorded for single-family homes. The median for co-ops rose far more sharply - up 16 percent in 12 months, to $170,000 at this year's halfway point. 'With the cost of home ownership constantly going up in Westchester, more and more middle-income families are shut out of that market,' Ms. Downes said. 'Meanwhile, there's a vicious cycle at work, because as rents rise, it becomes more and more difficult for people to put money aside for a down payment.' Although they constitute the core of renters of market-rate units, middle-income earners aren't the only ones fueling Westchester's increasingly brisk nonluxury rental market. Peter Sinnott, the owner of the Kensington, a 54-unit elevator building in New Rochelle, said he is also renting to former homeowners who are waiting for house prices to drop before they reinvest in the market. 'Some of our tenants are people who sold at the top of market and decided to take their money and put it in their pockets and wait,' Mr. Sinnott said. Some of these people could afford luxury units but are simply unwilling to pay the higher prices, said Mr. Sinnott, who charges $1,400 a month for one-bedroom apartments at the 66-year-old Kensington and about $1,800 for two-bedrooms. Mr. Sinnott described the Kensington as 'an older boutique building that offers the charm of high ceilings and parquet floors but not the very high-end amenities.' At Shore Road Gardens, the eight-building, 55-year-old complex where the Ferraras live, two-bedroom apartments go for about $1,500 a month. Bernard Kurtzke, the superintendent, said tenants include police officers and tradespeople - 'the salt of the earth who need a family-oriented, well-maintained and safe place to live.' In White Plains, at the Churchill, a 1960's elevator building, where two-bedroom apartments start at $1,495 a month, units are being upgraded to appeal to renters who may otherwise have looked at some of the new luxury units coming on the market, said Lou Budetti, a principal broker for ERA Insite Realty. 'Many of the landlords of these older buildings see themselves in competition with the owners of luxury rental apartments,' Mr. Budetti said. 'They don't offer the same kinds of amenities you see in very high-end apartment buildings, but they are offering units with brand new kitchens and baths and upgraded lobbies.' The Churchill is owned by Goldfarb Properties in New Rochelle, which has about 700 rental units in the county, said Timothy Ross, the company's vice president for management. It also owns and is renovating Drake House and Harbor House in New Rochelle. At the Building and Realty Institute of Westchester, a trade association in White Plains, Albert A. Annunciata, its executive director, described the current rental market as 'very, very competitive, especially because of all the new stuff coming online.' In White Plains alone, about 1,700 luxury rental units have been built in recent years. At One City Place in White Plains, luxury one-bedrooms start at $1,895, two-bedrooms at $2,695 and three-bedrooms at $4,600 and up. At Avalon on the Sound in New Rochelle, a luxury high-rise with a swimming pool, a clubhouse and central air-conditioning and washers and dryers in all units, one-bedrooms start at $1,700 a month and two-bedrooms go for $2,100 and up. But without new construction of work-force housing, according to Mr. Annunciata at the trade association, there is the risk that as ownership costs rise, demand for middle-income rentals could outstrip supply and become 'just another reason for people to leave Westchester County.'

Subject: CAMPOS DO JORDAO From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 06:36:11 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Economist says housing bubble will burst Princeton's Paul Krugman says the real estate market is heading for a tumble next year. August 25, 2005: 2:29 PM EDT CAMPOS DO JORDAO, Brazil (Reuters) - Soaring housing prices in the United States have created a real estate bubble that will likely burst early next year, Princeton University economist Paul Krugman said Thursday. 'I'll give you a forecast which might very well be wrong, but I think it will burst in the spring of next year,' he said at a derivatives conference in Brazil's winter resort of Campos do Jordao. 'I would be surprised if it doesn't burst in the next three years,' he added. Krugman said skyrocketing U.S. housing prices were supported by large -- and somewhat 'odd' -- capital inflows from emerging market countries, such as China, which has accumulated huge holdings of U.S. Treasury debt, helping keep long-term interest rates abnormally low. 'Americans pay for their houses with money they borrowed from the Chinese,' he said. In costly areas of California, like Orange and San Diego counties, the inventory of homes on the market is slightly larger than a year ago and analysts say prices are not rising as fast as they were in the past. An expected decline in U.S. housing investment would be part of an economic adjustment process which could include the weakening of the dollar, higher U.S. exports and the reduction of current account deficits in the world's largest economy, Krugman said. 'This is how we would like to see it happening -- smoothly -- but there are many moving parts and they're unlikely to move at the same time,' he said. 'So it's not going to happen unpainfully.' http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/25/news/economy/housing_bubble.reut/index.htm

Subject: Re: CAMPOS DO JORDAO From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 09:07:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Housing and energy costs, and a Federal Reserve that seems determined to continue tightening, do not make for a comforting economic mixture.

Subject: Re: CAMPOS DO JACKSON HOLE From: Pancho Villa To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 09:47:20 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Greenspan Chides Investors By EDMUND L. ANDREWS Published: August 27, 2005 ...'In his comments on Friday, Mr. Greenspan did not appear to be signaling a new desire by the Fed to pop a potential bubble in housing prices or to curb other forms of risk-taking. But he and a growing number of Fed officials do appear more intent on talking investors down from what they see as a potentially dangerous level of optimism and complacency. Housing prices have climbed far faster than overall inflation and far faster than household incomes for the last five years, partly in response to the Fed's policy of keeping interest rates low but also because of speculative behavior that is increasingly reminiscent of the frenzy over technology stocks just before the market bubble collapsed in 2000. But Mr. Greenspan was also alluding to a much broader pattern of economic behavior, an increased hunger among investors to look for higher profits wherever they might be and to pay higher prices for everything from bonds of Latin American nations to shares in risky hedge funds. Mr. Greenspan's remarks also hark back to what he has called the 'conundrum' of long-term interest rates declining even as the Federal Reserve has been systematically raising the overnight federal funds rate on loans between banks. The conundrum has been somewhat less in evidence lately, as interest rates on long-term 10-year Treasury bonds have edged higher. Still, long-term rates are no higher now than they were just before the Fed began raising overnight lending rates in June 2004. Mr. Greenspan has adamantly insisted, despite criticism from some economists, that the Fed's job is not to pop speculative bubbles because bubbles are extremely difficult to define and because the Fed's tools - like a sharp increase in interest rates - could cause more damage to the economy than they might prevent. But his comments nevertheless did suggest that the central bank wants to preach a new gospel of caution that might damp what Mr. Greenspan once called the 'irrational exuberance' of investors.'... http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/27/business/27greenspan.html

Subject: Re: CAMPOS DO JACKSON HOLE From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Aug 27, 2005 at 20:51:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: All sorts of danger out there, so the idea is to avoid it I suppose. The Fed though is not going to purposely limit the rise in housing prices or any decline in the dollar, and I approve of such restraint.

Subject: A Doll That Can Recognize Voices From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 06:13:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/technology/circuits/25doll.html August 25, 2005 A Doll That Can Recognize Voices, Identify Objects and Show Emotion By MICHEL MARRIOTT Judy Shackelford, who has been in the toy industry for more than 40 years, has seen a lot of dolls. But none, she says, like her latest creation, a marvel of digital technologies, including speech-recognition and memory chips, radio frequency tags and scanners, and facial robotics. She and her team have christened it Amazing Amanda. 'The toy industry is sort of like 'MacGyver,' ' Ms. Shackelford said, invoking the problem-solving 1980's television hero. 'You're always doing workarounds, figuring out how to rearrange the old in some new way to create something new. And you've got to do it for nickels and dimes and quarters.' She then turned to the doll seated on her lap. 'Hi, honey,' Ms. Shackelford said gently to Amazing Amanda, a blond, blue-eyed figure bearing more than a remote likeness to its creator. 'Hello, my name is Amanda,' the doll replied as Ms. Shackelford smiled warmly at its rosy face. 'We're going to have the best time together,' the doll promised. Amazing Amanda, scheduled for release next month by Playmates Toys, is expected to cost $99, said Ms. Shackelford, the chief executive of J. Shackelford & Associates, a product and marketing company in Moorpark, Calif., that specializes in toys and children's entertainment. At that price, the same as Apple's entry-level iPod Shuffle digital music player, the 18-inch-tall doll promises - right on the box it will be sold in - to 'listen, speak and show emotion.' Some analysts and buyers who have seen Amanda say it represents an evolutionary leap from earlier talking dolls like Chatty Cathy of the 1960's, a doll that cycled through a collection of recorded phrases when a child pulled a cord in its back. Radio frequency tags in Amanda's accessories - including toy food, potty and clothing - wirelessly inform the doll of what it is interacting with. For instance, if the doll asks for a spoon of peas and it is given its plastic cookie, it will gently admonish its caregiver, telling her that a cookie is not peas. While $99 is a premium price for a doll, it is only about $10 more than the price of the popular American Girl dolls. And, Ms. Shackelford said, Amanda may prove that girls as well as boys can embrace technology in their toys. While video games and interactive robots, like Wow Wee's Robosapien, have long been successful in capturing the imaginations and buying power of preteenage and adolescent boys, a different assumption has been made about what girls want, analysts say. Part of the popularity of low-tech dolls like Mattel's Chatty Cathy and Barbie, and more recent additions like Bratz (from MGA Entertainment) and the American Girl dolls (a line acquired by Mattel), has been that they allowed young girls to use their imagination, said David Riley, a senior manager at the NPD Group, a market research firm. 'I think girls have more active imaginations than boys do when it comes to play,' Mr. Riley noted. 'If girls have a button on their doll and can feel an engine inside it, that takes away from their ability to imagine.' He said that from what he knows of Amazing Amanda, Ms. Shackelford and her company appear to have overcome such problems, noting that Amanda appears to be more doll than robot. Mr. Riley added that the $20 billion toy industry has faltered in recent years as children's tastes and styles of play have changed. Toy spending has been widely seen as migrating to consumer electronics. Children are increasingly craving devices their parents want, many analysts say, like cellphones, digital cameras and portable digital music players. One way to counter that trend, Ms. Shackelford said, is a meaningful integration of advanced technologies into traditional toys, like dolls. 'You've got to get out of the mind dodge,' she said. 'You have to push the envelope.' Ms. Shackelford has been testing limits since she joined Mattel in 1976 as manager of preschool marketing. Three years later she became the highest-ranking woman in the American toy industry when she was named a Mattel vice president, the first woman to reach that rank. Credited with reviving the Barbie line of dolls and toys in the late 1970's, she left Mattel in 1986 to establish her own company. There, Ms. Shackelford created a series of doll lines, including other Amazing dolls - Amy, Ally, Maddie, Ashley and Baby - that all incorporated electronics so they could virtually 'know' things like when to wake up, and a child's birthday and favorite holidays. And now she is trying a new frontier with Amazing Amanda, convinced that it will stoke a girl's imagination, not take its place. One prerelease model of Amazing Amanda, once it was activated (by flipping the toy's only visible switch hidden high on its back and beneath its clothing), woke with a yawn, slowly opened its eyes and started asking questions in a cutesy, almost cartoonlike girl's voice. What the doll is actually doing, Ms. Shackelford said, is 'voice printing' the primary user's voice pattern. By asking a child to repeat 'Amanda' several times, the doll quickly comes to recognize and store in its electronic memory that child's voice, and only that child's voice, as its 'mommy.' Other voices are greeted with Amanda's cautionary proclamation, 'You don't sound like Mommy.' In all, Ms. Shackelford said, the doll is equipped for almost an hour of speech that includes various questions, programmed responses, requests, songs and games. And as Amanda speaks, the doll's soft-plastic lips move and its face, using Disney-like animatronics, help to suggest expressions. For instance, when Amazing Amanda plays a game called funny face, she asks if you would like to see a happy face or a sad one. If you answer 'funny face,' the doll's eyes brighten and she looks as if she is smiling. If Amanda is asked to make a sad one, her lower lip protrudes as her lids lower. She might even ask if you would like to see her cry, responding to 'yes' or 'no.' 'The speech-recognition chip running in Amazing Amanda acts not only as speech recognition, but also allows her to talk,' said Todd Mozer, chief executive of Sensory, a speech-technology company in Santa Clara, Calif., that developed the chip used in the doll. He noted that the technology could interpret a range of languages and dialects. Sensory executives said that was vitally important to Ms. Shackelford, whose new doll is one of the first products to use the new speech chip. Ms. Shackelford said the chip's multidialect capacities are important for her doll, which is being manufactured in China to be sold to English-speaking markets around the world. The chip, explained Adam Anderson, one of the lead project managers, carries additional dialect references gleaned from children's voices recorded in England, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. And by asking children to repeat words like 'pizza,' the doll can lock in specific dialects, 'remember' and respond accordingly, Mr. Anderson said. Some 150 pages of logic programmed into Amanda help guide children through activities as if journeying through verbal mazes, Ms. Shackelford said. 'The idea that a child can be led through play, that it can be done intuitively, is so important to me,' she said, adding that her doll's sophisticated technologies must be invisible. 'We don't want to make kids scared of technology,' said Ms. Shackelford, who says she is in her mid-60's and has no children of her own. 'You have a baby doll that is supposed to make a little girl feel like the doll loves her. Girls tell dolls all the time that they love them. 'This doll,' Ms. Shackelford said, 'acts like she loves you.'

Subject: Alone in Illness, Seeking Steady Arm From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 06:08:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/26/health/26alone.html?ex=1282708800&en=5569e96688e358da&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 26, 2005 Alone in Illness, Seeking Steady Arm to Lean On By JANE GROSS Every time Grace McCabe is handed a form in a doctor's office asking for an emergency contact, the blank space makes her shiver. It is such a simple question for anyone with a spouse, partner or children. But Ms. McCabe, 75, has always lived alone. Who would stand by her in a crisis? Who would be there for her in the worst of times? These were once hypothetical questions. But now Ms. McCabe's slowly fading eyesight is almost gone. She has always had lots of friends but had never asked one to take responsibility for her, to answer the middle-of-the-night telephone call from the emergency room, say, or to pay her bills because she cannot write checks herself. Of all her friends, she has fixed on one with a good heart, a steady hand under pressure and a talent for problem solving. So time and again, she writes 'Charlotte Frank' in the blank space and lightens the moment by calling to say, 'Charlotte, you're on another list.' When Ms. McCabe was knocked to the crosswalk by a reckless driver and suffered a concussion, Ms. Frank, 70 and herself single, stayed overnight on the living room couch. When Ms. McCabe could no longer see standard type, Ms. Frank got her a computer and set the font to its largest size so she could read the newspaper and order from catalogs. 'You find out there are good friends who become great friends,' Ms. McCabe said. 'Charlotte told me to 'grab on,' both literally and figuratively, and I did.' There is no way to calculate how many Americans of all ages living alone happen to be sick or disabled, but hospital discharge planners and home health care agencies say they are serving more single people without an obvious person to look after them. The growing number of single-person households - including the never-married, divorced and widowed - is evident in census reports. In 2003, nearly 27 percent of American households consisted of one person living alone, up from 18 percent in 1970, putting a premium on friendship, a relationship without the legal status or social standing of kin. And demographers warn that the graying of the baby boom generation will swell the ranks of single-person households, with illness and disability an inevitable corollary of old age. People living alone are among the most difficult cases, said James Bentley, a senior vice president at the American Hospital Association. Anyone who is sick or disabled, Mr. Bentley said, 'needs someone to quarterback their care,' both in the hospital and afterward, but people who live alone can end up being their own quarterbacks at a particularly vulnerable time. 'The patient can't be at both places at once mentally,' he said, 'but we don't yet have a good mechanism to address that.' Making the situation worse is the increase in short stays in hospitals, which sometimes send people home before they can manage alone. Mr. Bentley said that hospitals must develop new ways of preparing such patients for what lies ahead and that people who live alone must 'think, before they are ill,' what organized networks they have to call upon. 'If we wait until the baby boomers need this, there'll be so many of them it will be impossible to manage ad hoc,' he said. 'It's something we need to think about now, or it's going to be an absolute mess.' Some single people need help with a temporary medical crisis, like a knee replacement that makes it impossible to bathe without help or climb stairs. Or the problem can be permanent but not life-threatening, like Ms. McCabe's fading sight, a result of rod-cone dystrophy. Her peripheral vision is gone, and what she can see seems draped in muslin, so her friends accompany her on errands and help with paperwork. Then there are the grave illnesses, like cancer or Parkinson's disease. When a patient has no family member in charge, who sits sleepless in the surgical waiting room? Who argues with the insurance company, knows the dosage of each medicine, or calls far-flung loved ones with good news or bad? To be sure, a spouse or grown children are no insurance policy against suffering or mortality. But people who live alone without the obvious next-of-kin for those emergency contact forms must rely on patchwork support from professionals and friends. And accepting help, let alone asking for it, may not come naturally after years of self-sufficiency. 'Maybe they haven't asked for a lot of help until now,' said Christine Nolin, a social worker at CancerCare, which provides an array of free services for cancer patients. 'Good for them. But this is a different time in their life. It's our job to help people get comfortable with asking.' A large circle of friends, in and of itself, may not be an answer. Take Roberta Van Laven, 71, a widow of 15 years whose daughter lives in Australia. Ms. Van Laven has friends from her former job as a technical writer for the City of New York, friends from her book group, friends who share her love of opera. Now this proud woman has advanced ovarian cancer. Over the course of several years, recurrences and rounds of treatment, friends have offered to accompany her to chemotherapy, but she will not permit anyone to sit with her for six hours, though the distraction might be welcome. 'I tell them I'm saving them for an emergency,' she said. 'But it's really that it's just so hard to accept help.' A New Kind of Need The wish for unconditional care from a family member must surely be primal, so hard is it to give up. Barbara R., a 68-year-old former college professor, would have loved to have her older sister by her side last winter when she was given a diagnosis of breast cancer, had a lumpectomy, waited for the pathology report and went through radiation treatment. 'There is a kind of unconditionality and consistency when a family member cares for you,' Barbara said. But she knew her sister already had her hands full, with an elderly partner who had serious emphysema. 'He needed her more than I did,' Barbara said, acknowledging the hard truth single people face when relatives and friends have other, more pressing, responsibilities. (Barbara asked not to be identified fully because some relatives and colleagues are unaware of her illness.) Barbara knew she was entering the parallel universe of illness with many advantages. She had always been single, socialized regularly and belonged to an array of women's organizations. 'Friendship has been the organizing principle of my life,' she said. But as she faced a new level of neediness that could overwhelm even the most loving friends, her goal was to make sure 'that no one person had to shoulder too much.' The best way to do that, she figured, was to match her friends to the tasks they would be best at and that would fit their individual schedules. Barbara chose friends who had had cancer to join her at doctors' appointments when she was assessing treatment options. She chose those who shared her love of art and theater to keep her distracted with outings to see Christo's 'Gates,' the art installation in Central Park, or the play 'Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)' while awaiting the pathology report. The many excellent cooks among her friends stocked the freezer with homemade soup or brought dinner to a houseful of visitors after her lumpectomy, turning a dreaded day into something almost festive. One night when Barbara felt especially shaky, she called a neighbor cherished for her calm demeanor and invited herself to dinner. They pooled the contents of their refrigerators and shared a bottle of Hogue fumé blanc. The day of her operation, she chose a college classmate who entertained her beforehand with chatter about a recent trip to Tasmania and joined her in the recovery room afterward to hear the surgeon declare that her lymph nodes were fine. Barbara's hardest choice was whom to ask to sleep over after the operation, which meant an uncomfortable night on her living room couch. One friend who offered had pulmonary problems and was exhausted from caring for a 97-year-old mother. Another, with a bad knee, had just returned from a sister's out-of-town cancer operation. This was not the time, Barbara knew, to be worrying about anyone else as she surely would if she chose one of those friends. Instead she called an acquaintance, a retired physician, who is part of a neighborhood group Barbara recently joined. All its members are women. All live nearby. Their purpose is to be available to one another in times of need, like when someone requires a companion for the trip home after a colonoscopy. Barbara sees such nascent groups, and her own web of relationships that she calls a 'mandala of friendship,' as models for the growing cohort of people facing illness and old age alone. 'Our whole society is organized around nuclear family,' she said. 'Legally, culturally, friendship doesn't have much standing. How do we get beyond that? How do we create the kind of communities for ourselves that make caretaking easier?' Help in a Crisis Elvia Moran, 37, has been on her own since emigrating from Ecuador as a teenager. So she came to a premature health crisis with courage and good cheer that few others could muster. Watch her shuffle on a walker from the living room to the bedroom of her Yonkers apartment and gaze into the mirror, as if she did not even notice her body wasting under the assault of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease. Instead, her dimples flash as she admires her freshly washed hair, blown dry and styled by her best friend, Cristina Martinez. The pair giggle and gossip in Spanish, like two young girls playing beauty parlor. Ms. Martinez says her friend needs a better styling brush to tame the frizzies. But Ms. Moran is more than satisfied. 'Oh, Cristina, I look beautiful!' she said. 'Thank you! Thank you!' Ms. Moran says she would be lost without Ms. Martinez, whom she met nearly 20 years ago when they both lived in the same building. On daily visits, Ms. Martinez prepares Ms. Moran's favorite chicken soup, spiced with onion, garlic and lime. She folds laundry and rearranges the furniture to clear a safe path. She lends Ms. Moran money until her disability payments begin. It is money Ms. Martinez cannot spare since she stopped looking for work when Ms. Moran received her diagnosis last winter. And it is time away from her own family in Harlem, where her husband, a restaurant worker, is left to tend to their 3-year-old daughter. But for these two women there are none of the boundaries that usually distinguish friends from kin. 'She is for me like a sister,' Ms. Moran said. 'There is nobody else in the world with a heart like that.' Ms. Moran's dark prognosis came shortly after her triumphant graduation from Westchester Community College, which was to have been her ticket out of a job at a cosmetics factory. Within months she could not walk unassisted. Her hands were weak and her speech slurred. Doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital told her that before long she would need a respirator to breathe and a feeding tube for nourishment. She said she wanted neither and gave Ms. Martinez her health care proxy. Her friend cried as she signed the forms. Ms. Moran is in the United States without relatives while her mother in Ecuador pleads for a visa to come help. Ms. Martinez tried to move her friend closer to her own apartment but was unable to find a place on the ground floor or with an elevator for less than $800 a month. 'I don't want her to feel lonely and be depressed,' Ms. Martinez said. 'She should be with people she knows, all the time.' For a while Ms. Moran managed at home with weekly visits by a nurse, a social worker, a physical therapist and an occupational therapist. An aide came four hours a day, five days a week. When all the helpers were gone, things got scary and Ms. Martinez wished she could stay overnight, an impossibility with a toddler at home and a husband already irritated by her long absences. Once, Ms. Moran scalded her wrist when a pot of boiling water slipped from her hand. She called nobody, instead lecturing herself aloud to 'Be strong!' and applying toothpaste to the burn, as is customary in her native country. Another time her body convulsed and she was rushed to the hospital, alone. Ms. Martinez found her there the next day, in a soiled hospital gown, and marched to the nurses' station to demand attention. But bravery and devotion are no match for this relentless disease. As spring turned to summer, Ms. Moran had no choice but to move to a nursing home in Westchester County. Ms. Martinez, unfamiliar with commuter rail lines and struggling with English, tried to get from Harlem to the nursing home in Valhalla. Once, on a mystifying series of buses, the trip took three hours. Another time, using a car service, she spent $80. Her husband's annoyance turned to anger. But Ms. Martinez was undeterred. 'Elvia, she don't have anybody,' Ms. Martinez said. 'So whatever he says I keep running and running.' Even now, barely able to speak, and confined to a wheelchair, Ms. Moran returns her friend's kindness the only way she knows how. 'Cristina doesn't like it when I cry,' she said. 'So I try for her always to smile.' Fear of Being a Burden Frank Daykin spent 17 days in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent's Manhattan Hospital last October, on a ventilator after a life-threatening reaction to chemotherapy for a rare form of lymphoma. Had he been alone, Mr. Daykin wondered, what health care decisions would have been made on his behalf and who would have made them? But his friend Carol Kaimowitz watched over him. She was the one, at the doctor's request, who called his father in Nevada to say the end was near. She was the one who gave the approval for mysterious medical procedures and then worried they might kill him. Later she would admit to Mr. Daykin that 'it was the darkest, most frightening time.' Mr. Daykin, 47, and Ms. Kaimowitz, 59, met through their chamber music; he is a pianist and she a soprano. Both describe their collaboration as the most intimate relationship in their lives. But until Mr. Daykin's illness they spent little time together away from rehearsal or recital halls. Then Mr. Daykin woke in the night in his Queens apartment to blinding stomach pain. Like many people who live alone, he convinced himself it was something minor, like food poisoning, that could wait until the next morning. Only then did he board the subway for the hospital. There, without forethought or pause, he asked that Ms. Kaimowitz be called at her Midtown home. 'I just thought of the most responsible person I could imagine,' Mr. Daykin said, 'and that was Carol.' A tumor had perforated Mr. Daykin's colon, the first indication of lymphoma. From Day 1, Ms. Kaimowitz stayed by his side, 'a quiet, persistent, unconditionally supportive presence,' Mr. Daykin said. She went along to all his doctors' appointments because Mr. Daykin said, 'I didn't completely trust my own ability to hear what I was being told.' In the hospital, she played Scrabble or read him German poetry or music reviews. She assured him, more than once, that this was where she wanted to be. He needed that to be true and stopped asking why. Through a year of emergency operations, aggressive treatment and frequent hospitalizations, Ms. Kaimowitz never flinched. 'I don't know what thoughts were going through her head,' Mr. Daykin said. 'But to me she seemed unflappable.' That was her intention. 'I sometimes felt helpless, overwhelmed, even useless,' she said. 'But I tried not to let him know. I just kept going, controlled my emotions when I was with him and then went home and cried.' Several other friends helped out. One kept an appointment with the superintendent when the bathroom ceiling caved in. Another took Mr. Daykin to treatments and helped with paperwork. A third, a nurse who visited after his own 12-hour shift at another hospital, spoke knowingly with the medical team. All of them lifted Ms. Kaimowitz's spirits when she found herself flagging. Like many independent people, Mr. Daykin's greatest fear was 'to become a burden to anyone; to incur obligation.' So at home, between hospitalizations, he insisted on enough privacy 'to renourish myself, as it were, in the way I'm accustomed.' Ms. Kaimowitz baked chocolate chip brownies to fatten him up. But she visited only weekly, as he wanted. In the hospital, by contrast, Mr. Daykin bowed to dependence. He said he 'understood in some deeper part of myself, that is wiser than the 'everyday' part of myself, that I was in big trouble. So I tried to accept whatever came my way with a measure of grace.' Mr. Daykin has resumed performing, his health is stable and he is hoping for the best. The two friends are planning a European vacation. Ms. Kaimowitz said they were closer than ever. 'We talk easily and often about everything, she said. 'We e-mail one another our bad dreams. I have other close friends. But there is no one in my life like Frank, who I could hope would care for me during a serious illness.'

Subject: California Design's Endless Summer From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 05:56:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/garden/25cali.html August 25, 2005 California Design's Endless Summer By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON Los Angeles THE blockbuster show here right now is 'Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs' at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But for those interested in modern design, a small exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art could be the portal to equally amazing discoveries - an antechamber to lost riches of the last golden age of American design. The museum's second design biennial, which will end on Sunday, is a juried selection of contemporary California design that includes examples from obvious suspects like Apple Computer in Cupertino and Oakley, the eyewear designer, in Foothill Ranch. But in the spirit of a remarkable series of exhibitions called 'California Design,' mounted by the now defunct Pasadena Art Museum and its director, Eudorah M. Moore, from the 1950's to the 1970's, the biennial also includes independents like Lauren Saunders in Ventura, who knits paintings as pillows; Trina Turk, a fashion designer in Alhambra; Bluelounge Design, a four-man office in Pasadena that designs everything from footwear to furniture; and Osborn, an architectural firm in Glendale that developed a set of paint stencils able to reclad an elementary school building quickly, with energetic color and pattern. This is California, where even the weather feels both fortuitous and designed. 'California has a sense of - why not, let's try it,' Ms. Moore said in a telephone conversation last week. She said of her exhibitions, 'There was a brilliant optimism to what people were making and doing, and I thought it was important to record it.' The shows, which were hugely popular at the time, are now largely forgotten outside the state. 'California Design: The Legacy of West Coast Craft and Style,' a book by Jo Lauria, an independent curator, and Suzanne Baizerman, a curator of craft and decorative arts at the Oakland Museum, to be published next month by Chronicle Books, will revisit Ms. Moore's work and California's midcentury moment in the sun. With its integral interests in craft and design, from furnishings to products to environmental art, outdoors as well as indoors, and fashion, too, California's contribution to the American imagination at home is something so ubiquitous now as to seem commonplace. We call it lifestyle. California, characterized by the pop culture it created in music and movies, insisted that design was pop culture too, there to be used by all, in its every aspect. As Pasadena's current biennial makes clear, California as a force in design, relevant precisely because it is regional, is not a thing of the past. It is an endless summer. If globalization is now a fond idea for industry looking to design to increase sales, California designers and their output seem continuing proof of the potential of the local climate. 'If Columbus had discovered California, there wouldn't be an East Coast,' said Gere Kavanaugh, a designer in Los Angeles whose clients have included Nissan, Hallmark, Max Factor and PepsiCo, and who was included in 'California Design.' Ms. Kavanaugh shared a studio with Frank Gehry, now one of the state's favorite sons, in the 1960's and 70's. 'All the major car companies in the world have a design studio here, I mean every single one, whether Japanese or European,' said Dominic Symons, who founded Bluelounge. 'They do all the advance concepts out here, and you wonder why that is.' Bluelounge is currently at work on interface design for Panasonic DVD and DVR players. Ms. Turk, the fashion designer, said, 'I think a lot of major trends that have happened over the past 30 years have come from California.' Ms. Turk mentioned the importance of denim, especially innovative denim, the current surf wear influence, and the gradual 'casualization' of fashion generally. 'A totally California thing,' she said, sitting in her office at a plywood desk designed by Charles Eames, a California designer. 'I think California is the center of the universe,' she said, laughing at her prejudice. For anyone not familiar with the original 'California Design' exhibits or their catalogs, now highly collectible books, Ms. Moore's exhaustive project is an astounding treasure. For every recognizable name like Sam Maloof, the dean of studio furniture makers, or Harrison McIntosh, a pre-eminent potter, there is a wealth of influential unknowns: ceramists, weavers, industrial designers, glassblowers and jewelry makers. But what is California design? 'I think it's fair to say the climate and culture and geography are a big influence,' said Michael Downes, a designer with Giant Bicycle Company in Newbury Park, whose 'Fashion Bikes,' a pair of women's sport bicycles that look more like flip-flops than machines with gears, are included in the Pasadena biennial. The bike's foot pedals are flower petals. 'If you imagine yourself riding these products, it's a perfectly beautiful day in California, as opposed to winter in Minnesota. It's an illusion, but California represents an ideal.' But would Mr. Downes consider himself a California designer? 'It's an interesting question. Technically, I'm English and I work for a Taiwanese company,' he said. 'But, yeah.' More broadly, as values that helped form designs, Ms. Moore and others characterized California's cultural climate and landscape as open and permissive, like stretches of blue sea or sky, explorative and adventurous, ripe with possibility and peopled by those who sought that out. 'Designers came here because they could do what they wanted to and not feel constrained by conventions,' said Bill Stern, director of the Museum of California Design, which organizes traveling exhibitions and education programs. 'In the postwar period, there was an enormous influx of people to California because of employment. In 1943, 640,000 people came to California in one year. All those people needed houses, and they needed things in their houses. Designers were coming from all over the country, because there was competition to have things that were new, fresh, that hadn't been seen before.' Charles Hollis Jones, sometimes called the father of acrylic furniture, moved to Los Angeles from Indiana in 1963, at age 18, to pursue a career in design, because the excitement in materials and technology was there, something that still draws designers over 40 years later. 'They were making canopies for airplanes, casting sheets of acrylic four inches thick and curing them in the ground for 22 days,' Mr. Hollis Jones said of the aircraft industry in California. 'They weren't making canopies for airplanes in Bloomington, Indiana.' He used the techniques on furniture, developing an A-list clientele that included architects like John Lautner and Paul Williams, decorators like Billy Haines and Arthur Elrod and the local citizenry - Hollywood stars. 'I did 40 tissue boxes and wastepaper baskets for Sinatra,' said Mr. Hollis Jones, who was included in Ms. Moore's 'California Design' in 1970 and 1976 and who is experimenting now with blowing acrylic by glassmaking techniques. 'What California design is for me, is the fact that it bends the rules and exaggerates everything,' he explained, as though the process were a sheet of plastic to work with. 'We're not afraid here. You can have a dream and you can make it come true.' Lauren Saunders, who is included in the Pasadena biennial, quit an important job in the apparel business in 2001 and moved with her fiancé, Daniel Vehse, an industrial designer, from Los Angeles to Ventura, where they live and work in a small law office built in the 1950's, on a street that overlooks the ocean. For Ms. Saunders, it was something of a political act, an element of design not unknown to California, where by the 1970's, and the end of Ms. Moore's series, designers were vociferously invoking craft as a reaction to mass production and corporate inflexibility. Though her hand-loomed pillows show a range of local influences - one collection, Cypress, was inspired by the colors and shapes of driftwood picked up beachcombing after a storm - Ms. Saunders is also a California designer by intent. 'I wanted to lead a more satisfying life,' she said, sitting in her living room, her work stacked on the dining table. 'Create something that had value that I could be really proud of.' Ms. Saunders, who designed apparel fabrics and described the business as 'a bunch of people running around like they're curing cancer,' talked last week of her interest in working with other small independent companies run by women, and the idea of employing women who could bring their children to work, with a rotating responsibility for child care. A native of Michigan who studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, Ms. Saunders moved to Los Angeles reluctantly, to take a job in 1993. 'I didn't want to come out to California,' she said. 'It might as well have been the South.' Now, Ms. Saunders speaks comfortably of being a California designer, in part because of the artistic individuality it implies, and in part because of what she calls her 'weird utopian desire' to do the right thing. If you measure success by who succeeds you, Ms. Moore has every reason to be proud.

Subject: Google Gets Better. What's Up With That? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 05:55:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/technology/circuits/25pogue.html August 25, 2005 Google Gets Better. What's Up With That? By David Pogue EVER heard the old joke about the two psychiatrists who pass in a hallway? One says, 'Hello there.' The other thinks, 'I wonder what he meant by that?' In high-tech circles, that's pretty much what people are saying about Google these days. If you hadn't noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it's now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today's culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it's all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to? The mystery only intensified this week, as Google announced two more free software tools for Windows: a new version of Google Desktop Search and a free instant-messaging program called Google Talk. The original version of Desktop Search, which Google unleashed last fall, brought the speed and effortlessness of Google's Internet search to your own PC. You'd type a few letters, and in a fraction of a second, you'd be looking at a complete list of files that included your search term - even if that term appeared inside the body of a document. It could even search e-mail, chat-session transcripts and the contents of Web pages you'd seen. Google Desktop 1.0 certainly blew away Windows' own built-in search tool, which operates with all the speed of an anesthetized slug. But it was limited in three ways. First, you had to operate it from within your Web browser, limiting its convenience. Second, because it could call up Web pages, e-mail messages and chat transcripts, Google Desktop alarmed people who, ahem, had something to hide from bosses or spouses. And finally, it could see inside only a limited number of document types. For example, it couldn't search PDF files, Web sites visited with any browser except Internet Explorer, or e-mail messages except those in Outlook or Outlook Express. VERSION 2 , now available at google.com in what's technically in a public beta test version, attacks all of these drawbacks with a vengeance. In Version 2, you can begin a search with a keystroke or by clicking in the search box that's always on the screen. A pop-up menu of search results appears as you begin to type and narrows itself with each additional keystroke. When you see the item you want, you can open it by clicking or by walking up the list with the arrow keys and pressing Enter. In other words, you can now find and open a certain program, document or control panel entirely from the keyboard, with blazing speed and simplicity. This is old news to Mac fans, of course; the Spotlight feature in Mac OS X 10.4 works the same way. But for Windows XP and 2000 veterans, getting such an omniscient, speedy search feature free is truly liberating. ( Microsoft plans something similar for the next version of Windows, due at the end of 2006.) Google has also beefed up your privacy options. You can omit search categories like secure Web sites (banking sites, for example), password-protected Microsoft Office files, and so on, and you can even flag individual files so that they'll never appear in the search results again. Finally, the program now recognizes many more document types: e-mail from Gmail, Outlook, Outlook Express, Netscape Mail, Thunderbird and Mozilla Mail; chat transcripts from AOL or MSN Messenger; Web pages you've visited using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape or Mozilla; PDF files; and your Outlook calendar and address book. (And speaking of Outlook, Google Desktop now installs its own search bar right into Outlook, meaning that you can search your e-mail collection in the blink of a cursor.) The company expects to add more kinds of files to this list, thanks to a public plug-in protocol it has published online. Yet believe it or not, the little search box is the last thing you'll notice when you install Google Desktop. The first thing you'll see is the Sidebar, a column of rectangular panels hugging the right edge of your screen. Each is a window onto a different kind of real-time information from the Internet. Some are ho-hum, like your latest incoming Gmail and Outlook e-mail, news, stock and weather tickers. Others are refreshingly quirky: the Photos panel shows a continuous, two-inch-tall slideshow of pictures from your own collection, and the surprisingly useful Scratch Pad is a blank box where you can type casual notes throughout your workday (they're saved automatically). Each panel expands horizontally, drawer-like, to reveal more details when clicked. The Sidebar is about as clean-looking as anyone could make it, but it's still a lot of clutter in a very small space, especially if you add new panels as they become available. On the other hand, you can tidy things up quite a bit: drag your Sidebar panels into a different order, hide the ones you don't use, or collapse them into one-line summaries. Once again, Google isn't the first company to dream up a modular, Internet-connected suite of miniprograms; the Sidebar is a lot like Mac OS X's Dashboard or the shareware programs Desktop X and Konfabulator. But never mind that; you can't keep a good idea down, and this is a good one indeed. Google's second revelation this week, Google Talk, lets you communicate with your buddies either by typing or, if your PC has a microphone and speaker, by speaking. As long as you and your conversation partner are at Windows computers, you can converse with spectacular sound quality. Now, Google Talk 1.0 is probably the most stripped-down chat program on earth. No conference calling, video chats or direct person-to-person file transfers. (Features like these are common in rivals like Skype, iChat and the messenger programs from AOL, MSN and Yahoo.) So what, exactly, is Google trying to prove here? Its mission, in fact, is far grander. Google Talk aims to end the ridiculous era of proprietary chat networks. At the moment, AOL, MSN and Yahoo each maintain separate, incompatible networks. The big boys each want to be alone in the sandbox, and the losers are their customers. Google Talk, however, is based on an open, published standard that the company is making available to all. Already, Google Talk communicates with popular chat programs like iChat, Trillian, Adium, Psi and GAIM, but that's just the beginning. Google is making overtures to Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft about making their chat programs compatible; EarthLink has already agreed to join the federation; and Google is also inviting the makers of games, collaboration tools and even cellphones to join in what it hopes will one day be a grand, unified chat network. In the meantime, Google Talk is significant for another reason: it requires a Gmail account. (Gmail is Google's free, Web-based e-mail service, whose two most famous aspects are its vast capacity - over two gigabytes of storage for each account - and the ads that appear, in small type, off to the right side of each message you read. The ads are computer-matched to keywords in the body of the message, which disturbs some privacy advocates.) Until now, Gmail accounts were available by invitation only. Google let the service spread gradually and virally, giving each existing member a few additional invitations to extend. At one point, people were actually selling these invitations on eBay. As of yesterday, however, all that has changed. Now anyone can get a Gmail account - and can therefore use Google Talk. But to prevent spammers and other abusers from snapping up Gmail accounts by the thousands, Google has designed a clever safeguard: when you apply for a Gmail account, you must provide a cellphone number. Google sends a code to your phone, which you use to complete the registration. (Actually, you don't have to own a cellphone; you just have to know somebody with a cellphone. They can get the code for you, because each cellphone number is good for a number of registrations - just not hundreds of them.) In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use - not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons. Wish they'd cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company's really up to is enough to drive you crazy.

Subject: Need an authorization From: LI HUAFANG To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 00:18:41 (EDT) Email Address: lihf@sifl.org.cn Message: I have sent the mail to krugman@nytimes.com, but havenot recieved any reply. so i post it here. I am a Chinese reader. I have read your article The Chinese Challenge that was published in NYT June 27th. And I have translated this article into Chinese, may I have your authorization to use this Chinese version in academic ways. Also I have one different point with your. You said ¡°I'd block the Chinese bid for Unocal.¡± But its not easy for that US rely on Chinese in some political problems. As far as I know, the US Congress also gave some trouble to the China National Offshore Oil Corporation. The reason may sounds good like to keep security of US energy. But it also means that the US government does the same things like Chinese government. They are no difference. When you criticized Chinese government, why not US? In my opinion, we should treat the government as an ¡°economic person¡±, just like J. Buchanan did. Will you agree? Thank you for kind attention. Best wishes, lihuafang

Subject: Who's 'Gonna fly now' ? From: Pancho Villa alias de Toffol Davide To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 19:47:54 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: FRED BERGSTEN A clash of the titans could hurt us 'ALL' The US and China have been chief locomotives of global growth for several years. With exchange rates calculated at purchasing power parity, they are the two largest economies. They rank first and third among trading nations. An economic clash would thus be extremely costly for the world economy as well as for the two countries. Yet such a clash is now virtually inevitable and could occur as early as this autumn. Preventive actions, especially a much larger revaluation of the renminbi and a joint US-China initiative to revive the Doha round of global trade negotiations, are needed to head off this additional substantial risk to global prosperity and stability. The problem is that China is rapidly becoming the world's largest and fastest growing surplus country, mirroring the US as the largest and fastest growing deficit country. China's global trade surplus will probably triple in 2005 and its current account surplus will roughly double, approaching $150bn (€123bn) or about 7.5 per cent of gross domestic product. The US current account deficit is already running close to $800bn, or about 7 per cent of its economy and continues to rise rapidly. These imbalances are unsustainable in international financial terms. China, other surplus countries and private investors have so far been willing to fund the US deficits with only modest declines in the dollar and rises in US interest rates. But it is only a matter of time until the dollar falls by another 20 per cent or so and adjustments are forced on deficit and surplus countries. The coming clash of the titans will derive primarily, however, from domestic political unsustainability. Currency over-valuation and the external deficits they spawn are by far the most reliable predictors of trade protectionism in the US (and Europe). Bilateral trade imbalances, while irrelevant in economic terms, are politically potent and the US deficit with China now exceeds annual rates of $200bn. US imports from China are six times as large as US exports to China so those exports must increase six times as fast as imports just to keep the imbalance from increasing. The US-China conflict potential is magnified by other worries. Vulnerable US sectors, such as clothing, would seek protection against China whatever the currency relationship. Many Americans fear China is moving up the technology ladder and will start competing at the high end of the value-added spectrum. China's scramble to lock up energy resources is of particular concern. Efforts by Chinese companies to take over US firms trigger emotional responses, epitomised by the de facto congressional rejection of CNOOC's bid for Unocal.(!) There are anxieties that China is seeking a global military role that will threaten US security. Differences over Taiwan, human rights in China and Beijing's political system add further combustibility to the mix. A clash, at least in the economic domain, thus seems probable. The US has already limited Chinese exports in textiles, clothing, colour television sets, semiconductors, wood furniture and shrimp. Steel pipe and more clothing are likely to be restricted soon. The clash could escalate in the near future. Unless China increases the renminbi's 2 per cent revaluation announced in July to at least 10-15 per cent, and preferably 20-25 per cent, the US Senate is virtually certain to pass the Schumer Amendment, which would place a 27.5 per cent tariff on all imports from China until it does so. The House of Representatives adopted legislation last month that would make it much easier to apply new barriers against Chinese imports. The two bills could be meshed and come to the president before the end of the year, and a veto would be extremely difficult in light of the intense domestic feelings. China would justifiably retaliate, triggering a trade war. The US administration, despite its desire to work with China on North Korea and other issues, will have to adopt a tougher position to avoid such developments on the Hill. The treasury department will almost certainly label China a 'currency manipulator' in its report to Congress in October, a justified charge in light of China's massive intervention to keep the renminbi from rising for the past four years, after which it must produce a meaningful remedy; if it does not, Congress will take matters into its own hands. Pre-emptive measures are needed to head off these risks, hopefully in preparation for or during the visit to Washington next month by Hu Jintao, the Chinese president. The most important is for China to revalue by a meaningful amount, using its large budget surplus to stimulate domestic demand to offset any adverse effect on growth. A 10 per cent revaluation is needed simply to offset the renminbi's decline over the past three years. A 25 per cent increase, if mirrored by other Asian countries, would take $100bn off the US current account deficit and cool much of the congressional hostility for now. The US, for its part, must initiate a serious programme to increase domestic savings and thus sharply , reduce its reliance on foreign capital, chiefly by restoring the budget surpluses of five years ago. To regain positive momentum on trade, China should indicate willingness to liberalise further, though it already has the lowest import barriers of any large developing country. It could best do so by joining with the US to provide needed stimulus to the Doha round through offering substantial reductions in their remaining agricultural and other trade distortions. The US could encourage such co-operation by offering to treat China as a 'market economy' at least in sectors that meet that test. Failure to take such steps will trigger large risks for the world's two growth locomotives themselves, for relations between them and for the global economy. The writer is director of the Institute for International Economics FT Thursday August 25 2005

Subject: Google to Offer Messaging and Voice From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 19:39:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24google.html August 24, 2005 Google to Offer Instant Messaging and Voice Communications on Web By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO - Google, the Internet search innovator, will make its first direct challenge to the broader communications industry on Wednesday when it introduces an instant-messaging and voice communication service for personal computers. The program, Google Talk, will allow its users to exchange text messages and converse through their computers with others at remote locations. Other instant-messaging services offer similar capabilities, but Google said the appeal of its system would come from its voice quality, based on audio technology it has developed. As with other Google product introductions, the company has not linked the new service with a plan for making money, saying only that it was likely to look for revenue opportunities in the future. But the planned introduction is the clearest evidence yet that Google has vast ambitions to move beyond its Web search roots and create a company spanning the full range of digital information. 'This begs the question of what Google defines themselves as,' said Allen Weiner, an Internet analyst at Gartner, a market research firm. 'I believe they're now a media company whether or not they want to admit it.' In choosing to compete directly with the three major providers of instant messaging - AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo - Google has chosen a standard known as Jabber, which has been widely embraced by proponents of open-source software. The three major messaging services are largely islands that do not permit their users to send messages to and from competing services. But there have been reports that the Jabber open-source organization is preparing to interconnect with AOL, which is the largest provider of messaging with its AOL Instant Messenger system, known as AIM. More than 80 million Americans used instant-messaging services as of July, according to comScore Media Metrix. Of those users, 41.6 million used AIM, 19.1 million used Yahoo Messenger and 14.1 million used MSN Messenger. Although comScore does not track Jabber users, Peter Saint-Andre, the executive director of the Jabber Software Foundation, cited estimates by Osterman Research, a research and analysis firm specializing in messaging and digital collaboration, that 13.5 million use the Jabber standard. A Google executive said the company was hoping to use the Jabber standard to interconnect the messaging industry. 'We are going to start working to federate all the other networks,' said the executive, Georges Harik, a product management director who is responsible for Google Talk and several other services. At the start, Google Talk users will be able to exchange text messages with users of other Jabber-compatible software - including Apple's iChat service and EarthLink - but they will be able to converse only with other Google Talk users. (Google intends to make its voice technology interoperable with other systems at a later stage.) Google plans to link availability of its instant-messaging service to its e-mail service, Gmail, currently in public testing. The Gmail service will now be made generally available, and a Gmail address will function as a user's instant-messaging identity as well. Users can sign up for both services at google.com/talk; a mobile phone number must be entered as part of a measure to keep spam operators from stockpiling addresses. At present, Mr. Harik would only say that there are 'several million' Gmail customers, but he would not disclose a precise number. He said that Google saw its entry into the communications world in the context of a corporate mission of organizing and making all of the world's information accessible. 'It is important that you be able to find information, but it is also important that you be able to communicate it,' Mr. Harik said. The strategic shift is certain to change both the way Google's competitors and its partners view the company, which has quickly come to be a dominant force in both the advertising and Internet world. For example, AOL is still a significant Google partner for search results, but Google Talk is a direct competitive threat to the messaging world that AOL now dominates. Moreover, analysts expect Google to move quickly beyond instant messaging to add other voice and communication services, meaning that it is likely to compete against other providers of voice-over-Internet phone service like Vonage and Skype as well as communication industry giants. That may lead to the creation of competitive barriers that Google has not previously faced. 'It will be interesting to see if other companies try to shut them out,' said Benjamin Schachter, an Internet analyst at UBS Securities, of which Google has been a recent client.

Subject: Connecticut Investigates Hedge Fund From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 11:12:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/business/25hedge.html August 25, 2005 Connecticut Investigates Hedge Fund for Solvency By GRETCHEN MORGENSON State and federal officials in Connecticut are investigating the possible collapse of the Bayou Group, a hedge fund and brokerage firm in Stamford that managed an estimated $400 million for its investors, according to two people briefed on the investigation. Clients of the Bayou Group apparently grew concerned about the firm's status in recent days, when refund checks it had sent to customers could not be drawn upon for lack of funds, one of the two people briefed on the investigation said. In addition, telephones at Bayou went unanswered. 'We are aware that there is a situation with people not being able to be in contact with the company,' said James Heckman, a spokesman for the Connecticut Department of Banking. 'We are looking into it. Beyond that, I can't comment.' Christine Sciarrino, an assistant United States attorney for Connecticut, who leads the financial litigation unit of that office's civil division, declined to comment on the matter. A spokesman for the United States attorney's office did not return a phone call seeking comment. Regulatory filings indicate that the Bayou Group is overseen by Samuel Israel III, 46, of Harrison, N.Y. The Web site of the National Futures Association, a self-regulatory organization of the commodity futures industry, lists Mr. Israel as a member of one of its advisory committees. A telephone call yesterday afternoon to the Stamford office of the Bayou Group was not answered. A message left at Mr. Israel's home was not returned. According to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bayou started four hedge funds in January 2003, expecting to raise more than $250 million from wealthy individuals. The minimum investment in each fund was $250,000. They were called Bayou Superfund, Bayou No Leverage Fund, Bayou Affiliates and Bayou Accredited Fund. Hedge funds, which are lightly regulated investment funds aimed at wealthy investors, have grown significantly in recent years. Tremont Advisors, a firm that tracks hedge funds, said that individual hedge fund managers manage $1 trillion today, up from $120 billion in 1994. While hedge funds produced stellar returns in the years immediately following the bursting of the Nasdaq stock bubble in 2000, more recently many of them have had difficulty outpacing returns in the overall stock market. Last year, the hedge fund index rose 9.6 percent, while the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index increased 10.9 percent. The explosion in assets under management at hedge funds has worried some market participants, because they are not subject to the intense regulatory scrutiny of other investment advisers. In recent months, for example, federal investigators have been trying to unravel the apparent collapse of the KL Group, a hedge fund advisory business in West Palm Beach, Fla. Officials investigating that failure have said that $200 million may have been lost. Two of the firm's principals, who have been sued by the S.E.C., have disappeared. According to the people briefed on the investigation into the Bayou Group, its brokerage firm subsidiary, known as Bayou Securities, conducted trades for its hedge funds. The firm's trades were cleared by Bear Stearns, one of the biggest firms in the business of providing administrative and financing services to hedge funds. A Bear Stearns spokeswoman did not return a phone call seeking comment. Bayou has had regulatory troubles before. In 2003, Connecticut's banking department filed an administrative proceeding against Bayou Securities, which was started in January 1996, contending that the company's records did not fully reflect the business that it was conducting. Bayou settled the proceeding, without admitting or denying wrongdoing, but paid a $7,500 fine and agreed to provide banking regulators with all complaints lodged against it by Connecticut residents until October 2005. As part of its settlement, Bayou said that it had reviewed and adopted 'supervisory and compliance procedures designed to improve regulatory compliance,' and that the procedures would ensure that the firm's records would be accurate. Also in 2003, Mr. Israel and a colleague, Daniel Marino, were sued by Paul T. Westervelt Jr., and his son, Paul T. Westervelt III, in a breach of contract case in Federal District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana. The plaintiffs in the case contended that Bayou's management persuaded them to join the firm but failed to provide them with the necessary business documents and financial information relating to the firm. According to the complaint, after the elder Mr. Westervelt joined Bayou, he discovered what he considered to be 'possible violations of S.E.C. regulations governing the operating of hedge funds,' and other possible violations. The case was dismissed from federal court in November 2003 after the judge overseeing it ordered it to be heard by an arbitration panel, under NASD rules. It is not clear whether an arbitration was started. Lawyers representing both the plaintiffs and Bayou did not return phone calls seeking comment last night.

Subject: Rents Head Up From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 09:02:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/25/realestate/25rent.html August 25, 2005 Rents Head Up as Home Prices Put Off Buyers By DAVID LEONHARDT Rents are rising again across the country, squeezing tenants who are already coping with high gasoline prices and improving returns to landlords after a deep five-year slump. The turnaround appears to be another sign that the boom in house prices and sales is finally slowing, as homes have become so expensive in many metropolitan areas that some people have decided to rent instead. A government report yesterday also offered new evidence that the housing boom could be reaching a peak. The median price of a newly built home fell to $203,800 in July from $219,500 in June, after having risen in the winter and spring, the Commerce Department said. Still, the number of new homes that were sold continued to grow, and economists cautioned that the recent housing slowdown could turn out to be a pause. But rents have clearly changed direction, even if the increases have been relatively small. With the economy growing and mortgage rates inching up, more people are looking to rent apartments and homes rather than buy them. At the same time, many buildings are being turned into condominiums, reducing the supply of rental property. 'It seems like the tide has finally turned,' said Michael H. Zaransky, co-chief executive of Prime Property Investors, which owns 15 buildings in Chicago. Rents in about 85 percent of large metropolitan areas have climbed in the last year, according to Global Real Analytics, a research company in San Francisco. Late in 2003, rents were falling in 85 percent of markets. Only in the hottest markets like New York, Southern California and South Florida have average rents been rising generally. In Chicago, people who moved into a small brick building on the leafy corner of Sherwin Avenue and Paulina Street two years ago had it very good. They did not have to put down a security deposit, the $50 application fee was waived and, best of all, they got to live rent-free for two months. By last summer, the enticements had shrunk to one month of free rent. Today, all that a new tenant receives for signing an $1,100-a-month lease are the keys to the front door. Throughout the South, in cities like Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C., fewer apartments are empty, building managers say. Nationwide, the vacancy rate for rentals fell to 9.8 percent in the second quarter after having climbed early in 2004 to 10.4 percent, the highest level since the Census Bureau began keeping statistics in 1956. Even in Northern California - where average rents dropped about 25 percent after the dot-com crash, according to RealFacts, a research firm there - prices have reversed direction. 'I'm appalled at the rents and what they are asking in relation to what they are giving,' said Shari West, 47, who lives with her 13-year-old daughter and has been looking for a two-bedroom house in Castro Valley, about 25 miles east of San Francisco. 'You're not getting what you pay for.' The apartments she has seen cost almost $1,800 a month, about $100 or $200 more than they did when she briefly looked last summer, she recalled. The buildings still offering concessions, like a month's free rent or a reduced security deposit, are in neighborhoods where Ms. West said she did not want to live. In most places, the rent increases have been smaller than the ones Ms. West found - smaller in fact than inflation in the rest of the economy. The average rent nationwide rose 2.5 percent from the spring of 2004 to this spring. It had fallen 4.5 percent from 2001 to 2003, according to Global Real Analytics. Outside the San Francisco Bay Area, many of the biggest declines occurred in cities like Dallas, Denver and Memphis, where abundant land and light regulation allowed home builders to put up thousands of new houses. Rents have continued to drop in those cities over the last year. But they have begun rising in metropolitan areas including Seattle, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Kansas City, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Washington. 'It seems to us that the market bottomed last year,' said V. James Marfuggi, chief operating officer of EPT Management in El Paso, which owns 70 properties around the country. 'This will be the first year that concessions have not increased.' Some apartment owners have raised the effective rent on their apartments by cutting back on concessions while keeping the announced monthly rent roughly the same. On North Bosworth Avenue in Chicago, the rent for a two-bedroom apartment in a building near the elevated transit line has increased only slightly in the last year, but the landlord is no longer offering a free month to new tenants. Other landlords have become pickier about which tenants they accept, no longer signing leases with those who have spotty credit records or who must stretch to afford the rent, said Paul Magyar, director of leasing at Chicago Apartment Finders, a listing service. The surge in condominium conversions is also helping to push up rents by taking rental buildings off the market. Looking at weak rents and high sales prices, many owners have decided that their buildings are not worth keeping. Still, the market remains worse for landlords and better for renters than in much of the last two decades, in large part because home sales remain healthy. Mortgage rates are low, and many people are using creative loans that hold down their initial payments, like interest-only mortgages, to become first-time home buyers. The number of existing homes sold in July rose 4.7 percent compared with July 2004, the National Association of Realtors said this week. But the pace of sales slowed from June to July, according to the trade group, which adjusts its numbers to account for normal seasonal variations. 'The bottom line is housing is not plunging and it's not soaring,' said James O'Sullivan, an economist at the investment bank UBS. 'There are signs that housing is peaking, but there is no evidence that housing is weakening sharply.' Chris R. Howard, a 28-year-old computer technician at the University of Chicago, has suffered the consequences of rising rents, but he is about to become one reason that the profits of rental companies remain weak. In the spring, the rent on the two-bedroom apartment Mr. Howard shares with his girlfriend increased to $1,000 from $975. 'They didn't give any real justification,' he said, 'other than the rent was low and it needed to be raised.' In October, though, he plans to move to an apartment near the university that they are planning to buy. They could not afford anything in their neighborhood, Ravenswood, but their new apartment on the South Side will be almost twice as big as their current one. Mr. Howard said they were able to buy the place because mortgage rates were still extremely low.

Subject: Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 07:02:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23gut.html August 23, 2005 The Other Brain Also Deals With Many Woes By HARRIET BROWN Two brains are better than one. At least that is the rationale for the close - sometimes too close - relationship between the human body's two brains, the one at the top of the spinal cord and the hidden but powerful brain in the gut known as the enteric nervous system. For Dr. Michael D. Gershon, the author of 'The Second Brain' and the chairman of the department of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia, the connection between the two can be unpleasantly clear. 'Every time I call the National Institutes of Health to check on a grant proposal,' Dr. Gershon said, 'I become painfully aware of the influence the brain has on the gut.' In fact, anyone who has ever felt butterflies in the stomach before giving a speech, a gut feeling that flies in the face of fact or a bout of intestinal urgency the night before an examination has experienced the actions of the dual nervous systems. The connection between the brains lies at the heart of many woes, physical and psychiatric. Ailments like anxiety, depression, irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers and Parkinson's disease manifest symptoms at the brain and the gut level. 'The majority of patients with anxiety and depression will also have alterations of their GI function,' said Dr. Emeran Mayer, professor of medicine, physiology and psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles. A study in 1902 showed changes in the movement of food through the gastrointestinal tract in cats confronted by growling dogs. One system's symptoms - and cures - may affect the other. Antidepressants, for example, cause gastric distress in up to a quarter of the people who take them. Butterflies in the stomach are caused by a surge of stress hormones released by the body in a 'fight or flight' situation. Stress can also overstimulate nerves in the esophagus, causing a feeling of choking. Dr. Gershon, who coined the term 'second brain' in 1996, is one of a number of researchers who are studying brain-gut connections in the relatively new field of neurogastroenterology. New understandings of the way the second brain works, and the interactions between the two, are helping to treat disorders like constipation, ulcers and Hirschprung's disease. The role of the enteric nervous system is to manage every aspect of digestion, from the esophagus to the stomach, small intestine and colon. The second brain, or little brain, accomplishes all that with the same tools as the big brain, a sophisticated nearly self-contained network of neural circuitry, neurotransmitters and proteins. The independence is a function of the enteric nervous system's complexity. 'Rather than Mother Nature's trying to pack 100 million neurons someplace in the brain or spinal cord and then sending long connections to the GI tract, the circuitry is right next to the systems that require control,' said Jackie D. Wood, professor of physiology, cell biology and internal medicine at Ohio State. Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make literal and evolutionary sense. 'What brains do is control behavior,' Dr. Wood said. 'The brain in your gut has stored within its neural networks a variety of behavioral programs, like a library. The digestive state determines which program your gut calls up from its library and runs.' When someone skips lunch, the gut is more or less silent. Eat a pastrami sandwich, and contractions all along the small intestines mix the food with enzymes and move it toward the lining for absorption to begin. If the pastrami is rotten, reverse contractions will force it - and everything else in the gut - into the stomach and back out through the esophagus at high speed. In each situation, the gut must assess conditions, decide on a course of action and initiate a reflex. 'The gut monitors pressure,' Dr. Gershon said. 'It monitors the progress of digestion. It detects nutrients, and it measures acid and salts. It's a little chemical lab.' The enteric system does all this on its own, with little help from the central nervous system. The enteric nervous system was first described in 1921 by Dr. J. N. Langley, a British physician who believed that it was one of three parts - along with the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems - of the autonomic nervous system, which controls involuntary behaviors like breathing and circulation. In this triad, the enteric nervous system was seen as something of a tag-along to the other two. After Langley died, scientists more or less forgot about the enteric nervous system. Years later, when Dr. Gershon reintroduced the concept and suggested that the gut might use some of the same neurotransmitters as the brain, his theory was widely ridiculed. 'It was like saying that New York taxi drivers never miss a showing of 'Tosca' at the Met,' he recalled. By the early 80's, scientists had accepted the idea of the enteric nervous system and the role of neurotransmitters like serotonin in the gut. It is no surprise that there is a direct relationship between emotional stress and physical distress. 'Clinicians are finally acknowledging that a lot of dysfunction in GI disorders involves changes in the central nervous system,' said Gary M. Mawe, a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the University of Vermont. The big question is which comes first, physiology or psychology? The enteric and central nervous systems use the same hardware, as it were, to run two very different programs. Serotonin, for instance, is crucial to feelings of well-being. Hence the success of the antidepressants known as S.S.R.I.'s that raise the level of serotonin available to the brain. But 95 percent of the body's serotonin is housed in the gut, where it acts as a neurotransmitter and a signaling mechanism. The digestive process begins when a specialized cell, an enterochromaffin, squirts serotonin into the wall of the gut, which has at least seven types of serotonin receptors. The receptors, in turn, communicate with nerve cells to start digestive enzymes flowing or to start things moving through the intestines. Serotonin also acts as a go-between, keeping the brain in the skull up to date with what is happening in the brain below. Such communication is mostly one way, with 90 percent traveling from the gut to the head. Many of those messages are unpleasant, and serotonin is involved in sending them. Chemotherapy drugs like doxorubicin, which is used to treat breast cancer, cause serotonin to be released in the gut, leading to nausea and vomiting. 'The gut is not an organ from which you wish to receive frequent progress reports,' Dr. Gershon said. Serotonin is also implicated in one of the most debilitating gut disorders, irritable bowel syndrome, or I.B.S., which causes abdominal pain and cramping, bloating and, in some patients, alternating diarrhea and constipation. 'You can run any test you want on people with I.B.S., and their GI tracts look essentially normal,' Dr. Mawe said. The default assumption has been that the syndrome is a psychosomatic disease. But it turns out that irritable bowel syndrome, like depression, is at least in part a function of changes in the serotonin system. In this case, it is too much serotonin rather than too little. In a healthy person, after serotonin is released into the gut and initiates an intestinal reflex, it is whisked out of the bowel by a molecule known as the serotonin transporter, or SERT, found in the cells that line the gut wall. People with irritable bowel syndrome do not have enough SERT, so they wind up with too much serotonin floating around, causing diarrhea. The excess serotonin then overwhelms the receptors in the gut, shutting them down and causing constipation. When Dr. Gershon, whose work has been supported by Novartis, studied mice without SERT, he found that they developed a condition very much like I.B.S. in humans. Several new serotonin-based drugs - intestinal antidepressants, in a way - have brought hope for those with chronic gut disorders. Another mechanism that lends credence to physiology as the source of intestinal dysfunctions is the system of mast cells in the gut that have an important role in immune response. 'During stress, trauma or 'fight or flight' reactions, the barrier between the lumen, the interior of the gut where food is digested, and the rest of the bowel could be broken, and bad stuff could get across,' Dr. Wood said. 'So the big brain calls in more immune surveillance at the gut wall by activating mast cells.' These mast cells release histamines and other inflammatory agents, mobilizing the enteric nervous system to expel the perceived intruders, and causing diarrhea. Inflammation induced by mast cells may turn out to be crucial in understanding and treating GI disorders. Inflamed tissue becomes tender. A gut under stress, with chronic mast cell production and consequent inflammation, may become tender, as well. In animals, Dr. Mawe said, inflammation makes the sensory neurons in the gut fire more often, causing a kind of sensory hyperactivity. 'I have a theory that some chronic disorders may be caused by something like attention deficit disorder in the gut,' he said. Dr. Gershon, too, theorizes that physiology is the original culprit in brain-gut dysfunctions. 'We have identified molecular defects in the gut of everyone who has irritable bowel syndrome,' he said. 'If you were chained by bloody diarrhea to a toilet seat, you, too, might be depressed.' Still, psychology clearly plays a role. Recent studies suggest that stress, especially early in life, can cause chronic GI diseases, at least in animals. 'If you put a rat on top of a little platform surrounded by water, which is very stressful for a rat, it develops the equivalent of diarrhea,' Dr. Mayer said. Another experiment showed that when young rats were separated from their mothers, the layer of cells that line the gut, the same barrier that is strengthened by mast cells during stress, weakened and became more permeable, allowing bacteria from the intestine to pass through the bowel walls and stimulate immune cells. 'In rats, it's an adaptive response,' Dr. Mayer said. 'If they're born into a stressful, hostile environment, nature programs them to be more vigilant and stress responsive in their future life.' He said up to 70 percent of the patients he treats for chronic gut disorders had experienced early childhood traumas like parents' divorces, chronic illnesses or parents' deaths. 'I think that what happens in early life, along with an individual's genetic background, programs how a person will respond to stress for the rest of his or her life,' he said. Either way, what is good for one brain is often good for the other, too. A team of researchers from Penn State University recently discovered a possible new direction in treating intestinal disorders, biofeedback for the brain in the gut. In an experiment published in a recent issue of Neurogastroenterology and Motility, Robert M. Stern, a professor of psychology at Penn State, found that biofeedback helped people consciously increase and enhance their gastrointestinal activity. They used the brains in their heads, in other words, to help the brains in their guts, proving that at least some of the time two brains really are better than one.

Subject: Japan's Encounter With the West From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 06:12:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/travel/21shimoda.html August 21, 2005 Where Japan's Encounter With the West Began By KEN BELSON THE Odoriko express train pulled out of Tokyo Station one afternoon this spring, abuzz with gaggles of housewives, pensioners in full bloom and young couples cooing. In contrast to the tense and tired silence on most Japanese commuter trains, everyone on the express seemed excited to be going somewhere. Chatter filled the car as the train plowed past the concrete buildings that fill Tokyo, Kawasaki and Yokohama. After an hour, the train - which takes its name from the title of a novel by Yasunari Kawabata - lurched into the open to reveal broad views of Sagami Bay to the left and steep green mountains to the right. Everyone in the car gasped at the sudden and stunning vistas. The Izu Peninsula was near. For the next 90 minutes, the train snaked its way along the 40-mile eastern coastline, gliding through mountain tunnels and past fishing villages and resort towns where plumes of sulfur-filled air rose from the hot springs. The scenic journey was a pleasant reminder of why so many Japanese vacation there. The Izu Peninsula is one of Tokyo's most popular getaways, the rough equivalent of what the Hamptons are to New Yorkers: a quick escape that can be private or social, unpretentious or fashionable, depending on your mood. During the dozen years my wife and I spent in Japan, we visited Izu a handful of times, staying at hot springs and resort hotels on both coasts. But our best memories were of Shimoda, the historic and scenic city at the tip of the peninsula and the end of the train line. Shimoda's baths, local seafood and ample sunshine do a good job of washing away Tokyo's grime. Shimoda's seaside setting makes even two days there feel like a week away. While Shimoda is great for relaxing, it is more than a beach resort. The town played a crucial role in Japanese history when American naval vessels dropped anchor there in 1853 with the aim of ending the country's 250 years of self-imposed isolation. It was also there a year later, that representatives of the shogun met Commodore Matthew Perry at Ryosenji, a graceful temple in town, to sign a treaty that ushered in formal relations between the United States and Japan. With the stroke of a pen, Shimoda became one of two ports opened to foreign trade and social interaction between Japanese and Americans. Though the entire country was opened after the Meiji Restoration less than a generation later, Shimoda continues to celebrate its brief, yet pivotal moment on the world stage. Every spring, it holds the Black Ship Festival when American and Japanese seamen roam the streets, residents re-enact historic events and music and fireworks fill the night air. Shimoda's compact city center is also dotted with landmarks from that time. In just a few hours of walking around the eight-square-block downtown, visitors can see the smattering of 19th-century buildings and Perry Road, an elegant cobblestone street. The mix of history, architecture and nature give Shimoda that rarest of qualities in urban Japan: charm. But those in search of surf and seafood need not rub elbows with history buffs and tour buses. There are plenty of coves and another Shimoda delight - white sand beaches, which are rare in Japan. The town is flanked by a dozen or so beaches that young families, surfers and schoolchildren call home during the summer's laziest weekends. As on Long Island, there are a variety of hotels to fit most tastes and budgets, from Spartan family-run inns, or minshuku, to resorts that feature hot springs. We opted for the Shimoda View Hotel, which sits atop a hillside and looks out toward the Izu islands, which look like gumdrops along the horizon offshore. The hot springs were a highlight. Like most baths in Japan, there were two single-sex baths that are reversed once a day so visitors can enjoy both during a one-day visit. Both are the size of small pools and shallow enough for bathers to sit up to their chins in piping hot water and breathe in the thick steam. There are also outdoor baths with views of the ocean. Sitting outside under the stars with the ocean below as a soundtrack is more soothing than doing so in the day, although it is chillier. The hotel is also a stone's through from the longest and flattest beach on the eastern shore, Shirahama Ohama. With a string of inexpensive hotels and small shops along the highway above the beach, this stretch is crowded wall to wall with college students and small families during the summer. On the other side of Shimoda are more secluded coves and rockier beaches like Nabeta Hama that are reminiscent of the California coast. Set against tall cliffs, the trees run up to the shore and giant boulders sit right off shore. Toji Beach, a small rocky stretch, sits in front of a steep sand hill that teenagers speed down using plastic sleds. Regular visitors here fill the bed-and-breakfasts and members hotels. Pockets of exclusive summer homes dot the hillside. The seafood is wonderful regardless of where you stay. Most hotels serve elaborate breakfasts and dinners that are included in the price of the room, though most of the food can be found at Shimoda's better restaurants. Menus at both hotels and restaurants typically feature local specialties like horse mackerel (aji), which is often served as sashimi, sliced and sitting on a bed of daikon, and kinmedai, a plump red-skinned fish, that is served raw, stewed, broiled or baked. Visitors in September can enjoy sanma, or saury, at its freshest. These fish are available for sale in the city center. Shopkeepers often dry their himono, or split and smoked mackerel, under the sun using large wire-mesh tables. Amid a sea of knicknacks in the nearby craft stores, you can also find elegant silk mobiles and dolls, another local specialty. More memorable are the town's elegant and understated sites, including Ryosenji and Chorakuji, two temples off Perry Road, which runs parallel to the canal. On both sides of the disappointingly short street are a handful of shops and teahouses that offer a whiff of an earlier, slower time. Farther up the road, across from the junior high school, is a small museum that chronicles the town's moment in the sun. Back toward the train station, visitors can also take the five-minute cable car ride up Mount Nesugata for about $9, at 110 yen to the dollar, round-trip, which has a quiet flower park and commanding views of the Izu islands. The aquarium (admission $15.50) in town draws big crowds , as do boat tours of the harbor and nearby coastline. Local people and frequent weekend visitors generally avoid these attractions, nice as they are. Instead, they sprawl on the beach, surf and barbeque by the shore. Or they take to some of the hidden corners away from the crowds, like Cape Suzaki, a 10-minute taxi ride from downtown. The wind is a bit stronger there and the sea air thicker, and the imperial family has a summer home nearby. The gardens near some solitary tourist shops are the starting point for a 1.6-mile walking trail that runs past camellias and cherry trees to a lighthouse that dates from the Edo Era (1603-1868). Alone at last, you can plunk down for a picnic, stare out at the ocean and imagine what the watchman must have thought when he saw those big American ships steaming toward Shimoda Bay.

Subject: In Defense of the Welfare State From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 05:54:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2005/08/23/opinion/edpower.php August 24, 2005 In Defense of the Welfare State By Jonathan Power - International Herald Tribune STOCKHOLM - The statistics had arrived on the Swedish prime minister's desk that morning, his first day back at work after his summer vacation, cycling around the villages near his summer estate. It was good news. Goran Persson, now in his ninth year of office, told me that the growth rate for this year will be near 3 percent and next year more than 3 percent - enough, he said, to maintain Sweden's trajectory of the last decade, which was 'above the average for the European Union' and, in particular, 'as good as the Anglo-Saxons, Britain and the U.S.' (He admitted that he was referring to U.S. per capita growth, so as to discount the effect of its fast, immigrant-driven rise in population.) This raised the first question - how does this self-confessed socialist state do it? What is the secret for success when Swedish taxes are the highest in the world and the welfare state is the country's single largest employer? After all, when Persson came in as finance minister in 1994 the country was reeling economically, as state expenditures on the health and social sectors raced ahead of the country's ability to generate wealth. 'If you have a free economy,' explained the prime minister, 'a highly educated work force, a very healthy people, very high productivity and a sound environment then you can create the critical size of resources to create good growth. 'That has to be joined with adequate public financing of universities, research and development. As long as we are efficient and constantly challenging ourselves we continue to be productive. 'Then if we produce successful growth, the government gets the public's support for high taxes. If the quality of the public sector is good, then a prosperous people will continue to vote for funding it.' The Social Democrats have been in power for most of the last 73 years. But recently public opinion has turned away from the government, partly because of the prime minister's apparent dictatorial style and partly because of a series of scandals including his slow response to the tsunami, when hundreds of Swedes on vacation in Thailand died. Despite the malaise, Persson appears to relish the coming electoral fight. The key economic statistics are good, he argues, with low inflation, low interest rates, and with the economy finally moving from the export-dominated growth of previous years to domestic-driven growth, which promises rapid job creation. Moreover, he feels he is having some success in dealing with the criticisms that have been made of the welfare state. Many have observed that Sweden cannot sustain its generous womb-to-tomb system if so many Swedes abuse the system by calling in sick and claming unnecessary disability leave. On an average day, one-fifth of the potential workforce is claiming these rights, in a country that along with France and Japan is the healthiest in the world. 'I had a new report on my desk today to show that we are getting these figures down,' he said. 'It is now under control. We have given employers an incentive to convince their personnel to return from sick leave by offering them a tax benefit if they succeed. This means that they should improve their environment and their conditions of work. At the same time, we have been scrutinizing those doctors who have been too generous in signing sick notes.' Persson, lounging back in his chair and gazing out of the window that looks out on the capital's beguiling mix of waterways, 18th-century Renaissance-style palaces and grand houses, ends the conversation with two quick jabs. 'Europe has a lack of confidence vis-à- vis the U.S.,' he said. 'The U.S. is competitive, but not as competitive as we think. We are too self-critical in Europe, even though we have a much better social system and in Sweden are just as productive. On unemployment, it is overlooked that the U.S. has approaching two million people in jail and out of the labor market.' As for the opposition's claim that he might raise taxes, he seems blithely unconcerned: 'I have no plans for that at the moment, as the economy is doing so well. But if at the election I have to go to the Swedes and ask them to approve a tax rise so that we can improve our health services even more, I believe they will support me.' The sweet arguments of success? Or the arrogance of being too long in power? In a year, voters will decide. Meanwhile, the prime minister of the world's most successful socialist state gives notice he is in no mood to step down and pursue one of his two unfulfilled vocations - as either a priest or a farmer.

Subject: French Wrestle With Political Illusion From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 05:53:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/iht/2005/08/24/international/IHT-24globalist.html August 24, 2005 French Wrestle With Art of Political Illusionists By ROGER COHEN - International Herald Tribune In no major European country have politics remained as frozen since the Cold War's end as in France, where the old guard has proved largely impervious to the remaking of the world. Britain got New Labour and Tony Blair with their slick market-oriented makeover of a tired socialism. In Spain, Felipe González's elegant refashioning of the left helped lay the basis for post-Franco democracy. Italian politics could never be the same after the Berlin Wall fell because the system had revolved around keeping the Communists from power: the vehicle designed to that end, the Christian Democrats, disappeared. As for Germany, it incorporated a collapsed state, East Germany, and seems about to elect a woman raised there. While all this happened - not to mention the complete reinvention of central Europe - France managed to pass power from a man who first served in government in 1944 to another who first did so in 1967. Even for a country attached to its traditions, this amounts to a singular triumph of immobility. The passage of the presidency from François Mitterrand to Jacques Chirac was presented as one from left to right, but as Chirac has in general governed as a social democrat the distinction has proved less than startling. Mitterrand deployed the rhetoric of the left to mobilize his Socialist Party and then operated largely from the center. Chirac's Gaullism has similarly placed suspicion of the market and the United States at the heart of his discourse, and led him to govern from a nebulous centrist perch. The result is a paradox: a country more attached to ideological debate than any other in Europe, yet operating in an environment where 'left' and 'right' are often almost meaningless labels and where governance tends to consist of saying one thing - the state is a force for good - while trying to do another - privatize. Running France is above all a conjuring trick. It is perhaps because the art of the illusionist has lain at the center of French politics since 1945 - beginning with the depiction of wartime events and the Vichy regime - that it has been easier to maintain the various illusions that have preserved this country's strange political status quo. But, as the political season begins again in France after the summer break, there are signs of increasing strain. To the left and right, pressures are growing for clearer political positions that would offer the French at least the semblance of a real choice between distinct ideas. 'Our politics are archaic,' said Jean-Marie Bockel, the Socialist mayor of Mulhouse and an admirer of Blair. 'The Socialist Party is still asking itself if it's social democratic or more radical than that. Marxist ideology continued to be debated. Elsewhere the left has moved on.' A turbulent season awaits the Socialist Party in the run-up to its November congress. The split between advocates of what is sometimes called social liberalism here - in essence the embrace of Blairism - and supporters of more leftist policies has become so acute that talk of a schism is rife. Michel Rocard, a former Socialist prime minister, put the situation bluntly in a recent interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, saying it was time to 'cast Marxist dialect into the trash can' and calling a growing leftist force in the country, the antiglobalization movement known as Attac, 'a monument to economic and political stupidity.' His comments had a ring to them. But the fact is Attac has attracted 30,000 members in its seven years of existence. Its message that American-driven capitalism, known here as neo-liberalism, is making the world more unequal and more unjust has proved compelling. If the 'Non' campaign triumphed in the referendum on a European constitution, it was partly because Attac and the forces of the left around it managed to portray the document as a paean to neo-liberalism. This coalition of the 'Non' continues to hold sway, ensuring that the looming battle to define French socialism will not naturally lead down the same market-oriented path adopted by other European parties of the left. 'The experience of hundreds of millions of people has been the failure of globalization and Anglo-Saxon capitalism, which has accentuated inequalities, dismantled systems of social protection and increased unemployment,' said Jacques Nikonoff, the president of Attac. 'These processes can be reversed.' A natural response might be: 'Dream on, Jacques.' But the French are dreamers when it comes to politics, and the success of Attac's ideas, which include dismantling NATO, suggest that the appeal of the quasi-utopian is not about to die on the French left. As a result, the embattled Socialist leader François Hollande and other moderates like former Finance Minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn will not find it easy to unite the party around a clear message. After all, the moderates offer only the real world - the European Union, the trans-Atlantic alliance, the market tempered as best it can be to ensure that freedom is balanced with essential support for those who need it. Which French heart will beat faster to such a message? Given the difficulties, the Socialists may end up fudging things yet again, conjuring a semblance of unity with a few ringing leftist slogans designed to provide the mask for a pragmatic economic program. But my sense is that the French electorate is tired of such conjuring and wants politicians with the courage to make their views clear. Certainly, the success of Nicolas Sarkozy on the right of the political spectrum suggests the French are finding new merit in clear, declarative sentences of almost Anglo-Saxon ring. Sarkozy, the interior minister, is trying to do something Chirac has always avoided: spell out what the right wants. He is moving carefully, for tactical reasons, but his influence suggests a time of political candor is coming. If that happens, to left and right, France will move out of its political torpor. Other countries should then watch out: if France can achieve what it has through decades of conjured immobility, imagine what it could do once unbound.

Subject: Sector Stock Indexes From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 05:51:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://flagship2.vanguard.com/VGApp/hnw/FundsVIPERByName Sector Indexes 12/31/04 - 8/24/05 Energy 33.1 Financials -1.8 Health Care 5.3 Info Tech -1.7 Materials -6.0 REITs 8.0 Telecoms -0.1 Utilities 15.4

Subject: Fresh Gets Invited to the Cool Table From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 13:25:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/dining/24school.html August 24, 2005 Fresh Gets Invited to the Cool Table By MARIAN BURROS YOU don't usually find a college tour guide showing off the school cafeteria to prospective applicants. But at Middlebury College in Vermont this summer, that was where a student guide made her four-star sales pitch. 'The food here is amazing,' she said. 'When I went home for spring break, I actually missed it.' At a time when many school cafeterias are still serving traditional, mass-produced food, Middlebury has replaced 'mystery meat,' canned vegetables and other institutional menu staples - the butt of freshman-year jokes for generations - with locally raised chicken and lamb, and heirloom tomatoes, emerald green broccoli and plump ripe strawberries grown within a few miles of the campus. Middlebury is not alone in serving food that did not come from far away and out of Costco-size cans. From the University of Montana to public schools in Tallahassee, Fla., officials at more than 200 universities and 400 school districts are supporting a farm-to-cafeteria movement to build their menus around fresh local ingredients. And students are cheering instead of complaining. In the Owego and Whitney Point school districts in central New York, canned vegetables have been replaced by local farm-fresh tomatoes, broccoli, squash and cabbage. 'Sometimes it costs less, sometimes right around the same price, but the quality is so wonderful,' said Betsey Bacelli, food service director for both districts, who nine years ago accepted an offer from local farmers to buy their produce. 'The older students really recognize the difference in quality, so we make little steps, like more cabbage in the soup than we used to.' The movement among administrators to support local and regional sustainable agriculture, while helping their students eat better-tasting and better quality food, started on the East and West coasts and expanded across the country. But making the transition is not so easy. Food costs are often higher, supplies can be hard to find and it takes more money to pay qualified cooks and install working kitchens. Those who have embraced the concept cite the advantages, from fighting obesity among the young to helping the local economy. And while the Department of Agriculture has provided very little money for farm to cafeteria programs, individual administrators are using sustainable agriculture as part of the new federal wellness initiative, which requires school districts, in consultation with parents, students and schools, to create a comprehensive wellness program, especially nutrition guidelines. Rising oil prices provide an additional incentive. 'This is the perfect time to do it, because fuel costs are so high that distribution companies are interested in the program,' said Kate Adamick, project director for SchoolFood Plus at Food Change, a nonprofit that helps improve schoolchildren's eating habits in New York City. 'Children's obesity issues have highlighted the farm to school program,' said Marion Kalb, director of the national farm to school program for the Community Food Security Coalition. 'It appeals to taste as well as nutrition and how to get kids to change their eating habits.' The nonprofit coalition works to build sustainable food systems that ensure access to affordable, nutritious food. Doug Davis, food service director for the Burlington, Vt., schools, said that the idea of using local produce in the schools, where 5,500 meals are served each day, was first discussed in September 2003. 'It appeared overwhelming, almost impossible,' he said. But now the schools are buying tomatoes, lettuce and peppers in season and have developed recipes to use other produce like kale and carrots. This year, for the first time, they bought 500 pounds of zucchini, which was delivered earlier this month and processed for use in zucchini breads. 'One of the goals is to get more fiber in the schools, through fruits and vegetables,' Mr. Davis said. Last year the children ate 10 to 20 percent more vegetables than they did in 2003, and purchases of local produce jumped to 38 percent from 8 percent, he said. The farm to cafeteria program in Albuquerque, where schools are on a year-round schedule, featured local peaches, blackberries, watermelon, green chilies, sunflower sprouts and a salad bar this summer. 'Albuquerque and Santa Fe are great markets for the small Hispanic producers I work with,' said Craig Mapel, a marketing specialist with the New Mexico Department of Agriculture. Fred Martinez of Dixon, N.M., has been selling apples to the program from his 18-acre orchard for several years. 'The program has helped stabilize our market,' he said. 'Before, we could sell only four or five weeks before the big fruit producing districts like Washington took over.' Ms. Bacelli's school districts keep increasing their program, too, as she finds creative ways to use more produce, like acorn squash in cookies and muffins. 'We're hoping that with the federal government's new wellness initiative, all the districts in our area will do what we're doing and buy local fruits and vegetables, she said. 'My other dream is to get the students to eat rutabagas. I pray every night for world peace and funding.' Among all of the nation's school districts, New York City, because of its sheer size, faces the most daunting problems in changing the menus and the culture: it serves 860,000 meals a day at 1,500 locations, said Ms. Adamick, of SchoolFood Plus. 'We are not operating under any delusion that this is a short-term project,' Ms. Adamick said. Her program, with $3 million funding for its first year, part of it from the Agriculture Department's nutrition education program for low-income people, was designed to improve eating habits at school - and, through them, academic performance - while strengthening the state's agricultural economy. 'We talk about this as a 30-year project,' said Ms. Adamick, an attorney and a former chef. 'We need to change an entire culture, and you know how long it has taken to change the social view on smoking. This is more difficult. We are taking small steps, getting apples, carrots, pears, even broccoli into the schools.' At the college and university level, using local food has many pluses, said Dr. S. Georgia Nugent, president of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. As colleges compete for students, locally grown food has become a marketing tool for baby boomer parents, who created the organic food movement, and their environmentally aware children. 'You get higher quality food and lower environmental impact,' Dr. Nugent said. 'You support the local economy. And it is a way of teaching young people about their local environment and connecting it with what happens internationally.' It also helps the town and gown relationship. 'It's so important for this college to be part of the place,' Dr. Nugent said over dinner on the eve of the second annual National Farm to Cafeteria Conference, which took place at Kenyon this summer. 'We are perceived as an elite institution on the hill, surrounded by a rural community. We needed to come down off the hill and be good neighbors. We wanted to make a tangible commitment to the local economy.' On a smaller scale, the University of Montana in Missoula increased its local purchases to 13 percent from 7 percent of its total in the second year of its program. 'Parents like it; students like it,' said Mark LoParco, the university's director of dining services. Among the local products are bread made from local wheat; burgers, chili and quesadillas from local beef; granola and tortillas; and potatoes, carrots, cherries, salad, even safflower oil and salsas. In addition to the health and taste advantages, Mr. LoParco said he finds other reasons to buy locally. 'This is a regional sustainability program,' he said. 'We do it for food security, which is pretty compelling, and for environmental reasons.' Some colleges feature occasional seasonal menus with local products. A number of them, including Bates College in Lewiston, Me.; Oberlin in Ohio; Ohio University in Athens; Berkeley College at Yale; and Penn College of Technology, an affiliate of Penn State, as well as Kenyon and Middlebury, offer menus on which 30 percent or more of the food is locally grown. Costs, a significant issue in public schools, are less an issue at the college level. Kenyon added $100,000 to its food budget to support its buy-local program. Middlebury College has not earmarked additional money, yet as much as 33 percent of the food it serves in its cafeterias comes from local sources, a figure Nan Jenks-Jay, director of environmental affairs at the college, describes as 'extremely high, considering we only have a 10-week growing season.' In the beginning of the farm-to-cafeteria movement, big food-service companies like Aramark and Sodexho, which run many college and university dining halls, made it difficult to buy locally, preferring to make one phone call. But John Orobono, the senior vice president of supply chain management at Aramark, said the company no longer tries to discourage its collegiate customers from buying local. He acknowledged that Aramark still has a lot to learn. 'Initially there may be costs which Aramark may decide to absorb,' Mr. Orobono said. 'We can't afford to pass them on because we have to be competitive. Aramark will not be left behind. 'We can move product from Chile, from the West Coast, but we are challenged by moving product from Camden to Philly,' he added. 'Hopefully, this whole program will grow, and then there will be normal profitability. I believe there is a groundswell.' Niles Gebele, Aramark's food service director at Kenyon, who helped pioneer the company's participation in such programs, said: 'It's a real departure from the traditional industrial supply source: one phone call and you get all your stuff. Now it's a little more complicated, but there is evidence that good operators can respond to this.' Serving local foods at public schools and colleges and universities 'is not just a fad,' said John Turenne, who was with Aramark for 25 years, most recently as the executive chef at Yale's Berkeley College. 'This is what we should be doing,' he said. 'The globalization of food, the hidden costs, the loss of nutrition: it's not healthy for the planet or for the human body.' Mr. Turenne, now a consultant, met Alice Waters when she instituted a pioneering food program at Berkeley College, where her daughter lived while attending Yale. She sent Mr. Turenne to work in the Chez Panisse kitchen, and he came out a changed man. 'Everything was bottom line and numbers, and now it's about the food,' he said. 'It was an epiphany.' The introduction to fresh local ingredients has been an epiphany for many young people, too. Kate Barney, who had been active in the farm to cafeteria program before graduating from Kenyon this June, talked about one of her fellow students, who clearly had never seen anything as lusciously red as the hydroponic tomatoes being served in the cafeteria. 'She asked me if they had been dyed,' Ms. Barney said.

Subject: Belfast Is Ready for the Party From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 10:58:33 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/travel/21belfast.html August 21, 2005 Belfast Is Ready for the Party to Begin By STUART EMMRICH BELFAST in the late 1980's was not what you would call an inviting spot. When I arrived there by train on a hot summer afternoon in 1989, I wandered Central Station for almost half an hour, hunting for a place to store my overstuffed backpack until I could find a hotel for the night. Finally, I approached a police officer and asked where I could find the lockers. 'Mate,' he said, looking at me as though I were an idiot. 'This is Belfast. There are no lockers anywhere in this town.' Indeed, on the streets were signs of a city still reeling from years of stealth attacks by the Irish Republican Army, a place in which an unoccupied locker could all too easily be the resting place for yet another explosive. Clusters of armed policemen patrolled the city center, machine guns at the ready. A long line of cars stretched out from an underground parking garage, as security personnel methodically searched each car trunk for possible weapons. At one point I even saw an armored tank pass by. Back then, the main tourism activity was to hire a cab to take you on a quick tour of the war zones that were the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods - and you typically had to get separate cabs to take you to each place, as no one driver would venture into both. In addition, you could experience the slightly uncomfortable thrill of staying in the Europa Hotel, often cited as 'the most bombed hotel in Europe.' I spent one night and caught the morning train to Dublin. Sixteen years later, Belfast is almost unrecognizable. The city center is now a thriving social hub - with young, well-dressed couples whiling away their weekend afternoons at a series of fashionable cafes. A clutch of boutique hotels and first-class restaurants has opened up in recent years, and there have been sightings of visiting celebrities like Bono, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt regularly reported by The Belfast Telegraph. Parts of the formerly neglected downtown are now vast construction sites, as developers have moved in to convert decaying mid-19th-century buildings into luxury condos and retail spaces. Striking new public buildings dot the waterfront, itself the recipient of a handsome promenade that rings the city's perimeter. Most surprising, during a three-day visit in late June, I saw almost no policemen on the streets, I experienced no searches by armed guards as I entered public buildings, and witnessed none of the fear and paranoia that seemed so common in 1989. And all this was still weeks before the announcement by the I.R.A. that it was renouncing all use of violence, the most significant step in the peace process since the 1994 cease-fire - giving even more hope to the locals that the violence of the city's past might one day be a distant memory. (One thing hadn't changed, however: there were still no lockers at the train station.) I had come to Belfast this summer because I had read about the city's renaissance and its somewhat unlikely emergence as a 'cool' tourist destination. Friends in England had mentioned that it had just started to become a popular weekend break for Londoners, and it had garnered some positive coverage in the European papers. Could it be true? Had the Belfast of my memories really become 'the new Dublin,' as it was often referred to in the press? Early signs were promising. On a busy Saturday afternoon, the lobby bar of the Malmaison Hotel, the latest British outpost of this trendy boutique hotel chain, was filled with a buzzing crowd of 20- and 30-somethings sipping glasses of white wine while a huge television set hanging from the ceiling played a nonstop loop of runway shows from the Fashion Channel. Across town, at yet another fashionably hip hotel, Ten Square, a dozen or so outdoor tables were filled with young patrons enjoying a leisurely brunch. Down the road, shoppers were streaming out of historic St. George's Market, their bags overflowing with fresh produce and local seafood from one of the market's 23 fish stalls. On the inviting green lawn that surrounds the city's architectural centerpiece - the imposing City Hall, built in the late 1890's in the Classical Renaissance style - practically every patch of green and all of the surrounding benches were filled with people grabbing a quick picnic lunch, or a restorative nap or just hanging out and gossiping with friends. Off to the side, a group of teenage goths were clustered in a sea of black while shoppers heading to the nearby mall looked on in amusement. Walking around the streets of Belfast, I found the incongruity of what I was seeing hard to ignore. As I watched young couples stroll along the waterfront walkway that meandered along the River Lagan, I flashed back to a documentary I vaguely recalled seeing sometime in the 1980's, in which a Catholic mother talked about having tarred and feathered her daughter because she had become involved with a British soldier. As I sat in one of the crowded cafes that surround Donegall Square sipping a cappuccino, or walked through the lush grounds of the Botanic Gardens, it was difficult to remember just how shocking it had been to read about the violence of Belfast in the 1970's and 80's, at a time when the notion of neighbors wantonly killing one another in the name of faith still seemed all but incomprehensible, and the term 'suicide bomber' was not yet a part of the vernacular. The most visible sign of Belfast's ambitions can be found in the city's Cathedral Quarter, an area just slightly northeast of the city center that the locals commonly refer to as 'our Temple Bar' - a reference to the once-crime-ridden, run-down neighborhood in Dublin that in the last decade has been transformed by the addition of trendy bars and restaurants into a vibrant gathering spot for both locals and tourists. Hints of an urban revival abound in this neighborhood (anchored by its namesake, St. Anne's Cathedral), with renovated storefronts pasted with 'for rent' signs and scaffolding surrounding the hollowed remains of decaying but gorgeous Victorian buildings - with billboards announcing them as the future homes of luxury apartments. An annual arts festival is now held here, and among the early tenants are local artists and a few small gallery spaces, including Belfast Exposed - the Contemporary Gallery of Photography. But, to be honest, the area has a way to go before it will come close to rivaling Temple Bar. There are only a few places to eat and drink in the neighborhood, and the ones that are open seem to do only middling business in the evening. Take the John Hewitt Bar, on Donegall Street, a comfortably well-worn establishment singled out by almost every guidebook as one of the most picturesque watering holes in the city. On the Sunday evening I went there, a local singer/guitarist - promoted all weekend with large placards in the windows of the pub - played to an audience of 11 people, including the two bartenders. (Give the bar credit, though: Its featured beer that week, Taybeh, was advertised as having come from Palestine and was being touted as the 'beer for peace.') What night life there is in the Cathedral District these days seems to be largely targeted toward gay Belfasters, with Kremlin and Mynt drawing large crowds of gays and lesbians of barely legal drinking age on the weekend, and Milk jammed with patrons well into the early morning hours for its Monday night gay-themed event, 'Forbidden Fruit.' Night life in general doesn't seem to be Belfast's strong suit. In fact, the city turns into a bit of a ghost town at night. The downtown shops close up by around 6. Most of the pubs empty soon after. Few customers show up at the cafes, and most of the restaurants are either closed or doing little business. What action there is seems to shift mostly to Botanic and Lisburn Roads, in the somewhat more lively residential neighborhoods about a half-hour walk away. An eerie stillness descends on the city center that's unlike any other I've experienced in Europe. (It feels almost like Atlanta or Detroit, cities where much of the downtown action abruptly ends when the workday is over and the office workers flee to the suburbs.) Even on Saturday nights, when the downtown bars are packed with patrons, there is little of the street action you would expect on a typical summer weekend in a metropolitan capital. One night, around 9:30, the midsummer sky still bright with light, I walked through downtown Belfast from a restaurant to my hotel, a journey of about 15 minutes. The entire time I saw only two other people and just a few passing cars. When I got to my hotel, I asked the woman at the front desk why the city was empty. 'Oh, no one lives in the city center,' she said. 'Everyone has gone home for the day.' If the night life disappointed, though, the restaurant scene did the opposite. In fact, the real renaissance in Belfast is a culinary one. Led largely by Paul Rankin - owner of two top-tier restaurants as well as a couple of casual cafes, and the host of a popular cooking show in Britain, 'Ready, Steady, Cook' - Belfast's restaurant scene is among the best in Britain. Mr. Rankin's latest venture, Cayenne, is on Shaftesbury Square, along the so-called Golden Mile. This area used to be the social center of Belfast, but a series of I.R.A. bombings in the 1970's and 1980's - with restaurants reopening and then shutting down again after another attack - eventually forced most businesses to shutter for good. It is only in the past couple of years that this stretch of Great Victoria Street is once again drawing visitors. On a Saturday night in late June, Cayenne was jammed. Though a friend had called two weeks in advance to reserve for the two of us, we couldn't get a table until 9:45. Arriving a few minutes early, we were seated in the bar area, and reclined on a comfortable couch while we ordered drinks and read over the menu. It looked promising, an intriguingly fusion take on some regional specialties, like a 'chargrilled Lough Neagh eel with Japanese pickled vegetables.' Soon we were in an inviting, softly illuminated room - tables of seemingly happy patrons buzzing around us - dipping into a superb risotto with locally caught lobster, prawns, cockles and squid and sampling a bracing, clear tomato soup with orzo and spring vegetables. About three hours later, and after a lengthy chat with the maître d'hôtel about the vibrant dining scene in Belfast, we headed out into the warm summer air and ambled along the mostly empty streets back to my hotel, the silence broken only by a lone bus going by, a handful of people sitting inside. Not for the last time, I wondered where everyone was. ON my last day in Belfast, I was walking down High Street when I spotted a group of map-clutching tourists boarding an open-top sightseeing bus. Might as well hop on, I thought. If nothing else, it would be a good way to kill an hour. (To be honest, after three days in Belfast I was running out of things to do. There are only so many times you can visit a botanic garden, and at 11 a.m., it was still a bit too early to hit the pubs.) We meandered through the city, admiring its architecture, learning more from the tour guide about Belfast's history as a shipbuilding center (the Titanic was built here, in a building that is being turned into a museum). We heard about all the new developments being planned for land that now lay fallow and overrun by weeds, and how most of the new buildings in town, particularly the Laganside Courts building, were incorporating huge swaths of glass into their design, 'as a gesture of faith in the peace process.' Then we turned onto Shankill Road. There before us was the Belfast of old - the rundown buildings; the grim faces of the passersby; the Union Jacks flying from almost every window, reminding those who might wish for a unified Ireland that this was still a land fiercely loyal to the British government. Most striking were the famous murals that decorated nearly every vacant wall - huge, crudely drawn paintings that vilified the Catholic citizens of this divided city and celebrated the Protestants who had died in battle with their crosstown adversaries. The scene was the same a few minutes later when we drove down Falls Road, the main artery of Catholic Belfast. No Union Jacks here, but plenty of murals as well - some praising the work of other 'liberators' - the P.L.O., E.T.A., the insurgents in Iraq trying to keep George Bush from taking their oil - as well as those honoring their own dead, most notably Bobby Sands, who died during a prison hunger strike in 1981. As we rumbled through the neighborhood, the mood turned somber, and idle conversation ceased. Even two teenage boys from New York who had been chattering nonstop fell silent, except for a mumbled 'This is intense' from one. At one point the guide casually pointed out a 70-foot-high fence that she said ran the length of the Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods and kept each side from crossing into each other's territory. Called the Peace Wall - a name that perhaps only George Orwell could fully appreciate - it was open for just a few hours each day from Monday through Friday, when traffic could be carefully monitored. Seeing it now, on a Sunday morning, shut tight and heavily barricaded, it stood as stark a symbol as the Berlin Wall, now fallen. It was a chilling moment, one whose force caught me by surprise. For it is one thing to have read all about 'the Troubles' and yet another to actually witness firsthand the legacy of this conflict. As the bus turned back toward town, and the spruced-up city center came back into view, my attitude toward Belfast began to change. Yes, the 'new' Belfast - the Belfast of outsized ambitions, and perhaps unrealistic expectations - clearly had far to go. But it had already come an awfully long way.

Subject: Mutiny by Slaves Off South Africa From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 10:48:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/international/africa/24slaves.html?ex=1282536000&en=4f423b31530b4b67&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 24, 2005 Tracing a Mutiny by Slaves Off South Africa in 1766 By SHARON LaFRANIERE STRUIS BAY, South Africa - After years of painstaking research and sophisticated surveys, Jaco Boshoff may be on the verge of a nearly unheard-of discovery: the wreck of a Dutch slave ship that broke apart 239 years ago on this forbidding, windswept coast after a violent revolt by the slaves. On the other hand, he may have discovered a wire fence covered with beach sand. Mr. Boshoff, a 39-year-old marine archaeologist with the government-run Iziko Museums, will not find out until he starts digging on this deserted beach on Africa's southernmost point, probably later this year. After three years of surveys with sensitive magnetometers, he knows, at least, where to look: at a clutch of magnetic abnormalities, three beneath the beach and one beneath the surf, near the mouth of the Heuningries River, where the 450-ton slave ship, the Meermin, ran aground in 1766. If he is right, it will be a find for the history books - especially if he recovers shackles, spears and iron guns that shed light on how 147 Malagasy slaves seized their captors' vessel, only to be recaptured. Though European nations shipped millions of slaves from Africa over four centuries, archaeologists estimate that fewer than 10 slave shipwrecks have been found worldwide. If he is wrong, Mr. Boshoff said in an interview, 'I will have a lot of explaining to do.' He will, however, have an excuse. Historical records indicate that at least 30 ships have run aground in the treacherous waters off Struis Bay, the earliest of them in 1673. Although Mr. Boshoff says he believes beyond doubt that remains of a ship are buried on this beach - the jagged timbers of a wreck are sometimes uncovered during September's spring tides - there is always the prospect that his surveys have found the wrong one. 'Finding shipwrecks is just so difficult in the first place,' said Madeleine Burnside, the author of 'Spirits of the Passage,' a book on the slave trade, and executive director of the Mel Fisher Maritime Heritage Society in Key West, Fla. 'Usually - not always - they are located by accident.' Other slave-ship finds have produced compelling historical evidence of both the brutality and the lucrative nature of the slave trade. From the British ship Henrietta Marie, the only slave ship ever excavated in American waters, archeologists recovered 80 sets of iron shackles, cast-iron cannons and pewter mugs. The Henrietta Marie, discovered in 1972, was partly reconstructed and turned into a popular museum exhibit that toured the United States. Now housed at the Maritime Heritage Society's museum, the exhibit depicts conditions aboard for 190 African slaves who were sold in Jamaica just before the vessel sank 35 miles off Key West around 1700. Archaeologists who excavated the Henrietta Marie were lucky to find the ship's bell engraved with its name. For Mr. Boshoff, who at every opportunity tramps about on this beach with a global positioning device, a measuring wheel and wooden marking poles, identifying a wreck may be more of challenge. His best hope of proving that any find is in fact the Meermin, he said, will be to unearth one of the Malagasy spears that records show were carried aboard the ship. The ship's final voyage is well documented in letters and court records in archives in Cape Town, which are being organized electronically by Andrew Alexander, a University of Cape Town history student who is working with Mr. Boshoff. The documents tell a story rife with folly, trickery, men tossed overboard, bottled messages, rescue ships gone awry and captives-turned-captors-turned-captives once more. In the end, half of the 60-member Dutch crew and perhaps dozens of slaves were killed. The surviving crew went down in ignominy for losing their ship; the Malagasy slaves met bondage and servitude. The Dutch East India Company dispatched the three-masted Meermin from Cape Town in December 1765 to buy slaves on the west coast of Madagascar, nearly 1,700 miles away. The growing Dutch settlement at Cape Town relied on slave labor, and the warring tribes on Madagascar were known to trade their captives to European merchants for guns and goods. In late January, the Meermin left Madagascar with 147 slaves, including some women and children. Fearful the slaves would die in the airless cargo hold, the ship's captain ordered at least some of them unchained and allowed on deck. Another senior officer decided to employ five slaves to clean spears and other weapons that the crew had picked up in Madagascar as souvenirs. It was a stunningly stupid move. Armed, the slaves killed about half the crew, stabbing them to death or tossing them overboard. Surviving sailors barricaded themselves in the ship's lower quarters, surviving on raw bacon, potatoes and brandy. Once they realized they could not sail the ship on their own, the Malagasy allowed several crew members on deck to guide them back to Madagascar. By day, the Dutch headed in the general direction of the island. But at night they steered full sail for Cape Town. By the end of February, they had made it to 90 miles east of Cape Town. Spotting shore, the slaves decided they had reached their homeland and dropped anchor in the bay. Seventy slaves piled into two small boats and headed ashore, promising to light three fires on the beach to signal the others if the land was Madagascar. They did not get far. Dutch farmers, suspicious of the stationary ship without a flag, had alerted the local magistrate and organized a force of local men to patrol the beach. When the slaves hit shore, they were killed or captured. For the next week, the Meermin remained at sea while the Malagasy aboard tried to figure out what had happened and the Dutch on shore tried to figure out what to do. At some point, records indicate, more slaves came ashore in a raft, spotted a black shepherd running away and decided they had reached Madagascar. Their fate is unclear. Dutch authorities in Cape Town dispatched two rescue ships, but neither managed to find Struis Bay. The Meermin's officers at sea were trying to communicate with the Dutch on shore by the only method at hand: letters in bottles. Two floated ashore, were retrieved and delivered to the magistrate on March 6. The officers asked for three fires to be lit on the beach to deceive Malagasy into letting the ship come ashore. 'Otherwise all will go immediately to their deaths,' one letter said. Another letter advised that the 'Neegers' were unaware of their location and could be caught off guard. The trick worked. The ship sailed toward the beach, hitting a sandbar. Confronted with the Dutch force, the slaves gave up. For a week, the Dutch authorities worked to retrieve the ship's goods, recovering 286 muskets, 12 pistols, 5 bayonets, compasses and barrels of gunpowder and musket balls. They held an auction on the beach of ship cables, ropes and other less valuable items, then left the broken Meermin to be swallowed up by sand. Much has transpired on this beach since then. Before the area became part of a nature reserve, fishermen drove up and down it. One farmer erected a fence. Valuable artifacts uncovered by the tides over centuries could now be sitting in someone's garage. When he first saw the vast expanse of sand near the river's mouth, Mr. Boshoff said with a grin, he thought to himself: 'Phew! What have I let myself in for.' On the other hand, the sand might have preserved what water would have destroyed. Historical records suggest that the ship went down in or near the river's mouth, narrowing the search for its remains. Mr. Boshoff has also retrieved the ship's original blueprints, which will help him identify its size and shape. His research is financed by a grant from the South African lottery board, which sometimes uses profits to back heritage projects. He describes himself affably as 'a one-man show.' Major potential donors, like the Dutch government, want to see proof of the Meermin's remains before signing on to his project, he said. Eventually he hopes to generate enough interest to search for other slave wrecks in the vicinity, including the French ship Jardinière, which sank 28 years after the Meermin in the same bay. 'This is a long-term thing,' he said. 'Twenty years, plus.' Mr. Boshoff's field reports dutifully note both his struggles and his strides. His first efforts to find the Meermin involved lashing a magnetometer to a foam surfboard and towing it down the beach behind a 4-by-4 vehicle. The next day, he hammered a six-and-a-half-foot pole into the sand at the points where the device had recorded the presence of metal, hoping to hit something. 'This was a singularly unsuccessful exercise,' reads his report of November 2002. Later he determined the device was too rudimentary to register the presence of any metal deeper than five feet or provide accurate readings. Subsequent surveys from the air and on the ground went better. Last week Anglo-American, the mining and natural resources conglomerate, lent Mr. Boshoff a $40,000 magnetometer and the services of Albert Mandobe, a field assistant. For days Mr. Mandobe painstakingly paced the beach with a nine-foot metal pole strapped to his shoulder while the device recorded each magnetic abnormality as precisely as an electrocardiogram records heartbeats. The magnetometer's measurements will be used to design a contour map that Mr. Boshoff says will guide excavation. Three sites look promising. The fourth, Mr. Boshoff has concluded, is probably the buried fence. Success, he predicted, would ultimately be a combination of patience, skill and resources. Plus, he added, a measure of 'blind luck.'

Subject: Food for Niger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 09:46:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/opinion/l24niger.html August 24, 2005 Food for Niger To the Editor: Sophia Murphy faults the slow international response in Niger for the deaths from starvation. In fact, it is the American food aid programs she calls 'outdated' that have prevented many deaths and a more widespread famine. Nongovernmental organizations, like my own, have been responding to the crisis in the Sahel for the last 10 months and have been working for years on projects that help ensure improved food security. Catholic Relief Services began activities in Niger in which farmers were given vouchers they used to obtain locally appropriate seeds. These farmers were significantly less affected by this latest crisis. Tragically, because of limited resources, we were not able to reach more people. Ms. Murphy's call for more cash-based aid merits consideration. But the right parameters must be set in place to ensure that local purchases do not distort local markets, raising prices beyond the reach of people who could normally buy their own food. Ken Hackett President, Catholic Relief Services Baltimore, Aug. 19, 2005

Subject: Re: Food for Niger From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 13:34:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma, did you read my response to a similar posting on this topic? (I noticed that the posting was pushed off the board)

Subject: Re: Food for Niger From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 14:33:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I always read and usually save your responses. I noticed at once that your response was in kind with this letter. The discussion is important and will continue as the problem continues. Continue to add your insights.

Subject: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 09:25:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/business/worldbusiness/24cnd-china.html August 24, 2005 Switch in Europe: Now Says It Needs Chinese Textiles By THOMAS FULLER - International Herald Tribune PARIS - After months of complaining about a surge of textiles from China, officials in Europe now say they may not be able to live without them - at least not in the short term. Representatives from the 25 countries of the European Union met in Brussels today to address what retailers are describing as an emergency situation: nearly 75 million sweaters, bras and T-shirts, among other clothing, are blocked at European ports. European officials say they are considering a renegotiation of a deal struck in June between Brussels and Beijing that put quotas on Chinese-made clothing and textiles. 'The agreement provides for a certain flexibility,' a spokeswoman for the European Commission, Krisztina Nagy, said today. 'What has to be seen is what kind of adjustment or solution can be found to unblock the situation.' A team of European Union negotiators will leave for Beijing after the meeting in Brussels, probably later today, Ms. Nagy said. If the Europeans agree to significantly water down the quotas, it would be a political victory for Beijing, which is also holding talks with the United States over limiting textile exports. One indicator of the triumphant mood in China came from the Beijing News, which ran a cartoon in today's editions showing four half-naked Europeans standing on a dock holding a welcome sign as a Chinese ship loaded with clothes anchored offshore, according to Agence France-Presse in Beijing. European officials have suggested that one solution would be to allow retailers to use up next year's quotas immediately, thus allowing the clothing into stores in time for this fall and winter season, especially Christmas. But reaching agreement among the E.U.'s 25 countries may be difficult. The governments of Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden and Finland have been vocal in condemning the quotas, which they say are hurting their retailers and other textile-related industries such as design and marketing companies. Southern countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Greece - where the bulk of Europe's textile industry is based - were the most vocal in calling for the quota protection. Europe's textile industry employs 2.5 million people, according to William Lakin, director general of Euratex, a Brussels lobbying group for the textile industry. Mr. Lakin said textiles make up 7 percent of Europe's manufacturing sector. 'The trade is not fundamentally fair trade,' Mr. Lakin said in an interview today. 'If you actually put together a cost analysis in most of these cases of what the price amounts to - from the raw material, the processing, the dying, the finishing, the cutting, the sewing, plus the cost of freight and insurance - you reach cost levels which are substantially in excess of those being landed in Europe.' Retailers, by contrast, say Europe's textile quotas run the risk of leaving empty shelves across Europe in the coming weeks. They complain that the European Commission, which negotiates trade agreements on behalf of the Union, acted too quickly in imposing the quotas. 'The shortages in stores will become visible in early September when people are back from holiday and shops start selling the autumn and winter collections,' said Ralph Kamphöner, a senior adviser for international trade at Eurocommerce, a Brussels-based organization that represents Europe's retail sector. 'We want free trade,' Mr. Kamphöner said. 'Only in a free trade environment are we in a position to offer consumers a choice of the best products at the best available price.' Chinese textile imports surged both to the United States and Europe early this year after a global system of country-specific quotas expired.

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 17:46:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Now would be a good time to start discussing the implementation of employment laws in China that resemble the employment laws of Europe. Issues such as allowing for unions, minimum wage regulations, working environment regulations, etc, etc. If we are going to allow free trade, lets make it fair. Let's ensure that workers in China are entitled to the same laws protecting workers in Europe, especially if we are going to buy their products. ps: note that I made reference to European labour laws and not American (or Canadian) cause I believe labour laws in North America are simply terrible.... but that is my opinion.

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: Poyetas To: Mik Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 05:01:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I'm no expert in labour laws, but I can guarantee you that some of the labour laws in at least Germany are ridiculous. The no work on Sunday rule is the perfect example. Nevertheless, I do agree in general that working in Europe is much more relaxed and practical than in North America (I have now done both). On the free trade note, I think we can all forget about imposing labour regulations on the Chinese. How are you going to enforce such a thing? Unless there is a huge switch in consumer choice, this will never happen. I remember talking to a metal stamping machine manufacturer in Canada a while back. He told me he wanted to sell a 500M machine to China. The safety features (to insure nobody lost any limbs) made up 20M of the total cost. The chinese buyer told him that he would buy the machine if the manufacturer got rid of the safety features to lower the price. His logic was that he had such a supply of labour that if one guy lost an arm he could replace him with someone else at no cost. This is the mentality in these countries. The value of human life is less than in our society. We can't expect to go in and impose a whole new set of rules. Its like Russia today, I hate to say it, a primitive socio-economic system. Kind of like the US and England one hundred years ago. Like Mexico 5 years ago. Its a gradual process. Remember how everyone was complaining about Mexico and the maquiladoras a while back? I agree that things should be different, but we would be ignoring our own history if we expect to change these things in the short-term.

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: RL To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 08:47:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: well said poyetas. Fully agree. Lets hope the dynamics of china growth will incresingly make more difficult for them to exploit labour. If we try to impose labour regulations or trade cuotas we will only make it more difficult for them. Nothing is endless not even over suplly of hand labour in china

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: Emma To: RL Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 09:05:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Agreed with this series of comments, but America, Europe and Japan need to continue to emphasize human rights obligations of the Chinese leadership.

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: RL To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 11:31:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Continue? there is not much of that really. They all seem more interested in the geostartgic political game with China than anything else. But you are right they should ... In any case human rights and and political freedom is not the same as labour regulation. Also is funny(sad kind of funny) that some people look more interestred in labour regulations than in political freedom in China.

Subject: Re: Europe Says It Needs Chinese Textiles From: Emma To: RL Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 12:36:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: RL Notice the article below on the many mnay protests in China, largely environmental and labor protests. I would like us to view labor and environmental and human rights as being completely blended, so I use human rights as the broadest category. The strategic competition will only be satisfied as all concerned become more concerned with human rights or democracy. I agree with your direction.

Subject: Whoa From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 25, 2005 at 16:55:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Slow down - before human rights, let's just ensure that no arms and legs were lost in the manufacture of my t-shirt. In the same way we go after companies like Nike for supporting 'sweat shops' we should impose tarifs or quotas on products that are not made under 'normalised' labour laws. It isn't too involved and sophisticated and we are not trying to cause a revolution. Just ensure fait trade. In the same way that American, Japanese and European salaries were allowed to go up guarded by labour laws, so too should China. The big difference is that China is a communist country and there is no freedom to allow for labour development. In essence WE are supporting this distorted situation by buying so heavily. This is utter BULL!! and it must stop. In the same way that we view products that come from 'sweat shops' we should view products that come from factories that have no respectable labour laws. There should be no difference. China badly needs our money, and we badly need them to liberate. Why are we giving in?

Subject: Practicing Medicine Without a Swagger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 07:20:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/health/23essa.html August 23, 2005 Practicing Medicine Without a Swagger By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. It was hard not to feel entitled when working 36 hours straight as a medical resident. By the end of my shift, I found myself interrupting conversations and being rude to co-workers and even patients. After all, I had been up all night. But it was not only long call nights that allowed physicians to rule the roost. For decades, doctors enjoyed privileges and perquisites that made colleagues alternately envious and furious. But these days, doctors are less likely to be treated like royalty than - egads! - like employees. How are we dealing with this? Physicians actually enjoyed relatively little power until the early 20th century. Then, a series of scientific discoveries, most notably the germ theory of disease, enhanced what the sociologist Paul Starr called the 'cultural authority' of the medical profession. With improved tools like insulin, penicillin and the polio vaccine, the reputation of doctors accelerated further over the coming decades. As communities and charitable agencies built hospitals, they rewarded their medical staffs. Doctors were given their own parking lots, replete with personalized nameplates. They ate separately in special doctors' dining rooms. Nurses and other employees parked and ate in regular areas, often alongside the public. Rewarded in terms of money and prestige, some physicians became vain and arrogant, making extraordinary demands and openly misbehaving. Most notorious were certain surgeons who ran operating rooms like fiefs, screaming at staff members and even throwing surgical instruments to signify their discontent. Why was such behavior tolerated? To start with, physicians often ran hospitals and thus made exceptions for their peers, especially those who saved lives. Indeed, recalls Dr. Arthur H. Aufses Jr., professor of surgery at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, people who complained about surgeons were themselves at risk of being fired. One of the best depictions of surgical bravado occurs in the 1991 film 'The Doctor,' in which William Hurt plays Dr. Jack McKee, an arrogant surgeon who eventually develops cancer. In one scene, Mr. Hurt's character, accompanied by a crowd of overeager residents, brusquely dismisses a chaplain from a patient's bedside with a shake of his head. The message is clear: the doctor trumps even God. It was not only surgeons strutting around the hospital halls. Internists and other physicians ignored or made fun of patients who annoyed them, behaviors best depicted in the 1978 novel 'The House of God.' When I was a house officer in the 1980's, certain residents explicitly modeled themselves after the book's 'Fat Man,' who was less interested in patient care than in giving patients derogatory nicknames and in entertaining his peers. How and why did things begin to change? For one thing, society changed. By the 1970's, thanks to the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, authority figures were under attack. Physicians were not immune, especially those who had participated in unethical activities, like the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Suddenly, things like doctors' parking lots and dining rooms seemed to underscore medicine's elitist nature. Women entering the profession also played a crucial role. Men, who constituted a vast majority of physicians, could act out, but women could not. When Dr. Bonnie L. Bermas, now on the Harvard faculty, was training in the 1980's, she always felt she had to be on her best behavior, she said. As the percentage of women in medicine grew, fraternitylike behaviors became increasingly unacceptable. A more humane schedule is also a factor. New regulations have made the 36-hour shift a thing of the past. It is harder for doctors to expect favors when they are working shifts like everyone else. Most hospital employees, including physicians, believe that the humbling of doctors has been for the best. The 'days of the giants' may have been fun, but humanistic patient care has become paramount. There are still occasional reminders of the past, however. For example, almost everyone involved in clinical care - nurses, social workers and nutritionists - is generally addressed by his or her first name. Yet physicians are still called 'Dr. Smith' or 'Dr. Jones,' even, I might add, when they ask to be called by their first names. And there are also the periodic perks. One morning last winter, I stopped by the employee health department to get a flu shot. Because of the earlier shortages, about a dozen employees were waiting ahead of me. Soon the nurse who was to administer the shots appeared. She had known me since I was a resident. When she spied me, she asked, 'Doctor, what are you doing here?' Waiting for a flu shot, I explained. 'You get in here right now,' she said. I paused for a moment, nervously glanced around the room, and quietly followed her into her office. Barron H. Lerner is an associate professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University.

Subject: It's Google's Turn as the Villain From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 07:12:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/technology/24valley.html August 24, 2005 Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain By GARY RIVLIN SAN FRANCISCO - For years, Silicon Valley hungered for a company mighty enough to best Microsoft. Now it has one such contender: the phenomenally successful Google. But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat. A year after the company went public, those inside Google are learning the hard way what it means to be the top dog inside a culture accustomed to pulling for the underdog. And they are facing a hometown crowd that generally rebels against anything that smacks of corporate behavior. Nowadays, when venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and technologists gather in Silicon Valley, they often find themselves grousing about Google, complaining about everything from a hoarding of top engineers to its treatment of partners and potential partners. The word arrogant is frequently used. The news last week that Google plans to sell an additional 14 million shares of stock, adding $4 billion to its current cash reserves of $3 billion, will only provide more reasons to gripe. 'I've definitely been picking up on the resentment,' said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. 'They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do.' Mr. Levchin, who last year founded a multimedia company in San Francisco called Slide, said Google 'still has a long wick of good will to burn off,' but he added, 'I'm surprised at how fast the company's reputation is changing.' It was not that long ago that Google reigned here as the upstart computer company that could do no wrong. Now some working in the technology field are starting to draw comparisons between Google and Microsoft, the company in Redmond, Wash., that Silicon Valley loves most to hate. Bill Gates certainly sees similarities between Google and his own company. This spring, in an interview with Fortune, Mr. Gates, Microsoft's chairman, said that Google was 'more like us than anyone else we have ever competed with.' Google's success has already spurred Microsoft to develop its own Internet search engine (a project code-named Underdog), but Google has legions of engineers banging away on a range of projects of its own that, if successful, could dislodge Microsoft from the pre-eminent spot it has enjoyed since the early 1980's. Of course, Silicon Valley has had past pretenders to the throne. Netscape, which went public 10 years ago this month, and its Web browser, Navigator, were supposed to fell Microsoft - but it is Netscape that is no longer in business. And while Google is riding high, those closely following the company caution that it is hardly invincible; an inflated stock price, a desire to compete in too many sectors simultaneously or simple hubris might cause it to stumble, they say. Even Microsoft, after all, has had legal troubles. Still, similarities between Google and Microsoft are evident to local entrepreneurs including Steven I. Lurie, who worked at Microsoft between 1993 and 1999 but now lives in San Francisco, and Joe Kraus, a founder of the 1990's search firm Excite. 'There's that same 'think big' attitude about markets and opportunities,' said Mr. Lurie, who has visited the Google campus in Mountain View many times to see friends who work there. 'Maybe you can call it arrogance, but there's that same sense that they can do anything and get into any area and dominate.' To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a 'gentle giant' that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an 'extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything.' Now, in the view of Mr. Kraus, 'Microsoft is becoming I.B.M. and Google is becoming Microsoft.' Mr. Kraus is the chief executive and a founder of JotSpot, a Silicon Valley start-up hoping to sell blogging and other self-publishing tools to corporations. Just as Microsoft has been seen over the years as an aggressive, deep-pocketed competitor for talent, Internet start-ups in Silicon Valley complain that virtually every time they try to recruit a well-regarded computer programmer, that person is already contemplating an offer from Google. 'Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did,' said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. 'It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.' Google, Mr. Hoffman said, has caused 'across the board a 25 to 50 percent salary inflation for engineers in Silicon Valley' - or at least those in a position to weigh competing offers. A sought-after computer programmer can now expect to make more than $150,000 a year. David C. Drummond, vice president for corporate development at Google, acknowledged that the company was 'very competitive' in its pursuit of talent, but added: 'We're very sensitive to how everybody is perceiving us. We think the Silicon Valley ecosystem is critical for Google's success.' Google is also making it more difficult for some start-ups to raise funds. In the second half of the 1990's, entrepreneurs frequently complained that the specter of Microsoft hung over their every conversation with venture capitalists. Today, they say the same about Google. 'When I meet with venture capitalists, or if I'm engaged in a conversation about going into partnership with someone, inevitably the question is, 'Why couldn't Google do what you're doing?' ' said Craig Donato, the founder and chief executive of Oodle, a site for searching online classified listings more quickly. 'The answer is, 'They could, and they're probably thinking about it, but they can't do everything and do it well,' ' Mr. Donato said. 'Or at least I'm hoping they can't.' Google has already added free e-mail, mapping, news aggregation and digital-photo management to its offerings, bringing it into competition in each case with two or more rivals. On Wednesday, it will announce plans for an instant-messaging system. And its plans for a new stock issue are fueling speculation that it is preparing to enter any number of other markets, from services for mobile phone users to an online payment service that would compete with PayPal. Add to that list an Internet-based phone system and several products that would be directly aimed at Microsoft, including a Google browser and a software offering that would compete with Microsoft Office. 'If there's a perception that we're exploring lots of different areas, some of which might not be directly related to our core area of search, that's true,' said Mr. Drummond, the Google vice president. 'It's part of our DNA to be always innovating and exploring lots of different areas.' Yet so driven has Google been in its pursuit of new markets that at least a few in Silicon Valley are using an epithet to taunt Google that people here once reserved for Microsoft: 'The Borg,' a reference to an army of creatures in 'Star Trek: The Next Generation' that took over civilization after civilization with machinelike precision. Perhaps an anti-Google reaction was to be expected, given the glowing press the company has enjoyed for several years. Or maybe the carping and complaining is the inevitable reaction to a company so successful that it cannot help stomping on toes, even if accidentally. 'Hubris is an issue at every one of these Silicon Valley companies that are successful,' said Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal who has invested in roughly 15 Internet start-ups in recent years. 'I don't know if it's any worse at Google than it's been at other highly successful technology companies.' Aggressiveness is another signal trait among successful companies like Google - something those in parts of the media world are starting to learn. Google recently announced that it would not talk to any reporter from CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, until July 2006, after a reporter for the site wrote an article raising privacy questions about the information Google collects about individuals. The company also provoked the ire of many within the blogging world - not to mention snarky comments in Silicon Valley from those thinking Google was behaving like an old-line company that doesn't get it - when earlier this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer. 'Google is at that inflection point where it's starting to act like an establishment company, and Silicon Valley is a rebel culture,' said Gautam Godhwani, a founder and chief executive at Simply Hired, an online employment site. Microsoft, of course, has its hold on the Windows world - and a market capitalization almost four times Google's. By contrast, switching to a new search engine is as easy as calling up another Web page - if a new company is able to do to Google what Google did to some of the earliest leaders of search, including AltaVista and Excite. For the moment, at least, Google is aiming for that most coveted position in technology: a platform that, like Microsoft's operating system, is so popular that outside software developers write programs, and Web developers build new Google-related services, that render the Google home page indispensable to the personal computer ecosystem. 'In the day, you'd hear that Microsoft was the evil empire, especially in Silicon Valley,' said Brian Lent, the president of Medio Systems, a start-up in Seattle working on mobile-phone-based search. 'Google is the new evil empire, because they're in such a powerful position in terms of control. They have potential monopolistic control over access to information.' Mr. Lent, who worked closely with Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, when all three were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, helped introduce Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to one of the company's earliest investors. 'I like and respect the Google guys,' Mr. Lent said, 'but let's just say that their ultimate aim seems to me to be, 'One Google under Google, for which it stands.' '

Subject: Chapter 12 and its appendix From: Yann To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 07:02:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.worthpublishers.com/krugmanwellsnew/pdf/KRUGMAN_WELLS_MACRO_CHAPTER12.pdf and http://www.worthpublishers.com/krugmanwellsnew/pdf/KRUGMAN_WELLS_MACRO_CHAPTER_APPENDIX.pdf

Subject: Asset Values From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 06:24:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Just a thought that occured to me as I was reading the funny post making fun of Luskin. He says that in an efficient market you capture all the present and future cash flows from that asset in the price so the net result is zero. This however, must prove that open markets are inefficient because if this were the case (efficient markets), no one would ever buy IBM stock. The reason a stock market exists is because of differing expectations. This leads to the main point, which is, how can we estimate the future cash flows generated by asset x?? Is this not a function of how the asset is managed during the course of its life? A good manager will increase the PV of cash flows from an asset more than a bad manager, meaning that the value must be different depending on how that asset is used and the environment it operates in. The point is, its all relevant! Its all speculative! There is no intristic absolute value! So why look to the markets for growth??? Good management (caused by good education) and a good environment (caused by a solid social program and strong macroeconomic policies) will drive prospertiy into the future.

Subject: Re: Asset Values From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 09:18:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: An interesting argument, to which I agree. Growth comes from using macro-policy to properly stimulate overall demand with minimal inflation, while using micro-policy to make sure markets operate fairly for producers and consumers. Markets are not contimnually self-regulating nor do they sustain growth continually.

Subject: Land of 74,000 Protests (Little Fixed) From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 06:20:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/24/international/asia/24letter.html August 24, 2005 Land of 74,000 Protests (but Little Is Ever Fixed) By HOWARD W. FRENCH SHANGHAI - There is a growing uneasiness in the air in China, after months of increasingly bold protests rolling across the countryside. For reasons that range from rampant industrial pollution to widespread evictions and land seizures by corrupt local governments in cahoots with increasingly powerful property developers, ordinary Chinese seem to be saying they are fed up and won't take it any more. Each week brings news of at least one or two incidents, with thousands of villagers in a pitched battle with the police, or bloody crackdowns in which hundreds of protesters are tear-gassed and clubbed during roundups by the police. And by the government's own official tally, hundreds of these events each week escape wider public attention altogether. No one is ready to predict that this is the beginning of any great unraveling of an authoritarian state that has, over the last two decades, largely brought social peace and a reprieve from demands for political change by delivering breakneck economic growth. But the response by the Chinese authorities, a mixture of alarm and seeming disarray, is a clear indication that whatever is brewing here is being taken with utmost seriousness at the summit of power. Last week, for example, the government announced it was setting up special police units in 36 cities to put down riots and counter what the authorities say is the threat of terrorism. With the exception of infrequent incidents involving Uighur separatists in the remote western region of Xinjiang, terrorism is all but unheard of in China. On the evidence, it would seem the authorities are most concerned about what Zhou Yongkang, the public security minister, told Reuters last month were the 74,000 mass incidents, or demonstrations and riots, that occurred in 2004, an increase from 58,000 the year before, and only 10,000 a decade ago. Other signs of mounting concern over this unrest are just as telling. This week, The Liberation Army Daily quoted a notice by the armed forces warning soldiers that they would be 'severely penalized' for taking part in petitions or demonstrations. The statement appeared to be prompted by a series of recent protests by veterans over their pension benefits at a People's Liberation Army office in Beijing. News of the antiriot brigades coincided with an order to police chiefs nationwide to meet with 'petitioners' lodging complaints about this or that issue. The order seems to be an attempt to nip localized discontent in the bud before it can turn into outright protest or disorder. The entire campaign appears to have been kicked off with a strongly worded recent editorial, published in People's Daily, the Communist Party's mouthpiece, under the headline 'Maintain Stability to Speed Development.' The commentary warned citizens to obey the law, saying threats to social order would not be tolerated. In the last two weeks, the demonstrations have come to Shanghai, a showcase city that is among the country's most tightly policed, and where public protests are relatively rare. Day after day recently, the angry complaints of citizens could be heard in the heart of downtown here, especially across the street from the elegant exhibition center where city government was in session. In one protest, middle-aged residents invoked rebellious slogans from their youth during the Cultural Revolution, reportedly saying things like 'to rebel is just' as they denounced summary evictions to make way for high-rise developers and demanded fair compensation. On another day, in the same spot, a separate group of elderly residents, also angry about evictions, chanted the name of the city's party secretary, saying, 'Chen Liangyu, step down!' Nearby, a mother and her children, whom she has been unable to place in local schools, hoisted a sign whose bold characters read, 'Why do we need to bear the consequences of government non-performance?' A half-block away, restaurant workers massed to protest their dismissal by what they said were hired gangsters in favor of cheaper out-of-town employees. Taxi drivers, meanwhile, embittered over a steep increase in gasoline protests, have been discussing a mass work stoppage for Sept. 1. While Beijing focuses on the need for more policing and a more accountable local government, many Chinese identify official corruption as the biggest source of their woes. Many political analysts say the Chinese system of government, based on a monopolization of power by the Communist Party, inhibits transparency and prevents the development of the kinds of checks and balances that would help limit corruption and give citizens an outlet for their anger, along with a means for redressing grievances. 'There are a great many socioeconomic factors to stimulate protest, such as the increasing gap between rich and poor and many land and environmental factors,' said Wu Guoguang, a former government adviser and People's Daily editorialist who now teaches political science at the University of Victoria, in Canada. 'But the masses are angry basically because of abuse of power by party officials. If the government were clean and efficient, things would be much calmer. But the perception is that the officials don't want to pursue the state's interests, so much as pursue their own interests - both legal and illegal.' By contrast, in Japan, an outbreak of severe nervous system disorders in Minamata during the 1950's was traced to industrial dumping of mercury compounds into a local river basin. Citizens sued and obtained compensation, along with the enforcement of strict new environmental guidelines. In China, cases of dangerous industrial pollution are rife, even if their full human toll is not yet known. But local authorities often side with industrial interests, and the courts provide little relief. 'What the government has used mostly is administrative means to promote what it calls a 'harmonious society,' which means making security officials meet with petitioners, or forcing people found responsible for various things to resign,' said Mao Shoulong, an expert in public policy at People's University in Beijing. 'These approaches can solve some problems, but they create other ones. The reliance on the government has become ever larger, and this creates a huge administrative burden, with the government becoming a firefighter, rushing from problem to problem without ever really solving anything.'

Subject: US obesity rate is up From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 17:59:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Below is a long winded article explaining how the US obesity rate is up. There is actually an intriguing econmic solution for this. Simply put - there is a direct link between obesity and health costs. Right now, the US system can just cope. All the US needs to do is implement a system where medical insurance will decrease according to a scale on how your weight decreases. In essence for those who are obese, the more you lose weight, the more you save. Make them think with their wallat. *cough*, this applies to Paul Krugman (he isn't exactly skinny ;-D) Here is the article: WASHINGTON (AP) - Like a lot of people, the nation's weight problem is settling below its waistline. The states with the highest percentages of obese adults are mostly in the South: Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia, Louisiana and Tennessee. In the entire nation, only Oregon isn't getting fatter. Some 22.7 percent of American adults were obese in the 2002-04 period, up slightly from 22 percent for 2001-03, says the advocacy group Trust for America's Health, citing data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Alabama had the biggest increase. There, the obesity rate increased 1.5 percentage points to 27.7 percent. Eight states came in under 20 percent: Colorado, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Montana, Utah and New Hampshire. But their figures were all rising. Oregon held steady at 21 percent. Hawaii was not included in the group's report Tuesday. While certain regions of the country fared worse than others, particularly the Southeast, the organization said that no state met the federal government's goal of a 15 percent obesity rate for adults by 2010. An adult with a body mass index of 30 or more is considered obese. The equation used to figure body mass index is body weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared. The measurement is not a good indicator of obesity for muscular people who exercise a lot. 'Bulging waistlines are growing and it's going to cost taxpayers more dollars regardless of where you live,' said Shelley Hearne, the organization's executive director. Why the geographic patterns? Experts don't have any one clear answer. Some suggest that urban sprawl plays a role. Others say it's easier to find a burger and fries than apples and asparagus in poor communities. Dr. Delia West, a professor of public health in Arkansas, said demographics play a part. The South has a larger percentage of minorities, who have shown an increased risk for obesity. She said Southerners also tend to lead a more sedentary lifestyle than their counterparts in states such as Colorado or Oregon. People will find fewer jogging trails in Little Rock than in Denver, she said. Also, the Southern diet probably plays a role, said West, a professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. 'We know the difference between purple hulled peas and speckled butter beans,' she said. 'But we make them with bacon fat or salt pork, so even though we're getting the micronutrients, it often comes laden with these extra calories.' Hearne said the United States is stuck in a 'debate limbo' about how to confront obesity. She urged government action on several fronts, such as ensuring that land use plans promote physical activity, that school lunch programs serve more healthful meals, and that Medicaid recipients get access to subsidized fitness programs, such as aerobics classes at the local YMCA. Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, said he was wary of the call for more government action on obesity. The institute is a think tank that prefers free-market approaches to problems. 'I think obesity is a very personal issue. What you eat and how often you exercise, if that comes within the government's purview, it's difficult to think of what's left that isn't,' Balko said. Health policy analysts maintain that obesity increases the burden on taxpayers because it requires the Medicare and Medicaid programs to cover the treatment of diseases caused by obesity. The report issued Tuesday said taxpayers spent $39 billion in 2003 for the treatment of conditions attributable to obesity. Balko said it's not clear the government really knows how to persuade people to make better decisions. He said open-ended entitlement programs, such as Medicaid and Medicare, don't provide much of a financial incentive for people to watch their weight. The government just picks up the cost of treating diseases for those patients, regardless of the amounts, he said. He prefers that the government give Medicaid and Medicare recipients an incentive to open medical savings accounts, which would allow them to save money when they do not access the health care system. 'If they knew they only had so much to spend, or what they did not spend could be saved, then maybe you could instill a certain sense of responsibility and ownership,' Balko said.

Subject: If the Contrarians Are at the Gate From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 13:21:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21stra.html?ex=1282276800&en=7db9061d1b64a90a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 21, 2005 If the Contrarians Are at the Gate, They May Just Be Lost By MARK HULBERT SOME financial advisers who watch the VIX, a Chicago Board Options Exchange index that reflects traders' expectations of volatility in the stock market, have come to resemble cowboys patrolling their camp at night: They worry that trouble must be brewing when it becomes too quiet. But however valuable that assumption may have been in the Wild West, it has not proved to be a profitable way of interpreting the VIX. The C.B.O.E. created the VIX in 1993 to measure the expectations that options traders had about the volatility, or short-term price movements, of the stock market. The VIX is determined by a complex formula that is based on the assumption that, other things being equal, options will trade for higher prices when expected volatility rises. The VIX currently stands at 13.42, which is lower than about 79 percent of the index's past readings. Its historical range extends from a low of 9.31 in December 1993, to a high of 45.74 in October 1998. The exchange refers to the VIX as an 'investor fear gauge,' and the index quickly found a following among a group of market timers known as contrarians. They believe that the stock market rarely moves in the direction that the majority expects; therefore, they are bullish for the overall market when the VIX is high and indicating widespread investor fear. By the same token, they are bearish when, like today, the VIX is low and betraying investor complacency. Researchers, however, have been able to find only partial historical support at best for this interpretation of the VIX. According to a recent Hulbert Financial Digest study, the stock market has indeed tended to turn in an above-average performance following very high VIX readings - just as contrarians say. But contrary to what contrarians believe, the stock market has also produced above-average returns following very low readings. Indeed, the stock market has tended to turn in some of its worst months after VIX readings that are neither very high nor very low, but more or less in the middle of the pack. At the stock market's top in March 2000, for example, the VIX stood at 23.31, only moderately higher than its historical average of 19.7. During the 2000-2002 bear market, the average VIX level was 25.31, and never fell below 16. Even though their bearish interpretation of low VIX readings turns out to be wrong, contrarians may still try to find comfort in the Hulbert Financial Digest finding that above-average market returns tend to follow high VIX readings. But it would be a mistake to credit the VIX for this, according to Samuel Eisenstadt, senior vice president and research director at Value Line Inc. in New York. Mr. Eisenstadt argues that the root cause of the market's propensity to rise after high VIX readings has little to do with the index itself. Instead, he says, it is caused primarily by the market's tendency to reverse itself following sharp declines. Mr. Eisenstadt found that, once he controlled for those declines in his statistical tests, high VIX readings lost their apparent ability to forecast strong market action. Does the VIX, nevertheless, have a role to play as a contrarian market-timing tool? Some market timers think it does, provided they focus on its recent trend rather than its actual level. These contrarians consider fast rises in the VIX to be bullish, on the theory that investors are quickly becoming scared. By the same token, rapid declines are taken to be bearish, since it must mean that investors are becoming smugly confident. The Hulbert Financial Digest also failed to find support for this interpretation, however. On average, the stock market in the past has performed no differently after rapid rises in the VIX than it did after rapid falls. Even if this alternate interpretation of the VIX had statistical validity, however, it would not support the bearish conclusion that many contrarians currently have been drawing. That's because the VIX has been locked in a fairly narrow range for several months now and therefore has neither risen nor fallen sharply. The bottom line: There no doubt are many other things for investors to worry about, but a low VIX is not one of them.

Subject: Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Miscalculation From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 11:58:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/international/asia/23bikini.html August 23, 2005 A Tourism Plan's Itsy-Bitsy, Teeny-Weeny Miscalculation By NORIMITSU ONISHI BYEONSAN BIKINI BEACH, South Korea - It seemed like a good idea, a surefire way to catapult this beach into the ranks of Bali and Waikiki: a 10 percent discount for anyone in a bikini. It all started back in 2003 when local officials here, racking their brains over how to lure visitors to this stretch on South Korea's rural west coast, decided that a name change was due. Byeonsan Beach was reborn, with 'Bikini' in its name. While the change might not persuade modest locals of the merits of bikinis or Speedos overnight, the reasoning went, it could attract less inhibited visitors from Seoul. But after droves of bikini-wearers failed to turn up last year, the locals had to come up with something else. 'Since it's called Bikini Beach, we thought we should give visitors an extra incentive,' said Gang Heung Ueon, a spokesman for Buan County, sitting at a beachside fish restaurant specializing in clam porridge and raw cod. A poster of a bikini-clad woman in the restaurant explained the new incentive, in effect since July 7: 'Show off your bikini! Get a 10 percent discount on top!' Of the 45 restaurants, motels and other businesses in the area, 38 were participating. But so far, bikinis have proven elusive, Mr. Gang said. Only 10 percent of beachgoers have opted for skimpiness, he said - a figure that, on later inspection, seemed a stretch. Still, on a recent Saturday, expectations were high. The Miss Byeonsan Bikini Contest - called the Miss Byeonsan Beauty Contest until last year - was taking place. The contestants themselves would at least wear bikinis, or so went the promise. 'This beach might be compared one day to Bali or to other famous beaches in Southeast Asia,' Mr. Gang said. 'It's,' he added, 'a long-term goal.' Byeonsan, like other local governments in the country, had little need to conceive of creative ideas until a decade ago. The central government had simply appointed administrators from Seoul to run local governments until 1995, providing little incentive for local officials to try to stand out. But now 'a lot of creative ideas are coming out of the regions from ambitious politicians who want to move on to higher office,' said Ahn Young Hoon, a scholar at the Korea Research Institute for Local Administration. Suffering a scarcity of industries and depopulation, rural areas are trying to create a distinct image - a 'C.I.,' or 'company identity,' in the jargon popular among local government officials - to attract tourists and investors. The word 'amenity,' used in English and unfathomable to most Koreans, has become the guiding principle for several local governments. 'You look behind the times if you don't use it at least three times in a presentation,' Park Hyung Jae, a spokesman for the Namhae County government on the peninsula's southeastern shore, said of the 'amenity' catchphrase. After - or perhaps despite - looking up the word in a dictionary, Mr. Park concluded that it meant 'regional, agricultural, environmentally friendly, pollution-free, primitive, natural, pure.' The county now boasts of its 'green amenity.' 'It's now familiar because nowadays we use it as often as we eat kimchi,' Mr. Park said, mentioning Korea's national dish. In Seocheon County, directly north of here, 'Amenity Seocheon' is the motto used to advertise the region's unspoiled wilderness. The county also proposed a dog-eating festival for lovers of the meat, which is considered a delicacy in Korea. 'But some pet-lovers opposed the idea and we dropped it,' said Lee Jin Hee, a county official. Byeonsan County, too, drew opposition from a women's group after announcing its bikini discount, Mr. Gang said. Under a blazing sun, with many local men in shirts and trousers and women holding parasols, the bikini contest began at 2 p.m. on the beach. A few dozen local young women appeared on stage, wearing cancan dresses and then changing into one-piece swimsuits. Few women in bikinis or men in Speedos could be seen on the beach. When asked about their choice of swimwear, several women in bikinis ran away. 'A lot of women won't wear bikinis because they don't want to get sunburned,' said Choi Eun Jeong, 28, who wore a bikini but had not received the discount yet. 'I think it would have been better as a nude beach,' her boyfriend, Lee Woo Ho, 32, added, drawing an angry glance. The beauty contestants, still in their one-piece swimsuits, showed off their talents. A few sang. One would-be flight attendant gave airplane information in Korean, Japanese and English. Another walked suggestively around the stage. An especially tall contestant danced a sexy dance, towering over the M.C., who compared her to an eel. Watching the contest, standing atop a five-inch mound of sand he had built, Byun Young Il, 35, bemoaned the fact that few men had chosen to wear the same kind of short swimsuit briefs he was wearing. 'In reality, it's better for Korean men to wear Speedos because their legs tend to be short and it makes them look taller,' Mr. Byun said, a cigarette pack and orange lighter sticking out of the back of his briefs. 'But they tend to be shy.' Professional models came on stage, sporting bikinis and swimsuit briefs. But as the bikini contest unfolded, chances that it would live up to its billing seemed to dim. At the grocery store where Roh Yong Hwan, 24, worked, only about 10 people had asked for the discount since it went into effect. 'If what they're wearing is a little skimpy, or if they're at least wearing a bikini top, we'll give them the discount,' Mr. Roh said. The contest, as well as this summer day, was nearing its end. The beachgoers began packing up their belongings. The eel woman was crowned 'Miss Byeonsan Bikini Beach.' And the bikini, as elusive as ever, would be for another summer day.

Subject: Japan's Spending Habit Roils Plan From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 11:16:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/business/worldbusiness/23post.html August 23, 2005 Japan's Spending Habit Roils Plan to Sell Big Bank By JAMES BROOKE KOBE, Japan - Red and white loading cranes loomed like steel sentinels over an empty wharf on a recent afternoon here. Capable of unloading shipping containers at a rate of almost one a minute, these computerized towers often stand frozen for days at a time for lack of ships. Kobe's ranking in world container traffic tumbled to 43rd place last year, from 4th in 1980. Though Kobe's importance as a port started waning in the early 1990's, government bureaucrats responded to the 1995 earthquake here by renovating and expanding the port - to the tune of $50 billion. Kobe's idle cranes and deserted wharves are emblems of a broader habit in Japan: spending lavishly on public projects that may or may not have much use, let alone economic return. Given the country's dependence on such building, the proposed sale of Japan Post, a linchpin for government spending, has ignited a political firestorm. Japan Post, which still delivers the nation's mail, is also Japan's largest savings bank, with $3 trillion in assets, and sells insurance as well. The question posed by its sale is, Will Japan take a decisive turn toward free markets and privatize Japan Post, converting the world's largest state-run bank into the world's largest private bank? Or will the country continue as a semi-socialist economy where bureaucrats and politicians make multibillion-dollar investments with little regard to the country's economic health? An arcane issue to outsiders, the privatization of Japan Post was volcanic enough in Japan to start a revolt in the country's parliament, the Diet, among members of the Liberal Democratic Party, which has held almost uninterrupted power here for the last half-century. Fearful of losing access to Japan Post's assets, Upper House members rejected a privatization bill on Aug. 8. For Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who first called for postal privatization in 1992, it looked like the defeat of a lifetime dream. But, breaking with Japan's tradition of bland consensus politics, he responded that very day with a huge political gamble. He dissolved the Lower House, called an election for Sept. 11 and kicked 37 legislators who had voted against privatization out of the party. 'The post office has been the big piggy bank for the bureaucrats and the politicians,' said Alex Kerr, an American who chronicled in his book 'Dogs and Demons' the long-running love affair between Japan's politicians and concrete. 'The politicians really depended on the flow of these funds.' Although Japan's landscape is littered with modern monuments to the construction state, engineers continue to build what some observers lampoon as 'bullet trains to nowhere.' In Okinawa, Japan's southernmost prefecture, authorities recently inaugurated a 1.2-mile bridge to Kourijima Island. It is billed as the nation's longest toll-free bridge, and it is easy to see why no one expected to recoup the investment through tolls. The $250 million bridge serves an island with a population of 361. In Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost prefecture, work started in May on a 10-year, $4.3 billion project to extend bullet train service north to Hakodate, population 280,000. Running 92.5 miles, the new line is budgeted to cost $46 million a mile. After decades of spending on public works, Japan's government debt is 150 percent of its gross domestic product, the highest for a major developed economy. The weight of this debt, compounded by the shrinking of Japan's work force and by politicians' resistance to changes that would enhance productivity, will give Japan, through 2010, the lowest per capita growth rate among 30 major economies, according to an economic forecast issued in May by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Although Japan's economy is growing at an annualized rate of 1.1 percent, the economy has been in recession for almost half of the 14 years since the stock and real estate bubble burst in 1991. 'We have wasted an insane amount of money,' Robert A. Feldman, chief economist for Morgan Stanley Japan, said in an interview. 'Health care is being starved to keep the postal system, the roads and bridges around. In a country with a shrinking, aging population, this system is going to lower living standards.' The bill for those projects will be increasingly difficult to pay. Over the next decade, the number of Japanese workers is expected to decline by four million. Yet the building continues. Japan, which is slightly larger than Italy, has 83 airports. Five more are under construction. Although the Kansai International Airport in Osaka has yet to make a profit after a decade in operation, Nagoya recently opened its own $7.3 billion international airport, only 80 miles away. In 2006, Kobe is to open a multibillion-dollar domestic airport about 20 miles away from Kansai. In 2007, Kansai will counterattack with a new runway. Both airports are built on expensive landfill, the kind of base that turned to mush during the 1995 earthquake in Kobe. 'Kansai International Airport is a massive economic failure with hardly the number of flights predicted for it,' Mr. Kerr, the American author, said. 'It has not become the international hub it was supposed to be, and now Kobe is building a new airport right next door.' Japanese airports, notably in Tokyo and Osaka, charge the highest landing fees in the world. In this environment, Japanese cities often build their airfields of dreams, only to discover that the passengers do not come. About 75 miles southwest of here, Okayama spent $310 million in 2001 for a nearly two-mile international runway. Today, international service is limited to one daily flight to Seoul and one to Shanghai. In Kobe, the overinvestment in the port was obvious on a recent motorboat tour of the harbor, a bay that opened to foreign ships in 1868. 'Most of the cranes are up - up means no ship,' Takashi Shimada said during one of his last tours as director general of Kobe Port and Harbor Office. After the earthquake, he recalled, 'the facilities were completely restored, but the cargo did not come back.' Even though Kobe's cargo traffic stagnated in the early 1990's, shipping lines still concentrated regional cargo here for shipping overseas. But when the earthquake halted most operations at the port, Japanese companies discovered they could send their goods to places like Pusan, South Korea, for shipment to the United States and Europe, and it was faster and cheaper. 'Idle gantry cranes are the true situation in Kobe,' Makoto Kobukata, general manager of Maersk Kobe Terminal, said. 'There is about 20 percent usage for each crane.' At the time of the earthquake a decade ago, an astute private sector analyst might have warned that Kobe's ship had sailed. In the port's economic hinterland, Hyogo Prefecture and Osaka Prefecture, industrial production had been declining from a 1991 peak. By 2003, the combined production of both areas was down nearly one-third from 1991. Today, despite the overbuilding, the construction machine still rolls along, seemingly on autopilot. A massive landfill operation is under way to build new wharves in deep water, betting on what may be slim odds that Kobe will one day attract the new supersize container ships. With such white elephants taking shape before the public's eyes, austerity is catching on. Despite the political firestorm, Mr. Koizumi's election call has been greeted with advances in Japan's stock market and upticks in polls charting public and business approval ratings for his cabinet. 'We are at a turning point of our era,' Mr. Koizumi said Friday on releasing his party's platform. 'Privatization of the post office is the first step toward the reconstruction of Japan's politics and economy.' The Democratic Party of Japan, the main opposition party, has jumped on the antispending bandwagon, vowing to cut public spending by $90 billion by 2008, to cut public works spending in half, to cut the salaries of civil servants 20 percent and to cut postal savings deposits in half over the next eight years. The party now says it voted against the prime minister's Japan Post privatization bill because it did not go far enough. With voters suddenly focused on public spending, newspaper editorials talk about the need to break up the iron triangle of bureaucrats, politicians and government-dependent businesses. 'It is called irrigating your own rice field at the expense of others,' said Mr. Feldman, the economist. 'But there is actually a much deeper political philosophy debate going on now. It is market-oriented policies versus bureaucratic control.'

Subject: A World Where Down Means Up From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:55:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/business/19vulture.html August 19, 2005 A World Where Down Means Up By RIVA D. ATLAS Bad news is good news for Marc Lasry, one of the largest investors in the debt of bankrupt companies. Yet the strong economy has not been cooperating, leaving bad news in short supply. Indeed, the number of bankrupt companies has been dwindling, as low interest rates make it easy for even weak businesses to obtain cheap financing. But Mr. Lasry and other like-minded investors are betting that their day is not too far off. 'Distress is around the corner,' said Mr. Lasry, a soft-spoken 45-year-old who oversees the Avenue Capital Group, which manages more than $7 billion invested in the United States, Europe and Asia. He ticks off the potential catalysts for trouble: rising interest rates and oil prices; a mounting federal deficit and a low dollar; and a real estate bubble ready to burst. Perhaps the biggest factor is the risk assumed by banks and others in lending to less established and highly indebted companies. Some 7 percent of all junk bonds issued last year were rated triple-C by Standard & Poor's, the highest percentage ever, according to Credit Suisse First Boston. This year, that percentage promises to be even higher. 'When I look at all that, my view is that logic will win out,' Mr. Lasry said. He has just raised a $1.4 billion fund, focused on distressed debt of United States companies, although he has up to a year before he must start investing the cash. The question hanging over that bet is timing. When will boom turn to bust, leaving ripe pickings for Mr. Lasry and other so-called vulture investors? Mr. Lasry says he thinks corporate defaults will rise sharply over the next 12 months, although other investors say it could take longer. Corporate defaults dropped to just 0.44 percent of all outstanding junk bonds in the year ended in June, according to Credit Suisse First Boston. That is down from a peak of 15.4 percent in 2002. 'Now is not a good time to invest in distressed securities,' said Barry Colvin, president of Tremont Capital, which allocates money to hedge funds, and has substantially reduced its allocation in the area. Still, Mr. Colvin said, Mr. Lasry has demonstrated good timing before. 'He is very opportunistic about investing,' Mr. Colvin said After the Asian debt crisis of the late 1990's, Mr. Lasry quickly invested in the region, where he has since made millions. In 2004, an investment in the Thai Oil Company rose some 25 percent as energy prices soared. Largely on the back of his gains in Asia, Mr. Lasry personally earned an estimated $125 million last year, according to a ranking of the best-paid hedge fund managers by Alpha, a trade publication. He now has a staff of 20 in Beijing and offices in six other Asian cities. Within the last year, Chinese banks have accelerated sales of their bad loans as the government has become more receptive to foreign investors, he said. With more than $500 billion of such loans on the banks' books, 'it's a massive opportunity,' he said. Mr. Lasry also started a European vulture fund last year, largely to take advantage of new laws that will require banks in the region to increase their capital levels. The laws are prodding undercapitalized banks there to clean up their books, particularly in Germany, where banks are still weighed down with loans tied to the reconstruction of the former East Germany, he said. 'Banks are already starting to sell.' But closer to home, Mr. Lasry said, it has been slim pickings for vulture investors. After making a bundle a few years ago by investing in the debt of large well-known companies like MCI, which emerged from bankruptcy in April 2004, Avenue's funds in the United States have lately turned to the debt of smaller businesses that still have a tough time raising capital. As an example, Mr. Lasry cites Rampage, a clothing company that had just $51 million in revenue last year. The combination of fewer corporate defaults and a rush of money into hedge funds specializing in bankruptcies has meant lower returns for Mr. Lasry and other investors. Through July, one of Mr. Lasry's hedge funds focused on domestic debt is up just over 2 percent, slightly lagging a 2.88 percent return for the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, down from a return of about 9 percent for 2004 and 27 percent for 2003, according to a person briefed on the funds' results. (Returns for closed-end funds that he runs for institutions like the California Public Employees' Retirement System, known as Calpers, have been slightly higher.) But once bankruptcies pick up, Mr. Lasry said he expected returns to rebound to around 20 percent. His investors are also optimistic. 'The distressed-debt market will crack sometime soon, and we want to be ready,' said Panda Hershey, a portfolio manager with Calpers, which invests with Avenue. A native of Marrakesh, Morocco, Mr. Lasry has accumulated one of the largest pools of capital devoted to bankruptcy investing. And he has proved as nimble in his career moves as he has as an investor. A lawyer by training, he was an early investor in bankruptcies, managing a pool of capital for the billionaire Robert M. Bass in the late 1980's. After making connections through his investor activities, Mr. Lasry saw an opportunity to set up a brokerage firm specializing in two obscure niches in which he had an edge - bank debt and claims held by vendors and suppliers to bankrupt companies. By the late 1990's, anticipating a surge in bankruptcies and a demand for funds specializing in the business, Mr. Lasry shifted his focus back to investing, setting up Avenue Capital. He was helped early on in his fund-raising by David Bonderman of the Texas Pacific Group, who had been his boss when he worked for Mr. Bass, who introduced Mr. Lasry to Calpers, among other investors. Today, Mr. Lasry and his sister, Sonia Gardner, also a lawyer by training, run a team of 150 employees on three continents. He seems unperturbed by the stubbornly low rate of bankruptcies in the United States. 'Sooner or later, reality will prevail,' he said. 'The cycle will turn, and we'll be ready.'

Subject: China Ups the Ante in Its Bid for Oil From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:47:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/business/worldbusiness/23oil.html August 23, 2005 China Ups the Ante in Its Bid for Oil By KEITH BRADSHER and CHRISTOPHER PALA HONG KONG - One of China's state-owned oil companies may still be smarting from its failure to acquire Unocal this summer. But another Chinese oil giant showed on Monday that this country is still snapping up assets to satisfy its hunger for energy. China's biggest state-owned oil company, the China National Petroleum Corporation, announced on Monday that it would pay $4.18 billion for a Canadian oil company with shares traded in New York and substantial reserves in Kazakhstan. It is China's largest foreign acquisition yet, and more than twice what a Chinese computer company paid for I.B.M.'s personal computer business. China National Petroleum outbid India's state-owned Oil and Natural Gas Corporation in reaching a deal to acquire PetroKazakhstan, and it is not clear whether the Indian company will step up with a counterbid. Still, the process underlines the growing competition for oil resources by the world's two most populous countries, each of which is rapidly increasing oil imports. Monday's transaction shows that the great game, once a competition between imperial Russia and Britain for influence in Central Asia, lives on with new players, as China increasingly challenges Russia and the United States for access to the region's energy riches. PetroKazakhstan's fields are in north-central Kazakhstan, an area where Russian businesses, especially Lukoil, have been active. American companies have been more interested in oil reserves of the Caspian Sea, along Kazakhstan's western border, where the region's giant deposits are located, and have invested more than $8 billion there. China National Petroleum's willingness to pay a steep price of nearly $8 for each barrel of estimated oil reserves in the ground, with considerable further costs to pump and ship the oil, contrasts with prices as low as $1 a barrel of reserves in Central Asia in the 1990's. American oil companies have voiced growing alarm that they may be unable to compete with deep-pocketed state-owned oil companies worried about national security. These state oil companies appear more willing to pay high prices for reserves on fears that today's high oil prices will endure. PetroKazakhstan's acceptance of the Chinese bid is a consolation prize for China's oil industry. Another state-controlled Chinese company, Cnooc, withdrew its $18.5 billion offer for Unocal on Aug. 2 after strong opposition in Congress. But the tangled history of past Chinese oil investments in Kazakhstan casts a possible shadow on the deal. Kazakhstan has passed a law declaring its right to pre-empt the sale of any oil property in the country, which means the deal cannot be fully accomplished without government approval. That law was the basis for many questions from analysts during a PetroKazakhstan conference call on Monday with investors, analysts and journalists. Bernard F. Isautier, the company's chief executive, said that Kazakhstan could pre-empt the sale of assets within the country but could not block the sale of PetroKazakhstan itself. 'We are not speaking about a sale of assets where pre-emptive rights would apply,' he said. 'We don't expect any problem in that regard.' In Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, Mikhail Dorofeyev, head of the media department of KazMunaiGaz, the state oil company and industry regulator, said in a telephone interview that the company would have no comment on the announcement. Cnooc and the third of China's three state-owned oil giants, Sinopec, had tried and failed to buy a share in the Kashagan field sold by British Gas two years ago. Their initial agreements to buy stakes were pre-empted by foreign operators in the field, who invoked their right to split up British Gas's share among themselves - only to have the government step in and take half of British Gas's share for itself. PetroKazakhstan, based in Calgary, Alberta, but managed from London, is also a considerably smaller company than Unocal, and without Unocal's extensive natural gas reserves or Unocal's reputation for high technology. It nonetheless commanded a steep price of $55 a share in Monday's deal, a premium of 21.1 percent to the stock's closing price on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, partly because PetroKazakhstan's oil will help fill a pipeline to China now under construction. In the oil industry, 'China has consistently been willing to overpay for assets - it's more of a security issue for them than the absolute price,' said John T. Kuzmik, a partner and China specialist at Baker Botts, a big Houston energy law firm. The Oil and Natural Gas Corporation reportedly bid $3.6 billion. PetroKazakhstan's main asset lies in its full ownership of one oil field, Kumkol South, and half-ownership of two smaller ones, Kumkol North and Germunaigaz. 'It is a jewel - you look at the way they increased production,' said Vincent Noual, a specialist in Central Asian oil in the Geneva offices of IHS Energy, a big consulting firm, referring to a fourfold increase in production in nine years of Canadian ownership. PetroKazakhstan has highly strained relations with Kazakhstan's regulators, as well as with Lukoil of Russia, its main partner in the oil field. Monday's deal, announced before the opening of trading in New York, represents a huge payday for PetroKazakhstan's investors and the company's chief executive, Mr. Isautier. PetroKazakhstan used to be Hurricane Hydrocarbons, which was in bankruptcy protection in 1999. But the company still held one superb investment: its stakes in the Kazakh oil fields, purchased for just $120 million in 1996 when Hurricane bought the assets of Yuzhneftegaz, a Kazakh state-owned oil company. Oraz Jandosov, a former head of Kazakhstan's antimonopoly commission who is now an opposition politician, voiced a commonly held view when he said he expected that KazMunaiGaz would eventually acquire the refinery from China National Petroleum and Lukoil would eventually acquire the Turgai oil field, which produces about 35,000 barrels a day. Mr. Jandosov and many Kazakhs have frequently asserted that Hurricane Hydrocarbons must have paid bribes to acquire Yuzhneftegaz. 'The price offered by the Chinese proves that the initial was too low and they were cheating the state,' Mr. Jandosov said. Terrance Powell, PetroKazakhstan's spokesman, said that at the time, the field was producing much less oil than now, that Kazakhstan was in a state of financial crisis and that the price was fair. After the bankruptcy filing, Mr. Isautier joined the business, led the company out of bankruptcy, bought 88 percent of a large Kazakh refinery for $51 million, and began investing $143 million to develop the oil fields. Citigroup advised China National Petroleum on the deal while Goldman Sachs advised PetroKazakhstan. Citigroup has agreed to provide the Chinese company with a letter of credit for the entire value of the deal; the state-owned Chinese oil company will not borrow any money from other Chinese government agencies. China National agreed to pay $54 in cash for each share and put $76 million, worth another $1 a share, into a new company that is to be spun off to PetroKazakhstan shareholders and led by Mr. Isautier. The deal is subject to approval by two-thirds of PetroKazakhstan's shareholders at a meeting to be held in the first half of October, the exact date of which has not been set. PetroKazakhstan agreed to pay a breakup fee of $125 million to China National if PetroKazakhstan later accepts a higher offer. Keith Bradsher reported from Hong Kong for this article and Christopher Pala from Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Subject: Grasping the Depth of Time From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:27:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/23tue3.html?ex=1282449600&en=55ae46551ab20405&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 23, 2005 Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution By VERLYN KLINKENBORG Last month a team of paleontologists announced that it had found several fossilized dinosaur embryos that were 190 million years old - some 90 million years older than any dinosaur embryos found so far. Those kinds of numbers are always a little daunting. Ever since I was a boy in a public elementary school in Iowa, I've been learning to face the eons and eons that are embedded in the universe around us. I know the numbers as they stand at present, and I know what they mean, in a roughly comparative way. The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old. The truth of these numbers has the same effect on me as watching the night sky in the high desert. It fills me with a sense of nonspecific immensity. I don't think I'm alone in this. One of the most powerful limits to the human imagination is our inability to grasp, in a truly intuitive way, the depths of terrestrial and cosmological time. That inability is hardly surprising because our own lives are so very short in comparison. It's hard enough to come to terms with the brief scale of human history. But the difficulty of comprehending what time is on an evolutionary scale, I think, is a major impediment to understanding evolution. It's been approximately 3.5 billion years since primeval life first originated on this planet. That is not an unimaginable number in itself, if you're thinking of simple, discrete units like dollars or grains of sand. But 3.5 billion years of biological history is different. All those years have really passed, moment by moment, one by one. They encompass an actual, already lived reality, encompassing all the lives of all the organisms that have come and gone in that time. That expanse of time defines the realm of biological possibility in which life in its extraordinary diversity has evolved. It is time that has allowed the making of us. The idea of such quantities of time is extremely new. Humans began to understand the true scale of geological time in the early 19th century. The probable depth of cosmological time and the extent of the history of the human species have come to light only within our own lifetimes. That is a lot to absorb and, not surprisingly, many people refuse to absorb it. Nearly every attack on evolution - whether it is called intelligent design or plain creationism, synonyms for the same faith-based rejection of evolution - ultimately requires a foreshortening of cosmological, geological and biological time. Humans feel much more content imagining a world of more human proportions, with a shorter time scale and a simple narrative sense of cause and effect. But what we prefer to believe makes no difference. The fact that life on Earth has arrived at a point where it is possible for humans to have beliefs is due to the steady ticking away of eons and the trial and error of natural selection. Evolution is a robust theory, in the scientific sense, that has been tested and confirmed again and again. Intelligent design is not a theory at all, as scientists understand the word, but a well-financed political and religious campaign to muddy science. Its basic proposition - the intervention of a designer, a k a God - cannot be tested. It has no evidence to offer, and its assumptions that humans were divinely created are the same as its conclusions. Its objections to evolution are based on syllogistic reasoning and a highly selective treatment of the physical evidence. Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education. The purpose of the campaign for intelligent design is to deepen that failure. To present the arguments of intelligent design as part of a debate over evolution is nonsense. From the scientific perspective, there is no debate. But even the illusion of a debate is a sorry victory for antievolutionists, a public relations victory based, as so many have been in recent years, on ignorance and obfuscation. The essential, but often well-disguised, purpose of intelligent design, is to preserve the myth of a separate, divine creation for humans in the belief that only that can explain who we are. But there is a destructive hubris, a fearful arrogance, in that myth. It sets us apart from nature, except to dominate it. It misses both the grace and the moral depth of knowing that humans have only the same stake, the same right, in the Earth as every other creature that has ever lived here. There is a righteousness - a responsibility - in the deep, ancestral origins we share with all of life.

Subject: Elephants Follow Own Evolutionary Path From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:11:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/health/article-page.html?res=9E0CE2DB113DF933A0575AC0A9659C8B63&fta=y September 30, 2003 Small, Isolated Elephants Follow Own Evolutionary Path By MARK DERR The small Borneo elephant represents the last remnant of an ancient lineage, a team of international biologists has determined. The finding, based on DNA samples, overturns a long-held prevailing theory of the animals' origins: that they were descended from domesticated elephants that reverted to the wild. Instead, the elephant, isolated in the tropical rain forests of northeastern Borneo, has followed an independent evolutionary path for at least 18,000 years, and probably longer, the scientists conclude. In the process, it has become genetically distinct from other Asian elephants, the experts say, based on extensive comparisons of elephant DNA obtained across Asia. The report appears in the October issue of The Public Library of Science, Biology, a new peer-reviewed, online journal that was created as a free alternative to established journals that allow access only to subscribers. (Their paper was posted in advance of its publication at biology .plosjournals.org.) The analysis also revealed that the current Borneo elephant population, estimated at 1,000 to 2,500, lacks genetic variation, an indication that it arose from a small number of founders, was never very numerous and is highly inbred, said Dr. Prithiviraj Fernando, the main author and a scientist at the Columbia University Center for Environmental Research and Conservation. The researchers eventually hope to learn whether the Borneo elephant -- smaller than others in Asia and more round-bodied, with larger ears and straighter tusks -- is trapped in a genetic bottleneck, caused by extensive inbreeding, or has already passed through it, as some evidence suggests, Dr. Fernando said in a telephone interview from Sri Lanka. Extensive inbreeding can lead to undesirable genetic variants that leave the animals vulnerable to defects, diseases and changes in their environment, said Dr. Don J. Melnick, director of the Columbia center and a co-author of the study. Populations in bottlenecks often go extinct, he said. Dr. Raman Sukumar, chairman of the World Conservation Union's Asian Elephant Specialist Group, said in an e-mail message, ''This paper is indeed very significant in that it demonstrates a certain genetic uniqueness for the elephants of Borneo, and the most likely explanation is that the elephant colonized the island during the Pleistocene and has evolved there independently.'' He was not involved in the research. Under the prevailing theory, the Borneo elephants descended from Indian elephants presented to the Sultan of Sulu in 1750 by the East India Trading Company or were among a group shipped from Sumatra around the same time, when elephants were being heavily traded for war, logging and ceremonies from the 16th through the 18th century. A few of those elephants were believed to have escaped or been released and reverted to the wild, while retaining the tameness of their domesticated forebears. Asian and African elephants will attack and kill humans who threaten them, but the Borneo elephants are not aggressive toward people, said Dr. Michael Stuewe, a co-author of the paper affiliated with the Asian Rhino and Elephant Action Strategy of the World Wildlife Fund. ''I've seen researchers literally go up and touch them,'' he said. ''That tameness gave people the idea that they were zoo animals and not worth special attention.'' The elephants are found only in northeastern Borneo, in the Malaysian province of Sabah and in the Indonesian province of Kalimantan, where their forest habitat is to be protected in a park, Dr. Stuewe said. But in Sabah, logging and the conversion of forests to palm oil plantations and acacia farms for wood pulp represent a significant threat. When the World Wildlife Fund became involved in 1999 in efforts to preserve the jungles of Sabah, ''we had to prove that we weren't wasting money on zoo animals,'' Dr. Stuewe said. Biologists with the agency began collecting dung and blood samples from wild and captive elephants throughout Asia and shipping them to the researchers in New York. There Dr. Fernando and his colleagues extracted and analyzed mitochondrial and autosomal DNA. Mitochondrial DNA, involved in the cell's energy system, is inherited from the mother; autosomal DNA is inherited from both parents. Asian and African elephants and mammoths diverged from a common ancestor about six million years ago. Asian elephants ranged from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers into China and Borneo. Dr. Fernando had previously shown that the Asian elephant then split into two main lineages some three million years ago. In this case, lineages reflect variations in mitochondrial DNA, dated through a genetic clock based on the rate of naturally occurring mutation. Most mainland Asian elephants of today have diverged from the ''alpha'' lineage identified by Dr. Fernando. The elephants on the islands of Sumatra and Borneo and on the Malay Peninsula branched from the ''beta'' lineage. For reasons Dr. Fernando is now studying, Sri Lanka has elephants of both lineages. The most recent survey shows that Borneo elephants diverged from the beta lineage 300,000 years ago. The researchers had more difficulty putting a date on their colonization of Borneo. The lack of evidence of elephants anywhere on Borneo other than the northeast end, or of Borneo elephants anywhere else in Asia, adds to the mystery surrounding the animals' arrival and isolation. Dr. Melnick suggested that the Borneo elephant could have diverged in its current home range and never left, the way the elephants of Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula appear to have done at a later date. Or the lineage could have originated on the mainland, with part or all of it subsequently migrating to Borneo, as sea levels rose and fell during the Pleistocene with the advance and retreat of vast ice sheets, Dr. Fernando said. When seas were low, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, Sumatra, Java and Bali formed a landmass called Sundaland. The scientists suggest that the elephants crossed into Borneo during one of those periods, but not since 16,000 B.C. at the peak of an ice age. Since the glaciers melted around 10,000 B.C., the elephants have been stuck on their island. Several researchers, however, suggest that their genetic isolation began long before that. While a number of conservation organizations have seized on the research and have begun calling the Borneo elephant a distinct subspecies, the authors reject that approach for now. ''A subspecies is difficult to define because it is subjective,'' Dr. Fernando said. An attempt in the 1950's to classify the elephant as Elephas maximus borneensis faltered because of problems with the morphological work involving comparisons of the skeleton and other physical characteristics like tusks, Dr. Fernando said. Until more extensive morphological and genetic studies are completed, the researchers have opted to apply the designation E.S.U., evolutionary significant unit, a reproductively isolated population that is important to the species' evolution. By whatever name, the little Borneo elephant has suddenly been transformed from a feral animal of dubious origin to an ancient beast following its own evolutionary path in splendid isolation. The imperative for preserving it has risen accordingly. ''The Borneo elephant obviously needs special attention, and this is all the more imperative in view of the ongoing rapid attrition of its Sabah range,'' Dr. Sukumar said. Dr. Melnick added, ''The elephants of Borneo are only going to get more different genetically if they are properly protected and managed.''

Subject: Punishment for Merck From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 23, 2005 at 10:08:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/opinion/23tue2.html August 23, 2005 Punishment for Merck Merck deserves some sympathy, but not a lot, for the staggering loss it suffered last week in a case involving its painkiller Vioxx, which was withdrawn from the market because it raises the risk of heart attacks and strokes in a small percentage of patients. A Texas jury hit Merck with a symbolically staggering $253.5 million judgment (it will be reduced to $26.1 million under a Texas law capping punitive damages) even though the evidence that Vioxx actually caused the victim's death was extremely thin. The verdict may reflect the fact that Merck was facing an extremely capable lawyer, while its own lawyers committed blunders that alienated the jury. But before heaping too much sympathy on the beleaguered drugmaker, it is important to note that Merck brought a lot of this problem on itself - by failing to react quickly to evidence that Vioxx can be harmful in some patients and by promoting the drug beyond any rational use. Vioxx is in a class of painkillers known as cox-2 inhibitors. These drugs are, in general, no more effective than many older nonprescription drugs at relieving pain. Their presumed advantage is that they reduce the risk of the gastrointestinal bleeding and ulcers that afflict a minority of patients who take the older painkillers. Unfortunately, aggressive marketing propelled them to wide use by people at little risk of gastrointestinal side effects. Vioxx itself was used by more than 20 million people before it was withdrawn last September because a clinical study found cardiovascular problems in some patients who used it for longer than 18 months. Merck is now facing more than 4,000 lawsuits, and analysts estimate that it may ultimately have to pay tens of billions of dollars in liability awards to plaintiffs drawn from the huge pool of Vioxx users. That pool is much larger than it should have been because of the overmarketing of Vioxx. The Texas case - the first to go to trial - was filed by the widow of a man who died of an arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat, after taking Vioxx. There is a good possibility that Vioxx was not responsible for his death. A coroner had listed the cause of death as arrhythmia and Vioxx has never been linked to arrhythmias, so many experts considered the case against Merck quite weak. Even so, the jury bought the speculative theory put forth by the plaintiff's lawyer that the arrhythmia had been caused by a heart attack that acted so quickly it left no muscle damage visible at autopsy. The heart attack was presumed to have been caused by an undetected blood clot that, in turn, was blamed on Vioxx. The key evidence supporting this theory was a statement by the coroner that she believed a blood clot killed the victim, even though she had not mentioned that possibility in her autopsy report. That is an extremely flimsy scientific basis for holding Vioxx responsible, but this case was less about science than about punishing Merck for what jurors considered an egregious history of covering up evidence of risk while promoting the drug so heavily to consumers. Internal e-mail messages and documents showed that Merck scientists had been concerned about cardiovascular risks even before Vioxx went on the market and continued to be concerned thereafter, even while resisting regulatory efforts to add warnings to the drug's label and devising strategies to dodge any concerns from doctors. Merck loyalists contend that the e-mail notes were taken out of context and that the company made responsible decisions based on the fragmentary signals of risk it had in hand. But surely the overriding message sent by this verdict is that companies must jump at the first hint of risk and warn patients and doctors of any dangers as clearly and quickly as possible. They should not be stonewalling regulators, soft-pedaling risk to doctors or promoting drugs to millions of people who don't need them.

Subject: C9H13N for the economy From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 16:37:57 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Personal income is one key area where workers have fallen behind, compared with past periods of strong wage growth. By Mark Trumbull Think back to the last time the American economy was rapidly rolling forward: output growing more than 4 percent a year, millions of new jobs were created, and unemployment on a downward slope. Yes, the 1990s was a golden economic era. But the description refers to the performance that began last year. Despite continued strong economic growth, this expansion is clouded with enough complications and uncertainties that, for many, it doesn't feel like good times. The reason? A boom in corporate profits has not yet created a job market that makes workers feel secure, economists say. Hiring hasn't skyrocketed. Worse, wages are stagnant. This paycheck squeeze may prove more worrisome than soaring oil prices and concerns over a housing bubble. Some experts worry that wage stagnation may prove more permanent this time, because of an increasingly global market for labor. Few economists claim that today's economy matches the late 1990s, when unemployment was lower and job numbers seemed to rise as easily as the Dow Jones Industrial Average. There are real differences - higher oil prices are just the most obvious. But the current expansion is also occurring against a backdrop of worries. The pace of job growth, for one thing, was almost imperceptible during two years of concern about a 'jobless recovery.' Now that the economy has some momentum, the financial press is focused on threats to consumer well-being, such as the burden of energy costs and a soaring real estate market. 'Surveys show that even though the economy is growing reasonably strongly, a lot of households don't feel that,' says Nariman Behravesh, chief economist at Global Insight in Lexington, Mass. He points to two key reasons. First, since the last recession ended in November 2001, job growth has been weak until last year, when the Labor Department's employer survey showed a gain of 2.2 million jobs. Second, wage growth has been lackluster, despite strong gains in worker productivity. Normally, as employees are able to produce more in each hour of work, the result is greater cash flow that can be divvied up between workers and owners or investors. In the long run, rising productivity means rising wages and living standards. But in the short run, 'most of the gains in the economy have gone into profits rather than wages,' says Mr. Behravesh. The latest numbers from the Labor Department, in fact, show average weekly earnings for US workers have fallen by 0.5 percent in the past year, after adjusting for inflation. The divergence between productivity has sparked a debate among economists. Some say the gap is temporary, and will narrow as the labor market tightens and workers get more leverage to bargain. Others worry that it's a sign of new realities in the global marketplace that are pushing down US wages as workers compete with increasingly educated rivals in places such as India, China, and South Korea. Whichever view proves more valid in that debate, many Americans are feeling the combined pinch of slow wage growth, jobs that still aren't as plentiful as many would like, and a stock market that's snorting pretty softly for a bull. Only 37 percent of the public thinks the national economy is in good shape, according to a June poll by the Pew Research Center poll. That's higher than two years ago, but down from 2004. Perhaps more ominously, the percentage of the public rating their own financial situation positively fell to 44 percent, down from 51 percent in January. Sixty percent say jobs are too scarce in their community. Some common surveys of consumer sentiment show less gloomy results - sitting not far from their long-term averages. But even professionals come to mixed answers as they try to assess the health of the current economy. 'It's hard for me to see this as a good economy,' says Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. 'It's doing better than it had been,' but given that the nation went for four years without creating any jobs to speak of, 'we have a lot of ground to make up.' By contrast, the glass is way more than half full to Brian Wesbury, an economist at Claymore Securities. He's expecting the nation's output, or gross domestic product, to grow about 3.8 percent this year, and about the same next year, after last year's gain of 4.2 percent. All those numbers are impressive, in the sense that they are above the level that most experts say is sustainable over the long term without sparking inflation. 'There's been a significant rebound,' Mr. Wesbury says. 'I've been very confused by the coverage' in the media, with its focus on gas prices and alleged housing bubbles. For many economists, those concerns are real, but not necessarily as frightening as recent headlines might imply. Thanks in part to rising efficiency, energy costs represent only about 3.3 percent of household spending. That's up only a bit from its 1990s average. To many, the real worry is if oil prices jump further and remain at $75 a barrel or beyond, a scenario which may not occur. http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0822/p01s03-usec.html

Subject: And They Call This Advice? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:49:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21gret.html August 21, 2005 And They Call This Advice? By GRETCHEN MORGENSON WILL shareholders of the Providian Financial Corporation, one of the nation's biggest credit card issuers, approve their company's merger with Washington Mutual? They might if they block out all the criticism in the air and listen only to Institutional Shareholder Services, an influential but potentially biased advisory firm. Owners of Providian will vote on the proposed deal on Aug. 31. Under its terms, they will receive just under $19 a share in cash and Washington Mutual stock. That price represents a modest premium of 4.2 percent over the price of Providian just before the merger announcement. David L. King, a portfolio manager at Putnam Investments, has said he will vote against the merger. The funds own 7.5 percent of Providian's shares. Officials at Providian have said that the deal is fair. Last week, three proxy advisory services published reports advising institutional investors on how they should vote on the deal. Two recommended that shareholders reject it, mostly because the price was inadequate. Those encouraging a no vote are Glass, Lewis & Company of San Francisco and Egan-Jones of Wynnewood, Pa. Both are independent firms that make money solely from institutional investors who buy their advisory or research reports. Neither accepts fees from issuers of shares or bonds, which keeps them out of the morass of serving two masters. Enter I.S.S. of Rockville, Md. Unfortunately for the shareholders who rely on it, I.S.S. is very much in that two-master morass. It provides corporate services to issuers of securities and therefore receives fees from the companies it analyzes. For example, it advises companies on how to structure their stock option plans so as to be acceptable to the shareholders who will be asked to vote on them. The firm discloses its dueling services on the cover of its reports. The disclosure, however, is less than revealing. 'This issuer may have purchased self-assessment tools and publications from I.S.S.' Corporate Services division or the Corporate Services division may have provided advisory or analytical services to the issuer in connection with the proxies described in this report,' the disclaimer says. It provides an e-mail address for those who want to ask about any issuer's use of I.S.S. products. If this kind of nondisclosure seems familiar, just think back to those made famous by Wall Street analysts prior to the regulatory investigations into the conflicts in those shops. When asked in an e-mail message whether any of the players in the Providian deal were I.S.S.'s paying customers, and if so, what they paid the firm for other services, Cheryl Gustitis, I.S.S.'s spokeswoman, declined to comment. She said the firm managed the conflicts appropriately and added that I.S.S. provided such details to its clients. Ms. Gustitis said that in order to protect the privacy of clients, I.S.S. did not disclose the details of its relationships to reporters. 'From all the feedback we receive from our institutional clients, it appears they are quite happy with our transparency and fulfillment of their information needs,' she said. BUT the potential for conflicts remains troubling, as is I.S.S.'s refusal to disclose publicly what it has received in pay from the issuers it writes about. The news media regularly report the firm's recommendations on mergers, option plans and other proxy matters, yet news organizations cannot judge whether the reports are colored by the firm's lucrative relationships with the companies being discussed. By contrast, news articles in which research analysts are quoted now routinely disclose those analysts' conflicts, if there are any. The I.S.S. report on the Providian deal is lukewarm. It noted that the offer 'may be at the low end of a reasonable value range' for the company. I.S.S. pointed out another concern for shareholders - that Providian was not shopped aggressively to other potential buyers. The report also said that in the firm's meeting with Joseph W. Saunders, Providian's chief executive, his comments seemed to raise a question regarding his motivation 'to achieve the maximum price for shareholders.' Sound like red flags to you? Not to I.S.S., which concludes that there is 'insufficient consensus surrounding Providian's long-term earnings potential that would warrant a higher valuation and voting against this transaction.' 'With such a low premium of 4 percent to the prior day's close and the fact that there is a significant breakup fee of $225 million, it doesn't give us much comfort that investors are being protected,' said Sean Egan, managing director of Egan-Jones Ratings. 'There has been a huge turnaround among the credit card issuers over the past three years, and with MBNA being acquired, there's some scarcity value for Providian. But their shareholders are not getting it.' In its report, Glass Lewis said it believed that Providian was worth $21 to $24 a share. It said the company's business was performing well and could easily remain independent. 'Clearly, the Street felt this was a business that was turning around and growing substantially,' said Greg Taxin, chief executive of Glass Lewis. 'To sell that business without bothering to ask whether anyone else would pay more seems to us a failed process. We believe that shareholders ought to empower this management team to go negotiate a better deal.' Perhaps most disturbing about the I.S.S. recommendation is that it advises Providian shareholders to give up their rights to have their company appraised at a possibly higher value. Providian is incorporated in Delaware, where state law gives shareholders rejecting a merger or withholding their votes on it the right to secure an independent appraisal. That process is overseen by a Delaware court. There is almost no downside to a shareholder asserting his appraisal rights. If the independent appraisal finds the proposed deal to be fair, holders can still vote for the merger. The appraisal would also carry no cost to Providian shareholders; Washington Mutual would have to pay for it. But only those shareholders who do not vote for a merger can assert their appraisal rights. So by advising its institutional investor customers to vote for the deal, I.S.S. is recommending that they give up a virtually free option to secure a possibly higher price. Ms. Gustitis said I.S.S. chose that route because it reckoned the deal was in the best interests of Providian shareholders. Sophisticated investors know to exercise their appraisal rights in deals that they think were struck at too low a price. As has been widely reported, the investor Carl C. Icahn has asked for an independent appraisal of a deal involving two drug companies, Transkaryotic Therapies and Shire Pharmaceuticals. I.S.S. does not always advise shareholders to vote yes on mergers, of course. Ms. Gustitis said that while the firm could not quickly compile a comprehensive assessment of how often it had supported mergers in the past, I.S.S. had recommended against eight mergers so far this year. She also noted that I.S.S. had recommended that holders side with dissident shareholders on four proxy contests this year. But I.S.S.'s merger recommendations have often been the difference between acceptance or rejection by shareholders. Without its favorable recommendation on the Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merger, for example, that marriage probably would not have been consummated, according to many commentators at the time. THERE is no doubt that shareholders have rubber-stamped mergers for far too long. And in so many past cases, executives have gained immense wealth in deals that have destroyed shareholder value. Free-thinking Providian shareholders don't have to take I.S.S.'s advice and forgo the chance of a better deal. Those who do will have only themselves to blame.

Subject: Big Developer Is Counting on Rural Chic From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:14:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/national/22land.html August 22, 2005 In Florida, a Big Developer Is Counting on Rural Chic By ABBY GOODNOUGH WEST BAY, Fla. - What is a striving Florida developer to do when most of its vast holdings are not beach chic but rural, remote and mosquitoey? The St. Joe Company, which owns 800,000 mostly inland acres here in the scrubby pine forests of the Panhandle, is invoking Thoreau. The company, Florida's largest private landowner, is pushing 'new ruralism,' a concept it hopes will entice city and suburban dwellers who are weary of civilization and long to own a tractor, a pickup truck, or at least a kayak and a few large dogs. At developments called RiverCamps, where homes in a design proudly called 'Cracker Modern' will sit on lots of up to four acres lots near marshes, creeks and conservation areas, 'camp masters' will tutor residents in bird watching and flats fishing and organize 'owl prowls' and 'star parties.' At WhiteFence Farms, on 5- to 20-acre lots near fields and ponds, 'farmhands' will gas up an owner's tractor and help mow the meadow. A third category, Florida Ranches, will have up to 150 acres and cater to hunters. Recent sales of RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, the first project under way, average $342,900 for the land alone. Projects farther inland will most likely cost far less per acre. The idea is a corporate reinvention of new urbanism, an antisprawl movement that advocates compact, old-fashioned towns where residents can commune in parks, shops and restaurants within walking distance of their homes. Instead of connecting with neighbors, new ruralism promotes connecting with the land - though these cabins in the woods come with wireless Internet access and porches with screens that unfurl by remote control. The target market is people 42 to 60 who, tired of coastal hurricane threats or the beach scene in general, want something more like Walden Pond or Walton's Mountain. Most are expected to use these ranches, camps and farms as second homes, though a surprising number of prospective buyers want full-time rusticity, St. Joe executives said. Brainstorming sessions at St. Joe's headquarters in Jacksonville produced scraps of paper scrawled with phrases like 'wind in the trees,' 'stars, no lights,' and 'slamming, squeaking screen doors.' In June, the company published a white paper quoting Thoreau ('I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately') and defining new ruralism - a concept that developers elsewhere have also seized on - as rising with the sun, fishing with the tides and resting with the moon. 'People are trying to get back to a time they remember,' said Peter S. Rummell, St. Joe's chairman and chief executive, who grew up in rural upstate New York and oversaw theme parks for the Walt Disney Company before moving to St. Joe in 1997. 'A moderated ruralism seems pretty attractive.' It had better, if St. Joe is to succeed in the real estate business. The company's founder, Alfred I. duPont, bought huge tracts of land in the Panhandle in the 1930's, after which the company became a paper maker with banking and railroad interests. But the land was strictly for timber farming until the 1990's, when St. Joe sought to reinvigorate by switching to land development. Though the company has been developing property ever since, about 99 percent of its holdings - as much as all the developed land between Miami and Fort Pierce - remain wild. It first focused on its 30 miles of Gulf of Mexico coastline, creating resort towns like WaterColor and SummerCamp with multimillion-dollar vacation homes. Making inland holdings attractive is far more complicated, requiring not just market research but also a tricky makeover for land that has long been inhospitable. 'A big, thick pine forest with a lot of undergrowth is a pretty forbidding place,' Mr. Rummell said. 'It scares a lot of people.' At RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, which is near Panama City Beach and offers two-acre lots for up to $1 million, the overhaul involved thinning the forest and burning the thick underbrush so that softer, greener grasses would emerge. With the land reworked, a landscape architect identified 54 'environmental jewels' - Spider Lily Marsh and the like - and mapped them out for prospective buyers. Brochures promise homes in the 'Cracker Modern' style: lots of wood, metal roofs, broad roof overhangs to block the sun and screened porches. With construction yet to begin, 145 buyers, mostly from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Texas, have closed on plots at RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, the first of three such developments. 'We honestly asked ourselves, 'Will people live in this environment?' ' said Kevin Fox, the St. Joe executive overseeing RiverCamps. 'We've got critters, we've got heat, we've got humidity.' More problematic is the isolation of St. Joe's land, most of which lies in the barely traveled region between Tallahassee and Panama City Beach. Gulf County, where St. Joe owns 230,000 acres, has but 15,200 residents, and Liberty County, where it owns 112,000 acres, has 7,300. A lot of St. Joe land surrounds the swampy Apalachicola National Forest and Tate's Hell State Forest, where a farmer named Tate supposedly was lost for days and emerged snakebitten and delirious. The company is lobbying to move and expand the small Panama City airport, while moving sections of a coastal highway inland, widening other roads and donating land for a new hospital. Though St. Joe has worked to win over the counties its land is in, some residents and environmental advocates worry about the scope of its ambition and have fought some of its projects. Charles Pattison, executive director of 1000 Friends of Florida, a nonprofit environmental group, said St. Joe's latest plan 'could be positive' but that the company must take pains not to force wildlife off the land and to add enough infrastructure. 'This is an area of the state that typically has one of the lowest population densities,' Mr. Pattison said. 'Issues like protection of habitat, hurricane evacuation routes and service provisions have got to be addressed.' At the first WhiteFence Farms site, southeast of Tallahassee, St. Joe is preparing 373 acres of former watermelon and peanut fields for 'people who have always wanted to live on a farm but don't see themselves as farmers,' Mr. Fox said. They must also be willing to pay $20,000 to $45,000 an acre for the land alone. The company is digging ponds and smoothing pastures for buyers it imagines dabbling in horse riding, beekeeping, wildflower growing and field plowing. Deborah Dudley, a lawyer who is trading her home in nearby Rosemary Beach for one here at RiverCamps on Crooked Creek, said beach towns had grown too crowded with commercial distractions. 'You lose the whole basic feel of the land,' Ms. Dudley said. 'I don't want to use the word 'backwater,' that sounds too negative, but RiverCamps has this whole underpinning of past Florida - a rural history.' Ms. Dudley said she wanted to emulate Florida's early rural settlers, known as crackers, who, wrote a British traveler in 1857, 'lived among the pines, raised a few hogs and cows, grew a little patch of corn, and just barely survived.' Yet Ms. Dudley said she also expected the comforts that cracker settlers sorely lacked. 'Absolutely I want that privacy and those woods,' she said. 'Yet at the same time, I want to be able to invite a neighbor over for a glass of wine and I want a nice kitchen with a Sub-Zero refrigerator.'

Subject: Google Has Plenty of Projects in Mind From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 10:04:27 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/technology/22google.html August 22, 2005 Where to Spend $4 Billion? Google Has Plenty of Projects in Mind By JOHN MARKOFF SAN FRANCISCO - In all the speculation that followed the announcement from Google on Thursday that it planned to raise an additional $4 billion by selling stock, no one seemed to recall the space elevator. The elevator - a fanciful alternative to rocket boosters to reach earth orbit - is one of the dozens of business ideas that have been considered by the company's wide-eyed founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. It also is one of the ideas that the company's chief executive, Eric E. Schmidt, has taken pride in keeping 'below the line.' Of course, such fringe ventures could easily consume any number of billions of dollars that Google might raise on the stock market. It has been Mr. Schmidt's ability to keep the company focused on its stated mission of 'organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful' that has so far made the company a powerful threat to larger rivals like Microsoft. Indeed, that focus is so deeply interwoven in the company's culture that whatever direction Google turns, it is likely to disappoint those expecting a blockbuster acquisition. The 4,100-employee company that the three computer scientists have built has maintained a marked predisposition toward building and not buying its future. Indeed, its acquisitions to date have exclusively been of small technology start-ups led by designers whom Google wanted to hire. That is a marked contrast to its two main competitors, the Microsoft Corporation and Yahoo, which have recently turned to high-profile acquisitions to enter new markets. Google's preference has been instead to try to create new markets from scratch or to redefine existing ones when it enters them. This week, in two product introductions, Google will both reinforce its central mission and give an early hint of how it is planning to broaden its business strategy beyond advertising-supported Internet searches. On Monday, Google is planning to introduce a second-generation version of its downloadable computer search tool, Google Desktop. It will come with both personalization and software 'agent' features - learning capabilities - plus an invitation for independent programmers to develop small programs to extend the capability of the system. Both capabilities are likely to be seen as further competitive threats by Microsoft, which is focusing on similar information retrieval and organization advances in its long-delayed next-generation operating system, Windows Vista. 'We're really trying to make this into a platform,' said Nikhil Bhatla, product manager for Google Desktop. As with Apple Computer's popular Dashboard feature, the idea is that it will be simple for programmers to extend the reach of Google Desktop by adding custom applications, known as live content panels. Google executives say they plan to unveil on Wednesday a 'communications tool' that is potentially a clear step beyond the company's search-related business focus. While executives would not disclose what the new software tool might be, Google has long been expected to introduce an instant messaging service to compete with services offered by America Online, Yahoo and MSN from Microsoft. A new Google strategy to enter the communications world could raise even more interesting questions than the current Silicon Valley hubbub over what it might choose to buy. Indeed, largely overlooked last week in the glare of the $4 billion stock announcement was Google's acquisition of Android Inc., a start-up founded by a former Apple hardware designer, Andy Rubin. The move did not go unnoticed, however, by Silicon Valley cognoscenti. Mr. Rubin, who also worked for General Magic when it was in its start-up phase, went on to be a co-founder of Danger Inc., maker of the Sidekick smart phone, a combination cellphone and personal organizer that is sold by T-Mobile. Mr. Rubin is being joined by Andy Hertzfeld, another Apple and General Magic veteran. General Magic developed a handheld device in the 1990's. The Sidekick was an early favorite of both Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who wore the units on their belts as all-purpose voice and data communicators several years ago. A Google-branded smart phone has long been a pet project of Mr. Page, and earlier this year Google invested $2 million in a project by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the M.I.T. Media Laboratory, to develop a $100 wireless laptop. The smart-phone idea, which the company has not talked about publicly, would be a way to extend Google's reach and give it a more extensive connection with its users by offering Google on a multipurpose mobile device. Google has also attracted wide attention in other communications fields, both with its purchase of fiber optic cable capacity and with several quiet moves it has made in experimenting in wireless technologies. Recently the company has discussed public Wi-Fi networks with Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, who is leading an effort to develop a city-backed wireless data network infrastructure. The idea that Google might try to build an independent national Wi-Fi network has been discussed, but network industry specialists say that such an idea is far-fetched. 'Why would they want to get into the customer service business?' said Michael J. Kleeman, a telecommunications industry expert who was chief technology officer for Cometa Networks, which undertook an earlier national Wi-Fi network effort. He noted that two-thirds of the costs involved in such retail businesses are in customer acquisition and support. 'When was the last time you called Google with a problem?' he said.

Subject: Travels With My Florida Parrot T-Shirt From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 08:54:35 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21shelf.html?ex=1282276800&en=c67e9b67553eed67&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 21, 2005 Travels With My Florida Parrot T-Shirt By ROGER LOWENSTEIN THE really good writers do not write 'about' their subjects so much as use them to tell a story. The topic of free trade would not seem to offer much in the way of storytelling material, but Pietra Rivoli has proved otherwise. In 'The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy' (John Wiley & Sons, $29.95), Ms. Rivoli, an economist at Georgetown University, has mined a subject known for dry polemics and created an engaging and illuminating saga of the international textile trade. Her book's subtitle is 'An Economist Examines the Markets, Power and Politics of World Trade,' and the author acknowledges that, at the outset, she shared her profession's bias in favor of free trade and, in particular, its 'somewhat off-putting tendency to believe that if everyone understood what we understood' then 'they wouldn't argue so much.' But then, as she says in one of her many beguilingly titled subchapters, 'Student Protests Sent a Business Professor Around the World.' The protests occurred on 'a cold day in February 1999.' Ms. Rivoli was watching as students gathered at the gothic centerpiece of Georgetown to demonstrate against the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and other putative villains of international trade. The crowd, Ms. Rivoli noticed with characteristic acuity, had 'a moral certainty, a unity of purpose' that permitted it to distinguish black from white and good from evil 'with perfect clarity.' One woman seized the microphone and asked: 'Who made your T-shirt? Was it a child in Vietnam? Or a young girl from India earning 18 cents per hour? ... Did you know that she lives 12 to a room? That she shares her bed and has only gruel to eat?' Ms. Rivoli did not know these things, and she wondered how the woman at the microphone knew. But she decided to find out. In the rest of her narrative, the author tells the story of 'her' T-shirt, which she purchased for $5.99 by the exit of a Walgreen's in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. 'It was white and printed with a flamboyantly colored parrot, with the word 'Florida' scripted beneath.' A company in Miami had engraved the front, after buying the shirt from a factory in China. The Chinese manufacturer had purchased the cotton used to make the shirt from Texas. Eventually it will end up as part of a large but little-known market for used clothing destined for resale in East African ports. Ms. Rivoli follows her T-shirt along its route, but this is like saying that Melville followed his whale. In Texas, she plumbs the reasons for America's pre-eminence in the cotton trade. This leads to a fascinating inquiry into the pre-Civil War South and its use of African slaves, whose cheap labor was an early example of 'the ability to suppress and avoid competition' that she finds at every stage - not least in today's Asian sweatshops - of her T-shirt's journey. Even today, Texas owes much of its success to factors outside the 'free market,' like universities and other institutions that have helped to integrate ginning, packaging and shipping, and programs to familiarize farmers with technology. Most of all, American farmers benefit from government subsidies, whose effect is to disenfranchise lower-cost cotton from poor nations of West Africa. When Ms. Rivoli informs us that these subsidies amount to more than the United States' entire development aid budget for the continent of Africa, we are ready to cut the Chinese a little slack, recognizing that they are hardly alone in departing from the virtuous fantasy of free and unrestricted competition. Given the absurdly arcane (and infuriating) knot of import restrictions that will confront her shirt when it attempts to reenter the United States, it isn't clear, she observes dryly, 'whether the best negotiators, or the best T-shirts, would win.' By looking across history to the shifting center of textile manufacturing from Manchester, England, to Lowell, Mass., to South Carolina to Japan and, finally, the developing nations of Asia, Ms. Rivoli discovers a universal truth. Without making light of the horrors experienced by workers, she asserts that their jobs were a little better than other available options (usually farm work) and, what's more, that textile factories led to advances in industrialization and, just as dependably, in living standards. It is not too much to say that she uses the T-shirt to tell the story of progress. Similar points have been made before, but in the abstract dialect of economists. Ms. Rivoli does her best work at ground level, introducing us to a family farmer outside Lubbock, Tex.; a young woman on the assembly line in Shanghai; a reseller of shirts in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; a K Street lobbyist in Washington; not to mention figures from history. We learn of an earlier generation's exploitation from an Alabama sharecropper; of the mangled limbs suffered by factory workers in 19th-century Manchester from Friedrich Engels; and of the hazards of sweatshops from a survivor of the infamous fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in lower Manhattan in 1911 that killed 146 employees. THE book sparkles with short, happy sentences like 'Unlike French wine or Florida oranges, Texas cotton doesn't brag about where it was born and raised.' Stationed outside a shopping center in Bethesda, Md., where a Salvation Army truck is accepting donations of used clothing, the author tartly observes, 'It is a Saturday morning, and soccer moms are in a race to throw things away.' Ultimately, she concludes that the argument for free trade is as strong as ever, and it is a moral case as well as an economic one. She advises the activists not to disperse, but to refocus their efforts on including people, like repressed factory workers in China, in the political process 'rather than shielding them from markets.' Her nuanced and fair-minded approach is all the more powerful for eschewing the pretense of ideological absolutism, and her telescopic look through a single industry has all the makings of an economics classic.

Subject: Trade Pact Divides Central Americans From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 05:54:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/international/americas/21cafta.html August 21, 2005 U.S. Trade Pact Divides the Central Americans, With Farmers and Others Fearful By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. BIJAGUA, Costa Rica - Bolívar Elizondo barely ekes out a living on his 25-acre farm in the mountains near Bijagua, where he raises chickens, pigs, pineapples and a dozen cows. But his biggest worry these days is a free trade agreement with the United States. A man who must do everything by hand with a machete or knife, Mr. Elizondo depends on selling about 50 pigs a year to finance the rest of his tiny operation. He says he can never compete with the large mechanized meat producers from the United States that are expected to invade the market over the next 20 years if Costa Rica's legislature approves the accord. 'Without selling the pigs, I don't know how to survive,' he said as he fed plantains to his swine. 'I can't support myself. I will have to sell this. Who is going to buy it? Not another Costa Rican. It will be a multinational corporation.' The Central America Free Trade Agreement, known as Cafta, was barely passed by Congress in late July after President Bush put on a masterly display of logrolling and arm-twisting. But even in this region the agreement is far from a done deal. It has become a toxic political issue here in Central America's richest economy as well as in several others, including countries where the pact has already passed the legislatures. Mr. Bush argues that the deal will shore up political stability in the region and reduce a $2.3 billion deficit with the countries involved. But negotiators for the region did not have enough leverage to pry many concessions from the United States, critics and even some supporters said. A high-ranking Costa Rican official, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending his American counterparts, said the implicit threat was that temporary trade preferences enjoyed under old agreements would not be renewed. Central American countries had to get on board with the new pact or risk watching their exports dwindle. United States trade officials say they argued that a permanent agreement was a better deal for smaller countries than the two-decade-old, one-way trade preferences that could disappear at the whim of Congress. But they did not dispute that reluctance to extend the preferences past 2008 might have spurred countries to join the new pact. 'If a country chooses not to ratify Cafta and open its markets to U.S. goods and services, it should not automatically assume that Congress would continue to provide it preferential one-way access into the U.S. market,' said Neena Moorjani, a spokeswoman for the United States trade representative, Rob Portman. As such, the treaty has divided Costa Ricans and others in the region, with people both for and against it now warning of impending doom if they do not get their way. If the pact is approved, small farmers like Mr. Elizondo say they will be wiped out. If it is not, Costa Rican manufacturers like Luis Gamboa, whose factory produces stoves and refrigerators, say they may move to another country. Labor leaders threaten strikes and scream that the treaty will force public-sector layoffs and drive up health care costs. Flower growers say they will go out of business without it. The accord arouses such passions that the Costa Rican president, Abel Pacheco, dismissed all the negotiators and postponed sending it to the legislature for nearly 18 months. Most political analysts say he plans to let the next president deal with the issue, which is already defining the presidential race this winter. Alberto Trejos, the former trade minister, negotiated the deal for Costa Rica and then resigned last year in protest, saying the president lacked the stomach to face down the unions here. 'The president and government have at this late stage of their administration lost the nerve for a big fight,' he said in an interview. Nor have Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic passed the accord yet, for similar reasons. Even in Guatemala, where the legislature did approve the agreement, there were violent demonstrations against it. In El Salvador, one of the United States' closest allies, health care workers marched to protest the pact before it passed. Critics across the region, mostly laborite or leftist in their views, see the pact as a one-way street, benefiting United States multinational corporations at the expense of Central America's small businesses and farmers. 'Where is the evidence that this is going to develop us?' said Ottón Solís, an economist who is running for president in the Citizen Action Party. 'This is going to create more poverty and Central America will expel more people toward the U.S.A.' 'I never imagined Cafta was going to be so one sided,' he added. 'The law of the jungle benefits the big beast. We are a very small beast.' Opponents like him point to the experience of Mexico, whose 10-year experiment in free trade with the United States has depopulated much of the countryside and sent waves of migration north of the border. With that in mind, perhaps no Costa Rican region has more at stake than Guanacaste, where tens of thousands of small farmers like Mr. Elizondo raise beef, pigs, rice and sugar cane. Rice farmers here see the agreement as an unmitigated disaster. Even though they have 10 years before the 35 percent duty on imported rice begins to disappear, most say they will never be able compete with rice farmers in the United States, who have better technology and receive huge subsidies. It costs about $250 to produce a ton of rice in both countries, but the Americans sell it on the world market for much less, farmers here said. 'It's impossible for is to be competitive with all the subsidies that the North Americans have,' said Emilio Rodríguez Pacheco, 48, who farms about 25 acres of rice here. 'For the rice sector it's a tragedy.' At the same time, critics point out that vulnerable parts of the United States economy remain protected, even in areas where Central American negotiators managed small inroads, like sugar and textiles. The agreement, for instance, leaves in place the price supports for American sugar, while opening the door only a crack, letting in imports equal to 1 percent of United States production. The part on textiles was also written to protect United States fabric and yarn factories, this time from Chinese competition. It requires that 90 percent of apparel turned out by Central America makers use American fabrics, which they can buy duty free. 'If we are in Cafta, we can survive,' said María A. Quirce, the executive director of the Chamber of Textile Exporters. 'If we are out of Cafta, we are out of business.' Defenders of the pact say most of the complaints are baseless and born of fear of change. Freer access to the North American market is the only way, they maintain, for Central American economies to grow. Meanwhile, if the structure of the Costa Rican economy changes, then so be it. Ruined farmers will shift to export crops or find other kinds of work. Foreign investment will bring more jobs. 'We are condemned to be traders,' said former President Óscar Arias, who is running for president again this year and supports the treaty. 'We produce what we do not consume and we consume what we do not produce.' He added, 'It is essential for us to have access to the market.' Flower growers, for instance, say they have no choice but to support the new pact. Losing the low tariffs they have lived under in recent years, in part ushered in under agreements like the Caribbean Basin Initiative in 2000, would be disastrous for them. 'The free trade treaty, for us, would just keep up the status quo,' said Michael Thomas, the general manager of the American Flowers Corporation, in Alajuela. The same holds true for Sardimar S.A., a seafood processing company in the pacific port of Puntarenas, said Gabriella Muñoz, an executive with the company, and for Atlas Eléctrica S.A., the stove and refrigerator maker that Mr. Gamboa owns. Mr. Gamboa said he would like to enter into the American market, but would not risk plunking down the money to expand his factory unless he knew the treaty was in place. 'The United States market is what all the manufacturers are looking for,' he said. Some of the biggest winners are expected to be American companies who already have manufacturing plants here, like Intel, Conair, subsidiaries of Lee and Wrangler jeans, and Rawlings Sporting Goods, which makes major league baseballs in Costa Rica. But for many Costa Ricans, the most difficult points in the treaty are provisions that open the telecommunications market and protect the property rights of big American pharmaceutical companies from generic drug makers here. Both steps are expected to raise prices in parts of the economy that are treasured, in effect, as social equalizers. The state telephone and electricity company, for instance, has provided subsidized service for decades, giving Costa Ricans the cheapest telephone service in Latin America. The unions representing the utility's 10,000 workers contend that the treaty will let big companies drive their operation out of business in a few years. A vast strike and street protests are likely if the treaty is passed, said Mauricio González, president of a union representing professionals in the state telephone and energy monopoly. 'We see the free trade treaty as an instrument used for many things that don't have anything to do with business,' he said, 'but with dismantling our model of social development.'

Subject: Promises, Promises From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 05:48:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/opinion/22mon1.html August 22, 2005 Promises, Promises In 1947, when 23 nations agreed to start a new international organization to promote trade and arbitrate disputes, the wants of poor countries mattered little. Industrialized nations were rebuilding after World War II, and remained the colonial masters of Asia and Africa. Over the next half-century, that club - now known as the World Trade Organization - aggressively dismantled barriers against trade in industrial goods and services, areas in which its members hold a comparative advantage. But when it comes to areas where poor countries could flourish, such as textiles and agriculture, it has been a different story. American tariffs on textiles and apparel are among the nation's highest. Europe, Japan and the United States continue to resist facing global competition in agriculture on fair terms. The very same representatives of the club of rich countries who go around the world hectoring the poor to open up their markets to free trade put up roadblocks when those countries ask the rich to dismantle their own barriers to free trade in agricultural products. Last month, negotiations at the W.T.O.'s Geneva headquarters once again brought this sad reality into stark relief. The group is supposed to finally be taking up the issue of agriculture subsidies. Four years ago, in Doha, Qatar, poor countries demanded - and supposedly won - a promise that Europe, Japan and America would slash agricultural subsidies, in addition to further liberalizing world trade in services and manufactured goods. One year ago, the W.T.O. gave itself until July 2005 to draw up a plan for how it would do all this. Since then - surprise, surprise - negotiators have made big strides toward agreeing how to cut tariffs on manufactured goods, and, to a lesser extent, services. Both of those are important to rich countries. And guess where negotiations have stalled? The European Union and the United States are busily fighting over how little they can get away with when it comes to liberalizing farm trade. Listening to these two economic powerhouses snipe about who should be doing what is revolting; neither is doing anything real. The developed world funnels nearly $1 billion a day in subsidies to its own farmers, encouraging overproduction, which drives down commodity prices. Poor nations' farmers cannot compete with subsidized products, even within their own countries. In recent years, American farmers have been able to dump cotton, wheat, rice, corn and other products on world markets at prices that do not begin to cover their cost of production, all thanks to politicians and at the expense of American taxpayers. Europe's system, meanwhile, is even more odious: United States farm subsidies are equal to only a third of the European Union's. Farm tariffs are also a problem. Take cocoa. European tariffs on raw material are lower than tariffs on final products. That means that cocoa-producing countries like Ghana can't export chocolate to Europe, and are forced to export the raw material, cocoa, instead. It was with great fanfare five years ago that the United States and some 188 other countries signed the United Nations Millennium Declaration, a magna carta to eradicate poverty and hunger and disease among the one billion people in the world who subsist on barely anything. Chief among those goals was for the rich world to finally put muscle behind that overused phrase 'level the playing field,' when it comes to trade. But so far it has been nothing but talk, talk, talk on trade. While the rich continue their shameful obfuscating, poor countries are priced out of the market. A few weeks ago, the European Union's trade envoy, Peter Mandelson, actually complained to reporters that Europe had been making more than its fair share of compromises in the W.T.O. talks. 'This process of compromise has been a one-way street for well over a year,' he said. Mr. Mandelson and his counterparts in America and Japan would do well to remember what happened in Cancún, Mexico, in September 2003, when a bloc of poor nations, led by West African countries upset about cotton subsidies, helped torpedo an international trade deal. Big business on both sides of the Atlantic dearly wants a trade pact that liberalizes the rules on manufactured products and services. But for poor countries, the process of compromise has been a one-way street for more than half a century. It's time for the rich world to start doing a little compromising.

Subject: G.M. Troubled but Not By Bankruptcy From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 19:43:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/business/19place.html August 19, 2005 Wall St. Agrees G.M. Is Troubled but Not Bound for Bankruptcy Soon By DANNY HAKIM With its offer of employee discounts to the public, General Motors addressed its short-term woes: it had two months of robust sales and cleared out its bloated inventory. But the fire sale did not solve G.M.'s fundamental problems, which raises the question of whether this former bulwark of American industry faces the prospect of bankruptcy. Wall Street's answer? Not anytime soon. The company is losing billions of dollars in what has been its core business for nearly a century - building and selling cars and trucks in the United States. Further, its hundreds of thousands of retirees enjoy generous health care and pension benefits that are an increasingly costly burden as the company's American business shrinks. In the first half of the year, G.M. lost $1.4 billion and exhausted more than $3 billion in cash. And although its employee discount offers spurred sales, the effect on profits could be mixed, at best. For the next two or three years, though, financial analysts and bond investors say they do not expect that G.M. will go bankrupt because it has too much cash on hand. Beyond that limited time, however, the company's prospects are debatable, with much depending on how the chairman and chief executive, Rick Wagoner, remakes the company's North American operations. 'Our lending to these companies is based on liquidity: what's the probability of us being paid back?' said Mark Kiesel, an executive vice president at the bond giant Pimco. Mr. Kiesel was referring as well to Ford, which is not in much better shape than G.M., though it has a somewhat stronger cash position and relatively smaller retiree burden. 'Given the tremendous cash balances they have, we felt comfortable, but our comfort is fairly short term,' he said. Pimco invested in one- to two-year bonds from G.M. and Ford's financing divisions earlier this year. 'The thing that would concern any investor about lending long term is the health care and longer-term legacy costs,' Mr. Kiesel said. 'They have an aging work force, and as they retire they have to support those older workers with their existing work force.' That reflects the view of many bond investors and analysts, who are thinking short term. 'We're not concerned about a bankruptcy in the next couple years because of the amount of cash on the balance sheet,' said John F. Walsh, a bond portfolio manager at the American Century mutual fund company. 'Past three years or so,' Mr. Walsh added, 'it becomes a question of, Is the core business viable because of their cost structure?' One problem is that G.M. provides medical coverage to 1.1 million Americans, making it the nation's largest private provider of health benefits. While the company is pushing the United Automobile Workers union to agree to cuts in benefits to trim G.M.'s nearly $6 billion annual health care bill, it seems unlikely that the union will agree to the kind of cuts the company is seeking. G.M. has also increased its debt in recent years to finance its $100 billion pension plan. Another fundamental problem is that G.M. has failed to make enough compelling cars and trucks to sustain the eight brands it sells domestically: Chevrolet, Cadillac, GMC, Saturn, Hummer, Buick, Pontiac and Saab. Though offering the employee discount to consumers spurred sales, the company records revenue when vehicles leave the factory, not when they are later sold by dealers. So, when G.M. made steep production cuts earlier in the year, it was clear that its profits would suffer. Further, when the company had difficulty selling even its reduced production run, it had to resort to the discounts to clear out car lots. On the other hand, further or steeper production cuts might have been required if large numbers of 2005 models had remained unsold. There are plenty of other headaches. Robert S. Miller, the new chief executive of G.M.'s former parts division, Delphi, is pressing G.M. for what could be a costly bailout. That comes not long after G.M. had to pay $2 billion to end its much-criticized industrial alliance with Fiat. In addition, the downgrading of G.M.'s bonds to junk status has limited the flexibility in raising funds. And G.M. is gobbling up cash, about $3.1 billion so far this year, leaving it with about $20 billion in cash on its automotive balance sheet, versus $31 billion in debt, with average maturities exceeding a decade. Clearly, that is not sustainable. 'It's a piggy bank, and every month they shake money out of it,' said Maryann Keller, a longtime auto analyst, adding, 'Eventually, you have to start putting cash back into the piggy bank.' 'It doesn't have to go bankrupt, though given the track they're presently on, I'd agree with the bond investors,' she added. 'Two or three years is fine, but I'm not so sure about later, because G.M. has not given us much reason for comfort.' Jonathan Steinmetz, an auto analyst at Morgan Stanley, said, 'You have an organization with too much capacity, too many employees, too many brands and too many dealers,' referring to G.M.'s North American business. But Mr. Steinmetz said he believed that the company still had numerous levers to pull. 'Our forecast is not for a company that is going to start facing bankruptcy risk,' he said. Jerry Dubrowski, a G.M. spokesman, reiterated that bankruptcy was neither foreseen nor part of G.M.'s strategy. 'We don't think bankruptcy is a viable option in the auto industry,' Mr. Dubrowski said. 'In the airline industry, if a carrier files for bankruptcy, people continue to fly because the planes keep going. But in the auto industry, the buyer might not want to buy a product if they don't know that the warranty will be there. It's not a short-term product.' Investors focus on G.M.'s automotive balance sheet because its financing subsidiary, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, operates like a bank, with huge portfolios of assets and debts that balance against each other. But the subsidiary, the automaker's main profit driver, could be used as a life preserver, and G.M. has been raising cash by selling off some parts of G.M.A.C., including a majority stake in its commercial mortgage business. On the product front, G.M. has a new wave of vehicles coming over the next couple of years that have received some acclaim from critics in early viewings. The biggest part of the product wave will be replacements of large sport utility vehicles and pickups. Rising gasoline prices weigh on demand for larger vehicles, which have been G.M.'s main automotive profit center, but many analysts say believe that renewing such a large part of G.M.'s lineup will invariably provide some help for the company, starting next year. 'When you add up the S.U.V.'s and the pickup trucks, it's almost a third of G.M.'s North American sales volume, and they are higher-margin vehicles on top of that,' said Danny Liang, a bond analyst at American Century. 'Obviously the market is moving away from large S.U.V.'s to a certain extent, but I have to believe there is some level of pent-up demand for them.' Beyond that product wave, however, many analysts say the company has to slim down its North American operations, find a more winning product strategy and win major concessions from the U.A.W. 'Beyond two to three years, something needs to happen here,' Mr. Liang said. 'If the U.A.W. doesn't budge, and they're in the same situation, that becomes a huge risk.' Craig Hutson, an analyst at the bond research firm Gimme Credit, said much hinges on how G.M.'s new products fare. 'I don't think I can look out five years with this company,' Mr. Hutson said.

Subject: Earnings Slow, Dividends Pick Up Slack From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 19:40:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/10/business/yourmoney/10fund.html?ex=1124769600&en=4c0ef6457f52d6ca&ei=5070 As Earnings Slow, Dividends Pick Up the Slack By PAUL J. LIM FOR the past two years, the stock market's run has been fueled by a surprisingly strong surge in corporate profits. Unfortunately, the gas tank is starting to empty. After reaching rates of more than 20 percent starting in late 2003, profit growth is slowing. In fact, second-quarter earnings for companies in the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index are expected to grow by a much more modest 7 percent, according to Thomson Financial. Yet that doesn't mean that the case for owning stocks is weakening. At the moment, there is another very positive sign for the stock market: a surge in dividends. Just as corporate profit growth is slowing, dividends paid by S.& P. 500 companies are accelerating. Ever since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, dividend-paying stocks have commanded attention from investors, especially when the federal government cut taxes on qualified corporate dividends in 2003 to 15 percent from as high as 38.6 percent. But it was only at the end of 2003 that dividend growth started picking up speed. And it was only this year that dividends started growing faster than profits. In the first three months of the year, corporate earnings grew by less than 14 percent while dividends increased by almost 16 percent. In the second quarter, dividends jumped by nearly 13 percent, or almost double the estimated rate of profit growth. Dividends typically have grown faster than earnings only in economic downturns, like the one in 2001. During such periods, it's typically not a case of dividends accelerating but rather of earnings slowing faster than dividends, said Jeffrey N. Kleintop, chief investment strategist for PNC Advisors in Philadelphia. 'The fact that this is happening midway into a business cycle is really something,' he said. What does it mean? Because dividends compensate investors while they wait for equity prices to appreciate, investors are being paid more to hold stocks, and more of us should be willing to do so. To be sure, the dividend yield on the S.& P. 500 is still slightly below 2 percent, according to Standard & Poor's. But these aren't the roaring 1990's. Stocks aren't posting 20-percent-plus returns. So that means dividends are playing relatively larger roles. Over the last 12 months, for example, the S.& P. 500 has returned around 9 percent - and one-fifth of that return has come from dividends. The argument for paying attention to dividends right now goes beyond yield. 'Focusing on absolute yields is not a very good approach when it comes to dividends,' said Howard Silverblatt, equity market analyst at S.& P. Because dividend yields are calculated by dividing a stock's cash dividend per share by the share price, a high dividend yield could just be a sign of a company whose stock has taken a beating. But dividend growth measures the increase in the actual cash payout. This is why growing dividends are often seen as a sign of improving finances, as companies need to generate enough cash flow to return larger checks to shareholders. At the end of the day, it is the compounding effect of these growing dividends, reinvested methodically in one's portfolio, that helps engineer big returns, Mr. Silverblatt said. For example, from 1995 to 2004 - a period generally marked by a declining focus on dividends - the S.& P. 500 rose 164 percent, based on price appreciation. But by reinvesting small but growing dividends, investors earned 212 percent in total returns. Eugene C. Sit, chairman of Sit Investment Associates in Minneapolis, says he thinks dividends in the S.& P. 500 could grow 10 percent to 12 percent annually for the next several years, which should make dividend payers more attractive. The fact that government bonds are yielding such paltry sums makes dividend growers even more appealing, he says. 'If you're buying a bond at a 4 percent yield and you're in the highest marginal tax bracket, after taxes you're earning something close to 3 percent,' said Mr. Sit, lead manager of the Sit Dividend Growth fund. Yet an investor could earn similar or even higher yields through dividend-paying stocks, and those payouts are likely to grow significantly. Moreover, dividend investors are being taxed at a maximum rate of just 15 percent - at least through 2008, when the current dividend tax law will expire unless Congress extends it. Where are dividends growing the fastest? Oddly enough, in the technology sector, which until recently has hardly been synonymous with dividends. Tech dividends have grown 44 percent annually over the last two years as more companies that hadn't previously returned profits to shareholders started doing so. Of course, tech dividends are growing fast because they are starting from a very small base. Other sectors showing strong dividend growth of late have been telecommunications, financial services, consumer staples and consumer discretionary stocks. Daniel Clifton, executive director of the American Shareholders Association - an affiliate of Americans for Tax Reform that is pushing to make permanent the dividend tax cuts - says investors need to put things in perspective. Dividends may be growing faster than earnings because 'so many companies started withdrawing dividends in the 1990's to pursue growth,' he said. Many of those companies took cash that could have been paid out in dividends and reinvested it into the company to expand or even to acquire other businesses. As a handful of S.& P. 500 companies have begun to reinstate dividends, the growth rate has shot higher. Since the end of 2002, some 33 additional companies in the S.& P. 500 have started issuing dividends, bringing the total to 384. That is still a far cry from the 469 companies that did so in 1980, but the trend is clear and investors are already picking up on it. So far this year, dividend-paying stocks in the S.& P. index have returned 2.9 percent, on average, while those that don't pay dividends have lost 1.5 percent, according to S.& P. MOREOVER, since stocks hit their recent lows in April - amid fears of shrinking profits in the face of rising oil prices and interest rates - the fastest-growing sectors in terms of dividends have performed the best, Mr. Kleintop said. Those include technology, financial services, industrial, consumer staples and consumer discretionary stocks. But the absolute rate of growth is often less important than the sustainability of growth. Standard & Poor's puts together a list of companies that have managed to raise their dividends every year for the past quarter-century. From 1990 to 2004, these so-called dividend aristocrats returned 13.4 percent a year, on average. That's 2.5 percentage points better than the overall S.& P. 500. The good news for dividend-growth investors is that there is plenty of room for this trend to grow. Despite the recent pickup in dividend growth, the actual payout ratio - the percentage of a company's profits paid in dividends - is still near historical lows. That is one reason Mr. Kleintop says he believes that 'over the next 10, maybe 20 years, we could be in an environment where people are much more focused on dividends than they were in the 1980's and 90's.'

Subject: The Safety Net Was Pulled Away From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 19:26:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-na-disability21aug21,0,1251242,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines The Safety Net She Believed In Was Pulled Away When She Fell Debra Potter made a good living selling disability coverage. But like many working Americans, she learned the hard way that federal law now favors insurers. By Peter G. Gosselin August 21, 2005 Until a few years ago, Debra Potter made sure that her family could cruise the Caribbean, watch the NFL on big-screen TV and keep her elderly mother and in-laws at home in comfort. She did so by earning $250,000 a year selling more insurance than almost anybody else in the state of Virginia, virtually all of it disability and health policies that she thought put a safety net under middle-class and affluent families such as her own. Potter so believed in the protection she was providing that she made sure she was covered under a policy her employer, Southeastern financial services giant BB&T, had with UnumProvident Corp., the nation's largest disability insurer. But when Potter began falling down in 2002 and was subsequently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, she discovered that the protection didn't work anything like she'd expected. UnumProvident, whose policies the 50-year-old insurance agent had been selling, questioned whether Potter really was disabled and refused to pay her. Although the firm, based in Chattanooga, Tenn., relented a few weeks ago, the reversal took three years and did not come before the Potters had run through most of their savings, yanked one of their five children from college for lack of tuition and hired a lawyer. The $10.5-billion-a-year insurer denies mishandling Potter's case, saying only that 'new information' caused it to change its position and start paying. 'People need safety nets, and that's what I thought I was selling them,' Potter said. 'But here I am with all my knowledge of insurance and I couldn't make it work for me.' When middle-class Americans talk about safety nets, they usually mean such things as food stamps or housing subsidies — public assistance on which generally only the poor depend. In fact, working people up and down the income spectrum lean heavily on a long list of protections such as healthcare coverage, unemployment compensation and pensions or 401(k)s. But an examination of Potter's experience, UnumProvident's legal and regulatory record and the practices of several other insurers suggests that a key component of working Americans' protective shield fails with unnerving regularity. Disability insurance — now carried by more than 50 million Americans — generally promises to replace at least half of a person's wages in case of illness or injury. However, in a substantial number of cases, especially those involving workers with long-term or permanent disabilities, it doesn't deliver. The chief reason — and one that affects not only disability but the whole universe of employer-provided benefits — is a series of court decisions dealing with the federal benefits law known as ERISA. The decisions have prevented states from extending almost any form of consumer protection to these benefits, and have severely limited individuals' ability to successfully sue their insurers. 'People who file disability claims today are worse off than they were two or three decades ago,' said Judge William M. Acker Jr., who was appointed to the U.S. District Court in Alabama by President Reagan. 'The law that was supposed to protect them has been turned on its head; the chief beneficiaries are now the insurance companies,' said Acker, who has presided over a variety of disability insurance cases and has written extensively on the subject. That such a sweeping change could occur and that it could upend someone as well-heeled as Debra Potter illustrates how close most Americans are to the economic edge, where a few setbacks at work or in health can send a person tumbling. 'The safety nets designed to protect people from being run over by economic forces beyond their control have been shredded,' said California Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi, a Democrat whose department is investigating UnumProvident. Expanding coverage For years, disability was a sideline, often thrown in by insurance agents as an incentive to buy life insurance. But starting in the 1960s, the scope and importance of the disability safety net increased dramatically. Types of policies expanded to include both individual and employer-provided coverage. Benefit-payment periods were extended to last to age 65 or later. Eligibility rules were loosened to include not only people who could do no work at all but those unable to do just their 'own occupation.' An example of the difference: An airline pilot whose eyesight had deteriorated so much that he couldn't fly but could still do a desk job would not have been covered under the old system, but would be covered under the new one. Washington weighed in by extending Social Security to cover the most disabled, elderly or not, and by boosting benefits several times. Much of the expansion was driven by economic changes that spurred the need for disability coverage. The changes required many families to begin fielding not just one full-time worker, but two, in order to afford a middle-class life. As a result, families lost their 'reserve player,' the non-working spouse who could enter the workforce if the other fell ill or was injured, and so found it increasingly important to take out insurance against that possibility. However, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, many politicians and business executives had become convinced that matters had gone too far, that industry and government could not afford many of the promises they'd already made, and that some programs were backfiring by leading people to fake or exaggerate problems to collect benefits. Remarkably, in the case of disability insurance, the first group to bring the issue to a head was the nation's doctors, seeking payments not for their patients but for themselves. Disability insurers had sold a generation of doctors extremely generous, individual, 'own occupation' policies, confident that their new clients would continue working almost no matter what, and therefore file few claims. But as the managed care revolution began to clamp down on what physicians could charge, many doctors started to exit their profession and, according to insurance industry executives, a considerable number filed for disability. At the U.S. Supreme Court and at many federal appeals courts, attention focused on the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974. According to its preamble, ERISA's goal was to 'protect … participants in employee benefit plans and their beneficiaries.' Although the 208-page law's chief focus was pensions, it also superseded virtually all state laws that 'relate to any employee benefit plan.' One of its authors, the late Sen. Jacob K. Javits, a New York Republican, praised ERISA as 'the greatest development in the life of the American worker since Social Security.' But over the last 25 years, the Supreme Court has read the 'relate to' provision so broadly that claimants who believe they have been wrongly denied benefits are rarely able to sue for punitive damages under state bad-faith or fraud laws. The court has said the most that claimants generally can win by suing in federal court is the original benefits due them, no matter how long their wait or, often, how steep their legal fees. In addition, the court has effectively granted insurance companies and benefit plan administrators a special status that requires an employee whose claim has been denied to prove not just that the denial was wrong, but that the officials making the decision acted in an 'arbitrary and capricious' manner. Two views of ERISA The insurance industry argues that the recent trend in the law has strengthened, not weakened, the employee benefit system. 'It has allowed companies and unions to operate benefit plans without getting chewed up by lawsuits,' said Steven J. Sacher, who helped draft ERISA as a young Labor Department lawyer and now represents insurers as an attorney with the Washington office of Kilpatrick Stockton. 'That means they're willing to offer employees more choice of benefits at better prices.' 'I'm a big fan of ERISA,' UnumProvident Chief Executive Thomas R. Watjen said in a recent interview. 'It gives consumers a voice they didn't have before.' Watjen and other UnumProvident executives defend the company's operations, especially its handling of claims. 'We strive to set the standard for fair and objective claims handling,' said Senior Vice President George A. Shell Jr. As evidence, Shell said UnumProvident paid more than 90% of the 450,000 disability claims it received last year, at a cost of $4.2 billion. He said that in an additional 8% of cases, the firm did not pay because of what he described as technical reasons, as in cases where claimants returned to work before they became eligible for benefits. Only in the remaining 2% of cases or less — involving no more than 9,000 claimants — did the firm limit or deny benefits that led claimants to appeal. But industry experts say that the profitability of disability insurers hinges not so much on the mass of routine claims, which typically are for short periods and involve small sums, but rather on a small number of long-term claims by people who were making good — and therefore expensive-to-replace — incomes. 'There's no question claims costs are driven by the adverse experience of a small percentage' of claimants, said Charles E. Soule, retired CEO of Paul Revere Life Insurance Co., one of three firms that merged in the late 1990s to form UnumProvident, and author of the definitive textbook on disability insurance. 'I mean we're talking about single-digit.' The ability to deny even a fraction of these high-cost claims and to ensure that those denials stick can make a huge difference to the finances of an insurer. (UnumProvident refused to provide separate payout and denial rates for its long-term claims, although a spokesman said they differed only 'slightly' from the overall rates.) UnumProvident's claim denial practices have made it the target of several government investigations in recent years, a treatment that regulators say other insurers either already face or are likely to face in short order. 'In the last 12 months alone, we've seen the largest insurance brokers in America, the largest property and casualty companies in America, the largest title insurance companies, the largest financial service firms and the largest disability insurers all engaged in flagrant violations of their most basic obligations to their customers,' said Garamendi, the California insurance commissioner. 'This is not just a UnumProvident problem; it's an insurance industry one.' Although ERISA prohibits state regulators from intervening to help individuals in most disputes over employer-provided disability insurance, states can investigate insurers' overall conduct, penalize firms for bad behavior and, in some cases, ban companies from doing business within their boundaries. In an investigation concluded last year, regulators representing all 50 states looked at a random sample of almost 300 UnumProvident cases to see whether the company was engaged in 'systemic unfair claim settlement practices,' then examined 75 additional cases after the firm said it had made improvements. The state examiners concluded that both sets of cases had problems 'sufficient to merit further regulatory action.' However, 48 of the 50 states decided to settle with UnumProvident. The company agreed to pay a $15-million fine, review its decisions in more than 232,000 claims denied or closed over the last five years and revamp its entire claim-handling system. The major holdout from the agreement was California, which is conducting its own investigation and negotiating a separate settlement with the firm. In an interview, Shell, the UnumProvident senior vice president, emphasized that those states that did settle made no formal finding of wrongdoing against the firm. He said the problems that the states uncovered were not representative of the firm's overall performance because examiners looked only at 'contentious' closed cases. He characterized the changes agreed to by the company as the furthest thing from an admission of failure. 'I look at them as improvements from the past,' Shell said. However, Garamendi said in a recent interview that among his chief complaints about the settlement was that it failed to allege specific violations by the insurer, a deficiency that he said rendered the accord legally useless. 'Any settlement we sign will … allege specific violations of law and regulations,' the California regulator said. 'We want there to be no mistake in the minds of the company or the public about what the company did wrong and that it can't continue to do it.' Soaring income The middle child of two railroad workers, Debra Potter grew up in Birmingham, Ala., spent a few years at Auburn University and worked variously as a teacher, a secretary at a Pepsi bottling plant and a Girl Scout camp director. She married Ron Potter, a Presbyterian minister, in 1983. They had three children from previous marriages and soon had two together. They moved to this small northwestern Virginia community when Ron was appointed pastor of Sunnyside Presbyterian Church. The couple set about raising a family on his $20,000-a-year salary. Potter settled in for what she thought would be her life's work — being a stay-at-home mom. But by the late 1980s, it was becoming clear to the family that they'd never be able to send all of their kids to college on a preacher's pay alone. Debra and a girlfriend were helping an elderly parishioner of Ron's church fill out insurance forms one night when it struck the two women: Why not get their state insurance licenses? 'Here was something I was already doing anyways and that helped people and it had to pay more than I was making at the time,' she said. Potter eventually got hired by an old-line Winchester insurance agency, J.V. Arthur Inc., to start its group business. In a matter of a few years, she'd become one of the Arthur agency's top producers, sewing up the business of 230 groups that covered thousands of employees and paid the agency three-quarters of a million dollars a year in commissions. Close to one-third of that money went directly to Potter. The realization that the couple's income was taking off dawned slowly on the Potters. At Christmastime 1994, Potter bought her sports-crazed husband a 48-inch TV to watch football, golf and soccer. 'I realized I could pay cash and not even feel it,' she said. The family has since stepped up to a 56-inch screen. As the good news sank in, the Potters purchased one Winchester condo, and then another, to house Ron's parents and his grandmother. They remodeled the basement of their house as an apartment for Debra's mother. They started to do some serious traveling — to the Bahamas, Cancun and Australia. And by 2001, they'd begun to lay plans for their retirement. 'We literally thought we were going to be millionaires,' Ron Potter marveled. Reining in claims As Debra Potter's career was taking off in the mid-1990s, disability industry executives were struggling with an onslaught of expensive claims. At what was then Provident Corp., the company was tightening its claim-handling system in ways that reduced benefit costs and, whenever possible, used ERISA to cut claim payments and shield the firm from lawsuits, according to documents that emerged in subsequent litigation. In one 1995 memo, Ralph W. Mohney Jr., who was a senior vice president with Provident and is a consultant with the since-merged UnumProvident, explained that the firm's 'claim improvement initiatives' were designed to move the company from 'a claim-payment to a claim-management approach.' The 'return on these claim improvement initiatives,' he wrote to then-Provident Chief Executive J. Harold Chandler, 'is expected to be substantial…. A 1% decrease in benefit cost … translates into approximately $6 million in annual savings.' In another 1995 memo, Jeffrey G. McCall, then an assistant vice president with Provident, now a vice president with the merged firm, said the company had set up a task force to spot policies not covered by ERISA and to bring as many as possible under it. 'The advantages of ERISA coverage in litigious situations are enormous,' McCall wrote. 'There are no jury trials. There are no compensatory or punitive damages. Relief is usually limited.' As an example, McCall wrote, a company lawyer had recently identified 12 cases where the firm had paid out $7.8 million in benefits. 'If these 12 cases had been covered by ERISA,' he wrote, 'our liability would have been between zero and $0.5 million.' In recent interviews, senior UnumProvident executives said that Mohney's and McCall's remarks, which date back a decade, had been taken out of context. As an example, they said, the 'decrease in benefit costs' discussed by Mohney was expected to come from streamlining company operations rather than rejecting benefit claims. These executives adamantly denied that UnumProvident systematically turned down claims to improve the company's bottom line. In a news release, the company attributed most complaints about the company's operations to 'a handful of plaintiff's attorneys and a few disgruntled former employees.' The executives conceded, however, that the firm's handling of some cases was flawed. 'You're never going to hear from me that everything in the past was perfect,' said UnumProvident CEO Watjen, 'but we've shown a willingness to learn from our past mistakes.' A 'promise broken' Potter would not be alone in the problems that she began to encounter with UnumProvident in 2002. Nor would UnumProvident be the only disability insurer accused of mishandling claims and mistreating claimants. In Berkeley, Joan Hangarter had had to give up her chiropractic practice because of shoulder, neck and arm pain several years earlier. But after paying Hangarter under her individual disability policy for 20 months, a UnumProvident subsidiary terminated her benefits, attached her bank account and canceled her policy. Before it was over, the single mother of two had lost her home and gone on welfare. 'She was almost ruined,' said San Francisco lawyer Ray Bourhis, who handled Hangarter's case and whose book on the case, 'Insult to Injury,' will be published next month. In West Berne, N.Y., Kevin Murphy, now 51, was battling prostate cancer that his doctors said was spreading and that left him unable to perform his job as international sales vice president for textile maker Guilford Mills Inc. UnumProvident paid Murphy a $7,200 monthly benefit for most of 2002 and half of 2003, then declared him no longer disabled and cut him off even though he still wasn't working. In Wilkesboro, N.C., 47-year-old Ricky D. Hart was a mechanic at a Tyson Foods chicken-processing plant before a quadruple bypass — and the subsequent recurrence of artery blockages — convinced his doctors that he could no longer work. The insurer paid Hart $1,198.20 a month on and off for 18 months before cutting him off. In Michigan, another insurer, Liberty Life Assurance Co. of Boston, came in for a blistering verbal assault from a federal judge for its treatment of former Steelcase Inc. employee Nancy Loucks. The company, as administrator of Steelcase's disability plan, first concluded that Loucks had been disabled by a rheumatic condition and began paying her. Then, after requiring her to undergo repeated evaluations by company-paid doctors, it concluded that she was not disabled and stopped paying. 'Caveat emptor!' declared U.S. District Judge Richard A. Enslen. 'This case attests to a promise bought and a promise broken.' Enslen ordered the company to resume payments. Liberty Life appealed. And in Stoutsville, Ohio, there was Kristin S. Deskins. Deskins spent 25 years climbing the career ladder at the state's largest utility, American Electric Power Co., beginning as the company's first female meter electrician and reaching a $65,000-a-year marketing position. When Deskins fell ill in 2002 — like Potter, with multiple sclerosis — administrators for her employer's disability insurance plan apparently were so convinced that she would never work again that they assigned a specialist to help convince Social Security that she met the government's stringent standard for federal disability payments, which requires that applicants be unable to function in any occupation. Disability insurers have a huge financial interest in getting people who are seeking benefits from them onto the Social Security rolls. In effect, these insurers have come up with ways to shift much of the risk of having to cover ill and injured workers from themselves to Washington even as they continue collecting premiums. Most disability contracts require claimants to apply for Social Security as a condition of receiving benefits under their employer-provided plan. In cases where claimants finally win Social Security benefits, the contracts give insurers the right to offset what they owe by the amount the government pays. In fact, merely having people apply — even if their applications for government benefits ultimately are rejected — helps insurers by reducing what they have to set aside as reserves to ensure that they can pay what they owe. Documents show that in some instances insurers can reduce these reserves by as much as 30%. As a result, many insurers push almost all of their claimants into the Social Security pipeline no matter what their medical condition, once the company has paid their claims for a few months. Some companies take matters one step further. Having helped claimants demonstrate that they are totally disabled in order to qualify for Social Security, they then deny that the claimants are totally disabled for purposes of the insurer's coverage. Within weeks of Deskins finally qualifying for Social Security as totally disabled, claim administrators at Broadspire Services Inc., a subsidiary of Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity, wrote that they had concluded the mother of two could do some jobs after all. Among those they listed in a letter to her was the meter electrician's position she had occupied a quarter-century earlier. As a result, Broadspire said, it would no longer pay Deskins. This practice — helping people apply for Social Security as totally disabled, then doubling back and asserting that they weren't disabled for the purposes of company coverage — had already caught the eye of Richard Posner, a Chicago federal appeals court judge and conservative legal theorist. In a 1998 opinion, he wrote that an employer and its disability carrier, Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., had gone too far in treating one of the employer's customer service representatives in this fashion. The companies' behavior, he wrote, violated a fundamental principle of law, 'that if a party wins a suit on one ground, it can't turn around and in further litigation with the same opponent repudiate the ground in order to win a further victory.' He ruled that the company and insurer would have to make up the difference between Social Security and what the company policy promised. At the onset of illness The first hint of the disease about to overtake Potter appeared during a Jazzercise class she took at a local elementary school in summer 1999. She'd later tell doctors that she suddenly felt wobbly and exhausted. She had to take the next day off and, uncharacteristically, slept for 24 hours. But Potter wrote the incident off as a fluke or perhaps the first sign of menopause. And with so much going on in her new career, she had little time to pay attention. A regional bank had purchased the J.V. Arthur agency and Potter had been given a promotion. Then, BB&T snapped up the bank and she was offered another. She had testified before Congress, headed a regional coalition on rising health costs and had been elected president of the Virginia Assn. of Health Underwriters, an insurance industry trade group. All the while, the money kept rolling in — $190,128 in 1999, $229,354 in 2000, nearly $255,000 in 2001. Unfortunately, so too did the nagging problems. At an August 2001 soccer game in which her youngest son, Nate, then 17, was playing, she got up to go to the bathroom. But she said her legs refused to budge. As she filled out clients' paperwork that fall, her arms began to ache, then went numb. Finally in December, she went to Winchester Neurological Associates to see Dr. Patrick M. Capone. Capone's notes over the next year show a doctor in search of a diagnosis. Capone suspected multiple sclerosis from the outset. But when an MRI turned up only one wedge-shaped lesion in Potter's brain, instead of the two required by newly adopted diagnostic criteria for MS, he wrote that he couldn't prove she had the disease until further symptoms appeared. He tried out other diagnoses as well, but at least initially couldn't nail down any of these to his satisfaction. He noted in passing that his patient showed signs of depression and prescribed an antidepressant, but otherwise made little mention of her state of mind. Finally in May 2002, he wrote that Potter was suffering from 'chronic fatigue syndrome' and 'possible' MS. He warned that 'her fatigue is such that she is now in danger of losing gainful employment in spite of heroic efforts on her part.' While Capone wrestled with a diagnosis, her BB&T supervisor, Edwin E. White Jr., noticed that Potter looked increasingly tired, had trouble carrying the 20 or 30 pounds of paper she'd typically bring to a client meeting and began to miss work, according to subsequent documents in the case. As Potter's troubles deepened, White took over more and more of her responsibilities. Potter said that she discussed with her bosses the possibility of having to go out on disability. She said that White and other BB&T executives, in turn, discussed the issue with UnumProvident and were given assurances that she would be covered under BB&T's group disability policy with the insurer's Provident Life & Accident arm, whether her diagnosis was MS or chronic fatigue syndrome. Potter set herself one final goal of visiting her top 100 clients to explain what was happening with their accounts. But she only made it to six before she had to leave work May 30, 2002. A few weeks later, she filed for disability. Focus on inconsistencies Although UnumProvident describes the problems in the handling of Potter's claim as isolated, the parallels with problems uncovered by regulators during the multi-state examination of the company completed last fall are striking. For example, the multi-state review concluded that there was a bias in the way UnumProvident's in-house medical staff interpreted the records that claimants submitted to prove their disability. 'The bias,' the regulators wrote, 'was reflected in attempts to focus upon any apparent inconsistencies in the medical records or other information supplied by claimants, rather than attempt to derive a thorough understanding of the claimants' medical condition.' Although Capone in his medical records made comparatively little of Potter's psychological state to account for her condition, documents show that UnumProvident officials seized on what he had said. Within two weeks of the company's receiving her claim in early July 2002, an in-house nurse was e-mailing Potter's claim handler to alert her that Capone 'has noted that there is an anxiety/depressive factor present which could be significant.' Disability insurers have a considerable financial interest in concluding that a disability has psychological rather than physical roots. Most policies — including the one that covered Potter — limit the benefits that a company must pay for 'mental and nervous disorders' to two years. By contrast, many of those with physical causes must be paid until the claimant turns 65. In Potter's case, that meant the difference between UnumProvident's owing about $295,000 and its owing more than $2.5 million. In September, a second nurse, reviewing the records in the case, but not Potter herself, prepared a report that quoted Capone's notes from his first meeting with Potter that there was 'clear evidence' of anxiety or depression. What the UnumProvident report failed to mention was that in the very sentence before saying there was 'clear evidence' of anxiety, Capone wrote that his first guess about what was causing Potter's problems was a 'demyelinating disease' like MS. After reviewing company records, state regulators said they found many instances where UnumProvident denied benefits 'on the grounds that the claimant had failed to provide 'objective evidence' of a disabling condition' even where the company's claim forms did not require such evidence. Company documents show that within three weeks of receiving her disability claim, UnumProvident officials were on the phone to Potter complaining that her condition was 'self-reported' and saying they needed objective evidence that something was wrong with her. 'We must have medical records from the doctor where he finds out what is the problem and diagnoses the problem,' company official Mark Hicks wrote that he told Potter in an early August call. After their inquiry, the state regulators accused UnumProvident of placing an 'inappropriate burden on claimants to justify eligibility for benefits.' Among other things, the regulators said they found evidence that UnumProvident was engaged in a companywide effort 'to shift the burden of responsibility to the claimant to provide … records in support of a claim,' rather than investigate a claim's legitimacy on its own. On Aug. 15, 2002, five weeks after receiving Potter's disability claim, UnumProvident denied it, writing that 'we find no medical evidence to support your inability to perform the duties of your occupation. The medical evidence we have received does not indicate the severity of symptoms you claim to have.' In internal documents both before and after the denial, company officials complained about having not received a particular blood test that they said could have helped confirm Capone's secondary diagnosis of chronic fatigue syndrome. Although Potter had signed releases giving the company the right to order up almost any test it wanted, there is no record that anyone at the insurer did so. On Sept. 9, Potter wrote the company pleading with it to reconsider its decision. 'After helping so many people with disability claims personally in the past, I never expected this to take so long or be so difficult,' she said. 'Please address this appeal as soon as possible. Money is very tight and it is hard enough to deal with my illness with a positive attitude.' Capone followed up with a series of memos, culminating in one on Nov. 1, 2002, that read: 'The patient … does have an abnormality on her MR and could conceivably have multiple sclerosis. This cannot be confirmed as of yet. Nevertheless, she more than meets the diagnostic criteria for chronic fatigue syndrome. This has significantly incapacitated her, making gainful employment impossible at this juncture. 'There is no basis to support that her complaints are anything other than legitimate. Clearly, not having total knowledge of the pathophysiology of a disorder is no basis of the denial of its existence.' On Nov. 11, UnumProvident denied Potter's appeal. Among the reasons cited in its denial letter was the lack of the blood test the insurer wanted in order to check for chronic fatigue. Devastating effects In the period that followed, the Potters burned through most of their savings, pulled Nate from $19,000-a-year Roanoke College and canceled their annual family vacations. Documents show that BB&T made several appeals on Potter's behalf, but UnumProvident stood by its decision to deny her claim. On its own, BB&T appears to have given Potter the equivalent of about a year of her previous pay. When Potter tried to get the insurer to reconsider, she was sent her 4-inch-thick claim file and told the case was closed. All doubts about Potter's diagnosis vanished in August 2003, when she was hospitalized for eye pain and an inability to control her right eye. The eye problems, Capone said, clinched it — she had MS. The following July, Social Security declared Potter totally disabled and began paying her benefits. But it took UnumProvident almost another year to budge. In an interview, UnumProvident CEO Watjen refused to comment on particular cases, but pointed to recent declines in customer complaints and lawsuits as evidence that the company's claim-handling problems are in the past. James Sabourin, UnumProvident's communications vice president, said that company officials initially denied Potter's claim because of inadequate evidence of her disability but subsequently gathered more evidence and changed their minds. 'We received new information along the way, and with that new information we reached a different conclusion, one that's based on the bigger picture rather than focused on a specific symptom or disease,' he said. However, the files that the insurer sent to Potter after it closed her case suggest that UnumProvident's decision to reverse itself occurred only after Potter retained Jon Holder, a Bar Harbor, Maine, lawyer. It was Holder who provided the company with new information about Potter's condition and notified the insurer that Social Security had concluded that she was totally disabled. Although the insurer would eventually send Potter a check for the back benefits that it now agrees she was owed, the check did not include several hundred thousand dollars in legal fees that it cost her to get the company to change its position. (She and Holder are now asking UnumProvident to pay these amounts as well.) And the check would take three years to arrive. Asked about the three-year wait recently, Sabourin, the UnumProvident spokesman, said Potter, Holder and, by implication, BB&T were as much to blame as his company for drawing out Potter's case. 'Could we have done better? Quite possibly,' he said. 'But to suggest that we were solely responsible for this claim taking as long as it did is not accurate.' A 'flat-out mistake' As Debra Potter was beginning to encounter problems with UnumProvident in 2002, a federal court jury awarded Joan Hangarter, the Berkeley chiropractor, a $7.6-million judgment against the firm — an amount it could award only because Hangarter's was an individual policy, rather than an ERISA-covered group policy. A federal magistrate followed up with an injunction prohibiting the insurer from 'targeting categories of claims or claimants [for termination], employing biased medical examiners, destroying medical reports, and withholding … information.' Six weeks ago, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the jury award, although not the injunction. In Kevin Murphy's case, it took the cancer patient and former New York textile executive nearly one year, and the hiring of a lawyer, to get UnumProvident to restore his benefits, but it did so last summer. Sabourin recently acknowledged that the insurer had made a 'flat-out mistake' in switching off Murphy's benefits. As for Ricky D. Hart, the North Carolina chicken plant mechanic, UnumProvident acknowledges in documents that he has coronary heart disease. But in a letter last month, it said that it was cutting off his disability checks after an independent medical exam paid for by the company concluded that Hart could still work a 40-hour-a-week desk job and 'should not have any problems in operating heavy machinery.' It suggested that he exercise. Liberty Life, the company that denied former Steelcase employee Nancy Loucks' benefits, agreed to pay her an undisclosed sum this spring in return for her joining the company in asking the federal judge in the case to vacate his 'caveat emptor' ruling against the firm. The judge agreed, but not before the ruling went down in the lawbooks. In May, Broadspire Services was supposed to notify former Ohio utility manager Kristin Deskins whether it would reverse itself and restore her employer-provided disability benefits. Broadspire seemed to be in a bind. Along with specialists who assist people in applying for government benefits, it had helped Deskins win Social Security coverage on the basis that she was totally disabled, only to turn around and claim that her employer-provided plan need not pay because she was not totally disabled after all. But instead of extricating itself from this dilemma, Broadspire said in a May 26 letter that it had lost most of Deskins' paperwork. She would have to file her request for restoration of benefits all over again. Broadspire refused to comment on Deskins' case. Preparing for a day when she will no longer be able to walk, Debra Potter and her family sold their house in December and moved into a new one, where the living area is all on one floor, the bathrooms have grip bars and the halls are wide enough for a wheelchair. Potter makes it to her husband's Sunday service at the Sunnyside church, where the sign outside reads 'Exercise daily and walk with God.' But because of stiffness and exhaustion, she often has to be carried out. On July 15, a letter arrived from UnumProvident. It said that Potter's disability benefits had been approved. It did not include an apology for the three years and one week that she had to wait, or anything extra to pay the lawyer she had to hire. But it did include this warning: 'We may investigate your claim at any time…. [We] may have you examined … by specialists of our choice…. We may deny or suspend disability benefits if you fail to … cooperate.'

Subject: Oil Prices Soar, Time to Bail Out? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 17:25:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21energy.html August 21, 2005 As Oil Prices Soar, Is It Time to Bail Out? By CONRAD DE AENLLE IF energy producers are not raking in enough cash from record-setting crude oil prices, they can always look forward to the tax breaks packed into a bill that President Bush signed into law earlier this month to promote new production. Such an embarrassment of riches has been luring investors into the sector, but some professionals are counseling caution and warning that it may be time to take profits while energy markets are still bubbling. The oil and gas index of the American Stock Exchange has more than doubled since early 2003, easily beating the broad stock market. The run-up conceals concerns among some investment advisers that energy prices will start to retreat - if not sooner, then later - leaving shares of oil and gas producers vulnerable to a pullback. But such doubts only serve to embolden those keeping faith with the sector. They point out that Wall Street has continued to underestimate the staying power of the rally in crude, repeatedly creating pleasant surprises that keep share prices buoyant. 'They didn't believe that $40- or $50-a-barrel oil was sustainable,' David Spika, a strategist at Westwood Management in Dallas, said of the investing public, 'and now they don't believe that $60 oil is sustainable.' He is not certain it is, either, although he contends that 'as long as demand grows at a pace that outstrips supply, we're going to see prices stay above $50.' Doug Sheres, a portfolio manager at Rice Hall James & Associates in San Diego, is one of the skeptics, but he is a skeptic with a fat wallet. He said his firm was overweight in its energy investments, 'but we're not buyers' right now. 'The stocks that we have owned, we have owned for a long time. Now we're looking to take some money out.' Valuations have reached a point where 'it's becoming more difficult to make the case for owning any of them,' Mr. Sheres said. 'The way the stocks are valued now, you really need the oil price to go up to justify owning them.' His firm's dwindling portfolio of energy stocks is concentrated in companies that drill for oil or provide equipment for the task, including Patterson-UTI Energy, National Oilwell Varco and Tidewater. H. Giles Knight, senior portfolio manager at Gartmore Global Investments, has been an owner of drilling stocks, but he, like Mr. Sheres, said he was not going to hang around much longer. He said his firm had a large position on drillers, but would start trimming those holdings. 'With the energy spike, these stocks have been on a tear,' Mr. Knight said. 'They will trade up as long as oil goes up, but oil is in nosebleed territory.' One reason he has held on until now, and has no plans to close out his positions entirely, he said, was that drillers and makers of drilling equipment would keep producing strong earnings as long as crude stayed above $40 a barrel. At present prices, that leaves plenty of room to maneuver. Congress helped this segment of the industry when it passed the energy bill on July 29, Mr. Knight added. President Bush signed it on Aug. 8. It contains an estimated $14.5 billion in tax breaks to encourage oil production. The incentives, he said, 'favor oil drilling, so you have got to be positive, all things being equal.' His picks include Transocean, which focuses on offshore drilling; BJ Services, whose specialties are producing from land-based wells and making drilling tools, and Halliburton, an industry giant that also engages in construction and engineering. One of the few oil companies outside of the drillers that Mr. Knight likes is Occidental Petroleum, which is involved in production of oil, natural gas and chemicals. It also may become a takeover candidate. 'If anybody is interested in acquiring another oil company, it could be a good choice,' he said. Mr. Spika, being especially bullish on energy, is content to maintain his heavy investment because 'stock prices are not reflecting the true fundamentals' of the business, he said. Companies 'regularly exceed earnings estimates,' he said, and that is one reason 'why we are still very bullish.' He questions whether energy 'is still a cyclical business,' rising and falling with economic growth - and sometimes precipitating or exacerbating those ups and downs. Demand is likely to continue growing, he said, thanks to the voracity of two manufacturing powerhouses, China and India. Supply is another story, Mr. Spika said. In past periods of high energy prices, 'companies would have used cash flow to ramp up production,' he said. 'Now they are being very disciplined with capital,' returning profits to shareholders through stock buybacks and higher dividends and not engaging in as much exploration and production. Westwood's energy holdings are extensive and diverse, befitting Mr. Spika's sanguine view. As at so many other firms, they include drilling stocks. Two that Mr. Spika prefers are Baker-Hughes and the much smaller FMC Technologies. No matter their specialty, Mr. Spika said he looked for 'well-managed companies with good cash flow and increasing levels of production.' Two of his favorites are Apache and Burlington Resources. 'They are more leveraged to crude and natural-gas prices than the integrateds, which have their hands in a lot more businesses,' he said. Several of those integrateds, the major energy conglomerates, appeal to him, too, however. He mentioned Exxon Mobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips and two of the minor majors, Occidental and Murphy Oil. Those five, he said, 'have done a good job increasing production over the last few years.' Another attraction is the contribution that refining makes in the mix of these companies' activities. Refining is a lucrative undertaking these days, Mr. Spika said. The 'cracking' spread - the difference between the prices of crude oil and the finished products made from it - is especially high now. There is agreement among investors that the energy bill may help the drillers, but it is not expected to alter the outlook for most shares materially. The incentives in the bill are thought to be insufficient to tip the balance of supply and demand in the massive energy industry, at least not significantly. The process of finding new fuel sources, then producing reliable, ample and lasting supplies from them, is time-consuming and painstaking; any major increase in production stimulated by the bill is years away. MR. SHERES lamented what he viewed as a dearth of encouragement in the bill for power from alternative sources like wind and solar, saying that 'the world is driven by short-term politics and quick fixes.' Instead, he said, the bill contained 'more incentives for oil production.' Mr. Spika conceded that those incentives could eventually put a crimp in the high life that the energy industry has been leading if it results in extensive new production - but only a small crimp. 'There will be things society will do' to try to bring energy costs under control, he said, 'but we don't see any big factors over the next three to five years to alter our thesis. The stocks are still attractively valued, and we still see significant opportunity.'

Subject: Paul Krugman quiero traerte a Perú From: Kely Alfaro To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 15:55:05 (EDT) Email Address: waitasumaq@gmail.com Message: hola! no sé cómo conectarmente contigo, estudio en la universidad nacional de ingeniería y quiciera saber tu dirección para poder invitarte a ésta univesidad

Subject: Be Warned: Mr. Bubble's Worried Again From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 09:12:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21real.html?ex=1282276800&en=9e84a2d33bd3dade&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 21, 2005 Be Warned: Mr. Bubble's Worried Again By DAVID LEONHARDT ABBY JOSEPH COHEN, the Goldman Sachs strategist then making a name for herself as Wall Street's optimist in chief, sat directly to Alan Greenspan's right. One chair away was Robert J. Shiller, a largely unknown Yale economist. As they ate lunch in a stately dining room at the Federal Reserve that day in December 1996, Mr. Shiller argued that the stock market had risen to irrational levels. In a soft, Midwestern-tinged voice, he asked Mr. Greenspan, the Fed chairman, when the last time was that somebody in his job had warned the public that the stock market had become a bubble. Mr. Greenspan listened without giving his opinion, and Mr. Shiller went home assuming that he had been farther away from Mr. Greenspan than Ms. Cohen in more ways than one. Three days later, however, driving his son to school in the family Volvo, Mr. Shiller heard on the radio that stocks were plunging because Mr. Greenspan had asked in a speech whether 'irrational exuberance' was infecting the markets. 'I may have just started a worldwide stock-market crash,' the professor told his wife, Virginia, who accused him of delusions of grandeur. Today, nine years after his lunch with Mr. Greenspan and five years after the markets finally did crash, Mr. Shiller is sounding the same warning for real estate that he did for stocks. In speeches, in television and radio interviews and in a second edition of his prophetic 2000 book, 'Irrational Exuberance,' he is arguing that the housing craze is another bubble destined to end badly, just as every other real-estate boom on record has. These, in short, are his second 15 minutes of gloom. He predicts that prices could fall 40 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the next generation and that the end of the bubble will probably cause a recession at some point. Despite being a boyish-looking 59-year-old academic economist with a halting speaking manner, he has become the bugaboo of the multibillion-dollar real-estate industry. Its executives, like many Wall Street economists, say that low interest rates and a growing population will keep house prices rising, even if future increases are smaller than recent ones. On Monday, the National Association of Realtors reported that the median home price climbed to $208,500 in the second quarter, up 14 percent from a year earlier. 'Shiller is predicting the mountain goes into the sea,' Robert I. Toll, the chief executive of Toll Brothers, a home builder, said in a recent interview, without having been asked about the economist. 'He's selling himself.' To Mr. Shiller, though, it is a question of history, not salesmanship. Most people have never looked at decades and decades of home prices, because such data have been almost impossible to find. Stock-market charts often go back almost a century. Housing charts typically start sometime in the distant decade of the 1970's. But Mr. Shiller has unearthed some rare historical housing data for other countries. Using old classified advertisements, he was then able to fashion a chart for the United States that goes back to the 19th century. It all points to an unavoidable truth, he says. Every housing boom of the last few centuries has been followed by decades in which home values fell relative to inflation. Over the long term, the portion of income that families spend on their shelter stays about the same. Builders become more efficient, as they are doing today. Places that were once sleepy hinterlands, like the counties south of San Francisco or a patch of desert in southern Nevada, turn into bustling centers that take pressure off prices elsewhere. Even now, the United States remains a mostly empty nation. 'This is the biggest boom we've ever had,' said Mr. Shiller, who bought into the boom himself in 2002, with a vacation home near one of Connecticut's Thimble Islands. 'So a very plausible scenario is that home-price increases continue for a couple more years, and then we might have a recession and they continue down into negative territory and languish for a decade. 'It doesn't even attract that much attention,' he continued. 'There will be many people thinking it was a soft landing even though prices may have gone down in real terms by 40 percent.' MR. SHILLER begins his story 400 years ago, in the country that helped invent the idea of a bubble. In 1585, workers in Amsterdam began to dig a canal through the city. It became known as the Herengracht, or gentlemen's canal, for the fashionable row houses that soon sprang up on its banks. Merchants moved into many of them, and the canal remains one of the city's finest addresses today. In recent years, a Dutch economist named Piet M. A. Eichholtz heard about a book from the 1970's that traced the Herengracht's history, including records of every sale. But his efforts to track down a copy failed - until he was browsing through a secondhand bookstore in Amsterdam almost a decade ago, not long after Mr. Shiller's lunch with Mr. Greenspan, and stumbled across one. It had all the details Mr. Eichholtz wanted. To translate the sales into an index of prices over the years, Mr. Eichholtz turned to a method invented by Mr. Shiller and a colleague. The United States government uses the same process for its best-known measure of house prices, which is published every quarter by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, the chief regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The beauty of the method is that it does a better job of capturing the experience of homeowners than a simple average of house prices does. That average can rise when a bunch of new McMansions get built, even if existing houses have become no more valuable. The Shiller index, by following the same set of houses over many years, tracks the actual financial return that houses produce for their owners. On the Herengracht, those returns have often been fantastic for 25 or even 50 years at a time. Home prices soared in the first half of the 17th century, around the time of the tulip mania. But they came crashing down in the 1670's, when the prime minister was killed, and partially eaten, by a mob of angry Dutch, and the country nearly disintegrated. Prices lagged inflation during the Napoleonic wars but surged after William became king in 1814 and the country industrialized. Again and again, the cycle repeats itself. But there is essentially no long-term trend, beyond a general rise in house prices that roughly matches gains in peoples' incomes. As Amsterdam became a global city and its population exploded, demand for homes increased - but so, too, did supply. PRICES have hardly become more stable over the last 400 years; in fact, they've jumped up and down more in the 20th century than they did during the 18th and 19th. Only the 17th century, that time of cannibalized prime ministers, was more volatile. 'A whole lot of the price increases you see in houses is imaginary, because it's just inflation,' said Mr. Eichholtz, a professor at Maastricht University. 'People say, 'I have a house. It protects me against the economic imbalances or misfortunes of the country.' The big lesson is that real estate does not give you the protection that people think it does.' A history of Norwegian house prices that Mr. Shiller has found shows the same pattern. As does his index of American house prices, until the blastoff of the last decade. In chart form, it looks eerily similar to the stock chart from his 2000 book. But this is actually a happy story in many ways. Over the long course of history, families have not been forced to devote an ever-larger chunk of their money to the roof over their heads. They instead can afford better health care, new technologies and - as Mr. Shiller pointed out during lunch this month at a steakhouse in midtown Manhattan - leisurely restaurant meals. Still, history is easy to forget during times like these. Mr. Shiller says that a steady shift toward freer markets around the world has caused people to think much more about the importance of what they own. The best description, he said, comes from President Bush, who often talks of 'an ownership society.' (Mr. Shiller has tried, without success, to find out who in the White House had coined the phrase.) When his undergraduates were reading through old newspapers, they found that stories about house prices were once confined to the back pages of business sections. Today, real estate often seems to be topic A in the national conversation. Many people have made huge profits from selling homes, and many more have paper profits. When people get together with friends, they want to find a subject that makes others happy, Mr. Shiller says, and real estate fits the bill, just as stocks did in the 1990's. 'It's very much like studying a disease epidemic. It's a contagion,' Mr. Shiller said. 'When it goes in an up direction, it's very impressive. But it can also work in the down direction.' This psychological approach has been at the core of his work for years. In the 1970's, when his wife was studying psychology, he would soak up the discussions that she and her fellow graduate students had over dinner at the Shillers' house in Delaware. A decade ago, his beliefs about herd behavior led him to his lunchtime conversation with Mr. Greenspan. Mr. Shiller takes no credit for the phrase 'irrational exuberance.' He does not remember using it during the conversation. He recently searched through his daily diary, which he keeps on a computer, from the early 1990's and found only one phrase that was at all similar. In 1991, he used 'overexuberant' to describe an exercise that had left him feeling sore. His good friend, Jeremy J. Siegel, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, stumbled upon a 1959 quotation from Fortune magazine in which Mr. Greenspan discussed 'over-exuberance' in the financial community. The phrase is probably his. He may even have to dust it off again soon. He recently called some local markets 'frothy' but emphasized that there was no national bubble. Even so, Mr. Shiller has little company for his radical notion that house prices could fall by 40 percent. Many economists say that interest rates are low enough and demand for housing in big urban areas is high enough to keep from prices from falling very far. Mr. Shiller himself confesses to some doubt. 'I don't have any certainty,' he said. 'I have a lot of humility' about any prediction. 'We do have a shortage of land in the prestige areas, and so there is a potential for them to go up,' he added. 'But I just know that the trend over the last century has been for new prestige areas to appear.' If he is right, the Herengracht also looks due for one of its occasional corrections. Prices there have doubled, even accounting for inflation, over the last decade or so. It almost seems like they might never fall again.

Subject: The Breaking Point From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 08:26:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21OIL.html?ex=1282276800&en=4c742b408ca7847a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 21, 2005 The Breaking Point By PETER MAASS The largest oil terminal in the world, Ras Tanura, is located on the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, along the Persian Gulf. From Ras Tanura's control tower, you can see the classic totems of oil's dominion -- supertankers coming and going, row upon row of storage tanks and miles and miles of pipes. Ras Tanura, which I visited in June, is the funnel through which nearly 10 percent of the world's daily supply of petroleum flows. Standing in the control tower, you are surrounded by more than 50 million barrels of oil, yet not a drop can be seen. The oil is there, of course. In a technological sleight of hand, oil can be extracted from the deserts of Arabia, processed to get rid of water and gas, sent through pipelines to a terminal on the gulf, loaded onto a supertanker and shipped to a port thousands of miles away, then run through a refinery and poured into a tanker truck that delivers it to a suburban gas station, where it is pumped into an S.U.V. -- all without anyone's actually glimpsing the stuff. So long as there is enough oil to fuel the global economy, it is not only out of sight but also out of mind, at least for consumers. I visited Ras Tanura because oil is no longer out of mind, thanks to record prices caused by refinery shortages and surging demand -- most notably in the United States and China -- which has strained the capacity of oil producers and especially Saudi Arabia, the largest exporter of all. Unlike the 1973 crisis, when the embargo by the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries created an artificial shortfall, today's shortage, or near-shortage, is real. If demand surges even more, or if a producer goes offline because of unrest or terrorism, there may suddenly not be enough oil to go around. As Aref al-Ali, my escort from Saudi Aramco, the giant state-owned oil company, pointed out, ''One mistake at Ras Tanura today, and the price of oil will go up.'' This has turned the port into a fortress; its entrances have an array of gates and bomb barriers to prevent terrorists from cutting off the black oxygen that the modern world depends on. Yet the problem is far greater than the brief havoc that could be wrought by a speeding zealot with 50 pounds of TNT in the trunk of his car. Concerns are being voiced by some oil experts that Saudi Arabia and other producers may, in the near future, be unable to meet rising world demand. The producers are not running out of oil, not yet, but their decades-old reservoirs are not as full and geologically spry as they used to be, and they may be incapable of producing, on a daily basis, the increasing volumes of oil that the world requires. ''One thing is clear,'' warns Chevron, the second-largest American oil company, in a series of new advertisements, ''the era of easy oil is over.'' In the past several years, the gap between demand and supply, once considerable, has steadily narrowed, and today is almost negligible. The consequences of an actual shortfall of supply would be immense. If consumption begins to exceed production by even a small amount, the price of a barrel of oil could soar to triple-digit levels. This, in turn, could bring on a global recession, a result of exorbitant prices for transport fuels and for products that rely on petrochemicals -- which is to say, almost every product on the market. The impact on the American way of life would be profound: cars cannot be propelled by roof-borne windmills. The suburban and exurban lifestyles, hinged to two-car families and constant trips to work, school and Wal-Mart, might become unaffordable or, if gas rationing is imposed, impossible. Carpools would be the least imposing of many inconveniences; the cost of home heating would soar -- assuming, of course, that climate-controlled habitats do not become just a fond memory. But will such a situation really come to pass? That depends on Saudi Arabia. To know the answer, you need to know whether the Saudis, who possess 22 percent of the world's oil reserves, can increase their country's output beyond its current limit of 10.5 million barrels a day, and even beyond the 12.5-million-barrel target it has set for 2009. (World consumption is about 84 million barrels a day.) Saudi Arabia is the sole oil superpower. No other producer possesses reserves close to its 263 billion barrels, which is almost twice as much as the runner-up, Iran, with 133 billion barrels. New fields in other countries are discovered now and then, but they tend to offer only small increments. For example, the much-contested and as-yet-unexploited reserves in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge are believed to amount to about 10 billion barrels, or just a fraction of what the Saudis possess. But the truth about Saudi oil is hard to figure out. Oil reservoirs cannot be inventoried like wood in a wilderness: the oil is underground, unseen by geologists and engineers, who can, at best, make highly educated guesses about how much is underfoot and how much can be extracted in the future. And there is a further obstacle: the Saudis will not let outsiders audit their confidential data on reserves and production. Oil is an industry in which not only is the product hidden from sight but so is reliable information about it. And because we do not know when a supply-demand shortfall might arrive, we do not know when to begin preparing for it, so as to soften its impact; the economic blow may come as a sledgehammer from the darkness. Of course the Saudis do have something to say about this prospect. Before journeying to the kingdom, I went to Washington to hear the Saudi oil minister, Ali al-Naimi, speak at an energy conference in the mammoth Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, not far from the White House. Naimi was the star attraction at a gathering of the American petro-political nexus. Samuel Bodman, the U.S. energy secretary, was on the dais next to him. David O'Reilly, chairman and C.E.O. of Chevron, was waiting in the wings. The moderator was an éminence grise of the oil world, James Schlesinger, a former energy secretary, defense secretary and C.I.A. director. ''I want to assure you here today that Saudi Arabia's reserves are plentiful, and we stand ready to increase output as the market dictates,'' said Naimi, dressed in a gray business suit and speaking with only a slight Arabic accent. He addressed skeptics who contend that Saudi reservoirs cannot be tapped for larger amounts of oil. ''I am quite bullish on technology as the key to our energy future,'' he said. ''Technological innovation will allow us to find and extract more oil around the world.'' He described the task of increasing output as just ''a question of investment'' in new wells and pipelines, and he noted that consuming nations urgently need to build new refineries to process increased supplies of crude. ''There is absolutely no lack of resources worldwide,'' he repeated. His assurances did not assure. A barrel of oil cost $55 at the time of his speech; less than three months later, the price had jumped by 20 percent. The truth of the matter -- whether the world will really have enough petroleum in the years ahead -- was as well concealed as the millions of barrels of oil I couldn't see at Ras Tanura. For 31 years, Matthew Simmons has prospered as the head of his own firm, Simmons & Company International, which advises energy companies on mergers and acquisitions. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a graduate of the Harvard Business School and an unpaid adviser on energy policy to the 2000 presidential campaign of George W. Bush, he would be a card-carrying member of the global oil nomenclatura, if cards were issued for such things. Yet he is one of the principal reasons the oil world is beginning to ask hard questions of itself. Two years ago, Simmons went to Saudi Arabia on a government tour for business executives. The group was presented with the usual dog-and-pony show, but instead of being impressed, as most visitors tend to be, with the size and expertise of the Saudi oil industry, Simmons became perplexed. As he recalls in his somewhat heretical new book, ''Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy,'' a senior manager at Aramco told the visitors that ''fuzzy logic'' would be used to estimate the amount of oil that could be recovered. Simmons had never heard of fuzzy logic. What could be fuzzy about an oil reservoir? He suspected that Aramco, despite its promises of endless supplies, might in fact not know how much oil remained to be recovered. Simmons returned home with an itch to scratch. Saudi Arabia was one of the charter members of OPEC, founded in 1960 in Baghdad to coordinate the policies of oil producers. Like every OPEC country, Saudi Arabia provides only general numbers about its output and reserves; it does not release details about how much oil is extracted from each reservoir and what methods are used to extract that oil, and it does not permit audits by outsiders. The condition of Saudi fields, and those of other OPEC nations, is a closely guarded secret. That's largely because OPEC quotas, which were first imposed in 1983 to limit the output of member countries, were based on overall reserves; the higher an OPEC member's reserves, the higher its quota. It is widely believed that most, if not all, OPEC members exaggerated the sizes of their reserves in order to have the largest possible quota -- and thus the largest possible revenue stream. In the days of excess supply, bankers like Simmons did not know, or care, about the fudging; whether or not reserves were hyped, there was plenty of oil coming out of the ground. Through the 1970's, 80's and 90's, the capacity of OPEC and non-OPEC countries exceeded demand, and that's why OPEC imposed a quota system -- to keep some product off the market (although many OPEC members, seeking as much revenue as possible, quietly sold more oil than they were supposed to). Until quite recently, the only reason to fear a shortage was if a boycott, war or strike were to halt supplies. Few people imagined a time when supply would dry up because of demand alone. But a steady surge in demand in recent years -- led by China's emergence as a voracious importer of oil -- has changed that. This demand-driven scarcity has prompted the emergence of a cottage industry of experts who predict an impending crisis that will dwarf anything seen before. Their point is not that we are running out of oil, per se; although as much as half of the world's recoverable reserves are estimated to have been consumed, about a trillion barrels remain underground. Rather, they are concerned with what is called ''capacity'' -- the amount of oil that can be pumped to the surface on a daily basis. These experts -- still a minority in the oil world -- contend that because of the peculiarities of geology and the limits of modern technology, it will soon be impossible for the world's reservoirs to surrender enough oil to meet daily demand. One of the starkest warnings came in a February report commissioned by the United States Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. ''Because oil prices have been relatively high for the past decade, oil companies have conducted extensive exploration over that period, but their results have been disappointing,'' stated the report, assembled by Science Applications International, a research company that works on security and energy issues. ''If recent trends hold, there is little reason to expect that exploration success will dramatically improve in the future. . . . The image is one of a world moving from a long period in which reserves additions were much greater than consumption to an era in which annual additions are falling increasingly short of annual consumption. This is but one of a number of trends that suggest the world is fast approaching the inevitable peaking of conventional world oil production.'' The reference to ''peaking'' is not a haphazard word choice -- ''peaking'' is a term used in oil geology to define the critical point at which reservoirs can no longer produce increasing amounts of oil. (This tends to happen when reservoirs are about half-empty.) ''Peak oil'' is the point at which maximum production is reached; afterward, no matter how many wells are drilled in a country, production begins to decline. Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members may have enough oil to last for generations, but that is no longer the issue. The eventual and painful shift to different sources of energy -- the start of the post-oil age -- does not begin when the last drop of oil is sucked from under the Arabian desert. It begins when producers are unable to continue increasing their output to meet rising demand. Crunch time comes long before the last drop. ''The world has never faced a problem like this,'' the report for the Energy Department concluded. ''Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and revolutionary.'' Most experts do not share Simmons's concerns about the imminence of peak oil. One of the industry's most prominent consultants, Daniel Yergin, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about petroleum, dismisses the doomsday visions. ''This is not the first time that the world has 'run out of oil,''' he wrote in a recent Washington Post opinion essay. ''It's more like the fifth. Cycles of shortage and surplus characterize the entire history of the oil industry.'' Yergin says that a number of oil projects that are under construction will increase the supply by 20 percent in five years and that technological advances will increase the amount of oil that can be recovered from existing reservoirs. (Typically, with today's technology, only about 40 percent of a reservoir's oil can be pumped to the surface.) Yergin's bullish view has something in common with the views of the pessimists -- it rests on unknowns. Will the new projects that are under way yield as much oil as their financial backers hope? Will new technologies increase recovery rates as much as he expects? These questions are next to impossible to answer because coaxing oil out of the ground is an extraordinarily complex undertaking. The popular notion of reservoirs as underground lakes, from which wells extract oil like straws sucking a milkshake from a glass, is incorrect. Oil exists in drops between and inside porous rocks. A new reservoir may contain sufficient pressure to make these drops of oil flow to the surface in a gusher, but after a while -- usually within a few years and often sooner than that -- natural pressure lets up and is no longer sufficient to push oil to the surface. At that point, ''secondary'' recovery efforts are begun, like pumping water or gas into the reservoirs to increase the pressure. This process is unpredictable; reservoirs are extremely temperamental. If too much oil is extracted too quickly or if the wrong types or amounts of secondary efforts are employed, the amount of oil that can be recovered from a field can be greatly reduced; this is known in the oil world as ''damaging a reservoir.'' A widely cited example is Oman: in 2001, its daily production reached more than 960,000 barrels, but then suddenly declined, despite the use of advanced technologies. Today, Oman produces 785,000 barrels of oil a day. Herman Franssen, a consultant who worked in Oman for a decade, sees that country's experience as a possible lesson in the limits of technology for other producers that try to increase or maintain high levels of output. ''They reached a million barrels a day, and then a few years later production collapsed,'' Franssen said in a phone interview. ''They used all these new technologies, but they haven't been able to stop the decline yet.'' The vague production and reserve data that gets published does not begin to tell the whole story of an oil field's health, production potential or even its size. For a clear-as-possible picture of a country's oil situation, you need to know what is happening in each field -- how many wells it has, how much oil each well is producing, what recovery methods are being used and how long they've been used and the trend line since the field went into production. Data of that sort are typically not released by state-owned companies like Saudi Aramco. As Matthew Simmons searched for clues to the truth of the Saudi situation, he immersed himself in the minutiae of oil geology. He realized that data about Saudi fields might be found in the files of the Society of Petroleum Engineers. Oil engineers, like most professional groups, have regular conferences at which they discuss papers that delve into the work they do. The papers, which focus on particular wells that highlight a problem or a solution to a problem, are presented and debated at the conferences and published by the S.P.E. -- and then forgotten. Before Simmons poked around, no one had taken the time to pull together the S.P.E. papers that involved Saudi oil fields and review them en masse. Simmons found more than 200 such papers and studied them carefully. Although the papers cover only a portion of the kingdom's wells and date back, in some cases, several decades, they constitute perhaps the best public data about the condition and prospects of Saudi reservoirs. Ghawar is the treasure of the Saudi treasure chest. It is the largest oil field in the world and has produced, in the past 50 years, about 55 billion barrels of oil, which amounts to more than half of Saudi production in that period. The field currently produces more than five million barrels a day, which is about half of the kingdom's output. If Ghawar is facing problems, then so is Saudi Arabia and, indeed, the entire world. Simmons found that the Saudis are using increasingly large amounts of water to force oil out of Ghawar. Most of the wells are concentrated in the northern portion of the 174-mile-long field. That might seem like good news -- when the north runs low, the Saudis need only to drill wells in the south. But in fact it is bad news, Simmons concluded, because the southern portions of Ghawar are geologically more difficult to draw oil from. ''Someday (and perhaps that day will be soon), the remarkably high well flow rates at Ghawar's northern end will fade, as reservoir pressures finally plummet,'' Simmons writes in his book. ''Then, Saudi Arabian oil output will clearly have peaked. The death of this great king'' -- meaning Ghawar -- ''leaves no field of vaguely comparable stature in the line of succession. Twilight at Ghawar is fast approaching.'' He goes on: ''The geological phenomena and natural driving forces that created the Saudi oil miracle are conspiring now in normal and predictable ways to bring it to its conclusion, in a time frame potentially far shorter than officialdom would have us believe.'' Simmons concludes, ''Saudi Arabia clearly seems to be nearing or at its peak output and cannot materially grow its oil production.'' Saudi officials belittle Simmons's work. Nansen Saleri, a senior Aramco official, has described Simmons as a banker ''trying to come across as a scientist.'' In a speech last year, Saleri wryly said, ''I can read 200 papers on neurology, but you wouldn't want me to operate on your relatives.'' I caught up with Simmons in June, during a trip he made to Manhattan to talk with a group of oil-shipping executives. The impression he gives is of an enthusiastic inventor sharing a discovery that took him by surprise. He has a certain wide-eyed wonder in his regard, as if a bit of mystery can be found in everything that catches his eye. And he has a rumpled aspect -- thinning hair slightly askew, shirt sleeves a fraction too long. Though he delivers a bracing message, his discourse can wander. He is a successful businessman, and it is clear that he did not achieve his position by being a man of impeccable convention. He certainly has not lost sight of the rule that people who shout ''the end is nigh'' do not tend to be favorably reviewed by historians, let alone by their peers. He notes in his book that way back in 1979, The New York Times published an investigative story by Seymour Hersh under the headline ''Saudi Oil Capacity Questioned.'' He knows that in past decades the Cassandras failed to foresee new technologies, like deep-water and horizontal drilling, that provided new sources of oil and raised the amount of oil that can be recovered from reservoirs. But Simmons says that there are only so many rabbits technology can pull out of its petro-hat. He impishly notes that if the Saudis really wanted to, they could easily prove him wrong. ''If they want to satisfy people, they should issue field-by-field production reports and reserve data and have it audited,'' he told me. ''It would then take anybody less than a week to say, 'Gosh, Matt is totally wrong,' or 'Matt actually might be too optimistic.''' Simmons has a lot riding on his campaign -- not only his name but also his business, which would not be rewarded if he is proved to be a fool. What, I asked, if the data show that the Saudis will be able to sustain production of not only 12.5 million barrels a day -- their target for 2009 -- but 15 million barrels, which global demand is expected to require of them in the not-too-distant future? ''The odds of them sustaining 12 million barrels a day is very low,'' Simmons replied. ''The odds of them getting to 15 million for 50 years -- there's a better chance of me having Bill Gates's net worth, and I wouldn't bet a dime on that forecast.'' The gathering of executives took place in a restaurant at Chelsea Piers; about 35 men sat around a set of tables as the host introduced Simmons. He rambled a bit but hit his talking points, and the executives listened raptly; at one point, the man on my right broke into a soft whistle, of the sort that means ''Holy cow.'' Simmons didn't let up. ''We're going to look back at history and say $55 a barrel was cheap,'' he said, recalling a TV interview in which he predicted that a barrel might hit triple digits. He said that the anchor scoffed, in disbelief, ''A hundred dollars?'' Simmons replied, ''I wasn't talking about low triple digits.'' The onset of triple-digit prices might seem a blessing for the Saudis -- they would receive greater amounts of money for their increasingly scarce oil. But one popular misunderstanding about the Saudis -- and about OPEC in general -- is that high prices, no matter how high, are to their benefit. Although oil costing more than $60 a barrel hasn't caused a global recession, that could still happen: it can take a while for high prices to have their ruinous impact. And the higher above $60 that prices rise, the more likely a recession will become. High oil prices are inflationary; they raise the cost of virtually everything -- from gasoline to jet fuel to plastics and fertilizers -- and that means people buy less and travel less, which means a drop-off in economic activity. So after a brief windfall for producers, oil prices would slide as recession sets in and once-voracious economies slow down, using less oil. Prices have collapsed before, and not so long ago: in 1998, oil fell to $10 a barrel after an untimely increase in OPEC production and a reduction in demand from Asia, which was suffering through a financial crash. Saudi Arabia and the other members of OPEC entered crisis mode back then; adjusted for inflation, oil was at its lowest price since the cartel's creation, threatening to feed unrest among the ranks of jobless citizens in OPEC states. ''The Saudis are very happy with oil at $55 per barrel, but they're also nervous,'' a Western diplomat in Riyadh told me in May, referring to the price that prevailed then. (Like all the diplomats I spoke to, he insisted on speaking anonymously because of the sensitivities of relations with Saudi Arabia.) ''They don't know where this magic line has moved to. Is it now $65? Is it $75? Is it $80? They don't want to find out, because if you did have oil move that far north . . . the chain reaction can come back to a price collapse again.'' High prices can have another unfortunate effect for producers. When crude costs $10 a barrel or even $30 a barrel, alternative fuels are prohibitively expensive. For example, Canada has vast amounts of tar sands that can be rendered into heavy oil, but the cost of doing so is quite high. Yet those tar sands and other alternatives, like bioethanol, hydrogen fuel cells and liquid fuel from natural gas or coal, become economically viable as the going rate for a barrel rises past, say, $40 or more, especially if consuming governments choose to offer their own incentives or subsidies. So even if high prices don't cause a recession, the Saudis risk losing market share to rivals into whose nonfundamentalist hands Americans would much prefer to channel their energy dollars. A concerted push for greater energy conservation in the United States, which consumes one-quarter of the world's oil (mostly to fuel our cars, as gasoline), would hurt producing nations, too. Basically, any significant reduction in the demand for oil would be ruinous for OPEC members, who have little to offer the world but oil; if a substitute can be found, their future is bleak. Another Western diplomat explained the problem facing the Saudis: ''You want to have the price as high as possible without sending the consuming nations into a recession and at the same time not have the price so high that it encourages alternative technologies.'' From the American standpoint, one argument in favor of conservation and a switch to alternative fuels is that by limiting oil imports, the United States and its Western allies would reduce their dependence on a potentially unstable region. (In fact, in an effort to offset the risks of relying on the Saudis, America's top oil suppliers are Canada and Mexico.) In addition, sending less money to Saudi Arabia would mean less money in the hands of a regime that has spent the past few decades doling out huge amounts of its oil revenue to mosques, madrassas and other institutions that have fanned the fires of Islamic radicalism. The oil money has been dispensed not just by the Saudi royal family but by private individuals who benefited from the oil boom -- like Osama bin Laden, whose ample funds, probably eroded now, came from his father, a construction magnate. Without its oil windfall, Saudi Arabia would have had a hard time financing radical Islamists across the globe. For the Saudis, the political ramifications of reduced demand for its oil would not be negligible. The royal family has amassed vast personal wealth from the country's oil revenues. If, suddenly, Saudis became aware that the royal family had also failed to protect the value of the country's treasured resource, the response could be severe. The mere admission that Saudi reserves are not as impressively inexhaustible as the royal family has claimed could lead to hard questions about why the country, and the world, had been misled. With the death earlier this month of the long-ailing King Fahd, the royal family is undergoing another period of scrutiny; the new king, Abdullah, is in his 80's, and the crown prince, his half-brother Sultan, is in his 70's, so the issue of generational change remains to be settled. As long as the country is swimming in petro-dollars -- even as it is paying off debt accrued during its lean years -- everyone is relatively happy, but that can change. One diplomat I spoke to recalled a comment from Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the larger-than-life Saudi oil minister during the 1970's: ''The Stone Age didn't end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil.'' Until now, the Saudis had an excess of production capacity that allowed them, when necessary, to flood the market to drive prices down. They did that in 1990, when the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait eliminated not only Kuwait's supply of oil but also Iraq's. The Saudis functioned, as they always had, as the central bank of oil, releasing supply to the market when it was needed and withdrawing supply to keep prices from going lower than the cartel would have liked. In other words, they controlled not only the price of oil but their own destiny as well. ''That is what the world has called on them to do before -- turn on the taps to produce more and get prices down,'' a senior Western diplomat in Riyadh told me recently. ''Decreasing prices used to keep out alternative fuels. I don't see how they're able to do that anymore. This is a huge change, and it is a big step in the move to whatever is coming next. That's what's really happening.'' Without the ability to flood the markets with oil, the Saudis are resorting to flooding the market with promises; it is a sort of petro-jawboning. That's why Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, told his Washington audience that Saudi Arabia has embarked on a crash program to raise its capacity to 12.5 million barrels a day by 2009 and even higher in the years after that. Naimi is not unlike a factory manager who needs to promise the moon to his valuable clients, for fear of losing or alarming them. He has no choice. The moment he says anything bracing, the touchy energy markets will probably panic, pushing prices even higher and thereby hastening the onset of recession, a switch to alternative fuels or new conservation efforts -- or all three. Just a few words of honest caution could move the markets; Naimi's speeches are followed nearly as closely in the financial world as those of Alan Greenspan. I journeyed to Saudi Arabia to interview Naimi and other senior officials, to get as far beyond their prepared remarks as might be possible. Although I was allowed to see Ras Tanura, my interview requests were denied. I was invited to visit Aramco's oil museum in Dhahran, but that is something a Saudi schoolchild can do on a field trip. It was a ''show but don't tell'' policy. I was able to speak about production issues only with Ibrahim al-Muhanna, the oil ministry spokesman, who reluctantly met me over coffee in the lobby of my hotel in Riyadh. He defended Saudi Arabia's refusal to share more data, noting that the Saudis are no different from most oil producers. ''They will not tell you,'' he said. ''Nobody will. And that is not going to change.'' Referring to the fact that Saudi Arabia is often called the central bank of oil, he added: ''If an outsider goes to the Fed and asks, 'How much money do you have?' they will tell you. If you say, 'Can I come and count it?' they will not let you. This applies to oil companies and oil countries.'' I mentioned to Muhanna that many people think his government's ''trust us'' stance is not convincing in light of the cheating that has gone on within OPEC and in the industry as a whole; even Royal Dutch/Shell, a publicly listed oil company that undergoes regular audits, has admitted that it overstated its 2002 reserves by 23 percent. ''There is no reason for any country or company to lie,'' Muhanna replied. ''There is a lot of oil around.'' I didn't need to ask about Simmons and his peak-oil theory; when I met Muhanna at the conference in Washington, he nearly broke off our conversation at the mention of Simmons's name. ''He does not know anything,'' Muhanna said. ''The only thing he has is a big mouth. We should not pay attention to him. Either you believe us or you don't.'' So whom to believe? Before leaving New York for Saudi Arabia, I was advised by several oil experts to try to interview Sadad al-Husseini, who retired last year after serving as Aramco's top executive for exploration and production. I faxed him in Dhahran and received a surprisingly quick reply; he agreed to meet me. A week later, after I arrived in Riyadh, Husseini e-mailed me, asking when I would come to Dhahran; in a follow-up phone call, he offered to pick me up at the airport. He was, it seemed, eager to talk. It can be argued that in a nation devoted to oil, Husseini knows more about it than anyone else. Born in Syria, Husseini was raised in Saudi Arabia, where his father was a government official whose family took on Saudi citizenship. Husseini earned a Ph.D. in geological sciences from Brown University in 1973 and went to work in Aramco's exploration department, eventually rising to the highest position. Until his retirement last year -- said to have been caused by a top-level dispute, the nature of which is the source of many rumors -- Husseini was a member of the company's board and its management committee. He is one of the most respected and accomplished oilmen in the world. After meeting me at the cavernous airport that serves Dhahran, he drove me in his luxury sedan to the villa that houses his private office. As we entered, he pointed to an armoire that displayed a dozen or so vials of black liquid. ''These are samples from oil fields I discovered,'' he explained. Upstairs, there were even more vials, and he would have possessed more than that except, as he said, laughing, ''I didn't start collecting early enough.'' We spoke for several hours. The message he delivered was clear: the world is heading for an oil shortage. His warning is quite different from the calming speeches that Naimi and other Saudis, along with senior American officials, deliver on an almost daily basis. Husseini explained that the need to produce more oil is coming from two directions. Most obviously, demand is rising; in recent years, global demand has increased by two million barrels a day. (Current daily consumption, remember, is about 84 million barrels a day.) Less obviously, oil producers deplete their reserves every time they pump out a barrel of oil. This means that merely to maintain their reserve base, they have to replace the oil they extract from declining fields. It's the geological equivalent of running to stay in place. Husseini acknowledged that new fields are coming online, like offshore West Africa and the Caspian basin, but he said that their output isn't big enough to offset this growing need. ''You look at the globe and ask, 'Where are the big increments?' and there's hardly anything but Saudi Arabia,'' he said. ''The kingdom and Ghawar field are not the problem. That misses the whole point. The problem is that you go from 79 million barrels a day in 2002 to 82.5 in 2003 to 84.5 in 2004. You're leaping by two million to three million a year, and if you have to cover declines, that's another four to five million.'' In other words, if demand and depletion patterns continue, every year the world will need to open enough fields or wells to pump an additional six to eight million barrels a day -- at least two million new barrels a day to meet the rising demand and at least four million to compensate for the declining production of existing fields. ''That's like a whole new Saudi Arabia every couple of years,'' Husseini said. ''It can't be done indefinitely. It's not sustainable.'' Husseini speaks patiently, like a teacher who hopes someone is listening. He is in the enviable position of knowing what he talks about while having the freedom to speak openly about it. He did not disclose precise information about Saudi reserves or production -- which remain the equivalent of state secrets -- but he felt free to speak in generalities that were forthright, even when they conflicted with the reassuring statements of current Aramco officials. When I asked why he was willing to be so frank, he said it was because he sees a shortage ahead and wants to do what he can to avert it. I assumed that he would not be particularly distressed if his rivals in the Saudi oil establishment were embarrassed by his frankness. Although Matthew Simmons says it is unlikely that the Saudis will be able to produce 12.5 million barrels a day or sustain output at that level for a significant period of time, Husseini says the target is realistic; he says that Simmons is wrong to state that Saudi Arabia has reached its peak. But 12.5 million is just an interim marker, as far as consuming nations are concerned, on the way to 15 million barrels a day and beyond -- and that is the point at which Husseini says problems will arise. At the conference in Washington in May, James Schlesinger, the moderator, conducted a question-and-answer session with Naimi at the conclusion of the minister's speech. One of the first questions involved peak oil: might it be true that Saudi Arabia, which has relied on the same reservoirs, and especially Ghawar, for more than five decades, is nearing the geological limit of its output? Naimi wouldn't hear of it. ''I can assure you that we haven't peaked,'' he responded. ''If we peaked, we would not be going to 12.5 and we would not be visualizing a 15-million-barrel-per-day production capacity. . . . We can maintain 12.5 or 15 million for the next 30 to 50 years.'' Experts like Husseini are very concerned by the prospect of trying to produce 15 million barrels a day. Even if production can be ramped up that high, geology may not be forgiving. Fields that are overproduced can drop off, in terms of output, quite sharply and suddenly, leaving behind large amounts of oil that cannot be coaxed out with existing technology. This is called trapped oil, because the rocks or sediment around it prevent it from escaping to the surface. Unless new technologies are developed, that oil will never be extracted. In other words, the haste to recover oil can lead to less oil being recovered. ''You could go to 15, but that's when the questions of depletion rate, reservoir management and damaging the fields come into play,'' says Nawaf Obaid, a Saudi oil and security analyst who is regarded as being exceptionally well connected to key Saudi leaders. ''There is an understanding across the board within the kingdom, in the highest spheres, that if you're going to 15, you'll hit 15, but there will be considerable risks . . . of a steep decline curve that Aramco will not be able to do anything about.'' Even if the Saudis are willing to risk damaging their fields, or even if the risk is overstated, Husseini points out a practical problem. To produce and sustain 15 million barrels a day, Saudi Arabia will have to drill a lot more wells and build a lot more pipelines and processing facilities. Currently, the global oil industry suffers a deficit of qualified engineers to oversee such projects and the equipment and the raw materials -- for example, rigs and steel -- to build them. These things cannot be wished from thin air or developed quickly enough to meet the demand. ''If we had two dozen Texas A&M's producing a thousand new engineers a year and the industrial infrastructure in the kingdom, with the drilling rigs and power plants, we would have a better chance, but you cannot put that into place overnight,'' Husseini said. ''Capacity is not just a function of reserves. It is a function of reserves plus know-how plus a commercial economic system that is designed to increase the resource exploitation. For example, in the U.S. you have infrastructure -- there must be tens of thousands of miles of pipelines. If we, in Saudi Arabia, evolve to that level of commercial maturity, we could probably produce a heck of a lot more oil. But to get there is a very tedious, slow process.'' He worries that the rising global demand for oil will lead to the petroleum equivalent of running an engine at ever-increasing speeds without stopping to cool it down or change the oil. Husseini does not want to see the fragile and irreplaceable reservoirs of the Middle East become damaged through wanton overproduction. ''If you are ramping up production so fast and jump from high to higher to highest, and you're not having enough time to do what needs to be done, to understand what needs to be done, then you can damage reservoirs,'' he said. ''Systematic development is not just a matter of money. It's a matter of reservoir dynamics, understanding what's there, analyzing and understanding information. That's where people come in, experience comes in. These are not universally available resources.'' The most worrisome part of the crisis ahead revolves around a set of statistics from the Energy Information Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy. The E.I.A. forecast in 2004 that by 2020 Saudi Arabia would produce 18.2 million barrels of oil a day, and that by 2025 it would produce 22.5 million barrels a day. Those estimates were unusual, though. They were not based on secret information about Saudi capacity, but on the projected needs of energy consumers. The figures simply assumed that Saudi Arabia would be able to produce whatever the United States needed it to produce. Just last month, the E.I.A. suddenly revised those figures downward -- not because of startling new information about world demand or Saudi supply but because the figures had given so much ammunition to critics. Husseini, for example, described the 2004 forecast as unrealistic. ''That's not how you would manage a national, let alone an international, economy,'' he explained. ''That's the part that is scary. You draw some assumptions and then say, 'O.K., based on these assumptions, let's go forward and consume like hell and burn like hell.''' When I asked whether the kingdom could produce 20 million barrels a day -- about twice what it is producing today from fields that may be past their prime -- Husseini paused for a second or two. It wasn't clear if he was taking a moment to figure out the answer or if he needed a moment to decide if he should utter it. He finally replied with a single word: No. ''It's becoming unrealistic,'' he said. ''The expectations are beyond what is achievable. This is a global problem . . . that is not going to be solved by tinkering with the Saudi industry.'' It would be unfair to blame the Saudis alone for failing to warn of whatever shortages or catastrophes might lie ahead. In the political and corporate realms of the oil world, there are few incentives to be forthright. Executives of major oil companies have been reluctant to raise alarms; the mere mention of scarce supplies could alienate the governments that hand out lucrative exploration contracts and also send a message to investors that oil companies, though wildly profitable at the moment, have a Malthusian long-term future. Fortunately, that attitude seems to be beginning to change. Chevron's ''easy oil is over'' advertising campaign is an indication that even the boosters of an oil-drenched future are not as bullish as they once were. Politicians remain in the dark. During the 2004 presidential campaign, which occurred as gas prices were rising to record levels, the debate on energy policy was all but nonexistent. The Bush campaign produced an advertisement that concluded: ''Some people have wacky ideas. Like taxing gasoline more so people drive less. That's John Kerry.'' Although many environmentalists would have been delighted if Kerry had proposed that during the campaign, in fact the ad was referring to a 50-cents-a-gallon tax that Kerry supported 11 years ago as part of a package of measures to reduce the deficit. (The gas tax never made it to a vote in the Senate.) Kerry made no mention of taxing gasoline during the campaign; his proposal for doing something about high gas prices was to pressure OPEC to increase supplies. Husseini, for one, doesn't buy that approach. ''Everybody is looking at the producers to pull the chestnuts out of the fire, as if it's our job to fix everybody's problems,'' he told me. ''It's not our problem to tell a democratically elected government that you have to do something about your runaway consumers. If your government can't do the job, you can't expect other governments to do it for them.'' Back in the 70's, President Carter called for the moral equivalent of war to reduce our dependence on foreign oil; he was not re-elected. Since then, few politicians have spoken of an energy crisis or suggested that major policy changes are necessary to avert one. The energy bill signed earlier this month by President Bush did not even raise fuel-efficiency standards for passenger cars. When a crisis comes -- whether in a year or 2 or 10 -- it will be all the more painful because we will have done little or nothing to prepare for it.

Subject: The double whammy From: Pete Weis To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 11:45:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Diminishing oil and the eventual end to the global housing boom. Result - substantial drop in consumption, the end of the current account (creditors run for the hills), and a new economic reality.

Subject: Foolishness on Fuel From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 08:08:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/opinion/21sun2.html Foolishness on Fuel There are few better illustrations of the disconnect between what lawmakers in Washington know and what they do than an incident that occurred during committee debate on the energy bill in May: Senator Dianne Feinstein offered an amendment to strengthen fuel economy standards for S.U.V.'s, minivans and pickups. When James Talent, a Missouri Republican, opposed the amendment with an argument about potential lost jobs, he drew a sharp response from Pete Domenici, the committee chairman. What's really costing jobs, Mr. Domenici said, is Detroit's failure to make the fuel-efficient cars that can compete on world markets. Mr. Domenici then voted against Ms. Feinstein's amendment. So did most of his colleagues. This contradiction between the ability of smart people like Mr. Domenici to recognize an obvious problem and their failure to embrace an obvious solution is traceable to the political influence of the automakers and their unions, to ideological hostility to regulation, and to inertia. Congress has voted so often against improved fuel economy standards that it seems incapable of doing anything else. That does not make it any less culpable. Soaring gasoline prices, the treacherous situation in the Middle East and the evidence of global warming all tell us that we need to act quickly to cut down on imported oil. While over time the country is going to need a range of approaches to deal with its growing dependency, there is no better short-term answer than a more efficient transportation fleet. Cars and light trucks - S.U.V.'s, vans and pickups - account for roughly 40 percent of all United States oil consumption, which now amounts to about 20 million barrels a day. The same vehicles also account for more than one-fifth of the country's emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. Yet two recent and authoritative reports show that industry and policy makers are headed in exactly the wrong direction. One is from President Bush's own Environmental Protection Agency. Its main findings - that America's cars and trucks are significantly less efficient, on average, than they were in the late 1980's, and that leaps in technology have been used to make vehicles more powerful but not more fuel efficient - might have briefly discomfited legislators about to vote for an energy bill that would do nothing to improve matters. That might explain why the report was delayed until after the bill was in hand. The second report, from Environmental Defense, an advocacy group, makes the same points in much greater detail. It notes that even the Japanese - basking in the public relations glow provided by the Prius, Toyota's gas-electric hybrid - are doing poorly on a fleetwide basis. The culprit in all cases was the increasing market share of minivans and S.U.V.'s, which are held to more lenient fuel economy standards than other passenger vehicles. Where do we go now? The efficiency standards enacted 30 years ago after the Arab oil embargo made a huge difference in consumption (and, some believe, saved Detroit in the bargain). But history clearly means little to this Congress or this administration. Proposals expected later this month, calling for modest improvements in fuel efficiency for S.U.V.'s and other light trucks, are unlikely to make any serious dent in consumption. Some environmentalists are beginning to think that the best hope for more efficient cars may lie with mandatory caps on global warming gases, like those contained in a bill sponsored by Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman. Once caps are in place, the reasoning goes, every sector of the American economy, including transportation, will be required to do its part to meet the overall goal. That is essentially the thinking behind rules adopted last year by the California Air Resources Board. The rules will require a 30 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions from cars and light trucks by 2016, a target that will most likely be met by big increases in fuel efficiency. The Bush administration hates the California plan, and industry has challenged it in court. But George Pataki of New York and other Eastern governors have pledged to emulate it - which means the states may end up carrying a ball that Congress dropped. That would not be a bad thing at all.

Subject: Productivity Is Up. Or Down. From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:35:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/business/yourmoney/21view.html?ex=1282276800&en=6aa4eddc9c4e0b61&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 21, 2005 Productivity Is Up. Or Down. Pick Your Statistic. By DANIEL GROSS EVERY day, economy watchers are bombarded with seemingly contradictory indicators. Inflation is either contained, or it's about to explode. The price of oil is poised to drop, or to spiral higher. Lately, we've received seemingly contradictory figures on a crucial statistic: productivity. When the growth rate of productivity - the amount of output an hour the economy can produce - falls sharply, it's frequently a sign that dreaded inflation could be on the rise. When productivity growth rises smartly, it may indicate that companies are figuring out how to make more goods and services while keeping costs under control. That's why Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, closely watches the productivity figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over his 18-year tenure, Mr. Greenspan has managed to puzzle most observers with Fedspeak - a monotone patois that conveys small amounts of information in convoluted, carefully hedged sentences. But when he appeared before Congress in July, Mr. Greenspan acknowledged that he was a little puzzled by the recent productivity figures. 'The traditional measure of the growth in output per hour,' he said, 'has slowed sharply in recent quarters.' (Translation: productivity growth is way down, look out for inflation.) 'But,' he continued, 'a conceptually equivalent measure that uses output measured from the income side has slowed far less.' (Translation: maybe not.) The 'traditional measure' to which Mr. Greenspan referred is nonfarm business productivity. This broad measure of the economy calculates productivity based on examining the output and production of the vast American corporate sector. And as Mr. Greenspan noted, that figure had fallen sharply in recent quarters. The year-over-year growth rate of nonfarm business productivity fell from an impressive 4.2 percent in the second quarter of 2004 to a less impressive 2.3 percent in the second quarter of 2005. The 'conceptually equivalent measure' to which Mr. Greenspan referred is an alternate figure published by the bureau: the productivity of nonfinancial corporate businesses. This less broad measure excludes the gigantic financial sector and gauges productivity by examining the incomes of corporations, not their output. And revised figures released after Mr. Greenspan's July 20 testimony show the year-over-year growth rate of nonfinancial corporate productivity has risen sharply, to 5.4 percent in the first quarter of 2005 (second quarter statistics for this measure are not yet available) from 3.2 percent in the second quarter of 2004. In theory, the two measures of productivity should match up, even though they employ somewhat different methodology and data. And over the long term, they do. 'Between 1965 and 2004, both figures grew at about 2 percent per year on average,' said Phyllis Otto, supervisory economist at the bureau. But recently, they've gone their separate ways. And that makes the job of detecting the underlying trend in productivity more difficult. In principle, economists say, the figure that represents the broadest possible swath of the economy is preferable. That would seem to weigh in favor of the more pessimistic nonfarm business number. But there may be good reasons for giving careful weight to the measure of productivity that excludes the financial world. In some ways, it may be more accurate. After all, it's much easier to calculate productivity for companies that produce widgets than it is for companies that produce less tangible goods like insurance policies. While the productivity of a factory worker doesn't vary radically from month to month, the productivity of a hedge fund manager can swing wildly from week to week. What's more, it strikes some economists as strange that including the dynamic financial sector would somehow make the economy seem less productive. 'If you see productivity being dragged down by the inclusion of the financial sector, you have to be a little suspicious,' said David Altig, vice president and associate director for research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. (Mr. Altig speaks for himself, not for the Fed.) The divergence could mean there's a big problem with productivity in the financial sector. And the recent sharp rise in short-term interest rates has cut into the profits - and hence the productivity - of banks. Or it could mean that there's something fishy about the numbers themselves, or that some as-yet-undetected trends are muddling the productivity picture. 'This is a source of puzzlement,' said J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. BUT the tale of the two productivity figures isn't merely of academic interest. This conundrum has the potential to make the remaining months of Mr. Greenspan's tenure more difficult. 'If productivity is in fact slowing, the Fed will have to be more aggressive in raising rates to slow growth,' Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com, said. Otherwise, inflationary forces will develop, especially if labor costs rise. On the other hand, if productivity growth is stronger, then the Fed doesn't need to be as hawkish. As is frequently the case when two figures tell seemingly contradictory stories, the true picture may lie somewhere in between a drastic fall and an impressive rise. 'Given the divergence between these two readings,' as Mr. Greenspan put it in his inimitable way, 'a reasonably accurate determination of the extent of the recent slowing in productivity growth and its parsing into cyclical and secular influences will require the accumulation of more evidence.' (Translation: ask my successor about this next year.)

Subject: At Dow Jones, It's All About Family From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:31:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/business/media/20nocera.html At Dow Jones, It's All About Family By Joseph Nocera THE press did a good job for the stock price yesterday,' said Roy A. Hammer earlier this week. He was kidding, of course. 'It's not the way you want to have the stock go up,' he quickly added. Mr. Hammer, 71, a partner in the Boston law firm of Hemenway & Barnes, is a trustee for the various trusts held by the Bancroft family, who control Dow Jones and its trophy property, The Wall Street Journal. He was referring to an article in The New York Post on Monday that suggested some of the younger Bancrofts were so unhappy with the continued underperformance of the company that they had begun agitating for Dow Jones to be sold. As a result, Dow Jones stock jumped more than 10 percent. Mr. Hammer reiterated to me what he told other reporters over the previous few days: The Post was wrong. And from my own investigations, I had to agree. Young Bancrofts, old Bancrofts, middle-aged Bancrofts: none of them want to sell Dow Jones, even though they could find a buyer in a nanosecond, starting with The Post's owner, Rupert Murdoch, who has made no secret of his desire to own The Journal. Which is not to say that there isn't a high dose of family discontent, or that there isn't a good story in the current interplay between Dow Jones and the Bancrofts. There is. It's just not the one that appeared in The Post. ON the face of it, the saga of the Bancrofts and Dow Jones would seem to be the classic tale of heirs in America: as the generations get further away from the founder - in this case, Clarence W. Barron, who bought The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones news service, in 1902, with a $2,500 down payment - they come to care less about the asset that serves as the foundation of their wealth and more about the cash they could reap from a sale. This is especially true when the asset has not performed well, as is the case with Dow Jones. Its current chief executive, Peter R. Kann, has been in the job for 14 years. From the end of June 1991 (Mr. Kann came in July '91) through yesterday, Dow Jones's total return was 101 percent - lagging considerably the Standard & Poor's printing and publishing index, which had a return of 411 percent over that time, and the overall market, 336 percent. But the Bancroft story has never followed the classic pattern. Clarence Barron's youngest granddaughter, Jane Bancroft Cook, died just a few years ago, and she and her sister, Jesse Bancroft Cox, who died in 1982, passed on to their younger relatives their pride in, and passion for, The Wall Street Journal. 'They feel a sense of public trust,' Mr. Hammer said. The Bancrofts revel in The Wall Street Journal's first-rate journalism, and in the mid-1980's, in an effort to protect that journalism, Dow Jones established Class B shares, with 10 times the voting power of the common stock, to allow the family to remain in control of the company. (The Washington Post and New York Times companies have similar dual-share arrangements.) Although no Bancrofts currently work for the company, three family members are directors. 'The fact that we own The Wall Street Journal,' a family member told me some years ago, 'is the only thing that keeps us from being just another rich family.' Throughout their lives, Ms. Cook and Ms. Cox unstintingly supported management. That, too, they passed on to their heirs. For any Bancroft to criticize the way Dow Jones was run - even to other family members, much less to outsiders - was viewed as an act of disloyalty. Nor did the family have any organizational structure through which to voice criticism. The Bancrofts met a few times a years, but the meetings were largely run by Mr. Hammer and the other trustees at Hemenway & Barnes. As a result, the real power accrued to Mr. Hammer, who has not used it particularly well. Over the years, Mr. Hammer has rebuffed merger overtures. According to a 2003 New Yorker article, this included a 2002 overture from The New York Times that Mr. Hammer, along with Mr. Kann, rejected without consulting either the Dow Jones board or members of the Bancroft family. (Mr. Kann denies turning away merger offers without taking them to the board.) In 1998, after perhaps the worst example of mismanagement in the company's modern history - its waste of $1.6 billion on a misguided acquisition called Telerate - Mr. Hammer went on the Dow Jones board, supposedly to keep a closer eye on his clients' central asset. As a board member, however, he was largely a management supporter. (Last year, Mr. Hammer retired from the board and was succeeded by another Hemenway & Barnes lawyer.) Mr. Hammer also developed a plan, which the company approved, that allowed the family to lower the amount of Class B stock needed to retain control of Dow Jones. Amazingly, rather than push for Mr. Kann to be ousted - as is normal these days when a C.E.O. underperforms - Mr. Hammer's primary response to the company's stagnant share price has been to sell off Dow Jones stock. Perhaps even more amazing, the family has been as loyal to Mr. Hammer as it has been to Mr. Kann. The first crack in the family facade came in the late 1990's, when two young Bancrofts, Elisabeth Goth, then 32, and her cousin William C. Cox III, then 41, publicly raised questions about how Dow Jones was being run. Among other moves, they cooperated with two Fortune magazine articles (which I wrote) and a segment on 'CBS Sunday Morning.' Mr. Cox's willingness to criticize Dow Jones management was particularly brave, inasmuch he was working for the company, and as his father, William C. Cox Jr., was a Dow Jones board member. The result? The company did finally agree to unload Telerate. But in general, the rest of the family rallied around Mr. Kann, and, in effect, shunned the two dissidents. It took years for Ms. Goth, a champion equestrian, and Mr. Cox, now an investment manager, to return to the family's good graces. Did Dow Jones have a good run during the next few years? You bet it did. The Internet bubble was great for all financial publications, as advertising poured in. By 2000, the company was earning $3.32 a share and its stock price stood at well over $70 a share. Did this mean that Dow Jones had suddenly become a well-run company? It did not. Once the bubble burst, the company stumbled badly, as the financial and technology ads that were its lifeblood dried up. The stock drifted back down. It closed yesterday at $39.19. Earnings dropped markedly. And unlike many other media companies, including Scripps, which branched into highly successful cable networks including HGTV, Dow Jones did not spend its bubble winnings broadening its base. It remains a small newspaper company - its market capitalization is only $3.2 billion - almost entirely focused on one segment: financial and business news. It is extremely vulnerable to the vagaries of its narrow advertising niche, a niche many analysts believe will never fully come back. Last year, James H. Lowell 2nd, who has served for decades as an investment adviser to Hemenway & Barnes, asked the trustees if he could address the family on the subject of Dow Jones. He was turned down. But late this spring, around the time of the Dow Jones annual meeting, he sent family members an incendiary letter telling them that their asset was at risk. He suggested that the family set up an oversight committee to monitor the company. Mr. Hammer quickly rejected the idea. 'There shouldn't be a group of self-appointed family members constituting some kind of supervisory board over the board of directors,' he told me. Although most family members reacted to the letter the same way they've always reacted to criticism of Dow Jones - dismissing it out of hand - Mr. Lowell's words fell on a surprisingly large number of receptive ears. It wasn't just Ms. Goth and Mr. Cox anymore; there are, by my count, at least 10 members of the family (out of about three dozen adult Bancrofts) who are unhappy about the performance of management. Are they willing to speak publicly? No. They all saw what happened to Ms. Goth and Mr. Cox. 'If you speak out,' one Bancroft says, 'that alone will cause the rest of the family to discount what you're saying.' One of the newly disgruntled, for instance, is said to be Mr. Cox's father, the former board member. But when I called to ask him about Dow Jones, he gave me a curt 'no comment,' and hung up the phone. Still, at the family gathering preceding the Dow Jones annual meeting this spring, there was enough open discontent that the Bancrofts decided to hold a special family conclave to come up with a plan of action. That took place on May 26, a rainy Thursday in Boston. Mr. Lowell was pointedly not invited, but the family decided that the three Bancroft board members would begin, finally, to push Mr. Kann and demand the kind of financial results that would help bolster the stock price. And then, nothing, which of course has frustrated the dissidents enormously - and, in truth, made this column possible, even though I can't quote anyone by name. One family board member, Leslie Hill, a retired airline captain with an M.B.A., has been willing to ask tough questions, but she's been doing so all along. The other two remain in management's back pocket. Because of the family dynamics, the Bancrofts just don't have it in them to be shareholder activists, even though it is their own fortune at stake. Still, the needle has moved in recent months at Dow Jones. The nonfamily board members seem to have finally awakened. And the company has made two major moves recently: it bought the Internet financial site, MarketWatch, for $519 million. And, in an effort to broaden its advertising base, it will begin publishing a Saturday edition, starting next month. Both are high-risk measures, but at least Dow Jones is trying something. There's one other thing. Mr. Kann is 62. Mandatory retirement age for senior executives at Dow Jones is 65, but the board has already begun searching for his successor. Although Mr. Kann says he expects to keep his job until he turns 65, it is quite possible that well before his mandatory departure date, Mr. Kann will be pushed into a graceful retirement, and a new chief executive will be installed. The Bancrofts will give the new strategic moves a chance to play out, and they'll give the new C.E.O. plenty of running room. If he can turn the ship around, and the Saturday Journal is a hit, and MarketWatch generates gobs of Internet advertising - well, everyone will be happy, and the Bancrofts will remain proud owners of The Wall Street Journal. And if it doesn't turn out that way? Then, and only then, can you start writing articles about Dow Jones being for sale. At that point, it will even be true.

Subject: Falling Costs of Big-Screen TV's From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:23:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/technology/20tvprices.html Falling Costs of Big-Screen TV's to Keep Falling By DAMON DARLIN In consumer electronics, as in much of life, good things happen to those who wait - good things as in plunging prices. The cost of big-screen televisions, which have been steadily dropping by about 25 percent a year, are now expected to fall even more sharply this autumn, according to industry analysts. The coming markdowns reflect a singular confluence of business trends that will benefit consumers going into the holiday season. 'Prices are pretty much in a free fall,' said David Naranjo, who tracks the television industry for DisplaySearch, a market research firm. The best evidence of this is the expectation of analysts that in the next few weeks the Panasonic unit of the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company will announce that it is dropping prices as much as $500 on plasma-screen TV's that retail for around $3,500. Panasonic officials refused this week to confirm or deny the speculation, but because it sells the most plasma screens in the United States, a potential downward adjustment would be considered a harbinger of a price war for all varieties of big-screen TV's. The chief executive of the Syntax Groups, James Li, maker of the Olevia brand of flat-panel TV's, said, 'If they go to $3,000, I will go to $2,999.' All this spells good news for anyone thinking about upgrading from the old cathode-ray TV to screens that are 40 inches or larger in the three most popular formats. Full-featured plasma TV's with 50-inch screens that sold for $20,000 five years ago could edge close to $4,000 this season. A liquid-crystal-display version and a rear-projection TV with a digital light-processing chip will be considerably less, closing in on $1,800. That does not mean choosing a TV will be easy. No longer is it just a matter of price and size. There are no fewer than eight competing technologies, as well as different screen sizes and display standards that force you to grapple with a shape-shifting matrix of at least a dozen dimensions. Let's try to cut through that. It used to be that liquid-crystal-display technology was for small screens, plasma for medium, and digital light processing for large. Though the TV's with digital light processing have been the best value, plasma had the technological advantage and could sell for more because screens were big and flat. Now L.C.D.'s are as large and D.L.P. TV's are flatter. As the technologies overlap in the 32-inch to 46-inch screen sizes, the price differences narrow. A price cut in one technology forces cuts on the others, too. While these changes make any purchasing decision more complex, the resulting markdowns should compensate for the headaches. 'The consumer really holds the ace in this game,' said Jonas Tanenbaum, director of flat-panel and direct-view marketing for Samsung Electronics North America. The problem with buying any new technology is that tomorrow it will be cheaper - and better. So why not wait some more? When you buy a depreciating asset, it always makes sense to wait as long as you can. But at this stage in the introduction of big-screen high-definition TV sets, consumers are unlikely to get whipsawed by radical new technology that leaves them regretting their purchase. This year there are several compelling reasons for trading up to a bigger TV, especially one that offers high-definition. Nascar and the National Football League have begun broadcasting events in high-definition. (When it comes to $2,000 TV-purchasing decisions, surveys show men control the purse strings.) The TV networks are broadcasting more high-definition content, but it isn't all that exciting to watch Paul Kangas read the 'Nightly Business Report' on PBS in crisp clarity. Seeing the sweat knocked off the face of a sacked quarterback could be a thrill. Content matters. ' Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color' began broadcasting in 1961, but manufacturers recall that sales of color TV's did not take off until the mid-1960's, after the broadcasters put most of their programming in color. Driving big-screen prices below $2,000 - about what a color TV cost in the late 1960's, adjusting for inflation - is also expected to increase demand this year. A number of factors are causing that to happen faster than anyone expected. Manufacturers in China and Taiwan, the so-called Tier 3 makers that few consumers have ever heard of like Vestel, Changchong or Xoceco, are dropping heavily discounted L.C.D. TV's into general merchandise stores like Costco and Wal-Mart or at online discounters. Manufacturers with high profit margins have as much to fear from Texas. Dell is applying to TV's the low-cost supply chain and direct-to-consumer sales model that struck such envy and dread in the personal computer industry. While others were selling 42-inch plasma screens for $7,000, it blasted into the market with one for $3,500. It can do that because it does well on margins around 16 percent. The well-known Japanese and Korean manufacturers, with margins closer to 40 percent, are finding they must trim prices or lose sales. Some are trying to get retailers to trim their margins of about 10 percent to offer TV's for even less. Dell is now selling the 42-inch high-definition plasma screen for $2,600 and the company suggests it could go lower as it gets further deals on components. Michael Farello, Dell's vice president for United States consumer electronics, said he was recently looking at Dell ads from the mid-1990's comparing its $3,500 PC's with other makers' units at $6,000. 'This isn't the first time this has happened,' he said. Amid all this new competition, new factories in Asia are cranking out flat-panel displays. Economic theory holds that as volumes go up, costs go down. TV manufacturers can lower prices and cover the cost of the expensive new plants with the increased volume of TV set sales. But too many of the big makers decided to build plants, so now there is an oversupply of plasma screens that threatens to grow even larger. That will force manufacturers like Panasonic, Philips Electronics, the Samsung Electronics Company and the Sony Corporation to cut prices even more to soak up some of that overproduction through the rest of this decade. 'Price is being led by capacity,' says Gary Merson, editor of the HDTV Insider newsletter. Aren't you glad you waited?

Subject: The Price of Oil From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 21:33:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Though I do not believe that we will face any oil shortage in the coming generation, I do not believe we are likely to return to 40 dollars a barrel oil. How then does a price of oil from 40 to 80 dollars a barrel effect an investment portfolio?

Subject: Re: The Price of Oil From: Pete Weis To: Terri Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 00:54:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'Though I do not believe that we will face any oil shortage in the coming generation,...' Terri. What do you base this on? The following was written by Princeton geologist Kenneth Deffeyes. Another British geologist had a similar message. The BBC had a lengthy article which talked about considerable over reporting of oil reserves by OPEC nations during the 1980's when restrictions on oil production were instituted based on reported reserves by OPEC member nations. Another 2004 report by Swedish geologists also echoed the same rapidly approaching peak oil sentiments and also talked about extensive over reporting of oil reserves by both OPEC producers and oil majors. Wall Street has an interest in investors being in the dark about future steep increases in oil since it might spook them from buying stocks of many companies which would be negatively impacted by much higher energy costs. They argue that advances in searching for oil will result in large new finds. But the Swedish geologists as well as other geologists (such as Deffeyes) counter that despite improvements in searching techniques, new oil reserve finds have been steadily decreasing and they expect that decline to continue. So if you believe there will be no oil shortage in the 'coming generation', you must be basing this on something. This is a very important issue for the global economy in the near future, not to mention our own personal investing decisions. If we get it wrong, we will all pay a high price. I had posted the following sometime ago: Join us as we watch the crisis unfolding Re-printed from The New York Times op-ed page By Kenneth S. Deffeyes Published: March 25, 2005 Princeton, N.J. President Bush's hopes for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge came one step closer to reality last week. While Congress must still pass a law to allow drilling in the refuge, the Senate voted to include oil revenues from such drilling in the budget, making eventual approval of the president's plan more likely. Yet the debate over drilling in the Arctic refuge has been oddly beside the point. In fact, it may be distracting us from a far more important problem: a looming world oil shortage. A permanent drop in world oil production will have serious consequences . . . the economic blow . . . the psychological effect . . . The environmental argument over drilling in the refuge has often been portrayed as 'tree huggers' versus 'dirty drillers' (although, as a matter of fact, the north coastal plain of Alaska happens to have no trees to hug). Even as we concede that this is an oversimplification, we should also ask how a successful drilling operation would affect American oil production. The United States Geological Survey has estimated that the Arctic oil field is likely to be at least half the size of the Prudhoe Bay oil field, almost 100 miles to the west. Opening that oil field was like hitting a grand slam: Prudhoe Bay, which has already produced more than 13 billion barrels, is the biggest American oil field. (I was once at a party with a bunch of geologists from Mobil Oil when an argument broke out: who discovered Prudhoe Bay? Everybody in the room except me claimed to have done so.) Unfortunately, you don't hit a grand slam in every at-bat. The geological survey estimates that the Arctic refuge could produce at least half as much oil as Prudhoe Bay. It is also possible, however, that the refuge could produce no oil at all – it often happens in the oil industry. At the other extreme, the upper range of the geological survey's estimate soars to 16 billion barrels. Although the geologists at the survey are widely respected, the upper ranges of their petroleum estimates for the refuge have drawn criticism, sometimes expressed as giggles, from other petroleum geologists. Despite its size, Prudhoe Bay was not big enough to reverse the decline of American oil production. The greatest year of United States production was 1970. Prudhoe Bay started producing oil in 1977, but never enough to raise American production above the level of 1970. The Arctic refuge will probably have an even smaller effect. Every little bit helps, but even the most successful drilling project at the Arctic refuge would be only a little bit. But if the question of whether to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the wrong one, what's the right one? In 1997 and 1998, a few petroleum geologists began examining world oil production using the methods that M. King Hubbert used in predicting in 1956 that United States oil production would peak during the early 1970's. These geologists indicated that world oil output would reach its apex in this decade - some 30 to 40 years after the peak in American oil production. Almost no one paid attention. I used to work with Mr. Hubbert at Shell Oil, and my own independent research places the peak of world oil production late this year or early in 2006. Even a prompt and successful drilling operation in the Arctic refuge would not start pumping oil into the pipeline before 2008 or 2009. A permanent drop in world oil production will have serious consequences. In addition to the economic blow, there will be the psychological effect of accepting that there are limits to an important energy resource. What can we do? More efficient diesel automobiles, and greater reliance on wind and nuclear power, are well-engineered solutions that are available right now. Conservation, although costly in most cases, will have the largest impact. The United States also has a 300-year supply of coal, and methods for using coal without adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere are being developed. After world oil production starts to decline, a small group of geologists could gather in my living room and all claim to have discovered the peak. 'We told you so,' we could say. But that isn't the point. The controversy over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a side issue. The problem we need to face is the impending world oil shortage. Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a professor emeritus of geology at Princeton, is the author of 'Beyond Oil: The View from Hubbert's Peak.'

Subject: Oil From: Johnny5 To: Pete Weis Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:07:17 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Hey Pete, I missed you - where are you hiding today? hehe I watched this on c-span yesterday. Mr. Slaughter said we will spend money and find new oil - we always have - now I don't know that I agree with that Pete - seems lately we are not getting good return on oil searching projects - but he went on to say - finding the oil may not be the big problem - refining it needs more attention. Call-In Oil Production and Refinery Development C-SPAN, Washington Journal Washington, District of Columbia (United States) ID: 188443 - 2 - 08/20/2005 - 0:36 - $29.95 Slaughter, Bob, President, National Petrochemical and Refiners Association Mr. Slaughter talks about U.S. refinery capacities, oil production, and the rising costs of gasoline. http://www.mywesttexas.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15073025&BRD=2288&PAG=461&dept_id=474107&rfi=6 Refinery mishaps hamper oil output AP DataFeatures Midland Reporter Telegram 08/21/2005 By David J. Lynch U.S. oil refineries are stretching their aging facilities to boost output amid spiking gas prices. A series of refinery mishaps in recent weeks has jarred the oil market, crimping output in an industry running flat out to meet surging demand. Some U.S. refineries are operating at up to 99 percent capacity, according to Bob Slaughter, president of the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association. 'There is less room for error when you're running at high utilization rates for a very long time,' he says. The most recent incident occurred July 28 when an explosion and fire shook a BP refinery in Texas City, Texas. In March, 15 people were killed and 170 injured in an earlier explosion there. Troubled refineries are a global worry. On July 26, an explosion shuttered a Russian refinery in Novo-Ufimsk. And Europe faces a shortage of diesel fuel by 2015 unless new refinery investments materialize, according to consultants Wood Mackenzie. U.S. refiners expect to spend $20 billion on equipment from 2000 to 2010. But that won't expand output much. Most investment is equipping refineries to produce cleaner, low-sulfur fuels mandated by Congress, Slaughter says. Still, with oil prices hitting a record $66.86 a barrel Friday, refiners have been enjoying fat profits. Valero, of San Antonio, reported record net income for the quarter ending June 30 of $847 million vs. $633 million last year. Refiners remain unwilling to gamble the multibillion-dollar investment needed for a new plant in the face of local opposition and regulatory hurdles. Only one planned refinery is moving forward: a $2.5 billion facility 100 miles outside Phoenix. 'Everyone from the man in the street to the White House is talking about the need for more capacity,' says Glenn McGinnis, CEO of Arizona Clean Fuels Yuma, which has been pushing the plan for five years. Earlier this year, the company secured a major environmental permit from the state. But additional regulatory hurdles remain, and it will be 2010 before the new facility produces its first drop. In a market that can't wait, most refiners instead are embracing technology to improve existing facilities. ExxonMobil adds the equivalent of a new 200,000-to-300,000-barrel-a-day refinery every three years thanks to new technology and greater efficiency, says spokeswoman Lauren Kerr. One beneficiary of the industry drive: Emerson Electric, which markets a network of digital sensors for refineries. By alerting technicians to problems such as clogged lines, the PlantWeb sensors let refineries avoid costly downtime. 'We give them some extra eyes and ears,' says John Berra, head of Emerson's process management division. http://www.rutlandherald.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050821/NEWS/508210418/-1/NEWS02 The energy bill carries a new mandate requiring that production of ethanol production more than double by 2012 and providing financial incentives to reach that goal. Ethanol, now made mainly in Minnesota and other Midwestern states, is a corn-based gasoline additive that can replace MTBE to help engines run more smoothly and produce less pollution. Robert Slaughter, head of the Petrochemical and Refiners Association in Washington, said the ethanol mandate will raise the price of gasoline, at least for a few years. 'The mandate makes gasoline more difficult and expensive to make,' Slaughter said. 'You're losing miles per gallon when you put ethanol in your gasoline, and it's harder to ship. The industry will certainly learn how to use ethanol over time with less disruption, but there will be a learning curve.' Bob Dinneen, head of the Renewable Fuels Association in Washington, disagreed. 'Ethanol is clearly the most cost-effective octane replacement for MTBE,' he said. 'Today, 16 ethanol plants and two major expansions are under construction. … Dozens of additional plants are under development.' The energy bill's gasoline-formula clauses took effect immediately in California, but their implementation is delayed 270 days — until next May — in the rest of the country. As a condition for continuing to supply MTBE gasoline in the states where it is still allowed — still two-thirds of the country — gasoline refineries had lobbied for the energy measure to give them protection against lawsuits filed by communities over MTBE water contamination. The original House bill contained such a liability shield, but the Senate bill did not, and the legal protection was not in the final version signed by Bush. As a result, within days of the bill's passage, San Antonio, Texas-based Valero Energy Corp., the country's second-biggest gasoline refiner, said it would stop producing MTBE immediately when the energy bill's new oxygen-formulation clauses take effect in May. Especially if other refiners follow Valero's lead, the country's gasoline supply could take a major hit next year at a very bad time — just before the start of the summer driving season with its traditional increase in gas demand. That collision of decreased supply and increased demand, in some analysts' view, could make next summer even harder on drivers' pocketbooks. 'It would have been difficult for them to time this any worse,' said Doug McIntyre, a senior oil-market analyst with the U.S. Energy Information Administration. 'Unless there's a lot more slack in the system by then, you can expect supply and demand to be tight. And even small declines in supply can have a relatively large price impact.'

Subject: Re: Oil From: Pete Weis To: Johnny5 Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 11:10:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Hi Johnny. My wife and I are presently in wine country - leaving today for dry country (Utah). The following is from the London Times: June 14, 2005 Oil industry ‘struggling to find new reserves’ By Carl Mortished, International Business Editor THE international oil industry is struggling to discover enough new oil reserves, despite surging global demand for crude oil, according to a study by Wood Mackenzie, the energy consultants. In the face of steady annual increases in demand for oil over the past decade, the West’s big oil companies largely have failed to improve the yearly exploration yield of new reserves to their portfolios, the study shows. Smaller discoveries and diminishing reserves per well are adding to pressure on oil companies in the West to gain access to large, unexploited oilfields in Russia and the Gulf states. The Wood Mackenzie report, Global Oil and Gas Risks and Rewards, shows that typical annual returns from oil exploration — in the region of between three billion and five billion barrels — have not changed since the early 1990s. The only exception to the largely stagnant exploration trend was the discovery in 2000 of Kashagan, a ten billion barrel oilfield, in the Caspian Sea. Graham Kellas, vice-president at Wood Mackenzie, reckons that the international oil companies were highly successful in finding oil during the past decade, but now are working in a diminishing field of opportunity. “The hunt for oil continues, but it is becoming increasingly difficult,’’ he said. “There are few areas of the world that are unexplored and that is why the larger companies are so keen to get access to areas that are off-limits.” Shut out from the large known reserves of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq, the West’s oil companies have had significant successes, such as in the deep water of the Gulf of Mexico, Angola and Nigeria. There have also been failures, such as Brazil and Azerbaijan. Mr Kellas said: “Deep- water Brazil has been a big disappointment. No commercial discoveries have yet been made by international oil companies, despite having spent nearly $1.5 billion.” The collapse in the oil price in 1998 and the ensuing wave of company takeovers led to cutbacks in exploration spending that the oil companies have been slow to restore, fearing further oil gluts. Exploration drilling peaked in 1998 with a total of 725 wells drilled, but in 2003 the West’s oil industry completed just 554 wells. The diminishing average size of new discoveries is another factor causing the oil companies to seek access to Russia’s known oilfields. “Most of the activity in the former Soviet Union is the development of discoveries made in the Soviet period,” Mr Kellas said. PRICE PROBLEM Opec producers held out hope of further rises in production at today’s ministerial meeting to try to tame soaring crude prices, but they said that the oil cartel has little power to curb price rises, which were due to a lack of refinery capacity rather than crude supply. UK Brent crude closed up 57 cents at $53.24 a barrel.

Subject: South Korea Now Calls for More Babies From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 17:53:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/international/asia/21birthrate.html South Korea, in Turnabout, Now Calls for More Babies By NORIMITSU ONISHI WANDO, South Korea - After Park Pil Soo's second child was born nine years ago, he followed national family planning entreaties to limit families to two children by undergoing a free, government-sponsored vasectomy. Then, in April, Mr. Park took advantage of a new policy, and had the vasectomy reversed, also at the state's expense. He and his wife, Yang Eun Hwa, 36, are now trying to have a third child. After decades of promoting smaller families, South Korea - like several other Asian countries facing plummeting birthrates - is desperately seeking ways to get people to have more babies. In South Korea, the decline has been so precipitous that it caught the government off guard. Policies devised to discourage more than two children, like vasectomies and tubal ligations, were covered under the national health plan until last year. This year, the plan began covering reverse procedures for those two operations, as well as care for a couple's third or fourth child. 'I'd been thinking about getting the operation for a while, but was concerned about the cost,' said Mr. Park, 37, who runs the Samsung Electronics store in this seaside town on the southern shore of the Korean Peninsula. In South Korea, as in Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong, quick economic growth and social changes have produced disturbingly low birthrates that are transforming their societies and threatening their economic strength. In this ethnically homogenous nation, as in Japan, there is no support for the kind of immigration that has increased birthrates in some Western nations, including the United States. 'In the next two or three years, we won't be able to increase the birthrate,' said Park Ha Jeong, a director general in the Health Ministry. 'But we have to stop the decline, or it will be too late.' Young couples in Seoul and other cities are choosing to have few babies, but the low birthrate has hit rural places like Wando County hardest. Within less than a decade, it has transformed South Korea's rural landscape, shuttering schools, shrinking class sizes, setting off villagewide celebrations for the rare birth of a baby. Growing up here, Park Pil Soo has watched family sizes shrink to fewer than two children from as many as eight, and Wando's population decreases year by year. People have grown richer here. At his Samsung store, residents began buying air-conditioners four years ago, and they expect television sets in each room and a refrigerator just for kimchi. 'People now want a higher living standard instead of children,' he said, as he and his wife attended to customers on a recent Saturday. Wando's was the first local government to supplement the national health insurance to make reverse vasectomies and tubal ligations entirely free. So far, five men and two women have had the surgeries, said Hwang Dae Rae, the county official who came up with the idea and regularly calls the couples to inquire about possible 'good news.' (None has been reported so far.) Ms. Hwang acknowledged that the new policy would not solve the low birthrate problem, which, here and in the rest of Asia, is rooted in women's rising social and economic standing. 'In the past, women thought it was their obligation to have children, but not anymore,' she said. Still, she said, the new policy is symbolic of the change in the national government's approach, whose longtime, single-minded focus on small families had put social pressure on South Koreans. Choi Hyung Soon, 40, one of the two women to undergo a reverse tubal ligation, now wants a third child. After she had had two sons in her 20's, she underwent a tubal ligation because it seemed the right thing to do. 'The campaign at the time was to have only two children,' she said, at a barbecue restaurant she runs here. 'So one day a lot of my friends in the neighborhood decided to go have the operation, and I went along. I felt it was a foolish decision.' South Korea began aggressively promoting family planning in the 1960's, fearing that overpopulation would impede its economic growth. Slogans at the time warned South Koreans, who averaged six children per family, that they would become 'beggars without family planning.' Even in the 1980's, slogans declared that 'even two are a lot.' Successful family planning, coupled with changing mores, led the birthrate to drop below the ideal population replacement level of 2.1 in the 1980's and then more precipitously in the mid-1990's. Now on average a South Korean woman will have 1.19 child in her lifetime - a rate lower than Japan's birthrate of 1.28, comparable to Taiwan's 1.22, and higher than Hong Kong's 0.94. Mr. Park, of the Health Ministry, said the government committed itself to raising the birthrate only last year. 'We should have started these policies in the late 1990's, but we had been focused on decreasing the birthrate for 40 years and it was hard to change directions,' he said. But some of the measures aimed at reversing the trend have done little more than suggest the government is still out of step with the times. A campaign earlier this year urged women to have at least two children by joining the '1-2-3' movement: have one child in the first year of marriage and a second before turning 30. It ended after many young women and men, who have been delaying marriage until their late 20's or later, said the campaign's expectations were unrealistic in this age. Mr. Park said the government was considering new measures to tackle some of the biggest reasons cited by couples for not having children, including the high costs of after-school education and the lack of day care. The government also wants to give tax breaks to couples with several children and encourage paid maternity leaves. Local governments are not waiting, though. In April, Seocheon, a west coast county whose population has declined from 150,000 in the 1960's to 65,000, began giving out bonuses for babies: $300 for the first or second child, $800 for the third. 'Some villages haven't heard babies crying in 18 years,' said Lee Kwon Hee, the county deputy chief. At the Masan Elementary School, the population of 56 students is less than a tenth of what it was in the 1970's. Back then, pupils were packed together so that schools had what were called 'bean sprout classrooms,' said Kim Deok Sang, the principal. Nowadays, Masan's students have to join those at the two nearest schools for sporting and other events. There was some good news, though, in at least one corner of Seocheon County. Last winter, the village of Seokdong celebrated its first newborn in four years - twins, in fact, born to Lee Ji Yun, 28, and her husband, Park Dae Soo, 32. Their 4-year-old daughter had been the last child born there. The young couple own 10 cows and farm potatoes, rice, garlic and chilies. Although the county gave them a total of $1,100 for the twins, they emphasized that the cash incentive played no role in their decision. Mr. Park said he doubted that the bonus would bolster the birthrate. His wife, a nurse who stopped working when the twins were born, nodded. 'If I hadn't had twins, I would have kept working,' she said, citing inadequate medical and day care. 'The government should look at this society's fundamental problems,' her husband said, 'instead of just handing out money.'

Subject: Ayn Rand types - Take Note From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:15:57 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Great Article Emma - Whitney Houston sang this song - and while I agree with her the children are our future - I don't know that I agree with her 'depending on herself' is gonna be good long term for the nation - we need babies. When whitney gets old she will need children to depend on - not herself. Ayn Rand never had any - so she didn't help long term. She loved books - they were better than babies. I wonder who fed her soup in bed as an old lady? The books she loved? WHITNEY HOUSTON LYRICS 'Greatest Love Of All' I believe the children are our are future Teach them well and let them lead the way Show them all the beauty they possess inside Give them a sense of pride to make it easier Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be Everybody searching for a hero People need someone to look up to I never found anyone to fulfill my needs A lonely place to be So I learned to depend on me [Chorus:] I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadows If I fail, if I succeed At least I live as I believe No matter what they take from me They can't take away my dignity Because the greatest love of all Is happening to me I found the greatest love of all Inside of me The greatest love of all Is easy to achieve Learning to love yourself It is the greatest love of all I believe the children are our future Teach them well and let them lead the way Show them all the beauty they possess inside Give them a sense of pride to make it easier Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be [Chorus] And if by chance, that special place That you've been dreaming of Leads you to a lonely place Find your strength in love

Subject: Endangered Species Act Upheld From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 17:46:05 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/politics/20species.html Judges Rebuff Government on Endangered Species By FELICITY BARRINGER WASHINGTON - Federal judges on opposite sides of the country ruled Friday that the Fish and Wildlife Service had acted arbitrarily and violated the Endangered Species Act when it reversed its own decisions and cut back on protections for two disparate species. The judges - one in San Francisco and one in Brattleboro, Vt. - overturned separate regulations involving California tiger salamanders and gray wolves in New England. In both cases, the Bush administration had combined sparser, distinct populations of a species with larger, robust populations, and then said protections could be reduced. In his ruling striking down the agency's 2003 regulation on gray wolves, Judge J. Garvan Murtha wrote that the agency, after making the scientific determination that a species was endangered, could not change its mind 'because it lumps together a core population with a low to nonexistent population.' The gray wolf outside Alaska has been on the endangered list since 1973. Then, there were fewer than 500 outside Alaska. Today, the wolf's recovery has been a success story. The case, brought by the Natural Wildlife Federation and other groups, was based on evidence that, although the wolf's recovery in the Great Lakes area and parts of the Rocky Mountains had been successful, few if any gray wolves exist in New England. The latter fact has led some biologists to question whether gray wolves ever lived there. In 2003, the wildlife service, in what Judge Murtha called 'a stark departure' from its original plan, abandoned its separate designation of Northeastern wolves. Instead, it combined the Midwestern populations with those in the East. A year ago, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton announced she intended to take this Eastern population group off the endangered list. In the case of the California salamanders, brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, Judge William Alsup ruled that the wildlife service had 'no scientific evidence' for reversing itself in a 2004 regulation that reduced protections for separate populations of the tiger salamander in Santa Barbara and Sonoma Counties. Both populations had been listed as endangered. Judge Alsup's decision invalidated the 2004 rule, saying that it 'was bereft of any analysis.' Agency scientists, he found, 'were overruled and directed to eliminate' their earlier finding that these two populations of salamander were distinct subgroups and in danger of extermination. Peter Galvin, conservation director of the Center for Biological Diversity, said the ruling 'shines a very bright spotlight on the Bush administration's subversion of science.' Jeff Eisenberg, a spokesman for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, which had opposed protections for the salamanders, said his group 'regrets the Endangered Species Act has become so complicated and difficult to administer so as to produce the convoluted result.' A spokesman for the Interior Department could not be reached.

Subject: Museums of Native American Art From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 15:27:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/arts/design/20nati.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1124565454-jODOYR0HPHg9nBUMCISP6Q A New Dawn for Museums of Native American Art By JOSHUA BROCKMAN PHOENIX - Decorated with spirals and migration symbols, Nathan Begay's multicolored jar resembles an ancient assemblage of shards. But it's actually a synthesis of historical and modern: Mr. Begay, a 46-year-old artist of Hopi and Navajo descent, created it five years ago. Its inclusion with some 2,000 other objects in the Heard Museum's new exhibition of its permanent collection here reflects a sweeping change in the way museums are presenting Native American art. Rather than focusing on an ethnographic past, they are celebrating the full continuum of such art, juxtaposing contemporary pieces with historical ones and integrating native voices - often first-person narratives - into explanatory text and media. From the Heard, to the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, to the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, museums with substantial Native American collections are aggressively pursuing new work. To that end, dozens of museum officials will converge this weekend on Santa Fe, N.M., along with thousands of other private collectors, for the city's annual Indian Market. The gathering, which began in 1922, draws more than a thousand Native American artists who sell their work and compete in a juried competition held by the Southwestern Indian Arts Association. Museums seize the opportunity to discover contemporary artists and to become directly acquainted with them. Aside from its striking landscape, the Southwest continues to capture the public imagination because of the presence of Native American communities that keep their art, culture and language alive. The Heard's proximity to those communities and its first-person approach has led to some curatorial insights. 'It all starts with a commitment to get it right in the eyes of our native advisers and native communities,' said Frank H. Goodyear Jr., director of the Heard. 'We want to present the material in a way that connects to people and helps them understand native cultures, builds cultural sensitivity, builds cultural awareness, and makes them want to go beyond what they've seen.' The museum's installation, titled 'Home: Native People in the Southwest,' opened in a refurbished 21,000 square-foot gallery in May. It was years in the making: the Heard's previous permanent exhibition was in place for two decades. In June, the Eiteljorg in Indianapolis also opened a reinstallation of some of its Native American collections, in a new 45,000-square-foot wing. The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., is developing a new installation as well. A common thread in these efforts is to display Native American holdings as full-fledged art objects, but with a heavy emphasis on process and context. The installation at the Heard, displayed by tribal geography, covers the spectrum of peoples in the region. More than 50 recorded interviews with members of Native American tribes serve as the foundation for themes like homeland, language, family and community that are explored in exhibition text and presentations on electronic kiosks. Pottery provides a natural introduction to the exhibition themes, since clay is gathered from homelands and a finished work serves not only as decoration and a means for carrying on aesthetic traditions, but also as a vessel for cooking and storing food and water. Nampeyo, whose pottery is on view, was the matriarch of a dynasty of Hopi-Tewa potters and artists: a 1976 jar with a butterfly motif by her great-granddaughter Dextra Quotskuyva is on display nearby. Ms. Quotskuyva's son, Dan Namingha, carries on the tradition as a painter; his 'Red-Tailed Hawk Katsina' is one of the few paintings on view in the exhibition. 'My mother's work, the technical aspect is very traditional, but her ideas are contemporary in the sense that sometimes she'll capture something that relates to her currently,' Mr. Namingha said in a telephone interview. 'I'm the same way, and Nampeyo was the same way.' In general, museums are distancing themselves from presenting Native American art through the lens of only one discipline like art history or anthropology, said Mr. Goodyear of the Heard. 'Museums and native peoples have had a tenuous if not difficult relationship over the years,' he said, 'and that relationship hasn't been helped by the fact that the folks that have been traditionally interpreting the material have been non-native anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnographers, cultural historians and art historians.' The Heard began breaking down some of these barriers in the 1980's, Mr. Goodyear said, but today the hot issue remains, Who controls the material? W. Richard West Jr., director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, said that his curators try 'to emulate the original context as much as possible.' 'That's why we have worked directly with communities, that's why we have asked them to talk about the objects themselves,' he said, adding, 'From the native standpoint, it was the process involved in the creation of an object that was far more important in the end than the object itself.' The often densely packed objects and video histories in the Heard's show make for a saturated sensory experience. In a video, Larry Brown, a San Carlos Apache, handles a circa-1900 hand-tanned buckskin saddlebag and explains that the cutout designs with red material underneath were peculiar to the Apaches. A Zuni jeweler, Dan Simplicio Jr., says in the text that much of the large-format Zuni jewelry was made to be worn in ceremonies by both participants and spectators so that it 'could be could be seen by the ancestors looking down showing that people are well and surrounded with beautiful things.' The bracelets, pendants and bolos of Jesse Monongya, a Navajo-Hopi artist who became a jeweler in the mid-1970's after serving in Vietnam, figures prominently in a 'Defending Home' section. Other objects in that area include a Navajo bracelet fashioned around a Purple Heart awarded in the 40's. Amid the debate over presentation, from videos to mounted objects to blending old and new, the distinction of 'art versus artifact' remains an important issue, said Dan Monroe, director of the Peabody Essex Museum. 'Native American art was collected not as art, and not really even as artifact, but really as specimen,' he said. 'That's why the vast majority of art collected from indigenous cultures resides in natural history museums. 'The reason was that flora, fauna, and 'primitive' cultures all were conceived as being closely aligned. Certainly no one was talking or thinking about 'native American art.' That view held well into the 1930's.' At the Peabody Essex, 'we like to make it clear that Native Americans are here and are still creating art, albeit in very different ways in some respects than they did in the past, which is precisely what one would expect,' he said, adding, 'Cultures can't exist and be static.' Neither can museums, which is why the Heard's 'Home' exhibition includes room for change. By updating exhibitions, it aims to keep the public informed about contemporary Native American culture and counter stereotypes. These days, plenty of contemporary works address those stereotypes head on, like the digital photographs in 'Will Wilson: Auto Immune Response,' part of 'Artspeak: New Voices in Contemporary Expression,' a show running through Sept. 30 at the Heard, and 'Iconoclash,' continuing through Jan. 16 at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. In 'Iconoclash,' Marcus Amerman's 'Something Wicked' depicts a train pulling cargo that includes Buffalo Bill, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and the American flag, among other objects and personalities. In the foreground, buffalo are scattering in fear. 'The train is just American culture coming into this continent and all the things good, bad and strange it brings,' the artist said in an interview. David Bradley's sculpture 'Land O'Fakes' in the same show confronts fraud in the Indian art market and 'the commodification of Indian culture - the packaging of it in an attractive way to make money,' as the artist puts it. It is not clear whether the Indian princess he depicts is a Native American or a white woman dressed in Indian clothing. The logo on the back of the sculpture reads 'Land O'Bucks,' and the top mimics the packaging for 'Land O'Lakes' butter. (The company is based in Minnesota, and Mr. Bradley is a Minnesota Chippewa.) In his paintings, Mr. Bradley reinterprets popular imagery in a native context. His 'To Sleep, Perchance to Dream,' for example, is modeled after Henri Rousseau's 'Sleeping Gypsy.' 'While the Indian is sleeping, his homeland is being turned into a huge tourist attraction - Hollywood on the Rio Grande,' the artist said.

Subject: Exciting From: Britney To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 15:21:53 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is an exciting message board. Thank you for all these varied posts. I will return often.

Subject: Re: Exciting From: John C To: Britney Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 17:35:31 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Britney, did Emma show you this board? I noticed that you, Emma, Terri, and Jennifer seem to be posting from the same IP from time to time. There must be lots of economic discussions going on over there.

Subject: Shhh - you will make the voices angry From: Johnny5 To: John C Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:48:19 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: HAHA! I see I am not the only one suspecting multiple personalities!

Subject: Re: Exciting From: Maureen Dowd To: Britney Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 17:27:35 (EDT) Email Address: liberties@nytimes.com Message: I'm not sure that I can agree with you, Britney. The fundamental problem with Krugman is that he has never been one to trouble himself by actually doing research. As far as I can tell, he never does any: he simply reads a far-left book or a Democratic National Committee press release, and summarizes it in his column. (And for this the New York Times pays him?)

Subject: Stop that - flames are my job From: Johnny5 To: Maureen Dowd Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 08:08:07 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Why would an intellectual come here and start the flames with her first post - is this how you get ahead in life - causing great grief and putting yourself in the middle of the flame fest you start? That may work on TV Ms. Dowd, but it is not going to work here - hehe. I shall look forward to your posts and your perspective on the topics here - your flames and hate - save that for o'reilly. What are your quick fixes to the economy and employment? We need more constructive objectivism. Not flame fests.

Subject: The Danger of Deficits From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:56:45 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: The Danger of Deficits USA Today, August 16, 2005 Isabel V. Sawhill, Senior Fellow and Vice President, Economic Studies Put away the champagne. Sweep up the confetti. The applause that echoed around Washington on Monday with the revelation that the budget deficit will be only — only — $331 billion is misguided and, perhaps, reckless. Psychiatrists have clinical terms to describe how most elected officials are responding to the deficit — denial, repression, magical thinking. In short, they're doing next to nothing. There is a deafening silence — from the halls of Congress and corporate boardrooms to the living rooms and voting booths where Americans make decisions about their own and their children's futures. In fact, there is some good news on the deficit front. The Congressional Budget Office outlook for 2005 has improved markedly since its March projection. But no one should be lulled into thinking that this good news will last. The problem will get much worse if nothing is done. Deficits will become unsustainable when baby boomers begin to retire in 2008 and are poised to balloon out of control a generation hence, wreaking havoc on today's younger Americans. Solutions are all painful. We need to reform the three major entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid), curb soaring health care costs, raise federal revenue (yes, that means taxes), cut low-priority spending and impose budgeting rules. President Bush deserves praise for putting Social Security reform on the table, but his proposed private accounts would add $5 trillion in deficits over two decades. He talks about halving the deficit in five years, but the most recent congressional budget blueprint actually increases deficits by $168 billion over that period. The prescription drug law will add a half-trillion dollars or more over the coming decade. The Bigger Picture Social Security is a surprisingly small part of the problem. Medicare and Medicaid costs will increase four times faster than Social Security. If the big three entitlement programs — 42% of federal spending — grow at present rates, either everything else that government does will be crowded out, or a 33% tax increase will be needed by 2030. If taxes stay at current levels, no money will be left for national parks, highways, extra police, better-trained teachers, veterans' health care, and the environment. Without deficit reduction, just interest on the debt will absorb one out of every three personal income tax dollars collected by 2015. But why should anyone care? One danger is that Asian and other central banks, which hold a huge and growing chunk of American debt, could stop financing our deficits. Interest rates would rise, stocks and bonds would plunge, and recession would follow. Another possibility is that increasing federal debt — combined with America's dwindling private savings — would mean much less money available to invest in new infrastructure and equipment, new technologies and new businesses. And a cardinal rule of economics is: Less investment means less economic growth and a slower increase in living standards. The failure to address deficits reflects wishful thinking, irresponsible political rhetoric and myopia. We'd need indefinite economic growth of more than 4% per year, something the U.S. economy did not do even during the go-go late 1990s, when growth averaged 3.3%. Selective cuts alone wouldn't work either because only 19% of the budget is not for mandated entitlement programs, defense, or debt interest. Finally, it's myopic to believe that budget deficits just don't matter. You would be hard-pressed to find an economist who concurs. So, what's to be done? We need to reform Social Security and Medicare eligibility and benefit formulas: We could raise the eligibility age as life expectancy rises, and reduce benefits for the well-off, but protect lower-wage workers. We could transform Medicare from an open-ended, fee-for-service system to one protecting all Americans from catastrophic expenses. Those with limited means would be given enough to buy a basic health plan, but no one would be guaranteed unlimited care at public expense. Plenty of federal programs are ineffective, obsolete, or cater to politically powerful elites — and could be cut. The big hitch is politics. The U.S. tax system cries out for overhaul. It must be simpler, fairer and more conducive to growth and efficiency. We could introduce a modest consumption or value-added tax, and eliminate $200 billion in tax subsidies. What might be most troubling is the lack of presidential leadership and bipartisan congressional action to restore fiscal sanity. What will it take? Another Ross Perot? A stock market crash? Rallies in Washington? The Chinese moving their money into euros? A Serious Approach There's a better way: Thoughtful Republicans and Democrats could seek compromises as they did in the 1983 Social Security reforms, the 1986 tax reform, or the budget agreements. An independent, high-profile commission on deficit reduction — like the military base-closing commission — could be appointed. It could provide not only recommendations but also political cover for the president and Congress to act. The longer we wait, the more painful actions will need to be, and the more likely that fiscal termites in the economic woodwork will bring down the house. If there's a silver lining, it is this: The deficit challenge gives Americans a unique opportunity to re-examine the role of government and how we pay for it. And, if we act now, we can ensure prosperity and security for our children and grandchildren. http://www.brook.edu/views/op-ed/sawhill/20050816.htm

Subject: Hwy Billls instead of water bills From: Johnny5 To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 06:24:23 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: 'taxes stay at current levels, no money will be left for national parks, highways, extra police, better-trained teachers, veterans' health care, and the environment' http://www.floridatrend.com/issue/default.asp?a=5594&s=1 Construction and repair of water systems is the No. 1 infrastructure need in the U.S. It will require an estimated $276 billion over the next 20 years. Florida’s drinking-water infrastructure backlog is $3.7 billion. The state’s wastewater infrastructure backlog is $9.96 billion. Meanwhile, the state loses 364 million gallons a day to leaking pipes. DeBenedictis argues that private companies can build new systems and repair old ones at lower cost. http://www.citizen.org/documents/waves.pdf A june 2005 report of the failures of water privatization in the USA - waves of regret - hehe And make no mistake, cities need funding. The EPA has estimated there will be an enormous gap, perhaps as much as $500 billion or more, between what is expected to be spent on infrastructure maintenance and what must be spent over the next two decades.5 Policies promoted by the Bush administration are playing into the water companies’ hands. The administration has consistently tried to cut funding of existing federal water infrastructure programs.6 In four of the last five fiscal years, the administration has proposed cutting the budget for the Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund to pay for wastewater system upgrades from $1.35 billion annually to $850 million, while resisting calls to raise the Safe Drinking Water Revolving Loan Fund, which provides assistance for water system upgrades.7 Administration officials have even testified that the president is opposed to increasing federal funding for infrastructure. 8 Also, the administration has backed language in legislation to reauthorize existing federal water funding assistance programs that would require cities to consider water privatization before they could receive federal funding.9 And in lockstep with private industry’s goals, the EPA is increasingly playing down the role of federal financial assistance while actively encouraging communities to pay for system upgrades by raising rates to consumers10—exactly the strategy the industry hopes will drive cash-strapped and embattled local politicians to opt for the false promise of privatization. The companies have also curried favor with the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM), and particularly that organization’s water “task force,” the Urban Water Council. The Conference of Mayors has long enjoyed support of large water companies, and Veolia Water even sponsors a “Meet the Mayors” feature on the conference’s website, www.usmayors.org, which includes a link to Veolia Water—the only hyperlink to a corporation on the USCM homepage. Within the Urban Water Council, meanwhile, there is a Water Development Advisory Board to help the Council “pursue policy designed to advance the goals and objectives of the nation’s cities.” The advisory board is comprised exclusively of private companies. U.S. arms of the world’s largest global firms, American Water (RWE), United Water (Suez) and Veolia Water Operating Services, as well as U.S.-headquartered OMI, Inc. are “full members” of the advisory board, while financial, legal, engineering and other firms working within the water privatization support industry are “associate members.” http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=water main Water main break forces closure near Naval Station SD San Diego Union Tribune, United States - Aug 19, 2005 SAN DIEGO – A water main break on US Navy property forced the closure of some public streets today in the area of Naval Station San Diego, authorities said. ... Street repairs needed after main breaks Macon Telegraph Downtown water main breaks News 8 Austin, TX - Aug 19, 2005 A significant water main break at 12th and Nueces streets in Downtown Austin is affecting buildings in a 10-block radius. At one ... Downtown main break disrupts traffic, water service KVUE (subscription) all 3 related » Some may take financial bath in water main flood Pittsburgh Post Gazette, PA - Aug 19, 2005 So when a water main break on Fort Duquesne Boulevard forced an evacuation of her law firm's offices at Three Gateway Center Wednesday, she and her colleagues ... Owners line up to report soggy cars Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Workmen tackle burst water main BBC News, UK - Aug 18, 2005 Workmen are trying to establish the cause of a burst water main which led to the evacuation of about 100 people from their homes in Greater Manchester. ... Company's advice to leak victims BBC News all 2 related » Water pipes main concern of proposed TIF district Pioneer Press Online, IL - Aug 17, 2005 Replacement of a 75-year-old water main virtually being held together by patches that have been secured to it following breaks is one of the major planned ... Water Main Break At Morgan & Weinbach WFIE-TV, IN - Aug 15, 2005 UPDATE, MON, 10:50 AM: There were some delays for motorists Monday morning, after a water main break at Morgan and Weinbach. The ...

Subject: The Problem of Deficits From: Britney To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 14:01:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is a looming danger in deficits that are to grow faster than an economy can grow, however public recognition of the danger can be difficult. California had a deficit that was a problem before the current governor, and the deficit remains, but the last governor sought to deal with the deficit by allowing a tax increase and was recalled and replaced. We have a federal deficit that is a problem, but there is no administrative wish to be blamed for proposing a tax incrase to deal with the deficit. So, we go on.

Subject: With no responsibility, no fault From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:54:58 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: PAUL DE GRAUWE The eurozone's conundrum of power without responsibility The contrast between the macroeconomic management of the US and that of the eurozone during the past five years could not be greater. While the European Central Bank has remained cautious in manipulating the interest rate (it has not changed it for almost two years), the US Federal Reserve has exhibited an extreme form of activism. Similarly, the aggregate budget deficits in the eurozone have barely changed since 2001 when the recession set in, while the US government has moved from a surplus to a deficit exceeding 5 per cent of gross domestic product. Where does this difference come from? There is no doubt that part of the difference can be traced to the fact that the eurozone is a diverse group of countries with very different economic conditions. This makes it difficult for the eurozone authorities to come to a consensus about the conduct of monetary and fiscal policies, and to move quickly in the face of changing economic conditions. But this is only part of the explanation. Equally important is the power of ideas. As John Maynard Keynes observed: 'Practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.' The practical men in Frankfurt have become the slaves of a theory telling us that the sources of economic cycles are shocks in technology (productivity shocks) and changes in preferences. There is very little the central bank can do about these movements. If it tries too hard to 'fine-tune' the economy it will end up with more inflation. Thus, the best thing it can do is to stabilise the price level. This will not only minimise the effects of these shocks, it is also the best contribution a central bank can make to promote growth. All the rest is the responsibility of governments: if these want more growth let them introduce structural reforms. In this view, there is also no need for an active budgetary policy aiming at stabilising the economy. For the practical men in Brussels the best thing governments can do is to aim for balanced budgets. The practical men in Washington are influenced by a very different set of ideas. These are deeply rooted in Keynesian thinking. In this view, there are not only productivity shocks but also demand shocks. 'Animal spirits' - that is, waves of optimism and pessimism - capture consumers and investors. These waves have a strong element of self-fulfilling prophesy. When pessimism prevails, consumers and investors alike hold back their spending, thereby reducing output and income, and validating their pessimism. When optimism prevails, consumers and investors spend a lot, thereby increasing output and income, and validating their optimism. In the logic of these Keynesian ideas, the responsibility of a central bank extends beyond price stability. There are movements in demand that cannot be stabilised only by targeting the rate of inflation. In addition, in this view it is the responsibility of the government to counter the changes in the moods of consumers and investors by manipulating the budget, even allowing it to go into the red by a higher margin than the mythical 3 per cent that has so mesmerised European policymakers. The theory that so influences the European policymakers is now the dominant one, at least in the academic world. It has been given various names. Let us call it the new classical theory. It is intriguing that a theory developed by American economists is disregarded by the US authorities but is taken very seriously in Europe. It is equally puzzling that Keynesianism, which is utterly discredited in the academic world, has continued to guide the actions of the US authorities in the past 10 years, and even seems to be working. It is probably too early to tell which theory is the one to deliver growth and stability. Instead of trying to evaluate these theories, I want to focus on how the new classical theory has been used to legitimise the governance of the eurozone. Take monetary policies. Without asking permission, the ECB has absolved itself of any responsibility for unemployment. It has relegated this responsibility to the national governments, and it has done so using the wisdom of the new classical theory, which teaches the central bank not to listen to politicians and to focus on price stability. And from the perspective of the new classical theory there is no better governance structure than one that isolates the ECB from these politicians and locates it in an ivory euro tower. However, by relegating the responsibility for unemployment to the national governments, the ECB creates a political problem. If national politicians have to bear the sole responsibility for unemployment, indeed, if they are voted out of office because it increases, it is only natural that they will want to use all available instruments, including the monetary instrument, to right it. A similar problem exists with fiscal policies in the eurozone. When, in the name of a theory that glorifies balanced budgets, the European Commission starts a procedure aimed at forcing national governments to cut spending and or increase taxes, it bears no political responsibility for these decisions. The national governments do. When these follow up on the Commission's procedure, cut spending and raise taxes, they face being forced out of power at the next election. In contrast, the Commission at no time faces the prospect of being voted away. The legitimisation of the eurozone governance structure by the new classical theory only masks the weakness of this governance. Its weakness has everything to do with the fact that the power to manage the eurozone economies has been given to European institutions that bear no political responsibility for their actions, while the national governments, which have lost their macroeconomic instruments, are made accountable before their electorates for the failures of macroeconomic management at the European level. This poor governance will turn out to be unsustainable. There is only one way out of the conundrum (at least for those of us who wish to preserve the monetary union). It is to create institutions at the European level - a European government with political responsibility and a parliament with legislative powers - that are capable of conducting macroeconomic policies and that will bear the political responsibility for their actions, and for the actions of the independent central bank. All this requires a strong political union. It has to be admitted that the mood in Europe today does not seem to favour such a solution. The writer is professor of international economics at the University of Leuven FT Wednesday August 17 2005

Subject: Why Am I Not Surprised or Impressed? From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:25:43 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/20/business/20values.html This Bear Is Running (To the Bank) By CONRAD de AENLLE THE stock market is supposed to climb a wall of worry, and there is no shortage of unsettling developments today to nip irrational exuberance in the bud. The Federal Reserve is raising interest rates every chance it gets, job growth seems either too fast or too slow, the growth of the current-account deficit is just too fast, and don't forget $66 oil. David W. Tice is one fund manager who is not worrying. He is confident about the direction of the market, even though he has far less to show for the 50 percent-plus gains in the Nasdaq and Standard & Poor's 500-stock index since the fall of 2002 than almost all of his peers. It's not that Mr. Tice thinks the fretters are agitated over nothing. It's that the direction he is confident that stocks will take is down. Mr. Tice runs the Prudent Bear fund, which seeks to benefit from declining share prices. There have been precious few of those for him to latch onto lately, but there is no need to pity him or his shareholders, especially after taking account of the fund's returns stretching further back than the recent period of outsize gains in equities. Prudent Bear is the best performer over five years among 23 bear-market funds tracked by Morningstar. The fund recorded an annualized gain of 12.31 percent, compared with a return of 0.76 percent for the average bear fund. The average domestic equity fund in Morningstar's database, the ordinary kind that seeks to profit from rising prices, shows virtually no five-year gain or loss. Mr. Tice says that we are headed for a period that will treat investors more like the miserable years of 2001 and 2002 than the more pleasant time since then. 'I'm as bearish as ever,' he said. 'I'm all beared up.' Mr. Tice views stocks as being 'in a topping process within a correction in a secular bear market,' the next phase of which will be propelled by several factors, in his opinion, but especially one. 'We're in a credit bubble that is going to cripple the economy,' he warned. That bubble has been driving up prices of assets like stocks and real estate, while interest rates and prices of goods and services have remained stable, creating what he sees as a false sense of economic well-being. We have been here before, he noted. 'It's not that difficult a concept, but it's crucial,' Mr. Tice said. 'Look at what happened in the United States in the 20's and Japan in the late 80's. There were asset bubbles with low interest rates that ended up in very bad economic periods for more than 10 years.' Investors are not prepared for such lean times, he said, questioning just how limited their enthusiasm really is. He suggested that there is palpable euphoria, much as in the late 1990's, only this time it is being churned up by the real estate market instead of Internet stocks. Mr. Tice is preparing for hard times by selling short financial issues - Fannie Mae, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation and J. P. Morgan Chase are three he especially disdains - as well as faded blue chips like General Motors and Eastman Kodak. He says he expects to add homebuilders to his list of shorts but is waiting for the right moment. Two sectors that he has no immediate intention of selling are technology and energy, and he is long precious metals stocks, which often rise when the broad market falls. Unlike the typical bear fund, which picks a stock index, then uses derivatives like futures and options contracts to achieve a return opposite that of the index, Prudent Bear is actively managed. So when the Internet bubble popped, he shorted dot-coms with both hands and let alone stable sectors that experienced a flight to quality. He was also able to lighten up on his short positions after the market bottomed out and started to recover. He likes to stress that he is not a permanent committed bear, no matter what the fund is called, and that even he will get excited about owning stocks one day. But not until imbalances in the economy are corrected and share prices have moved a lot lower. 'Eventually I can see myself turning bullish,' Mr. Tice said, 'but it's going to be a long time from now.'

Subject: Pete is Smarter than Tice From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:34:04 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Look Shiller just wrote an article today that he bought a house in 2002 and thinks the housing bubble has a few more years to go - strike one for tice on his wrong timing. Also homes don't go to nothing like several internet firms and thier stocks did - there is always some value to the land and house no? Ergo they will not fall like BRCM eh? http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=BRCM&t=5y Strike 2 for tice. Jim Rogers who is short Fannie - says Fannie mae has special rules referring to their accounting books not being open for another year - so Tice forgets those guys are not playing by regular market rules but command and control style central magic! Strike 3 and you are OUTTA HERE tice. So Pete my hero - he says Johnny5, timing the bust is a fools play - no more tice for him - diversify - invest in ways that expect the dollar losing its purchasing power - people getting poorer - and just hold on - I guess ole Pete still in Permanent Portfolio and Energy. Johnny5 bought a little VDC cause he figures peter lynch was right and people gonna buy thier smokes and staples no matter the price - the will let go of that Escalade and big house and walk every and sweat with no air conditioning before they gonna stop smoking and drinking. Now after this MERCK stuff play out, johnny5 gonna take Terri's advice and get him some vangaurd healthcare - VHT - cause we all know going forward that gonna be the real burden on our system.

Subject: Re: Why Am I Not Surprised or Impressed? From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:42:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: To be fair, David Tice is as good a bear fund manager as I know of. But, long term investing as a bear is more than just difficult.

Subject: Cheap Rivals Chip Away at a Cornerstone From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:09:48 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/international/europe/19paris.html Cheap Rivals Chip Away at a Cornerstone, the Arab Store By JOHN TAGLIABUE PARIS - For decades 'the Arab on the corner' has been synonymous here with homely down-market grocery stores jammed with fruits and vegetables, wines and liquors, dairy goods and a smattering of candy bars, floral bouquets, canned goods and preserves - the stuff of late-night shopping sprees when other stores are shuttered. The more enduring of these stores have been here for generations, handed to sons by fathers who emigrated, usually from North Africa, in search of French opportunities. But now, for many, the worm is in the apple. The bombings in London and Egypt are naturally the city's summer talk, and they have caused discomfort for many of these merchants, in a country that has its share of ethnic tensions, but where they have tried to create a role for themselves. 'It's not good,' said Abdelaziz Tiouajni on a recent day, as he set apples straight in his store in the northern Ninth Arrondissement. 'So many deaths.' But Arab grocers like Mr. Tiouajni face a more immediate, mundane threat. Increasingly, franchised convenience stores are invading their neighborhoods, faceless dealerships lacking physiognomy that stay open seven days a week and boast, thanks to their central buying power, prices well below those of their fragmented competitors. 'Competition is very severe; my competitors buy as a group,' said Mr. Tiouajni, 25, who followed his father, Salim, to Paris from the Tunisian island of Djerba two decades ago. His father opened the store - barely 1,300 square feet of fruits and vegetables gradually giving way to shelves of oil and flour, cereal and wine and liquor - and Mr. Tiouajni inherited it five years ago, after his father, now 45, opened a fruit store in the southern suburb of Palaiseau. 'Most stores like these are run by Tunisians and Moroccans,' he said, making them to Paris much of what the Koreans grocers are to Manhattan. His most profitable goods are the fruit, he said, because of the larger markups. The Arab on the corner has always had his poets, defenders and exalters. Several years ago, the French author Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt published a novel, 'Monsieur Ibrahim and the Flowers of the Koran,' a kind of fairy tale of religious harmony in which an elderly Arab grocer befriends a Jewish boy, Moise, nicknamed Momo. When the Arab dies, Momo inherits the store and becomes Mohammed. 'Arab, in the grocery business,' he muses in the story's closing line, 'means staying open nights and Sundays.' Asked if he had a particular Arab grocer in mind, Mr. Schmitt, now 45, replied: 'Yes, when I wrote the story I was living in the Jewish neighborhood around the Rue Bleue - there was an Arab - open from 8 in the morning until midnight. I was fascinated, I realized that many Jews felt much closer to the Arab - someone from the Mediterranean basin - than to other Jews, say the Ashkenazim,' the central and northern European Jews. And who was Momo? He paused, then asked, 'Me?' Mr. Schmitt said he realized that Parisians were drawn to these corner stores because they had 'another rhythm - no music - tastes and fragrances of fruits , spices, almonds and pistachio.' But it was also because their owners seemed tireless. 'An agreeable and pacifying place,' he said. The fantasy, fable and warmth surrounding these stores may explain in part the attachment of Mr. Tiouajni's customers, despite the higher prices. If his figs are going for 4.90 euros a kilo, the chain store's price is 4.30; his Provençal melons may go for 3.90, against 1.50 at the competition. 'Our clientele is very loyal,' he said, searching for reasons for the store's continued success. What did he think of the bombing? 'That's politics,' he replied. 'That's not my thing.' The bombings in London and Egypt are no issue for Maria Pinto, 58, a concierge in a neighborhood apartment building. 'If you want good quality, it's here,' she said. 'I buy fruit, vegetables - it's expensive, but it's fresh, clean - that's very important.' Terrorism may cast no shadow, but the menace from the Franprix at the other end of the street is very real. Last year, Franprix, a chain convenience store-cum-grocery that is part of the even bigger Casino foodstuffs group, opened another store, even more gleaming than the first, just down the street. 'Franprix is a wholesaler, our exclusive supplier, so our prices are lower on average, maybe 30 percent,' said Joachim Amouri, the 36-year-old store manager, explaining the competitive advantage. Fruits and vegetables are delivered to the store daily, and packaged goods and frozen foods twice a week, he said. Would Franprix gradually swallow up the Arabs on the corner and turn them into so many Franprixs? No, he replied, because those stores, many little more than deep kiosks, are too small. So would they be forced out of business? He paused, then replied, 'That's part of the rules of the game.' Mr. Tiouajni acknowledges that business is not as good as it used to be, not only from the chain store competition, but also from an overall slumping French economy that discourages spending. Still, he would never consider buying a franchise himself. Indeed , if he had to begin all over again, he would do as his father did, selling only fruit. 'It's more profitable,' he said.

Subject: LIve Baby Live From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 08:57:00 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: China’s baby step By Kenneth Rogoff Whatever the ultimate economic effects of China’s first modest step towards floating its currency, one has to admire its strategic brilliance. The genius of China’s mini-move (allowing the Yuan to rise 2% against the dollar) is that no one can tell when or what is going to happen next. Protectionists in the United States and Europe, itching to slap huge punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, have been caught flat-footed. They want to keep bathing in press coverage, but if they push their China-bashing too far and too fast, the protectionists will be seen as hindering delicate behind-the-scenes negotiations. But no one knows whether China’s baby step is the start of something much bigger, as China’s authorities hint one day and deny the next. By relenting just a little to intense global pressure to revalue its exchange rate, the Chinese leadership has masterfully stifled the growing chorus of demands to rein in its growing trade surplus. The key question, however, remains whether China is defying market forces at its own risk. On the surface, at least, the mini-revaluation hardly seems to have compromised China’s ability to bend exchange markets to its will. Foreign experts had warned that a small Yuan appreciation might be worse than none. While hardly denting global trade imbalances, a small move would bring in a flood of foreign capital, overwhelming China’s currency defenses and leading to chaos. So far, that has not happened and, China once again seems to have gone its own way and proved the experts wrong. But hold the applause. Perhaps the speculative-inflow scenario will play out, but in slow motion. After all, China is not a country where investors can just take their money in a heartbeat. It can hold the fort because it maintains one of the world’s strictest regimes of exchange and capital controls. Unlike many Latin American and former Soviet-bloc countries, where similar controls are honored mainly in the breach, violating capital controls in China is virtually a capital offense. But, over the past fifty years, when many other countries, including France and Italy, implemented draconian controls, the result was always the same: eventually, the private sector adapted and eroded the controls’ effectiveness. Whether by misreporting imports and exports or exploiting corrupt government officials (which China has in ample supply), private capital eventually starts finding its way around the controls if the incentives are strong enough. Thus, even if the Chinese authorities can somehow keep their capital controls from hemorrhaging as the country’s financial system becomes more sophisticated and decentralized, they will not be able to stop the controls from dying a death of a thousand cuts. After that, China will be able to keep its exchange rate pegged only by slavishly following US interest-rate policy, which makes no sense for such a large and diverse region. Indeed, over the longer term, the biggest concern for China is that some day money will be trying to get out. Even China’s vast reserves will not be enough to stave off a painful devaluation. It is a lot easier to exit from a fixed exchange rate regime when the pressures on the currency are upwards. While it may seem hard to imagine that the speculative tide might ever turn against China, exchange-rate pressures can turn in an instant. Today’s darling currency can be tomorrow’s dog. Considering China’s huge and growing income inequalities, and its massive disguised rural unemployment, it is easy to imagine a period of political instability that sends investors heading for the exits. Mix in China’s shaky financial system and the prospect of trade sanctions after an altercation over, say, Taiwan, and it is clear that the Yuan might not always be a one-way bet. Last but not least, the Chinese authorities desperately need to maintain the country’s breakneck economic growth in order to preserve the Communist Party’s legitimacy. But, as the economy becomes richer and more complex, there will be no escaping the market imperative in internal credit allocation. Every other emerging market, even in Asia, has eventually had to cross this bridge. Indeed, the need to pursue financial liberalization to maintain growth is a central reason why middle-income countries are so prone to financial crises. That’s why Chinese authorities should move to greater flexibility now, and not wait until it is too late. So should we expect to see much bigger currency moves in China anytime soon? Should we ever expect to see wild gyrations in China’s exchange rate of the sort one routinely sees in, say, the Australian dollar or the South African rand? Neither scenario is very likely. Only fire-breathing free-market advocates, seemingly oblivious to the fact that China’s shaky financial system cannot survive liberalization overnight, are calling for an extreme version of floating. But there may well be a lot more to come over the next 12-18 months. The first round of Yuan revaluation won’t be over until the currency is up against the dollar by at least 10%, and probably more. China’s first currency move was brilliant only if it is not the last. Kenneth Rogoff, a former chief economist of the IMF, is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_6-8-2005_pg5_13

Subject: Re: LIve Baby Live From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:04:59 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Another terrific post. This is the best analysis of China's currency move yet, since China has flexibility now but there really is no telling where the Yuan will be in 3, 6, 9 or 12 months. If anything this is a fine reason to increase foreign investment that is designed for production for the Chinese market.

Subject: Giving African Art What It Is Due From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 08:31:45 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/arts/design/19cott.html Giving African Art an Example of What It Is Due By HOLLAND COTTER A century from now, art historians will shake their heads in disbelief at what universities were teaching circa 2005. How, they will wonder, could scholars have been so obtuse? Entire courses devoted to that froth called French Impressionism; whole seminars to a prolific pasticheur named Pablo Picasso, whose chief innovation lay in mining African art for modernist gold. As for the study of African art itself, it was relegated to the margins of the discipline. In age, variety and beauty, art from Africa is second to none. Africa had traditions of abstract art, performance art, installation art and conceptual art centuries before the West ever dreamed up the names. African art stayed vital and culture-altering as the West's avant-garde episode withered away. So why is African art given such scant attention circa 2005? Why are precious opportunities to study and document it lost for lack of money, personnel and encouragement? Future historians probably will not have clear answers - cultural blindness is hard to explain. Charitably, they will assume that universities did what they could with the limited vision they had. But some universities have a broad vision. The City University of New York is one. Its Queensborough Community College has quietly assembled an impressive collection of African art. A year ago, the college inaugurated a permanent display of the collection in its campus gallery. This summer the gallery is presenting nearly 100 privately owned sculptures in an exhibition titled 'Artists and Patrons in Traditional African Cultures: African Sculpture From the Gary Schulze Collection.' Mr. Schulze's interest in African art began when he was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone in the early 1960's, and much of the work in the show comes from there and a few other West Africa countries. Yet because African culture is a fluid, manifold, cross-pollinating phenomenon, the stylistic range of the objects on view is broad and the chronological span wide, from the second millennium B.C. almost to the present. Giving shape to such diversity isn't easy. The curator, Donna Page, an adjunct instructor in the department of art and photography at Queensborough, tackles the job by adopting patronage as a theme and sorting out 60 objects under categories of royal patronage, religious patronage and what might be called civic patronage. In reality, distinctions are not so neat, but the scheme works here, giving the show and Mr. Schulze's collection a graspable logic. The collection, despite unevenness, has pieces of exceptional interest, even in the context of a city with major institutional holdings of African material at the Metropolitan and Brooklyn Museums. The show begins with one such work, an exquisite wooden figure of a woman carved in the mid-19th century by a Temne artist in Sierra Leone. With her crested coiffure, long neck carved in coils, and abdomen lightly marked with beautifying scars, she is a study in orderly patterning. Her lithe figure and clear face adhere to a feminine ideal of both form and character. The way she touches her breasts, as if in a gesture of offering, speaks of a generosity of spirit that is the truest meaning of fertility. Ms. Page notes in the slender exhibition catalog that this sculpture and a similar one in the British Museum are among nearly a dozen thought to have been carved by the same artist, his or her name unrecorded. The sweeping assumption that anonymity is a condition natural to African art is wrong. The names of important artists were, in fact, well known in their day, except to colonial collectors who either didn't understand local languages, or who, as they carried off a sculpture, simply didn't ask, 'By the way, who made this?' The fact that Mr. Schulze, when in Africa, not only asked the question but spoke with the artist himself gives one of the show's several beautiful, gleaming Sande Society masks a sense of personal magnetism. The piece was carved by Kondeh Bundu, a Mende artist in Sierra Leone, whom the collector photographed and interviewed. The interview, recorded in 1962 and included in the catalog, suggests that this 'unanonymous' artist well knew his own worth and his fame. When Mr. Schulze handed him an ancient stone carving from the collection of the Sierra Leone national museum for an inspection, the artist accepted the piece as a gift. 'Tell the government that your friend, Kondeh, the carver, wanted it. Tell the prime minister that Kondeh Bundu of Waiama wants to keep it.' In fact, Mr. Schulze himself collected a good amount of similar archaeological material, and Ms. Page has installed a sampling on the gallery's second floor. The oldest pieces are sleek terracotta heads and figures first dug up by tin miners working near the town of Nok in Nigeria in the 1920's. Dated between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500, they put to rest any lingering myth that African art is without a deep history. Then there are the small, expressive, large-eyed stone figures that farmers in Sierra Leone came across when clearing fields. Tentatively dated from the 15th to 17th centuries, they are attributed to a group of related peoples referred to collectively as the Sape Confederation. The confederation is thought to have extended over parts of present-day Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, a reminder that African national boundaries as they exist now were largely created by Europeans to divide up their spoils. In the end, the most reliable, organic indicators of African cultural realities, which often represent its political realities, are to be found in its boundary-crossing art. This fact automatically lifts the study of African art history from the status of academic luxury item - a cosmetic extra tacked on to keep those multiculturalists quiet - to intellectual and existential necessity. Without it, the label 'Department of Art History' is a sham. This necessity makes both the Queensborough show and its fine and growing permanent African display - organized by the gallery's curator, Leonard Kahan, and its director, Faustino Quintanilla - important events as well as aesthetic pleasures. That permanent display will be in place for years to come. With luck, other university galleries around the country will emulate it, and their numbers will grow, just as the global influence of Africa itself continues to increase. Maybe, after all, art historians in 2105 will be shaking their heads in admiration at what our century accomplished. One thing is certain: many of those scholars of the future will be African.

Subject: Brazil Seeks to Cut Cost of AIDS Drug From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 07:12:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/business/19abbott.html Brazil Again Seeks to Cut Cost of AIDS Drug By PAULO PRADA BRASÍLIA - After an impasse last month, Brazil's health ministry said Thursday that it was once more pressing Abbott Laboratories to lower the price of Kaletra, an important AIDS medicine, or risk having Brazilian manufacturers break the drug's patent and produce it at a lower cost. A ministry spokesman, Esténio Brasileino, said Thursday that the government sent a letter to Abbott last week after several Brazilian laboratories notified the ministry that they could manufacture and sell a generic version of the drug, now purchased from Abbott at $1.17 a pill, for 41 cents a pill. After negotiations with Abbott in July, Brazil's departing health minister, Humberto Costa, said the government had reached an agreement with Abbott under which the drug maker would lower the price of Kaletra by an undisclosed amount. Without discussing terms, the government said the lower price would save it $259 million over six years. Kaletra, a widely used antiretroviral, is one of several medicines that make up the so-called cocktail used to treat patients with H.I.V. Less than a week later, however, José Saraiva Felipe, Mr. Costa's successor, dismissed the agreement and said Brazil would press for further reductions. Abbott, which is based in Abbott Park, Ill., said it last met with the Brazilian government about a week ago and was continuing to negotiate a possible price change. 'We had what we thought was a very good agreement,' said Brian Kyhos, a spokesman at Abbott headquarters. In light of the new demands, he added, 'We will continue to seek a price level that Brazil can agree to and honor.' The Brazilian demands reflect efforts by the government to reduce the ballooning costs of the country's ambitious AIDS program, which provides free medicines and treatment to those infected. The cost of Kaletra makes up nearly a third of the more than $300 million the country spends a year on medicines for the program. At present, some 170,000 people in Brazil, Latin America's most populous country, are believed to be infected with H.I.V., according to government figures. The growing numbers, the government argues, would allow it to declare a national health emergency - a move that under World Trade Organization rules would allow Brazil to break the patents on medicines and pay a 3 percent royalty to manufacturers for the rights to produce copycat versions. The standoff with Abbott is the latest of several battles waged by the Brazilian government to reduce the cost of medicines in developing countries.

Subject: Crocodile Blood - Aids Proof From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Sun, Aug 21, 2005 at 07:43:56 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Jurassic Park time Emma and Terri? Where can I buy some Frankenstien science ETF's? http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4155522.stm Crocodile blood antibiotics hope Even horrific fighting wounds on the animal heal quickly Scientists are catching crocodiles and sampling their blood in the hope of finding powerful new drugs to fight human infections. Australian Adam Britton and US expert Mark Merchant spent the last fortnight combing the Northern Territory for salt and freshwater crocs. It has been known for some time that these animals heal serious injuries rapidly and almost without infection. More recently, tests showed alligator blood has strong antibacterial powers. Natural fighters Dr Merchant said there was a wealth of anecdotal evidence suggesting that alligators and crocodiles are resistant to bacterial infection. 'These animals are very territorial and when they fight it gets very ugly. 'They tear limbs off one another and leave huge gaping wounds. We caught nine large, wild saltwater crocodiles and bled some 15 or 20 captive fresh and saltwater crocodiles Dr Merchant 'And, despite the fact that they live in an environment that harbour potentially a lot of pathogenic microbes, these horrible wounds seem to heal up very rapidly and almost always without infection.' About three and a half years ago he tested alligator blood and pinpointed why these animals were so resistant to infection. Alligators and crocodiles, like humans, have a natural defence system against invading bacteria, viruses and fungi, which involves a group of proteins called the complement system. When Dr Merchant exposed the alligator blood to pathogens such as HIV, West Nile Virus and E Coli, it started to kill them. 'It turns out that this complement system is much more effective than ours. Healing power 'But there is really no clinical utility because I can't isolate them from alligators and inject them into your veins because your body would recognise that it was not human.' Instead, he hopes to be able find something in the crocodile and alligator blood that can be mimicked in a drug, and has begun to look at white blood cells - the cells that flock to fight invading pathogens. White blood cells make and release tiny proteins to fight the infection and Dr Merchant believes that, if he can isolate these from the animals, it might point a way to making new antibiotics and antiviral drugs for humans. 'We caught nine large, wild saltwater crocodiles and bled some 15 or 20 captive fresh and saltwater crocodiles. 'I have isolated the white blood cells and cracked them open to look at the proteins.' He is now waiting for the samples to be shipped back to his lab at McNeese State University in Louisiana in the US so he can carry out further tests over the coming months. The next step would then be to make similar proteins and see if they could kill bacteria, fungi and viruses that are a problem in humans, such as HIV and Staphylococcus aureus - the bacterium that has become resistant to antibiotics and has been causing so-called MRSA superbug outbreaks in hospitals around the world.

Subject: The power 'TRIP' From: Pancho Villa To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 19:32:45 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: The wrongs in intellectual property rights By Joseph E. Stiglitz Last October, the General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Org-anization (WIPO) decided to consider what a development-oriented intellectual property regime might look like. The move was little noticed, but, in some ways, it was as important as the World Trade Organization’s decision that the current round of trade negotiations be devoted to development. Both decisions acknowledge that the current rules of the international economic game reflect the interests of the advanced industrial countries – especially of their big corporations – more than the interests of the developing world. Without intellectual property protection, incentives to engage in certain types of creative endeavors would be weakened. But there are high costs associated with intellectual property. Ideas are the most important input into research, and if intellectual property slows down the ability to use others’ ideas, then scientific and technological progress will suffer. In fact, many of the most important ideas – for example, the mathematics that underlies the modern computer or the theories behind atomic energy or lasers – are not protected by intellectual property. Academics spend considerable energy freely disseminating their research findings. I am pleased when someone uses my ideas on asymmetric information – though I do appreciate them giving me some credit. The growth of the “open source” movement on the Internet shows that not just the most basic ideas, but even products of enormous immediate commercial value can be produced without intellectual property protection. By contrast, an intellectual property regime rewards innovators by creating a temporary monopoly power, allowing them to charge far higher prices than they could if there were competition. In the process, ideas are disseminated and used less than they would be otherwise. The economic rationale for intellectual property is that faster innovation offsets the enormous costs of such inefficiencies. But it has become increasingly clear that excessively strong or badly formulated intellectual property rights may actually impede innovation – and not just by increasing the price of research. Monopolists may have much less incentive to innovate than they would if they had to compete. Modern research has shown that the great economist Joseph Schumpeter was wrong in thinking that competition in innovation leads to a succession of firms. In fact, a monopolist, once established, may be hard to dislodge, as Microsoft has so amply demonstrated. Indeed, once established, a monopoly can use its market power to squelch competitors, as Microsoft so amply demonstrated in the case of the Netscape Web browser. Such abuses of market power discourage innovation. Moreover, so-called “patent thickets” – the fear that some advance will tread on pre-existing patents, of which the innovator may not even be aware – may also discourage innovation. After the pioneering work of the Wright brothers and the Curtis brothers, overlapping patent claims thwarted the development of the airplane, until the United States government finally forced a patent pool as World War I loomed. Today, many in the computer industry worry that such a patent thicket may impede software development. The creation of any product requires many ideas, and sorting out their relative contribution to the outcome – let alone which ones are really new – can be nearly impossible. Consider a drug based on traditional knowledge, say, of an herb well known for its medicinal properties. How important is the contribution of the American firm that isolates the active ingredient? Pharmaceutical companies argue that they should be entitled to a full patent, paying nothing to the developing country from which the traditional knowledge was taken, even though the country preserves the biodiversity without which the drug would never have come to market. Not surprisingly, developing countries see things differently. Society has always recognized that other values may trump intellectual property. The need to prevent excessive monopoly power has led anti-trust authorities to require compulsory licensing (as the US government did with the telephone company AT&T). When America faced an anthrax threat in the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officials issued a compulsory license for Cipro, the best-known antidote. Unfortunately, the trade negotiators who framed the intellectual-property agreement of the Uruguay trade round of the early 1990’s (TRIP’s) were either unaware of all of this, or more likely, uninterested. I served on the Clinton administration’s Council of Economic Advisors at the time, and it was clear that there was more interest in pleasing the pharmaceutical and entertainment industries than in ensuring an intellectual-property regime that was good for science, let alone for developing countries. I suspect that most of those who signed the agreement did not fully understand what they were doing. If they had, would they have willingly condemned thousands of AIDS sufferers to death because they might no longer be able to get affordable generic drugs? Had the question been posed in this way to parliaments around the world, I believe that TRIP’s would have been soundly rejected. Intellectual property is important, but the appropriate intellectual-property regime for a developing country is different from that for an advanced industrial country. The TRIP’s scheme failed to recognize this. In fact, intellectual property should never have been included in a trade agreement in the first place, at least partly because its regulation is demonstrably beyond the competency of trade negotiators. Besides, an international organization already exists to protect intellectual property. Hopefully, in WIPO’s reconsideration of intellectual property regimes, the voices of the developing world will be heard more clearly than it was in the WTO negotiations; hopefully, WIPO will succeed in outlining what a pro-developing intellectual property regime implies; and hopefully, WTO will listen: the aim of trade liberalization is to boost development, not hinder it. dt - ps (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. His most recent book is The Roaring Nineties: A New History of the World’s Most Prosperous Decade.) http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2005/08/17/2003268101

Subject: Re: The power 'TRIP' From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 11:08:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is an important issue, but Joseph Stiglitz has to start narrowing the scope of his essays and using specific cases. This is not the best writing on intellectual property, and we need better.

Subject: Re: The power 'TRIP' From: Emma To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 07:04:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Pancho, this is an exceptionally important problem. Thank you and please contribute more on the issue of intellectual property rights for there is the prime wealth source in developed and developing countries in this century.

Subject: 10 yr Manipulation?? From: Johnny5 To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 15:07:05 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/19/markets/pimco_complaint/ Investor charges Pimco with manipulation A Chicago investor claims bond behemoth Pimco artificially drove up the price of futures contracts. August 19, 2005: 2:24 PM EDT by Amanda Cantrell, CNN/Money staff writer NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - An investor has sued money manager Pacific Investment Management Company, claiming the firm manipulated the price of June 10-year Treasury futures contracts on the Chicago Board of Trade, according to suit filed in a federal court. The investor, Raymond Chiu, alleges Pimco intentionally created artificially high prices in the futures market by accumulating about $10 billion worth of Treasury futures contracts due in June, as well as 'billions of dollars' worth of the Treasury notes that would be required to fulfill these contracts. Pimco is based in Newport Beach, Calif. Legendary bond guru Bill Gross is the firm's chief investment officer. The suit filed in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Illinois in Chicago, which claims Pimco violated the Commodity Exchange Act, is seeking class-action status. Chiu is accusing Pimco of creating a manipulative 'short squeeze,' which causes short-sellers to pay inflated prices to cover their positions because the entity that owns large amounts of a given security withholds the securities from the market. Buying futures contracts and hoarding the bonds available to fulfill them violates Commodity Futures Trading Commission regulations. Futures contracts are promises to deliver bonds at a future date and are used by businesses as a hedge against unfavorable price changes and by speculators hoping to profit from those changes. The shortage of 10-year Treasury notes led to the millions of dollars of investment losses in June, as short sellers scrambling to cover their positions had to buy back the bonds at high prices to fulfill their obligations. Chiu's complaint charges that, during the period in question, there were only about $10 billion to $13 billion of the 'cheapest to deliver' 10-year Treasury notes available to satisfy the June futures contract, while the value of these outstanding contracts was as high as $170 billion. The complaint alleges that this 'artificial scarcity' of bonds caused the price of the futures contracts to increase, generating a profit for Pimco. But Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chicago-based hedge fund Citadel investments played a key role in the shortage by accumulating 'as much as $8 billion of a single issue of 10-year Treasury notes sometime in late May -- more than half the amount readily available in the market.' That weakens the theory that one investor created the shortage. A spokesperson for the firm said that as a policy, Citadel does not confirm or give details on trades. In response to what happened in June, the Chicago Board of Trade has instituted a new rule that limits how many bonds any one futures holder can demand to be delivered, to take effect with the December 2005 contracts. But the market is rife with speculation that September could present another squeeze. Calls to Pimco and to Chiu's attorneys were not returned by press time.

Subject: Paul K at cooper union on 8/19/05? From: tf To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 14:28:23 (EDT) Email Address: tfoster@goldinllc.com Message: heard just now on leonard lopate that PK was going to be at cooper u this eve at 630? do i have time right? can someone confirm. (no help from cpr u or wnyc) thx

Subject: Re: Paul K at cooper union on 8/19/05? From: john haskell To: tf Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 15:47:39 (EDT) Email Address: johnhhaskell@yahoo.com Message: heard just now on leonard lopate that PK was going to be at cooper u this eve at 630? do i have time right? can someone confirm. (no help from cpr u or wnyc) thx --- this is outrageous. Go to WNYC and download the MP3, Lopate says, 'he will be speaking at k-k-k Great Hall on 77th Street at 6:30.' Message to Mr. Lopate: please speak clearly, or if you don't want to speak clearly, at least put the guest's appearance info on the website!

Subject: Re: Paul K at cooper union on 8/19/05? From: john haskell To: john haskell Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 15:57:04 (EDT) Email Address: johnhhaskell@yahoo.com Message: after listening to Lopate about ten times it seems that he's not saying 'k-k-oreans grand hall' but 'Cooper Union's Grand Hall,' obscured by some technical fault. And if that's correct he didn't really say 'Seventy Seventh street,' but 'Seven--Seventh Street.' So it must be correct.

Subject: Re: Paul K at cooper union on 8/19/05? From: tf To: john haskell Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 16:25:13 (EDT) Email Address: tfoster@goldinllc.com Message: whoa. thanks. i only heard it once and was at work and chewing while listening. also heard 77th but realized it must have been '7 east 7th' ... thanks again.

Subject: Understanding the housing bubble From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 10:07:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: OK, I need some help here. How come the demand for homes has seen a net increase? Can someone explain the mechanism? Are people that were once renting now buying? Because it can't be coming from people just re-mortgaging, right? The net increase must be coming from people who were not homeowners before. But would a 2% change in i-rates suddenly change someones decision to either own or rent? Maybe its coming from rich people deciding to buy a second home with all the money they got from the tax breaks. Any ideas????

Subject: Re: Understanding the housing bubble From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 11:46:02 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There are always a fair number of people who do not own homes, whether affluent or low income, older or younger. When home owning becomes more attractive because mortgage cost decline and mortgages become less expensive, there is increased demand. When people find home prices increasing about them, they are even more likely to buy. Low interest rates brong low mortgage rates and demand increases and prices rise and demand increases again. Homeownership has increased in America and other countries in which there have been housing booms. Germany needs a housing boom, but Germany cannot seem to understand how to make owning a home more affordable and attractive.

Subject: Feeding More for Less in Niger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 09:31:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/opinion/19murphy.html Feeding More for Less in Niger By SOPHIA MURPHY THE famine unfolding today in Niger has too many familiar characteristics. One of the poorest countries in the world is in a deadly crisis - one foreseen and ignored until the cost of intervention had jumped from $1 per child to $80, according to the United Nations. Many people have died and more will die in the coming weeks and months because rich countries failed to respond in time. United Nations agencies first appealed for money and food in November, but governments have only started to respond seriously in the last few weeks. It does not have to be this way. Swift and smart reforms to outdated American food-aid programs can move us toward preventing such crises rather than cleaning up after them. In a study I did this year with Kathleen McAfee, a geographer at the University of California, Berkeley, we concluded that the United States' food-aid system has two main problems - ones that other major donor countries have already taken steps to solve. First, almost all the aid is in the form of food produced in the United States. The government buys food from American commodity traders. The food is fortified, bagged and shipped by American firms. This approach usually results in costs well over market rate for food, handling and transport. The emphasis on using American commodities and firms is grossly inefficient and means that food is slow to arrive where it is needed. It also prevents the establishment of local food systems. Most other major donors, particularly those in the European Union, give money instead of food. This frees agencies like the United Nations World Food Program to buy food from farmers near the affected country - farmers who are often very poor - and to send the food quickly where it is most needed. To its credit, the Bush administration proposed designating an additional $300 million for food to be bought from local or regional sources this year, but Congress rejected the proposal. The second major problem is that the United States sells some of its food aid. It is the only country other than South Korea to sell food aid (albeit for less than commercial prices) or give it to intermediaries that then sell it. Private American aid organizations receive American food aid and sometimes sell the food at local markets to raise money for their other aid programs in the country. Governments of recipient countries also sell food aid at local markets to raise money. The result is a subsidized sale that creates unfair competition for local farmers and commercial traders. The current system ensures that the United States' food aid falls far short of its potential. While our food aid saves lives, it could save many more. And most important, the system fails to strengthen food production and systems of food distribution in vulnerable countries. If we want our contributions to tackle the root causes of hunger, then the United States government needs to make immediate changes to the food-aid system. It should transition to cash-based aid and phase out sales of food aid. The United States also needs to work with other donors and local governments to establish regional reserves in the most vulnerable parts of the world so that local authorities and private agencies can respond to crises quickly. The government should make multi-year guaranteed donations to the World Food Program so that the agency has the financial reserves to allow it plan its responses to emerging crises. The United States should also simplify its food aid system, which consists of six different programs administered by two agencies. The best food aid is flexible, timely, responsive and provides a buffer for tragic food shortfalls caused by devastation from disease, war or nature, while strengthening the systems of food production and distribution in the countries and regions it is trying to help. Food-aid donations from the United States to Niger, recently doubled with a pledge to reach $13 million in 2005, could save many more lives if we change the way we spend the money. We should work not only to prevent every death we can in Niger today, but also to ensure that the children and grandchildren of those affected by this crisis can look back on it as an exception rather than a norm.

Subject: Re: Feeding More for Less in Niger From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 12:58:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Sophoia Murphy is a very well respected official in aid programs. I agree with her in that there are many more efficient methods of funding aid and in particular I had the same argument about using expensive American companies to prepare the aid, where you can get far more value for money using companies from other parts of the world. But I have to disagree with her on the following points: The statement... 'Most other major donors, particularly those in the European Union, give money instead of food. This frees agencies like the United Nations World Food Program to buy food from farmers near the affected country - farmers who are often very poor - and to send the food quickly where it is most needed.' Well when the UN did this in Mozambique some years back, they caused major havoc in the local market. The only farmers that could sell the vast amounts needed were the richer local commercial farmers. By urgently buying from the local farmers, they increased the price of the food (increased demand) and the locals could not afford their own food. Whether or not this lesson was learnt - I don't know but it raises a serious flaw in buying locally. The the paragraph about how the US 'sometimes' sells the food aid is very misleading. When exactly does the US sell it food aid? Under what circumstances? The argument should be about ensuring the US never sells its food aid. When aid food finds its way into the market this is normally under criminal circumstances. Although a problem, it should not be seen as the overall norm. Focus should then be placed on ensuring that this does not happen. I work in the development field and if there is anything that is dangerous - it has to be the availability of cash. By bringing in cash we have always got tremendous problems. The Cash based aid could not be more wrong. The the statement, 'The United States also needs to work with other donors and local governments to establish regional reserves in the most vulnerable parts of the world ..' That could not be more wrong. The local givernment then becomes heavily relient on that regional reserve of food and focuses their money on other issues (often in the purchase of arms). The US should work with governments in getting THEM to fund regional reserves in vulnerable parts of the world. This ensure that governments take control of these matters and understand how seriously we (the West) take these matters. One of Niger's biggest problems is that they were neglecting this issue fromthe beginning. If Niger was forced to set aside a reserve of food, to take care of vulnerable people, they may also start think about developing those people and making the less vulnerable. We have to consistently think about making developing countries self sustaining and not taking care fo their problems for them. That is how you ensure that this type of crisis does not repeat itself.

Subject: Re: Feeding More for Less in Niger From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 13:21:42 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Agreed. The column was not to my liking, but well worth your extended comment.

Subject: Will the Economy Slow? From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 07:30:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is growing concern among analysts to whom we pay most attention that the economy could easily falter in the coming year. We should pay close attention to Federal Reserve policy these coming months, for if housing is slowing and energy prices remain as high we could be slowing seriously by spring. The Fed must be careful.

Subject: Re: Will the Economy Slow? From: Mik To: Terri Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 11:51:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: One thing is guaranteed - your inflation is far higher than is being reported. And you are guaranteed that the inflation rate is going to increase further despite the Fed raising interest rates (unless they do a drastic raise of over 1 percentage point). The slowing down in the housing market will be coupled with an increase in the stock market as investors turn back to the stock market. Will the economy slow? The question is in the correction in the inflation rate data? If salaries are increased to cater for the corrected inflation rate and spending will increase and the market will move forward. (A little inflation is not such a bad thing) but corporations must be willing to pay more on salaries based on inflation data. By hiding inflation data, corporations will improve revenue (increased sales prices) and not increase salaries, squeezing the middle class further. My opinion.

Subject: Re: Will the Economy Slow? From: Pete Weis To: Mik Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 12:10:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: 'The slowing down in the housing market will be coupled with an increase in the stock market as investors turn back to the stock market.' Mik, a slowing in the housing market could mean loses for some real estate investors and a slowing in consumption. When you add in higher and higher energy costs, wouldn't this combination reduce business activity and profits? Wouldn't this hit the stock markets as well - especially since we are seeing a global housing boom which is adding to global consumption? How do the stock markets do well under weakening global economic conditions? Or do you think a weakening in global housing is not enough of a negative factor to seriously impact economic conditions?

Subject: Re: Will the Economy Slow? From: Terri To: Mik Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 14:57:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting. I must think this through, but I agree that wage and benefit increases are minimal for a healthy economy and likely to remain so. This is important. A large rate increase by the Federal Reserve is not a possibility, for it would bring a market crisis unless intimated long in advance and would almost surely lead to a recession.

Subject: Sleep at Home and Invest in Stock Market From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:59:47 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/19/realestate/19real.html?ex=1282104000&en=f5ee3bed3ea4ed2f&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 19, 2005 In the Long Run, Sleep at Home and Invest in the Stock Market By MOTOKO RICH and DAVID LEONHARDT The housing boom of the last five years has made many homeowners feel like very, very smart investors. As the value of real estate has skyrocketed, owners have become enamored of the wealth their homes are creating, with many concluding that real estate is now a safer and better investment than stocks. It turns out, though, that the last five years - when homes in some hot markets like Manhattan and Las Vegas have outperformed stocks - has been a highly unusual period. In fact, by a wide margin over time, stock prices have risen more quickly than home values, even on the East and West Coasts, where home values have appreciated most. When Marti and Ray Jacobs sold the five-bedroom colonial house in Harrington Park, N.J., where they had lived since 1970, they made what looked like a typically impressive profit. They had paid $110,000 to have the house built and sold it in July for $900,000. But the truth is that much of the gain came from simple price inflation, the same force that has made a gallon of milk more expensive today than it was three decades ago. The Jacobses also invested tens of thousands of dollars in a new master bathroom, with marble floors, a Jacuzzi bathtub and vanity cabinets. Add it all up, and they ended up making an inflation-adjusted profit of less than 10 percent over the 35 years. That return does not come close to the gains of the stock market over the same period. The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index has increased almost 200 percent since 1970, even after accounting for inflation. Yet investment advisers worry that this reality is getting lost in today's enthusiasm for houses, even as some economists say the housing market has peaked. People are buying homes purely on speculation, trading real estate almost as if it were a stock. Surveys show that a large majority of Americans consider real estate to be a safer investment than stocks. 'With how strong the real estate market has performed, there is the urge for people to chase returns,' said Jeff A. Weiand, executive vice president of RTD Financial Advisors in Philadelphia. 'But it's very difficult to beat the long-term historical record of stocks.' Since 1980, for example, money invested in the Standard & Poor's 500 has delivered a return of 10 percent a year on average. Including dividends, the return on the S.& P. 500 rises to 12 percent a year. Even in New York and San Francisco, homes have risen in value only about 7 percent a year over the same span. That does not mean real estate is a bad investment. It is often an important source of wealth for families. But its main benefit is what it has always been: you can live in the house you own. 'The biggest value of the house is the shelter it provides,' said Thomas Z. Lys, an accounting professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. 'Too many people are fixated on speculation whereas most of the benefit really comes from usage.' Despite the fact that home values usually appreciate over time, most of the value of a house actually comes from the ability to use it. In this way, it is more like a car, albeit one that does not become less valuable over time, than it is like a stock. Whenever people sell one house, they must immediately pay to live elsewhere, meaning that they can never wholly cash out of a home's value. Including the value of living in a house - that is, the rent that a family would have to pay to live in an equivalent house elsewhere - homes in New York have returned more than 15 percent a year since 1980, according to an analysis by Mr. Lys. But only five percentage points of this return comes from sheer price appreciation, as opposed to the value of shelter. Mr. Lys accounted for property taxes, spending on renovations, interest payments and the tax deductions on those payments, and the fact that most house purchases are made with mortgages. When the sale of a house brings in a cash windfall, homeowners tend to focus on the fact that they made a down payment that was just a fraction of their house's value, lifting their return. But many forget just how much money they spent on property taxes, a new roof and the mortgage interest. Add to all these factors the corrosive effect of inflation, and the returns are even lower. The Jacobses - she is an administrator for a magazine and he a lawyer - were quite pleased with the sale of their house in New Jersey. To them, it was a place to raise their two children more than it was an investment. When the couple spent about $100,000 to redo their master bathroom, install a walk-in closet and build a deck in the mid-1980's, Mr. Jacobs recalled saying to his wife, 'We'll never get the money out that we put into this, but at least we'll enjoy it for 15 years or so.' Told of the comparative returns on his house and the stock market, Mr. Jacobs said, 'Of course I couldn't live in the portfolio.' Today, however, he has come to see the advantages of the stock market. The Jacobses now rent an apartment on the Upper West Side for more than $4,000 a month and have invested the proceeds from the house sale in the stock market, making it easier for them to raise cash by selling shares. 'I didn't want to take the money that we pulled out of the house and have all that money tied up in an apartment where I still have expenses of maintenance fees,' Mr. Jacobs said. But many people seem to be going in the opposite direction from the Jacobses. Eighty percent of Americans deemed real estate a safer investment than stocks in an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll done this spring, while only 13 percent said stocks were safer. Part of that sentiment is driven by the recent memory of the stock market collapse in 2000. Many homeowners seem to have forgotten that less than 15 years ago house prices in the Northeast and California fell, but the money they lost on technology stocks is still fresh in their minds. Stocks are also more volatile, and their price changes can be viewed every day. 'The news doesn't report to you daily that your house price might have gone up or down,' Mr. Lys said. 'So you think your house price is more stable than it really is because you don't observe these minute-by-minute gyrations.' Economists caution that any comparison between real estate and stocks is tricky, because real estate is typically a leveraged investment, in which a home buyer makes a down payment equal to only a fraction of a house's value and borrows to finance the rest. While it is possible to borrow money from a brokerage firm to buy stocks, most individual investors simply buy the shares outright. When home prices are rising, the leverage from a mortgage lifts real estate returns in the short term. Someone putting down $100,000 to buy a $500,000 home can feel as if the investment doubled when told that the house is now worth $600,000. But the power of leverage vanishes as homeowners pay off the mortgage, as the Jacobses have. Leverage also creates more short-term risk, especially for those who have stretched to afford their house. 'If the home went down by 30 percent, you'd probably be sitting with a bankruptcy attorney,' said Jonathan Golub, United States equity strategist at J. P. Morgan Asset Management in New York. 'If your I.B.M. stock goes down by 30 percent, no big deal. So you had $100,000, now you have $70,000. You don't declare bankruptcy; you just don't go out to the movies as much, or you retire a year later.' But such risks are hard to imagine when many markets are still enjoying double-digit percentage increases every year. The number of people buying houses they do not plan to live in has surged. There are also Internet exchanges where investors can trade yet-to-be-built condominiums or futures contracts tied to average home prices in big metropolitan areas. But economists and investment advisers say that most of the value from real estate comes not from anything that can be captured by flipping it, but from the safety net it provides in bad times. Even if the market shifts downward, 'you have a roof over your head,' said Jonathan Miller, a real estate appraiser in Manhattan. Beyond the shelter it provides, the biggest advantage of real estate might be that it protects people from their worst investment instincts. Most people do not sell their house out of frustration after a few months of declining values, as they might with a stock. Instead, they are almost forced to be long-run investors who do not try to time the market. Harlan Larson, a retired manager of car dealerships near Minneapolis, still regrets having bought Northwest Airlines stock at $25 a share a few years ago. It is now trading at less than $5. By comparison, he views the four-bedroom home he bought for $32,500 in 1965 - or about $200,000 in today's dollars - as a money tree. He and his wife recently listed it for $413,000. That would translate into an annual return of 1.2 percent, taking into account inflation and the cost of two new decks and an extra room. They plan to move to Texas after it has sold. 'I wish I'd bought more real estate,' Mr. Larson said.

Subject: Pressure on Price Controls in China From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:23:16 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/business/worldbusiness/18yuan.html?ex=1282017600&en=0337f7929eaea8a5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss August 18, 2005 Fuel Shortages Put Pressure on Price Controls in China By KEITH BRADSHER HONG KONG - Sudden shortages of gasoline and diesel in Southeastern China are reigniting a debate here: Is pressure from state companies, coupled with freely available information on oil prices, driving China to accept market forces faster than it may have wanted? Dozens of service stations in Southeastern China, notably in cities near Hong Kong, abruptly ran out of fuel this week just as officials in Beijing were debating requests from domestic oil companies to charge more for diesel and gasoline. The shortages have produced long lines of angry motorists at service stations and have disrupted some freight shipments, as trucks do not have the diesel to make trips. Some in China and abroad say the state oil companies created the shortages to increase prices. China regulates retail fuel prices, adjusting them no more than once a month. But the government has not raised them nearly as quickly as world oil prices have risen, hoping to keep inflation in check. This has left refiners with negligible profit margins, and even losses, as they convert oil into gasoline and diesel. Sinopec, the state-controlled oil company that dominates the refining of fuel in China, especially in Southeastern China, said late Wednesday that the shortages were a result of people stockpiling fuel now that they have enough information to bet on the direction of oil prices. Asked if a shortage had been deliberately created, Evan Jia, a spokesman for Sinopec, said, 'We try our best to supply the marketplace.' People in China today have much greater access to information about world prices than ever before, and as they see high world oil prices, they are topping off fuel tanks in expectation that China will soon raise domestic prices, Mr. Jia said. 'They buy inventory for their own tank in the hope the price will be changing,' Mr. Jia said. 'People think the trend in China should be toward a price increase.' While there are no good figures on the private storage capacity for fuel in China, oil experts say it is probably considerable as years of electricity shortages have prompted factories across the country to install backup diesel generators with large fuel tanks. Chinese factories appear to have run down their fuel tanks in the second quarter, when previously torrid diesel sales slowed to a crawl, and may be refilling their tanks now. A typhoon and a tropical storm have also disrupted tanker deliveries to Southeastern China in the last two weeks, Mr. Jia said. Sinopec is a conglomerate of nearly 10,000 formerly separate oil production, refining and distribution entities, previously under the direct control of local, provincial and central government agencies and still somewhat influenced by them. 'Refineries do not want to process the crude. We try our best,' Mr. Jia said. But the timing of the latest shortages, coinciding with an active debate in the government-controlled news media over whether China should liberalize retail energy prices, has made many energy analysts suspicious of these rationales. Sam Dale, an Asian oil analyst in Singapore with Energy Intelligence, a newsletter-publishing company based in New York, said oil companies appeared to be putting pressure on the Chinese government to free retail prices, by running their refineries below capacity and holding back supplies from the market. 'It's an artificial shortage,' he said. Jeff Brown, an oil demand analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris, said retail prices had not been high enough in China to cover refiners' costs for many months. He said it was mysterious that the shortages appear to be worse now than under similar conditions in April. Chinese refiners' razor-thin margins have not changed much in recent months, Mr. Brown noted. The margins narrowed last winter and have remained narrow because rising world oil prices in dollars have been offset by more slowly rising retail prices in China and last month's 2 percent increase in the value of China's currency. Mr. Jia said Sinopec service stations would be fully stocked by Thursday in cities near here that have been experiencing shortages. Sinopec's refineries are operating at 89 to 90 percent of capacity, compared with past rates as high as 97 to 98 percent, Mr. Jia said. There is a shortfall mainly because some refineries are closed for maintenance, but some refinery managers are also reluctant to produce at full tilt when retail prices are low, he added. Sinopec's closest domestic rival in refining, PetroChina, is more active in Northern China. PetroChina officials had no comment on Wednesday.

Subject: Great Engine of China Is Low on Fuel From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:15:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/19/business/worldbusiness/19energy.html?ex=1124942400&en=7d3c17ed58675f16&ei=5070&emc=eta1 April 19, 2005 The Great Engine of China Is Low on Fuel By KEITH BRADSHER GUANGZHOU, China - Service stations across China are starting to run short on diesel this spring, while electricity blackouts here in southeastern China are growing worse as power stations cut back on purchases of fuel oil. For truckers and factory owners, the diesel and electricity shortages are a nuisance, sometimes a costly one. The Guangzhou Boaosi Appliance Company, which makes refrigerators here, is without electricity from the municipal grid four days a week, and just bought a costly generator last month to continue operating on diesel. The diesel and power shortages have one thing in common: they are largely the result of the clash between China's Communist past and its increasingly capitalist present. The government has set retail prices too low for diesel and electricity. So businesses, facing high world oil prices, are supplying less of both. Disruptions in Chinese markets for fuel oil, diesel and other oil products are causing ripples in global markets in turn, as traders and investors around the world struggle to interpret the effects on international oil supply and demand. The puzzle for oil analysts is how Chinese households, factory owners and refinery managers will react when the government eventually liberalizes prices, which is expected in the next few weeks. Government officials have already announced that they will raise retail electricity prices for industrial users, although probably not homes, on May 1. An increase in diesel prices is also widely expected. As buyers of everything from cotton pajamas to construction equipment gathered here from around the world Friday for the opening of the two-week Canton Trade Fair, the nearest Sinopec service station had signs on all its diesel pumps saying they were sold out of fuel, though the gasoline pumps were still flowing. A couple of trucks loitered nearby. In contrast, lines of trucks waiting for diesel have been reported at scattered service stations elsewhere in China over the last few days. The Chinese government raised the regulated retail price of gasoline by 7 percent on March 23, to $1.66 a gallon. But it left diesel unchanged at $1.57 a gallon to avoid antagonizing farmers, who need a lot of diesel in their tractors for spring planting. Speculators across China have responded by hoarding diesel in the expectation of a price increase after the planting, said Evan Jia, a spokesman for Sinopec, China's main refiner. To make matters worse, refiners shifted at the end of last year toward producing more gasoline and less diesel from each barrel of oil. They have refused to go back on that decision, even stepping up exports of diesel in response to low prices at home. 'We do not want the marketplace to give us indications' of how much diesel to produce, when it is hoarding that is driving the market, Mr. Jia said. At the same time, half of the power stations fired by fuel oil here in Guangdong province have been closed for part or all of the last month. Global prices for fuel oil, a heavy oil not used much in the West but relied on by the Chinese to power many electric plants, have climbed sharply, but power companies have not been allowed to charge more for the electricity they produce; the government-controlled Shenzhen Daily recently reported that fuel-oil imports had dropped by half last month. A small increase in diesel and electricity prices could have the counter- intuitive effect of increasing China's oil imports, said Jeff Brown, an oil demand analyst at the International Energy Agency in Paris. A small increase could make refiners willing to sell more diesel, and power companies willing to generate more electricity, while having little effect on residents' desire to buy diesel and power, he explained. But a larger increase in diesel and electricity prices could dampen over all Chinese demand, by persuading Chinese vehicle owners and factory managers to conserve. This could potentially hurt oil consumption and prices around the world. Nobody knows how large an increase would be needed to hurt Chinese demand significantly. 'It's just a mess trying to forecast this,' Mr. Brown said. To be sure, central planning has also had advantages for China's energy markets. Sweeping aside environmental, land use and financial hurdles that can delay power stations in the West for years, China has embarked on a binge of construction of new power plants, many of them coal-fired. These are already starting to make blackouts less common elsewhere in China and hold the promise of eventually letting the electricity supply catch up with demand even here in the Pearl River Delta, which rivals the Yangtze River Delta around Shanghai as one of China's two main export powerhouses. Henry Zhang, the general manager of the Shishi Hengyi Textile Product Trade Company in Shishi City in east-central China, said that his factory had already noticed an improvement. The factory was blacked out two days a week in 2003, a day a week last year and this year, none at all. 'This year, we have no problems,' he said. But blackouts have been a serious problem for years here in Guangzhou, the biggest city in the Pearl River Delta, and they are worse this spring as oil-fired plants have shut down, though coal-fired power plants have kept running. Diesel generators have become a necessity for factories across much of China in the last few years, as electricity demand has soared past supply, and they have helped turn China into the world's second-largest oil consumer, after the United States. Factories receive priority in diesel shipments, and 19 representatives of companies from across China said in separate interviews at the trade fair here that they had not had trouble buying enough diesel to refill their fuel tanks periodically. Yet the generators are costly in many ways. The diesel alone costs two to three times as much per kilowatt generated as electricity from power plants, managers complain, and on top of that are labor costs for maintenance and operation as well as the cost of the generator and the cost of space to put the generator and its fuel tank. The generators, particularly older, domestically manufactured models, also rank among the biggest polluters in a country with some of the worst air pollution. Generator sales are an important barometer of long-term business confidence in the national power grid. But while China has moved ahead of the United States to become the world's largest market for industrial-size generators, there are signs that some businesses are hoping the country's overburdened power stations will catch up. At Cummins Inc., generator sales surged last year but have evened out at that high level so far this year, said John Watkins, the president of the company's East Asian operations. At Weichai, one of China's largest generator manufacturers, which is based in Weifang in northeastern China, sales have continued rising this year. But Zhou Lai Xian, the vice manager of the company's export department, said that the company's maintenance workers had noticed that it appeared as though many generators outside southeastern China were being run less this year than last year. 'The country has put a lot of effort into solving this problem, so it is getting better' in many regions, he said. But in the meantime, he said, companies are still lining up to buy generators in case they find themselves once again without power.

Subject: A Country Bound by the Great Wall From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:12:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/arts/design/18wall.html?ex=1282017600&en=04e4082337cb3bab&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss In a Country Bound by the Great Wall, a Retrospective of Art Defined by It By SHEILA MELVIN BEIJING - 'The Wall,' a major retrospective of Chinese contemporary art from the last 20 years, is a thought-provoking exhibition that explores the many walls - physical and metaphorical - that unite and divide Chinese society. The show, which runs here until Sunday and opens at the State University at Buffalo on Oct. 1, includes installations, performance art, video, photography and painting. These are displayed, fittingly enough, in the maze of circling walls and hidden cul-de-sacs that make up the exhibition space of the Millennium Monument Art Museum. Though 'The Wall' is a retrospective, it is organized by theme rather than chronology, and much of the work is recent. Unsurprisingly, given the show's title, many of the works on display concern the Great Wall. Indeed, the exhibition is an offspring of the curator Gao Minglu's fascination with the dichotomy between the Great Wall as an emblem of Chinese nationalism and its representation in contemporary art. 'The Great Wall as a symbol of the nation first emerged in the early 20th century,' said Mr. Gao, who is also an assistant professor of art history at the University at Buffalo. 'But the avant-garde has taken a very different perspective toward it - more skeptical, more ambiguous. They are mourning the Great Wall rather than celebrating it. This is very different than under Mao or in the World War II era.' The ambiguous view is evident in several pieces, including Gu Wenda's remarkable 2004-5 work '10,000 Kilometers,' which at first resembles a miniature version of a section of the wall, until one realizes that the 6-inch-thick bricks are made entirely of matted human hair. Behind the wall hangs a diaphanous curtain of swirled hair and glue resembling filigree, or wisps of smoke. If the hair wall is somewhat nauseating, the hair curtain is inexplicably beautiful, and together the two pieces evoke both the horror of the Great Wall - the great numbers of conscripts who labored and died building it - and its transcendent majesty. Zheng Lianjie's 'Big Explosion' performances of 1993, documented here in photographs, fall into the category of art that mourns the wall, its symbolism or both. Indeed, as part of his performances, Mr. Zheng worked with other artists and hired villagers to carry 10,000 crumbling bricks from the bottom of the wall to the top; photographs show the bricks wrapped in red crosses and strewn across a ruined section of wall. To erase any doubt about their intentions, Mr. Zheng and his colleagues then staged a funeral ceremony for the Great Wall and flung fake money over the 'dead' bricks to send them off to heaven. Even within the supposed security of the Great Wall, China has long been a nation of walls: cities were walled and the preferred architectural style for houses incorporated walled courtyards. After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, the city walls came down, and in the last 20 years countless other walls, of homes, theaters, temples and teahouses, have fallen to the blows of sledgehammers wielded by armies of migrant workers. This rapid redevelopment and urbanization of once-rural suburbs - the absence of walls - is a second major theme of the show. Wang Jingsong's 1999 photography work 'A Hundred Chai' shows the Chinese character for 'condemned' - chai - spray-painted on 100 buildings. The encircled characters are the same, but the color, style and background of each is different. The work evokes the many individual sacrifices required by the march of urban development. Mounted nearby is 'Urban Fiction' (2005), a series of chromatic prints by Xing Danwen. The prints show developers' models of the huge apartment complexes that have sprouted across Beijing in recent years, but they are wistfully humanized by the imposition of fragments from real life: a woman on a balcony watering flowers, a couple in a passionate embrace, a lonely figure crying in a window. Many of the works in the exhibition focus on the migrant laborers who demolish and construct the nation's walls and the ordinary workers who have lost their jobs because of economic reforms. Wang Bing's digital video 'Tiexi District' is an exhaustive nine-hour documentary that explores the lives, loves and losses of factory workers in one of China's rust-belt areas. Zhang Dali's 'Chinese Offspring' is a striking installation comprising dozens of naked human figures hung upside down from the ceiling. The figures, plaster body casts of migrant workers hired for the project, are in every imaginable position - bending, squatting, reaching, lolling - but all have their eyes closed tight. They convey a sense of vertigo and overwhelming sympathy for the millions of men and women whose lives have been turned upside down by modernization. The invisible boundary that is perhaps most closely considered in 'The Wall' is the one that separates women from men; the exhibition tries to surmount this divide by displaying a number of works by female artists. Because these artists often use needle, thread, fabric and the like in their work, Mr. Gao suggested that such domestic materials might be meant to address their subordinate position. But if the pieces shown here do indeed use traditional female materials, the works seem more celebratory than rebellious. Yin Xiuzhen's 'Supermarket' (2002) is a lighthearted, compelling installation with 2 ceiling-high shopping carts, 8 pedal-operated sewing machines and 16 patchwork quilts on which elderly seamstresses have stitched three-dimensional vistas. Some of these vistas are urban, replete with high-rises, bridges, cars and trucks, while others are rural, with country houses, ponds, ducks and donkeys. All are fashioned from old clothes, and each can be viewed as an effort to stitch back together the nation's rapidly changing physical and cultural patchwork. Yu Hong's 2005 'Memory Dress' is a series of oversize printed T-shirts on metal hangers, with each shirt representing a year in the life of the artist and the country. The shirt from 1969, for example, shows Ms. Yu's painting of herself as a 3-year-old in Beihai Park; on the back is a 1969 propaganda photo of a family singing 'The Quotations of Chairman Mao.' The T-shirts trace Ms. Yu's progression from child to mother and artist, as well as marking the enormous changes China has undergone in just her lifetime. One is also confronted with the limits of these changes: the T-shirt for 1989 was removed. All that is left to represent that momentous year of antigovernment protests centered in Tiananmen Square is an empty hanger. The final wall evoked by this exhibition, albeit obliquely, is the one that separated China's contemporary art and artists from its mainstream culture for most of the 1980's and 90's. This wall has largely been demolished in the past five years as contemporary art has entered what Mr. Gao calls the 'Art Museum Age.' Chinese art is sought by collectors and curators from around the world, and major museums across China vie to hold the most attention-getting contemporary art exhibitions. There is much good to be said about this breaching of the wall, for artists and viewers alike, but Mr. Gao said he also feared it had caused artists to compromise their work to fit curatorial interests and the demands of the market. He said he looked forward to the day when the hallowed walls of museums and galleries would lose their appeal. 'I hope some artists will rebel against the museum exhibition and criticize the institutional art world and the curatorial system,' he said. 'I want to be criticized! But right now artists have no time to criticize. They are just enjoying.'

Subject: The Sound and the Fury From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 14:09:29 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/arts/music/14eich.html?ex=1125028800&en=9c3896db94f3de76&ei=5070&emc=eta1 The Sound and the Fury By JEREMY EICHLER SALZBURG, Austria CULTURAL festivals do not get much more glamorous than the one that takes place every summer in this immaculately preserved Baroque city. At the opera here two weeks ago, the audience included men in sleek tuxedos and women in gowns that evoked the splendor of imperial ages past. You might have imagined that they were streaming in for some music by Mozart, the local hero, but this summer Salzburg opened its festival on a different, more complex note. Austria's elite was turning out for a dark opera called 'The Branded,' by Franz Schreker. In a way it was as much a political event as a cultural one, a gesture of musical reparation. Schreker, an Austrian-Jewish composer whose career suffered under the Nazis, died in 1934 after a stroke. His music was later banned and mostly forgotten. This year, the festival has tried to restore some honor to his name and to remind the public of what was once in its midst. 'Salzburg had a very strong Nazi movement,' Helga Rabl-Stadler, the president of the festival, explained in a recent interview. 'We think it is very important and necessary to bring the music we have never heard because of the Third Reich.' The audience response on opening night was duly respectful but also somewhat tentative. Schreker is not the only one receiving new attention. In both Salzburg and Vienna, the music of exiled composers like Erich Korngold and Alexander Zemlinsky is again being brought before the public. In Germany this year, there have been dozens of performances of works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, a German composer who responded to his dark times with music of fierce protest. Sixty years after the end of World War II, across German-speaking Europe, classical music has been invoked as a medium of public memory, an accompaniment to the fitful process of reckoning with the past. In these countries, as firsthand memories of the war dwindle, music is serving as a kind of proxy allowing postwar generations to approach a difficult history. But why, other than the convenience of an anniversary, is this music being called to speak now? And what exactly can it remember? In Germany, the effort to showcase the music of composers who suffered under the Third Reich has been under way for a decade or more as part of a broader imperative to confront the Nazi past. It has even spurred a small recording boom in 'degenerate music,' to use the name by which the Nazis referred to modernism and jazz. But this year in Germany, the 60th anniversary of the war seemed to be met with a palpable sense of guilt-fatigue, despite the opening of the new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. The German president, Horst Köhler, has sympathized with the suffering of German victims, including those who experienced the allied bombing of the cities. The strategic wisdom and basic morality of that campaign has also been questioned anew. Meanwhile, those born after the war have other pressing problems, including the vexed aftermath of unification. Austria is a different case. Encouraged by the prevalent postwar myth that it was not an aggressor but rather the first victim of Nazism, the nation was slower to face its wartime legacy. Since the revelation in 1986 that the country's president, Kurt Waldheim, had whitewashed his Nazi connection, apologies and national soul-searching have ensued, but it is a work in progress. Even as music by the nation's once-banned composers is returning, a politician from the Freedom Party recently questioned the existence of gas chambers. Both countries have used classical music more than any other art as a conduit and a repository of memory. There are good reasons for this: since the 19th century, music has been a staging ground for the region's political and ideological battles, and an echo chamber for questions of cultural and national identity. Music also tracked the great German downfall. The orchestras played almost every day in Auschwitz. And then there is the medium of music itself: a symphony or a string quartet, with its abstract musical language, can communicate powerful emotions while remaining mute on the details of meaning. Thomas Mann called it 'that spoken unspokenness given to music alone.' Behind these emotions, however, lie the composers who produced them. And their stories, particular, temporal and thoroughly human, speak in ways all their own. THE hundredth anniversary of Hartmann's birth in in Munich is this month. The centenary celebrations have included more than 60 performances of his work, mostly in Munich but also across Germany. A new exhibition on his life and music is at the Munich City Museum, and the summer festival of the Bavarian State Opera opened in June with a successful performance of his opera 'Simplicius Simplicissimus.' On musical terms alone, the attention to Hartmann is long overdue. He was a master German symphonist whose work drew deeply from almost three centuries of Austro-German tradition, from Bach to Webern, and distilled these influences in his own deeply personal style, which spoke with abundant power and emotional urgency. The centenary may well give his music a lasting lift within Germany; it deserves to be heard more in the United States as well, where it turns up only rarely. But Hartmann's output is almost never cited without its dramatic context. He was a great believer in the moral possibilities of art precisely at a time when it was being so profoundly debased. Hartmann chose to stay in Germany but was one of the disturbingly few composers who did not collaborate with the Nazis. He withdrew from public musical life and channeled his opposition into his music. The works he composed under the Third Reich are indeed a powerful testament. Perhaps the most famous is his searing 'Concerto Funebre,' written in 1939 to protest the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. Subversive Czech tunes and Russian songs of revolution are smuggled into the music, the memory of Hartmann's protest inscribed into the texture of the piece. On other occasions, Hartmann declared his allegiances in the inscriptions of his work. He composed a piano sonata at the end of the war, after witnessing 20,000 inmates marching from the concentration camp at Dachau shortly before its liberation. The score read, 'Endless was the stream - endless the misery - endless the sorrow.' These political commitments made his music unplayable at home. As the war intensified, Hartmann, buried his manuscripts deep in the mountains for safekeeping. But he survived the war through his wife's family's wealth and through a delicate dance with the authorities. In a way the Hartmann centenary could not have been better timed with the national mood in Germany. Hartmann was the textbook 'inner emigrant,' one who remained in the country physically but spiritually withdrew from his surroundings. His experiences of suffering under the Nazis while retaining ethical integrity have all the makings of a perfect musical resistance myth. This is not to dismiss Hartmann's protest. His wartime record was courageous, not to mention his outstanding postwar service in restoring Germany's contemporary-music culture by founding the series Musica Viva. But his example also resonates conveniently well with elements of the country's new historical self-image. It makes for a certain reciprocal appeal: Hartmann needs to be heard in Germany today, and today's Germany needs its Hartmann. Finally, Hartmann's example raises larger, difficult questions about the very category of the inner emigrant, a status that was claimed after the war by many German artists and writers far less deserving than Hartmann. At its core, the concept is suffused with a troubling ethical ambiguity, as if one could be present at the scene of a crime and yet morally absent. Was it possible to live quietly through the Third Reich without being partly implicated in what occurred? THE Austrian composer Schreker was at the other pole of musical memory this summer. The new production of 'The Branded' ('Die Gezeichneten'), which tells the eerily prescient story of an artistic utopia that mutates into a nightmare of corruption, decadence and murder, capped the Salzburg Festival's four-year series of operas by repressed composers. Schreker was a major musical casualty of the Third Reich. His half-Jewish ancestry and his progressive affiliations made inner emigration impossible, and he was planning actual emigration in 1934 when he died. He had already been forced out of prominent teaching positions in Berlin after Hitler rose to power. Unlike some composers who left behind only glimpses of their potential, Schreker achieved demonstrable brilliance. A string of wildly successful operas featured a kind of shimmering, intoxicated music that breathed deeply of the Viennese Art Nouveau but brought its lushly textured sensuality into an era of probing Expressionism. During his heyday, Schreker was something of a contradiction in terms: a truly popular modernist whose music was performed almost as often as Strauss's. He was hailed by his champions as the true heir to Wagner or, as one American publication called him, 'the messiah of German opera.' And yet artistic careers don't map neatly onto political timelines. Schreker's star faded even before the Nazis arrived, when he failed to keep up with the shifting fashions of the Weimar Republic. After the war, the musical avant-garde had no time to look back. It was too busy forging ahead with the legacy of Schreker's peer, Arnold Schoenberg, creating difficult serial music that promised a break with the seemingly tainted traditions of the past. Schreker's life's work was simply left behind, buried beneath the rubble. Now with old prejudices about musical progress having fallen away, Schreker's work is ripe for another shot at posterity. As his biographer Christopher Hailey has argued, Schreker's lavish utopian sound-canvases offered an alternative vision of modernism that was later lost in the shuffle, a path not taken into the future of music. We may finally be ready to appreciate Schreker's work on its own terms and, in so doing, reclaim a broader founding vision of modernism. Indeed, whether or not the recent performances can help Austrians remember their past, they should certainly help music remember its own. And yet, there may be a tension between these two uses of music. As long as these works continue to serve as memorials, they remain sequestered from the repertory of which they were once a vital part. From a strictly musical perspective, the question is whether composers like Schreker can be unburdened from the task of so much symbolizing. This might allow them to re-enter the Austrian musical pantheon as one of the country's own, long after the 'degenerate art' tributes have ended. But from the perspective of a collective grappling with the past, the questions grow more complicated. In some ways, classical music is perfectly suited to the task of public memory in Austria and Germany, precisely because of its privileged place in these societies. The Salzburg Festival itself was conceived as the 'noble confession' of the Austrian soul. Giving Schreker pride of place there this summer sends a powerful symbolic message. But the broader limits of using music this way are also painfully apparent. These programs reach only a limited part of an educated elite. There is also the risk of offering an easy out: grappling with the past, whether personal or collective, should entail more than an enjoyable night at the opera. Music can be a beginning to this process, but surely not an end. To suggest it would clearly be an evasion, an outsourcing of difficult public-political work to the genteel corridors of culture. And finally, the role of the listener is typically too passive for music to serve as a fully successful vehicle of public memory. In the end, memorials are about much more than just their contemplation; they are about how that renewed memory is brought back into the world. The scholar James Young has written about public monuments, but his words of caution apply equally to this music: 'Were we to passively remark only on the contours of these memorials, were we to leave unexplored their genesis and remain unchanged by the recollective act, it could be said that we have not remembered at all.'

Subject: An Exquisite Path to an Elusive Past From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:51:26 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/arts/design/18cott.html?ex=1282017600&en=38ebc45e00c4dff9&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss An Exquisite Path to an Elusive Past By HOLLAND COTTER SALEM, Mass. -Yul Brynner. Pad thai. That's what you know about the culture of Thailand? Never mind. Historians are in the dark about it too. This is one reason that 'The Kingdom of Siam: The Art of Central Thailand, 1350-1800' at the Peabody Essex Museum here is the thrill it is. Completely gorgeous, with its comely Buddhas and paintings in light-struck gold, it is also a reconnaissance mission-in-progress to the past, with scholars clearing the path just a few steps ahead of you all the way. Starting out, you should pack some basic information, like the fact that Thailand is sandwiched into Southeast Asia between Myanmar (formerly Burma) to the west and Cambodia to the east. At different times over the centuries each controlled it, and both did much to shape its predominantly Buddhist art. In the mid-14th century, political balances shifted. Burma had long since run out of steam; Cambodia's fabled Angkor empire was on the slide. A powerful Thai kingdom was in ascendance. Foreigners called it Siam; the kingdom called itself Ayutthaya (pronounced ah-YOOT-tah-yah) and built a capital city of the same name. The city must have been quite a place. With ambitious rulers and a sociable, multi-ethnic population in residence, and merchants from China, Japan, India, Persia and Europe pouring in, it became a major entrepôt for trade in Asian luxury goods. When, in 1686, a royal embassy from Ayutthaya visited the court of Louis XIV in France, it brought an embarrassment of riches: shiploads of jewelry, silk, Chinese ceramics and crates of birds' nests for soup. The ordinarily unflappable staff at Versailles was nonplussed. No one knew where to put all the stuff, let alone what to make of it. Still, Ayutthaya must have impressed them as a kingdom grand in every way, which it probably was. Gilded sculptures of the Buddha more than 60 feet tall were not uncommon in its temples. Those temples, like the Wat Mahathat and the Wat Ratchaburana, were awesome sights, their steep, tiered bases topped by towers shaped like NASA shuttles. Hidden inside were treasures fit for deities, donated by kings. 'Probably' is an important word here; most of the hard evidence is gone. In 1569, armies from a resurgent Burma leveled Ayutthaya. It was quickly rebuilt; indeed, the city reached its zenith of global celebrity in the 17th century. Then, in 1767, the Burmese slammed it again, leaving just a few structures intact. The site was then abandoned and a new capital was established near modern Bangkok. It would be too much to say that Ayutthaya has been resurrected in the exhibition, organized by Forrest McGill, chief curator of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, and M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati, assistant professor of Asian art at California State University, Sacramento. But certainly the foundations for an imaginative reconstruction are now well in place. The show opens with a single image, an immense metal head of a Buddha, which instantly pulls us back to a world that was. Its placement high on a modern pedestal gives a sense of the original figure's staggering size. And a jagged gash at the top of the head speaks of the violence that brought it down. The gallery behind it has traces of another monument, in a group of objects associated with the main temple tower of the Wat Ratchaburana. In 1957, looters broke into the tower and made off with hundreds of valuables. But archaeologists assessing the loss discovered something new: a sealed room, the temple's relic chamber, sunk deep in its base. The vaultlike space was crammed with treasures: royal crowns, votive sculptures, a gold-covered miniature of the tower itself, all donated as pious gifts. Those gifts are now yielding information. The chamber would have been sealed the year the temple was finished; A.D. 1424 is the generally accepted date. And because everything in it would have been made before then, the contents stand as a body of comparative material by which other Thai art could be evaluated. As vague as this method may be for establishing chronology, it is what we have. Almost nothing from Ayutthaya was dated by its makers. And because most of what survives is dynastic in nature, meant to perpetuate a royal style as well as convey an illusion of continuity and stability, artists were encouraged to create replicas of antique forms - replicas so exact as so to be indistinguishable from originals. As scholars ruefully acknowledge in the show's catalog, those artists did their jobs extremely well, creating a time-baffling art suspended between past, present and future. And this fact, once fully grasped, lends the show a frisson of mystery that further burnishes the beauty of its 80 objects, many on loan from Thai museums for the first time. A congregation of Buddhas and bodhisattvas, some with egg-shaped Sri Lankan heads or squared-off Khmer chins, fills the first two rooms. And certain types of figures, like one of the Buddha walking, are distinctively Thai. You see him bopping along, en pointe, in a carved stone relief panel, a piece that provided one of those revelations scholars live for. When the hefty panel was pulled away from a wall in a Thai museum storeroom in preparation for shipping, a date was found incised on its back: the equivalent, in Buddhist years, of A.D. 1375. For me, the show's high point is its small selection of illuminated manuscripts and paintings. That such objects escaped the ravages of war and the country's damp, bug-friendly climate, is astounding. One of the finest of all Thai books is here, the Buddhist cosmology called 'The Three Worlds,' on loan from the Museum für Indische Kunst in Berlin. And from the Asian Art Museum comes the first Thai paintings on cloth to be dated to the Ayutthaya period. A swatch from a processional banner shows a scene from one of the Buddha's past lives. Here he appears as a young sage named Vidhura, who is being pulled through the sky by a ferocious but not-too-swift demon. Technically, Vidhura is a prisoner, but this alert, amused face instantly let you know who's in charge. People can get terribly sniffy about the art of the Ayutthaya's 18th-century golden years, especially its ornate black and gilt lacquerware painting. But the painting looks fabulous here, shimmering inexhaustibly over the surface of manuscript cabinets. And while most of the designs are of ceaselessly burgeoning flowers and mythical beasts, one set of cabinet doors carried two human figures. One is a European dressed in a peculiarly puffy version of European armor, the other wears a turban. Traditionally, they've been identified as Louis XIV and the Indian Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Ayutthaya's court had contacts with both. They also suggest sly depictions of exotic ethnic types as seen through Siamese eyes. Maybe they're both: the exalted Sun King and the Indian monarch as the equivalent of slightly over-the-top characters in a musical comedy. Nobody knows the answer, or at least we don't know it yet. Like so much else in this beguiling, expeditionary show, these images are elusive fantasies in a real history: mysteries materialized.

Subject: Niger: A New Face of Hunger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 08:53:23 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/weekinreview/31polgreen.html?ex=1280462400&en=72863c1f11d2e9af&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss A New Face of Hunger, Without the Old Excuses By LYDIA POLGREEN THE pictures are wrenching. A nomad holds an infant aloft, its gaunt head lolling dangerously, its matchstick limbs akimbo. A father asks God to forgive him for weeping publicly; he has just buried his son. A child in an emergency clinic awakens from a hunger-induced stupor only to moan and weep from the pain of his starvation-induced skin sores. These images of victims of a food crisis in the vast, landlocked West African nation of Niger, captured by a BBC television correspondent and shown around the world, look like something the world has seen before - the famine in Ethiopia in the 1980's. That catastrophe prompted an extraordinary outpouring of generosity, along with a vow that the world would never again stand by as millions went hungry. Yet here it is again, far smaller in scale, yet replete with images of stick-thin children with hunger-swollen bellies clinging to bony, flat-breasted mothers. Once again there is the question: what causes these calamities that invariably afflict the world's poorest corners? The immediate cause is certainly known. Locust swarms and poor rains last year wiped out much of the nation's harvest and caused grain prices to triple. But when misfortunes strike other countries, they can help their people, with planning, with resources and by seeking aid from abroad. So what has gone so terribly wrong in Niger? For decades famine was seen largely as a consequence of bad political leadership. Food scarcity in Ethiopia in the 1980's had natural causes, but its transformation into a deadly famine came to be understood as mostly man-made, the result of a Stalinist regime's collectivist ideology and its pursuit of victory over insurgents without regard to the well-being of its people. It seemed a neat illustration of the development the economist Amartya Sen's dictum: 'No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.' But that does not explain Niger's problem. Niger is a democracy. It has been one since 1999, when it made the transition to multiparty democracy and constitutional rule after a decade of turmoil. It has also made, in part at least, the painful transition from a centralized, state-run economy to a market-driven one, earning praise and ultimately relief from about half of its estimated $1.6 billion in foreign debt from the World Bank. Yet Niger still earns a horrifically high score on the index of human misery compiled by the United Nations Development Program, which lists it as the second least developed nation in the world, just ahead of Sierra Leone. More than 25 percent of its children die before their fifth birthdays. Those who survive go on to scrape a meager existence from a harsh, arid savanna that is just barely suitable for farming and cattle grazing, yet must feed 12 million people. Cyclical droughts and chronic hunger are a way of life. Life expectancy tops out at 46 years. Nor is Niger alone in its troubles. Of the 25 countries at the bottom of the development list, all but two are in Africa. Niger's food crisis - it is not, despite news reports, a famine yet - is not even the worst on the continent. Similar problems, involving even larger numbers, exist in Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Darfur and elsewhere. Far from ignoring or playing down its troubles, Niger's government, in cooperation with international aid agencies, sounded the alarm back in November. It provided subsidized grain and other aid from its own stocks, and has apparently made every effort to avert disaster. The world simply failed to respond, leaving the government unable to mount a sufficient aid campaign. 'The world has not noticed,' said Mark Malloch Brown, chief of staff to the Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general. 'When you get a crisis of this kind in a little known, landlocked country, which is Francophone and hard to reach, the inability to mobilize and galvanize sufficient support in a timely way is huge.' Of $16 million requested by the United Nations in an appeal for aid, less than a third had been received until about a week ago, when images of starving children began appearing on television. Food distribution is well under way, but precious time was lost, Mr. Malloch Brown said. Niger and its neighbors are textbook cases of what the Columbia University economist Jeffrey D. Sachs calls 'the poverty trap.' 'When poverty is extreme,' Mr. Sachs wrote in his recent book, 'The End of Poverty,' 'the poor do not have the ability - by themselves - to get out of the mess.' The new prescription he advocates for such countries, as he described it in a telephone interview, is a large infusion of aid directed to basic needs like growing more food, providing access to clean drinking water and preventing diseases like malaria. If farmers in Niger got better seeds and fertilizers, he said, they would grow more crops, preventing food shortages in the first place. Children who had safe drinking water would not suffer from diarrhea or its deadly complications, malnourishment and dehydration. Fighting malaria, which debilitates as well as kills, would increase productivity. Good roads would allow rural populations to send produce to market in flush times and let their government and aid agencies know who is in trouble in bad times. Niger may be a democracy, but its government is weak and its tiny budget is almost entirely dependent on foreign aid. It may have a free press, but if literacy is at 17 percent and few can afford radios or televisions, how can a free press safeguard against famine? It may have elections, but if the government has put itself at the mercy of international donors in return for promises of aid, can it be held to account when the world does not live up to its end of the bargain? In the end, the way out of misery for countries like Niger is neither democracy nor increased aid alone, but a blend of the two, said Stephen Devereux, an expert on famine at the University of Sussex in Britain. Mr. Sen's phrase about famine and poverty is often misquoted to leave out the word 'functioning.' Helping young democracies become functioning nations is probably the only way to inoculate countries like Niger against catastrophe. 'Niger appears to have done everything it could,' Mr. Devereux said. 'We have to ask ourselves, what do international donors owe Niger in return? If you accept the situation that a country is so poor that it will be dependent on assistance for a long time, the responsibility for preventing famine is shared.'

Subject: Hope for Hungry Children From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 08:58:13 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/international/africa/08niger.html?ex=1281153600&en=5b8fa716e16b5871&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Hope for Hungry Children, Arriving in a Foil Packet By MICHAEL WINES MARADI, Niger - In the crowd of riotously dressed mothers clasping wailing, naked infants at a Doctors Without Borders feeding center just west of here, Taorey Asama, at 27 months, stands out for a heart-rending reason: she looks like a normal baby. Many of the others have the skeletal frames and baggy skin of children with severe malnutrition. The good news is that a month ago, so did Taorey. 'When she came here, she was all small and curled up,' said her mother, Henda, 30. 'It's Plumpy'nut that's made her like this. She's immense!' Never heard of Plumpy'nut? Come to Maradi, a bustling crossroads where the number of malnourished children exceeds even the flocks of motor scooters flitting down its dirt streets. At this epicenter of Niger's latest hunger crisis, Plumpy'nut is saving lives, perhaps including Taorey's. Plumpy'nut, which comes in a silvery foil package the size of two grasping baby-size hands, is 500 calories of fortified peanut butter, a beige paste about as thick as mashed potatoes and stuffed with milk, vitamins and minerals. But that is akin to calling a 1945 Mouton Rothschild fortified grape juice. Since the packets came into the hands of relief organizations during the Darfur crisis in Sudan, they have been revolutionizing emergency care for severely malnourished children who are old enough to take solid food, by taking care out of crowded field hospitals and straight into mothers' homes. The prescription given to mothers here is simple: give one baby two packets of Plumpy'nut each day. Watch him wolf them down. Wait for him to grow. Which he will, almost immediately: badly malnourished babies can gain one to two pounds a week eating Plumpy'nut. 'This product, it's beyond opinion - it's documented, it's scientific fact,' Dr. Milton Tectonidis, a Paris-based nutrition specialist for Doctors Without Borders, said in an interview here. 'We've seen it working. With this one product, we can treat three-quarters of children on an outpatient basis. Before, we had to hospitalize them all and give them fortified milk.' Traditional malnutrition therapy hospitalizes the tots, nursing them to health with steady infusions of vitamin-laced milk. Then they are sent home with powdered milk formula to complete their recovery. It works well, but milk is costly, must be mixed from water and is prone to spoiling. And when mothers prepare the formula with the dirty water all too common in impoverished villages, babies get sick. In comparison, Plumpy'nut - the name melds the words 'plump' and 'peanut' - costs less than the milk formula, has a two-year shelf life and need not be mixed with anything. Its sealed packaging and thick consistency make it a poor home for disease-causing germs that thrive in milk. Perhaps most revolutionary, however, is that mothers, not doctors, can give it to their toddlers. That not only reduces costs, but also frees the doctors to treat the sickest children, who often suffer not just from malnutrition, but also from diseases like malaria or dysentery. The usual course of treatment is four weeks of Plumpy'nut, costing about $20, along with grain-based food like Unimix, a vitamin-packed flour that can be made into the porridge many Africans eat. But some children return to health in as little as two weeks. The product is the brainchild of a French scientist, André Briend, who had labored in vain for years to concoct a ready-to-eat nutrition supplement, until serendipity - a bottle of the popular Nutella breakfast spread on his kitchen table - led him to try a paste instead using candy bars and other kinds of food. Later, Nutriset, a French company that specializes in making food supplements for relief work, began packaging the formula under the name Plumpy'nut. For three months, Doctors Without Borders has been handing out week-long supplies of Plumpy'nut, 14 foil packets in a black plastic grocery sack, at its five outpatient feeding centers in Maradi and 21 centers elsewhere in Niger. Not everyone gets it: newcomer babies are weighed and measured, and only those whose weight is dramatically below normal for their height qualify. Those who are too ill for outpatient care go to a nearby field hospital. About 700 babies are being treated in Maradi, and about 130 more arrive for screening each day, of which perhaps 80 are accepted and given an ankle bracelet - their ticket, so to speak, good for a weekly trip to the center for more foil packs, bags of grain and cooking oil. Across the area of hunger in Niger, about 5,000 children spread across 32 feeding centers are being given the packets. Theodore Bitangi, a 33-year-old nurse who oversees the Maradi feeding centers, says that the program is growing almost as rapidly as its patients. 'When they come in, the state they're in, they look like embryos. They're so small sometimes,' he said. 'And after taking Plumpy'nut, they look like real babies.' Mothers who have been feeding the paste to their babies would hardly disagree. 'As soon as I got him home, he started eating it - every day, aggressively,' Idrissa, 24, who has no last name, said of her 2-year-old son. 'And after three days, I could see a big difference. The change was abrupt.' Her son, who refused to open his eyes before starting the Plumpy'nut regimen one week ago, has added fat under his sagging skin and, when his packet is finished, cries for another. 'I don't know how to express it,' Idrissa said. 'I'm so happy.' Raham, 45, who has no last name, walks an hour each way to the clinic from her village, Madata, to pick up a weekly bag of Plumpy'nut for her year-old son, Safia Ibrahim. 'It's no problem to walk that far,' she said, 'because it's for the health of my baby. And there's nothing to eat in our village.' One of the virtues of Plumpy'nut is that it can be made almost anywhere with local materials and a slurry of vitamins and minerals prepared by Nutriset. Versions of the same product are being manufactured in Malawi and in Niger's capital, Niamey, and Nutriset has welcomed the notion of local partners - from charities to women's groups - who might make Plumpy'nut under license or even as franchisees. Which raises a question: if Plumpy'nut is good enough to give malnourished children in food emergencies, why not give it to the countless thousands of children in Niger who are hungry when the world's attention is directed elsewhere? The United Nations reports that 150,000 children under age 5 in Niger are severely malnourished, and another 650,000 moderately malnourished - all together, about one in five. Malnutrition is a factor in 60 percent of deaths of children younger than 5 - and in Niger, more than a quarter of all children never reach their fifth birthday. Fourteen packets a week times 150,000 children times 4 weeks is a lot of Plumpy'nut. But then, says Dr. Tectonidis, it is not the mathematics, or even the nutrition science, that is the hard part. It is keeping the world's eyes focused on solving Niger's everyday hunger problem once the television coverage of this crisis has ended. 'We know what's needed in terms of malnutrition,' he said. 'It's just the will that's lacking.'

Subject: Nomads Agonize as Livestock Die From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:01:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/07/international/africa/06cnd-niger.html?ex=1281067200&en=80d1752d9c813567&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Niger's Nomads Agonize as Livestock Die By MICHAEL WINES ZOURARE, Niger - With his black burnoose and piercing tan eyes set in angular, leathery features, Ali Yougouda is the very picture of a Tuareg, a stoic nomad who juggles two wives, 10 children and life on the Sahara's fringes without breaking a sweat. Until he talks about his herd. In May, he was tending 68 head of cattle and sheep. Today he has 18 cows and bulls. He is devastated, bereft. 'The first two died of pneumonia,' he said, crouching beneath a tree in this remote mud-hut village. 'Then the rest started to die slowly, from hunger, because all they could find in their stomachs was sand. The last one died two weeks ago.' Mr. Yougouda, 40, epitomizes another side of Niger's hunger crisis: the devastation it has wrought on this nation's legendary nomads and herders. Mr. Yougouda's Tuareg tribe, known as the Kel Ouawar-Gadabeji, has suffered hunger and privation from the scattered rains that reduced last autumn's harvest and the food stocks that normally see them through the long dry season. But the hundreds of tribespeople in this village have so far survived. Not so their livestock, which the herdsmen have pushed farther and farther afield in search of green pastures. Weak from the trek, their stomachs filled with grit from pulling the few tufts of grass from the sandy earth, thousands of the animals have simply lain down to die in recent months. The carcasses of long-curve-horned cattle dot the landscape on the sole path to the village, an hour's bone-cracking journey via four-by-four from the nearest dirt road. The losses not only threaten the centuries-old tradition of the Tuareg and other nomads like the Fulani, also known as the Peulh. It is a personal blow, even a humiliation, for a people who regard their animals almost as kin. 'We treat them like brothers and sisters,' said Amadou Abou, the elder brother of the village chief here. 'We're inseparable. It's a tragedy because we have lost what is most dear to us - an animal, a brother.' A handful of international charities, including Oxfam and CARE International, are rushing to the nomads' aid with food, money and more livestock. But the nomads, scattered across Niger's vast rural stretches, are not easy to find, much less to reach. 'The situation is extremely grave for the Tuareg, because they live from their cattle,' said Illiassou Adamou, who heads CARE's office in Maradi, just south of one of the worst-hit areas. 'When you lose a bovine, it takes five years to raise another to replace it. When you lose cattle this year, even if the situation is good next year, it's still a critical situation.' While rains are somewhat better, the past months' dry spell is still snuffing out the livelihoods of thousands of herders across Niger, especially around Dakoro, a regional center where 40,000 people live, and where rains have been spotty for two years straight. The Tuareg and Fulani, in their flowing burnooses and conical, feathered hats, have ranged across the area for centuries with their cattle, sheep, donkeys and goats, following rain and fresh grass in the lands just below the Sahara. They seldom eat their charges, preferring to live off their milk and to sell them for money to buy the sorghum and millet that anchor their diets. The reduced rains have dealt these nomads a triple whammy. The grains on which they rely have skyrocketed in price. The postharvest leavings of sorghum and millet plants - on which their herds rely - became equally scarce. The grasslands that supplement the animals' diets also shrank. And what forage and crops remained was seized upon last autumn by swarms of locusts that descended in clouds and, the nomads say, denuded the landscape. Those nomads who drove their herds south toward Nigeria, where rains were better, often suffered few losses. Those who chased rumors of rain in the north, around Dakoro, were just as frequently wiped out. 'Survive? Did we survive?' asked Mr. Abou, the chief's thin, balding elder brother. 'The remnants of plants and the livestock we had, that's how we survived.' When money ran out to buy cheap foodfrom the more urban south, he said, tribespeople resorted to boiling leaves and roots plucked out of the ground. Mr. Yougouda, the black-robed herdsman, lost all 30 of his sheep and 20 of his 38 cows after months of roaming in a futile hunt for green pastures. 'Sometimes we had to pull the cow up, because he had given up,' he said. Some would call him lucky. In Bargas, perhaps 20 miles east of Zourare, Souley Gorba, 28, took 100 sheep, 70 cows and 20 goats to hunt for pasture last October. He returned in June with 11 animals. 'I went south, all the way to Saboumachi' - about 50 miles - 'and I stayed there five months,' Mr. Gorba said. 'Then I realized that it was every bit as bad as where I had come from.' By February, he said, his herd was growing sick from hunger. He began selling cows to raise money to feed the rest - and saw prices plummet in June to $25 a head from hundreds of dollars per head. In a sense, the Tuareg and Fulani are used to this: the Sahel region of central Africa, just south of the Sahara, suffers a cyclical drought that thins herds and reduces food stocks roughly every 10 years. The worst in memory came in 1984, when a crop failure led to a food and forage shortfall that made headlines the next year, and briefly put African hunger atop the list of global priorities. This summer, Oxfam is giving thousands of herders vouchers for food and other vital goods in exchange for needed work like collecting animal carcasses and cutting trenches in fields to prevent erosion, until the hunger crisis eases. The charity also is buying up weakened animals for slaughter at nearly triple the market price. That not only frees up scarce pasture for stronger animals, but helps slow the steep drop in prices for cattle - and gives hungry families enough money to buy 220 pounds of millet. CARE takes another tack, giving groups of herders new cattle - two females and a male - which are passed on to other herders as they produce calves. Mr. Amadou of CARE calls the latest crisis a temporary blow for the nomads, who he says will roam Niger 'as long as the world exists.' Some may, but the Fulani nomad, Mr. Gorba, may not be one of them. After losing nearly 200 head of livestock, he and his wife rented land from a farmer this year and began learning how to grow millet. The loss of his animals, he said, is a grief that equals the loss of his parents, and the loss of his heritage is an ache inside him. 'It is my great worry that I will not be able to get enough animals to have a herd again,' he said Friday, standing in the shade of a mud wall at a market set up by Oxfam to trade vouchers for food and other essentials. 'I haven't any idea how to do it.' But 'I can't miss the life of a nomad,' he said, 'because I will never give it up. I will be sedentary. But in my heart, I will be a nomad.'

Subject: Anguish Is Reflected in Its Children From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:06:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/international/africa/05niger.html?ex=1280894400&en=a463fb08164b91ec&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Niger's Anguish Is Reflected in Its Dying Children By MICHAEL WINES ELKOKIYA, Niger - At sunset Wednesday, in an unmarked grave in a cemetery rimmed by millet fields, the men of this mud-walled village buried Baby Boy Saminou, the latest casualty of the hunger ravaging 3.6 million farmers and herders in this destitute nation. At 16 months, he was little bigger than some newborns, with the matchstick limbs and skeletal ribs of the severely malnourished. He had died three hours earlier in the intensive care unit of a field hospital run by Doctors Without Borders, where 30 others like him still lie with their mothers on metal cots. One in five is dying - the result, many say, of a belated response by the outside world to a disaster predicted in detail nine months ago. Niger's latest hunger problem, like Baby Boy Saminou's tragedy, is more complex than it first appears. As aid begins to trickle into some of the nearly 4,000 villages across southern Niger that need help - the vanguard of a flood of food brought forth by television images of shrunken babies - the rich world's response to Niger's worst nutrition crisis since the 1985 famine is, in fact, proving too late for many. Unseen on television, however, are the shrunken infants who die all but unnoticed even in so-called normal years. Of each 1,000 children born alive in this, the world's second-poorest nation, a staggering 262 fail to reach their fifth birthdays. Five of Baby Boy Saminou's seven brothers and sisters were among them. The longest-surviving of those who died reached 4 years of age. Asked what killed the last three, Saminou's father, Saidou Ida, said simply, 'Malnutrition.' International aid officials and charity workers here say that the world's dilatory reaction to Niger's woes is hard to excuse. Some of them also say that Niger's miseries this year are merely a worsened version of its perennial ones - and that until Niger addresses its problems of primitive farming, primitive health care and primitive social conditions, infants will continue to die unnoticed in numbers that dwarf any hunger emergency. 'That is the bigger question that both Niger and the international community, everyone, needs to answer,' Marcus Prior, the West Africa spokesman for the World Food Program, said in an interview in Maradi, the regional city where little Saminou died. 'We feel that we've tried to raise awareness. But at the same time, this is something that's a recurring problem.' That it is a perennial problem, Mr. Prior and others stress, in no way minimizes the urgency of Niger's current disaster - erratic rainfall and severe food shortages in the agricultural and herding belts where many of Niger's 11 million to 12 million people live. Together, they are pushing the death rate for small children even higher than Niger's customary one-in-four level, and killing off the livestock upon which the nation's nomads depend. How many people need aid depends on the yardstick used. About 1.2 million of Niger's 3.6 million rural farmers and herders are described as 'extremely vulnerable' to food shortages and in need of food aid, according to an assessment of Niger's crisis conducted four months ago by the United Nations, major charities and Niger's government. Of those, about 874,000 urgently need free food, the latest assessment concluded late last month, and that number could rise until the harvest is completed in October. But that does not mean that nearly 900,000 people will starve; the vast bulk of the hungry will somehow survive. Most of those who do die will be young children. But even among those, most will not die of starvation. 'Children will likely die from malnourishment, but a substantial proportion is probably dying from conditions related to poor water quality, or other non-food-related problems,' FEWS Net, a famine warning service financed with United States assistance, reported late last month. Much of this disaster was suspected last November, when experts monitoring Niger's farms found a 220,000-ton shortfall - about 7.5 percent of the normal crop - in the harvest of grains, especially the millet that is the staple of most people's diet. Among others, the United Nations World Food Program and Doctors Without Borders sounded alarms, and Niger's government, with World Food Program approval, quickly asked donors to give Niger 71,000 tons of food aid and $3 million for the 400,000 most vulnerable farmers and herders. By May, it had received fewer than 7,000 tons of food and one $323,000 donation, from Luxembourg. 'I think everyone knew that a crisis was going on,' said Johanne Sekkenes, the Niger mission head of Doctors Without Borders, in an interview in Niamey, the capital. 'But the answer given at the time, from governments and international agencies in Niger, was that the ongoing, normal development programs should be reinforced.' Niger's government ruled out both free food aid and health care to hungry families, preferring to sell surplus millet at subsidized prices in an effort to force the price of scarce millet down. But millet prices skyrocketed, forcing families to sell cattle and other goods to buy food. The charity has angrily accused governments of allowing children to die, albeit not intentionally, so that the free market in grain would not be disrupted. Others say that Niger is on a steady course toward future disasters, free aid or not. Even with huge numbers of dying children, the average woman bears seven babies, and the population is growing at a rate that by 2026 will double the number of people on a land that already is straining its capacity. Moreover, Niger has few of the modern tools that might enable it to feed itself, meaning that charities must make up a food shortage virtually every year. 'You've seen the kind of tools people use to farm,' Mr. Prior said. 'You've seen the lack of irrigation and the total dependency on what falls from the sky. I doubt you've seen any fertilizer or modern technology being used.' When the rainy season arrived in June, bringing malaria and other diseases with it, children weakened by lack of food began to fall ill and die in numbers even greater than in normal years. Doctors Without Borders has treated more than 14,000 children at six centers this year, more than double the 2004 total. It has nearly 5,000 under treatment today. Admissions at its centers rose by a quarter from mid-July to August. Among the newcomers was Baby Boy Saminou, whose 40-year-old mother, Mariama, brought him to the charity's Maradi hospital Wednesday from her village of about 2,500, down a rutted road 15 miles away. The boy was receiving free food, and had visited the Doctors Without Borders clinic five days earlier with a mouth infection. But his condition worsened last weekend. 'I didn't even have time to talk to her, the baby was so bad,' Chantelle Umtoni, 34, the chief of the intensive care ward, said as she watched the mother and child from her desk Wednesday afternoon. 'He has severe anemia. He has severe malaria. He was dehydrated - completely dry. And he had heart failure.' Indeed, doctors restarted his heart as they plugged bags of blood and intravenous fluid into him and clapped an oxygen mask on his face to assist his labored breathing. Dr. Umtoni said she gave the boy a 50-50 chance of living. Dire as they are, such cases are not unusual. 'We average 30, 35 children every day,' she said. 'All of them are malnourished, severely malnourished. That's already a severe disease by itself. Add atop that malaria and anemia, and they come in a bit too late.' Mariama sat by her child, draped in the same brilliant orange-and-green cloth she wore, and watched him as she toted up her family. Of eight children, five were dead. The two survivors, she said, are 15 and 17 years old. As she spoke, a nurse, Boraka Abdou, put a stethoscope to the baby's chest, listened, then summoned Dr. Umtoni. She listened intently. Then, wordlessly, the two removed his oxygen mask and catheters. Mariama stared at her dead child, impassive, then covered him in a red scarf. An hour later, she was home, having ridden the 15 miles with her baby in her arms, tears running down her face. Outside her compound, she gave the dead child to her mother-in-law, who washed its face. Then she sat on a wooden bowl used to grind millet and wailed, inconsolable. Women, hearing the news, came to grieve with her. The two women bathed Baby Boy Saminou and wrapped him in a white T-shirt for a traditional Islamic burial. The village chief, Moussa Djidji, said that at least 10 of the village's children had died since January.

Subject: Meanwhile, People Starve From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:09:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/opinion/14sun2.html?ex=1281672000&en=774fc0dbb87c3106&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Meanwhile, People Starve Were it not for Hilary Andersson, a BBC television journalist, Niger's starving people would very likely be getting as little attention as the starving citizens of nearby Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. Her wrenching report from Niger, where more than three million people are now in danger of starving to death, set off a worldwide aid effort that a year of United Nations warnings could not. Had attention been paid sooner, lives could have been saved, at one-eightieth - that's right, one-eightieth - what it will cost today. And easy, affordable steps that could prevent such scenes elsewhere, like a proposed United Nations $500 million emergency response fund, haven't been taken. Niger, one of the world's poorest countries, has long lived at the mercy of an unforgiving climate, and the destruction of last year's crops through drought and crop-eating locusts is the main cause of its present plight. The usual contributors to famine elsewhere, like war, dictatorship or crackpot economic theories, are notably absent. Niger's government is democratically elected and President Mamadou Tandja's orthodox budget-balancing and market-opening policies are regularly praised by Western leaders and international lenders. Regrettably, Mr. Tandja has an unhealthy tendency to take that orthodoxy too far, to his people's detriment. In April, with the famine already gathering force, he imposed food tax increases as part of a budget-balancing package. Amid widespread protests, he later backed off. But in an interview with the BBC last week, he insisted that his people 'look well-fed' and that reports to the contrary were 'false propaganda' being spread by aid agencies to attract funding. For the historically minded, his bizarre insensitivity to his people's suffering evokes parallels with Ireland's deadly famine of more than a century and a half ago, where the rigid laissez-faire ideology of the ruling British authorities made the bad problem of a failed potato crop needlessly worse. Then, locally grown grains were sold abroad for profit while millions of Irish peasants were allowed to starve. Today, market stalls in Maradi, a major trading center of Niger, are piled high with food for the few who can afford it, while elsewhere in the same city thousands of starving and desperate people jostle for scarce relief supplies. The Nobel Prize-winning economist, Amartya Sen, has taught, rightly, that 'no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.' Functioning is the key word; leaders who are truly accountable to their people have strong incentives to take timely preventive action. Mr. Tandja, whom President Bush hailed at the White House this June as an exemplary democrat, clearly needs a refresher course in humane economics and accountable democracy.

Subject: Many Going to College Are Not Ready From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 08:50:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/education/17scores.html Many Going to College Are Not Ready, Report Says By TAMAR LEWIN Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests. The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science. 'It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college,' Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday. ACT sets its college-readiness benchmarks - including the reading comprehension benchmark, which is new this year - by correlating earlier students' ACT scores with grades they actually received as college freshmen. Based on that data, the benchmarks indicate the skill level at which a student has a 70 percent likelihood of earning a C or better, and a 50 percent chance of earning a B or better. Among those who took the 2005 test, only 51 percent achieved the benchmark in reading, 26 percent in science, and 41 percent in math; the figure for English was 68 percent. Results from the new optional ACT writing test, which was not widely taken this year, were not included in the report. About 40 percent of the nation's 2005 high school graduates took the ACT, and the average overall score, 20.9 of a possible 36, was unchanged from the year before. But Dr. Ferguson found it heartening that scores were holding even, given that the pool of test takers had become so much larger and more diverse, in part because both Illinois and Colorado now use the ACT to test all students, even those who do not see themselves as college-bound. Minority students now make up 27 percent of all ACT test takers, up from 24 percent in the class of 2001. The number of Hispanic test takers has grown 40 percent in that period, and the number of African-American test takers 23 percent. Caucasians taking the test have increased by only 2 percent. 'It's wonderful that more and more students who might not have considered college several years ago are now making plans for education beyond high school,' Dr. Ferguson said. But it is a source of concern, he said, that too many students are not taking the kind of rigorous high school courses that will prepare them for college. In fact, only 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT had completed the recommended core curriculum for college-bound students: four years of English and three years each of social studies, science and math at the level of algebra or higher. Those who do complete the core curriculum are far more likely to meet college readiness standards, Dr. Ferguson said, but the percentage who complete that core has been falling. 'The message doesn't seem to be getting though,' he said. The ACT report highlighted other worrisome trends as well, including a continuing decline in the percentage of students planning to major in engineering, computer science and education. And at a time when more women than men go to college, Dr. Ferguson said, it is also a matter of concern that 56 percent of this year's graduates who took the ACT were female, and only 44 percent male. As in previous years, men had higher average math and science scores, and women higher averages scores in English and reading.

Subject: Oil and Indonesia's Economic Stability From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 06:07:09 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/business/worldbusiness/17indo.html Oil Worries Challenge Indonesia's Economic Stability By WAYNE ARNOLD Indonesia's oil troubles are coming home to roost, posing a growing challenge to President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's ability to maintain economic stability. Indonesia is a member of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, and oil and natural gas are among the country's largest sources of export revenue. But red tape, legal uncertainty and past political turmoil have turned Indonesia into a net oil importer, and companies have shied away from investing in new oil wells or refineries. At $65 a barrel, oil has become as big a threat to Indonesia's economic health as it is to that of the United States or Europe. Analysts are increasingly divided as to whether Mr. Yudhoyono will be able to keep Indonesia on course or whether oil prices will join the list of calamities buffeting the country, including terrorist attacks, the December tsunami, bird flu, the reappearance of polio and spreading forest fires that have sent a pall of acrid haze across Southeast Asia in the last two weeks. The president did little to settle that debate yesterday, when he told Parliament that oil prices remained a threat and that while he expected the economy to grow 6.2 percent next year, it would do little to reduce unemployment and poverty. Like its neighbors Malaysia and Thailand, Indonesia subsidizes the price of fuel to keep it affordable for citizens. All three countries are now moving to pass along the higher oil prices to consumers. 'The fuel price hike policy will indeed increase the burden of the people, and may even cause an increase of poverty,' Mr. Yudhoyono said. But, saying he pursued the policy with 'a heavy heart,' he predicted that if oil prices remain where they are, Indonesia would have to spend more than 140 trillion rupiahs on subsidies this year. Indonesia spent 73 trillion rupiahs ($7.4 billion) on fuel subsidies last year. 'The burden for fuel subsidy that we must bear will swell along with the price hike of international crude oil,' he said. Oddly, it is just that kind of candor that is generating optimism among foreign investors and analysts about Indonesia despite its many problems. Indeed, approved foreign direct investment rose 79 percent in the first seven months of this year, to $6.64 billion, according to Dow Jones. 'This government has identified publicly many of the same problems that businesses have identified,' said James W. Castle, president of the business consultancy Castle Asia in Jakarta. 'In the past, there was always this feeling of denial. Now at least we're talking the same language.' Analysts also say that one of Mr. Yudhoyono's biggest obstacles remains getting the country's lumbering bureaucracy to enact his policies. Yesterday, he reiterated his pledge to eradicate corruption and shake up the government machinery. In addition to filing 233 lawsuits charging corruption, he said he would seek changes in government salaries, professionalism, productivity and 'the increase of discipline and work ethos.' Pessimists say the bureaucracy is holding up many of the foreign investment pledges being made. 'All the hoopla over F.D.I. coming to Indonesia hasn't come through,' said Harry Su, head of research at BNP Paribas in Jakarta, referring to foreign direct investment. New toll roads and other infrastructure projects, for example, are being held up as bureaucrats and investors wrangle over terms, analysts say. Emblematic of the hurdles in Indonesia's crucial oil and gas sector, analysts say, is the dispute delaying development of oil fields near the central Javan town of Cepu. With more than 600 million barrels of oil, Cepu could firmly re-establish Indonesia as an oil exporter. But Exxon Mobil and Indonesia's state oil company Pertamina have been locked in negotiations since 2001 over how to split revenues from the field. Mr. Yudhoyono indicated in his address yesterday that a deal had been concluded, but details have yet to emerge despite reports of a preliminary agreement in late June. This week, Indonesia reported that its economy slowed to 5.5 percent in the second quarter compared with the period a year ago, from 6.2 percent in the first quarter. The second-quarter figure was below the government target of 6 percent for the year, the pace economists and policy makers agree is the minimum necessary to absorb new entrants into the job market and reduce poverty in the restive archipelago, the world's most populous Muslim nation. Faltering investment in oil and gas showed up as a 2.9 percent drop in overall mining output. But optimists were encouraged by the data, noting that other sectors were performing well. 'It's not really a broad-based slowdown,' said Chua Hak Bin, senior regional economist at DBS Bank in Singapore. 'I find it difficult to be too alarmist.' But pessimists caution that rising fuel prices are pushing up prices for other goods and services, auguring ill for consumer spending. Inflation in July rose to 7.8 percent. Still, the optimists say that Mr. Yudhoyono deserves more credit - and time. 'You've got to give the government more benefit of the doubt and, unfortunately, be more patient,' Mr. Castle said. 'Indonesia's problems are so deep and profound.'

Subject: Productivity Is the Issue of the Hour From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 05:59:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/business/08fed.html?ex=1281153600&en=50ea97eaa01ab06b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Productivity Is the Issue of the Hour for the Fed By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON - Ten years ago, Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, broke with conventional wisdom and correctly recognized that the United States had entered an era of faster growth in productivity. It was a huge shift that allowed the Fed to encourage faster economic growth and increased prosperity without significant inflation. But as Mr. Greenspan prepares to retire, probably by early January, the Federal Reserve faces a slowdown from the torrid pace of productivity in the past several years. As shown by the big jump in jobs during July, up 207,000 from June, and the more than 1.3 million jobs added this year, the pool of unemployed workers is dwindling and wages are rising faster than productivity. The big question for the Federal Reserve is whether the lull is simply a return to the average pace since 1995 or a return to the doldrums that prevailed from the early 1970's to the early 1990's. With economic growth strong and labor costs rising, Fed officials are all but certain to raise short-term interest rates on Tuesday to 3.5 percent and to increase them again to at least 4 percent by the end of the year as they grope toward a neutral monetary policy. The issue of productivity growth lies behind much of the debate. If output climbs more slowly than labor costs, companies will be under pressure to raise prices. If output rises in line with labor costs, whether because of new technology or new ways of doing business, wages and employment can rise without contributing to inflation. Productivity growth has slowed sharply in the last year, but Fed officials and most outside specialists said this was to be expected. Productivity often surges in the early part of an economic recovery, as companies rush to meet higher demand but are still too nervous to add workers, and then slows as employment picks up. The issue for Fed officials is the long-term trend. From about 1973 to 1995, productivity rose an average of 1.5 percent a year. But the pace nearly doubled after 1995, to almost 3 percent, as major advances in technology spurred big drops in the cost of computing power and companies invested heavily in information technology. Productivity growth shot up to 4 percent a year from 2001 through 2004. Employers shaken by the recession of 2001 and then uncertainties tied to terrorism and war sought and found ways to increase production without hiring workers. And because many companies overspent on technology in the 1990's, they were able to generate new efficiencies without additional investment in the years that followed. The superheated productivity, which caused anemic job growth for three years, appears to be ending. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, hourly wages for nonfarm businesses climbed at an annual rate of 10.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2004 - the biggest jump in almost five years - and by 6.3 percent in the first three months of this year. Unit labor costs, or the cost of labor for a given amount of output, went down in 2001 and 2002 but have climbed sharply since the middle of last year. So far, productivity has remained strong - 4 percent in 2004, for the third year in a row, and 2.9 percent in the first quarter of 2005. Fed economists say they believe the normal rate of productivity growth in the new era is about 2.5 percent. But Mr. Greenspan recently cautioned that predictions were difficult, because the pace of productivity growth depends heavily on the pace of technological innovation. 'Over the past decade, the U.S. economy has benefited from a remarkable acceleration of productivity,' Mr. Greenspan told the Senate Banking Committee last month. 'But experience suggests that such rapid advances are unlikely to be maintained in an economy that has reached the cutting edge of technology.' Mr. Greenspan and other Fed officials have noted that there are some possible red flags. One measure of technological innovation is the drop in prices for computing power and communications. Those declines have been much smaller in recent years than they were in the boom years of the late 90's. According to the Commerce Department Bureau of Economic Analysis, which prepares the government's growth statistics, technology prices are falling much slower now than in the 1990's. Prices for computer equipment, adjusted for increases in processing power, plunged by more than 23 percent a year from 1995 through 1999. But since 2000, the declines have slowed to about 10 percent - roughly where they were before the big productivity boom. A similar pattern holds for prices on a broader array of information and communications technology. 'The rate of technical change, which is the most difficult thing to measure, seems to be slowing from the unprecedented pace of a few years ago,' said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Economy.com. The issue is important to future productivity, because many analysts say they believe that plunging technology prices were responsible - along with the dot-com stock market bubble - for a big part of the huge investment in such equipment during the 1990's. Mr. Zandi added that investment in technology, though strong, was not as strong as it was when the productivity boom took off. As a share of gross domestic product, investment in equipment and software has slipped from about 9 percent in the late 1990's to 8 percent today. But in a paper published last December by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a trio of economists predicted that technology would keep productivity growth about 2.6 percent. Dale Jorgenson, a professor at Harvard and a co-author of the study, said last week, 'We are experiencing productivity growth that is very high by historic standards, and there is nothing on the horizon to slow it down,' The biggest risk, he cautioned, is not that innovation will slow down but that the United States is too dependent on foreign capital for its investments. 'Productivity is zooming along because of the investment, but we are not financing much of this ourselves,' he said.

Subject: Productivity and Investment From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 05:56:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: We have come to the astonishing point of zero household saving, and it is saving that provides for investment. American investment then is coming from corporations and from international sources. Corporations however are investing less than in the 1990s, and international investment cannot make up for lack of household saving and cannot be reliable.

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa aka David To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 08:38:07 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: The Production Function Y = AF(K(:=I) = f(interest-rate),H,N) 'Where K, H and N denote the imputs of capital, human capital and labour and A denotes the state of technology. The production function AF(K,H,N) in this equation states that the output produced depends on factor inputs K, H and N and on the state of technology. Increases in factor inputs and improved technology lead to an increase in output supply.'

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa alias El Gringo To: Pancho Villa aka David Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:03:13 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: BTW, U may also include in this equation another, in my opinion, quite important parameter, namely parameter gnao. Gnao = f(If / Id). Gnao is in fact the ratio between foreign investments and domestic investments and could be a factor to describe the effectiveness of whole I, bla, bla, bla, bla, etc. etc.

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Emma To: Pancho Villa alias El Gringo Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:19:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Interesting to think about from an historical perspective. Always go on with the 'blas,' for they are important.

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 10:49:00 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Dear Emma, '...from an historical, psychological, political, social, mathematical, of course, economical perspective (bla, bla, bla, bla)'

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 10:52:24 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Oops, forgot the 'cultural' perspective, mea culpa

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 14:11:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please explain these remarks a bit. Understanding productivity is important but difficult. Where are you pointing?

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 15:45:25 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Terri, I think that the best way to understand the notion of the, economically seen, difficult term 'productivity' lies first, within the intellectual attempt at grasping the complex combination(s) of all the factors I evoked in the previuos post (bla, blah, bla...)

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Terri To: Pancho Villa Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 18:30:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Understood. When I think you are playing, I should know that you are actually making a shrewd point. I am impressed as usual, and learning to always think with you. Nice.

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Emma To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 19:09:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Then, you shall have your culture :)

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Pancho Villa alias The Peasant To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 19:33:53 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: Yes Emma, my 'agri-culture' ;)

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Setanta To: Pancho Villa alias The Peasant Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:59:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: pancho, in relation to your first post, whats the difference between human capital and labour? are you referring to 'brains' and 'brawn'? i thought they were captured by effort? sorry if this is a silly question, its 6 years from my last labour economics lecture and have been immersed in accounting and auditing ever since!

Subject: Re: The Production Function From: Terri To: Setanta Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 07:22:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Human capital or labor are the same production factor with different titles.

Subject: Another Methane Move From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 05:54:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/18/opinion/18thu3.html Another Methane Move Unless you live in the Rocky Mountain West, it's hard to realize just how pervasive the push for new petroleum leases in that region really is. Although a vast amount of land is already under lease - and most of those leases have not been developed - the cry in the oil and gas community is for still more access to new territory. The Bush administration has been encouraging this constant push for more drilling, almost entirely without regard to other values. A case in point is the growing pressure to open Valle Vidal, a part of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico, to coal-bed methane development. Valle Vidal is an open expanse of valleys and alpine meadows in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, often called the Yellowstone of the southern Rockies. It was given to the nation by Pennzoil in 1982 to be managed as a wildlife habitat, and it is home to the largest elk herd in New Mexico. The move to open nearly half of it - some 40,000 acres - to coal-bed methane drilling is being proposed by El Paso Corporation, which was one of the chief companies involved in the California energy crisis several years ago. There is coal-bed methane development on private land nearby, but the thought of drilling in Valle Vidal has created an unusual coalition of opponents. Even the former head of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association opposes it. There is a chance that with concerted public opposition, this particular drilling plan can be stopped. But the Valle Vidal situation is a reminder that the oil and gas industry - particularly the coal-bed methane sector - sees no natural limits to the expansion of its leases, no matter how pristine or environmentally significant the land it covets may be. The White House has given the industry no reason to consider restraint. Its energy policy is based entirely on expansion, extraction and consumption, with little thought for conservation or the environment.

Subject: Productivity From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 05:40:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Continuing to read and think about the productivity issue, I am increasingly troubled by suggestions that the productivity growth spurt of the last decade may be slowing to the average of 1975 to 1995. There will be several articles in coming day on the issue and we should pay attention, for our well being depends largely on productivity.

Subject: Thoughts on Niger From: Mik To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 15:41:18 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Emma, I don't know much about Niger as my expertise is in English and Portuguese speaking Africa. My first thought (which could be wrong) on the principle of 'Functioning Democracy' in Africa is unfortunately very cynical (here we go again - but I will end off with a positive example this time). Most 'democracies' in Africa are NOT true functioning democracies. Not even South Africa which saw open and fair elections with a change of president. Africa is (in general) still run by tribes. And people vote in their tribal leaders. For this reason, no matter how bad the leader may be, he will still be voted in because he represents the majority tribe. In Uganda we saw something interesting. The majority tribe is located in the North of the country and are Idi Amin supporters (that is how Idi Amin came to power in the first place). There are two more tribes in the South and the people in the south realised that by coming together they are a majority. So they vote for Museveni (who is the current president of Uganda). They will always vote for Museveni because he will represent their tribes (and they don't want to be ruled by any other tribal leader). Luckily a lot of these leaders are behaving themselves due to international pressure. But they slip up every so often as it appears in Niger. In South Africa, the majority tribe is the Xhosa and the most feared tribe is the Zulu. The Zulu tribe has their own political representation, but the remaining tribes vote along with the Xhosa tribe for the ANC. And we can be sure that the ANC will remain in power for as long as the population of Xhosas is the largest (which appears to be forever). We hope that with time and improved education, tribal links will diminish and more pure democracy will flourish. Now for the positive side: There is one country in Africa that is truly democratic. In fact it is the oldest democracy in Africa and actually the most succesful country in Africa.... Botswana. This country with a mere 1.4 million people has only one tribe. So competing politicians are evaluated on their political strength, not tribal relation. For a country that is almost entirely desert, has to import most of its water and import all its electricity, they are not only per capita the richest but the most progressive country in Africa. They are actually the true model for Africa's future. So when done properly, democracy works well.

Subject: Re: Thoughts on Niger From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 15:43:21 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: An excellent response to articles on Niger. I am thinking and talking about the points your have made, and I did find the response this morning but it is always helpful to check for I might have missed. Excellent.

Subject: Re: Thoughts on Niger From: RL To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 07:25:00 (EDT) Email Address: rafaelloring@yahoo.es Message: Emma could you re-post your original post on Niger? Thanks RL

Subject: Re: Thoughts on Niger From: Emma To: RL Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 19:08:11 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: A pleasure :)

Subject: An Investor's Puzzle From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 14:42:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: There is an investor's puzzle I am well aware of but sort of wish to wish away. Inflation leaving out energy is no problem, but with energy there is a problem. So too, corporate profits are fine including energy but not fine otherwise. If we have an economy driven by housing, we increasingly have an energy company driven stock market.

Subject: Philosopher of Optimism Endures From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 12:41:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/books/17wils.html Philosopher of Optimism Endures Negative Deluge By BRAD SPURGEON GORRAN HAVEN, Britain - Any intellectual who divides opinion as much as Colin Wilson has for almost 50 years must be onto something, even if it is only whether humans should be pessimistic or optimistic. Mr. Wilson, who turned 74 in June and whose autobiography, 'Dreaming to Some Purpose,' recently appeared in paperback from Arrow, describes in the first chapter how he made his own choice. The son of working-class parents from Leicester - his father was in the boot and shoe trade - he was forced to quit school and go to work at 16, even though his ambition was to become 'Einstein's successor.' After a stint in a wool factory, he found a job as a laboratory assistant, but he was still in despair and decided to kill himself. On the verge of swallowing hydrocyanic acid, he had an insight: there were two Colin Wilsons, one an idiotic, self-pitying teenager and the other a thinking man, his real self. The idiot, he realized, would kill them both. 'In that moment,' he wrote, 'I glimpsed the marvelous, immense richness of reality, extending to distant horizons.' Achieving such moments of optimistic insight has been his goal and subject matter ever since, through more than 100 books, from his first success, 'The Outsider,' published in 1956, when he was declared a major existentialist thinker at 24, to the autobiography. In an interview last month at his home of nearly 50 years on the Cornish coast, Mr. Wilson was as optimistic as ever, even though his autobiography and his life's work have come under strong attack in some quarters. 'What I wanted to do was to try to create a philosophy upon a completely new foundation,' he said, sitting in his living room along with a parrot, two dogs and part of his collection of 30,000 books and as many records. 'Whereas in the past optimism had been regarded as rather shallow - because 'oh well, it's just your temperament, you happen to be just a cheerful sort of person' - what I wanted to do was to establish that in fact it is the pessimists who are allowing all kinds of errors to creep into their work.' He includes in that category writers like Hemingway and philosophers like Sartre. In books on sex, crime, psychology and the occult, and in more than a dozen novels, Mr. Wilson has explored how pessimism can rob ordinary people of their powers. 'If you asked me what is the basis of all my work,' he said, 'it's the feeling there's something basically wrong with human beings. Human beings are like grandfather clocks driven by watch springs. Our powers appear to be taken away from us by something.' The critics, particularly in Britain, have alternately called him a genius and a fool. His autobiography, published in hardcover last year, has received mixed reviews. Though lauded by some, the attacks on it and Mr. Wilson have been as virulent as those he provoked in the 1950's after he became a popular culture name with the publication of 'The Outsider.' That book dealt with alienation in thinkers, artists and men of action like T. E. Lawrence, van Gogh, Camus and Nietzsche, and caught the mood of the age. Critics, including Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee, hailed Mr. Wilson as a British version of the French existentialists. His fans ranged from Muammar el-Qaddafi to Groucho Marx, who asked his British publisher to send a copy of his own autobiography to three people in Britain: Winston Churchill, Somerset Maugham and Colin Wilson. 'The Outsider' was translated into dozens of languages and sold millions of copies. It has never been out of print. The Times of London called Mr. Wilson and John Osborne - another young working-class man, whose play 'Look Back in Anger' opened about the same time 'The Outsider' was published - 'angry young men.' That name was passed on to others of their generation, including Kingsley Amis, Alan Sillitoe and even Doris Lessing. But fame brought its own problems for Wilson. His sometimes tumultuous early personal life became fodder for gossip columnists. He was still married to his first wife while living with his future second wife, Joy. His publisher, Victor Gollancz, urged him to leave the spotlight, and he and Joy moved to Cornwall. But the publicity had done its damage. His second book, 'Religion and the Rebel,' was panned and his career looked dead. Mr. Wilson said the episode had actually saved him as a writer, however. 'Too much success gets you resting on your laurels and creates a kind of quicksand that you can't get out of,' he said. 'So I was relieved to get out of London.' He said his books were probably heading for condemnation in Britain anyway. 'I'm basically a writer of ideas, and the English aren't interested in ideas,' he said. 'The English, I'm afraid, are totally brainless. If you're a writer of ideas like Sartre or Foucault or Derrida, then the general French public know your name, whereas here in England, their equivalent in the world of philosophy wouldn't be known.' He never lost belief in the importance of his work in trying to find out how to harness human beings' full powers and wipe out gloom. 'Sartre's 'man is a useless passion,' and Camus's feeling that life is absurd, and so on, basically meant that philosophy itself had turned really pretty dark,' he said. 'I could see that there was a basic fallacy in Sartre and Camus and all of these existentialists, Heidegger and so on. The basic fallacy lay in their failure to understand the actual foundation of the problem.' That foundation, he said, is that human perception is intentional; the pessimists themselves paint their world black. Mr. Wilson has spent much of his life researching how to achieve those moments of well-being that bring insight, what the American psychologist Abraham Maslow called 'peak experiences.' Those moments can come only through effort, concentration or focus, and refusing to lose one's vital energies through pessimism. 'What it means basically is that you're able to focus until you suddenly experience that sense that everything is good,' Mr. Wilson said. 'We go around leaking energy in the same way that someone who has slashed their wrists would go around leaking blood. 'Once you can actually get over that and recognize that this is not necessary, suddenly you begin to see the possibility of achieving a state of mind, a kind of steady focus, which means that you see things as extremely good.' If harnessed by everyone, this could lead to the next step in human evolution, a kind of Superman. 'The problem with human beings so far is that they are met with so many setbacks that they are quite easily defeatable, particularly in the modern age when they've got too separated from their roots,' he said. Over the last year, he has been forced to test his own powers in this area. 'When I was pretty sure that the autobiography was going to be a great success, and when it, on the contrary, got viciously attacked,' Mr. Wilson said, 'well, I know I'm not wrong. Obviously the times are out of joint.' Though 'Dreaming to Some Purpose' was warmly received in The Independent on Sunday and The Spectator and was praised by the novelist Philip Pullman, the autobiography - and Mr. Wilson - received a barrage of negative profiles and reviews in The Sunday Times and The Observer. These made fun of the book's more eccentric parts, like his avowed fetish for women's panties. As a measure of the passions that Mr. Wilson provokes, Robert Meadley, an essayist, wrote 'The Odyssey of a Dogged Optimist' (Savoy, 2004), a 188-page book defending him. 'If you think a man's a fool and his books are a waste of time, how long does it take to say so?' Mr. Meadley wrote, questioning the space the newspapers gave to the attacks. Part of Mr. Meadley's conclusion is that the British intellectual establishment still felt threatened by Mr. Wilson, a self-educated outsider from the working class. 'One of my main problems as far as the public is concerned is that I've always been interested in too many things,' Mr. Wilson said, 'and if they can't typecast you as a writer on this or that, then I'm afraid you tend not to be understood at all.'

Subject: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Setanta To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 11:25:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dublin in the summer of 1905 felt like a very British city. Yes, you were in Ireland, but British rule in Ireland, and particularly Dublin, would have felt very secure. Had anyone suggested that, within little more than a decade, there would be a bloody rising, leading to a war of independence and culminating in the Free State, you would probably have laughed off their forecast as the deluded dream of extreme nationalists. In the summer of 2005, anyone suggesting that Europe in general, and Germany in particular, might revisit the path that led to the rise of Hitler, could be similarly dismissed. Yet, on closer inspection, remarkable trends have emerged in Europe over the past few months which indicate that populism could resurface quite easily. In France and the Netherlands, the No votes to the European constitution were a warning, but the recent political developments in Germany - where a populist protest party formed three weeks ago is registering 12 per cent at the polls - are much more telling. Germany votes on September 16.Until a few weeks ago, it was expected that this would result in either the centre-right or the centre-left winning, but from nowhere, a party with the loose description of Der Linkspar, or Left Party, has elbowed its way into the reckoning. The Linkspar is the brainchild of the former leader of the East German communist party, Gregor Gysi, and the former firebrand of the Social Democrat Party, Oskar Lafontaine. Both are eloquent orators and are using ordinary Germans' main fears - unemployment and foreigners - to galvanise voters. Neither man has a clear agenda, but their platform is a hodge-podge of issues designed to push plenty of old-fashioned populist buttons. All the usual suspects are in the mix, from the far-left favourite of higher taxes on business, to the far-right gem of blaming foreigners for stealing German jobs one day, to banning foreign speculators from taking over German companies the next. Last week, it was a defence of Iran's right to develop nuclear weapons against the US/Israeli alliance in the Middle East, and an adoption of the slogans of the anti-globalisation movements. Despite the strong impression that the Linkspartie is making it up as it goes along, Europe's most educated electorate is responding. Why? An unexpected place to start explaining why Germans would support a mix of protectionism at home and anti-Americanism abroad is China. China is changing the economic landscape for everyone, but it is threatening Germany more than any other country in Europe. The reason is that Germany is the world's pre-eminent exporter of manufactured goods. Despite years of high costs, Germany has managed to retain its dominance across a variety of areas. This means Germany has much to lose from China's emergence as the workshop of the world. But, unlike the US, which has an enormous trade and current account deficit that prompts regular China-bashing from political and corporate leaders, Germany's trade account is in enormous surplus, so the threat from China is not well signposted or understood. This opacity is the nub of Germany's problem, even though China's threat to Germany is being felt in the more politically sensitive arena of unemployment. In contrast, the US feels Chinese competition in the virtual world of current account deficits and currency fluctuations, which may send regular readers of the Financial Times into delirium, but does not determine elections. Unemployment, on the other hand – particularly if it stands at over five million voters as it does in Germany - affects the very soul of the nation. But why does China have a more significant impact on German unemployment than it does on American joblessness? And why does that lead to anti-American, rather than anti-Chinese political sentiment in Germany? This is the conundrum. German jobs do not necessarily get exported to China directly. The mechanism is more circuitous. Due to the opportunities that globalisation gives to transnational corporations, every time they make corporate decisions, they are factoring the cost in China into their calculations. It is impossible for any civilised society to compete with Chinese rates of pay that start at 50 cent an hour, so the German worker is priced out of the manufacturing market for new jobs. But those in existing jobs are protected by strong labour laws so, in the short term, it is those without jobs (the unemployed and young workers trying to come into the labour force for the first time) who suffer twice as much. The reason this same process has not led to a rise in American unemployment is that the US has replaced manufacturing jobs with service jobs, and its service economy is driven by its credit bubble, which has been fuelled, as in Ireland, by its housing boom. In Germany, there is no housing boom. In fact, house prices have hardly budged for ten years. Without a housing boom, you get no credit bubble; with no credit bubble, there is no consumer spending; without consumer spending, there are no service jobs; and with fewer jobs, a country will never have political consensus. So far, so explicable, but why has German political anger that results from the economic conundrum been directed at America, rather than China? There are many reasons for this. Possibly because China is remote, it is difficult to articulate what form anti-Chinese protests might take. Another possibility is that those who respond to the Linkspart's anti-American rhetoric can't actually see the full picture. It is also possible that anti-globalisation, because it is primarily a vehicle for anti-Americanism, offers a readymade cocktail of easily-recognised villains, which might be confused if the Chinese were thrown in. My own hunch is that being anti-American is simply easier. The leaders of the Linkspar are part of the long continental leftist tradition of anti-Americanism. Whatever the reasons, the Linkspar is tapping into German fears that the world is changing too rapidly and that this change is threatening their country. It is easy to see why the cosmopolitan elite of the political and corporate world does not fear this threat, for it is benefiting from it. But in Germany, France, Italy and Holland, the man on the street is worried. If your livelihood were to be outsourced to Beijing, wouldn't you feel the same way? The election in Germany should be examined closely to see what happens when a nation feels economically threatened. Not for the first time, Germany is being hypnotised by populists with listenable and potent rhetoric. http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/Articles/view.asp?CategoryID=-1&CategoryName=&ArticleID=294

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Terri To: Setanta Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 11:55:08 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Germany needs a housing boom! Now.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Terri To: Setanta Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 11:53:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: The column seems extreme in pessimism. What do you make of the situation?

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Poyetas To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 08:22:44 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: As a foreigner who lives and works in Berlin, I have to say that the article is both pessemistic but at the same time touches on some of the core problems in German society. The first is the Euro. I have always said that it was a bad idea for a country such as Germany to join the Euro because they have lost all monetary independance and global competitivness. In a market with so much labour rigidity (in terms of wage flexibility and mobility), this spells disaster. Prices are way too high relative to wages. The whole integration process was badly thought out and horribly implemented. Secondly, Germans really are inflexible and ridiculously idealistic. The world is going through a period of extreme idealism in all areas, Islam, Republicans and Europhiles ignore common sense in search of some greater ideal which is often very far removed from basic human nature, yet in spite of this, there is a general lack of creativity in German society. THEY COPY EVERYTHING!!! Telecommunication infrastructure is 10 years behind that in North America and Scandanavia. If there is massive unemployment here, its because of Germans themselves, not some foreign entity. The divide between East and West is another sore point. Stoiber (the leader of the CDU, Germany's answer to the GOP) has constantly been making derrogatory comments over East Germans. This divide has only increased radicalism. Any foreigner would be shocked to see the amount of Nazis that now exist in East Germany. Trust me, i've already had a couple of bump-ins. But perhaps the saddest aspect of all German society at the moment is the lack of initiative. People talk for hours about doing something and then never do it! Its a very frustrating experience at times. There are many positive aspects with the current system. I believe there is no better city in Europe at the moment than Berlin but until some of these socio-economic hinderences are removed, there will always be role for extremism to play.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 06:05:20 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: What does the term idealism refer to? I realize now that I do not understand how the term is being used. European idealism?

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Pancho Villa To: Poyetas Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 04:47:59 (EDT) Email Address: nma@hotmail.com Message: 'Stoiber (the leader of the CDU, Germany's answer to the GOP)' Stoiber is in fact the leader of the BSU (Bavarian Social Union)

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:24:00 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: How has such a dynamic social economy come to be so moribund? Where is the confidence in building, where the idealistic social initiative? Excellent comment to a provoking post.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 09:52:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Curious, for Berlin is a wonderful center for the arts but is otherwise not able to innovate.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Poyetas To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 10:58:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Yes, That is why I love it here. It is such an artistic mecca. But Berlin is not really Germany. Its like a historical, cultural and political island. The problem comes not from artists but from politicians who make 90,000 Euro's a year for screwing the country over. The point is that the government really messed things up with the Euro. That was the topic of my masters thesis and I still believe it to be true. The assumptions of an optimum currency area do not lend themselves well to the European situation. As previously mentioned, we are suffering from a GLOBAL case of idealistic extremism. Whether its in the US, Middle East or Europe. This is the source of all problems. Until we get rid of the ignorance, there will be no happy ending.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 12:41:22 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please tell me if you thesis is available online, for I will read it if so. I am going to discuss your supposition with friends later today. 'Indealistic extremism' is a framework I had not thought of to understand movements or ion the case of Germany a stasis today. Clever, clever. We must have more art or the site.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 15:09:28 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Thanks :) I will always include cultural or arts articles along with economics articles.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 20:42:35 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Please do continue to add thoughts about Europe. I do care much for Europe.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Setanta To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 05:59:14 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Pancho, Thats very interesting, i once did a paper in my final year on whether Europe was an OCA. I recall i came to the conclusion that it was. I'm not sure if it was my pro European idealism shining through. I'll see if i can dig it up over the weekend and post it here. Could you do the same? pancho v setanta, head to head!!!

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Emma To: Setanta Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 06:01:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This would be most interesting to read. What do you mean when referring to European idealism? I realize I am not sure how the term idealism is being used. 'Pro European idealism,' an interesting expression.

Subject: Re: A new brand of populism in Germany From: Setanta To: Emma Date Posted: Fri, Aug 19, 2005 at 09:10:52 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: oops, my comment above should have been addressed to Poyetas and not Pancho as previously stated. with all of pancho's aliases to keep track of, i got confused!!! i'll clarify my expression 'pro european idealism'. my paper was written in 1999, a year after the fixing of exchange rates within europe and 2 years before the introduction of the Euro currency. it was still being hotly debated in the economics dept of my university. my professor was staunchly anti-euro and several of the class, myself included, were pro. i was pro before i studied the subject and, despite my attempts at academic independence (study the matter and make my mind up after examining all the evidence) fear that my paper may have been tainted by this bias. i hope (i haven't read it since i got my grade!) this is not the case and my (hopefully cogent) arguments stand up after 5-6 years!!!! i was always an idealist, and when it came to the EU experiment was very much an idealist. the thought of an united europe and closeness to our european partners always appealed to me. maybe it is that within europe we, a nation that was a subject for 700 years, would have our independence and identity enshrined in law, is the reason that ireland is so pro-europe. we have seen first hand how the powerful nation/state can oppress others and instinctivly know that a union/coalition by consensus is far safer that one powerful nation. incidently, that professor was british, but would like to think that was not the reason for his opposition to the Euro. if i were to rewrite the paper, i think i would not agree so heartily that the Eurozone is as prime 'OCA' territory as i did and concentrate on the fact that the critical ingredient to the success of the Euro is will, both political and popular.

Subject: Ads Using the Everyday Woman From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 11:07:30 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/business/media/17adco.html For Everyday Products, Ads Using the Everyday Woman By STUART ELLIOTT Madison Avenue is increasingly interested in using everyday women in advertising instead of just waifish supermodels. The change comes after the Dove line of personal-care products sold by Unilever introduced what it called a 'campaign for real beauty,' which presents women in advertisements as they are rather than as some believe they ought to be. If the fad becomes a trend and shows legs, so to speak, it has the potential to fundamentally change decades of image-making on Madison Avenue. But that is a big if indeed. There have been many previous instances of ads that showed so-called real women in place of professional models, which receded as the allure of glamour again reared its beautiful head. This week, Nike is introducing a humorous print and online campaign for exercise gear, frankly glorifying body parts that until now were almost never seen in ads, much less celebrated. One ad, which begins boldly, 'My butt is big,' features an oversize photograph of the derrière in question. Another Nike ad declares, 'I have thunder thighs,' while a third asserts: 'My shoulders aren't dainty or proportional to my hips. Some say they are like a man's. I say, leave men out of it.' The Nike ads, by Wieden & Kennedy in Portland, Ore., are arriving days after the Chicken of the Sea brand of tuna introduced a television commercial showing a gorgeous young woman being ogled by the men in her office. She can escape their wolfish ways only in the elevator, which she enters alone, then breathes a sigh of relief - revealing that she really has a more-than-ample stomach, which she had been holding in. The Nike campaign was in the works, executives say, well before the much-publicized arrival last month of Dove print and outdoor ads showing six women, none of them models, sizes 4 to 12, smiling in their underwear. (The first of the Dove 'real beauty' ads, showing older, wrinkled women, started appearing last fall.) The Chicken of the Sea commercial is adapted from a spot that its parent, Thai Union Frozen Products, began running in Asia in 2001. Even so, the arrival of all the ads at the same time suggests that change may be in the air. 'We've gotten tired of airbrushed pictures none of us can relate to or recognize,' said Linda Kaplan Thaler, one of the most prominent women in advertising, whose agency, the Kaplan Thaler Group in New York, was not involved in creating any of the campaigns. Advertisers are 'loosening the reins,' said Ms. Kaplan Thaler, who is chief executive and chief creative officer at her agency, which is owned by the Publicis Groupe, in recognition of the reality that 'women are the majority of consumers and are buying most of the products.' But those facts have been evident for years. Why the new style of ads now? One reason, said Nathan Coyle, senior strategist at Brain Reserve in New York, a consulting company, is the advent of reality television. 'Your neighbors, everyday people, are the new celebrities,' Mr. Coyle said, which feeds the desire for marketers 'to shift from depicting women who are unattainable to women who are attainable.' Kelly Simmons, president of a brand consulting company in Philadelphia named Bubble, offered another reason: the aging of the baby-boom generation - the 76 million Americans born from 1946 to 1964 - who have long set the pace for marketers and advertising agencies. The first baby boomers will start turning 60 on Jan. 1. 'There's no question baby boomers feel better about their bodies,' Ms. Simmons said, 'and are determined to age beautifully,' adding, 'It feels there are real voices of women coming through' in the Dove and Nike ads. 'I applaud the trend.' Nancy Monsarrat, United States director for advertising at Nike in Beaverton, Ore., said that in addition to the different attitudes about body image among boomer women, 'younger women have a different perspective' from that of their counterparts a decade or two ago. 'They're more personally independent about who they can and should be,' Ms. Monsarrat said, which is also reflected in the campaign's approach. 'One of the things we've noticed is if you go to an exercise class, if you go to a marathon, active women come in a lot of shapes and sizes,' she added. 'This can be a great celebration of that.' Fitness and health are also the focus of the Chicken of the Sea commercial, said John Signorino, the company's president and chief executive, in San Diego. He imported the spot to the United States after consumers - including, he said, his wife - received overseas versions of it from friends by e-mail. 'It's an effort to show consumers, in an attention-getting way, that tuna, and Chicken of the Sea, fit into a healthy lifestyle,' Mr. Signorino said. The commercial is being shown, or soon will be, on networks like ABC, CBS, HGTV and Oxygen, he added, and will be circulated through e-mail. The spot is adapted from the original version created by an agency in Bangkok named Chaiyo. Ms. Monsarrat said the Nike campaign, which is also scheduled to appear on a Web site (www.nikewomen.com), is in keeping with her company's efforts, dating back more than a decade, to address issues about women's self-images in a positive way, without stereotypes. She cited campaigns that carried themes like 'This is not a goddess' and 'If you let me play,' all of which were intended, she said, to be 'honest in how we communicate with our target consumer.' Nike was not alone in the 1990's in running ads meant to question the conventional wisdom about images of women in advertising. In 1997, the Body Shop gained international attention for a campaign carrying the theme 'Love your body,' which featured a Rubenesque plastic doll named Ruby. The print ads and posters showed the voluptuous, even zaftig, Ruby reclining on a sofa under this headline: 'There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do.' And since 1997, the Advertising Women of New York club has presented awards to campaigns that its members deem to be breaking ground by portraying women in realistic, nonstereotypical ways. In addition to Nike, winners of such awards have included Adidas, Avon, Gatorade, John Hancock and Reebok. The waxing and waning of so-called real women in advertising comes as marketers and agencies embrace the idea, then revert to traditional images when they believe it is time for a new direction as consumers lose interest. 'Advertising sometimes starts trends and sometimes it follows trends,' Ms. Kaplan Thaler said. Even if they do not turn up in ads, 'real women have always been here, are here and continue to be here,' she added. 'I'm always happy to see advertising that does not dictate a norm none of us can achieve.' Still, said Ms. Simmons of Bubble, who studies sex issues in marketing, more remains to be done before the stereotypes are banished. 'The emphasis is still on women's bodies' in the new ads, Ms. Simmons said. 'It's not like we're looking at their irises.'

Subject: Bonds From: Terri To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 10:33:40 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice that amazingly the long term Treasury bond is below 4.25% in yield again. There is a steady demand for long term bonds, as though inflation is simply not going to be a concern. This has to be a sign investors are confident the Federal Reserve is well ahead of any price problem that might arise.

Subject: Cayman Purchasing From: Johnny5 To: Terri Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 06:16:48 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Mr. Phil Grandie at www.philsgang.com says there is manipulation in the 10year by offshore accounts - PIMCO and cayman islands. Central bankers wouldn't allow such manipulation of the 10 yr would they?

Subject: Re: Bonds From: David E.. To: Terri Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 12:31:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: -Another possible viewpoint on why 10 year bonds are priced so low - The steady stream of demand for bonds mostly comes from China and Japan. Whose demand is driven by the need to keep the yen and the remimbi priced low. It has been suggested that the Chinese will do everything in their power to keep the remimbi priced low until the Chinese 2008 Olympics are over. When trouble strikes it will come quickly. Keep your powder dry and diversify to protect against both the possibilities of inflation or deflation.

Subject: Re: Bonds From: Emma To: David E.. Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 12:44:17 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is an apt comment; agreed. There are 2 more articles on the danger of the housing bubble in the Wall Street Journal today. Paul Krugman is not alone in worrying.

Subject: Re: Bonds From: Terri To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 13:16:19 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: David, I too think there will be little movement in the value of the Yuan till at least the Olympics. Whether the dollar can hold against other currencies till then is not clear however, nor is it clear bonds can hold. I just do not have a sense of this, so I think value value value with every purchase.

Subject: Dear Bobby From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 10:22:46 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Dear Bobby, Please save a set of posts if possible when you store part of the message board. Thanks lots :)

Subject: When Doctors Advise Investors From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 09:56:50 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/opinion/17wed2.html When Doctors Advise Investors It's getting harder and harder to disentangle the medical profession from financial conflicts of interest. The familiar concern has involved doctors who take money from pharmaceutical or biotechnology companies for consulting or research. Such ties inevitably call into question how objective such doctors can be in conducting research, offering advice to government agencies or prescribing drugs for patients. It is never wholly clear whether the doctor is focused on the medical needs of patients or has one eye on the prospects of a financial patron. Now, as described yesterday in an article by Stephanie Saul and Jenny Anderson in The Times, there is an additional concern: doctors who are paid to give advice to investment firms. The worry here is not that doctors will somehow shortchange their patients, but that their advice to financial firms may distort the markets, offering sophisticated investors the kind of insider information that the ordinary investor can't get. With little notice or alarm, this form of financial consulting has expanded rapidly. An article on June 1 in The Journal of the American Medical Association concluded that almost 10 percent of the nation's 700,000 doctors had entered into formal consulting relations with the investment industry. The percentage of doctors from academic medical centers, where much of the clinical research of interest to investors takes place, was thought to be considerably higher. The financial firms seeking advice include hedge funds, venture capital firms, investment bankers and stockbrokers, among others. They are assisted by specialized companies that enroll doctors and link them with information-hungry financial firms. A doctor is typically paid on an hourly basis - at rates ranging from $200 to more than $1,000 per hour - for consulting that can be done by telephone or face to face. This kind of consulting looks like a recipe for trouble. The information most prized by investors is some hint as to how an experimental drug is performing in ongoing clinical trials or informed guidance about problems that may trouble the Food and Drug Administration. Although the doctors are routinely warned not to reveal confidential or proprietary information, it is a virtual certainty that when the scope of consulting is so large, there will be disclosures, even if they are inadvertent. The best antidote would be a pledge of abstinence backed by the ethical guidelines of medical societies. Any doctor who has inside information about clinical trials or the F.D.A.'s thinking should not do consulting work for investment firms.

Subject: Doctors' Links With Investor Matchmakers From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 09:56:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/business/16research.html?ex=1281844800&en=93361cff80b4cbe8&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss Doctors' Links With Investor Matchmakers Raise Concerns By STEPHANIE SAUL and JENNY ANDERSON At first, the calls seemed innocuous. Investment companies were offering Dr. Ronald B. Natale $200 or $300 for 15 minutes, asking that he discuss general trends in lung cancer, sometimes over the telephone. But Dr. Natale became suspicious as the money offers kept growing, just before he was to present the case for Iressa, a new lung cancer drug, to a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel in September 2002. Dr. Natale's access to research data on Iressa made him an attractive source for investment researchers seeking inside information. 'Wow, they were offering $1,000, $1,500, for 30 minutes of my time,' said Dr. Natale, a prominent researcher at Cedars-Sinai Comprehensive Cancer Center in Los Angeles. He said he routinely turned down offers to speak to investors. While Dr. Natale has qualms, other doctors apparently do not. Nearly 10 percent of the nation's 700,000 doctors have signed up as consultants with a new segment of the investment industry - companies that act as the Match.com of the investment world, according to an article in The Journal of the American Medical Association. For a fee, they arrange conversations between investors and leading professionals, experts or even employees of major companies. Matching investors with doctors can raise particularly troubling questions. Physicians frequently serve as clinical researchers for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, testing new drugs. Inside knowledge about those tests, before it is publicly available, could be worth millions. The Securities and Exchange Commission has now begun looking at whether doctors, participating in clinical trials, are accepting money to talk to analysts and investors about the confidential results. Such a breach, under some circumstances, could be construed as a violation of insider trading law. Among the businesses that have emerged as matchmakers is Gerson Lehrman Group of New York. Founded in 1998, Gerson is the industry leader in connecting investors with specialists in fields ranging from Turkish cement to underwire brassieres. Gerson's 150,000 specialists include 60,000 physicians. Another company, Leerink Swann & Company of Boston, has a subsidiary that advertises a network of more than 11,500 medical professionals, including physicians, willing to talk to investors. The idea is fairly new, but the business model has already come under scrutiny. Even though the companies prohibit panelists from violating confidences or revealing proprietary information, such conversations carry the risk that participants will betray secrets. 'The frequency of physician contact, this matrix or extraordinary network of physicians that were at the disposal of investment firms, is a setup for trouble,' said Dr. Eric J. Topol of the Cleveland Clinic, who co-wrote the JAMA article, which appeared in June, exploring the growing relationships between physicians and investment companies. Dr. Topol has firsthand knowledge of the problem. Last year, he gave up his own $12,000-a-year position on a hedge fund advisory panel after concluding it created the appearance of impropriety. Dr. Topol was stung by implications that his expertise helped the fund short Merck before the company's decision to withdraw Vioxx last September. But Dr. Topol had written about the cardiovascular problems associated with Vioxx and similar cox-2 painkillers well before he joined the hedge fund in 2003. Dr. Topol, the Cleveland Clinic's chief of cardiology, also ended his relationship with several companies in the health care and pharmaceutical businesses. 'If you weigh the liabilities and the jeopardy against the limited upside, it does not come out in favor of these relationships,' said Dr. Topol, whose article cited various ways doctors earned money as consultants and advisers to industry. Investment houses and research analysts often sponsor dinners where paid panels of physicians give their thoughts about pharmaceutical developments. Investment analysts attend medical society meetings, where they mingle with practicing physicians. Hedge funds hire physicians to sit on advisory panels. 'We do this all the time,' said Jami Rubin, a pharmaceutical industry analyst with Morgan Stanley, who said her company frequently relied on physicians for advice. 'We pay them for their time. Sometimes they do conference calls. Sometimes they prepare slide shows.' Ms. Rubin said she used doctors as educators to 'explain how drugs work, their mechanism of action, potential shortfalls, positives, negatives, speculation on the issues that the F.D.A. might have.' 'I don't think there's any issue about that whatsoever,' she said. Concerns about whether investment companies could get inside word about clinical research has prompted some precautions. The F.D.A., which regulates clinical trials, does not have authority over investment transactions. But last year the agency took steps to increase information-sharing with the S.E.C. In a statement last week, the F.D.A. said that any activity that raised questions about the integrity of clinical research could render the results useless for supporting new drug applications. A recent article in The Seattle Times indicated that it had found 26 instances in which doctors had given up confidential information to analysts. Several medical societies have taken steps to protect scientific papers submitted by their members. The American Society of Clinical Oncologists, for example, gives its members advance copies of research papers presented at its meetings; the copies are covered in shrink-wrap and accompanied by a warning that they are only for educational use. Members are barred from trading on information in the abstracts until after it is publicly available. The Biotechnology Industry Organization, which includes companies whose fate can turn on one clinical trial, is reviewing whether additional regulation is necessary. 'Ultimately our companies are the most likely to be victimized by this kind of conduct,' said the association's chief executive, Jim Greenwood. Mr. Greenwood said that one of the organization's member companies, Isis Pharmaceuticals, complained three years ago to UBS. That was after a UBS analyst issued a report contending that a lung cancer drug had failed a Phase 3 clinical trial, citing 'recent conversations with investigators involved in the trial.' Shares of Isis tumbled 20 percent the day of the report. A UBS spokesman, Mark Hengel, declined to comment on whether doctors involved in the trial were surveyed, but said: 'UBS research notes are highly regarded. The information is sourced and broadly disseminated to our client base.' Some firms like Gerson Lehrman do not supply investment advice, but simply serve as a go-between. Gerson Lehrman was started by Mark Gerson, a Yale Law School graduate and a former teacher, and Thomas Lehrman, to publish books about major changes in industries. The business evolved when hedge fund managers said they did not have the time to read books but preferred access to the list of experts the authors had used. So now the business works like this: hedge funds or mutual funds pay Gerson Lehrman an annual subscription fee, in the range of $120,000 a year, per sector. Gerson pays its specialists at a rate set by the specialist. Portfolio mangers, for example, submit to Gerson a project they are working on and Gerson scours its database for the best specialists, then contacts them to check their availability and ability to participate. Each is sent a disclosure form requiring them not to disclose material nonpublic information, trade secrets or breach any previously confidentiality agreements. Gerson Lehrman and Leerink Swann declined to comment for this article. But a letter from Mark Gerson, chief executive of Gerson Lehrman, said: 'Before participating in our network, all physicians and scientists sign a contract that explicitly states they must not violate any of their confidentiality agreements, must check if they are unsure what those confidentiality obligations are and will be paid for time allocated to a project if they must discontinue it out of any related concerns.' Last week, according to people close to the company, Gerson Lehrman started to offer compliance officers from hedge funds and mutual funds the ability to submit a 'blacklist' of ticker symbols of companies owned by the fund. That way, if a fund owns a particular company's stock, Gerson can block the fund's analysts from requesting experts linked to that company. According to Dr. Topol, Gerson Lehrman has built its network over the Internet, sending out e-mail messages to large physician groups, hoping they will enroll. 'Most physicians have been targets of e-mails,' he said. One member of Gerson Lehrman's physician panel, Dr. Eric Scott Sills of Atlanta, said he had participated in telephone conferences for Gerson Lehrman five or six times in the last 18 months. Dr. Sills, an infertility specialist who also conducts clinical research, said he was never told exactly what company the callers were representing. 'They've never asked about present research projects going on at our center in Atlanta and never asked me to share preliminary data sets with them,' he said. Dr. Natale of Cedars-Sinai said that as a clinical researcher he was uncomfortable with taking fees to consult for the investment community. 'I really don't want to have to think about whether it's ethical or unethical, what information I cannot share, what's confidential and what's not confidential,' he said, explaining why he turns down such offers. Clinical trials of drugs are usually double-blind, meaning that neither the physicians nor the patients know which patients are getting the experimental drug and which are receiving sugar pills. Large trials often have many sites with small numbers of patients. 'It's not common for one investigator to have the full picture,' said Dr. Elliott Sigal, director of global research for Bristol-Myers Squibb. Some are concerned, however, that important information could unintentionally slip out. 'Obviously, they're not trying to get any physician to provide inside information,' Dr. Topol said of companies like Gerson Lehrman. 'But invariably, even without awareness and even without intent, that can happen.' And the appearance of impropriety by itself is a problem, said Dr. Catherine De Angelis, the editor of The Journal of the American Medical Association. The advice Dr. De Angelis said she gave Dr. Topol last year could apply more broadly. 'Whatever you're making from just being a consultant, just give it up,' she said. 'It's not worth our integrity. Even though you know you're not doing anything wrong. It's the perception.'

Subject: Donald Luskin Krugman truth squad From: Jon Wesley To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 15:44:46 (EDT) Email Address: familyguyantiflag@yahoo.com Message: I don't know if this has been brought up before, because I am new here, but can anyone give me information on whether this guy from the National Review Online is actually factual in his so called 'debunking' of Paul Krugman's work? I have read examples of his stuff, and some of it is BS but is there any info that anyone else can give me? Thanks very much.

Subject: Devilish Details From: Johnny5 To: Jon Wesley Date Posted: Thurs, Aug 18, 2005 at 17:53:18 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Constructive Criticism is always welcome and it should be, what specific things does luskin say that you want clarification on? You see it's like me saying bush is a loon - that is too broad, but when we start talking specifics like his religious statements that those that believe in Jesus understand what he means (I believe in buddha - so bush and jesus are still a mystery to me), statements on swedish and swiss armies, statements on imaginary numbers - etc etc you can attack specifics and not the general 'bush is a loon' So give us some specific details.

Subject: Re: Donald Luskin Krugman truth squad From: Jennifer To: Jon Wesley Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 10:41:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: These sources are never worth a glance.

Subject: Gene-Altered Rice and the Farm Belt From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 15:18:10 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/business/16biorice.html Can Gene-Altered Rice Rescue the Farm Belt? By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO WATSON, Mo. - Like an expectant father, Jason Garst stood in calf-deep water and studied the three-foot-high rice plants growing in a flooded field here. It was a curious sight in northwest Missouri, where the growing season is considered to be too short for rice. Mr. Garst, a sixth-generation farmer, is hoping at least one of the 12 varieties on his test plot will sprout this fall. If one does, he will start growing rice plants that have been genetically engineered to produce proteins found in human milk, saliva and tears. Once converted into a powder form, those proteins would be used in granola bars and drinks to help infants in developing countries avoid death from diarrhea. 'I know in my heart that this will be better than anything else we are doing,' said Mr. Garst, 35, who also farms soybeans and potatoes. The rice project is backed by a private company called Ventria Bioscience but also has the support of the state and a local university, which are hoping to reverse the long decline in the area's farm economy. But the project has run into opposition from environmental groups and even the beer giant Anheuser-Busch amid fears about the health effects of genetically engineered crops, making Mr. Garst's little rice paddy a piece of a larger battlefield. The economic and academic ambitions of the Missouri project make it unique, but the arguments echo those heard in similar disputes in Europe and, increasingly, in the United States. Critics of Ventria's plans are concerned that the gene-altered rice could contaminate regular rice crops and pose a health risk to consumers, scaring off buyers. Ventria and its academic partner in the project, Northwest Missouri State University, say they can control the potential for contamination. And they say the risks are minimal when balanced against the potential for the special rice to help cut the costs of drugs and save lives. The debate has a certain urgency in the Farm Belt because it highlights the challenge facing much of the region's economy: finding new products that will reduce farmers' reliance on commodity crops. As equipment has become more efficient and foreign competition has stiffened, farms have consolidated and profit margins have shrunk, forcing farmers to plant ever more acres to squeeze out a living. The genetic engineering work that Ventria and other companies are doing can add value to products like rice, offering farmers a more stable income that does not rely on steep government subsidies. 'There is no question that this represents a chance to transform the economy of the region,' said Mark Drabenstott, director of the Center for the Study of Rural America at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. 'For regions like northwest Missouri, there is not a long list of economic alternatives.' Despite opposition, Ventria's plans to grow genetically engineered rice - eventually to commercial scale - are going forward. The company began growing rice in North Carolina this summer after getting approval from the Agriculture Department. Once Ventria decides where it will grow rice in Missouri, it will have to apply for a permit from the department, a process expected to take two to three months. Dean L. Hubbard, president of Northwest Missouri State, persuaded Ventria last year to move its operations from Sacramento to new buildings planned for the Northwest campus in Maryville, about 90 miles north of Kansas City. Seeking a way to reverse the area's slide in population, Dr. Hubbard teamed up with Melvin D. Booth, a Northwest Missouri alumnus who previously ran two large biotechnology companies. The two approached Ventria about making it part of the university's plan to form joint ventures with young biopharmaceutical companies. Ventria was already considering similar offers from universities in Georgia, Louisiana and North Carolina, but Scott E. Deeter, Ventria's chief executive, agreed to visit the university last August. Mr. Deeter said that on the ride from the Kansas City airport, he was intrigued when Dr. Hubbard described the university's program to heat and cool the campus using bio-fuel derived from paper and wood chips. At the meeting, Mr. Garst presented him with a research paper he had prepared on what it would take to grow rice in northern Missouri. 'It was very impressive,' said Ning Huang, Ventria's vice president for research and development, who was there. Finally it came down to whether Ventria scientists would agree to move to Maryville, population 10,000, from California. Next year 13 will move, including Dr. Huang. Under the agreement reached last November, Ventria will pay farmers more than double what they make on their most profitable crop, and pay Northwest Missouri $500 an acre for crops grown on university land. The university is spending about $10 million to help build a production and teaching complex, and the state is kicking in another $10 million. Atchison County, Mo., where Mr. Garst's farmland is, has lost more than 1,000 people, or 14 percent of its population, since 1990. The town of Watson, once a thriving rural hub with three grocery stores and an opera house, has just over 100 people and no place to buy a soda. Most buildings have been boarded up. 'To reverse the population slide, you have to make it profitable to farm,' Dr. Hubbard said. 'My dream is that 10 years from now, this rural economy has been transformed, that it is vibrant again and people are renovating their downtowns.' The fate of Mr. Garst's experimental rice plot has loomed larger since Ventria encountered resistance to planting its rice in the southern part of the state, where rice has traditionally been grown. When the company was considering Missouri as a place to grow its rice, it talked to Anheuser-Busch, which uses Missouri rice in its beer. Mr. Deeter said Anheuser-Busch initially did not raise any opposition to the project. But when Ventria tried to plant rice in southern Missouri this spring, the beer maker threatened not to buy any rice grown in the state. The company feared a consumer backlash if people thought gene-altered rice could end up in their bottles of Bud. For Missouri's farm economy, the risk of growing pharmaceutical rice is high. More than half of Missouri's rice is sent abroad, to the European Union and Caribbean countries that are especially sensitive about genetically modified products. 'We are still having to make statements to our customers that the rice we export is not genetically modified,' said Carl Brothers, the vice president for marketing at Riceland Foods, which markets more than half of Missouri's rice. 'We are concerned longer term that if Ventria and others get involved that will get harder to say.' The two companies reached a truce in April: Ventria agreed not to grow genetically modified rice within 120 miles of commercial rice crops. 'We can continue to purchase rice grown and processed in Missouri as long as Ventria's growing areas remain sufficiently far from commercial rice production,' said Francine Katz, a spokeswoman for Anheuser-Busch. That deal suddenly made four test plots in the northern part of the state, including Mr. Garst's, all the more important, since Ventria's agreement with Northwest Missouri State calls for the company to grow 70 percent of its rice in the state. To prove to its customers that it would have a diverse supply base, Ventria must grow in at least one other location in North America, and is also searching for a growing area in the Southern Hemisphere to be able to produce year-round. In June, Ventria planted 70 acres of genetically modified rice in North Carolina. There, environmentalists continue to attack the company, saying the rice poses a threat to other crops and the human food chain. Ventria's rice fields are just a few miles from a rice-seed-screening research center and are also close to two wildlife refuges with large populations of migrant birds and swans that environmentalists contend could transport Ventria's rice seeds into wild areas. Storms and floods, environmentalists say, could also lead to rice contamination. 'Just washing away in a big rain- storm is enough,' said Margaret Mellon, director of the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington. Scientists at Ventria, which is yet to make any money from its bio-rice, say rice is among the safest crops for genetic engineering. Rice stalks pollinate themselves, so the altered genes, which are synthetic versions of human genes, cannot be easily transferred to plants in other fields. And Ventria requires farmers to employ a 'closed system,' using dedicated equipment and a production process where the seed is ground into a powder before it leaves the farm. But critics say that there is no way to guarantee that the farmers will follow all the government regulations and Ventria's rules, and that they are worried about the risk of contamination because it would be hard to detect. 'We simply wouldn't know if a contamination event took place,' said Craig Culp, a spokesman for the Center for Food Safety, in Washington. Dr. Hubbard acknowledged that there are risks, but he said he believed that they were minimal. Federal regulations have been tested before, most notably in 2002, when drug-producing corn made by ProdiGene began sprouting in soybean fields near its Iowa and Nebraska sites. The Agriculture Department seized 500,000 bushels of soybeans and assessed the company nearly $3 million in fines and disposal costs. Earlier, in 2000, a gene-altered variety of corn that was approved for animal feed but not for human consumption was found in taco shells and other grocery items, prompting recalls. Mr. Garst is a modern breed of farmer with a master's degree and a healthy interest in science. And he himself has done whatever he can to wring more from his commodity crops, even trying out a $300,000 tractor that steers automatically using a global-positioning satellite to till straighter rows. 'Obviously, you will not see pharmaceutical crops from here to Kansas City,' he said of Ventria's project. 'But there will be pockets in this area where you will see development. If you keep two more farmers in this area it is huge - there are four of us now.'

Subject: One Hundred Years of Uncertainty From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 14:32:51 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/08/opinion/08greene.html?ex=1270612800&en=c87d6bab356df279&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland One Hundred Years of Uncertainty By BRIAN GREENE JUST about a hundred years ago, Albert Einstein began writing a paper that secured his place in the pantheon of humankind's greatest thinkers. With his discovery of special relativity, Einstein upended the familiar, thousands-year-old conception of space and time. To be sure, even a century later, not everyone has fully embraced Einstein's discovery. Nevertheless, say 'Einstein' and most everyone thinks 'relativity.' What is less widely appreciated, however, is that physicists call 1905 Einstein's 'miracle year' not because of the discovery of relativity alone, but because in that year Einstein achieved the unimaginable, writing four papers that each resulted in deep and formative changes to our understanding of the universe. One of these papers - not on relativity - garnered him the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. It also began a transformation in physics that Einstein found so disquieting that he spent the last 30 years of his life in a determined effort to repudiate it. Two of the four 1905 papers were indeed on relativity. The first, completed in June, laid out the foundations of his new view of space and time, showing that distances and durations are not absolute, as everyone since Newton had thought, but instead are affected by one's motion. Clocks moving relative to one another tick off time at different rates; yardsticks moving relative to one another measure different lengths. You don't perceive this because the speeds of everyday life are too slow for the effects to be noticeable. If you could move near the speed of light, the effects would be obvious. The second relativity paper, completed in September, is a three-page addendum to the first, which derived his most famous result, E = mc2, an equation as short as it is powerful. It told the world that matter can be converted into energy - and a lot of it - since the speed of light squared (c2) is a huge number. We've witnessed this equation's consequences in the devastating might of nuclear weapons and the tantalizing promise of nuclear energy. The third paper, completed in May, conclusively established the existence of atoms - an idea discussed in various forms for millenniums - by showing that the numerous microscopic collisions they'd generate would account for the observed, though previously unexplained, jittery motion of impurities suspended in liquids. With these three papers, our view of space, time and matter was permanently changed. Yet, it is the remaining 1905 paper, written in March, whose legacy is arguably the most profound. In this work, Einstein went against the grain of conventional wisdom and argued that light, at its most elementary level, is not a wave, as everyone had thought, but actually a stream of tiny packets or bundles of energy that have since come to be known as photons. This might sound like a largely technical advance, updating one description of light to another. But through subsequent research that amplified and extended Einstein's argument (see Figures 1 through 3), scientists revealed a mathematically precise and thoroughly startling picture of reality called quantum mechanics. Before the discovery of quantum mechanics, the framework of physics was this: If you tell me how things are now, I can then use the laws of physics to calculate, and hence predict, how things will be later. You tell me the velocity of a baseball as it leaves Derek Jeter's bat, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate where it will land a handful of seconds later. You tell me the height of a building from which a flowerpot has fallen, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the speed of impact when it hits the ground. You tell me the positions of the Earth and the Moon, and I can use the laws of physics to calculate the date of the first solar eclipse in the 25th century. What's important is that in these and all other examples, the accuracy of my predictions depends solely on the accuracy of the information you give me. Even laws that differ substantially in detail - from the classical laws of Newton to the relativistic laws of Einstein - fit squarely within this framework. Quantum mechanics does not merely challenge the previous laws of physics. Quantum mechanics challenges this centuries-old framework of physics itself. According to quantum mechanics, physics cannot make definite predictions. Instead, even if you give me the most precise description possible of how things are now, we learn from quantum mechanics that the most physics can do is predict the probability that things will turn out one way, or another, or another way still. The reason we have for so long been unaware that the universe evolves probabilistically is that for the relatively large, everyday objects we typically encounter - baseballs, flowerpots, the Moon - quantum mechanics shows that the probabilities become highly skewed, hugely favoring one outcome and effectively suppressing all others. A typical quantum calculation reveals that if you tell me the velocity of something as large as a baseball, there is more than a 99.99999999999999 (or so) percent likelihood that it will land at the location I can figure out using the laws of Newton or, for even better accuracy, the laws of Einstein. With such a skewed probability, the quantum reasoning goes, we have long overlooked the tiny chance that the baseball can (and, on extraordinarily rare occasions, will) land somewhere completely different. When it comes to small objects like molecules, atoms and subatomic particles, though, the quantum probabilities are typically not skewed. For the motion of an electron zipping around the nucleus of an atom, for example, a quantum calculation lays out odds that are all roughly comparable that the electron will be in a variety of different locations - a 13 percent chance, say, that the electron will be here, a 19 percent chance that it will be there, an 11 percent chance that it will be in a third place, and so on. Crucially, these predictions can be tested. Take an enormous sample of identically prepared atoms, measure the electron's position in each, and tally up the number of times you find the electron at one location or another. According to the pre-quantum framework, identical starting conditions should yield identical outcomes; we should find the electron to be at the same place in each measurement. But if quantum mechanics is right, in 13 percent of our measurements we should find the electron here, in 19 percent we should find it there, in 11 percent we should find it in that third place. And, to fantastic precision, we do. Faced with a mountain of supporting data, Einstein couldn't argue with the success of quantum mechanics. But to him, even though his own Nobel Prize-winning work was a catalyst for the quantum revolution, the theory was anathema. Commentators over the decades have focused on Einstein's refusal to accept the probabilistic framework of quantum mechanics, a position summarized in his frequent comment that 'God does not play dice with the universe.' Einstein, radical thinker that he was, still believed in the sanctity of a universe that evolved in a fully definite, fully predictable manner. If, as quantum mechanics asserted, the best you can ever do is predict probabilities, Einstein countered that he'd 'rather be a cobbler, or even an employee in a gaming house, than a physicist.' This emphasis, however, partly obscures a larger point. It wasn't the mere reliance on probabilistic predictions that so troubled Einstein. Unlike many of his colleagues, Einstein believed that a fundamental physical theory was much more than the sum total of its predictions - it was a mathematical reflection of an underlying reality. And the reality entailed by quantum mechanics was a reality Einstein couldn't accept. An example: Imagine you shoot an electron from here and a few seconds later it's detected by your equipment over there. What path did the electron follow during the passage from you to the detector? The answer according to quantum mechanics? There is no answer. The very idea that an electron, or a photon, or any other particle, travels along a single, definite trajectory from here to there is a quaint version of reality that quantum mechanics declares outmoded. Instead, the proponents of quantum theory claimed, reality consists of a haze of all possibilities - all trajectories - mutually commingling and simultaneously unfolding. And why don't we see this? According to the quantum doctrine, when we make a measurement or perform an observation, we force the myriad possibilities to ante up, snap out of the haze and settle on a single outcome. But between observations - when we are not looking - reality consists entirely of jostling possibilities. Quantum reality, in other words, remains ambiguous until measured. The reality of common perception is thus merely a definitive-looking veneer obscuring the internal workings of a highly uncertain cosmos. Which is where Einstein drew a line in the sand. A universe of this sort offended him; he could not accept, as he put it, that 'the Old One' would so profoundly incorporate a hidden element of happenstance in the nature of reality. Einstein quipped to his quantum colleagues, 'Do you really think the Moon is not there when you're not looking?' and set himself the Herculean task of reworking the laws of physics to resurrect conventional reality. Einstein waged a two-front assault on the problem. He sought an internal chink in the quantum framework that would establish it as a mere steppingstone on the path to a deeper and more complete description of the universe. At the same time, he sought a grander synthesis of nature's laws - what he called a 'unified theory' - that he believed would reveal the probabilities of quantum mechanics to be no more profound than the probabilities offered in weather forecasts, probabilities that simply reflect an incomplete knowledge of an underlying, definite reality. In 1935, through a disarmingly simple mathematical analysis, Einstein (with two colleagues) established a beachhead on the first front. He proved that quantum mechanics is either an incomplete theory or, if it is complete, the universe is - in Einstein's words - 'spooky.' Why 'spooky?' Because the theory would allow certain widely separated particles to correlate their behaviors perfectly (somewhat as if a pair of widely separated dice would always come up the same number when tossed at distant casinos). Since such 'spooky' behavior would border on nuttiness, Einstein thought he'd made clear that quantum theory couldn't yet be considered a complete description of reality. The nimble quantum proponents, however, would have nothing of it. They insisted that quantum theory made predictions - albeit statistical predictions - that were consistently born out by experiment. By the precepts of the scientific method, they argued, the theory was established. They maintained that searching beyond the theory's predictions for a glimpse of a reality behind the quantum equations betrayed a foolhardy intellectual greediness. Nevertheless, for the remaining decades of his life, Einstein could not give up the quest, exclaiming at one point, 'I have thought a hundred times more about quantum problems than I have about relativity.' He turned exclusively to his second line of attack and became absorbed with the prospect of finding the unified theory, a preoccupation that resulted in his losing touch with mainstream physics. By the 1940's, the once dapper young iconoclast had grown into a wizened old man of science who was widely viewed as a revolutionary thinker of a bygone era. By the early 1950's, Einstein realized he was losing the battle. But the memories of his earlier success with relativity - 'the years of anxious searching in the dark, with their intense longing, their alternations of confidence and exhaustion and the final emergence into the light' - urged him onward. Maybe the intense light of discovery that had so brilliantly illuminated his path as a young man would shine once again. While lying in a bed in Princeton Hospital in mid-April 1955, Einstein asked for the pad of paper on which he had been scribbling equations in the desperate hope that in his final hours the truth would come to him. It didn't. Was Einstein misguided? Must we accept that there is a fuzzy, probabilistic quantum arena lying just beneath the definitive experiences of everyday reality? As of today, we still don't have a final answer. Fifty years after Einstein's death, however, the scales have certainly tipped farther in this direction. Decades of painstaking experimentation have confirmed quantum theory's predictions beyond the slightest doubt. Moreover, in a shocking scientific twist, some of the more recent of these experiments have shown that Einstein's 'spooky' processes do in fact take place (particles many miles apart have been shown capable of correlating their behavior). It's a stunning finding, and one that reaffirms Einstein's uncanny ability to unearth features of nature so mind-boggling that even he couldn't accept what he'd found. Finally, there has been tremendous progress over the last 20 years toward a unified theory with the discovery and development of superstring theory. So far, though, superstring theory embraces quantum theory without change, and has thus not revealed the definitive reality Einstein so passionately sought. With the passage of time and quantum mechanics' unassailable successes, debate about the theory's meaning has quieted. The majority of physicists have simply stopped worrying about quantum mechanics' meaning, even as they employ its mathematics to make the most precise predictions in the history of science. Others prefer reformulations of quantum mechanics that claim to restore some features of conventional reality at the expense of additional - and, some have argued, more troubling - deviations (like the notion that there are parallel universes). Yet others investigate hypothesized modifications to the theory's equations that don't spoil its successful predictions but try to bring it closer to common experience. Over the 25 years since I first learned quantum mechanics, I've at various times subscribed to each of these perspectives. My shifting attitude, however, reflects that I'm still unsettled. Were Einstein to interrogate me today about quantum reality, I'd have to admit that deep inside I harbor many of the doubts that gnawed at him for decades. Can it really be that the solid world of experience and perception, in which a single, definite reality appears to unfold with dependable certainty, rests on the shifting sands of quantum probabilities? Well, yes. Probably. The evidence is compelling and tangible. Although we have yet to fully lay bare quantum mechanics' grand lesson for the underlying nature of the universe, I like to think even Einstein would be impressed that in the 50 years since his death our facility with quantum mechanics has matured from a mathematical understanding of the subatomic realm to precision control. Today's technological wizardry (computers, M.R.I.'s, smart bombs) exists only because research in applied quantum physics has resulted in techniques for manipulating the motion of electrons - probabilities and all - through mazes of ultramicroscopic circuitry. Advances hovering on the horizon, like nanoscience and quantum computers, offer the promise of even more spectacular transformations. So the next time you use your cellphone or laptop, pause for a moment. Recognize that even these commonplace devices rely on our greatest, yet most puzzling, scientific achievement and - as things now stand - tap into humankind's most supreme assault on the idea that reality is what we think it is. Brian Greene, a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia, is the author of 'The Elegant Universe,'' and, most recently, 'The Fabric of the Cosmos.'

Subject: Comes a Quest to Save the Tiger From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 12:08:58 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16conv.html From a Childhood Ambition Comes a Quest to Save the Tiger By CLAUDIA DREIFUS In the 1960's, when Ullas Karanth was a teenager in India, he read books by naturalists who were researching the tigers of Asia. 'Someday, I'll study tigers, too,' he told himself. But in a country still emerging from colonial rule, there was no such profession as wildlife biologist. And so Ullas Karanth took up engineering, which he detested, only to give it up and become a farmer, bringing him closer to the wilderness and the tigers. By the 1980's, he had established himself as a kind of amateur biologist gathering information on the animals of the Nagarahole reserve near to his farm. That work eventually led to an opportunity to study in the United States and later to become a protégé of the pioneering tiger expert George Schaller. Today Dr. Karanth is himself a leading tiger researcher and the director of the Wildlife Conservation Society's India Program, which is based in Bangalore. Dr. Karanth, 57, was in New York on a recent summer afternoon to attend a conference at the Bronx Zoo, a subsidiary of the conservation society, on the future of tigers in the wild. In a break in the proceedings, he spoke of his favorite feline. Q. Do we know how many wild tigers still exist in India? A. We don't. The government claims that there are over 3,000. But that figure is based on a flawed counting method that officials developed for themselves. There are preservation groups who claim the number is more like 1,000. It's probably not that low. At the Wildlife Conservation Society, we won't guess. What we will say, based on scientific data, is that there are only about 115,000 square miles of forest still left in the country where tigers can thrive and breed. In most of that territory, there's been a tremendous tiger decline due to habitat degradation by local people and development activities like mines, dams and roads, and the poaching of tiger prey. We believe that if India is to have tigers, these wildlife reserves must be rigorously protected. Q. Is the killing of tigers for use in traditional Chinese medicine contributing to their disappearance? A. That's part of it. The fact that the parts of one dead tiger are worth something like $5,000 certainly encourages poachers. Actually the biggest threat to tiger survival is habitat destruction and the uncontrolled hunting of tiger-prey species. We have plenty of forest areas where there should be tigers, but their numbers are low there because the prey species have been hunted out by local people. So it turns out that if you want to protect tigers, you also need to protect the deer. In India, wildlife conservation has an unusual history. Tigers were very much in decline until the 1970's, when Indira Gandhi came to power. She was an autocrat. But she was also a very keen naturalist, and she had complete control over the nation's politics. Mrs. Gandhi told her minions that there would be no more destruction of important wildlife areas and she enforced that order. She put in strong laws, stopped uncontrolled hunting and logging in the reserves. And thanks to her cracking of the whip, the tiger came back. That recovery continued until the 1990's, when Indian politics became very fragmented. The leaders we've had since are excellent on economic development, but none have shown much interest in conservation. Q. You've spent decades observing tiger behavior. What do you find most interesting about them? A. The way nature has designed them. They are built to take down prey four to five times their own size. If I went into the forest, it would be hard for me to get within striking range of a deer. This huge cat does it effortlessly. It can grab onto something that weighs about a ton, wrestles it down and kill it, all very safely and quietly. Q. Have you ever gotten emotionally involved with the animals you were observing? A. Objective scientists aren't supposed to, but I have. During the early 1990's, I was putting radio collars on tigers and leopards at Nagarahole reserve in southern India and then tracking their behavior. With time, this one leopard got really quite habituated to me. For two years, I'd follow him at night. I had a little laboratory in the middle of the forest, and this leopard used to come around at midnight frequently and I'd hear his call. Even half asleep, I'd turn on my receiver and when I'd pick up his signals, I felt, oh, O.K., there's my leopard. But one morning, his signal read as if he was lying inactive somewhere in the forest and I really got worried. When I finally located him, he was strung up like a lynching victim. The leopard had walked into a snare some poacher had set up for deer. Yes, I know, leopards have high mortality rates, and I'm not supposed to feel emotion. But when this happens to a creature you know, you can't be coldblooded. Incidents like this happen every day and their toll on animal life is cumulative. The killers are usually local people trying to get some protein. However, this is one reason I feel negatively toward the 'sustainable use' concept that one hears so much in development circles. Q. What's wrong with the concept of sustainable use and the idea of financing projects for local people to make money from the forests, and in turn protect the animals? A. It's naïve. People and tigers have never coexisted harmoniously. They compete for land, protein, resources. In a country like India where there are so many people and so little land, sustainable development is actually a recipe for wiping out the protected areas. If you want tigers, you can't have people sweeping through the reserves cutting down trees, gathering forest products, hunting for protein and creating gardens that fragment the natural areas. Moreover, you definitely should not be paying forestry officials - charged with protecting wildlife - to do rural economic development. If you do it, their mission drifts toward development and the wildlife conservation part gets lost. To protect wildlife, you have to do the harder thing, which is set aside some areas where human activities are reduced or eliminated. At present, about 5 percent of the country is designated as protected. But I estimate that 75 percent of that 'protected' land has been compromised by human activity. This needs to be halted. Q. Do you think the Indian tiger can be saved? A. Certainly. If there's the will. One thing that gives us a head start: India actually has more wild tigers than our neighbors. We won't need to reintroduce them. Also, tigers reproduce easily; they are not like pandas. Also, I believe that there are aspects of Indian culture that can be mobilized for conservation. If you look at the Hindu religion, there's real guilt associated with the killing of an animal. So if you are protecting a park and you catch a poacher, this sense of guilt puts the enforcement officials at an advantage. Another thing, at the core of our religion is the belief that man is a part of nature. This supports the idea that wild animals have a right to survive. I've talked with farmers whose crops have been raided by elephants, and they really hated them. But when you asked, 'Don't elephants and tigers have the right to exist?' they always said yes. All these factors make me optimistic.

Subject: The Long Arm of Einstein From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 11:52:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16gps.html The Long Arm of Einstein Guides My Steering Wheel By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS I was driving in Los Angeles a few weeks ago and relying on a global positioning system receiver attached to my hand-held organizer, which was verbally guiding me through a maze of freeways and unfamiliar streets. I had plenty of time stopped in traffic jams to ponder the scientific breakthroughs that made this technology possible. What I thought about were not the triumphs of Silicon Valley and microchips. I thought about Albert Einstein. The United Nations and several other international organizations have designated 2005 as the World Year of Physics in honor of Einstein's 'miracle year' in 1905, when he wrote five seminal papers that changed the way we think about the world. But his greatest achievement occurred a decade later, when he finished his general theory of relativity. Einstein revolutionized our understanding of space, time and the nature of gravity. He described a universe in which matter and energy could curve space, which in turn would affect the dynamics of matter and energy, which then could affect the geometry of space, and so on. It took more than three decades to develop the first direct terrestrial experimental tests of his esoteric ideas. But, esoteric or not, without general relativity, I couldn't precisely navigate through Los Angeles. Global positioning systems rely on careful measurement differences between signals sent from several satellites thousands of miles apart. The time differences between the signals sent to the device in my car must be measured to an accuracy of about a billionth of a second to distinguish my position to within a few feet. But general relativity predicts that the relative clicking of clocks changes depending on their position in a gravitational field. Satellites located high above Earth are moving in a gravitational field that is slightly weaker than what we experience on the ground. As a result, their internal clocks tick at a different rate than those on Earth. The effect is extremely small, but it is comparable to the accuracy needed to distinguish the position of objects on the scale that is otherwise possible with needed by global positioning devices. Without correcting for it, the systems would give results that are ever so slightly off. Einstein didn't develop general relativity because he wanted to find a better way to track his own position. He wanted to address fundamental questions about the universe, and even if he had been so inclined he probably could not have foreseen in 1915 the technology that makes G.P.S. measurements possible today. This is a timely example of the cross-germination of fundamental scientific investigation and modern technological innovation than this. The insights that Einstein's theories have given us about the basic workings of the cosmos, on scales as large as the visible universe itself, and going back to the earliest moments of the Big Bang, are invaluable to our understanding of nature and themselves should justify the support we provide for continuing research in general relativity and cosmology. But in a time when many areas of fundamental research are facing drastic budget threats in favor of more targeted programs with short-term goals, it is worth remembering that even the most esoteric scientific ideas can ultimately affect one's daily life. It is something worth thinking about the next time you are caught in a traffic jam. Lawrence M. Krauss is director of the Center for Education and Research in Cosmology and Astrophysics at Case Western Reserve University. His new book,'Hiding in the Mirror,' will appear this fall.

Subject: And Newton? From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 13:57:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I know this is the year where we are to give respect to Einstein for what he did, but I do think it is somewhat unfair to give this much credit to Einstein for the GPS technology and no where as much to Newton or Doppler. The error correction due to Einstein's theory of relativity is ever so slight (as the author points out). The error could be about 2 feet (if that) where as the overall error from a GPS is in excess of 4 feet. Meaning that Einstein's contribution to the GPS is negligable. Sorry for being so cynical. Without Newton on the other hand, the GPS system would not even be up in the space let alone measuring where we are. We use Newton's laws of gravity (not Einstein's) to get the rocket/satelite into space. The orbit and angle for broadcasting signals are decided using Newtonian physics/mechanics. And after moving from the genius of what Newton left us, let's not forget Doppler who worked out that frequecy changes based on movement. By measuring the Doppler effect we can figure out the movement of the satelite and the movement of the car. Yes Einstein's theories apply well to Cosmology (better than Newtonian and Doppler), but perhaps Lawrence Krauss has a bias towards Einstein.

Subject: Re: And Newton? From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 14:20:55 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Of course you are right, but remember that Newton's mathematics is not set aside by Einstein's except in extreme circumstances. Newton is simple subsumed, and Doppler gave Einstein ideas on special relativity effects. Listen to a train whistle as the tone changes and think of relativity of motion with only light speed constant.

Subject: Sorry Emma From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 15:21:39 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: You are right. I've just overly cynical lately. I've gota starting being more positive.

Subject: Re: Sorry Emma From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 16:28:38 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: No, you are always making me think of interesting possibilities. I am still working on applying Jared Diamond.

Subject: Re: Sorry Emma From: Emma To: Emma Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 16:31:04 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Notice the Niger post from Sunday. 'Meanwhile, People Starve.'

Subject: Niger From: Mik To: Emma Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 14:53:25 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: I made a posting in reply to you Niger article. But it appears to have been pushed off the board. Did you my response?

Subject: Re: Niger From: Emma To: Mik Date Posted: Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 15:44:07 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Excellent, posted above.

Subject: Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 11:51:32 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/16/science/16goss.html Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose By BENEDICT CAREY Juicy gossip moves so quickly - He did what? She has pictures? - that few people have time to cover their ears, even if they wanted to. 'I heard a lot in the hallway, on the way to class,' said Mady Miraglia, 35, a high school history teacher in Los Gatos, Calif., speaking about a previous job, where she got a running commentary from fellow teachers on the sexual peccadilloes and classroom struggles of her colleagues. 'To be honest, it made me feel better as a teacher to hear others being put down,' she said. 'I was out there on my own, I had no sense of how I was doing in class, and the gossip gave me some connection. And I felt like it gave me status, knowing information, being on the inside.' Gossip has long been dismissed by researchers as little more than background noise, blather with no useful function. But some investigators now say that gossip should be central to any study of group interaction. People find it irresistible for good reason: Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out. 'There has been a tendency to denigrate gossip as sloppy and unreliable' and unworthy of serious study, said David Sloan Wilson, a professor of biology and anthropology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and the author of 'Darwin's Cathedral,' a book on evolution and group behavior. 'But gossip appears to be a very sophisticated, multifunctional interaction which is important in policing behaviors in a group and defining group membership.' When two or more people huddle to share inside information about another person who is absent, they are often spreading important news, and enacting a mutually protective ritual that may have evolved from early grooming behaviors, some biologists argue. Long-term studies of Pacific Islanders, American middle-school children and residents of rural Newfoundland and Mexico, among others, have confirmed that the content and frequency of gossip are universal: people devote anywhere from a fifth to two-thirds or more of their daily conversation to gossip, and men appear to be just as eager for the skinny as women. Sneaking, lying and cheating among friends or acquaintances make for the most savory material, of course, and most people pass on their best nuggets to at least two other people, surveys find. This grapevine branches out through almost every social group and it functions, in part, to keep people from straying too far outside the group's rules, written and unwritten, social scientists find. In one recent experiment, Dr. Wilson led a team of researchers who asked a group of 195 men and women to rate their approval or disapproval of several situations in which people talked behind the back of a neighbor. In one, a rancher complained to other ranchers that his neighbor had neglected to fix a fence, allowing cattle to wander and freeload. The report was accurate, and the students did not disapprove of the gossip. But men in particular, the researchers found, strongly objected if the rancher chose to keep mum about the fence incident. 'Plain and simple he should have told about the problem to warn other ranchers,' wrote one study participant, expressing a common sentiment that, in this case, a failure to gossip put the group at risk. 'We're told we're not supposed to gossip, that our reputation plummets, but in this context there may be an expectation that you should gossip: you're obligated to tell, like an informal version of the honor code at military academies,' Dr. Wilson said. This rule-enforcing dynamic is hardly confined to the lab. For 18 months, Kevin Kniffin, an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, tracked the social interactions of a university crew team, about 50 men and women who rowed together in groups of four or eight. Dr. Kniffin said he was still analyzing his research notes. But a preliminary finding, he said, was that gossip levels peaked when the team included a slacker, a young man who regularly missed practices or showed up late. Fellow crew members joked about the slacker's sex life behind his back and made cruel cracks about his character and manhood, in part because the man's shortcoming reflected badly on the entire team. 'As soon as this guy left the team, the people were back to talking about radio, food, politics, weather, those sorts of things,' Dr. Kniffin said. 'There was very little negative gossip.' Given this protective group function, gossiping too little may be at least as risky as gossiping too much, some psychologists say. After all, scuttlebutt is the most highly valued social currency there is. While humor and story telling can warm any occasion, a good scoop spreads through a room like an illicit and irresistible drug, passed along in nods and crooked smiles, in discreet walks out to the balcony, the corridor, the powder room. Knowing that your boss is cheating on his wife, or that a sister-in-law has a drinking problem or a rival has benefited from a secret trust fund may be enormously important, and in many cases change a person's behavior for the better. 'We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy,' said Sarah Wert, a psychologist at Yale. 'Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal.' Talking out of school may also buffer against low-grade depressive moods. In one recent study, Dr. Wert had 84 college students write about a time in their lives when they felt particularly alienated socially, and also about a memory of being warmly accepted. After finishing the task, Dr. Wert prompted the participants to gossip with a friend about a mutual acquaintance, as she filmed the exchanges. Those who rated their self-esteem highly showed a clear pattern: they spread good gossip when they felt accepted and a more derogatory brand when they felt marginalized. The gossip may involve putting someone else down to feel better by comparison. Or it may simply be a way to connect with someone else and share insecurities. But the end result, she said, is often a healthy relief of social and professional anxiety. Ms. Miraglia, the high school teacher, said that in her previous job she found it especially comforting to hear about more senior teachers' struggle to control difficult students. 'It was my first job, and I felt overwhelmed, and to hear someone say, 'There's no control in that class' about another teacher, that helped build my confidence,' she said. She said she also heard about teachers who made inappropriate comments to students about sex, a clear violation of school policy and professional standards. Adept gossipers usually sense which kinds of discreet talk are most likely to win acceptance from a particular group. For example, a closely knit corporate team with clear values - working late hours, for instance - will tend to embrace a person who gripes in private about a colleague who leaves early and shun one who complains about the late nights. By contrast, a widely dispersed sales force may lap up gossip about colleagues, but take it lightly, allowing members to work however they please, said Eric K. Foster, a scholar at the Institute for Survey Research at Temple University in Philadelphia, who recently published an analysis of gossip research. It is harder to judge how gossip will move through groups that are split into factions, like companies with divisions that are entirely independent, Dr. Foster said. 'In these situations, it is the person who gravitates into a intermediate position, making connections between the factions, who controls the gossip flow and holds a lot of power,' he said. Such people can mask devious intentions, spread false rumors and manipulate others for years, as anyone who has worked in an organization for a long time knows. But to the extent that healthy gossip has evolved to protect social groups, it will also ultimately expose many of those who cheat and betray. Any particularly nasty gossip has an author or authors, after all, and any functioning gossip network builds up a memory. So do the people who are tuned in to the network. In one 2004 study, psychologists had college students in Ohio fill out questionnaires, asking about the best gossip they had heard in the last week, the last month and the last year. The students then explained in writing what they learned by hearing the stories. Among the life lessons: 'Infidelity will eventually catch up with you,' 'Cheerful people are not necessarily happy people' and 'Just because someone says they have pictures of something doesn't mean they do.' None of which they had learned in class.

Subject: Spyware and Cookies From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Tues, Aug 16, 2005 at 07:22:01 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/business/media/15adcol.html Spyware Heats Up the Debate Over Cookies By BOB TEDESCHI INTERNET users are taking back control of their computers, and online marketers and publishers are not pleased with the results. But they don't quite know what to do about their conundrum - if it is a conundrum, since they can't even agree on that. Until recently, Internet businesses could track their users freely, using what are known as cookies, tiny text files they embed on the user's hard drive. Now, with the proliferation of antispyware programs that can delete unwanted cookies, they often cannot tell who has been to their Web site before or what they have seen. And this erosion of control over a tool for gaining insight into consumer behavior has many of them fretting. 'Cookies are critical from a business perspective,' said Lorraine Ross, vice president for sales at USAToday.com. 'They help us do things like track our profitability per unique visitor, for instance. But if you don't know how many people are coming in, you don't really have a handle on whether your profitability is improving or not.' It isn't necessarily just corporate America that is threatened by the anticookie fervor, Ms. Ross said - the deleters stand to suffer, too. For example, cookies help a computer limit how many times a user sees annoying ads like a floating, animated message. Such 'frequency caps,' to use industry parlance, are common among publishers. 'So cookies are a really good thing for managing the user's experience,' she said. Last year, though, Ms. Ross said executives at the company debated how effective their frequency limits were, since a growing number of Internet users were deleting cookies and possibly seeing lots of animated ads. Ms. Ross said that like most established companies, USAToday.com did not use its cookies to identify its users. 'But the user's paranoia is understandable, given the history,' she said. Cookies first got a bad name in 1999, when DoubleClick announced that it would use them to identify Internet users and analyze both their offline purchasing patterns and online surfing habits for the purpose of showing them more relevant online ads. That plan died a loud, painful death after privacy advocates objected strenuously, and marketers and publishers have since taken a much more cautious approach. Even so, privacy advocates deplore cookies and, as software programs like Webroot Spy Sweeper and McAfee AntiSpyware have come on the market, surfers by the millions are apparently knocking the cookies out of service as fast as the programs can be installed. This spring, the online consulting firm Jupiter Research published a report saying that nearly 40 percent of Internet users surveyed regularly erased them. 'I don't think cookies should be out there at all,' said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an advocacy group based in Washington, 'but the good news here is that consumers are at least becoming more sophisticated about the appropriate use of cookies.' Eric Peterson, the analyst who wrote the Jupiter report, pointed out that most of the deleted files were so-called third-party cookies placed on the computer by a company other than the one operating the site the user was visiting. Most publishers rely on outside companies like DoubleClick and Atlas to send ads to the user's computer and track the effectiveness of campaigns. Antispyware programs often leave in place first-party cookies, which can save users the inconvenience of having to log in to a news site each time they visit, but remove third-party cookies, the main target of users' ire. Some people say they think that total anonymity is the way to go. The threat to the bottom line is real. Mr. Peterson said cookies not only helped sites measure overall profitability, but were critical in measuring the effectiveness of individual advertising campaigns. Marketers, for instance, could conceivably pay a Web site to deliver ads to 100,000 people, but only reach about 60,000 because so many of them were being counted twice. 'If you're O.K. with getting your ads to half as many people, and not really being sure how effective your campaign was, well then you can happily put your head in the sand,' Mr. Peterson said. 'Most people tell us they want data more accurate than that.' But are that many people really blocking cookies? Some executives aren't so sure. 'When I talk to publishers, nobody says the problem is as big as the press suggests,' said Greg Stuart, chief executive of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group. 'So our role should be to get to some factual basis.' Mr. Stuart said his organization was planning its own research into the issue because, he said, much of the recent research 'involves asking consumers about what they did, which isn't always a good indicator of their behavior.' Another doubter is Peter Naylor, senior vice president for sales at iVillage, a network of women's sites. 'I don't think the problem is real, based on what we're seeing, or more importantly not seeing,' he said. Mr. Naylor said he had not conducted tests or surveys to determine if his company's visitors were deleting or blocking cookies, 'but nothing has changed dramatically enough to raise a red flag.' 'And I've heard literally nothing about it from advertisers,' he added. Among those companies fielding the most calls about cookie deletion are advertising technology businesses like Atlas. Young-Bean Song, the director of analytics for Atlas, said that even if the cookie deletion rates were as high as 40 percent, publishers and marketers could still rely on the data from the 60 percent remaining of a site's users to gauge the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and other important statistics. Perhaps because executives cannot agree on the scope of the problem, solutions have been slow to emerge. Mr. Stuart of the Interactive Advertising Bureau said that if the issue turned out to be as big as some suspect, his organization was likely to embark on an ad campaign to convince online users that cookies were not harmful. Already, Internet companies are trying to accommodate Web users in practical ways. In May, WebTrends, a site that had helped online businesses analyze advertising and Web site data by using third-party cookies, began offering its clients the ability to offer first-party cookies without losing the data associated with the old third-party ones. Greg Drew, WebTrends' chief executive, said some users still blocked cookies altogether, so the solution was not completely effective. Still, he said, many clients had flocked to the service. In the meantime, Ms. Ross of USAToday.com said the real solution was to overcome consumer hostility toward what she regards as a legitimate business practice that makes life easier for everyone. That may be a long shot, but she is hopeful. 'We have to think about long-term answers,' she said. 'We need to have users love their cookies, for the right reasons.'

Subject: Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 15:37:34 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/fashion/sundaystyles/14PHILLY.html Philadelphia Story: The Next Borough By JESSICA PRESSLER PHILADELPHIA WEARING a Paul Green School of Rock T-shirt, his bangs plastered to his forehead in the summer heat, Laris Kreslins pulled in front of a handsome brownstone on Rittenhouse Square, the priciest neighborhood in the city, and hopped out of his car. 'We're going to show you what a real Philly apartment looks like,' he said, unlocking the door to reveal a spacious one-bedroom flat sparsely decorated with CD's and copies of music magazines. 'As you can see, it has hardwood floors, lots of light and very high ceilings,' he said. Then Mr. Kreslins paused and delivered what he knew would be the kicker: 'Rent is $800 a month. Heat and electricity included.' Mr. Kreslins isn't selling real estate. He's selling Philadelphia. The publisher of Arthur, a free arts and culture magazine, Mr. Kreslins, 30, lived in a tiny apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, before leaving New York two years ago and ending up in Philadelphia, where he and his girlfriend, Kendra Gaeta, 30, another Brooklynite, bought a four-bedroom house close to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in March and promptly started a Web site, movetophilly.com. The site, designed to lure 20- and 30-something singles and couples to the city, features a sultry caricature of Patti LaBelle, a longtime resident, who entreats visitors to e-mail for the kind of tour Mr. Kreslins was recently holding, taking visitors to a thrift store, a Polish butcher and his friend Brendan's apartment. Philadelphians occasionally refer to their city - somewhat deprecatingly - as the 'sixth borough' of New York, and with almost 8,000 commuters making the 75-minute train ride between the cities each weekday, the label seems not far off the mark. But Mr. Kreslins and Ms. Gaeta are a new breed of Philadelphia-bound commuters, those who come from New York by train or the popular Chinatown bus for a weekend and then come back, with a U-Haul, to stay. They are the first wave of what could be called Philadelphia's Brooklynization. Hard numbers assessing exactly how many new residents are from New York are not available, but real estate brokers are noting an influx of prospective buyers and renters from the city; club owners and restaurant employees have spotted newcomers, on both sides of the bar; and 'everyone knows someone who's moved here from New York,' said Paul Levy, the executive director of the Center City District, a business improvement group, and himself a former Brooklyn resident. Attracted by a thriving arts and music scene here and a cost of living that is 37 percent lower than New York's, according to city figures, a significant number of youngish artists, musicians, restaurateurs and designers are leaving New York City and heading down the turnpike for the same reasons they once moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan. 'We got priced out of Manhattan, and we moved to Brooklyn,' said John Schmersal, 32, of the three-member band Enon; two of them migrated here in January. 'Then we got priced out of Brooklyn. Now we're in Philadelphia.' On a recent Friday night Mr. Schmersal and his girlfriend, Toko Yasuda, were huddled at the bar at the Khyber, a smoky rock institution in the nightclub-heavy Old City neighborhood, a Colonial area of narrow streets bordering the Delaware River east of City Hall, to see Love as Laughter, a New York City band. 'We like going to shows here,' Mr. Schmersal said. 'In New York there are so many people, it's impossible to even get in to see hot bands.' Much less be in a band. 'For years I was willing to sacrifice quality of life for artistic fulfillment - you know, you find a circle of artists and you scrape by,' said Anna Neighbor, a 27-year-old bass player and Williamsburg exile, between sips of Yuengling lager at a bar in the Northern Liberties neighborhood, an artists' enclave north of City Hall. In January Ms. Neighbor and her husband, Daniel Matz, and Jason McNeely, all members of the indie rock band Windsor for the Derby, decided to leave Brooklyn. Ms. Neighbor and Mr. Matz discovered Fishtown, a gentrifying blue-collar neighborhood adjacent to Northern Liberties, where, in the last five years, youthful faces with bed head have made their way among the traditionally Irish Catholic residents. They found a three-bedroom row house for $170,000. 'New York is mythologically all about vibrancy and creativity, but it's hard to work a 40-hour week and come home and be Jackson Pollock,' said Mr. Matz, 32, a guitarist. He said that by living in Philadelphia he could support himself teaching public school and devote the rest of his time to his band. A few blocks away from Ms. Neighbor's house live Laura Watt, a 38-year-old painter, and her husband, Clark Thompson, 38, a financial services technician who left his Manhattan-based bank for one in Philadelphia a year ago. They settled in a three-level condominium in a new housing development called Rag Flats in Fishtown with their two children, Gus and Lydia. At $439,000 it was pricier than any of the block's three-story row houses, but with three bedrooms, each with an outdoor deck; solar heat and electricity; a rooftop with spectacular views; and a dumbwaiter going down to the kitchen, they thought it was worth it. 'Philadelphia reminds me a lot of what Brooklyn used to be like,' said Ms. Watt, who had lived in Brooklyn and Westchester County for 15 years. Fifteen or 20 years ago, the idea of Philadelphia as a place to go for quality life would have been laughable to many people, even to Philadelphians. Sandwiched between New York and Washington, Philadelphia was a flyover city - trainover really - a place where a mayor had ordered the bombing of a neighborhood and where Eagles fans reveled in booing their own team, its chief popular exports cheese steaks and 'Rocky.' While Philadelphia's rich cultural history, like its art museum, its symphony orchestra and its Colonial architecture, gave the city establishment credentials, it did not produce much of an avant-garde. 'The Philadelphia market was really provincial,' said Steven Lowy, who opened a gallery in Philadelphia in 1984 but fled back to Manhattan three years later. Lately the city has stepped up its efforts to woo people back, in part by trying to position Center City as 'young and hip and cool,' said Meryl Levitz, the president of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation, who regularly holds lunches at which she tells the New York media, 'We're closer than the Hamptons!' The campaign had a boost last month when Forbes magazine named Philadelphia No. 12 on its list of best cities for singles (out of 40), a jump from No. 15 a year ago. In 2004 tourists in Philadelphia numbered 25.5 million, an increase of 41 percent in the last five years, and though the city had been losing residents - especially young ones - steadily since the 1950's, when it had 2.07 million people, the population of the city, the nation's fifth-largest, has leveled off at 1.5 million in the last four years. A government plan to provide the city with free wireless Internet access has as yet gone unrealized, but the national publicity surrounding it has given Philadelphia a progressive image, as has a marketing campaign by the tourism bureau, started in 2003 to attract gay tourists. That tagline was 'Get your history straight and your nightlife gay.' 'There's a big gay clientele coming down here,' said Michael McCann, a real estate agent with Prudential Fox and Roach, who also said he has seen a 'significant increase' in buyers from Manhattan and has worked with 'a ton' of 'single people and couples between 28 and 43' from Brooklyn. Often they move to start the kind of business they had in New York. Danuta Mieloch, 39, an owner of Rescue Rittenhouse Spa, who administered body scrubs to celebrities at Paul Labrecque on the Upper East Side before moving to Philadelphia to start her own place, is an example. Jose Garces, 33, a former chef at Chicama and Pipa in Gramercy Park, will open Amada, a tapas restaurant in Old City, in September. Matthew Izzo, 35, and his business partner, Mark Ax, 35, defected from New York design firms to start their own home and design boutiques, the Matthew Izzo shops. 'It's just so much more workable here,' Mr. Izzo said. 'It's smaller and more manageable.' And Lindsay Berman, 27, who left a marketing job at the Showtime network in Manhattan, is waiting tables part time at Jones, a 70's throwback diner in Center City, while she gets her T-shirt line, Dirty Old Shirt, off the ground. Not that everyone is committed for life. Some 'can't give up their Brooklyn phone numbers,' said Heather Murphy Monteith, a dancer who runs a disco for toddlers. She has noticed 718 and 917 area codes popping up on the contact sheets. Some keep more than just their digits: Mitzi Wong, 36, a buyer for the Philadelphia-based trend mecca Anthropologie, bought a 'Jane Austen-like' row house in Society Hill, the historic Philadelphia neighborhood, but she is keeping her East Village apartment for weekends. Lee Daniels, a native Philadelphian and producer of the film 'Monster's Ball,' rents in Harlem but bought a luxury apartment on the Delaware riverfront. 'So many people are moving here,' Mr. Daniels said. 'People just fall in love with it.' Many of the things that were once deterring about Philadelphia have also been turned around. The recent lifting of archaic building ordinances and a 10-year tax abatement on new construction means that blighted factories and brownstones are now being converted, many into luxury apartments, and new buildings are going up in place of weed-filled lots. Bring-your-own restaurants, born out of Pennsylvania's Puritan liquor restrictions, have become a charming hallmark of Center City. Philadelphia still has its share of urban blight: It ranks higher than New York in homelessness, crime and poverty. It maintains a high position in the Men's Health list of America's Fattest Cities each year, and, as New Yorkers often complain, you would be hard-pressed to find much open after 2 a.m. But the renaissance in real estate and restaurants has aligned with the city's music scene, which runs the gamut of cool. In a recent conversation Nick Sylvester, who covers Philadelphia music for The Village Voice and Pitchfork Media, an online music magazine, mentions diverse acts like the indie rockers Dr. Dog and Man Man, Beanie Sigel's State Property crew, and D.J.'s Diplo and Dave Pianka. 'Philly's decidedly anti-scene, and that appeals to a lot of musicians that move there,' he said. 'They can actually do their own thing.' There are art shows of international renown, like the Salvador Dalí show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the spring, and shows by quirky collectives like Space 1026 in Chinatown, which recently housed an installation made with Cheez-Its. All of which has collided with a peculiar cultural moment in which uncool is the new cool, in which blue-collar scrappiness and a surfeit of fried-meat specialties now seems endearingly kitschy. At least one developer is banking on the hope that Philadelphia's appeal is not just a fleeting fad. On a vast tract of land in Northern Liberties, an area once notable for hate crimes and heroin availability, a 50-year-old former shopping center developer named Bart Blatstein is building a $100 million development. Scheduled for completion in 2007, it will have 1,000 apartments, half a million square feet of ground-floor retail space and 100,000 square feet of industrial-chic office space, all of which Mr. Blatstein says will be offered at reduced rents to 'edgy, creative types.' The project is seeking New Yorkers. (Mr. Blatstein's company, Tower Properties, plans to advertise both in The Village Voice and on New York's Craigslist.) 'We want it to be a cross between Williamsburg and SoHo,' he said. But Mr. Lowy, of Portico gallery in SoHo, is skeptical about the long-run chances for young artists: 'The quality of life is pretty good but many of those artists probably won't stay. Can you get an art dealer to come to your studio when you're in Philly? Sure, you have time to make more art, but there's no one to buy it.'

Subject: Death Tax? Double Tax? It's No Tax From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 14:22:57 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/14/business/yourmoney/14view.html Death Tax? Double Tax? For Most, It's No Tax By EDMUND L. ANDREWS WASHINGTON WHEN Congress comes back from its summer recess, one of the first things Senate Republicans will try to do, again, is kill the estate tax. Perhaps no other tax has so many passionate, persevering and politically organized opponents as the estate tax, or 'death tax,' as they have branded it. As Michael J. Graetz and Ian Shapiro of Yale recount in 'Death by a Thousand Cuts' (Princeton University Press), their entertaining account of the repeal movement, opponents of the estate tax have already achieved a remarkable political feat by building broad public support for abolishing a tax that currently affects only 2 percent of all estates. But repeal would be costly - more than $70 billion a year, once it was complete - and many of the populist arguments in favor of repeal are misleading. If estate or inheritance taxes were frozen at today's levels, they would have almost no impact on family farmers and most small-business owners. And while opponents contend that the estate tax is a 'double tax,' many of the earnings that are subject to it were never taxed in the first place. The tax opponents, many of whom began as political neophytes more than 20 years ago, lead a powerful coalition of small-business owners, farmers, trade associations and corporate lobbying groups like the American Council on Capital Formation. Killing the estate tax is one of President Bush's top priorities, and the House of Representatives has already passed a repeal measure four different times. But Senate Republicans, despite attempts to cut a deal with conservative Democrats before the summer recess, have been stalled on the issue. Unable to muster the 60 votes they need to overcome a Democratic filibuster, Senate leaders are now vowing to push for full repeal as soon as they come back in September. Hoping to pressure Democrats from conservative farming states just before Congress adjourned, two business-backed advocacy groups spent about $500,000 on television ads last month in states including Montana, North Dakota, Arkansas and Louisiana. The ads, produced by the American Family Business Institute and the Free Enterprise Fund - the first an advocacy group dedicated to abolishing the estate tax, the second an advocacy group aimed at a wider range of tax cuts - focused on images of soldiers fighting on D-Day in World War II. 'The I.R.S. hits this greatest generation with an unjust double tax, the death tax,' the narrator intoned in an ad aimed at North Dakota. Viewers are urged to 'tell Kent Conrad,' the state's Democratic senator, to 'change his vote.' But despite the populist rhetoric and oft-repeated horror stories about families being forced to sell their farms in order to pay estate taxes, the battle is over a very large amount of money held by a very small number of families. A report last month by the Congressional Budget Office found that in 2000 only 2 percent of all estates - about 52,000 - were subject to any estate tax. At that point, taxes were imposed only on estates worth $675,000 or more. The limit rose to $1.5 million in 2004, and if that limit had been in effect in 2000, only 13,771 estates - fewer than 1 percent - would have been subject to the tax. All but 740 of them would have had enough in liquid assets to cover estate tax liabilities, the office estimated. At the moment, taxes are imposed only on estates worth more than $1.5 million. Under Mr. Bush's tax cut of 2001, the estate tax is set to shrink steadily over this decade and disappear in 2010. But the 2001 bill called for the estate tax to reappear in full force in 2011. The nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that full repeal would cost $290 billion over the next 10 years, but that calculation understates the true cost because full repeal would not occur until 2011. Once the estate tax was fully repealed, the Treasury would lose more than $70 billion a year in today's dollars. Over the first 10 years of full repeal, the cost would total more than $700 billion, plus interest. Assuming that the government is still running an annual deficit in 2011, which is more likely than not, the total 10-year cost would be close to $1 trillion. A compromise being floated by Senator Jon Kyl, Republican of Arizona, could be almost as expensive. Indeed, because of a strange wrinkle, the compromise could end up being far more generous to many heirs than outright repeal. Mr. Kyl's proposal called for excluding estate taxes on all property up to $3.5 million and taxing anything above that amount at 15 percent - the same rate now charged on capital gains. Under current law, estate tax rates range up to about 45 percent. As a practical matter, Mr. Kyl's approach would eliminate the estate tax for more than 99 percent of all families and greatly reduce taxes for the few who owed anything at all. If the $3.5 million exclusion were in effect in 2000, the Congressional Budget Office estimated, only 3,676 estates - about 0.15 percent of all estates - would have had to pay any tax. But the proposed compromise also comes with an important twist that could make it more expensive than the $53 billion a year estimated by Congressional tax scorers. The twist is that the proposal would retain a big tax break that is supposed to disappear along with the estate tax. That break is known as the 'stepped-up basis,' and it means that an heir does not owe any capital gains taxes on any increase in value of property during the life of the person who died. A mansion that appreciated to $10 million from $1 million, for example, would not be subject to any capital gains taxes on that profit if an heir sold it. For many families with estates worth less than $3.5 million, that could amount to a double tax break. A person could build up wealth for years, yet avoid paying taxes because the gains were all 'unrealized.' His children could then inherit the property, sell it and avoid both the capital gains and estate taxes. The added cost of retaining a stepped-up basis may be only partially reflected in the official cost estimates of Mr. Kyl's proposal, because it is difficult to estimate when people will sell inherited property. But the American Family Business Institute has said that a very high percentage of heirs sell or restructure their holdings within five years. That's why it is misleading for opponents of the estate tax to claim that it is a double tax on earnings that have already been taxed once. In many cases, that's not true. 'A lot of assets that passed through very large estates have never been taxed and never will be,' said Mr. Graetz of Yale. 'It's a very big issue.' For thousands of single-digit millionaires, that could be a very good deal indeed.

Subject: CBO and OMB - who gonna pay da tax? From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 19:57:33 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: Congressional Budget Office Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin , Congressional Budget Office Watched on cspan today - taxes are going to have to be paid by someone going forward 10 years, there is just no way around it. Elephants seem they want the poor man to pay, Donkey Spratt said wait, maybe the rich man needs to pay. I am all for it, let the rich man pay some more, kudlow and friends don't like the death tax, but I remember oliver stone's gordon gecko saying how too much wealth is controlled by idiot sons and widows.

Subject: Immigrant Women Line Up for Day Labor From: Emma To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 08:43:41 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/15/nyregion/15labor.html Invisible to Most, Immigrant Women Line Up for Day Labor By NINA BERNSTEIN The women are not noticed by the weekday morning crowds that rush past Eighth Avenue and 37th Street, in the heart of Manhattan's fashion district. They arrive in twos and threes after 8 a.m., shrinking against the buildings on both sides of the avenue, until scores of them are waiting, small, dark-haired Mexicans, Ecuadoreans, Hondurans. By noon they have vanished. In swift, discreet sidewalk negotiations, perhaps half have been hired for a day's work at the minimum wage or less in some of the neighborhood's last struggling garment factories. The rest have given up until tomorrow. A few miles away in Williamsburg, commuters on the busy Brooklyn-Queens Expressway are equally oblivious to the similar scene unfolding on an overpass above them. There, the work at stake is $8-an-hour housecleaning, and those vying for a day's scrubbing, mainly for Hasidic homemakers, stand in a crude ascending hierarchy of employer preference: Mexican and Central American women in their 30's at the back, Polish immigrant women in their 50's and 60's in the middle, and young Polish students with a command of English at the head of the line. At a time when male day laborers have become the most public and contentious face of economic immigration to the United States, these two rare female shape-ups have doubled in size almost unobserved in recent years. Their growth reflects a larger overlooked reality: Women make up 44 percent of the nation's low-wage immigrant work force, and worldwide, studies show, more and more women are migrating for work. Often invisible and undercounted, experts say, female economic migrants are an increasing presence, especially in big cities like New York, where the demand is not for men to pick lettuce or process poultry, but for women to pick up the scraps of a collapsed manufacturing sector, or to serve in the vast underground economy of domestic service. Although more women across the country are showing up in day-labor hiring halls, often run by grass-roots labor groups, experts say that these two female shape-ups may well be the only significant ones of their kind in the nation - places where women are willing to put their personal safety in jeopardy for a few hours of work. 'What else is there to do if you have nothing to eat?' asked Rosario Jocha, 49, still standing on Eighth Avenue at 11 a.m. on a recent Wednesday. She said she had recently grabbed a day's work cutting threads from jackets even when the employer, a Chinese immigrant subcontractor, insisted he could not pay more than $5.75 an hour, 25 cents below the state minimum wage. 'I've been here 11 years, and I still haven't found a stable, steady job.' At both locations, some of the women waiting for work had been in the country as little as a few months; others, like Ms. Jocha, a Queens resident from Ecuador, were old-timers who spoke of better jobs lost when small-business employers could not pay rising rent. On Eighth Avenue, merchants said that 100 to 150 women regularly sought work six mornings a week year round - double or triple the number when the intersection first emerged as an informal female hiring site about six years ago. Yet May Chen, a vice president of Unite, the garment workers' union, whose headquarters is only a dozen blocks away, said she was unaware of the shape-up's existence until she was asked about it for this article. And Aaron Adams, a veteran garment center landlord who passes by every day, said he had assumed the women standing there 'were just shooting the breeze.' Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, a sociologist who has written extensively about the feminization of migration, said she was not surprised. 'The space that these women occupy, the public spaces in the city, are just like fleeting moments,' she said. 'They don't really have a place in the city that's visible, so it's easy to ignore them.' Even the discussion of legal guest worker proposals in Congress centers on male migrants, she said. But though nationally men account for about two-thirds of labor migration among illegal immigrants, primarily because of agricultural demand, she said, global patterns indicate that women are easily half the immigrant workers flowing to large metropolitan areas like New York. Ms. Parreñas and other researchers find that women who migrate for work are likely to be single mothers supporting children in their native countries. Compared with their male counterparts, they earn less, despite higher levels of education, according to a 2002 study of the United States' low-wage immigrant work force by the Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, which estimated that two million foreign-born women made less than the minimum wage. Yet women are also more likely to remain in America, and they send home a higher proportion of their earnings. Unvarnished lessons in global supply, demand and division play out at both New York hiring sites. 'We never talk to the Latinas - sometimes they agree to work for less,' said Teresa, a 53-year-old Polish widow who, like many of the 60 women waiting for cleaning work near Marcy and Division Avenues in Williamsburg on a recent Friday morning, would give only her first name. At the other end of the curved concrete abutment, Maria, 35, from Ecuador, gave a shrug. 'They pay them more,' she complained, as a woman in Hasidic dress passed by the Spanish-speaking group and selected a tall young Polish woman. 'It's just that they're white.' Even among the Poles, immigration complicates the pecking order. Some older women won green cards after years as live-in maids for sponsors, and boast in broken English of children in college. Other women lack papers, or shuttle on temporary work visas between their struggling families in rural Poland and spartan, overpriced rooms in Brooklyn. And in summer, just when demand declines because of employer vacations, they now face growing numbers of young Polish women working illegally on tourist visas while living rent-free with Brooklyn relatives. 'They don't want babushkas,' complained Zofia, a 50-year-old mother of five, as a young Hasidic man led Justyne, a 24-year-old Polish student, to his S.U.V. Not all employers had the same preferences, however, and most, like Rifky Kohn, 28, a pregnant mother of four, were on foot. At midday, with the Sabbath approaching, she gladly hired a Polish woman in her late 60's. 'She looks more experienced,' explained Mrs. Kohn. Rosa Yumbla, who supports four children in Ecuador, recently skipped a day on the overpass to address a national conference of day labor organizers at New York University Law School. She spoke at the urging of the Latin American Workers Project, an advocacy group in Brooklyn. 'We suffer the changing weather throughout the year, the heat of the sun and cold in winter, because where we wait to be picked up is on the corner,' Ms. Yumbla said in Spanish to an audience that included the mayor's commissioner for immigrant affairs. 'Help us secure a space where we can be safer.' For now, the women depend on one another and their own instincts for safety. On a recent Wednesday, when a man on Eighth Avenue approached a young Mexican woman with a vague description of a part-time job in a store at the Port Authority, an older woman drew close and signaled disapproval. The man, who gave his name as Victor Miranda and his age as 55, then turned to Josefa Limas, 32, who arrived from Puebla, Mexico, only six months ago. She, too, shook her head. 'Sometimes they'll just end up taking you somewhere else,' she said, describing another woman's close call the previous day. 'An Indian man took her to an elevator and wouldn't let her out. He came over and tried to grab her. She pressed an emergency button and got away.' Still, the pressure to take chances can be strong. Nellie, 32, who shares a room in the Bronx, pulled out a picture of the three children she left four years ago with her sister in rural Ecuador, in an effort to earn money for the heart operation needed by her son, the youngest. 'The little I make here I send to him,' she said. 'Many times I just want to go to be with him, but I don't have the money to do so. It gives me a desperate feeling.' On this day she counted herself lucky: she had been called back for a second day's work at $6 an hour, she said. And leaving the line, she melted into the crowd.

Subject: Re: Immigrant Women Line Up for Day Labor From: Johnny5 To: Emma Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 12:59:07 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: 'Compared with their male counterparts, they earn less, despite higher levels of education, according to a 2002 study of the United States' low-wage immigrant work force by the Urban Institute,' How said, higher education should be rewarded - they are supposed to be coming to a more fair country than they left no?

Subject: I don't understand Kudlow From: Poyetas To: All Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 05:11:37 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Based on what I've been seeing, everyone on this forum should have their own talkshow because they are twice as informed as everyone who does have a talkshow and debates Krugman. What in the world is Larry Kudlow talking about?? 1. 'the expansion of homeownership among the middle, lower-middle and lower-income classes is one of the great benefits and boons of this economic prosperity.' - People are just re-mortgaging their homes, that is no net increase in home ownership. 'But they are looking at stocks vs. real estate and saying, well, at least I am going to be able to hold my investment' - Your investment will hold as long as the housing market holds because the economy is 85% housing! Your putting all your eggs in one basket. ITS A HIGHLY CORRELATED ECONOMY!! 'Just real quick, I think it is an investment-led recovery, particularly capital investment' - Ummmmm, haven't we learned anything from the 1990's?? I've said this before...Money (with a view to profit) does not create solutions, money does not increase creativity. They are mutually exclusive. Invest in things that foster creative thoughts by all means, but don't expect to make returns off something as spontanious and irrational as human ingenuity. You will always lose!

Subject: Noyce on Cspan From: Johnny5 To: Poyetas Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 13:07:06 (EDT) Email Address: johnny5@yahoo.com Message: 'but don't expect to make returns off something as spontanious and irrational as human ingenuity. You will always lose! ' HAHA - I just watched a special on the father of silicon valley, Noyce - he said he always liked ideas that were new and untested and hated the tried and true. Bill Gates is a slave to innovation. RE kudlow's claim - I have seen in inner city palm beach county, several homes that were very ugly and slum looking have been remodeled and renovated and the areas are looking better. True those people are under more debt load now, but their neighborhoods sure look pretty - I guess what do you think is more important - looking pretty or sustainable finances - now remember IMAGE is A LOT here in america. My carpentar redneck friend probably put it best, he was sick and tired of the women he saw read homes and garden and then to follow the latest fashion rip up a perfectly good kitchen to put in the latest corian countertops and make her husband have to work a second job to pay for it - HAHA! I think krugman is not so much about IMAGE as fundamentals - he would probably buy his daughters the 20 dollar jeans at kmart - but kudlow is gonna get his daughters the 300 dollar jeans because like he says - it looks better. HAHA!

Subject: Re: I don't understand Kudlow From: Emma To: Poyetas Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 08:47:06 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: This is an excellent way to handle rebuttal. Nice points. 'Invest in things that foster creative thoughts by all means, but don't expect to make returns off something as spontanious and irrational as human ingenuity.' Nicely expressed.

Subject: investing From: byron To: All Date Posted: Sun, Aug 14, 2005 at 23:30:03 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: My daughter has a small amount in vanguard indext 500. She just started working a new job and i am trying to get her to start investing for her eventual retirement. Should she continue in the 500 indext or mix it up in some other vanguard funds? I know vanguard is touted quite a bit on this forum and the advise from you all is pretty sound. Byron

Subject: Re: investing From: Terri To: byron Date Posted: Mon, Aug 15, 2005 at 05:47:12 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Byron Vanguard has switched all it indexes but the S&P to the Morgan Stanley constructions which are superior to the old indexes in construction. The S&P however is so popular that it has not been switched. John Bogle suggested years ago that the index of choice be broader than the S&P. So, I do not use the S&P. The Vanguard LargeCap Index is closest to the S&P but includes more midcap companies. Then there is the Total Stock Market Index which includes midcap and smallcap. There is the MidCap Index and value and growth in both large and small cap. I have leaned to value and midcap indexes, and much prefer the SmallCap Value index to the complete smallcap or growth smallcap. When building in the beginning I find no reason not to use a single index as LargeCap or Total Stock Market. I will add....

Subject: Re: investing From: Dorian To: Emma Date Posted: Sat, Aug 20, 2005 at 06:23:54 (EDT) Email Address: Not Provided Message: Wow. Thanks. I have had all my money in short term T-bills for years. Just a couple of weeks ago I thought Gold looked awfully low (420 dollars and even lower) and thought I would purchase some sort of investment linked to gold but didn't have an account set up. The last time I looked it was prohibitive. Non-US currencies are also looking attractive at the moment. And there were several other opportunities which would have been better taken a while ago (e.g.,energy funds) but I haven't had any brokerage account set up. Thanks, Dorian