Wedding Planning

this morning i was gonna go driving, but i started reading the paper and am still online!! sometimes, i almost hope that there isn't a good article in the paper, as then i don't feel obligated to scan the whole paper (or my whole daily media reading list) for other good articles to be thorough. yet another detriment to having a consciousness about being thorough. a conditioned trait from my dad, the military, and being a banker for ten years.

yesterday, went with my brother to check out details and planning for the wedding. went to the church, the reception hotel, the gardens for the pictures, and a bunch of other little errands. it was another beautiful day, and the sun was very hot due to the lack of a good breeze. being in hawaii you really need to be able to withstand the divergence of temperatures. the other day on the bus i was freezing. and last night it was rather cool in the evening breeze. but during the day it would have been hardly bearable under the direct sun for more than an hour or two, unless you were on the beach and in the water.

in the evening, we went to the christmas party for his group -- the JAG (lawyer) corps for the 25th Light Infantry Division HQ. people were playing miniature golf and pool. i was wearing sam's UT sweatshirt, and everyone thought i had gone to UT or was still in school. hahah! after the pot luck dinner, santa came and there was a piniata. oh to be a kid again...

tomorrow, my girlfriend arrives from Hanoi (where she has been setting up a new branch office) via Tokyo!!

Lott to Resign as Senate Republican Leader

Lott to Resign as Senate Republican Leader
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/politics/20CND_LOTT.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi said today that he would step down as Republican leader, 15 days after casual remarks at a 100th birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond started a political firestorm that Mr. Lott could not tamp down.

"In the interest of pursuing the best possible agenda for the future of our country, I will not seek to remain as majority leader of the United States Senate for the 108th Congress, effective Jan. 6, 2003," Mr. Lott said in a statement issued by his office. "To all those who offered me their friendship, support and prayers, I will be eternally grateful. I will continue to serve the people of Mississippi in the United States Senate."

Mr. Lott, 61, first elected to the Senate in 1988, will not face re-election until 2006. He has been Republican leader since mid-1996, when Senator Bob Dole of Kansas quit the Senate to run for president.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, read a statement from the president, which said in part, "I respect the very difficult decision Trent has made on behalf of the American people." Mr. Fleischer added that Mr. Bush would not attempt to influence the choice of a new Republican leader.

Mr. Lott apparently concluded that he had no chance to keep his leadership post, especially with the announcement on Thursday by Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee that he was considering trying for the majority leader position. Mr. Frist, a political moderate, is understood to have the backing of President Bush.

It was not entirely clear this morning that Mr. Frist's ascension was a certainty, given the interest of several other Republican senators, including Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and James Inhofe of Oklahoma, in replacing Mr. Lott.

But Mr. Frist does enjoy strong backing. Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico said he hoped to persuade his fellow Republicans to make Mr. Frist majority leader by acclamation in "a new spirit of unification," rather than wait until Jan. 6, when Republicans are scheduled to meet to vote on leadership posts. Republicans will have 51 seats in the Senate, to 48 for the Democrats. One independent, Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, votes with the Democrats.

Mr. Lott's chances to keep his post, which he had been vowing to fight for, seemed to weaken hour by hour, with Mr. Frist's announcement that he would be willing to try for the majority office.

Senator Lott's remarks on Dec. 5, that the United States would have been better off if Mr. Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, when, as South Carolina's governor, he ran on a segregationist "Dixiecrat" platform, attracted little attention at first.

The furor grew gradually, and it was fanned when President Bush publicly rebuked Mr. Lott. The president's criticism, and the White House's widely reported, if tacit, desire that Mr. Lott step down helped to seal the senator's political fate. Mr. Lott apologized repeatedly, but to no avail.

In the president's statement, Mr. Bush expressed gratitude for Mr. Lott's efforts on behalf of the Republican agenda and called Mr. Lott "a valued friend and a man I respect."

Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Bush was told of Mr. Lott's decision by Andrew H. Card, the president's chief of staff, just as a National Security Council meeting was breaking up. Mr. Bush called Mr. Lott around 11 a.m. and spoke to him for about 10 minutes in what Mr. Fleischer called "a warm conversation."

Mr. Fleischer declined to respond directly when asked whether the president thought Mr. Lott's departure was the best thing for the Republican Party, which enjoys less support than the Democratic Party among black voters and members of other minorities.

"The president is a man who believes deeply in outreach," Mr. Fleischer said.

Senator John S. McCain, Republican of Arizona, expressed relief that Mr. Lott had decided to yield the leadership post. "Senator Lott took the honorable course both for his country and for his party," Mr. McCain said in a statement issued by his office. "It is now incumbent upon our party to heal the pain that was inflicted over the past few weeks. Our task is to make it unambiguously clear to the American people that we are an inclusive party in the spirit of our founder, Abraham Lincoln. National unity is essential as we confront the many challenges both at home and abroad."

Senator Frist, a close ally of President Bush, became the first Republican to openly challenge Mr. Lott for the position of majority leader and quickly won the support of several influential colleagues.

"If it is clear that a majority of the Republican caucus believes a change in leadership would benefit the institution of the United States Senate, I will likely step forward for that role," Mr. Frist said in a statement issued by his office on Thursday.

Within an hour of Senator Frist's statement, some of his Republican colleagues, including John W. Warner of Virginia and Lamar Alexander, the incoming junior senator from Tennessee, began rallying around him.

"I'm pleased to join the Bill Frist team," Senator Warner told reporters at a hastily called news conference in the rotunda of the Russell Senate office building. "And I can assure you the team is growing in numbers very quickly. And I think it is in the best interest of Congress that the Republican caucus have a choice."

"If Bill Frist is a candidate for majority leader, I'm for him," said Mr. Alexander, the former education secretary whom Mr. Frist assiduously courted to run for the Senate. "He's my neighbor, my friend, my senior senator and one of our best national leaders."

Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, who was the first Republican to suggest that his party consider an alternative for Mr. Lott — a statement that some Republicans interpreted as a move to seek the job himself — did not comment at first on Mr. Frist. But a Republican aide said Mr. Nickles "would likely be supportive of a Frist candidacy."

Mr. Frist's candidacy came as a relief to Mr. Bush's top political aides, who have despaired as the travails of Mr. Lott, a Mississippi Republican, have dominated the political headlines and events have veered out of their control, an unusual occurrence for a disciplined White House that has become accustomed to controlling much of the agenda of Washington.

White House officials insisted that they had done nothing to encourage Mr. Frist, but Republicans close to Mr. Bush have called Mr. Frist a White House favorite to replace Mr. Lott. Republicans said it was essential that the White House not be seen as interfering in the clubby world of the Senate. Any perceived attempts to manipulate the outcome of the leadership vote, they said, were likely to backfire.

For that reason, some Republicans said that Mr. Frist was hardly assured of the post, should he seek it, because he would be viewed as too close to the White House by senators wishing to assert their independence. Mr. Frist is also a relative newcomer, Republicans said, and his leadership skills are untested. On the other hand, Mr. Frist was chairman of the Republican Senatorial Committee, leading the party's successful drive to strengthen its Senate majority.

All day Thursday, a steady chorus of influential Republicans, some extremely close to Mr. Bush, continued to question Mr. Lott's ability to survive and said they did not see how he would function effectively if he remained in the position.

"It's going to be tough for him to lead," said Brad Freeman, a close friend of Mr. Bush's and a major Republican fund raiser in California. "The Democrats would keep using it all the time, and the whole Senate would be considering the wrong things."

Mr. Frist's potential candidacy emerged late Thursday, as Mr. Lott was home in Mississippi working the phones to secure support among Republican senators, who are scheduled meet on Jan. 6.

The few public statements made Thursday by Mr. Lott's colleagues did not indicate that he was making much progress. Mr. Inhofe and Craig Thomas of Wyoming both hinted broadly they would support a candidate other than Mr. Lott.

"His ability as a leader dissipates on a daily basis," Mr. Inhofe said, in an interview with The Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. Senator Warner said later that Mr. Inhofe now supported Senator Frist.

As soon as word of Mr. Frist's statement became public, lawmakers and other Senate officials said they expected support to build for him quickly.

"It's all over," said one Republican Senate aide.

Mr. Warner said he spoke to Mr. Frist shortly after he issued the statement saying he would probably seek the nomination. "I said, `Senator Frist, we're taking the word likely out,' " Mr. Warner said, adding that Mr. Frist replied, "Go to it. It's out, no equivocation."
Aside from himself and Mr. Inhofe, Senator George F. Allen of Virginia is also supporting Senator Frist, Mr. Warner said. He said he had tried to reach Mr. Lott on Thursday night, without success.

"He has has been a strong floor leader and a very good strategist," Mr. Warner said. "I endeavored to call him today to let him know our intentions. But this is bigger than friendship."

Mr. Lott's supporters were saying as late as Thursday that the majority leader would not only survive but be able to work effectively with the White House.

"It's going to be a problem for a while," said Charles Black, a Republican lobbyist who is close to Mr. Lott. "But if he follows through on the things he's talked about in good faith, that's going to convince anybody."

Mr. Black said that a chastened Mr. Lott had vowed to push policies and legislation to help minorities and that "if he does, when Congress comes back, it won't take long to restore confidence."

He added: "The biggest part of that job is working with other senators up there, and he's always been good at that. That's his strength."

Powell Says Iraq Raises Risk of War

Powell Says Iraq Raises Risk of War by Lying About Illegal Arms
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN with JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/international/middleeast/20IRAQ.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, citing a new assertion by United Nations inspectors that Iraq has failed to disclose information about its illegal weapons, said today that Saddam Hussein's government was in "material breach" of Security Council resolutions and "well on its way to losing this last chance" to avoid a war.

In one of the toughest warnings to Mr. Hussein since United Nations inspectors arrived in Baghdad to search for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear arms, Mr. Powell also said Iraq needed to comply on disclosure within weeks rather than months.

Mr. Powell's unusually explicit talk of the possibility of force was seen in Washington and at the United Nations as notable for coming from the figure considered the most reluctant of those around Mr. Bush to go to war. Mr. Powell is also known as the administration's principal advocate for seeking United Nations support before military force is used.

In the 12,200 pages of documents it released on Dec. 7, Iraq continues its "pattern of noncooperation, its pattern of deception, its pattern of dissembling, its pattern of lying," Mr. Powell said. "If that is going to be the way they continue through the weeks ahead, then we're not going to find a peaceful solution to this problem."

At the United Nations, both the chiefs of the weapons inspection teams and France, a veto-bearing permanent member of the Security Council, appeared to lend crucial international support to the United States' assessment that Iraq had let the world down once more.

Hans Blix, the chief of the chemical and biological weapons inspection teams, said that "an opportunity was missed" by Baghdad to come clean about new arms programs and that making a full disclosure would have been better for Iraq. Mr. Blix told the Council in a closed briefing that there were "inaccuracies" in Iraq's claim that it destroyed a huge stockpile of anthrax it built up from 1988 to 1991. It was the first time the inspectors suggested that Iraq had lied.

Mr. Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, chief of the nuclear inspectors, agreed that Iraq was "cooperating well" in terms of allowing inspectors access to sites.

But Mr. Blix, speaking for all the United Nations inspectors, said, "The absence of evidence means, of course, that one cannot have confidence that there do not remain weapons of mass destruction."

Mr. Powell's blunt words came as President Bush met with Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of American forces in the Middle East, to discuss plans for moving more troops and equipment to the Persian Gulf. The Pentagon has already been given approval for an additional 50,000 troops in the region, doubling the number there now.

In addition, American and Turkish officials met today to work out the details of site surveys to be conducted by the United States at 10 to 15 bases and ports in Turkey in the next several days, a senior military official said.

Military officials said the changes would allow Mr. Bush to begin an offensive if necessary by late January.

Administration officials said this evening that tough talk from Mr. Powell and disclosures of troop plans were all part of a calculated move to increase pressure on Mr. Hussein, as well as on dissidents who might cooperate with weapons inspectors or even on those who might be willing to oust him.

"We're stepping up everything, including military preparations, to send Iraq a message," an administration official said. "The pressure is going to be built up even more."

Mr. Powell's unusually explicit talk of the possibility of force was seen in Washington and at the United Nations as notable for coming from the figure considered the most reluctant of those around Mr. Bush to go to war. Mr. Powell is also known as the administration's principal advocate for seeking United Nations support before military force is used.

The United States ambassador to the United Nations, John D. Negroponte, expressed the American reaction there today, calling the declaration "an insult to our intelligence and indeed an insult to this Council."

Among those providing support for the American reaction was France, which up to now has been especially eager to avoid war by forcing Iraq to disarm through the inspections.

Today it publicly criticized the declaration as incomplete and full of inconsistencies, although it stopped short of saying the document was in breach of resolutions.

Over all, the negative reaction to the Iraqi declaration was an early vindication of the administration's strategy: allowing Mr. Hussein to show by his own actions that he will not give up his secret weapons peacefully.

Most members of the Council, including the United States, insisted that the failings of Iraq's arms declaration made it urgent to support the weapons inspectors in their search for evidence in Iraq.

At the same time, pressure increased sharply on Washington to share with the inspectors secret intelligence about Iraq's arms programs that the administration so far has withheld from the inspectors in order to use for its denunciations of Mr. Hussein.

Mr. Negroponte pledged to the Council and the inspectors today that Washington would open the flow of intelligence data.

At the request of the United States and several other nations, the inspectors agreed to brief the Council more frequently in January than was previously scheduled. The change of plan will give Washington more opportunities in coming weeks to judge whether Iraq is continuing to try to foil the inspections.

At the State Department, Mr. Powell discussed the specific nature of what Iraq had failed to disclose; a two-page list of omissions was distributed.

Amplifying an assertion by Mr. Blix about the existence of an anthrax stockpile, Mr. Powell said that records dating from the 1990's inspections showed that Iraq could have produced 27,500 quarts of anthrax. The Iraqi declaration, he pointed out, is "silent on this stockpile, which alone would be enough to kill several million people."

Mr. Powell also said that although Iraq had earlier admitted manufacturing about 20,000 quarts of botulinum toxin, a biological agent, its declaration showed these and other potential supplies to be missing. Also missing from the declaration were known stockpiles of precursors of poison gas.

In the nuclear sphere, he said that based on unspecified intelligence since 1998, when United Nations inspectors left Iraq, it was known to have built mobile biological weapons productions units, and to have tried to obtain aluminum tubes for the enrichment of uranium for nuclear weapons. These efforts, too, remain undisclosed by Iraq.

The failure to provide details about these programs, Mr. Powell said, "has brought it closer to the day when it will have to face" the consequences outlined in the United Nations Security Council resolution approved in November.

"The world will not wait forever," he said, adding that until Iraq fully cooperates with the United Nations, "we should be very skeptical and, I'm afraid, we should be very discouraged with respect to the prospects for finding a peaceful solution."

Administration officials had criticized Iraq's disclosure of its weapons programs almost immediately after it was issued less than two weeks ago. In fact, few officials or experts expected Iraq to disclose much, so their dissatisfaction was mixed with a feeling of vindication on that score.

In the early 1990's, it took months, even years, for inspectors to pry information from Iraq about its biological and chemical weapons. Today Mr. Powell made it clear that the latest process would not be allowed to drag out that long.

The next target date for decisions on Iraq, some administration officials said, is Jan. 27. That is the date that Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei are to make their first full report on their inspections. Not coincidentally, some officials say it is approximately the time when the military would be ready to attack.

There had been a debate in the administration over whether to label the latest Iraqi failure a "material breach." In the end, Mr. Powell and Mr. Negroponte both used that term today.

It was significant because the word "breach" applies to Iraq's obligations to disarm under the cease-fire of 1991. Determination of an Iraqi breach would effectively permit a return to military force by the United States and its allies.

Yet, although he used the term, Mr. Powell made it clear that a number of steps needed to be taken before war would be considered.

First, he called for a further effort to "audit and examine" the Iraqi declaration of Dec. 7 and an accelerated effort to interview Iraqi scientists and other experts "outside Iraq, where they can speak freely." He said any Iraqi effort to block such interviews would be considered another material breach.

The secretary said inspectors should also "intensify their efforts" in Iraq, even though some officials say that without Iraqi cooperation or help from scientists, the odds of their finding solid evidence of arms programs are not large.

While saying the United States would take steps to share with inspectors its information on weapons and weapons sites, Mr. Powell was vague about them — deliberately so, officials said. The United States could provide highly sensitive intelligence information, and possibly help from agents inside Iraq to spirit cooperating scientists out of the country along with the families.

Mr. Blix has expressed reservations about such interviews, especially if they are conducted outside the country, saying that he would not go along with "abductions."

Bush Pessimistic About Peace Prospects with Iraq

Bush Pessimistic About Peace Prospects with Iraq
By REUTERS
Filed at 4:33 p.m. ET
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-usa.html

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush offered a pessimistic assessment on Friday of prospects for avoiding war with Iraq, saying Baghdad's arms declaration was disappointing and vowing, ``We're serious about keeping the peace.''

Some 50,000 ground troops were being told to get ready to move to the region. There are now 60,000 U.S. troops in the region, more than half of them Navy and Air Force personnel aboard aircraft carriers and at air bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

``Yesterday was a disappointing day for those who long for peace,'' Bush told reporters a day after the United States declared Iraq in ``material breach'' of a U.N. disarmament resolution for failing to disclosed suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.

Asked if the United States was on a path to war, Bush said the Iraqi arms document as analyzed by the United States ``was not encouraging.''

``We expected him to show that he would disarm,'' Bush said of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. ``We're serious about keeping the peace. We're serious about working with our friends in the United Nations so that this body ably led by Kofi Annan has got relevance as we go into the 21st century.''

Bush spoke as he met Annan, who is U.N. secretary general, and representatives from the European Union and Russia on ways to advance the Middle East peace process.

Washington was taking great pains to assure the international community it is abiding by the U.N. weapons inspections process, even as it builds up military forces in the region with an eye toward what U.S. officials said could be a decision by Bush in late January or early February to go to war.

``The United States will continue to work with our allies through the consultative process in a deliberate way and a thoughtful way, but in the end, there should be no doubt about the outcome,'' said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

``Saddam Hussein will honor his commitments to the world, demonstrate that he is sincere about peace by disarming, or the United States will lead a coalition that disarms him,'' he said.

The United States planned to give U.N. inspectors as early as Friday new intelligence on sites where Iraq may be hiding its weapons of mass destruction program, U.S. officials said.

The information will be transmitted ``today or over the weekend,'' one senior U.S. official told Reuters.

Officials said the data will involve fewer than six sites where U.S. intelligence believes Iraq has ``suspicious chemical weapons or elements of production.''

Arms inspectors earlier in the day criticized the United States, which is alone in saying Baghdad is in ``material breach'' of a U.N. disarmament resolution, and its ally Britain for not sharing vital information on Iraq.

The administration is worried Iraqi ``infiltrators'' may be part of the U.N. team. The U.S. decision to share intelligence will be as much a test of the U.N. inspectors -- to see if they can keep the data secret in advance of surprise visits to the Iraqi sites -- as of Baghdad, one official said.

The next important date in the process is Jan. 27, when chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix is scheduled to make his first substantive report to the U.N. Security Council on Iraq's arms declaration, Baghdad's cooperation with inspectors, and making Iraqi scientists inside Iraq available for interviews.

U.S. officials were working with Blix on a plan to gain access to Iraqi scientists.

``He's raised issues to be addressed, we're working with him on those issues,'' said one U.S. official.

Military preparations continued apace.

The U.S. military forged ahead with a buildup that could have more than 100,000 troops in the Gulf region in January or February.

Some 50,000 ground troops were being told to get ready to move to the region. There are now 60,000 U.S. troops in the region, more than half of them Navy and Air Force personnel aboard aircraft carriers and at air bases in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar.

Much of the new deployment would be armored troops who would make use of hundreds of tanks and other equipment from radios to food rations stockpiled in the Gulf since the 1991 Gulf War.

``On a variety of fronts, things are ramping up,'' said a senior administration official.

Hold Your Nose an Negotiate

Hold Your Nose and Negotiate
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/opinion/20KRIS.html

President Bush finally turns out to have a clear, forceful plan to deal with North Korea's defying the West by restarting its nuclear warhead assembly line.

The plan is to invade Iraq.

The White House is trying to play down the crisis on the Korean Peninsula so that it can focus public attention on Iraq instead. But North Korea raises risks that Iraq does not — because it already has a couple of nuclear weapons, as well as artillery and missiles that can dump nerve gas on American military bases in Asia, and Taepodong missiles that can drop nuclear warheads on Alaska and, soon, the lower 48 states.

Washington's failure to engage North Korea has in a few months turned a minor problem (a uranium program that would take years to produce weapons) into a major crisis (the restarting of a reactor with enough plutonium to produce five additional warheads). Now the administration is allowing the situation to drift on a trajectory that conceivably could end up as another Korean war.

"The potential threat posed by North Korea at this point is worse than anything else that we face," said James Laney, a former ambassador to South Korea. "This needs to be attended to now, at the highest levels of this administration. We need to get engaged with South Korea and figure out how to solve this diplomatically, since war would be catastrophic."

An official with an international organization puts it this way: "North Korea scares the hell out of me. I've been there, and it petrifies me. By comparison, Iraq doesn't scare me at all."

Perhaps it's a cheap shot to complain about North Korea policy, because the North is a country made for pundits here in the peanut gallery — it's possible to write with withering scorn about any alternative the administration could choose. All our options regarding North Korea are hideous, and those responsible for making policy on North Korea must have committed mortal sins in previous lives for God to torture them so. To his credit, Mr. Bush has so far shown a most un-Bushian patience in reacting to North Korean provocation.

We now find ourselves with three choices. First, we can negotiate with North Korea, which shows some signs of seeking the same kind of tentative opening to the West that China pursued in the late 1970's. The downside is that negotiation would reward bad behavior, and so Mr. Bush has ruled out this option.

Second, we can ignore North Korea, focus on Iraq and hope that economic pressure brings the Dear Leader, Kim Jong Il, to his senses. That's what Washington is trying now, but it's not working. In fact, North Korea's economy is doing better than in the 1990's, and if it were pinched, North Korea could always raise cash by, say, selling smallpox virus to Al Qaeda. And even if we succeeded in squeezing North Korea economically, we would be bothered much more than the Dear Leader as tens of thousands of Koreans died of famine and disease.

Third, we can launch a military strike on the Yongbyon reactor. But North Korea would probably respond by turning South Korea (and American bases there) into what it describes as "a sea of flames."

"I think they would respond by shooting artillery toward South Korea and missiles toward Japan," said Kongdan Oh, author of an excellent book on North Korea.

These are three terrible choices, but a president's job is to pick the least awful. And hands down that's the first one, negotiation. One way to hide our embarrassment at talking would be to get Russia to convene an international conference, in which the Dear Leader would give up his nukes and permit inspectors, and outside countries would recognize North Korea.

As Robert Gallucci, a former ambassador with long experience in Korea, put it: "I don't have any difficulty with diplomacy backed by force. But what I don't understand is force with no diplomacy."

Ignoring North Korea doesn't work any better than ignoring a rambunctious toddler; it just encourages further provocation. Next North Korea may begin processing fuel rods at Yongbyon, a step that could give it five to eight more warheads in about four months.

Granted there's no good North Korea policy, but it's still worth finding a better one — like holding our nose and negotiating — because North Korea is already what Iraq might become tomorrow.

Seoul May Loosen Its Ties to the U.S.

Seoul May Loosen Its Ties to the U.S.
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/international/asia/20KORE.html

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 19 — Roh Moo Hyun, who favors continued engagement with North Korea and greater autonomy from the United States, triumphed today in a tight presidential election. The outcome, after a campaign marked by huge anti-American demonstrations, sets South Korea and the United States on the most divergent diplomatic paths in half a century of close alliance.

The Bush administration has spent the last three months pressing traditional friends like Japan and newer ones, like Russia and China, to put heavy pressure on North Korea to force that country to abandon a once secret nuclear weapons program and to end its missile sales to the Middle East and Pakistan.

Mr. Roh, a lawyer, was the candidate of the governing Millennium Democratic Party. He staked his campaign on continued engagement with North Korea, despite its threatening nuclear program and quirky, often impenetrable diplomacy. He has forcefully ruled out deadlines for compliance or economic sanctions to force his country's impoverished Communist neighbor to respect its international engagements.

In Washington, James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for Asian and Pacific affairs, told reporters that the Bush administration viewed today's election as an opportunity to work with President-elect Roh "to build an even stronger relationship between our two countries for this new century."

Mr. Kelly sought to minimize differences between Mr. Roh and the administration on North Korea and other issues, suggesting that those differences might have been unfairly magnified during the heat of the campaign.

Mr. Roh's main rival, Lee Hoi Chang, a staunchly conservative former Supreme Court justice, said during the campaign that South Korea should suspend its assistance to North Korea until it cooperated on a host of issues, from arms control to the reunion of families separated since the Korean War.

Mr. Lee's defeat today was his second; he lost even more narrowly to the departing president, Kim Dae Jung, five years ago. Mr. Kim was barred by the Constitution from seeking a second term.

Mr. Roh's commitment to engagement with North Korea, the most important legacy of his political mentor, President Kim, has been so pronounced at times that it produced a stunning last-minute turn of events that many here thought could have cost him the election.

In the final day of campaigning on Wednesday, Mr. Roh's comments about North Korea shocked a former rival candidate and 11th-hour supporter, Chung Mong Joon, scion of the Hyundai empire, causing him to drop their painstakingly arranged alliance.

With Mr. Chung standing nearby, Mr. Roh said that "if the U.S. and North Korea start a war, we will stop it," a comment read by some as implying that South Korea would take a neutral position.

Through a spokesman, Mr. Chung denounced the speech, saying, "The United States is our ally, and our view is that the U.S. has no reason to fight North Korea."

Mr. Chung's abrupt withdrawal of support was front-page news in every daily this morning, and most commentators here assumed that it would wreck Mr. Roh's chances.

The two men forged their alliance only last month after opinion surveys consistently placed Mr. Lee as the front-runner. Mr. Roh, who had been placing third in the opinion polls, defeated Mr. Chung in a hastily arranged primary and was catapulted into the front-runner's position.

This afternoon, with his triumph not yet assured, Mr. Roh restated the assertive diplomatic position he had taken throughout the campaign.

"We must have dialogue with the North and with the U.S.," Mr. Roh, 56, told a crowd in downtown Seoul. "In this way we must make sure that the North-U.S. dispute does not escalate into a war. Now the Republic of Korea must take a central role. We cannot have a war."

South Korean politics have a long history of treacherous twists, bold dirty tricks and corresponding conspiracy theories. So theories abounded today about Mr. Chung's motives. People invoked everything from a fear of a vendetta against Hyundai if Mr. Lee won to heavy backstage lobbying by Washington, which has 37,000 troops in South Korea.

"Almost everyone expected that Chung's move would do a lot more damage," said Yim Young Soon, a political scientist at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul. "In the end, the fact that Chung defaulted seemed to solidify Roh's support.

"On the North Korean nuclear threat, the conventional wisdom said it would help Lee Hoi Chang, but people who live close to the demilitarized zone turned out to prefer Roh's more peaceful approach."

Hwang Yeon Yae, 53, who owns a snack shop in a working-class Seoul neighborhood, said he and his friends talked all night about "Chung's betrayal." He added: "But the people here are strongly behind Roh, and I don't think it will change many people's minds. That's Korean politics."

That judgment proved correct. Nearly complete election results showed Mr. Roh winning with 48.9 percent of the vote, compared with 46.6 percent for Mr. Lee.

If relations with North Korea were at the center of the campaign from the very start, South Korea's ties with the United States were the barely concealed subtext.

Huge crowds have massed in Seoul and other cities to protest the recent acquittal by a United States military tribunal of two American soldiers in the accidental death of two schoolgirls who were crushed by an armored vehicle in June.

The outpouring of anti-American sentiment appeared to help Mr. Roh, who advocated the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea when he was a labor lawyer in the 1980's. The protests appeared to put Mr. Lee, whose diplomatic views are close to those of the Bush administration, on the defensive.

Already assured of strong support from the young and the working class, Mr. Roh edged toward the center, repeatedly stating that his opposition to American bases had been mistaken and that he valued the alliance with the United States.

Often asked during the campaign why he had never visited the United States, though, Mr. Roh was quick to flash his diffident side, replying pointedly that he was not interested in going to Washington "just for the sake of a photo op."

Mr. Roh's challenge now is to reconcile the dual yearnings of South Korea's sophisticated and increasingly affluent younger generations for more autonomy from the United States and reduced tensions with North Korea with continued reliance on American security.

"The challenge will be between accommodating popular aspirations and meeting the demands of the Bush administration," said Scott Snyder, Korea representative of the Asia Foundation. "The new president is going to face critical decisions in three areas: redefining the relationship with the U.S., managing relations with North Korea and reorienting Korea's relations in the regional context."

Mr. Roh's victory represents a rise against tremendous odds. In South Korea's highly class-conscious society, he was born to a family of peach and chicken farmers in a ramshackle farming village now within the city of Kimhae in the southeast.

Mr. Lee, his chief rival, is a patrician lawyer and former prime minister, and Mr. Chung one of the richest men in South Korea.

Mr. Roh was too poor to attend college. Yet he studied law for years and was admitted to the bar in 1975. Mr. Roh spent the politically turbulent early 1980's defending student and labor activists against the military government and formally joined the democracy movement in 1987, winning a seat in Parliament from Pusan in 1988.

French Court Fines Soros for Insider Trading

French Court Fines Soros for Insider Trading
By JOHN TAGLIABUE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/international/20CND_SOROS.html

PARIS, Dec. 20 — In a bizarre ending to a 14-year-old investigation, a French court today convicted the American financier George Soros of insider trading and fined him 2.2 million euros, or about $2.3 million.

The verdict by the three-member bench came after a prosecutor recommended during a hearing last month that, at the minimum, Mr. Soros be fined 2.2 million euros, the sum he is accused of having earned on what officials say were illegal transactions.

In a statement, Mr. Soros, who was in New York today, reiterated his belief that the charges against him were `'unfounded and without merit" and said he was "astonished and dismayed by the court's ruling."

Declaring that he would appeal the decision "to the highest level necessary," Mr. Soros said, "At no point was I in possession of inside information regarding Société Générale."

Michael Vachon, a spokesman for Mr. Soros, who was in New York when the court announced its decision, said by phone from New York today that Mr. Soros "is sort of taking it in."

"It is a shock," he said.

Two other defendants, Jean-Charles Naouri, 53, a former senior official in the France's Finance Ministry, and Samir Traboulsi, 64, a French citizen of Lebanese origin, were acquitted. The prosecutor had recommended fines for both men.

Mr. Soros is best known for his wildly successful investing but also for his philanthropy, most notably in formerly Communist Eastern Europe. In the 1980's, he acquired stakes valued at about $50 million in four formerly state-owned companies in France, including the bank Société Générale. The stakes were purchased in 1988 for Mr. Soros's Quantum Fund.

The case drew interest here partly because of Mr. Soros's image as the paradigm of the free-wheeling financier and partly because it illustrated some of the anomalies of financial oversight in France.

The case dates back to the privatization by a center-right government in 1987 of Société Générale, a major French banking company that was until then government owned. The following year, a Socialist-led government returned to office and sought to regain control of the bank. Sensing an opportunity for gain, while assisting their political allies, a group of investors around the French financier Georges Pebereau devised a scheme to acquire control of the bank, sending its share price soaring.

Mr. Pebereau's raid was ultimately unsuccessful, but in September 1988 an associate of Mr. Pebereau informed Mr. Soros in a telephone conversation of the planned bid, according to testimony to the court.

Mr. Soros's lawyers argued that the information Mr. Soros received was not sufficiently confidential to substantiate the charge of insider trading. Moreover, they argued that until new legislation relating to insider trading was enacted in 1990, the offense was limited to employees purchasing shares in their own companies.

Lawyers for Mr. Soros said the case could be appealed in France and to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. One of their strongest arguments would be the length of the proceedings. In the past, cases that have dragged on for as few as five years have been overturned by European courts on appeal.

In an appearance before the court in November, Mr. Soros said: `'I have been in business all my life, and I think I know what is insider trading, and what isn't."

Today's ruling marked the first time that Mr. Soros has been convicted of financial misdeeds. In 1979, he signed a consent decree with the Securities and Exchange Commission in a civil proceeding relating to his purchase of shares in an American computer manufacturer that was about to issue fresh shares of stock. S.E.C. officials contended that Mr. Soros had sold shares to push down the price of the new shares; Mr. Soros acknowledged no wrongdoing but agreed not to engage in similar practices in the future.

While the case drew attention because of Mr. Soros's notoriety in financial circles, it was also seen as illustrative of the ill-functioning of financial control and the court system in France. Prosecutors replied to criticism of the extraordinary lapse of time between the events and the court trial by pointing to delays in obtaining financial documentation relating to the trial from other European countries, notably Switzerland.

In fact, Mr. Pebereau's unsuccessful bid for Société Générale formed part of a political intrigue involving efforts by former President Francois Mitterand, who sought after his re-election in 1988 to bring several large French companies into the sphere of investors inclined to Mr. Mitterand's Socialist party.

An early investigation into the events by the French stock market oversight agency made little mention of Mr. Soros. Not until after 1992 did the prosecutors question him about his role in the affair. None of the key participants in Mr. Pebereau's scheme, including the former chairman of the L'Oreal cosmetics group, Francois Dalle, and the French founder of the Perrier water group, Gustave Leven, were brought to trial.

Mr. Soros's lawyer, Bernard du Granrut, told reporters that "an entire range of quite particular issues that we raised were not even considered by the court."

Wall St. Firms to Pay $1.4 Billion in Settlement

Wall St. Firms to Pay $1.4 Billion in Settlement With Regulators
By GRETCHEN MORGENSON and PATRICK McGEEHAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/business/20CND-WALL.html

The nation's biggest brokerage firms have agreed to pay $1.4 billion in fines to end investigations into whether they issued misleading stock recommendations and handed out hot new shares to curry favor with corporate clients.

The firms have also agreed to sweeping changes in the way research is done on Wall Street and the way new stocks are distributed, moving away from the practices they used during the stock boom of the 1990's.

As part of the settlement, which was announced today, the firms will pay an additional $500 million over five years to buy stock research from independent analysts and distribute it to investors. The agreement is not final, but regulators were hoping that the announcement would put an encouraging cap on a year fraught with corporate scandal.

The agreement is a result of roughly five months of fractious negotiations between the firms and securities regulators. It is intended to force Wall Street to produce honest stock research and to protect analysts from pressure within the firm to issue upbeat forecasts to attract investment banking fees. Under the terms of the deal, brokerage firms will also be barred from dispensing hot stocks to top executives or directors of public companies.

The broad agreement does not include the punishment of any Wall Street analysts or executives who supervised them, though state and national regulators may still pursue investigations of some analysts. That means Sanford I. Weill, the chairman of Citigroup, would not be charged with any violations of securities laws under the agreement.

Mr. Weill has said that he asked Jack B. Grubman, who was a star analyst at Citigroup, to take a fresh look at his negative rating on AT&T stock in 1999. Mr. Grubman, who has been criticized as being too cozy with corporate clients, may still be punished. Regulators plan to fine him about $15 million and bar him from the securities industry for life in a separate settlement, people involved in the investigations said.

"The objective throughout this investigation has been to protect small investors by ensuring integrity in the marketplace," Eliot Spitzer, the attorney general of New York, who was a lead negotiator of the settlement, said on Thursday. "Hopefully, the rules that are embodied in this potential settlement will restore investor confidence by restoring integrity to the marketplace."

Regulators may not provide much more evidence of wrongdoing until the settlement is officially drawn up next year.

In agreeing to the fines, the firms would neither admit nor deny charges that they had misled investors. It is not clear how much of the fines will go to a restitution fund for investors.

The money will be split about evenly between the national regulators and the states. Half the proceeds will go to the national regulators — the Securities and Exchange Commission, the NASD and the New York Stock Exchange. The states will divide their share using a formula based largely on population.

Christine A. Bruenn, president of the North American Securities Administrators Association, said on Thursday night: "A settlement will help restore faith in our markets if it changes the corporate culture, metes out meaningful penalties, gives investors independent research and the facts that they need. "

Under the corporate governance law passed this year, fines collected by the S.E.C. must go to a restitution fund. But state regulators argue that it is too difficult to determine exactly who is owed restitution relating to research offenses. They say that some of the money may go toward investor education, but much of it may go into states' treasuries.

"It would be nice if some of the more egregious violators were punished," said Alan R. Bromberg, a professor of corporate and securities law at Southern Methodist University. Mr. Bromberg said he was disappointed that investors would not recoup more from the firms.

"To an extent, it's always individuals who are responsible for wrongdoing," Mr. Bromberg said. "This sort of settlement smooths that over so there's only corporate or institutional responsibility, not individual responsibility."

The settlement came roughly a year and a half after Mr. Spitzer began to uncover deep conflicts of interest in Wall Street research. Some analysts recommended stocks to investors not because of their prospects but because the analysts could share in the investment banking fees that the rosy research helped generate. Investigators from other regulatory organizations later joined Mr. Spitzer in putting Wall Street practices under the microscope.

Individual investors, meanwhile, were relying heavily on the research coming out of Wall Street firms, not knowing that much of it was biased. Individuals were typically shut out of new stock offerings and could buy such shares only after they had risen significantly in price.

As a result, dubious research and preferential treatment in the allocation of hot new shares contributed to vast losses by individual investors in the sharp stock market fall of the last two and a half years. Revelations about the nature and extent of the unfair practices have led to a significant decline in investor confidence in the financial markets.

Under the settlement, the type of selling activities that had become a large part of an analyst's job during the stock market mania will be curtailed. Analysts will no longer be allowed to help sell stocks their firms are underwriting by accompanying investment bankers to meetings with investors. Neither will analysts' services be included in pitches made by their firms to companies hoping to sell shares or bonds to the public.

In addition, a firm's investment bankers will be barred from putting pressure on analysts to change their views on a company. Bankers will not be involved in analysts' performance reviews or in discussions relating to their compensation. The firms will have to designate individuals in their legal and compliance departments to monitor the interaction between analysts and their colleagues in other departments.

To ensure that the principals abide by the terms of the settlement, regulators will conduct examinations of each firm beginning 18 months from now.

Each firm covered by the agreement will pay $5 million to $15 million annually for five years to obtain stock research from at least three sources that have no ties to an investment bank, people involved in the negotiations said. The firms would have to make those alternative views available to their customers by highlighting them in their regular communications, these people said.

The selection and purchase of the outside research would be overseen at each firm by an independent monitor appointed by regulators, they said. To improve transparency of their own investment recommendations, the big Wall Street firms would have to make their research available on their Web sites within 90 days of original publication, they said.

Some brokerage firms have agreed to pay larger fines than others and to pay different amounts for independent research and investor education. The final numbers were still being negotiated on Thursday night and could still change, people involved in the talks said.

The Salomon Smith Barney unit of Citigroup will pay the largest fine: $325 million. Mr. Grubman, the firm's former telecommunications analyst, has been sued by NASD over his recommendations on the stock of a corporate client, Winstar Communications. He is also the subject of intense scrutiny for his unceasing support for companies whose stocks and bonds Salomon had underwritten but that in most cases lost almost all of their value. A spokesman for Mr. Grubman declined to comment last night on any settlement talks.

Credit Suisse First Boston, a powerhouse in technology investment banking and research during the late 1990's, will pay $150 million. Merrill Lynch has already paid a $100 million fine to the states.

Seven other firms have agreed to pay about $50 million each. They are Bear Stearns; Deutsche Bank; Goldman Sachs Group; J. P. Morgan Chase; Lehman Brothers Holdings; Morgan Stanley; and UBS Warburg. Two smaller firms, U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray and Thomas Weisel Partners, have tentatively agreed to pay a combined $50 million, people close to the negotiations said.

Including the money already paid by Merrill, the total of fines paid by the firms covered in the settlement rises to $975 million.

The settlement is the second instance in less than a decade that Wall Street firms have agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle regulatory charges of anti-investor practices. In 1997, about 30 brokerage firms and Nasdaq agreed to pay about $1 billion to settle an investor lawsuit that they had colluded to keep costs unnaturally high in the trading of Nasdaq stocks.

But that case was overseen by federal investigators at the S.E.C. and the Justice Department, while the investigation into Wall Street research was begun by Mr. Spitzer, a state official. Indeed, federal regulators seemed late to recognize the severity of the conflicts among Wall Street analysts and joined in the investigation only this year, after Mr. Spitzer released e-mail messages written by Merrill Lynch analysts that showed them privately deriding some of the same companies whose shares they were recommending to the public. Investigators subsequently released damaging e-mail messages written by analysts at Salomon Smith Barney and Credit Suisse First Boston.

In settling with the S.E.C., NASD, the New York attorney general and other state regulators, the 12 firms hope to put an end to the drumbeat of disclosures about dubious conduct that has damaged their reputations among investors.

The shift that transformed many research analysts into stock promoters became most intense during the stock market bubble of the late 1990's, when Wall Street firms were generating enormous fees helping companies issue new shares or debt. Analysts, who had previously worked in the background assessing companies' financial positions and business prospects, became stars in their own right, recommending shares of companies they followed on television and in other media.

As the shares rose, so did analysts' credibility among investors and their power within the firms. Soon analysts were making millions of dollars a year, with a good part of their compensation coming from investment banking deals they helped bring to their firms.

But after the frenzied stock market peaked in March 2000, investors began to be suspicious of analysts' unrelenting bullishness on companies whose shares were plummeting. Last April, when Mr. Spitzer released the Merrill Lynch e-mail messages, investors began to see how promotional and prone to conflict stock analysts had become during the mania.

"The most notable achievement of Mr. Spitzer was publicizing these abuses," said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor of law at Columbia University. "No firm could continue to maintain that there was value in securities research once he was waving their e-mails around.

"We can't say there won't again be bubbles," Mr. Coffee added. "But we've convinced investors that they cannot rely on gurus."

Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet

Bush Administration to Propose System for Monitoring Internet
By JOHN MARKOFF and JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/technology/20MONI.html

The Bush administration is planning to propose requiring Internet service providers to help build a centralized system to enable broad monitoring of the Internet and, potentially, surveillance of its users.

The proposal is part of a final version of a report, "The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace," set for release early next year, according to several people who have been briefed on the report. It is a component of the effort to increase national security after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board is preparing the report, and it is intended to create public and private cooperation to regulate and defend the national computer networks, not only from everyday hazards like viruses but also from terrorist attack. Ultimately the report is intended to provide an Internet strategy for the new Department of Homeland Security.

Such a proposal, which would be subject to Congressional and regulatory approval, would be a technical challenge because the Internet has thousands of independent service providers, from garage operations to giant corporations like American Online, AT&T, Microsoft and Worldcom.

The report does not detail specific operational requirements, locations for the centralized system or costs, people who were briefed on the document said.

While the proposal is meant to gauge the overall state of the worldwide network, some officials of Internet companies who have been briefed on the proposal say they worry that such a system could be used to cross the indistinct border between broad monitoring and wiretap.

Stewart Baker, a Washington lawyer who represents some of the nation's largest Internet providers, said, "Internet service providers are concerned about the privacy implications of this as well as liability," since providing access to live feeds of network activity could be interpreted as a wiretap or as the "pen register" and "trap and trace" systems used on phones without a judicial order.

Mr. Baker said the issue would need to be resolved before the proposal could move forward.

Tiffany Olson, the deputy chief of staff for the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, said yesterday that the proposal, which includes a national network operations center, was still in flux. She said the proposed methods did not necessarily require gathering data that would allow monitoring at an individual user level.

But the need for a large-scale operations center is real, Ms. Olson said, because Internet service providers and security companies and other online companies only have a view of the part of the Internet that is under their control.

"We don't have anybody that is able to look at the entire picture," she said. "When something is happening, we don't know it's happening until it's too late."

The government report was first released in draft form in September, and described the monitoring center, but it suggested it would likely be controlled by industry. The current draft sets the stage for the government to have a leadership role.

The new proposal is labeled in the report as an "early-warning center" that the board says is required to offer early detection of Internet-based attacks as well as defense against viruses and worms.

But Internet service providers argue that its data-monitoring functions could be used to track the activities of individuals using the network.

An official with a major data services company who has been briefed on several aspects of the government's plans said it was hard to see how such capabilities could be provided to government without the potential for real-time monitoring, even of individuals.

"Part of monitoring the Internet and doing real-time analysis is to be able to track incidents while they are occurring," the official said.

The official compared the system to Carnivore, the Internet wiretap system used by the F.B.I., saying: "Am I analogizing this to Carnivore? Absolutely. But in fact, it's 10 times worse. Carnivore was working on much smaller feeds and could not scale. This is looking at the whole Internet."

One former federal Internet security official cautioned against drawing conclusions from the information that is available so far about the Securing Cyberspace report's conclusions.

Michael Vatis, the founding director of the National Critical Infrastructure Protection Center and now the director of the Institute for Security Technology Studies at Dartmouth, said it was common for proposals to be cast in the worst possible light before anything is actually known about the technology that will be used or the legal framework within which it will function.

"You get a firestorm created before anybody knows what, concretely, is being proposed," Mr. Vatis said.

A technology that is deployed without the proper legal controls "could be used to violate privacy," he said, and should be considered carefully.

But at the other end of the spectrum of reaction, Mr. Vatis warned, "You end up without technology that could be very useful to combat terrorism, information warfare or some other harmful act."

City Jobless Rate Rises to 8%

City Jobless Rate Rises to 8%, Continuing an Upward Climb
By LESLIE EATON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/nyregion/20JOBS.html

The jobless rate in New York City continued to rise in November, and the unemployed are finding it increasingly difficult to get work and are running through their unemployment insurance benefits, according to several studies released yesterday.

The unemployment rate rose to 8 percent, adjusting for seasonal factors, from 7.8 percent in October, the New York State Department of Labor said. The jobless rate, which dipped during the summer, has returned to where it was in the spring.

Unemployment in the city is far higher than upstate, where the rate is just 4.7 percent. For the state as a whole, the rate is 6 percent, which equals the national average.

The number of jobs in the city — not all of which are held by city residents — also continued to dwindle. Payroll employment dropped by 4,300 in November, according to the New York City comptroller's office, which adjusted the state data for seasonal factors and calculated a larger loss than some economists. Employment has declined for the last three months, dropping by a total of 28,500 jobs, according to the comptroller's office.

Not all of the employment news was negative. Retailers hired slightly more workers in November than they have, on average, during other Novembers in the last decade, said James P. Brown, an analyst at the State Labor Department. Hotels have also added employees over the last three months, as both industries prepared for the holiday rush.

"We're having an average Christmas, and that's good," Mr. Brown said. "If we don't have a decent Christmas, in January the layoffs get really big."

An analysis of unemployment data by the Community Service Society of New York, which does advocacy work for the poor, found that more people who are looking for work are doing so because they lost their jobs, not because they quit their old jobs or are trying to re-enter the labor market. The report said that in 2000, the last boom year, less than 45 percent of those looking for work had lost their previous jobs; in the 12 months since September 2001, that figure rose to almost 58 percent.

And New Yorkers are remaining unemployed for longer than they did during boom times, the report said. On average, since September 2001, about half of all job-seekers remained unemployed for more than three months. In 2000, only about 40 percent of the unemployed did not find a job within three months.

"As disturbing as these figures are, they may understate the current reality," according to the society's report, which was written by Mark Levitan, a senior policy analyst for the group. "It is likely that as the recession has worn on, the proportion of job losers among the unemployed has risen and the average duration of unemployment has grown longer."

The fact that people are remaining unemployed longer is particularly significant because regular unemployment benefits run out after six months, Mr. Levitan noted. A federal program to provide an extra three months of benefits expires on Dec. 28, and while President Bush recently said he favored extending the deadline, the House and Senate deadlocked over the issue earlier this fall.

About 62,800 people in New York State who are now eligible for or are receiving extended benefits will lose them if the program expires as scheduled, according to a new estimate by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group in Washington. The group says that 84,200 people across the state have already exhausted their regular and extended benefits and have not found new jobs.

Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations

Gene Study Identifies 5 Main Human Populations
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/health/20GENE.html

Scientists studying the DNA of 52 human groups from around the world have concluded that people belong to five principal groups corresponding to the major geographical regions of the world: Africa, Europe, Asia, Melanesia and the Americas.

The study, based on scans of the whole human genome, is the most thorough to look for patterns corresponding to major geographical regions. These regions broadly correspond with popular notions of race, the researchers said in interviews.

The researchers did not analyze genes but rather short segments of DNA known as markers, similar to those used in DNA fingerprinting tests, that have no apparent function in the body.

"What this study says is that if you look at enough markers you can identify the geographic region a person comes from," said Dr. Kenneth Kidd of Yale University, an author of the report.

The issue of race and ethnicity has forced itself to biomedical researchers' attention because human populations have different patterns of disease, and advances in decoding DNA have made it possible to try and correlate disease with genetics.

The study, published today in Science, finds that "self-reported population ancestry likely provides a suitable proxy for genetic ancestry." In other words, someone saying he is of European ancestry will have genetic similarities to other Europeans.

Using self-reported ancestry "is less expensive and less intrusive" said Dr. Marcus Feldman of Stanford University, the senior author of the study. Rather than analyzing a person's DNA, a doctor could simply ask his race or continent of origin and gain useful information about their genetic make-up.

Several scientific journal editors have said references to race should be avoided. But a leading population geneticist, Dr. Neil Risch of Stanford University, argued recently that race was a valid area of medical research because it reflects the genetic differences that arose on each continent after the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

"Neil's article was theoretical and this is the data that backs up what he said," Dr. Feldman said.

The new result is based on blood samples gathered from around the world as part of the Human Genome Diversity Project, though on a much less ambitious scale than originally intended. Dr. Feldman and his colleagues analyzed the DNA of more than 1,000 people at some 400 markers. Because the sites have no particular function, they are free to change or mutate without harming the individual, and can become quite different over the generations.

The Science authors concluded that 95 percent of the genetic variations in the human genome is found in people all over the world, as might be expected for a small ancestral population that dispersed perhaps as recently as 50,000 years ago.

But as the first human populations started reproducing independently from one another, each started to develop its own pattern of genetic differences. The five major continental groups now differ to a small degree, the Science article says, as judged by the markers. The DNA in the genes is subject to different pressures, like those of natural selection.

Similar divisions of the world's population have been implied by earlier studies based on the Y chromosome, carried by males, and on mitochondrial DNA, bequeathed through the female line. But both elements constitute a tiny fraction of the human genome and it was not clear how well they might represent the behavior of the rest of the genome.

Despite the large shared pool of genetic variation, the small number of differences allows the separate genetic history of each major group to be traced. Even though this split broadly corresponds with popular notions of race, the authors of Science article avoid using the word, referring to the genetic patterning they have found with words like "population structure" and "self-reported population ancestry."

But Dr. Feldman said the finding essentially confirmed the popular conception of race. He said precautions should be taken to make sure the new data coming out of genetic studies were not abused.

"We need to get a team of ethicists and anthropologists and some physicians together to address what the consequences of the next phase of genetic analysis is going to be," he said.

Some diseases are much commoner among some ethnic groups than others. Sickle cell anemia is common among Africans, while hemochromatosis, an iron metabolism disorder, occurs in 7.5 percent of Swedes. It can therefore be useful for a doctor to consider a patient's race in diagnosing disease. Researchers seeking the genetic variants that cause such diseases must take race into account because a mixed population may confound their studies.

The new medical interest in race and genetics has left many sociologists and anthropologists beating a different drum in their assertions that race is a cultural idea, not a biological one. The American Sociological Association, for instance, said in a recent statement that "race is a social construct" and warned of the "danger of contributing to the popular conception of race as biological."

Dr. Alan Goodman, a physical anthropologist at Hampshire College and an adviser to the association, said, "there is no biological basis for race." The clusters shown in the Science article were driven by geography, not race, he said.

But Dr. Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University and chairman of the committee that wrote the sociologists' statement on race, said it was meant to talk about the sociological implications of classifying people by race and was not intended to discuss the genetics.

"Sociologists don't have the competence to go there," he said.

Anti-Psychotics Approved to Treat Suicidal Behavior

Anti-Psychotics Approved to Treat Suicidal Behavior
By ERICA GOODE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/health/20SUIC.html

Clozapine, one of a new generation of anti-psychotic drugs, has become the first psychiatric medication to win federal approval as a treatment for suicidal behavior.

The Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday that the agency had approved the drug for treating recurrent suicidal thoughts or suicide attempts in patients with schizophrenia, a devastating illness that afflicts 1 of 100 Americans.

Clozapine was first marketed in 1989 by Novartis under the brand name Clozaril. But the company's exclusive rights to sell the drug expired in 1994, and the medication is also available in generic form.

A clinical trial conducted by Novartis found that over two years, suicidal patients who took clozapine made fewer suicide attempts and required fewer hospitalizations to prevent suicide than similar patients taking olanzapine, another of the new generation drugs.

The study involved 980 patients with schizophrenia, 490 taking each drug. Paulo Costa, the president and chief executive of Novartis, said, "For a long time, the incidence of suicide in schizophrenic patients has been of concern to caregivers and to patients themselves and to the psychiatric community."

Dr. Herbert Y. Meltzer, a professor of psychiatry at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and the principal investigator for the clinical trial, said that about 1 in 10 patients with schizophrenia committed suicide. Many more try to kill themselves.

Clozapine was the first of the so-called atypicals, a class of anti-psychotic drugs that had fewer side effects than their predecessors and that helped patients who did not respond to older drugs like thorazine or haloperidol.

But clozapine has been less popular than its competitors because patients who take the medication must have frequent blood tests for agranulocytosis, a blood disorder that is an infrequent but potentially fatal side effect.

One to two percent of people taking clozapine develop agranulocytosis and about 1 in 10,000 die from the disorder. But Dr. Meltzer said that given the far higher rate of suicide in schizophrenia, the drug might be lifesaving for patients at high risk.

"There has always been a reluctance to use clozapine because of the side effects," he said. "This will be a major motivation for clinicians and patients to give clozapine a try."

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of North Carolina, said the study that led to the F.D.A.'s approval made clear "that clozapine has the ability to alleviate the symptoms which impel patients to suicidal behaviors."

But Dr. Lieberman added that other newer anti-psychotics might also prove effective in reducing suicide.

He said that the difference in suicide rates between the two groups in the study was statistically significant but small and that the clinical trial did not compare the newer drugs with older generation medications.

"It's reasonable to think that this effect may be also shared by other clozapine-like drugs," Dr. Lieberman said.

In a press release announcing the drug's approval for use in treating suicidal behavior, the food and drug agency said that clozapine might help patients "who are judged to be at chronic risk" for such behavior, based on a history of attempted suicide, hospitalization or suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Lieberman and other researchers speculated that clozapine might help lessen suicidal behavior because it acted on serotonin, a messenger chemical in the brain. Studies have linked abnormalities in serotonin production to suicide.

Dr. Meltzer said clozapine might turn out to be effective for suicidal patients with other illnesses like manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, or psychotic depression.

He said the indicators of a high risk of suicide included feelings of hopelessness, depression, a history of previous suicide attempts and, in men, alcohol or drug abuse.

Novartis said patients who take clozapine must be monitored by weekly blood tests for the first six months they are taking the drug and then every other week after that.

Life Is an Art on 57th Street

Life Is an Art on 57th Street
By SANDEE BRAWARSKY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/arts/20STRE.html

A woman who hasn't been a teenager in some time hangs upside down on a trapeze, while another hoists herself up onto a set of free-swinging rings, bringing her spandex-covered legs over her head. Drago Mehandzic, a gymnastics coach born in Yugoslavia, offers support, verbally, next to the large windows of the gym he operates six floors above 57th Street. Drago, as he and his gym are known, explained that there are health benefits from dangling torsos, but the gymnasts also seem to have one of the more interesting views of the streetscape below and the large glittering snowflake, suspended these days above that street's intersection with Fifth Avenue.

I explored 57th Street — the grand boulevard of Manhattan's crosstown routes — right-side up, walking from the Hudson to the East River, returning frequently to poke around its many pockets. A two-mile cultural corridor, this is the street of Carnegie Hall debuts and "Breakfast at Tiffany's"; lined with art galleries, fashionable shops and long-standing family businesses. Crossing back and forth between the north and south sides of the street, I enjoy shifting perspectives, from close-ups of the storefronts to full views of building facades. On each visit to 57th Street I enter different establishments, so my personal list of favorite places is ever-expanding. I share an idiosyncratic selection, ever aware that on all streets of this city there is always something more to discover.

At times 57th Street feels like the Rue de la Paix in Paris as the crosstown street is described in the 1930's-era "WPA Guide to New York City." The architecture is eclectic, from the Solow Building (at 9 West 57th), with its sleek, sloping glass tower, to the Art Deco stone edifice that was an original Automat and is now Shelly's New York (104 West 57th), to several stately landmarks. Marilyn Monroe lived here, near Sutton Place; the composer Bela Bartok spent the last year of his life at 309 West 57th; and the Impressionist Childe Hassam painted in a double-height studio at 130 West 57th.

This street's development began in the 1860's as the city was stretching northward. One of the pioneers in elegant uptown living was Mary Mason Jones, who completed a home in 1869 at the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue, far beyond what was then the city's residential area. (Jones, Edith Wharton's aunt, was said to be the model for Mrs. Manson Mingott in "The Age of Innocence.") Other trailblazers included Theodore Roosevelt's family, which built an Italianate mansion at 6 West 57th in 1873, when Theodore was 15. Beginning in the late 1870's, elevated trains crossed the street along Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenues, casting patterns of shadow until the tracks were razed between 1938 and 1955.

No longer the hub of theme restaurants that it was in the 1990's, 57th Street has art and music as its most lasting theme. Here even a bagel store becomes an exhibition space. Arkady Goshchinsky, an engineer from the former Soviet Union who taught himself bagel making, started showing art at his store, Bagel Baron (315 West 57th), in 1990. He is now featuring the work of Alexander Lisovsky, an Odessa artist who paints meditative landscapes. "I'm a crazy bagel man who loves art," Mr. Goshchinsky said. His shop is unusual in selling caviar next to the whitefish, as well as a vegetarian borscht from an old family recipe.

An Area Poised for Change

Borscht was also a staple at the Russian Tea Room, which last summer joined the list of 57th Street haunts that are no more, like the Louis H. Chalif Normal School of Dancing, whose 1916 building now houses Columbia Artists Management; and Sheffield Farms Dairy, built on the site of a brewery and sold to CBS News in 1952.

I begin my walk at the far western end, where the sky is large over empty lots, low buildings and the Hudson. This area is poised for change, with luxury apartments planned for the 12th Avenue corner. On the next block, initials dominate: a BMW showroom at the corner of 11th Avenue; the headquarters of IFF (International Flavors and Fragrances Inc.), where new scents are tested, but none waft onto the street; and CBS, which named a newsmagazine program "West 57th" in the 1980's.

The resident theater company of 57th Street, the Looking Glass Theater, rents the basement of the parish house (422 West 57th) of Trinity Presbyterian Church next door. The church was built in 1886 as a Sunday school mission for immigrant children. Justine Lambert, artistic director of the theater, which will have its 10th anniversary next year, described its mission as exploring a feminine vision and aesthetic.

At the Morning Star Restaurant at Ninth Avenue, Cathy Stapleton, a waitress for 25 years, knows everyone's preferences. There is nothing fancy about this all-American Greek-owned restaurant, but it is 57th Street's only 24-hour diner.

International cuisine is plentiful on the thoroughfare's western end, including Holidays (333 West 57th), a takeout place with Caribbean specialties like curried goat and jerk chicken, and Le Biarritz (325 West 57th), a gracious French establishment that evokes an earlier era, open since 1965.

On the Eighth Avenue corner, construction is to begin next year on a dramatic tower of faceted glass and steel to top the limestone 1928 Hearst Magazine Building, the first of a cluster of New York City landmarks on this stretch. Prominent at the bases of the columns hovering over the six-story building are paired sculptural figures — representing comedy and tragedy, art and music, sport and industry, printing and science — that will continue to overlook the neighborhood.

Practice, Practice, Practice

Crossing Broadway, I head to the Art Students League (215 West 57th) in a landmark 1892 French Renaissance building that may be the most striking on the street. Several sculptures command attention in the lobby, and the permanent collection includes a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe, who studied here, as did Jackson Pollock and Louise Nevelson; Charlton Heston was a model. Current students include professionals and amateurs.

It is worth crossing the street to look at the ceiling extending from the entrance of Lee's Art Shop (220 West 57th). The Steinberg family, which owns Lee's and its 1897 building, have been in business on 57th Street for more than 50 years, almost 30 at this site. In a recent expansion, the family uncovered the original ornamental, colorful ceiling dating to when the building was erected by the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects.

When a horse and carriage traveling to Central Park halts at Seventh Avenue, I imagine 19th-century figures stepping down to enter the 1885 Osborne Apartments (205 West 57th), a doyenne of a landmark building with a jewel-box lobby, or proceeding to Carnegie Hall (156 West 57th), also a landmark, built in 1891. The opening of Carnegie Hall prompted this area's growth as a musical center with nearby recital spaces, music shops and recording studios. In September a concert hall will be opening underneath Carnegie Hall. Before evening performances, when the marquee is lighted with tiny white bulbs, concertgoers can feel that century-old buzz of excitement at the building whose name is synonymous with great musical achievement.

The lobby of Le Parker Meridien Hotel (118 West 57th), with its skylight-topped atrium and two-story colonnade, provides a different kind of stage. It occupies the former site of the Great Northern Hotel, a narrow tower that housed a 24-hour beauty salon. These days a very popular 57th Street breakfast is served — daily until 3 p.m. — at Norma's, just off the lobby.

Across the street, Fontana di Trevi (151 West 57th) is one of the oldest restaurants on the street, established in 1956 by the father of the current proprietor, Barbara Mei. A painting of the Trevi Fountain adorns one wall of the lobby, while a glittering mosaic of a dancer, violin and painter's palette graces another.

Pianos to Corset Stays

Although many people are described as the mayor of 57th Street, I'd vote for Henry Steinway, the 87-year-old great-grandson of the man who founded the Steinway piano company. His family no longer owns the company, but he comes to work regularly and offered me a tour of the monumental Steinway Hall (109 West 57th), a landmark completed in 1925, when he was 10. Visitors are welcome to wander through the first-floor galleries, which showcase many grands, baby grands and uprights (there's no problem playing a few notes), along with an impressive collection of early-20th-century paintings with musical themes, including several by Rockwell Kent and N. C. Wyeth's "Beethoven and Nature." Concerts were held here until the 1950's, when the building was sold; now visitors might catch occasional student recitals.

One of the things that drew Mira Jedwabnik Van Doren to the street in 1939 was that it reminded her of Europe. Then 10 years old and newly arrived from Vilna, Russia, she was charged with finding an apartment for her family. They moved into 130 West 57th, with its two-story bay windows, and now they own this 1908 landmark building. The light attracted many artists to the studios, and the location attracted musicians. The lobby houses an exhibition of photographs and memorabilia related to former tenants, including Joseph Heller, José Ferrer and the Rolling Stones.

New shops border the old, but the places layered with history are the most intriguing. At Stack's Rare Coins (123 West 57th), I saw a lustrous 1907 $20 gold coin displaying a pretty Lady Liberty with flowing hair on the flip side of a flying eagle, probably worth 500 times as much. At this location since 1953, Stacks was established in 1935 and is headed by second- and third-generation family members. At the Ritz Thrift Shop (107 West 57th), which specializes in pre-owned furs, I also got to touch the merchandise as a third-generation family member, a master salesman, urged me to try on a sable coat as we spoke, and I did. But I left without it.

A sumptuous mansion of books, Rizzoli (31 West 57th) features many art, architecture and design titles. Greenberg & Hammer (24 West 57th) is the rare New York dressmakers' supplies store, where bobbins and corset stays are still sold. In the spirit of the street, original drawings by costume designers who are regular customers are framed on the walls and their creations adorn the holiday windows. That notions store is at the base of the New York Gallery Building (24 West 57th), one of several stacked gallery sites.

A Rock for Holly Golightly

Across the way and just above street level, the Foundation for Hellenic Culture (7 West 57th) has recently shown work by contemporary Greek artists; the exhibition through Dec. 31 is "Art and Children," which radiates color and is on loan from the Museum of Greek Children's Art. In the back room, Ekaterini Myrivili, the foundation's director, pointed out a restored painted ceiling with, coincidentally, classical motifs and patterns, that she dated to the turn of the last century. Next door, the exhibition space at Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg (3 West 57th) is open to the public before auctions.

The Fifth Avenue intersection may be this street's busiest, anchored on the northwest by Bergdorf Goodman, named for two tailors who formed a partnership more than a century ago, and on the southeast by Tiffany & Company. Inside, the Tiffany diamond is displayed, with its 1,000-watt shimmer. One of the largest yellow diamonds ever found, it was uncovered in a South African mine in 1877, and this 128.54-carat gem was worn by Audrey Hepburn in the promotional photographs for the film "Breakfast at Tiffany's." It would go well with the sable.

Continuing east toward Madison Avenue the path turns international, with the flagship boutiques of Chanel (15 East 57th) and Christian Dior (21 East 57th), the latter building with its folded planes of glass. From the tea salon at the new Burberry store (9 East 57th), I look onto the street and begin to see plaid in the panoramic grid of lines created by the dark glass and stone buildings. The reddish steel Calder sculpture, "Saurien," at the Madison Avenue corner, adds the signature color.

Although the street lacks a formal garden, bamboo trees flourish here, in a light-filled atrium connected to 580 Madison. In June the Dahesh Museum of Art is scheduled to open in the adjacent former I.B.M. Gallery. Cater-corner, the Art Deco landmark 1929 Fuller Building (41 East 57th) is host to more galleries than any other on the street. Its setback tower is echoed in the modern Four Seasons Hotel (57 East 57th) and the Ritz Tower (109 East 57th) at Park Avenue, which was the tallest residential building in New York when it went up in 1925.

Dempsey & Carroll (110 East 57th) sells the kind of calling cards that Mary Mason Jones and other Victorian New Yorkers might have used, as well as other engraved stationery, books and desk supplies. Originally on Union Square, the company was founded in 1878. Another long-established business, Hammacher Schlemmer (147 East 57th), began as a hardware store on the Bowery in 1848 and moved to 57th Street in 1926. Now it seems more like a museum of the possible, selling home gadgets and inventions like a self-navigating vacuum cleaner.

An unexpected gallery east of Lexington, the Colombian Center (140 East 57th), features the work of Colombian artists on its ground floor, with antique coffee grinders also on display. Although there used to be several movie houses on the street, the only public one remaining is the Sutton Theater (205 East 57th) near Third Avenue, housed in a former 1917 bank building.

Among the many distinctive restaurants on the eastern half of this street, with roots that span from Vietnam (Le Colonial at No. 149) to the Bronx (Jimmy's Downtown at No. 400), are Teodora (No. 141), Pazo (No. 106) and Mr. Chow's (No. 324), with its hanging sculpture by Richard Smith.

An $80,000 Tip

One of the oldest buildings on the entire stretch is a three-story 1869 brownstone just west of First Avenue that is now Neary's (358 East 57th), a restaurant opened by Jimmy Neary nearly 100 years later on St. Patrick's Day 1967. Amid photographs of celebrities, a plaque on the wall honors a customer who bequeathed an $80,000 tip.

The hectic pace slows down east of First Avenue toward Sutton Place, which seems like a relatively quiet, residential lane. This easterly neighborhood is named for Effingham Sutton, a merchant who acquired the land in 1875. Factories and tenements dominated until the 1920's, when town houses and apartment buildings replaced them. The street abuts the compact Sutton Park, with fine views of the Queensboro Bridge; the park's centerpiece is a life-size bronze wild boar, a modern cast of a 17th-century Florentine sculpture.

Sometimes in my 57th Street wanderings, I loop back to the Fuller Building at Madison Avenue. Now at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery, a group show features several New York scenes. But I am immediately drawn to a bronze sculpture at the window, a female figure on a trapeze, swaying to the rhythms of the street below.

When Light Was Captured

When Light Was Captured
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/20/arts/design/20KIMM.html

Among the earliest photographs William Henry Fox Talbot made was a picture of lace now in the Talbot show at the International Center of Photography. Talbot placed the lace on a piece of paper he had sensitized with silver salts, then put them both in the sun. After a few minutes he removed the lace. The paper, reacting to the sunlight, retained the impression of the fabric as a silhouette.

Amazing. The image today looks mysterious: a fine, flat, abstract shape, irregular and ghostly. It takes a moment to recognize it. Before that, we assume the intent is art, accustomed as we are to seeing abstract images in museums that way, which was certainly not how Talbot thought about the photograph.

We can only imagine the original magic of it. Vision became a physical object fixed on paper; three dimensions became two not through the intermediary of somebody wrestling with a pencil or brush but directly through nature, and in more detail than anybody, or almost anybody, could match by hand. The famous story is that Talbot, frustrated at his own infelicitous attempts to sketch landscapes while at Lake Como in Italy in 1833, determined to find another way "to cause these natural images to imprint themselves durably."

So photography was born partly as a kind of convenience, a labor-saving alternative to drawing, but also an impersonal machine, dispassionate, unlike the human hand, except that it soon became obvious to Talbot and every other thinking person that photography, like drawing, was still inescapably a tool of human manipulation and individual taste.

Nothing can return us to the state of innocence before photography was invented — invented twice, by Talbot and by Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, separately, using different techniques. But this show, the first thorough retrospective of Talbot in the United States, can remind us how utterly the world was changed by their invention. Talbot, the archetypal 19th-century polymath and inventor, came up with the negative-positive process, the chemical and mechanical method that did for visual images no less than what the printing press did for the written word. As a result he reshaped how people saw their surroundings: photography became, as a visual tool, the threshold between the past and modernity.

I stress what may already be obvious at the start because the exhibition recapitulates basic photographic truths. These include the simple pleasure of looking at a photograph. Organized by the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (with support from the Talbot Committee), the show is installed here in galleries that include many of Talbot's letters. (He wrote so much that it's almost possible to track what he did every day of his adult life.) On the walls are what at a glance look like brownish blotches, each a subtly different tint: photographs, windows onto Talbot's universe, the slow world of landed, educated England in the early 19th century, both antique and Romantic.

Talbot photographed Byronic landscapes and also pensive men sitting in plush armchairs gazing dreamily into the ether. The Rembrandtish quality of his prints, softly accentuated by the texture of the paper, enhanced the atmosphere of moody poetry. He contrived stagy scenes of laborers, who posed holding saws and hammers or stood beside ladders, pretending to work or do who knows what. Shadowy streets and university buildings, empty (because the photographs required long exposures and so couldn't capture people moving), look ghostly like ruins. Views of Paris make the city seem stonily inert.

We know these sorts of scenes from snapshots by shutterbugs who probably never heard of Talbot. He brought about a world now largely imagined through images people see through a viewfinder, accumulate, hold in their hands.

The family portrait. The class photo. The news shot. The passport picture. The view of Uncle Burt smiling before the Tower of London. Photographs define the rituals of our lives; they make everyone a potential artist and document reality, while also altering it, because photographs have their own particular truth and integrity. Talbot's photograph of lace, for example, recorded the existence of the fabric he placed on the sheet of paper but is not a reproduction of it. The picture is an image with properties specific to photography: flatness, tinting, cropping. Photographs fragment and dislocate the world, and reduce everything to the same scale, as Talbot recognized.

They also concentrate attention on what the eye might not normally bother to notice, which, when set apart on a sheet of paper, becomes strange, new and beautiful. Susan Sontag famously observed: "Nobody exclaims: `Isn't that ugly! I must take a photograph of it.' Even if someone did say that, all it would mean is, `I find that ugly thing . . . beautiful.' "

Not incidentally, Talbot called his early photographs calotypes, from "kalos," meaning beautiful.

Everything became potentially beautiful. Artists before Talbot painted banal and mundane things and made them look beautiful. But photography conveyed beauty differently.

Talbot made a beautiful photograph of books on shelves, perhaps imitating a still life, perhaps suggesting photography's potential as evidence, legal or otherwise, perhaps implying a self-portrait. Those are Talbot's books, about subjects he studied, and include volumes with articles he wrote in them. We're meant to read the titles on the spines. Do they add up to a diary of a life?

The meaning is up to you. Talbot's genius was to raise the different possibilities. He identified from the start, with what now seems astonishing speed and clarity, photography's implications, which he laid out in "The Pencil of Nature," the first book illustrated with photographs.

One room of the show is devoted to prints from it. (The quality of the prints throughout the exhibition varies disappointingly, time often having taken its toll, but some are magnificent.) Talbot photographed a Daumier lithograph to demonstrate photography's function as a reproductive medium. He photographed a plaster bust of Patroclus. (He bought the bust at a shop in London; the curators have included it in the show.)

This proved a different point: not just that art can be photographed and the photographs dispersed, but that lighting alters the appearance of whatever is in a photograph, as every Hollywood star knows.

Talbot saw the future, in which photography would become an industry. His panorama of the Reading Establishment shows the world's first commercial photographic company to produce prints from calotype paper negatives.

He and his associates pose to illustrate photography's potential: a man sits for his portrait; a Velázquez engraving and a maquette of Canova's "Three Graces" await photographers; technicians monitor prints for "The Pencil of Nature." This is a picture of photographers photographing themselves while preparing the first book of photographs about photography.

Then Talbot stopped. By the mid-1840's, barely a decade after he had started, he seems to have taken his last photographs. He published papers about botany, mathematics and ancient Assyrian inscriptions. When he died in 1877, at 77, he was remembered in the journal Nature for deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions from Nineveh.

The word amateur derives from the word for love. Talbot, the ultimate amateur, invented photography for the love of it, in a spirit of curiosity, then he pursued other interests.

A strong-willed man with a big ego, who was adamantly proprietary about his invention, he was only incidentally an artist. His artistry seems more eloquent for being secondary and economical, a byproduct of a sensitive mind.

Inventions age and are supplanted. Art is constant. Talbot's technique is being replaced by digital technology, but his pictures remain vivid and alluring. The art of his photographs is clearly in the enduring freshness of their wonderment.

Waikiki

it was a beautiful day today. so after lunch, i took the bus to the edge of chinatown and then walked all the way to waikiki. checked out our hotels that we'll be moving into next week. very nice. this is going to be really fun.

afterwards, i was so tired and it took a good two hours to get back to my brother's place. he had bought tickets to the Two Towers, so we rushed in just in time. and miraculously we still got great seats! unfortunately i was just too tired. partly from the time change, and mostly from walking all day. so i fell asleep several times, and basically missed the last half of the movie. oh well, i guess i'll have to see it again. when i was a banker, i used to go to movies with my girlfriends all the time and fall asleep. i used to joke that it was my $8 nap. when you're tired, there is nothing better than falling asleep. so despite the fact that you just paid to see a movie, sometimes there is nothing sweeter than being so tired and then allowing yourself to fall asleep.

Powell and Jeb Bush Criticize Lott for Remarks

Powell and Jeb Bush Criticize Lott for Remarks
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG with ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/politics/19LOTT.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, two prominent Republicans who rarely speak out on national domestic issues, today joined the chorus of critics of Senator Trent Lott.

With the furor over Senator Lott well into its second week, and his future remaining uncertain, Mr. Powell declared himself disappointed in Mr. Lott's laudatory comments about Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign, which was based on preserving racial segregation.

"I was disappointed in the senator's statement; I deplored the sentiments behind the statement," Mr. Powell said at a State Department briefing with the Danish foreign minister. "There was nothing about the 1948 election or the Dixiecrat agenda that should have been acceptable in any way to any American at that time or any American now."

Mr. Powell added, however, that he felt Mr. Lott was "speaking with sincerity" when he apologized.

Governor Bush, the president's brother, meanwhile, said the fracas over the senator was damaging Republicans.

"It doesn't help to have this swirling controversy that Senator Lott, in spite of his enormous political skills, doesn't seem to be able to handle well," Governor Bush told The Miami Herald in an interview published today. "Something's going to have to change. This can't be the topic of conversation over the next week."

Their comments are significant for several reasons. Mr. Powell, the most prominent black member of President Bush's administration, generally confines his comments to international affairs. Though he has spoken out on subjects like affirmative action, he has been reluctant to act as the administration's spokesman on racial issues. Mr. Powell's comments are also noteworthy because it is unusual for a cabinet official to speak out against a Senate leader.

Governor Bush, because of his close relationship with the president, is usually careful not to speak out on national issues.

While Senator Lott was being criticized from outside the Senate, one lawmaker who could vote on his fate came out against him today. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island became the first Republican senator to call outright for Mr. Lott to resign his leadership post.

"It's time for a change," Mr. Chafee, a moderate, told a radio station in his home state.

Asked if he would like to see Mr. Lott leave the leadership post, he replied, "Yes, I would."

Representative J. C. Watts Jr., the sole black Republican House member, who had defended Mr. Lott, hinted broadly today that he should consider stepping down to spare his family the turmoil of a protracted fight over the leadership position.

"I can tell you that if it was me, I would not put my family nor my grandchildren nor my party through that," Mr. Watts said on CNN.

For his part, Senator Lott again vowed to keep his job as majority leader. People close to Mr. Lott said he spent the day in Mississippi meeting with constituents and working the phones, trying to line up support from his Republican colleagues, who are planning to meet on Jan. 6 to discuss his future in the Republican leadership.

"I am hanging in there; I am going to fight through this," Mr. Lott said in an interview in Pascagoula with MSNBC. He added: "I am going to stay as majority leader. I'm going to stay in the Senate. My Congress does support me."

Roughly a dozen Republican senators have declared their support for Mr. Lott. But it is not clear if he has the 25 votes — in addition to his own — that he needs to retain his leadership job. Several more senior Republicans today came to Mr. Lott's defense. Among them is Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who said in an interview that "no rational person" could think Mr. Lott would advocate a return to segregation.

"The critics have have been pouring it on and piling on," Mr. Hatch said, adding that he believed Mr. Lott would continue in his post.

Charles Black, a Republican lobbyist who is close to Mr. Lott, said today that Senators Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania were trying to round up support for the majority leader among their Republican colleagues. If a vote on Mr. Lott's future were held immediately, Mr. Black said, "he clearly would still be the leader."

Still, the storm over the comments at Mr. Thurmond's 100th-birthday party has refused to die down and there was a growing sense on Capitol Hill and in the White House that Mr. Lott is only prolonging his departure. Even if he can keep his job, some Republicans say, Mr. Lott will have a difficult time being effective.

"Senator Trent Lott no longer represents the state of Mississippi," a Senate Republican aide said. "He represents the state of denial."

The fight surrounding Mr. Lott stems from comments he made at the birthday party on Dec. 5, suggesting that the nation would have been better off had Mr. Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 on a Dixiecrat platform that opposed "social intermingling of the races," been elected.

Mr. Lott later called his remarks insensitive. But with news reports revealing that he made similar comments two decades ago, his entire record on civil rights, and indeed the record of the Republican Party, has come under scrutiny.

For Republicans, who just last month were riding high from their Election Day victories, the uproar has proved a terrible distraction. President Bush issued a strong public rebuke of Mr. Lott last week, but did not call for the senator to step down from his leadership post.

For the White House, the Lott matter is a delicate one. Advisers to Mr. Bush are concerned that the dispute could hurt the party's image and affect the administration's agenda, but the White House does not want to be seen as meddling in Senate affairs.

Today, after delivering a speech to the Chamber of Commerce in Biloxi, Mr. Lott sharply criticized what he said were anonymous leaks from White House officials calling for his removal.

"There seems to be some things that are seeping out that have not been helpful," Mr. Lott said.

He added: "I understand how that happens because you've got a lot of people who work there that have different points of view. But I believe they do support what I am trying to do here and the president will continue to do so."

Mr. Lott also told reporters today that he had been in touch with White House officials, and people close to the senator said he spoke this morning to Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff. But they did not know who placed the call or the nature of the conversation.

Mr. Lott's aides said today that he had been in daily contact with White House officials since the president's criticism of him last week, but that Mr. Lott had talked to the president only once.

At the same time, the president's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, insisted today that the White House was not working behind the scenes to oust Mr. Lott. As he has over the past several days, Mr. Fleischer today continued to put forth the president's position that Mr. Lott should not resign, and said no more on the subject.

But several Republicans close to the White House said today that the administration would like Mr. Lott to step down but was increasingly nervous about appearing to intervene in the Senate's business.

"They are bending over backwards to be careful because they want to avoid angering Republican senators," one influential Republican said.

Will China's huge dam create a huge cesspool?

Will China's huge dam create a huge cesspool?
by Jasper Becker IHT
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/80570.html

FENGJIE, China The sledgehammer swings into a nearby building and another slab crashes to the ground. But in Hong's restaurant none of the diners looks up from their plate of the daily special - stewed red pepper and pig's stomach lining.
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As China completes one of the world's biggest hydroelectric dams, along the Three Gorges section of the Yangtze River, the towns along the gorges look as if they have been carpet-bombed.

Scavengers search amid the piles of bricks, stooping to pick up bits of wiring or wood. Some scrap merchants specialize in iron and copper; others have collected doors or window frames.
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As a traveler climbs up from a ferry boat on the river and passes through this strange market of bric-a-brac, past half-ruined houses where inhabitants linger on like outcasts, he has the feeling of being in a post-apocalypse movie.
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High above, at the top of the gorge, new housing blocks can be glimpsed, painted in breezy pastel colors.
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Local officials up and the down the Yangtze are under pressure to meet the government's plan to remove 550,000 people by the end of 2002 and demolish their buildings.
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Just before the Chinese Communist Party's 16th Congress opened last month, the second channel of the Yangtze was blocked so that the dam would start filling the reservoir. By June 2003, the first of the giant turbines is scheduled to begin generating electricity.
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To coincide with the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, the water in the reservoir will rise again. By then more than a million people will have been forcibly resettled.
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Hong said that he brought his family back from Fijian Province, where they were relocated to a newly built village for migrants from the Three Gorges. He said that he could earn more money by reopening his restaurant on the banks of the Yangtze.
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Those who are hanging on, like Hong, hope to force government officials to offer a better compensation deal before the Three Gorges reservoir is filled in the spring and their homes are inundated.
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Hong said that the more immediate threat comes from rats. Migrating rodents are moving out in search of new homes, too.
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"I don't mean mice - they are about this big," Hong said, holding his hands wide apart. "Every night I see them. They get into the bedding, tearing up the quilts and stealing all the food they can find."
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The government has been busy organizing rat extermination campaigns, fearing that the rats could cause an epidemic of leptospirosis, a disease that can result in kidney failure and meningitis.
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Rats are not the only worry. The land to be submerged by the water reservoir is littered with piles of decaying rubbish, the most visible symbol of a legacy of poisonous waste.
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The factories and cities in the reservoir area have been spewing so much filth into the Yangtze River that its water, the color of coffee, has long been undrinkable.
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Environmental officials warn that the millions of tons of garbage and industrial waste left behind threaten to turn the Three Gorges reservoir into a cesspool. Although the government recently set aside $4.8 billion to clean up the river, little seems to be happening.
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According to a 1993 survey, more than 3,000 industrial and mining enterprises in the area released more than a billion tons of waste water into the river each year containing 590 different pollutants. The river bed is now a toxic sludge of dangerous heavy metals.
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The central government has ordered the closure of 500 of the worst industrial polluters. But locals fear that the new cities will still continue to discharge their sewage into the river because many rural factories are refusing to obey the edicts from the capital.
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Perched on the banks of the Xihe River, which runs into the Yangtze, are cement, salt, paper and textile factories. Their waste has turned its water a dull gray color.
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"They installed a treatment plant at the hemp factory, the worst polluter around here," said a retired worker in Nanxi. "But the factory never uses it. They just want to make more money."
.
The writer, a journalist in Beijing and author of "The Chinese," contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.

PRD - In search of Mr Right

In search of Mr Right
by Annie Wang, SCMP
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
http://totallyhk.scmp.com/thkarts/anniewang/ZZZ3QAK5U9D.html

FOR A BEAUTIFUL and educated single woman such as Lulu, finding Mr Right always takes time. It can be a tough decision when there are so many men to choose from, so Lulu consults her pals, Niuniu, Beibei and CC. Lulu knows each girlfriend has a different personality and outlook on life so they will probably give her different advice. She hopes they can reach some sort of middle ground. Lulu meets the girls in the Buddha's Bar near Beihai Park on Saturday night. After they order bubble tea and almond cookies, Lulu takes several cards out of her purse. Each has detailed notes on men she recently met. She passes the cards to Beibei. Beibei has a nip of the almond cookie and reads the notes aloud.

''Candidate No 1: International lawyer based in Beijing. Late 20s, handsome, intelligent, Yale-educated, witty, worldly, preppy, narcissistic, talented in bed, a womaniser with a bad temperament. American.

''Candidate No 2: Self-made billionaire from Shenzhen. Owns several real-estate businesses, middle-school education, married but will divorce soon, generous, honest, tough, stubborn, swears a lot, bald, smoker, stale mouth and a big belly.

''Candidate No 3: Banker from New York. Middle-aged, pale, ordinary-looking, a graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gentlemanly, respects women, hard-working, divorced, two children, a good listener, a wonderful cook, boring, no hobbies, can't ski or swim.

''Candidate No 4: Scientist. 30-something, meek, honest, caring, loving, sensitive, balanced, into outdoor activities, introverted, not ambitious and never gets angry.

''Candidate No 5: Art professor. Model looks, romantic, passionate, intelligent, knowledgeable, interesting, emotionally traumatised by previous relationship, unstable and schizophrenic.''

Niuniu says: ''I vote out No 5. Better not deal with emotional disasters. They can destroy your sanity.''

Niuniu suffered two years of depression in America after countless break-ups and back-and-forths with an emotionally unstable man.

Beibei dismisses No 2 right away. ''You don't need to marry money,'' she says. ''Without billions of dollars, you can live comfortably as a professional woman. You need men of taste to match up with you.''

Of course, Beibei has plenty of money and doesn't need to marry a rich man to change her circumstances.

CC vetoes No 1. ''Although the lawyer's looks and money would satisfy your vanity, he has no sense of loyalty,'' she says. ''He is worth nothing, just like Nick.''

CC hates womanisers like her former English boyfriend Nick, who won't quit until he sleeps with every woman he meets in Asia.

''So only the banker and the scientist are left,'' Beibei says, turning to Lulu. ''What do you think of them?''

Lulu pauses then says: ''The banker is too boring. I'm still young. I feel that I would miss all the excitement of life by marrying him. I'd rather have a roller-coaster life than a boring one.''

Niuniu asks: ''What about the scientist?''

Lulu sighs: ''He's not ambitious enough. My own problem is lack of ambition. I'd love my other side to make up for me. Plus, I studied liberal arts in school. I kind of prefer my man to have a similar educational background so we can have many things to talk about.''

''Can you introduce him to me then?'' Niuniu cuts in. ''Loving, caring and sensitive, he sounds a million bucks to me. I always prefer men who are content and happy. Ambition can easily turn into greed. Plus, I can learn science from him and he can learn arts and literature from me.''

Before Lulu can say anything, Beibei jumps in: ''I'd like to get to know the international lawyer. He sounds like a wonderful lover to have. I don't mind that he's a womaniser since I sleep with other men apart from my husband. No strings attached on either side, it makes things a lot easier for me.''

CC chimes in: ''The banker is good for me. I'm talkative and need to have a pair of attentive ears. As for boredom, it's bad, but better than betrayal.''

Beibei takes another look at Lulu's notes, saying, ''Lulu, can I have No 5 as well? Model looks, passionate, romantic, another great lover I need. When can you introduce us to them?''

''Anytime you like, my friends,'' Lulu says with a shrug.

''Great!'' Niuniu, Beibei and CC chorus, then talk ecstatically among themselves about meeting these men. Feeling ignored, Lulu pleads: ''What about me?'' Nobody seems to hear.

Lulu thinks to herself: ''I guess it's not too bad for me since I still get the billionaire. That will make plenty of Shanghai girls jealous.''

Annie Wang's column will appear on Tuesday next week.'

Inmates Go Free to Help States Reduce Deficits

Inmates Go Free to Help States Reduce Deficits
By FOX BUTTERFIELD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/national/19CRIM.html

LEXINGTON, Ky., Dec. 18 — They began walking out of the Fayette County Jail here this afternoon, the first of 567 Kentucky state prison inmates that Gov. Paul E. Patton abruptly ordered released this week in a step to reduce a $500 million budget deficit.

Governor Patton said only nonviolent offenders were being given the early mass commutation. But those let out today included men convicted of burglary, theft, arson and drug possession, some of them chronic criminals.

"A percentage of them are going to recommit a crime, and some of them are going to be worse than the crimes they are in for," Mr. Patton acknowledged in announcing the emergency releases. But, he added, "I have to do what I have to do to live within the revenue that we have."

It is a quandary that confronts an increasing number of politicians across the nation in this time of deficits. After three decades of building ever more prisons and passing tougher sentencing laws, politicians now see themselves as being forced to choose between keeping a lid on spending or being tough on crime.

As a result, states are laying off prison guards, or giving prisoners emergency early releases like those in Kentucky. Some states have gone so far as to repeal mandatory minimum sentences or to send drug offenders to treatment rather than to prison in an effort to slow down the inflow of new inmates.

And in other locales, prosecutors or courts have placed a moratorium on misdemeanor cases like shoplifting, domestic violence and prostitution.

"What has happened is that as corrections has grown so enormously and consumed so many resources, it has finally become a target for budget cutters as the economy has turned down," said Chase Riveland, a former director of the corrections departments in Washington and Colorado and now a prison consultant.

The pressure to change stems from the math. Since the early 1970's, the number of state prisoners has risen 500 percent, making corrections the fastest growing item in most state budgets.

With more than two million inmates currently in state and federal prisons and local jails, the bill for corrections has reached $30 billion, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

To cope, Iowa has laid off prison guards. Ohio and Illinois have closed prisons.

Montana, Arkansas and Texas, along with Kentucky, have discovered loopholes that allow them to release convicted felons early, getting around the strict truth-in-sentencing laws and no parole policies passed in the 1990's that were supposed to prevent such releases.

In Oklahoma, Gov. Frank Keating, a conservative Republican who added 1,000 new inmates a year to the state's once small prison system, has asked the Pardon and Parole Board to find 1,000 nonviolent inmates to release early as a result of the state's budget crisis.

"Oklahoma has always prided itself on being a law-and-order state," said Cal Hobson, a Democrat who is president of the State Senate. "Now we've got more law and order than we can afford."

In Virginia Beach, Commonwealth Attorney Harvey L. Bryant III, the local prosecutor, has announced that because of state cutbacks to his office's budget, he will no longer prosecute the 2,200 misdemeanor domestic violence cases he gets a year.

"I deeply regret that the victims of domestic violence will no longer have a prosecutor on their side," said Mr. Bryant, a Republican. "But something had to go. I'm two assistant attorneys short."

All of these changes will save some money, but will not undo the fiscal imbalances caused by the prison boom of the 1980's and 1990's, said Nicholas Turner, director of national programs at the Vera Institute of Justice in New York, a research organization.

To make larger savings, a number of states have begun to look at more fundamental changes in the very laws they passed over the past two decades.

Last week the legislature in Michigan, faced with a budget deficit and prison overcrowding, voted to repeal the state's strict mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes which have led to even life sentences for possession of cocaine or heroin. John Engler, the departing Republican governor, is expected to sign the bill into law.

In Kansas, the Kansas Sentencing Commission will recommend to the Legislature next month a new policy under which people arrested for simple drug possession, with no record of prior arrests for violent crimes or drug trafficking, will be placed in mandatory treatment instead of sent to prison.

Since the sentencing commission is made up of a bipartisan group of legislators, as well as prosecutors and judges, the plan is expected to pass the Legislature.

Savings under the new policy will be sizeable, said Barbara Tombs, the executive director of the commission.

About 1,500 of Kansas' 9,000 inmates are projected to be eligible, with the cost for a year in drug treatment about $2,500 compared with $21,000 for a year in prison. And, because Kansas had earlier eliminated most drug treatment in its prisons, the commission forecasts that recidivism should be lower, saving the cost of locking drug addicts up over and over.

"I think this is critical for Kansas," Ms. Tombs said. "We are at capacity now in our prisons, and we are either going to have to build a new prison, which we cannot afford, or institute alternative sentencing policies for some offenders."

"We don't want to do what Kentucky is doing," Ms. Tombs said, "letting dangerous people out the back end."

Similarly, in Alabama, where a judge has fined the state for dumping inmates on county jails, a sentencing commission will make reform recommendations to the Legislature early next year to stem the inflow of prison inmates. These measures include restoring flexibility for judges in making sentencing decisions and placing more offenders on probation or in halfway houses rather than in the state's prisons.

Georgia, Utah, Idaho and Nebraska are all considering some version of these sentencing overhauls to reduce the number of new state inmates.

Mr. Turner, noting that most of the states making fundamental changes are controlled by Republicans, said: "This seems like one of those Nixon goes to China things. After years of being tough on crime, only Republicans have the credentials to change prison policy."

Moreover, Mr. Turner said, the politicians making these reforms, and those ordering early release of inmates, have been helped by the decline in the crime rate over the past decade, reducing public anxiety about crime.

A few states have bucked the trend. New York, for example, which has one of the largest prison systems, has been able to avoid early releases or major changes in sentencing because the large drop in crime in New York City has meant fewer people going to prison.

In Lexington today, Vincent Thomas walked out of the Fayette County Jail a free man, without even the need to report to a parole officer or pass urine tests for drugs.

Mr. Thomas paused to shake hands with Glenn Brown, the county jailer, said thanks to Governor Patton for releasing the 567 inmates and promised he would stay clean and not come back.

Ray Larson, the Fayette commonwealth's attorney, expressed skepticism.

"By letting them out, we know they are sooner or later going to commit more crimes," said Mr. Larson, a Democrat who has been elected prosecutor here since 1982.

The seven men released from the Fayette County Jail today, Mr. Larson noted, had a total of 21 prior felony convictions and 130 convictions for misdemeanors. And they probably have even longer records, Mr. Larson said, because in Kentucky first-time offenders seldom get convicted except for the most serious crimes.

"It is a discouraging day to people in law enforcement," Mr. Larson said. "It will probably follow that the crime rate will rise, and judges will be reluctant to sentence these people to prison only to see them released."

Governor Patton, a Democrat, specified that those released were all convicted of Class D felonies, the lowest level under Kentucky law. They had an average of 80 days remaining on their sentences.

Most of those released today have been held in county jails around Kentucky, instead of in the state's prisons, because Kentucky's prison population — now more than 15,000 — has grown faster than the number of state prison beds.

The releases, some of which took place today, with another batch to be freed on Friday, will result in an immediate savings of $1.3 million, Governor Patton said.

Some politicians expressed support for the governor's action, saying they do not oppose the early release of nonviolent offenders but do oppose higher taxes.

"It's very expensive to warehouse someone who's not a threat to the community," said Dan Kelly, a Republican who is majority leader in the State Senate.

On the other hand, Kentucky's attorney general, Ben Chandler, a Democrat, said, "It is my opinion that the amount of time a criminal serves in prison should be based on the crime committed, not on the balance of the state treasury."

Plans for Ground Zero Unveiled

Plans for Ground Zero Unveiled
By EDWARD WYATT
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/19/nyregion/19REBU.html

Seven teams of architects from around the world unveiled new designs for the World Trade Center site yesterday, giving a remarkable civic tutorial on architecture and contemporary urban design aimed at mending the hole left in Lower Manhattan by the Sept. 11 attack.

The designs, the subject of secrecy and speculation since the teams began work 12 weeks ago, include a broad array of elements: quiet memorial gardens and scenic plazas in the sky, soaring towers of bare scaffolding and sprawling canopies of glass. Four include what would be the tallest building in the world, and all set aside an area for a memorial to the victims of 9/11.

"The architects have responded with great depth to the question, `What does Sept. 11 represent?' " said John C. Whitehead, the chairman of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, the joint city-state agency that is overseeing the rebuilding project. "Their responses vary, just as our own reactions to the trauma, the aftermath and recovery were so very personal and so very different."

The main point of the exercise, as for a similar one in July that resulted in six scrapped designs, was not to design buildings but to create a land-use plan for the site, setting the location of office buildings, a train station, a memorial and new streets. That land-use plan is to be released by Jan. 31.

Left unspoken during the three-hour presentation in the gleaming glass atrium of the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center was that none of these designs might ever appear on the skyline. For all the high-minded talk of the allegory and repose in the designs, commercial considerations will be large and perhaps the leading factors in determining what is built and when.

Some of the designs, like a crystalline tower by Foster & Partners, the British firm led by Norman Foster, are directly reminiscent of the Twin Towers, a single tower whose two halves, according to the architect, "split and kiss at three points."

Others center their most striking elements on the footprints of the destroyed towers, as in the plan by Daniel Libeskind, the German architect whose design takes visitors on a deliberate procession 70 feet down into ground zero, to the bedrock of the excavated site.

A design by a team led by architects Frederic Schwartz and Rafael Viñoly encloses 13 acres of the 16-acre site under an enormous glass ceiling, with two glass cylinders protecting the footprints of the towers. Another, by a group called United Architects, creates a similarly large public space 800 feet in the air, where a skyway connects five towers with gardens, shopping, cafes and a conference center. Another team's towers, connected with three horizontal floors, inevitably drew comparisons to a giant tick-tack-toe board.

Each design presented yesterday included office buildings, a train station, a memorial and more, and while it is the more that sets the designs apart, that is also the most provisional part of the effort.

None of that dampened the enthusiasm of many people who saw the designs yesterday. At the conclusion of the first presentation, by Mr. Libeskind, a round of applause from the assembled audience of government officials, family members of Sept. 11 victims and residents of Lower Manhattan rose to a roar.

"I think it signaled a sort of release," said C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, who was in the audience, "as people realized that these plans were not at all like the other six we saw last summer."

Those other plans, released in July, were derided as unimaginative and ugly even before they were released to the public, as government officials and members of civic groups interested in the rebuilding process were given a preview of the plans and gave vent to their disappointment. At a public hearing of 4,500 people that month, the resoundingly negative response to the plans led rebuilding officials to declare that they would essentially start over the planning for the site.

The plans that have resulted from this new round "were forged in a democratic process," said Louis R. Tomson, the president of the development corporation.

As rebuilding officials and some of the architects themselves said, the designs also spoke of a spirit of pride and patriotism that swept the country after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, one that brought hundreds of professional designers and amateur architects from around the country to submit ideas, thoughts and plans.

Now, officials from Lower Manhattan Development; the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which owns the site; and other city, state and federal representatives will work to decide on a master plan for the site by the end of next month.

As part of that effort, the plans will be on display at the Winter Garden from tomorrow through Feb. 3. Comments can be submitted to rebuilding officials at the exhibition or through the corporation's Internet site, www.RenewNYC.org. The plans can also be viewed on that site and at www.LowerManhattan.info.

The development corporation has scheduled a public hearing for Jan. 13 in Lower Manhattan to hear further public comments on the plans, but some observers of the rebuilding effort are already calling for an expanded discussion.

"The terrific variety and breadth of this work calls out for the kind of public process that gives people an opportunity to have their voices heard," said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society.

In describing their designs, the architects were by turns poetic and bombastic.

Mr. Libeskind spoke of the beauty of the huge concrete slurry walls that hold back the Hudson River and that are an integral part of his idea for the memorial site, 70 feet below ground in the excavated pit. "You can just hear the gravel underfoot as you peruse the brilliance of those magical foundations that have spoken with their own voice," he said.

Lord Foster emphasized the environmentally friendly elements of his tower, with a multilayered facade that can be partly opened to allow natural ventilation. A team that included the New York architects Richard Meier and Peter Eisenman divided its memorial among seven spaces, including a memorial plaza that would float on the Hudson River.

The plan by Peterson Littenberg Architects included elements of the plan the firm contributed to the first round of designs that were well received, including the promenade down West Street from the trade center site to Battery Park, adding two twin towers, each 1,400 feet tall, standing next to each other on the eastern edge of the site.

Several teams designed what were referred to as "cities in the sky," buildings that included public and cultural space at their middle and upper levels, in essence adding to the available area for those uses. A team led by Skidmore Owings & Merrill, the firm that designed the new 7 World Trade Center building, included public gardens at the level of the 52nd floor in its design.

A team known as United Architects, which included several firms dominated by a younger generation of architects than those on the teams led by renowned leaders in the field, built what its representative called "a very visionary, utopian proposal for a city in the sky."

And among the three proposals generated by the Think team is one with a park 10 stories above street level that cantilevers over West Street.

"I don't think there's any question that these designs addressed the problems that the last ones missed," said Nikki Stern, whose husband, James E. Potorti, was killed on Sept. 11. "This round involved a lot more design and creativity," she said.

She noted, however, that neither the architects themselves nor the materials passed out by the development corporation made clear exactly how the designs addressed the requirements; how much office space was incorporated in their towers, or how many square feet of retail stores and hotel rooms would be on or near the site.

David Kallick, a coordinator of the Labor Community Advocacy Network to Rebuild New York, said he felt that several designs were little different from those rejected last summer. "Some of them really turned their back on Chinatown or cut off the site from the east rather than integrating it with the rest of downtown," he said.

Roland W. Betts, a director of the development corporation who oversees the task force on the development of the site, said that he believes there will be a good deal of debate over the virtues and faults of the new plans.

"It's the nature of our democracy that this process is open and inclusive, sometimes discordant, sometimes cacophonic, on a subject so inherently painful and where such great losses were experienced by so many," he said.

A poet looks at the world...

Words
by Ruth Stone (b1915)

Wallace Stevens says,
"A poet looks at the world
as a man looks at a woman."

I can never know what a man sees
when he looks at a woman.

That is a sealed universe.

On the outside of the bubble
everything is stretched to infinity.

Along the blacktop, trees are bearded as old men,
like rows of nodding gray-bearded mandarins.
Their secondhand beards were spun by female gypsy moths.

All mandarins are trapped in their images.

A poet looks at the world
as a woman looks at a man.

Oahu Arrival

arrived last night in honolulu after about 16 hours of traveling and two six hour flights. after being up all night again working and getting myself ready to leave, i was pretty tired and slept for about half my first flight. but i almost didn't make my next flight in LA.

flying so many international flights lately, i took it for granted that i could always buy a laptop power adaptor on the plane, as i had seen repeatedly in the brochures they handed out. what i forgot to realize was that on domestic flights, there was no duty free, and thus no selling period. so arriving in LAX i went looking for a place where i could buy one.

in the terminal where i arrived (terminal 4), none of the few stores had anything but souvenirs, books, and food. but i was told there was a store in the adjacent terminal that would have them. the only hitch was that i would have to pass outside of security to get to the next terminal. but i had an hour and a half to wait, so i figured i had enough time to go. i should have stayed and waited in the terminal instead.

in the next terminal, after spending some time to find the place, the store i needed was closed. (i was told they were imminently on the verge of going out of business.) when i finally returned and tried to reenter my original terminal, and after waiting on the long line for security, i was told that i could not go through with three carry-ons as two was the maximum. argh!! i guess JFK was a little more lax. but two of my bags were relatively small (my backpack with my laptop, and a small duffel with christmas gifts) and i could have easily combined them if i had had a bigger bag. i went through the other line to try my luck with another agent. but it was the same story. and i only had about 40 minutes to departure!

so i ran downstairs to check one of my bags. luckily i'm platinum on american, so i didn't have to wait in the butt-ass long line for regular check-in. but even the first class platinum line took some time. when i got to the agent, she told me that i would be charged $80 for the extra bag as i had already checked in two previously. argh! my 'second' bad was just my garment bag and i could have combined the two as well. then, she couldn't access the flight to print out my tag, as the plane was leaving in 30 minutes and the baggage screen had closed out. panic now set in. luckily, after a few frantic calls, she was able to write a hand tag. then she personally ran the bag down. thank you AAdvantage Platinum! and since we were so pressed for time, she didn't have a chance to charge me the $80. ;-)

i ran back upstairs and waited in the security line. thankfully it went rather quickly, despite getting pulled out of the line to get my hefty pelican camera hardcase checked for explosive residue. and then it was a short race to the gate. how relieved was i just to finally settle into my seat. seven hours later we arrived an hour late to a setting sun, rainy skies, and a rainbow over waikiki. i can't believe i'm in hawaii!

Blair for President

Blair for President
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/opinion/18FRIE.html

With Al Gore now out of the presidential race, everyone is giving the Democrats advice on who their candidate should be. All I know is that whoever the Democrats choose needs to keep in mind a few basic rules that Democrats have forgotten in recent years.

Rule #1: People listen through their stomachs. The key to the success of any presidential candidate is to convey to voters — in a way they can feel in their gut — that you as a leader know what world they're living in. George Bush Sr. lost to Bill Clinton because he failed to convey to voters in their gut that he knew what world they were living in — a world of rising economic insecurity.

Mr. Clinton's campaign conveyed through one phrase, "It's the economy, stupid," that he knew exactly what world people were living in; and because of that, they were ready to overlook his foibles. Connect with people's gut concerns and they'll go anywhere with you — without asking for the details. Don't connect, and you'll never be able to show people enough details to get them to follow.

George W. Bush has conveyed to Americans in their gut that he understands exactly what world they're living in now — a world threatened by terrorism in which, as the former N.S.C. adviser Sandy Berger put it, "national security is now personal security." In this new world, Mr. Bush has been a warrior without mercy. No Democratic leader has — yet — forged such a gut connection with the American people on this issue.

Rule #2: Never put yourself in a position where you succeed only if your country fails. The Democrats can't just wait for Mr. Bush to fail in Iraq, or hope the economy collapses, and assume they will benefit. People want to hear a positive alternative agenda. There can be a hard-nosed Democratic alternative. It is one that would say, "Yes, let's win the war on terrorism, but that requires a multi-pronged approach that addresses all our vulnerabilities and levels with the American people."

Right now the Bush bumper sticker reads: "You Can Have It All: Guns, Butter, War With Iraq, Tax Cuts & Humvees." This is nonsense. America has never won a war without the public's being enlisted and summoned to sacrifice. Is there a Democrat ready to push for a crash oil conservation program and development of renewable energy alternatives — that would also respond to European anger over Kyoto? Is there a Democrat ready to take on our absurd farm subsidies and textile tariffs that help keep countries like Pakistan poor by keeping them hooked on aid, not trade? Is there a Democrat ready to take on the far-right Bush forces, which are now trying to undermine all U.S. support for global population controls? (Just what we need: more failed states with exploding populations.)

Is there a Democrat ready to say we don't need more long-term tax cuts, which will only produce chronic large deficits that will reduce resources for both homeland security and Head Start? And our economy doesn't need more short-term tax stimulus either — it needs a successful war on terrorism. The economy is recovering slowly on its own. What's holding it back now are fears about terrorism and war with Iraq, which keep oil prices high and investment low. The minute those are resolved, you will see consumers ready to spend and companies ready to invest.

Rule #3: Get a candidate people like. I don't know George Bush, and I do not like his domestic policies. But I find him hard to dislike. The "likability factor" is hugely underestimated in politics.

Rule #4: Get a candidate who can give a fireside chat. In these confusing times, people crave a leader who can explain why we're doing what we're doing and how it will lead to a better world. That is what the Democrats need. Mr. Bush conveys a lot of sincerity, but he lacks the emotional or intellectual depth to really reassure people. I'm convinced that one reason for his high poll ratings is projection: We desperately want to believe that he knows what he is doing, and that he is always acting in the best interests of the nation — and not on naked political considerations — because if he isn't, we're all sunk.

Right now there is only one Democrat who could live up to all these rules: the British prime minister, Tony Blair. Maybe the Democrats should give him a green card. He's tough on national security, he has an alternative global vision, people like him and he is a beautiful, reassuring speaker. He's Bill Clinton without baggage. I'd say he's a natural.

Personal Truths and Legal Fictions

Personal Truths and Legal Fictions
By DAHLIA LITHWICK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/opinion/17LITH.html

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va.

Justice Clarence Thomas's emotional outburst during an oral argument last week was both stunning and illuminating. Many of us in the courtroom were surprised simply at the sound of his voice; he speaks only four or five times a year, less often than most of his colleagues speak during an average morning. More astonishing, however, was to hear the most conservative jurist on the court — and the man often accused of callousness about the plight of African-Americans — let loose with a personal accounting of what a burning cross means to a black man in America. His words changed the tenor of the debate, if not the minds of his colleagues, about the role of the law and the definition of justice.

At the oral argument in Virginia v. Black, a case challenging Virginia's cross-burning statute on free-speech grounds, Justice Thomas interrupted the government lawyer who was defending the constitutionality of the Virginia law. Justice Thomas had no real question; he simply wanted to elaborate upon the lawyer's argument, with which he clearly agreed. The burning cross, he said, symbolizes "no communication, no particular message." It symbolizes nothing but a "reign of terror" signifying "100 years of lynchings." Justice Thomas, who was raised in segregated Georgia, emphasized that, if anything, the lawyer and his colleagues on the bench had "underestimated the power of the symbol."

This ought not to have been a hard case, particularly for the most speech-protective court in history. After all, and as Justice Thomas illustrated better than anyone, the burning cross is powerful precisely because it is a "symbol" — a hideous, blood-drenched symbol — but it is not inherently dangerous. This court has always protected such symbolic expression, with prior cases deeming laws singling out cross- and flag-burning unconstitutional.

But with his personal narrative, Justice Thomas changed the terms of the legal debate. After he spoke, members of the court took turns characterizing burning crosses as uniquely threatening symbolic speech — as threatening as a gun, according to Justice Antonin Scalia — and as therefore undeserving of First Amendment protection. The dynamic is familiar to any former law student: a criminal law class on the definition of "consent" in a rape case is paralyzed when a woman in the back row says she was raped. A policy debate about whether to try juvenile offenders as adults stops when a student blurts out that his brother was killed in a gang fight.

These awkward silences happen when legal analysis and personal narrative (often of victimization) collide. At these moments, law school professors are rendered speechless — and Supreme Court justices, evidently, jettison their three-part tests to reassure their distressed colleague that indeed burning crosses are uniquely symbolic of imminent violence.

This judicial sensitivity is admirable. It's also rare in the high court, where even the most harrowing personal narrative is usually bleached out to clinical analysis and citation to precedent. But what if this case were about swastikas and no Holocaust survivor were on the court? Would the justices be so quick to deny death-row appeals if one of them had a son scheduled for execution?

There are two legal versions of what happened in the courtroom last week. The first is that what Justice Thomas did is unforgivable; by hijacking the argument into the murk of personal experience, he did violence to the disinterested, lucid distance necessary for justice to be achieved. The second version is that he recognized, and his colleagues chose to respect, that some questions cannot be answered dispassionately, especially ones as fraught as, "Can symbols constitute threats?" In this version, personal narrative in appellate decision-making is ignored only at the peril of true justice.

The latter conclusion is troubling. It suggests that the Supreme Court will never do "true justice" until there's a Holocaust survivor, a gay abortionist and a blind monk on the bench. And really, how much identity politics can you fit on the head of nine pins? But the protective swoop down from the bench last week — the near inability of any of Clarence Thomas's colleagues and friends to reframe the legal issue after he had framed the emotional one — suggests that the former possibility is wishful thinking, if not denial.

The truth likely lies somewhere between the two extremes: justice can only be done when judges representing the most diverse experiences and backgrounds sit on the nation's courts. From there, they can apply the stark, linear analyses of the law. Sometimes, when they fail to be wholly clinical, as Justice Thomas did, the law may still be enriched in spite of itself. And when we can finally push through these complicated silences to resume the legal conversation, we may finally begin to turn the ideal of justice into reality.

Dahlia Lithwick is a senior editor at Slate.

Of Ghosts and Mississippi

Of Ghosts and Mississippi
By MAUREEN DOWD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/opinion/18DOWD.html

WASHINGTON

Karl Rove came back to his West Wing office after yet another fruitless meeting on the topic of "How to pry the Senate gavel from Trent Lott's cold, dead hands while pretending to be mildly supportive," to find his desk occupied.

Lee Atwater was spinning around in Karl's chair like a little kid.

"Wow, man, you really got it goin'," Lee's ghost told his old protégé, his raspy drawl tinged with envy. "The planets are lined up in your orbit. Bush's personal approval ratings are rockin'. You killed in the midterms. How'd it happen without me? You and me, the two boy geniuses of Southern politics. But you are more in the driver's seat of Junior's presidency than I ever was of the old man's. Everybody's waitin' to see what you'll do with my ol' buddy Trent.

"Poor Strom. I had some fun times when I was Strom's 16th — or was it 17th? — campaign manager for the Senate. I remember in '78 I put together a rally in Strom's race against Pug Ravenel. I stuck all the old, gnarly-lookin' white Klan types in the back, and put all the rosy, scrubbed schoolkids and their parents up front with flags near the TV cameras. You gotta keep the seggies on board, you just don't want 'em up front.

"Trent's soul train death dance ain't workin'. So many Democrats want him to stay, he has to go. What'd you guys call Trent in those newspaper leaks? A walking piñata? That piñata has gotta be smashed before Christmas. But be careful, man. The Bushes don't have much appetite for shoving somebody over the side, and they don't want to see our bloody handprints on the body.

"You are on the horns of a strategic dilemma, ol' man. You gotta bail out on Trent while giving the impression to our base in the South that you're not bailin'. You don't want to say anything that will get the seggies mad and you don't want to do anything that will remind the editorial writers about all the stuff you did for the seggies during the South Carolina primary: sending Junior to Bob Jones University; fuzzin' up Junior's position on the Confederate flag and attacking McCain's position as not supportive enough; having Junior cuddle up to Big Daddy Strom; winkin' when Republicans unrelated to the campaign — maybe even the same "unknown" parties who ran the Willie Horton ad in '88 — smeared McCain for having a black daughter.

"Lay in the weeds, Karl. Don't overreach on tellin' the Senate what to do. Get the Angel of Death, Dick Cheney, to get some senator to tell Trent to let loose. If you want Frist to replace him as majority leader, don't send Frist, cause they'll be rough on the messenger, too.

"I loved ol' Trent. I helped him back in '76 when he was leadin' the Reagan forces against Ford in Mississippi. And I can relate. I was sweatin' it that time when I was chairman of the party in '89 and I had to resign from Howard University's board after the students rioted 'cause of Willie Horton. It hurts to be called a racist, man.

"But you know we go by `Godfather' rules: This is business, not personal. How can Trent count the votes in the Senate if he can't count the C-Span cameras in a room? The man's dumber than concrete. Why didn't they just have a birthday party for Strom with some strippers, rather than a hokey thing with cameras?

"And what was that B.E.T. appearance about? What's next? Gettin' down on his knees with Jesse Jackson to pray? Goin' up to the Lincoln Memorial with John Lewis to recite "I have a dream"? Is Dick Morris dictatin' this dum-dum stuff to Trent?

"Pay no mind to the support he's gettin' from blacks in Congress. It's a ruse. If Trent stays now, he'll make Nancy Pelosi look like Phyllis Schlafly. He'll be an anchor around everything you want to do. Every judge you put up before the Senate with any kind of questionable record on civil rights, they'll tie Trent around him like a big red bow.

"You're gonna have to stop exploiting the black-white divide for awhile. We just go brown, get more Hispanics under the big tent.

"But we'll be able to use the code again. Junior just helped get Sonny Perdue elected governor of Georgia, callin' Sonny "a down-to-earth fellow." And ol' Sonny's main issue was restoring the Confederate flag. In 2004, Junior's gonna need all Sonny's confederate flag voters.

"You'll be O.K. Trent will go down. I always found in Washington, when they're out to getcha, they usually getcha."

Lott Stands Firm as Colleague Urges Leadership Change

Lott Stands Firm as Colleague Urges Leadership Change
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and CARL HULSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/politics/18CND-LOTT.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 17 - Senator Trent Lott restated his determination today to become Senate majority leader next month even as one of his Republican colleagues, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, said that ``it's time for a change.''

`` I would like to see him leave,'' Senator Chafee said in a radio interview on WPRO-AM, in Providence, R.I., ``The only way to have a change, in my opinion, is for the White House to come in here and say to Majority Leader Trent Lott, `It's time for a change.'''

Senator Chafee said that despite Mr. Lott's efforts to undo the damage caused by his favorable remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond's racist 1948 presidential campaign, ``the biggest problem has been that his apologies haven't connected.''

A spokeswoman for Mr. Chafee, one of a handful of moderate Republicans being pressed by Democrats and liberal groups to switch parties to deny Republicans control of the Senate, emphasized later that Mr. Chafee was not calling on Mr. Lott to resign now. Rather, the spokeswoman, Debbie Rich, said, Mr. Chafee favored Mr. Lott's being replaced as leader in a leadership vote planned for Jan. 6, possibly by a woman, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison.

On Sunday, Senator Don Nickles of Oklahoma, currently the Republican whip, or No.2 in the leadership, said that when Congress reconvenes next month, Senate Republicans should hold another vote for majority leader. Mr. Nickles, a conservative, is widely regarded as having aspirations to become Republican leader.

Senator Lott, rejecting signals from the White House that he should resign as the Senate Republicans' leader, vowed today to resist efforts to oust him and said he believed that President Bush himself supported his remaining Republican leader when the Republicans reclaim control of the Senate next month.

``There seems to be some things that are seeping out that have not been helpful,'' he said in his home state of Mississippi today, referring to reports citing dissatisfaction with him in the White House. ``I understand how that happens because you've got a lot of people who work there that have different points of view. But I believe they do support what I am trying to do here and the president will continue to do so.''

On Tuesday, ABC News broadcast an interview with Mr. Lott in which he was adamant about not stepping down.

``I'm the son of a shipyard worker from Pascagoula, Miss.,'' Mr. Lott. ``I've had to fight all my life - and I'm not stopping now.''

But advisers to the president expressed concern that Mr. Lott's defiance would undermine President Bush's appeals to minorities and stain the image of the Republican Party. They scrambled to survey influential party figures for the best strategy to remove Mr. Lott from his post.

In contrast to Monday, when White House officials went to great lengths to portray themselves as leaving Mr. Lott's fate to his Senate colleagues, by late Tuesday they appeared to be more overtly involved.

Republicans said that Karl Rove, the president's chief political adviser, was engaged in phone calls with party members about Mr. Lott and was receiving advice about what the White House should do.

Mr. Rove was careful, Republicans said, not to push a point of view or otherwise be seen as trying to manipulate the outcome of Senate affairs.

Mr. Rove declined to comment on Mr. Lott's remarks. But a Republican close to President Bush said that Mr. Lott's refusal to step aside was prolonging the inevitable.

``He's keeping track of what's going on, he's understanding the shifting alliances and he's keeping his boss informed,'' one Republican in close contact with the White House said of Mr. Rove. ``He's not standing behind the curtain making the smoke come out and when the smoke comes out, some person engineered by him appears.''

The common view among Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill was that it was almost inconceivable that Mr. Lott could retain the post of Republican leader given the position of the White House, opposition from a cross-section of the Republican establishment and the outcry over his comments two weeks ago.

Mr. Lott, at a 100th-birthday party for Senator Strom Thurmond, referred with praise to Mr. Thurmond's presidential bid in 1948. The campaign was based on maintaining racial segregation. Mr. Lott had made similar comments two decades ago, and tonight MSNBC reported a third instance - at a bill signing ceremony in October 2000 - in which Mr. Lott said Mr. Thurmond ``should have been president.''

As White House officials sought to gauge support for Mr. Lott or for possible rivals, Mr. Lott also spent his Tuesday making phone calls, trying to assess whether he could survive a Senate vote on his leadership called for Jan. 6.

A number of presidential advisers said that Mr. Lott had become a terrible distraction to the White House at a time when officials were trying to prepare for Mr. Bush's State of the Union address in January and next year's legislative agenda. Advisers also said Mr. Lott was undercutting the president's efforts to reach out to minorities in preparation for the 2004 presidential campaign.

Mr. Bush publicly rebuked Mr. Lott last week but has since remained silent on the controversy. But in a demonstration of how the Lott debacle has shaken the administration, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, was fully prepared at his regular news briefing on Tuesday with what he said were the president's accomplishments on behalf of minorities.

Mr. Fleischer said the Bush administration had, among other things, successfully resolved the desegregation dispute in Yonkers, N.Y.; prosecuted 350 hate crime investigations; and moved to fill in gaps in social welfare through its plan to funnel more government money to religious charities.

Mr. Fleischer said that Mr. Bush also ``looks forward'' to going to Africa next month and that the president had signed into law the African Growth and Opportunity Act.

Despite the wide view among lawmakers that Mr. Lott would not survive, some of the senator's most loyal lieutenants asserted that opinion was shifting in favor of the Mississippi senator and that he could continue as Republican leader.

Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, the Republican conference chairman who called the Jan. 6 meeting to consider whether Mr. Lott should remain as leader, said he was ``confident'' that Mr. Lott would keep his post. Mr. Santorum added that he was ``getting the sense that people are becoming more and more convinced that Senator Lott should stay.''

Mr. Santorum said he had scheduled the meeting for January because most senators were not now in Washington. He also said he wanted the matter - and any further accusations about Mr. Lott - to be seen in ``context'' and not the subject of a rash decision.

Other Republicans went to Mr. Lott's defense, too. ``Trent Lott doesn't deserve the death penalty for what he said,'' said Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. ``It was foolish to the extreme, but it's an occupational hazard we have.'' Mr. Specter said he would back Mr. Lott ``even if it costs me some political skin.''

Potential successors to Mr. Lott, including Senators Don Nickles of Oklahoma and Bill Frist of Tennessee, had nothing to say on Tuesday and were mainly assessing the climate for Mr. Lott.

In Alaska, Senator Ted Stevens, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, told the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce on Monday that he planned to return to Washington to ``defend my friend, and I'm going to tell him he stays as our leader, and I'm going to try to show that Senator Lott is, in fact, a representative of the new South - one that hates segregation.''

Black and white politicians and businesspeople also staged a rally on Mr. Lott's behalf in Jackson, Miss., the state capital. And Lott allies pointed to supportive comments from Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado, an American Indian.

Mr. Lott's backers also made clear their belief that the White House was pushing too hard to depose Mr. Lott. They also said that a call for consideration of new leadership by Mr. Nickles had angered some senators, who viewed it as an unseemly power grab.

But other Republican senators appeared to distance themselves from Mr. Lott. Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon issued a statement saying Mr. Lott's original remark about Mr. Thurmond's presidential bid ``goes against everything I and the people of Oregon believe in.''

Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, who would be up for re-election in 2004, said that ``leaders have a duty to strengthen the civic fabric that binds us together as one people committed to equality and freedom.''

And Mr. Bond's fellow Missourian, newly elected Senator James M. Talent, who was elected with significant help from the White House this year, said, ``There is now a substantial question as to whether Senator Lott has the capacity to move'' a Republican agenda in the new Congress.

Several Senate Republican officials noted that the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert - and not Mr. Lott - met with Mr. Bush at the White House on Tuesday to discuss next year's legislative agenda. They said the absence of Mr. Lott was a clear signal that the president did not want to be identified with Mr. Lott.

While Congressional aides said that the meeting to discuss the legislative agenda for 2003 was set previously and that Mr. Lott was out of town, some Republicans said it illustrated how difficult it would be for Mr. Bush even to consult with Mr. Lott because of Mr. Lott's standing.

``They don't want any photo op with him or the president anywhere near him,'' one Republican strategist said.

But Mr. Fleischer dismissed such comments, and said Mr. Bush had often met with Mr. Hastert separately from Mr. Lott. He also asserted, ``The president views Senator Lott as a friend.''

Bush Is Expected to Say Iraq Failed to Meet U.N. Terms

Bush Is Expected to Say Iraq Failed to Meet U.N. Terms
By DAVID E. SANGER with JULIA PRESTON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/international/middleeast/18CND-PREX.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 18 — President Bush, who is expected to declare on Thursday that Iraq has violated the United Nations resolution requiring it to disclose all its weapons of mass destruction, met today with his national security advisers to discuss the United States' next move.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, would say only that the United States would have a formal response soon to Iraqi's 12,000-page declaration.

"We have learned much about the declaration, although the review is not complete," Mr. Fleischer said. "The president is concerned about omissions in the declaration and about problems in the declaration."

In London today, the British foreign secretary, Jack Staw, said that Saddam Hussein's assertion that he has no weapons of mass destruction was an "obvious falsehood" and that Iraq's declaration to the United Nations was lacking.

"This will fool nobody," Mr. Straw said in a statement. "If Saddam persists in this obvious falsehood, it will become clear that he has rejected the pathway to peace laid down in Resolution 1441."

Prime Minister Tony Blair told members of Parliament today that there was widespread skepticism about Iraq's weapons declaration.

"I think most people who have looked at this obviously very long document are pretty skeptical about the claims that it makes, but it's important we study it in detail and make a formal and considered response," Mr. Blair said.

The prime minister said that his government would not issue a formal response until after the New Year.

In Washington, the Bush administration continued working on its response — one that senior administration officials have said will likely declare Iraq in "material breach" of its obligations.

The issues confronting Mr. Bush — particularly the question of whether the time is right to declare a material breach, which could provide what Washington sees as a legal justification for going to war — were discussed in detail at a meeting of his senior national security advisers on Tuesday afternoon, according to several officials.

In interviews Tuesday night, those officials refused to say what options the group had decided to present to Mr. Bush. But a consensus appeared to be developing that Iraq's failure to explain what happened to its chemical and biological weapons programs after 1998 — and its contention that all work on nuclear weapons stopped a decade ago — should be characterized as evidence that Iraq is engaged in what one official called "not so passive resistance" to a full inspection by the United Nations.

American intelligence officials say the extensive arms documentation that Iraq issued earlier this month lacks evidence that it disposed of chemical and biological weapons that United Nations inspectors had identified prior to 1998, or that the inspectors suspected still existed when they left Iraq under duress that year. Administration officials have not produced evidence that Iraq has nuclear weapons, but say President Saddam Hussein is thought to have acquired equipment that would aid in the development of such arms.

The officials said they did not expect that the Iraqi violations would be described by Mr. Bush as an immediate cause for war, but rather as a "serious matter" and evidence that Iraq was again engaging in a game of hide-and-seek with inspectors.

"What you will see will be a patient White House, very concerned about another failure by Iraq to cooperate but willing to allow the weapons inspections to go ahead," said one administration official familiar with the debate. Another said the Administration would use the omissions to step up pressure on the United Nations to demand interviews with Iraqi scientists outside of Iraq, fully expecting that Mr. Hussein would resist those interviews.

A senior State Department nonproliferation official, John S. Wolf, met Tuesday morning with Hans Blix, the head of the United Nations weapons inspection team, to describe the deficiencies that American intelligence agencies say they have found in the Iraqi declaration. The meeting, which was not announced publicly, was the first time the administration laid out to the United Nations its assessment of the inadequacies of the declaration.

"We gave him the thrust with some examples," one administration official said of the session, where the American ambassador to the United Nations, John D. Negroponte, was also present.

Mr. Wolf, however, did not fully disclose to the Security Council members the data backing up the United States analysis of the Iraqi document.

Senior White House officials insisted that the principal advisers, who include Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, had made no specific recommendations to Mr. Bush.

Asked if the group had agreed that Iraq was in "material breach" of its obligations, Sean McCormack, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said, "No such decisions have been taken by the United States government at any principals' meeting, whether today or at any other time."

The administration never publicly discloses those meetings, saying the contents are classified and the recommendations to Mr. Bush are confidential.

The debate over how to characterize Iraqi violations is important because it may determine how many allies join the United States in any eventual conflict.

Mr. Bush, some aides expect, will take a cautious approach, denouncing Iraq but stopping short of any pre-emptive action. The most likely result, some officials say, is that President Bush will declare that what Washington sees as Iraq's failure to account for chemical and biological weapons that have been missing since the mid-1990's, and Baghdad's declaration that all its nuclear weapons research has stopped, are the latest in a series of steps that violate Security Council Resolution 1441.

"I don't expect the president will say that this this alone is casus belli," one senior Administration official, using the Latin term for cause for war. "But it builds the case."

The immediate effect of the administration's declaration, officials say, will be to put enormous new pressure on both the Security Council and the United Nations inspectors.

The administration's private insistence that Iraq has committed a new and grave violation of its promises put it on a course to differ sharply with Secretary General Kofi Annan and most if not all of the other permanent members of the Security Council.

Once again on Tuesday, Mr. Annan repeated his admonition that the weapons inspectors should be allowed to carry on with their work at their own pace.

"I think as I've said before: we need to give Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei time to analyze these documents," Mr. Annan said. "I think we should wait for that." He added that the inspectors "have a mandate and they should carry on with it."

He was referring to Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix. Mr. Blix is to provide his first assessment of the Iraqi declaration to the Security Council on Thursday. The White House is planning a simultaneous announcement of its own views.

Mr. Blix informed the Council late Monday that he would not give a full assessment of the vast declaration when he and Mr. ElBaradei meet with the group on Thursday. Rather, Mr. Blix said, he intends to provide a preliminary overview and a guide for the 10 nonpermanent Council members to study the documents.

Administration officials were adamant last night that Mr. Bush has made no final decisions, though as one official said earlier in the day, "It's clear that Thursday will be a big day for us." The debate, said one participant, "isn't over whether Iraq falsified its claims — it's over how to prove that, and how best to bring along the maximum number of allies to the same conclusion."

In an effort to convince other members of the Security Council, several senior officials said they thought Mr. Bush would defer the question of whether the omissions themselves are a sufficient legal pretext for military action, under the American interpretation of Resolution 1441.

The 10 rotating members of the Security Council received their copies of the declaration this evening, after the documents had been filtered by United Nations experts for information that could provide a guide for making weapons of mass destruction. The five permanent members, which are all nuclear powers, received the declaration on Dec. 8.

The Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Sergey Lavrov, insisted this week that only the weapons inspectors have the authority to determine whether a serious breach has been committed or not.

"It is not for Russia or anybody else to make any judgments" until the inspectors render their evaluations, Mr. Lavrov said.

If something happens that Mr. Blix "believes is a violation, he comes to the Security Council," Mr. Lavrov said. "There is no other way, and everybody knows it."

French diplomats have also argued that it is up to Mr. Blix and Mr. ElBaradei to evaluate Iraq's conduct, not individual Council nations. France will also stick rigorously to the letter of Resolution 1441, which says that "false statements or omissions in the declarations . . . and failure by Iraq at any time to comply with, and cooperate fully in the implementation of, this resolution shall constitute a further material breach."

In the view of France, this clause means that missing data and less than candid statements in the declarations are not enough to make a "material breach," diplomats said, if there is no other pattern of defiance by Baghdad.

British leaders have also accepted this interpretation, which was fundamental to getting France's accord for the resolution.

Mission on the Mekong: Save the Giant Catfish

Mission on the Mekong: Save the Giant Catfish
By SETH MYDANS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/international/asia/18CAMB.html

DUOM KOR, Cambodia — The fisherman stood chest-deep in the river and waved his catch triumphantly in the air, a yellow plastic disc taken from a trapped fish. It read, "Please return to the Department of Fisheries."

"Five thousand riel!" he shouted, "Five thousand riel!' " — the wanted-dead-or-alive reward amounting to $1.25.

Swaying slightly as he stood on a nearby floating fishpen, Zeb S. Hogan peeled off the bills and took possession of the tag. So far this year, he said, he had spent about $10,000 buying and releasing a total of five tons of fish or paying for the recovered tags that help track their migrations.

He buys the big fish for about 45 cents a pound, measures them, photographs them, tags them and then slips them back into the rushing brown water. For a monster of, say, 600 pounds, the transaction can approach the average yearly income of a Cambodian fisherman.

Like many inland fisheries, the Mekong River basin is being degraded by overfishing, habitat destruction and development plans that include dams and navigation channels. One response has been the Mekong Fish Conservation Program, which employs Mr. Hogan, a specialist in the migration of fish, to study them and try to rescue a few of the most endangered.

He is part of an army of conservationists who have spread around the world — often just a bit too late — to try to save disappearing species along with their shrinking habitats.

The disc recovered today, from a fish caught a couple of miles upriver from Phnom Penh on the Tonle Sap, represented a routine catch for the conservation program, which is sponsored by the University of California, Davis, and the National Geographic Conservation Trust.

The really big scores, both for Mr. Hogan and for the fishermen, are the giant catfish, underwater beasts as heavy as two linebackers — one of the biggest, and most endangered, freshwater fish in the world.

Every fisherman with a bag net big enough to catch them has Mr. Hogan's mobile telephone number. He is ready, 24 hours a day, to speed up the river with a pocketful of cash.

"We know all the fishermen's names, we know who they are, and they know who we are," said Mr. Hogan, who has run the program for the last three years.

He buys the big fish for about 45 cents a pound, measures them, photographs them, tags them and then slips them back into the rushing brown water. For a monster of, say, 600 pounds, the transaction can approach the average yearly income of a Cambodian fisherman.

The Mekong Giant Catfish (Pangasianodon gigas), king of the river, is the largest and most vulnerable of its creatures, and Mr. Hogan said it would probably be just the first of many species to disappear.

"The fish is basically going extinct," he said. "The first year I was out here, in 2000, they caught 11 fish. Then in 2001 they caught seven." As the current catfish season comes to an end, this year's total catch is down to five, only three of which survived their capture.

In neighboring Thailand, their other remaining habitat, a new dam has blocked the migration of large fish and no giant catfish have been caught for the last two years. That marks the bottom of a steady decline, with 60 fish caught in 1989 and 16 in 1995. Thai specialists working to breed giant catfish in reservoirs have failed so far to establish self-sustaining populations. Even if they succeed, it is unlikely that the giant catfish will survive in the rivers much longer.

The migrations of the giant catfish and hundreds of other species depend on the seasonal ebb and flow of floodwaters, which could be disrupted by a series of dams now being built in southern China and elsewhere along the Mekong and its tributaries.

"Hydropower development smooths out these cycles," Mr. Hogan said. "But the fish ecology is dependent on these cycles."

The life cycle of the giant catfish is a sort of geographical rocking horse, beginning in early summer when monsoon rains sweep the young fish from their hidden spawning grounds near Laos and down the swollen Mekong.

At Phnom Penh the Mekong converges with the Tonle Sap and the fish make a U-turn, heading up to the giant lake also known as Tonle Sap where they hide and grow fat.

Starting in mid-October, when the rains are ending and the lake begins to drain, they retrace their semicircular journey. At the peak of this return migration, in December and January, the waters near Phnom Penh seethe with fish. "You'll see people with little scoop nets put them into the water and come up filled with fish," Mr. Hogan said.

Giant cone-shaped bag nets — 75 feet wide and 360 feet long — are deployed just upriver where the Tonle Sap narrows. They can capture more than a ton of fish an hour.

Sixty-three of these nets, spread side by side in 15 successive rows, form the last barriers for the giant catfish as they head toward the Mekong to spawn. It is here that Mr. Hogan is making his last stand, to help save them, or at least to document their disappearance.

As the sun sets, the river turns black and smooth and Mr. Hogan, on his daily inspection, peers into the baskets of fish.

"In one basket you can see 40 or 50 kinds of fish," he said. "You just couldn't find something like that in the United States."

There are 750 confirmed species of fish in Cambodia's rivers. Estimates of the total number go as high as 1,000 or even 2,000.

Soon, it seems, the largest of them will be gone.

Hudson Shipwrecks Found, but No Loose Lips

Hudson Shipwrecks Found, but No Loose Lips
By KIRK JOHNSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/nyregion/18WREC.html

NYACK, N.Y. — Scientists mapping the bottom of the Hudson River with sonar say they have found nearly every single ship that ever foundered in the river over the last 400 years or more. Not just some of them, or most of them, but — astonishingly — all of them, except for a few that may have been disturbed by dredging.

The ghostly images provide a record of collisions and carelessness and storm-tossed fate — most of it previously unrecorded and utterly unknown — from the days of sail and steam through the diesel tugs and tankers on the river today. Altogether, more than 200 possible wrecks, spread out over 140 miles from the southern tip of Manhattan to Troy, have been identified.

But don't ask where the wrecks are. It's a state secret.

The sonar maps are the unexpected byproduct of a state-financed project to map the river's bottom for habitat and pollution-abatement studies, and because of the thoroughness of the research mandate — every square foot of river deeper than six feet was scanned — scientists feel confident that they missed almost nothing.

But the sonar maps do not just locate the wrecks. They pinpoint them with the accuracy that only satellites and global-positioning technology can achieve. And that level of precision, say state officials who have stamped the maps "confidential" and barred their publication, is precisely the problem. Centuries of maritime history, they say, would be up for grabs by salvagers and collectors before the state — which claims ownership over everything on the river's bottom — could even know what was at risk.

"We don't want to ring the dinner bell for people who have ulterior motives and don't behave responsibly," said Mark L. Peckham, a historic preservation coordinator at the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, which led a team earlier in December to begin assessing the first of the sites. State officials allowed a reporter and photographer to see the maps and accompany the research team on the condition that specific depths of the wrecks and other clues about their locations not be published.

"These are important resources for understanding New York's history and we really need to do the responsible thing," Mr. Peckham said.

Some of the images are definitely hull-shaped; others are simply vague rectangular or oval lumps, entombed by decades or centuries of mud. Of the handful that have been tested so far for metallic content using a towed magnetometer, some have indicated the likely presence of an engine; others — perhaps the oldest of the old — show almost no metal.

"This is like going into your grandmother's attic, which you thought was full of junk, and finding it's actually a museum," said Robin E. Bell, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory who has led the mapping team.

Archaeologists say that while many of the wrecks probably have little historic significance — several overturned barges, for example, have already been identified by their distinctive outline — the likelihood is high that the river will yield at least a few long-held secrets.

What appears to be a largely intact 19th-century sailing sloop — something that historians and sailors have hungered after for years and never found — has been located in Haverstraw Bay, about 35 miles north of Manhattan, for instance, and the suspected remains of a half-dozen Revolutionary War vessels scuttled in 1777 have been tentatively identified farther north.

The surveys have also turned up more mysterious structures, including a series of submerged walls more than 900 feet long that scientists say are clearly of human construction. They say the walls are probably 3,000 years old because that was the last time the river's water levels were low enough to have allowed construction on dry land.

"I think there are going to be really significant findings," said Warren Riess, a research associate professor of history and marine sciences at the University of Maine who has been asked by the state to help assess the sites. "A lot will be uninteresting too, but that's O.K.; that's science."

Because the Hudson was never much of a pirate's nest or a conduit to gold and silver mining country, historians and maritime experts do not expect any lost chests of doubloons. The ships of the Hudson were the working stiffs of their day, and even after New York became the nation's busiest port in the mid-19th century, the river's cargo was predominantly still the stuff of workaday capitalism: coal, furs, wood and iron. Many of the boats that sank were never even recorded, except perhaps on some merchant's ledger sheet. But some experts say that that humble portrait of ordinary life is perhaps the real potential value of the data.

In 1870, for example, a severe storm in Haverstraw Bay sent as many as 10 boats to the bottom. Their cargo? Tons and tons of bricks. Mr. Peckham said he thought, on the basis of old newspaper accounts, that the sunken sloop was from that lost fleet.

"People recorded the lost warships and the special ships, but these would have been the mundane type of ships that no one recorded. They didn't bother," Professor Riess said. "I think the possibility of finding something that no one has seen before — a type of vessel that we have no written records about — is very high."

People also should not expect haunting photographs, like the ones made famous at sites of deep-ocean wrecks like the Titanic, because for much of the time, in much of the Hudson, the visibility is only about two inches because of the concentrations of marine life and mud. On an unusually pristine day, divers might be able to see to the end of their arms — never farther.

That is also, perhaps, why many of the wrecks have not been found, even ones that sank in water only 30 to 40 feet deep. Fast currents and heavy river traffic also make diving or salvage work at the sites treacherous — another fact that worries state officials, who say that publishing the locations could attract recreational divers who are not familiar with the river and its dangers.

Figuring out what is best for science is not so easy either. Dr. Bell of the mapping team said state officials first suggested that she leave the spaces blank where the wreck sites were found. But a blank spot on a map otherwise filled with numbers about depths and sediment would probably itself be seen as a signal that something had turned up, she said. It was then suggested that numbers be made up to fill the blank spaces.

"As a scientist, that really gave me the heebie-jeebies," she said. "You don't make up numbers."

So for now, the publication of the maps is suspended, though state officials say that their goal is to open all the documents to the public eventually and put the maps on the Internet.

"The project we're starting is to come up with a method of assessing the significance of the sites and what level of protection they require," said Frances F. Dunwell, a special assistant for the State Department of Environmental Conservation, which paid for the mapping under the $186 million Hudson River Estuary Plan, announced in 1996 by Gov. George E. Pataki. "The reason we're doing this is so we can publish the maps."

State officials in charge of the historical investigation say they have no plans to raise any of the ships, partly because of the huge cost and logistical issues involved, but also because in many cases river bottom mud, which has almost no oxygen, is a nearly perfect preservative. Professor Riess, who has dived to and explored Revolutionary War-era ships in northern New England, said that on those dives, he found cloth, leather, even food — including potatoes and blueberries — that had been held in stasis by the mud for two centuries or more.

"The potato fell apart as soon as you touched it, but it was still there," he said.

Professor Riess was unable to dive to any of the new sites during the first week of the historical analysis because of weather and equipment problems. And the winter weather, he said, now makes it unlikely that he will be able to dive again until spring.

But hope runs high. The scans in December with a magnetometer showed that the suspected sloop in Haverstraw Bay, whether it turns out to be from the lost fleet of 1870 or not, showed very little metal content, supporting the belief that it was indeed a sailing vessel.

Eating on the Upper West Side

A Table for Two? We Can Seat You at 5:30 or 10
By ERIC ASIMOV
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/dining/18WEST.html

IT used to be said that if you were on the Upper West Side and wanted a great meal, the first thing to do was to hail a cab. But now the cabs are heading uptown.

At Ouest, on Broadway near 84th Street, the wait for a table was an hour on one recent night. Even blasts of cold air each time the door opened were not enough to discourage the crowd standing in the bar from their crack at Tom Valenti's American bistro cuisine. The walk-ins were less hopeful at Aix, at Broadway and 88th Street. The best opportunity for an 8 p.m. table and a chance to taste Didier Virot's sophisticated Provence-inspired cuisine, a hostess advised, was two or three weeks down the road.

They probably stood a better chance of seats at Compass, on West 70th Street, if they didn't mind dodging the corporate revelers who rushed, clutching their goody bags, to the idling Town Cars outside. Tables within the handsome red-steeped dining room, adjoining a glass-enclosed private room, were turning quickly, and perhaps after a cocktail in the spacious bar area, something would soon open up. "It's definitely trendier," said Anna Araman, an advertising sales executive, as she waited with a friend, Vivian Zei, a financial adviser, at Compass. Ms. Zei added, "It's all 30- and 40-year-old women wearing leather pants!"

The executive chef, Neil Annis, had no time to notice what his customers were wearing. "This place is so incredibly busy we can hardly keep our heads above water," he said after lunch on Thursday. "We've got 300 people tonight, 400 people tomorrow night, 300 for Sunday night."

For years, the Upper West Side has been a culinary whipping boy, a paradox of a neighborhood that must love to eat because of all the bad restaurants it supports. Top chefs would sooner scout out new sites on the Lower East Side than consider the Upper West Side, seen as the domain of perennial graduate students and their therapists, whose idea of waiting for dinner means glaring at the counterman after taking a number at Zabar's. They see Upper West Siders as "just a lot of lefties who don't want to spend money," Mr. Annis said. And with so many residents working outside the Upper West Side during the day, it lacked that crucial ingredient for fine dining: the expense account lunch.

But slowly, attitudes are changing. The resounding success of Ouest, Aix and Compass has demonstrated to restaurateurs, at least, that they may have a grand untapped well of customers on the Upper West Side. Opening a restaurant there will not require the creation of a new neighborhood acronym, like NoLIta. On the horizon early next year are Nice Matin, at Amsterdam Avenue and 79th Street; a Mediterranean restaurant with Andrew D'Amico, the longtime chef at Sign of the Dove, in the kitchen; and a second restaurant from Mr. Valenti, as yet unnamed, that will explore southern Italian regional cooking.

"We all know that everybody is jumping to cash in on the West Side," Mr. D'Amico said. Compass, for one, is not only doing a big lunch business, but it has played host almost daily to corporate parties, something rarely seen on the Upper West Side.

Despite its image as the spiritual home of Chinese takeout, the Upper West Side in truth has always had its share of decent, even better-than-decent restaurants. Though wretched, anonymous pasta joints come to mind, small, modestly priced places have long abounded, like Cafe Frida, a new-wave Mexican restaurant; Cooke's Corner, a contemporary American wine bar; and Gennaro, an Italian storefront. Celeste, a modest trattoria, recently opened on Amsterdam Avenue. Its owners, Roberta Ruggini and Giancarlo Quadalti, also own Teodora on East 57th Street.

"The West Side is another city for me," Ms. Ruggini said. "It's more European. Most of the people are families. They come, and they become friends."

Cafe Luxembourg, an elegantly seductive bistro, has drawn crowds for years on West 70th Street, while Jean-Luc, a prototypical French bistro, is doing well on Columbus Avenue. Ocean Grill and Ruby Foo's modestly upped the ante in the late 1990's. But unless you count Jean Georges down by Columbus Circle and Picholine near Lincoln Center, the Upper West Side has conspicuously lacked the sort of chef-driven culinary destination that the Upper East Side and countless other neighborhoods have long taken for granted.

"People in the restaurant business called it a wasteland; they said, `Didier, you're making a mistake,' " said Mr. Virot, the executive chef at Aix, which opened a couple of months ago on the longtime site of Boulevard, a lackluster barbecue joint. "But I'm getting a lot of people from the Upper East Side, even some people from downtown. I was honestly surprised."

To many in the industry, the failure of Ansonia, an ambitious restaurant that opened on Columbus Avenue in 1996, was a cautionary tale. In spite of a talented young chef, Bill Telepan, Ansonia closed within a year, giving ammunition to those who felt the Upper West Side could not sustain a fine restaurant. But Mr. Telepan, who has been the chef at Judson Grill since 1998, learned a different lesson.

"I don't think it had anything to do with the area; it was more about what we did," he said. "Ansonia just didn't have the right formula. We were a high-end restaurant, but we also had cigar smoking and a late-night lounge, and people were confused. The lesson for me was that the neighborhood could sustain a restaurant like that."

Aix's instant popularity may be the most unlikely. Dishes like sautéed loin of venison served with a purée of six root vegetables, quince-beet strudel and cocoa-coffee sauce are carefully composed and precisely calibrated, with little thought given to the preferences of the neighborhood. Those desperate for, say, steak, will have to try another place, or at least confine themselves to the bar menu, which offers simpler fare.

"I guess I'm a little surprised," said Phil Suarez, a longtime partner of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, who has kept clear of the Upper West Side north of Jean Georges, fearing that the largely residential district was inhospitable to fine dining. "I didn't think above 72nd they would embrace something like Aix, but then again, there's a whole lot of new people moving there."

The new people, including those who have moved into Trump Place along the Hudson River, have added a new layer of wealth to the Upper West Side, where real estate values can now rival those on the Upper East Side. What's more, some restaurateurs are anticipating new customers as a result of development projects around Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center. "People can now afford the fine dining," Mr. Suarez said. "They're embracing these places."

That may be so, but some Upper West Siders seem more cautious than enthusiastic in their tastes. Mr. Annis at Compass, who used to cook at Lespinasse, has found that his customers don't necessarily want their food to be as complex as he would like. "When I first came to this area, I was really doing what I wanted to do," he said. "It was very sophisticated and had a lot of finesse, but people were outspokenly adamant that it was too expensive and too complicated. People were like, `Why can't I get a steak with fries?' All they want is a grilled piece of tuna with broccoli rabe."

So Mr. Annis added to his menu a section of simple grilled meats, along with a $30 prix fixe. "It has made the place gangbusters," he said.

Mr. Annis may grumble a bit at customers who settle for the familiar, but he is only learning what Scott Campbell has long known. Mr. Campbell, the chef and an owner of @SQC on Columbus Avenue, who has cooked at various restaurants on the Upper West Side since 1988, says that Upper West Siders really don't want to spend a lot of money, and they want what he calls deep flavors. "Chefs always had a hard time dealing with the Upper West Side," he said. "If you do something totally chef-driven, it might be great on the plate, but you won't be in business too long."

That's fine with Mr. Valenti, who says he has included "composed, signature-type things" on his menu for those who enjoyed his cooking downtown at Alison on Dominick Street and on the Upper East Side at Butterfield 81, but that's not what he likes himself. "I don't want design on a plate; I want good simple chicken and mashed potatoes," Mr. Valenti said.

"It's really about satisfaction," he said of his cooking. "It's less intellectually driven and more craving-driven."

As at Compass, part of Ouest's menu is reserved for simple grilled dishes, like lamb chops and pork chops. But even his composed plates are forceful and robust rather than cerebral: honeycomb tripe braised in a tomato and red wine sauce, for example. Tripe is on the menu, too, at La Grolla, a small Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue that specializes in the hearty cuisine of Valle d'Aosta. La Grolla is much more of a typical West Side place, where 85 percent of the customers live within 10 blocks and come in over and over again. "I know them, I know their kids, I know their dogs and cats," said Gina Comenzo, a partner.

Mr. Virot at Aix hasn't had an opportunity to become so intimate with his clientele. He's been too busy. He's charging a few dollars less than at Virot, his short-lived restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, and he's made the dining room more casual, too, accommodating families by offering children penne with tomato sauce. But he still feels he's doing the food he wants to do.

Despite Aix's popularity, Mr. Campbell of @SQC, for one, is unsure how it will do over time. "If I wanted to gild the lily, putting foie with this and caviar with that, it would be very difficult," he said. "When you're sending your kids to private schools and paying your mortgage, that Amex bill gets pretty happy at the end of the month."

The importance of the fashion show

The importance of the fashion show
by Sara Gay Forden Bloomberg
Friday, December 6, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/79323.html

MILAN Minutes before a model strutted down the catwalk at Alexander McQueen's Paris show in October, seamstresses stitched the final seams of her ruffled, rainbow-colored gown. It took four months and 250 meters of fabric to make - and sold for E26,870.
.
The gown, dubbed the "Oyster Dress" for its undulating layers, was well worth the investment for Gucci Group NV, which owns 51 percent of the young English designer's label and is trying to build it into a successful luxury brand.

Only a few oyster dresses were sold - mostly to department stores for window displays - yet the design stole the show. It made the cover of Women's Wear Daily, got the show top billing in The New York Times and otherwise created the kind of buzz designers hope for.
.
At a time when sales in the $60 billion business remain at the same level as in 2000, fashion shows are one budget item not being cut out. They remain crucial to designers' strategies even as the free-spending consumers of the 1990s cut back because of slumping stock markets, job losses, slowing growth and fears of terrorism and war.
.
"There are no successful products without the fashion show, which is more important now than ever in the past," Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Holding NV's chief executive officer, said in an interview.
.
Fashion companies spend an estimated combined total of E200 million a year to roll out their men's and women's collections each fall and spring. That figure represents about 6 percent of the industry's overall investment in communications and advertising, according to the Milan consulting company Pambianco Strategie di Impresa SpA.
.
"The fashion show is the moment when our industry presents its new models to the trade," said Gucci's chief executive officer, Domenico De Sole, "just like the Paris car show or air show for those businesses."
.
The cost of a 20-minute fashion show averages from $100,000 to $500,000, while an advertising campaign costs around $1 million to produce. The show, which also sets the theme for the campaign, nets millions of dollars in free advertising as print and broadcast media feature photos and stories from the catwalks in the following months.
.
Some houses pepper their front rows with celebrities, which also boosts media coverage. Versace has made headlines by inviting Madonna, Chelsea Clinton, Britney Spears and Courtney Love to shows.
.
In September, the celebrity count in Giorgio Armani's front rows included Tina Turner, George Clooney, Sophia Loren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Olivier Martinez, Kim Cattrall, Milla Jovovich, Mira Sorvino, Joely Richardson, Anna Friel and Rosamund Pike. Each was dressed in Armani, which under normal practice they would be allowed to keep.
.
In return for attending the shows, celebrities often receive free travel and accommodations as well as free clothes and invitations to post-show parties.
.
Companies use the free advertising for their brands to promote their accessory lines. Purses, shoes and belts make up 30 percent to 50 percent of total sales at most leading European luxury brands, although they represent much more at Louis Vuitton.
.
The estimated value of the editorial coverage of the March women's fashion shows received by 10 labels in U.S. fashion magazines was worth more than $7 million, according to a tally completed for Bloomberg by Right Angle Research, a New York-based media consulting company. That is about how much it would have cost the companies to buy the equivalent number of ads.
.
"The houses are more than making their money back," said Right Angle's founder and owner, Larry Hotz.
.
The Internet, which makes photographs from the runways accessible around the world minutes after the paparazzi have stopped snapping, has turned the catwalks into a mass communication tool. The buying appointments with department stores and boutiques from around the world, held in the days after the show, lead directly to sales. Investors also keep abreast of fashion trends. "I follow the shows to get a sense of which designer is hot and which is not," said Scilla Huang Sun, who manages a E50 million luxury-goods fund for Clariden Bank. "A good show is not a guarantee of high turnover, but it is a sign of who might do well."
.
The first fashion show was held in London in 1905 by a designer called Lucile, and ready-to-wear shows now take place four times a year in New York, London, Milan and Paris.
.
Women's fall collections are presented in late February-early March; spring collections are in late September-early October. Men's shows are in January and July. Women's couture shows are held in Paris in January and in July. "A fashion show transmits a designer's message a lot more clearly than models in a showroom with undone hair, no makeup and no attitude, which can be very off-putting," said Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director of Neiman Marcus Group Inc., the U.S. department store company.
.
Designers often turn to stylists such as Lori Goldstein, Brana Wolf, Melanie Wolf and Bill Mullen, who help them focus, edit and present the clothes - with a price tag. For the set, lighting, music, model casting and choreography of a show, designers work with a director or producer as well.
.
"The key is to come up with a concept that can define a designer's identity season after season, but will also highlight the specifics of each collection," said Alexandre de Betak, who stages shows for established houses such as Christian Dior, Celine and Victoria's Secret, as well as the emerging designers Hussein Chalayan and Viktor Rolf.
.
Hence, light-bank towers and a mirrored runway that changes color each season are typical for a Christian Dior show, pink neon lights distinguish John Galliano's stage, while live music and stylized choreography are trademarks for Hussein Chalayan.
.
Without models, though, there would not be much to watch. Model fees for runway shows vary from $10,000 to $30,000 per show, depending on the model's experience, standing and whether an exclusive appearance is involved. "We cannot do business without fashion shows," said Concetta Lanciaux, an adviser to the president and executive vice president for synergies at LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. "The companies that do not show are in crisis. If you eliminate the show, you very rapidly decline, lose visibility, your capacity to inspire and capacity to be desired," she said.
.
Sara Gay Forden covers European fashion and the luxury business from Milan for Bloomberg News.

< < Back to Start of Article MILAN Minutes before a model strutted down the catwalk at Alexander McQueen's Paris show in October, seamstresses stitched the final seams of her ruffled, rainbow-colored gown. It took four months and 250 meters of fabric to make - and sold for E26,870.
.
The gown, dubbed the "Oyster Dress" for its undulating layers, was well worth the investment for Gucci Group NV, which owns 51 percent of the young English designer's label and is trying to build it into a successful luxury brand.
.
Only a few oyster dresses were sold - mostly to department stores for window displays - yet the design stole the show. It made the cover of Women's Wear Daily, got the show top billing in The New York Times and otherwise created the kind of buzz designers hope for.
.
At a time when sales in the $60 billion business remain at the same level as in 2000, fashion shows are one budget item not being cut out. They remain crucial to designers' strategies even as the free-spending consumers of the 1990s cut back because of slumping stock markets, job losses, slowing growth and fears of terrorism and war.
.
"There are no successful products without the fashion show, which is more important now than ever in the past," Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Holding NV's chief executive officer, said in an interview.
.
Fashion companies spend an estimated combined total of E200 million a year to roll out their men's and women's collections each fall and spring. That figure represents about 6 percent of the industry's overall investment in communications and advertising, according to the Milan consulting company Pambianco Strategie di Impresa SpA.
.
"The fashion show is the moment when our industry presents its new models to the trade," said Gucci's chief executive officer, Domenico De Sole, "just like the Paris car show or air show for those businesses."
.
The cost of a 20-minute fashion show averages from $100,000 to $500,000, while an advertising campaign costs around $1 million to produce. The show, which also sets the theme for the campaign, nets millions of dollars in free advertising as print and broadcast media feature photos and stories from the catwalks in the following months.
.
Some houses pepper their front rows with celebrities, which also boosts media coverage. Versace has made headlines by inviting Madonna, Chelsea Clinton, Britney Spears and Courtney Love to shows.
.
In September, the celebrity count in Giorgio Armani's front rows included Tina Turner, George Clooney, Sophia Loren, Kristin Scott Thomas, Olivier Martinez, Kim Cattrall, Milla Jovovich, Mira Sorvino, Joely Richardson, Anna Friel and Rosamund Pike. Each was dressed in Armani, which under normal practice they would be allowed to keep.
.
In return for attending the shows, celebrities often receive free travel and accommodations as well as free clothes and invitations to post-show parties.
.
Companies use the free advertising for their brands to promote their accessory lines. Purses, shoes and belts make up 30 percent to 50 percent of total sales at most leading European luxury brands, although they represent much more at Louis Vuitton.
.
The estimated value of the editorial coverage of the March women's fashion shows received by 10 labels in U.S. fashion magazines was worth more than $7 million, according to a tally completed for Bloomberg by Right Angle Research, a New York-based media consulting company. That is about how much it would have cost the companies to buy the equivalent number of ads.
.
"The houses are more than making their money back," said Right Angle's founder and owner, Larry Hotz.
.
The Internet, which makes photographs from the runways accessible around the world minutes after the paparazzi have stopped snapping, has turned the catwalks into a mass communication tool. The buying appointments with department stores and boutiques from around the world, held in the days after the show, lead directly to sales. Investors also keep abreast of fashion trends. "I follow the shows to get a sense of which designer is hot and which is not," said Scilla Huang Sun, who manages a E50 million luxury-goods fund for Clariden Bank. "A good show is not a guarantee of high turnover, but it is a sign of who might do well."
.
The first fashion show was held in London in 1905 by a designer called Lucile, and ready-to-wear shows now take place four times a year in New York, London, Milan and Paris.
.
Women's fall collections are presented in late February-early March; spring collections are in late September-early October. Men's shows are in January and July. Women's couture shows are held in Paris in January and in July. "A fashion show transmits a designer's message a lot more clearly than models in a showroom with undone hair, no makeup and no attitude, which can be very off-putting," said Joan Kaner, senior vice president and fashion director of Neiman Marcus Group Inc., the U.S. department store company.
.
Designers often turn to stylists such as Lori Goldstein, Brana Wolf, Melanie Wolf and Bill Mullen, who help them focus, edit and present the clothes - with a price tag. For the set, lighting, music, model casting and choreography of a show, designers work with a director or producer as well.
.
"The key is to come up with a concept that can define a designer's identity season after season, but will also highlight the specifics of each collection," said Alexandre de Betak, who stages shows for established houses such as Christian Dior, Celine and Victoria's Secret, as well as the emerging designers Hussein Chalayan and Viktor Rolf.
.
Hence, light-bank towers and a mirrored runway that changes color each season are typical for a Christian Dior show, pink neon lights distinguish John Galliano's stage, while live music and stylized choreography are trademarks for Hussein Chalayan.
.
Without models, though, there would not be much to watch. Model fees for runway shows vary from $10,000 to $30,000 per show, depending on the model's experience, standing and whether an exclusive appearance is involved. "We cannot do business without fashion shows," said Concetta Lanciaux, an adviser to the president and executive vice president for synergies at LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA. "The companies that do not show are in crisis. If you eliminate the show, you very rapidly decline, lose visibility, your capacity to inspire and capacity to be desired," she said.
.
Sara Gay Forden covers European fashion and the luxury business from Milan for Bloomberg News.

Consumers Finding Ways to Zap Telemarketer Calls

Consumers Finding Ways to Zap Telemarketer Calls
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/technology/18TELE.html

In their continuing struggle against telemarketers, consumers are powerless no more.

Telemarketers who call the home of Tono Kessler in Perkasie, Pa., are likely to hear this recorded message: "The number you are calling has Call Intercept, a service that requires callers whose telephone number does not appear on the Caller ID display to identify themselves before the call can continue." Few telemarketers take the trouble.

Federal and state laws already offer some protection against unethical and overly intrusive telemarketers. Twenty-seven states have established do-not-call lists, according to the Direct Marketing Association, and 12 million Americans have signed up. In New York State, 1.9 million households, or one in four, have joined the list, and in privacy-minded California, where half the population has unlisted phone numbers, a list will be introduced next year.

Like a growing number of Americans, Mr. Kessler subscribes to an automated service from his telephone company that blocks most unwanted calls. "I would estimate that 98 percent of the calls have stopped," he said.

Today, the Federal Trade Commission is expected to announce plans for a nationwide do-not-call list. Consumers have already signed up by the millions for the growing number of statewide do-not-call lists in more than half the states. And they are also turning to gadgets with names like Telezapper, and to services like Call Intercept (in effect, paying the phone company to help them cope with a nuisance brought to them, yes, through the phone company).

At the same time, telemarketers continue to come up with ways to circumvent those protective measures — for example, sending a dummy telephone number with their calls so that services like the one Mr. Kessler uses will not block the call automatically. "It's an arms race," said Anne Kraus-Keenan, the manager at Verizon Communications for the service that Mr. Kessler uses.

According to the Direct Marketing Association, telemarketers make 104 million calls a day to businesses and consumers in the United States. And although people say they hate the calls, somebody out there is buying. The industry reported revenue from consumers of $295.3 billion last year.

The revolution that brought about modern telemarketing is a device that has actually been around for many years, the predictive dialer. It rapidly dials the telephone, trying many lines at a time. That is why when you answer there is often a click and no one on the other end. The software that drives the system predicts when a sales representative will end a spiel and has a new call ready. "It increases productivity immensely," adding 15 minutes of productive talk time per hour of work, said Jerry Cerasale, vice president for government affairs at the Direct Marketing Association.

Those in the telemarketing industry say that the criticism they get from consumers is unwarranted. "Telemarketing is annoying — until it's something you need," said Keith Gill, vice president of MarkeTel Systems, a company in Regina, Saskatechewan, that makes equipment for call centers. "We're real people."

Reducing the number of calls comes down to knowing what Mr. Gill calls the magic phrase: "Please put me on your do-not-call list." He acknowledges, however, that his own father bought a TeleZapper, a $40 device that plays a tone that signals that a line has been disconnected. (Most predictive dialing machines drop those calls.)

Another manufacturer of telemarketing equipment admits to being irritated by calls that violate consumer protection laws — for example, prerecorded messages or pitches from companies that do not identify themselves at the outset. He compared his role, however, to that of a gun manufacturer. "I don't load the gun, and I don't fire the gun."

Federal and state laws already offer some protection against unethical and overly intrusive telemarketers. Twenty-seven states have established do-not-call lists, according to the Direct Marketing Association, and 12 million Americans have signed up. In New York State, 1.9 million households, or one in four, have joined the list, and in privacy-minded California, where half the population has unlisted phone numbers, a list will be introduced next year.

The lists are not perfect. Like many states, Texas allows some charity fund-raising, calls for political campaigns and calls deemed purely informative; these days, Texans often pick up the phone to hear, "This is not a sales call — it's for informational purposes only." Still, a study last June by the Information Policy Institute, a research group in New York City that opposes national lists, found that state lists were somewhat effective. Twenty-eight percent of those on state lists said they had received calls from local companies they do not otherwise do business with, compared with 52 percent of those who did not sign up.

The new federal do-not-call list will probably be challenged in court by the direct marketing industry, which says that the Federal Trade Commission has no jurisdiction in the matter, and which has argued that the law unconstitutionally restricts the companies' First Amendment rights.

Many of the current laws can be used to sue abusive telemarketers. New York State's Consumer Protection Board has obtained agreements from 40 companies to pay $572,410 for violations. And individuals sue as well. Robert Bulmash, author of "So You Want to Sue a Telemarketer," says that the 6,000 members of the anti-telemarketing organization he founded, Private Citizen, have been paid more than a million dollars in judgments and settlements since 1996. "They don't play chess. They don't garden. What they do as an avocation is, they go after telemarketers."

The growing population of angry people who do not want their dinner interrupted can be seen as a mob or as a grass-roots movement. But to entrepreneurs, they are something else: a market. Entertainers even pitch to it. Hating telemarketers has become a national pastime and fodder for late-night television comics, Web sites and just about all types of humor, high and low. No joke is too savage, no prank too cruel.

"When you talk about telemarketing, you really strike a nerve with a lot of people," said Tom Mabe, a comedian in Kentucky who makes a living selling recordings of crank responses to telemarketers.

In one conversation, he tells a salesman from a funeral home that it's lucky he called, because he's been contemplating suicide and was waiting for a sign from God. Then he asks if the company has a credit plan. Mr. Mabe said he had sold some 130,000 copies of his three CD's.

People are not just buying jokes, however. They are trying to buy privacy itself. "A mini-industry has sprung up of these products that people can buy and attach to their phones" in hopes of blocking the calls, said Beth Givens, head of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a San Diego-based group that advises people about protecting privacy and that has a Web page.

The company that makes the TeleZapper, the Royal Appliance Manufacturing Company, said that in the last four months of 2001, when the product was introduced, it sold 400,000 of them. (It did not release more recent figures.) But consumers do not have to buy such products to achieve similar results. Several Web sites make the tones available for free downloading and recording on answering machines (home.attbi .com/dakine/defeat.htm.). Other consumers simply let their answering machines screen their calls, often using Caller ID to help them pick up calls from friends and family.

The escalation never ends. Some makers of telemarketing equipment redesign their equipment to ignore the tones. Others program their dialers to leave recorded messages on answering machines and to hang up if someone answers the phone. Some can leave the messages on voice mail without ringing the phone at all.

Makers of the predictive dialers say that phone company call-screening services like the one Mr. Kessler uses are effective. Before signing up, he had grown so tired of telemarketers that he began to pester them back, "yelling at them, speaking to them in a made-up language, playing `Mary Had a Little Lamb' with the touch-tone keypad," he said. Then a friend in the business told him that "where he worked, if someone was mean and rude, they would pass that number around the room for everyone to call, and share it with other telemarketers to get even."

Where weirdness failed, technology saved the day. If a telemarketer does announce himself and Mr. Kessler does not want to accept the call, he presses "3" and a recording states that he does not accept phone solicitations, and requests placement on the do-not-call list. (He complains, however, that some friends have a hard time getting through.)

Ms. Kraus-Keenan, the Verizon manager, said that 85 percent of callers simply give up when asked to identify themselves. "That means your phone is ringing a lot less," she said. In the nearly two years that the service has been offered, Verizon has signed up more than one million customers, she said. Fees vary, but Verizon's customers pay $5 a month for the call intercept service and $7.99 more for the Caller ID service, which is also required. Similar services are offered by other telephone companies, including Qwest Communications, SBC Communications and BellSouth, which have signed up 1 million, 2.5 million and more than 1 million customers, respectively.

Many consumers who sign up for do-not-call lists retain call intercept services, said a Verizon spokeswoman, because they want "multiple lines of defense" against telemarketers.

It irks many privacy activists that consumers should have to pay telephone companies, which profit from selling services to telemarketers, to protect their privacy. "They're selling to both sides of the war and pocketing the money," Mr. Bulmash of the anti-telemarketing group said.

Paying a price for privacy is less frustrating, however, than what Cynthia Bell went through. Ms. Bell, an assistant district attorney for Travis County, Tex., and her husband are fans of the antics of Mr. Mabe, the comic. So they began telling unwanted callers that the party they were seeking had died. They tried to outdo each other, spinning tales of toppling refrigerators and runaway recycling trucks.

They amused themselves until one day Ms. Bell received a letter from a credit card company notifying "the estate of Cynthia Bell" that her card was being canceled. Ms. Bell called to explain that she was, in fact, alive, and to correct the record and reinstate the card. But a few months later she received a second notice of her death from the company, and simply canceled the card.

That was the end of it, she thought. But a few days after the second letter, she received yet another telemarketing call at home.

"This guy," she said, "was hawking tombstones."

China sets a hot pace of growth

China sets a hot pace of growth
by Joseph Kahn NYT
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/80654.html

SHANGHAI China's economy has defied the worldwide slowdown and continued its long streak of rapid growth, raising the prospect that it has begun to pull its weight as an economic engine for Asia and for the world.
.
With the United States, Europe and Japan all experiencing sluggish growth, China's economy is expected to expand by a robust 8 percent this year, fueled by a surge in exports, soaring foreign investment and a housing boom.
.
Even if its growth cools next year, as most economists predict, China has begun to rival Japan as the pivotal player in the Asian economy.

China has become the largest export market for both South Korea and Taiwan, for example, and has elbowed out Japan to become the biggest Asian exporter to the United States.
.
"China has already become the largest market for several East Asian countries," said Nicholas Lardy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It has become deeply integrated with the region and to an extent is pulling all its neighbors along with it."
.
In size, the Chinese economy remains far behind those of Japan and the United States. Chinese output is about one-quarter of Japan's and one-ninth that of the United States.
.
Even if China continues to grow much more quickly than the others, it will be the middle of the century before China becomes the world's largest economy.
.
Beijing also has moved exceedingly slowly to tackle the troubles of its state banking system and to dismantle unprofitable state enterprises.
.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that both sectors will drag down economic growth over the next few years. Some economists argue that bad debts pose a severe long-term threat to China.
.
Yet those problems have been around for many years, and they have not stopped China from beginning to realize its potential.
.
This year, China appears set to attract a record $50 billion in foreign investment, many times the amount received by any other developing country and perhaps more than the United States. Much of this investment has gone into bolstering China's position as the world's assembly line. It is now a leader in almost every category of manufactured goods, from shoes to semiconductors.
.
China produces so much, in fact, that some economists say it has helped create a glut of industrial products that has undermined prices - hurting profits but helping consumers - around the globe. China's home market has experienced falling prices for five consecutive years. So far this year, consumer prices have declined 1 percent. Fierce competition and falling prices have prompted multinational corporations to move production lines to China, which can make goods for less than its Asian neighbors can.
.
China's growth thus has come partly at the expense of the region in general. Still, about half of its exports, or about $275 billion of exports last year, consists of products made in China by foreign companies or joint ventures of Chinese and foreign companies. China also has begun pulling in imports at a record pace. Under terms of its entry into the World Trade Organization last December, Beijing agreed to reduce tariffs sharply. They now average 15 percent, about one-fourth of their peak level in the 1980s. It must reduce them further, to 9 percent on average, by 2005.
.
In one sign of its growing importance to the world economy, China passed the United States this year as the world's largest importer of steel, helping absorb some global overcapacity.
.
China already produces more steel than Japan and America combined, but a building boom and a surge in auto production led to imports of 23 million metric tons in the nine months through September, compared with 22 million tons for the United States in the period.
.
Or consider the Asian tourist industry. The number of visitors to Southeast Asia from both Japan and the United States has fallen below the levels of six years ago, according to Singapore government statistics.
.
But mainland Chinese are traveling as never before, with the number doubling in the past six years and continuing to grow.

< < Back to Start of Article Economy emerging as a global engine

SHANGHAI China's economy has defied the worldwide slowdown and continued its long streak of rapid growth, raising the prospect that it has begun to pull its weight as an economic engine for Asia and for the world.
.
With the United States, Europe and Japan all experiencing sluggish growth, China's economy is expected to expand by a robust 8 percent this year, fueled by a surge in exports, soaring foreign investment and a housing boom.
.
Even if its growth cools next year, as most economists predict, China has begun to rival Japan as the pivotal player in the Asian economy.
.
China has become the largest export market for both South Korea and Taiwan, for example, and has elbowed out Japan to become the biggest Asian exporter to the United States.
.
"China has already become the largest market for several East Asian countries," said Nicholas Lardy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "It has become deeply integrated with the region and to an extent is pulling all its neighbors along with it."
.
In size, the Chinese economy remains far behind those of Japan and the United States. Chinese output is about one-quarter of Japan's and one-ninth that of the United States.
.
Even if China continues to grow much more quickly than the others, it will be the middle of the century before China becomes the world's largest economy.
.
Beijing also has moved exceedingly slowly to tackle the troubles of its state banking system and to dismantle unprofitable state enterprises.
.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development estimates that both sectors will drag down economic growth over the next few years. Some economists argue that bad debts pose a severe long-term threat to China.
.
Yet those problems have been around for many years, and they have not stopped China from beginning to realize its potential.
.
This year, China appears set to attract a record $50 billion in foreign investment, many times the amount received by any other developing country and perhaps more than the United States. Much of this investment has gone into bolstering China's position as the world's assembly line. It is now a leader in almost every category of manufactured goods, from shoes to semiconductors.
.
China produces so much, in fact, that some economists say it has helped create a glut of industrial products that has undermined prices - hurting profits but helping consumers - around the globe. China's home market has experienced falling prices for five consecutive years. So far this year, consumer prices have declined 1 percent. Fierce competition and falling prices have prompted multinational corporations to move production lines to China, which can make goods for less than its Asian neighbors can.
.
China's growth thus has come partly at the expense of the region in general. Still, about half of its exports, or about $275 billion of exports last year, consists of products made in China by foreign companies or joint ventures of Chinese and foreign companies. China also has begun pulling in imports at a record pace. Under terms of its entry into the World Trade Organization last December, Beijing agreed to reduce tariffs sharply. They now average 15 percent, about one-fourth of their peak level in the 1980s. It must reduce them further, to 9 percent on average, by 2005.
.
In one sign of its growing importance to the world economy, China passed the United States this year as the world's largest importer of steel, helping absorb some global overcapacity.
.
China already produces more steel than Japan and America combined, but a building boom and a surge in auto production led to imports of 23 million metric tons in the nine months through September, compared with 22 million tons for the United States in the period.
.
Or consider the Asian tourist industry. The number of visitors to Southeast Asia from both Japan and the United States has fallen below the levels of six years ago, according to Singapore government statistics.
.
But mainland Chinese are traveling as never before, with the number doubling in the past six years and continuing to grow.

Bank loans soup up car sales in China

Bank loans soup up car sales in China
by Peter S. Goodman WP
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/80610.html

Her eyes scanned the vehicles at the largest open-air car market in China, then settled on a fire-engine-red, Chinese-built Volkswagen Passat sedan. All that stood between her and driving it away was 239,000 yuan ($28,870).

For Mo Ting, 25, that sticker price was clearly a stretch. Together, she and her husband bring home about $900 a month, good money in a country where hundreds of millions of people still subsist on less than that in a whole year.

If they put aside their other dream, home ownership, they could just make it if they employed a means just now catching on here: getting a car loan from a bank.

As China's auto market booms - it is the fastest-growing in the world, up 55 percent in the first 11 months of this year - foreign and domestic manufacturers are counting on new forms of financing to continue to expand the universe of buyers. Banks are obliging by aggressively marketing car loans to support an industry the government sees as crucial to China's transformation from an agricultural country into an industrial powerhouse.
.
"The auto industry is the pillar industry in China," said Lu Juntao, an official in the personal banking department of the government-controlled Agricultural Bank of China, which, with a 34 percent market share, is the country's largest source of car loans. "The development of the industry can stir up the development of other industries."
.
For the banks, auto loans, along with home mortgages, are seen as a key means of improving balance sheets laden with bad debts to state-owned companies, a way to shift their cash to a crop of increasingly high-earning Chinese consumers.
.
But as car loans become more popular, totaling $6 billion in the first nine months of 2002 by official estimates, signs are emerging that a credit bubble may be forming. The banks are lending to nearly all comers on easy terms, without much assurance that their customers can repay them. And many consumers, now getting their first taste of credit in a traditionally risk-averse society, are taking on more than they can handle.
.
The banks lending the money, along with the insurance companies that often cover the loans, remain remarkably ignorant about their customers' finances. Credit checks are rudimentary and perfunctory, bank executives acknowledge.
.
"We really can't say the credit system here is good," said Jia Xinguang of China National Automotive Industry Consulting Development Corp., a government-affiliated group. "In fact, there is no credit system."
.
Many households with monthly incomes of $400 to $500 are taking on debts that obligate them to hand over half of that toward paying off their vehicles.
.
In the United States, lenders typically refuse credit once borrowers' payment obligations reach 40 percent of their income.
.
Some 30 percent of all car purchases will be financed by 2007 as more young people with good jobs but little savings and little aversion to debt enter the market for new cars, Automotive Resources Asia forecasts.
.
"Banks are still playing a very small role in China's car market today, but their potential is huge," said Yale Zhang, an analyst at the group. "We're seeing a taking off of private purchasing power."
.
Prices for cars are falling fast as more production plants are set up. But the demand cannot sustain so many plants, most analysts say.
.
A decade ago, China's car industry was driven purely by sales to government departments, military units and government-owned ventures. Today, 40 percent of all cars in China are sold to individuals.
.
During the first 11 months of this year, more than 1 million passenger cars were sold in China, according to government data.

< < Back to Start of Article Her eyes scanned the vehicles at the largest open-air car market in China, then settled on a fire-engine-red, Chinese-built Volkswagen Passat sedan. All that stood between her and driving it away was 239,000 yuan ($28,870).
.
For Mo Ting, 25, that sticker price was clearly a stretch. Together, she and her husband bring home about $900 a month, good money in a country where hundreds of millions of people still subsist on less than that in a whole year.
.
If they put aside their other dream, home ownership, they could just make it if they employed a means just now catching on here: getting a car loan from a bank.
.
As China's auto market booms - it is the fastest-growing in the world, up 55 percent in the first 11 months of this year - foreign and domestic manufacturers are counting on new forms of financing to continue to expand the universe of buyers. Banks are obliging by aggressively marketing car loans to support an industry the government sees as crucial to China's transformation from an agricultural country into an industrial powerhouse.
.
"The auto industry is the pillar industry in China," said Lu Juntao, an official in the personal banking department of the government-controlled Agricultural Bank of China, which, with a 34 percent market share, is the country's largest source of car loans. "The development of the industry can stir up the development of other industries."
.
For the banks, auto loans, along with home mortgages, are seen as a key means of improving balance sheets laden with bad debts to state-owned companies, a way to shift their cash to a crop of increasingly high-earning Chinese consumers.
.
But as car loans become more popular, totaling $6 billion in the first nine months of 2002 by official estimates, signs are emerging that a credit bubble may be forming. The banks are lending to nearly all comers on easy terms, without much assurance that their customers can repay them. And many consumers, now getting their first taste of credit in a traditionally risk-averse society, are taking on more than they can handle.
.
The banks lending the money, along with the insurance companies that often cover the loans, remain remarkably ignorant about their customers' finances. Credit checks are rudimentary and perfunctory, bank executives acknowledge.
.
"We really can't say the credit system here is good," said Jia Xinguang of China National Automotive Industry Consulting Development Corp., a government-affiliated group. "In fact, there is no credit system."
.
Many households with monthly incomes of $400 to $500 are taking on debts that obligate them to hand over half of that toward paying off their vehicles.
.
In the United States, lenders typically refuse credit once borrowers' payment obligations reach 40 percent of their income.
.
Some 30 percent of all car purchases will be financed by 2007 as more young people with good jobs but little savings and little aversion to debt enter the market for new cars, Automotive Resources Asia forecasts.
.
"Banks are still playing a very small role in China's car market today, but their potential is huge," said Yale Zhang, an analyst at the group. "We're seeing a taking off of private purchasing power."
.
Prices for cars are falling fast as more production plants are set up. But the demand cannot sustain so many plants, most analysts say.
.
A decade ago, China's car industry was driven purely by sales to government departments, military units and government-owned ventures. Today, 40 percent of all cars in China are sold to individuals.
.
During the first 11 months of this year, more than 1 million passenger cars were sold in China, according to government data.

Japan: A lost economy?

A lost economy: Japan battles the past in its search for a way forward
by James Brooke NYT
Wednesday, December 18, 2002
http://www.iht.com/articles/80657.html

TOKYO Japan's lost decade is stretching toward a lost baker's dozen. Forecast growth of 1 percent in 2002 is expected to dribble down to 0.1 percent in 2003, according to a recent survey of economists.

Political gridlock blocks deregulation, smothering growth opportunities in health, education, housing and travel. As tax revenue dwindles to half of government expenditures, elderly conservative legislators cling to the ancien régime by printing more and more bonds. And the fight against bad bank loans looks like a frantic scene from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as deflation and economic stagnation create bad loans as fast as banks can write them off.
.
Japan will remain the world's second-largest economy for at least two more decades, but it will not be the locomotive for a world recovery next year. Instead, it will be a series of well-appointed Pullman coaches, where the passengers sense that cracks are appearing in the wheels.
.
"Japan is like Germany, falling into a dependency on the American consumer," said Kathy Matsui, managing director of Goldman Sachs Japan Ltd. "The only way out is to deregulate. But deregulation is the last option for politicians."
.
Overpriced housing, overpriced recreation and a looming health-care shortage for the growing legions of elderly all offer opportunities for growth if the nation chooses to tackle them. But the governing Liberal Democratic Party has more members in Parliament over the age of 70 than under 40.
.
For the grandfathers wielding behind-the-scenes power in Parliament, Japan, with the world's longest life expectancies, looks pretty good today, compared with their childhoods in the 1940s and 1950s.
.
Today's politicians do not expect to be around when today's bills come due. The amount of government debt is the equivalent of 140 percent of gross domestic product, the highest ratio for a major market economy. Two of the three leading credit rating agencies, Moody's Investor Service Inc. and Fitch Ratings, downgraded Japan's debt rating in 2002.
.
The Japanese miracle was hailed as a triumph of the Japanese people. But the Japanese malaise is now the fault of outsiders. Stocks in Tokyo are dragged down by New York markets. Japan "imports deflation from China" - a code phrase for the fact that Chinese workers will do the same assembly work as Japanese for 5 cents on the dollar.
.
Like alchemists, financial officials write lengthy newspaper essays, trying to divine a magic monetary formula that will turn recession into resurrection. Voices for deregulation are relegated to the political fringe.
.
Without much help from the government, Japan struggles to adjust to Asia's great economic fact of the 21st century: the embrace of market economics by China, a country with 10 times the population.
.
While the government worries about dropping prices, the people worry about dropping salaries. White-collar incomes have fallen for 21 months. Summer and winter bonuses, responsible for as much as a third of incomes, are down by a record 5 percent. Next year, the government plans to cut some civil service pay and retirement allowances.
.
More significant, new workers are having a hard time finding well-paying jobs. The latest government statistics show that in August there were 420,000 fewer full-time jobs than a year earlier but 400,000 additional temporary jobs.
.
Unemployment is expected to creep up to 6 percent next year from 5.5 percent now, a postwar record. Unofficial unemployment is already at European levels, around 8.5 percent.
.
"The depth and duration of the next downturn will be shallower and milder than in the last three recessions of the 1990s," said Mikihiro Matsuoka, an economist for Deutsche Securities in Tokyo.
.
He added, "Unless deflation is prevented, the disposal of bad loans will be an endless pain."
.
Kenneth Courtis, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia, is one of many foreign financial players who are quietly voting with their feet, devoting more and more time to China and less and less to Japan.
.
Bad debts are paralyzing the Japanese banking system "in a way which hasn't happened in a major economy since the system broke down in the 1930s," Courtis said.
.
"Remember Thailand? When it imploded, it shook markets from London to Wall Street, yet Japan's economy is 46 times larger."

< < Back to Start of Article TOKYO Japan's lost decade is stretching toward a lost baker's dozen. Forecast growth of 1 percent in 2002 is expected to dribble down to 0.1 percent in 2003, according to a recent survey of economists.
.
Political gridlock blocks deregulation, smothering growth opportunities in health, education, housing and travel. As tax revenue dwindles to half of government expenditures, elderly conservative legislators cling to the ancien régime by printing more and more bonds. And the fight against bad bank loans looks like a frantic scene from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" as deflation and economic stagnation create bad loans as fast as banks can write them off.
.
Japan will remain the world's second-largest economy for at least two more decades, but it will not be the locomotive for a world recovery next year. Instead, it will be a series of well-appointed Pullman coaches, where the passengers sense that cracks are appearing in the wheels.
.
"Japan is like Germany, falling into a dependency on the American consumer," said Kathy Matsui, managing director of Goldman Sachs Japan Ltd. "The only way out is to deregulate. But deregulation is the last option for politicians."
.
Overpriced housing, overpriced recreation and a looming health-care shortage for the growing legions of elderly all offer opportunities for growth if the nation chooses to tackle them. But the governing Liberal Democratic Party has more members in Parliament over the age of 70 than under 40.
.
For the grandfathers wielding behind-the-scenes power in Parliament, Japan, with the world's longest life expectancies, looks pretty good today, compared with their childhoods in the 1940s and 1950s.
.
Today's politicians do not expect to be around when today's bills come due. The amount of government debt is the equivalent of 140 percent of gross domestic product, the highest ratio for a major market economy. Two of the three leading credit rating agencies, Moody's Investor Service Inc. and Fitch Ratings, downgraded Japan's debt rating in 2002.
.
The Japanese miracle was hailed as a triumph of the Japanese people. But the Japanese malaise is now the fault of outsiders. Stocks in Tokyo are dragged down by New York markets. Japan "imports deflation from China" - a code phrase for the fact that Chinese workers will do the same assembly work as Japanese for 5 cents on the dollar.
.
Like alchemists, financial officials write lengthy newspaper essays, trying to divine a magic monetary formula that will turn recession into resurrection. Voices for deregulation are relegated to the political fringe.
.
Without much help from the government, Japan struggles to adjust to Asia's great economic fact of the 21st century: the embrace of market economics by China, a country with 10 times the population.
.
While the government worries about dropping prices, the people worry about dropping salaries. White-collar incomes have fallen for 21 months. Summer and winter bonuses, responsible for as much as a third of incomes, are down by a record 5 percent. Next year, the government plans to cut some civil service pay and retirement allowances.
.
More significant, new workers are having a hard time finding well-paying jobs. The latest government statistics show that in August there were 420,000 fewer full-time jobs than a year earlier but 400,000 additional temporary jobs.
.
Unemployment is expected to creep up to 6 percent next year from 5.5 percent now, a postwar record. Unofficial unemployment is already at European levels, around 8.5 percent.
.
"The depth and duration of the next downturn will be shallower and milder than in the last three recessions of the 1990s," said Mikihiro Matsuoka, an economist for Deutsche Securities in Tokyo.
.
He added, "Unless deflation is prevented, the disposal of bad loans will be an endless pain."
.
Kenneth Courtis, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs Asia, is one of many foreign financial players who are quietly voting with their feet, devoting more and more time to China and less and less to Japan.
.
Bad debts are paralyzing the Japanese banking system "in a way which hasn't happened in a major economy since the system broke down in the 1930s," Courtis said.
.
"Remember Thailand? When it imploded, it shook markets from London to Wall Street, yet Japan's economy is 46 times larger."

Conseco Files for Chapter 11

Conseco Files for Chapter 11
By KENNETH N. GILPIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/18/business/18CND-CONS.html

In a widely anticipated move, Conseco Inc., the onetime high-flying insurance and finance company, is filing for protection from its creditors under Chapter 11 of the Federal Bankruptcy Code.

Details of the filing, which were still being worked out this morning, were not available. Though large, the filing would not be one of the biggest on record.

In its most recent quarterly report, Conseco, which is based in Carmel, Ind., listed $52.2 billion in assets. But its insurance subsidiaries, like Bankers National Life Insurance Company, are not part of the filing.

Mark Lubbers, a Conseco spokesman, said this morning that the insurance companies represent well over half of Conseco's total assets.

Seeking protection are two holding companies, Conseco Inc. and the Conseco Insurance Holding Company, the parent of Conseco's insurance companies.

Together, those two entities have $3.8 billion worth of bank and private debt. In addition, Conseco has an additional $2.4 billion worth of outstanding obligations in the form of trust-preferred securities and preferred equity.

Conseco's insurance companies are not included in the filing because unlike most other corporations, insurance companies are not eligible to file for bankruptcy. They are governed instead by state laws primarily designed to protect policyholders.

In a statement released this morning, Jose Montemayor, commissioner of the Texas Department of Insurance, said: "It's important for consumers to understand that state insurance laws make the Conseco insurance companies separate entities, distinct and apart from the holding company. In effect, there is a legal `firewall' between a holding company and any insurance company it owns."

Always an acquisitive operation, Conseco's fortunes took a disastrous turn for the worse following its decision in 1998 to acquire the Green Tree Financial Corporation, a mobil-home lender, for $6.44 billion in stock.

Conseco made the deal just as the mobile home business peaked. Eventually, the company was saddled with billions in debt and went into a tailspin.

The bankruptcy filing "is not a surprise," said Patrick Finnegan, a senior analyst at Moody's Investors Service.

"This was one the market, the ratings agencies and all observers saw coming a while ago," Mr. Finnegan said. "For much of the last decade, we have have sub-investment grade ratings on this company. It was a highly levered operation."

Gary C. Wendt, the former head of General Electric's GE Capital unit, was hired in the late 1990's to try to turn Conseco around.

Despite efforts to slash costs by selling assets, Mr. Wendt was unable to generate sufficient cash from Conseco's operating companies to adequately service its debt.

In August, Conseco said it would stop making payments on certain notes. A month later, after a 30-day grace period, the company defaulted on its public debt.

In October Mr. Wendt resigned as chief executive. He was succeeded by William J. Shea.

For the quarter ended Sept. 30, Conseco said it lost $1.77 billion, or $5.11 a share. Its stock has been delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. And the company faces investigations by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Alabama Securities Commission.

Conservatives Led the Way in Criticizing Lott's Remarks

Conservatives Led the Way in Criticizing Lott's Remarks
By JIM RUTENBERG and FELICITY BARRINGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/politics/17CONS.html

Early, widespread and harsh criticism by conservative commentators and publications has provided much of the tinder for the political fires surrounding Senator Trent Lott since his favorable comments about the segregationist presidential campaign of 1948.

Conservative columnists, including Andrew Sullivan, William Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, and publications like National Review and The Wall Street Journal have castigated Mr. Lott for his remarks at Senator Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, arguing that the conservative movement's credibility on racially tinged issues like affirmative action and school vouchers has been squandered.

The intensity of the criticism has even surprised Democrats, who say they are unused to seeing the conservative press take on one of its own so ferociously.

Mr. Sullivan, on his Web site, and Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Washington Post, are among those who have called on Mr. Lott to resign. Others, like Sean Hannity of Fox News Channel and the radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, have said the remarks were indefensible but were not necessarily reason enough for Mr. Lott to step down. An editorial in The Wall Street Journal stopped short of a direct call for Mr. Lott's ouster, but named three Republicans it preferred in the post.

The responses by conservatives have provided a marked contrast to the contention — put forth most recently by former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore — that the nation's conservative news media acts as a monolithic Republican support system.

Robert Bartley, the editor of The Wall Street Journal, said, "I don't know that there's anything close," when asked if he could remember such a revolt against a conservative leader by those who are usually like-minded on the issues.

Richard Lowry, the editor of National Review, said that young conservatives particularly feel undermined by Mr. Lott's comment.

"The reaction to this on the right has been tinged with outrage," Mr. Lowry said. "I think that's a product of decades of hard work that conservatives have done on racially charged issues out of idealism and principle. To have those positions tarred, even inadvertently, with this backwardness on race is extremely distressing."

The intensity of the criticism has even surprised Democrats, who say they are unused to seeing the conservative press take on one of its own so ferociously.

"It's a level of cannibalism that we generally don't see," said Chris Lehane, the Democratic strategist who was the spokesman for Al Gore's presidential campaign.

Some Democrats, in fact, are crediting conservative commentators with providing the momentum for the story, which was first reported only in dribs and drabs in the mainstream press.

Even before prominent Democrats joined the criticism, conservatives with active Web sites were posting highly critical columns.

Mr. Sullivan, one of the first conservatives to highlight the issue, wrote: "After his disgusting remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th-birthday party, it seems to me that the Republican Party has a simple choice. Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader; or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans.

"Why are the Republican commentators so silent about this? And the liberals?"

Mr. Sullivan and the few who weighed in on the issue early on were not alone for long. In his call last Thursday for Mr. Lott to resign from the leadership, Mr. Krauthammer wrote, "What is so appalling about Lott's remarks is not the bigotry but the blindess," and he noted that "the civil rights movement forever set the standard for social transformation in America."

"Lott sees the civil rights movement and `all these problems over all these years.' He missed the whole story," Mr. Krauthamer wrote.

The next day, the lead editorial in The Wall Street Journal all but called for Mr. Lott's resignation, saying: "The Senate Republicans will now have to defend against the race card that Mr. Lott gave their enemies to play. In light of this, it's remarkable that Senate Republicans have shown the restraint they have."

The editorial named three Republican senators — Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Bill Frist of Tennessee and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania — who, the editors thought "would all do better as G.O.P. leaders than Mr. Lott."

The televised debate, meanwhile, has at times resembled a bizarre world with various guests taking wholly unexpected positions.

Last Wednesday, "The O'Reilly Factor," the Fox News Channel talk show with Bill O'Reilly as host, featured a white guest from the conservative Family Research Council, Kenneth L. Connor, who skewered Mr. Lott for his remarks. Squaring off against him on the program, was Kevin Martin, of the African American Republican Leadership Council.

"I'm defending it," Mr. Martin said, because "both sides, conservative and liberal, are playing this for their own political agenda."

The split within the ranks of conservative commentators is not over the wisdom of Mr. Lott's remarks, but over calls for his resignation.

"There's really not a lot of disagreement about how conservatives feel about what he said," said Sean Hannity the conservative co-host of "Hannity & Colmes" on the Fox News Channel who also hosts a radio program. "They didn't like it; they know it's wrong."

Mr. Hannity has been joined by Robert Novak and Tucker Carlson, the conservative side of the desk on CNN's political talk show "Crossfire," in his argument that Mr. Lott should not give up his leadership.

Mr. O'Reilly began last week by saying, "I have looked at Trent Lott's record, and I don't see that vitriolic thing toward the blacks," but ended it with "the people of the United States must hold those in power responsible for what they do and say."

Mr. Limbaugh has criticized Mr. Lott for the remarks but has warned that his resignation could embolden Democrats. He has also accused "conservative punditry" of trying to prove to mainstream colleagues that they are not "like all those people in the South."

Mr. Carlson said in an interview that some conservatives were calling for Mr. Lott's resignation less out of their professed moral outrage than from their long-held belief that he is too accommodating to opponents.

"They don't think that Trent Lott is fundamentally on their side," he said, "that he is not fundamentally a conservative."

And, of course, there are those who believe that Mr. Lott's continued position in leadership will become a powerful hammer against all Republicans, including the president, during the 2004 campaign.

C.I.A. Chief Prospers From Bond With Bush

C.I.A. Chief Prospers From Bond With Bush
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/politics/17TENE.html

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16 — When George W. Bush was president-elect, he got some fateful advice about his daily C.I.A. briefing from a man who would know.

Mr. Bush's father, the only president to have served as C.I.A. director, was in the unique position of having both given and received the secret morning updates, and often told friends that his time in the 1970's at the C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., was one of the best jobs he ever had.

He unequivocally instructed his son, said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff, to develop a close relationship with the person who ran the spy organization and oversaw the other intelligence agencies that make up America's covert empire.

"The former president reinforced how important it was that a president have face-to-face meetings with the C.I.A. director, rather than just receive his intelligence reports on paper," Mr. Card said in an interview last week.

"And so the president-elect told me, when I was the chief of staff-designate: 'Make sure that happens. I want to see the C.I.A. director and be able to talk with him.' "

At that moment one of the most unlikely and important relationships in Washington was born. President Bush, the 56-year-old Texas-bred product of Andover, Yale and the Republican establishment, would bond with George J. Tenet, the 49-year-old gregarious Clinton appointee who once worked as a busboy in his father's Greek diner in Little Neck, Queens. In those days, Mr. Tenet once joked, he had "the biggest mouth in town."

Two years into the relationship, Mr. Tenet has faced bitter public criticism over the intelligence failures that preceded the Sept. 11 attacks, yet his link with Mr. Bush has not only survived but been strengthened by the ongoing campaign against terrorism and the crisis over Iraq. Friends and critics of Mr. Tenet agree that the president's trust explains why an embattled C.I.A. director caught unaware by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon remains in his job. Last week, Mr. Tenet was once again under fire as a joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks issued a report sharply criticizing the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies for failing to thwart the plots, which killed more than 3,000 people.

"The most important factor in determining the director of central intelligence's success is his relationship with the president of the United States," said John M. Deutch, Mr. Tenet's immediate predecessor as C.I.A. chief. "And George Tenet has that as well as anybody ever has." Mr. Tenet declined to be interviewed for this article.

Administration officials say Mr. Bush will not forget how Mr. Tenet regrouped after Sept. 11, and marshaled C.I.A. forces in Afghanistan to work with opposition forces to the Taliban, buy off warlords and direct American bombers to critical targets. But equally important, friends say, is that the two men have a similar chemistry.

"They're pragmatists, they talk sort of `male talk,' " said Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was co-chairman of the committee investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. "George is a very smart person, but his rhetoric isn't theoretical. It's blunt. It's straightforward."

Advisers say Mr. Bush, who grew up with resentments about the East Coast elite, likes Mr. Tenet for his lack of pretense. In a speech in 1999 at his alma mater, Benjamin N. Cardozo High School in Queens, Mr. Tenet called himself "the short fat guy from Little Neck," and told the crowd that "many of you will go on to college and you will run into people who went to fancy prep schools and who appear to have a higher quality education than you do. They don't."

Former C.I.A. officials say Mr. Tenet's relationship with Mr. Bush's father is also a critical factor in his success. The 41st president was overwhelmed, friends say, when Mr. Tenet named the agency headquarters after him in 1999. Agency officials point out that it was Republicans in Congress — not Mr. Tenet, then President Bill Clinton's C.I.A. director — who pushed through the legislation for the renaming. But at the ceremony, Mr. Tenet and the former president were seated next to each other and appeared to bond strongly. It was the kind of gesture that feeds Mr. Tenet's reputation as a man who brilliantly cultivates those important to his advancement.

Friends of the first President Bush will not say whether he advised his son to keep Mr. Tenet on the job — "the president made his own decision," Mr. Card said. But no one disputes that the elder Mr. Bush has long said that C.I.A. directors should be apolitical, and that he felt wronged at the end of the Ford administration in 1977 when President Carter would not keep him on as director.

Mr. Tenet has benefited from other political mentors, too, and sharpened his political skills as a top aide to former Senator David Boren, the Democrat from Oklahoma who headed the Senate Intelligence Committee in the 1980's. "He has not politicized the office and therefore he has retained excellent ties with leaders of both political parties," said Mr. Boren.

Last Wednesday, Mr. Tenet began his day with more thunderbolts cracking down from Capitol Hill. The joint Congressional committee investigating Sept. 11 issued its bad-news report, and Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican who is Mr. Tenet's most caustic critic, said the C.I.A. director should be held personally responsible.

Perhaps worst of all, at least from Mr. Tenet's point of view, Mr. Shelby and the committee called for a cabinet-level national intelligence chief who would threaten Mr. Tenet's authority. Mr. Shelby, in a separate report, said "one of the great unanswered questions" of Sept. 11 was how Mr. Tenet "could have considered himself to be `at war' against this country's most important foreign threat without bothering to use the full range of authorities at his disposal."

In explaining Mr. Shelby's animosity, C.I.A. officials cite what they call "The Day of Great Affront," when the senator was not seated on the dais at the C.I.A.-renaming ceremony. Mr. Shelby has long denied holding a grudge against Mr. Tenet over the event.

Mr. Tenet's strong ties to the Bushes have proved far more important than his poor relations with Mr. Shelby. At a black-tie dinner of the Republican establishment honoring Mr. Tenet last week in Georgetown, father and son sent letters wrapping Mr. Tenet in familial devotion.

"You are a true patriot, an asset to our nation and a valued adviser," President Bush said in his message, which was read aloud to the crowd at a dinner of the Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom at the Four Seasons Hotel. Former President Bush was no less effusive. Mr. Tenet, he wrote, was doing a "superb job" as his son's intelligence chief. He added that the problems he himself faced as C.I.A. director a quarter century ago "are nowhere near as complicated as the problems faced today."

Mr. Tenet clearly agreed with that assessment. That night his speech amounted to a lengthy defense of the agency's knowledge of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11 and its success in capturing terrorist leaders since then. Echoing favorite phrases of his president, Mr. Tenet painted a picture of a C.I.A. that was at the center of the campaign against terrorism.

"We are still in the `hunt phase' of this war — the painstaking pursuit of individual Al Qaeda members and their cells," Mr. Tenet said.

Mr. Tenet's influence derives from his near-daily half-hour meeting in the Oval Office with Mr. Bush, usually starting at 8 a.m. It is the president's first briefing of the day and is attended by Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Card and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. It is followed by a half-hour briefing from Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, but administration officials say Mr. Bush has not developed the camaraderie with Mr. Mueller that he has with Mr. Tenet.

Few other presidents have so regularly seen their C.I.A. directors. (R. James Woolsey, President Clinton's first C.I.A. director, met with him so rarely that when a small plane crashed into the White House South Lawn in 1994, the joke at the C.I.A. was that it was Mr. Woolsey trying get in to see the president.)

Mr. Bush sees Mr. Tenet more often than he does Secretary of State Colin L. Powell or even Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In recent months Mr. Rumsfeld has challenged Mr. Tenet's authority by proposing a new position at the Pentagon, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and by setting up his own intelligence unit to search for Iraq's links to terrorists. At least one defense official has said the tension between the Pentagon and the C.I.A. is intensifying as the administration prepares for a confrontation with Iraq.

Although C.I.A. officials will not discuss such operations publicly, the agency is widely believed to be running operatives into northern Iraq to work with Kurdish opposition groups to Saddam Hussein.

For now, then, Mr. Tenet's position seems secure. The White House has not endorsed the Congressional proposal to establish a domestic intelligence czar and is unlikely to do so until the newly established commission examining the Sept. 11 attacks completes its work.

"The president has confidence in how George Tenet does his work, and how he analyses intelligence," Mr. Card said, "but also how he suggests how the intelligence should be used — what actions should be taken because of it. In the war against terrorism, many of the soldiers are actually under the command of George Tenet, a kind of covert army. It's something that we don't have full appreciation of, but they are on the front lines."

In the meantime, Mr. Tenet scoffed last week at recurring talk that should things go badly for him at the agency, he would run for Congress from Queens.

`Never," Mr. Tenet said during the cocktail crush at the Nixon Center dinner. "It's not going to happen. I've got the best job in government."

A Top Antitrust Lawyer at Giant Firm Joins a Rival

A Top Antitrust Lawyer at Giant Firm Joins a Rival
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and JONATHAN D. GLATER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/business/17FIRM.html

A top lawyer at Clifford Chance, one of the world's largest law firms, defected yesterday to a New York competitor, raising questions about the appeal of globe-spanning firms that developed in the late 1990's from a spate of mega-mergers.

Kevin J. Arquit, the global co-head of Clifford Chance's antitrust practice and a former senior official at the Federal Trade Commission, will become a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, a firm best known for its roster of blue-chip corporate and investment banking clients. Mr. Arquit, who was one of Clifford Chance's top- billing partners, is taking along another partner, Aimee H. Goldstein.

The defections by Mr. Arquit and Ms. Goldstein are the latest hit to the image of Clifford Chance, which was formed from the 2000 merger of the British firm of the same name and the New York firm of Rogers & Wells. Since the merger, several other top partners have left, including Chris Bright, who ran the antitrust practice out of the firm's London office and who joined Shearman & Sterling last year. With each departure, speculation has swirled about how well the cultures of the firms have meshed.

Partners at Clifford Chance point out that the firm has also picked up about 30 new partners from other firms over the last two and a half years.

But Clifford Chance continues to receive negative publicity, most recently when the firm's junior lawyers prepared a memorandum describing a "profound problem" at the firm. The memo, which was leaked to the news media, criticized the firm's culture and a requirement that associates bill more than 2,400 hours a year. Such a requirement encourages lawyers to pad their hours and work slowly rather than quickly, the memo's authors suggested.

Mr. Arquit insisted yesterday that his decision to leave was a personal choice to explore a new opportunity and was unrelated to the Clifford Chance culture. Still, he said he decided to move to Simpson because "it is a place where on a day-to-day basis I'm going to feel more comfortable with the working relationships." He quickly added, "I don't want these to be taken as negative words about the folks who are staying at Clifford Chance."

John K. Carroll, the head of Clifford Chance's regulatory and white-collar defense group for the Americas, said that while "you never like to lose someone who is as good a lawyer as Kevin is, I don't think it will have a material effect on our business."

Mr. Carroll said that Mr. Arquit's departure "probably says about a thousand different things to a thousand different people" about the differences between the business models and cultures of firms like Clifford Chance and Simpson Thacher. "Some people will be more comfortable in smaller firms and some people, like me, get very excited by the whole global thing," he said.

Robert Kindler, global head of mergers and acquisitions at J. P. Morgan Chase and a longtime peer of Mr. Arquit, said: "Kevin leaving shows there must be a culture clash. Everyone has talked about doing mergers with U.S. law firms. So far, there haven't been others because of the culture issues."

Mr. Arquit's move is expected to bolster Simpson's antitrust and mergers practice by giving the firm "a real credibility of understanding Washington's antitrust agencies," said Michael N. Sohn, a partner at Arnold & Porter in Washington.

Lynn Mestel, president of Mestel & Company, a recruiter who works with large law firms, said the defections would not harm Clifford Chance in the long run. "Clifford Chance is one of the world's best and very well-run firms, doing top-tier work worldwide," she said. "Any attrition that it has is just a reflection of size and, to a much lesser degree, merger fallout, because that took place a while ago."

Clifford Chance, a firm with 3,800 lawyers worldwide, acquired Rogers & Wells in 2000, building up its presence in the United States and particularly in New York. Mr. Arquit was a partner in Rogers & Wells. After the merger, Rogers & Wells partners' wages were adjusted to fit into Clifford Chance's compensation plan.

Mr. Arquit was an exception because of the value of the business he brought to the firm. According to The American Lawyer, his yearly salary was about $3.5 million, higher than that of his other partners. Mr. Arquit declined to comment on his salary.

Ms. Mestel said that partners at big firms usually left for rivals because of lack of support for their practice areas — if a firm's mergers and acquisitions business is slow, there might not be much for an antitrust lawyer to do — or because of internal politics. Increasingly, though, partners are moving because they want to be part of a huge, global firm, or because they want to be part of a smaller operation. A group of lawyers from Brobeck Phleger & Harrison, a medium-size firm with about 600 lawyers in San Francisco, recently joined Clifford Chance, for example.

The movement of partners is not limited to large firms. The 100-lawyer firm of Davis & Gilbert announced yesterday that it had hired away Martin Garbus, the founding partner of Frankfurt, Garbus, Kurnit, Klein & Selz.

Over all, partner movement among firms has increased in recent years, said Brad Hildebrandt, chairman of Hildebrandt International, a consulting firm that advises law firms. In a recession, there is more pressure on firms to get rid of partners who are not pulling their own weight and to poach partners who can bring valuable clients with them.

A Legal Uproar Over Proposals to Regulate the Profession

A Legal Uproar Over Proposals to Regulate the Profession
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/business/17LAW.html

Corporate lawyers have hurriedly organized to block some proposed standards of conduct for the profession, arguing that the government proposals would critically damage their relationships with clients.

A provision that would require lawyers to take evidence of potential fraud to a company's top managers and even its board could drastically hinder business deals, the lawyers contend. And they are livid over a provision requiring them to withdraw from representing a client — and to tell the government that they have withdrawn — if the client did not appropriately resolve a lawyer's concerns about possible fraud. That would violate the privilege preserving the confidentiality of conversations with clients, as the lawyers see it.

The American Bar Association has created a task force to respond to the proposed rules, in addition to an existing task force responding to the corporate scandals. A few lawyers at big firms — the kind of $600-an-hour corporate advisers not used to regulation of their own jobs — have begun a letter-writing campaign seeking to kill some of the provisions.

The proposed rules, which would take effect at the end of January, were called for in corporate governance legislation this summer, and comments are being accepted through tomorrow. The agency is holding an open roundtable this afternoon on the proposed rules' impact on lawyers from abroad.

The Securities and Exchange Commission released the proposals on Nov. 21, just weeks after the commission's chairman, Harvey L. Pitt, announced he would resign. Some lawyers have said that they hope Mr. Pitt's successor will be less aggressive and will listen to the objections of the profession.

William H. Donaldson has been selected by the administration to lead the commission, but Mr. Pitt will remain in the job until Mr. Donaldson is confirmed.

"There's a high level of concern about the implications of this," said Fred Krebs, president of the American Corporate Counsel Association, whose members are mostly internal lawyers for companies. "There's a very real fear that the rules will change the relationship" with the client, he said.

While the profession may come up with a counterproposal before the deadline tomorrow, the comments already show some support from outside the legal profession, but clear opposition from corporate lawyers.

"You have proposed rules which, going beyond anything explicitly or implicitly required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, demean and directly undermine those lawyers' prime professional responsibility," a group of 29 lawyers wrote to the S.E.C.

Another lawyer criticized the timing of the release of the rules. "By requiring that comments on the release be received on or before Dec. 18, 2002, in the midst of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, the S.E.C. will be deprived of many of the thoughtful comments from the legal community which are necessary to evaluate the fundamental changes in the attorney-client relationship," wrote Frederick D. Lipman, a lawyer at Blank, Rome, Comisky & McCaulley.

Geoffrey Hazard, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said, "Lawyers are allergic to regulation of any kind." The provisions of these rules are tougher for lawyers because they do not require that a lawyer know of a potential fraud, but merely that the lawyer have evidence of it, he said.

"It's one thing to stare someone in the eye and say you knew this, and quite another to say it was there to be seen," he said. After any fraud is found, lawyers will be subject to criticism that they should have noticed evidence of fraud, he said.

The current system of regulating lawyers is adequate, said Alfred P. Carlton Jr., president of the American Bar Association. "We have a very fine system of lawyer regulation in this country that for 200 years has been run by state judiciaries," said Mr. Carlton, who created the professional task force evaluating the proposed rules and considering possible responses.

"If lawyers have transgressed, they will be called to account," he said. Very few lawyers have been the targets of criminal prosecution in any of the corporate collapses of the last year, he added.

Mr. Krebs of the corporate counsel association said that the rules would not necessarily prevent fraud anyway. "It's a bit optimistic to assume that there's all kinds of nefarious, inappropriate, illegal conduct going on out there that is going to be changed if only the attorneys and accountants are forced to disclose either to boards or to the government," he said.

Of most concern to many lawyers is what is being called the noisy withdrawal requirement, which says a lawyer should resign and report the resignation to the S.E.C. when a client does not take appropriate steps in response to a report of evidence of potential fraud. "In effect, you would have to point the finger at a client," violating the attorney-client privilege, one corporate lawyer said.

But Roger C. Cramton, a professor at the Cornell University Law School, said that many states already allow (but do not require) lawyers to disclose client confidences to prevent fraud. "Has it destroyed the ability to represent them?" he asked rhetorically. "The answer clearly is no."

The proposed rules may simply give some teeth to state ethical rules that lawyers should follow anyway, but that are rarely enforced, Mr. Cramton said. And lawyers prefer less enforcement over more, he added.

Some large firms may still organize a group response to the proposed rules, said Paul B. Ford Jr., a senior partner at Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett in New York. "There's going to be a lot of discussion," he said, adding that "hopefully there'll be some emerging consensus about how we can give guidance to the S.E.C."

The legal community is not unified in opposing the proposed rules, though. Some plaintiff-side securities lawyers, far from thinking the rules would go too far, suggest that the proposals do not go far enough.

"The rules do not provide for any obligation on the part of corporate counsel to investigate anything," said Nicholas E. Chimicles, a plaintiffs' lawyer at Chimicles & Tikellis in Haverford, Pa. "Without a duty of investigation, there are no teeth to the rules and no expectation that the rules' application would result in the discovery of concealed violations."

So far, companies have kept relatively quiet on the matter. Kimberly Pinter, director for corporate finance and tax at the National Association of Manufacturers, said that she had not yet heard from the organization's members that the proposed rules were a problem because most executives were still digesting them.

"We're not getting the doors broken down," she said. "But I certainly expect that we will hear from people."

The Heavy Cost of Chronic Stress

The Heavy Cost of Chronic Stress
By ERICA GOODE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/health/psychology/17STRE.html

In this season of bickering relatives and whining children, of overcrowded department stores and unwritten Christmas cards, it is instructive to consider the plight of the Pacific salmon.

As the fish leap, flop and struggle upstream to spawn, their levels of cortisol, a potent stress hormone, surge, providing energy to fight the current. But the hormone also leads the salmon to stop eating. Their digestive tracts wither away. Their immune systems break down. And after laying their eggs, they die of exhaustion and infection, their bodies worn out by the journey.

Salmon cannot help being stressed out. They are programmed to die, their systems propelled into overdrive by evolutionary design.

Humans, on the other hand, are usually subject to stresses of their own making, the chronic, primarily psychological, pressures of modern life. Yet they also suffer consequences when the body's biological mechanisms for handling stress go awry.

Prolonged or severe stress has been shown to weaken the immune system, strain the heart, damage memory cells in the brain and deposit fat at the waist rather than the hips and buttocks (a risk factor for heart disease, cancer and other illnesses), said Dr. Bruce S. McEwen, director of the neuroendocrinology laboratory at the Rockefeller University and the author of a new book, "The End of Stress as We Know It." Stress has been implicated in aging, depression, heart disease, rheumatoid arthritis and diabetes, among other illnesses.

Researchers have known for many decades that physical stress takes a toll on the body. But only relatively recently have the profound effects of psychological stress on health been widely acknowledged. Two decades ago, many basic scientists scoffed at the notion that mental state could affect illness. The link between mind and body was considered murky territory, best left to psychiatrists.

But in the last decade, researchers have convincingly demonstrated that psychological stress can increase vulnerability to disease and have begun to understand how that might occur.

"If you would have said to me back in 1982 that stress could modulate how the immune system worked, I would have said, `Forget about it,' " said Dr. Ronald Glaser, an immunologist at Ohio State University.

The more researchers have learned, the clearer it has become that stress may be a thread tying together many illnesses that were previously thought to be unrelated.

"What used to be thought of as pathways that led pretty explicitly to one particular disease outcome can now be seen as leading to a whole lot of different outcomes," said Dr. Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of neurology at Stanford.

Central to this new understanding is a novel conception of stress, developed by Dr. McEwen, who has been studying the subject for more than three decades. According to his model, it is not stress per se that is harmful. Rather, the problems associated with stress result from a complicated interaction between the demands of the outside world and the body's capacity to manage potential threats.

That capacity can be influenced by heredity and childhood experience; by diet, exercise and sleep patterns; by the presence or absence of close personal relationships; by income level and social status; and by the piling on of normal stresses to the point that they overload the system.

In moderate amounts, the scientists argue, stress can be benign, even beneficial, and most people are equipped to deal with it.

Preparing to give a speech, take a test or avoid a speeding car, the body undergoes an elaborate series of adjustments. Physiological processes essential in mobilizing a response — the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the endocrine glands and brain regions involved in emotion and memory — are recruited into action. Nonessential functions like reproduction and digestion are put off till later.

Adrenaline, and later cortisol, both stress hormones secreted by the adrenal glands, flood the body. Heart rate and blood pressure rise, respiration quickens, oxygen flows to the muscles, and immune cells prepare to rush to the site of an injury.

When the speech is delivered, the test taken or the car avoided, another complex set of adjustments calms things down, returning the body to normal.

This process of "equilibrium through change" is called allostasis, and it is essential for survival. But it was developed, Dr. McEwen and Dr. Sapolsky point out, for the dangers humans might have encountered in a typical day on the savannah, the sudden appearance of a lion, for example, or a temporary shortage of antelope meat.

Blaring car alarms, controlling bosses, two-career marriages, six-mile traffic jams and rude salesclerks were simply not part of the plan.

When stress persists for too long or becomes too severe, Dr. McEwen said, the normally protective mechanisms become overburdened, a condition that he refers to as allostatic load. The finely tuned feedback system is disrupted, and over time it runs amok, causing damage.

Work that Dr. McEwen and his colleagues have conducted with rats nicely illustrates this wear-and-tear effect. In the studies, the rats were placed in a small compartment, their movement restricted for six hours a day during their normal resting time. The first time the rats were restrained, Dr. McEwen said, their cortisol levels rose as their stress response moved into full gear. But after that, their cortisol production switched off earlier each day as they became accustomed to the restraint.

That might have been the end of the story. But the researchers also found that at 21 days, the rats began to show the effects of chronic stress. They grew anxious and aggressive. Their immune systems became slower to fight off invaders. Nerve cells in the hippocampus, a brain region involved in memory, atrophied. The production of new hippocampal neurons stopped.

Dr. Sheldon Cohen, a professor of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, has found that people respond much the same way. Among volunteers inoculated with a cold virus, those who reported life stresses that continued for more than one month like unemployment or family problems were more likely to develop colds than those who reported stress lasting less than a month. The longer the stress persisted, the greater the risk of illness.

Allostatic load is often made worse, Dr. McEwen said, by how people respond to stress, eating fatty foods, staying late at work, avoiding the treadmill or drinking to excess. "The fact is that we're now living in a world where our systems are not allowed a chance to rest, to go back to base line," he said. "They're being driven by excess calories, by inadequate sleep, by lack of exercise, by smoking, by isolation or frenzied competition."

The Chemistry
Shrinking Cells,
Turned-Off Responses

Doctors sometimes dismiss stress-related complaints as "all in the patient's head." In a sense, they are right. The brain, specifically the amygdala, detects the first signs of danger, as demonstrated in now-classic studies by Dr. Joseph LeDoux of New York University. Other brain areas evaluate the threat's importance, decide how to respond and remember when and where the danger occurred, increasing the chances of avoiding it next time.

So it is not surprising that when the stress system is derailed, the brain is a target for damage. A decade of research has demonstrated that sustained stress and the resulting overproduction of cortisol can have chilling effects on the hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped brain structure intimately involved in memory formation.

Scientists say they believe that the hippocampus plays an active role in registering not only events, but also their context, an important task in the face of danger. In stressful situations, the hippocampus also helps turn off the stress response after the threat has subsided.

But high levels of cortisol, studies have shown, can shrink nerve cells in the hippocampus and halt the creation of new hippocampal neurons. These changes are associated with aging and memory problems. Some evidence also links a smaller hippocampus with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and sexual abuse in childhood, though the meaning of this size difference is still being debated.

Like other hormones, cortisol normally rises and falls with daily rhythms, its production higher in the morning and lower in the evening. Prolonged or severe stress appears to disrupt the cycle. Chronically stressed people sometimes have higher base line cortisol levels and produce too much or too little of it at the wrong times.

One result, recent studies indicate, is that fat is deposited at the abdomen rather than the hips or the buttocks. One of cortisol's primary functions is to help mobilize energy in times of acute stress by releasing glucose into the blood. But when cortisol remains chronically elevated, it acts, along with high insulin levels, to send fat into storage at the waist. This makes sense if a famine looms. But it is bad news for anyone who wants to minimize the risk of heart disease, cancer and other illnesses.

Studies have shown that excess cortisol secretion in animals increases visceral fat. And Dr. Elissa S. Epel at the University of California at San Francisco has found that even in slender women, stress, cortisol and belly fat seem to go together.

The notion that being stressed makes people sick is a popular one, and most people subscribe to some version of it. Come down with the flu in the midst of a messy divorce or a frantic period at the office, and someone is bound to blame stress.

But it was not until the 1980's and early 90's that scientists began to discover the mechanisms that might lie behind the mind and body link. Investigators uncovered nerves that connect the brain with the spleen and thymus, organs important in immune responses, and they established that nerve cells could affect the activity of infection-fighting white blood cells.

Scientists also found that cytokines, proteins produced by immune cells, could influence brain processes. Among other things, the proteins appeared able to activate the second major phase of the stress response, the so-called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal, or H.P.A., axis. In this chemical sequence, the hypothalamus, situated in the forebrain, dispatches chemical signals to the pituitary, which in turn secretes the stress hormone ACTH, prompting the adrenal glands to produce cortisol.

Much remains unknown about how the brain, the endocrine system and the immune system interact, and some of what is known is not well understood. For example, high levels of cortisol have long been known to shut off the production and action of cytokines, which initiate the immune response. At normal levels, cortisol can enhance immunity by increasing the production of inflammation-fighting cytokines. Yet in some cases, it seems, cortisol does not properly shut down the immune system under stress, allowing the continued production of cytokines that promote inflammation. These cytokines have been linked to heart disease, depression, stroke and other illnesses.

Still, scientists can watch stress hammer away at the immune system in the laboratory. Dr. Glaser of Ohio State and his wife, Dr. Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, found that small wounds took an average of nine days longer to heal in women who cared for patients with Alzheimer's disease than in women who were not under similar stress. In another study, arguments between husbands and wives were accompanied by increases in stress hormones and immunological changes over a 24-hour period.

Stress also seems to make people more likely to contract some infectious illnesses. Dr. Cohen of Carnegie Mellon has spent years inoculating intrepid volunteers with cold and influenza viruses, and his findings offer strong evidence that stressed people are more likely to become infected and had more severe symptoms after becoming ill.

A direct link between stress and more serious diseases, however, has been more difficult to establish, Dr. Cohen said. Recent studies have provided increased support for the notion that stress contributes to heart disease, and researchers have tied psychological stress, directly or indirectly, to diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, severe depression and other mental disorders. But the influence of chronic stress on other diseases like cancer remains controversial. All the same, Dr. Cohen said, "The evidence that stress puts people at risk for disease is a lot better than it was 10 years ago."

The Risks
From an Early Start,
Lifelong Effects

Why do some people seem more vulnerable to life's pressures than others? Personality and health habits play a role. And severe stress in early life appears to cast a long shadow.

Dr. Michael Meaney of McGill University and his colleagues have found that rat pups intensively licked and groomed by their mothers were bolder and secreted lower levels of the stress hormone ACTH in stressful situations than rats lacking such attention — an equanimity that lasted throughout their lives. (Cuddled pups, the researchers found in another study, were also smarter than their neglected peers.)

In humans, physical and sexual abuse and other traumas in childhood have been associated with a more pronounced response to stress later in life. In one study, Dr. Charles Nemeroff, a psychiatrist at Emory University, and his colleagues found that women who were physically or sexually abused as children secreted more of two stress hormones in response to a mildly stressful situation than women who had not been abused.

Yet perhaps the best indicator of how people are likely to be affected by stress is their position in the social hierarchy. In subordinate male monkeys, for example, the stress of being servile to their alpha counterparts causes damage in the hippocampus. And dominant monkeys who are repeatedly moved from social group to social group, forcing them to constantly re-establish their position, also exhibit severe stress and are more likely to develop atherosclerosis, according to studies by Dr. Jay Kaplan of Wake Forest University School of Medicine.

Being low in the hierarchy also affects reproduction, presumably because evolution dictated that in times of stress, other factors were more pressing than procreation. In a recent study, Dr. Kaplan found that the constant low-level harassment by dominant female monkeys shut down reproductive function in subordinate females and built up fat deposits in their arteries.

It would be nice to think that humans are less chained to their social rankings. But alas, researchers have found this not to be the case. A wealth of studies shows that the risk for many diseases increases with every step down the socioeconomic scale, even when factors like smoking and access to health care are taken into account.

A real estate mogul living in a Park Avenue penthouse has a better health prognosis than the head of a small company in an upscale condo a few blocks away. And a renter in a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan will be a tier or two lower still in health expectations.

Even people's perceptions of their relative standings in society affect their disease risk. In one study, led by Dr. Nancy E. Adler, also at the University of California at San Francisco, women who placed themselves higher on the social ladder reported better physical health and had lower resting cortisol levels and less abdominal fat than women who placed themselves on lower rungs.

No matter what one's circumstances, of course, some stress in life is inevitable. But illness is not, Dr. McEwen said. A variety of strategies can help reduce disease risk.

Reaching for a gallon of ice cream to soothe the tension of a family argument is not one of them, however, nor is forgoing exercise in favor of curling up on the sofa for an eight-hour marathon of "Law and Order."

The best ways to cope, Dr. McEwen said, turn out to be the time-honored ones: eat sensibly, get plenty of sleep, exercise regularly, stop at one martini and stay away from cigarettes. "It's a matter of making choices in your life," he said.

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online
By AMY HARMON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/science/17JOUR.html

A group of prominent scientists is mounting an electronic challenge to the leading scientific journals, accusing them of holding back the progress of science by restricting online access to their articles so they can reap higher profits.

Supported by a $9 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the scientists say that this week they will announce the creation of two peer-reviewed online journals on biology and medicine, with the goal of cornering the best scientific papers and immediately depositing them in the public domain.

By providing a highly visible alternative to what they view as an outmoded system of distributing information, the founders hope science itself will be transformed. The two journals are the first of what they envision as a vast electronic library in which no one has to pay dues or seek permission to read, copy or use the collective product of the world's academic research.

"The written record is the lifeblood of science," said Dr. Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel laureate in medicine who is serving as the chairman of the new nonprofit publisher. "Our ability to build on the old to discover the new is all based on the way we disseminate our results."

By contrast, established journals like Science and Nature charge steep annual subscription fees and bar access to their online editions to nonsubscribers, although Science recently began providing free electronic access to articles a year after publication.

The new publishing venture, Public Library of Science, is an outgrowth of several years of friction between scientists and the journals over who should control access to scientific literature in the electronic age. For most scientists, who typically assign their copyright to the journals for no compensation, the main goal is to distribute their work as widely as possible.

Academic publishers argue that if they made the articles more widely available they would lose the subscription revenue they need to ensure the quality of the editorial process. Far from holding back science, they say, the journals have played a crucial role in its advancement as a trusted repository of significant discovery.

"We have very high standards, and it is somewhat costly," said Dr. Donald Kennedy, the editor of Science. "We're dealing in a market whether we like it or not."

Science estimates that 800,000 people read the magazine electronically now, compared with 140,000 readers of the print version. Given the number of downloads at universities like Harvard and Stanford, which buy site licenses for about $5,000 a year, the magazine says people are reading articles for only a few cents each.

In many cases even such small per-article charges to access a digital database can make for substantial income. The Dutch-British conglomerate Reed Elsevier Group, the world's largest academic publisher, posted a 30 percent profit last year on its science publishing activities. Science took in $34 million last year on advertising alone.

But supporters of the Public Library of Science say the point is not how much money the journals make, but their monopoly control over literature that should belong to the public.

"We would be perfectly happy for them to have huge profit margins providing that in exchange for all this money we're giving them we got to own the literature and the literature did not belong to them," said Dr. Michael B. Eisen, a biologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, and a founder of the Public Library of Science.

When scientists relied on print-and-paper journals to distribute their work, the Library's supporters argue, it made sense to charge for access, since each copy represented an additional expense. But they say that at a time when the Internet has reduced distribution costs to almost zero, a system that grants journals exclusive rights over distribution is no longer necessary.

By publishing on the Internet and forgoing any profits, the new venture says it is now possible to maintain a high-quality journal without charging subscription fees.

Instead, the new journals hope institutions that finance research will come to regard publishing as part of the cost. The journals will initially ask most authors to pay about $1,500 per article, for exposure to a wider potential audience and a much faster turnaround time.

The library's founders agree that its success will depend largely on whether leading scholars are willing to forsake the certain status of publishing in the established journals to support the principle of science as a public resource. In a profession where publishing in a top journal is often crucial to success and grant money, that may be a difficult task.

"I'd be happy to forswear publishing in any of those journals, but I'm not in a position where I need a job," said Dr. Marc Kirschner, chairman of the cell biology department at Harvard Medical School and a member of the electronic library's editorial board. "The difficulty will be getting over this hump from the point where people say, `Why should I risk it?' to where they don't see it as a risk."

In that regard, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute — the nonprofit institute whose $11 billion endowment makes it a leading supporter of medical research — has emerged as a powerful ally. Dr. Thomas R. Cech, the institute's president, has publicly endorsed the library's goals and promised to cover its investigators' extra costs of publishing in the new journals.

As for other researchers, "people will want to be associated with this because it is such a good deed," said another member of the library's editorial board, Dr. Nicholas R. Cozzarelli, editor of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Unfettered access to the literature, library supporters say, would eliminate unnecessary duplication and allow doctors in poor countries, scientists at budget-conscious institutions, high school students, cancer patients and anyone else who could not afford subscriptions to benefit from existing research and add to it.

Moreover, they say, the taxpayers, who spend nearly $40 billion a year on biomedical research, should not have to pay again — or wait some unspecified period — to be able to search for and see the results themselves.

But Derk Haank, chairman of Elsevier Science, whose 1,500 journals include Cell, says such criticism is misguided. Elsevier, he says, is offering broader access to its electronic databases to the institutions that want it for far less than the cost of subscribing to dozens of paper journals. "It sounds very sympathetic to say this should be available to the public," he said. "But this kind of material is only used by experts."

Still, in addition to making data available to more people sooner, the electronic library's founders argue that the research itself becomes more valuable when it is not walled off by copyrights and Balkanized in separate electronic databases. They envision the sprouting of a kind of cyber neural network, where all of scientific knowledge can be searched, sorted and grafted with a fluidity that will speed discovery.

Under the library's editorial policy, any data can be integrated into new work as long as the original author is credited appropriately. The model is inspired by GenBank, the central repository of DNA sequences whose open access policy has driven much of the progress in genomics and biotechnology of the last decade.

The library's roots can be traced to Dr. Patrick O. Brown's frustration at the barriers to literature he needed for research at his genetics laboratory at the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1998. "The information I wanted was information scientists had published with the goal of making it available to all their colleagues," he said. "And I couldn't get it readily because of the way the system was organized."

Dr. Varmus, then director of the National Institutes for Health, talked with Dr. Brown in January 1999 and decided to pay for a Web site that would provide free access to peer-reviewed scientific literature. PubMedCentral (www.pubmedcentral.gov) was opened the next year.

By a year later, however, only a handful of journals had decided to participate in the government archive. In an effort to whip up enthusiasm, Drs. Varmus, Brown and Eisen began circulating an open letter to the journals, asking them to place their articles in a free online database.

The petition quickly garnered 30,000 signers around the world, including several Nobel laureates, who promised to publish their work only in journals that complied with their demand. But almost none did.

That is when Dr. Varmus and his colleagues became convinced that they needed to raise money to start their own publication. After being rejected by several traditional science research foundations, the scientists found a sympathetic ear at the Silicon Valley foundation whose benefactor, Dr. Gordon E. Moore, was the co-founder of Intel Corporation.

"Scientists are a conservative bunch," said Dr. Edward Penhoet, the foundation's senior director for science. "In the short term they'll still be publishing in Cell and other places. But in the long term, I think this has the potential to dramatically facilitate science."

Surrealism for Sale, Straight From the Source

Surrealism for Sale, Straight From the Source
By ALAN RIDING
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/17/arts/design/17BRET.html

PARIS, Dec. 16 — In photographs André Breton is rarely seen smiling. As the founder and undisputed leader of the Surrealist movement, he evidently took himself seriously. Between the 1920's and 1950's he alone defined the rules of Surrealism and tolerated no challenge to his authority. He encouraged rebellion against prevailing artistic and social norms, but artists and poets who fell out of his favor were summarily expelled from the movement.

On the other hand, he must have had loads of charisma.

Over the years, in addition to the artworks he bought, notably primitive sculptures from Oceania, hundreds of paintings, drawings, photographs and books were given to him by friends, followers and little-known artists seeking his blessing. When Breton died at 70 on Sept. 28, 1966, his small apartment at 42 Rue Fontaine in the Pigalle district of Paris was a veritable treasure trove. He had lived there since 1922. His heirs — his widow, Elisa, and his daughter from an earlier relationship, Aube — decided to touch nothing. "My stepmother lived there, and it was her family environment," Aube Breton Elléouët, 67, explained. "For 35 years we looked for an answer to what could be done with this collection. My father had never expressed himself on the subject."

Now, two years after Elisa Breton's death, with the French government unwilling to buy the collection, the largest single record of the Surrealist movement is to be sold next spring at the Hôtel Drouot-Richelieu, where Paris auctions are held. One measure of the size of the sale is that the auction house, CalmelsCohen, plans at least six catalogs to cover the 5,300 lots. The auction, from April 1 to 18, is expected to raise $30 million to $40 million.

Books, which account for 3,500 of the lots, include some dedicated to Breton by Freud, Trotsky and Apollinaire as well as art catalogs and journals. Among the 500 lots of manuscripts are originals of some of Breton's writings as well as records of Surrealist "games" and experiments. Modern art is represented by 450 paintings, drawings and sculptures and 500 lots of photographs. And there are 200 examples of popular art and 150 works of primitive art, mainly from Oceania. (A description of the collection is online at breton.calmelscohen.com.)

To compensate for the inevitable dispersal of the collection, the entire contents of 42 Rue Fontaine have been recorded digitally and will be made available through a CD-ROM. "Everything," explains a news release by Jean-Michel Ollé and Jean-Pierre Sakoun, who prepared the database. "Paintings, objects, photos, manuscripts, books. Everything from the least important to the most, the historic and the everyday, the private and the public."

The principal item not included in the auction is what is known as Breton's Wall, literally the cluttered wall behind his desk that was featured in many photographs and came to be considered a work of art — the art of collecting — in its own right. The wall was given by Mrs. Breton Elléouët to the National Museum of Modern Art at the Georges Pompidou Center in lieu of death duties owed to the government by the Breton estate.

The wall's shelves are crowded with dozens of Oceanic sculptures as well as Inuit objects and pre-Hispanic figures from Mexico. On the wall itself are paintings, engravings and drawings by the likes of Francis Picabia, Alfred Jarry, Roberto Matta, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, Joan Miró and Wassily Kandinsky. And tucked among them is the odd personal item, like a photograph of Elisa Breton.

Yet the collection to be sold in the spring reveals more about Breton's approach to art, since it includes not only major works, but also lesser works by long forgotten artists and even objects that Breton bought at auctions and flea markets or simply found while out strolling.

"My father had as much passion for a piece found on the bank of a river as for an important painting in his collection," Mrs. Breton Elléouët said.

Still, the auction will not lack important works, notably "Danseuse Espagnole" or "Spanish Dancer," by Miró, Matta's "Poster for Arcane 17," Magritte's "Woman Hidden in a Forest," an untitled work by Arshile Gorky and "Danger, Dancer," a painting on a photograph on glass by Man Ray. It also includes scores of less valuable works by equally famous artists, among them Picasso, Picabia, Arp, Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner and André Masson. More than 100 original prints by Man Ray dominate the photography collection.

Notably absent is any work by Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian Metaphysical painter, with whom Breton fell out. And a postcard-size collage and gouache is the only work in the sale by Salvador Dali, easily the most famous Surrealist painter, who was expelled from the movement by Breton. The auction also includes no book by the poet Louis Aragon, another friend turned foe. The evidence is clear: Surrealist rebels were expurgated from Breton's life.

Breton himself, while he dabbled with collages and wrote poetry of considerable merit, was most famous simply for being Breton. He was above all immensely curious, his early poetry and interest in psychoanalysis serving as a springboard for Surrealism's constant exploration of the connections between poetry and life, chance, love and sexuality. To describe Surrealism as a sect is to ignore its enormous influence, but Breton himself was very much its guru.

"I believe it is into my thought that I put all my daring, all the strength and hope of which I am capable," he wrote in a letter to the art collector Jacques Doucet in December 1924, shortly after publication of the Surrealist Manifesto. "It possesses me entirely, jealously and makes a mockery of worldly goods."

Certainly while Surrealism today is best remembered through the works of Dali, Magritte, Miró and Ernst, visual art was not central to Breton's vision of the movement. Yet he undoubtedly had an eye for innovative art: it was at his insistence that in 1924 Doucet bought one of the landmark works of 20th-century art, Picasso's "Desmoiselles d'Avignon," now a jewel in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

As an inspiration for Surrealism, though, Breton was drawn principally to Oceanic art, which he described as "one of the great lock-keepers of our heart." While African art was the rage in Paris at the time, he felt it was too linked to human rituals and animals. He preferred Oceanic art "for its immemorial effort to express the interpenetration of the physical and the mental, to triumph over the dualism of perception and representation." Put more simply, he considered it more mystical.

"Oceanic objects were Breton's companions all his life," said Pierre Amrouche, an expert on primitive art who is an adviser to the Breton auction. "It was his family, a tribe of which he was the chief. The very first object he acquired was an Easter Island piece bought when he was 15 with money he was given for good school results." (The most valuable Oceanic work in the auction is "Uli," a four-foot-high wooden ancestor statue from the South Pacific island New Ireland, with a sale price estimated at $600,000 to $800,000.)

When Breton traveled to Mexico in 1938 to visit the exiled Trotsky, he discovered pre-Hispanic art. And when he was himself exiled in the United States during World War II, he further developed his interest in American Indian and Inuit art, which also joined his collection. From 1941 to 1945, with Ernst, Dali, Matta and other Surrealists also in exile, New York became the temporary capital of Surrealism, although Breton never felt at home there: he never bothered to learn English.

His own political views were always on the left, but he was a true militant only of Surrealism. He joined the French Communist Party in 1927 and, unaccustomed to taking orders, was soon horrified by its dogmatism. He finally resigned from the party in 1935 (this was the main cause of his rift with Aragon, who stayed in the party), but after the war he was a vocal critic of France's involvement in wars in Indochina and Algeria and an outspoken foe of Stalinism.

Although Surrealism survived the war, with Breton himself returning to Paris to preside over it, by the 1950's and 1960's it had been overtaken by new art movements. Yet when Breton died, while Surrealist paintings hung on the walls of museums around the world, it was at 42 Rue Fontaine that the soul of the movement resided. Works were frequently loaned for exhibitions, but repeated efforts by his widow and daughter to win government backing for creation of a Breton or a Surrealist foundation came to nothing.

After Elisa Breton's death in early 2000 and the transfer of Breton's Wall to the Pompidou, Mrs. Breton Elléouët decided to make an inventory of the collection. "That's when we became involved," Laurence Calmels, a partner in CalmelsCohen, recalled. "We arrived at 42 Rue Fontaine, where nothing had changed except `the Wall.' Breton's desk was as he left it, his pipe, the bag of tobacco, the books. There were paintings on walls, but we found many covered in dust in a mezzanine. There were cartons of documents. He kept everything. It took three months to do the inventory."

It was only then, convinced that she had no alternative, that Mrs. Breton Elléouët reluctantly chose to sell the collection. "A few works have been sold to the Pompidou and the new Primitive Arts Museum," she said. "As for the rest of the collection, during 35 years of representations we received not a single proposal or offer of help."

The Week

what a busy week this was. returned early monday morning from miami. went to see Kenny Schacter's new space with MOMA. successfully prepared and argued my case in small claims court for my billing dispute with my photo lab. finished up three videos for WarkClements. negotiated and settled my other small claims case brought by an ex-roommate. continued my photo editing work. and played with my new toy -- the 3 megapixel Canon S230 Digital Elph.

i bought one just before miami to test out for my mom. and i loved it so much i got my own when i got back. i just couldn't stop taking pictures. and the quality in 5x7s on premium glossy paper is pretty incredible. ok, not as good as prints from my scanned 645 transparencies. but not bad at all.

friday, went to my favorite shanghai place on mott street for guotie and cantonese fried noodles. then to a christmas party at my friend michelle's parent's gallery in Tribeca. bumped into Andrew Bradfield, who i started work with at First Boston eons ago, and is now playing in a band that was featured in Vanity Fair last month. he was there with a friend of the owner of the space. NYC is such a small world.

saturday, tom and jane invited me over for a little home cooked dinner. tom made barbequed pork and a soup with radishes and stewed ribs that was pretty good. afterwards, we went to Kips Bay to see Star Trek Nemesis. i love star trek.

then sunday, after a little midtown madness and a visit to Tiffany's, we went to shanghai gourmet again for more guotie, xiao long bao, and other goodies. jennifer said the xiao long bao were the best she'd ever had (even shanghai). yummy!

so now i've been up all night working again, and i can't believe i am leaving tomorrow to hawaii for a month! still so much to do before i leave...

A Coming Flood Erodes the Life of a Chinese City

A Coming Flood Erodes the Life of a Chinese City
By JOSEPH KAHN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/asia/15CHIN.html

YUNYANG, China, Dec. 10 — Anyone who has money, a good job or a friend in the right place has long since abandoned this riverside city.

Banks and government offices have drawn their shutters. The medical clinic will close its doors for good next week. Empty buildings have been taken over by squatters.

The people who remain here are poor, desperate, unlucky or all three. They are Noahs in search of an ark.

Just over six months from now, the silt-laden Yangtze River, swelled by the giant Three Gorges Dam, will inundate Yunyang's quay, then the old promenade, then the river-view apartment buildings. It will lap up to the city's main street. Even the poor will have to move to higher ground by then, but many still do not know how.

"We want to live someplace that has flowers and lights, where it's pretty and not so dark all the time," said Jie Shibi, a 43-year-old mother of two who has lost her job as a port worker. "We just want to leave."

The Three Gorges Dam is the largest hydroelectric project ever attempted. It is someday supposed to generate as much electricity as 18 nuclear power plants and help control the flood-prone river.

Yet its cost is high, even beyond the $30 billion price tag of the dam itself. The dam will create a virtual inland sea and raise the level of the Yangtze for 300 miles upstream, displacing 1.13 million people, more than 120 cities and towns, and uncountable historic artifacts.

Low-lying Yunyang, the county seat, is the most intensely affected, with 160,000 people who must move. The government has provided some relocated people with homes in wealthier places, like Shanghai. Others now live about 20 miles upstream in New Yunyang. It has shiny pink- and yellow-tiled apartment buildings and a manicured park overlooking the Yangtze from a bluff.

The heaviest burden is borne by those who are staying on in what will remain of the old city. Even after demolition crews finish blowing up buildings that fall beneath the projected new water line, and even after workers finish stripping the 1,700-year-old Zhang Fei Temple of its treasures and carting them away to a new site, many thousands of people will still call this place home.

Parts of the old city will survive the deluge, but its residents say its spirit has been fully submerged.

"Emigration has left this place destitute," said Bao Yunfu, whose bookshop was empty of customers one recent evening.

Managing the people who will lose their homes to the dam has in many ways proved a bigger engineering challenge than the dam itself. The government has allocated an estimated $10 billion to the task.

But since resettlement began in 1993, the efforts have been dogged by rampant corruption and by complaints that the government has not always made good on its promise to provide factory jobs or alternative farmland to those displaced.

Yet at least some of those who move find their circumstances significantly improved, while those who stay behind seem largely forgotten.

Those who remain tend to be the ones without work units, the Communist Party's main channel to distribute social benefits and maintain social control. They are people who cannot afford homes in the new town, even with government relocation subsidies. They are peasants who lost farms near the river and have no place else to go.

Red-lettered billboards, like targets on a rifle range, mark the meters of the coming flood — 135, 148.4, 175. Nearly everything below 148.4 has been thoroughly ransacked, first by the families and companies that left, then by demolition teams removing traces of human habitation from the future reservoir floor.

The city's lower reaches look as if they suffered sustained aerial bombing. Foundations are now ditches. A stone ramp to the port lies in a thousand pieces. The wind whips up clouds of architectural innards that look suspiciously like asbestos.

People wander through the ruins collecting scraps to sell. One group uses an old grain storage warehouse as a dump. Discarded books, toys, bicycle tires and cardboard are stacked to the 20-foot ceiling.

Chen Shunqing is one of the scavengers. He left his farm earlier this year because the government decreed that he and other farmers who cultivated the steep hillsides could no longer plant crops. Soil runoff adds to the silt in the brown Yangtze, which collects at the base of the new dam and requires constant dredging.

Now, Mr. Chen, 48, is here trying to make enough money for his son to continue attending school. He tries to hammer an old motorcycle engine into scrap. When the head falls off the hammer, he uses the engine to bang it back together.

Yunyang's once bustling port now handles almost no traffic. Capsule-shaped hydrofoils skim by without slowing down, as do the five-story ferry boats carrying tourists toward the Three Gorges.

The beach serves as a dry dock for private contractors who repair or dismantle rusted river ships. Hulking barge carcasses in various states of destruction are propped up with rocks. Workers wave acetylene torches with one hand and smoke cigarettes with the other. Sparks fly, and the air smells of sulfur.

There is no sign of supervision. Lan Tianguo, a former butcher who runs a ship-salvage crew, dismissed the need. "We are careful enough," he said. "We don't want to wreck our own ships."

China's normally rigid social order has broken down. Residents talk about armed robberies and rapes. A boatman tells of an out-of-towner who was shot to death after a dispute with a taxi driver.

Yunyang also has few of the usual population controls. Displaced farmers squat in buildings that will not be inundated until 2007, when the reservoir reaches its peak.

Yang Yan, 19, moved to town from a nearby village with her boyfriend. They share a three-room apartment that has cement floors and no lights. The only decoration is a calendar from 2001, left behind by the owners.

"It's better than the village, which is very dark and cold," she said.

Farmers, day laborers and porters are now the only regular diners at Xiang Guimei's noodle shop, which no longer sells noodles.

"Bank workers and officials used to buy noodle soup," Ms. Xiang said as she cooked over an open coal fire. "But these guys," she said, pointing to her half dozen grimy-faced patrons, "they only want cheap stuff."

For centuries, the Three Gorges, the cliffs that rise into the mist over the mean surge of the Yangtze, have inspired poets and painters. More recently, they have attracted tourists eager to see their sheer vertical drop before the reservoir reduces it.

But the river's towns have fewer admirers. The land is rocky and the soil is poor. It takes at least eight hours by fast boat to reach the nearest big city, and there are no railroads, airports or major highways nearby.

Yunyang's fame comes only from the ancient temple honoring a Han Dynasty general, Zhang Fei. The temple was built in the third century to commemorate his battlefield victories. It has stood, though not without indelicate renovations, ever since.

Dismantling it is now Yunyang's steadiest work. The government, addressing complaints that the dam would destroy too many cultural relics, vowed to preserve the temple by rebuilding it on higher ground, brick by brick.

Locals have been pulling apart the stones for months now. One of them is Huang Bing, who is 21. He comforts himself that the temple, which he first visited with his father when he was 6, will be saved.

But after a crane plucked Zhang Fei's statue from its altar one recent day, Mr. Huang and some friends burned incense and set off firecrackers, hoping to encourage the general's ghost to escape the flood.

"I don't really believe in Buddhism, but you never know," he said. "Some people say we can move the stones but the spirit will stay behind."

An Empire of Mosques

Hussein's Obsession: An Empire of Mosques
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/middleeast/15MOSQ.html

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — For a glimpse into Saddam Hussein's cast of mind as he weighs the threat of another war with the United States, there are few more revealing places to look than the Mother of All Battles Mosque, a vast, newly constructed edifice of gleaming white limestone and blue mosaic that the Iraqi leader oversaw from blueprint to completion on Baghdad's western outskirts.

First, the minarets.

The outer four, each 140 feet high, were built to resemble the barrels of Kalashnikov rifles, pointing skyward. The inner four, each 120 feet high, look like the Scud missiles that Iraq fired at Israel in 1991 during the Mother of All Battles, known to Americans as the Persian Gulf war. At their peak, these inner minarets are decorated with red, white and black Iraqi flags.

There is more.

Inside a special sanctum, treated by the mosque's custodian with the reverence due a holy of holies, there are 650 pages of the Koran — written, it is said, in Mr. Hussein's blood. As the official legend has it, "Mr. President" donated 28 liters of his blood — about 50 pints — over two years, and a famous calligrapher, Abas al-Baghdadi, mixed it with ink and preservatives to produce the handsome writing now laid out page by page in glass-walled display cases.

A reflecting pool that encircles the mosque is shaped like the map of the Arab world. At the far end, a blue mosaic plinth sits like an island in the clear water. The plinth is a reproduction of Mr. Hussein's thumbprint, and atop is a stylized reproduction, in gold, of his Arabic initials. In this, as in all else, no expense has been spared. Officials put the cost of the mosque, in a country where many families live in abject poverty on $10 or $15 a month, at $7.5 million.

Mosque-building — on a scale, Iraqi officials say, that no Arab leader has undertaken since the days of the great Abbasid caliphs who ruled the Arab world from Baghdad until the middle of the 13th century — has become Mr. Hussein's grand obsession. He has set out to make Baghdad the undisputed center of Islamic architecture, as it was under the Abbasids, and the only thing that has stopped him from building even bigger, the officials say, is a concern not to outstrip the Islamic holy places in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.

A few miles from the Mother of All Battles Mosque, two others are rising that will dwarf it. One five times the size, with many similar features in celebration of Mr. Hussein, is to be known as the Mosque of Saddam the Great. It is visible in skeleton form on the bulldozed plain that used to be Baghdad's airport, and is due to be completed in 2015. A mile or two beyond, in a gigantic cluster of domes that seem borrowed from the design book for Las Vegas, is the Al-Rahman Mosque, meaning "the most merciful," heading for completion in 2004.

Part of the message the Iraqi leader is sending with his mosque-building is that he, Saddam Hussein, is the natural leader of an Arab world yearning for past glories under the banner of Islam that fluttered atop the Arab armies that conquered much of the ancient world after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. But the lesson encoded in the Mother of All Battles Mosque, or Umm al-Mahare, as it is called in Arabic, seems to be much narrower, and aimed like its Kalashnikov-and-Scud minarets at a more selected audience: the United States.

With United Nations weapons inspectors now heading out every morning with powers to search the secret laboratories and weapons-making plants that were at the heart of Mr. Hussein's ambitions to turn Iraq into the Arab superpower, the Iraqi leader has had to do something that he says outright, in almost every speech, he abhors having had to do: bow down before the power of the outside world, led by the United States. On several occasions recently, the Iraqi leader has spoken of his concern that Iraqis — meaning himself, as the country's absolute ruler — not be seen to be "weaklings" and "cowards."

But along with this, there has been another message, and it is the one written in stone and marble at the Mother of All Battles Mosque: That Iraqis are natural warriors, that they search ceaselessly for what Mr. Hussein called last week "the great meanings inside themselves," and that they are like coiled springs waiting for the moment of "anger and revolt" when they can avenge the wrongs done them by their enemies. In short, that they are ready for war, as Mr. Hussein said at a cabinet meeting this week, when he told his generals "that your heads will remain high with honor, God willing, and your enemy will be defeated."

To Americans, and to many Arabs, it might seem chimerical that Mr. Hussein could present himself as a man who has brought Iraq glory in war.

Iraq's eight-year war with Iran in the 1980's ended in a battlefield stalemate, no ground gained, with at least 500,000 Iraqis, and as many Iranians, dead. The Persian Gulf war, which was triggered by Mr. Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, ended after six weeks of American bombing and less than 72 hours of land warfare, and the abiding image, for Americans, of Iraqi soldiers scrambling out of desert bunkers with their hands raised in surrender to American troops.

But at the Mother of All Battles Mosque, the inescapable message is that Mr. Hussein wants Iraqis to think of the battle for Kuwait as a glorious chapter in their history, one they should be ready to re-live if America once again chooses to launch its missiles and bombs and tanks at Iraq. Seen through this perspective, the gulf war was a victory, not a defeat, for Iraq, and its people should welcome a new chance to follow Mr. Hussein if the time comes to land a new punch on America's nose.

Many who know Iraq, and the United States, and can make even a layman's estimate of their relative military strengths, would regard this as illusionism of a piece with Iraq's persistence in holding onto Kuwait in 1990 under American threats, and boasting of certain victory, until the denouement. What is harder to say, given the closed nature of Iraq under Mr. Hussein, is whether it is an illusionism like Winston Churchill's in 1940, baying at the Nazi armies in France while knowing that Britain's land forces were in no shape to repel an invasion, or whether it is something much grimmer for Iraq, the failure of a leader who lives in a tightly protected seclusion to grasp the realities that press in keenly on others.

Although Mr. Hussein is said to have visited the mosque frequently during its construction, lending himself to the project as a kind of architect-in-chief, in the way that Mao in China and Kim Il Sung in North Korea used to do with every hospital and bridge and dam, officials at the mosque say that they have not seen him there since before the mosque opened last year on April 28, Mr. Hussein's birthday. The absence of "Mr. President" on the day of the opening was a striking lacuna they attribute to the heavy demands on the Iraqi leader's time. "Perhaps he was too busy," they say.

But the imam at the mosque, the chief cleric, is pleased to tell reporters what he believes Mr. Hussein had in mind with the mosque. What he says comes as no surprise.

Was the mosque a symbol of Iraq's defeat of America in the gulf war, he was asked.

"Exactly, you have divined it well," said Sheik Thahir Ibrahim al-Shammari, his face shining with a look of something like beatitude.

But was this not stretching a point a little, he was asked, given the fact that Iraqi troops fled the battlefield in Kuwait so fast.

The imam smiled. He had heard the questions before, and fielding them was to him about as easy as batting away a child's softball pitches.

"Well," he said, coming back at his questioner with the cleric's equivalent of a sucker punch, "I am not, of course, a military man. I am not a man to speak of battles, won or lost. But the building of this mosque, and other mosques, what is that if not a victory? The resistance Iraqis have shown to 12 years of American aggression, what is that if not a victory? No, what you see here is decidedly a monument to victory, define that as you will."

One thing the mosque's keepers appear to have learned from meeting reporters is that the architectural flourishes — the Kalashnikov minarets and the Scud-like towers beside them — may be a little over the top for the Western taste. Accordingly, the presentation has changed.

Where once visitors were told what seems obvious — how the elegant cylinders of the inner minarets slim to an aerodynamic peak, like a ballistic missile tapering at the nose cone — they are now assured that no such references were ever in the architects' minds.

But there is no such reticence about the features that memorialize Mr. Hussein. Sheik Shammari was happy to run through the details:

The outer minarets 43 meters in height, for the 43 days of American bombing at the start of the gulf war. Then inner minarets, 37 meters in height, for the year 1937; numbering 4, for the fourth month, April; and 28 water jets in the pool beneath the minarets, for the 28th day — all in all, the 37-4-28, for April 28, 1937, Mr. Hussein's birthday.

The mosque is one of the few buildings in Iraq where there is no portrait of Mr. Hussein. But more striking than that, there is no memorial, within the mosque, for the 100,000 Iraqis the government says died from American bombing during the gulf war. Few independent experts who have studied the 1991 bombing campaign consider the figure remotely credible, but, in any case, the war's Iraqi victims go unheralded.

Outside, in the mosque's spacious grounds, there is a memorial to the dead of the Iran-Iraq war, but that, too, seems more a paean to victory than an acknowledgment of suffering. Alongside heroic, Soviet-style figures of ordinary men, women and children carved into the white limestone, there is a quotation from Mr. Hussein's message on the occasion of the cease-fire with Iran in August 1988, describing the moment as "a great day, a day of days."

The seeming lack of a human dimension was underscored on Friday, the Muslim day of prayer, by the fact that the mosque was all but deserted at the height of the day, apparently because ordinary Iraqis prefer to gather in large numbers at the lovely old mosques in the center of Baghdad.

Sheik Shammari said that 2,500 people had attended the noonday prayers, at which he had called for "God's mercy" on Palestinian suicide bombers — a favorite topic of Mr. Hussein, who has promised cash payments of $25,000 to the family of every Palestinian blowing up himself, and Israelis. But mainly, he said, he had spoken of the certainty of Iraq's victory over the United States.

"I told them, `Our enemy has very advanced weapons, and in this they are stronger than we are,' " he said. "But I also said, `But we also have weapons that they do not have. We have our faith, Islam, and we have our great leader-president, Saddam Hussein. These are weapons far stronger than anything our enemy has.' "

Incongruously, for a cleric of a mosque that seems political to the peak of its dome, the sheik said he preferred not to speak of politics.

But then he thought it over, and could not resist.

There was a president, he said, without mentioning any country, who was "steeped in the blood" of Iraqis, and who had a "crazy, paranoid" vision of the world that was driving him on to war, regardless of the sufferings it would bring.

"If we want to be merciful, we would call him a Satan," he said. "He has absolutely no sense of reality, none at all."

He was speaking of President Bush.

Europe Gropes for an Identity

Visions of a Union: Europe Gropes for an Identity
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/international/europe/15EURO.html

COPENHAGEN, Dec. 13 — In redrawing the map of Europe, the 15 men whose countries represent Europe's most important and exclusive club tore down one border and built another.

They formally invited 10 new members, most with dysfunctional economies, to join their European Union by 2004, thereby expanding eastward into territories whose economic and political development was long stunted by Communism.

They also rejected Turkey's demand that its candidacy be given more urgency, erecting a wall that is sure to be seen by the mostly Muslim country of 67 million people — and by the rest of the Muslim world — as a division between the Christian West and the Islamic East. The Europeans turned down a plea by Turkey to set a date for starting talks on its eventual admission.

The front page of the Turkish newspaper Hurriyet was illustrated with da Vinci's "Last Supper," with the question, "Will the E.U., like Christ's last supper, be purely for Christians or will there be a Muslim at the table?"

European politicians wave away talk of a clash of religions or of blocking Turkey to control immigration and insist that their decision was based on standards of democracy and human rights, and on controlling immigration and terrorism.

With the decisions here, the European Union has given itself the thankless task of defining Europe, a task that has baffled scholars and politicians for centuries.

"Geographical Europe," wrote Norman Davies in "Europe: A History," "has always had to compete with notions of Europe as a cultural community, and in the absence of common political structures, European civilization could only be determined by cultural criteria."

Jean Monnet, the visionary advocate not just of economic union but of an eventual United States of Europe, took the extreme position in the immediate years after World War II, writing, "Europe has never existed; one has genuinely to create Europe."

His way of doing so was to bring together that part of geographical Europe that was democratic into a common unit by knitting its economies together. The aim was that politics would follow.

Now, the European Union is embarked on the task of adapting that vision to a very different political landscape. Even as it struggles to create political, economic, social and even military institutions to serve its current members, it has been challenged by events to enlarge itself — and face the question of what other societies might fit in.

At the meeting this week, there was never any doubt that Poland would be welcomed. Turkey, by contrast, stood knocking at the door but will have to wait two more years for the European Union's leaders to decide whether to set a date for talks regarding its candidacy to begin.

Is it that Turkey's human rights record and democratic institutions do not measure up to Western standards, while those of Eastern European democracies do?

Or is it fear that the bridge to trade with the Muslim world would be a two-way conduit that could also bring terrorists from countries like Iraq and Afghanistan into Europe?

Whatever the true political reason, the choices being made have stirred some rethinking in Europe.

François Heisbourg, the director of the Paris-based Fondation pour la Recherche Statégique, says there are two sides to the debate on how Europe is defined: "The first vision is one in which Europe is defined in terms of geography and religion. The second vision is about shared values and a sense of shared history."

He added, "While Turkey doesn't fit into the first, it can fit into the second."

There are limits to pure geography. Last week's invitations were extended to Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia. But Albania and the countries that make up the former Yugoslavia were left out, presumably because of their economic and political instability.

During the cold war, Turkey seemed a special case. Valued for its strategic location and its military, it joined NATO in 1952. Entry into Europe's economic club was supposed to be the logical next step, even though only a sliver of its territory lies in geographical Europe.

These days, though, common values have assumed more importance. In 1993 the European Union's leaders developed a "criteria" for membership: a candidate state must be judged to follow democratic principles and fully respect human rights, and must be well on its way to meeting certain economic and institutional standards before it can begin talks to join. These are the criteria invoked to slow down Turkey's bid.

Turks can argue that their cultural interchange with Europe goes back centuries, but Europe does not choose to remember the fact. In fact, Turkey was the very definition of the anti-Europe, the vast Muslim empire that at one point sent its armies of conquest as far into Europe as Vienna.

Turkey insists it changed its ways in the 20th century, when modernizers made it into a republic whose division of mosque and state has always been enforced.

And its military usefulness is no small bargaining point. Turkey has a bigger army than any European Union member, and a military budget that is behind only those of Britain, France, Germany and Italy.

All of those arguments seemed to resonate in Europe until Communism fell and Islamic terrorism became a threat. Then Turkey found itself at the end of a long line of new candidates. One reason is that many Europeans feel that expansion is out of control, with 10 new members joining at once.

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, the former French president who is spearheading a project to draft a constitution for the European Union, may have done the Turks a favor when he said that Turkey was "not a European country" and that inviting it in would mean "the end of Europe."

If nothing else, the remark framed the debate in a stark way and forced people to stake out positions.

Even the most global of symbols, this year's Miss World, Azra Akin, a Turkish citizen who grew up in Denmark, has weighed in on Turkey's side. Ms. Akin, a 21-year-old model, certainly thinks Turkey is part of Europe. Last week she issued a plea to the European Union. "Turkish people look up to Europe," she said. "Certainly, when compared to some Eastern European countries, Turkey is quite a sophisticated and developed country."

Yoga, Unlike Fashion, Is Deep. Right?

Yoga, Unlike Fashion, Is Deep. Right?
By KATE BETTS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/15/fashion/15VIEW.html

THE last thing I thought I'd be buying at the Marc Jacobs boutique in SoHo was a sticky yoga mat. Yoga was for sincere, mantra-chanting people who liked to do tree poses in public. Not something that ever seemed likely to preoccupy the glittering, self-besotted members of the fashion tribe. We follow trends, not gurus. Our masters are Miuccia Prada and Manolo Blahnik. We worship at the altar of consumerism, and can see the universe in a bead on a Fendi baguette. We do not by nature believe there is a clear line between divinity and a divine pair of shoes.

Maybe these aren't the loftiest values, but I always figured the heart has its reasons.

And then recently in SoHo I ran into my old friend Heidi Lender, a fashionista of the first rank. She had recently splurged on a pair of bright red Sergeant Pepper-style Marc Jacobs boots. But now, she said, she had to take them back. She had no use for them because she was planning to move to Mysore, India, to devote herself to the study of Ashtanga yoga.

It was a moment of cognitive dissonance: here was a fashionista passing up a pair of boots that were plastered on every must-have list west of Prague for a ticket to some shala on the far side of the earth. I hardly dared ask, "Would she be doing tree poses?"

"Yes," she whispered.

It's hard to fathom why fashion, which has thrived for centuries on humanity's most nakedly materialistic tendencies, would now be embracing a spiritual tradition that aspires to move people beyond the illusion of appearances.

But yoga is not just fashionable, with some 18 million practitioners in the United States; it has come to permeate every nook of the fashion world itself. Christy Turlington was on a recent cover of Vogue demonstrating the bow pose in a Calvin Klein evening dress. At runway shows, you hear musical Indian names like Iyengar, Kripalu and Shivananda peppering conversations. Every stylist, makeup artist and fashion publicist worth her weight in Nuala sweats is bowing to some newfound guru at corner gymnasiums and SoHo lofts.

I was curious to learn why, and so like any serious shopper, I set out to riffle through the racks of yoga practices. The more I looked, the more I found that yoga, at least in America, was a lot like the fashionista universe — committed to a pecking order among gurus, an "in" crowd of devotees, and a finely calibrated list of dos and don'ts. You had to be careful or you could commit the fashion equivalent of wearing a dead swan to the Academy Awards.

Bikram yoga, which is performed in rooms heated up to 105 degrees, seemed systematic and athletic and appealingly nonspiritual, but the yogis I consulted were quick to point out that the founder, Bikram Choudhury, drives around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce. Too much ego, they clucked.

Jivamukti, once the trendiest Manhattan yoga studio with its enormous gift shop and thumping disco music, now seemed like a sanctuary for Lucky magazine readers. If I was going to submit myself to the selfless study of yoga, I didn't want my dharma talks served up supermarket style. I wanted haute couture yoga, and Jivamukti seemed more like the Gap.

That's when I heard about Eddie Stern, a leading teacher of Ashtanga, whose New York studio is the V.I.P. room of yoga. There have been celebrity sightings of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ms. Turlington, the supermodel-turned-yoga archetype.

Ashtanga is known as boot camp yoga — that's boot camp as in Marines, not Marc Jacobs. Devotees break down in tears in the middle of the more difficult postures. The word is, an Ashtanga workout can change your life if you survive it.

As karma would have it, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, the 86-year-old Brahmin-born guru of Ashtanga yoga, was making his twice-a-year visit to New York to conduct a workshop. Ashtanga enthusiasts were pouring into Manhattan from all over the country to practice with this amazingly elastic grandfather they called Guruji. They were all eager to kiss his feet, his bootless feet. It was like Yves Saint Laurent being the host of a trunk show at Saks.

"You should come," my friend Heidi said. "You don't have to kiss Guruji's feet."

Outside the Puck Building on Lafayette Street in SoHo, several black town cars and a Toyota land cruiser with "Prana" vanity plates purred quietly in the predawn darkness. Inside, 200 Ashtangis with long striped scarves and funky hand-knit caps that looked like something straight out of the Kurt Cobain Journals trickled into a loft space. Donna Karan and a friend were busy unrolling their sticky mats.

We stood to attention as Guruji entered the room in a white dhoti, followed by his daughter Saraswathi and his grandson, Sharath Rangaswamy, a skinny guy with a sly smile.

Before I could exhale, we were down on the floor in a chateronga pose and then flexing up into upward dog. Accompanying these Eastern calisthenics was ujjayi breath, a kind of breathing that makes you sound like Darth Vader.

I was flopping around like a beached pilot whale while yogis all around me were casually twisting their feet behind their necks.

Sharath, who was patrolling the delinquents in the back of the class, sat down beside me and casually folded his legs into the lotus posture. I just shook my head. "It will hurt more if you don't do it," he said firmly.

Temporarily forgetting that yoga is a spiritual discipline and that spiritual disciplines are not known for logical rigor, I tried it. It hurt more than if I hadn't done it.

I crept back home to bed and stayed there in corpse pose for most of the day.

Yet, something about the whole change-your-life fervor of Asthanga was infectious. It seemed to exactly follow the pattern in fashion where you feel that a new identity can be precipitated by a handbag or a pair of boots.

A few days later, in the dark of morning, I met Heidi at Eddie Stern's Broome Street studio, a peaceful place with no sign on the door, no health-club-type gift shop or thumping aerobics-class music.

Students filter in slowly — on average, 75 to 100 a day — and begin bending and twisting through a precise and fluid regimen of 30 or so postures. Being new, I was allowed only to watch. The room smelled like sweet incense and sweat, and the only sound was the Darth Vader-like rustle of people doing the ujjayi breath.

Something about the whole secretive, exclusive ritual reminded me of what it was like to cruise Azzedine Alaïa's atelier when he first started selling his sexy creations out of a small apartment on the Rue de Bellechasse in Paris. New clients were allowed to shop only if they were brought by friends of the designer or possessed enough nerve to ring the fourth buzzer and brave rejection.

Mr. Stern teaches what is called the Mysore style, where the students move at their own pace under his eye or the watchful eye of his colleague, Russell Kai, who is known not only as the guy in Christy Turlington's book, but also as a strict and thorough teacher. He patiently explained that people can go through a lot of pain and discomfort in the practice, but that students develop a level of fearlessness. "So far as I know, nobody's been crippled yet," he said.

Two days later, Heidi and I were sitting across the street having a cup of jasmine tea at a hangout where Ashtanga students often go to discuss their classes.

"It freaks a lot of people out because it's just you and your practice," Heidi said. "There are no mirrors, and there's no one telling you what to do. It's just you facing yourself. You and your fear."

Heidi didn't seem to be fretting about anything. She was calm, like someone who knew she was definitely going to make it onto the Louis Vuitton wait list for the Takashi Murakami handbags next spring. She talked about her practice as if it were a family. It reminded me of how I used to think of the fashion tribe, floating from city to city.

The more I listened to her talk about her practice, and the occasional celebrity frisson she had had on the mats, like the time she asked Madonna to pose for a picture with her at a shala in Los Angeles, the more it seemed that fashion's exclusivity and hierarchies were naturally suited to the echelons of the yoga world.

The doctrines of yoga might be aimed at the conquest of the self, but the practice of getting there, the feeling of belonging, of believing for a moment that you are fresh and new and recreated, exactly matched the promise of fashion itself.

And then there was Heidi's amazing yoga-tuned body. I high-tailed it over to the Marc Jacobs boutique.

"Do you want to try on the boots?" one of the saleswomen asked.

"I want the yoga mat," I said.

Web Calling Roils the Telecom World

Web Calling Roils the Telecom World
By SIMON ROMERO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/16/technology/16TELE.html

Will the price of international telephone calls continue to decline? And will more people choose wireless technology over land lines? The answers lie in whether new technologies continue to rival existing ones in the coming year.

Internet-based calls account for more than 10 percent of all international calling traffic today, up from almost nothing five years ago, as they reached about 18 billion minutes worldwide, up from 9.9 billion at the end of 2001, according to TeleGeography, a research firm. Most of these calls originated or terminated in poor countries.

A glance across the humbled telecommunications industry might suggest that its largest companies are worried about other pressing issues in 2003, chief among them stabilizing the market for the tried-and-true service of placing calls from a phone tightly tethered to a jack.

After all, telecommunications and technology companies lost $7.6 billion in global market value from March 2000 to September 2002, as the industry was gripped by stunning collapses, financial scandals and an effort to absorb excess capacity on globe-spanning communications systems.

But alongside the industry's search for its direction after such turmoil are trends that threaten to destabilize global telecommunications further in 2003. These trends could be described as the start of a cannibalization of established services by disruptive new technologies.

A November ruling by Panama's Supreme Court indicates how friction on the industry's margins is starting to sting the big companies at its center. In that decision, the court immediately suspended a government decree that had prohibited Panamanians from making Internet-based phone calls.

International calls routed over the Internet and placed on either computers or regular telephones are often offered at steep discounts. The technology used to route Internet calls is a relatively inexpensive way to route calls around the world.

In Panama's case, one company, Cable and Wireless of Britain, has a venture with the government that allows it a virtual monopoly to provide international calling services. So the Panamanian government's decision effectively strengthened Cable and Wireless at the expense of smaller companies selling cheaper international calls.

The government ban was "a vain attempt to hold back the inevitable," said Scott Bradner, a consultant with Harvard University Information Systems.

Although its growth is still somewhat sluggish and in the early stages, Internet-based calling has expanded so much that it is understandable why monopolistic telephone companies, especially in the developing world, are feeling threatened.

Internet-based calls account for more than 10 percent of all international calling traffic today, up from almost nothing five years ago, as they reached about 18 billion minutes worldwide, up from 9.9 billion at the end of 2001, according to TeleGeography, a research firm. Most of these calls originated or terminated in poor countries.

Wholesale carriers carve out a business for themselves by taking advantage of differences in fees charged by local telephone companies to complete calls and the actual, often cheaper rates of transporting voice calls over the Internet.

Several governments in developing countries other than Panama, like Kenya and South Africa, have imposed restrictions on Internet calls, while phone companies in other nations, notably Colombia and Vietnam, have formed partnerships with wholesalers to seize on such opportunities.

For the time being, Internet-based calling volume remains relatively small, about one-eighteenth of the traffic handled by traditional phone companies. But analysts say the real disruption to the industry depends on whether large carriers decide to mothball billions of dollars' worth of traditional switching equipment in favor of Internet-based technology.

Such a critical decision does not appear to be around the corner, and such a radical short-term shift should not be expected. Instead, analysts expect the growth of Internet-based telephone systems and, to a larger extent, the expansion of wireless calling to continue without rapidly eroding the business of traditional phone companies.

The struggle for supremacy among other telecommunications technologies offers some perspective. As Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, points out, the telephone overtook the telegraph in volume in the early 20th century but telegraph use remained stable for years, reaching a peak in 1945.

The business of sending and receiving telegrams effectively died out in the 1990's. AT&T, which did not formally change its name from American Telephone and Telegraph until 1994, transmitted its last telegram in 1991. So the cannibalization of the telegraph by the telephone took almost a century.

Still, there are reasons for traditional phone companies to be concerned. The United States has had a fourfold increase in wireless calling volumes per person since 1995.

"The substitution of cellphones for wire-line ones is finally becoming a reality," Mr. Odlyzko said.

The rise of rival communications technologies has many implications for the industry, but in the months ahead the effects are largely expected to be deflationary, pushing down prices for local, long-distance and wireless service.

And as other new technologies emerge, like voice calling over new Wi-Fi wireless systems, at least one thing remains clear. Contrary to the expectations of the Internet zealots of the late 1990's, the industry's most potentially disruptive killer application will continue to be voice communications.

Hummingbirds

Hummingbirds
by Ruth Stone (b1915)

Driving the perfect fuel, their thermonuclear wings,
into the hot layer of the sugar's chromosphere,
hummingbirds in Egypt
might have visited the tombs of the Pharaohs
when they were fresh in their oils and perfumes.
The pyramids fitted,
stone slab against slab,
with little breathers, narrow slits of light,
where a few esters, a sweet resinous wind,
might have risen soft as a parachute.
Robbers breached the false doors,
the trick halls often booby traps,
embalming them in the powder of crushed rock.
These, too, they might have visited.
The miniature dagger hangs in the air,
entering the wild furnace of the flower's heart.