Art Basel Miami Day3

after a full day of collections, and two private parties, we were out till 4:30am last night at the Delano, Mynt and then the living room at the Opium Garden. so today waking at 8am, i was thoroughly exhausted and didn't have any time to post anything from yesterday, Day 3. so here are a few pictures now.

now off to dinner and a few more parties. hope to be able to post some pictures later from today's schedule. and still need to rewrite and finish my account from Day2.

so..... tired.......... zz . zz. zzz z. zzzzzzzzz

Art Basel Miami Day2

Our second day at ArtBaselMiami began with a visit to Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art (new to Miami since 1996). we were awed when the Director and Head Curator Bonnie Clearwater related to us that the building designed by Charles Gwathmey (Gwathmey Siegel & Assoc.) was fully designed and constructed for less than $2 million. less than the cost of many manhattan apartments! inside were several exhibits including a travelling Yoko Ono retrospective. honestly, i hadn't realized the extent to which Yoko Ono was an artist in her own right even before meeting John Lennon. one interesting piece was a lifesize plexiglass maze. we were warned to walk with our hands in front of our bodies, as it was incredibly easy to really slam into the invisible walls (as one of our members did!). they'll definitely have to reconstruct that piece over time.

after visits to several galleries and lunch at the Beach House resort, we visited the beautiful home and private collection of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz. as Mrs. de la Cruz graciously explained to us, after their children grew up and left the house, they decided to remake their home as they dreamed, virtually converting it into a viewing space and research center for the public. their beautiful collection was extensive and included diverse talents from latin as well as continental and japanese artists.

afterwards, in our two hours of free time, i returned to the convention center to try and do a better job than i had done the day before. yesterday i had barely seen a fifth of the collections in nearly four hours. so today, by virtually running through the exhibits, i covered more ground than i had done before. but i still didn't finish. and i also felt like i was missing alot, as shown by the paucity of my notes and digital images.

in the evening we had dinner at the Big Fish, in a more industrial area by a working canal (really the Miami River). we ate to the sounds of dock loaders and miami's elevated trains, as several ocean going cargo ships were pushed pulled and escorted under two nearby draw bridges. over the course of our dinner, we had a very interesting discussion with the new assistant curator of drawings at MOMA, Jordan Kantor, about (1) the different roles of creatives and curators with respect to the work of artists and their placement in context, (2) the arguments for collecting art, even if you think you have no resources, and (3) the importance of periodicals (like Parkett). by the time we returned to the hotel from a street party for Miami's Design District, i could do no more than drag myself into bed.

so now day three. a few more private collections, a group dinner at the Cisneros residence in Coral Gables, and then three more parties in the evening. i'm already exhausted. but loving the weather, especially when i see all the snow in NYC!

Early Winter Storm Snarls Travel and Knocks Out Power

Early Winter Storm Snarls Travel and Knocks Out Power
By ANTHONY DePALMA
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/nyregion/06SNOW.html

The first major winter storm of the season — uncommon in its timing and its intensity — bullied its way up the Eastern Seaboard yesterday, snarling airports and highways, closing schools and offices and blanketing New York with more snow in a single day than the city received through all of last winter.

The vast storm caused thousands of traffic accidents from North Carolina to Connecticut as it barreled across a third of the country in the last few days, powered by a blast of arctic air and an intensifying El Niño that meteorologists are predicting will cause extreme weather well into next year.

For many, though, the oddest aspect of the storm was that so much snow fell so early. Winter does not formally begin until Dec. 22, but meteorologists consider the first week of December the beginning of the season.

Nothing like this storm has come to New York City since 1938, according to meteorological records. Coming just a week after Thanksgiving, and with leaves still clinging to the sycamore trees in Bryant Park, the snow was a blustery dose of weather reality for those lulled by years of mild winters into thinking that the season is no longer what it used to be.

The six inches that fell on Central Park by late last night was nearly double the 3.5 inches that was recorded throughout all of last winter.

"This could be payback time," said Frederick J. Gadomski, a meteorologist at Pennsylvania State University. "Cold and snow are still a part of New York winter weather. This early taste of winter should be a reminder of that."

And a reminder that snow brings both economic costs and benefits. For ski resorts in the area, the first significant snowfall since February 2001 is a welcome blast of winter. The storm will also lay down snow cover that will help replenish reservoirs badly hurt by a lack of significant snow last year. Malls and stores just beginning their crucial holiday shopping seasons are hoping that the snow will be a wash, making it difficult for shoppers to travel for a while but convincing them that Christmas is only three weeks away.

The storm was also a fiscal reality check for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other elected officials in the region, who are struggling to balance their budgets. For them, the accumulating piles of snow look like nothing so much as mounting debts. "Every mayor would love to have very few snow days," Mr. Bloomberg said yesterday as he took command of the first snow emergency of his administration.

Facing a $6.4 billion deficit next year, the mayor equated snowflakes with dollar signs, telling reporters that it costs the city about $1 million an inch to clear the snow. A four- to six-inch snowfall in the first week of December would clearly make a substantial dent in the city's $20 million snow removal budget.

Still, streets had to be cleared. The city's armada of 1,000 plow trucks and 2,300 sanitation workers began work at daybreak and continued throughout the day as the snow continued falling heavily, snarling traffic on city streets and for suburban commuters throughout the region.

Gray skies and swirling snow made it difficult to see more than a few blocks around Times Square, and forced Staten Island Ferry pilots to slow down crossing times until visibility improved.

But the signs of winter were unmistakable everywhere. By late afternoon, street corners in Times Square were overflowing with slush the consistency of leftover farina; snowblowers that had not been fired up all last winter were coaxed, stumbling and coughing, out of storage; and bicycle messengers tried to continue looking cool as they negotiated slippery streets while pedaling in yellow rubber boots.

Meteorologists at the National Weather Service consider this storm "noteworthy" because of its power and unusual timing. They have followed it intensely since it gathered strength in the Western states earlier this week. Jim Hoke, director of the service's hydrometeorological prediction center, said the storm ran along a rough axis from Oklahoma to North Carolina before turning northeast along the coast.

"That's when a nor'easter developed off the North Carolina coast," Dr. Hoke said.

The storm hit North and South Carolina particularly hard, pelting large sections of the states with freezing rain and unaccustomed snow. Electric service to 1.5 million people in both states was knocked out, and highways became automotive skating rinks as drivers with little experience with freezing conditions tried to negotiate dark and snow-slicked roads.

At least 20 people have died in the storm since it roared out of the West, news agencies reported. Authorities said eight people were killed in traffic accidents in Kentucky and Missouri. On Long Island, the acclaimed tenor saxophone player Bob Berg, 51, of East Hampton was killed and his wife, Arja, 52, was injured yesterday morning on Route 27 when their car was struck by a cement truck, the authorities said. She was in stable condition last night in Southampton Hospital, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Carolina Power and Light reported that 470,000 customers in North Carolina were without power yesterday afternoon. Duke University had to cancel a national Internet chat it had planned for prospective students Wednesday night because the organizers could not get to the campus.

After turning toward the Northeast, the storm plowed up the coast, dumping six inches of snow in Washington, Baltimore and other major cities.

The snow made winter seem to encroach on autumn the way the hockey season seems to overlap with football. The last time it snowed so much so early was in 1938, when a late November storm dumped 8.8 inches in New York City.

Yesterday morning, snow started falling in the New York region about 7 a.m., beating forecasts by a few hours. Classes in many southern New Jersey schools were canceled before children arrived. In other areas, schools were open but classes were dismissed early.

Two days of subfreezing temperatures earlier in the week meant that snow began accumulating as soon as the first flakes hit the pavement, offering the kind of day tow truck drivers like Frank Guenther live for.

"Today is the money day," said Mr. Guenther as he hooked chains from his tow truck to a white Ford van that had spun off the Garden State Parkway near Pleasantville, N.J. Mr. Guenther, 37, said his family's business, Guenther & Sons Towing, had 10 trucks out and could not respond to all the calls that came in.

Sgt. Kevin Rehmann of the New Jersey State Police estimated that there were hundreds of minor accidents across New Jersey. And although the southern part of the state received more snow, Sergeant Rehmann said it was the more heavily traveled northern section, around Interstates 80, 78 and 287, where most of the accidents were concentrated.

On Long Island, there were power failures and at least 280 minor accidents by midafternoon, even as hundreds of snowplows tried to keep major expressways clear. Thomas R. Suozzi, the Nassau County executive, said the county's budget problems made the early snow more unwelcome than usual. He estimated that the storm would cost the county nearly $150,000, and said, "If this happens an awful lot between now and the end of the year, we're going to have a problem."

Keeping highways clear and traffic flowing also taxed New Jersey's officials. Kevin Davitt, a spokesman for Gov. James E. McGreevey, said the state had spent money clearing roads after a series of small ice storms in recent weeks. "While the budget for snow removal and storm preparation is not broke," Mr. Davitt said, "it's perilously close, and this doesn't help."

The region's trains were a far safer and more reliable bet than cars for most of the day. The Metro-North Railroad reported that its trains were running on or close to schedule throughout the day. New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road began experiencing 15- to 20-minute delays by early evening.

The snow and near freezing temperatures caused mounting delays of up to five hours at metropolitan area airports. By late afternoon, flights leaving Newark Liberty International Airport were delayed by as much as four hours. Incoming flights did little better, being delayed by about two hours. Dozens of flights were canceled throughout the day. La Guardia Airport and Kennedy Airport both had substantial delays and cancellations. Noting that hundreds of travelers were likely to be stranded, Mayor Bloomberg encouraged them to bring "books and magazines to read."

In Connecticut, which was hit hard by a snowstorm last week that skirted New York and New Jersey, Gov. John G. Rowland ordered agency heads to dismiss all nonessential state workers at 1 p.m. A long line of cars, their headlights glittering in the gray afternoon, stretched down arteries leading out of Hartford. Children throughout the region were delighted by the early onset of winter, and undoubtedly hoped that a big snowfall during the first week of December would lead to many other snow days — and school cancellations — before spring, which is not entirely wishful thinking.

"It certainly is possible that this storm is a harbinger of what is to come this winter," said Dr. Hoke of the National Weather Service. With El Niño threatening to stir up trouble, there is an increased likelihood of more winter storms, he said, but "winter storms do not necessarily mean snow" in this area.

Despite the professional prognostications, some people remain convinced that old-fashioned winters are unlikely to return.

Keith Desimone, a computer network consultant from Garden City, N.Y., who works on Wall Street, said he doubted the early snowfall was an omen of a cruel winter. "Weather is so crazy, I wouldn't count on it," said Mr. Desimone, 25. "For all we know, this could be the only snow we get all winter."

U.S. Is Pressuring Inspectors in Iraq to Aid Defections

U.S. Is Pressuring Inspectors in Iraq to Aid Defections
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/international/middleeast/06INSP.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — The Bush administration has stepped up pressure on Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspection team to identify key Iraqi weapons scientists and spirit them out of Iraq so they can be offered asylum in exchange for disclosing where Saddam Hussein is hiding weapons of mass destruction, according to administration and United Nations officials.

High-level negotiations on the issue became visible when Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, met with Mr. Blix in New York on Monday and pressed the issue of interviewing Iraqi scientists. The administration is offering to set up a witness protection program for defecting Iraqi scientists, thus enabling a more aggressive approach.

A United States official at the United Nations said that the talks on how to handle Iraqi scientists were continuing and that the initial message to Mr. Blix, a chief arms inspector, was that Washington wanted him to "make it a priority" to use the full powers conveyed by the Security Council resolution passed on Nov. 8.

The resolution demands that Iraq provide "unimpeded" and "unrestricted" access "to all officials and other persons" that inspectors decide they want to interview "inside or outside Iraq."

The purpose of this inspection tool, perhaps the most aggressive tactic in a decade of Iraq inspections, is to achieve a breakthrough in gathering fresh evidence about Iraq's weapons program at a time when Baghdad is under mounting criticism from senior American officials for previously concealing its weapons programs and lying about them.

Private tips and defectors have contributed to most of the American intelligence gathered on Iraq's secret nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, United States officials said.

It is not clear what intelligence the administration is using as a basis for its deductions or how much of this information has been shared with the United Nations.

The push by Washington for defectors has further pressurized the atmosphere surrounding the first week of inspections as Iraq prepares to make what the Security Council has said must be a full disclosure of its secret arms programs.

A senior administration official tonight said that "the United States is concerned with the safety, welfare and nonintimidation of people who may wish to cooperate" with inspectors. "We take this issue seriously," the official continued, "and we hope the international community would also attach the same importance to the issue."

The reliance on the United States to take over from the United Nations the handling of Iraqi defectors is a very delicate issue, senior administration officials said.

The United Nations is keen to protect its mission from activities that might compromise it, and the handling, debriefing and resettlement of defectors is traditionally a function of intelligence agencies.

Senior Iraqi officials have begun to assail the inspection mission as a tool of American intelligence and war preparation. On Wednesday, Iraq's vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, referring to the inspectors, said that "their work is to spy to serve the C.I.A. and Mossad," the Israeli intelligence agency.

According to the arrangements under discussion in Washington and New York, United Nations inspectors could identify Iraqi scientists who are believed to have crucial knowledge of weapons programs. They would be flown out of the country, perhaps with their families.

American officials would then debrief the Iraqis, feed any useful information back to the United Nations teams and then help resettle the Iraqi scientists in a country willing to take them. Those who wanted to return to Iraq could, but American and United Nations officials said the risks of return would be high for any Iraqi taken outside the country.

American official say Iraqi intelligence agencies routinely kill any Iraqi suspected of cooperating with foreign countries.

An intense argument is under way, however, on almost all of the details of a protection program. Some American officials want the United Nations team to be aggressive in identifying scientists and demanding that they leave the country, perhaps without the scientists' permission. Mr. Blix is said to be arguing that the United Nations cannot, in effect, abduct people against their will. His view is being backed by most of the United Nations hierarchy and the State Department in Washington, officials said.

But there were strong contrary views in the Pentagon and White House, officials said.

"I don't see how they can do their mission," Richard Perle said of the inspectors, "if they cannot interview" scientists and other officials associated with secret programs. Mr. Perle is chairman of the Defense Policy Board, an advisory body to the Pentagon. He said the Security Council provision demanding access to Iraqi weapons scientists and their families "was the only innovation in the entire resolution, and if they don't use it, they will fail."

Similar strong views have been expressed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

"If you go back and look at the history of inspections in Iraq," Mr. Rumsfeld said on Tuesday, "the reality is that things have been found — not by discovery, but through defectors."

United Nations officials, uneasy with soliciting or demanding defections, have been searching for a means to conduct private interviews with Iraqi scientists inside the country. American officials have asserted that this is out of the question since the inspection teams are under intense surveillance by Iraqi intelligence. The officials said they were aware of a large number of scientists who have knowledge of Iraqi weapons programs. Some would like to see Mr. Blix submit a list of names to the Iraqi government and demand to interview those individuals.

Still, Mr. Blix is said to be resisting any idea that the United Nations can force Iraqi scientists to take the life-threatening step of leaving Iraq for interrogation.

"That's where the problem is," said an administration official sympathetic to the concerns Mr. Blix and other United Nations officials have expressed. "Taking someone against their will is contrary to the whole United Nations concept. You'd fracture the U.N. consensus."

The Security Council resolution authorizes the inspectors "to facilitate the travel of those interviewed" and their family members outside of Iraq. This provision was intended to protect the inspectors from retribution, but even this protection has raised questions.

"Let's say for argument's sake that you are a senior government official," a United Nations expert said. "It is one thing for you to say that it is part of your job to agree to go out of the country to be interviewed, but why would you pull your wife out of her job and the kids out of school? If you wanted to assure Saddam that you had no plans to defect, you would leave them there to reassure him."

Advocates of an aggressive approach argue that the inspectors could order scientists to report with their families, giving them no choice so Mr. Hussein could not blame them. Once out of the country, the scientists could make their own choices. But United Nations officials ask how many family members count in a country built on clans where extended families can run to the dozens or hundreds?

"We are conscious that this is potentially a key issue," a United Nations official said. "But many of us think that defections are best done by a welcoming government. There is no U.N. mechanism for this. The U.N. has no capacity to grant asylum. Any government, and the United States in particular, has all of that capacity."

Mr. Bush's national security advisers were scheduled to meet today to further discuss the questions of how to handle Iraqi scientists.

Love and Race

Love and Race
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/opinion/06KRIS.html

In a world brimming with bad news, here's one of the happiest trends: Instead of preying on people of different races, young Americans are falling in love with them.

"Mixed-race marriages in the U.S. now number 1.5 million and are roughly doubling each decade. About 40 percent of Asian-Americans and 6 percent of blacks have married whites in recent years.

Still more striking, one survey found that 40 percent of Americans had dated someone of another race."

Whites and blacks can be found strolling together as couples even at the University of Mississippi, once the symbol of racial confrontation.

"I will say that they are always given a second glance," acknowledges C. J. Rhodes, a black student at Ole Miss. He adds that there are still misgivings about interracial dating, particularly among black women and a formidable number of "white Southerners who view this race-mixing as abnormal, frozen by fear to see Sara Beth bring home a brotha."

Mixed-race marriages in the U.S. now number 1.5 million and are roughly doubling each decade. About 40 percent of Asian-Americans and 6 percent of blacks have married whites in recent years.

Still more striking, one survey found that 40 percent of Americans had dated someone of another race.

In a country where racial divisions remain deep, all this love is an enormously hopeful sign of progress in bridging barriers. Scientists who study the human genome say that race is mostly a bogus distinction reflecting very little genetic difference, perhaps one-hundredth of 1 percent of our DNA.

Skin color differences are recent, arising over only the last 100,000 years or so, a twinkling of an evolutionary eye. That's too short a period for substantial genetic differences to emerge, and so there is perhaps 10 times more genetic difference within a race than there is between races. Thus we should welcome any trend that makes a superficial issue like color less central to how we categorize each other.

The rise in interracial marriage reflects a revolution in attitudes. As recently as 1958 a white mother in Monroe, N.C., called the police after her little girl kissed a black playmate on the cheek; the boy, Hanover Thompson, 9, was then sentenced to 14 years in prison for attempted rape. (His appeals failed, but he was released later after an outcry.)

In 1963, 59 percent of Americans believed that marriage between blacks and whites should be illegal. At one time or another 42 states banned intermarriage, although the Supreme Court finally invalidated these laws in 1967.

Typically, the miscegenation laws voided any interracial marriages, making the children illegitimate, and some states included penalties such as enslavement, life imprisonment and whippings. My wife is Chinese-American, and our relationship would once have been felonious.

At every juncture from the 19th century on, the segregationists warned that granting rights to blacks would mean the start of a slippery slope, ending up with black men marrying white women. The racists were prophetic.

"They were absolutely right," notes Randall Kennedy, the Harvard Law School professor and author of a dazzling new book, "Interracial Intimacies," to be published next month. "I do think [interracial marriage] is a good thing. It's a welcome sign of thoroughgoing desegregation. We talk about desegregation in the public sphere; here's desegregation in the most intimate sphere."

These days, interracial romance can be seen on the big screen, on TV shows and in the lives of some prominent Americans. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen has a black wife, as does Peter Norton, the software guru. The Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas has a white wife.

I find the surge in intermarriage to be one of the most positive fronts in American race relations today, building bridges and empathy. But it's still in its infancy.

I was excited to track down interracial couples at Ole Miss, thinking they would be perfect to make my point about this hopeful trend. But none were willing to talk about the issue on the record.

"Even if people wanted to marry [interracially], I think they'd keep it kind of quiet," explained a minister on campus.

For centuries, racists warned that racial equality would lead to the "mongrelization" of America. Perhaps they were right in a sense, for we're increasingly going to see a blurring of racial distinctions. But these distinctions acquired enormous social resonance without ever having much basis in biology.

China Is Using Its New Economic Weight to Outmaneuver Japan

China Is Using Its New Economic Weight to Outmaneuver Japan
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/international/asia/06ASIA.html

TOKYO, Dec. 5 — Backed by an economy four times the size of China's, Japan still doles out foreign aid to its enormous — and thriving — neighbor. But to judge by China's recent slights and snubs of Japan, a visitor might think that China is already the economic power of Asia.

One day, China slapped emergency tariffs on steel imports from Japan. The next day, Nippon Steel Corporation obligingly announced a $1 billion joint venture with China's largest steel maker to build a state-of-the-art rolled-sheet steel factory in China.

When Lee Teng-hui, a former president of Taiwan, applied for a visa to visit Japan, where he studied in college, Japan's Foreign Ministry denied the request, citing a desire to avoid provoking Chinese "rancor."

In the same week, China showed little concern for Japanese rancor when it expelled a Japanese defense attaché and a Japanese human rights worker.

"It shows a lack of confidence on the Japanese side, and strong confidence on the China side," said C. H. Kwan, an economist here.

Japan, rich and with an aging population, increasingly appears intimidated by China, which is striving and bursting with youth. China's leadership recently set an ambitious goal of quadrupling its $1 trillion economy in 20 years. Japan's goals are much more modest: ending deflation and bringing bad bank loans under control by 2005.

With one-tenth of China's population, Japan more and more acts as if it has already reverted to its historical place in Asia: a nation on the periphery of the Chinese empire.

Early in November, at an Asian regional meeting in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the largest buzz surrounded Prime Minister Zhu Rongji of China, who signed the outlines of a China-based regional free-trade pact, which is set to begin by 2010, and then posed for a "family photo" with leaders of 10 Southeast Asian countries.

Japan's prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, countered with his own offer of a free-trade pact, but was caught off balance when China offered to create a similar pact for China, South Korea and Japan.

Mr. Koizumi, knowing that Japan's conservative Parliament is years from accepting such trade liberalization, dismissed the proposal, saying, "We should take a medium- to long-term view of the matter."

Japan's Nikkei Weekly, a leading economic magazine, reported from Phnom Penh of Japanese "shock" at China's free-trade proposal, writing: "Japan wants to ensure its economic leadership, while feeling increasingly threatened by China, which is aggressively expanding its economic power in the region."

Also in Phnom Penh, the Chinese moved to ease tensions over the Spratly Islands, a far-flung group of islets claimed in parts by Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. The six countries signed an agreement pledging to exercise "self-restraint" and to avoid activities that would "complicate or escalate" the territorial dispute.

This agreement to disagree contrasted with Japan's open disagreement with Russia over four islands north of Japan, part of the Kurile Island chain, that were occupied by the Soviet Union just after World War II.

Japan claims the islands and has refused to sign a peace treaty with Russia until they are returned. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has shown no inclination to concede territory.

In Simple Pronouns, Clues to Shifting Latino Identity

In Simple Pronouns, Clues to Shifting Latino Identity
By JANNY SCOTT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/nyregion/05LANG.html

New York City has long been a laboratory for the study of language, a petri dish in which dialects mingle and collide, where linguists have lurked incognito in department stores, luring unwitting natives into blurting out revealing phrases like, say, "Fourth Floor."

For many years, scholarly interest in New York language focused on indigenous varieties of English, the most notorious being Noo Yawkese. But as the city's demographics have shifted, scholars have turned their attention to such things as Spanglish and the nature of New York Spanish.

Now a team of linguists is studying the consequences of the collision of Spanish dialects in New York, looking not only at how that contact is affecting the Spanish spoken but also at what the outcome might suggest about the evolution of Latino identity in the city and beyond.

If they find dialects converging, they say, it may signal the rise of a New York Spanish and perhaps signify an eventual convergence of identities too. If they find the dialects unchanged, it might imply that the contact between different groups is fueling an urge to remain distinct.

"The question is what does this say about the unity of Latinos in the next generation?" said Ana Celia Zentella, a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego and one of the researchers in the New York study. "And what do these language accommodations mean for the future of Spanish in New York in particular and in the United States in general?

"When you think that the United States is the fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation in the world and New York has more Spanish speakers than 13 Latin American capitals, you begin to appreciate the dimensions of the linguistic and cultural hybridity that's taking place."

Oddly enough, what the researchers are studying is a linguistic feature that may look insignificant at first glance: the use or nonuse of subject pronouns. But it is one of those tiny details in science, like the finch's beak in the study of evolution, that occasionally illuminate something profound.

The use of subject pronouns in Spanish has long been of interest to linguists. (There is an entire book on so-called subject expression among Spanish speakers in Madrid.) In English, the subject of a sentence is always expressed; in Spanish it can be, and often is, left out.

For example, where an English speaker would say "We sing," a Spanish speaker could say either "Nosotros cantamos" or simply "Cantamos." Linguists say Spanish speakers from the Caribbean tend to use a lot of pronouns; people from Central and South American countries use them less.

"What makes New York City interesting, and why we grabbed this issue, is that New York contains people from areas that differ with respect to this feature," said Ricardo Otheguy, a professor of linguistics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a researcher on the project.

"It's interesting to compare Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Cubans with the Mexicans, who use few pronouns," he said. "And communities are different in their exposure to English. The Mexican community in New York is new; the Puerto Rican community is well settled."

The language of New Yorkers has often attracted attention. In a seminal piece of field work back in 1962, the sociolinguist William Labov stationed himself in department stores, asking directions, and elucidated the class differences in the way New Yorkers pronounce that inimitable after-a-vowel R. (The clerks serving the more affluent shoppers in upscale Saks said "fawth flaw" far less frequently than their peers at a discount store.)

But the city has changed. Latinos are more numerous and more diverse. They make up 27 percent of the city's population. And while nearly three-quarters of New York Latinos in 1990 came from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba, that group's share has dropped to 57 percent.

Meanwhile, the number of Mexicans in New York City tripled during the 1990's to nearly 187,000, according to the 2000 census. The number of Ecuadoreans rose by nearly 30 percent, to 101,000. Other large groups include Colombians, Peruvians and Central Americans.

"Language is a window into people's views of themselves vis-a-vis the dominant group and vis-a-vis the other groups that they're often lumped with," said Professor Zentella, who, with a Puerto Rican mother and a Mexican father, grew up knowing that words like frijoles and habichuelas expressed more than beans.

"People will often use their particular regional variety of Spanish as a flag, emblematic of their national origin," she said. "But there are other times in which they refer to Spanish as the unifier of a much larger, disparate group of people across different class and ethnic and national backgrounds."

Professor Zentella describes herself as "an anthropolitical linguist" who studies what happens when people from different groups converge. Among other things, she has studied Spanglish, which she sees as "a way of making a graphic statement about having a foot in both cultural worlds."

She has also studied forms of pronunciation that are stigmatized, assumed by others to be lower class and therefore incorrect. "Some things get tagged as markers that then carry a lot of social weight," she said. "That's how groupness is conveyed through language."

Professor Otheguy has spent years studying the influence of English on New York Spanish, exploring the significance of English phrases that end up being translated word for word into Spanish, and of so-called loan words that are borrowed from English to express ideas that may not be expressed in Spanish.

For example, he said, early Spanish-speaking settlers in New York were mostly from the Caribbean, so they took "the winter vocabulary of English," creating words for things like steam, coat and boiler — words that are spoken rather than written but that resemble their English counterparts.

"Many times the loan takes place even though there is a word that's usable and perfectly accessible to the people who borrow the English word," he said. "So it isn't simply a matter of filling a gap because the gap ain't there. The person knows a Spanish word and uses both of them."

So far, Professors Otheguy and Zentella and graduate students working on the pronoun study have interviewed some 120 Spanish-speaking New Yorkers, including 20 each who were born in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Ecuador and Colombia, or whose parents were born there.

Each group of 20 includes a range of people from different social classes, degrees of education and exposure to English. Some have had a lot of contact with others from their place of birth; some have had relatively little. They have lived in New York for varying lengths of time.

None were told the precise nature of the research, just that it entailed documenting the experiences of Latino immigrants in New York. They were asked about their background, their childhood, their experiences — anything to get them to relax and keep talking.

Every interview was then transcribed, with every verb that could have had a pronoun highlighted in boldface. Each verb has been coded as to whether a pronoun was used and each interview is being analyzed to identify what factors predict pronoun use and how they differ between groups.

Findings are expected next year.

If linguistic behavior is an indication of identity, a merging of dialects might suggest a merging of identities, Professor Otheguy said. It could suggest that Latinos in New York are thinking of themselves less as members of national groups than they did in the past and more as members of a broader community.

But people also use language to distinguish themselves from others.

"So the possibility may be that the contact with other Hispanics does not create a sense of Hispanic fraternity but just the opposite," he said. "It creates a sense of wanting to be not mistaken for Mexican or Cuban. `I want to be Ecuadorean.' So that's the alternative."

Army-Navy Rivalry Reaches Symbolic Proportions

Army-Navy Rivalry Reaches Symbolic Proportions
By JOE LAPOINTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/sports/ncaafootball/06ARMY.html

WEST POINT, N.Y., Dec. 5 — In a lounge at the Army football stadium, the wall decor is primarily black and white, with a historical motif. A photograph from 1908 shows bareheaded young men grimacing and grappling and the score "Army 6, Navy 4."

Another picture features "1915 lettermen: Eisenhower, Bradley, Van Fleet" near a quotation from George C. Marshall declaring: "I want an officer for a secret and dangerous mission. I want a West Point football player."

Todd Berry, the coach of Army, glanced around at these things earlier this week, along with pictures of Glenn Davis, Doc Blanchard and Pete Dawkins, who played in an era of great teams at the two oldest service academies.

Times have changed. As Berry prepares his team to face Navy at Giants Stadium on Saturday afternoon in the 103rd meeting of the series, both teams have records of 1-10. "The ghosts from the past," Berry called the pictures. "You see Doc and Glenn and Pete all looking down on you. There's a responsibility and accountability to the standard that was set."

But it is difficult to match that standard now, when the best young football players choose colleges that will lead them toward lucrative careers in the National Football League and won't demand a five-year military commitment after graduation.

Although still a prestigious event, the annual Army-Navy game has become more of a symbolic ritual than a high point on the college football calendar. The pregame ceremonies are often more moving than the game itself, especially now, with the United States moving closer to a possible attack on Iraq.

Derek Jaskowiak, a senior offensive tackle for Navy, said the nationally televised event on the last Saturday of the regular season "reminds a lot of people of how things were in the old days, reminiscent of their childhoods." But the display of up-to-date military equipment around the time of the national anthem will remind some of the players of what lies ahead for them in the near future.

One of those players is Michael Brimage, a sophomore fullback for Navy who hopes to become a pilot. "You see the Apaches flying overhead, the F-18s, the F-14s, and it's awesome," he said. "There is nothing that compares to Army-Navy."

Both teams are rebuilding under relatively new coaching staffs. Berry, in his third season, went 1-10 in 2000 and 3-8 last season. At Navy, Coach Paul Johnson is in his first season. By beating S.M.U. in their first game, the Midshipmen equaled their victory total for the previous two seasons.

When someone suggested to Johnson this week that Navy's athletes and those at Army tend to be a little brighter and more articulate than the average college football players, he smiled and said, "They run a little slower, too." He turned more serious when asked why Army and Navy do not win as much as Air Force does.

"They've had a commitment to win out there for a while," Johnson said of Air Force. Are the standards at Air Force relaxed to favor good athletes, as some critics charge and Air Force denies? "It would be sour grapes if I told you anything about that because I don't really know how they do things," Johnson said. "There are differences in all the academies. This is our first year here. Hopefully, we can build up to where we are winning, too."

Navy came close to upsetting Notre Dame on Nov. 9, losing by 30-23 after leading in the fourth quarter. Vaughn Kelley, a Navy sophomore cornerback, said of that game: "We learned a lot. I know I did. I learned to stay deep." He said his team will improve rapidly and that he still expects "great things" before he graduates. As for their preparations for Army, Kelley said, "watching all these films, I believe we can do anything on that field with our eyes closed right now."

Berry, the Army coach, said the hardest part of this game is keeping his players, particularly his seniors, from becoming too emotional. For most of them, it will be the last game they will play on an organized level. "They all have those out-of-body experiences," Berry said. "They get into this emotional crazed look about them that is not beneficial."

One of this year's seniors, guard Alex Moore, called the game "the greatest rivalry in college football." As for the impending end of his football career, Moore said of his sport: "I love it, sir. I can't believe it's almost over." In the summer, he will begin training to work with tanks.
He recalled President Bush's visit to the locker room before last year's game, less than three months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "It's a pretty big rush, just being in his presence," Moore said. "He's your commander in chief."

When asked about the glib comparison that is sometimes made between football and war, Moore said: "It definitely trivializes war a little bit. No way are war and football close because of the severity of war."

Clarence Holmes, a senior defensive end for Army, said he wanted to work with the "big guns" of the field artillery because of the team atmosphere that equipment demands. "Football has prepared me well for that," Holmes said. Of Navy, he said: "They are our brothers in arms. But between the snaps, they are our foes."

It is impossible to speak with players from either team for long without drifting toward serious subjects. All will be trained as officers to lead others in combat about a year after graduation. Many said their classes at the academies have given them a historical and philosophical perspective.

Mike Schwartz, a senior tight end from Army, said he enjoyed studying World War I because of "how big it was."

"It's amazing to think how the alliances were and how big a war can just get real quickly," he said.
Aris Comeaux, a senior wide receiver for Army, said he spends a lot of time reading his Bible and reflecting on the spiritual aspects of war and football. "Football is just a gift from God to show us physically how we deal with a spiritual life, too," he said. "Football has taught me so much about life." Of the current talk about Iraq, he said: "We know it's out there. You have to turn off that switch and turn on the football switch."
Comeaux and his Army teammates were wearing combat fatigues when making their appearances with the news media. Down the Eastern Seaboard, 285 miles to the south, the Navy players were in their dress blue uniforms and talking about similar things.

Chandler Sims, a senior wide receiver for Navy, said his mother wants him to get a desk job, but that his ambitions are higher. "I'd like to fly," he said. "I want to be a Marine." All the talk about Iraq, he said, "is exciting and frightening at the same time."

"I don't think anyone can actually fathom the magnitude of going to war," Sims added. "It's different than watching it on TV. It's so imminent."

So is the game. Sims said the team was well prepared. "We stayed here over Thanksgiving, and we've been working on Army for over a week," he said. "That kind of mellowed everyone out." Brimage added, "It's a one-game season and this is the biggest game of the year."

High-Speed Wireless Internet Network Is Planned

High-Speed Wireless Internet Network Is Planned
By JOHN MARKOFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/06/technology/06WIRE.html

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 5 — The wireless technology known as WiFi, which allows users of personal and hand-held computers to connect to the Internet at high speed without cables, got a significant stamp of approval today when AT&T, I.B.M. and Intel announced a new company to create a nationwide network.

The unruly technology, which has largely been a playground for hackers, hobbyists and high-technology start-ups, is already sprouting mushroomlike in coffee shops, bookstores, airports, hotels, homes, businesses and even a few parks.

The new company, Cometa Networks, has set ambitious goals for itself: to deploy more than 20,000 wireless access points by the end of 2004, placing an cable-less high-speed Internet connection within either a five-minute walk in urban areas or a five-minute drive in suburban communities.

Executives from the technology companies and the two investment firms, Apax Partners and 3i, that joined to create the network said they would begin offering their service through cellular and wired telephone companies, D.S.L. and cable Internet service providers and other Internet retailers some time in 2003.

The service is intended to let subscribers pop open their laptops and have a seamless high-speed wireless extension of their personal or corporate Internet services — initially in the 50 largest metropolitan areas — without having to give credit card numbers or enter additional information, as is generally the case now. Connections would generally be at least the speed of a typical home broadband connection.

Cometa executives said that they expected the national availability of the wireless network would combine with Intel's planned inclusion of wireless Internet capability in all its mobile microprocessors next year to spur a fundamental shift in the way Americans will use the Internet.

"This is that big," said Dr. Lawrence B. Brilliant, chief executive of Cometa Networks. "It's that exciting; it's that much of a distortion in the computing field. It's a change in the way people use technology."

Until now WiFi has been viewed by many technology analysts as an upstart from-the-bottom technology that has the potential of upsetting other capital-intensive technology deployments, like the expensive next-generation data-oriented cellular networks known as 2.5G and 3G that are being established by companies like AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon.

But Cometa executives said that because they had chosen a wholesale business strategy, in which they will not sell Internet service directly to consumers or business, it is more likely that the two technologies would complement each other. In addition, users of the wireless access points would generally be stationary while connecting to the Internet.

"WiFi has very high bandwidth and short range, while 2.5 and 3G cellular are lower bandwidth services designed to support data services on the fly," said Theodore Schell, chairman of Cometa Networks and a general partner of Apax Partners. "They will have different cost equations, and there is a place for both of these technologies."

Industry analysts have said they believe that growing WiFi use could steal valuable subscribers from cellular companies that are hoping consumers will begin using their cellphones for data services like movie times, restaurant reviews and shopping deals wherever they are traveling.

The Cometa executives said they were not certain how the new network would be used but were convinced that the nation's 100 million Internet users would begin to use their portable computers in new ways once connections are widely and easily available as they travel.

The executives and industry analysts acknowledged that creating a new nationwide wireless network was something of an act of faith given the general economic and technological gloom in the telecommunications industry. It is widely believed that the industry had overbuilt and had overinvested in the Internet boom of the last decade.

The new company would not disclose its planned prices or the equity stakes of the five partners. Wireless industry analysts, however, have said WiFi hot spots can cost as much as $4,000 apiece to install in public places. If the average cost is half that, the installation of 20,000 access points would cost $40 million.

"One of the problems is that giant companies creating wireless ventures often have not had tremendous success," said Alan Reiter, publisher of Wireless Internet and Mobile Computing, an industry newsletter based in Chevy Chase, Md. He pointed to ambitious and expensive undertakings like a cellular data initiative known as C.P.D.P. in the 1980's and early 1990's and the wireless data service known as Metricom, which went bankrupt last year with $800 million of debts.

Other analysts questioned whether Cometa Networks would be able to make headway in an already crowded WiFi marketplace that has had both early failures and a host of smaller, aggressive start-ups.

"It's obvious that what is happening right now is a wireless land grab," said Andrew Seybold, editor of Outlook 4Mobility, a publishing and consulting firm based in Los Gatos, Calif. "The question is, How many places can they lock up and how quickly?"

Cometa executives insisted, however, that they were in a different position from their predecessors. The companies have a technological advantage in that they will not have to create customer equipment, relying on Intel's equipping the nation's portable computers with wireless abilities.

They said Cometa was also in a particularly strong position with respect to its competitors because it could use AT&T's existing data network, to connect the planned 20,000 wireless access points.

Leaving the relationship with individual customers to Internet service providers "is smart from a business point of view," said Richard Miller, a wireless data industry consultant at Breo Ventures in Palo Alto, Calif. At the same time, he noted, the venture will not succeed unless big corporate customers demand the service from Internet service providers.

"The demand will have to come from the enterprise to the carriers," he said.

To gain the confidence of corporate customers the new network will have to meet stringent data security standards, and Dr. Brilliant said that Cometa planned to take advantage of industry standards like virtual private networks to add security to the WiFi standard.

A Perfectionist Does It His Way

A Perfectionist Does It His Way
By ALEX WITCHEL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/dining/04JEFF.html

I, I'm putting my belt on!"

It was 11 a.m. when I arrived at Jeffrey Steingarten's loft in the Flatiron district to find that he was not dressed and that his bed was not made. I noticed this because his bed is only a few feet from the kitchen that takes up most of the place.

As he slammed the Murphy bed up into the wall and started blasting opera, his assistant, Elizabeth Alsop, offered me a seat at the kitchen table where someone — who could it be? — had left a copy of a favorable USA Today review of his new book, "It Must Have Been Something I Ate: The Return of the Man Who Ate Everything" (Alfred A. Knopf). It is a volume of his collected food essays from Vogue, where he has written since 1989. His first collection, "The Man Who Ate Everything," was a New York Times best seller in its paperback edition, and last spring, he won a National Magazine Award for some of the essays in the new book. Mr. Steingarten can write, he just can't tell time.

He emerged wearing a navy blazer, gray flannels and loafers, dressed as the lawyer he was before Vogue — Harvard College 1965 (where he wrote for the Lampoon) and Harvard Law School 1968. The kitchen was crammed with piles of every sort, from flour bins to rotisseries one on top of the next, and to get to the counter he inched around what looked like a pirate's stash: dusty bottles of port, rum and whiskey lined 12 deep along the walls. He had spent the week practicing his form on the dish that was to be our lunch, agnolotti al plin, a miniature filled pasta that's pinched around the edges. He had recently been in Turin, Italy, for a Slow Food convention, where he spent hours with Luigi Caputo of the restaurant Balbo, learning how to pinch like a pro.

Perfecting recipes and cooking techniques in the most obsessive ways possible is pretty much Mr. Steingarten's job description. He goes somewhere in the world, watches someone do something, then comes home and tries it 50 different ways himself.

He augments his findings with some of the most exhaustive research available outside of NASA, then writes up the tale, whether it is how he arranged a delivery of rendered horse fat from Vienna so he could make the perfect French fry, or how he chased down a wild bluefin tuna in the middle of winter for the thrill of the hunt and the prize of eating premium toro on the spot. Of that adventure he wrote: "What arbitrary and destructive force was pulling me ineluctably toward my star-crossed encounter with this monstrous ruler of the frozen deep? I believe it was the editor in chief of Vogue."

At this particular moment, giving the completely false impression that he intended to make up for lost time and get to work, Mr. Steingarten started rolling pasta, and his elegant navy blazer was soon lashed with flour. Why on earth was he dressed that way to cook? "I find it's more slimming," he said, squeezing dots of filling in a straight line along the edge of the pasta sheet. "Men have it much worse than females. Throughout history there have been great paintings and sculptures of chubby women. But have you ever seen a statue of a fat man? Absolutely not."

He rolled the pasta forward, pinched it and ran a pastry wheel next to the line of little lumps, making what looked like a long ruffle. "Here's the secret, O.K.?" he said. "It's important to force the air out when you pinch it. You don't want them falling apart or getting bloated in the water." He said something else I couldn't hear with the music still blasting. "You're going to have to turn that off," I said, which elicited a frown from the author. "I can turn it off," Ms. Alsop offered, which prompted Mr. Steingarten to thunder, "No! No one touches my hi-fi."

In the ensuing silence, Mr. Steingarten determined he was in need of a drink. So, at 11:30 he opened a $400 bottle of '89 Louis Latour Montrachet, and explained that once the agnolotti were cooked and dressed with herb-infused butter and a sprinkling of Parmesan, he would subject them to three variations before serving: one dish would be adorned with shaved white truffles, another with truffle oil, another with truffle flour.

As he spoke the phone rang and a plaintive voice from Vogue inquired on the machine about Mr. Steingarten's expense report, a call Ms. Alsop ran to take. He shrugged. "I had euros and pounds on one form; it really flummoxed them," he said, clearly distracted by his wineglass. "I'm afraid it's corked," he said sadly. "Montrachet is so good and this is so not good." He sighed deeply. "It just shows, Gather ye rosebuds."

Good advice. One hour down, we might at least attempt an interview. I could ask questions. He could even answer them instead of tracking an e-Bay bid for still another rotisserie. He reluctantly sat at the table, where he tried opening a bottle of red this time, an '82 St. Julien, Château Ducru-Beaucaillou. The cork would not budge and he took a sharp knife to it, easing it out of the bottle. Since I wasn't drinking, he kindly gave me an excellent piece of candied orange peel from Fauchon and fresh dates that were quite sublime. I asked about his family.

"Let me get a cigar," he said, up again. "My grandfather was a grocer on the Lower East Side; not a very successful grocer. He got in trouble at one point for watering milk. We never talked about it." Mr. Steingarten's father was a lawyer, and he and his wife raised their son and daughter, Lois, in Hewlett Neck, N.Y. Mr. Steingarten married Caron Smith in 1977, and in 1998 she took a job at the San Diego Museum of Art, where she is senior curator of Asian art, so their marriage is now bicoastal. When I asked how that was working out, he proclaimed, "When I'm not there, Caron eats horribly."
So much for family history. "Can't we talk about food?" Mr. Steingarten asked dolefully. During law school (his roommate was Dr. Andrew Weil, the holistic health guru) he would come home from property class, watch Julia Child on WGBH and write her recipes on his yellow legal pads. Then he would cook. But not like other people. This is a man who in the last 10 years alone has made at least one potato gratin a week, every week of every year, drawing on a collection of 200 recipes. He dry-aged a 30-pound cross-section of beef in his refrigerator, then butchered and cooked it himself — except for the parts that had rotted.

His first assignment for Anna Wintour, whom he had met through friends, was in 1988 when she was editing HG, an incarnation of House & Garden. Mr. Steingarten was to write 500 to 800 words on whether fish could really be cooked in a microwave oven. After sampling 12 microwave ovens, he turned in a piece 4,200 words long — and she printed it. When Ms. Wintour went to Vogue the following year, he went with her.

BUT what about the 20 years between law school and food writing? He worked for Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, doing research on poverty law and legal services for the poor. He moved to New York in 1971 and continued that work, receiving several foundation grants to research the legal rights of the mentally ill. He wrote the occasional piece for Harper's and Atlantic Monthly on politics or economics, but it was not until Ms. Wintour that he found his muse. That she happens to be the body double for Olive Oyl is the height of improbability, but it's his good fortune that she apparently likes reading about food more than she likes eating it. Mr. Steingarten has been known to say that when his weight is up, Ms. Wintour is less inclined to take his calls.

He smiled. "There's no doubt she wants me to go on the Atkins diet," he said. "I've actually spent a third of the time on it during the last 30 years, and a third on high carbs. Look, if there was a diet that worked, no one would be fat."

Ms. Wintour, speaking briskly by phone, said: "I have great respect for Jeffrey. He is obsessive and a perfectionist and that's what makes him so special. He's so completely thorough in his research, he comes at it from such an original angle." A hint of a smile entered her voice. "We did get into a lot of trouble with that horse fat piece; we had an avalanche of letters about that one. But I can tell you, no one in the food world buys Vogue for the fashion, they buy it for Jeffrey."

One of Mr. Steingarten's pet themes is an utter lack of patience with people who are convinced they have food allergies. Lactose intolerance in particular irritates him, as does the government's squeamishness about allowing the import of unpasteurized cheeses. He says he gets food poisoning only once every two years or so, something of a record for someone who travels the world eating things like deep-fried bamboo worms, roasted wasp larvae and mashed pig's brains.

And speaking of food, such as it is, are we ever going to eat?

Ms. Alsop presented two sides of smoked salmon from a tour of Brooklyn smokehouses Mr. Steingarten had just taken with Mark Russ Federman, the owner of the esteemed appetizing store, Russ & Daughters. Ms. Alsop placed two cookie sheets in front of him, one covered with wild salmon, the other with farmed salmon. He sliced some of each and quickly determined that the wild one was spectacular, the farmed less so. But one taste was not enough. He sat, fork in hand, and kept on eating.

I looked at my watch. Three hours and 15 minutes and the cooking had yet to begin. It seemed perfectly clear that there was to be no interview. We might at least have a meal.

Mr. Steingarten gathered himself slowly, turned toward the stove and tripped over some bottles. "That's what happens when you're being rushed," he said, in an injured tone.

Rushed? Was he joking?

"I looked forward to today not just because of the article, but because you and I would be playing," he said quietly, looking as if someone had just pushed him into his locker.

Oh. I looked at his face, at the jumble surrounding him — cans and cans of boudin noir, Illy coffee, two bottles of Chambord side by side (whatever for?) and I put down my pad. I picked up a perfect piece of Parmesan from DiPalo's and let go. "You know Jeffrey, you're right," I said. "Let's do it your way."

He smiled like the sun and once the specter of pesky questions disappeared, he couldn't have been happier, or speedier, even though he made Ms. Alsop measure the servings of the agnolotti — three ounces, to approximate those served at Balbo.

To say the pasta was quite firm was a polite way of saying it was undercooked. The white truffles, which he shaved with abandon, disappointed him. "They have a very good aroma, but I think their taste is weak," he said. The version with truffle oil was ghastly, but the version with truffle flour was tasty, indeed.

Then he made espresso and opened boxes labeled Domori. Speaking of the master pastry chef, he said, "Pierre Hermé says it's perhaps the best chocolate he's ever had." We tasted it dark and light, along with Gianduja, a Piedmontese hazelnut chocolate. "Rich, soft, slightly milky," Mr. Steingarten said, rolling it, and the words, around in his mouth.

Again, I looked at my watch. Four and a half hours later, it was getting close to dinnertime. "Thank you for letting me come and play," I said, and we laughed together, no hard feelings.

"But one more thing," I said, turning back toward the table. "I feel bad about the chocolate because I tasted it in little bites." I had broken up at least a half-dozen pieces, which now littered the table on their bits of foil.

"That doesn't matter," Mr. Steingarten said comfortably, following my gaze. "I'll eat it all."

Reports from the front line

Reports from the front line
By Hannah Lee (Email: hannah.lee@scmp.com)
Friday, December 6, 2002
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/ZZZ23AR7R8D.html

Life is unpredictable, says Susanna Cheung Chui-ting, sipping hot chocolate in a Wan Chai cafe. ''Why wait to do what you want to do? Maybe I'll have no money when I retire, but who cares? I may not even have the chance to grow old.''

This devil-may-care attitude to life has taken the journalist to some of the world's most hostile and chaotic places. Reporting for the BBC World Service and the Rome-based Inter Press Services, she covered the riots in Indonesia just before the fall of president Suharto in 1998 and then the violent election in East Timor in September 1999 (stories from which won her Amnesty International's Human Rights Press Awards in 2000).

These experiences are described in Cheung's Chinese-language book Reporting Chaos: A Journalist's Eye Witness Account From The World's War Zones (Marco Polo Publishers $93). The book also tells the story of her visits to the Balkans in 1999 and Cambodia in 1998, and includes an account of her arduous journey retracing the alleged escape route in 2000 of the 17th Karmapa Lama - one of the four most important Tibetan spiritual leaders - across the Himalayas from Tibet to India. Although hailed by the local Chinese-language press as Hong Kong's only female war-correspondent after her coverage of the Balkan war in 1999, Cheung - who works for various media outlets - decribes herself as just a ''backpacking reporter'', a term she proudly claims to have coined. Like many backpackers, Cheung travels with the bare essentials, is thrifty with her resources and stays for weeks rather than days at one place.

Cheung has always enjoyed travelling, but her decision to become a journalist came while she studied sociology at the University of London, when she met - and was inspired by - Louise de Rosario, an American freelance journalist who was writing for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Cheung describes how the meeting she calls ''a gift from above'' came about. ''Louise came to London to cover the Sino-British Joint Declaration. She was supposed to stay with a mutual friend but was turned away because her feet smelled,'' Cheung says, laughing. ''She had been travelling for about three months and was very dirty. So she stayed with me instead.''

During the two weeks the pair spent together, de Rosario so impressed and fascinated Cheung with her tales of life on the road as a journalist that when de Rosario asked her hostess what she wanted to do with her life after graduation, Cheung replied: ''I want to be like you.''

But her education came first. After completing her degree in 1984, Cheung returned to Hong Kong to study for a master's degree in sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Then came her first reporting job, at the Hong Kong Economic Digest. Cheung has since written for the Hong Kong Economic Times as well as Singapore's Straits Times and Taiwan's Taipei Times. After 15 years of writing and travelling, Cheung says her most unforgettable experience as a reporter was in Afghanistan. She says she visited the country last year after seeing photographs on the Internet of ''ghostlike'' women covered head to toe by black burqas. Shocked, she asked herself: ''Why do they have to cover up like that? What is life like for them? How can they live like that?''

Determined to find out, she took off, despite the lack of support from her editor at the time, who after declaring: ''No one in Hong Kong is interested in Afghanistan,'' relented with the comment: ''Go on then - if you want to die - go.''

So Cheung went - not that she wanted to die. ''These places aren't as dangerous as they sound,'' she says, something she repeats often to her worried parents, who ran a garment-manufacturing business in Hong Kong and are now retired in Canada. Hoping their daughter would become a civil servant, they once said: ''If we knew you were to become a journalist, we wouldn't have bothered sending you to university,'' Cheung says.

Hitching a lift with the Red Cross, she arrived in the Afghan capital Kabul on a 12-seater plane in July last year, beginning a two-week stay that proved worthwhile, but was highly stressful, Cheung says. ''People kept telling me to relax, but I couldn't. I kept thinking my headscarf had fallen off and I'd be penalised by the religious police,'' she recalls. Cheung says she once hugged a local without thinking and later heard people talking about the incident, suggesting the man had tried to touch her. ''I felt constantly worried,'' she says. ''A day felt like a year.'' When she donned a burqa, she was surprised to find herself swaying under the weight of the robe. Its ''eye-net'' allowed only a blurry image of the world, and she had to take extra care when she walked. However, the worst thing, she writes in her book, was the isolation and loneliness she felt under the black shroud.

Afghanistan wasn't the only place Cheung felt under pressure. Defying official advice to leave East Timor, Cheung was caught up in its violence. By the time she finally decided to leave, it was almost too late, and she found herself running with refugees to catch a boat for West Timor. ''I never thought I'd have to run for my life,'' she says. ''I had all my bags with me, and felt very dirty and hungry - it was awful.''

A Palestinian boy hurls rocks in the Gaza Strip.

Another unavoidable worry is about money, says Cheung. ''As soon as people see you're a foreigner, they know you're carrying lots of cash. You have to be very careful,'' she cautions, adding that she kept her money bag close to her at all times.

Cheung says it is not just people overseas who assume she is well-to-do; many at home also think she has bags of money because she travels so frequently. ''Well, I don't,'' says Cheung. ''I just don't care much about material things.''

So why does she do what she does? Cheung replies: ''If my stories touch a single person, then I've achieved my aim.'' She feels she is making a difference every time someone tells her ''your presence alone brings a lot of comfort''.

She explains: ''It reminds them that someone cares, that they haven't been completely forgotten by the world. Even if the people continue to suffer after my visit, knowing that I have brought brief moments of comfort . . . that's good enough for me.''

Cheung acknowledges that at the beginning of her reporting career, her priority was to get the ''big'' stories. She was driven by the thought of winning awards and achieving recognition, she says, but now, she is no longer interested in fame. Part of that feeling stems from her unwillingness to betray the people she writes about, and who trusted and found comfort in her. ''It's impossible to describe; go and have a look yourself,'' Cheung says. ''It's not just about news, but humanity.''

Having just returned from the West Bank and spoke to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, - some of these stories were published in Ming Pao - Cheung is keen to learn more about the Middle East and plans to do a course in Middle Eastern studies at the United Nations University in Jordan. Chinese, she says, need to know more about this part of the world.

Pop star Gigi Leung blackmailed by mainland man

Pop star Gigi Leung blackmailed by mainland man
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://hongkong.scmp.com/hknews/ZZZGKCR7R8D.html
Friday, December 6, 2002
Updated at 1.17pm

Pop star Gigi Leung has received threatening faxes and phone calls from a mainland man who tried to blackmail the singer-actress, newspapers reported on Friday.

The man claimed he had discovered that Leung allegedly did not pay taxes to the mainland for her earnings from commercials there and demanded the star give him money to cover this up, the reports said.

Stephanie Chan, Leung's manager, confirmed to several Chinese-language newspapers here that the star's office has filed a complaint with police.

''We will not bow to any evil forces,'' Ms Chan was quoted as telling the mass circulation Apple Daily.

''That man's claim was totally groundless.''

It is unclear who the man is, but the official Web site of Leung's fan club posted a statement accusing him of ''persecuting'' Leung.

Local media reported that Hong Kong police have enlisted the help of mainland public security officials in the investigation.

Police did not immediately return calls early on Friday, and no telephone number for Leung's office was available from directory assistance.

The 26-year-old Leung is one of the SAR's hottest pop idols, having starred in 20 films and recorded numerous Canto-pop albums, with a big following in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.

Art Basel Miami

First pre-day of the Art Basel Miami. even though i woke up at 2am to finish my laundry, pack and do a little work, i barely made the 6:20am flight this morning. anyway, after boarding, we ended up sitting at the gate for another half an hour. slept almost the whole way.

after settling into our rooms, we went to the pre-vernissage. it was great to be able to have all that art to ourselves before the floodgates are open tomorrow. however, i barely covered a fifth of the exhibits after almost four long hours of viewing. and i was exhausted and my back was aching.

afterwards, we met for dinner at Bond Street. then a short walk through at the Bass Museum Opening. opening party on the beach and short fireworks. then browsed through series of projects displayed in converted shipping containers. then Mynt for the after party. we stayed for about 10 minutes, and realizing that we were all exhausted finally called it a night.

and now my bed is calling me...

An Islamic Reformation

An Islamic Reformation
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/opinion/04FRIE.html

That's going on in Iran today is, without question, the most promising trend in the Muslim world. It is a combination of Martin Luther and Tiananmen Square — a drive for an Islamic reformation combined with a spontaneous student-led democracy movement. This movement faces a formidable opponent in Iran's conservative clerical leadership. It can't provide a quick fix to what ails relations between Islam and the West today. There is none. But it is still hugely important, because it reflects a deepening understanding by many Iranian Muslims that to thrive in the modern era they, and other Muslims, need an Islam different from the lifeless, anti-modern, anti-Western fundamentalism being imposed in Iran and propagated by the Saudi Wahhabi clerics. This understanding is the necessary condition for preventing the brewing crisis between Islam and the West — which was triggered by 9/11 — from turning into a war of civilizations.

To put it another way, what's going on in Iran today is precisely the war of ideas within Islam that is the most important war of all. We can kill Osama bin Laden and all his acolytes, but others will spring up in their place. The only ones who can delegitimize and root out these forces in any sustained way are Muslim societies themselves. And that will happen only when more Muslim societies undergo, from within, their own struggle for democracy and religious reform. Only the disenchanted citizens of the Soviet bloc could kill Marx; only Muslims fed up that their faith is being dominated by anti-modernists can kill bin Ladenism and its offshoots.

This struggle in Iran is symbolized by one man, whose name you should know: Hashem Aghajari, a former Islamic revolutionary and now a college professor, who was arrested Nov. 6 and sentenced to death by the Iranian hard-liners — triggering a student uprising — after giving a speech on the need to rejuvenate Islam with an "Islamic Protestantism."

Mr. Aghajari's speech was delivered on the 25th anniversary of the death of Ali Shariati, one of the Iranian revolution's most progressive thinkers. In the speech — translated by the invaluable MEMRI service — he often cited Mr. Shariati as his inspiration. He began by noting that just as "the Protestant movement wanted to rescue Christianity from the clergy and the church hierarchy," so Muslims must do something similar today. The Muslim clergymen who have come to dominate their faith, he said, were never meant to have a monopoly on religious thinking or be allowed to ban any new interpretations in light of modernity.

"Just as people at the dawn of Islam conversed with the Prophet, we have the right to do this today," he said. "Just as they interpreted what was conveyed [to them] at historical junctures, we must do the same. We cannot say: `Because this is the past we must accept it without question.' . . . This is not logical. For years, young people were afraid to open a Koran. They said, `We must go ask the mullahs what the Koran says.' Then came Shariati, and he told the young people that those ideas were bankrupt. [He said] you could understand the Koran using your own methods. . . . The religious leaders taught that if you understand the Koran on your own, you have committed a crime. They feared that their racket would cease to exist if young people learned [the Koran] on their own."

He continued: "We need a religion that respects the rights of all — a progressive religion, rather than a traditional religion that tramples the people. . . . One must be a good person, a pure person. We must not say that if you are not with us we can do whatever we want to you. By behaving as we do, we are trampling our own religious principles."

Mr. Aghajari concluded: "Today, more than ever, we need the `Islamic humanism' and `Islamic Protestantism' that Shariati advocated. While [Iran's clerical leaders] apparently do not recognize human rights, this principle has been recognized by our Constitution. . . . The [Iranian regime] divides people into insiders and outsiders. They can do whatever they want to the outsiders. They can go to their homes, steal their property, slander them, terrorize them and kill them because they were outsiders. Is this Islamic logic? When there is no respect for human beings?"

Mr. Aghajari refused to appeal his death sentence, saying his whole conviction was a farce. But on Monday his lawyer appealed on his own. Mr. Aghajari's fate now hangs in the balance. Watch this story. It's the most important trial in the world today.

China Has World's Tightest Internet Censorship

China Has World's Tightest Internet Censorship, Study Finds
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/international/asia/04CHIN.html

SHANGHAI, Dec. 3 — China has the most extensive Internet censorship in the world, regularly denying local users access to 19,000 Web sites that the government deems threatening, a study by Harvard Law School researchers finds.

The study, which tested access from multiple points in China over six months, found that Beijing blocked thousands of the most popular news, political and religious sites, along with selected entertainment and educational destinations. The researchers said censors sometimes punished people who sought forbidden information by temporarily making it hard for them to gain any access to the Internet.

Defying predictions that the Internet was inherently too diverse and malleable for state control, China has denied a vast majority of its 46 million Internet users access to information that it feels could weaken its authoritarian power. Beijing does so even as it allows Internet use for commercial, cultural, educational and entertainment purposes, which it views as essential in a globalized era.

Only the most determined and technologically savvy users can evade the filtering, and they do so at some personal risk, the study says.

"If the purpose of such filtering is to influence what the average Chinese Internet user sees, success could be within grasp," said Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at the law school and a co-author of the study.

The study offers fresh evidence that the Internet may be proving easier to control than older forms of communication like telephones, facsimile machines or even letters. China can tap some telephones or faxes or read mail. But it cannot monitor every call, fax message and letter.

The Internet, in contrast, has common checkpoints. All traffic passes through routers that make up the telecommunications backbone here. China blocks all access to many sites, and it has begun selectively filtering content in real time — even as viewers seek access to it — and deleting individual links or Web pages that it finds offensive.

By regularly testing access to 200,000 popular Web addresses, the researchers found that China blocked up to 50,000 sites at some point in the six-month period. Of those, the study found 19,000 sites that could not be reached from different places in China on multiple days. The study is at http://cyber .law.harvard.edu/filtering/china.

Compared with Saudi Arabia, which the team studied earlier, China exercises far broader though sometimes shallower control. Beijing completely blocked access to the major sites on Tibet and Taiwan. A user who types "democracy China" into Google, the popular search engine, would find nearly all the top sites with those words out of reach. Google itself was blocked in September, although access is now restored.

Chinese users cannot often reach the sites run by Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. China also does not allow users to connect to major Western religious sites.

News media sites are also often blocked. Among those users had trouble reaching in the test period were National Public Radio, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine.

Though China says a main justification for censorship is the proliferation of pornography, its blocking of such sites is less dogged. The study found that China blocked fewer than 15 percent of the most popular sexually explicit sites. Saudi Arabia banned 86 percent of the list.

Former Myanmar Dictator Ne Win Dies

Former Myanmar Dictator Ne Win Dies
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Obit-Ne-Win.html
Filed at 11:35 p.m. ET

YANGON, Myanmar (AP) -- Gen. Ne Win, Myanmar's former military dictator who dragged his country from the verge of prosperity down into poverty during his 26 years in power, died Thursday under house arrest, family members said. He was 91.

The family members said he died at 7.30 a.m. in his lakeside villa, where he had been kept confined along with his daughter since March 7 following the arrest of his three grandsons and son-in-law on charges of attempting to overthrow the military government. The family members spoke on condition of anonymity.

No other details of the circumstances of his death were immediately available.

A national hero for his role in winning independence from Britain in 1948, Ne Win seized power in a bloodless coup in 1962, starting an era of authoritarianism that would sully his reputation.

He retired from politics in 1988 but retained behind-the-scenes clout. His influence began to wane a few years ago, and he stood totally discredited earlier this year with the arrest of his relatives.

Because of that Ne Win's death is not expected to change the balance of power in the secretive junta that rules Myanmar, also known as Burma, analysts said.

``I don't think it will make much difference. Sadly, there could be many more Ne Wins in Burma,'' said Aung Zaw, a Myanmar dissident who publishes a pro-democracy magazine from neighboring Thailand.

Ne Win's son-in-law -- Aye Zaw Win, 54, the husband of Ne Win's daughter Sandar Win, and the couple's three sons -- Aye Ne Win, 25, Kyaw Ne Win, 23, and Zwe Ne Win, 21 -- were sentenced to death Sept. 26 after being convicted of treason on the coup charges. They have appealed the verdict.

The government claimed the family was upset at losing privileges as Ne Win's influence declined.

A barbed wire fence that had blocked the road to his house since his arrest was opened slightly on Thursday, creating enough place for cars to go through. But the road was deserted except for three soldiers standing near the barricade.

There was no sign of unusual activity at the house either. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known, and the government did not make any announcement.

Ne Win had suffered a heart attack in September 2001 and had a pacemaker attached. He was last seen in public in good health on March 21, 2001 when he offered lunch to 99 Buddhist monks and more than 500 friends, most of them his Socialist days cronies.

He retired from politics in 1988, just before a popular uprising for democracy erupted, triggered by his quarter century of misrule and catapulting Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of the late independence hero Gen. Aung San, to political prominence.

Thousands of civilian protesters were gunned down in the military crackdown that followed and many more fled into exile. Myanmar is still viewed by the West as a pariah state.

Since October 2001, the regime and Suu Kyi have held closed-door talks, resulting in some releases of political prisoners.

Ne Win was born Shu Maung on May 14, 1911, to middle class parents in the central city of Paungbe in what then was a British colony. When he joined the growing anti-British movement, he took the revolutionary name Ne Win, which means ``brilliant as the sun.''

In 1940 he was among a group of revolutionaries who secretly traveled to Japan for military training. Returning home he led the Burma Independence Army into the capital of Yangon, then known as Rangoon, while the British were retreating. In 1949, he became armed forces chief of staff in 1949.

In 1958, the military ousted a weak civilian prime minister and set up a caretaker government with Ne Win at its head, until a new prime minister was elected. In 1962, Ne Win moved against the new government, jailed the prime minister and vowed to lead the country on a neutral, egalitarian and moralistic ``Burmese road to socialism.''

Private businesses were nationalized, foreign private investment virtually ceased, and inefficiency, corruption and black-marketeering soon spread throughout the system.

Ne Win also achieved notoriety as a playboy and reclusive eccentric. A deep belief in numerology prompted him once to issue banknotes in 45 and 90 kyat denominations because the numbers were divisible by his lucky number nine.

Josef Silverstein, an American political scientist who has studied Myanmar for a half century, said Ne Win led his country from the verge of prosperity to ruin.

``When he took power he broke all his oaths by setting the constitution aside. Under his rule, Burma literally went into the tank,'' he said in a telephone interview.

When Ne Win took power, Myanmar was well on the way to recovering from the ravages of the World War II, exporting 2 million tons of rice per year. But by 1987, Myanmar was reduced to the status of a least developed nation, he said.

However, a mystique surrounded Ne Win, who was regarded by many in Myanmar as having almost magical powers of survival that allowed him to stay in power so long and live into old age.

For years, rumors that the ``Old Man'' had died circulated periodically in Yangon.

Building a Better Cat

Building a Better Cat
By SAUL HANSELL
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/technology/circuits/05prof.html

PAWTUCKET, R.I.

WHAT could be cooler than opening a big box under the Christmas tree and finding a two-foot-long green robotic dinosaur?

"Their answer: a cat. But unlike the other robotic pets, it would not be the sort of silvery contraption that looks as though it just pounced off a flying saucer. No, he would build a cuddly lap cat that would purr when you petted it and press its face into your hand if you rubbed its cheeks. It would be covered in fur, not hard plastic."

That's what Leif Askeland thought two years ago as he and a team of fellow engineers at Hasbro's Tiger Electronics division were rushing to finish a working model of a microchip-controlled raptor that could lumber across the floor, swing its tail and open its jaws to show off a fearsome set of teeth.

Mr. Askeland displayed his creation in January 2001 at Toy Fair, the industry's annual gathering in New York. The reaction of the assembled buyers from the world's toy stores was tepid, and Hasbro canceled the dinosaur before it ever hit the shelves. Starting with Tiger's Furby, robotic creatures had been one of the biggest fads of the late 1990's. But sales had crashed, and many in the industry were pronouncing the entire species extinct.

It was a blow to Mr. Askeland, but he and his team knew that advances in technology were enabling toys to do far more for less money. So in the spring of last year they sat around a big wooden table here on the factory floor that once stamped out Hasbro's Mr. Potato Head and G.I. Joe, and tried to figure out what sort of robotic toy would appeal to retailers, parents and children.

Their answer: a cat. But unlike the other robotic pets, it would not be the sort of silvery contraption that looks as though it just pounced off a flying saucer. No, he would build a cuddly lap cat that would purr when you petted it and press its face into your hand if you rubbed its cheeks. It would be covered in fur, not hard plastic.

After a year of development and deep skepticism within Hasbro and in the toy industry, the result of Mr. Askeland's work hit the market in July. At $35 each, FurReal Friends, as Hasbro named it, has become one of the season's hottest toys and is almost sold out at stores across the country. Hasbro declines to specify how many FurReal Friends it has sold but says the figure is in the millions.

That a cat would succeed where a dinosaur failed reflects in one sense the fickleness of the toy market.

"There is a lot of market research before a toy launch, but success or failure is hard to predict,'' said Jill Krutick, a toy industry analyst at Salomon Smith Barney. "You see something that spikes up, like animal gadgetry, and then consumers turn up their noses at it.''

But the development of the FurReal cat may also suggest that the electronic toy industry is beginning to grow up, subordinating the gadgetry to classic, open-ended modes of play.

"You don't want the technology in a toy to be visible,'' said Judy Ellis, the chairwoman of the toy design department at the Fashion Institute of Technology. "The first robot pets were very cool-looking, but a child doesn't relate to a shiny surface. A child can relate to a furry cat.''

Indeed, Mr. Askeland passed up some of the technological features used in other robotic pets like infrared sensors so more money could go into the feel of the cat's fur and the look of its eyes.

"You can make tricks that you would do one time,'' Mr. Askeland said. "We preferred to focus on the emotional aspects of play. Nurturing and friendship are things that stay with you for a lifetime.''

The success of the FurReal cat is all the more unusual because it is not usually the place of engineers like Mr. Askeland to come up with new toys. In the toy industry pecking order, creating toys is the role of independent inventors and staff designers. Engineers are supposed to realize the visions of the designers so that the motors do not rattle and the parts do not fall off.

"Toy engineering should be more highly regarded than it is,'' Mr. Askeland said. "Not only are there constant deadlines, there are challenges to meet quality criteria, and you have to be able to do a lot with little.''

Growing up in Oslo, Mr. Askeland (pronounced ASK-uh-land) had no idea he would design toys, let alone furry robot friends. He studied engineering and wound up working for a graphic-products company that sent him to its headquarters in Providence, R.I. He married a woman from Warwick, R.I., and parlayed his experience with plastics into a job with Hasbro. (He and his wife, Karen, have two children - a son, 12, and a daughter, 6 - whom he uses as his personal research department.)

At Hasbro, his first assignment was shaping the parts for a baby's busy box. He soon graduated to toddler toys and by 1994 was the chief engineer for Hasbro's Playskool division. One task there was to make sure that additions to Playskool's line of rocking Weebles figures would still wobble but not fall down.

Mr. Askeland said he was especially proud of the design of a big Playskool dollhouse, the first of its size to be made out of plastic and not wood.

"The realism we had was groundbreaking at the time,'' he said. "We had lights and sounds and a great assortment of accessories, down to plastic pillows and curtains. It became a product with a lot of play value.''

The dollhouse and other toys increasingly tended to have electronic components - and Mr. Askeland earned a second degree, this time in electrical engineering, at Johnson & Wales University.

His new skills came into play in 1998 when Hasbro bought Tiger Toys, a company in Vernon Hills, Ill., known for its electronics. Tiger was about to introduce an elaborate little creature with a 200-word vocabulary called Furby, and Mr. Askeland was brought in to work out some last-minute design kinks. Hasbro went on to sell some 40 million Furbies, and Mr. Askeland soon found himself running Tiger's engineering operation.

He assembled a team with experts on mechanics, visual design and game play, which is essentially the art of sequencing what an electronic toy does so that children have fun. All of them were taxed by the cat.

"Cats are very difficult,'' he said. "There have been a lot of robot dogs, but not very many good cats.''

They set out in particular to make the cat as lifelike as possible. Rather than the gears and axles used in many mechanical toys, they created a neck bone and a spine of interlocking plastic vertebrae manipulated by ribbons to create a looser, more lifelike range of motion.

At the same time, the designers had to make sacrifices to keep down the toy's selling price. Along with infrared sensors, the cat also lacks speech recognition capability, for example, which Furby had. And its paws do not move. FurReal is forever a lap cat.

"There is a tendency to put too much in toys,'' Mr. Askeland said. "Once you have it be mobile, what are you going to do with it? Where is it going to walk?''

He says that the cat incorporates technological innovations that are far from digital. A new process for shaving the fur allows a smooth transition from long hair on the cat's back to shorter hair on its face. And Hasbro has actually applied for a patent on the process that was used to make the eyes with a pink outer rim and speckled color in the iris.

To get the shape of the head right, Mr. Askeland created a computer scan of a cat skull.

"People think you just put it all together and stuff it,'' he said. "It's a lot more than that.''

The most difficult task, however, was designing the cat's software to make the game play realistic and fun. It took many tests in Mr. Askeland's workshop and down the hall in Hasbro's FunLab, where children are brought to try out toys as designers zoom about with cameras taping their finger movements.

In Mr. Askeland's office in a portioned-off corner of the former toy factory here, an elaborate chart summarizes the cat's game play.

When the cat is first turned on, it "wakes up,'' stretching its neck and arching its back. It meows and then begins to monitor six scattered sensors that can tell if it is being touched on the head, neck, back or tail. A sensor between the ears notices changes in light.

It starts in playful mode, where it is active and frequently meows. Pulling its tail nudges it into irritated mode, characterized by hissing and an arched back. (Good thing the budget couldn't accommodate claws.) Petting the cat's head or chin three times brings on cuddly mode and a lot of small movements and purring.

Long before development was complete, Mr. Askeland had to move into office politics mode and convince Hasbro's executives that they should overcome their fear of mechanical pets and invest many millions of dollars in his quixotic cat project.

This involved many demonstrations of half-built cats with gears visible and wires hanging out.

"At first, I saw a nonworking plush item and people were trying to describe to me what it would do,'' said Duncan Billing, who became the general manager for Hasbro's Big Kids division, which includes Tiger Electronics, in the fall of 2001. One of his first tasks was to pick the toys to build for Christmas 2002. He agreed that Mr. Askeland could build a working model of the cat.

"I saw it and said, 'Wow, no one has ever made a cat this realistic,' '' Mr. Billing said. The company took the model to Toy Fair. The market's reaction was skeptical yet just positive enough that Hasbro ordered a batch to test-market in New York. That went well enough that last spring Hasbro started full manufacturing of three versions in white, gray and marmalade.

Hasbro said that the cat, whose target audience is 6- to-12-year-old girls, has found a second one: people in nursing homes who want the companionship of a cat without the litter box. The cat is manufactured in China, and the company said there was not enough lead time to get more onto the market by the end of the year.

Hasbro's marketing department is now eager for Mr. Askeland's group to design a pet shop full of creatures that can turn FurReal into a big brand.

Mr. Askeland said he would be happy to do that, but he takes satisfaction in the way that in this case, marketing took a back seat to the engineers.

"Usually, there is more strategy to what we do,'' he said. "The cat was just a bunch of engineers getting together who wanted to do something neat.''

Guggenheim — Ultimatum, Then $12 Million

Chairman Gives the Guggenheim an Ultimatum, Then $12 Million
By CELESTINE BOHLEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/04/arts/design/04GUGG.html

Peter B. Lewis, the philanthropist who recently stunned Cleveland, his hometown, by announcing a boycott of charitable contributions there, this week gave the beleaguered Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum a $12 million gift, but only after forcing the institution's ambitious director to accept a pared-down budget.

Mr. Lewis, who is chairman of the museum's board of trustees and its largest benefactor, said he had presented Thomas Krens, the museum's flamboyant and controversial director, with a "tough love" choice: he could either bring the museum's tangled financial affairs in order, or start looking for another job.

"In the last four or five months, I stopped cajoling and started seriously threatening," Mr. Lewis said, noting that just 10 days ago, he had rejected Mr. Krens's proposed spending plan for 2003. "I said, `Tom, either you go back and come back with a real plan, or we will have to talk about your leaving.' "

Mr. Krens came back with an amended $24 million budget, down about 13 percent from last year. It was adopted Monday by the board. Mr. Lewis's $12 million gift was used mainly to clear up old debts, pay off pending bills and reduce the principal on an outstanding bond issue, all done so that the Guggenheim next year can start off with a clean slate.

"The financial situation at the museum is solid, more solid than it has been in a long time, because its bills have been paid and it is operating on a balanced budget," Mr. Lewis said in a lengthy and candid telephone interview.

Mr. Krens, meanwhile, downplayed the difficulty he had in complying with Mr. Lewis's newly rigorous approach to the museum's finances. "What Peter has done is extraordinarily generous," he said. "We delivered the plan, and he found the plan so acceptable that he was moved to give $12 million."

Mr. Krens said that the budget anticipates no changes in the museum's scheduled program of exhibitions for the coming year, and no new round of layoffs, although he acknowledged that there had been a far greater shrinkage in staff than had previously been revealed. The 2003 budget adopted Monday was half the level of several years ago. Both men also said that given the financial difficulties, planning a much-anticipated Guggenheim branch designed by Frank Gehry for lower Manhattan was something that could be considered only far in the future.

But Mr. Krens continued: "This is a good-news story. "The model is working." Speaking of Mr. Lewis, he added, "It is his responsibility to challenge, to say this is the problem, this is the objective. It is his job to nail me down, but we are on the same page."

Mr. Lewis, who made his fortune in the automobile insurance business in Ohio, has contributed a total of $62 million to the museum since he joined the board in 1993. In those days, the Guggenheim was on a roll, expanding its operations overseas with new museums in Bilbao, Berlin and Las Vegas, and building new partnerships that have added to its international reputation. And Mr. Krens became an art world celebrity and a fiercely debated figure in the museum world in the process.

While the Guggenheim's international operations broke even, Mr. Lewis said that annual spending in New York, which in 1999 reached a peak of $48 million, was veering out of control. "In pursuit of its dreams and in operating its business, the Guggenheim in New York first used yesterday's reserves and then used tomorrow's optimism," Mr. Lewis said.

Mr. Lewis, who became the museum's chairman in 1998, said he agreed to lift the restriction on how his own gifts could be spent and, by his own account, directed some $30 million to pay operating expenses. "It was my money, my choice," he said. "But what you had was an institution that was overly ambitious, overly expansive. You get buoyed by success, and you begin to believe your own press clippings. And I was complicitous."

Last year, in the wake of the September terrorist attacks, the Guggenheim awoke to a financial crunch, as the number of visitors, particularly from abroad, plummeted, together with contributions from its patrons. At that time, Mr. Krens pushed through painful budget cuts and announced layoffs that by this summer, had totaled more than 90 people. On Monday, he confirmed that the number of staff positions at the museum had dropped from 391 to 181 in the last year.

But Mr. Lewis said those cuts were not enough. "The first thing is to cut costs, and then you have to operate going forward," he said. "When I first said to Tom and his people that there must be a plan, they didn't resist. They didn't know what I was talking about."

Now, Mr. Lewis said, the museum has a detailed strategic plan for the coming year, with "milestones" built into each quarterly budget that should flag any deviation.

"What I got, I got right on deadline, but I got it, and I believe it can be executed, because it is not a lot of daydreams," he said. "If not, I will know very quickly."

In Cleveland, Mr. Lewis withdrew his support of Case Western Reserve University and its ambitious business school — and then, as a consequence, his contributions to other local nonprofit institutions — in order to register his disgust at what he characterized as the lack of fiscal control imposed by the university's board of trustees.

At the Guggenheim, he said, he himself was part of the problem. "In this situation, I was not only on the board, I was the chairman," he said. "There was a mess and it got worse on my watch, so shame on me. I feel responsible."

Mr. Lewis's reputation for candor and outspokenness has sometimes landed him in trouble. In Cleveland, he said a disgruntled citizen recently put up a billboard, showing Mr. Lewis making an obscene gesture of contempt toward the city around him.

At the Guggenheim, Mr. Lewis said he relished Mr. Krens's high-risk approach to art and museum management. "He is a maverick, I am a maverick," he said. "I like Tom, but I am down to tough love. We are going to make this right this time, or else someone is going to have to go."

As for the Guggenheim's future plans for its downtown building, Mr. Lewis did not rule out helping to finance it.

"If Frank Gehry designs a public-service building that gets built in downtown New York, I am willing to contribute the last 25 percent," he said. "But there are conditions. First, that no energy is committed to do anything about this now. And second, that when the time comes, I have to have the money."

Poetry of Praise for New York City

Poetry of Praise for New York City
By MEL GUSSOW
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/05/books/05POET.html

In his poem "Mannahatta," Walt Whitman characterized that aboriginal name for New York City as "liquid, sane, unruly, self-sufficient." Taking its title from another line in that Whitman poem, the Poetry Society of America on Tuesday presented "The Words of My City," an anthology of New Yorkers reading New York poems. Whitman's seemingly contradictory words echoed through the evening.

The event, organized by Alice Quinn, executive director of the Poetry Society and the poetry editor of The New Yorker, took place in the Great Hall at Cooper Union and, she said, was intended "as an evening of many arts centered around poetry of the city." The readers included poets (Richard Howard, Sapphire, Willie Perdomo) as well as the choreographer Mark Morris (reading Frank O'Hara) and the actress Maria Tucci. Stephin Merritt played the ukulele and sang songs of the city.

As conjured up by poets, New York is a city of extreme contrasts: of dark underground tunnels and soaring skyscrapers, of slums and museums, of perpetual going-out-of-business signs and carefully cultivated roof gardens. There were so many subway poems — by Sharon Olds, Katha Pollitt and Langston Hughes, among others — as to make the audience think that the writers never took buses or taxis.

Actually there was one poem that referred to taxis, May Swenson's "At the Museum of Modern Art," offered by Ms. Tucci, the most evocative of the evening's readers. Looking out the window of the Modern, Ms. Swenson spies, "Non-objective taxis surging west, on Fifty-third/ liquefy in slippery yellows, dusky crimsons."

Amid the verse there were moments of visual imagery, highlighted by the work of the cartoonist Ben Katchor. On a screen he presented three comic strips of life in the city, additionally enlivening them with his own wry commentary. In the first strip, a tenant who weighs 200 pounds is assailed by his neighbors because his "physical presence poses a threat" to the structure of their century-old building.

Then Mr. Katchor chronicled the imaginary escapades of street artists dedicated to painting New York — doorways, monuments — with gold, an attempt, he said, at "gilding the city." Finally, he amusingly described an invaluable art collection of dried fruit (grapes, pears), preserved and handed down through the ages as if they were objects from a mummy's tomb.

Repeatedly the beauty of the city was affirmed, as opposed to the threat of violence. New York was seen as a kind of urban balancing act, with everything evening out after periods of flux.

Grace Paley read from Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" and Sara Teasdale's "Union Square" as well as her own work. In a parenthetical remark, she said that she did not feel fearful until she started to spend most of her time away from New York.

There was only one poem with a direct reference to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, "The Last Hours of Laódikê, Sister of Hektor," written and read by Nicholas Christopher. He explained that he had started to write the poem before that attack and it was about the siege of Troy. Finishing it later that year, he realized the contemporary parallels, and labeled it "a poem of Sept. 11":

Cold missiles and a rain

of embers accompany the men

who slide like shadows into the city . . .

There was a prophetic note in Muriel Rukeyser's 1962 poem "Waterlily Fire," read by Ms. Paley: "Towers falling. A dream of towers."

Many of the poems read at Cooper Union came from "Poems of New York," a new pocket-size Everyman's Library book selected and edited by Elizabeth Schmidt. In the introduction, Ms. Schmidt says that she began collecting poems for this book after 9/11. These poems "became directives for appreciating all we take for granted." She adds, "Poets who have written about New York are masters at preserving, and allowing us to cherish, moments of life in this theater of chance and change."

Macromedia MX

Went to Macromedia's seminars on Studio MX and Cold Fusion today, starting at 8:30am!

the first half was a pretty basic presentation, but there were some interesting things in Dreamweaver and Flash that they talked about. the second half was more technical and included an overview of Cold Fusion (dynamic html pages from database backend) that was pretty eye-opening for me. at least i had had an introduction from installing and implementing movable type. otherwise i'd be totally lost.

i guess i need to move to a better web-development "platform" than coding raw html tags in notepad... [!!]

Will China Blindside the West?

Will China Blindside the West?
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/opinion/03KRIS.html

GAOSHAN, China
This is the story of the Dai family in China's remote Dabie Mountains, and a reminder that we're not doing much to prepare for perhaps the most important long-term trend in the world — the rise of China.

The Dais live here in Gaoshan, a hamlet in central China's Hubei Province. I met them in 1990, when their eldest child, an excellent sixth-grade student named Dai Manju, had just dropped out of school because the family could not afford $13 in annual school fees.

Gaoshan had no electricity and was a two-hour hike from the nearest dirt road. The Dais shared their mud-brick house with their pig, and they owned nothing: no watch, no bicycle, no change of clothes.

"[Now,] they are living in a new six-room house, made of concrete. The pig lives outside. The parents proudly showed me their stove, television and electric fan."

I wrote about Dai Manju back then, and a reader sent her $100 to help, but Morgan Guaranty Trust Company missed a decimal point and sent $10,000 instead. The villagers were mightily impressed by American generosity — and carelessness.

The money went not to the villagers but to the county authorities, who used it to cover school fees for Dai Manju and other pupils and, mostly, to build a desperately needed school in another district. Since then, gaps between rich and poor have worsened in China, and so I decided to seek out the Dai family again. I thought that I would find them still living amid desperate poverty and official indifference, allowing me to write a reality-check column about how the Chinese boom has boosted coastal areas but left the vast interior little changed.

But then I came to the end of the old dirt road — and found that the path had been extended a few years ago so that now it is possible to drive all the way to Gaoshan. Every home in the village now has electricity. Two families even have telephones.

As for the Dais, they are living in a new six-room house, made of concrete. The pig lives outside. The parents proudly showed me their stove, television and electric fan.

Dai Manju turned out to have graduated from high school and then from technical school in accounting, and such lofty academic credentials are no longer uncommon in Gaoshan. She and her two siblings are working in Guangdong Province, all earning $125 a month or more — what her father earned in a year.

These inland rural areas lag behind the coastal regions, and so the income gaps are growing. But lives are unmistakably getting better almost everywhere. (The only exception I saw was Henan Province, where AIDS is impoverishing villages.) Partly gains come because peasants in villages like Gaoshan go south to work in those sweatshops denounced by American students but treasured by Chinese workers.

The lesson, for me, is that China's transformation is trickling even into the poor interior, dragging all 1.3 billion people into the world economy. When historians look back on our time, I think they'll focus on the resurgence of China after 500 years of weakness — and the way America was oblivious as this happened.

Plenty can still go wrong in China, from a banking crisis (national banks are insolvent) to labor riots (laid-off workers are grumbling everywhere). The government is often brutal and is catastrophically mismanaging an AIDS crisis.

But it's possible for China simultaneously to torture people and enrich them. Human and financial capital are growing and being deployed more sensibly, and a ferocious drive and work ethic are galvanizing even remote nooks like Gaoshan.

For most of human history, China was the world's largest economy and most advanced civilization. Then it stagnated after about 1450, but some estimates are that even as late as 1820 China amounted to 32 percent of the world's G.D.P. — and then it utterly collapsed.

Now, with the Dais and a billion people like them emerging from subsistence, China is on course eventually to recover its traditional pre-eminence. And just as China at its peak was blindsided by the rise of the West, we're likely to be blindsided by the rise of China.

You want a Thanksgiving example of that drive I mentioned? Some years ago, a friend was among a group of Americans teaching English in Sichuan Province, and when they couldn't locate a turkey for Thanksgiving they asked a government official for help. Eager to please the Americans, he arranged a feast that included, amazingly, two turkeys.

Later it turned out that he'd confiscated them from the local zoo.

Equipment Missing at Iraqi Missile Development Plant

Equipment Missing at Iraqi Missile Development Plant
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/international/middleeast/03BAGH.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 2 — The new round of United Nations weapons inspections in Iraq appeared to run into its first serious problem today when inspectors said "a number of pieces of equipment" found at a top-secret missile development plant in 1998 had disappeared, despite a requirement under United Nations resolutions that they not be moved.

A terse United Nations statement did not specify the nature of the missing equipment. Inspectors made the discovery during a six-hour visit earlier in the day at a missile plant in the Waziriyah district of northern Baghdad.

Iraqi officials told reporters immediately after the inspection that the team had found nothing amiss.

But hours later, the inspectors' statement brought a sudden turn in what, until today, had been a series of tense but largely uneventful inspections.

The statement, brusquely worded, said the missing items had been placed under surveillance by monitoring cameras in 1998 and "tagged" with numbered labels signifying that they were not to be moved.

"In 1998, the site contained a number of pieces of equipment tagged by the United Nations Special Commission," the statement said, referring to the agency that was responsible for the inspections through most of the 1990's. The commission withdrew in the last days of 1998 before intensive American missile and bomb attacks. Now, the statement said, inspectors for the new United Nations monitoring agency found that none of the tagged items remained.

"It was claimed that some of these had been destroyed by the bombing of the site; some had been transferred to other sites," the statement said.

The Waziriyah plant, run by a state-owned company called Al Karama, was described in the statement as "one of Iraq's principal missile development sites."

Other missile experts have said that one of its main tasks has been perfecting electronic guidance systems for a short-range, liquid propellant ballistic missile known as the Samoud, one of several missiles thought to have been developed to carry biological, chemical or even nuclear warheads, as well as conventional explosives.

The compound of about a dozen hangarlike concrete buildings with 20-foot-high steel doors was rebuilt after it was largely destroyed in a United States cruise missile attack in December 1998. President Clinton ordered a four-day bombing assault, joined by British planes, after United Nations officials heading inspection teams that had endured years of harassment and intransigence by Iraqi officials ran out of patience with attempts to block their access to nuclear weapons sites and withdrew the inspectors. There were no further inspections until last week.

With Iraqi officials remaining silent on the issue tonight after the statement was issued, it was not clear whether the problem could be quickly resolved by the Iraqis' finding the missing equipment, or whether the day's events were the preliminary to a more threatening showdown. Bush administration officials have said the United States might act on its warnings of military action against Iraq if it commits even a single serious breach of its obligations under the tough new weapons-inspection mandate passed by the Security Council last month.

Iraqi military officers who run the plant were in a feisty mood when reporters were admitted to the plant at midafternoon. They made a showpiece of a mound of tangled concrete and steel from the American missile attack, bulldozed into an area the size of two football fields. "See that we have rebuilt everything that the evildoers destroyed," said Brig. Gen. Muhammad Saleh Muhammad, the plant's director.

But on the issue of the weapons inspections, the 40-year-old Iraqi officer was circumspect. "It's not a normal thing, psychologically, to impose this indignity," he said. "But we will cooperate with the inspectors because they come here under a resolution of the United Nations. We want to prove to the world the falsehood of all the claims of Bush and Blair, that we have weapons of mass destruction." Of the day's inspection, he said, "They searched everything, our machinery, our computers, our documents, and they found nothing."

According to Central Intelligence Agency documents, the Samoud missile system that is the plant's main work — the Arabic term translates roughly as defiance — is not in itself a banned weapon under United Nations resolutions, since it has a declared range of less than 150 kilometers, or 94 miles. It is a scaled-down version of the Soviet-built Scud, which Iraq used extensively in its war with Iran. Some versions of the Samoud are said to have a range of as much as 590 miles.

But the main concern about the missile is its intensive development, including repeated flight tests since the Waziriyah plant was rebuilt in 1999. Experts see this development as aimed at technological improvements applicable to multistage missiles with a range of as much as 1,875 miles that Iraq is known to have at an early stage of design. C.I.A. experts have concluded that the Samoud still has major problems, including a shaky guidance system.

The developments at the missile plant today, contrasted with the outcome on Thursday, the second day of the inspections, after United Nations experts found a device known as a fermenter missing while they were examining an animal vaccine laboratory south of Baghdad that had been used to develop deadly biological toxins for military use in the 1990's. On that occasion, the Iraqis led them immediately to a veterinary complex north of Baghdad where the missing fermenter was found.

That sequence was broadly typical of the inspections until today.

By concentrating their early inspections on sites discovered by United Nations teams in the 1990's, the new inspection teams in effect gave the Iraqis a chance to adjust to the stringent terms of the new mandate without, as inspection officials thought, much risk that the Iraqis would be caught openly subverting longstanding weapons restrictions. Senior inspection officials said last week that they expected that problems, if any, would emerge only when the inspections moved on to new sites that the Iraqis may think are unknown to the inspectors.

Those inspections are likely to move into high gear only after next Sunday, the deadline for Iraq to declare all of its banned programs. But today, while the missile inspection team was at Waziriyah, a team of nuclear inspectors broke the pattern and went to two plants that have never been searched before. The plants they chose, distilleries producing a local spirit named arak and 75-cents-a-bottle gin, were about as far as imaginable from the normal run of installations on nuclear inspectors' checklists.

The United Nations statement on the inspections at the distilleries said only that the two plants, and a third nearby that underwent a previous United Nations weapons inspection in 1998, "proved to be dedicated to the production of alcohol." This seemed to vindicate bemused officials at the plants.

"They surprised us with their visit today," said Albert Moussa Younan, director of the Al-Baraj plant at Khan Bani Saad, about 20 miles northwest of Baghdad. "They didn't find anything because our company produces only alcoholic drinks."

The inspectors arrived in vehicles carrying placards of the International Atomic Energy Agency, responsible solely for searching for banned nuclear programs.

Nuclear experts reached by telephone in the United States and Britain said they knew of no connection between brewing alcohol and the processes required to build nuclear weapons. That seemed to leave two possibilities. One was that the team included biological weapons specialists and that labeling them as nuclear experts might have been a ruse to fool the Iraqis into thinking that the day's target was a nuclear site, when the real concern was to see whether fermenting equipment at the distilleries might have been used to develop biological toxins.

Since the team leader was Jacques Baute, the French nuclear physicist who heads the atomic energy agency's team, a more probable explanation was that the inspectors suspected that equipment used in developing nuclear weapons might have been hidden at the plants.

India's Desperate Bachelors

The Desperate Bachelors
India's Growing Population Imbalance Means Brides Are Becoming Scarce
By John Lancaster, Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 2, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61642-2002Dec1.html

BHALI ANANDPUR, India -- Four years ago, as is the custom here, Jai Palarwal and his wife set out to find a bride for their eldest son. They buttonholed friends and relatives, and after two years finally secured a meeting with the parents of a teenage girl from another village. But the marriage was not to be. The parents thought their daughter could do better.

Since then, there hasn't even been a nibble.

"The ones who are looking want a groom with a government job and large tracts of land, and we have neither," said Palarwal, a retired electrician, as he lounged on a rope cot outside his modest four-room home. "The girls' parents have become very choosy."

They can afford to be. The parents in question live in the state of Haryana, and Haryana is running out of girls.

A fertile farming state just west of New Delhi, Haryana produces a smaller share of girls, relative to overall births, than almost anywhere else in India. The 2001 census found just 820 girls for every 1,000 boys among children under age 6, down from 879 in 1991. The lopsided sex ratio reflects the spread of modern medical technology, particularly ultrasound exams, which allow Indian couples to indulge a cultural preference for sons by using abortion to avoid having girls.

The situation in Haryana has become so desperate that some parents are not only dropping their demands for wedding dowries, a tradition that still has a wide following in India, but are offering a "bride price" to families of prospective mates for their sons.

"That's what I'll try," said Palarwal, adding that he is prepared to offer up to 25,000 rupees -- about $520 -- to the family of the right girl. "Even if the girl is squint-eyed, I'll get my son married," he said.

While Haryana is an extreme case, the trend is also visible at the national level, where the number of girls under 6 declined from 945 for every 1,000 boys in 1991 to 927 in 2001. Some of the sharpest declines have occurred in the most prosperous areas of the country -- including wealthy neighborhoods in New Delhi -- where couples have the wherewithal to practice sex-selective abortion and the pressure from their parents to produce sons is often acute.

But only now are some people realizing what the shortage might mean for the sons.

"Earlier, we used to say, 'She has to be from the right caste, the right family, the right state -- everything,' " recalled Mahendra Singh, 54, a farmer and member of the village council here who is scouring the area in search of a bride for his 22-year-old son. "Now we don't care, as long as there's a girl who comes into the house."

The use of medical tests to determine the sex of a fetus is illegal in India, and -- at least in Haryana -- the bride shortage has spurred a crackdown on doctors and technicians who flout the law, with several well-publicized arrests. But the law is easily circumvented, experts say, and there is no indication that ordinary Indian couples are abandoning their quest for male heirs.

"The authorities are shocked at the bride shortage in Haryana, and they are suddenly clamping down in a big way," said Richa Tanwar, director of women's studies at Kurukshetra University in Haryana. "But even the bride shortage is not going to change things in the society. . . . The attitude is, okay, let the neighbors have daughters, I still want my sons."

Such attitudes are hardly new in South Asia, where sons are frequently seen as economic assets and daughters as liabilities, given the need to marry them off with large dowries. Some parents have resorted to murder, smothering or starving their newborn daughters or even poisoning them with opium balls.

The advent of medical tests such as amniocentesis and ultrasound over the last two decades has skewed the sex ratio further. As noted in a recent UNICEF study, South Asia "is the only region that defies the global biological norm, with only 94 women for every 100 men, so that 74 million women are 'simply missing.' " As many as 50 million of the missing women are from India.

The imbalance is especially glaring in Haryana, experts say, because the state combines traditional values with relatively high levels of education and income. That means parents are aware of sex-determining medical tests and able to afford them. "In Haryana, if you just take the literate population, you will see that the sex ratio is even worse," said Tanwar, the women's studies professor. "When you are literate, you will find ways and means to use and misuse technology to get rid of the girl fetus."

Bhali Anandpur, about 60 miles west of New Delhi and home to 800 families, is typical of Haryana's rural villages. Surrounded by sugar-cane fields, it is pleasant and well-maintained, with a bustling coed high school and a large Hindu temple towering above a main avenue paved with bricks. Women fill buckets from hand pumps in front of simple but spacious homes, some of which have cable television. Cows wade in a watering hole.

But in one respect, there's something unnatural about the village. In 2000, census workers counted a total population of 2,370 males and 1,957 females, according to Om Prakash, a science teacher at the high school who supervised the effort. The disparity was especially pronounced among children under 6, with 351 boys and 302 girls.

There was no separate category for girls and women of marriageable age, but young men in the village say they don't need a census to tell them they are lonely. (The legal age for marrying in India is 18, but in practice many girls get married in their early or mid-teens.)

"All the boys you see here, they'll all become overage," said Palarwal, the electrician, waving his arm at a dozen young men who joined him at the entrance to his home on a recent sunny morning. "They finish their day's work, and when evening comes, they sit down and think, 'Even today I haven't got a girl.' "

Among the group was Ajit Singh, 29, who would seem to be a reasonable marriage prospect given his university degree and income as a salesman of medical devices. Singh said his search is leading nowhere. "I have been looking around for some years, but in the last two years, the need has become desperate," he said.

Singh's bachelor status may reflect his high standards -- in particular, his insistence that any potential bride come from Haryana and his own Jat caste, which predominates here.

But others aren't so picky. Sajno Palarwal, 60, said she searched for years for a bride for her son, Rotas, to no avail. "We were too poor," said Palarwal, a wiry, expressive woman whose husband died nine years ago.

Finally, two years ago, she decided to look outside Haryana, enlisting the help of relatives with contacts in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. "By then we were too desperate," she said. "We just wanted a girl."

She eventually found one, a 16-year-old from another caste, and Rotas Palarwal boarded a train with two uncles to make the 500-mile journey to her village. While he sat in another room, his uncles met the girl and her family and closed the deal. Some weeks later he saw his wife, Archana, for the first time, on his wedding day. His mother gave the family about $100 as "a gift."

Things seemed to have worked out. "She is now a Haryanwi," Rotas Palarwal said proudly as his wife, now 18, hovered in the background. "I am very happy."

Men in the village are under no illusions about the reason for the bride shortage. They speak of the latest census data and its relationship to illegal sex-determination tests. "Everyone's very stubborn about only wanting sons," said Mahendra Singh, 54, the village council member, who has three daughters and two sons. "They don't realize that this is going to affect society. People just assume that if a daughter is born, it's a thing to mourn."

Almost in the next breath, though, he revealed his own conflicting feelings on the subject. "I regret that I didn't sterilize earlier," he said. "Then I wouldn't have had as many daughters."

Special correspondent Rama Lakshmi contributed to this report.

Britain Issues File on Iraq's 'Unique Horror'

Britain Issues File on Iraq's 'Unique Horror'
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/international/europe/03BRIT.html

LONDON, Dec. 2 — Britain released a dossier of evidence today arguing that systematic rape, torture, gassing, public beheadings and mass executions of Iraqis by Saddam Hussein were the deliberate policy of his "regime of unique horror."

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the document, which the government said was based on intelligence material, victims' first-hand accounts and reports by nongovernmental organizations, set out a powerful human rights case in addition to the international security argument for disarming Mr. Hussein.

"We not only help those countries in the region which are subject to Iraqi threats and intimidations," Mr. Straw said. "We also deprive Saddam of his most powerful tools for keeping the Iraqi people living in fear and subjugation."

Some rights groups and antiwar politicians expressed fears that the government had other motives than protesting human rights abuses for releasing the file.

"I think that this highly unusual, indeed unprecedented, publication is cranking up for war," said Tam Dalyell of Labor, the longest-serving member of Parliament and a persistent critic of current policy toward Iraq.

Amnesty International accused Mr. Straw of a "cold and calculated manipulation" of the human rights situation in Iraq to back up the American and British governments' case for military moves against Baghdad.

"Let us not forget that these same governments turned a blind eye to Amnesty International's reports of widespread human rights violations in Iraq before the gulf war," said the secretary general of the group, Irene Khan.

A senior official, speaking under the Foreign Office practice of anonymity, said the bulk of the report was from reports by academic and human rights groups about incidents in the 1980's and 90's.

The release is the third time since the Sept. 11 attacks that Britain has come forth with compilations of published reports and intelligence findings to bolster tough joint American and British positions against terror and Iraq.

Mr. Straw made the dossier public at a breakfast meeting of the Atlantic Partnership, a group that aims to improve relations between Europe and North America.

Mr. Straw told the breakfast gathering that the aim of the disclosures was "to remind the world that the abuses of the Iraqi regime extend far beyond its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in violation of its international obligations."

The document listed what it said were Mr. Hussein's favored methods of torture. They included eye gouging; piercing hands with an electric drill, stubbing out cigarettes on skin, mock execution, suspension from ceilings, electric shocks to the genitals, rape, finger- and toenail extraction, beating the soles of the feet and acid baths.

The report said that since mid-2000 the punishment for slandering or making abusive comments about the president or his family has been amputating the tongue. "Iraqi television has broadcast pictures of these punishments as a warning for others," the file said.

A copy of a government personnel card in the report, credited to the Iraq Research and Documentation Project at Harvard, described a state employee, Aziz Salih Ahmed, as a "fighter in the popular army." The report said his assigned "activity" was "violation of women's honor."

A graphic video that supplemented the 23-page document was played at a Foreign Office briefing and made available to television stations. It showed government opponents being kicked and beaten after an uprising in 1991 and the bodies of women and children after a chemical weapons attack in 1998 on Halabja, a Kurdish town in northern Iraq.

The senior official denied that the purpose of the presentation was to rally support for possible military moves against Iraq.

"This dossier itself is not attempting to provide a justification for military action," he said.

The former head of the Iraqi nuclear energy agency, Dr. Hussain al-Shahristani was at the briefing to relate his experiences of being imprisoned and tortured in Iraq. Like Amnesty International, Dr. Hussain noted that the British and American governments had not been so concerned about human rights in Iraq in the past. "However," he said, "later is better than never."

Dr. Hussain escaped Iraq in 1991 after 12 years in jail, 11 of them in solitary confinement, for his refusal to be involved in the nuclear program after it was diverted in 1979 to weapons development. He said he doubted that the current inspections would succeed in turning up weapons of mass destruction.

"Saddam is the master at hiding, concealing and moving around weapons," he said.

Dr. Hussain also questioned whether any scientists working in the weapons program would be able to take up the United Nations offer to leave Iraq with their families to testify to what they knew.

"They were all forced against their will to take part," he said. "But they will fear cooperating because they know Saddam will attack their relatives, their homes, their tribes and their towns."

It's Business Almost as Usual at Mombasa's Beach Resorts

It's Business Almost as Usual at Mombasa's Beach Resorts
By MARC LACEY and DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/international/africa/03KENY.html

MOMBASA, Kenya, Dec. 2 — Even as investigators pick through the rubble of the bombed-out Paradise Hotel, there are still men leading sluggish camels along the scorching sand of Kenya's picturesque coastline, goading tourists into taking a ride.

"I'm praying the tourists don't go away," said Ali Hassan Abdi, 31, who makes a living by charging the equivalent of $6 for a ride on his camel, a sturdy beast named Amsa.

Mombasa's so-called beach boys, young men eager to make some easy money, are still offering boat rides to the coral reefs, help in securing marijuana or sex on the beach for lonely women.

"We need our daily bread," said Jamal Hamisi, 27, one of the men who swarm around tourists as soon as they venture out of their walled resorts for walks on the sand. "We're trying to tell them the trouble has passed."

Many tourists do not seem to need to hear the pitch. Hotel owners reported that relatively few vacationers packed up and left after the bombing, nor were switchboards flooded with cancellations. Throughout the day today, the lounge chairs at resort after resort were full of lobster-red vacationers, who seemed to flip themselves over on their towels in unison.

Well before this latest catastrophe, tourism had fallen off badly here, dropping significantly after violent pre-election clashes in 1997 and only lately beginning to pick up. Tourism is Kenya's second-largest earner of foreign exchange, after tea, bringing in about $320 million last year.

"Every time I see the headlines I groan," said Simon Balls, who runs Kelly and Peacock Safaris, which takes visitors into Kenya's many game parks. "People living overseas may think they will get blasted away if they come here. There was a major incident at the coast, but it was very targeted and Kenya is not under siege."

The most jittery visitors were clearly Israelis, many of whom cut their vacations short and returned to Israel. Their break from the violence they experience every day at home was thoroughly spoiled.

Still, some have stayed on. Schlomo Vered, a retired aviation mechanic from the Israeli city of Rehovot, arrived on the same plane that militants later tried to shoot down as it departed from Mombasa's airport.

Three days after most Israeli tourists left, Mr. Vered sat in the bar of the Ocean View Hotel today, declaring that he might stay three or four months more.

"We live with terror in Israel, and we don't run from that," said Mr. Vered, clad in a T-shirt, baggy knee-length shorts and a baseball cap.

In fact, Mr. Vered, 65, had an added incentive to stay. At his side, dressed in tight pants and a leopard-skin tank top, was 24-year-old Masi Wambu, whom he had befriended on an earlier visit. Ms. Wambu nodded happily at Mr. Vered's words.

Mr. Vered, who described himself as "almost divorced," is like many of the European men who visit Mombasa in search of a new, laid-back lifestyle.

"I went through a lot of women until I met one I liked," he said.

Other vacationers were quite blunt in stating their hesitancy to stay at hotels known for attracting large groups of Israelis. Germany, Britain and France provide the largest numbers of tourists to Kenya.

"After the attacks, some tourists asked whether we had Israeli clientele, and we answered in the negative," Farid Abdalla, manager of the Nyali Beach Hotel, which caters mostly to the British, told Reuters.

Charles Cufal, 52, a Swiss journalist watching the waves from the restaurant at Bamburi Villas, said: "For myself, I feel safe. But I would prefer to stay at a hotel not frequented by Israelis, and I'm not speaking negatively of them."

Of course, it was people from other countries who were killed in other recent terrorist attacks. When a powerful car bomb was set off outside a crowded disco in Kuta Beach on the Indonesian island of Bali in October, Australians made up at least 82 of the nearly 200 deaths. Indonesian and Australian investigators attribute that attack to a Muslim group that they suspect has links to Al Qaeda.

In April a suicide bomber killed 21 people, including 15 tourists, in an attack on Africa's oldest synagogue, on the island of Djerba off the coast of Tunisia.

"Whatever happened in Mombasa was rather unfortunate, but we should be able to root out these problematic people," said Freddie Kiuru, general manager of the Travelers Beach Hotel here, which was reopened recently after a fire swept through the resort last year. "We would not like it to happen again."

Mr. Balls, the safari operator, said he did not believe that the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi, followed by the bombing on the coast, signaled a violent trend in Kenya.

The government-run Kenya Tourist Board recently began a major promotional campaign to lure more visitors to "magical Kenya." One slick brochure shows two women lying on the sand in thong bikinis and offers these inspiring words: "The sun-soaked beaches and warm inviting waters of the Indian Ocean are a haven of peace and tranquillity. Lay back, relax and let the rest of the world drift away."

That seems far more difficult now.

The American Embassy in Nairobi issued an updated travel warning today urging tourists visiting Kenya to beware of "the continuing threat posed by terrorism in East Africa and the capacity of terrorist groups to carry out attacks."

Still, the American woman who was jailed for several days as a suspect in the Mombasa bombing continued her vacation at the beach today after she and her husband were released over the weekend.

"As far as tourists anywhere in the world, it's not a safe situation until we get these terrorists," said the woman, Alicia Talhammer, 31, of Tallahasee, Fla., whose decision to check out immediately after the bombings had aroused police suspicions. "But I don't think people should stop traveling. There's too much to see."

Russia & China Proceed with Pipeline Project

Russia in Energy Talks With China
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/business/worldbusiness/02RUSS.html

MOSCOW, Dec. 1 — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia will seek to advance energy projects by Russia and China during a visit to China this week, officials said in Moscow over the weekend.

On a three-day visit to China, Mr. Putin will "emphasize the realization of large joint projects in the sphere of oil and gas," among other sectors, a close aide to Mr. Putin, Sergei Prikhodko, was quoted as saying by the Russian government's news agency, Ria-Novosti.

In particular, an oil pipeline project that would carry Russian oil from the Siberian city of Angarsk to Daqing in northeast China, is expected to move forward, said the Russian deputy foreign minister, Aleksandr Losyukov, in an interview with Russian news agency Itar-Tass. Mr. Losyukov said all the paperwork would be "officially approved" by the end of the year.

A spokesman for Viktor B. Khristenko, the deputy prime minister responsible for energy issues, was more cautious, saying only that the government was still considering signing off on the project. An executive at Transneft, Russia's pipeline monopoly, said his company had not prepared any information about the pipeline for Mr. Putin's visit, an indication that a larger agreement may not be signed this week.

Russia and China signed an agreement to study the pipeline project in September 2001. Since then, a Russian company, Yukos, has completed an investment study and is drawing up a detailed plan of the route.

Construction could begin as early as summer 2003, a Yukos spokesman, Roman Artemyev, said. The 1,400-mile pipeline will eventually carry 600,000 barrels of oil a day to northeast China, a region with waning oil reserves.

The project is one of several that Russia hopes to promote. A consortium led by BP that owns a large gas field called Kovykta in the Siberian region of Irkutsk has sought to secure contracts with China for the purchase of its gas. The project has been slow to proceed, mainly because, analysts said, China considers the import of Russian oil as a priority over gas.

"The bottom line is that now China obviously wants oil," said Philip Vorobyov, an analyst in the Moscow office of Cambridge Energy Research Associates. "Gas probably won't happen for a few years."

Still, China is undertaking a flagship project in the gas industry — a gas pipeline that will stretch from western China to the country's more developed east. Russia's natural gas monopoly, Gazprom, is part of a consortium to build the pipeline. If the project succeeds, it will serve as a positive signal and could lead to China becoming a customer for Russian gas, Mr. Vorobyov said.

Russian oil and gas companies are looking for new markets as production rises. Growing markets in Asia are attractive, but large exports have been impossible because of transport difficulties. Most Russian oil is produced in West Siberia, far from Russia's eastern coast and Asian countries. Russia and China are not now linked by a pipeline.

Russia's minister of economics and trade, German O. Gref, said in comments carried by Russian agencies this weekend that "the realization of joint projects in the sphere of oil and gas, including the Russia-China oil pipeline, will increase trade flows by several billions of dollars."

While Mr. Khristenko said on Saturday that total trade flows between Russia and China could be $20 billion to $30 billion a year over the next several years, total trade between the two countries stood at just $10.7 billion in 2001.

J.P. Morgan closes $7.7B fund

J.P. Morgan closes $7.7B fund
by Katherine Goncharoff
Updated 11:31 AM EST, Dec-3-2002
http://www.thedeal.com/

The private equity arm of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., J.P. Morgan Partners, has closed a $7.7 billion fund, the largest private equity fund raised to date, but more than $5 billion short of its original $13 billion goal.

The new J.P. Morgan Partners Global Investors LP partnership fund will make both leveraged buyout and venture capital investments over five years. But a source close to the fund raising added that the PE fund is expected to focus heavily on buyouts.

The new investment vehicle, which was raised over a two-year period by an internal team that involved the participation of J.P. Morgan Securities Inc., includes $1.7 billion in funds from major institutional investors, among them Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, CalPERS, New York State Common Retirement Fund and the State of Michigan Retirement Fund, as well as from high-net-worth individuals. J.P. Morgan said it will invest up to $4 for every dollar of outside money that has been invested.

J.P. Morgan raised the money even as the investment bank suffered through eight straight quarters of losses, due largely to its large commitments to both venture capital and private equity-style telecom investments.

Moreover, the fund's overarching strategy, which aims to invest in every stage of private equity, from early stage venture capital to leveraged buyouts across most business sectors around the globe, is currently out of fashion.

“This is a difficult market in which to raise a multibillion-dollar fund and it will be much more difficult to raise such funds moving forward, but they [J.P. Morgan] have a unique franchise and a team with the right breadth and depth of experience that allows them to offer this type of broad-ranging product,” said Erik Hirsch, chief investment officer at Hamilton Lane, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., based consulting firm to large pension funds.

Since the tech and telecom downturn, general partners in PE or VC funds have been more amenable to investing in highly focused funds that have demonstrated success in a specific segment of the market, such as biotechnology or specifically buyout deals.

CSFB vets establish PE-like firm

CSFB vets establish PE-like firm
by Josh Kosman
Updated 05:23 PM EST, Dec-2-2002
http://www.thedeal.com/

Steve Wiesner, the former head of Credit Suisse First Boston's West Coast M&A business development effort, has established his own firm in order to buy minority stakes in small and microcap public companies.

Wiesner founded Zuma Capital Partners LLC and added Martin Diaz, a former principal with CSFB's merchant banking arm. The firm plans to apply a private equity philosophy to public market investing. The Sherman Oaks, Calif.-based firm plans to raise capital from individuals and institutions to buy positions in companies with an equity value between $10 million and $100 million.

Zuma plans to invest about $5 million per deal and hold its positions for three to five years. It expects to buy its stakes at a 5% to 15% discount from from institutional holders like public pensions and mutual funds, taking advantage of what Wiesner says is an undervalued public market.

"We're looking at companies trading at three times Ebit with reasonable growth prospects," he said. "So it is a very compelling time. And what makes it enormously compelling from a transaction perspective is that there are so many holders who would love to get out of these holdings but can't."

These holders, he explains, bought stakes in $750 million market cap companies that have now become $75 million businesses. But if they exit through the public markets, they risk lowering the company's stock price.

"We're playing in a relatively uncrowded segment of the equity market," he said. "Given the illiquidity of the positions that we're acquiring, most hedge funds will be reluctant to play. Since our stakes will not be controlling, traditional private equity players aren't in the market either."

There are 939 companies in Zuma's investment universe trading at less than two times book value, he said, with institutions controlling the majority of the stock in more than 180 of these companies.

Zuma is avoiding investments in financial services, real estate, natural resources, technology, telecommunications products and services and utilities.

To Prevent Sexual Abuse, Abusers Step Forward

To Prevent Sexual Abuse, Abusers Step Forward
By LINDA VILLAROSA
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/health/psychology/03ABUS.html

I am a recovering child sexual abuser," said the lanky 71-year-old man. "For several years in the early 90's, I abused three of my granddaughters."

As he spoke, the noisy room was stunned into silence. The man and his wife, from rural Vermont, were speaking in front of a group of about 100 teachers in Burlington.

"After each of the incidents, I felt guilty and hated myself," said the man, who also told of being sexually abused as a boy. "I vowed to stop, but I didn't. My stepdaughter confronting me is what finally stopped me."

The man and his wife, who do not use their real names when addressing groups in the workshops and asked that their names not be used to spare their grandchildren additional pain, are part of an unusual program sponsored by Stop It Now, a sexual abuse prevention group based in Haydenville, Mass. Instead of focusing exclusively on the victims of abuse, these programs also let abusers talk about what they did.

The goal is not only to allow abusers to educate the public about sexual abuse, but also to rally adults — friends, family, neighbors, teachers, professionals and the abusers themselves — to act before abuse ever occurs. Never before, say those in the field, has a prevention program directly asked abusers to step forward. And rarely, they say, has a program asked the public at large to confront suspicious behavior in adults.

For the past two decades, nearly all sexual abuse prevention programs have focused on children, rather than the molesters, experts say. Children, abused at a rate of 500,000 a year in this country, have been taught the difference between good touch and bad touch, instructed to say "no" if they are being violated and encouraged to get help. But the crisis in the Roman Catholic Church again highlights how difficult it is for children to come forward and confront the adults who are harming them.

"This approach marks a huge shift in the field," said Dr. Keith Kaufman, a professor and chairman of the department of psychology at Portland State University in Oregon. Dr. Kaufman is president of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, a nonprofit organization based in Beaverton, Ore., that two years ago began endorsing a prevention model that focuses on offenders.

"We have had a 20-year history of a singular approach to prevention with a focus on relying on kids to protect themselves from adults," Dr. Kaufman said. "This doesn't even make sense logically. Why do we think it's right to give children the huge responsibility of protecting themselves from sexual offenders?"

For the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this fall has financed two state-based programs that focus on preventing adults from abusing children. Prevent Child Abuse Georgia, an Atlanta-based nonprofit organization, has just begun a three-year pilot program that will use a public awareness campaign to identify and educate potential sexual offenders.

In New England, Massachusetts Citizens for Children has created a school-based curriculum that will include teaching teenagers how to understand and identify inappropriate sexual feelings they have toward younger children.

These projects and others join the work of Stop It Now, which pioneered prevention programs like these in the early 1990's. In 1995, the organization instituted a campaign in Vermont, using print, billboard and public service announcements. For instance, one television public service announcement featured the voice of a mother who had sought treatment for her 10-year-old son after she saw him put his hands down the pants of a 5-year-old girl.

Another, using actors to depict a real case, described how a sister confronted her brother, suspecting that he was having sexual feelings toward their young niece. People were encouraged to call the organization's toll-free number for information, treatment referrals or simply to talk.

Comparing knowledge before and four years after the campaign, a Vermont telephone survey revealed a 40 percent increase in the number of people who could define sexual abuse, a 10 percent increase in respondents who could identify at least one warning sign and a 6 percent increase in the number who conceded that abusers were likely to live in their neighborhoods.

Since then, Stop It Now has created similar programs in Philadelphia, England and Ireland and will begin a project in seven counties in Minnesota next year.

Stop It Now's approach is modeled after other public health campaigns, like the one created by Mothers Against Drunk Driving. "I thought about the shift we have seen in behaviors like drunk driving and smoking," said Fran Henry, the founder and director of Stop It Now.

"People are willing to confront and challenge people from getting behind the wheel, because they've heard the message `friends don't let friends drive drunk,' " Ms. Henry said. "That clicked for me. Why couldn't we use those principles to both understand child sexual abuse and get adults to hold other adults accountable for their inappropriate behavior?"

Ms. Henry, 53, also brought her personal experiences to her work. She was sexually abused by her father from age 12 to 16. "I tried to get my father to stop, but wasn't able to until I was older," she said. "As a young teenager, I could never disclose what was going on if I knew my father would go to jail. My goal is to try and protect kids, by getting adults to take action, so that what happened to me never happens to another child."

Among the most controversial aspects of Stop It Now's work have been the two dozen workshops that spotlight offenders like the Vermont grandfather.

Nick, a 58-year-old cook at a New England university, has taken part in six or seven Stop It Now workshops. He was arrested 13 years ago, after admitting that he had molested three of his daughters and two of their childhood friends. He spent a year in prison and many more in treatment. Nick, who uses only his first name in workshops and agreed to be interviewed on the condition that his surname be withheld, said he spoke to groups because it was his responsibility "to participate in the process that identifies and stops other perpetrators of inappropriate sexual behavior."

"If I can help offenders see that what they are doing is wrong, and that there is a way to change, then I have served as a good example," Nick said.

Some find this approach ineffective, taking attention and resources away from those who have been abused and directing it toward those who have preyed on children. Stop It Now has even been accused of being an "amnesty program" for offenders.

Judy Little, executive director of Voices in Action, a nonprofit organization for victims of child sexual abuse outside Cincinnati, says that though offenders have a responsibility to prevent abuse, listening to them is difficult.

"The professional and humanitarian in me believes that if we are ever to stop this cycle, we have to help perpetrators heal and allow those that are healed to take part in prevention," said Ms. Little, who was abused as a child. "But part of me is still hurting inside from the abuse that I suffered, so I don't care what they have to say. I don't want to hear the empty excuses for their behavior."

Results from the Stop It Now telephone survey in Vermont found that only 66 percent of respondents would take direct action if they suspected abuse, and the number dropped to 43 percent if the abuser was someone they knew.

Stop It Now's help lines in Vermont and Philadelphia have taken 2,009 calls since 1995, 352 from people who identified themselves as abusers or someone at risk for abusing. Another 1,299 calls were from adults who knew an abuser or someone at risk for abusing.

Because many state laws require all professionals to report child sexual abuse to the authorities, callers generally do not leave their names. But the professionals can give them referrals and other information anonymously.

It is unclear how many abusers or family members have called to seek treatment, but most experts guess the number is few.

"Stop It Now is pushing the envelope, but it is still naïve to believe that offenders and their families will come forward in droves, given the denial around sexual abuse," said Gail Burns-Smith, executive director of Connecticut Sexual Assault Crisis Services in East Hartford, and chairwoman of the board of the National Alliance to End Sexual Violence.

"Offenders have distorted thinking about the crimes they are committing against someone," she continued. "They don't see that they are doing harm to their victims. I'd say that, at best, this approach is only a hopeful solution."

Even Nick doubts that hearing a recovering offender speak would have stopped him from abusing or compelled him to stop. "I'm not sure if hearing someone like myself would have changed my behavior," Nick said.

"On one level I knew what I was doing was absolutely unacceptable. But while I was perpetrating, I disassociated myself. I was in denial."

"Looking back," he added, "it doesn't make sense how my daughters had become sexual objects to me. It was a force I don't fully understand. What I do know is that even as I was offending, I didn't want to be doing what I was doing."

Wayne Bowers of Lansing, Mich., who has twice been convicted of "indecent liberties with a child" for sexually abusing boys on the baseball team he coached, said that perpetrator-prevention might have helped him change.

"While I was offending I was out of control, but I was also sick and tired and looking for help," said Mr. Bowers, 57, who is the director of the Sex Abuse Treatment Alliance, an advocacy and education group.

"I was scared to death and wanted to talk to someone, but I had no idea who," Mr. Bowers said. "If there had been a help line, I would have called it. I served my time, I got treatment and I haven't victimized anyone for 20 years. I have an attraction to adolescent boys, and there isn't any way that I can totally eliminate those feelings. But I've found a way to keep myself in control. There is hope."

Patch Raises New Hope for Beating Depression

Patch Raises New Hope for Beating Depression
By MARY DUFFY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/03/health/psychology/03PATC.html

It was the first type of antidepressant, and for many people the monamine oxidase, or MAO, inhibitor remains the best hope for relief from major depression.

The trouble is that the side effects can be so serious that MAO inhibitors are rarely prescribed. When taken with certain foods, for example, they may bring on sudden and severe hypertension.

The problems, however, may soon be resolved.

A study reported in November in The American Journal of Psychiatry suggests that by administering the MAO inhibitor selegiline in patch form, patients can receive the antidepressant benefits of the drug without the usual side effects.

In research conducted at six sites, 42 percent of the subjects treated with the patch recovered from major depression within six weeks, and many showed great improvement much sooner. In the study, neither subjects nor researchers knew who had received the dummy medication.

One subject, requesting anonymity, told how his mood changed after a few weeks on the patch, saying: "It was like a switch had gone on. Before I had the patch, I couldn't function. Suddenly, I had a dramatic change in outlook. I could look forward to things."

Monamine oxidase is an enzyme found in the brain and in the digestive system. By inhibiting MAO in the brain, the antidepressant is believed to give patients a better supply of neurotransmitters to fight the symptoms of depression. Taken orally, however, the medication also blocks MAO in the digestive system, and that interferes with the detoxification of tyramine, a harmful byproduct of many aged foods.

Patients receiving MAO inhibitors are instructed to follow a tyramine-restrictive diet, which means no aged cheeses, no red wine, no soy sauce, no fermented foods and little or no alcohol. Eating tyramine-rich food while taking a MAO inhibitor can cause sudden and severe hypertension.

Delivering selegiline through the skin, however, changes the way the medication is absorbed. Rather than first being filtered through the intestines and liver, in patch form, the drug is aimed at the central nervous system.

"With this study we've demonstrated a way of getting an MAO inhibitor to the brain without interfering with the MAO in the digestive system," said the study's lead author, Dr. Alexander Bodkin of the clinical psychopharmacology research program of McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass. The study was supported by the developers of the selegiline patch, Somerset Pharmaceuticals of Tampa, Fla.

While subjects in this study were instructed to follow a tyramine-restricted diet, in subsequent studies they were not.

Dr. Beverly McCabe, a professor of dietetics and nutrition at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a co-author of the "Handbook of Food and Drug Interaction," to be published in January, believes this form of drug delivery offers great promise. "I would think the risk of a tyramine reaction would be very low with transdermal selegiline," Dr. McCabe said. "The drug would absorbed into the bloodstream more evenly, which would also be beneficial."

Dr. Frederic Quitkin, director of the depression evaluation service at the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan, said, "MAO inhibitors are really great drugs: complicated to use, but extremely effective." As for the selegiline patch, he said, the research is encouraging. But he cautioned, "It will require further study to see how effective it is."

Another notable finding in the study of 177 patients was the 94 percent compliance rate for those on the selegiline patch. That is significant, said Dr. Bodkin, because compliance rates with oral antidepressants are typically much lower.

One side effect, in 36 percent of subjects, was a reaction, like redness or irritation, at the site of the patch. For most patients, Dr. Bodkin said, the irritation is minor compared with the side effects of most antidepressants.

A Beijing Opera in NYC

Went to a really stellar performance by the Qi Shu Fang Beijing Opera Company yesterday. i was really lucky to have caught the performance, as i only noticed a small advertisement and glowing NYT review (from last year's performance) just two hours before the performance was to begin.

Unlike other chinese operas i had seen before on television, this one was beautiful and well executed (as far as i as a novice could tell), with beautifully made scintillating and colorful costumes, well executed vocals, english side-titles, and a chinese instrument section that was almost perfectly together throughout the performance.

added to that were the acrobatic performance of selected members of the cast as they went through their faux-fighting routines. besides chinese styled cartwheels and body flips, one member did a series of continuous in-place sommersaults for what seemed like half a minute!!

although the audience was mixed, there seemed to be a predominance of more country styled mainlanders in attendance, manifest to me by (1) the propensity for more than several members of the audience to repeatedly get up and leave from and return to their seats during the first half of the performance, (2) the loud laudatory grunts of "hao! hao!" (good! good!) in beijing accent ('er2hua4'), (3) the fact that most of the audience retained their outer jackets (often big stuffed down coats) as if they were at an open air performance (there were only about five coats in the check room!), and (4) the loud voice of one chinese gentleman in heated conversation on a cell phone through one complete scene.

however, while others may have seen those manifestations as detracting, to me they lended a sense of seeming authenticity to the performance. and overall i was quite pleased with having been able to attend and experience Beijing in Manhattan on a cold winter sunday.

[will try to post a few more pictures later...]

Alien Abduction

An Alien Abduction Can Complicate Your Life
By JAMES GORMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/arts/television/02GORM.html

Suppose that all those alien abduction stories are true. Aliens did crash at Roswell, N.M., in 1947. The government has indeed engaged in a decades long cover-up. Beings from outer space do snatch human beings from their cars and bedrooms to probe them, with an eye toward interbreeding. And these beings do appear to be big-eyed and spindly limbed with heads like super-sized gray almonds, except when they don't.

That's the premise of "Taken," a mini-series that starts tonight on the Sci-Fi Channel, and runs for 10 consecutive weeknights, with a two-hour episode each night. The overall effect is to give viewers who have not been abducted a taste of what it must be like: the time inexplicably lost, the confusion over what "they" want with us and the nagging sense that something very peculiar, and not at all pleasant, is going on.

At least in this case it's not hard to find out who "they" are. The series is presented by Steven Spielberg. He brought the idea of a history of alien abductions to Leslie Bohem, the writer, and an executive producer with Mr. Spielberg. Each of the episodes has a different director.

The story is a multigenerational saga of the personal struggles and experiences of three families.

The Clarkes start out human, but quickly acquire an alien strain after Sally, played by Catherine Dent, falls for an extraterrestrial injured in the Roswell crash and gives birth to his son.

Another clan, the thoroughly despicable Crawfords, spend most of their time hunting aliens and the Clarkes. In the process they conduct their own abductions and commit a variety of murders, often in a strangely matter-of-fact way. The Crawfords are far more bizarre than the aliens, which may be meant to suggest something profound.

Finally, the men of the unfortunate Keys family just keep being abducted, generation after generation: abducted and probed, abducted and probed.

"Taken" does eventually explain what the aliens are up to, but it never explains another mystery common to this series and to real-life tales of abduction. Why would beings with the ability to manipulate time and memory and to power spaceships with their thoughts need to thread crude physical probes up the noses of human beings as if they were otolaryngologists manqué? In the real-life accounts of abductions, the probes are not always nasal, but "Taken" thankfully leaves out other points of entry.

It is of course too easy to mock stories of alien abduction, and it seems to be one purpose of "Taken" to take seriously the obvious distress of people who believe that they have been abducted. A promotional Web site for the series includes the testimony of real people who believe that they have been taken, as well as links to information about the Roswell crash, including other shows that have appeared on the Sci-Fi Channel.

The series is, however, unlikely to convince anyone who hasn't been aboard a spaceship. For one thing, it suffers from very uneven acting. Some of the characters are well enough drawn. Ms. Dent is convincing as a woman who might attract men from any star. And her hybrid children and grandchildren are also well played. But the alien-hunting Crawfords are not only odious but played, particularly in the second generation, with an odd, robotic stiffness.

This must be intentional, since it passes from one generation to the next. I suspect that the idea is to show how alien some human beings are, while other characters show how human aliens can be. Still, the lack of affect shown by Andy Powers, playing the second-generation alien hunter, Eric Crawford, makes him seem as if he suffered a childhood lobotomy.

To be fair, the actors don't have much of a chance. The primary idea of "Taken" is one of such familiarity that there is little new, even in the eventual explanation of what the aliens are up to. The series offers a modicum of suspense, but little satisfying action and absolutely no sense of humor.

"Taken" lacks one of the hallmarks of good science fiction: surprise. Heartwarming tales like "E.T.," stylish future-noir dramas like "Blade Runner," "Star Trek" in its several incarnations, "The Matrix": all of them offer something new to think about. But "Taken" is a recapitulation of popular mythology in which the banal overwhelms the extraordinary.

One of the stabs at profundity is the narrator, Allie, played by Dakota Fanning, who appears in the last few episodes as a child of great importance to humans and aliens. She makes occasional philosophical comments intended to suggest that she is wise beyond her years, and that there is some deep content in what we are viewing.

A better guide might have been a heroin dealer who appears briefly in Episode 4. He is talking to Jesse Keys, the second generation of this often-taken family, is back from Vietnam. He is an addict, a war hero like his father before him, and also like his father, a veteran of many abductions.

He is talking about how his experience made Vietnam seem like just another dreadful chapter in his life, and he says, "My whole life is like that, walking point through a jungle, waiting for something that I can't stop to happen to me."

The dealer says, "No disrespect, but how does that make you any different than anybody else?"

TAKEN

Sci-Fi Channel, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time
Directed by Breck Eisner, Félix Enríquez Alcalá, John Fawcett, Robert Harmon, Tobe Hooper, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Tom Wright, Jeremy Kagan, Jeff Woolnough and Bryan Spicer; written by Leslie Bohem. Steven Spielberg, Steve Beers and Mr. Bohem, executive producers. Music by Laura Karpman; production design by Chris Gorak; Deron Fields, visual effects coordinator. A DreamWorks Television production.
WITH: Dakota Fanning (Allie Keys), James N. Kirk (Jesse Keys), Catherine Dent (Sally Clarke), Ryan Hurst (Tom Clarke), Joel Gretsch (Capt. Owen Crawford), Heather Donahue (Mary Crawford), Andy Powers (Eric Crawford), Matt Frewer (Dr. Chet Wakeman), Emily Bergl (Lisa Clarke) and Adam Kaufman (Charlie Keys).

Well, Hello, Henry

Well, Hello, Henry
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/opinion/02SAFI.html

WASHINGTON

The hate-Henry industry within the aging liberal establishment is having a hissy fit over President Bush's appointment of Henry Kissinger to chair the commission inquiring into why our government failed to anticipate Sept. 11, and how to avert such disasters in the future.

I yield to nobody in presenting credentials as a Kissinger critic. On my wall is a 1973 drawing by David Levine, the greatest caricaturist since James Gillray, showing me gleefully ensconced in the powerful secretary of state's hair, bedeviling him mercilessly from my new perch at The New York Times.

Henry attributes this animus to my belief that he caused the tapping of my home phone when we both worked at the White House, exacerbated by my outrage at his subsequent acquiescence to the shah of Iran's betrayal of my friends, the Kurds. The fact is that I kicked Henry when he was up.

Here we are, three decades later, and Henry-haters cry: How dare Bush appoint this scourge of leakers to a job that requires the exposure of embarrassments in the intelligence world? Won't a grateful Kissinger do Bush's bidding by protecting the Saudi bankrollers of terror for "reasons of state"?

No. The Kissinger of today is not the sycophant of the Nixon tapes, the realpolitiking Super-K of the Ford era. Nor is he the amateur Machiavelli of the 1980 G.O.P. convention at which he tried to broker a Reagan-Ford "co-presidency" — a bid to hold on to power that led him into the political wilderness, equally unloved by anti-Nixon liberals and anti-détente conservatives.

During his wilderness years, however, with no visible means of official support, he maintained a level of influence through an amazing feat of self-levitation. By counseling clients for huge fees and tutoring rising politicians for no fee, he maintains both his global business status and his diplomatic contacts. By writing long (too long, I keep telling him) columns in a deliberative setting, and by rationing his thoughtful if lugubrious television appearances, he maintains a serious intellectual standing.

He is neither an extinct volcano nor an erupting one; rather, he oozes a lava of foreign-policy judgment. Unlike John Poindexter, he has learned from his egregious mistakes and may even differentiate government secrecy from personal privacy. Approaching octogenarianhood, Kissinger has become a foreign-policy resource, capable of reassessing his earlier disdain for Wilsonian idealism.

Does that qualify him for chief 9/11 inquisitor? If the main object is to find the sinners of commission, no; if to discover the sins of omission, probably; if to recommend strategic changes in our approach to the war on terror, certainly.

Conflicts of interest? He's working for his historic reputation now, not his clients; same with George Mitchell, his Democratic balancer. I'd like to see them joined not only by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, but by wild cards like Lee Hamilton and Dan Quayle, Mario Cuomo and Stanley Sporkin, shaken up by writers David Wise and Edward Jay Epstein. A popular choice for chief counsel would be Rudy Giuliani.

I recall sitting in Edward Bennett Williams's box at a Redskins game in Henry's heyday. Our quarterback threw a touchdown pass, but an official threw a flag for offensive interference. "Bad call!" shouted Williams. Former Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the next seat, shook his head sadly and said, "Poor judgment." Henry leaped to his feet, shook his fists and yelled, "On vot theory?"

What's the rationale for a card-carrying Kissinger critic to be pleased by Bush's giving this battered but unbowed national resource the power of subpoena to serve his country one last time?

Just as F.D.R. appointed Joseph P. Kennedy as first chairman of the S.E.C. because that predator knew all the manipulative tricks, Bush chose Kissinger because the old operator can see through the secret obfuscations he mastered long ago.

And because "only Nixon" could bring along right-wingers in his opening to Beijing, Henry is one of the few who has the trust of the keepers of the secrets to reveal to the commission the truth about our weaknesses, past and present.

On top of that, he's equipped to fit the facts into a "conceptual framework" — his beloved cliché — to provide desperately needed guidance to the Homeland Security bureaucracy.

Dot's my theory. Welcome back, Henry.

Airlines offer Email/SMS FLight Updates

Flight Delayed? Find Out Fast
By SUSAN STELLIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/travel/sundaytravel/01prac.html
http://www.aa.com/notify
http://www.united.com/easyupdate

ALTHOUGH much of the news coming from the airlines in recent months has involved service cutbacks, all is not gloomy on the customer service front. Airlines continue to invest in technology that automates many interactions with customers, a strategy that has some drawbacks but has also brought benefits to the public. One promising example is the flight-status notification services most major United States carriers now offer.

The details and sophistication of the services vary by airline, but the basic function allows customers to sign up for automatic notifications on arrival and departure times, including information about delays, gate changes and, in some cases, where baggage can be picked up.

Such services are offered by United, American, Delta, Northwest and Continental, which allow customers to sign up to receive these notifications on the carriers' Web sites. Messages are sent to any device that can receive text or e-mail - a computer, pager, handheld organizer or mobile phone. United and American also let passengers receive voice messages, making the service more accessible to less-wired customers or those with older cellphones.

I recently tried American's notification service on a trip from Kennedy Airport to Oakland, Calif., and was surprised by how helpful it was.

Since I bought my ticket online, I was prompted during the booking process to create a flight notification alert. But if you buy your ticket by phone or want to sign up for an alert on a ticket you already have bought, you can do so at www.aa.com/notify.

On the outbound leg of my trip, I asked to receive a text message on my cellphone two hours before the flight's 5:30 p.m. departure with an update on the flight's status and gate information. (I could have set the alert to arrive between 30 minutes and four hours before the scheduled departure, and although it frequently costs money to send text messages from cellphones, many service plans let subscribers receive messages without charge.) Sure enough, at 3:29 p.m., a message arrived on my phone indicating the flight was on time, with a new departure gate.

The message was written in the electronic shorthand typically used to deliver information to the small screens on mobile devices: "AA 257 GATE CHG DEPT JFK 05:30 P GATE NOW 43 ARVL OAK 08:52 P GATE 8A BAG N/A." (The last part meant the baggage-claim information was not yet available.)

A Sense of Relief

I was on my way to the airport but realized I had forgotten to call to find out if the flight was on time. So there was a surprising psychological benefit - namely, relief - in getting a communication saying it would not be delayed. I also avoided looking up the airline's phone number, finding the receipt with my flight number and placing the call myself.

These reactions were echoed by a friend, Gabriel Levy, who has used flight notification systems for dozens of trips on American and United. "When the flight is not delayed, it's a great system," he said. "It's a final piece of assurance that your flight is going to be on time. When you get negative news, it's less useful because you're already on your way."

Indeed, that is the main limitation of these systems: flights are often delayed after most passengers have left for the airport. There is also some confusion about when travelers need to be at the airport if their flight is delayed. This summer, my sister received a notification on her cellphone from American saying her flight was delayed, but when she called the airline she was told that she should still be at the airport before the scheduled departure time in case the flight's status changed.

Airline representatives acknowledge that this is a gray area, and that policies vary depending on the circumstances of the delay.

"Delays are always a tricky thing," said Sanjay Nair, a manager in United's reservations division who was involved in developing its flight notification service, EasyUpdate. "Typically, delays start happening two or three hours before the flight and many customers are already at the airport," Mr. Nair said. Customers could still benefit from updates sent every 15 minutes about the status of the delay, he said - freeing them from hovering around gate agents.

One-Time Registration

United's system (at the Web site www.united.com/easyupdate) has features other airlines do not yet offer, like the ability to sign up for alerts one time, rather than before each flight. United saves your preferences, so as long as you give your frequent flier number when you buy a ticket - even if you buy it through a travel agent or another Web site - you get whatever alerts you request for every United flight.

United also allows customers to sign up for a wider selection of messages than its competitors do, including notifications about seat upgrades. For instance, a passenger might be granted an upgrade three or four days before departure, Mr. Nair said, which would generate a message confirming the upgrade.

"They don't have to call in every so often seeing what the status of their upgrade is," he said.

Another feature United offers is the ability to indicate "quiet times," so no calls interrupt your sleep between, say, 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

At this point, Delta, Continental and Northwest basically just send departure or arrival information to any device that can receive e-mail or a text message.

Travelocity has an alert function similar to United's (the same technology supports both systems). Travelocity's notification feature works for flights on a variety of airlines booked through its site, but the depth and timeliness of the information depends on the data from the airlines. Orbitz customers can sign up for similar arrival and departure notifications, called Traveler Care Alerts, to be sent to a cellphone, pager, handheld device, e-mail address or fax (though Orbitz also warns that the accuracy of the data depends on the airlines). Expedia users must first register for two Microsoft services, .NET Passport and .NET Alerts, to receive flight status notifications on various mobile devices.

Customers can also use the notification systems for alerts about someone else's itinerary, useful for a spouse or a driver picking up a passenger at the airport. "A lot of the customers who use this product aren't even flying," said Scott Hyden, managing director of interactive marketing at American. "For somebody picking you up, they know what terminal to go to." He estimated that 30 percent of the system's users request arrival messages, roughly the same percentage reported by United. I frequently fly to Michigan to visit my parents, so when more airlines offer a voice option with their notification services - and a greater ability to customize the alerts - I will be able to save some annoyance by having my parents sign up.

Of course, the other hurdle, now, is going through the trouble to sign up for an alert every time you fly. As my friend Gabriel put it, "If you have time to do that, you probably have time to check on the delay status yourself."

SUSAN STELLIN writes frequently for The Times.

G.O.P.'s 'Cardinals of Spending' Are Reined In

G.O.P.'s 'Cardinals of Spending' Are Reined In by House Leaders
By DAVID FIRESTONE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/politics/02SPEN.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — It was several steps short of a full-blown purge, but a recent move by the strong-minded Republican House leadership to consolidate its power over the next Congress still packed enough force to jolt Capitol Hill.

In a display of discipline applauded by some of the most conservative House members, the leadership pulled in the reins on the 13 Republican members who control most discretionary federal spending, a group of subcommittee chairmen so powerful they are known as the Cardinals. From now on, House leaders said, the chairmen will be selected not by seniority but by J. Dennis Hastert, the House speaker, and Tom DeLay, the majority leader, and their close circle, who are likely to use their new leverage to restrain spending.

The message was unmistakable: Congressional appropriators will have to follow the tune piped by the leadership, in close consultation with the White House. Those Republicans who march to their own beat in doling out spending favors or preserving programs without authorization could find themselves out of a job.

"These subcommittee chairmen are as powerful or in some cases more powerful than regular committee chairmen," said John Feehery, Mr. Hastert's spokesman. "The speaker's action reflects the fact that those chairmen are now going to have to be accountable."

The Cardinals of the Appropriations Committee are generally not well known to the public, but their supreme authority over the 13 spending bills that provide the government with tax money has made them a magnet for lobbyists and campaign cash, and has made every other member who needs a project back home beholden to them. Each year, chairmen like Jerry Lewis of California, who leads the defense subcommittee; Joe Skeen of New Mexico, who leads the interior subcommittee; and Henry Bonilla of Texas, who leads the agriculture subcommittee, pick and choose from among thousands of spending requests. Their concentrated power has always produced tensions with Congressional leaders and the executive branch.

Several top Republican aides said privately that some subcommittee chairmen had become so enchanted with their unchecked ability to spend billions of federal dollars in their districts and those of friends — a practice formally known as earmarking and commonly called pork-barreling — that they had strayed from the ideological reservation.

Mr. Hastert has not forgotten that four of the chairmen defied the leadership a year ago and voted against giving President Bush the ability to negotiate free-trade agreements. And appropriations staff members are considered insufficiently deferential to the wishes of the leadership.

"Now the leadership gets to have the Cardinals come in and grovel before them," said Sonny Callahan of Alabama, who just retired from the House and his position as head of the energy and water subcommittee. His tone reflected the annoyance of many Republican spending leaders at the implications of the new rule.

But far more is at issue than vengeance and personal loyalty. The current appropriators and their staff members have long been seen by committed House conservatives as free-spending captives of the old system, unwilling to consider a broad rethinking of the federal budget that might actually result in a smaller government. The subcommittee chairmen have been a frequent target of the Republican Study Committee, a rising group of junior House conservatives, for refusing to consider deep cuts in foreign aid and domestic social programs, and for the usual pork-barrel projects.

Hoping to restrain the influence of an old-boy system that kept many Republican moderates on the Appropriations Committee, the new chairwoman of the study committee, Sue Myrick of North Carolina, proposed just after the elections that the entire Republican caucus be allowed to vote on the appointments of the subcommittee chairmen. That approach was considered too radical by the leadership, but Mr. Hastert and Mr. DeLay agreed to put the selections in the hands of their Republican Steering Committee, a group of about 25 top House Republicans that now selects most committee chairmen.

The adoption of their suggestion left many conservatives crowing, and vowing that an era of fiscal restraint was about to dawn, one justified by the recent election.

"This new selection element will perhaps give the Cardinals a better appreciation for sticking to the budget," said Jeff Flake of Arizona, a member of the study committee, "which hasn't been the case for the last few years." Mr. Flake added, "Once we get rid of those independent fiefdoms, I think you'll start to see what Republicans are really made of when it comes to spending, especially now that we can't blame the Senate for everything."

Among the first targets for scrutiny in the next Congress, Republican officials say, are two spending bills that pay for many of the largest social programs. One is for the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education. The other is for the Veterans Administration and the Housing and Urban Development Department.

Neither bill was approved this year because of a spending dispute with the Senate, in large part because conservatives won a battle with the subcommittee chairmen to prevent spending from exceeding the White House targets and reaching the Senate's level. House appropriators said the administration's targets were too low, and talks between the two factions foundered after House leaders backed the conservative group.

Democrats, when they were in power, used a system for selecting subcommittee chairmen similar to the Republicans' new one, but they say the Republican system presages a wintry spending climate.

"The White House and the Republican leadership have obviously decided that they can now go for it all in slashing nondefense domestic spending," said one leading Democratic aide. "The mainstream Republicans don't want to see it cut, but the leaders think that now is the time to strike."

There has long been a cultural divide between Republican appropriators and orthodox Republican conservatives. Members who struggle to rise through the ranks do so for the right to determine where money is spent, not to cut back on spending, and Republican chairmen have handed out "earmarks" to beseeching colleagues with no less enthusiasm than Democrats before them.

C. W. Bill Young of Florida, the 31-year House veteran who is chairman of the full Appropriations Committee, has publicly clashed with Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the White House budget director, over spending limits that Mr. Young considers far too low. Mr. Hastert and Mr. DeLay have made it clear that their sympathies are with the administration.

Just a few weeks ago, Republican officials said, Mr. Young and his Republican counterpart in the Senate, Ted Stevens of Alaska, went to the White House to plead the case for permission to spend more money when the stalled spending bills are taken up early next year. President Bush did not budge, however, and Mr. Hastert and Mr. DeLay are expected to take a similar hard line.

Committee members say that none of the so-called Cardinals are in immediate danger of being forced out, but they predict that the House leaders will keep a particularly close eye on a few, including Ralph Regula of Ohio, who leads the subcommittee on labor and health; James T. Walsh of New York, who leads the subcommittee that handles veterans, housing and the environmental and space agencies; and Harold Rogers of Kentucky, who leads the subcommittee on transportation.

Mr. Walsh, in an interview, said he did not feel particularly pressured by the leadership, acknowledging only a few "day-to-day differences of opinion" that the leaders wanted cleared up with him and the other subcommittee chairmen.

"I can live with their judgments," he said. "I guess the good news is, they're tacitly saying we do have a lot of clout. I take that as a compliment."

Supreme Court Could Opt for a Momentous Term

Supreme Court Could Opt for a Momentous Term
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/politics/01SCOT.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 — The Supreme Court faces choices in the next few weeks that could convert the current term from solidly interesting to potentially momentous.

Cases that have been making their way through the appellate pipeline, some with great visibility and others with little notice, have arrived at the court's door. The justices will soon announce whether they will hear the following cases:

•The widely publicized challenge to the University of Michigan's use of affirmative action to increase minority enrollment at its law school. If the justices agree to hear the appeal by a conservative policy group on behalf of a disappointed white applicant, the case will be the court's first in 25 years to consider the extent to which public universities are permitted to take race into account in admissions.

•A gay rights case from Texas that has received little attention but is potentially the most important such case since the 1980's. Two gay men are invoking the constitutional guarantee of equal protection to challenge a Texas law that criminalizes conduct between same-sex couples that is not a crime when engaged in by people of opposite sexes.

•A major free speech case on the right of a company to engage in public debate with the full First Amendment protection its critics enjoy. Much of corporate America has been galvanized by a California Supreme Court ruling last spring that Nike could be sued for fraudulent business practices for misstatements it made in response to critics of its third world employment practices. If the justices take Nike's appeal, the result will be at least to clarify and perhaps to limit the commercial speech doctrine, once welcomed by business as a shield but increasingly seen as a liability.

•Another important First Amendment case that asks the court to examine the boundary between provocative but legitimate advocacy and unprotected threats and intimidation. The case is an appeal by sponsors of an anti-abortion Web site and advertising campaign that featured "guilty" and "wanted" posters identifying doctors who perform abortions. The doctors sued under a provision of the federal law that protects access to abortion clinics and won a $120 million verdict, which was upheld on appeal.

Any of these cases that the court agrees to hear will be argued in the spring and decided by the end of the term in early summer. As the justices are well aware, they build more than their own docket when they add a case with far-reaching social and political implications. Inevitably, they help shape the country's agenda as well. A year ago, for example, the issue of school choice moved into the public spotlight because the court agreed to review Cleveland's voucher program, which made public money available for religious school tuition.

Affirmative action has never been out of the spotlight, although by giving a qualified endorsement to the value of campus diversity in its splintered Bakke decision in 1978, the Supreme Court perhaps bought nearly two decades of relative peace on the subject. That period ended in the mid-1990's, when federal appeals courts began extrapolating from the justices' restrictive view of affirmative action in other contexts to declare that the Bakke case was no longer a binding precedent.

The Supreme Court, itself badly split, remained silent throughout this period. The case now before the court exemplifies how messy the legal landscape has become. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati heard arguments a year ago in two affirmative action cases involving the University of Michigan, one on law school admissions and the other on undergraduate admissions.

The Sixth Circuit ruling last May addressed only the law school case, upholding the program in a 5-to-4 decision in which a dissent questioned the majority's integrity. The undergraduate case remains in limbo. But the Center for Individual Rights, which brought the cases, has appealed them. The appeal in the law school case, Grutter v. Bollinger, No. 02-241, asks the court to review the Sixth Circuit's conclusion that diversity remains a valid, compelling goal that justifies consideration of race in admissions.

The undergraduate case, Gratz v. Bollinger, No. 02-516, asks the Supreme Court to bypass the Sixth Circuit and directly review the Federal District Court ruling that upheld the program in December 2000. The court rarely grants such requests. It is unclear whether the procedural messiness will deter the court from taking up either case, or whether the justices will decide they can no longer remain silent on such an important subject.

It has been 16 years since the court in Bowers v. Hardwick dismissed as "at best, facetious" the contention that the right to privacy extended to the choice by consenting gay adults to engage in sex within the privacy of their home. While asking the court to overrule that decision, the new case, Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, also offers a different route, through equal protection.

Texas is one of a few states with criminal sodomy laws that apply explicitly only to same-sex behavior. The challenge brought by the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund on behalf of John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner thus raises a question of sexual discrimination as well as sexual orientation discrimination. Had either partner been female, the state would have had no case. "Lawrence and Garner are now convicted criminals because of who they are, not because of what they were doing in Lawrence's home when the police intruded," their appeal asserts. The Texas Court of Appeals upheld their convictions and $200 fines.

While the Supreme Court is more conservative now than it was in 1986, some analysts of gay rights say that changes in the social and legal climate could mean the court will revisit the issue. In the 1960's, every state had a criminal sodomy law. By the time of Bowers v. Hardwick, only half the states did, and now only a fourth do. In a 1996 decision, Romer v. Evans, the court voted 6 to 3 to overturn a Colorado amendment that barred local governments from enacting ordinances to protect gays.

The corporate speech case, Nike Inc. v. Kasky, No. 02-575, reaches the court at a time of ferment over the role of the First Amendment in commercial speech. Some justices have said it is time to give commercial speech full First Amendment protection. The case poses that issue obliquely while directly confronting the question of how to define commercial speech when companies use means beyond conventional advertising to convey their messages.

The court's precedents give less protection to speech that proposes a commercial transaction, like advertising. The California court extended the definition of such commercial speech to include corporate discourse that had the potential to influence consumers' economic behavior. That broader definition threatens to impinge on core political speech, Nike contends.

The lawsuit over the anti-abortion Web site known as the Nuremberg Files, which lists doctors who perform abortions and those wounded or killed, also raises the question of defining political speech — not to distinguish it from commercial speech but from a raw threat, which has no constitutional protection. The case is American Coalition of Life Activists v. Planned Parenthood, No. 02-563.

In a web-exclusive column, Linda Greenhouse answers readers' questions on Supreme Court rules and procedure. E-mail Ms. Greenhouse a question at scotuswb@nytimes.com. Please include your name, address and daytime telephone number; upon request names may be withheld.

Scholarly Mentor to Bush's Team

Scholarly Mentor to Bush's Team
By DAVID LEONHARDT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/business/yourmoney/01FELD.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — BY title, they are economic advisers to the president. By training, they are disciples of Marty.

Marty — Martin S. Feldstein — may well be the most influential economist in Washington, even though he has not worked there since 1984, when he returned to the Harvard faculty.

Lawrence B. Lindsey, President Bush's top economic official, once worked as Mr. Feldstein's top teaching assistant, overseeing the logistics of his big economics lecture to Harvard undergraduates.

R. Glenn Hubbard, now chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, fed punch cards filled with data into an early computer to help Mr. Feldstein with his research.

In one of Mr. Hubbard's first classes as a graduate student at Harvard — taught, of course, by Mr. Feldstein — he sometimes sat with Richard H. Clarida, who now runs the economic policy division of the Treasury Department.

Add Mr. Clarida's deputy and Mr. Hubbard's chief of staff, among others, and the Bush administration's economic team begins to look like a Feldstein alumni club.

"I don't think it's chance," Mr. Lindsey said. "I think it's Marty."

Almost two decades after the soft-spoken but hard-driving Mr. Feldstein ended a fractious stint in the Reagan administration, he has built an empire of influence that is probably unmatched in his field. Aside from his administration ties, he holds sway over many fellow economists as president of the nation's premier economic research organization, and thousands of Harvard students who have taken his, and only his, economics class during their Harvard years have gone on to become policy makers and corporate executives.

Mr. Feldstein's stature and his vigorous defense of Mr. Bush's economic policies have won him frequent mention as a possible candidate to succeed Alan Greenspan eventually as chairman of the Federal Reserve.

Known for his wide-ranging research on taxes and government spending that examines the ways public policy affects people's behavior, Mr. Feldstein has helped shift the economic consensus to the right over the last three decades. As an adviser to Mr. Bush's 2000 campaign and a frequent contributor to op-ed pages, Mr. Feldstein provided much of the intellectual rationale for the tax cut last year. He continues to push for changes in the Social Security system that would include private investment accounts.

A slight, bookish man with a friendly manner, Mr. Feldstein has become a mentor even to many economists who think he exaggerates the effect of taxes.

"His work was on the one hand on the cutting edge of research theory and on the other hand directly relevant to the policy of the day," said Lawrence H. Summers, the president of Harvard, another student of Mr. Feldstein and a Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration. "That's why he drew so many graduate students to him."

Jonathan Gruber, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied with Mr. Feldstein and also worked in the Clinton administration's Treasury Department, added, "He has shown that taxes matter."

Since 1977, Mr. Feldstein has wielded academic power as the president of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an elite, nonpartisan group of about 500 economists best known as the body that decides when recessions begin and end. More important, it publishes research papers long before any academic journal does, determining which work is likely to receive wide attention.

From his corner office at the bureau, above a Cambridge furniture store, Mr. Feldstein helps shape the public debate and determine the research priorities of other economists as he chooses the subjects of the bureau's books and conferences. Aside from traveling with his wife, Kathleen, who is also an economist, and spending time at their homes in the Boston suburbs, Cape Cod and Vermont, Mr. Feldstein is almost always at the bureau.

When he is at Harvard, he shows a fondness for the classroom unusual for his rank. He still teaches that introductory economics class, the college's largest lecture. While the curriculum is by no means out of the mainstream, it does bear his conservative stamp.

"I think that is quite a remarkable number," he said during a lecture one recent Monday, using a laser pointer to direct attention to "43.65 percent" displayed on an enormous screen inside the steeply tiered Sanders Theater, just off Harvard Yard. The percentage signified the portion of every additional dollar earned by somebody making $35,000 a year that goes to paying taxes.

"I find it quite strange that somebody at this relatively low income is paying about half of his income in taxes," he said in his clear, dry speaking style. "What high marginal tax rates do is distort behavior."

Except for a few beeps emanating from electronic devices, the class could have happened decades earlier. Mr. Feldstein himself took introductory economics in this theater as a freshman more than 40 years ago. At the time, he planned to follow the career path of his father, a lawyer, but was seduced by economics.

Since then, he has joined a long line of Harvard professors who have broken out of the ivory tower and influenced policy. What sets him apart are the number of his protégés who have followed his path and the confluence of a group of them near the height of government about 25 years after they all studied in Cambridge.

"There was something in the air in those days," Mr. Clarida said of the late 1970's. Then, with the inflation and unemployment rates both hovering near 10 percent, and oil-producing countries squelching production, economists were forced to look for new answers.

"Marty was a real inspiration to us," said Mr. Clarida, who speaks to Mr. Feldstein about once a month. "When Glenn and I and others were there, Marty went from the halls of academia to the pinnacles of economic advising."

The crimson hue of Mr. Bush's economic team and the prominence of Mr. Feldstein also suggest that Harvard's reputation as a training ground only for Democratic administrations needs updating.

Fourteen years ago, George H. W. Bush teased his opponent in the presidential campaign, Michael S. Dukakis, a graduate of the university's law school, for having opinions "born in Harvard Yard's boutique." Today, another Republican president named Bush is relying on advisers who learned their trade in the very same Harvard quadrangle.

"The Kremlin on the Charles doesn't seem to be true anymore," Mr. Feldstein said.

MR. FELDSTEIN'S life's work began in what amounts to enemy territory for a free-market economist: Britain's government-run hospitals.

After graduating from Harvard College, he won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Oxford University and ended up staying six years. Armed with the new power of computers, which then filled entire rooms, he wrote his dissertation on the ways that hospital spending affected health care.

"I felt I was the kid in the candy store," he said. "Imagine, you're a 24-year-old, a 25-year-old, and you've got these new tools."

He showed British government officials how different levels of financing affected doctors' decisions, he recalled, "and they would say: `Oh my God. I had no idea.' "

Back at Harvard as a young professor, he expanded his research. He has long argued that Social Security causes people to save less money than they should, although a technical error in an old paper undermined some of his arguments. He corrected the mistake, calling it insignificant, but many economists say he did not take the matter seriously enough and call it the worst moment in his career. He has also said that unemployment benefits keep joblessness higher than it otherwise would be and that taxes often cause people and companies to act in inefficient ways.

"He is basically the father of supply-side economics — not the Laffer curve, the stupid side of supply-side economics," said Mr. Gruber, referring to a graph purporting to show that tax cuts can pay for themselves.

Mr. Feldstein's writings in policy journals during the 1970's began to attract the attention of other free-market fans. Mr. Hubbard, for example, as an engineering student at the University of Central Florida, read Mr. Feldstein's work and made a decision that was then unusual: he chose Harvard over M.I.T. "The more I was familiar with what Marty was doing, the more I wanted to go to Harvard," Mr. Hubbard said.

Mr. Feldstein also became a regular at Capitol Hill hearings, and in 1978, one Republican Congressman invited him to Kennebunkport, Me. There, he met the elder George Bush, who was starting to plan his first presidential run.

"I spent some time one on one with Bush to make sure he understood economics better," Mr. Feldstein said, building up to a typically self-deprecating comment for an economist. "Whether he would have been better served spending that time campaigning, I don't know."

Although Mr. Bush lost the 1980 nomination to Mr. Reagan, Mr. Feldstein had made enough friends to be named the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. He hired both Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Lindsey's new wife, Susan, for the council's staff and tried to convince them to start work the Monday after their wedding. They took a weeklong honeymoon instead.

The council employs members of both political parties, and Mr. Feldstein also hired two economists who would become prominent Democrats: Paul Krugman, who now teaches at Princeton and is a columnist for The New York Times who often criticizes the Bush administration, and Mr. Summers.

"The great hidden secret of his career," Mr. Feldstein said of Mr. Summers, "is that he began life in the Reagan administration."

Mr. Feldstein's two years in Washington made him famous and won him wide respect as a teller of uncomfortable truths, but his term was hardly a political success. While other Reagan aides argued for ever more tax cuts and military spending, Mr. Feldstein warned of the dangers of looming budget deficits and became something of a persona non grata in the West Wing. During one press briefing, Larry Speakes, a spokesman for the president, alternated between pronouncing Mr. Feldstein's name accurately (Feld-stine) and inaccurately (Feld-steen), in a move widely seen as an attempt to belittle him.

The experience appears to have affected both Mr. Feldstein and his disciples. Mr. Clarida, Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Lindsey all say they talk to him often, but none remembered asking his advice about working in Washington.

For his part, Mr. Feldstein has shown little taste since the 1980's for straying from the Republican Party line. In 1992, he predicted that the Clinton administration's tax increase would stifle economic growth and do little to erase the deficit. An article he wrote for The Wall Street Journal in 2000 was headlined "Bush's Tax Plan Is Even Better Than the Campaign Says." (Mr. Feldstein helped create the plan.) In 2001, when President Bush was forming his cabinet, Mr. Feldstein and his wife began a Boston Globe article by writing, "Paul O'Neill was an inspired choice for secretary of the Treasury." Mr. Feldstein is also on the board of Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical company with strong Republican ties.

In many ways, Mr. Feldstein has cultivated two different public personas: political fighter and academic sage. At the center of his academic life, the National Bureau of Economic Research, he emphasizes the less partisan part of his political past by hanging framed editorial cartoons that depict his battles within the Reagan administration.

Mr. Feldstein has run the bureau since 1977, except for the two years he spent in Washington. Regardless of their politics, economists credit him with building the bureau from a small institution with a few dozen researchers to a center of intellectual firepower that stands apart from any single university.

"There's been enormous speculation about the post-Greenspan Fed," said Alan B. Krueger, a former Feldstein student who worked in the Clinton administration and now teaches at Princeton. "Of more importance to the economics profession is the post-Feldstein N.B.E.R."

Mr. Gruber, the M.I.T. professor, put it this way: "My guess is that except for one or two journals, people see my articles more often as N.B.E.R. working papers. Now, it's not as prestigious on my vitae. But what do I care? I have tenure. What I care is that people see my research."

The bureau's three floors resemble a small business, with people in their 20's and 30's sitting in paper-filled cubicles and photographs of new arrivals taped to a door. Graduate students from Harvard and M.I.T. often come to the office in the afternoon, after their teaching duties are done, and stay well into the night. Mr. Feldstein sometimes joins them.

"I have a Harvard office, but I hardly ever, ever use it," he said, sitting in a bureau conference room beneath the wall of framed cartoons.

As Mr. Clarida said, "Nobody gets very involved in the bureau without Marty wanting it to happen."

ECONOMISTS on left and right say Mr. Feldstein selects the bureau's researchers without regard to their politics. If he has a weakness, they add, it is for economists at elite universities.

"He's very supportive of people who disagree with him ideologically, of people who are to the left of him," said Robert B. Reich, a labor secretary during Bill Clinton's tenure and a former Harvard professor. "Basically, he's an honest intellectual."

One of the bureau's few political controversies involves Mr. Feldstein's choice of the few articles highlighted in the bureau's monthly digest and that then appear regularly in the mass media.

Some moderates and liberals — who refused to be quoted by name, noting that they are affiliated researchers — said they saw a clear preference for conservative-leaning papers. The November digest, for example, summarizes a study arguing that inequality is less severe than it sometimes seems and another documenting a benefit of a flat tax.

Mr. Feldstein said he selected studies only with an eye toward what a large audience would find interesting. His teaching philosophy is similar, he says: "This course tries hard not to be conservative."

Mr. Summers is among the Democrats who deliver guest lectures, and Mr. Feldstein is careful to point out to students the differences between what he considers political choices and economic laws.

Still, Ec10, as it is known at Harvard, is hardly neutral — in its readings or its lectures — and its point of view contributes a good deal to his importance. Over the last two decades, thousands of Harvard undergraduates have received a decidedly anti-tax, free-market-leaning introduction to economics.

In a recent lecture on taxes, Mr. Feldstein stood almost motionless at the center of the same stage used by Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. and led the class through a discussion of the costs of high taxes.

Taxes, he said, cause people to spend large sums on housing and to place an unnaturally high value on company benefits, because both offer tax advantages, he said.

"I wish I could give this part of the lecture to the United States Congress," he told students.

Mr. Feldstein likes to think of the class's impact in intellectual rather than political terms: it teaches students to think like economists, he says. But he understands the effect it can have on students, nonetheless.

"I really like it; I've been doing it for 18 years," he said. "I think it changes the way they see the world."

Bali's Economy Fragile as an Eggshell

Bali's Broken Economy: As Fragile as an Eggshell
By JANE PERLEZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/international/asia/02BALI.html

DENPASAR, Indonesia — His fingers clasp a long brush and with the finest of strokes, Nyoman Kantor paints the figures of a Balinese myth onto eggshell. Luscious reds, greens and yellows sparkle on the egg, a memento popular with tourists who come to Mr. Kantor's outdoor studio and salesroom. Roughly speaking, these $10 eggs are Bali's answer to Fabergé's jeweled versions of a century ago.

But these days, business is about as slow as it has ever been. Bali's tourism collapsed after the terrorist attack on a disco in October, and the return of the foreign visitors is only slowly starting again.

In the weeks after the attack, Mr. Kantor, 48, said he did not sell any of his goose eggs. They take two days to paint, and he makes about a $5 profit on each one. "I haven't been to the hotels to sell because there are so few customers," he said.

About half of Bali's economy is based on tourism, according to the World Bank, a heavy reliance for a society accustomed to some of the highest standards of living in Indonesia. In the last decade, rice fields have been eaten up by hotel developments in the southern half of the island, and increasing numbers of Balinese have moved from agricultural livelihoods to work in tourism.

Hoteliers say each room generates 25 jobs: receptionists, cooks, gardeners, money-changers, guides, dancers for nighttime entertainment, even lifeguards for protection at the beach.

Indications of an early recovery are not encouraging, economists say.

Many upmarket hotels are reporting occupancy rates of less than 20 percent. Some low-rent hotels have closed temporarily. Taxi drivers complain they have few passengers. Some stores are offering sizable discounts for their carved wood furniture and trendy clothes.

The World Bank says about 1.7 million people work in Bali, and according to the direst estimates, as many as half could become unemployed if the tourism continues to slump.

But the worst may not happen.

Much depends on how fast the investigation into the terrorist attack proceeds, economists say. If the inquiry proceeds quickly and suspects continue to be arrested, foreign governments will consider removing the travel warnings that are discouraging tourists, Western officials predict.

Japan, Singapore and other Asian countries do not have travel warnings on Indonesia, and their citizens are traveling again to Bali. The United States, Australia and Britain have not significantly modified the travel warnings they issued after the terrorist attack. Security has been visibly improved at the airport at Denpasar and the major hotels now have policemen patrolling their grounds.

While Bali waits for the foreigners to return, the Bali Tourism Board has begun a campaign to stimulate the domestic market. The idea was to fill vacant hotel rooms with Indonesians, who often take time off after Ramadan. The response has been good, said the minister of trade, Rini Mariani Soewandi.

"We have to get Garuda to restore the flights they have cut," she said, referring to the national airline.

One of the biggest problems facing the Balinese is how to maintain their standard of living.

"All the social indicators in Bali are above average," said K. Sarwar Lateef, the senior adviser to the World Bank in Indonesia. "There are strong traditions of schooling." The World Bank is working on a plan to ensure that parents who become unemployed can still pay their children's school fees, he said.

Another challenge is how to help the Balinese who have loans to pay back.

Mr. Kantor's 23-year-old son, I Made Muliana, who is also an egg painter, recently bought a motorbike. "The bike is good for going to the hotels to sell," said Mr. Muliana. He owes the bank $30 a month for the next three years, he said. How was he going to pay the installments? Mr. Muliana shrugged.

At the Oberoi Hotel, a five-star resort on the ocean, many employees have taken loans, said the general manager, Kamal K. Kaul. About 75 percent of staff salaries came from service charges placed on customers' bills, he said.

"For two decades staff incomes have been going up," Mr. Kaul said. "This attack is something they never dreamed would happen. These realities of modern life the Balinese will have to learn to cope with."

Like most people involved with Bali, Mr. Kaul was relatively upbeat. On the commercial side, Christmas bookings were holding, he said.

The Hindu religious leaders have appealed to the Balinese to stay calm. "For the Balinese, life is all about seeking balance," Mr. Kaul said. "Many are reverting to prayer."

In a signal of long-term confidence, Starbucks still plans to open in Bali, said Anthony Cottan, the country general manager.

A Starbucks store was planned not far from the Sari Club, the target of the attack that killed more than 180 people, Mr. Cottan said. "Our plan was to open in the first quarter next year. We feel that there might be only a six-month delay," he said. "We're still very enthusiastic."

U.S. and Philippines May Start New Training Mission

U.S. and Philippines May Start Training Mission
By ERIC SCHMITT with CARLOS H. CONDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/international/asia/01FILI.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 — The United States and the Philippines may soon start a new military training operation against Muslim extremists in the southern Philippines that would involve 300 to 400 American troops, including many on jungle combat patrols in a risky hunt for a resurgent guerrilla force, military officials say.

The proposed exercise, which could begin as soon as January, reflects the Pentagon's growing concern that militant Islamic networks pose an increasing threat to Americans and American interests in Southeast Asia, and that a training mission with Philippine forces earlier this year failed to quell the Muslim guerrilla movement.

The new operation would be an increase in the Pentagon's commitment to combating terrorism in the Philippines by shifting hundreds of troops now scheduled for classroom or routine training in the northern Philippines to a combat zone in the south. The exercise would involve American Special Forces, as well as Army and Marine forces, over much of next year, officials said.

No decisions have been made yet on the proposal, officials said, but Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has directed the military's Pacific Command and Joint Staff to draw up plans for a sequel to the counterterrorism training mission that American forces carried out on Basilan Island in the southern Philippines earlier this year.

Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, commander of American forces in the Pacific, is scheduled to meet with Mr. Rumsfeld in Washington in the next few days, and officials said they were likely to discuss details of the proposed mission.

President Bush has personally been following developments in the Philippines, administration officials said. Mr. Bush spoke to President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting in Mexico in late October, and spoke again by telephone two weeks ago with President Arroyo about terrorism issues, a White House official said.

About 1,300 American troops, including 160 Special Forces soldiers, completed the six-month mission on Basilan at the end of July. Those exercises were intended to wipe out Abu Sayyaf, a small band of Islamic radicals who have seized and beheaded American hostages.

But only one principal Abu Sayyaf leader was killed during that operation, and the group's other leaders have reorganized in Sulu Province, principally on Jolo Island. While the American-led mission effectively drove Abu Sayyaf from Basilan and parts of southern Mindanao, the American-trained Philippine forces have not sustained the momentum. Abu Sayyaf has been tied to a string of recent bombings in the southern Philippines, including an explosion last month that killed an American Green Beret, Pentagon officials said.

About 275 American troops have remained in the southern Philippines to help share intelligence information with Philippine forces and coordinate a long-term security assistance and counterterrorism program that is scheduled to begin in January on the northern island of Luzon.

But now the Pentagon is weighing whether to conduct some of that training on or near Jolo. That would make the exercises akin to combat operations and put American trainers that might accompany their Philippine soldiers on patrols at much greater risk.

Under the plans being discussed, 150 to 175 additional American troops, mainly Special Forces soldiers, would join the American forces already in the southern Philippines in the first training mission, military officials said.

Other exercises later in the year, involving Army and Marine forces, would also deploy American troops and equipment to the south to expand and diversify the training.

"The Philippine military has asked to extend the Basilan model to Jolo," said one senior American military official. "While we've neutralized Basilan as an operating area for them, their leadership has pretty much relocated to Jolo."

But as with previous training missions, Filipino officials continue to seek assurances that Americans will not engage in combat while advising Filipino troops because the Philippine Constitution prohibits using foreign troops for combat. Even so, American troops are under orders to fire in self-defense, and the rules for this proposed mission near Jolo would be no different.

The Bush administration has declared Abu Sayyaf a terrorist organization. A decade ago, when the group was founded with a goal to create an Islamic state, Osama bin Laden sent a brother-in-law to coordinate with the group. He provided money and sought to arrange a merger between Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, a much larger and more powerful group in the Philippines.

American and Philippine intelligence officials have said the relationship never developed and Abu Sayyaf degenerated into thugs who kidnapped for ransoms.

Some American officials believe that in recent months, Abu Sayyaf has established connections with Jemaah Islamiyah, a radical Islamic network that seeks establishment of an Islamic state across Southeast Asia. The network is based in Indonesia, and its spiritual leader is Abu Bakar Bashir, who is now in custody in Indonesia.

Jemaah Islamiyah has been declared a terrorist organization by the United States and the United Nations. It has been linked to several terrorist attacks, including one in Bali last month that killed more than 180 tourists, according to Indonesia and Western intelligence officials.

"We are pulling a lot of strings on the J. I. piece," said the senior American military official. "We still don't have clarity on that."

A Pentagon official concurred: "We're watching the connections very closely to determine whether they are institutional, personal or what. I don't think we have anything definitive. Is this just family connections helping each other out or a conscious, directed effort to combine and use each other's efforts?"

A senior Philippine intelligence officials said his agency "does not have concrete evidence of any new linkages" between Abu Sayyaf and Al Qaeda. Last month, an Abu Sayyaf member was picked up in Thailand while trying to buy weapons.

American officials said that Philippine intelligence analysts had "connected the dots sooner than we have" on the possible Jemaah Islamiyah-Philippine connection, but added that American officials were treading cautiously.

Philippine officials have long advocated expanding the operational training to Jolo. But they say American officials initially were reluctant, given higher priorities against terrorist threats in countries like Yemen, and with American forces preparing for a possible war with Iraq.

"We felt that the success in Basilan should be replicated in Jolo," said Maj. Gen. Emmanuel Teodosio, the director of the Philippine side of the Basilan exercise.

The Pentagon's attitude shifted markedly after a series of bombings in the Philippines, especially the blast that killed Sgt. First Class Mark Wayne Jackson in Zamboanga last month, seemed to signal a troubling confluence of terrorist organizations in the country.

"Abu Sayyaf probably doesn't have network to carry out bombings throughout the archipelago, so they need the support of like-minded people," said the senior American military official.

"Increasingly, it's thought that Abu Sayyaf, J. I. and other Muslim separatists were responsible" for the bombing that killed Sergeant Jackson, the official continued.

The United States Navy continues to fly regular P-3 reconnaissance missions over the Sulu Archipelago to provide badly needed intelligence to Philippine Army forces battling about 250 Abu Sayyaf rebels there in rugged, jungle fighting.

Pentagon officials said the options under consideration would not increase the overall projected American military presence in the Philippines or prompt the Philippine Senate to revisit conditions under which American forces can operate.

"The thinking here and at the State Department is that anything that goes beyond the Basilan model could be reason to trigger a new round of political debate in the Philippines," said the senior American military official.

Digital piracy entering dangerous territory

Black Market for Software Is Sidestepping Export Controls
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/technology/02PIRA.html

Digital piracy, often thought of as the illicit trade in music, office software and games, has moved into more dangerous territory.

A black market has emerged for scientific and engineering software powerful enough to fall under United States export restrictions. Such software can be used in a wide range of tasks like designing rockets or nuclear reactors or predicting the path of a cloud of anthrax spores.

Intellectual property "isn't just Napster," and it "isn't just copying Madonna's songs," one Justice Department official said, adding, "It's the software that allows you to model the fuel flow in a fighter jet."

Much of the specialized software cannot be exported legally to "pariah" nations like Libya, North Korea or Iraq. Yet Steve M. Legensky, the founder and general manager of Intelligent Light, an engineering software company in Lyndhurst, N.J., has found bootleg copies of his company's software, which is bound by the export controls, being offered on the Internet alongside sophisticated engineering wares from 120 other companies. Many of those companies are also subject to more stringent rules against exporting their technology to a broader list of countries deemed a military risk by the United States government.

The illicit copies of the software from Intelligent Light, which in licensed versions typically sells for $12,000, was being sold by Chinese entrepreneurs for $200. The posted advertisement for the wares promised that a "step-by-step install guide and crack file make it easy to install and use!" Which means that anyone with a modem and a little cash can evade the export control rules, even those that apply to prohibited countries.

"All they need to do is get a wire transfer, and they can get the software over the Internet," Mr. Legensky said.

Jeanne L. Mara, the company's president and chief executive, said, "It stinks that people can get it for nothing — but it absolutely stinks that these guys can get it for nothing."

But when companies want to take action against a breach of the export controls, they often find themselves frustrated — whether because the United States government is reluctant to crack down on emerging trade allies like China or because software piracy over the Internet is almost impossible to stop, even when there are attempts to do so.

Ms. Mara said that she had made the rounds in the Commerce, Justice, State Departments and the Small Business Administration. For her troubles, she said, she got many sighs and apologies from officials who seemed averse to addressing the delicate politics and economics of United States-China relations.

Black-market sales and violations of copyright are not new, and China has long been notoriously lax in its protection of international copyright. The Business Software Alliance, an industry lobbying group with a vigorous anti-piracy program, estimates that 92 percent of the business software used in China is pirated.

Robert M. Kruger, the group's vice president for enforcement, said that despite small declines in the rate of piracy, the dollar amount was growing as the nation developed. "The bottom line is, we have still a tremendous amount of work to do to make China a safer place for intellectual property, and software in particular," he said.

Though the case against piracy is passionately argued by paid advocates for the music and film industries and Silicon Valley, the Business Software Alliance's own surveys show that most consumers find it hard to summon outrage. They see the fight as a way to ensure that Bill Gates and Britney Spears get every penny coming to them.

Not all concerns about software piracy, however, are about ensuring that the rich become richer. When software like Visual Light shows up on the wrong desktop, issues of national security come into play, said Tom Kurke, the vice president for business development and global alliances for Bentley Systems, which helps companies collaborate on and manage projects in architecture, engineering and construction. "Piracy is bad enough, but piracy in these blacklisted countries is three times worse," he said.

His company, which is a member of the Business Software Alliance, has also found black market sites that sell its product, which can be exported only under restrictions like those that govern Intelligent Light. "We're absolutely concerned from the revenue side of the pirating of our intellectual property — the stealing of software," he said. "But there is a legitimate concern for these technologies being used in countries where you wouldn't want these used."

William A. Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council in Washington, said, "If you're talking about bad guys — and Iraq is a classic example — you don't want to give them the ability to get out of the stone age if you can avoid it."

In Ms. Mara's case, "as soon as the word `Chinese' came up, everybody ran in the other direction," she said. At least at the Justice Department, she said, the officials and agents recognized the threat her software posed if it reached the wrong people.

Scott S. Christie, an assistant United States attorney in Newark, said that Ms. Mara was presenting a bedeviling problem: trying to enforce United States copyright and export rules in other countries. "We scratched our heads and gave a lot of thought as to exactly what we could do, given the realities," he said.

And that's where it stands, he said. "We're still trying to resolve in our minds what the best approach is going to be," he added. "Unfortunately, it's an issue of sovereignty and diplomacy, which is sort of outside of my realm and what I do."

It is a common refrain. At the Defense Department, a spokeswoman said that the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which monitors weapons sales and exports, did not watch individual software packages closely. "The software that we're interested in," she said, "is either embedded code or firmware" — that is, the software that is built into chips — as part of a completed weapon system.

The United States has made progress in recent years in setting up agreements with China to address law enforcement issues, Justice Department officials said. "The Department of Justice will review any matter, and consider taking appropriate prosecutorial measures" to combat software piracy, said John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division.

But in practice, mounting an international investigation is daunting, and reserved for such prominent cases as the inquiry into accusations of of illegal fund-raising by Democrats by Chinese donors during the 1996 presidential campaign.

The biggest problem with policing software exports, current and past officials say, is the ephemeral nature of the wares: with the Internet, software can slip past national barriers with the simple click of a mouse. When experts like Mr. Reinsch talk of trying to restrict the movement of software, they tend toward metaphors of genies and bottles, bubbles under wallpaper and putting toothpaste back in tubes. "This drove me crazy as an export official," said Mr. Reinsch, who led the Bureau of Export Administration in the Clinton administration. "How do you enforce this?"

Mr. Reinsch and the federal government learned the hard way in the 1990's, when the Clinton administration tried to limit the export of strong encryption software. The nation's high-technology industries argued that the policy only hurt American businesses and honest buyers because the technology could be developed anywhere and could be distributed illicitly via modem. Ultimately, the White House relented and softened export restrictions.

The idea of restraining other software is similarly quixotic, said Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency and a prominent Clinton administration voice opposing the spread of strong encryption technology internationally. "In the crypto area, you had no real support from industry, and they were delighted to see it escape" to other countries, he said. "But here with the best will in the world, you see it's escaped."

To his mind, Mr. Baker said, Intelligent Light's problems are part of a broader trend of mistakenly looking at national security issues as problems for law enforcement. "O.K., you can't prosecute 'em," he said. "Well, duh." Instead, he said half-jokingly, the government could be exploring alternatives. "Surely, this is the case where you ought to call a government-funded hacker and say, `Screw it up!' " and make it more difficult for the black-market entrepreneurs to conduct their business.

Another expert in technology and the difficulties of export, however, said he was not worried about the wanderings of high-end engineering software. "If I had my druthers, it would not go to Iraq," said James A. Lewis, a senior fellow and director of the technology program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

But software alone is not enough to do great harm, he said, adding that with programs like those used to create nuclear weapons, it is also crucial to have the data generated by past bomb tests. "It's the data sets, at the end of the day, that make a difference," Mr. Lewis said.

He joked that the software companies could do better to enlist some real muscle. "Maybe they can get the M.P.A.A. to chase after these guys," he said, referring to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Ms. Mara and Mr. Legensky are not laughing, however. They say they used to receive the occasional handwritten letter with postmarks and stamps from Iraq bearing Saddam Hussein's picture. "We have heard of your beautiful software," the letters would typically say. "We would like to buy it."

Since the software became part of the illicit Internet bazaar, Ms. Mara said, the stream of exotic postmarks has tapered off.

Seeking a Vision of Truth

Seeking a Vision of Truth, Guided by a Higher Power
By JAMES LEE BURKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/books/02BURK.html

I have never thought of my vocation as work. I never had what is called writer's block, nor have I ever measured the value of what I do in terms of its commercial success. I also believe that whatever degree of creative talent I possess was not earned but was given to me by a power outside myself, for a specific purpose, one that has little to do with my own life.

The previous statement is one of fact and not meant to be a description of virtue. I believe creativity is a votive gift, presented arbitrarily by the hand of God, and those who possess it are simply its vessel. Those who become grandiose and vain about its presence in their lives usually see it taken from them and given to someone else. At least that has been my experience.

Robert Frost called his art a lover's quarrel with the world. Ernest Hemingway said a writer must have the probity of a priest of God. George Orwell believed the writer's task was to set right the injustices caused by what he called the bloody hand of the empire at work. I think all three men could no more stop writing than they could will themselves to stop breathing. Hemingway, in the same statement about probity, said that once writing became the artist's greatest pleasure as well as his greatest vice, the only thing that could separate him from it was death.

When I was a teacher of creative writing, a student would occasionally ask me if I thought he had talent, if indeed he should try to make a career of his writing. I never answered the question, because the student had asked the wrong question. A real writer is driven both by obsession and a secret vanity, namely that he has a perfect vision of the truth, in the same way that the camera lens can close perfectly on a piece of the external world. If the writer does not convey that vision to someone else, his talent turns to a self-consuming bitterness.

Shakespeare said that all power lies in the world of dreams. John Milton, in a sonnet written on his blindness, described his sleep as being filled with light, but at dawn he was once again robbed of his sight and woke to darkness.

My old professor John Neihardt, author of "Black Elk Speaks," used to say he wrote in the late hours because that was the time of day when the voices of dead poets spoke to him. It's no accident that each of these men saw his art emanating from a world that exists somewhere beyond the appearance of things.

Early in my writing career I came to believe that the stories I wrote were already written in the unconscious by a hand other than my own. In the 46 years that have elapsed since I published my first short story in a college magazine, I have never been able to see more than two or perhaps three scenes ahead in a story. For me the creative process is more one of discovery than creation. But I also had to learn that the gift or obsession or neurosis that compelled me to write was one that required a discipline that did not allow exceptions, at least not if I wanted to be successful.

At 20 I worked briefly on an offshore oil exploration rig in what was called the oil patch, 10 days on and 5 days off. I rented a mailbox at the post office, mailed off my stories to various magazines before going offshore, then found the rejections waiting for me when I returned. I gave myself 36 hours to put the manuscripts back in the mail, and I've maintained the same system all these years, because to keep the work at home is to ensure its failure.

I know of no finer life than that of a fiction writer. You need only a notebook and a pencil and a belief in that quiet voice that dwells inside you in order to create a book that is truly wonderful. My first novel, "Half of Paradise," cannot be called truly wonderful, but to me, when I was writing on a pipeline in southeast Texas, it was.

Jack Kerouac once said, "Your art is the Holy Ghost blowing through your soul." He also said that there was no such thing as failure in art, not when you genuinely invest yourself in it. What a critic might call failure is just part of larger work that is ongoing.

The material for the stories is everywhere. The whole human family becomes your cast of characters. You can give voice to those who have none and expose those who would turn the earth into a sludge pit. As an artist you have automatic membership in a group that is loathed, feared and denigrated by every dictator and demagogue in the world. The greatest compliment I ever received was to have my novel "Cimarron Rose" expurgated to the point that it was banned at the Texas State Penitentiary at Huntsville.

The most difficult test for me as a writer came during the middle of my career, when, after publishing three novels in New York, I went 13 years without a hardback publication. My novel "The Lost Get-Back Boogie" alone received 110 rejections during nine years of submission, supposedly a record in the industry.

It was during this period I had to relearn the lesson I had learned at 20, when I worked on the offshore oil crew: you write it a day at a time and let God be the measure of its worth; you let the score take care of itself; and most important, you never lose faith in your vision. God might choose fools and people who glow with neurosis for his partners in creation, but he doesn't make mistakes.

Libraries Grapple With Internet

What Would Dewey Do? Libraries Grapple With Internet
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/02/national/02LIBR.html

PHOENIX, Nov. 27 — In its six years of service, the central Phoenix library has become a favorite destination for thousands of residents who have no other access to computers and the Internet. On any given day, separate areas for children, teenagers and adults — with 65 computers in all — swarm with users, clicking away at research, games, music, e-mail messages and chat rooms.

But some users are also clicking away at sexually explicit material, creating one of the thorniest issues that libraries nationwide now face: balancing community standards against the First Amendment rights of patrons who use the computers to view X-rated material.

"For me, this has been one of the most challenging issues of my career," said Toni Garvey, the city librarian, who oversees policy in the 13 branches of the Phoenix system. "We all want to do the right thing, but it's not clear what the right thing is."

Virtually all of the nation's public libraries are wired for Internet access, according to the American Library Association. But guided by only a handful of legal decisions, they have been pretty much left on their own to decide how to control material that is offensive to some but is protected under the Constitution. And the solutions vary.

Some libraries, like those in Cleveland, do not limit Internet access. Libraries in Raleigh, N.C., have installed software on all their 500 computers with Internet access to block sexually explicit material. Libraries in Great Falls, Mont., require parents to sign consent forms for their children to use computers.

Here in Phoenix, patrons viewing sexual material might get a tap on the shoulder from a librarian and a request to look at something more suitable.

Many libraries have educational programs for children and their parents to warn them of the dangers of the Internet. And a growing number of public libraries use a combination of approaches, even if they do not always work. During a two-hour period at the Phoenix central branch this week, for example, three men were observed with sexually explicit material on their screens.

"We only want to act if they're involved with illegal activity," Cindy Holt, information services manager for the Phoenix library, said, referring to material that is not protected by the Constitution.

Another problem, Ms. Holt said, is offensive material that sometimes pops onto the screen after one user leaves and another sits down. "We get complaints about that," she said. "We have to take care of it, but it cuts into our time."

Luci Kauffman, a library assistant who works in the teenage area, said even innocent-looking Internet games can lead a patron to an unsavory site. "We know it can happen," Ms. Kauffman said. "We can't accuse anybody of anything; we just have to get them off the computer or get them to log off and on again."

The challenge to strike a balance is made more difficult by the large percentage of children using computers. For that reason, the central branch here has designated an area for users under the age of 12, and all eight computers are equipped with filters designed to block access to Web sites with sexual content.

But such filtering is at the center of a case before the United States Supreme Court. The court has agreed to review a case involving the Children's Internet Protection Act, a measure signed by President Bill Clinton in 2000 that requires public schools and libraries receiving federal money for Internet access to block all access to obscene material and to block children's access to graphic material. About 90 percent of public libraries get federal subsidies for Internet access.

The Supreme Court review follows a recent ruling in a lawsuit brought by the American Library Association and more than two dozen other groups claiming that filters violate library patrons' First Amendment rights. A three-judge federal court in Philadelphia said the act was unconstitutional for requiring a library to restrict First Amendment rights as a condition of receiving federal money for technology. With strong backing from conservative groups like the Family Research Council, the Bush administration appealed.

As they await arguments early next year, libraries are grappling with how to safeguard children as well as First Amendment rights, with a strong belief that the filters the government is promoting may not be the best or only way to do it. That view has made targets of many librarians, who are accused of failing to shield children from the seamier side of the Web in the name of free speech.

"We are criticized by people who say we don't care about children," said Emily Sheketoff, executive director of the Washington office of the American Library Association. "We just don't accept the idea that children are protected by these technological measures."

In addition, opponents of filtering software contend that filters block and discourage legitimate Internet use, like research on such topics as sexually transmitted diseases. Ms. Garvey said that in 1996 some filters blocked access to the 30th Super Bowl because, like all Super Bowls, it was designated with Roman numerals: Super Bowl XXX.

Several courts have ruled against filters.

In 1998, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., ruled that a policy of placing filters on all the computers in Loudoun County public libraries "offends the guarantee of free speech" and is therefore unconstitutional. The ruling was not appealed. In 1999, a California state court ruled against the mother of a boy seeking to require libraries in Livermore to install blocking software after the boy downloaded pictures of nude women. An appeals court upheld the decision.

But to filter proponents like Donna Rice Hughes, author of a 1998 book, "Kids Online: Protecting Your Children in Cyberspace," and adviser to FamilyClick.com, an Internet filtering service, those are misguided rulings that lose sight of the larger issue of protecting children. Ms. Hughes insisted that the newer filters could distinguish between research and pornographic sites and that education without filters was useless.

Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America, a Christian women's organization that promotes traditional family values, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, supporting the children's act. Ms. LaRue said Congress passed it "so that federal tax dollars wouldn't be used to turn libraries into dirty peep shows open to kids."

Reflecting on the question before the Supreme Court, Ms. LaRue and others favoring filters say their use is not a First Amendment issue but the right of Congress to determine conditions under which taxpayer money can be spent, pointing out that libraries and public schools can always provide unrestricted Internet access by choosing not to accept federal money to get it.

Yet the need to find a balanced approach scarcely abates.

Around the time the men at the Phoenix central library were spotted with sexual material on their screens, a trio of teenage girls huddled around a computer screen in Teen Central, an area just for those ages 12 to 19, where the 20 computers are not filtered. They were clicking around a site populated by students at their school, Green Mountain High, when suddenly pictures of topless women appeared. The girls giggled and quickly clicked them away, knowing that one of their classmates had added the link just to amuse his friends.

Angela Rojas, 15, one of the girls, said clicking onto something unexpected does not happen often. "Just an accident," she said, offering as good a reason as any why both sides on the issue are so concerned.

Many Tremors Scare California

It Wasn't the Big One, but Many Tremors Scare California
By DEAN E. MURPHY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/national/01QUAK.html

SAN RAMON, Calif., Nov. 30 — The ground started shaking last Sunday morning beneath this bedroom community about 35 miles east of San Francisco, but there was little concern. The quake measured 3.9 on the Richter scale, and left barely a picture on the wall askew. People in California tend to save their worry for the Big One — something catastrophic, like the quake that destroyed much of San Francisco in 1906.

But when another small quake struck here Sunday night, and another Monday morning, and another and another and another — by Friday, the United States Geological Survey had registered what it called a "swarm" of more than 120 quakes — nervousness set in.

"Earthquakes are primal-fear things," said Stephanie J. Hanna, the Geological Survey's communications chief for the Western region. "They don't kill as many people as you think, but when terra firma isn't anymore, it scares people down to the deepest level."

Technically, the San Ramon earthquakes are regarded as "background seismicity" because they did not occur on a main fault. But San Ramon is not far from the Calaveras fault, one of three major faults in the San Francisco Bay Area that scientists consider most likely to produce a big earthquake.

More significantly, the San Ramon quakes have happened on a small, previously unknown fault that crosses the Calaveras seven miles beneath the surface, potentially triggering quakes on the Calaveras, too.

"I grew up in San Ramon, and normally you have an earthquake and it passes," said Parshaw Vaziri, the outreach director at the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center in Berkeley. "To have it be repetitive for so many days has people thinking. There is a fear that this is leading to something bigger."

Seismologists say swarms like San Ramon's are not uncommon, but when they strike in heavily populated places known for seismic volatility, they can create unusual anxiety.

The last significant swarm near San Ramon occurred several miles to the north in Alamo, Calif., in 1990, when there were 350 quakes over six weeks. In nearby Danville in 1970, there were 353 quakes in a month.

David P. Schwartz, chief of the Geological Survey's San Francisco Bay Area Earthquake Hazards Project, said the previous swarms did not set off any major earthquakes. But he and other earthquake experts do not know whether this swarm will be harmless.

A study in 1999 by scientists at the United States Geological Survey and elsewhere concluded that there was a 70 percent probability of at least one quake of magnitude 6.7 or greater in the Bay Area before 2030. The Calaveras was among the faults with the highest probability.

"The reason we have concern is that we have seen other places where earthquakes on one fault trigger earthquakes on another fault," Mr. Schwartz said. "Our experience with this is just very short. More likely than not, the swarm will dissipate and we will have the San Ramon swarm to talk about. But we are just trying to be a little cautious, and fundamentally watch the sequence develop and watch for any changes."

He said the last big quake on the Calaveras fault was more than 300 years ago, making it ripe for activity. The section near San Ramon has been quiet for 40 years, he said.

"Whenever you have a section of a fault that has been quiet, and suddenly you have activity on or near it, that raises a flag: What does this mean?" Mr. Schwartz said.

The San Ramon shaking has been minor: no loss of life, no injuries and no reports of property damage, according to the Police Department.

Donna Dickey, a city councilwoman, said that most of the quakes had been so small she could not tell if the shaking was from the ground, her grandchildren or the family dogs. But she said the amount of shaking was less relevant than its source: a previously unknown fault beneath a city that had nearly doubled in population in two decades. As San Francisco's suburbs spread east, the thousands of unknown faults that scientists suspect exist in the Bay Area carry potentially greater consequences for life and property.

For all the attention on the swarm in San Ramon, Mr. Schwartz said that a recent earthquake in Alaska also carried great significance for Californians. On Nov. 3, a magnitude 7.9 quake, centered about 90 miles south of Fairbanks, damaged supports on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and cracked highways and roads.

That quake offered a preview of what seismologists expect on the San Andreas fault in Southern California, he said. A recent report released by the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America said the southern section of that fault "is primed for an earthquake" of magnitude 7.6 to 7.8.

"The kind of ground rupture we saw in Alaska, about 200 miles, is the kind of ground rupture that could occur on the southern San Andreas, the part that runs past Palm Springs to San Bernardino," he said. "Had that earthquake occurred in Southern California, we would still be picking up the pieces."

Study Tracks Why Eating Less Extends Life

Study Tracks Why Eating Less Extends Life
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/01/health/01EAT.html

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30 — Scientists say they have made progress in understanding why eating less leads to longer life.

Studies of yeast, rodents and other organisms found that drastically cutting calories extended life, and researchers are trying to find out how that happens. They hope to develop drugs to mimic the effect in humans.

In a report in the current issue of the journal Science, the researchers said studies of fruit flies showed that an enzyme called Rpd3 histone deacetylase is probably vital.

"If you decrease the level of enzyme without eating less, you still get life span extension," said Stewart Frankel, a scientist at Yale and the senior author of the study.

In the study, flies with genetic mutations that brought lower levels of the enzyme lived significantly longer than normal. With a low-calorie diet as well, they lived 41 percent longer.

Dr. Frankel cautioned that a drug to safely produce the effect in people may be years away.

One drug, phenylbutyrate, is thought to lower the Rpd3 enzyme, Dr. Frankel said. An earlier study showed that it extended the lives of fruit flies.

Blanka Rogina and Stephen Helfand of the University of Connecticut Health Center helped in the study.